Archive of Our Own ^beta

Parties around the Knot are generally hit-or-miss, and Gene's been there a year and knows there's no way the "open marriage ceremony" for two full-bloods actually extends its invitation to him. Still he's shaking Tom's shoulder to get him off of a couch to sneak into this party with him after Jill won't budge out of her shop for the night. Free booze, he continuously intones; Tom wants to kill him for waking him up but he knows Gene will rustle up a couple of the League idiots and get caught and roughed out of the neighborhood only five minutes in if he doesn't come, so he comes.

Mostly Gene's preoccupied complaining, "Where the hell did they get all the nice furniture?" at the reception, which is barely crowded enough for the two to get away with darting out of their inclusive corner at a small table just long enough to keep filling their glasses. It takes him and Tom half the night to even figure out who's just gotten married; Gene is surprised Tom didn't know already. Tom being Tom, he knows everybody, even if he's not really friends with more than a few.

Gene's still vaguely puzzled that he is one of those people; it feels like forever ago and also like yesterday that he fell in with him and Jill after jumping into one of the dark and suffocating compartments of a cargo vessel and landing literally on top of Jill. There had been a bit of scuffling that she defensively started until Tom had gotten out a compact light and made them realize they were both ex-napes.

She didn't like Gene then; it was days of the three of them traveling together over the wordless negotiation that there was no reason not to look after each other before she even said a word to him. He still remembers her eying him quizzically while she munched messily on a piece of fruit, finally declaring, "You don't look like a Gene." She didn't like him and Tom didn't like him but he stopped keeping track of it and then one day he was muttering something about where he was going to live and Tom said, "It's not like I'm going to let anything happen to you."

Gene and Jill were still arguing all the time about her hobbies, her research, the dismissive way he'd say, "But Romulan is such an ugly language." She was even more defensive about it once they reached the Knot and she realized her being Terran-born but interested in the culture she'd been separated from made her an exception to the rule, even if not by a lot.

"You know, there were areas on Romulus where entire cities of people committed suicide because they refused to be overtaken by the Empire. That kind of pride, it's..." Jill made some vague overwhelmed gesture. "It's not something I can even fathom, it's like, I don't even know what it means to feel connected to something so huge that it's that important to me. And that's why it's so interesting."

"But it's just futile, trying to catch up," he argued. "We can't be connected to it."

"That's not the point."

"Then what is? Cause whatever we do, we're not ever going to be what an actual Romulan would consider Romulan, and if I'm not Terran either, what the fuck does that make me? And you yourself, you love the music, and the films—"

"I like the films that were around before the Empire, but—whatever, it's not like I'm on the side that thinks we should get rid of all the Terran entertainment in the village, that would just be sad. My point is," she hesitated, then slowly said, "When we were forced into a society that's trying to superimpose itself onto others when it's not just ruthlessly wiping them out on by one...I just can't see people like you who don't give a shit about our heritage and not think there's something inherently self-loathing about that. Like we're all just giving up."

She was startled to see the sudden anger in his expression when she looked up. Gene never understands why people are always a little surprised to see him get defensive about anything.

"What are you trying to say about me?"

"I—" She blinked. "Nothing. Nothing about you."

It was the clumsy way they ended their first friendly argument, which made them somehow friends. Aside from starting to be and feel significantly less alone around that point, nothing has really changed about Gene since they had that conversation.

He finds himself soon impressed by how loud the reception is. The couple, when he gets a glimpse, doesn't look like they're blissfully in love as much as caught up in some competitive ferocity of a game that involves their guests being pitted in a type of drinking game against each other. Sneaking ale is easy as pie once most of the guests are tipsy, and Gene grins as Tom gets swishier, still eloquent and in control but batting at things as he gestures with his words but slouching deeper into his seat by the minute.

But a fight breaks out, and he's Tom, so he furrows his brows across the hall and gets up with a wait-here wave, probably stumbling off to do something that will get both of them thrown out even though it's only him trying to help out. Gene guesses it doesn't matter cause he's ready to go soon and would just be kind of amused if that was the blunt side of the evening. But he does get annoyed when Tom gets out of his sight and still isn't back. He's just at the point when he's too bored of looking off to that end of the room and letting his eyes roam towards the other end of the hall, when it happens. He sees him.

Gene was born among humans and prodded and poked and augmented by humans in the labs, and then sold for his muscle to the state where he was used by them and forced by them to beat and shove and hold down other humans. He was more or less befriended by the lowest, dismissed class of criminal humans; he gambled with them and fought with them and slipped cigarettes under door cracks into their cells to win their favors as if he was a criminal too. One night he even found one bleeding and weak on the bathroom floor from some scuffle, and it wasn't his job but he helped him up and he fell in love with him and thought that nothing could be uglier than everything that man wasn't.

His name was Robert and he somehow came back for Gene and bought off and stowed him away to a life of pulling a stocking cap on over his ears and brows and being something like a human in the streets and doing human things human ways in that cold slip of air under his sheets. Gene knew he wanted things a different way but he never asked, just like he closed his eyes sometimes and imagined what he would look like if he were human. He looked in the mirror and hated his ears, the eyebrows too sharp and devilish, the way they made him look awkward and clownish when he smiled. Beauty belonged to smooth ears, men with their stern or gentle curves of eyebrows, women who flushed a slight pink or raised their thin half-moons in amusement. He was grateful for his dark skin because nobody could see the tint of the veins underneath, and he could go out and be with the human and his human friends and they could pretend they didn't know any better.

Except for that night that was uneventful to everybody else, even Robert: when Gene broke his nose and even though they usually overlooked what he was they couldn't ignore the riot of a sight like that, and they laughed like hyenas at the color of the blood running over his mouth. He still remembers how it was worse because of the flash of pain blooming under his eyes in the middle of all the mockery, hot sting seeming to cloud his hearing but not enough for him not to hear the word "nape."

Gene wasn't that, but he was; this man loved him, Gene could trust it from the way he collapsed and begged at the very suggestion of what would happen if Gene wanted to run east, saying he couldn't stand it if something ever happened to him. Gene said he was a nape, said what's the difference if he was never free to walk out the door. He said it rhetorically, not quite actually thinking about it, but then when Robert clutched at Gene because that thought was so terrible, he said, You're not, you're so human, there's something in you that's more human than I am, like he always did.

And Gene swelled with relief at the words, he felt right and loved, but in the middle of the night like some phantom had overtaken him he slipped out of the house without a goodbye, knowing as always that he was somehow ugly, feeling he was loved by someone who wished that he didn't. And then comes Jill and Tom and everyone he sees now every day, and he aches with a dirty little sense of guilt that for all the virtue he senses in all of them, he still feels that something about their kind is barred from certain graceful or handsome qualities Gene has only learned through the eyes of Terrans.

And now a boy.

Or a man, he's not sure, but he sees him: A turn to the way he holds his head standing over there in the corner, something solid and vulnerable at once that catches him before he realizes he's admiring the entire form. Brown hair short and bending up in the humid evening from a neat crop, a small mildly pointing nose above those vaguely pouting lips and eyes that burn without brightness from across the room; but the eyebrows are this rich sleek line like you could trace and taste some elevation of emotion in their thin simple lines, and the ears perfect and regal and pointed as if with a brushstroke. Gene is looking and thinking for the first time like what's in his veins is the right blood, his body feeling all fast and green like some furious arrival of spring as he's staring and staring and changing on the spot.

He is beautiful. This marks the first time in Gene's life he ever thought he could be too.

He is also walking up to him.

Gene gives a little cough, remembers the chilly presence of a glass in his hand, and takes a sip from it and sets it onto the table as he prepares for what's about to be a small disaster. He blinks awkwardly as the boy is already assailing him with some demand in Romulan, and Gene doesn't understand a word of it, but he can guess.

"I—Yeah. I was just objectifying the hell out of you," Gene blurts out with his eyes blinking in self-bewilderment. There's no way that comment would be charming to a Romulan (he assumes) and Gene is immediately grateful that the boy doesn't seem to understand a word of what just spat out of him and just tries to look a little repentant. "I'm...sorry? For staring at you—?"

Throughout Gene's stammering the Romulan has been acknowledging the Standard with some small alarm, and before Gene is prepared he's muttering something that sounds like some kind of warning, and suddenly starts shoving at him. Or at least it feels that way as the boy probably isn't used to handling somebody with only seventy-five percent his own muscle strength, and when Gene's arm smacks painfully against the little door frame he's being pushed through by his hipbones he can only laugh, overwhelmed and light-headed and pleasantly shocked at the comfortable contact. It's all in the facial expression that the boy isn't throwing him out as much as getting him out of the line of sight of anyone who would treat him much more harshly, as he directs Gene quickly through the tiny hallway into a small round back room with an impressive makeshift sunroof.

He's trying to say something else, probably asking if he can understand him at all, a questioning tone and a doubtful helpless shake of his head.

Gene puts out his arms in a broad gesture of regret. "Sorry."

"I know...little bit." Gene is guessing 'a little bit' means he knows almost nothing in Standard, because he looks resigned from trying to say anything else.

Gene isn't sure what to do next and ends up instinctively going for sitting down on the big duvet-like chair. The boy doesn't look like he really planned to just sit in here with him as much as escort him out, but they're here and nobody else is around, so he sits down with a tired impersonal air, the way you'd sit on a park bench next to someone you don't know.

He looks very forlorn. It's not like Gene didn't notice when he was busy ogling him, but he only now has the time to wonder why. And the way the boy keeps giving these drowsy shrugs, he seems a bit inebriated. Gene isn't really sure how that works for full-bloods, but he doesn't think any Terran ale affects them at all, so he's wondering what could be in his system.

"Hey," he mutters quietly. "My name's Gene."

The boy looks over not as if he'd forgotten he was there but like he was perfectly serene with the silence. But Gene maybe is misreading him; he squints and replies, "Fvah?"

Gene points to himself. "Gene. You?"

Now seems to be the closest or longest look at Gene the kid has bothered to get, and for some reason the edges of his mouth start to slightly crook up. And then he shifts in a little closer, just in the motion of relaxing his limbs out a bit. He says, at length, "Alel."

Gene would have never thought he could have patience for this kind of thing, but Alel seems so sad that he doesn't want to do anything other than distract him, and the boy seems to be completely alright with being distracted. As the very weak gesturing excuse for attempts to converse or ask how to say things go on, Gene falls into a more comfortable slouch. Alel keeps worrying at his weird leather shoes, squeezing his fingers around his own feet, but eventually drops his legs and sits back too.

Gene asks him with a pointing motion about the bandage he sees peeking under his fraying collar; he manages to explain with a blunt gesture that his collarbone is healing from a break.

"You're up and partying with a broken collarbone?"

Somehow he seems to understand, and he mimics gulping something down.

"You're on painkillers?" A wobbly waving motion that somehow indicates to Alel that he's noticed he's a little bit stoned out. Alel gives one of those open-ended shrugs, but Gene's noticing that as he's been talking to him he hasn't seemed quite as out of it.

A silence works itself in, but it's not uncomfortable, once Gene glances up through the sunroof to the dim vision of stars visible through the light pollution. Alel doesn't look; Gene isn't sure what's he's looking at or thinking about, but when he looks down and Alel's eyes are just trained thoughtfully to the floor, he finds himself unable to take his eyes off of him again.

It's a calmer admiration right then; he almost feels as if he's allowed to just look for a while. Alel perceives it, and meets him halfway with a sidelong inquisitive look, almost playful. There's something so self-assured and shy in him at the same time, and it makes something in Gene just sink in, like he immediately knows he could be around it forever.

He's just sitting there not caring if it's stupid and premature for him to feel all this, when he feels Alel's left hand moving around his fingers as if in a tentative attempt at saying something, and it's the kind of touch that's so small and inconsequential it almost doesn't happen, but for the moment Gene forgets how to breathe.

It's a Vulcan thing, really, but it's a trait that's hard to kick out of the genes and if you're Romulan and you're sort of lucky enough, you'll get it, the hand thing. Romulans can't use it like Vulcans do, of course, they don't have the actual telepathy; but somebody explained it to Gene once, that the sensitivity in the hands is still hard-wired to the part of the brain that receives telepathic information, which in a psi-null brain kind of lights up in an empty but awesome rush, and your own emotions just go into this electric tingle.

Gene remembers puberty and feeling like there was something in him talking to himself when he first messed around with somebody else, his fingers sending nipping jolts of Feel that? down his spine. And Robert wouldn't play around with it; if Gene got into something the way a human doesn't he'd snicker it off and say, "Stop being weird." Sometimes when Gene was alone in the house all day and he'd jack off in the shower he'd slide a few fingers in his mouth, tentative, and then stop because it felt too good and he couldn't let himself want that. But now that he's away from all that he's started to wonder what it means here: can a brush between fingers be like a friendly kiss, does longer and tighter and sweeter mean more of an invitation? Maybe it happens under tables away from his eyes, but he never dared to ask anyone about it.

And he's sure just holding someone's hand like this isn't some huge thing but it's like something or somebody is giving a loud message to Gene because it's the first thing Alel does to him, something not very human. It freezes him into a baited nervousness while he stares at the hand loosely squeezing his for this one second where he feels some new geography of possibility implanting within him. Alel looks at him with these wide honest eyes and his teeth graze a little bit at his bottom lip as if in realization of something heady and nervy.

It's all of a few seconds before, as if choreographed, their heads swim slowly through the air to each other, Gene tipping down and Alel tipping up and the kiss is two pieces of driftwood bumping in the water, slow and sudden at once. Their eyes seem to close at the exact same moment; Alel's lips are open and languid as his fingers move along Gene's fingers in a way that makes Gene feel his heart being lovingly squeezed in a fist as Alel slowly, slowly kisses him, until he doesn't.

The stop is not sudden, but they both close off and sit back just an inch.

Alel looks like he isn't sure what he's just done. Gene might look a little bit like that too.

Somebody is coming down the hall, and their hands unwind.

Gene gives a little whistle, one that Tom will recognize as something he'd do, realizing quickly that he was probably getting worried or at least pissed off. Sure enough, it's Tom coming in with his face all What the hell? where it's not still a bit too drunk to react normally. When he looks at the duvet and then squints and says in a confused greeting, "Alel?" it's not what Gene expected, even though he should have expected it because, hey, Tom.

It isn't until they're walking back with half a bottle of bronze booze in Gene's hand that Tom says, "You know he's from the family that got here a week ago."

Gene's steps slow in his reaction. "...What? No."

"Yeah."

Tom mentioned it when he got home that day, overwhelmed by the widely but briefly talked-about group that had frantically limped into town on their feet, needing a lot of assistance from him up at the front when they couldn't talk to the humans and probably would have refused to even if they could. The two parents looked like starved hell, and the kid who Gene only now understands is the kid he just met, looked like he'd been kicked and beat on for a good time only hours before. Nobody got the whole story, not even Tom. The actual background would probably fall under the rule that nothing's shocking at the Knot, but people still latch onto gossip, and the mystery of something unspeakable is sometimes more haunting than when you know the whole truth. Not to the Terrans, probably, but around here everything was about how many throws you had left in your spirit. Suffering had to be viewed subjectively; this was part of Tom's whole philosophy.

It sure as hell haunts Gene that he doesn't know where Alel came from, how his collarbone and whatever else got broken. It's not that Gene finds him so vulnerable, he doesn't really have any idea if he is, but he finds it surprisingly hard to deal with the fact that the person he just met didn't just pop out of thin air clean and naive and untouched.

Gene doesn't see Alel again until he's responding to a violence complaint that happens to be over a brawl going on in the same shack where his family is bunking for the time being. None of the three of them have anything to do with the problem but Gene sees them all in the corner trying to wrap themselves up away from it on their camp bed.

Alel pretends not to recognize him from anywhere. Gene makes a click noise with a wink at him on his way out the door, getting some vague death glare from the lady who, come to think of it, seems pretty damn old to be his mother.

Neither of the two are actually his parents. Charlie's the one who tells him they're not related, unless you count being distant fifth-something cousins and never having met until you tallied off your birthright points in the back of a labor truck as being family. Gene has never had any blood family so he's really unable to grasp the whole emotional concept, but it sounds like it's more to do with some screwed-up illusion of prosperity than anything else. He'll never be able to shake off his suspicion that those two are clinging to Alel in a stupid hope that he'll award them with some towering social standing if they ever get back to Romulus.

Gene kind of assumed, what with Alel not knowing Standard, that he was from one of the poorer parts of Romulus. Charlie says she's almost certain the opposite is true, that his father probably had some obscene amount of power on Romulus and that Alel grew up practically getting his rings kissed and never having to meddle with the commoners. The idea feels so unfitting and ridiculous, but he also laughs in a grim, overwhelming acknowledgment that people like that are enslaved. People like that who are too haughty to get out much are ripped out of their homes and end up here, and what a fucking world this is.

Now that Gene knows where Alel is living he catches him coming out of his house late at night while he's walking out with Jill. He greets him with a smirking "Hey, prince," and Alel either doesn't get it or just doesn't mind, so the nickname sticks. Alel comes along easy enough and soon after the three of them and Tom are in the town, and Alel starts at the first gulp from the tall glass at the Upside Diner.

He's scrambling for the word. "Cold..."

"You didn't expect it to be cold? It's weird that you've never had a fucking milkshake."

"Mihkshake..."

"Milk."

He takes another sip, reconsidering and then going for a broader one.

"Yeah?"

"Hmm."

Jill is across from them next to Tom, who already has a habit of staring at Alel like the kid isn't capable of realizing he's being stared at. She occasionally practices her pretty decent Romulan talking to Alel, which gives Gene the same foolish and vague jealousy he felt when he realized Tom had already known Alel's name.

Alel is up in the bathroom when Tom, who has been pretty neutral so far, looks at Gene and slowly asks, "What are you doing?" This is same old Tom, he's so good with people's differences but when they get too close to his own, his tolerance capsizes in a way. He's had a hard time with traditionals lately; there are little things that happen on the job that make both of them feel absolutely hated by them sometimes and a lot of the time they're right. Chances are Tom's been talking to Charlie and he doesn't like the looks he gets from the parents, and already has his mind made up what Alel's like.

Doesn't stop him from putting a word in that Gene should try to convince him to join the League. It wouldn't be the first worker Tom isn't crazy about, and they can use all the full Vulcanoid muscle they can get. But Gene hates that he brings it up, cause whether it's how he sets out, it's going to end up some kind of test of Alel's character whether he's willing to have that much to do with them or not.

Gene keeps stealing chances like these, usually late at night, only getting to see Alel maybe once a week. He thinks about trying to kiss him again every single time and every part of him wants it constantly, and it's not that they pretend that never happened, but it doesn't happen again. It's been a few months and his Standard has improved enough that they can talk in very simple sentences, only occasionally tripping up at some concept that seems impossible to circuitously explain.

"How old have you?" he asks Gene one night while they're watching some of the Knot kids kick around a ball.

"How old are you?" It's a correction, but then Alel answers.

"Seventeen."

"Ah."

Alel gives a not-quite-squeezing touch to his ribs, because he gets distracted and hasn't answered.

"Oh, I'm...nineteen? In dog years, of course."

"...What?"

"When we don't know for sure, the estimation, we call it dog years."

"Why?"

Gene shrugs. "I actually don't know. Could be some self-deprecating joke about the wolf mythology thing?"

Alel says in objection and confusion, "That is a Terran story."

"And it's self-deprecating."

"Why would...?" Alel doesn't finish the question, and he looks slightly annoyed and resigned.

Gene doesn't dare get into the parts of the story that nag at him on his worse days, when the Knot feels split into two battling brothers, the impure bastards like him waiting on the growl of local war. Just last month a woman got beat up to within an inch of her life by a couple young full-bloods because she'd spent the night in town with a local Terran. Gene knows that most of the town has some respect for anyone who's part of the League, but it's not for what's outside of the Knot that he keeps a gun by his bed.

Gene thinks about this when they're all hanging out at the tavern a couple weeks later, and at this point Jill ends up translating something Alel seems surprisingly impassioned about and can't begin to explain in his second language.

"He's saying that it's offensive that so many of the Terranized Vulcanoids get sort of defaulted to the Romulan identity—"

"So you think it's offensive that we get compared to you," Tom is saying.

Jill shakes her head, interrupting Alel as he stammers to argue, "It holds this implication that the philosophies of Earth are closer to Romulus than Vulcan, like...All it takes is the body and not suppressing emotions and bam, you're a Romulan, it's not that simple."

"Would you consider maybe taking into account," Tom says, "how we didn't choose to be taken to Terra, or born on Terra, and how your people deliberately bar people like us from knowing anything about that culture at whatever opportunity they can? Your 'father,' even? Do you know what he said to me the other day?"

"Tom, chill the hell out. It's your day off," Gene cuts in calmly, rolling his eyes as he reaches for his beer.

Alel looks between Tom and Gene; he's not feeling half as bullied as Tom might like, but he isn't sure where to start. Gene leans over to mutter to him, "I'll get you another drink" and gets up.

Of course when he gets back, Alel has reportedly politely slipped off, and Tom is saying something defensive to Jill that makes her sink back from him and dismissively say, "Oh, go suck a knuckle, Tom."

"Nice," Gene says to Tom, snatching his jacket up from the booth. He isn't going to say anything else, but then just as he's checking the time he sees the wary expression on Tom's face. "Just so you know? I'm probably always going to run after him like the fucking idiot I am."

There is some hesitation, as if he actually wants Tom's approval, like this is actually him having just informed him that he doesn't simply like Alel.

Tom eventually just sighs. "So go."

She meets him when she goes to see the new doctor, the one everyone is saying charges less than the vaguely derisive practitioner on the other side of town. She needs to visit a doctor more often than anyone she knows and she never feels like dealing with a ton of loaded questions about her habits, so she goes and tries out what turns out to be a gruff but harmless middle-aged grumbler with a roommate she hears before she sees because of the privacy curtain: He's yelling at someone and she somewhat conversationally asks, "Who's that?" because of the break of the formal feel, the fact that the doctor's scolding the other man for daring to come in and pour himself some orange juice while he has a patient in what apparently is also their kitchen.

This man goes by the name Scotty and he stumbles into her life with some question about her pistol that's laying on the counter, and the doctor, who hasn't bothered to tell her his name, stops trying to wrangle him out of the room because the conversation makes her sit more still.

The doctor is not nice, but he makes no open remarks about her conditions except for a clench of the jaw that may in fact be angry when his medical PADD brings up the data from her brand number. Scotty has an accent she isn't quite cultured enough to place and he talks as if talking to someone like her is second nature; not even the most compassionate humans in town are quite able to drop the veil, the thing that they're looking through like they have to imagine her resembling something else to relate to her, but this man does not overlook the fact that she is alien. He reads it like a good book.

"So you're prone to these infections a lot of the time," the doctor says. She's not sure if it's a question. He puts down his tricorder and says, "If I give you this hypo you're gonna be pretty much knocked out for the rest of the day, so you might want to do it at home. Is that fine? Come back to me tomorrow if the symptoms don't improve."

They are both very strange men. She leaves without giving the second one her name.

They see each other in town less than a week after; he falls into step with where she's walking next to some of the shops without crossing the street to actually join her, smiling jovially when she gives him a look. Her answering grin is not quite welcoming, but it doesn't go away.

"My name's Jill," she says later when they're seated across from one another with a couple of the cheapest drinks in the tacky pub.

"And," Scotty asks, "what name would you have chosen for yourself, I wonder?"

She examines the edge of her beer mug, unable somehow to meet the eyes of the first Terran who has ever come within a hundred miles of thinking to ask her a question like that. It's as if she doesn't know if she heard right, but she smiles casually within the same second. "I picked it. I haven't gone by my factory name since I was fourteen or fifteen."

"Ah. Well, it suits you." He lifts his glass to her name and they just fall into it. She keeps waiting for one of them to overstep into topics neither of them wants to talk about (the humans around here are secretive too, after all) but they manage to make enough of strictly local topics. He asks her where she learned to make guns.

"Ah, I was such a smartass back after we first arrived here...My friend Tom was trying to tighten up the really lousy system that became what the League is now, and they couldn't get enough weapons. There was one person in the entire town who made them, and he was ready to take in an apprentice, and he had only time to teach one. A bunch of kids came running to sort of audition by shooting at this target...And I was in that line, but when I got handed the gun I said, 'I don't want to shoot guns, I want to make them.'" She shrugs over a sip of her beer. "He laughed, and he told me to come back same time next day."

She likes the crease at the edges of his eyes when he laughs. The next Tuesday her stomach's aching again; Bones hits her with a hypo and doesn't charge this time and when this one knocks her into a drowsy tizzy Scotty helps her limp into his room to lend her the bed. She wakes up when he's back from his job, when he's sitting in the room reading, smiling, watching her. She smiles back, and when she gets back to the Knot Tom asks, "The doctor's again?" and she doesn't answer.

Gene has long since been able to abandon his weak attempts to learn some Romulan because of how fast Alel becomes comprehensible in Terran standard thanks to his slowly budding friendship with Jill. They spend a lot of nights watching films together after she's done with work; it's surprisingly lighthearted when it's the three of them huddled in Gene's little cabin with the swelling melodrama music of classic movies murmuring the night along.

Gene has a thing for James Dean—he's got that grumpy-vulnerable tight set to his features, kind of like Alel—and when Alel conveys that the character reminds him of Gene, he scoffs not just at that incongruity but at remembering with a bit of a sour edge when he was the slightly younger version of himself with a fascination for so-called bad boys. He doesn't see how he'd fit into the archetype, but he can see how Alel might put him there as some alluring taboo idea of a person, somebody gazing from a fog more mysterious than substantive, someone you only care about as you love a location.

Alel immediately wonders what's wrong with what he said, and Gene just shrugs it off, reaching for his drink.

There's nothing Alel can say anymore that Gene won't twist into some sweet little hurt, like he's banking on the bitter lack of him under his skin to make up for when he can't have any of it anymore. He used to hear the proverbial exaggerations about how fitfully Romulans feel and not really think all that really applied to him, just as he never thought these things were anything he would ever feel connected to until he met Alel. A year ago he was finally out of being a far too impressionable kid and into being cynical of the idea that someone as fresh and foolish as himself could already love like it's for life. But he's fallen like an anvil, fuck-all crazy for this kid, and Jill should read that pretty well but when she's winking at Gene in support of the double-edged flirtation that is his relationship with Alel she seems to have little idea how far it's already gotten, or of how far it's never going to go, and her eager acceptance of the possibility makes Gene almost wish she'd be more like Tom is about it.

When it's late, Gene always walks Alel back to his cabin block. On some memorable nights, the films will remind Alel of old Romulan stories and he'll recollect them from some old memory and tell them to Gene, slipping from his usual shyness into fluid confidence with his speech somewhere in the middle. But on this night they pass the one tent where a gambling party is getting started, and Gene starts to saunter them in without a word to Alel.

"Gene—"

"It's late, I know. Just one game, come on."

"—Gene? Jolan-tru!"

This shout comes from S'anra, one of the most apathetically welcoming members of her particular group of full-bloods that falls somewhere short of the rigid prejudice of Alel's supposed kin. She doles out friendliness to some League members more than she would the usual un-cultured Romulans, but Gene doesn't much care for worrying about how nice she is. They're a good time to each other and that's it.

S'anra seems surprised to see Alel with him and they exchange a couple words in Romulan that Alel seems less than eager to politely appease as they approach the table. He then seems even perceptibly wary to see Rai sitting there. Gene isn't surprised at all that they know each other, or that Alel doesn't seem to like him. It's in the spirit of the Knot to understand that Rai probably only learned Standard to better insult people. He never takes it so far that somebody like Gene can't even stand to be around him, but he's just the type who never manages to let you forget what you are.

Most of the time the tent crowds play a Romulan betting game involving cards and wooden tiles for which there has never been a consensus on the actual traditional name, and often they settle for just calling it uvhae. Somebody's shuffling and tapping the deck in a knobby noise as Rai says something unexpectedly familiar in tone to Alel, who gives some shrugging motion as Rai's glance passes from him to Gene.

"So our more esteemed bloods hang with the spays now?" Rai teases.

"I do," Alel says with what seems a bold amount of nonchalance to Rai, who looks like he decides to be impressed rather than defensive.

Rai changes it up to smirking at Gene. "You don't seem surprised that your reputation precedes you."

Gene can only laugh because he's such a damn asshole he doesn't even remember that they've met before. "Not as much as yours precedes you. I don't need to check out the nape of your neck to know that you're a dick."

"You would know, though. You would know." Rai's pointing a swinging finger now, and Gene estimates he's in for a loud good time if the guy gets any drunker. "You and Tom, you guys know everybody, right?"

"Rai, you need to respect him."

"You don't have to say that," Gene interrupts S'anra. "I'm not everybody's fucking nanny."

"I'm just saying, Rai, you'll have no luck if something bad happens to you..."

"Oh, D'era," Rai whines, "what if the spays won't come to my rescue?"

Gene calmly says, "The League isn't all spays." It gets half-drowned in the scoldings of Khamak who's sitting close to Rai, probably getting emotional and reminding him, We are all brothers in the eyes of D'era or some other shit that would make Gene roll his eyes. Gene and Alel take their cue to go get a beer they decide to split, and when they return to the table Rai is standing and seems to be on his way out.

"Aw, leaving so soon?" Gene goes so far as to clap his hand around Rai's upper arm for a second in his show of being mock-maudlin. Rai, one of the few men around town who is taller than Gene, looks pointedly down at this with equally unfriendly amusement.

"You know, there's something I've been wondering about you..." With a smirk that's both flat-drunk and exaggeratedly pensive, he ponders, "Were certain measures taken to prevent reproduction among spays? Like, ah, did they engineer your entire batch to love sucking cock, or were you just a fluke?"

Gene is just as shocked as the entire crowd under the tarp when it happens: Before Gene can even start to form a comeback Alel is snapping over and cracking Rai down with a quick punch that sends him dizzying to the floor.

Half a dozen gasps flit around as Alel isn't done, doesn't let Rai stumble up and takes the second to bear down on him with a couple more punches, a fist tangled in his collar. But one more second and Gene's got him in a practiced pull, wrenching him off.

"Hey woah, knock it off, knock it off. Hey—" Gene gets the still fidgeting Alel down and slammed in a cuffing grip, face almost pressed over the tile deck on the wobbling table.

In the next seconds Alel dissolves to looking chagrined and out of breath, and something makes Gene feel jumpy and light so that he's just bent over him and trying not to laugh, the hops in his breath making Alel's hair fan up a little. One more second stretches with Gene pressed over him and he finally can't help grinning. "Are you done? You cool?"

Alel lets out a long unsteady sigh. He nods.

They get the hell out of there, Gene only stopping to catch a glance back at Rai and bite his knuckle at him.

As soon as they're outside and he's out of the crowd's earshot he's bent over laughing it up again. "Alel, what the hell was that?"

He looks up to see Alel stopped, wary of what exactly is being laughed at. "He's a dick...?"

"Yeah," Gene coughed, lightly laughing all over again. "That was awesome. It's okay. I was just doing my job back there, it's okay."

They start walking again, Gene shaking his head and still amused about it, hands deep in the pockets of his old sweater. Alel is glancing over at him now and again before he finally asks, "How is it that you aren't so mad? You don't get mad. Everyone else, seems like they are always...angry."

Gene isn't sure how to answer, just shrugs as their pace slows a little. "It's kinda part of the League M.O."

"What—?"

"Um. It's just my job, I guess."

"The others not like you." Alel is speaking more quietly now. "...Tom isn't like you."

Gene slows and stops next to him. "I get angry. Trust me."

"Not about Rai?" Alel stops now too. "He likes reminding you...that you were—"

"A spay? Tom tries to teach me to be proud of that, you know, I'm not ashamed of it..."

"...not what I said," Alel is mumbling, something offended in his expression. "It's that he talks like you were a thing."

"That is what I was. I was created to be a product. I was lucky enough to have a defect that landed me in one of the better slave gigs instead of with some pervert, so honestly I don't need any pity over it."

"He doesn't—" Alel squints, stammering, "The other things he said, like he..."

Alel looks for a second as if he's remembering some other curiosity. "What?" Gene demands.

"Jill says...For humans, it's not, uh, strange? Two men or two women, to like...?"

"Oh. Oh. Alel, Terrans don't care what anybody does, as long as they're Terran. Terrans don't even have to fuck Terrans—If they like foreign tail it's just a fetish, nobody gives a fuck. And I guess, I don't know. Romulans value their procreation." Gene cocks his eyebrow, a knowing smirk coming onto his face. "I mean...You wouldn't actually be trying to ask me if it's a spay thing, would you, because judging from your eagerness to beat the shit out of Rai back there, I'm sure you have a pretty good idea what you already think about that."

For a second Alel looks kind of guilty, like he thinks he offended Gene. "When I was a child, on home it was never...nobody talked about it. I'm—I didn't know, before..."

Alel's voice stammers into nothing. An uncomfortable softened note shifts there, him looking right up into Gene's eyes, something clearer than usual. Gene feels magnetic and ruthless; he wants to ask so badly, Before what? He takes a slight step into him without thinking. He hears one little nervous sigh, and then Alel steps back.

"Jolan-tru, Gene," he says, and turns to walk the short rest of his way home.

Bones is doing overtime, reading up on different batches of augments and comparing them to the one that's got her serial number, while she plays cards with Scotty and tries to convince the doc to throw in the towel.

"You know, the reason you're different from the younger generations is that they improved it," Bones discovers. "They got the genetics right later on so that the kids were born just fine with less muscle mass, but with you, there's something that's actually harnessing your muscle development. And I do not...fucking get what the hell that is," his voice steams off, fingers flicking through page by page on his research PADD.

"He's looking to make me into a science fair project," Jill stage-whispers, making Scotty laugh.

Then Bones asks, "Do you feel like you should be stronger? Like...I don't know, can you actually tell?"

Something comes over Jill like a wind, and she's putting down her cards so that her hands can pick at each other in her lap while she probably has that look on her face that's often misread as angry, sort of confused and sour.

There's quite a bit of silence before she says, "There was this guy once who explained to me what it's like to have a phantom limb. I sort of thought...I feel like that all over, sometimes." She presses her knuckles in a fist against her lips for a second, avoiding their eyes. As if in explanation, she adds in a wavering tone, "No one's ever asked me that before."

"I swear to God," Bones growls after a moment, "if I only had better access to any kind of data from the clinics...Even if I'd known about this shit back when we were on—"

"—Jill, it's your play."

It was a warning to backpedal, Scotty cutting in like that; she didn't miss the little look of Oh, fuck me in Bones' expression when he realized the overstep.

It isn't something she dwells on. The area has a lot of "no pasts"-type notions, and it isn't even necessarily something they wanted to hide from her rather than just avoid dragging into the light. After all, if it was some big bad secret, Bones didn't really seem stupid enough to have a slip with someone he barely even liked.

The next day she's in the shop—bolts for doors, boring work that day—when Gene comes swaggering by. He asks, "So when do we all get to meet your Terrans?"

"You say that like you're actually interested."

"Sure, I'm interested," he says, but Jill looks up from her work with a bit of suspicion. A little more seriously he asks, "But really, you're not just going on medical visits?"

It would be pretty disconcerting if it was always that, so she assures him, "No. Look, I don't know, Gene. You're all just gonna laugh it up no matter what I do, I don't even know more than a couple of them well at all, so..."

At some point, as if conspiratorially among him and Tom, they've both become aware that it's for the most part just one person she goes over to see, and they've had some skirting conversations about it before. But the tone in Gene's voice is unusual for him, cutting straight to honesty and not caring for the moment what it bares about himself. "Just don't fall in love with him, okay?"

Jill looks up. Gene is leaning in on his hands on the console table and chewing at his bottom lip. She walks over and dunks the bolt in the kettle, and in the hissing steam rush in the air she turns to look at Gene with a delayed puzzled look on her face.

"It's just another way they own you, you know?" He's shrugging, and she realizes this is about something outside of the scope of years she's known him in, and she doesn't know what to say or whether she's supposed to ask...

Gene changes the subject.

"Wait, really? Your eyes are different colors?" Scotty is leaning into her space where they're seated at the little kitchen table. "How did I never notice that?"

"It's my discount defect. People want them with these like, unreal colors; they got my left one more blueish but they fucked up the other one, so, one of them is all me. I probably came about a hundred credits less for it." She grins.

Scotty hovers one hand to cover her right eye, then moves his other hand to cover the left, switching up, comparing which seems to fit her better. After a second he smiles. "Yeah."

There is a gaping valley that has formed around Jill's perception of Scotty since she met him. The same ease in his demeanor that made him automatically approachable when they first met seems somehow threatening now. When they argue about the documents they swap just to have something they've both read and can talk about, his teasing level of comfort with her is about as harmless as a person can possibly get without being "sweet." He is easily the nicest to her out of any Terran she's ever met and this is exactly what terrifies her, sometimes, at the back of her mind. Callous forms of virtue and coarse humor is what she trusts as homey and soulful in other people, but kindness. Kindness is a lie.

In the last couple seconds of easy symmetry of meeting eyes with him, her face has fallen to something. Her heart's picking up. He asks her what's wrong.

That's when Bones enters the house, quickly giving her a gesture after he apologizes for being late, and she follows his direction straight over to the hospital section while Scotty goes to find something to do.

She is just sitting there steaming in everything she doesn't want to think about: Scotty and every gritty detail of her faulty body and how constantly sick she is. She and Bones have inside jokes by now, and while that rather grimly reflects how often her needs send her to the clinic it's also the first time she's understood what it is to have a doctor-patient relationship everyone enjoys on the outside, even if he can't always give the same quality of medicine. Bones has become the only person familiar with the version of her that's half-naked, goose-bumped, and scared. When she finally breaks down and admits the pain killers aren't doing much of anything for her muscle aches, she has to press the heels of her hands into her eyes to keep from having some kind of breakdown. Everything feels like it's spinning.

"You gotta tell me this stuff. I'm serious." He sets down his PADD in visible frustration. "Look, the other day, when I asked you about the women not living as long—"

"That wasn't—"

"I shouldn't have asked you that in front of everybody, but I honestly figured if it was something that bad you would have mentioned it to me before. Jill, I can't even try if you don't try. So the supplements aren't working on you like they would for a full-blood, it's not the first time we've had that problem. I'll look into it."

"But it's always something." Jill laughs frantically up at the ceiling. "I feel like I'm dying. All the time, I feel like I'm dying."

"You're not dying under my watch. Now lie down and stay still."

He's getting a full-body x-ray with the medical tricorder, kindly overlooking the fact that she is emotionally un-fraying right in front of him.

When he says, out of the fucking blue, "You know, Scotty really cares about you."

He has to perceive the panicked hiccup of her heartbeat while she's lying there trying hard not to move, but she doesn't know because her eyes are up at the ceiling while she feels pinned down under this tingle of the tricorder reading every malady; and suddenly she says, "I love him" like she's confessing to something dirty and malignant inside of her and pleading doctor-patient confidence, just please don't tell anyone else. His only response for the next stretch of moments is a brief and steadying hand on her shoulder before he finishes the scan.

"You can sit up now," he finally says. When she does, he rattles off some stats she only half hears, tells her what he's putting her on next. And then he says, "Look at me."

She looks up, and suddenly thinks just maybe he gets it.

He says, "Things are gonna get better for you."

She ends up grabbing the medication out of his hand a minute later and practically running for the door. She's spooked herself too much to comm or visit Scotty for a week after that, but only for a week.

One night Jill appears in Tom's doorway shaking hard, and as soon as he notices her as a troubling shape in the threshold he immediately goes forward and grasps her gently at the shoulders and asks her what's wrong, what happened.

"Tom..." She croaks, "I think I fucked up."

Senselessly, Jill starts going through Tom's collection of data on physics, shit like that, still trembling while she groans short responses to his questions, finally saying at length, something frantic and angry bubbling in her voice, "Jim is James Kirk. Remember the four missing officers they think are probably dead? Think about it, Tom."

Somehow she manages to flip through page by page of data, some parody of distraction as if she doesn't look about to blow her top. Tom says in realization, "Holy shit."

"Who's Jim Kirk?" Gene asks.

He's standing at the bathroom door and they look over like neither of them had any idea he was there. Tom seems to weigh the issue briefly before telling Gene to go take a walk.

"Wait, are you serious?" Gene isn't taking it personally; it's that this is apparently something that could seriously put those humans in danger if it isn't kept on a need-to-know basis, which in itself is enough of a reason Alel finds him sitting right outside the front door listening in some moments later, quickly putting up a finger to motion for him to be quiet before Alel stops in his tracks and then curiously sits down next to him.

"Damn it, Jill, something like this comes up you pick up a comm and get me over there, you don't just—"

Jill makes a high desperate laughing noise, seeming to express she had not been in any state of mind to do something that rational. Her voice is small: "I panicked."

"...Jill, what did you do?"

Even from outside Gene's head shifts up a bit, worried by the seemingly telling frantic note in her voice.

Tom's voice then is practically all professionalism, measured and quiet. "Did you kill any of them?"

"No." But it grabs at something in her and Gene is almost convinced she's crying in there. "I almost shot Jim. I had him at point blank, and I...Fuck, I can't believe I did it and yet even now it's like I want him dead, Tom."

"Why?"

"...What?"

"So they're big-time T.E., I know it's a big mind-fuck, but think about why they might be here. Why they might have 'gone missing' in the first place. Of course I know why you freaked out, but I've met them, and it doesn't add up."

"Doesn't add up?! Pick up a fucking PADD and look at the things that man has done. How can you twist this into me being some kind of paranoid little—"

"What, as if the records never lie?—And don't you dare make this about Tony—"

"You're the one who's making this about Tony!" Jill snaps, aggressively growling, "Seriously, fuck your condescending bullshit, Tom, you know why I can't—"

"I am not being condescending," Tom says, angrier than ever, shouting. "I, am trying to fucking tell you that you are not a little girl anymore, and just because he fucked you up doesn't mean you can't tell the difference between good and bad."

"You don't know that."

"Yes I do."

"You don't." The anger in the air has filtered out, leaving something colder. "Nothing you ever do will ever make you understand, because you didn't love Tony. You think, if I somehow understood at the time that he was such a sick bastard, that I could have done what you did? You don't know. You don't know what it is to know that somebody never really loved you, but still wake up in the morning for long after you figure this out, and just miss them, because of how it felt when you thought that they did."

Tom is saying something back but what Gene hears is Alel quietly saying his name. Alel's hand is on his arm, a reaction to how something has cringed up in a sting and made Gene bury his face into one of his hands almost as if ashamed.

"Gene?" he whispers again, and Gene needs to get the hell out of there. He's up on his feet and walking away fast.

Alel catches up and tries to ask him something once they're out of earshot.

"Leave me alone," Gene says in a rush of irritation, and he can feel the look of concern following him all the way down the block.

Jill spends the entire week reading, and reading. Tom vaguely tells Gene that it has something to do with trying to see if some bizarre alibi that Scotty was trying to tell her checks out.

"The thing is, I probably wouldn't understand what it's all about, but the more farfetched and ridiculous it sounds..."

"The more you think it actually might not be bullshit?"

"Right. But then again, I'm not really married to the idea that he was telling the truth."

Gene's face squints in tired curiosity.

"She was riled up enough to kill somebody," Tom clarifies. "Who wouldn't lie if they had to?"

"But if they want that badly to protect their own..." Gene almost looks sheepish about what he was about to say, about that seeming like an indication in itself they can't be all that bad.

"No, I know what you mean."

They're sitting out by the front barricades on the look-out, which usually consists of Tom smoking and Gene counting the tiny pinpoints of vehicles blinking in and out from where the thick trees block their winding motion in the mountains.

"Why is it you can trust them, like for her, but not..." Gene has his eyes cast far away and he can't even finish the question.

"Alel," Tom says.

Gene shrugs and takes off his aviator sunglasses, wiping them on the sleeve of his hooded sweater.

"It's not really about them. It's not about Alel, it's about Jill, and you. Because I know what you've both gone through." Tom looks uncomfortable forcing it out. "It took her years to trust me, you know? Like, deep down she had to know I'd always been trying to take care of her, but she didn't want to move on and trust me because she didn't think it would do any good for her...The point is, with you, I feel like I have to worry that you trust people too easy. But with Jill, being like this since she was so young...I'm afraid she never trusts."

There's a short moment of thoughtful silence before Gene says, "Didn't the two of you stay with some nice people on the outside though?"

"I'm not really sure what to call it. We found this family that was willing to work us for shelter. They promised not to collar us and they put us up in our own room and everything, but Jill just saw it as them owning us and just not being the brutal type."

"There's only so much you can call it freedom when it's dangerous to walk out the door, that kinda thing," Gene mutters, knowing all that fully well. "I got to admit there are days when I think that as far as Terrans go there are basically just bad people, and the people who...can't be troubled to be mean. Like they see it as cruelty to animals or something, the way people treat us...Hell, half the humans on our side of town are just hiding from the law or something."

Tom thinks on it until he's wearing an incredulous smirk. "And then there's these four..."

When all Tom can do is give the topic a wordless noise of uncertainty, Gene nods. "No, I know."

"Did I ever tell you one of the first things Jill ever said to me about the engineer?" Tom slowly recounts, "She said, 'He's so kind, that it gives me the creeps.'"

He's sleeping off the edge of his early morning shift when his personal comm starts the constant beeping: the sound set only for automated emergency messages. Gene leans over and blinks forward at it for only a moment, and he lets a moment of horror settle into him, for only a second. "Oh shit," he says in a small groan as he darts out of bed.

In the trading square next to the main bunker where the crowd is gathering, Jill and Gene finally catch a glance of each other just before Tom has to let a round off into the air to hurry the crowd into being attentive.

"Listen," Tom shouts. "This bunker belongs to everybody. It is also the safest one. Anyone who isn't comfortable rubbing elbows with any one of their fellow Romulans is welcome to find another one. If I see anyone trying to skim somebody out of this, I will throw them out. It's about to be raining bullets and worse any minute now, so if you give us any trouble for trying to help get your asses underground, we will shoot."

Jill is shouting fast into the crowd, either translating or giving some other protest to some of the rushing motions. A figure darts out from behind someone else in Gene's peripheral vision, and he looks to see Alel coming up to him, his look mingling relief with the shared, unspoken fear in everyone's eyes.

In the next second Jill's run over to Gene to start loading him up with extra magazines. He's holstering up over his ratty undershirt and sweatpants, and Alel looks him up and down, the look on his face oddly tender as he weakly remarks, "You are in your pajamas."

Gene lets out a small attempt at a laugh. "Yeah."

Alel looks between him and Jill. "Do you have another weapon you could give me?"

"A couple of the people going down there have weapons, Alel, don't worry," Jill says with a brief squeeze to his shoulder.

"I don't want to go down there." He meets Gene's widening eyes. "I want to go with the League."

The idea is unthinkable to the point that Gene's laugh comes off cruel and mocking. "Hell no."

"Why not?" Alel is looking to Jill.

"Like you've ever even shot a phaser," Gene says.

"I have."

"When?"

Alel glares at him in determination. "What about Jill, Jill isn't League..."

"Jill has training."

"Hnaiv'alhl," Alel dismisses, bullshit. And then he lays a good one: "I can hear better than any of you."

"Charlie has ears."

"And where is Charlie?"

"Look, you're not going," Gene snaps.

A hard glare thickens between them. Gene catches a look at Alel's live-ins over his shoulder, their concern over the current situation probably the only thing keeping them from reacting how they usually would to Alel approaching him like this. Alel doesn't follow his glance but understands it.

Gene says, "Your family's waiting."

"Oh." Icily, Alel says, "Now you call them my family?"

Gene uneasily does a hop on his heels and then grabs Alel away by the arm, just enough steps to give Jill a cue. When he looks shortly back at the old couple now, it's to make a different point. "You're going to get in that bunker, and you're gonna promise me now that you are going to stay there until you know this is over, no matter what you see, no matter what you hear. You promise me this. Because even if I get out of this okay, you'll never be able to promise me anything else."

Alel gets this terrible, angry, desperate and sad look on his face, and Gene immediately knows that he's going to listen.

Right then is when they start directing people in, and Gene seizes some nerve out of the air. For a second everyone is too distracted to see it when he leans and pulls Alel with one arm into something too sloppy to be an embrace that he could even return, presses his mouth in at his neck just under his ear, and then avoids Alel's eyes as he stands straight and quickly walks away.

They lock everyone under and then they move, refusing to flinch only minutes later when the first mammoth noises of crashing metal and the pinching flashes of phaser fire noise start in the air, ominously feeling far off and close at the same time in a snickering echo.

What happens later is Tom finally hearing from Charlie, and deciding from what she's relaying that he needs to lead a group back to the west end of the Knot to defend an unarmed group that's stubbornly hiding out in the church.

"Are you fucking serious?!"

"Tom, you'll be lucky if you even make it there."

Tom ignores them. "I need you two to get over to Mill's. There's a group of a couple dozen that's sitting ducks there too."

"Tom..." Jill's eyes won't settle into acceptance. "Tom—"

"I'll be okay." Tom looks between both of them with something settling into a mix of worry and assuring pride before he takes off.

Jill is terribly quiet while they work their way down the block to Mill's; by now they can see the forms of hovering vessels approaching against the dusk and they say nothing until they get inside the little tavern.

A loudly proactive member of the crowd inside declares that he'd be eager to go out and fight if he could. Gene checks, "None of you have anything?"

"Is there anyone who lives or works here?" Jill shouts, and a woman puts up her hand. "Do you use any fuel for that fireplace?"

A couple minutes later Gene and a couple other people are helping to gather up all the empty bottles they can find, Gene going for a quick process of uncapping and dumping the contents into the sink and then clinking them Jill's way on the counter. She uses a big pair of kitchen scissors to gnaw stripes of fabric from an abandoned apron.

"These aren't enough stoppers," she says later while carefully and quickly pouring the petrol in. "They need to be the cork kind. Is there any wine in the back?"

The server woman comes out of a dusty room with the noise of bottles tinkling together in the cart, a varied assortment of Romulan ales that come in thin jug-shaped bottles. They start tearing the stoppers out and jamming holes into the middle.

"Jill."

"What?" she replies quietly.

"Why is this happening?"

She doesn't look up at Gene while she explains. "New law basically says nape sympathizers have the same standing as napes. A bunch of humans on the outside of us that the Empire doesn't give a shit about means party time for slavers. And if this is all to some organized plan I bet anything the T.E.'s sending their hoods too."

"But...Are they coming for us or for them?"

"They're coming for everyone, Gene. But they'll always come for us first."

He is finishing off the wick of one cocktail when some Terran-born teenager on his right is reading the label of one of the bottles.

"We should have started on the other ones first," he mutters pitifully. "This ale is authentic, from Romulus. It's over fifty years old."

Gene looks over at the bottle for a blank little moment. He reaches and grabs it out of the kid's grasp and tips back to take a long gulp from it, and he hands it back to the boy, who with a slow and miserable reverence does the same. And then he hands it to someone on his right.

The bottle makes its way around through the trembling assembly of hands while the distant noises of screaming and shooting make their presence known like a flock of birds. Some of the people are crying as they take their drink, and even Jill has to wipe at both her mouth and her eyes after she messily draws down the last swallow of it.

The shake in the air feels like they are already mourning, like they already know: that in less than an hour's time after the sun goes down, Jill and Gene will get wiped into an alley where they get surrounded by two fleet packs, where all they can do is crouch and clutch into the darkest shadow they can find. That Jill will get on her communicator and start saying Tom's name, and Tom won't answer. That they'll manage to kill a few of them when they are found but will get crowded and disarmed and then beaten down into the delirium of thrashing out in the frail hope that if they piss them off bad enough they might just get killed instead of taken, as Gene will be unable to shake a terrible intuition that that's exactly what happened to Tom.

Gene doesn't know how long they've been in the cargo compartment. He and Jill are both in passing-out bad shape in the heads, and at one point he's pretty sure he blacked out and woke up again to the cargo door slamming.

No one in the pitch black of the packed place utters it, but they're all clutching to some shred of reassurance that for some reason the vessel hasn't started moving since they were thrown in. But soon enough it moves.

"Jill?" His voice feels thin and he can't see the condition of her body where she's next to him, her head slightly leaning into his shoulder. His arms are jammed behind him in the metal cuffs and all he can do is shift to shake her just slightly by his arm. "Jill?"

She doesn't answer, and something coldly makes him choked up before his whole body seems to buckle and give in to the fear. He sits there breathing frantically with the unbearable thought that Jill is passed out and isn't going to wake up again until they pull into wherever the hell they'll be taken now, and maybe Gene will never see her awake again. This, right now, is the moment when he becomes alone. He remembers it was in a crowded compartment a lot like this where he first met her, and this is where it's going to be over.

"Jill..."

He's started muttering little apologies for all the little bitchy things he's ever done to her when something cracks up ahead into the hull and a slow grinding noise of separation starts to growl across one side of the vessel. He looks up to feel the surreal sense of elation rather than panic washing over everyone over the sudden certainty that they are crashing, crunching down against some corner of a building before it nudges into stuttering between hovering and diving. The impact isn't bad enough to do much more than worsen the cramping of his arms under his back when it touches down.

Everyone starts scurrying into sounds of sudden hope, Gene getting blocked out of it on the floor as a small stampede heads to start pounding on the back hatch. He hears the quick twang of phaser fire hitting metal and it's a fast pour of bodies before he sees enough to understand. Humans, but the first one he sees is the woman, one of Jill's humans. He sees her pretty dark shoulder through a tear in her jacket and the little red scratches all along her and just that look on her face like her spirit's been dragged over dirt and through teeth and come back again to pull all of them up from hell, and Gene's head thunks back against the wall for a second like he's praying thanks to somebody.

After Gene knew he was safe his emotions started pouring down again, like he had space enough for them now. It's not that he isn't remembering anything, he just isn't thinking about whatever violent lament he might have committed in the past several minutes and he doesn't really know or care what happened up to the point when he was crashing into his bed, Alel cozying the thin wool blanket up over him as it feels a bit to Gene like he's only imagining him there. Imagining that he was right there throwing his arms around him just after he limped out of the vessel. Gene sits up with the blanket on his lap, anxious and woozy.

"Gene." Alel doesn't quite put his hands on Gene's hands; he slides them over his until they're resting around his wrists. He looks miserably down at his own fingers when he says, "I broke my promise...I saw Tom die."

It doesn't surprise him, it doesn't send him into a shock, because he already knew the moment they couldn't reach Tom before. He finally flatly replies, "Okay...I guess I'll want to hear about that some day, just...not now."

It won't be the same for Jill. Her entire body will collapse in some attempt to deny it, to not have to be struck with it. She will wail as if dying.

"Somebody needs to tell her," he says.

Alel is looking into his eyes for something and just ends up giving a nod. "I was go look for Khamak. You need sleep."

He can't imagine sleeping even as tired as he is, but Alel's motions are insistent and comforting, and he's already relaxing far down into the cheap mattress.

Alel is quietly saying, "I...I'm locking your door, but I've come back later, if you want to tell me your password...?"

"Sure, whatever," already rolling over, he mumbles, "it's your name."

There is a pause before he feels Alel stand up and leave.

Jill wakes up in a heave of shock, realizing in a blink that she is not in that cargo hold and just sees looming colorless white and panics, suddenly unable to contain the terrified mantras that have been tapping through her mind all night as if they never stopped even as she was unconscious; she moans in a tiny raspy voice, "Help me, help me, please, somebody help me, I can't, I can't—"

Someone is next to her with a light touch on her shoulders, speaking to her. "Hey. Hey, it's me, you're with us. Jill—"

"I can't go back," she whimpers, or screams, she doesn't know, "I can't, help, help me—"

"Jill!" Bones. Bones, she recognizes that voice now. "You realize where you are? Jill, honey, I'm gonna help you, but you gotta say it's okay..."

She has a fractured rib that registers painfully enough to make her stay lying down for a few seconds, still jabbing her as she gasps, breath going a mile a minute.

"Are you gonna trust me?"

She groans, "Doc, was it...That was really Nina, in the car...? How—?"

"Scotty had to come find you. She wouldn't let him go alone." He's already hitting her with a disinfectant.

Lying back farther, she asks, "Is he okay?" without planning to.

"He'll be fine. They're both alright. You just try to calm down for a minute." After a moment he thinks to add, "I saw that, uh...Gene and the other kid were alright. I don't know about..."

"Tom," she says, "his name is Tom."

And she stares at the white ceiling and makes herself breathe, makes herself pretend she isn't already crying.

Later Gene wakes up to the smell of burning skin outside, and to the little foggy feel of Alel's warm breath landing on his shoulder from where he's lying close behind him on the tiny bed. They don't quite touch.

On a morning like this that feels like waking up after the world has ended, everything becomes a reminder of its own sweetly unattainable beginnings, and during one shared sigh on that bed Gene thinks very briefly about the heat of Alel's hand on his that first night they met. It feels like ten years ago rather than one, like he only imagined it happening in the first place.

Nothing is lucid for the first day or two. Gene isn't aware of anything enough to be surprised or grateful by Alel's doting on him when he's not off somewhere for a few hours, probably checking up on his parents.

The first night after the riots, Alel has come back from a mourning service the traditionals held at the middle of town, apparently sworn to observe a week or so of silence for all the people murdered or missing. His tacitness isn't so noticeable since Gene, with the exception of the comm call he makes to check up on Jill, ends up hardly saying a word for the next couple days while Alel just sits around with him, pensive. On the occasion that he does have to try to communicate something to him Gene feels this nostalgic ache for when they first met and knew almost nothing in a same language, strangely longing to know if the connection would also have occurred to Alel.

Gene's silence cracks on the third or fourth morning. He's sitting outside just to eavesdrop on the blaring broadcast of the little restaurant across the street, his head rocked back against his door, but he's not really paying attention to the news. He's thinking back, vaguely fumbling through everything that happened. And he mutters, "So did those expat human freaks fucking save our asses, or did I imagine that?"

Alel looks over and cracks into half of a grimacing laugh.

They end up walking over to the Knot's little medical station and Gene gets up a list of injured people who could use having some food delivered to them. Alel comes along, and Gene is happy for the company in the presence of the west end of the neighborhood that seems to have a chilling hush over it, maybe because of the vows or there just being less people around, or a combination of both. They're interrupted by Beni, one of the other surviving League members, who yells Gene's name from half a block down and comes running, looking semi-agitated.

"Charlie and I have been looking all over for you."

Gene shrugs, cocking an eyebrow. He hadn't bothered bringing his comm. "I've only been out for like an hour. What do you need?"

"You need to go to the comm station. Somebody from the outside is trying to talk to you, like...I don't know, this guy who wants to make sure you're alright."

He squints, scoffs. "Must be some other Gene. I don't know anybody stuck on the outside."

"Not stuck, no. He's some Terran."

Gene has taken a couple steps to walk away already, and stops, turning back slowly. After only a second he stacks a couple of the flimsy boxes onto the ones Alel's already carrying and takes off without a word.

The only place in the whole village where video communication is possible is actually in the town proper. It takes Gene almost ten minutes to get all the way out of the Knot and across the bridge and into the little utility station with the busted lock on the door. Somebody waving the air off with a paper fan was watching out the window and opens saying, "You finally."

"Yeah, fuck off."

She scoffs but makes her way off to go buy a beer.

Gene is gripped with a profound hesitation just inside the door. As he does when he's uneasy, he reaches back and tightens the old shoelace he uses to keep his dreads out of his face.

He gets around to stepping over with his hands in his pockets and regarding the face that lightens up at his appearance. Robert, with his same old dark hair and hint of handsome stubble, his slightly dopey grin Gene faintly remembers thinking was charming. The tap of his white teeth appearing between the lips makes Gene want to look away, like he's gone shy about something.

"Jesus...Gene." Robert slouches forward. "It's so good to see you."

Gene says, "Hey, Rob." He manages a weak smile.

Robert opens his mouth, and it doesn't seem like what he planned to say when he says in a meek laugh, "I like the hair."

"Thanks," Gene mutters.

There's another stretch of speechlessness, like he can only wait for some explanation while Robert sits there a little overwhelmed. Robert finally backtracks. "Look, I know I never tried to reach you before. I had no idea, I mean I hoped that you'd managed to make it over there..."

"Of course I made it here." Gene shrugs, attempting to make it light and cocky. "It's me, you know?"

"When I heard about what happened, I just had to fucking...I had to see if I could find you." And then he asks. "Are you alright?"

Something angry is squirming in Gene; he's been standing there trying to figure out why ever since he walked in. "Am I alright?"

Robert doesn't know what to say.

Gene asks, "What have you been doing?"

"Oh, you know. Same old."

"Same old," Gene repeats.

"Look, be straight with me, Gene. Have you got a plan over there? Like...a way out? A way off?"

With a sigh, he slowly explains, "There's one ship in town. This guy's auctioning it. I've got this friend of a friend who thinks he has a good chance..."

"Okay. Well...look, I'm in St. Louis now."

"No..." Gene is shaking his head in disbelief. "No. What kind of a fucking idiot do you have to be to comm me up and ask me, as if that's what you really wanna know, if I'm okay? Of course I'm not okay. A third of the people I know are dead. And to answer the question you're really calling to ask, no."

The tone heightens fast, Robert's face finally showing his frantic edge. "Gene, I am freaking out thinking that something's gonna happen to you, how can you—"

"I don't want you to freak out about me. Like you even give a shit that my friends are dying. I bet it didn't even occur to you that I would've met people, that I'd be grieving right now. Oh, that's right..." He feels something acidic falling into his expression. "You don't think that I fit in."

Robert has a frowning, guilty look. "I know things are tough right now, but in case you haven't been keeping up, a lot of us on the outside are pretty pissed off about what's been going on too—"

"Oh, this shit again, this shit I fell for—You and I are not in the same boat, Rob. Look, I know, I get that they were pretty rough on people in that prison, and it wasn't fair they put you away longer than that other asshole, or that you can't find a good job now, I get it, but at least you get to think to yourself, 'Hell, I wish I'd never gotten caught.' They made me wish I'd never been born."

"What can I do?!" Robert pleads. "What, Gene, I can't put myself in your place, it's not possible, but I—"

"You had your chance to prove it," he snaps back, almost incredulous to the point of laughing at him. "You wouldn't come with me before. Not in a million years would you have done that for me. The answer's no. You just called to see if, now that I'm in deep shit, I might come crawling back? What the fuck for? So we can steal cars together? I can't live out there. It would just be hiding."

"—Please, you don't have to be with me, just—I'm sorry—"

"What do I need you for?" Gene lashes back. "I was better at jacking cars than you ever were anyway. I was better at stealing them, better at fixing them. I'm better at being human than you are. I'm better at being Romulan than you are. I'm better at fucking, better at falling in love than you are. What do I need you for?"

There was a time, ages ago, when Gene helped a broken-down and bruised Robert off the floor, out of the rocky spots with the rough human guards even when he could get in trouble for it, when he felt for him and then fell for him because he saw something in his situation he could relate to, as if they were caught in the same cage in that prison. Like there was some cohesive "us" against the people that hurt them.

One day they got caught smoking a joint together in Robert's cell when Gene was supposed to be doing a room inspection, and they gave Gene the whole "You're supposed to keep 'em in line, not flirt," but it was really that they were bored. Gene got hauled into the snow in the courtyard after they stripped him down to his underwear and they slammed the door and left him out there—he'll never know just how long it was—but there was some party with the cop crew across the street playing the first hard rock music Gene ever heard and when some couple came strolling by on the sidewalk by the fence, they just jeered and laughed at his violent shivering. His freezing hands were screaming and he was whimpering like a dog when they let him back in.

Robert had to scrub down the lavatories.

Gene says, "Bye, Rob," and he slams the door on his way out.

He changes into his sleepwear as soon as he gets back to his cabin, and in an overwhelmed rush just sinks onto his couch, tiredly mopping his hand at his face. It's nearly dark outside and it's only when he finally taps the little lamp on that he happens to catch the sight of Alel coming shyly in, the look on his face indecipherable.

Gene sinks into his previous position with a groaning feeling of dread. Simply during the walk back here it was easy to pick up on the fact that a lot of rumors are spreading about him just because of the transmission, several of them happening to be true. He didn't make things much better for himself by angrily kicking over a fruit cart after telling Beni to shut it before he'd even gotten half of a question out when they passed by each other.

Alel has his little beat-up PADD ready for interrogation; the question is short but orderly and Gene only reads the words "a human man" before shoving it back into Alel's hand.

"Yeah. Yes. I was fucking a Terran for a while. Now you know." It's only the last thing he would have ever been willing to tell Alel about himself; no big deal. On a week when he wasn't still swimming through grief just to get out of bed in the morning, it might have been some cause for serious emotional panic, but right now he's bitter and resigned and part of him just wants Alel to walk back out the door without bothering to tell him how disgusted he is.

He keeps asking questions, starting with some gestured inquiry that manages to ask if he's going to run away to Robert, and Gene can't decipher whether Alel is hypothetically trying to talk him out of it, or into it, or being completely neutral on the subject. Oddly, it's the first time Gene has contemplated how obvious that option would seem to other people, and how it might actually seem unwise that he didn't consider it at all.

Gene is also so buried under his mood that he doesn't quite realize or care that he isn't giving Alel very straight answers. He comes to realize however that Alel is using an endearingly ridiculous series of gestures in an attempt to ask him if he wants to.

"Did he own you or did you love him?" the PADD reads, and this one he has to answer, even though both sides of the question seem equally dirty to him. He really thinks he hates Robert for comming now. He identifies the feeling it put in him as some smudge at the bottom of himself that's still there no matter how long he goes on ignoring it.

"I didn't belong to him. I mean, he had to buy me but I never had to do anything for him. The rest of it doesn't matter."

The curt response isn't enough, though; Alel is stupidly grabbing his sleeve to get his attention again.

"What?" he snaps. "What the fuck do you want me to say?"

The question is just as circuitous as the rest, helped into a pretty line of coherence by his translator: "How long were you with him?" But this is when Gene squints down at the thing in Alel's grasp and starts to realize this might just be all a bunch of irrelevance. Alel's lips are pressed together and he's shifty and nervous, and...

"Hang on." Gene sits up a little, crooking his glance to make up for how Alel's eyes start darting away. "Fuck me sideways...Are you jealous?"

Now the floor seems suddenly very interesting to Alel, and he doesn't say anything, his knee bobbing and a cringe sinking into him. When he does look at Gene, though, he apparently sees something that makes him stay instead of running for the door.

Whatever he sees, Gene realizes, could quite possibly be the fact that Gene just responded to something with more of an actual personality than Alel's seen him capable of forming over anything since the attack. Like he's going to bravely prod at this just to get to Gene, just to give them both some kind of respite. But he still doesn't respond.

"Are you?" he asks again, still incredulous, and now he's pushing into Alel's space on the couch. He says an almost teasing, gentle "Come on, prince."

Alel starts to type something into his PADD. Gene grabs it out of his hands.

"It's a yes-or-no question," he says, snatching it out of Alel's reach when he tries to get it back. He gets an immense sudden pleasure in seeing the floundering look in Alel's eyes for some reason, in the way he swallows with thick uncertainty as he freezes up. When the hesitation goes on and on, though, he says it much less mockingly, softly: "You're jealous?..."

There's a moment of Alel just being entirely still in irritation, but quickly he's reaching again and Gene twists back, expecting him to try to snatch the PADD out of his right hand, but what he's doing is gripping a hand into Gene's shirt as his body comes up to press their mouths together, full and insistent and, oh, oh fuck, Alel is absolutely jealous.

Alel's left hand reaches to turn his head into the angle so that the kiss is open and surging and everything in his movement is so beautifully greedy Gene just about passes out for the first second of it. The weather in the room is suddenly a profound rush of Gene's heart beating furiously and Alel sighing fast and hot into his mouth. By the time they're starting to melt into lying down, Gene's hands can't stop moving, caught between the cradling tangle in Alel's hair and reaching to get their fingers wound tight together.

Gene gets a little bit of the top weight, bearing onto where Alel relaxes down, his legs beginning to straddle around Gene. Alel's tongue is a shock of warmth that makes Gene's stomach start to shudder, his kisses just as soft as he remembers, the taste of him just slightly sharper than a human's. The long-imagined return to that mouth after a whole year feels like setting some wistful idea of Alel on fire, like the limbs and lips Gene longed after are now eclipsed by some huger touchable force of a man he really knows now. He wants to drink the air from his lungs, the gasps of wanting like little miracles as he takes that hand and slides and squeezes his fingers between the others and murmurs pads along the knuckles while Alel tightens his hand back and moves along his body above him in sighing tides, his eyes dark and gorgeous.

Gene pulls Alel's bottom lip between his teeth with the same rhythm of his fingers coaxing at the sensitive inside of the thumb and suddenly Alel's going crazy, one hand coming up to squeeze at the nape of Gene's neck as if to taste the tattoo there. His hands seem to be shaking, and then they're coaxing down Gene's back and down over his hipbones and untying his pants in a quick pull. He's biting at his own lip now, seemingly against a swarming desire to say something.

As he eagerly starts on Alel's clothes with pawing motions, Gene swallows and starts with "Okay, look, you've never...You've never done anything, right?"

Alel's glance up at him is deliberately relaxed, and Gene takes that as his way of shrugging off the "yes," not wanting to have to ask for anything.

"The point is, you're not talking right now—" He's interrupted when Alel pulls up and presses a wet kiss at Gene's wrist, nibbling softly up to his palm, "Ungh. Look, just promise me you'll make sure I figure it out if I need to stop anything, okay?"

Alel gives something like an eye-roll as he nods, and as Gene reaches to tap off the lamp he's just as annoyed because that's pure Alel, never stopping to realize how lucky he is, that maybe nobody was ever this careful at first with Gene and Gene is just lucky it never got much worse than Robert. Lucky like that fleet bastard Tony picking up an extra nape to match Jill and making the mistake of making it Tom. Luck that doesn't occur to Alel who rolls his eyes thinking this is just him being treated like a kid and even in the endless frustration with him Gene feels his heart loudly flipping out in his abdomen over what's happening, the familiar making it more real. Gene scoops his hands under Alel's waistband and pulls and tries to remember how to think through revelation after revelation; he takes one of Alel's hands that's skimming in a vaguely filthy rhythm along his and, never quite stopping the unison motion of interlinking and stroking their fingers, brings their hands down Alel's chest and lower and wraps them around him.

The feel of Alel in his hand, of him in his own hand and his hand in his hand, and Alel's head rocking back with a little bang against the armrest and Gene hears himself humming a rise of noise into his ear, feeling at the way he touches himself as if it makes him a part of every desire Alel's ever had. After having stopped dreaming Alel wanted anything this far and now replacing the stoic stubbornness with the lax vision of him unraveling under him, he can't help wanting to crash into every rush of want this kid has ever dared to feel for anything. Both of their breaths are going hotter and quicker with each motion and his fingers are sending little prickles of heat straight to his own arousal and it's as if he can feel everything Alel feels.

He still doesn't really know if Alel is supposed to be completely silent or just not use words, he hasn't asked, but Alel gives out a bit when he starts whispering unthinking, assuring things into his ear, "—never been anyone else, not since the day I met you." It draws an astonished little moan. "Just you, okay, just you..."

At some point Alel tries to roll them over and they end up on the floor, smearing the fleece blanket from the couch down with them, and Gene makes a noise like a laugh and then a gasp as Alel is quicker, thick and rubbing against him and Gene is already getting thrown out of coherence, mumbling mantras. He's back to leaning in halfway on top of Alel when he can tell they're both close and somehow thinks to clamp his hand over Alel's mouth.

His mind doesn't remark on the irony, that Romulans don't do this before they're married and Romulan men don't do this with other men or marry other men, not typically not properly, and yet so much of this experience is defined by Alel observing his silence and this makes sense in a way that is bigger than blind conformity, is a solid universe beneath Gene. A moment later Gene realizes Alel's eyes are tearing up and the stifled moan that he feels through his fingers seems like a cry of both mourning and gratification, the two mingling into life where he looks suddenly drowning and desperate and hits climax like a hard wall.

Gene is no longer forgetting how sad he is when they drop down and wrap around each other in the tangle of the blanket and fall asleep, but he feels less alone than he can ever remember feeling in his entire little life.

He wakes up spooned against Alel who's tracing his mouth all over his neck, deliberately waking him up. He gives a little complaining groan in answer, and Alel traces his finger over the wing shape that sneaks along one side of the back of his neck just intricately enough to slightly obscure the ugly bar code.

Alel keeps tracing it for a minute and Gene eventually mumbles, "You wanna know why I got that?" Alel's chin rests in the crook of his shoulder, which seems like answer enough. Gene gives a long sigh and flings his arm into a stretching motion as he collects it in his head. "Why I only got one wing, I mean, that's what everybody asks...It's weird, cause I got it when I was done working the prison; I got it because I was this idealistic, poetic little shit and I wanted something on me that meant that I was free. But I only got the one wing. It's like...I'd taken a step in the right direction, but part of me knew even then I wasn't completely free yet."

There's another moment of Gene staring forward at the floor, and his voice is thinner when he speaks.

"I honestly don't know if I ever felt anything real with him. Or if it was just how badly I wanted to have somebody. If it'd been up to me, you never would have found out. I still feel dirty about it. And now that you know I want to tell you it was just my lucky break, it was my way out, that I was basically using him. But it would be bullshit, and I still just can't stand that you know..."

He'll lose the moment and start berating himself for saying any of this in the first place if he looks Alel in the eye, he knows this, but Alel just wraps his arms tight around Gene and presses his mouth into his neck like he never wants to let go, and suddenly it's okay. It just feels so okay, that Gene puts his hands over his eyes and winces and:

"I love you. I know I do. I'm messed up, I'm really fucking messed up most of the time, but not about this. I have for a long time, I love you, okay?..."

He's too busy trying to keep his head from backtracking into realizing what he just said when Alel leans up and tips him back by the shoulder to make him look at him.

The first thing that might describe Alel is that he looks scared, but there are other things there too, practically every major emotion warring for dominance, and Gene isn't sure why Alel kind of shakes him a bit while he just looks at Gene like he's trying not to take too much in and freak out.

"I mean it." Gene does this nervous little swallow while he affectionately pushes at the mopped-up strands of Alel's short hair. Then he says, "I need to go out. You coming?"

The weather's ugly outside. Alel walks with him out to pick up his gun he lent to one of the League members who somehow lost their firearm during the attacks. On their walk back it starts to rain, sudden and hard, turning the mud into a noisy stick as they walk. With a sigh, Gene resolves they should sit it out, and they end up seated on the long bench under the tavern tarp, watching a couple kids muck barefoot through the slick in their work clothes just for the fun of it.

Along comes Di'ranov.

Gene has less firsthand experience with Alel's so-called "father" than he does with the mother, who usually rebuffs him as if he's literally invisible when she sees him at all and makes Gene get bitter and rude about it. Alel rarely talks about either of them and Gene doesn't know Di'ranov at all.

One thing he knows is that he did not have to take the vow—something about the head of the house speaking for the rest even in times of grief, or something comparable that made Gene suppress an eye-roll when Charlie explained it. He's half a generation younger than the mother and Gene can't understand what he says to Alel after he halts in front of them, something in his arrogant profile impervious to the bitter weather in a way that demands the type of respect you'd give an old warrior. Gene can't understand him, but the point is, it quickly becomes clear to him that the old man is saying things in the full snide sense of confidence that Alel will not, cannot say anything back in any kind of protest.

Maybe a month ago something like that would have made Gene immediately seethe in hatred towards the man, but now, he's too exhausted to really show it. Even though it goes without any real deduction that Di'ranov is chewing Alel out over hanging out with him, Gene just wants to cut himself out of the mess, and he stares down into the mud somewhere, letting his knee bob up and down restlessly.

That is, until he notices how quietly enraged Alel looks, and suddenly that's all he can look at. He wishes harder than ever before that languages could stick in his mind, that he could understand more than a fucking phrase or two, because he would kill to understand what's going on—not between them, that wouldn't be a fair description—what's being done. Alel's face reads this entire scope of How could you? like he knows, he knows he's being somehow bullied right now in a way that sullies something important to him even if the nagging he's getting is nothing so new.

Alel does nothing. He sits there and takes it, until Di'ranov looks about done, until he looks like he's resigned to being disappointed or disgusted and is ready to leave them alone.

Before the old man turns to walk away, he looks not at Alel but in a slant that's directed at something vaguer, something approaching Gene with a sliding look of dismissal that Gene can practically feel in this powerful little prickle. And then, on a second thought, he says something that's apparently so filthy Jill won't even be able to tell Gene what it means later.

And Gene has forgotten what Alel's voice sounds like, apparently, or it's just that he's never heard it like this, bolted high with rage as he explodes up out of his seat and Gene can only imagine later on what this must look like to everyone, from a few feet away, from a few yards away, the quick scandal it is, that Alel broke his vow of silence to trudge up screaming at his father right in the middle of the market.

Alel has hardly said anything before Di'ranov is slapping him a thunderous blow, and the slide of the ground plants up to him in a sharp fall. He moves to get up but slips and gets clumsily almost face-down in it, his sleeves and neck swimming in the mud conspiring to smudge him in the disgrace in front of the couple dozen who have frozen in shock all around. He's getting a hell of a tongue-lashing from Di'ranov and all that Gene is thinking as he's now standing and staring in frozen stupid awe of this is, Get up. Get up, get up, get. up.

From where Gene is standing he can see that Alel is cringing in on himself, trembling in some mix of anger and humiliation, and when he does stand back up and spit the dirt out of his mouth as if that's his only response to the old man, it's to bitterly walk away without a glance back at him or at Gene.

Alel passes through a couple of the staring people in the crowd without faltering, and close by there is where Gene spots Jill, looking like she was just been pulled out of some daze at the confusion of witnessing the whole thing and wearing some jacket that's a couple sizes too big.

"Jill?..." Gene is pulled immediately forward until she sees him, and she says nothing before he pulls her into his arms.

"Hey," she mumbles in at his shoulder, hugging back weakly.

That night they listen to Tom's favorite band, for hours, so that Jill can cry until she can't cry anymore. She ends up asleep with her head lulled somewhere over his knee and he doesn't sleep at all, telling himself he's not waiting for some kind of reassurance to walk through the door of his place.

For the next few days, he doesn't see Alel at all.

Gene thinks his last straw is a Doberman Pinscher that belonged to no one but tended to protectively follow some of the League around. It isn't until Gene randomly thinks to ask, "Where's Pistol, anyway?" that somebody tells him one of the Imperials shot her down, just for fun. He yells to high nothing about it at no one in particular, ends up throwing and breaking a couple glasses at the tavern where this all goes down. He tells Jill he can't stand it anymore. He wants to kill them. Every one of them. He wants to blow up the fucking planet, along with their children and their cats and their dogs.

Here it is, he starts to think. This is where I turn into a bad man. He's one more disaster away from toughening too far and starting to be exactly like the caricatured Romulan stereotype the Terran Empire hypocritically paints up to justify some of the things they do, an idea of his race he can't argue isn't true to some degree and which has always given him a slight bit of dread. One more thing and he'll be festering with too much hatred to even think anymore.

The next night is when a little girl happens to him in much the way Alel happened to him the night he met him. She's this skinny quiet thing with big eyes and brown hair and skin as green as the blood in his veins. Jill's humans stole her into town after they went out to see if they could win some cash at a glossy night club and the pretty one got a dumb idea. The babysitting duties default over to the League, but that first night everybody's already looking at Gene with the girl like she's his already. On the second shift he has to skip to take care of her he watches her slurp down the last of the potato soup and deep down he knows it's probably an inevitability. He's never imagined winding up in anything like this but he almost thinks he'd want to mess up anybody who tried to tell him he can't do it.

"Madda, right?" Jill asks when she sees him and the girl and butts into the food line next to him one morning. She attempts some motion of greeting at Madda, who's shyly clinging to Gene's leg, her hand dangling from a light grip around one of his fingers. When she straightens back up level with him she mutters, "Shit, Gene. People really aren't staring at her in a good way."

"I know. We're all keeping an eye on her."

From a bit up ahead in the other line, Alel sees them and immediately comes over. He gets his bearings at the sight of it and says, "So it's true."

Gene scoffs at how Alel scrutinizes the girl so heavily, but realizes it's more curious than anything.

Alel steps a bit closer to Gene and Madda as if to take up a spot in line, still looking down at her. "I have never seen an Orion in person..."

"Really?" Jill replies.

"Yeah, I guess you wouldn't have," Gene says, his smirk not all there. After a moment, he says flatly to Alel, "You haven't been around."

"I know," he replies quietly, and bites his lip, not offering an explanation.

Madda varies her bored motions of swinging her arm off Gene's: Her other hand latches thoughtlessly up around Alel's thumb and she pivots restlessly between their two hands.

Alel looks down with some detached realization of the hand reaching for his hand, and then in the next couple seconds slowly shuts down in his eyes, as if remembering something painful and dear.

Jill meets Gene's eyes in the next second, and from her concern and confusion Gene figures she doesn't know why it is that Alel has a soft spot for kids.

Alel says, "I have to go."

When he's gone, Jill looks not quite accusingly at Gene. "What?" he asks.

"...Did something happen with you two while I was gone?"

He wants to be smug, and teasing and cryptic about it. He wants to boast about it and make it a joke. But all he can feel is suddenly very sad.

"Gene?..."

He opens his door to run out that night, and Alel is standing there.

He backs up to let him in, and as Alel steps into the dim light of the auto-lamp Gene can tell he's dreading whatever conversation they're about to have. He stands unmoving close to the door, and after they both are silent in hesitation for a while Gene says, "The humans won the ship. They're taking passengers."

"I heard." Alel nods. His jaw is clenched nervously for a few seconds, and he quietly says, "I've talked to Di'ranov."

Gene swerves away from him a little, unsteady and scratching his hand along his jaw.

"I want you to know he is not always so unkind, Gene, he understands I—He does not expect me to stop seeing you..."

Gene is so not ready for the shoe to drop, but he manages to choke out, "But?"

"Gene, you would already know..." Alel's sad eyes catch into the light, vibrant and impossible and always belonging to something else, it seems. "I can't leave with you."

He practically has to pull in a lot of air to get the words out. "You can't—leave with me, or you can't—"

"I have to stay."

"No. No." The word could fall out a hundred more times if Gene doesn't stop himself. "No. You have to—You need to get the fuck out of here, it's not a fucking joke, okay?" Alel is trying to interrupt but he keeps spilling, "The Knot's fucked. We lost two thirds of our people who are trained for any kind of combat, it would take several weeks, maybe months to train rookies, but for all we know they could hit us again by the end of the week, and it'll be even worse then. People around here are not scared enough because they don't understand—"

"Gene." His voice is horrible, unsettling in its levelness. "I know this."

"What is this? Tell me what the hell this is. You think some Bird of Prey is gonna drop down on Terra and save us? Look, it was sure as hell nice to believe in that for a while—"

"My family believes that D'era will help us. And that this ship is not the way."

"Fuck them. They just don't want to rub too close to the humans."

"I will try, Gene. I will try to get them to come, but—"

"—We both know that's a dead end. If you stay here—" Gene is shouting now, heavy and even, fists twisting into the fabric at Alel's shoulders without him realizing he was moving into him. "If you stay here, you will be dead or worse by the end of the year. I can promise you that."

"I know the risk. I know." Alel's voice is breaking into desperation now. "But I can't leave my family, Gene, please—"

"Stop saying that they're your family!" he snaps. "It's bullshit. How can you trivialize the people you lost by calling them your family?!—"

"This is for my family." Alel is suddenly shouting too. "All of this is for them, and their name. You understand that, I know you must—"

"—Shut up, shut up. Just..." Gene is backing off from him and now he can't breathe, because in that moment he completely understands, this is it. He is going to lose him. He is going to lose him, and he understands exactly why, and he knows there is nothing he can do about it. He growls, "Being dead doesn't make them right."

Alel has never come close to hitting Gene before, even when they've had fights, but it's all over his eyes that he wants to; his fist trembles and he's probably just barely managing to remind himself that he can hit Gene a lot harder than Gene can hit back.

"They don't care about you. They don't love you if they want to keep you here—"

"They believe I will be saved, if I stand by the right thing."

"...But you don't."

"I don't know what I believe." The admission is quick and low, certain in uncertainty. Alel looks miserable, his eyes gleaning as he shakes his head. "I failed them before, once. I don't know what I deserve."

"You think this makes you brave? Is that what you think?" Gene's mind is screaming with how backwards the entire thing feels to him. He wants to seize at Alel and tell him things he has no words for, the things he felt and saw in him the first night they met, the way he was drawn to something in Alel that made him seem simply like everything that boy was proud to be he was more completely than he realized, that it pulled at and then mended some ache in Gene for the part of him he wasn't born to be. He cannot understand how the boy is now a man standing in front of him and declaring himself somehow incomplete and undeserving. What Gene says is trying to hurt him, trying to twist him. "This isn't brave. This is you being exactly what Tom thought you were."

Alel's motion forward is like he's hit with an electric jolt when he tries to reach for Gene, who doesn't let him. "I love you."

"But you wish you didn't," Gene is quick and harsh, "so it doesn't mean shit."

"I love you." He's shaking his head, shaking all over. "I did always."

Gene pushes the heels of his hands at his eyes as he backs up a few steps, his entire body hollow-feeling and reeling into solitary misery. What he says is, "I wish I'd never met you," and then, "Fucking hell, I was supposed to go get Madda."

Charlie's waiting for him at her cabin, impatient-looking until she sees his face, and when she says, "You made me late" it's her encoded way of expressing some peripheral concern.

"Sorry, I know." Gene makes some abrupt motion of rubbing his hands at his face, uncovering his expression in a sudden forced smile as Madda comes hopping over to him from Charlie's arm chair. "How's my girl?"

He walks Madda around the neighborhood, eventually realizing that he's blindly headed for the grounds out close to where the back gates used to be, where the ashes were buried. Tom's marker is way back at the eastern side. Gene sits there for a moment as if alone while Madda idles calmly, sitting in a rocking motion against one of his knees as she mildly sing-songs something that got stuck in her head from the movie broadcast.

"Gene-Gene," she calls him, vying for some small attention. Gene is staring forward morosely when she pries herself onto his lap and clenches her tiny arms around his torso, just latching as kids latch, and the contact breaks a dam in Gene that's been built up slowly his entire life, it seems, and he can't not anymore: He pulls Madda up in his lap and hugs her to him as the sobs start to shake out of him, and there he sits under the stars just rocking the girl in his lap and looking skyward as if in a desperate prayer, crying for all the death in his life and mourning the losses yet to come.

"Have you ever read anything about the Mar'nira massacre?" Gene asks Jill on the day the four humans are getting ready to take up names for their bust off Terra, the day Gene spends trying to share some inkling of the same lightheartedness going on around their house. Almost everyone is in the kitchen at the same time and more or less part of the conversation, and Gene isn't really sick of the looks of sympathy quite yet, but they keep coming.

"Wait, yeah." Jill says, "It was that really esteemed city that was like a capital of one area on Romulus. You were a big deal if you lived within a few kilometers of the middle, so at the center it was some of the wealthiest people on Romulus."

"Or, you know, 'most noble'," Gene says bitterly.

"Right. Well, the story is that this chancellor or senator's family and the entire surrounding area was kept off-limits to Terran occupation for a really long time because the highest-ups were willing to pay this outrageous dilithium tax that some fleet captain could profit from if he lied about the stats on the location. But I guess Starfleet at large figured it out and wanted more slaves, so..." Jill's face drops to a darker expression. "It's mostly this important event because the T.E. had to go out of their way to prove that nobody was 'above the sword,' as they kept saying. They went after the senator and killed him just to prove the point that negotiations weren't an option anymore."

"It wasn't the senator who was killed," Gene interjects at a low tone. "They dragged his wife and his thirteen-year-old daughter out into some town square and cut their throats, in front of him and the entire city."

Jill's eyes get a little big. "How do you know? Did Alel tell you that?"

"It was his mother and his sister."

The kitchen is deafeningly silent for a moment.

"He was supposed to die too, but when the soldiers were collecting everybody, he lied about his family name," Gene explains, and Jill understands, is already covering her mouth in shock and pity. "He's been trying to get forgiven ever since. No 'honorable Romulan' does that."

"Jesus." This is from Jim, who looks like he's begging the kitchen floor to make him forget what he just heard. The one woman stands next to him with about the same look; later when she happens to be returning to the kitchen while Gene gets Madda a drink, she talks to him and is somehow both frank and gentle about it.

"It's Nyota, you know," she says after he uncertainly greets her. "It's Jill that insists on calling me Nina still..."

He manages a half-smirk about that.

After biting her lip for a second, she says, "You seem pretty sure he isn't going to change his mind."

"Please don't give me that," he tiredly protests, but she ends up being the first one who doesn't console him by way of denial.

"I just think someone needs to tell you, that no matter what happens today? You need to be sure you say goodbye to him." She interrupts the sad little protest that wants to cut out of him when he opens his mouth. "I know, it'll hurt like hell. But..."

Nyota turns her back and sets about rearranging something on the counter like it covers up the suddenly melancholy gravel to her voice that Gene doesn't quite understand.

"If you don't take the chance to say it," she slowly insists, "you will regret it for the rest of your life. And you know it."

Thirty minutes later they're taking names from the townies out on the porch, and Gene is trying to calculate any possible sequence of things he can say to tell Alel goodbye when the time comes. His mind only stutters over the angry certainties, abstract and fevered ideas he could never say out loud to any other soul. He wants to comm up Alel and tell him, I am going to feel it when you die. No matter how many light years away I've gone I am going to feel it in my fingertips and all the way up my spine and my heart is going to holler to a stop until I die of you being dead. He sits with his hand closed in a too-tight fist around his communicator, and skinny little Madda touches his wrist then almost like she understands, so he takes a deep breath and puts the damn thing down and sets her onto his lap.

Jill tried to explain the situation of her Terrans to Gene already, the fact that they are foreign beyond foreign, from some other color in a prism of infinite possibilities, the same as their names but not the same. He accepts that they are good people without a full understanding of it because the concept bores him, but how can they not both have a bit of a mental snag over the fact that there is an entire universe of people like them? They had all somehow seemed like people who were as forced from one world into the other as the napes are, improbable and lonely folk, and this is why. One of the first things Gene asks is, "Are we that fixed? Would there be copies of us somewhere where they come from?"

Of course there is a better world than this one. One with races who are at least nobler in what they stand for when they aren't kinder. One where Gene and Jill and Tom weren't born in cages and would all have been given very different names. Jill would trust as she wants, and Tom would be alive and a very good warrior. Alel's family would all be together, and probably Gene would have never met him, never met any of them, whoever he is or was or could be.

The Gene in this version of his life has spent most of it, in a way that is mostly obscured to his own conscious idea of it, hating himself. There is a fact written down and sealed into some imposing envelope of his mental paperwork that means that somewhere inside of him he believed while growing up that he was fundamentally flawed, that his soul had been packed into something dirty and that he deserved to be owned.

And then something like a year ago this Gene went to a party and he saw a boy standing across the room who became irreversibly consequential to him in a way that would have mattered even if they had never met again. In this moment some garden of happier Genes sprouted in pedals from flowers dropping from stems, and there is one of them, the happiest one, but no one could tell which one it is.

Gene couldn't, but while he knows that there is a better world than this one, he supposes later on that there is also a worse one. One in which Alel did not come into focus through the sunlight looking every bit like some rugged wanderer in his weird ugly garments and with a pack dangling from his right grip, arriving from lost to found on the lawn where he put down only his name for the ride, and then went alone into the house.

When Gene follows, he hesitates at the edge of the room where Madda greets Alel, seeming to remember him as she bounces restlessly on the Terrans' ratty couch and he says something to her that's too quiet for Gene to hear. He isn't looking at Gene until he's ready to, and then Gene understands why he avoided him before; the second he does something in him collapses and he has to crash across half of the room to go get scooped into Gene's arms, bury his face at the sturdy peak of his ribs.

It doesn't feel good, it can't feel good at the moment, knowing what Alel has just left behind him. It will be weeks before Alel can open his mouth about the issue without feeling beaten down with guilt, but when he can, when they're in the middle of the good kind of sleepless night on the ship and they catch a couple moments to themselves: Alel will tell him that at the end he knew he would feel guilty either way, but what he couldn't live with after all was letting Gene go on believing he was ashamed of him. Gene will pull him in and pull him in and tremble a little as he tells him again and again that everything's going to be okay as if he just realized it himself.

At the moment, though, there is nothing in the room but the sound of Madda irritating the couch under her rocking and the little sounds of Alel's sad breathing, and neither of them have to say anything. Gene holds on to him for dear life.

On the last evening she'll ever see the Knot, Jill takes Scotty for one last walk. They venture a little daringly ("We won't tell anyone") into the northern part of the woods behind the village and discover something that Jill can only interpret as monumental. As the view of it gets eaten at the edges by the tall teeth of trees, it's hard to discern where it ends: The thing looks like an old train track twisted treacherously like a donut, suspended far, far up on old, old wood. It's roughly a cylindrical shape broken off from something else.

She gathers it isn't quite sacred from the way Scotty laughs.

"That's so odd," he says, all confused and delighted. "Where's the rest of the roller coaster?"

"...That's what it was?"

"Yeah. You know, somebody must have found a way to break it down to use the wood. Maybe it was long before you ever lived here." He squints over and clasps his hand around hers to direct her into following his curious path around the remains. "You don't even know what a coaster looks like? I've got to get you to a theme park some day."

She swallows, looking at her hand in his, and mumbles, "How would you ever do that?"

"I'll get you to one. I will," he says, and stops walking, looking down now also. At his easiest register, the one that says that whatever she says it's alright, he asks, "This okay?"

Jill looks at their hands loosely clasped around each other and she imagines it as an entire planet full of little Scottys and Jills who are just a little bit braver than she is, and she swings an impulsive step in his direction, pulls down at Scotty's shirt and lands her lips on his. It's a slow, soft moment before she pulls back with a pluck.

"Yeah," she says. "It's okay."