![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninety6tears[See Master Post]
Some time after midnight she starts to realize that no one has asked her what it was she said to Jill before.
She's in the back behind the passenger seat, in which Jim has his head lulled far back and one hand still where it stopped in the middle of combing up through his hair at some point and an elbow knocked tiredly to the window. Scotty on her left and Leonard in the driver's, and they're parked down the street from the house, just close enough that they'd pick up on it if anything happened.
It's the break after a long uneasy silence when Leonard and Jim get to talking again.
"Nothing's going to happen. We've been out here half the night." Jim's voice is brittle, a little angry under the stubborn certainty.
Leonard makes a worried sigh. "She said—"
"She isn't going to tell anybody. If Scotty thinks she isn't, I'm pretty sure she isn't."
Scotty's voice is rough when he puts in, "Look, I'm just wondering...If they start putting our pictures out there..."
"I'm sure they already have. Luckily, she's one of the only people we know around here who really pays attention to that stuff. She's the only one who knows us. The point is, I would fucking guarantee you there are other people around here who have looked at us and thought, maybe. But if we start acting like something's up, if we suddenly try to skip town, they're not just going to be thinking maybe anymore." Jim explains all of this like he'd rather not talk about anything at all right now. "We put our noses down and act like we've always been acting. It may not be much of a plan, but it's all we've got."
In response to that last part he gives a glance around the car, his impatient invitation for any other opinions. And with a somewhat daring indifference, opens the car door.
"What are you—"
"I have work in the morning. I'm going to bed." Jim slams the door behind him, and even though they're all so wound-up that the cool night air seems to threaten a feeling of enclosed safety in the vehicle, nobody tries to stop him.
Only a few minutes later, she follows. She shivers through the silence of the dark neighborhood, walking home in her cheap sandals, sighing as her body realizes its exhaustion when she puts in the code to open the back door.
He's already in bed when she crawls in after, his back facing her and his body unmoving as if he's already fallen asleep. She slides her body in under the blanket and then fluidly moves in close, drawing her arms around him and burrowing her face between his shoulders, a shaky breath going out and going in and going out again.
Now he moves; his body turns into hers and he lets her hold him tighter that way, just squeezing into him, making sure he's there. Just for a moment he draws back to push her hair out of her eyes, looks kind of numbly searching into them; with that same nearly unfeeling curiosity, he slips his body down enough to press his lips onto hers. He kisses her once, and again, three times. She only passively kisses him back. As if he's looking for something and she's merely letting him look for that thing.
He searches for whatever it is until they fall asleep, and somehow they do that awful night, waiting for somebody to come and burn the house down.
On the first day of spring she helps Leonard communicate with a patient, a child with a broken foot and a worrisome older sibling. She sticks around in the kitchen afterward, eventually opening the back door and sitting on the one step into the yard.
"You think we'll have to build a fence if we get the ship?" Leonard asks quietly as he pulls up the one chair they have outside and sits on it backwards.
"I guess we will," she says, smiling tiredly. "Unless they figure out how to fix it up and fly it in one day. Though it depends. How easy is it to steal a vessel?"
Shaking his head, scratching the back of it, he shrugs. "Well. Hell if I know."
She smiles with a little shake of her head. Then she clears her throat after a moment. "What do you think about Jim?"
He looks at her uncertainly, something hesitant in his eyes.
Pressing her lips together, she just shrugs. The house and the outside is very quiet; birds chirp in the mild cold, and everything they say feels a little too gentle, too naked. "He's just having a hard time, I guess," she says in some attempt to console herself.
"He almost got killed. And not in a way he'd like to go, that's for sure." The doctor shakes his head up somewhere, pleading at nothing. "I don't know what to tell you. I would've been giving him anti-depressants months ago if we had any."
"I'm sure he'll make it out of this, though." She says this figurative assurance like she just needs to hear it, even if he won't say it too. "I mean. He's good with this stuff, right?"
Before Leonard sorts together a response to that, she comes out of the silence with a hesitant noise, speaks with a dark and distant note.
"You know. That place you were in, when you realized that you weren't going to see your daughter again. Like you accepted it all at once, that this is where we are. Scotty got there on his own at some point, I'm sure. And maybe Jim's there now. But me...It's like I'm still waiting for it. And I don't understand it, because it's like I know, but I don't know."
When she stops staring off into the sparsely grassy field that is their yard, she realizes Leonard looking straight at her. He asks, "What happened when you went to Pemba?"
She sits up a little, not sure what he's asking.
"It's just that I have to admit I was a little relieved at how fast you turned around and left."
She thinks she understands the implication. "It wasn't my mother. I'm not fooling myself there. Those people we left on the Enterprise weren't our crew. We're alone, and I know it. We're so completely alone, but every morning I wake up and it's like I've forgotten that...This old life is still at the back of my mind, and it won't quit. It won't leave."
The next day it's her and Jim in the kitchen, the others out working while the big debate hollers over the audio system; they're finally listening to the news now, but they still don't talk about it. Jim's making breakfast while she sits at the table, both of them heavy in their silence, the meaning of some chancellor's words ticking a foreboding rhythm through the room.
He turns off the burner and a couple minutes later is sitting down next to her.
"Are you scared?" she asks, very quietly, just as he's reaching for a knife.
His movements pause; he looks at her, then looks away somewhere, organizing his plate and his fork and he faintly, finally replies, "When am I not scared?"
He pushes the other plate in front of her: one of the only eggs they've seen all year and also some of the bread he's been trying to save.
"Thank you," she says, for the cooking. He gives her a softly accustomed look in response, and they pretend they aren't listening to politicians rather sportingly toss around the last shreds of their peace of mind for the duration of a tacit breakfast.
The law gets passed.
She finds out when most of Brighton's employees are taking lunch where he lets them hang out outside of his office, keeping mostly to herself as she hasn't worked often enough to really be acquainted with many of the workers, and Scotty's still outside putting off his breaks as usual. Everyone's crowded around the broadcast, and it doesn't take her long to realize why.
"Mazel's proposition, now in effect as international policy, has spurred the onslaught of a number of actions immediately being taken by the Empire; the potentially alarming element to these changes we are immediately seeing is the invitation being issued by these new policies to have any people act promptly on the civilian level to help arrest and identify any humans who have engaged in clear actions of anti-Terran activism, a distinction already set forth by the bill's public section.
"The empress makes it clear that enslavement of these individuals is not only permissible but a safe solution to the troublesomely casual presence of potentially dangerous aberrants that have become increasingly visual in the past few years. While governmental bodies will be reacting on a step-by-step rate in condemning these individuals, the duty of our citizens to the Empire is to do everything they can to help identify them, even if only on the small level of branding them; the law proposes this as a practical way to ensure that the most threatening groups of these people cannot adopt pretenses and simply return to living as Terran citizens; a simple 'X' shape anywhere on the person's neck is sufficient to identify an individual as an enemy of the Empire, and relatively easy to produce..."
At some point Nyota's hand came slowly up and covered disbelievingly at her mouth as she stood very still, as the rest of the room followed her into a solemnity that she only snapped out of when Scotty was suddenly at her side, his expression wary. For a second they said nothing; she put her hand at his shoulder as if to make sure she had him where she knew he was.
They go back to work.
They go back to work, until Brighton pops his head into the storage room around dusk, shouting.
"The border's been compromised. Everyone get home to your families."
Scotty's muttering some curses when she finds him again; when they're walking down the business block, he pulls at her sleeve and they go into an alleyway, avoiding the clearer channels of streets where it isn't long before they first catch sight of a mammoth tank of a vehicle roaring in, not bothering to target anyone in sight but, they soon realize, driving straight for the Knot.
After weaseling between buildings in no particular direction that isn't simply away from the main road and into the darker pockets in the shade, she knows something's going on in Scotty's head. Suddenly remembering something, she asks, "Do you know if Jim's home?"
"He was working Rosetta's, wasn't he?" he replies, stopping as if to catch his breath with a hand rested on a picnic bench in the shadowy courtyard. "I'm sure he'll head home."
Nyota pulls in and lets out a long breath, steps up closer to him. All she says is, "Scotty."
He's shaking his head in a troubled way before he looks at her, and just nods to himself, says, "Right." For a moment after that dazed and senseless word she searches him, and then swallows.
"...You're going to the Knot." That sinks in while a couple other slaver trucks are heard; the first ringing blast of gunshots from some obscure direction. Her nerves jump at it, only making her reply sooner, "Okay," not so much saying okay as Give me a minute to think about just what the hell you're saying.
A couple enraged people shout in the distance, small and ineffectual; she really doesn't know what to make of the fact that this can only get worse. They exchange a multitude of comments in eye contact alone, all the arguments for why she should be okay, why she definitely might not be okay; what she ends up saying is, "And your plan is to go in there and drag her out, and hope that Jim or Leonard is able to just swing by with the car and pick you up?" She understands. She noticed when she was at the Knot how insecure so many of the homes are, how small and easy to find the few bunkers were. The whole idea of it is ugly. The stupidity of assuming they'll be able to do anything about it notwithstanding, she knows there's no way she'll be able to talk him out of this.
She says, "Okay," and it means something else this time. "But we should move now. The phaser's at the house; we'll just have to find something we—"
"Leonard wouldn't even—Wait. Who's we?"
Nyota is already walking.
"Waaait, wait. Nuh-uh. Can you even imagine what Jim would do to me—"
"What about Jim?" she demands, turning back around. "You tell me how he'd feel about me coming home without you saying I'd let you go off and do something this crazy. I'll deal with Jim. You're doing this with me, or not at all. Make a decision."
He starts walking with a bit of an angry determination in his step; she takes that as a yes, but doesn't understand why he's headed straight off towards the northern lot until he says, "We need weapons."
She understands; within their range, the best place to find anything that could be used for defense is most likely to be in people's cars. As they reach the small lot with nine or so vehicles parked there, but no people, she starts to ask, "How will we...?"
He goes straight for the pole in the corner of the lot, and Nyota realizes the big power box on it is part of the system that boosts comm signals in the area. As Scotty wrenches it open and starts messing around with all the switches and keys, she doesn't have time to ask what he's doing before he's telling her to go to the nearest vehicle and try to open the trunk on his mark.
"What—?"
"I can make a short burst of a jam signal that the cheaper security systems react to like it's being unlocked. Go."
At the first vehicle, she presses up until he yells "Now!?"
Somewhat comically, even when the trunk she's pressing at doesn't budge, she does hear a chorus of tweeting and clicking, and a few of the trunks in the lot are automatically hovering open. "Um. I'll check these two over here."
When she's done ransacking and then squinting through windows to see if anything good is on the seats, she comes back with an empty-handed frustrated gesture. Scotty has found a long metal handled object that he immediately shoves into her grasp. "Maybe we'll get our hands on something else later."
Not bothering to ask why he chose to give it to her, she follows as they take off again for the long way back east-side around the thronging noises coming from the central neighborhoods of the city, the roars of machinery and screaming and the very occasional but stomach-turning glinting noise of phaser fire sometimes overriding the occurrences of old-fashioned bullets.
As they approach the Knot, the place seems in a sudden way to be closer than perceived, from the fact that the widely surrounding gates are so affixed in their spacial understanding of the entire area; the main clearance gate has simply disappeared, as if something already barreled a huge section of it down. Nyota's anxiously pulling her comm unit up to her ear, but Scotty gives her a grim shrug, saying, "I commed home after I was trying to reach Jill. I haven't heard back yet."
She doesn't know why that sinks in sharp and worrisome in her mind, but it does. "Leonard was home. And...Jim should have..."
"Leonard could have been out," Scotty points out. "I'm sure they'll get to the house soon, and...when we find her, it shouldn't be hard bringing the car over..."
"...God. If this gets bad—"
"It'll be alright. We just—"
"We have to move."
Getting into and around the Knot is only difficult because of the congestion of the crowds attempting to get out that they seem to encounter in waves, eventually instinctively reaching to clutch hands so that they don't lose track of each other. The presence of the slavers is only peripherally apparent for much of their search so far, the madness and panic evident in the faces going by giving away whatever threats are happening farther in, until the two turn a corner and immediately jolt back at the sight: a helpless pile of unconscious Romulans being bound and carted up into the cargo compartment of a private trade vessel. Nyota takes note in the split amount of time that one of their own is injured, having noticed a mess of a bloody body being tended to by another.
"You know where she lives, right?"
Scotty nods. "Her shop is almost at the end, past the trade clearing?"
She lets out a dreading sigh; the entire place isn't considerably huge, but in this mess, that far feels like miles. He takes her with an affirming grasp on her arm and they go off where he leads, keeping against structures and walls, trying not to look too scared, for that small hope of being mistaken for slavers by the other humans.
What they're wading through in the next several minutes would seem to be the gap between those who are running and the point that everyone is running from; they encounter only small groups of Romulans slipping by them with no care, occasionally glancing at them suspiciously from windows before ducking back out of sight. The wail of a sobbing infant ghosts from somewhere, the last noise among the desolation before Nyota stops in the middle of trying to comm home again at the realization of a much louder clamor a block or so ahead.
From what they do hear they end up simply giving each other dreading looks before they make themselves creep in closer to the outskirts of the mess partly illuminated by the weak light posts.
Next to the market tents and the lookout tower in the Knot there is a large clearing that is slightly past the middle of the whole camp, and approaching here is where the figures in the distance come into a cleaner view of violent, snapping motions. She wants to tell herself it's just a handful of citizens who were reckless enough to come out here, she thinks, These people are going to die. And she may be right, but in this waning distance from the battles there is still the body lying face down with the elegiac form of two mountainous shoulder blades cringing up under the white tunic fabric, the sight of more of them collapsing after the occasional lethal gun blast, arms flailing and falling and going limp in every direction; and Nyota's seen some things before she wishes she could burn out of her memory, but not like this. This is like something out of a book, a war, but the kind that's somehow only worse for being nearly insignificant. This is not history, and it makes her feel like the entire place is choking and dying.
"Okay." She balls her fists tight into her palm and around the hard handle, clenching and unclenching and "How are we going to get around this? Are you sure she'd even be at her place?"
"Fuck if I..." Scotty's frantic laughter trails off. "But she...She wouldn't be up there." He shakes his head.
She spots the couple that's huddled behind one of the small cabin houses and is already approaching them. Scotty quickly follows suit as she's shouting, "Listen, we're looking for Jill. Do you...?"
She attempts a couple lines in Romulan when that gets them blank stares; when there's still nothing, Scotty yells, "Jill. The metalsmith, do you know her?"
They still get no response and then, just a few structures down, the pull of a chase appears in shadows preceded by the bodies: two Romulans pursued by a vehicle. Scotty and Nyota jump back under the shadow of the close awning, and something snaps out and latches around the slower Romulan's foot: a body jolts down, limp, spasming in a brief wave of electrocution as the car pulls over and a human hops out of the back, pulling a gun on the other Romulan who cuts back fast, fearlessly crowding in and smacking the gun out of his grasp just as he takes a shot: Nyota looks away when a Romulan hand insinuates at the handle of a jaw, hearing the crack of bone and a body slamming into car metal as Scotty's encouraging her in a new direction.
They skulk around an edge of the clearing while everyone is veering away from the jerking turmoil of another vehicle where a group of armed Romulans is crawling up all over it like spiders, smashing rocks into the windows and screaming an endless chant of threats as they attempt to violently dissect their way through the car to the people inside. One Terran hops and tries to claw his way up a nearby panel of fence, gets a phaser blast that drops him to the ground where Scotty and Nyota trip around him, running with their hands connected and she's beginning to realize maybe they're headed to the tavern that's connected to Jill's shop, seeing if she's hiding in there.
"You haven't seen anyone we know...?"
"No," Scotty says.
All the while, an occasional new ton of metal has arrived, either a truck-like hover vessel or smaller ships landing in from the sky in increasing measures; finally when a vaguely diamond-shaped and slightly larger vessel comes in with an ominously sophisticated and unassuming look to it, Scotty says, "Let's get in there now."
"What is it?"
"I don't..." Scotty shakes his head. "I don't know for sure, but I think those are a fleet model."
A small car that's been successfully hijacked by some Romulans is whirring around, enabling a reckless trigger-happy escapade that gets a few slavers in the dirt but also gives some Knot people a run for the shadows, and Nyota and Scotty catch some curious looks from the little group taking refuge behind the same waste barrel.
This is where they are when one of the diamond vessels touches down only a yard away. A small ramp drops down, letting out a handful of people, and the undeniable sharp vision of those uniforms: a bit more ruggedly built than the clothes worn by the part of the fleet they were part of for a while, but unmistakably Imperials. All of them have phasers; some of them have rifles, and many also have...
Scotty has put a steadying hand on her shoulder at some point. "You see those things they got...They look like a combination of a phaser and a branding iron?"
"...Yes."
"Well, that's...That's pretty much what they are."
One thought trips into another; she fearfully snaps, "Why the hell isn't anybody comming us back?"
"It's alright. Nee?" He waits for her to look at him in response to that not often used—and occasionally but not always annoying—nickname. "I'm sorry—I shouldn'ta gotten you into—"
"No," she retorts, as if in disagreement with something more concrete. "To hell with that. We're finding her, okay? Let's keep moving. Now, look, I think you better take this. It's pretty straightforward as weapons go, whatever it is, but you can still hit harder. It's not like we're getting separated, right?"
He complies, and as if to take their mind off of how insane it is as they're moving from a somewhat decent hiding place into the mere hope that somebody won't come after them, mutters, "You've never seen a baseball bat before?"
She squints in curiosity through her breath all elevated in fear. "Um. They still have baseball here?"
"Ah, it's not very Terran of you not to like baseball, Nyota."
"Oh. Well, maybe they'll let us off the hook for having it, then." It's a terrible joke and from up ahead his hand squeezes around her wrist as if he's laughing, and she almost wants to cry. As they reach one of the nearby shacks and Scotty seems to be contemplating making a run for it, she asks, "Is this the shop?"
Scotty nods. They're crouched down behind a stack of crates, peering over it to where the small building is across a stretch of road in plain sight for all around; the area they're in has died down in volume, as if everyone is still here but hiding, which means so are the fleet soldiers, she assumes with a guarded tensing of her jaw.
"On my mark, okay?"
She nods.
When he gives it, they fling up and dart across the street, pulling each other in a wordless change of plans between the shop and the next building rather than going in, taking cover in the channeling alleyway; both check around the back of both shacks, seeing nothing, but immediately flitting around opposite corners when they hear a kick of motion approaching their location.
Across the gap now being approached by the heavy sound of footfalls, Scotty and Nyota look at each other. She gives him an intent look, as if pleading for him to follow her lead, then kicks just a bit of dust out into the view of the alley, starts creeping back.
Her heart's pounding and a voice in her head frantically pleading when the figure appears, rugged paneled uniform fabric and a hand gripped firm around a phaser, but it works: He barely has a chance to see her before the couple swift steps and the sharp sound of the bat blowing to the back of his head, and he's out.
She sees she's by a window, ducks down, then both of them are peering just up at the edge for anyone inside. It's the half that houses the tavern area; the small bar at the corner as well as the rest of the room has no lights on. Scotty anxiously decides to go in, and creeps in ahead of her, slowly opening the door.
They make it a few steps in, trying to squint around in the dark. Scotty tries, "Lights at ten percent." Just as the system complies, a body is up and slamming him to the floor.
A woman in a rage is cramming in Scotty's neck under her hands. Nyota darts into a shouting of protest and assurances, eventually yelling, "Daelennsu. Daelennsu! We're friends! Please!—"
"—Stop!" A voice is shouting the woman's name now, coming forward and quickly urging her into some composure; she quits her throttling with an expression as if the meaning of what Nyota was shouting is now catching up to her, and a couple other Romulans are coming out of the woodwork as Scotty noisily coughs for air.
The second one who came out looks at the two humans, not looking exactly happy that they're allies, but settles on telling Uhura, "Your accent's lousy." She just barely has the presence of mind to roll her eyes.
She doesn't recognize any of the other people who've appeared in the chance she gets to look before somebody commands the lights back off. She puts a hand to Scotty's shoulder through his lingering gasps, says, "We're looking for somebody. Do you—"
The front door of the tavern is kicked open. Two figures appear before somebody barks, "Lights on full...Oh, what have we here?"
She scrambles across the floor just enough to try to tell the Romulan who has a small child with her to run like hell, which is an urge she abandons when she sees that the two civilian slavers have a firearm. Scotty and she instinctively move together a little rather than backing up into walls as the rest of the room does. The slavers have northern accents, are wearing something like camping or hunting gear, and one is a red-haired woman, the other blond but looking like he could be her brother and cocking a brow of some kind of delight when he notices the two fellow humans. The two exchange similar looks.
"I'll get it." The man is throwing down a backpack and opening it in a snap of motion while the woman trains the phaser right at them. She doesn't give any macho bullshit about telling them to stay put. Neither of them have to say anything to anyone in the room as it stills under the un-worded threat of the weapon in her hand.
But she does stride up in a half-bored swagger, and asks Scotty, "Whatcha doing here?" in mock-innocence. "Hmm?"
Scotty has that crooked set to his jaw, and only there, that look like someone isn't worth being more than a bad taste in his mouth. Nyota's seen it before; she wishes she could remember when, something among the things that happened only over a year ago, all feeling like a lifetime ago now.
"You work in the dirt with these napes?" the redhead asks, wry. "Fight for them like a good little dog?...You drink that piss they call ale or just settle for their piss?" The blond snickers.
"Oh my, lassie, you're clever," Scotty grunts. "Did you spend the ride over here cooking that one up?"
She squints back, tilting her head and then evenly asks, "Do you fuck them?"
That makes something a bit harder ride into his expression. "And how's the weather under the Empire's bawbag? 'Cause clearly that's the only piece in the sack you ever get, lady, and you're talkin' to a man with evidently low standards."
The woman even looks a bit icy in the eyes with chagrin when that makes her cohort laugh, but the laugh is mostly deprecating: "Oh, he's gonna be fun..."
"Do her first," the redhead dictates, and his eyebrow goes up; Scotty shifts next to Nyota, but she's already seen it, the device that the man came up tossing and catching by the handle like it was his favorite hand-held converter, has already been trying to get eye contact with him...
"Yeah, how about it, smartass?" the blond snarls at Scotty. "You get to watch while we brand your girlfriend here."
She just barely manages to stop the outraged line of curses ready to snap right out of Scotty by saying his name, low and solid, only looking at him as he looks over. "It's okay," she says, her voice not as shaky as her entire body feels, and she only looks at him for the next few seconds, not at the man approaching. She nods at Scotty. "It's okay." A bruising grasp at her arm and she's snatched up, and that's when Scotty starts shouting and shouting and doesn't stop.
It's just the wood of the floor coming hard against her shoulder blades before she's up on her hands and the fingers that are yanking her hair off one side, the sting at her scalp from pulling too hard. These seem to hurt more than the actual thing coming against the side of her neck, with the way her mind just falls away in the next moment: it goes so slow and so fast and what she's focusing on is the cheap wood and Scotty's litany of swearing and threatening and screaming that becomes this white-hot noise with the white-hot rip when she can feel the exact 'X' shape kissing obscenely into her skin, until she's part of the noise and takes a second to even realize she's screaming now, raging, kicking and gnawing a couple lines into the floor with her ankles. It's like she has this scream that's been dampened up in her chest with one terrible thing at a time and now that she's started she can't stop. Maybe it's only two seconds after it happens, but it's not even the man that lets go of her but his limp hand once the bullet drives through his head, and she breathes in again with a gasp at the body hitting hard to the floor.
Then again and the woman is dead with one snap of a bullet. One of the Romulans in the room cries out someone's name; she looks toward the doorway and there's one wearing a woven tunic, surveying around him urgently. And behind him...
"Alel?" She shouts it at the same time Scotty does, is on her shaky legs and going over to him before she thinks, throwing out too many questions at once, grabbing the young man by the shoulders.
Alel is a wreck. His face is all pinched up as his back collapses into the wall as if he needs somewhere to toil, angrily vulnerable. She notices a continuous bloodied stain down his hands and forearms, the knuckles richly red. He looks like he's been crying. That usual glint of determination in his expression has been amplified to a quiet fire of fury.
She tries to be comforting rather than assail him when she starts asking in Romulan, "Where are the others? Were you with them?..."
He doesn't reply in Romulan; it's as if he's too dazed to sift one set of language from the other, as if he doesn't remember she can speak and understand it, as if he doesn't know who he's talking to. He groans a dazed and grieving "He told me to keep hide, not to come out. Not if I heard or saw—He made me swear..."
"Who? Who did?..."
Her eyes widen at the almost drowned-out chirrup that makes her lean down and snap up her communicator. "Hello!?"
"God dammit to hell, Nyota, this tracking system had better be malfunctioning."
She backs up off Alel a bit once Scotty catches over to them and sees that she's talking on the comm and takes up trying to talk to Alel. All she can say back is, "Leonard..."
"Please tell me everyone's alright."
"We're fine, but...I think something happened to Jill and—"
"Listen—Put Jim on, I need to ask—"
"What? Jim isn't with us. Jim isn't there?" The bad feeling has sunk to a terrible one, as she realizes the silence of Leonard having similar worries on the other end.
"No, Jim ain't home. He left his comm at the house like he's always doing, so I can't...Look, the two of you should just try really hard to blend in, you're human, I know it's not—"
"I can't." Even though he can't see her, she's shaking her head and shaking her head. "I can't do that."
"Why?"
It comes out bad-tasting, bitter and sudden through her teeth. "Because I got branded."
Silence. More silence.
"...Leonard?"
"Stay together, and try to move around as little as possible."
"What—"
"Whatever you do, don't lose your comms, you got that?...I'm coming to get you."
Alel all but robs the man he came in with of his phaser, giving some pleading apology to him as he does it, and Nyota and Scotty are pulled along in some direction she follows with the assumption that Scotty got a bit more of an explanation from Alel than she did, but she knows they don't have time to repeat it to her.
The Imperial traffic seems to have increased in terms of the number of ships when they get outside, the largest tangle of conflict having sifted from the trading area to closer to the very back of the Knot, as if the Romulans had some planned strategy to drive as many intruders as possible in that direction. Alel leads them back there, constantly flitting his glance around as if looking for something, employing his decent aim to shoot down almost anyone who's also armed before their human vision picks up on any of them. They have to back into somewhere for refuge when one of the vaguely tank-shaped fleet shuttles comes by; the small vessel gets rushed by a couple fighters and Nyota sees the click-shine, something glass with flame gnawing wick, just in time to yell, "Get down!" before the well-launched cocktail blows out the windshield in a spraying burst of fire.
Then they're rushing on and on and they've reached the very back fence, and this is the time the Knot decides to blow one of their torpedoes at an incoming fleet vessel. The flitting light comes straight from the high lookout tower back at the clearing, blows off the entire point of the diamond shape; it spins, hits another ship, sparks off the bump and starts spinning down like a frisbee.
"Oh shit," Nyota hears from Scotty just as they realize it's going to take out the back fence: It comes down with a thunderous crunching crash, sliding along the top of the gates some fifty yards south of them until it crashes into the ground; the point of destruction on the fence rings a noise all along the length of it, as the entire back poles whine forward in the aftershocks. Everyone realizes just in time that they need to run the hell away from it, feet flicking off in instinct, and when she's coughing up a bit of dust that gasps up under the endless thud of metal just at the edge of her body where she's run to the northern side of a destroyed vehicle, she inches back and looks around and tries to scream when somebody yanks her into a cruel grasp.
It isn't fair it isn't fair it isn't fair; Scotty and Alel are on the other side of the fucking car and this hand is clamped over her mouth and she can't produce a screaming enough whine through the suffocating fingers, and it doesn't matter: She feels the tip of what she knows is a phaser at her temple, looks down to her scrambling feet enough to see the combat boots, black pants, a red shirt...
She submits to the forceful directions and the motions are snatching them out of sight, behind the long line of shacks before Scotty could even think to look in this direction. She makes a helpless protesting noise, gets a rude shove to her temple and keeps walking; when they've stopped somewhere just a small block away, she realizes they're next to one of the fleet shuttles, and one of the soldiers turns and gives an almost bored look at both of them.
"Sympathizer. Saw her running with a Romulan. And she's already branded."
The lean figure who comes forward is unpleasantly pale, with one dark orb of an eye and the other covered in an old-fashioned eye patch, slick brown locks down to his chin, the appearance overgrown and hermit-like. She looks stubbornly at the ground in front of her but can't help checking the short glance at him when his appraisal of the other man's find seems like something deeper; but then he looks at the other and says, "Well, good work, ensign. Just put her in the back with the rest."
She's yanked and then dropped in the large cargo compartment of the shuttle, which only gets enough light to vaguely glaze the appearance of some others who have been thrown in here before the compartment is slammed shut and goes pitch black. For a second there is merely a horribly empty sound of many people breathing, no one talking; and before she can even think of what she'd say to any of them, she hears one of the men stepping back around to the door, as if entertaining a second thought of something. Quickly craning her neck over to try to hear through the wall, she catches the man of higher rank telling the ensign to go wait in the cockpit. He complies with only an undercurrent of confusion, and Nyota feels a sinking dread as the compartment is clicked open and the door whirs back up.
Up the short ladder and the heavy boots step in, stopping leisurely next to her scraped knees; from his grip, a light shines right into her face. It doesn't move until she submits to the harassing hint for her to look up at him, her chest heaving and eyes squinting and defiant.
The lieutenant bends down just a little; as the blots in her vision clear a bit, she sees the wheels turning in the man's expression.
"Don't I know you?" he asks.
She doesn't say anything. It doesn't surprise her at all when he snaps her up by the forearm, pulls her down and out of the shuttle.
And she doesn't realize until then, until just before the door shuts on the back of the shuttle behind them, when she hears the pained and groggy voice calling, "Nina?..."
Jill was sitting right next to her.
He pulls her quick into some empty cabin house, and she stands still where he stops her next to where something like potato chips have spilled onto the floor, a shabby table knocked over next to her feet.
He looks her over again, this time putting his hands in his back pockets, shifting and pacing back and forth in front of her. She just stands tall and feels her teeth chattering, not knowing anymore if her jaw keeps shaking from fear or anger, but she never once fails to meet his eye now.
"You're Uhura," he finally says, and a chip crunches under his boot as he pauses in his steps. He nods to himself when she refuses to say anything back, slowly says, "My name's Marcon, but I don't think you'd remember. You had a thing with my roommate while we were in training. Ring any bells?"
While she's looking at his face, she does try to remember why he looks familiar; not him but another man, possibly someone she had a class with. Maybe one of that Simone Gourney's friends. As she's looking back intently, he slowly smirks.
"Of course, maybe you don't recognize me with just the one eye." He points with a humored shrug at the patch, which has a long scar running under and past it down from the socket. Nyota's thoughts stray and bristle over some indent on her mind of a Halloween party in the old rec room, Pavel grinning and fumbling to adjust the pirate patch Sulu had on upside down; she feels some weakness kick sharply into her gut, nostalgia frozen over by some feel of distant finality, and tries to gulp it down.
Marcon steps a little bit closer, and now speaks more quietly. "You're in trouble, you know. The whole fleet's been wondering what happened to you, if you and the others are really dead...They're here, aren't they? I bet you could tell me...exactly where they are." Some appetite has him licking at his bottom lip, looking up and down her with a self-satisfied raw look in his eyes. Suddenly he says, "You must have a comm unit somewhere on you...Take off your boots."
She only dares enough defiance to hesitate before stiffly bending down, removing one boot and then the other. The comm visibly tumbles out when her left boot comes off, and for some reason the feel of her bare feet, the loss of that trusty weight against her ankles makes her nerves grip onto what's really happening, how helpless she is and how helpless all four of them are with this man aware that they're here, and she doesn't have so much as...
He's bending over and quickly picking up the comm unit when she speaks.
"I'm going to put my shoes back on, if you don't mind."
The mild cold of her voice makes him laugh, low and slow and lazy. He steps back as if surmising something else about her, looking her up and down again. Anxiously ticking his phaser back and forth in his grasp, he scrunches his nose and drawls, "I suppose that would be fine."
There's a crash outside, two people rustling violently and some shouts heard farther off, the lingering murmurs of warfare still clanging and neither of them flinching at the noise as she's tightening the laces up again. The street lights flicker out for a long cough, then kick back on dimmer than before. Marcon keeps talking.
"Honestly, it's all pretty damn astonishing. You didn't seem like the type, and—well, it's as if everything they used to say about Kirk isn't even true. I wonder," he pronounces mock-wistfully, "what they're going to do to you. You got that little 'X' on your neck, but they're not gonna make you a slave...You're not just libs. You're traitors. After they nibble you out of my hands and slap me with half a dozen commendation rewards, they're going to make examples of you." He grins, shaking his head in a kind of bemused horror. "You'll be screaming, Uhura, before they're done with you."
Then something lunges out, somebody crashing out from hiding in the little side room. Nyota gasps at the sight of the Romulan child and Marcon barely has a chance to react before some practiced hard clutch on the bottom side of his hand makes him grunt in pain and drop his phaser. The kid has the weapon and is escaping out the front door as the lieutenant hollers in rage—
And she runs. Her shoes hit sharply against the wood and she's slamming out the back door with absolutely no thought but fucking run, adrenaline making the second or two feel like a slow churn of motion before the hears him cursing and cursing and yes coming after her...
Her feet slide against the mud produced by something spilled into the dirt paths, her desperate breath turning into a couple whimpers as she shifts, balances, catches into harder ground and takes to a faster speed; finally after she's able to twist her route into a b-line across the unoccupied back road she gets into a fluid continuous motion—Runs, runs runs and ignores the filthy words being poured after her and the stronger set of feet gnawing behind. Quickly, her mind flits to remember where his vessel was, knows that the second she makes it easier to get back there, it's over.
It's with a swift grinding halt-turn that she cuts a left out of the town, headed toward the woods; he follows.
In a shaking voice she growls a low mutter of something like, "Come on, you son of a bitch," and he has to be thinking there's no way this thin little thing could outrun him, no way at all. And she's suddenly telling herself over and over again that she can't go too fast, not yet, not yet, too fast and he'll stop the chase.
After some uncountable amount of seconds, she feels a twist in her stomach with the sense that he's gaining on her too much, and then a signal seems to turn up in her mind like an air horn. She wills the bolting action of her muscles, a kind of snap propelling her forward at a slicing speed.
Along with the fearful tears streaming cold down her cheeks she is flooding with the awareness of it, that she can and will do this. At this moment she can't think about being anything except fast, but she's pulling not farther but closer to that history of herself as she remembers the one time, she was stupidly late for her philosophy and catching looks as she bolted across the green campus, eventually profusely embarrassed at sideswiping an instructor who she stopped into to say she was sorry, saw arched eyebrows with two possible reactions to her indecisively fumbling against each other in his eyes and how it wasn't until that moment that she'd ever felt any pull into his presence by anything other than respect; she thinks of the finish-line scraping under her teenage feet and a kiss on the forehead from her father when they ate ice cream later but she does not think of these things because they are gone. Because she would only think of these things if she was about to die.
These days there is a wail of worry that they all know, a constant nausea that almost gives the hunger a run for its money, and there is never anything for it except that now she is tearing through the air, her tank top and jacket gnawing themselves in the breeze and with every crunching assault the uneven ground makes to her feet she is destroying all the demons and keeping them off; she loves Jim with his eyes that now look always angry and robbed and Leonard with his calloused way of softening everyone else and Scotty always laughing something off in the back of the house and now even Jill who hates her for something she's never been, and she cannot translate or conjugate or talk her way out of this but hell if she can run fast enough it will be these bastards that don't belong here, not them. Everyone is coming home tonight. This one behind her is a dead man.
Just past the tree she remembers with the crooked corner next to the torn-off branches from a lightning strike, she begins to sprint more clumsy and flailing as she hears him gaining on her again. Plays a game with herself that it's supposed to hurt, faster, harder, faster. She sees in a burning vision the white paint forming a vague 'X' bleeding across the next tree trunk—running just behind it and there's the edge and she kicks—
The ground disappears.
Her momentum throws her into slow fall, treading air until she feels the wall of dirt just barely in reach through the unlacing vision of the hologram and scrabbles at it. The air is punched out of her by her impact with the loosening edge and she grips on but feels the cheap mesh collapsing under her; behind and under her is the grunt before a body hits, resounding a consonant crack of bone from the deep fathoms.
There is a quiet stillness, any hum of dying violence back at the Knot drowned out by the night's cold and calm chirping. And as she lets out angry wincing groans at the mesh digging sharply into her hands, as she slowly manages to pull herself up and out and over, as she rolls over to solid ground and sinks back on her elbows, it seems to her that the loudest thing for miles is the sound of her breathing. And breathing. And breathing.
>interlude
Some time after midnight she starts to realize that no one has asked her what it was she said to Jill before.
She's in the back behind the passenger seat, in which Jim has his head lulled far back and one hand still where it stopped in the middle of combing up through his hair at some point and an elbow knocked tiredly to the window. Scotty on her left and Leonard in the driver's, and they're parked down the street from the house, just close enough that they'd pick up on it if anything happened.
It's the break after a long uneasy silence when Leonard and Jim get to talking again.
"Nothing's going to happen. We've been out here half the night." Jim's voice is brittle, a little angry under the stubborn certainty.
Leonard makes a worried sigh. "She said—"
"She isn't going to tell anybody. If Scotty thinks she isn't, I'm pretty sure she isn't."
Scotty's voice is rough when he puts in, "Look, I'm just wondering...If they start putting our pictures out there..."
"I'm sure they already have. Luckily, she's one of the only people we know around here who really pays attention to that stuff. She's the only one who knows us. The point is, I would fucking guarantee you there are other people around here who have looked at us and thought, maybe. But if we start acting like something's up, if we suddenly try to skip town, they're not just going to be thinking maybe anymore." Jim explains all of this like he'd rather not talk about anything at all right now. "We put our noses down and act like we've always been acting. It may not be much of a plan, but it's all we've got."
In response to that last part he gives a glance around the car, his impatient invitation for any other opinions. And with a somewhat daring indifference, opens the car door.
"What are you—"
"I have work in the morning. I'm going to bed." Jim slams the door behind him, and even though they're all so wound-up that the cool night air seems to threaten a feeling of enclosed safety in the vehicle, nobody tries to stop him.
Only a few minutes later, she follows. She shivers through the silence of the dark neighborhood, walking home in her cheap sandals, sighing as her body realizes its exhaustion when she puts in the code to open the back door.
He's already in bed when she crawls in after, his back facing her and his body unmoving as if he's already fallen asleep. She slides her body in under the blanket and then fluidly moves in close, drawing her arms around him and burrowing her face between his shoulders, a shaky breath going out and going in and going out again.
Now he moves; his body turns into hers and he lets her hold him tighter that way, just squeezing into him, making sure he's there. Just for a moment he draws back to push her hair out of her eyes, looks kind of numbly searching into them; with that same nearly unfeeling curiosity, he slips his body down enough to press his lips onto hers. He kisses her once, and again, three times. She only passively kisses him back. As if he's looking for something and she's merely letting him look for that thing.
He searches for whatever it is until they fall asleep, and somehow they do that awful night, waiting for somebody to come and burn the house down.
1 YEAR.
On the first day of spring she helps Leonard communicate with a patient, a child with a broken foot and a worrisome older sibling. She sticks around in the kitchen afterward, eventually opening the back door and sitting on the one step into the yard.
"You think we'll have to build a fence if we get the ship?" Leonard asks quietly as he pulls up the one chair they have outside and sits on it backwards.
"I guess we will," she says, smiling tiredly. "Unless they figure out how to fix it up and fly it in one day. Though it depends. How easy is it to steal a vessel?"
Shaking his head, scratching the back of it, he shrugs. "Well. Hell if I know."
She smiles with a little shake of her head. Then she clears her throat after a moment. "What do you think about Jim?"
He looks at her uncertainly, something hesitant in his eyes.
Pressing her lips together, she just shrugs. The house and the outside is very quiet; birds chirp in the mild cold, and everything they say feels a little too gentle, too naked. "He's just having a hard time, I guess," she says in some attempt to console herself.
"He almost got killed. And not in a way he'd like to go, that's for sure." The doctor shakes his head up somewhere, pleading at nothing. "I don't know what to tell you. I would've been giving him anti-depressants months ago if we had any."
"I'm sure he'll make it out of this, though." She says this figurative assurance like she just needs to hear it, even if he won't say it too. "I mean. He's good with this stuff, right?"
Before Leonard sorts together a response to that, she comes out of the silence with a hesitant noise, speaks with a dark and distant note.
"You know. That place you were in, when you realized that you weren't going to see your daughter again. Like you accepted it all at once, that this is where we are. Scotty got there on his own at some point, I'm sure. And maybe Jim's there now. But me...It's like I'm still waiting for it. And I don't understand it, because it's like I know, but I don't know."
When she stops staring off into the sparsely grassy field that is their yard, she realizes Leonard looking straight at her. He asks, "What happened when you went to Pemba?"
She sits up a little, not sure what he's asking.
"It's just that I have to admit I was a little relieved at how fast you turned around and left."
She thinks she understands the implication. "It wasn't my mother. I'm not fooling myself there. Those people we left on the Enterprise weren't our crew. We're alone, and I know it. We're so completely alone, but every morning I wake up and it's like I've forgotten that...This old life is still at the back of my mind, and it won't quit. It won't leave."
The next day it's her and Jim in the kitchen, the others out working while the big debate hollers over the audio system; they're finally listening to the news now, but they still don't talk about it. Jim's making breakfast while she sits at the table, both of them heavy in their silence, the meaning of some chancellor's words ticking a foreboding rhythm through the room.
He turns off the burner and a couple minutes later is sitting down next to her.
"Are you scared?" she asks, very quietly, just as he's reaching for a knife.
His movements pause; he looks at her, then looks away somewhere, organizing his plate and his fork and he faintly, finally replies, "When am I not scared?"
He pushes the other plate in front of her: one of the only eggs they've seen all year and also some of the bread he's been trying to save.
"Thank you," she says, for the cooking. He gives her a softly accustomed look in response, and they pretend they aren't listening to politicians rather sportingly toss around the last shreds of their peace of mind for the duration of a tacit breakfast.
The law gets passed.
She finds out when most of Brighton's employees are taking lunch where he lets them hang out outside of his office, keeping mostly to herself as she hasn't worked often enough to really be acquainted with many of the workers, and Scotty's still outside putting off his breaks as usual. Everyone's crowded around the broadcast, and it doesn't take her long to realize why.
"Mazel's proposition, now in effect as international policy, has spurred the onslaught of a number of actions immediately being taken by the Empire; the potentially alarming element to these changes we are immediately seeing is the invitation being issued by these new policies to have any people act promptly on the civilian level to help arrest and identify any humans who have engaged in clear actions of anti-Terran activism, a distinction already set forth by the bill's public section.
"The empress makes it clear that enslavement of these individuals is not only permissible but a safe solution to the troublesomely casual presence of potentially dangerous aberrants that have become increasingly visual in the past few years. While governmental bodies will be reacting on a step-by-step rate in condemning these individuals, the duty of our citizens to the Empire is to do everything they can to help identify them, even if only on the small level of branding them; the law proposes this as a practical way to ensure that the most threatening groups of these people cannot adopt pretenses and simply return to living as Terran citizens; a simple 'X' shape anywhere on the person's neck is sufficient to identify an individual as an enemy of the Empire, and relatively easy to produce..."
At some point Nyota's hand came slowly up and covered disbelievingly at her mouth as she stood very still, as the rest of the room followed her into a solemnity that she only snapped out of when Scotty was suddenly at her side, his expression wary. For a second they said nothing; she put her hand at his shoulder as if to make sure she had him where she knew he was.
They go back to work.
They go back to work, until Brighton pops his head into the storage room around dusk, shouting.
"The border's been compromised. Everyone get home to your families."
Scotty's muttering some curses when she finds him again; when they're walking down the business block, he pulls at her sleeve and they go into an alleyway, avoiding the clearer channels of streets where it isn't long before they first catch sight of a mammoth tank of a vehicle roaring in, not bothering to target anyone in sight but, they soon realize, driving straight for the Knot.
After weaseling between buildings in no particular direction that isn't simply away from the main road and into the darker pockets in the shade, she knows something's going on in Scotty's head. Suddenly remembering something, she asks, "Do you know if Jim's home?"
"He was working Rosetta's, wasn't he?" he replies, stopping as if to catch his breath with a hand rested on a picnic bench in the shadowy courtyard. "I'm sure he'll head home."
Nyota pulls in and lets out a long breath, steps up closer to him. All she says is, "Scotty."
He's shaking his head in a troubled way before he looks at her, and just nods to himself, says, "Right." For a moment after that dazed and senseless word she searches him, and then swallows.
"...You're going to the Knot." That sinks in while a couple other slaver trucks are heard; the first ringing blast of gunshots from some obscure direction. Her nerves jump at it, only making her reply sooner, "Okay," not so much saying okay as Give me a minute to think about just what the hell you're saying.
A couple enraged people shout in the distance, small and ineffectual; she really doesn't know what to make of the fact that this can only get worse. They exchange a multitude of comments in eye contact alone, all the arguments for why she should be okay, why she definitely might not be okay; what she ends up saying is, "And your plan is to go in there and drag her out, and hope that Jim or Leonard is able to just swing by with the car and pick you up?" She understands. She noticed when she was at the Knot how insecure so many of the homes are, how small and easy to find the few bunkers were. The whole idea of it is ugly. The stupidity of assuming they'll be able to do anything about it notwithstanding, she knows there's no way she'll be able to talk him out of this.
She says, "Okay," and it means something else this time. "But we should move now. The phaser's at the house; we'll just have to find something we—"
"Leonard wouldn't even—Wait. Who's we?"
Nyota is already walking.
"Waaait, wait. Nuh-uh. Can you even imagine what Jim would do to me—"
"What about Jim?" she demands, turning back around. "You tell me how he'd feel about me coming home without you saying I'd let you go off and do something this crazy. I'll deal with Jim. You're doing this with me, or not at all. Make a decision."
He starts walking with a bit of an angry determination in his step; she takes that as a yes, but doesn't understand why he's headed straight off towards the northern lot until he says, "We need weapons."
She understands; within their range, the best place to find anything that could be used for defense is most likely to be in people's cars. As they reach the small lot with nine or so vehicles parked there, but no people, she starts to ask, "How will we...?"
He goes straight for the pole in the corner of the lot, and Nyota realizes the big power box on it is part of the system that boosts comm signals in the area. As Scotty wrenches it open and starts messing around with all the switches and keys, she doesn't have time to ask what he's doing before he's telling her to go to the nearest vehicle and try to open the trunk on his mark.
"What—?"
"I can make a short burst of a jam signal that the cheaper security systems react to like it's being unlocked. Go."
At the first vehicle, she presses up until he yells "Now!?"
Somewhat comically, even when the trunk she's pressing at doesn't budge, she does hear a chorus of tweeting and clicking, and a few of the trunks in the lot are automatically hovering open. "Um. I'll check these two over here."
When she's done ransacking and then squinting through windows to see if anything good is on the seats, she comes back with an empty-handed frustrated gesture. Scotty has found a long metal handled object that he immediately shoves into her grasp. "Maybe we'll get our hands on something else later."
Not bothering to ask why he chose to give it to her, she follows as they take off again for the long way back east-side around the thronging noises coming from the central neighborhoods of the city, the roars of machinery and screaming and the very occasional but stomach-turning glinting noise of phaser fire sometimes overriding the occurrences of old-fashioned bullets.
As they approach the Knot, the place seems in a sudden way to be closer than perceived, from the fact that the widely surrounding gates are so affixed in their spacial understanding of the entire area; the main clearance gate has simply disappeared, as if something already barreled a huge section of it down. Nyota's anxiously pulling her comm unit up to her ear, but Scotty gives her a grim shrug, saying, "I commed home after I was trying to reach Jill. I haven't heard back yet."
She doesn't know why that sinks in sharp and worrisome in her mind, but it does. "Leonard was home. And...Jim should have..."
"Leonard could have been out," Scotty points out. "I'm sure they'll get to the house soon, and...when we find her, it shouldn't be hard bringing the car over..."
"...God. If this gets bad—"
"It'll be alright. We just—"
"We have to move."
Getting into and around the Knot is only difficult because of the congestion of the crowds attempting to get out that they seem to encounter in waves, eventually instinctively reaching to clutch hands so that they don't lose track of each other. The presence of the slavers is only peripherally apparent for much of their search so far, the madness and panic evident in the faces going by giving away whatever threats are happening farther in, until the two turn a corner and immediately jolt back at the sight: a helpless pile of unconscious Romulans being bound and carted up into the cargo compartment of a private trade vessel. Nyota takes note in the split amount of time that one of their own is injured, having noticed a mess of a bloody body being tended to by another.
"You know where she lives, right?"
Scotty nods. "Her shop is almost at the end, past the trade clearing?"
She lets out a dreading sigh; the entire place isn't considerably huge, but in this mess, that far feels like miles. He takes her with an affirming grasp on her arm and they go off where he leads, keeping against structures and walls, trying not to look too scared, for that small hope of being mistaken for slavers by the other humans.
What they're wading through in the next several minutes would seem to be the gap between those who are running and the point that everyone is running from; they encounter only small groups of Romulans slipping by them with no care, occasionally glancing at them suspiciously from windows before ducking back out of sight. The wail of a sobbing infant ghosts from somewhere, the last noise among the desolation before Nyota stops in the middle of trying to comm home again at the realization of a much louder clamor a block or so ahead.
From what they do hear they end up simply giving each other dreading looks before they make themselves creep in closer to the outskirts of the mess partly illuminated by the weak light posts.
Next to the market tents and the lookout tower in the Knot there is a large clearing that is slightly past the middle of the whole camp, and approaching here is where the figures in the distance come into a cleaner view of violent, snapping motions. She wants to tell herself it's just a handful of citizens who were reckless enough to come out here, she thinks, These people are going to die. And she may be right, but in this waning distance from the battles there is still the body lying face down with the elegiac form of two mountainous shoulder blades cringing up under the white tunic fabric, the sight of more of them collapsing after the occasional lethal gun blast, arms flailing and falling and going limp in every direction; and Nyota's seen some things before she wishes she could burn out of her memory, but not like this. This is like something out of a book, a war, but the kind that's somehow only worse for being nearly insignificant. This is not history, and it makes her feel like the entire place is choking and dying.
"Okay." She balls her fists tight into her palm and around the hard handle, clenching and unclenching and "How are we going to get around this? Are you sure she'd even be at her place?"
"Fuck if I..." Scotty's frantic laughter trails off. "But she...She wouldn't be up there." He shakes his head.
She spots the couple that's huddled behind one of the small cabin houses and is already approaching them. Scotty quickly follows suit as she's shouting, "Listen, we're looking for Jill. Do you...?"
She attempts a couple lines in Romulan when that gets them blank stares; when there's still nothing, Scotty yells, "Jill. The metalsmith, do you know her?"
They still get no response and then, just a few structures down, the pull of a chase appears in shadows preceded by the bodies: two Romulans pursued by a vehicle. Scotty and Nyota jump back under the shadow of the close awning, and something snaps out and latches around the slower Romulan's foot: a body jolts down, limp, spasming in a brief wave of electrocution as the car pulls over and a human hops out of the back, pulling a gun on the other Romulan who cuts back fast, fearlessly crowding in and smacking the gun out of his grasp just as he takes a shot: Nyota looks away when a Romulan hand insinuates at the handle of a jaw, hearing the crack of bone and a body slamming into car metal as Scotty's encouraging her in a new direction.
They skulk around an edge of the clearing while everyone is veering away from the jerking turmoil of another vehicle where a group of armed Romulans is crawling up all over it like spiders, smashing rocks into the windows and screaming an endless chant of threats as they attempt to violently dissect their way through the car to the people inside. One Terran hops and tries to claw his way up a nearby panel of fence, gets a phaser blast that drops him to the ground where Scotty and Nyota trip around him, running with their hands connected and she's beginning to realize maybe they're headed to the tavern that's connected to Jill's shop, seeing if she's hiding in there.
"You haven't seen anyone we know...?"
"No," Scotty says.
All the while, an occasional new ton of metal has arrived, either a truck-like hover vessel or smaller ships landing in from the sky in increasing measures; finally when a vaguely diamond-shaped and slightly larger vessel comes in with an ominously sophisticated and unassuming look to it, Scotty says, "Let's get in there now."
"What is it?"
"I don't..." Scotty shakes his head. "I don't know for sure, but I think those are a fleet model."
A small car that's been successfully hijacked by some Romulans is whirring around, enabling a reckless trigger-happy escapade that gets a few slavers in the dirt but also gives some Knot people a run for the shadows, and Nyota and Scotty catch some curious looks from the little group taking refuge behind the same waste barrel.
This is where they are when one of the diamond vessels touches down only a yard away. A small ramp drops down, letting out a handful of people, and the undeniable sharp vision of those uniforms: a bit more ruggedly built than the clothes worn by the part of the fleet they were part of for a while, but unmistakably Imperials. All of them have phasers; some of them have rifles, and many also have...
Scotty has put a steadying hand on her shoulder at some point. "You see those things they got...They look like a combination of a phaser and a branding iron?"
"...Yes."
"Well, that's...That's pretty much what they are."
One thought trips into another; she fearfully snaps, "Why the hell isn't anybody comming us back?"
"It's alright. Nee?" He waits for her to look at him in response to that not often used—and occasionally but not always annoying—nickname. "I'm sorry—I shouldn'ta gotten you into—"
"No," she retorts, as if in disagreement with something more concrete. "To hell with that. We're finding her, okay? Let's keep moving. Now, look, I think you better take this. It's pretty straightforward as weapons go, whatever it is, but you can still hit harder. It's not like we're getting separated, right?"
He complies, and as if to take their mind off of how insane it is as they're moving from a somewhat decent hiding place into the mere hope that somebody won't come after them, mutters, "You've never seen a baseball bat before?"
She squints in curiosity through her breath all elevated in fear. "Um. They still have baseball here?"
"Ah, it's not very Terran of you not to like baseball, Nyota."
"Oh. Well, maybe they'll let us off the hook for having it, then." It's a terrible joke and from up ahead his hand squeezes around her wrist as if he's laughing, and she almost wants to cry. As they reach one of the nearby shacks and Scotty seems to be contemplating making a run for it, she asks, "Is this the shop?"
Scotty nods. They're crouched down behind a stack of crates, peering over it to where the small building is across a stretch of road in plain sight for all around; the area they're in has died down in volume, as if everyone is still here but hiding, which means so are the fleet soldiers, she assumes with a guarded tensing of her jaw.
"On my mark, okay?"
She nods.
When he gives it, they fling up and dart across the street, pulling each other in a wordless change of plans between the shop and the next building rather than going in, taking cover in the channeling alleyway; both check around the back of both shacks, seeing nothing, but immediately flitting around opposite corners when they hear a kick of motion approaching their location.
Across the gap now being approached by the heavy sound of footfalls, Scotty and Nyota look at each other. She gives him an intent look, as if pleading for him to follow her lead, then kicks just a bit of dust out into the view of the alley, starts creeping back.
Her heart's pounding and a voice in her head frantically pleading when the figure appears, rugged paneled uniform fabric and a hand gripped firm around a phaser, but it works: He barely has a chance to see her before the couple swift steps and the sharp sound of the bat blowing to the back of his head, and he's out.
She sees she's by a window, ducks down, then both of them are peering just up at the edge for anyone inside. It's the half that houses the tavern area; the small bar at the corner as well as the rest of the room has no lights on. Scotty anxiously decides to go in, and creeps in ahead of her, slowly opening the door.
They make it a few steps in, trying to squint around in the dark. Scotty tries, "Lights at ten percent." Just as the system complies, a body is up and slamming him to the floor.
A woman in a rage is cramming in Scotty's neck under her hands. Nyota darts into a shouting of protest and assurances, eventually yelling, "Daelennsu. Daelennsu! We're friends! Please!—"
"—Stop!" A voice is shouting the woman's name now, coming forward and quickly urging her into some composure; she quits her throttling with an expression as if the meaning of what Nyota was shouting is now catching up to her, and a couple other Romulans are coming out of the woodwork as Scotty noisily coughs for air.
The second one who came out looks at the two humans, not looking exactly happy that they're allies, but settles on telling Uhura, "Your accent's lousy." She just barely has the presence of mind to roll her eyes.
She doesn't recognize any of the other people who've appeared in the chance she gets to look before somebody commands the lights back off. She puts a hand to Scotty's shoulder through his lingering gasps, says, "We're looking for somebody. Do you—"
The front door of the tavern is kicked open. Two figures appear before somebody barks, "Lights on full...Oh, what have we here?"
She scrambles across the floor just enough to try to tell the Romulan who has a small child with her to run like hell, which is an urge she abandons when she sees that the two civilian slavers have a firearm. Scotty and she instinctively move together a little rather than backing up into walls as the rest of the room does. The slavers have northern accents, are wearing something like camping or hunting gear, and one is a red-haired woman, the other blond but looking like he could be her brother and cocking a brow of some kind of delight when he notices the two fellow humans. The two exchange similar looks.
"I'll get it." The man is throwing down a backpack and opening it in a snap of motion while the woman trains the phaser right at them. She doesn't give any macho bullshit about telling them to stay put. Neither of them have to say anything to anyone in the room as it stills under the un-worded threat of the weapon in her hand.
But she does stride up in a half-bored swagger, and asks Scotty, "Whatcha doing here?" in mock-innocence. "Hmm?"
Scotty has that crooked set to his jaw, and only there, that look like someone isn't worth being more than a bad taste in his mouth. Nyota's seen it before; she wishes she could remember when, something among the things that happened only over a year ago, all feeling like a lifetime ago now.
"You work in the dirt with these napes?" the redhead asks, wry. "Fight for them like a good little dog?...You drink that piss they call ale or just settle for their piss?" The blond snickers.
"Oh my, lassie, you're clever," Scotty grunts. "Did you spend the ride over here cooking that one up?"
She squints back, tilting her head and then evenly asks, "Do you fuck them?"
That makes something a bit harder ride into his expression. "And how's the weather under the Empire's bawbag? 'Cause clearly that's the only piece in the sack you ever get, lady, and you're talkin' to a man with evidently low standards."
The woman even looks a bit icy in the eyes with chagrin when that makes her cohort laugh, but the laugh is mostly deprecating: "Oh, he's gonna be fun..."
"Do her first," the redhead dictates, and his eyebrow goes up; Scotty shifts next to Nyota, but she's already seen it, the device that the man came up tossing and catching by the handle like it was his favorite hand-held converter, has already been trying to get eye contact with him...
"Yeah, how about it, smartass?" the blond snarls at Scotty. "You get to watch while we brand your girlfriend here."
She just barely manages to stop the outraged line of curses ready to snap right out of Scotty by saying his name, low and solid, only looking at him as he looks over. "It's okay," she says, her voice not as shaky as her entire body feels, and she only looks at him for the next few seconds, not at the man approaching. She nods at Scotty. "It's okay." A bruising grasp at her arm and she's snatched up, and that's when Scotty starts shouting and shouting and doesn't stop.
It's just the wood of the floor coming hard against her shoulder blades before she's up on her hands and the fingers that are yanking her hair off one side, the sting at her scalp from pulling too hard. These seem to hurt more than the actual thing coming against the side of her neck, with the way her mind just falls away in the next moment: it goes so slow and so fast and what she's focusing on is the cheap wood and Scotty's litany of swearing and threatening and screaming that becomes this white-hot noise with the white-hot rip when she can feel the exact 'X' shape kissing obscenely into her skin, until she's part of the noise and takes a second to even realize she's screaming now, raging, kicking and gnawing a couple lines into the floor with her ankles. It's like she has this scream that's been dampened up in her chest with one terrible thing at a time and now that she's started she can't stop. Maybe it's only two seconds after it happens, but it's not even the man that lets go of her but his limp hand once the bullet drives through his head, and she breathes in again with a gasp at the body hitting hard to the floor.
Then again and the woman is dead with one snap of a bullet. One of the Romulans in the room cries out someone's name; she looks toward the doorway and there's one wearing a woven tunic, surveying around him urgently. And behind him...
"Alel?" She shouts it at the same time Scotty does, is on her shaky legs and going over to him before she thinks, throwing out too many questions at once, grabbing the young man by the shoulders.
Alel is a wreck. His face is all pinched up as his back collapses into the wall as if he needs somewhere to toil, angrily vulnerable. She notices a continuous bloodied stain down his hands and forearms, the knuckles richly red. He looks like he's been crying. That usual glint of determination in his expression has been amplified to a quiet fire of fury.
She tries to be comforting rather than assail him when she starts asking in Romulan, "Where are the others? Were you with them?..."
He doesn't reply in Romulan; it's as if he's too dazed to sift one set of language from the other, as if he doesn't remember she can speak and understand it, as if he doesn't know who he's talking to. He groans a dazed and grieving "He told me to keep hide, not to come out. Not if I heard or saw—He made me swear..."
"Who? Who did?..."
Her eyes widen at the almost drowned-out chirrup that makes her lean down and snap up her communicator. "Hello!?"
"God dammit to hell, Nyota, this tracking system had better be malfunctioning."
She backs up off Alel a bit once Scotty catches over to them and sees that she's talking on the comm and takes up trying to talk to Alel. All she can say back is, "Leonard..."
"Please tell me everyone's alright."
"We're fine, but...I think something happened to Jill and—"
"Listen—Put Jim on, I need to ask—"
"What? Jim isn't with us. Jim isn't there?" The bad feeling has sunk to a terrible one, as she realizes the silence of Leonard having similar worries on the other end.
"No, Jim ain't home. He left his comm at the house like he's always doing, so I can't...Look, the two of you should just try really hard to blend in, you're human, I know it's not—"
"I can't." Even though he can't see her, she's shaking her head and shaking her head. "I can't do that."
"Why?"
It comes out bad-tasting, bitter and sudden through her teeth. "Because I got branded."
Silence. More silence.
"...Leonard?"
"Stay together, and try to move around as little as possible."
"What—"
"Whatever you do, don't lose your comms, you got that?...I'm coming to get you."
Alel all but robs the man he came in with of his phaser, giving some pleading apology to him as he does it, and Nyota and Scotty are pulled along in some direction she follows with the assumption that Scotty got a bit more of an explanation from Alel than she did, but she knows they don't have time to repeat it to her.
The Imperial traffic seems to have increased in terms of the number of ships when they get outside, the largest tangle of conflict having sifted from the trading area to closer to the very back of the Knot, as if the Romulans had some planned strategy to drive as many intruders as possible in that direction. Alel leads them back there, constantly flitting his glance around as if looking for something, employing his decent aim to shoot down almost anyone who's also armed before their human vision picks up on any of them. They have to back into somewhere for refuge when one of the vaguely tank-shaped fleet shuttles comes by; the small vessel gets rushed by a couple fighters and Nyota sees the click-shine, something glass with flame gnawing wick, just in time to yell, "Get down!" before the well-launched cocktail blows out the windshield in a spraying burst of fire.
Then they're rushing on and on and they've reached the very back fence, and this is the time the Knot decides to blow one of their torpedoes at an incoming fleet vessel. The flitting light comes straight from the high lookout tower back at the clearing, blows off the entire point of the diamond shape; it spins, hits another ship, sparks off the bump and starts spinning down like a frisbee.
"Oh shit," Nyota hears from Scotty just as they realize it's going to take out the back fence: It comes down with a thunderous crunching crash, sliding along the top of the gates some fifty yards south of them until it crashes into the ground; the point of destruction on the fence rings a noise all along the length of it, as the entire back poles whine forward in the aftershocks. Everyone realizes just in time that they need to run the hell away from it, feet flicking off in instinct, and when she's coughing up a bit of dust that gasps up under the endless thud of metal just at the edge of her body where she's run to the northern side of a destroyed vehicle, she inches back and looks around and tries to scream when somebody yanks her into a cruel grasp.
It isn't fair it isn't fair it isn't fair; Scotty and Alel are on the other side of the fucking car and this hand is clamped over her mouth and she can't produce a screaming enough whine through the suffocating fingers, and it doesn't matter: She feels the tip of what she knows is a phaser at her temple, looks down to her scrambling feet enough to see the combat boots, black pants, a red shirt...
She submits to the forceful directions and the motions are snatching them out of sight, behind the long line of shacks before Scotty could even think to look in this direction. She makes a helpless protesting noise, gets a rude shove to her temple and keeps walking; when they've stopped somewhere just a small block away, she realizes they're next to one of the fleet shuttles, and one of the soldiers turns and gives an almost bored look at both of them.
"Sympathizer. Saw her running with a Romulan. And she's already branded."
The lean figure who comes forward is unpleasantly pale, with one dark orb of an eye and the other covered in an old-fashioned eye patch, slick brown locks down to his chin, the appearance overgrown and hermit-like. She looks stubbornly at the ground in front of her but can't help checking the short glance at him when his appraisal of the other man's find seems like something deeper; but then he looks at the other and says, "Well, good work, ensign. Just put her in the back with the rest."
She's yanked and then dropped in the large cargo compartment of the shuttle, which only gets enough light to vaguely glaze the appearance of some others who have been thrown in here before the compartment is slammed shut and goes pitch black. For a second there is merely a horribly empty sound of many people breathing, no one talking; and before she can even think of what she'd say to any of them, she hears one of the men stepping back around to the door, as if entertaining a second thought of something. Quickly craning her neck over to try to hear through the wall, she catches the man of higher rank telling the ensign to go wait in the cockpit. He complies with only an undercurrent of confusion, and Nyota feels a sinking dread as the compartment is clicked open and the door whirs back up.
Up the short ladder and the heavy boots step in, stopping leisurely next to her scraped knees; from his grip, a light shines right into her face. It doesn't move until she submits to the harassing hint for her to look up at him, her chest heaving and eyes squinting and defiant.
The lieutenant bends down just a little; as the blots in her vision clear a bit, she sees the wheels turning in the man's expression.
"Don't I know you?" he asks.
She doesn't say anything. It doesn't surprise her at all when he snaps her up by the forearm, pulls her down and out of the shuttle.
And she doesn't realize until then, until just before the door shuts on the back of the shuttle behind them, when she hears the pained and groggy voice calling, "Nina?..."
Jill was sitting right next to her.
He pulls her quick into some empty cabin house, and she stands still where he stops her next to where something like potato chips have spilled onto the floor, a shabby table knocked over next to her feet.
He looks her over again, this time putting his hands in his back pockets, shifting and pacing back and forth in front of her. She just stands tall and feels her teeth chattering, not knowing anymore if her jaw keeps shaking from fear or anger, but she never once fails to meet his eye now.
"You're Uhura," he finally says, and a chip crunches under his boot as he pauses in his steps. He nods to himself when she refuses to say anything back, slowly says, "My name's Marcon, but I don't think you'd remember. You had a thing with my roommate while we were in training. Ring any bells?"
While she's looking at his face, she does try to remember why he looks familiar; not him but another man, possibly someone she had a class with. Maybe one of that Simone Gourney's friends. As she's looking back intently, he slowly smirks.
"Of course, maybe you don't recognize me with just the one eye." He points with a humored shrug at the patch, which has a long scar running under and past it down from the socket. Nyota's thoughts stray and bristle over some indent on her mind of a Halloween party in the old rec room, Pavel grinning and fumbling to adjust the pirate patch Sulu had on upside down; she feels some weakness kick sharply into her gut, nostalgia frozen over by some feel of distant finality, and tries to gulp it down.
Marcon steps a little bit closer, and now speaks more quietly. "You're in trouble, you know. The whole fleet's been wondering what happened to you, if you and the others are really dead...They're here, aren't they? I bet you could tell me...exactly where they are." Some appetite has him licking at his bottom lip, looking up and down her with a self-satisfied raw look in his eyes. Suddenly he says, "You must have a comm unit somewhere on you...Take off your boots."
She only dares enough defiance to hesitate before stiffly bending down, removing one boot and then the other. The comm visibly tumbles out when her left boot comes off, and for some reason the feel of her bare feet, the loss of that trusty weight against her ankles makes her nerves grip onto what's really happening, how helpless she is and how helpless all four of them are with this man aware that they're here, and she doesn't have so much as...
He's bending over and quickly picking up the comm unit when she speaks.
"I'm going to put my shoes back on, if you don't mind."
The mild cold of her voice makes him laugh, low and slow and lazy. He steps back as if surmising something else about her, looking her up and down again. Anxiously ticking his phaser back and forth in his grasp, he scrunches his nose and drawls, "I suppose that would be fine."
There's a crash outside, two people rustling violently and some shouts heard farther off, the lingering murmurs of warfare still clanging and neither of them flinching at the noise as she's tightening the laces up again. The street lights flicker out for a long cough, then kick back on dimmer than before. Marcon keeps talking.
"Honestly, it's all pretty damn astonishing. You didn't seem like the type, and—well, it's as if everything they used to say about Kirk isn't even true. I wonder," he pronounces mock-wistfully, "what they're going to do to you. You got that little 'X' on your neck, but they're not gonna make you a slave...You're not just libs. You're traitors. After they nibble you out of my hands and slap me with half a dozen commendation rewards, they're going to make examples of you." He grins, shaking his head in a kind of bemused horror. "You'll be screaming, Uhura, before they're done with you."
Then something lunges out, somebody crashing out from hiding in the little side room. Nyota gasps at the sight of the Romulan child and Marcon barely has a chance to react before some practiced hard clutch on the bottom side of his hand makes him grunt in pain and drop his phaser. The kid has the weapon and is escaping out the front door as the lieutenant hollers in rage—
And she runs. Her shoes hit sharply against the wood and she's slamming out the back door with absolutely no thought but fucking run, adrenaline making the second or two feel like a slow churn of motion before the hears him cursing and cursing and yes coming after her...
Her feet slide against the mud produced by something spilled into the dirt paths, her desperate breath turning into a couple whimpers as she shifts, balances, catches into harder ground and takes to a faster speed; finally after she's able to twist her route into a b-line across the unoccupied back road she gets into a fluid continuous motion—Runs, runs runs and ignores the filthy words being poured after her and the stronger set of feet gnawing behind. Quickly, her mind flits to remember where his vessel was, knows that the second she makes it easier to get back there, it's over.
It's with a swift grinding halt-turn that she cuts a left out of the town, headed toward the woods; he follows.
In a shaking voice she growls a low mutter of something like, "Come on, you son of a bitch," and he has to be thinking there's no way this thin little thing could outrun him, no way at all. And she's suddenly telling herself over and over again that she can't go too fast, not yet, not yet, too fast and he'll stop the chase.
After some uncountable amount of seconds, she feels a twist in her stomach with the sense that he's gaining on her too much, and then a signal seems to turn up in her mind like an air horn. She wills the bolting action of her muscles, a kind of snap propelling her forward at a slicing speed.
Along with the fearful tears streaming cold down her cheeks she is flooding with the awareness of it, that she can and will do this. At this moment she can't think about being anything except fast, but she's pulling not farther but closer to that history of herself as she remembers the one time, she was stupidly late for her philosophy and catching looks as she bolted across the green campus, eventually profusely embarrassed at sideswiping an instructor who she stopped into to say she was sorry, saw arched eyebrows with two possible reactions to her indecisively fumbling against each other in his eyes and how it wasn't until that moment that she'd ever felt any pull into his presence by anything other than respect; she thinks of the finish-line scraping under her teenage feet and a kiss on the forehead from her father when they ate ice cream later but she does not think of these things because they are gone. Because she would only think of these things if she was about to die.
These days there is a wail of worry that they all know, a constant nausea that almost gives the hunger a run for its money, and there is never anything for it except that now she is tearing through the air, her tank top and jacket gnawing themselves in the breeze and with every crunching assault the uneven ground makes to her feet she is destroying all the demons and keeping them off; she loves Jim with his eyes that now look always angry and robbed and Leonard with his calloused way of softening everyone else and Scotty always laughing something off in the back of the house and now even Jill who hates her for something she's never been, and she cannot translate or conjugate or talk her way out of this but hell if she can run fast enough it will be these bastards that don't belong here, not them. Everyone is coming home tonight. This one behind her is a dead man.
Just past the tree she remembers with the crooked corner next to the torn-off branches from a lightning strike, she begins to sprint more clumsy and flailing as she hears him gaining on her again. Plays a game with herself that it's supposed to hurt, faster, harder, faster. She sees in a burning vision the white paint forming a vague 'X' bleeding across the next tree trunk—running just behind it and there's the edge and she kicks—
The ground disappears.
Her momentum throws her into slow fall, treading air until she feels the wall of dirt just barely in reach through the unlacing vision of the hologram and scrabbles at it. The air is punched out of her by her impact with the loosening edge and she grips on but feels the cheap mesh collapsing under her; behind and under her is the grunt before a body hits, resounding a consonant crack of bone from the deep fathoms.
There is a quiet stillness, any hum of dying violence back at the Knot drowned out by the night's cold and calm chirping. And as she lets out angry wincing groans at the mesh digging sharply into her hands, as she slowly manages to pull herself up and out and over, as she rolls over to solid ground and sinks back on her elbows, it seems to her that the loudest thing for miles is the sound of her breathing. And breathing. And breathing.
>interlude
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-11-04 09:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-11 09:17 pm (UTC)and here I thought last chapter was suspenseful. Show what I know.