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ninety6tears[See Master Post]
He wakes up in the middle of the night with a crashing pain that rings all over from the back of his head, barely registering what happened as his voice coughs out into a short and loud groan.
"Jim?" In the dark, Nyota's head appears looking over him from the top of the lofted bed. Her voice is scratched with sleep but a little urgent, and it feels like she doesn't even give him a second to reply before her feet are hopping down and passing by him and running down the hallway, towards the other bedroom.
"I'm fine," he insists five or six times when he's still on his back on the hard wood, any movement he makes provoking a bruising flash of pain in his head. Nyota seems to avoid looking right at him as she bites her bottom lip and Bones still goes at his head with the tricorder even though his worry has calmed quite a bit.
"You're not fine," Bones announces tersely, "you have a minor concussion." Jim wonders where the hypospray comes from, imagining in his annoyance that the man keeps them in his damn pajamas. Before he can make any remark about it, Bones is abruptly grumbling, "What the hell kinda nightmare makes you knock a guy to the floor?"
Nyota almost imperceptibly cringes; Jim dismissively says, "It's a small bed. And I seriously don't feel like I've got a concussion."
"You've got a hell of a headache obviously...Are you dizzy? Any ringing in your ears?"
"No." Jim sighs. "And no."
"Nausea..."
"Okay, yeah. I kinda feel I'm gonna throw up." He feels the need to amend, "But not like I'm actually going to."
"You're good and concussed, kid," Bones concludes, and Jim can only distantly frown at that very expired endearment which the doctor sometimes recycles just for old time's sake. "Let's get you back in bed. Up and at 'em."
After he makes a sort of amusingly weak attempt at getting up before giving squinting resignation, Nyota and Bones sigh and more or less manage to lift him back up and roll him onto the bed. He can feel the lingering worry in McCoy's movements, the slightly more familial way he touches him on the shoulder than he tended to do long before now.
"Thanks," he mutters, already feeling his eyes heavily shutting.
"I want you to wake him up again before morning, make sure he can still name a couple presidents and all that," he says to Nyota, who nods as she settles back down on the other side of the small bed. "Come wake me up again if anything's wrong."
Jim plunges back asleep and is awakened later by something soft and nice, her mouth lightly pursed somewhere at his jaw and her body leaning in over him slightly.
He feels a smirk crawling up his face before he fully opens his eyes. "Hmm. I should hit my head on things more often if this is the treatment I get."
"Shut up," she gets out in a bit of a laugh.
There's a blue hint of sunlight in the room. He can see enough of her face that he wants to touch it, and does, with a lazy tracing of his finger down her cheek. Her expression slowly and softly dulls to that shy guilt from earlier.
"...I can't believe I did that. I'm sorry."
"Hey, no. Whose ingenious idea was it to loft the bed over the shelf anyway?"
"Yours." She cracks a tiny smile. They're silent for a while, and the moment passes. "So do you remember where you are?"
"Yeah," he says up to the ceiling after a few seconds. "I know where I am."
And their bodies disconnect and turn, lying back to back again.
Brighton apparently has a troubling habit of ignoring his comm, so Jim has to saunter into his office to apologize for taking a sick day. But Brighton doesn't seem to take attendance, cause when he looks over from chewing his lip in front of his viewscreen he just says, "Hey, Cyrus." Even though he always calls him that, Jim is still getting used to the fake last name. "By the way, loved your handiwork on that compact. I was able to mark it up quite a bit before I shipped it out."
"Oh, the energy conversion ended up being a bitch, but I figured you'd want a good overhaul. Thanks. And..." He just can't help how his voice trails off: The captain of the ISS Enterprise is on the news.
"...Have you not heard about this?"
"Heard what?" Jim replies, squinting at what is probably some stock footage of Spock meeting at embassies and all that, while he can't quite make sense of what the announcer is saying about him.
"Apparently he negotiated a truce between these two, uh...these planets that kept going at each other. It's been really controversial cause up until now the T.E. was obviously just letting it happen so they'd basically wipe themselves out to the point of being more dependent on us? Tellarites and someone else, I think."
Jim takes a minute to respond. "And what does our glorious Empire make of this?"
"I think the general idea is they wish they'd thought of it. It's looking to be economically good for them after all. But it's a big mess cause the captain isn't talking like he's making an exception, he's talking like he thinks this kind of thing is generally a good idea, and they're not exactly tripping over in excitement to agree with that."
There is a trace of cynicism in Brighton's explanation. Jim's puzzlement probably reflects the attitude, and he barely realizes he's saying it aloud when he mutters, "What the hell are you up to?" to the image of the goateed Spock up on the screen.
"Yeah, who the hell knows," Brighton says with a shrug.
It's freezing and snowing outside the night that Bones walks in, angry with shivering, declaring that there's "some serious powwow" happening at the Knot. Jim saw the first bursts of color from the fireworks and parade-like gatherings earlier, but when he can hear some bass rhythm pulsing outside just from their porch he assumes it must have really picked up.
He's downright puzzled when somebody has the audacity to come knocking this late during a weekend, opens the door with a mumbled "What the fuck?" and is even more confused to see Jill.
Sometimes he almost forgets that Jill is still, if a tweaked version of Romulan, still Romulan. She's wearing such a nearly comical amount of layers it's kind of hilarious making out her nonchalant face beyond the rings of fluff surrounding her head, and it makes him remember how much easier it is for them to get cold.
But apparently even when she's not as strong as an average Vulcanoid she can still carry a family-sized flatscreen across town like it's her purse.
"You...brought us entertainment." He squints at her other side. "And beer?"
She gives a little laugh, not even inviting herself in yet. "It's a viewscreen none of us seem to want. Well, I nabbed it off somebody who would claim to care, but won't notice it's gone for one or two weeks, so. Oh, and it's similar to beer. You'll like it."
Nyota is coming up to them still yelling something down the hall at Scotty. "It's Jill!" she's saying, with an exasperation as if she expects to have to repeat herself to Scotty's usual finnickiness over the doorbell.
"Come on in. And thanks, but," Jim pauses, awkwardly running a hand through his hair and slowly tries to explain, "We have kind of a household pact about not drinking alcohol?..."
Nyota's the one who squints at the six-pack, her expression a little bit imploring when she looks at Jim.
"...Except for special occasions," Jim finally amends, gladly taking the drinks from Jill and saying, "Get in here already."
Jill comes inside and stomps the snow off her boots, begins de-layering; the yellowy flush from being in the cold starts to fade from her face, and a thick burst of her brown hair escapes from her hood. It's the first time Jim's seen it outside of her distinctive fat braid that hangs down her back.
Later when they're sitting on the couch or just on pillows on the floor, Scotty asks Jill what the special occasion actually is.
"It's a big send-off."
"Oh, that's right." Scotty seems to be recalling a conversation the others weren't around for. "Somebody's got a vessel already fixed up in there."
"Somebody's leaving?" Nyota asks in surprise. "They...How?"
"I've actually experimentally checked out the mainframes," Scotty reassures, "and if you've got all the right bells and whistles, you can set off jamming signals to get off of here."
"You've checked it out?" Jill asks with some amusement. Then her face gets a bit more serious. "Are you all trying to leave?"
Before any of them can start to work out an answer, her certainty solidifies with another realization.
"Most of you work for Brighton."
Talking about money is acceptable etiquette around town, it seems, but no one really talks about Brighton's ship. Nobody outright asks you if you're going to bid. It's not a subject. And Jill doesn't ask, but she doesn't really have to.
"Oh," she says, her voice small before the shrugs and says a little more casually, "Nothing wrong with a little friendly competition, I guess."
And fuck if that doesn't give Jim a pretty nasty feeling; before he can ask, she shrugs and nods.
"I'm planning on leaving with a few of mine if they get it." Jim almost can't grasp how her tone isn't at all bitter or judgmental when she says, "But, I don't get it. If you want to go abolitionist in space, it's easy. You don't have to come here to buy a ship..."
"We wouldn't exactly pass the background checks," Bones says, noncommittal in how much more he's willing to tell.
Jill pauses in the motion of tipping up her bottle; with a little sneering smile she slowly asks, "Are you guys in trouble with the law or something?"
Jim quickly insists, "We're here because we want to be."
"Hey, it's none of my business." She shrugs, and the indifference is forced but sincere.
Scotty is the most equipped to naturally change the subject and starts to ask Jill if she's here because she doesn't know any of the people skipping off.
"Actually, one of them is a friend of mine...To be honest, I kind of came here hoping I could just get buzzed with you all and not have to think too hard about it."
"You can get drunk?" Jim is suddenly curious.
"Of course I can get drunk. I'm way behind you guys right now, but I just need something pretty strong. Though, it might help if you had something sugary lying around."
Nyota blinks and remembers, "I think we still have an emergency supply of those peanut butter cups from the end of summer."
"Ugh, I can't even look at those anymore," Bones groans. "Help yourself."
She does, and she's on her third package when Jim, already halfway gone on what is the strongest thing to ever call itself beer, words some question vaguely approaching the issue of whether the Knot has any "unified and/or long-term plan." She gets a sort of Don't get me started look on her face.
"Depends on who you ask. Some of them think that D'era is going to deliver us from suffering." A lofty, possibly mocking gesture. "Other people think this place is really going to hold up for as long as they need it."
"And you don't?" Scotty asks.
"What do you think?" She gives a cringing little shrug, as if not planning on really elaborating, but when Scotty's not so wavering, she lays out, "Look. I'm into history. This isn't the first time somebody's tried to start a little revolution against the T.E., and it's like nobody around here even realizes that. This may be the most well-equipped one there's ever been, but all it means is the Empire is going to have to get bored before they bother to gather together enough of their people to come in here and clean us up. But they're going to do it."
"So you're worried about the Imperials?" Bones wants to clarify. "More than just any slave traders that wanna mess around here?"
"It would have to be a very organized, very large group of slave runners to even get in the front door. And we've been attacked before, about a year ago...Didn't end well for them. But it all depends. In case of an aerial attack...I'm not really supposed to tell you guys this, but we do have a few photon torpedoes. We're pretty well-stocked on weapons now, but half of our handhelds run on old ammunition, and that runs out. I've calculated that if we'd put the overall time and energy we spent the last six to twelve months on manufacturing and salvaging firepower into building our own ship, we could've built the type of vessel for long-term travel, the kind that could get us all out of here at the same time. But then again, if we'd gotten attacked by the actual fleet within the last year, we'd have been dead."
She takes another bite, talks around the chocolate chunk in her mouth. "Still. We're going to run out of luck eventually. If it had been up to me, I'd have taken the gamble. And Captain Spock's little ethical mid-life crisis is likely to do more harm to us than good. He's just making people defensive. You Terrans don't like to know too much about your precious space gang. They can get away with murder, and they do, they even murder each other; but you'd rather feign ignorance."
They all have to school their reactions to all that. Jim clears his throat. "What do you think of the captain, though?"
"What do you mean what do I think of him?" When she realizes that isn't explanation enough, she puts down a piece of chocolate like she can't have an appetite while she's talking about this. "You might get the occasional T.E. suit who doesn't know what he's doing. But he's Imperial fleet, and one of the highest-ups? That's all I need to know. I'd shoot him between the eyes if I got the chance."
"Even though he's not hevam?" Scotty says.
"What does that matter? Everyone knows he's half, anyway." Something in her eyes backpedals. "And I don't use that word. Well, I do, but only for a particular kind of human."
"I know," Scotty replies.
And Jim must really be drunk, because he says it out loud, interrupting with, "Have you ever had to kill anybody?"
She gives him a look that makes him wonder if that was rude. But then her response is squinting eyes and "Where do you think you are exactly?" And she's really peering down at where he's leaning against the couch, looking at all of them, seems to literally be trying to puzzle out where the hell they all came from.
Jim gets them on the subject of hooking up the viewscreen, and she's as eager as any of them to lighten up the mood. They prop the thing in the corner of the living room that not enough heat seems to reach, and then Jim and Bones wrestle immaturely over a shared blanket while Scotty and Jill settle on an early 22nd century western feature. Jim thinks he's seen it before, but he doesn't pay close enough attention, maybe not really wanting to see how this version ends. In some kind of postmodern statement it was produced in black and white, and the room hums in the monochrome and the blushing shadows of the light cast from the screen. Scotty is blowing hot air into his hands, and Jill, in a sort of defensively casual but shy way, takes his left between both of hers and rubs at it, softly trapping his fingers in hers on her lap. Jim can't help but see it happen in his sidelong curiosity, the way she doesn't look down at what she's doing, the way it comes off as something very daring simply because it's clear that it is to her. And how some spell is broken by the motion of Nyota returning to the room, making their hands self-consciously untwist.
"What the hell are you wearing your coat for?" Scotty demands.
"We're out of soap," she says with a dully rueful expression.
"Are you kidding?" Bones exclaims.
"It's not snowing now." She shrugs, but her eyes keep straying to the floor. Jim thinks something is up with her, the way she's been a little quiet all night. It's almost like seeing Jill and Scotty's affection prods a little too much at somewhere sore. As she's leaving the room before they can ask anything else, Jim gives Bones a nudge with his knee.
"Go with her."
Bones is looking at Jim as if he knows something he doesn't. "You could go..."
Jim ignores that. "Just go talk to her?"
Bones gets up to leave, crossing by Scotty and a very confused Jill who's now fumbling with the blanket across her lap.
She looks over at Jim. "Did I do something...?"
"Why do you think it's you?" Jim reassuringly waves her off.
"I have to ask, now that the doc isn't around..." Jill suddenly candidly speculates, "Are you trying to starve your way to that ship, Jim?"
Scotty lets out an impressed scoff that Jill just asks. Jim replies, "I'm not starving."
She squints at him for a second. "I know we have a conflict of interests, but you do realize...I mean, if we were to win it, we'd give you a ride off of here..."
"Right, but where would we go?" Scotty gives a little grim laugh. "Where are your friends going?"
"We know that there's a hidden colony out there, or at least there was once. We'll be lucky if we hear something back from this party, but everyone's going insane over us possibly figuring out if this place is actually safe for us...Though I have to honestly say I don't know how they're taking to liberationist Terrans. It would take a lot of convincing to get some Romulans to even let you on their ship. I'm lucky enough I have a chance of getting out of here since I'm just a degenerate."
Scotty lets out a noise of irritation, calling back to something previously brought up between them. "For fuck sakes, I really hate that you put up with that."
"You realize that on Romulan a newborn with my type of defects would have been thrown out with the trash?"
"Jesus." In a drunken grumble Jim asks, "Who are your friends, that they let you talk about yourself like that?"
Sometimes it seems like Jill never stops shrugging. "Most of my real friends are like me."
That puts a damper on that, but suddenly Jill is brightening up with an idea that seems almost funny to her.
"Hey. Do you all wanna come meet them?"
"What, like..." Jim mumbles, "Go out for drinks or something?" like this isn't something he can easily picture.
"No, I mean do you wanna come see the Knot."
They're both slightly flabbergasted by the idea. "That's...allowed?" Scotty asks.
"Yeah. If you're escorted it's okay."
Scotty and Jim exchange little looks of suppressed enthusiasm, emanating with their helpless curiosity through their shrugs.
"Yeah. Hell yeah," Scotty says.
They all meet up at the bridge over the lake on the weekend, and Jill grins at how they're rather nervously approaching, flicks her cigarette into the water and hops her way over to lead them in.
The two Romulans guarding one of the entrances do a body search while Jill chats with the one that seems friendlier than the other. Jim is getting a closer look at the appearance of the fencing that borders the whole Knot area, squinting in growing amusement at the whimsical irregular shape of it where it hasn't been replaced. "Was this already built when everybody came here?"
"It looks like it used to be an amusement park," Scotty speculates.
"A what?" Jill asks.
"Don't tell me they never had Disneyland on Romulus," Bones jokes, earning a light shove to his arm from Nyota.
"Jill."
The wary-sounding greeting comes from an approaching Romulan garbed in a checker weave and looking at her with tensely pinched features.
"Khamak." The man is handsome but in a decidedly boring way, and Jill acknowledges him with a polite smile, waving up the four behind her now that one of the guards has gestured they're free to go in. She stops as Khamak starts speaking to her in quick Romulan. Her response is nearly matching his natural speed with the language even if not quite fluent, and all Jim can tell for sure is she's calmly arguing with him. When she eventually slips back into Standard, it's like a dismissal.
"It's only two hours until curfew."
Khamak squints behind her at all of them. "I want your hevai out of here by then."
"Calm down," she waves him off with a grumble. Jim can't decide what level of familiarity she has with him; with her it seems like anything could mean affection.
None of them are really sure where she's planning to take them as they follow behind her leisured pace farther in, and Jim notices that the path they're following resembles an unnecessarily circuitous paved walkway, deciding, definitely a theme park, and finding it kind of a pleasant piece of unpredictability that the little town was built around some of the less efficient details rather than over them. Out of the bundles of homes or little workshops they pass by, some of them look like they were probably never torn down before, and he smirks at imagining the confusion of being confronted with all the gimmicky structures imitating everything from old-fashioned boat houses to European cantinas to small castles. Places that used to be gift shops that only looked like homey inns on the outside actually have people sleeping in them inside.
A woman twirling a small child between her arms shortly says hi to Jill on their way into some tavern, and Jim can't tell whether it's an actual business or something more communally managed, but none of them are thirsty or hungry anyway. Jill turns and gives a pat to the back of the head of a teenager who's sitting alone reading at a sizable table, muttering, "Of course it's just you here."
"The others are going late," the boy replies, and only glances briefly at the rest of them. His accent is extremely pronounced.
"'Running late.' Maybe they got held up. Look, everyone sit down, you're making me anxious."
They do, and Jim might as well ask, "So do you know how this place got started up?"
Jill sighs, uncertain of the specifics. "Around...less than ten years ago? Some humans started an underground slave-freeing system, managed to get a lot of people together out here who were willing to offer refuge to escaped aliens in their homes, but after a time it became clear that unless they could get off the planet somehow, the ex-slaves had nowhere to go. I'm not really sure how it transitioned from there, and we don't even know for sure what happened to those Terrans—As far as we know they were just regular citizens pretending to be slave runners who were actually buying people into freedom. But somebody was smart enough to do a good job getting the word out so that slaves who were only afraid of escaping because they had nowhere to go could know they do have somewhere. I think it's only been in the past five or so years that Terrans have been able to think they could actually live safely in the district, but most of that started miles away from the Knot, so I can't really explain it."
"Must have been a lot more guns going off back at the beginning," Nyota guesses.
"I kind of think it's funny, really, that the Knot is almost protected by the outside. You guys don't have the autonomy, and outside the other gate it's really abolitionism by reputation alone, but...with humans being so much more hesitant to go after their own?" Jill gives a thoughtful kind of grimace. "It gives us kind of a buffer. I don't think we could do this without that, and yeah, there must have been some time when we were protected by the outside too, and didn't even see it happening because we're shut up in here all scared. I don't know...I went outside the gate once just to see the town. I was glad to have my gun in case anyone strange was passing through, but nothing happened."
"Speaking of guns," Bones mutters a little darkly, and Jim realizes that he's looking at the young man entering the tavern who could not more obviously be a member of the League. Jill has her back to him and doesn't see him approaching, and Jim can only smile wryly over at Bones when it becomes clear he's headed over to them.
The Romulan, who looks a bit older than the boyish one already sitting with them, is wearing jeans, a pistol in a shoulder holster which looks like it was patched together after the death of something else made out of leather, and no shirt. His long neck is accentuated on the side by an elaborate and obscure tattoo that curves somewhere down like a bird's wing and appears, from what Jim can see, to cover up whatever neck brand must be there. Most of the Romulans around town keep their hair quite long, probably as a point of pride considering the chopped-off hair they saw on so many slaves, but this is the first ex-slave Jim's seen with a head of ropey dreadlocks. They hang to his chin around his narrow stubbled face, which at present has a distracted and impatient set to it as he shrugs out of his holster, sits down, places the weapon neatly at his edge of the table, and after shedding that symbol of his status sits back in a suddenly lazy demeanor and asks, "So where the fuck is Tom?"
"You weren't with him?" Jill asks.
"Wait, wait, that's right. He had to go up to the front gate. He's gonna be late."
"Everybody, this is Gene," Jill says with a sigh, having given up on introducing everyone at once. The newcomer gives them all a gesture that's genuine in its half-friendliness, and she adds, "And Alel's our youngest."
The young one, who has the closest to a traditional short haircut than anyone they've yet seen, resumed his reading minutes ago and hasn't so much as looked up since the newcomer came in. He now gives them all the briefest polite smile, his face falling quickly back to the stubbornly determined set to his eyes that gives his appearance some vague maturity. Gene gives Alel a sidelong smirk, and as if annoyed that he hasn't paid any attention to him since he walked in, nudges him in the arm with his elbow. Alel just gives him an irritated glance, his mouth pulling into the tiniest snarl-smile of very white teeth.
"So which one's your boyfriend, Jill?" Gene asks with a sneer.
"Which one's your boyfriend?" Jill rebukes in a grumble and an expression that probably only makes sense to a couple people at the table. "Scotty's right here. Bones is the good doctor."
In his long-suffering repression of annoyance at being called that almost constantly now, Bones gives a grudging wave.
"I'm his favorite patient," Jill declares.
"Where the hell did you get that idea?" he says with an actual hint of a smile under the roughness, getting a wink from her.
"And this is Nina. And Jim."
"Is Jim the asshole?" Gene is trying to be an asshole.
"You're just making stuff up now." Jill looks like she's regretting this entire damn thing.
"Did you run into Khamak on the way in?" Gene is shifting gears and she nods, with a look telling him it was about what he suspects. "I hope he brings it up to Tom. It's always great to watch them go at it."
"You are such child, Gene," Alel mutters in response to that.
"You got something better for me to do?"
The young man seems to smirk to himself before mumbling something else, in Romulan. Across the table, Nyota lets outs a couple low laughs, and Alel looks at her in open astonishment. She winks at him, and Jim realizes from the slighted annoyance in Gene that he must not understand the language at all.
"Oh, here's that bastard..." Gene sits up taller to wave down at somebody behind them, "What happened?"
"l'll tell you later." The man who replies is already coming over Jim's shoulder. He's also armed, with what Jim notices to be the exact phaser that was confiscated from them when they arrived. He appears to be somewhat older than most of the league members Jim has seen; his expression is tired but easy, not so smug. He gives everyone a short nod. "I'm sorry, rinam, I don't have much time to hang around..."
He leans in to kiss Jill on the top of her head while she frowns dramatically. Jim is more sure by now he's the oldest of the group and immediately senses that he's particularly close to Jill from that kind of half-distracted familial affection. He notices also that she doesn't introduce them, as if she's told him enough about them to not really need to.
Jim finally asks, "So are you friends with the whole league, Jill?"
A couple laughs go out around the table; Tom is scoffing, "I hope not."
"Tom kind of is the league," Gene affords. "Most of us are a bunch of jerk-offs, though," he adds, seemingly with the hyperbolic description of anyone who has problems with their job.
Jill adds, "Of course Tom's been trying to get Alel on the league..."
Gene interrupts, "But Alel doesn't share," and there's a short rustling heard from under the table like a teasing jab of one foot getting quickly blocked by the other. But Alel's attention is caught as he looks Gene up and down with some new annoyed thought, and then starts to shuck off one of his busy layers of knit clothing. "I'm not wearing your itchy clothes," Gene protests. "It's too small."
"Everything you wear is too small. And is cold outside."
"Fvadt," Tom suddenly quietly curses, his eyes noticing something at the entrance.
"What?" Gene looks up, then his face falls into irritation and he grumbles, "Oh, it's Ri'nanov..."
"See you later, Alel," Tom mutters dryly, while Alel looks of more placid worry.
"No rush, man, we have about five minutes before she can even see us. She's almost blind now, isn't she?"
"Gene, shut up," Jill warns.
"It's not like she can understand me."
And Jim realizes the presence of the slowly approaching elderly woman who is taking in the general presence at the table like some threatening spectacle rather than a group of people. She zeroes in on Alel as she mutters endless words he can't understand, some admonishing mantra of a curse or a plea. Alel is sighing and trying to say something to her as she comes up closer. After the initial futility of it, the kid just stands up, only giving a kind of warning glance at all of them as a form of goodbye on top of the motion of tossing his garment over Gene's shoulder before he takes the woman by the arm, giving soothing words as he gently leads her away and eventually out the door.
They all sit in a silence that isn't exactly awkward as much as impregnated with silent troubled exchanges. Jill's the first to talk, and says, "You need to get in those pants before it's too late, Gene."
It seems like the comment is Jill getting even for something and Gene lets out a long uncomfortable sigh.
"By all means," Tom adds in a more flippant tone, "get the little shit over his repression long enough to fuck him, so he can get tired of you and leave us all alone."
Before the rest of them can be blindsided by the harshness of that comment, Jill is coolly saying, "Ignore him, Gene, he's just being an overprotective little—"
"Why can't you trust him?" Gene directs the demand at Tom.
"Gene...Alel is still treating those two he escaped with like they're Mommy and Daddy and they can tell him what to do. It's like he needs somebody to hold his fucking hand. People like that don't..."
"You're not my daddy and I do what you tell me."
"That's cause you respect me," Tom replies, pointing sternly across the table as the conversation is waylaid by them smiling in affection. But Tom shakes his head. "And he's a good little churchgoer, and you know what they're preaching in there."
"How would I know when we're not allowed in?" Gene mumbles.
"Wait." Bones asks, "You're not allowed to worship cause you're all..."
Gene just responds with a clicking sound of his tongue, saying, "Yeah, not with these clinic stamps" as he indicates the back of his neck, and he's brisk and neutral about explaining, "D'era didn't make us, or whatever they say."
"We can still read about it, though," Jill points out, and it's clear from a shy defensiveness that she has probably read quite a lot. She shrugs, says with emphasis, "It's a beautiful religion. It just has a lot of dangerous ideas."
In a kind of afterthought, Gene starts to mutter, "Tom's probably right—"
"Gene..."
"No, really. Alel's gonna bloom up into a proper Romulan, his pseudo-parents will find him a nice proper Romulan girl, and their babies will be the purest little hundred percents. With the cutest little green cheeks...I should be happy for him, right?" Gene's whole speech is transparently bitter. "I mean, he's probably gonna make it off this planet faster than we are either way..."
"Why?" Jill demands, "Why do you think that?"
Gene sighs in a way that seems to indicate that this is a frequent debate.
"Because an economically fragile Empire that's way the hell over on Romulus is going to hear about a little clan of thieving pirating Terranized weaklings, and come storming through the mainframes with photons blazing just to come pick us up? The Romulans out there would probably see all of us the way Alel's family sees us, and even if there are some out there with family here, the people who are in a position to do anything about it aren't going to care. Stop breaking my heart with that stuff, okay?"
"I'm just saying—"
"We don't have anything to give them. Some of the people here can't even read."
With the expression of someone only willing to resign from protest for the sake of dropping the conversation, Gene takes a long swig from Tom's water bottle. Acknowledging all the guests more fully, he grimaces at the whole table and says, "Wow, this really isn't much of a good time, is it?"
Tom and Jill groan simultaneously.
"We were just talking about this the other day," she explains, laughing a little. "Something bad always happens when Gene complains that he's not having fun."
"Like, that time that—"
Tom is interrupted by the sound of his comm unit beeping.
"I swear, if this is bad news..." He shakes his head, goes off a few steps to answer the walkie-talkie-like device.
Scotty and Nyota are asking Jill something, and after a second Jim leans into the direction of Gene, who takes a fast hint and secretively crouches forward a bit.
In an almost completely serious and businesslike manner, Jim says, "Have you tried flirting with other people in front of him?"
Gene blinks. "Has that worked for you?"
Jim cringes thoughtfully, offers, "I'm pretty sure it's worked on me..."
"Gene." Tom coming back to the table, clapping Gene on the shoulder. "Put that sweater on, you'll freeze."
"What's going on?" Jill asks.
Tom realizes something and is already coming back to the table. "You're the doctor?" he says to McCoy.
"Is somebody hurt?"
"No, somebody's dead. None of ours." Tom quickly waves off the alarmed looks. "Poaching hole alarm went off an hour ago. And, uh. It's not elk."
Jill curses, and is the first to shoot up out of her chair.
Between the foothills and the expanse of the Knot neighborhood an area of more lightly wooded land spans the length of an acre or so, and they all follow Tom and Gene, as well as one other woman Tom commed up there, outside a back gate to where Jill warns all of them to look for white 'X's painted on the trees. Jim peeks down enough to see the contraption affixed below the east-facing side of the first tree that bears the mark; a primitive holographic image projects the appearance of grass and twigs over the gaping hole. If he shifts to get close enough to see through the weak web-like illusion, he can see it goes down enough feet to make for a potentially lethal fall.
Where they stop is at the fifth hole where a small team of people are already yanking the bottom base up by a set of ropes. Jim is too curious to avert his eyes, but his stomach turns in instinctive shock at the condition of the human body when it emerges.
Nyota makes a seething noise and turns away with her eyebrows going up. Alel also trips a little back with an unsettled look, which is the time when the others notice him lagging around and Tom demands, "What the hell are you doing here?"
After Alel's stubborn silence makes it clear enough he's not going to leave, Tom just leaves him alone with a shake of his head.
"Alright. Charlie's searching the body for explosives," Tom explains when the entire group except the woman have backed away, some of them leaning into something that might have once been used as a tall fence post. Tom is lighting one of the home-rolled cigarettes Jill sometimes smokes and having some side conversation with her before he says to Bones, "We were hoping you could have a look at the body, see if anything weird turns up."
Bones furrows his brow, opening his mouth wide before bluntly admitting, "I'm not entirely sure what the hell is going on here." The rest of them scoff as if they were waiting for someone to say it. "You think this person was a spy or something just cause he fell in a hole?"
"Not exactly."
"He couldn't just be some hiker or something?" Scotty asks.
"Even aside from having signs posted, it's common knowledge for the people living around the coast that you shouldn't mess around here," Jill explains. "If somebody ends up falling in a trap they were either trying to sneak in or around this place, or they're...really stupid."
Nyota asks, "Has this never happened before?"
"No," Gene says. "Well, we did lose one of ours. This group of dumbass teenagers used to come out here and dare each other to try to hop the holes. Which is really not that hard if you're pure Romulan, but one of them wasn't."
There is a collective look of distant regret about that, Jill saying, "I can't believe I can't remember her name..."
Tom squints. "It was like...Harper?"
"Parker?" Gene guesses. They don't ever come upon a solid answer before the very tall woman Tom called Charlie comes over to present a big bastard of a hunting knife that was apparently the only thing on the body, and then the group gets to work moving it into the town so that they can get to some medical equipment.
"The fall broke his neck," Bones is declaring many minutes later, shoving his hands in his pockets. "He also has a pretty big narcotics problem."
Gene says, "Huh." Next to him in front of the table the body is sitting on, Alel is giving the empty gaping gaze of the dead man's face a slightly troubled stare. He reaches out in a soft motion to close the eyes; as he takes his hand back to bury it in his pocket he has a self-conscious look, like he isn't sure why he did it. Gene gives him some sidelong curious expression just before the door to the little cabin, not for the first time, is assailed with the curious masses waiting outside. Alel sticks his head out for a moment and yells something Jim assumes is the Romulan equivalent of "Fuck off, there's nothing to see."
Jim steps over to Nyota for a moment. "What's that word I keep hearing them say?" He's referring to the only league members present who have been almost continuously speaking in the tongue since they fell in with the group. "Something like...'motchek'?"
She smiles as if she was just piecing it together herself. "Match'k. I think they're using it as a not quite derogatory word for...us. It's a plant that grows on Romulus. The fruit is similar to tomatoes."
Jim squints as she waits for him to get it. He thinks he does, and suddenly their dry smiles are identical. "Cause we bleed red?"
Simultaneously they make a motion like something balled in their hands being squeezed until it bursts, sniggering darkly.
Then everyone's eyes widen slightly: just next to them Gene is interrupted from a startled kind of laughing in front of a hesitantly grinning Alel by Tom snapping from halfway across the room: "What did you say?"
The two young men get all befuddled, Alel clearly being the subject of the demand, as if Tom picked up just one clip of a comment that set him right off.
Gene whines Tom's name all drawn-out, but Tom shouts at Alel, "You think that's funny?...Get out. No, get the hell out, I don't wanna see your face for the rest of the day."
Almost looking petulant, Alel gives Gene an uneasy rolling of his eyes and goes, while Tom gets back to whatever he was taking care of with a long stream of angry muttering. "Arrogant little..."
Jill is a mix of embarrassed and incredulously amused, stage-whispering, "I thought it was funny" to Gene.
He's giving her a grateful expression topped with a ruefulness. "I mean, it's funny cause it's true. I don't know my age, it's kind of a running thing that we could be the same fucking age for all I know."
"Yeah, but the way he said it like, 'At least I know how old I am.' It just sounded..."
"He wouldn't say it like that—"
"I know," Jill says with a cringe. "I'll talk to him."
Tom is hardly oblivious to the tone of the conversation, and even though he's still visibly fuming he lifts his head up from his conversation with Charlie to grumble in grudging amendment, "Yeah, take the night off if you want to run after him or—"
"Oh, I'm going," Gene tersely slips off from where he's half-sitting on the table.
"Fine."
"Fine." There doesn't seem to be any real wrath as Gene quickly leaves; he just barely gets out, "Nice meeting you all" before he slams the door behind him, and Scotty finds all of this rather amusing and has to take a minute to convince Jill that he isn't screwing with her when he abruptly professes to quite enjoying her friends.
Soon before they leave, Tom ends up coming out of an indecisive reverie to go over and single out Jim, who can't help disarming the hesitation with a dry remark before Tom says anything.
"You ever try meditating?"
Tom scoffs but grins a little and returns, "Have you?"
Jim's brow furrows over a stiff smile.
"Listen: From one overprotective asshole to another...I'm assuming you guys have the emergency comm number to reach us, right?"
"Uh. No..."
"I'll have Jill give it to you." After a second he quietly adds, "The thing is, with some of the stuff they're talking about on the broadcast, it could be a matter of time until the Terrans here are in just as much danger as we are, and this whole place...it shouldn't be so separated. I just want to make sure you know we're here to protect everyone in town. After all, it's not like you can comm the cops."
Before Jim can really realize his admiration and gratitude in response to that, Tom has already given him a pat on the arm and walked away.
Tom ends up announcing that he's sending out two large parties into the woods, one to find and tell the hunting party to go back home for the night, the other to look and see if anyone else is lurking out there. Jim is unable to gauge how much they really have to worry about, but the orders seem strictly precautionary; no one's looking very on edge about it. Still, as Jill breaks up the party offering to walk them all back, he finds himself really hoping the dead man was stupid, or at least doesn't have any friends out there.
Jill walks with them after the front gate back to their house, falling into step with the rest of them after a few minutes of her and Scotty lagging behind.
"Tom and I have stuck together the longest," she's explaining as they pass by the basketball court. "Gene we met on the way here...He was a state-owned nape, got put to work from a pretty young age doing prison security. I'm pretty sure the story is that he got into a fling with an inmate doing short time. The guy was able to come back about a year after his sentence was over and buy Gene into freedom under all the pretense of ownership. And they were together, I guess, until he wanted to come out here. He doesn't like to talk about it."
Bones is the one to ask, "What about the young one?"
"We don't know about Alel," she says, shaking her head. "We know he was probably working for some rich family fairly close by, but nothing about how he got captured and sold, where he grew up, anything like that. He and this old married pair just came limping into town about nine months ago, looking like death warmed over, wearing these ratty clothes; hardly able to say anything in Standard. Those two elderlies still hardly talk to anyone else. We assumed for a long time they were his parents from the way they acted with him, but no...It's always kind of odd with the true Romulans. But the stories I've actually heard from them are some of the worst. Like I'm almost happy I was born into it rather than having this one day of bad luck that ruined my life, you know?"
Bones is maybe stepping around the question he's actually asking: "Have you always been the only woman in the club?"
Jill slows, but doesn't stop walking. "That's not necessarily true. My friend that left a while ago, and there was Maria who I met last year...but she died."
"What happened to her?"
"She just...died." She says it so distantly, as if this isn't even about her: "The female spays have these heart problems. We're not sure why it's so much more common with girls, it's like...some genetic side effect of something they only tested on us. But sometimes..." She stammers, "People are surprised sometimes when they find out I'm one of them. Because of my age."
Jim can't bring himself to look at Scotty, at Bones or at anybody. He looks at the horizon, the chilling sky encroaching on them in the dusk.
Bones only replies, "Oh."
None of them would ever try to say they didn't see it coming.
Jim finally dares to wonder what's happening when he's taking his break at Rosetta's which he usually spends outside, even in the cold air, resting against the wall or sitting on the rickety bench watching his breath snake through the air. He notices something that literally appeared overnight: right across the narrow road, a bluntly and brightly lined painting of an all-too-familiar visage is spanning gigantic and vibrant on the bricks; the angle of the brows and the coolness of the expression would seem intentionally authoritative if they were not perfectly accurate. The words "FALSE HOPE?" are the bold outburst below it. It's an oddly uncertain message to commit to propaganda, but it seems like a fitting step up from the former anarchic indifference that was all the politics of the place had to offer.
The recent events were these: Captain Spock of the I.S.S. Enterprise refusing to accept a personal appellation from the Empress for his economic brilliance, no doubt a monetary reward that would have come with the underlying message that he need not continue to serve the Empire in a similar manner. A refusal which, while worded politely, echoed through the media in ripples of astonishment, doubt, outrage; and apparently, in proximal regions, occasional daring hope.
Twenty days later, after an ambassador ordered a rendezvous with private counsel to occur as soon as the Enterprise could be troubled to journey to a specified outpost, the captain allegedly falsified the directed location where the meeting would take place, beamed down privately, was reported later as missing and has not been found since.
Fueled by but not directly related to this enigma is the current debate about the proper action to be taken in response to the increasingly visible organizations of "anti-Terran humans." A certain ambassador whose name Jim can never recall has made the controversial proposal that any native Terran who neglects to place his loyalties with Terra should be treated accordingly; in effect, treated no differently from all other inferior races, even if it means treating them like slaves.
Jim is scrubbing down the body of an old hoverbike, listening to the debate on the broadcast.
"The notion that we would treat our own people like we do our enemies, it's just sickening to me. I know people who have family in that area, and certainly they don't agree with their philosophies, but it's not—"
"Oh, please, 'philosophies.' How much longer are we going to...cushion this flood of ideas under a lot of safe labels so that we don't have to face the effect they're having?"
"So you honestly think the Empire is threatened by a bunch of sad idiots living out in the woods? Or by this other group in Europe?"
"Do I feel the Empire itself is threatened, of course I don't. But on the level of civilian life, they don't seem to realize what would happen if we suddenly became a bunch of bleeding hearts over our slaves and took off all the shock bands...As if they'd just gladly walk out the door without hurting anybody? These people are pushing the entire strongly constructed paradigm of our society directly into one of vulnerability—It's not that the fleet couldn't effectively intervene, it's that we're Terra and they shouldn't have to."
"If both of you could let me interrupt, I think it's important to remark on the fact that our infamous Captain Spock is of course not human. If his actions are deliberately against the Terran Empire, do we really need to react in a way that hurts our own, or do we view him as an external threat?"
"Well, I could mention that his old comrade James Kirk was once quoted as saying he thought his first officer was much more human than Vulcan, but what do we even make of him anymore?—"
"Yes, how clever of you to place blame on a missing person—"
"You really believe it's likely those four are dead? My bet is they're in hiding somewhere just like Spock, and the officials clearly seem to suspect as much even though they won't come out and say it—"
"Jim?"
He nearly jumps out of his skin at Brighton's voice. "Sorry...What?"
"I was saying, it's a slow day. You look pretty tired, why don't you pack it in for the night...Are you alright?"
Jim nods, and heads right for the bathroom to splash some water over his face, trying to calm down. And he leaves work, and he goes home to Jill and Scotty at the table in the kitchen, and he tells himself it's alright, even though he can't not worry that there's a ticking bomb under the floorboards, even though Scotty can certainly feel it too but doesn't show it at all because there's absolutely nothing else for it but to be the man he is, sit down, complain about the food, say hi to Jim like nothing's up.
And it's funny how nearly anti-climactic it all is; no switch-on or switch-off, no suspense. He isn't paying attention to what the two are saying after the point he manages for a minute to stop constantly monitoring the slow dry of the evening, misses what it is that might have tipped the scale, and it wasn't necessarily anything that anybody said. It could have been the simplest, most harmless idea, a new fact conjoining dangerously with an old one, two plus two plus two, and the last event is something closer and louder than anything anyone could say in the bustling spectrum of news and debates and the incongruous politics: as simple as Jill lifting her cigarette up to her mouth and the cigarette never making it there. The slowest lilt of her arm and her hand going heavy back down to the table is not an expression of surprise or confusion, just the snap and the falling leaf of a terrible, terrifying thought.
Jim knows before Scotty does, and that's just when the front door cracks open, and Jim makes for an exit from the kitchen. He comes up quickly intercepting Bones and Nyota where they're carrying in some food, his voice hushed low as he asks them, "Where's the phaser? We still keep it in the car?"
Nyota's eyes are going big, Bones simply ruffling his brows and replying, "I'm pretty sure it's in the kitchen, right?"
"Jim. What's going on?"
A sudden crash and something thudding a bruise against one of the kitchen walls, and everyone moves in alarm at the sound of Jill's inscrutable shouting, Scotty's weak protests that are nearly drowned out by accusatory curses and screams, and it doesn't take very long for the two to grimly understand.
"Oh Jesus," Bones says.
"—you're all fleet scum?!—The engineer, right? It's all of you, isn't it, I swear, if you try to lie to me, you—"
"Jill, just listen to me!" Scotty must have to duck to avoid whatever metal object is flung violently across the room, along with anything else she can get her hands on; the other three can hear it as they're making their way to the kitchen. "It's—I have to explain, I was never T.E., it's not—"
"What's your name. Tell me your name."
His voice at an angry high, he snaps, "Montgomery fucking Scott, but it's not me! Jill—"
Something else thrown. "You don't fucking belong here, you can't just run in with your tails between your legs..." Her voice is seething and shaky when Jim finally gets close and peeks around the door, and there's something in her like she's still putting it all together, like she's only halfway to the worst this is going to get. "You fucking bastard. You'll all be lucky if I don't get the rest to come burn this whole house down with you in it, you—"
"Listen, dammit. There was an accident, we're not even from this whole...fucking—" Scotty kicks something. "We look like them but we're not them, alright, there was this transporter accident when—"
"How stupid do you think I am—"
"No. No, Jill, I'm telling you this 'cause you're smart enough to get it—"
"Hevam!" She spits it out in a scream, like the word has been devouring any other thought in her head. "You can go to hell. You think I've never been fucked over before?! I'm not your little nape whore, it's not gonna work—"
"—Jim." Nyota's voice is urgent, quiet as she stops his movement. "No, don't go in there."
"What, are you—"
"No no, listen. If she was going to really hurt him she would've done it already." Her voice is emphasized with some unspoken warning to it. "Jim—!"
He goes in anyway, the others lingering around the doorway behind him as the two get out a couple more screams, and then Jill looks over to the rest of them, backs up for a second like a steaming cornered animal, looks at Jim, says, "You," and pulls out her revolver.
It's not the first time Jim has had a firearm pointed at him, but it's the first time it's come in such a back-handed and bitterly effortless way, and from someone he knows. As he's putting his hands up he's not used to the sickening twist it puts in his stomach, something that's far more sour than fear. The rest of the room is silent and seems to have left him.
"Okay." He swallows. "You're really gonna do that?"
She is. She comes up closer, retorts through her teeth with a mocking lift of her brows, "On your knees. Captain Kirk."
Scotty says her name again; it's imploring and quiet and somehow angrier this time, and she doesn't even hear it, just steps even farther forward and taps the barrel against Jim's head once he's down on the floor. She's looking at the others now, a terrible-sounding laugh ringing under her panic.
"Of course. How didn't I see this before? The engineer. The doctor...Oh. Nyota, right?" She says that name with such a magnitude of bitter mockery, like she wants to make sure none of them will ever hear it the same way again. "Uhura? The skilled communications officer?"
No one dares to say anything. Jill looks back down. "And your illustrious senior officer. Your good captain. Right? Now, listen. Why don't you tell me, Kirk, how many people were enslaved, and raped, and murdered, by people under your command—"
Somebody's begging, "No, don't do that, don't you fucking do that—"
"Under your command," Jill evenly repeats. "And I might think about being nice."
Jim isn't looking up anymore. Everything in his vision is his hands on the wooden floor in front of him, like he can't stand to look at everybody else. "Fuck you, Jill."
"Jesus, Jim, just tell her that—"
"Yes. I'm the captain," Jim interrupts, actually wanting to make sure she's not listening to anyone else. "Anything they did...It's my responsibility."
Curses of panic and protest as Jill looks at him in understanding, her expression not softening but dropping to some other resolve.
"Fine," Jill says. "They live. You die."
She pulls the hammer back on her revolver, and through the frantic snap of noise coming from all directions, one phrase strips through. Nyota's voice all loud and obscure and Jim's ears are so raw through the white tangle that it takes the coherence falling after the fact that he's not dead yet to realize he can't make any sense of what she's saying.
Jim crooks his glance up enough to see Jill's face, sort of angrily hesitant, glaring in Nyota's direction. "What did you say?" she quietly demands.
Something in Romulan; Nyota repeats it, then some variance of it, a line of frantically sobbed words.
Jill says something back in the same tongue, and Jim isn't understanding a word, but it sounds like a clarification, something with an undertone that's vaguely warning and threatening, but also something weakening.
Another stream of words from Nyota; that same litany again, and then simply: "Please."
Jill's grasp on her pistol has not shaken once. Jim has been practically certain ever since she pointed it at him that she was going to shoot him, that she badly wanted to shoot him, and everything in her face and her body seems to be fighting against that want as she takes in and lets out a breath with a slight furious whimper underneath, steps back. Slowly, then surely lowers the gun.
The rest of the room seems to collapse into walls all at once. Jim is still staring forward and down for a moment, is finally moved when his shoulders are grasped into a sloppy embrace by one of McCoy's arms. Nyota has slid slowly all the way to the floor where her back is against the fridge, hands crowding over her forehead as she seems to gasp for air.
When Jim finally looks up at Jill, it seems like she's snapped out of something. Scotty is glaring at her. She almost looks fearful when she meets his eyes, some first time and some last time breathing at once in the icy air between them.
"Get out," Scotty says.
She opens her mouth—
"Get out!" he shouts.
No one tries to take her gun, or go for their phaser under the sink. Jim doesn't even realize this until he looks up again and Jill's gone.
>Sleep Now In the Fire
He wakes up in the middle of the night with a crashing pain that rings all over from the back of his head, barely registering what happened as his voice coughs out into a short and loud groan.
"Jim?" In the dark, Nyota's head appears looking over him from the top of the lofted bed. Her voice is scratched with sleep but a little urgent, and it feels like she doesn't even give him a second to reply before her feet are hopping down and passing by him and running down the hallway, towards the other bedroom.
"I'm fine," he insists five or six times when he's still on his back on the hard wood, any movement he makes provoking a bruising flash of pain in his head. Nyota seems to avoid looking right at him as she bites her bottom lip and Bones still goes at his head with the tricorder even though his worry has calmed quite a bit.
"You're not fine," Bones announces tersely, "you have a minor concussion." Jim wonders where the hypospray comes from, imagining in his annoyance that the man keeps them in his damn pajamas. Before he can make any remark about it, Bones is abruptly grumbling, "What the hell kinda nightmare makes you knock a guy to the floor?"
Nyota almost imperceptibly cringes; Jim dismissively says, "It's a small bed. And I seriously don't feel like I've got a concussion."
"You've got a hell of a headache obviously...Are you dizzy? Any ringing in your ears?"
"No." Jim sighs. "And no."
"Nausea..."
"Okay, yeah. I kinda feel I'm gonna throw up." He feels the need to amend, "But not like I'm actually going to."
"You're good and concussed, kid," Bones concludes, and Jim can only distantly frown at that very expired endearment which the doctor sometimes recycles just for old time's sake. "Let's get you back in bed. Up and at 'em."
After he makes a sort of amusingly weak attempt at getting up before giving squinting resignation, Nyota and Bones sigh and more or less manage to lift him back up and roll him onto the bed. He can feel the lingering worry in McCoy's movements, the slightly more familial way he touches him on the shoulder than he tended to do long before now.
"Thanks," he mutters, already feeling his eyes heavily shutting.
"I want you to wake him up again before morning, make sure he can still name a couple presidents and all that," he says to Nyota, who nods as she settles back down on the other side of the small bed. "Come wake me up again if anything's wrong."
Jim plunges back asleep and is awakened later by something soft and nice, her mouth lightly pursed somewhere at his jaw and her body leaning in over him slightly.
He feels a smirk crawling up his face before he fully opens his eyes. "Hmm. I should hit my head on things more often if this is the treatment I get."
"Shut up," she gets out in a bit of a laugh.
There's a blue hint of sunlight in the room. He can see enough of her face that he wants to touch it, and does, with a lazy tracing of his finger down her cheek. Her expression slowly and softly dulls to that shy guilt from earlier.
"...I can't believe I did that. I'm sorry."
"Hey, no. Whose ingenious idea was it to loft the bed over the shelf anyway?"
"Yours." She cracks a tiny smile. They're silent for a while, and the moment passes. "So do you remember where you are?"
"Yeah," he says up to the ceiling after a few seconds. "I know where I am."
And their bodies disconnect and turn, lying back to back again.
Brighton apparently has a troubling habit of ignoring his comm, so Jim has to saunter into his office to apologize for taking a sick day. But Brighton doesn't seem to take attendance, cause when he looks over from chewing his lip in front of his viewscreen he just says, "Hey, Cyrus." Even though he always calls him that, Jim is still getting used to the fake last name. "By the way, loved your handiwork on that compact. I was able to mark it up quite a bit before I shipped it out."
"Oh, the energy conversion ended up being a bitch, but I figured you'd want a good overhaul. Thanks. And..." He just can't help how his voice trails off: The captain of the ISS Enterprise is on the news.
"...Have you not heard about this?"
"Heard what?" Jim replies, squinting at what is probably some stock footage of Spock meeting at embassies and all that, while he can't quite make sense of what the announcer is saying about him.
"Apparently he negotiated a truce between these two, uh...these planets that kept going at each other. It's been really controversial cause up until now the T.E. was obviously just letting it happen so they'd basically wipe themselves out to the point of being more dependent on us? Tellarites and someone else, I think."
Jim takes a minute to respond. "And what does our glorious Empire make of this?"
"I think the general idea is they wish they'd thought of it. It's looking to be economically good for them after all. But it's a big mess cause the captain isn't talking like he's making an exception, he's talking like he thinks this kind of thing is generally a good idea, and they're not exactly tripping over in excitement to agree with that."
There is a trace of cynicism in Brighton's explanation. Jim's puzzlement probably reflects the attitude, and he barely realizes he's saying it aloud when he mutters, "What the hell are you up to?" to the image of the goateed Spock up on the screen.
"Yeah, who the hell knows," Brighton says with a shrug.
It's freezing and snowing outside the night that Bones walks in, angry with shivering, declaring that there's "some serious powwow" happening at the Knot. Jim saw the first bursts of color from the fireworks and parade-like gatherings earlier, but when he can hear some bass rhythm pulsing outside just from their porch he assumes it must have really picked up.
He's downright puzzled when somebody has the audacity to come knocking this late during a weekend, opens the door with a mumbled "What the fuck?" and is even more confused to see Jill.
Sometimes he almost forgets that Jill is still, if a tweaked version of Romulan, still Romulan. She's wearing such a nearly comical amount of layers it's kind of hilarious making out her nonchalant face beyond the rings of fluff surrounding her head, and it makes him remember how much easier it is for them to get cold.
But apparently even when she's not as strong as an average Vulcanoid she can still carry a family-sized flatscreen across town like it's her purse.
"You...brought us entertainment." He squints at her other side. "And beer?"
She gives a little laugh, not even inviting herself in yet. "It's a viewscreen none of us seem to want. Well, I nabbed it off somebody who would claim to care, but won't notice it's gone for one or two weeks, so. Oh, and it's similar to beer. You'll like it."
Nyota is coming up to them still yelling something down the hall at Scotty. "It's Jill!" she's saying, with an exasperation as if she expects to have to repeat herself to Scotty's usual finnickiness over the doorbell.
"Come on in. And thanks, but," Jim pauses, awkwardly running a hand through his hair and slowly tries to explain, "We have kind of a household pact about not drinking alcohol?..."
Nyota's the one who squints at the six-pack, her expression a little bit imploring when she looks at Jim.
"...Except for special occasions," Jim finally amends, gladly taking the drinks from Jill and saying, "Get in here already."
Jill comes inside and stomps the snow off her boots, begins de-layering; the yellowy flush from being in the cold starts to fade from her face, and a thick burst of her brown hair escapes from her hood. It's the first time Jim's seen it outside of her distinctive fat braid that hangs down her back.
Later when they're sitting on the couch or just on pillows on the floor, Scotty asks Jill what the special occasion actually is.
"It's a big send-off."
"Oh, that's right." Scotty seems to be recalling a conversation the others weren't around for. "Somebody's got a vessel already fixed up in there."
"Somebody's leaving?" Nyota asks in surprise. "They...How?"
"I've actually experimentally checked out the mainframes," Scotty reassures, "and if you've got all the right bells and whistles, you can set off jamming signals to get off of here."
"You've checked it out?" Jill asks with some amusement. Then her face gets a bit more serious. "Are you all trying to leave?"
Before any of them can start to work out an answer, her certainty solidifies with another realization.
"Most of you work for Brighton."
Talking about money is acceptable etiquette around town, it seems, but no one really talks about Brighton's ship. Nobody outright asks you if you're going to bid. It's not a subject. And Jill doesn't ask, but she doesn't really have to.
"Oh," she says, her voice small before the shrugs and says a little more casually, "Nothing wrong with a little friendly competition, I guess."
And fuck if that doesn't give Jim a pretty nasty feeling; before he can ask, she shrugs and nods.
"I'm planning on leaving with a few of mine if they get it." Jim almost can't grasp how her tone isn't at all bitter or judgmental when she says, "But, I don't get it. If you want to go abolitionist in space, it's easy. You don't have to come here to buy a ship..."
"We wouldn't exactly pass the background checks," Bones says, noncommittal in how much more he's willing to tell.
Jill pauses in the motion of tipping up her bottle; with a little sneering smile she slowly asks, "Are you guys in trouble with the law or something?"
Jim quickly insists, "We're here because we want to be."
"Hey, it's none of my business." She shrugs, and the indifference is forced but sincere.
Scotty is the most equipped to naturally change the subject and starts to ask Jill if she's here because she doesn't know any of the people skipping off.
"Actually, one of them is a friend of mine...To be honest, I kind of came here hoping I could just get buzzed with you all and not have to think too hard about it."
"You can get drunk?" Jim is suddenly curious.
"Of course I can get drunk. I'm way behind you guys right now, but I just need something pretty strong. Though, it might help if you had something sugary lying around."
Nyota blinks and remembers, "I think we still have an emergency supply of those peanut butter cups from the end of summer."
"Ugh, I can't even look at those anymore," Bones groans. "Help yourself."
She does, and she's on her third package when Jim, already halfway gone on what is the strongest thing to ever call itself beer, words some question vaguely approaching the issue of whether the Knot has any "unified and/or long-term plan." She gets a sort of Don't get me started look on her face.
"Depends on who you ask. Some of them think that D'era is going to deliver us from suffering." A lofty, possibly mocking gesture. "Other people think this place is really going to hold up for as long as they need it."
"And you don't?" Scotty asks.
"What do you think?" She gives a cringing little shrug, as if not planning on really elaborating, but when Scotty's not so wavering, she lays out, "Look. I'm into history. This isn't the first time somebody's tried to start a little revolution against the T.E., and it's like nobody around here even realizes that. This may be the most well-equipped one there's ever been, but all it means is the Empire is going to have to get bored before they bother to gather together enough of their people to come in here and clean us up. But they're going to do it."
"So you're worried about the Imperials?" Bones wants to clarify. "More than just any slave traders that wanna mess around here?"
"It would have to be a very organized, very large group of slave runners to even get in the front door. And we've been attacked before, about a year ago...Didn't end well for them. But it all depends. In case of an aerial attack...I'm not really supposed to tell you guys this, but we do have a few photon torpedoes. We're pretty well-stocked on weapons now, but half of our handhelds run on old ammunition, and that runs out. I've calculated that if we'd put the overall time and energy we spent the last six to twelve months on manufacturing and salvaging firepower into building our own ship, we could've built the type of vessel for long-term travel, the kind that could get us all out of here at the same time. But then again, if we'd gotten attacked by the actual fleet within the last year, we'd have been dead."
She takes another bite, talks around the chocolate chunk in her mouth. "Still. We're going to run out of luck eventually. If it had been up to me, I'd have taken the gamble. And Captain Spock's little ethical mid-life crisis is likely to do more harm to us than good. He's just making people defensive. You Terrans don't like to know too much about your precious space gang. They can get away with murder, and they do, they even murder each other; but you'd rather feign ignorance."
They all have to school their reactions to all that. Jim clears his throat. "What do you think of the captain, though?"
"What do you mean what do I think of him?" When she realizes that isn't explanation enough, she puts down a piece of chocolate like she can't have an appetite while she's talking about this. "You might get the occasional T.E. suit who doesn't know what he's doing. But he's Imperial fleet, and one of the highest-ups? That's all I need to know. I'd shoot him between the eyes if I got the chance."
"Even though he's not hevam?" Scotty says.
"What does that matter? Everyone knows he's half, anyway." Something in her eyes backpedals. "And I don't use that word. Well, I do, but only for a particular kind of human."
"I know," Scotty replies.
And Jim must really be drunk, because he says it out loud, interrupting with, "Have you ever had to kill anybody?"
She gives him a look that makes him wonder if that was rude. But then her response is squinting eyes and "Where do you think you are exactly?" And she's really peering down at where he's leaning against the couch, looking at all of them, seems to literally be trying to puzzle out where the hell they all came from.
Jim gets them on the subject of hooking up the viewscreen, and she's as eager as any of them to lighten up the mood. They prop the thing in the corner of the living room that not enough heat seems to reach, and then Jim and Bones wrestle immaturely over a shared blanket while Scotty and Jill settle on an early 22nd century western feature. Jim thinks he's seen it before, but he doesn't pay close enough attention, maybe not really wanting to see how this version ends. In some kind of postmodern statement it was produced in black and white, and the room hums in the monochrome and the blushing shadows of the light cast from the screen. Scotty is blowing hot air into his hands, and Jill, in a sort of defensively casual but shy way, takes his left between both of hers and rubs at it, softly trapping his fingers in hers on her lap. Jim can't help but see it happen in his sidelong curiosity, the way she doesn't look down at what she's doing, the way it comes off as something very daring simply because it's clear that it is to her. And how some spell is broken by the motion of Nyota returning to the room, making their hands self-consciously untwist.
"What the hell are you wearing your coat for?" Scotty demands.
"We're out of soap," she says with a dully rueful expression.
"Are you kidding?" Bones exclaims.
"It's not snowing now." She shrugs, but her eyes keep straying to the floor. Jim thinks something is up with her, the way she's been a little quiet all night. It's almost like seeing Jill and Scotty's affection prods a little too much at somewhere sore. As she's leaving the room before they can ask anything else, Jim gives Bones a nudge with his knee.
"Go with her."
Bones is looking at Jim as if he knows something he doesn't. "You could go..."
Jim ignores that. "Just go talk to her?"
Bones gets up to leave, crossing by Scotty and a very confused Jill who's now fumbling with the blanket across her lap.
She looks over at Jim. "Did I do something...?"
"Why do you think it's you?" Jim reassuringly waves her off.
"I have to ask, now that the doc isn't around..." Jill suddenly candidly speculates, "Are you trying to starve your way to that ship, Jim?"
Scotty lets out an impressed scoff that Jill just asks. Jim replies, "I'm not starving."
She squints at him for a second. "I know we have a conflict of interests, but you do realize...I mean, if we were to win it, we'd give you a ride off of here..."
"Right, but where would we go?" Scotty gives a little grim laugh. "Where are your friends going?"
"We know that there's a hidden colony out there, or at least there was once. We'll be lucky if we hear something back from this party, but everyone's going insane over us possibly figuring out if this place is actually safe for us...Though I have to honestly say I don't know how they're taking to liberationist Terrans. It would take a lot of convincing to get some Romulans to even let you on their ship. I'm lucky enough I have a chance of getting out of here since I'm just a degenerate."
Scotty lets out a noise of irritation, calling back to something previously brought up between them. "For fuck sakes, I really hate that you put up with that."
"You realize that on Romulan a newborn with my type of defects would have been thrown out with the trash?"
"Jesus." In a drunken grumble Jim asks, "Who are your friends, that they let you talk about yourself like that?"
Sometimes it seems like Jill never stops shrugging. "Most of my real friends are like me."
That puts a damper on that, but suddenly Jill is brightening up with an idea that seems almost funny to her.
"Hey. Do you all wanna come meet them?"
"What, like..." Jim mumbles, "Go out for drinks or something?" like this isn't something he can easily picture.
"No, I mean do you wanna come see the Knot."
They're both slightly flabbergasted by the idea. "That's...allowed?" Scotty asks.
"Yeah. If you're escorted it's okay."
Scotty and Jim exchange little looks of suppressed enthusiasm, emanating with their helpless curiosity through their shrugs.
"Yeah. Hell yeah," Scotty says.
They all meet up at the bridge over the lake on the weekend, and Jill grins at how they're rather nervously approaching, flicks her cigarette into the water and hops her way over to lead them in.
The two Romulans guarding one of the entrances do a body search while Jill chats with the one that seems friendlier than the other. Jim is getting a closer look at the appearance of the fencing that borders the whole Knot area, squinting in growing amusement at the whimsical irregular shape of it where it hasn't been replaced. "Was this already built when everybody came here?"
"It looks like it used to be an amusement park," Scotty speculates.
"A what?" Jill asks.
"Don't tell me they never had Disneyland on Romulus," Bones jokes, earning a light shove to his arm from Nyota.
"Jill."
The wary-sounding greeting comes from an approaching Romulan garbed in a checker weave and looking at her with tensely pinched features.
"Khamak." The man is handsome but in a decidedly boring way, and Jill acknowledges him with a polite smile, waving up the four behind her now that one of the guards has gestured they're free to go in. She stops as Khamak starts speaking to her in quick Romulan. Her response is nearly matching his natural speed with the language even if not quite fluent, and all Jim can tell for sure is she's calmly arguing with him. When she eventually slips back into Standard, it's like a dismissal.
"It's only two hours until curfew."
Khamak squints behind her at all of them. "I want your hevai out of here by then."
"Calm down," she waves him off with a grumble. Jim can't decide what level of familiarity she has with him; with her it seems like anything could mean affection.
None of them are really sure where she's planning to take them as they follow behind her leisured pace farther in, and Jim notices that the path they're following resembles an unnecessarily circuitous paved walkway, deciding, definitely a theme park, and finding it kind of a pleasant piece of unpredictability that the little town was built around some of the less efficient details rather than over them. Out of the bundles of homes or little workshops they pass by, some of them look like they were probably never torn down before, and he smirks at imagining the confusion of being confronted with all the gimmicky structures imitating everything from old-fashioned boat houses to European cantinas to small castles. Places that used to be gift shops that only looked like homey inns on the outside actually have people sleeping in them inside.
A woman twirling a small child between her arms shortly says hi to Jill on their way into some tavern, and Jim can't tell whether it's an actual business or something more communally managed, but none of them are thirsty or hungry anyway. Jill turns and gives a pat to the back of the head of a teenager who's sitting alone reading at a sizable table, muttering, "Of course it's just you here."
"The others are going late," the boy replies, and only glances briefly at the rest of them. His accent is extremely pronounced.
"'Running late.' Maybe they got held up. Look, everyone sit down, you're making me anxious."
They do, and Jim might as well ask, "So do you know how this place got started up?"
Jill sighs, uncertain of the specifics. "Around...less than ten years ago? Some humans started an underground slave-freeing system, managed to get a lot of people together out here who were willing to offer refuge to escaped aliens in their homes, but after a time it became clear that unless they could get off the planet somehow, the ex-slaves had nowhere to go. I'm not really sure how it transitioned from there, and we don't even know for sure what happened to those Terrans—As far as we know they were just regular citizens pretending to be slave runners who were actually buying people into freedom. But somebody was smart enough to do a good job getting the word out so that slaves who were only afraid of escaping because they had nowhere to go could know they do have somewhere. I think it's only been in the past five or so years that Terrans have been able to think they could actually live safely in the district, but most of that started miles away from the Knot, so I can't really explain it."
"Must have been a lot more guns going off back at the beginning," Nyota guesses.
"I kind of think it's funny, really, that the Knot is almost protected by the outside. You guys don't have the autonomy, and outside the other gate it's really abolitionism by reputation alone, but...with humans being so much more hesitant to go after their own?" Jill gives a thoughtful kind of grimace. "It gives us kind of a buffer. I don't think we could do this without that, and yeah, there must have been some time when we were protected by the outside too, and didn't even see it happening because we're shut up in here all scared. I don't know...I went outside the gate once just to see the town. I was glad to have my gun in case anyone strange was passing through, but nothing happened."
"Speaking of guns," Bones mutters a little darkly, and Jim realizes that he's looking at the young man entering the tavern who could not more obviously be a member of the League. Jill has her back to him and doesn't see him approaching, and Jim can only smile wryly over at Bones when it becomes clear he's headed over to them.
The Romulan, who looks a bit older than the boyish one already sitting with them, is wearing jeans, a pistol in a shoulder holster which looks like it was patched together after the death of something else made out of leather, and no shirt. His long neck is accentuated on the side by an elaborate and obscure tattoo that curves somewhere down like a bird's wing and appears, from what Jim can see, to cover up whatever neck brand must be there. Most of the Romulans around town keep their hair quite long, probably as a point of pride considering the chopped-off hair they saw on so many slaves, but this is the first ex-slave Jim's seen with a head of ropey dreadlocks. They hang to his chin around his narrow stubbled face, which at present has a distracted and impatient set to it as he shrugs out of his holster, sits down, places the weapon neatly at his edge of the table, and after shedding that symbol of his status sits back in a suddenly lazy demeanor and asks, "So where the fuck is Tom?"
"You weren't with him?" Jill asks.
"Wait, wait, that's right. He had to go up to the front gate. He's gonna be late."
"Everybody, this is Gene," Jill says with a sigh, having given up on introducing everyone at once. The newcomer gives them all a gesture that's genuine in its half-friendliness, and she adds, "And Alel's our youngest."
The young one, who has the closest to a traditional short haircut than anyone they've yet seen, resumed his reading minutes ago and hasn't so much as looked up since the newcomer came in. He now gives them all the briefest polite smile, his face falling quickly back to the stubbornly determined set to his eyes that gives his appearance some vague maturity. Gene gives Alel a sidelong smirk, and as if annoyed that he hasn't paid any attention to him since he walked in, nudges him in the arm with his elbow. Alel just gives him an irritated glance, his mouth pulling into the tiniest snarl-smile of very white teeth.
"So which one's your boyfriend, Jill?" Gene asks with a sneer.
"Which one's your boyfriend?" Jill rebukes in a grumble and an expression that probably only makes sense to a couple people at the table. "Scotty's right here. Bones is the good doctor."
In his long-suffering repression of annoyance at being called that almost constantly now, Bones gives a grudging wave.
"I'm his favorite patient," Jill declares.
"Where the hell did you get that idea?" he says with an actual hint of a smile under the roughness, getting a wink from her.
"And this is Nina. And Jim."
"Is Jim the asshole?" Gene is trying to be an asshole.
"You're just making stuff up now." Jill looks like she's regretting this entire damn thing.
"Did you run into Khamak on the way in?" Gene is shifting gears and she nods, with a look telling him it was about what he suspects. "I hope he brings it up to Tom. It's always great to watch them go at it."
"You are such child, Gene," Alel mutters in response to that.
"You got something better for me to do?"
The young man seems to smirk to himself before mumbling something else, in Romulan. Across the table, Nyota lets outs a couple low laughs, and Alel looks at her in open astonishment. She winks at him, and Jim realizes from the slighted annoyance in Gene that he must not understand the language at all.
"Oh, here's that bastard..." Gene sits up taller to wave down at somebody behind them, "What happened?"
"l'll tell you later." The man who replies is already coming over Jim's shoulder. He's also armed, with what Jim notices to be the exact phaser that was confiscated from them when they arrived. He appears to be somewhat older than most of the league members Jim has seen; his expression is tired but easy, not so smug. He gives everyone a short nod. "I'm sorry, rinam, I don't have much time to hang around..."
He leans in to kiss Jill on the top of her head while she frowns dramatically. Jim is more sure by now he's the oldest of the group and immediately senses that he's particularly close to Jill from that kind of half-distracted familial affection. He notices also that she doesn't introduce them, as if she's told him enough about them to not really need to.
Jim finally asks, "So are you friends with the whole league, Jill?"
A couple laughs go out around the table; Tom is scoffing, "I hope not."
"Tom kind of is the league," Gene affords. "Most of us are a bunch of jerk-offs, though," he adds, seemingly with the hyperbolic description of anyone who has problems with their job.
Jill adds, "Of course Tom's been trying to get Alel on the league..."
Gene interrupts, "But Alel doesn't share," and there's a short rustling heard from under the table like a teasing jab of one foot getting quickly blocked by the other. But Alel's attention is caught as he looks Gene up and down with some new annoyed thought, and then starts to shuck off one of his busy layers of knit clothing. "I'm not wearing your itchy clothes," Gene protests. "It's too small."
"Everything you wear is too small. And is cold outside."
"Fvadt," Tom suddenly quietly curses, his eyes noticing something at the entrance.
"What?" Gene looks up, then his face falls into irritation and he grumbles, "Oh, it's Ri'nanov..."
"See you later, Alel," Tom mutters dryly, while Alel looks of more placid worry.
"No rush, man, we have about five minutes before she can even see us. She's almost blind now, isn't she?"
"Gene, shut up," Jill warns.
"It's not like she can understand me."
And Jim realizes the presence of the slowly approaching elderly woman who is taking in the general presence at the table like some threatening spectacle rather than a group of people. She zeroes in on Alel as she mutters endless words he can't understand, some admonishing mantra of a curse or a plea. Alel is sighing and trying to say something to her as she comes up closer. After the initial futility of it, the kid just stands up, only giving a kind of warning glance at all of them as a form of goodbye on top of the motion of tossing his garment over Gene's shoulder before he takes the woman by the arm, giving soothing words as he gently leads her away and eventually out the door.
They all sit in a silence that isn't exactly awkward as much as impregnated with silent troubled exchanges. Jill's the first to talk, and says, "You need to get in those pants before it's too late, Gene."
It seems like the comment is Jill getting even for something and Gene lets out a long uncomfortable sigh.
"By all means," Tom adds in a more flippant tone, "get the little shit over his repression long enough to fuck him, so he can get tired of you and leave us all alone."
Before the rest of them can be blindsided by the harshness of that comment, Jill is coolly saying, "Ignore him, Gene, he's just being an overprotective little—"
"Why can't you trust him?" Gene directs the demand at Tom.
"Gene...Alel is still treating those two he escaped with like they're Mommy and Daddy and they can tell him what to do. It's like he needs somebody to hold his fucking hand. People like that don't..."
"You're not my daddy and I do what you tell me."
"That's cause you respect me," Tom replies, pointing sternly across the table as the conversation is waylaid by them smiling in affection. But Tom shakes his head. "And he's a good little churchgoer, and you know what they're preaching in there."
"How would I know when we're not allowed in?" Gene mumbles.
"Wait." Bones asks, "You're not allowed to worship cause you're all..."
Gene just responds with a clicking sound of his tongue, saying, "Yeah, not with these clinic stamps" as he indicates the back of his neck, and he's brisk and neutral about explaining, "D'era didn't make us, or whatever they say."
"We can still read about it, though," Jill points out, and it's clear from a shy defensiveness that she has probably read quite a lot. She shrugs, says with emphasis, "It's a beautiful religion. It just has a lot of dangerous ideas."
In a kind of afterthought, Gene starts to mutter, "Tom's probably right—"
"Gene..."
"No, really. Alel's gonna bloom up into a proper Romulan, his pseudo-parents will find him a nice proper Romulan girl, and their babies will be the purest little hundred percents. With the cutest little green cheeks...I should be happy for him, right?" Gene's whole speech is transparently bitter. "I mean, he's probably gonna make it off this planet faster than we are either way..."
"Why?" Jill demands, "Why do you think that?"
Gene sighs in a way that seems to indicate that this is a frequent debate.
"Because an economically fragile Empire that's way the hell over on Romulus is going to hear about a little clan of thieving pirating Terranized weaklings, and come storming through the mainframes with photons blazing just to come pick us up? The Romulans out there would probably see all of us the way Alel's family sees us, and even if there are some out there with family here, the people who are in a position to do anything about it aren't going to care. Stop breaking my heart with that stuff, okay?"
"I'm just saying—"
"We don't have anything to give them. Some of the people here can't even read."
With the expression of someone only willing to resign from protest for the sake of dropping the conversation, Gene takes a long swig from Tom's water bottle. Acknowledging all the guests more fully, he grimaces at the whole table and says, "Wow, this really isn't much of a good time, is it?"
Tom and Jill groan simultaneously.
"We were just talking about this the other day," she explains, laughing a little. "Something bad always happens when Gene complains that he's not having fun."
"Like, that time that—"
Tom is interrupted by the sound of his comm unit beeping.
"I swear, if this is bad news..." He shakes his head, goes off a few steps to answer the walkie-talkie-like device.
Scotty and Nyota are asking Jill something, and after a second Jim leans into the direction of Gene, who takes a fast hint and secretively crouches forward a bit.
In an almost completely serious and businesslike manner, Jim says, "Have you tried flirting with other people in front of him?"
Gene blinks. "Has that worked for you?"
Jim cringes thoughtfully, offers, "I'm pretty sure it's worked on me..."
"Gene." Tom coming back to the table, clapping Gene on the shoulder. "Put that sweater on, you'll freeze."
"What's going on?" Jill asks.
Tom realizes something and is already coming back to the table. "You're the doctor?" he says to McCoy.
"Is somebody hurt?"
"No, somebody's dead. None of ours." Tom quickly waves off the alarmed looks. "Poaching hole alarm went off an hour ago. And, uh. It's not elk."
Jill curses, and is the first to shoot up out of her chair.
Between the foothills and the expanse of the Knot neighborhood an area of more lightly wooded land spans the length of an acre or so, and they all follow Tom and Gene, as well as one other woman Tom commed up there, outside a back gate to where Jill warns all of them to look for white 'X's painted on the trees. Jim peeks down enough to see the contraption affixed below the east-facing side of the first tree that bears the mark; a primitive holographic image projects the appearance of grass and twigs over the gaping hole. If he shifts to get close enough to see through the weak web-like illusion, he can see it goes down enough feet to make for a potentially lethal fall.
Where they stop is at the fifth hole where a small team of people are already yanking the bottom base up by a set of ropes. Jim is too curious to avert his eyes, but his stomach turns in instinctive shock at the condition of the human body when it emerges.
Nyota makes a seething noise and turns away with her eyebrows going up. Alel also trips a little back with an unsettled look, which is the time when the others notice him lagging around and Tom demands, "What the hell are you doing here?"
After Alel's stubborn silence makes it clear enough he's not going to leave, Tom just leaves him alone with a shake of his head.
"Alright. Charlie's searching the body for explosives," Tom explains when the entire group except the woman have backed away, some of them leaning into something that might have once been used as a tall fence post. Tom is lighting one of the home-rolled cigarettes Jill sometimes smokes and having some side conversation with her before he says to Bones, "We were hoping you could have a look at the body, see if anything weird turns up."
Bones furrows his brow, opening his mouth wide before bluntly admitting, "I'm not entirely sure what the hell is going on here." The rest of them scoff as if they were waiting for someone to say it. "You think this person was a spy or something just cause he fell in a hole?"
"Not exactly."
"He couldn't just be some hiker or something?" Scotty asks.
"Even aside from having signs posted, it's common knowledge for the people living around the coast that you shouldn't mess around here," Jill explains. "If somebody ends up falling in a trap they were either trying to sneak in or around this place, or they're...really stupid."
Nyota asks, "Has this never happened before?"
"No," Gene says. "Well, we did lose one of ours. This group of dumbass teenagers used to come out here and dare each other to try to hop the holes. Which is really not that hard if you're pure Romulan, but one of them wasn't."
There is a collective look of distant regret about that, Jill saying, "I can't believe I can't remember her name..."
Tom squints. "It was like...Harper?"
"Parker?" Gene guesses. They don't ever come upon a solid answer before the very tall woman Tom called Charlie comes over to present a big bastard of a hunting knife that was apparently the only thing on the body, and then the group gets to work moving it into the town so that they can get to some medical equipment.
"The fall broke his neck," Bones is declaring many minutes later, shoving his hands in his pockets. "He also has a pretty big narcotics problem."
Gene says, "Huh." Next to him in front of the table the body is sitting on, Alel is giving the empty gaping gaze of the dead man's face a slightly troubled stare. He reaches out in a soft motion to close the eyes; as he takes his hand back to bury it in his pocket he has a self-conscious look, like he isn't sure why he did it. Gene gives him some sidelong curious expression just before the door to the little cabin, not for the first time, is assailed with the curious masses waiting outside. Alel sticks his head out for a moment and yells something Jim assumes is the Romulan equivalent of "Fuck off, there's nothing to see."
Jim steps over to Nyota for a moment. "What's that word I keep hearing them say?" He's referring to the only league members present who have been almost continuously speaking in the tongue since they fell in with the group. "Something like...'motchek'?"
She smiles as if she was just piecing it together herself. "Match'k. I think they're using it as a not quite derogatory word for...us. It's a plant that grows on Romulus. The fruit is similar to tomatoes."
Jim squints as she waits for him to get it. He thinks he does, and suddenly their dry smiles are identical. "Cause we bleed red?"
Simultaneously they make a motion like something balled in their hands being squeezed until it bursts, sniggering darkly.
Then everyone's eyes widen slightly: just next to them Gene is interrupted from a startled kind of laughing in front of a hesitantly grinning Alel by Tom snapping from halfway across the room: "What did you say?"
The two young men get all befuddled, Alel clearly being the subject of the demand, as if Tom picked up just one clip of a comment that set him right off.
Gene whines Tom's name all drawn-out, but Tom shouts at Alel, "You think that's funny?...Get out. No, get the hell out, I don't wanna see your face for the rest of the day."
Almost looking petulant, Alel gives Gene an uneasy rolling of his eyes and goes, while Tom gets back to whatever he was taking care of with a long stream of angry muttering. "Arrogant little..."
Jill is a mix of embarrassed and incredulously amused, stage-whispering, "I thought it was funny" to Gene.
He's giving her a grateful expression topped with a ruefulness. "I mean, it's funny cause it's true. I don't know my age, it's kind of a running thing that we could be the same fucking age for all I know."
"Yeah, but the way he said it like, 'At least I know how old I am.' It just sounded..."
"He wouldn't say it like that—"
"I know," Jill says with a cringe. "I'll talk to him."
Tom is hardly oblivious to the tone of the conversation, and even though he's still visibly fuming he lifts his head up from his conversation with Charlie to grumble in grudging amendment, "Yeah, take the night off if you want to run after him or—"
"Oh, I'm going," Gene tersely slips off from where he's half-sitting on the table.
"Fine."
"Fine." There doesn't seem to be any real wrath as Gene quickly leaves; he just barely gets out, "Nice meeting you all" before he slams the door behind him, and Scotty finds all of this rather amusing and has to take a minute to convince Jill that he isn't screwing with her when he abruptly professes to quite enjoying her friends.
Soon before they leave, Tom ends up coming out of an indecisive reverie to go over and single out Jim, who can't help disarming the hesitation with a dry remark before Tom says anything.
"You ever try meditating?"
Tom scoffs but grins a little and returns, "Have you?"
Jim's brow furrows over a stiff smile.
"Listen: From one overprotective asshole to another...I'm assuming you guys have the emergency comm number to reach us, right?"
"Uh. No..."
"I'll have Jill give it to you." After a second he quietly adds, "The thing is, with some of the stuff they're talking about on the broadcast, it could be a matter of time until the Terrans here are in just as much danger as we are, and this whole place...it shouldn't be so separated. I just want to make sure you know we're here to protect everyone in town. After all, it's not like you can comm the cops."
Before Jim can really realize his admiration and gratitude in response to that, Tom has already given him a pat on the arm and walked away.
Tom ends up announcing that he's sending out two large parties into the woods, one to find and tell the hunting party to go back home for the night, the other to look and see if anyone else is lurking out there. Jim is unable to gauge how much they really have to worry about, but the orders seem strictly precautionary; no one's looking very on edge about it. Still, as Jill breaks up the party offering to walk them all back, he finds himself really hoping the dead man was stupid, or at least doesn't have any friends out there.
Jill walks with them after the front gate back to their house, falling into step with the rest of them after a few minutes of her and Scotty lagging behind.
"Tom and I have stuck together the longest," she's explaining as they pass by the basketball court. "Gene we met on the way here...He was a state-owned nape, got put to work from a pretty young age doing prison security. I'm pretty sure the story is that he got into a fling with an inmate doing short time. The guy was able to come back about a year after his sentence was over and buy Gene into freedom under all the pretense of ownership. And they were together, I guess, until he wanted to come out here. He doesn't like to talk about it."
Bones is the one to ask, "What about the young one?"
"We don't know about Alel," she says, shaking her head. "We know he was probably working for some rich family fairly close by, but nothing about how he got captured and sold, where he grew up, anything like that. He and this old married pair just came limping into town about nine months ago, looking like death warmed over, wearing these ratty clothes; hardly able to say anything in Standard. Those two elderlies still hardly talk to anyone else. We assumed for a long time they were his parents from the way they acted with him, but no...It's always kind of odd with the true Romulans. But the stories I've actually heard from them are some of the worst. Like I'm almost happy I was born into it rather than having this one day of bad luck that ruined my life, you know?"
Bones is maybe stepping around the question he's actually asking: "Have you always been the only woman in the club?"
Jill slows, but doesn't stop walking. "That's not necessarily true. My friend that left a while ago, and there was Maria who I met last year...but she died."
"What happened to her?"
"She just...died." She says it so distantly, as if this isn't even about her: "The female spays have these heart problems. We're not sure why it's so much more common with girls, it's like...some genetic side effect of something they only tested on us. But sometimes..." She stammers, "People are surprised sometimes when they find out I'm one of them. Because of my age."
Jim can't bring himself to look at Scotty, at Bones or at anybody. He looks at the horizon, the chilling sky encroaching on them in the dusk.
Bones only replies, "Oh."
None of them would ever try to say they didn't see it coming.
Jim finally dares to wonder what's happening when he's taking his break at Rosetta's which he usually spends outside, even in the cold air, resting against the wall or sitting on the rickety bench watching his breath snake through the air. He notices something that literally appeared overnight: right across the narrow road, a bluntly and brightly lined painting of an all-too-familiar visage is spanning gigantic and vibrant on the bricks; the angle of the brows and the coolness of the expression would seem intentionally authoritative if they were not perfectly accurate. The words "FALSE HOPE?" are the bold outburst below it. It's an oddly uncertain message to commit to propaganda, but it seems like a fitting step up from the former anarchic indifference that was all the politics of the place had to offer.
The recent events were these: Captain Spock of the I.S.S. Enterprise refusing to accept a personal appellation from the Empress for his economic brilliance, no doubt a monetary reward that would have come with the underlying message that he need not continue to serve the Empire in a similar manner. A refusal which, while worded politely, echoed through the media in ripples of astonishment, doubt, outrage; and apparently, in proximal regions, occasional daring hope.
Twenty days later, after an ambassador ordered a rendezvous with private counsel to occur as soon as the Enterprise could be troubled to journey to a specified outpost, the captain allegedly falsified the directed location where the meeting would take place, beamed down privately, was reported later as missing and has not been found since.
Fueled by but not directly related to this enigma is the current debate about the proper action to be taken in response to the increasingly visible organizations of "anti-Terran humans." A certain ambassador whose name Jim can never recall has made the controversial proposal that any native Terran who neglects to place his loyalties with Terra should be treated accordingly; in effect, treated no differently from all other inferior races, even if it means treating them like slaves.
Jim is scrubbing down the body of an old hoverbike, listening to the debate on the broadcast.
"The notion that we would treat our own people like we do our enemies, it's just sickening to me. I know people who have family in that area, and certainly they don't agree with their philosophies, but it's not—"
"Oh, please, 'philosophies.' How much longer are we going to...cushion this flood of ideas under a lot of safe labels so that we don't have to face the effect they're having?"
"So you honestly think the Empire is threatened by a bunch of sad idiots living out in the woods? Or by this other group in Europe?"
"Do I feel the Empire itself is threatened, of course I don't. But on the level of civilian life, they don't seem to realize what would happen if we suddenly became a bunch of bleeding hearts over our slaves and took off all the shock bands...As if they'd just gladly walk out the door without hurting anybody? These people are pushing the entire strongly constructed paradigm of our society directly into one of vulnerability—It's not that the fleet couldn't effectively intervene, it's that we're Terra and they shouldn't have to."
"If both of you could let me interrupt, I think it's important to remark on the fact that our infamous Captain Spock is of course not human. If his actions are deliberately against the Terran Empire, do we really need to react in a way that hurts our own, or do we view him as an external threat?"
"Well, I could mention that his old comrade James Kirk was once quoted as saying he thought his first officer was much more human than Vulcan, but what do we even make of him anymore?—"
"Yes, how clever of you to place blame on a missing person—"
"You really believe it's likely those four are dead? My bet is they're in hiding somewhere just like Spock, and the officials clearly seem to suspect as much even though they won't come out and say it—"
"Jim?"
He nearly jumps out of his skin at Brighton's voice. "Sorry...What?"
"I was saying, it's a slow day. You look pretty tired, why don't you pack it in for the night...Are you alright?"
Jim nods, and heads right for the bathroom to splash some water over his face, trying to calm down. And he leaves work, and he goes home to Jill and Scotty at the table in the kitchen, and he tells himself it's alright, even though he can't not worry that there's a ticking bomb under the floorboards, even though Scotty can certainly feel it too but doesn't show it at all because there's absolutely nothing else for it but to be the man he is, sit down, complain about the food, say hi to Jim like nothing's up.
And it's funny how nearly anti-climactic it all is; no switch-on or switch-off, no suspense. He isn't paying attention to what the two are saying after the point he manages for a minute to stop constantly monitoring the slow dry of the evening, misses what it is that might have tipped the scale, and it wasn't necessarily anything that anybody said. It could have been the simplest, most harmless idea, a new fact conjoining dangerously with an old one, two plus two plus two, and the last event is something closer and louder than anything anyone could say in the bustling spectrum of news and debates and the incongruous politics: as simple as Jill lifting her cigarette up to her mouth and the cigarette never making it there. The slowest lilt of her arm and her hand going heavy back down to the table is not an expression of surprise or confusion, just the snap and the falling leaf of a terrible, terrifying thought.
Jim knows before Scotty does, and that's just when the front door cracks open, and Jim makes for an exit from the kitchen. He comes up quickly intercepting Bones and Nyota where they're carrying in some food, his voice hushed low as he asks them, "Where's the phaser? We still keep it in the car?"
Nyota's eyes are going big, Bones simply ruffling his brows and replying, "I'm pretty sure it's in the kitchen, right?"
"Jim. What's going on?"
A sudden crash and something thudding a bruise against one of the kitchen walls, and everyone moves in alarm at the sound of Jill's inscrutable shouting, Scotty's weak protests that are nearly drowned out by accusatory curses and screams, and it doesn't take very long for the two to grimly understand.
"Oh Jesus," Bones says.
"—you're all fleet scum?!—The engineer, right? It's all of you, isn't it, I swear, if you try to lie to me, you—"
"Jill, just listen to me!" Scotty must have to duck to avoid whatever metal object is flung violently across the room, along with anything else she can get her hands on; the other three can hear it as they're making their way to the kitchen. "It's—I have to explain, I was never T.E., it's not—"
"What's your name. Tell me your name."
His voice at an angry high, he snaps, "Montgomery fucking Scott, but it's not me! Jill—"
Something else thrown. "You don't fucking belong here, you can't just run in with your tails between your legs..." Her voice is seething and shaky when Jim finally gets close and peeks around the door, and there's something in her like she's still putting it all together, like she's only halfway to the worst this is going to get. "You fucking bastard. You'll all be lucky if I don't get the rest to come burn this whole house down with you in it, you—"
"Listen, dammit. There was an accident, we're not even from this whole...fucking—" Scotty kicks something. "We look like them but we're not them, alright, there was this transporter accident when—"
"How stupid do you think I am—"
"No. No, Jill, I'm telling you this 'cause you're smart enough to get it—"
"Hevam!" She spits it out in a scream, like the word has been devouring any other thought in her head. "You can go to hell. You think I've never been fucked over before?! I'm not your little nape whore, it's not gonna work—"
"—Jim." Nyota's voice is urgent, quiet as she stops his movement. "No, don't go in there."
"What, are you—"
"No no, listen. If she was going to really hurt him she would've done it already." Her voice is emphasized with some unspoken warning to it. "Jim—!"
He goes in anyway, the others lingering around the doorway behind him as the two get out a couple more screams, and then Jill looks over to the rest of them, backs up for a second like a steaming cornered animal, looks at Jim, says, "You," and pulls out her revolver.
It's not the first time Jim has had a firearm pointed at him, but it's the first time it's come in such a back-handed and bitterly effortless way, and from someone he knows. As he's putting his hands up he's not used to the sickening twist it puts in his stomach, something that's far more sour than fear. The rest of the room is silent and seems to have left him.
"Okay." He swallows. "You're really gonna do that?"
She is. She comes up closer, retorts through her teeth with a mocking lift of her brows, "On your knees. Captain Kirk."
Scotty says her name again; it's imploring and quiet and somehow angrier this time, and she doesn't even hear it, just steps even farther forward and taps the barrel against Jim's head once he's down on the floor. She's looking at the others now, a terrible-sounding laugh ringing under her panic.
"Of course. How didn't I see this before? The engineer. The doctor...Oh. Nyota, right?" She says that name with such a magnitude of bitter mockery, like she wants to make sure none of them will ever hear it the same way again. "Uhura? The skilled communications officer?"
No one dares to say anything. Jill looks back down. "And your illustrious senior officer. Your good captain. Right? Now, listen. Why don't you tell me, Kirk, how many people were enslaved, and raped, and murdered, by people under your command—"
Somebody's begging, "No, don't do that, don't you fucking do that—"
"Under your command," Jill evenly repeats. "And I might think about being nice."
Jim isn't looking up anymore. Everything in his vision is his hands on the wooden floor in front of him, like he can't stand to look at everybody else. "Fuck you, Jill."
"Jesus, Jim, just tell her that—"
"Yes. I'm the captain," Jim interrupts, actually wanting to make sure she's not listening to anyone else. "Anything they did...It's my responsibility."
Curses of panic and protest as Jill looks at him in understanding, her expression not softening but dropping to some other resolve.
"Fine," Jill says. "They live. You die."
She pulls the hammer back on her revolver, and through the frantic snap of noise coming from all directions, one phrase strips through. Nyota's voice all loud and obscure and Jim's ears are so raw through the white tangle that it takes the coherence falling after the fact that he's not dead yet to realize he can't make any sense of what she's saying.
Jim crooks his glance up enough to see Jill's face, sort of angrily hesitant, glaring in Nyota's direction. "What did you say?" she quietly demands.
Something in Romulan; Nyota repeats it, then some variance of it, a line of frantically sobbed words.
Jill says something back in the same tongue, and Jim isn't understanding a word, but it sounds like a clarification, something with an undertone that's vaguely warning and threatening, but also something weakening.
Another stream of words from Nyota; that same litany again, and then simply: "Please."
Jill's grasp on her pistol has not shaken once. Jim has been practically certain ever since she pointed it at him that she was going to shoot him, that she badly wanted to shoot him, and everything in her face and her body seems to be fighting against that want as she takes in and lets out a breath with a slight furious whimper underneath, steps back. Slowly, then surely lowers the gun.
The rest of the room seems to collapse into walls all at once. Jim is still staring forward and down for a moment, is finally moved when his shoulders are grasped into a sloppy embrace by one of McCoy's arms. Nyota has slid slowly all the way to the floor where her back is against the fridge, hands crowding over her forehead as she seems to gasp for air.
When Jim finally looks up at Jill, it seems like she's snapped out of something. Scotty is glaring at her. She almost looks fearful when she meets his eyes, some first time and some last time breathing at once in the icy air between them.
"Get out," Scotty says.
She opens her mouth—
"Get out!" he shouts.
No one tries to take her gun, or go for their phaser under the sink. Jim doesn't even realize this until he looks up again and Jill's gone.
>Sleep Now In the Fire
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Date: 2010-11-04 09:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-11 08:46 pm (UTC)I was just going to read this one chapter and actually go to bed early tonight, but there's no way in hell after this. Because, no no no please tell me everything's going to work out, I really like Jill...!
*clicks on link quickly*
ps: Gene and Tom are pretty awesome too. :)