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ninety6tears[See Master Post]
She's blinking away her exhaustion after she finds where Marcon dumped her communicator in the empty cabin. She just squeezes it in her grasp for a second and starts to move back into the eerily quieting outdoors, avoiding the bodies both human and Romulan dumped limp through the streets.
She's just opening her comm unit with her breath held hopefully, when a passing vehicle going fast in hover mode halts all in a millisecond, and she looks and sees it careening closer to the ground and getting out of the driver door is Leonard and she shouts something wordless and runs into his arms.
"What's wrong with him?" she asks, already having seen Scotty in the passenger side with a rushed job of a bandage around his head.
"He caught some shrapnel right after he lost you. The kid took off...I think he's still looking for—"
"Get back in the car," she interrupts as the urgency seizes her again.
She explains while she's hopping into the back and squeezing Scotty's shoulder; Leonard takes off, giving the car its share of scrapes and bumps wrapping it around corners on the way back to where she'd left the shuttle. They're almost there when she suddenly snaps, "Back up, this way, go, go, go I think I saw it—!"
She's almost tossed to the other side of the back seat as he maneuvers them around; he snaps the car back in the direction where she saw the shuttle moving through the cracks between houses on the other end, and in a jolt of precision they're right next to it in the place where the two roads merge.
"You got it!?" Leonard shouts frantically as she's yelling a stream of instructions, cringing with all the prayers running through her thoughts when the car gets up just a little bit ahead. With the phaser Scotty passed her from the front seat, she wields out of the back seat and aims her best shot and just doesn't stop shooting where he told her to shoot, just before the couple ensigns can notice them, taking out the integrity of where one half of the passenger section is connected to the cargo. It doesn't look like it's hitting them very hard but the shuttle is emitting a loud bending groan, apparently banged up enough that the pilot has to lag it down. Scotty said the problem wouldn't show up on their sensors as anything more than minor debris damage, but that they wouldn't want to travel far without checking on the hull first.
They're outnumbered by the number of phasers on the two fleet soldiers, but in their aggressive haste, it's easy: A phaser burst to the first one that comes tumbling out of the shuttle and the other one Leonard takes down with a sharp bump of their hood that bowls him into the grass, making it easy to shoot him before he can even feel the ribs he just broke.
"Hey—I told you not to move," Leonard's scolding, but is ignored by Scotty flinging the car door open and with a sigh from the doctor they're all moving out of it at once.
At the back of the cargo compartment they can hear a couple shouts, a fist pounding, before they phase the door open and the noises exalt and raise into disbelief; the Romulans who don't have their hands bound are moving to help the others, and Leonard gets up there with the tricorder. Nyota backs up a little when she sees Gene, his hands bound behind his back but not waiting to be helped out of the crude cuffs before he hops down out of the vessel, wearing what looks like pajamas and looking dazed under a gruesome cut just at his hairline.
There's a thunking rhythm of rapidly approaching footsteps that her ears pick up on just as Gene's squinting off, his voice small and laced with numbness and disbelief. "Alel?..."
Gene's back thuds hard against the side of the shuttle when the young Romulan flings himself around him, but Gene doesn't seem to feel it as Alel is practically climbing up his body and burying himself in him, can't hold him up with his hands bound and just leans far down with him into a collapsing ascent until they're both on their knees and Gene is muffling the cry of some sudden onslaught of grief with a bite at Alel's shoulder, pressed close into him. Nyota can only hesitate at the sight of almost violent agony, that pure Romulan rage in a much more pitiful light than she's ever witnessed before, but finally leans down and quietly says Gene's name until he lets her use the fleet phaser to remove his cuffs.
"Leonard, she isn't waking up!" Scotty's voice from up in the shuttle, a bit frantic. Nyota goes over to see Leonard checking her over. This is when she sickly notices how battered-up Jill is; she's seen worse within the last hour, but the green splotches of bruises all over her body are still worrisome.
She runs to get the car and pulls it up right next to the shuttle, getting out again as Leonard's saying, "No, no, that elbow's dislocated, I'll—You shouldn't be carrying her anyway, seeing as you're injured—"
Leonard ends up gently placing the unconscious Jill in the back seat where Nyota gently has her legs propped over where she's sitting, and then he and Scotty get back into the front and they're off in a blow of dust. Nyota isn't used to the unsteady handling of the car in hover mode and unconsciously gives almost soothing squeezes to Jill's knee as the vehicle bustles out of the Knot; up front, she hears Scotty having to shoot a couple people, but with the riots slowing it's chillingly about as easy getting out as it was coming in. She vaguely begins to wonder, when they pass a small throng of armed Romulans with a few humans held at gunpoint, if there was actually a winner in this battle.
Once they're on the main streets beyond the dilapidated front gates, she leans forward a little, letting her forehead rest on the back of the front seat, trying to fight the mix of emotional and physical swerving nausea running through her. "Jim?..."
She looks up to see Leonard's eyes in the rear view; he says with reservation, "Still hasn't shown up."
She almost makes it. They get home and pull in the driveway and Leonard carries Jill up the steps and shouts at an injured stranger lingering by the door to be quick about getting inside and in line, then has to threaten Scotty with various creatively unpleasant notions to get him to sit down for an examination and grab the time while Jill is still out to start looking him over. He's just telling him to sit tight and try to relax when Nyota's entire body is suddenly lurching her through the door to the side bathroom and she's loudly throwing up.
She kicks the door closed after, washes her mouth out and washes water over her face, squinting into her hands for a minute before she reaches in a deft motion to grab the towel and wipe off. She straightens up and looks at herself in the mirror, and then she pulls the hair off the right side of her neck and looks at it.
The burn mark is crookedly placed, somersaulted between an 'X' and a cross. One stem crawls very visibly over the carotid bump; she shifts the angle of her head a few times, gauging that she'd need another mirror to see it fully where it ends somewhere under her ear. But she can confirm the obvious: It's visible enough to be a problem, to be dangerous for her and for everyone else, and for good.
The door opens just a tad, then all the way, and Leonard steps in and closes it behind them. For some reason that's when she's overwhelmed to the point of collapsing down until her elbows are propped around her head on the sink and her legs are kicking into this angry itchy motion; the first thing her mind picks out of the dirt to land into a sudden groan is "I love him." She's pulled over just a bit and hugs into his torso, gripping his shirt. "I love him so much, I swear if—"
"I know, I know. I love him too, just..." She feels him tousling at the back of her hair while he's talking, and then he's putting down the seat on the toilet so she'll sit down, pulling out his tricorder to look at the brand with a tensed look.
It doesn't take him long to confirm what they both know, and it seems to pain him to say it more than she thinks it all really deserves. "I can't do anything about it. It's a phaser burn that's made to fuck with your natural pigmentation...It'll heal back like that if I do anything to it."
Looking down at his leaning form, she nods, and he lands his hand on her knee.
"How many motherfuckers does that hurt like?"
She gives a sniffling little weak laugh. "A lot."
"So, I want you to go hold some ice on that. And I want you to go outside and wait for him. Okay?"
She takes in and lets out a long breath, and then nods.
When Jim comes home, the light's off on their porch and he has a senseless thought at first that the figure on the steps is Jill sitting out for a cigarette. Then he remembers that Jill doesn't come over anymore and Jill could maybe be dead, and the body crouched there is unmoving as if poised in an awe that surveyed him all the way from the end of the block. He hesitates in confusion, and then he reaches and flicks on the lantern.
The deep scrapes running up Nyota's legs have a more immediate color than her dirtied cut-off shorts, and his heart leaps at the wrecked sight. She's looking up at him like she can't believe her eyes, a resonant mirror of his own shock: His chest looms up and down in sick worry. Part of him already knows.
"What happened?"
"Scotty's hurt," she explains the important part first. "So's Jill. She's inside...They should both be fine."
He realizes at dreading length, "You went into the Knot?" His voice feels too flat, like he's forgotten how to use it. There isn't enough air in his lungs.
There is a long pause before she evenly demands, "Where were you?"
He opens his mouth but falters back, because it feels so irrelevant right now. "It's too long a story."
The messy abstraction of her features starts to blot recognizably into anger. "Where were you?"
"Tell me what—"
"No." In a quick movement, she's off the steps on legs that waver a bit as if weak with exertion. Standing closer and almost fuming. "All this stuff happening, and you come waltzing in late like it's just another day for you to fuck off somewhere without a comm? Tell me what you were doing."
"The bar has a basement under a trapdoor. It was safe down there. I was trying to talk her into waving some other people down..." He gives an overwhelmed shrugging motion. "That's all."
He doesn't like the way she's looking very closely at him, not even blinking for a span of several seconds. "You and the other workers?..."
"...What?"
Now she stands even closer to him. "The entire town was being torn apart, and you were hiding in a basement with your boss."
"Why?" He sneers, the reaction sour. "Feeling disappointed in me?"
"That's not the point." She shakes her head. Abruptly she asks, "Does she suspect us?"
"What?"
"Because if she suspected you, or recognized you, or..." Nyota shakes her head. "God, she could make you do anything, and I know that you'd do it, and the worst part, is that you'd never say anything about it because you don't tell us anything anymore—"
"That's not going on," Jim interrupts once he can croak the words together.
Nyota looks like she could cry. "And you're standing right there and telling me, and I don't even know. I don't know if I believe you. We don't know what's going on with you half the time, you're still not eating enough, you're working too much...."
A thick scoff and he's saying, "We need as much as we—"
"You disappear for entire days," she snaps. "You think you can take care of everybody, but you can't, and I'm trying to work around this same old bullshit ego of yours so that I can take care of you."
"Yeah, well, it's hard..." Jim says vaguely, "when it comes to you, I mean."
"What are you talking about?"
"I was never supposed to be anything except Captain to you," he bites out, not really wanting to say it, his hands making a helpless motion. "You didn't sign up for this."
"None of us signed up for this," she immediately protests, but it's not that it isn't clipping onto the right meaning for her, and her eyes get a little sad. "Don't do that. Not right now."
He looks right at her for a pause, implacable.
"Jim..." Nyota looks a little stunned. For a while neither of them speaks while her head shakes in protest and she starts to say something, and the interruption comes out like he needs to rob the words from her.
"Sure, you love me, in some..." He makes a searching gesture in the air as his voice gets more animated with a grind of near-anger. "In a kind of claustrophobic way, you love me, yeah."
She opens her mouth again—
"I mean, wake up," he almost shouts. "You barely even liked me when we were back home."
She steps back from him, and he can practically feel her whole body thrumming with anger, doesn't understand it but is already starting to wish he could take it all back.
"You don't know what happened to me today," is all she can think to say before she turns away.
He sees it then; every sound in his mind goes rumbling and dissonant as he's stepping forward. "Wait..."
When he reaches to lift her hair up to look at her neck, her hand slaps down his arm.
"Did—" He can't even speak, suddenly choking hard on rage, "Did somebody—?"
"Yes." Her arms clutch at herself and she shakes her head.
"Somebody—God, somebody hurt you, I'll fucking—"
"—Nothing else happened," she tries to harshly cut through his panic, and by now he has no idea what he's saying or what his hands are trying to grasp at, the air, her, the neck of some sick bastard or the big blow of a solid fact screaming in his mind that means I need to get them the fuck out of here...
Everything halts and fizzles out when she slaps him hard across the face. He lets out one pant and backs up a step, a hand scrubbing at the back of his neck.
Her chest heaves up and down angrily. She starts, "I—" And then instead of saying anything she throws her arms around him.
Jim is barely realizing the change of the weather enough to tighten back his hold around her when McCoy blows out onto the porch in the squeek of the screen door, looking with a sharp intake of breath at Jim.
"I am really fucking happy you aren't one of the dead bodies on the broadcast, but right now I need both of you to help me in here."
Coming into the kitchen, Jim takes in the crowd of Romulans who are just numerous enough to make the area a bit too crowded to see what's really going on. He doesn't recognize any of them except for Khamak. Just as he's coming in all dazed and hesitant, Scotty's voice is at his left, and he looks down to see him lying on one of the two medical tables. Scotty gives a surprised, "Ey, it's Jimmy" before automatically clutching Jim's hand into a tightly grasping shake, insistent and maudlin.
"You alright?" Jim asks, looking him up and down.
Scotty shakes it off with a motion of his head, face both pained and happy with relief and Jim manages a small smile of reassurance.
"You're supposed to be asleep," Nyota accuses.
"I'm resting, sweet hon."
They get sort of interrupted and Jim and Nyota try to inch farther to the other side of the kitchen when it becomes clear there's a bit of an uproar with the Romulans; a couple of them are making inscrutable demands and launching out too many questions and the whole scene is pierced with the undertow of the long suddenly building wail from beyond; as the crowd moves just enough to see through, Jill appears in a vision of terrible sobbing, the squinting rage of grief and agony or both at once spilling from where she clutches the cheap sheets and coils up, all numb of her near-nakedness in the scrub gown hiking up in her motions. And Bones is pissed, going with authoritative anger right up to Khamak, when Jim asks, "Who was it?"
Standing next to him, Nyota's expression is almost sickened, and she realizes what he's asking. "Tom."
Jim's mood sinks to the floor, and Leonard's voice is barking atop the mess of mutters: "You come in here and upset my patient—I haven't even set her arm back yet cause you and your punks won't clear off and don't give me that shit, you can understand exactly what I'm saying—"
Khamak comes up closer to the doctor to say something that doesn't quite make it across the room.
"She told me she wants you all to leave, she's been sayin' it since you walked in—"
"You lie—"
"Fuck off," Bones says, unusually quick to be so dismissive.
"She is my eri-ailhun!" Khamak protests.
Jim sees Nyota's face fall, ever-so-briefly, to a terse acceptance when her mouth forms an 'O,' and Bones even hesitates in confusion, but shortly has his arms widened apart, eyebrows all heaven-help-us.
"I don't care if she's your left kneecap," he snaps. "She doesn't want you here. Look, you can keep the hypos these other jackasses are pocketing, just get out before I have to throw you out."
And there's a certain way Bones gets that clears all the noise out of a room; Jim's seen him do it several times during emergencies and now it even works on a group where half of them may not even understand him. In a moment they've all disappeared but the room is still pretty occupied; Bones asks Nyota to talk to the young boy with an injured leg who's been sitting far over in the waiting chair looking like a deer in headlights, drugs up Scotty so that he'll go to sleep, and in a rush of trying to be heard through all of Jill's grief is getting to work on her.
"Look, I can give you an anesthetic, I just don't know—"
"It's fine. I know you shouldn't waste them," Jill speaks in a surprising flatness through the ongoing stream of her crying. "Just do it."
"...Right." Bones nods, and then nods again. He's moving over and arranging his grasp around her arm, and says, "Count of three?..."
Without thinking Jim moves forward and manages just before the final count to offer his arm as something to clutch at, and his hand is seized in hers in an unthinking motion. Her water-streaked face cringes and clutches into him just before the shout of pain seizes sharp through her; right afterward she seems to actually realize it was him who was standing there, just as he drops her hand and is already moving away.
He walks out to where the living room space is visible in the kitchen, with a look of purpose that makes Bones yell after him, "Jim?..."
"I'm counting," he says before getting down to the floor and sliding the box out from under the couch. "Tell me if you have anything to put in."
"I thought you were going to count at the end of the month," Bones says a little tiredly, and turns back into the kitchen to go tend to the child; Nyota slips by him and has a paper bag—one of the ones Scotty stashes his pay in—and is handing it to Jim, sitting down next to him and silently starting to help him sort the bills into piles.
Some five minutes later, she's announcing her total just before he's almost finished counting. His motions slow, put down the last bill with a resigned slap.
"We still need at least a grand," he says, pinching the bridge of his nose. "If we want much of a chance."
He finally sees her frowning over at him. "We'll get it," she says quietly.
He just sighs back on the floor for a tired moment, then sits back up to start putting it all away.
The next morning the local broadcast is announcing the estimated number of human casualties as well as the number that were captured or killed all over town; it's weird to think that no one thought to ask of it the night before, but if there was a winner and a loser, the Knot triumphed. The one or two torpedoes they'd spent on Imperial attackers had left the soldiers unwilling to call any bluff on whether they had many more of them to shoot; Nyota and Scotty agree that while it was a little hard to discern what was happening while in the thick of it, it seems like most of the fleet members escaped.
Jim is shaking his head in grim wonder at the whole thing still; he understands how it must have happened with the two of them when it looked like only civilians were coming to attack them, then them suddenly being in the crossfires when the fleet showed up. Nyota turns to Scotty when she's sitting playing a very distracted game of cards with him in bed, thinking to ask, "You don't think anyone recognized you, do you?"
"I didn't even get very close to any of them, I don' think," Scotty mumbles. "I didn't even think of that before..."
"One of the men who captured Jill...He knew me, or knew her, before." Her arms are crossed and she just shifts around in response to the eyes growing more amazed at her. They all wait for an explanation and all she offers is, "But it doesn't matter. He's dead."
By noon there's video footage on the pirated local channel, ashen images on screen to match the smell reaching all over the town of piles of burning bodies being disposed of out at the nearest foothill. Jill is on the couch wrapped in a blanket, taking in the news of victory with exhausted, numb features. Jim keeps waiting to see her and Scotty speaking with each other, but maybe he's giving her some space, maybe he's even still a little mad at her. She lets Nyota sit next to her, the two just sitting close with their shoulders touching watching the viewscreen together, but they don't seem to talk.
Gene somehow gets his hands on their comm number; they get a call from him a couple times, the first time to make sure he can take Khamak's word for it she's okay, the second time to see if she wants to talk. Jim detects that there's some confusion about her insistence to stay at the house. McCoy is grateful for the rare calm cooperation of a badly injured patient, but it seems a little unlike her. Jim eventually remarks very quietly that it's probably just going to be very difficult to see how different things look, how different things are, when she goes back home.
"About a quarter of the people she knew at all will have disappeared," he says. "It's gotta be terrible over there."
Brighton comms to inform him that there's no use coming in to work that evening when they need as much help as they can get re-structuring the front gate.
"Wait, which gate?"
"The gate. Forget the Knot, have you seen it? The Knot is no more, my friend."
It ends up a very interesting sight when he reports to work there; Romulans were always partly involved in the main border security, but there are dozens of people both alien and human helping to hammer back up all the metal that isn't beyond repair. In certain ways, it's an inspiring sight to see all the integration. There are a couple feuds between a Romulan lady with a bad temper and a young man complaining that he can't understand her; at other times, though, you'd never guess there had been such a broad divide before.
Somebody puts on some music later in the day; it's a very old Terran song and Jim is surprised that some of the Romulans seem to know it, and for a few minutes somebody's very theatrically lip-syncing and somebody else is cat-calling at them and somebody else is rhythmically banging their tools together, people snickering all around. Everything feels a little bit lighter, even when he knows there's something warring under the surface with all these people.
Before he walks home, he overhears all the buzz about the fact that Brighton's taking the bids at the end of the month. He sighs and pushes the constant tick of that thought to the back of his mind.
Jim stops at the entrance to Bones and Scotty's room, leaning into the doorway for a second before he goes inside. After sighing down comfortably with his feet hanging off next to where Scotty is half-sitting-half-lying at the head of the bed, he comments, "You guys get more sun in here."
"Real bitch when you'd rather sleep all day," Scotty points out.
Jim cracks a slight smile. "How are you doing, man?"
"Oh, you know. Dizzy and hungry."
Jim fiddles with the blanket. "Are you talking to Jill at all?"
Scotty sets down what he's reading to scrub a hand at his forehead. "Has she made you any amends?"
Jim jostles a leg out farther, shakes his head a little. "...She doesn't owe me anything. It's not a nice feeling that she couldn't believe us just because we're us, I get that, but it's not fair to blame her."
"Yeah, it's funny how none of that makes me feel any better about it."
Jim takes in a long breath and lets it go, sits there tapping his finger on something for a second, and then abruptly gets up.
"Good talk," Scotty grunts after him.
Jim rolls his eyes. Only a minute later he's walking out of the kitchen having produced the box of cigarettes Bones found in one of the cabinets a couple days after Jill stopped coming over. She's on the couch still, and instead of saying anything he tosses the little box onto her lap and twiddles between his fingers the oddly crafted lighter she also left as he goes out onto the porch. She's blinking after him, recognizing a crude invitation when she sees it, and shortly after seating himself on the step she comes out after him with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and one of the cylinders hanging from her mouth.
They sit in silence at first as he lights it for her, taking the first whiff when she offers and coughing a little right after. She breaks into half a cackle at him.
"Oh, fuck off," he mumbles, coughing once more. "Those aren't all that popular back home."
Her eyes go flat and sly. "Is that so?"
"Kinda hard to keep up the habit if you regularly live in space, anyway."
It's the beginning of something that is more like a currency of honesty than an exchange of real trust. She falls into contemplation for a minute, and finally mutters, "I put in a lot of research trying to figure out what Scotty was trying to tell me that day, you know."
"And did you get anywhere?"
"I get the general concept. But it's all theoretical anyway."
"Not to us," Jim says, almost with a dark laugh. The expression on her face makes him crook into a half-grimace. "You don't believe us, do you?"
She lets out a long sigh of smoke."I guess what it comes down to is I definitely didn't cover for all of you because I believed you. I just...I don't know. Answer me this. Let's assume, for a minute, I believe you...What were the Romulans like where you come from?"
"That's the first thing you ask..." He sits back slowly, wearing an expression that makes her cock her eyebrow at how he's almost cringing. "They were never a picnic when I was in command. A lot of the ones I encountered were paranoid and difficult if not outright murderous. I mean, Nero was Nero, but anyone could have done what he did if they were crazy enough. You can't just ask me to tell you what they were like, as a whole, that's not...It's not really fair."
"Would I fit in with them?" she asks a little wryly.
Jim only hesitates a second before shaking his head, quietly admitting, "I doubt it."
He's surprised by the frown and the way she goes quiet for a moment. She puts out her cigarette and then has a lukewarm ironic smile, realizing, "Hey...I believe you."
He shakes his head at the half-joke. "Talking like that, it's like you're not much of a fan either."
"I'm a misanthropist," she corrects. "Well. Who isn't, but I do have to admit...there's just something that runs through my race that makes us even worse than Terrans."
He gives her a look of surprise.
"Yeah." She scoffs at herself. "I guess I've never told anyone before that I feel that way. But, you know, history. We've been at our own brothers far longer than we've been enslaved by anyone else. Your planet named Romulus very appropriately; if I was superstitious I'd think you condemned us all to fratricide."
He gives an incredulous, cynical little sound.
"Did your Romulans also enslave their own people?"
"We didn't know a whole lot about them. Though, my first officer suspected once..." His voice trails off, and he sort of dismisses his own comment with a shrug.
"Your Spock?" Jill prods, as if curiously drawn to something she hears in Jim's voice.
"But our humans enslaved themselves too," Jim averts, insisting with a bit of anger, "and the other night, that wasn't a Romulan who hurt Nyota, so. I think your theory has some problems."
"All I know is, somewhere I decided that the difference between somebody I'd like to know and everyone else is whether a person can take something awful that's happened to them, something so devastating and disappointing, or disillusioning, and turn it into hope somehow. And Romulans are shit at it. I don't know how it's done, but I've done it. I'm not sure how many more goes I have in me, but at least I got this far...Though, really, you should be thanking your sweet Jesus or whoever that I'm trying to be some kind of example because you might be dead otherwise."
"...What do you mean?"
"What Nina said, when I...you know. It was like she knew the way I felt about that, like she knew I'd have to back off if she made the comparison—"
"I don't—Oh. Right."
Jill takes a second to scrutinize him, looks like she could almost laugh. "You don't know what it means."
"...No."
Her arms go wide out in a gesture of surprise. "And you never asked her?"
"No," he quietly repeats.
Jill puts out the last of her cigarette and slowly sits up a bit straighter. "This phrase: 'Veoth-rhannu, kivoi ekhes. It's historically important to Romulans, and unless this happened with your world too, I'm guessing she just happened to read about it at some point. Near the end of the many decades when they were still enslaving their own lower classes, families were still respected as units and weren't separated from each other, so it was more of a feudalism structure. But then that went out of fashion, and suddenly anybody could get ransacked and thrown out of their houses, and if their kids didn't look like they'd make strong workers, well." She raises her brows ruefully. "The only way you really had a prayer was if you knew you were the last of your name. Family lineage was always important to Romulans, and they would occasionally take pity on families who had no relatives left, and the parents would call out, 'Mercy for my children.' Only in the alternate phrase which became more famous, 'Dosais-rhannu, ekhes,' it literally meant, 'Mercy for what is of me,' 'Mercy for what is left of me.' That's what she said. And even if I couldn't believe Scotty I at least understood that the four of you are alone."
The impact of that settles for a moment. Jill rearranges her blankets, gives Jim another speculative look.
"What is the deal with the two of you anyway?"
Jim takes a second to react.
"I mean, she's your girl, right?"
He lets out a little surprised noise, slowly shakes his head. "No, she's..."
Jill's just waiting with expectant eyes, and he doesn't know why he'd talk to her of all people about this, but then he's opening his mouth.
"We sleep in the same bed," he explains numbly, giving a slight shrug. "Sometimes she wants me, I guess. It would work better if we were happy. But if we were happy, we wouldn't be here."
"So you two weren't like that...before..."
This is when he realizes he just really wants to fucking tell somebody, since he's never quite been able to bring it up to Bones. "I used to make these cracks sometimes...I would make fun of her for being just, a little bit nicer to me...when her man wasn't around." He slowly shakes his head. "Talk about a joke that isn't funny anymore."
Jill has a vaguely confused look, but not an unsympathetic one.
"...He was a good friend of mine. Or, he was supposed to be. I really don't know anymore," he cuts out of that nervous rush of words, rubbing at his eye. "So does your boyfriend know about Scotty?"
She wears a not particularly bothered expression, like everything is too cold and bleak right now to bother feeling bad about that, and Jim isn't sure if it makes him more or less irritated. "What about Scotty?...Khamak didn't propose to me until I'd stopped coming over here."
Jim feels his mouth slowly dropping open.
"He and his friends have a pretty good chance of winning Brighton's ship, and they've been making one too many promises to people; I'd have to have a little more than camaraderie with him to get any guarantee that I could come along. He knows why I accepted. It doesn't bother him."
"That's who you were talking about, I thought—your actual friends—"
"My friends will also have a way out of here, okay. Don't think for a second I'll be too busy suffering a loveless marriage to be grateful that I got them away from here, it'll hardly matter to me." Her voice is rising a little, and he can hear her more frantic emotion over recent events in the words. "It's not so terrible of him that he wouldn't offer me that if we weren't getting married. Especially since hardly anyone else would want me. Even aside from the preference for more traditional women," she explains with a bad taste in her mouth, "it's not like I'm able to have children."
At some point Jim has started pinching the bridge of his nose. "If we get that ship," he slowly says, "you will have a ride off of Earth regardless of whether you want nothing to do with us, and it's sure as fuck not because Scotty doesn't care about you—"
"I'm aware of the concept of unconditional love, thank you."
She's so terse, as if she's totally aware of how this whole nightmare they fell into over a year ago must look to him, and it makes him bark into the tiniest laugh, grim and overwhelmed when he explains, "I am just so sick, Jill. I have had it up to my eyes, seeing people just settle for what they have because they're stuck where they are."
"Maybe you should try being a bad man then."
He lets out another huff.
She shrugs. "I've never seen anyone who was good to anybody else end up happy."
"I hate," Jim says after some consideration, "that I believe you."
"Only the kind suffer," she says; it sounds proverbial. "And you can't be kind without suffering first."
"Now, that second part..." Jim mutters, shaking his head, "That just isn't true."
"You've suffered, though," she says, like she's thought a little too hard about all this. "I mean, you're the one who almost always seems like you're angry at something."
Jim thinks, taking in a deep breath. Finally saying with an uncomfortable twisting expression, "There's suffering and then there's loss. I don't think...that mine really compares to anything in this place..."
"Does thinking about it that way make it hurt any less?"
"No." He shrugs and says, "But none of it has much to do with the fact that I'm trying to do the right thing."
She looks dubious, like she made up her mind about all of this a lifetime ago. "Suffering is a part of life; the people who avoid it aren't whole. They have no compassion. If I can believe that what I've been through is cathartic, it all at least makes some sense."
"But, hypothetically. What if everybody's born good?"
"Is that what you think?"
"Yeah. Maybe."
Her expression is wry and slowly considering as she stands up, slipping the blanket off her shoulders and setting it on the step.
She sighs. "Then I guess you got me there, Captain."
He looks up at her. "Are you taking off?"
She shrugs, meaning she is. He takes in that she's antsy, as if she needs to run off and just let everything out for a while, but she's also searching for something to say, biting her bottom lip. "I'm sorry about what I did. I'm gonna make it up to you, okay?"
He doesn't know what to say. "You don't have to leave..."
"I really should, you know?...See you later, Jim." After idly fiddling with a zipper on the thin hoodie Nyota lent her, she turns and takes the first couple steps out.
"Jill?"
Scotty's in the doorway, and Jill stops at the sound of her name. She seems to gather something into a ball before turning to give him this sad, indirect smile, slow and flinching.
"You want my jacket for the way home?"
There is a long wind of hesitation before she turns and comes a couple steps back, the tone in her answer making it as if this is some much more serious question at hand. "Yeah. Okay."
When Scotty reaches out and is helping her into the sleeves one after the other, she slides slowly into the bomber coat and Jim realizes somewhere in the middle of the motion that she's crying. Some little gulp of sound escapes her as he's clutching the collar around her, giving her an affectionate last tug.
The words are so quiet when Scotty whispers something to her, but Jim thinks he hears "I'm sorry," and then Tom's name, amidst something else.
Jill sniffs and nods, just mumbling, "Yeah."
Scotty plants a firm, long kiss on her forehead, her entire body stilling with the emotion, her eyes shutting. And then he lets her go.
>Easy To Be Hard
She's blinking away her exhaustion after she finds where Marcon dumped her communicator in the empty cabin. She just squeezes it in her grasp for a second and starts to move back into the eerily quieting outdoors, avoiding the bodies both human and Romulan dumped limp through the streets.
She's just opening her comm unit with her breath held hopefully, when a passing vehicle going fast in hover mode halts all in a millisecond, and she looks and sees it careening closer to the ground and getting out of the driver door is Leonard and she shouts something wordless and runs into his arms.
"What's wrong with him?" she asks, already having seen Scotty in the passenger side with a rushed job of a bandage around his head.
"He caught some shrapnel right after he lost you. The kid took off...I think he's still looking for—"
"Get back in the car," she interrupts as the urgency seizes her again.
She explains while she's hopping into the back and squeezing Scotty's shoulder; Leonard takes off, giving the car its share of scrapes and bumps wrapping it around corners on the way back to where she'd left the shuttle. They're almost there when she suddenly snaps, "Back up, this way, go, go, go I think I saw it—!"
She's almost tossed to the other side of the back seat as he maneuvers them around; he snaps the car back in the direction where she saw the shuttle moving through the cracks between houses on the other end, and in a jolt of precision they're right next to it in the place where the two roads merge.
"You got it!?" Leonard shouts frantically as she's yelling a stream of instructions, cringing with all the prayers running through her thoughts when the car gets up just a little bit ahead. With the phaser Scotty passed her from the front seat, she wields out of the back seat and aims her best shot and just doesn't stop shooting where he told her to shoot, just before the couple ensigns can notice them, taking out the integrity of where one half of the passenger section is connected to the cargo. It doesn't look like it's hitting them very hard but the shuttle is emitting a loud bending groan, apparently banged up enough that the pilot has to lag it down. Scotty said the problem wouldn't show up on their sensors as anything more than minor debris damage, but that they wouldn't want to travel far without checking on the hull first.
They're outnumbered by the number of phasers on the two fleet soldiers, but in their aggressive haste, it's easy: A phaser burst to the first one that comes tumbling out of the shuttle and the other one Leonard takes down with a sharp bump of their hood that bowls him into the grass, making it easy to shoot him before he can even feel the ribs he just broke.
"Hey—I told you not to move," Leonard's scolding, but is ignored by Scotty flinging the car door open and with a sigh from the doctor they're all moving out of it at once.
At the back of the cargo compartment they can hear a couple shouts, a fist pounding, before they phase the door open and the noises exalt and raise into disbelief; the Romulans who don't have their hands bound are moving to help the others, and Leonard gets up there with the tricorder. Nyota backs up a little when she sees Gene, his hands bound behind his back but not waiting to be helped out of the crude cuffs before he hops down out of the vessel, wearing what looks like pajamas and looking dazed under a gruesome cut just at his hairline.
There's a thunking rhythm of rapidly approaching footsteps that her ears pick up on just as Gene's squinting off, his voice small and laced with numbness and disbelief. "Alel?..."
Gene's back thuds hard against the side of the shuttle when the young Romulan flings himself around him, but Gene doesn't seem to feel it as Alel is practically climbing up his body and burying himself in him, can't hold him up with his hands bound and just leans far down with him into a collapsing ascent until they're both on their knees and Gene is muffling the cry of some sudden onslaught of grief with a bite at Alel's shoulder, pressed close into him. Nyota can only hesitate at the sight of almost violent agony, that pure Romulan rage in a much more pitiful light than she's ever witnessed before, but finally leans down and quietly says Gene's name until he lets her use the fleet phaser to remove his cuffs.
"Leonard, she isn't waking up!" Scotty's voice from up in the shuttle, a bit frantic. Nyota goes over to see Leonard checking her over. This is when she sickly notices how battered-up Jill is; she's seen worse within the last hour, but the green splotches of bruises all over her body are still worrisome.
She runs to get the car and pulls it up right next to the shuttle, getting out again as Leonard's saying, "No, no, that elbow's dislocated, I'll—You shouldn't be carrying her anyway, seeing as you're injured—"
Leonard ends up gently placing the unconscious Jill in the back seat where Nyota gently has her legs propped over where she's sitting, and then he and Scotty get back into the front and they're off in a blow of dust. Nyota isn't used to the unsteady handling of the car in hover mode and unconsciously gives almost soothing squeezes to Jill's knee as the vehicle bustles out of the Knot; up front, she hears Scotty having to shoot a couple people, but with the riots slowing it's chillingly about as easy getting out as it was coming in. She vaguely begins to wonder, when they pass a small throng of armed Romulans with a few humans held at gunpoint, if there was actually a winner in this battle.
Once they're on the main streets beyond the dilapidated front gates, she leans forward a little, letting her forehead rest on the back of the front seat, trying to fight the mix of emotional and physical swerving nausea running through her. "Jim?..."
She looks up to see Leonard's eyes in the rear view; he says with reservation, "Still hasn't shown up."
She almost makes it. They get home and pull in the driveway and Leonard carries Jill up the steps and shouts at an injured stranger lingering by the door to be quick about getting inside and in line, then has to threaten Scotty with various creatively unpleasant notions to get him to sit down for an examination and grab the time while Jill is still out to start looking him over. He's just telling him to sit tight and try to relax when Nyota's entire body is suddenly lurching her through the door to the side bathroom and she's loudly throwing up.
She kicks the door closed after, washes her mouth out and washes water over her face, squinting into her hands for a minute before she reaches in a deft motion to grab the towel and wipe off. She straightens up and looks at herself in the mirror, and then she pulls the hair off the right side of her neck and looks at it.
The burn mark is crookedly placed, somersaulted between an 'X' and a cross. One stem crawls very visibly over the carotid bump; she shifts the angle of her head a few times, gauging that she'd need another mirror to see it fully where it ends somewhere under her ear. But she can confirm the obvious: It's visible enough to be a problem, to be dangerous for her and for everyone else, and for good.
The door opens just a tad, then all the way, and Leonard steps in and closes it behind them. For some reason that's when she's overwhelmed to the point of collapsing down until her elbows are propped around her head on the sink and her legs are kicking into this angry itchy motion; the first thing her mind picks out of the dirt to land into a sudden groan is "I love him." She's pulled over just a bit and hugs into his torso, gripping his shirt. "I love him so much, I swear if—"
"I know, I know. I love him too, just..." She feels him tousling at the back of her hair while he's talking, and then he's putting down the seat on the toilet so she'll sit down, pulling out his tricorder to look at the brand with a tensed look.
It doesn't take him long to confirm what they both know, and it seems to pain him to say it more than she thinks it all really deserves. "I can't do anything about it. It's a phaser burn that's made to fuck with your natural pigmentation...It'll heal back like that if I do anything to it."
Looking down at his leaning form, she nods, and he lands his hand on her knee.
"How many motherfuckers does that hurt like?"
She gives a sniffling little weak laugh. "A lot."
"So, I want you to go hold some ice on that. And I want you to go outside and wait for him. Okay?"
She takes in and lets out a long breath, and then nods.
When Jim comes home, the light's off on their porch and he has a senseless thought at first that the figure on the steps is Jill sitting out for a cigarette. Then he remembers that Jill doesn't come over anymore and Jill could maybe be dead, and the body crouched there is unmoving as if poised in an awe that surveyed him all the way from the end of the block. He hesitates in confusion, and then he reaches and flicks on the lantern.
The deep scrapes running up Nyota's legs have a more immediate color than her dirtied cut-off shorts, and his heart leaps at the wrecked sight. She's looking up at him like she can't believe her eyes, a resonant mirror of his own shock: His chest looms up and down in sick worry. Part of him already knows.
"What happened?"
"Scotty's hurt," she explains the important part first. "So's Jill. She's inside...They should both be fine."
He realizes at dreading length, "You went into the Knot?" His voice feels too flat, like he's forgotten how to use it. There isn't enough air in his lungs.
There is a long pause before she evenly demands, "Where were you?"
He opens his mouth but falters back, because it feels so irrelevant right now. "It's too long a story."
The messy abstraction of her features starts to blot recognizably into anger. "Where were you?"
"Tell me what—"
"No." In a quick movement, she's off the steps on legs that waver a bit as if weak with exertion. Standing closer and almost fuming. "All this stuff happening, and you come waltzing in late like it's just another day for you to fuck off somewhere without a comm? Tell me what you were doing."
"The bar has a basement under a trapdoor. It was safe down there. I was trying to talk her into waving some other people down..." He gives an overwhelmed shrugging motion. "That's all."
He doesn't like the way she's looking very closely at him, not even blinking for a span of several seconds. "You and the other workers?..."
"...What?"
Now she stands even closer to him. "The entire town was being torn apart, and you were hiding in a basement with your boss."
"Why?" He sneers, the reaction sour. "Feeling disappointed in me?"
"That's not the point." She shakes her head. Abruptly she asks, "Does she suspect us?"
"What?"
"Because if she suspected you, or recognized you, or..." Nyota shakes her head. "God, she could make you do anything, and I know that you'd do it, and the worst part, is that you'd never say anything about it because you don't tell us anything anymore—"
"That's not going on," Jim interrupts once he can croak the words together.
Nyota looks like she could cry. "And you're standing right there and telling me, and I don't even know. I don't know if I believe you. We don't know what's going on with you half the time, you're still not eating enough, you're working too much...."
A thick scoff and he's saying, "We need as much as we—"
"You disappear for entire days," she snaps. "You think you can take care of everybody, but you can't, and I'm trying to work around this same old bullshit ego of yours so that I can take care of you."
"Yeah, well, it's hard..." Jim says vaguely, "when it comes to you, I mean."
"What are you talking about?"
"I was never supposed to be anything except Captain to you," he bites out, not really wanting to say it, his hands making a helpless motion. "You didn't sign up for this."
"None of us signed up for this," she immediately protests, but it's not that it isn't clipping onto the right meaning for her, and her eyes get a little sad. "Don't do that. Not right now."
He looks right at her for a pause, implacable.
"Jim..." Nyota looks a little stunned. For a while neither of them speaks while her head shakes in protest and she starts to say something, and the interruption comes out like he needs to rob the words from her.
"Sure, you love me, in some..." He makes a searching gesture in the air as his voice gets more animated with a grind of near-anger. "In a kind of claustrophobic way, you love me, yeah."
She opens her mouth again—
"I mean, wake up," he almost shouts. "You barely even liked me when we were back home."
She steps back from him, and he can practically feel her whole body thrumming with anger, doesn't understand it but is already starting to wish he could take it all back.
"You don't know what happened to me today," is all she can think to say before she turns away.
He sees it then; every sound in his mind goes rumbling and dissonant as he's stepping forward. "Wait..."
When he reaches to lift her hair up to look at her neck, her hand slaps down his arm.
"Did—" He can't even speak, suddenly choking hard on rage, "Did somebody—?"
"Yes." Her arms clutch at herself and she shakes her head.
"Somebody—God, somebody hurt you, I'll fucking—"
"—Nothing else happened," she tries to harshly cut through his panic, and by now he has no idea what he's saying or what his hands are trying to grasp at, the air, her, the neck of some sick bastard or the big blow of a solid fact screaming in his mind that means I need to get them the fuck out of here...
Everything halts and fizzles out when she slaps him hard across the face. He lets out one pant and backs up a step, a hand scrubbing at the back of his neck.
Her chest heaves up and down angrily. She starts, "I—" And then instead of saying anything she throws her arms around him.
Jim is barely realizing the change of the weather enough to tighten back his hold around her when McCoy blows out onto the porch in the squeek of the screen door, looking with a sharp intake of breath at Jim.
"I am really fucking happy you aren't one of the dead bodies on the broadcast, but right now I need both of you to help me in here."
Coming into the kitchen, Jim takes in the crowd of Romulans who are just numerous enough to make the area a bit too crowded to see what's really going on. He doesn't recognize any of them except for Khamak. Just as he's coming in all dazed and hesitant, Scotty's voice is at his left, and he looks down to see him lying on one of the two medical tables. Scotty gives a surprised, "Ey, it's Jimmy" before automatically clutching Jim's hand into a tightly grasping shake, insistent and maudlin.
"You alright?" Jim asks, looking him up and down.
Scotty shakes it off with a motion of his head, face both pained and happy with relief and Jim manages a small smile of reassurance.
"You're supposed to be asleep," Nyota accuses.
"I'm resting, sweet hon."
They get sort of interrupted and Jim and Nyota try to inch farther to the other side of the kitchen when it becomes clear there's a bit of an uproar with the Romulans; a couple of them are making inscrutable demands and launching out too many questions and the whole scene is pierced with the undertow of the long suddenly building wail from beyond; as the crowd moves just enough to see through, Jill appears in a vision of terrible sobbing, the squinting rage of grief and agony or both at once spilling from where she clutches the cheap sheets and coils up, all numb of her near-nakedness in the scrub gown hiking up in her motions. And Bones is pissed, going with authoritative anger right up to Khamak, when Jim asks, "Who was it?"
Standing next to him, Nyota's expression is almost sickened, and she realizes what he's asking. "Tom."
Jim's mood sinks to the floor, and Leonard's voice is barking atop the mess of mutters: "You come in here and upset my patient—I haven't even set her arm back yet cause you and your punks won't clear off and don't give me that shit, you can understand exactly what I'm saying—"
Khamak comes up closer to the doctor to say something that doesn't quite make it across the room.
"She told me she wants you all to leave, she's been sayin' it since you walked in—"
"You lie—"
"Fuck off," Bones says, unusually quick to be so dismissive.
"She is my eri-ailhun!" Khamak protests.
Jim sees Nyota's face fall, ever-so-briefly, to a terse acceptance when her mouth forms an 'O,' and Bones even hesitates in confusion, but shortly has his arms widened apart, eyebrows all heaven-help-us.
"I don't care if she's your left kneecap," he snaps. "She doesn't want you here. Look, you can keep the hypos these other jackasses are pocketing, just get out before I have to throw you out."
And there's a certain way Bones gets that clears all the noise out of a room; Jim's seen him do it several times during emergencies and now it even works on a group where half of them may not even understand him. In a moment they've all disappeared but the room is still pretty occupied; Bones asks Nyota to talk to the young boy with an injured leg who's been sitting far over in the waiting chair looking like a deer in headlights, drugs up Scotty so that he'll go to sleep, and in a rush of trying to be heard through all of Jill's grief is getting to work on her.
"Look, I can give you an anesthetic, I just don't know—"
"It's fine. I know you shouldn't waste them," Jill speaks in a surprising flatness through the ongoing stream of her crying. "Just do it."
"...Right." Bones nods, and then nods again. He's moving over and arranging his grasp around her arm, and says, "Count of three?..."
Without thinking Jim moves forward and manages just before the final count to offer his arm as something to clutch at, and his hand is seized in hers in an unthinking motion. Her water-streaked face cringes and clutches into him just before the shout of pain seizes sharp through her; right afterward she seems to actually realize it was him who was standing there, just as he drops her hand and is already moving away.
He walks out to where the living room space is visible in the kitchen, with a look of purpose that makes Bones yell after him, "Jim?..."
"I'm counting," he says before getting down to the floor and sliding the box out from under the couch. "Tell me if you have anything to put in."
"I thought you were going to count at the end of the month," Bones says a little tiredly, and turns back into the kitchen to go tend to the child; Nyota slips by him and has a paper bag—one of the ones Scotty stashes his pay in—and is handing it to Jim, sitting down next to him and silently starting to help him sort the bills into piles.
Some five minutes later, she's announcing her total just before he's almost finished counting. His motions slow, put down the last bill with a resigned slap.
"We still need at least a grand," he says, pinching the bridge of his nose. "If we want much of a chance."
He finally sees her frowning over at him. "We'll get it," she says quietly.
He just sighs back on the floor for a tired moment, then sits back up to start putting it all away.
The next morning the local broadcast is announcing the estimated number of human casualties as well as the number that were captured or killed all over town; it's weird to think that no one thought to ask of it the night before, but if there was a winner and a loser, the Knot triumphed. The one or two torpedoes they'd spent on Imperial attackers had left the soldiers unwilling to call any bluff on whether they had many more of them to shoot; Nyota and Scotty agree that while it was a little hard to discern what was happening while in the thick of it, it seems like most of the fleet members escaped.
Jim is shaking his head in grim wonder at the whole thing still; he understands how it must have happened with the two of them when it looked like only civilians were coming to attack them, then them suddenly being in the crossfires when the fleet showed up. Nyota turns to Scotty when she's sitting playing a very distracted game of cards with him in bed, thinking to ask, "You don't think anyone recognized you, do you?"
"I didn't even get very close to any of them, I don' think," Scotty mumbles. "I didn't even think of that before..."
"One of the men who captured Jill...He knew me, or knew her, before." Her arms are crossed and she just shifts around in response to the eyes growing more amazed at her. They all wait for an explanation and all she offers is, "But it doesn't matter. He's dead."
By noon there's video footage on the pirated local channel, ashen images on screen to match the smell reaching all over the town of piles of burning bodies being disposed of out at the nearest foothill. Jill is on the couch wrapped in a blanket, taking in the news of victory with exhausted, numb features. Jim keeps waiting to see her and Scotty speaking with each other, but maybe he's giving her some space, maybe he's even still a little mad at her. She lets Nyota sit next to her, the two just sitting close with their shoulders touching watching the viewscreen together, but they don't seem to talk.
Gene somehow gets his hands on their comm number; they get a call from him a couple times, the first time to make sure he can take Khamak's word for it she's okay, the second time to see if she wants to talk. Jim detects that there's some confusion about her insistence to stay at the house. McCoy is grateful for the rare calm cooperation of a badly injured patient, but it seems a little unlike her. Jim eventually remarks very quietly that it's probably just going to be very difficult to see how different things look, how different things are, when she goes back home.
"About a quarter of the people she knew at all will have disappeared," he says. "It's gotta be terrible over there."
Brighton comms to inform him that there's no use coming in to work that evening when they need as much help as they can get re-structuring the front gate.
"Wait, which gate?"
"The gate. Forget the Knot, have you seen it? The Knot is no more, my friend."
It ends up a very interesting sight when he reports to work there; Romulans were always partly involved in the main border security, but there are dozens of people both alien and human helping to hammer back up all the metal that isn't beyond repair. In certain ways, it's an inspiring sight to see all the integration. There are a couple feuds between a Romulan lady with a bad temper and a young man complaining that he can't understand her; at other times, though, you'd never guess there had been such a broad divide before.
Somebody puts on some music later in the day; it's a very old Terran song and Jim is surprised that some of the Romulans seem to know it, and for a few minutes somebody's very theatrically lip-syncing and somebody else is cat-calling at them and somebody else is rhythmically banging their tools together, people snickering all around. Everything feels a little bit lighter, even when he knows there's something warring under the surface with all these people.
Before he walks home, he overhears all the buzz about the fact that Brighton's taking the bids at the end of the month. He sighs and pushes the constant tick of that thought to the back of his mind.
Jim stops at the entrance to Bones and Scotty's room, leaning into the doorway for a second before he goes inside. After sighing down comfortably with his feet hanging off next to where Scotty is half-sitting-half-lying at the head of the bed, he comments, "You guys get more sun in here."
"Real bitch when you'd rather sleep all day," Scotty points out.
Jim cracks a slight smile. "How are you doing, man?"
"Oh, you know. Dizzy and hungry."
Jim fiddles with the blanket. "Are you talking to Jill at all?"
Scotty sets down what he's reading to scrub a hand at his forehead. "Has she made you any amends?"
Jim jostles a leg out farther, shakes his head a little. "...She doesn't owe me anything. It's not a nice feeling that she couldn't believe us just because we're us, I get that, but it's not fair to blame her."
"Yeah, it's funny how none of that makes me feel any better about it."
Jim takes in a long breath and lets it go, sits there tapping his finger on something for a second, and then abruptly gets up.
"Good talk," Scotty grunts after him.
Jim rolls his eyes. Only a minute later he's walking out of the kitchen having produced the box of cigarettes Bones found in one of the cabinets a couple days after Jill stopped coming over. She's on the couch still, and instead of saying anything he tosses the little box onto her lap and twiddles between his fingers the oddly crafted lighter she also left as he goes out onto the porch. She's blinking after him, recognizing a crude invitation when she sees it, and shortly after seating himself on the step she comes out after him with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and one of the cylinders hanging from her mouth.
They sit in silence at first as he lights it for her, taking the first whiff when she offers and coughing a little right after. She breaks into half a cackle at him.
"Oh, fuck off," he mumbles, coughing once more. "Those aren't all that popular back home."
Her eyes go flat and sly. "Is that so?"
"Kinda hard to keep up the habit if you regularly live in space, anyway."
It's the beginning of something that is more like a currency of honesty than an exchange of real trust. She falls into contemplation for a minute, and finally mutters, "I put in a lot of research trying to figure out what Scotty was trying to tell me that day, you know."
"And did you get anywhere?"
"I get the general concept. But it's all theoretical anyway."
"Not to us," Jim says, almost with a dark laugh. The expression on her face makes him crook into a half-grimace. "You don't believe us, do you?"
She lets out a long sigh of smoke."I guess what it comes down to is I definitely didn't cover for all of you because I believed you. I just...I don't know. Answer me this. Let's assume, for a minute, I believe you...What were the Romulans like where you come from?"
"That's the first thing you ask..." He sits back slowly, wearing an expression that makes her cock her eyebrow at how he's almost cringing. "They were never a picnic when I was in command. A lot of the ones I encountered were paranoid and difficult if not outright murderous. I mean, Nero was Nero, but anyone could have done what he did if they were crazy enough. You can't just ask me to tell you what they were like, as a whole, that's not...It's not really fair."
"Would I fit in with them?" she asks a little wryly.
Jim only hesitates a second before shaking his head, quietly admitting, "I doubt it."
He's surprised by the frown and the way she goes quiet for a moment. She puts out her cigarette and then has a lukewarm ironic smile, realizing, "Hey...I believe you."
He shakes his head at the half-joke. "Talking like that, it's like you're not much of a fan either."
"I'm a misanthropist," she corrects. "Well. Who isn't, but I do have to admit...there's just something that runs through my race that makes us even worse than Terrans."
He gives her a look of surprise.
"Yeah." She scoffs at herself. "I guess I've never told anyone before that I feel that way. But, you know, history. We've been at our own brothers far longer than we've been enslaved by anyone else. Your planet named Romulus very appropriately; if I was superstitious I'd think you condemned us all to fratricide."
He gives an incredulous, cynical little sound.
"Did your Romulans also enslave their own people?"
"We didn't know a whole lot about them. Though, my first officer suspected once..." His voice trails off, and he sort of dismisses his own comment with a shrug.
"Your Spock?" Jill prods, as if curiously drawn to something she hears in Jim's voice.
"But our humans enslaved themselves too," Jim averts, insisting with a bit of anger, "and the other night, that wasn't a Romulan who hurt Nyota, so. I think your theory has some problems."
"All I know is, somewhere I decided that the difference between somebody I'd like to know and everyone else is whether a person can take something awful that's happened to them, something so devastating and disappointing, or disillusioning, and turn it into hope somehow. And Romulans are shit at it. I don't know how it's done, but I've done it. I'm not sure how many more goes I have in me, but at least I got this far...Though, really, you should be thanking your sweet Jesus or whoever that I'm trying to be some kind of example because you might be dead otherwise."
"...What do you mean?"
"What Nina said, when I...you know. It was like she knew the way I felt about that, like she knew I'd have to back off if she made the comparison—"
"I don't—Oh. Right."
Jill takes a second to scrutinize him, looks like she could almost laugh. "You don't know what it means."
"...No."
Her arms go wide out in a gesture of surprise. "And you never asked her?"
"No," he quietly repeats.
Jill puts out the last of her cigarette and slowly sits up a bit straighter. "This phrase: 'Veoth-rhannu, kivoi ekhes. It's historically important to Romulans, and unless this happened with your world too, I'm guessing she just happened to read about it at some point. Near the end of the many decades when they were still enslaving their own lower classes, families were still respected as units and weren't separated from each other, so it was more of a feudalism structure. But then that went out of fashion, and suddenly anybody could get ransacked and thrown out of their houses, and if their kids didn't look like they'd make strong workers, well." She raises her brows ruefully. "The only way you really had a prayer was if you knew you were the last of your name. Family lineage was always important to Romulans, and they would occasionally take pity on families who had no relatives left, and the parents would call out, 'Mercy for my children.' Only in the alternate phrase which became more famous, 'Dosais-rhannu, ekhes,' it literally meant, 'Mercy for what is of me,' 'Mercy for what is left of me.' That's what she said. And even if I couldn't believe Scotty I at least understood that the four of you are alone."
The impact of that settles for a moment. Jill rearranges her blankets, gives Jim another speculative look.
"What is the deal with the two of you anyway?"
Jim takes a second to react.
"I mean, she's your girl, right?"
He lets out a little surprised noise, slowly shakes his head. "No, she's..."
Jill's just waiting with expectant eyes, and he doesn't know why he'd talk to her of all people about this, but then he's opening his mouth.
"We sleep in the same bed," he explains numbly, giving a slight shrug. "Sometimes she wants me, I guess. It would work better if we were happy. But if we were happy, we wouldn't be here."
"So you two weren't like that...before..."
This is when he realizes he just really wants to fucking tell somebody, since he's never quite been able to bring it up to Bones. "I used to make these cracks sometimes...I would make fun of her for being just, a little bit nicer to me...when her man wasn't around." He slowly shakes his head. "Talk about a joke that isn't funny anymore."
Jill has a vaguely confused look, but not an unsympathetic one.
"...He was a good friend of mine. Or, he was supposed to be. I really don't know anymore," he cuts out of that nervous rush of words, rubbing at his eye. "So does your boyfriend know about Scotty?"
She wears a not particularly bothered expression, like everything is too cold and bleak right now to bother feeling bad about that, and Jim isn't sure if it makes him more or less irritated. "What about Scotty?...Khamak didn't propose to me until I'd stopped coming over here."
Jim feels his mouth slowly dropping open.
"He and his friends have a pretty good chance of winning Brighton's ship, and they've been making one too many promises to people; I'd have to have a little more than camaraderie with him to get any guarantee that I could come along. He knows why I accepted. It doesn't bother him."
"That's who you were talking about, I thought—your actual friends—"
"My friends will also have a way out of here, okay. Don't think for a second I'll be too busy suffering a loveless marriage to be grateful that I got them away from here, it'll hardly matter to me." Her voice is rising a little, and he can hear her more frantic emotion over recent events in the words. "It's not so terrible of him that he wouldn't offer me that if we weren't getting married. Especially since hardly anyone else would want me. Even aside from the preference for more traditional women," she explains with a bad taste in her mouth, "it's not like I'm able to have children."
At some point Jim has started pinching the bridge of his nose. "If we get that ship," he slowly says, "you will have a ride off of Earth regardless of whether you want nothing to do with us, and it's sure as fuck not because Scotty doesn't care about you—"
"I'm aware of the concept of unconditional love, thank you."
She's so terse, as if she's totally aware of how this whole nightmare they fell into over a year ago must look to him, and it makes him bark into the tiniest laugh, grim and overwhelmed when he explains, "I am just so sick, Jill. I have had it up to my eyes, seeing people just settle for what they have because they're stuck where they are."
"Maybe you should try being a bad man then."
He lets out another huff.
She shrugs. "I've never seen anyone who was good to anybody else end up happy."
"I hate," Jim says after some consideration, "that I believe you."
"Only the kind suffer," she says; it sounds proverbial. "And you can't be kind without suffering first."
"Now, that second part..." Jim mutters, shaking his head, "That just isn't true."
"You've suffered, though," she says, like she's thought a little too hard about all this. "I mean, you're the one who almost always seems like you're angry at something."
Jim thinks, taking in a deep breath. Finally saying with an uncomfortable twisting expression, "There's suffering and then there's loss. I don't think...that mine really compares to anything in this place..."
"Does thinking about it that way make it hurt any less?"
"No." He shrugs and says, "But none of it has much to do with the fact that I'm trying to do the right thing."
She looks dubious, like she made up her mind about all of this a lifetime ago. "Suffering is a part of life; the people who avoid it aren't whole. They have no compassion. If I can believe that what I've been through is cathartic, it all at least makes some sense."
"But, hypothetically. What if everybody's born good?"
"Is that what you think?"
"Yeah. Maybe."
Her expression is wry and slowly considering as she stands up, slipping the blanket off her shoulders and setting it on the step.
She sighs. "Then I guess you got me there, Captain."
He looks up at her. "Are you taking off?"
She shrugs, meaning she is. He takes in that she's antsy, as if she needs to run off and just let everything out for a while, but she's also searching for something to say, biting her bottom lip. "I'm sorry about what I did. I'm gonna make it up to you, okay?"
He doesn't know what to say. "You don't have to leave..."
"I really should, you know?...See you later, Jim." After idly fiddling with a zipper on the thin hoodie Nyota lent her, she turns and takes the first couple steps out.
"Jill?"
Scotty's in the doorway, and Jill stops at the sound of her name. She seems to gather something into a ball before turning to give him this sad, indirect smile, slow and flinching.
"You want my jacket for the way home?"
There is a long wind of hesitation before she turns and comes a couple steps back, the tone in her answer making it as if this is some much more serious question at hand. "Yeah. Okay."
When Scotty reaches out and is helping her into the sleeves one after the other, she slides slowly into the bomber coat and Jim realizes somewhere in the middle of the motion that she's crying. Some little gulp of sound escapes her as he's clutching the collar around her, giving her an affectionate last tug.
The words are so quiet when Scotty whispers something to her, but Jim thinks he hears "I'm sorry," and then Tom's name, amidst something else.
Jill sniffs and nods, just mumbling, "Yeah."
Scotty plants a firm, long kiss on her forehead, her entire body stilling with the emotion, her eyes shutting. And then he lets her go.
>Easy To Be Hard
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Date: 2010-11-04 10:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-12 10:51 am (UTC)I don't suppose Bones could get his hands on a dermal regenerator (if they even exist at this point in history, I think they might not until Next Gen's time?) for Nyota?
also, I'm immensely glad that Jill and Jim are starting to reconcile - or have reconciled? - but oh, her and Scotty... it's just so sad...