Fic: "Secondary Adjustment" (Winona, Jim, Spock, PG13)
Title: Secondary Adjustment
Characters: Winona, Jim, Spock
Rating: PG13 for language and the supposition of violence, but gen.
Words: ~6700
Summary: Winona gets a message from an old friend she's never met, and Jim's life changes again.
A/N: So, after a few (or possibly several) watchings of the Reboot movie, it occurred to me to wonder why Spock Prime, who knows what year it is (evidence: he tells Jim in the meld how many years in the future he came from), and who has no reason to think Jim would beat his own TOS 'verse record for youngness of attaining captaincy, is surprised to learn he is not the captain. Then I got to thinking about what in Jim's life must have been different, to spur the changes that would make it possible for him to have been the captain Spock Prime expected, and wondering how Spock Prime could have attempted to force that additional change in the timeline. Thanks to people who listened to me whine about this for the last couple of weeks, and
lauriegilbert and
inell for reading for sense and commas. If this reminds you of another SciFi canon, it's supposed to.
Secondary Adjustment
The day Winona receives the message is the day her nascent plans all change. Or would, if she had the slightest claim to anything so involved as a plan; really what she has is inertia and habit.
And a new baby, which is the only thing that makes her sure she's not some sort of robot with a limited and uninspiring menu of options; she's pretty sure there's a lot of science fiction history that suggests even cyborgs can't have babies with perfect steady blue eyes and pale soft hair that puffs up with static on being touched.
Right?
She is, in fact, considering this again, absently, when the moment arrives.
It's brief, a video transmitted via means she doesn't understand (working out the method and the machinery will turn out to be the job for which she will eventually get the fucking Dyson award for innovation in design, and goddamn is that ever not what she saw her life looking like when she was twenty-three and deeply enough in love to ditch her birth control in deep space because it was peacetime and it damped her libido and watching George come was a good and valid reason to do anything in the galaxy, but she doesn't know that yet); she knows only in her gut that it's utterly, unfathomably, true.
She has seen--forty or so times now--the replays of everything, everything transmitted by Kelvin right up to the last shattered frame in which her husband died. She has seen the twisting image of a Romulan--and that they looked like Vulcans had been rumored but not quite confirmed and fuck, they do; she knows only a handful of the latter, and in her experience they are often disdainful, often deeply thoughtful, often brilliant, and never sly.
The first Romulan in the replays is sly, his manner either insane or devious (maybe both); the second is simply and undeniably seething with rage (and probably also insane). She's watched them over and over, for every detail of the men who killed George and for every detail of the ship which was so very technologically superior to anything they have. Eventually, she notices there is a shadow in the transmission records, from the period during which the Captain--Robau, not, as everyone keeps reminding her… her mind doesn't even like touching on this topic, so, well, it was Robau--was aboard the monster.
She's not, technically, in communications (though, also technically, the communications array is very much within the purview of Engineering), but the urge to do something useful has her prying at the replay like a madwoman--they think she is, and she knows it, but it keeps her functional, it and tiny baby Jim (James. Jamie, maybe she'll call him, to distinguish from her dad) with his wide blue eyes and the hands that curl over his ears as he sleeps, as though he's eternally shutting out the sound of her screams. She feels sort of guilty about that, but he's an easy baby, they keep telling her, and he sleeps as she picks at clarifying the transmission record--until she can see the secondary image: the rest of Robau's transmission, the distorted and static-washed picture (hologram?) of someone named Spock.
Federation Security, she is eventually told upon reaching the safety of Hood, which has strained every system it has to come pick them up before life support fails, precludes any of her 'altered' images ever being released, but it doesn't matter. She's seen them. Hood's medical staff review her records and speak with K,Shlaa regarding birth trauma, post-partum recovery, and her status, and then they take her work and set it aside, and task her to assisting with the remote monitoring of the warp field generators. It's easy work, light duty, so she can bond with her son, and on the one hand, she appreciates the effort, because it isn't as though Starfleet is exactly set up for infants on starships. On the other hand, she's bored beyond belief, and she wants to know more about this Spock. About Nero, and Ayel, and what it was about Robau that enraged them (him? Perhaps it was only Nero) so. She plays the images in her head over and over, looking for details as baby Jamie suckles and wraps his fingers over the curve of his ear, as though he's aware her thoughts all focus on men whose features are different just there, specifically.
And then she's back in Iowa, trying to explain to her mother and George's mother, who have six hundred questions about George and about Jamie and about what she will do now, and it's enough to make a sane woman mad, and right now, Winona isn't quite sure--almost, but not completely--that she's fully sane, regardless of what Hood's doctor put kindly (gently, as though she were fragile, and maybe she is) in her records.
It is literally the next week, seven days after her arrival and twenty-two after what the stoic refer to as the incident, that the transmission arrives. It is brief--barely two and a half minutes--and delivered with the sober demeanor she has seen in Starfleet's handful of Vulcan envoys, and it is spoken by the same man whose whereabouts Nero sought.
She's sitting in the kitchen, wireless holographic projector partially disassembled on the table before her, when the message arrives. It's just dumb luck, she thinks at first, that the functioning components are the projector, the sound, and the sound recording. There will be no video playback, but it occurs to her promptly that she has to capture the sound if she can, so she presses the button.
Winona, I am Spock, the man says.
She knew that, but this is when she presses the button.
Forgive what must seem to be uncharacteristic bluntness and familiarity, but time is short, and in my timeline, we have met. If my calculations are correct, Nero has just torn apart your life; I have just watched him tear apart many more, a quarter-century in your future. Before he did, he described plans so horrible I must make an effort to stop his further endeavors; that he has carried out the first stage suggests he was not bluffing.
And so, I turn to you. I have nothing but a single transmission device, a degraded but dilithium-based power cell, and an unfortunately incomplete memory of a recent--to me--schematic involving time dilation effects and warp-aided wormhole transmission. My emotional state does not bear exploring, but I cannot risk explaining further because beyond what I am about to propose, additional alterations to the timeline in which I now find myself would surely be unwise.
My only hope--and my window of opportunity may be escaping even as I speak but I have not thought of a better approach--is to create circumstances under which Jim rises to the position of captain more quickly than he ever could have in the timeline whence I come, in order that he might be a in a position to change what is happening; thus, I appeal to you. I have the capacity to send this one message and nothing more, and I must guess where and when you are likely to be. You and I have discussed your love of and comfort in machinery, and you must, by now, be somewhere taking apart something that will catch this message; if not I must rely on the fact that you usually have one or two somewhere picking up transmissions. But in impressing upon you the urgency of circumstance, I digress.
I am uncertain how to express what must happen, but if Nero is to be stopped, I can think of no man more likely to defeat him than James Tiberius Kirk. In short, he must become harder, smarter, readier to take action than he ever was in my timeline; this seems impossible, because the Jim I knew was nothing if not brilliant and aggressive in diplomacy and in action.
Teach him, Winona. It pains me to say this, but if he is to succeed, you, or someone, must teach him not only the ways of the diplomat and the soldier, but every sneaky, dirty, underhanded trick there is. Must teach him to fight, and to win, and to do it when he's so young it seems impossible he could bear the strain, and do it without explaining to him why he needs to be this man. It--everything depends on how well he is prepared.
The power in this cell is falling to the point at which I must attempt to send this, so I shall count on your understanding. You cannot tell him, but you must give him the tools, Winona, and the motivation, some way, any way, to--
It's a moment before she realizes the transmission must have sent itself when the power reached a certain level. It's another before she tumbles to the fact that this Vulcan just performed an insane and unprecedented act of engineering genius in order to send a desperate warning.
To her.
Jim, she thinks. Spock, the Spock Nero wanted, knows her Jim.
Clearly she can't call him Jamie, then.
Her dad will laugh at the addition of Tiberius to jazz up plain old Jim. George would, too, regardless of the worstness of the name.
She copies the audio file twice--once on the player and again on her padd--then replays it.
By the time Ja--Jim. Jimmy, for now. By the time he fusses, she's started a list, and all right, it's more than a little nuts to be seriously considering preparing her newborn for a life that leads to, to what, a shoot-out with a crazed Romulan? based on the say-so of, evidently, a time-traveling, perhaps dimension-hopping, Vulcan old enough to be her great-grandfather, but she just… believes him.
It feels not unlike believing George, and although she's entirely aware she's still grieving (the textbooks say this will be true for a long time, and there will be stages), the plans that are unfolding in her mind feel right, and also true.
And good.
She says (almost) as much to her mother, when she has a bag packed for her and another for Jimmy. She needs to take a little break, think about life, think about what she's going to do now. She's retired, technically; loss of spouse in service gets her a pension and she's twenty-fucking-four years old and the pension isn't much but she just needs to start. Start something.
When she says she's leaving for a while, her mother thinks she's gone stark raving mad, which is why she doesn't say a damn thing about familiar Vulcans and time-bending transmissions; it's also why both the copies of the file on the projector are locked to her, and why the padd's going with them.
And why she knows she's going to delete them all soon.
She can't teach Jimmy anything yet, but she can go get started on acquiring skills in trickery and dirty fighting, and by the end of the third day, she's in the seat of the old car George spent the previous summer restoring. Jimmy's still quiet, observant, eyes huge, fingers in his mouth as they drive away in a cloud of dust the next morning, heading south because a dartboard said so.
Plans, when one is trying to stop a future maniac, require a certain number of random elements, she tells herself.
Also, she likes the morning sun on her face as she drives.
--
It turns out, it's a shitload easier still to find what you need, no questions asked, south of the border. Winona's Spanish kind of sucks, but it gets the job done, and all in all, it's probably actually a benefit to Jimmy that Emilio's sister is happy to watch (and talk to) him alongside her Alejo, who is just a month older. It leaves Winona undistracted while Emilio teaches her everything there is to know about quantum resonance and applied temporal dynamics. Well, not everything, but everything there is on the street, and all in all, she thinks for purposes of applied mechanics, this is probably a better education for Jimmy than anything she could have pulled off with the best schools. Better for him, not better objectively.
She wonders, sometimes, whether she's just batshit insane, whether she tripped off into some half-life when George died and everything's a dream. She wonders whether she ought to simply tap into her account (she does, periodically, between locations, often enough to prevent any frustrating inquiries into whether she's alive, but that's not how she generally pays her tuition. It's easier to keep everything under the table if she isn't Winona, isn't George Kirk's widow, and isn't learning all this stuff because a Vulcan who is currently about six years old sent her word from a future which is his past. So, she pays the obvious ways, with sex or with odd jobs. It's mostly pretty all right.
Jimmy babbles happily at her in the evening, his R's rolling better than hers ever will as he yammers about stray gatos and delicious tortillas in a developing pidgin all his own.
He calls Juanita abuela, which is a little surprising, but then, Juanita is nearly fifteen years older than Winona, and has three teenagers as well. Winona wonders briefly whether Alejo is in fact her grandchild, but then, it doesn't matter.
When Emilio starts asking questions--starts asking her to stay and offering to take care of them, wanting to know what it is she's got in mind--it's time to go. It has been for a while, because she's exhausted his knowledge of the subject, but all in all, he isn't a bad guy, and she thinks she deserves at least a few days, or maybe weeks, of being cared for.
But not a few months.
--
Daryl is not good at taking care of her, but he is a lot of fun--goofy and unrestrained in a way she's forgotten how to be, if she ever knew. It's not that she was never a teenager, but then, maybe it is; by the time she turned fifteen she had her sights set on Starfleet, and she was careful not to do anything stupid enough to complicate her admission.
Here, every day is an adventure, which shouldn’t really be possible in Bumfuck, Idaho. It's not that she's not acquiring--and letting Jimmy acquire--all sorts of useful things from wilderness survival (plant identification both for food and for avoidance of toxins; creation of stable and warm shelter from natural elements; avoidance of predators and tracking of prey). She finds it a bit odd, on the one hand, that there are still people who live this life, because honestly there's very little reason to believe that there will be such a cataclysm that it will be necessary; however, not a day goes by that she doesn't remember grave, desperate Spock. She has no idea what tools Jimmy will need, and anything might be the key.
Of course it's absurd. This life is absurd. Her faith is absurd, and hers alone. She's never said a word to anyone, and she knows there are a lot of people who worry about her, and about Jimmy. She sends periodic messages that can't be traced--she remembers a lot about relevant comm tech, and has picked up a handful of extra tidbits in the past five years, as well--in an effort to alleviate their concerns, and does what she knows she has to for her son. It's still a weird life, and not the one she had envisioned for herself and George and maybe a couple more babies, but it's the right one.
That's almost enough to ease the niggle about keeping George's only child away from the Kirks. It can't be helped, but she's not thrilled about it.
Speaking of worrying, she actually worries quite a bit herself about Daryl's light-heartedness. Many of his friends are isolationist and suspicious, and he doesn't fit with them very well, but he gets along, and he's never mean the way some of them are. She's glad he's who she threw in with, out of this lot, and keeps in mind that he's young, and that maybe he's one of those that will eventually separate himself from his past. She knows it can be done.
Regardless, Jimmy thinks the camping is great fun, and he likes the knots and traps and climbing ancient oak and pine trees, his legs and fingers no longer chubby and now clever and limber as he helps and occasionally hinders Daryl.
That part, at least, she knows is good for him.
--
The only things they get out of their five months in Pennsylvania are a good working knowledge of animal husbandry, and the clear sense that it doesn't matter whether Winona herself consents and so does William; William's community does not, outside of some very specific circumstances.
That's not the whole reason they leave, because William makes it perfectly clear he will stand up for himself if he thinks he needs to, and he's twice old enough to know his own mind.
Jimmy, naturally, comes away also with a slew of new words learned in William's house (Dutch and German, more or less, though she's pretty sure there's a lot of drift from the tongues as they were spoken in the time these people are mostly frozen in) and a new appreciation for freshly-churned real butter.
And a fairly horrifying allergic reaction to cedar shavings, as William is showing him how to whittle. The Amish avoid modern medicine, and while a part of Winona says they never would have survived all these years if their own medicines weren't worthwhile, it's always in her mind that Jimmy has what might be called a destiny (which sounds pompous even in her own head). And he's her only baby. She takes him to a more modern clinic (one which serves the uninsured and still takes cash) and leaves the state the same night as he sleeps in the back seat.
--
"Mom? Mom!"
Winona scrubs a hand across her face and pushes up the visor on her gear. "Yeah?" The seam she's welding cools and fades as she turns to see Jimmy, blond hair lit up around his head as he stands in the doorway with the afternoon sun behind him.
"Carlos is a douchey motherfucker."
"James Tiberius--"
"Well, he is. And you would know, wouldn't you, being the relevant mother?"
She meets his gaze and ignores the implication. "Fine, but you're not quite nine years old, and that mouth is going to get you in trouble."
Jimmy comes closer, mouth set petulantly--no. Well, yes, but it's also swollen, and apparently that mouth already did get him in trouble. She purses her lips. Carlos has always been a little rough with both of them, but he's getting worse. Maybe it's time to move on.
She glances back at the stasis field generator. It's not really stable, but she doesn't think there's a lot more for Carlos to teach her, and she can teach Jimmy just as well somewhere else. She powers it down. "So, what'd you say to him?" she asks casually.
"Nothin'"
"I can see how well that worked for you." It hurts her stomach to let him get knocked around, but she can't think of another interpretation for Spock's words, than that Jimmy, her baby Jimmy that still puts his hand up to cup his ear as he sleeps even now, has to have a good head and a major chip on his shoulders. She's not sure how the fuck she's going to convince him he needs Starfleet, but thankfully she has some years to work on that. She picks up the cold unit and the welding torch because Carlos definitely owes her that much, and puts both in the trunk of George's car.
Maybe it's time to go home to Iowa for a while. Time to take a little break.
Time to show Jimmy what a normal family is like.
He'll probably resent it, but that's all to the good, right?
--
Frank is sweet at first, greeting her at the grocery store two weeks after she's back, and she remembers him from the first day of sixth grade. She'd just turned ten, and was determined not to make her mother worry so she definitely wasn't telling anyone about the issue with the decrepit old lockers, but Frank, a big seventh-grader (older then her, but also just plain big, his hands practically double the size of hers had appeared at her side after school and shown her how to smack the thing just so with the side of her closed fist.
It's funny, that her most specific memory of the man she's sleeping with (after nearly a twenty-year separation, a marriage, a child, and a long unfinished adventure, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have memories from before that are relevant to the now) is how he helped her by teaching her to hit something. Maybe he has something to teach Jimmy anyway, just like all the rest of them.
He's not beating her (or Jimmy), and she has no reason to think he will, though she could be wrong. He is, she supposes, a bit explosive verbally, but then, he works in a call center; he has every reason to wind up pissed off by the incredible boredom of each day.
And he's way better than Carlos, and her parents like him.
She hasn't abandoned her plan, by any means; she's going to stay here for a couple of years and then she and Jimmy will hit the road again.
Except a year goes by before she knows it, and eight months of that have included Frank living at the house with them (and she really didn't mean for that to happen, and her folks are just so damn glad they're here.
She watches Jimmy take apart a phase restrictor (it's at least four generations out of date, but the concepts are still valid), and thinks about how to move on again. Taking him away again, now that he's got grandparents and a home that he has every reason to think is real (it's not like she can tell him it's like every other time)… that's going to be hard.
It's another four months before the obvious solution occurs to her. Jimmy can stay here, with her parents and Frank. And the Kirks, though she may have fucked that relationship up beyond recognition. She can go back out, on a shuttle or on a ship, out into the black. Her official skills are a little rusty, but she can certainly still pass a proficiency exam, and the admiralty will buy that after more than ten years, she's bored; she'll use the same reason that got her the pension in the first place as a good reason she should go out on short assignments.
Jimmy has what might politely be described as a tantrum, when she tells him, but fuck, this has to be better for him than continuing to drag him up and down the Americas six months or ten at a time.
When she receives a transmission from him in the midst of her third brief assignment--immediately after one from Frank describing the incident and assuring her that aside from impressive scrapes and bruises, he's all right and in much better shape than that car--the fury in his eyes and voice, which he isn't even trying to hide despite that she's certain her mother is in the room and chiding softly, it occurs to her that this, too, is serving Spock's ends, making him angry at even her.
That hurts, and she spends a long hour after the transmission ends half-praying (it isn't that she's convinced of the existence of any God, because that leaves Kelvin unexplainable because she isn't interested in believing in a God that lets that sort of rupture in time--has to be an abomination, right?--go on, but she does believe in hope) that she isn't crazy, and Spock isn't wrong. Won't be wrong. Wasn't… She never knows in what tense to refer to the timeline problem, but she's never learned not to stumble over it. It doesn't matter, anyway; time itself isn't particularly interested in tense.
Finally, she takes a breath and composes a letter to the admiralty. She has two days' liberty upcoming, but afterward, she hopes they have a more substantial assignment for her. She considers her words for a few minutes, then adds some bullshit about how she understands they might be unable to find as short-term an assignment as she'd like, but that she's willing to be flexible about that. They have something for her the next day; her less formally-learned skills are serving her very, very well.
In that two days of liberty, she marries Frank because short hops are one thing, but deep space is fucking dangerous and she can't take Spock's directive so far as to actually risk Jimmy ending up in one of the 'fleet orphanages.
When she goes back up, she gets weekly reports from Frank and her mother about the scrapes (daily and sometimes hourly) Jimmy gets into. They make her a little nuts, because Christ, she's raised a mad genius with a penchant for adrenaline and very little sense of any sort of chain of command, but the variety of ways in which he gets into hot water, in school and sometimes in police custody, make her a little proud, too. It's perverse, but there it is.
It's occurred to her many times that if a rupture in time is an abomination, then her efforts to force Jimmy's life into a cadence and shape it never should have borne is abominable as well, but she thinks, or at least justifies, that this is the sort of leap of faith which, once taken, isn't to be stepped back from.
Jim's anger, and his brilliance, feed her faith.
--
It's completely by accident that Winona becomes aware that there are four separate dissertations on what is typically referred to as the Kelvin Incident in the academy library. She's sort of startled to think it's been fifteen years and of course there are, because this is exactly the sort of thing that gets taught and pored over and kicked back and forth for educational purposes. Once she knows they're there, she's surprised she hadn't expected it, and she can't help herself. She has to read them.
Two are by pure academics. They're about theory and war, about the psychology of Romulans (bullshit, she thinks. It wasn't that Nero was Romulan; it was that he was insane. Although maybe it takes less, psychologically, to bring a Romulan to that point than a human. Or, maybe it takes more. In any case, both academics need some seat time that isn't in a simulator, because she seriously doubts he was a representative sample). She moves on to the other two papers.
One is by a man named Pike, whose interest is in how it came to be that Kelvin went in alone (because there was no fucking warning, obviously, and no real opportunity to wait for backup; any ship that had found itself less than three light years from a fucking lightning storm in space would have gone to investigate). She reads a little further and realizes he knows that, that his thesis was that until it's possible for them to develop and deploy the kind of shielding and warp capacity to stand up to something much worse than any damage they expect to see, perhaps even research vessels ought to go out in pods of a sort, not to the same systems, but in closer range to help each other in crises. His position is that because research vessels are often alone, more of them are lost than they should be, and that means often the research they were doing is also compromised. She shrugs. All right, so he's not an idiot. She looks at the fourth paper, which is by someone interested in the technical and computer specifications of the Romulan vessel. His theory, based on Ayel's question about the stardate, is that the Romulan homeworld has an outpost of which the Federation is completely unaware, where they've been manipulating the passage of time in order to progress more quickly than his cohort could possibly keep up.
She wonders whether she might have eventually come to such a conclusion herself about the oddness of the question, but she thinks not. She doesn't think he adequately considers the topic of why they wouldn't for one thing be aware of the rate of difference for their own facility in the first place, and for another thing have simply checked on their own--it hardly seems likely they emerged from a secret base and were so pissed off they needed to stab someone with a trident.
Unless the base itself or its technology confers madness. Which is not what Spock implied, but that's not information this fellow Daystrom has access to.
She checks out of curiosity to see whether either of the two are on active duty; Daystrom's working for an institute, maybe one he's founded himself, but Pike has been captain of Yorktown for three years. She frowns and tries to recall whether she's met him. She thinks not.
Interesting. The image in his official file looks like someone who's got charisma over steel, and based on the date of the dissertation, he has to have made captain ridiculously fast.
She checks the paper copy of the dissertation out of the library, just to look through it a little more carefully. Someone like that, she--and Jimmy--can learn from, and while that wouldn't (couldn't, for several reasons) be the way things were with Carlos or Daryl or any of the others, maybe it's worth trying to wangle a post.
--
When Jim doesn't do anything--not Starfleet, not college, not any legal and regular job--by the time he's twenty, Winona thinks there's a decent chance she's failed.
Or that she's been delusional all along, or that a better solution was found, or that Spock was wrong.
A Spock, one in whom she can see the old man of the image in her mind's eye, maybe (the image is faded, and it feels like a hundred years since she saw it on Hood's screens and over her own kitchen table), is a student at the academy, having enrolled amid some kind of upset with his father the ambassador, and she wonders whether he contacted himself at some point, whether this is the backup plan.
Or whether Jim is the backup plan.
Either way, it kills her a little to think it was all for naught, maybe, but if Jim's to be captain so very young as Spock intimated he would have to be, the calendar suggests he'd have to have started on that path by now.
After a few more months, she takes retirement (for real this time, the pension her own), and chooses not to return to Iowa. Jim hates her, Frank is three years past giving up on her, her parents are certain she's nuts, and if this is all going to lead to some sort of apocalypse anyway, then she'd rather retire to Hawaii and take up surfing. She's still fit, but she's tired, and a focus that's miles from anything about angry Romulans is welcome.
It's definitely late enough in the game that it can't matter, right?
She sends Jim quarterly invitations to join her, along with the customary bits and pieces she can't help teaching him after all this time. He doesn't ever take her up on it, and she has no idea whether he tinkers with the puzzles and ideas like he did when he was five and six, and even when he was thirteen and furious.
She wonders if he's kept up the mishmash of improbable skills, and if so, to what end.
Sometimes, she thinks the reason she didn't return to Iowa was that she just couldn't stand to watch her failure demonstrate itself over and over again, to watch him get into it with every imaginable opponent including the local police without any useful outcome. She's not sure how it is that of all the things he did learn, how to not get busted isn't one of them, but he's resistant on that front, and she doesn't see it changing.
--
Jim doesn't tell her, when, two years into that retirement, Pike finally recruits him into Starfleet. She eventually hears generalities from Pike himself, but what he has to say isn't much; the man is circumspect without being secretive, which has always suggested good things about him--not that that ever meant she told him what Jim's unusual childhood was all about, nor that she even offered clues. He merely says that Jim has been persuaded that he can be more than his father was.
That framing makes her cringe, but this has never been about her, so she lets it go. Jim's at the end of his first semester by the time word gets to her, and evidently demonstrating all the power of the brain hardly anyone but her has ever seen.
She wasn't even entirely sure he'd ever taken the entrance tests; clearly it's just another thing they didn't talk about. It serves her right.
The first letter she sends him at school (with tips on astronav calculus variables) goes unanswered.
The second gets back a short transmission--an actual image, not just voice, though it's not in real time--and even thought she's been hard as nails for a long time, tears spring to her eyes when she sees the spark of interest, genuine and only a little bit clouded and guarded. He's doing well. He's doing very well. He can do this.
That he has the green remains of a monster black eye and evidence of a healing split lip only goes to show the rest of who he is is unchanged, which makes a smile tug at the corners of her mouth. It doesn't even matter what he says (though yes, she saves the file and listens to it roughly a hundred more times). It only matters that he's thriving.
--
The news of the attack on Vulcan--well, the natural disaster, but Winona just knows--comes weeks before Jim is due to graduate, and Winona feels sick. So close.
And then the story starts changing hour by hour: the fleet is diverting from exercises. The student fleet went out to offer aid. Vulcan has been evacuated. Vulcan has been destroyed. Refugees are coming. No one got away. The student fleet is devastated. The main fleet is devastated. The attacker has vanished again. The attacker is heading for Earth.
Winona turns off the news feeds and goes outside to watch the sun set. Perhaps in a few hours the story will have clarified.
She remembers herself at Jim's age, when patience was not only not one of her virtues, but was a skill she thought she had no hope of learning. It just goes to show, she thinks wryly. You never know.
She waits until long after midnight, when the ocean is lit with millions of glints of setting moonlight, then goes back in to see what the net has learned.
Toward dawn, between one word and the next, the transmission stutters and skips, and then before it dies entirely, there is one image of the ship.
It turns out twenty-five years isn't long enough, by at least an order of magnitude, between sightings of that thing. Winona stares in fascinated horror, then nods to herself. The fleet is out there, and if anyone can stop this, it's Jim.
He is where he is supposed to be, somehow.
Sleep is impossible, and self-distraction seems disrespectful, so she gets out a file full of clippings, only gathered since her retirement, regarding the life she and Jim have led. If this goes the way it's supposed to, she thinks there's a decent chance the Spock who contacted her all those years ago may be interested, and she might as well get organized.
--
"Winona."
She turns at the familiar voice. It's been well over twenty years since she last heard it, since she deleted the message she can still hear in her memory. "Spock."
He sits on the bench next to her and smiles broadly, odd for a Vulcan, but she's learned he's a half-breed and one that served for decades with humans. Perhaps he's learned, or perhaps he simply isn't like other Vulcans. "There are no words in any language I know for how remote was my hope," he says. "If you were any other woman, or Jim any other man--"
"We almost didn't make it."
"Jim was not the captain, and yet, everything came together." He shrugs slightly. "When he and I met--this iteration of him, that is--I was quite surprised at his rank. His lack of rank. I fear I may have manipulated him slightly."
"Is that so?" Winona isn't sure what to make of the sensation in her belly, which is somewhere between hope realized, fear underscored, and pride left to grow. "Perhaps you should see someone about your need to control the direction of the galaxy."
It comes out tarter than she means it to, mostly because somewhere in there her throat has gone shaky and her knees have gone weak. She starts to try to clarify, but he chuckles. "Perhaps I should," he agrees.
She doesn't know any other Vulcans who laugh. Suddenly his uniqueness comforts her. She's been alone on an unspoken path for a long, long time, and here is the only person who knows it. She blinks back the slight burn in her eyes and swallows. "I thought I'd blown it," she says. "He was twenty, and nowhere near the academy. Nowhere near Starfleet. I didn't know if I'd pushed too hard, made him too resistant to authority…"
"Yes, I saw," Spock says. At her quizzical look, he adds, "In order to explain my identity to him, a meld was required. In it, a great deal of who he is, and what made him, bled through." He pauses. "It was, indeed, a close call. However, it was the correct close call. I could not have asked for more."
She has no idea what to say to that.
After a pause, he continues. "The duration of my wait, between the sending of the message and the arrival of Jim literally on my doorstep, was sixteen-point-two-two hours."
"Fuck. Shit, sorry."
"No, I appreciate the sentiment. For you, it was a quarter-century of uncertainty." He looks at her closely. "I am sorry, to have asked it of you."
She shakes her head. "Don't be."
They remain for a while, looking out at the repairs being made to the Bay Bridge, and then she asks, "Does he know?"
"I did not tell him."
She nods. "Then I think we should both--all--just go on, as though this was the way the world was meant to be."
"I concur." He turns to face her. "If, however, you eventually find you wish for me to help you forget--"
She shakes her head, and he stops. The offer is made, and she won't ever take him up on it.
The clock chimes noon, and she has somewhere to be. Her son (her whole, healthy, basically happy son) and a few friends are having lunch, and to her great surprise, she's invited. She nods at Spock one more time, and stands to go.
He remains, watching the ocean as though he sees something from another life.
She wonders what it is, and hopes it's a memory he's glad to keep, but she doesn't ask (about that, or any of the hundred questions she has about her other life, or how to send a message back in time to exactly the right place and moment), and walks away.
I originally posted this at http://florahart.dreamwidth.org/1029268.html, and you are welcome to comment there. OpenID and/or anon comments are allowed.
Characters: Winona, Jim, Spock
Rating: PG13 for language and the supposition of violence, but gen.
Words: ~6700
Summary: Winona gets a message from an old friend she's never met, and Jim's life changes again.
A/N: So, after a few (or possibly several) watchings of the Reboot movie, it occurred to me to wonder why Spock Prime, who knows what year it is (evidence: he tells Jim in the meld how many years in the future he came from), and who has no reason to think Jim would beat his own TOS 'verse record for youngness of attaining captaincy, is surprised to learn he is not the captain. Then I got to thinking about what in Jim's life must have been different, to spur the changes that would make it possible for him to have been the captain Spock Prime expected, and wondering how Spock Prime could have attempted to force that additional change in the timeline. Thanks to people who listened to me whine about this for the last couple of weeks, and
lauriegilbert and
inell for reading for sense and commas. If this reminds you of another SciFi canon, it's supposed to.
Secondary Adjustment
The day Winona receives the message is the day her nascent plans all change. Or would, if she had the slightest claim to anything so involved as a plan; really what she has is inertia and habit.
And a new baby, which is the only thing that makes her sure she's not some sort of robot with a limited and uninspiring menu of options; she's pretty sure there's a lot of science fiction history that suggests even cyborgs can't have babies with perfect steady blue eyes and pale soft hair that puffs up with static on being touched.
Right?
She is, in fact, considering this again, absently, when the moment arrives.
It's brief, a video transmitted via means she doesn't understand (working out the method and the machinery will turn out to be the job for which she will eventually get the fucking Dyson award for innovation in design, and goddamn is that ever not what she saw her life looking like when she was twenty-three and deeply enough in love to ditch her birth control in deep space because it was peacetime and it damped her libido and watching George come was a good and valid reason to do anything in the galaxy, but she doesn't know that yet); she knows only in her gut that it's utterly, unfathomably, true.
She has seen--forty or so times now--the replays of everything, everything transmitted by Kelvin right up to the last shattered frame in which her husband died. She has seen the twisting image of a Romulan--and that they looked like Vulcans had been rumored but not quite confirmed and fuck, they do; she knows only a handful of the latter, and in her experience they are often disdainful, often deeply thoughtful, often brilliant, and never sly.
The first Romulan in the replays is sly, his manner either insane or devious (maybe both); the second is simply and undeniably seething with rage (and probably also insane). She's watched them over and over, for every detail of the men who killed George and for every detail of the ship which was so very technologically superior to anything they have. Eventually, she notices there is a shadow in the transmission records, from the period during which the Captain--Robau, not, as everyone keeps reminding her… her mind doesn't even like touching on this topic, so, well, it was Robau--was aboard the monster.
She's not, technically, in communications (though, also technically, the communications array is very much within the purview of Engineering), but the urge to do something useful has her prying at the replay like a madwoman--they think she is, and she knows it, but it keeps her functional, it and tiny baby Jim (James. Jamie, maybe she'll call him, to distinguish from her dad) with his wide blue eyes and the hands that curl over his ears as he sleeps, as though he's eternally shutting out the sound of her screams. She feels sort of guilty about that, but he's an easy baby, they keep telling her, and he sleeps as she picks at clarifying the transmission record--until she can see the secondary image: the rest of Robau's transmission, the distorted and static-washed picture (hologram?) of someone named Spock.
Federation Security, she is eventually told upon reaching the safety of Hood, which has strained every system it has to come pick them up before life support fails, precludes any of her 'altered' images ever being released, but it doesn't matter. She's seen them. Hood's medical staff review her records and speak with K,Shlaa regarding birth trauma, post-partum recovery, and her status, and then they take her work and set it aside, and task her to assisting with the remote monitoring of the warp field generators. It's easy work, light duty, so she can bond with her son, and on the one hand, she appreciates the effort, because it isn't as though Starfleet is exactly set up for infants on starships. On the other hand, she's bored beyond belief, and she wants to know more about this Spock. About Nero, and Ayel, and what it was about Robau that enraged them (him? Perhaps it was only Nero) so. She plays the images in her head over and over, looking for details as baby Jamie suckles and wraps his fingers over the curve of his ear, as though he's aware her thoughts all focus on men whose features are different just there, specifically.
And then she's back in Iowa, trying to explain to her mother and George's mother, who have six hundred questions about George and about Jamie and about what she will do now, and it's enough to make a sane woman mad, and right now, Winona isn't quite sure--almost, but not completely--that she's fully sane, regardless of what Hood's doctor put kindly (gently, as though she were fragile, and maybe she is) in her records.
It is literally the next week, seven days after her arrival and twenty-two after what the stoic refer to as the incident, that the transmission arrives. It is brief--barely two and a half minutes--and delivered with the sober demeanor she has seen in Starfleet's handful of Vulcan envoys, and it is spoken by the same man whose whereabouts Nero sought.
She's sitting in the kitchen, wireless holographic projector partially disassembled on the table before her, when the message arrives. It's just dumb luck, she thinks at first, that the functioning components are the projector, the sound, and the sound recording. There will be no video playback, but it occurs to her promptly that she has to capture the sound if she can, so she presses the button.
Winona, I am Spock, the man says.
She knew that, but this is when she presses the button.
Forgive what must seem to be uncharacteristic bluntness and familiarity, but time is short, and in my timeline, we have met. If my calculations are correct, Nero has just torn apart your life; I have just watched him tear apart many more, a quarter-century in your future. Before he did, he described plans so horrible I must make an effort to stop his further endeavors; that he has carried out the first stage suggests he was not bluffing.
And so, I turn to you. I have nothing but a single transmission device, a degraded but dilithium-based power cell, and an unfortunately incomplete memory of a recent--to me--schematic involving time dilation effects and warp-aided wormhole transmission. My emotional state does not bear exploring, but I cannot risk explaining further because beyond what I am about to propose, additional alterations to the timeline in which I now find myself would surely be unwise.
My only hope--and my window of opportunity may be escaping even as I speak but I have not thought of a better approach--is to create circumstances under which Jim rises to the position of captain more quickly than he ever could have in the timeline whence I come, in order that he might be a in a position to change what is happening; thus, I appeal to you. I have the capacity to send this one message and nothing more, and I must guess where and when you are likely to be. You and I have discussed your love of and comfort in machinery, and you must, by now, be somewhere taking apart something that will catch this message; if not I must rely on the fact that you usually have one or two somewhere picking up transmissions. But in impressing upon you the urgency of circumstance, I digress.
I am uncertain how to express what must happen, but if Nero is to be stopped, I can think of no man more likely to defeat him than James Tiberius Kirk. In short, he must become harder, smarter, readier to take action than he ever was in my timeline; this seems impossible, because the Jim I knew was nothing if not brilliant and aggressive in diplomacy and in action.
Teach him, Winona. It pains me to say this, but if he is to succeed, you, or someone, must teach him not only the ways of the diplomat and the soldier, but every sneaky, dirty, underhanded trick there is. Must teach him to fight, and to win, and to do it when he's so young it seems impossible he could bear the strain, and do it without explaining to him why he needs to be this man. It--everything depends on how well he is prepared.
The power in this cell is falling to the point at which I must attempt to send this, so I shall count on your understanding. You cannot tell him, but you must give him the tools, Winona, and the motivation, some way, any way, to--
It's a moment before she realizes the transmission must have sent itself when the power reached a certain level. It's another before she tumbles to the fact that this Vulcan just performed an insane and unprecedented act of engineering genius in order to send a desperate warning.
To her.
Jim, she thinks. Spock, the Spock Nero wanted, knows her Jim.
Clearly she can't call him Jamie, then.
Her dad will laugh at the addition of Tiberius to jazz up plain old Jim. George would, too, regardless of the worstness of the name.
She copies the audio file twice--once on the player and again on her padd--then replays it.
By the time Ja--Jim. Jimmy, for now. By the time he fusses, she's started a list, and all right, it's more than a little nuts to be seriously considering preparing her newborn for a life that leads to, to what, a shoot-out with a crazed Romulan? based on the say-so of, evidently, a time-traveling, perhaps dimension-hopping, Vulcan old enough to be her great-grandfather, but she just… believes him.
It feels not unlike believing George, and although she's entirely aware she's still grieving (the textbooks say this will be true for a long time, and there will be stages), the plans that are unfolding in her mind feel right, and also true.
And good.
She says (almost) as much to her mother, when she has a bag packed for her and another for Jimmy. She needs to take a little break, think about life, think about what she's going to do now. She's retired, technically; loss of spouse in service gets her a pension and she's twenty-fucking-four years old and the pension isn't much but she just needs to start. Start something.
When she says she's leaving for a while, her mother thinks she's gone stark raving mad, which is why she doesn't say a damn thing about familiar Vulcans and time-bending transmissions; it's also why both the copies of the file on the projector are locked to her, and why the padd's going with them.
And why she knows she's going to delete them all soon.
She can't teach Jimmy anything yet, but she can go get started on acquiring skills in trickery and dirty fighting, and by the end of the third day, she's in the seat of the old car George spent the previous summer restoring. Jimmy's still quiet, observant, eyes huge, fingers in his mouth as they drive away in a cloud of dust the next morning, heading south because a dartboard said so.
Plans, when one is trying to stop a future maniac, require a certain number of random elements, she tells herself.
Also, she likes the morning sun on her face as she drives.
--
It turns out, it's a shitload easier still to find what you need, no questions asked, south of the border. Winona's Spanish kind of sucks, but it gets the job done, and all in all, it's probably actually a benefit to Jimmy that Emilio's sister is happy to watch (and talk to) him alongside her Alejo, who is just a month older. It leaves Winona undistracted while Emilio teaches her everything there is to know about quantum resonance and applied temporal dynamics. Well, not everything, but everything there is on the street, and all in all, she thinks for purposes of applied mechanics, this is probably a better education for Jimmy than anything she could have pulled off with the best schools. Better for him, not better objectively.
She wonders, sometimes, whether she's just batshit insane, whether she tripped off into some half-life when George died and everything's a dream. She wonders whether she ought to simply tap into her account (she does, periodically, between locations, often enough to prevent any frustrating inquiries into whether she's alive, but that's not how she generally pays her tuition. It's easier to keep everything under the table if she isn't Winona, isn't George Kirk's widow, and isn't learning all this stuff because a Vulcan who is currently about six years old sent her word from a future which is his past. So, she pays the obvious ways, with sex or with odd jobs. It's mostly pretty all right.
Jimmy babbles happily at her in the evening, his R's rolling better than hers ever will as he yammers about stray gatos and delicious tortillas in a developing pidgin all his own.
He calls Juanita abuela, which is a little surprising, but then, Juanita is nearly fifteen years older than Winona, and has three teenagers as well. Winona wonders briefly whether Alejo is in fact her grandchild, but then, it doesn't matter.
When Emilio starts asking questions--starts asking her to stay and offering to take care of them, wanting to know what it is she's got in mind--it's time to go. It has been for a while, because she's exhausted his knowledge of the subject, but all in all, he isn't a bad guy, and she thinks she deserves at least a few days, or maybe weeks, of being cared for.
But not a few months.
--
Daryl is not good at taking care of her, but he is a lot of fun--goofy and unrestrained in a way she's forgotten how to be, if she ever knew. It's not that she was never a teenager, but then, maybe it is; by the time she turned fifteen she had her sights set on Starfleet, and she was careful not to do anything stupid enough to complicate her admission.
Here, every day is an adventure, which shouldn’t really be possible in Bumfuck, Idaho. It's not that she's not acquiring--and letting Jimmy acquire--all sorts of useful things from wilderness survival (plant identification both for food and for avoidance of toxins; creation of stable and warm shelter from natural elements; avoidance of predators and tracking of prey). She finds it a bit odd, on the one hand, that there are still people who live this life, because honestly there's very little reason to believe that there will be such a cataclysm that it will be necessary; however, not a day goes by that she doesn't remember grave, desperate Spock. She has no idea what tools Jimmy will need, and anything might be the key.
Of course it's absurd. This life is absurd. Her faith is absurd, and hers alone. She's never said a word to anyone, and she knows there are a lot of people who worry about her, and about Jimmy. She sends periodic messages that can't be traced--she remembers a lot about relevant comm tech, and has picked up a handful of extra tidbits in the past five years, as well--in an effort to alleviate their concerns, and does what she knows she has to for her son. It's still a weird life, and not the one she had envisioned for herself and George and maybe a couple more babies, but it's the right one.
That's almost enough to ease the niggle about keeping George's only child away from the Kirks. It can't be helped, but she's not thrilled about it.
Speaking of worrying, she actually worries quite a bit herself about Daryl's light-heartedness. Many of his friends are isolationist and suspicious, and he doesn't fit with them very well, but he gets along, and he's never mean the way some of them are. She's glad he's who she threw in with, out of this lot, and keeps in mind that he's young, and that maybe he's one of those that will eventually separate himself from his past. She knows it can be done.
Regardless, Jimmy thinks the camping is great fun, and he likes the knots and traps and climbing ancient oak and pine trees, his legs and fingers no longer chubby and now clever and limber as he helps and occasionally hinders Daryl.
That part, at least, she knows is good for him.
--
The only things they get out of their five months in Pennsylvania are a good working knowledge of animal husbandry, and the clear sense that it doesn't matter whether Winona herself consents and so does William; William's community does not, outside of some very specific circumstances.
That's not the whole reason they leave, because William makes it perfectly clear he will stand up for himself if he thinks he needs to, and he's twice old enough to know his own mind.
Jimmy, naturally, comes away also with a slew of new words learned in William's house (Dutch and German, more or less, though she's pretty sure there's a lot of drift from the tongues as they were spoken in the time these people are mostly frozen in) and a new appreciation for freshly-churned real butter.
And a fairly horrifying allergic reaction to cedar shavings, as William is showing him how to whittle. The Amish avoid modern medicine, and while a part of Winona says they never would have survived all these years if their own medicines weren't worthwhile, it's always in her mind that Jimmy has what might be called a destiny (which sounds pompous even in her own head). And he's her only baby. She takes him to a more modern clinic (one which serves the uninsured and still takes cash) and leaves the state the same night as he sleeps in the back seat.
--
"Mom? Mom!"
Winona scrubs a hand across her face and pushes up the visor on her gear. "Yeah?" The seam she's welding cools and fades as she turns to see Jimmy, blond hair lit up around his head as he stands in the doorway with the afternoon sun behind him.
"Carlos is a douchey motherfucker."
"James Tiberius--"
"Well, he is. And you would know, wouldn't you, being the relevant mother?"
She meets his gaze and ignores the implication. "Fine, but you're not quite nine years old, and that mouth is going to get you in trouble."
Jimmy comes closer, mouth set petulantly--no. Well, yes, but it's also swollen, and apparently that mouth already did get him in trouble. She purses her lips. Carlos has always been a little rough with both of them, but he's getting worse. Maybe it's time to move on.
She glances back at the stasis field generator. It's not really stable, but she doesn't think there's a lot more for Carlos to teach her, and she can teach Jimmy just as well somewhere else. She powers it down. "So, what'd you say to him?" she asks casually.
"Nothin'"
"I can see how well that worked for you." It hurts her stomach to let him get knocked around, but she can't think of another interpretation for Spock's words, than that Jimmy, her baby Jimmy that still puts his hand up to cup his ear as he sleeps even now, has to have a good head and a major chip on his shoulders. She's not sure how the fuck she's going to convince him he needs Starfleet, but thankfully she has some years to work on that. She picks up the cold unit and the welding torch because Carlos definitely owes her that much, and puts both in the trunk of George's car.
Maybe it's time to go home to Iowa for a while. Time to take a little break.
Time to show Jimmy what a normal family is like.
He'll probably resent it, but that's all to the good, right?
--
Frank is sweet at first, greeting her at the grocery store two weeks after she's back, and she remembers him from the first day of sixth grade. She'd just turned ten, and was determined not to make her mother worry so she definitely wasn't telling anyone about the issue with the decrepit old lockers, but Frank, a big seventh-grader (older then her, but also just plain big, his hands practically double the size of hers had appeared at her side after school and shown her how to smack the thing just so with the side of her closed fist.
It's funny, that her most specific memory of the man she's sleeping with (after nearly a twenty-year separation, a marriage, a child, and a long unfinished adventure, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have memories from before that are relevant to the now) is how he helped her by teaching her to hit something. Maybe he has something to teach Jimmy anyway, just like all the rest of them.
He's not beating her (or Jimmy), and she has no reason to think he will, though she could be wrong. He is, she supposes, a bit explosive verbally, but then, he works in a call center; he has every reason to wind up pissed off by the incredible boredom of each day.
And he's way better than Carlos, and her parents like him.
She hasn't abandoned her plan, by any means; she's going to stay here for a couple of years and then she and Jimmy will hit the road again.
Except a year goes by before she knows it, and eight months of that have included Frank living at the house with them (and she really didn't mean for that to happen, and her folks are just so damn glad they're here.
She watches Jimmy take apart a phase restrictor (it's at least four generations out of date, but the concepts are still valid), and thinks about how to move on again. Taking him away again, now that he's got grandparents and a home that he has every reason to think is real (it's not like she can tell him it's like every other time)… that's going to be hard.
It's another four months before the obvious solution occurs to her. Jimmy can stay here, with her parents and Frank. And the Kirks, though she may have fucked that relationship up beyond recognition. She can go back out, on a shuttle or on a ship, out into the black. Her official skills are a little rusty, but she can certainly still pass a proficiency exam, and the admiralty will buy that after more than ten years, she's bored; she'll use the same reason that got her the pension in the first place as a good reason she should go out on short assignments.
Jimmy has what might politely be described as a tantrum, when she tells him, but fuck, this has to be better for him than continuing to drag him up and down the Americas six months or ten at a time.
When she receives a transmission from him in the midst of her third brief assignment--immediately after one from Frank describing the incident and assuring her that aside from impressive scrapes and bruises, he's all right and in much better shape than that car--the fury in his eyes and voice, which he isn't even trying to hide despite that she's certain her mother is in the room and chiding softly, it occurs to her that this, too, is serving Spock's ends, making him angry at even her.
That hurts, and she spends a long hour after the transmission ends half-praying (it isn't that she's convinced of the existence of any God, because that leaves Kelvin unexplainable because she isn't interested in believing in a God that lets that sort of rupture in time--has to be an abomination, right?--go on, but she does believe in hope) that she isn't crazy, and Spock isn't wrong. Won't be wrong. Wasn't… She never knows in what tense to refer to the timeline problem, but she's never learned not to stumble over it. It doesn't matter, anyway; time itself isn't particularly interested in tense.
Finally, she takes a breath and composes a letter to the admiralty. She has two days' liberty upcoming, but afterward, she hopes they have a more substantial assignment for her. She considers her words for a few minutes, then adds some bullshit about how she understands they might be unable to find as short-term an assignment as she'd like, but that she's willing to be flexible about that. They have something for her the next day; her less formally-learned skills are serving her very, very well.
In that two days of liberty, she marries Frank because short hops are one thing, but deep space is fucking dangerous and she can't take Spock's directive so far as to actually risk Jimmy ending up in one of the 'fleet orphanages.
When she goes back up, she gets weekly reports from Frank and her mother about the scrapes (daily and sometimes hourly) Jimmy gets into. They make her a little nuts, because Christ, she's raised a mad genius with a penchant for adrenaline and very little sense of any sort of chain of command, but the variety of ways in which he gets into hot water, in school and sometimes in police custody, make her a little proud, too. It's perverse, but there it is.
It's occurred to her many times that if a rupture in time is an abomination, then her efforts to force Jimmy's life into a cadence and shape it never should have borne is abominable as well, but she thinks, or at least justifies, that this is the sort of leap of faith which, once taken, isn't to be stepped back from.
Jim's anger, and his brilliance, feed her faith.
--
It's completely by accident that Winona becomes aware that there are four separate dissertations on what is typically referred to as the Kelvin Incident in the academy library. She's sort of startled to think it's been fifteen years and of course there are, because this is exactly the sort of thing that gets taught and pored over and kicked back and forth for educational purposes. Once she knows they're there, she's surprised she hadn't expected it, and she can't help herself. She has to read them.
Two are by pure academics. They're about theory and war, about the psychology of Romulans (bullshit, she thinks. It wasn't that Nero was Romulan; it was that he was insane. Although maybe it takes less, psychologically, to bring a Romulan to that point than a human. Or, maybe it takes more. In any case, both academics need some seat time that isn't in a simulator, because she seriously doubts he was a representative sample). She moves on to the other two papers.
One is by a man named Pike, whose interest is in how it came to be that Kelvin went in alone (because there was no fucking warning, obviously, and no real opportunity to wait for backup; any ship that had found itself less than three light years from a fucking lightning storm in space would have gone to investigate). She reads a little further and realizes he knows that, that his thesis was that until it's possible for them to develop and deploy the kind of shielding and warp capacity to stand up to something much worse than any damage they expect to see, perhaps even research vessels ought to go out in pods of a sort, not to the same systems, but in closer range to help each other in crises. His position is that because research vessels are often alone, more of them are lost than they should be, and that means often the research they were doing is also compromised. She shrugs. All right, so he's not an idiot. She looks at the fourth paper, which is by someone interested in the technical and computer specifications of the Romulan vessel. His theory, based on Ayel's question about the stardate, is that the Romulan homeworld has an outpost of which the Federation is completely unaware, where they've been manipulating the passage of time in order to progress more quickly than his cohort could possibly keep up.
She wonders whether she might have eventually come to such a conclusion herself about the oddness of the question, but she thinks not. She doesn't think he adequately considers the topic of why they wouldn't for one thing be aware of the rate of difference for their own facility in the first place, and for another thing have simply checked on their own--it hardly seems likely they emerged from a secret base and were so pissed off they needed to stab someone with a trident.
Unless the base itself or its technology confers madness. Which is not what Spock implied, but that's not information this fellow Daystrom has access to.
She checks out of curiosity to see whether either of the two are on active duty; Daystrom's working for an institute, maybe one he's founded himself, but Pike has been captain of Yorktown for three years. She frowns and tries to recall whether she's met him. She thinks not.
Interesting. The image in his official file looks like someone who's got charisma over steel, and based on the date of the dissertation, he has to have made captain ridiculously fast.
She checks the paper copy of the dissertation out of the library, just to look through it a little more carefully. Someone like that, she--and Jimmy--can learn from, and while that wouldn't (couldn't, for several reasons) be the way things were with Carlos or Daryl or any of the others, maybe it's worth trying to wangle a post.
--
When Jim doesn't do anything--not Starfleet, not college, not any legal and regular job--by the time he's twenty, Winona thinks there's a decent chance she's failed.
Or that she's been delusional all along, or that a better solution was found, or that Spock was wrong.
A Spock, one in whom she can see the old man of the image in her mind's eye, maybe (the image is faded, and it feels like a hundred years since she saw it on Hood's screens and over her own kitchen table), is a student at the academy, having enrolled amid some kind of upset with his father the ambassador, and she wonders whether he contacted himself at some point, whether this is the backup plan.
Or whether Jim is the backup plan.
Either way, it kills her a little to think it was all for naught, maybe, but if Jim's to be captain so very young as Spock intimated he would have to be, the calendar suggests he'd have to have started on that path by now.
After a few more months, she takes retirement (for real this time, the pension her own), and chooses not to return to Iowa. Jim hates her, Frank is three years past giving up on her, her parents are certain she's nuts, and if this is all going to lead to some sort of apocalypse anyway, then she'd rather retire to Hawaii and take up surfing. She's still fit, but she's tired, and a focus that's miles from anything about angry Romulans is welcome.
It's definitely late enough in the game that it can't matter, right?
She sends Jim quarterly invitations to join her, along with the customary bits and pieces she can't help teaching him after all this time. He doesn't ever take her up on it, and she has no idea whether he tinkers with the puzzles and ideas like he did when he was five and six, and even when he was thirteen and furious.
She wonders if he's kept up the mishmash of improbable skills, and if so, to what end.
Sometimes, she thinks the reason she didn't return to Iowa was that she just couldn't stand to watch her failure demonstrate itself over and over again, to watch him get into it with every imaginable opponent including the local police without any useful outcome. She's not sure how it is that of all the things he did learn, how to not get busted isn't one of them, but he's resistant on that front, and she doesn't see it changing.
--
Jim doesn't tell her, when, two years into that retirement, Pike finally recruits him into Starfleet. She eventually hears generalities from Pike himself, but what he has to say isn't much; the man is circumspect without being secretive, which has always suggested good things about him--not that that ever meant she told him what Jim's unusual childhood was all about, nor that she even offered clues. He merely says that Jim has been persuaded that he can be more than his father was.
That framing makes her cringe, but this has never been about her, so she lets it go. Jim's at the end of his first semester by the time word gets to her, and evidently demonstrating all the power of the brain hardly anyone but her has ever seen.
She wasn't even entirely sure he'd ever taken the entrance tests; clearly it's just another thing they didn't talk about. It serves her right.
The first letter she sends him at school (with tips on astronav calculus variables) goes unanswered.
The second gets back a short transmission--an actual image, not just voice, though it's not in real time--and even thought she's been hard as nails for a long time, tears spring to her eyes when she sees the spark of interest, genuine and only a little bit clouded and guarded. He's doing well. He's doing very well. He can do this.
That he has the green remains of a monster black eye and evidence of a healing split lip only goes to show the rest of who he is is unchanged, which makes a smile tug at the corners of her mouth. It doesn't even matter what he says (though yes, she saves the file and listens to it roughly a hundred more times). It only matters that he's thriving.
--
The news of the attack on Vulcan--well, the natural disaster, but Winona just knows--comes weeks before Jim is due to graduate, and Winona feels sick. So close.
And then the story starts changing hour by hour: the fleet is diverting from exercises. The student fleet went out to offer aid. Vulcan has been evacuated. Vulcan has been destroyed. Refugees are coming. No one got away. The student fleet is devastated. The main fleet is devastated. The attacker has vanished again. The attacker is heading for Earth.
Winona turns off the news feeds and goes outside to watch the sun set. Perhaps in a few hours the story will have clarified.
She remembers herself at Jim's age, when patience was not only not one of her virtues, but was a skill she thought she had no hope of learning. It just goes to show, she thinks wryly. You never know.
She waits until long after midnight, when the ocean is lit with millions of glints of setting moonlight, then goes back in to see what the net has learned.
Toward dawn, between one word and the next, the transmission stutters and skips, and then before it dies entirely, there is one image of the ship.
It turns out twenty-five years isn't long enough, by at least an order of magnitude, between sightings of that thing. Winona stares in fascinated horror, then nods to herself. The fleet is out there, and if anyone can stop this, it's Jim.
He is where he is supposed to be, somehow.
Sleep is impossible, and self-distraction seems disrespectful, so she gets out a file full of clippings, only gathered since her retirement, regarding the life she and Jim have led. If this goes the way it's supposed to, she thinks there's a decent chance the Spock who contacted her all those years ago may be interested, and she might as well get organized.
--
"Winona."
She turns at the familiar voice. It's been well over twenty years since she last heard it, since she deleted the message she can still hear in her memory. "Spock."
He sits on the bench next to her and smiles broadly, odd for a Vulcan, but she's learned he's a half-breed and one that served for decades with humans. Perhaps he's learned, or perhaps he simply isn't like other Vulcans. "There are no words in any language I know for how remote was my hope," he says. "If you were any other woman, or Jim any other man--"
"We almost didn't make it."
"Jim was not the captain, and yet, everything came together." He shrugs slightly. "When he and I met--this iteration of him, that is--I was quite surprised at his rank. His lack of rank. I fear I may have manipulated him slightly."
"Is that so?" Winona isn't sure what to make of the sensation in her belly, which is somewhere between hope realized, fear underscored, and pride left to grow. "Perhaps you should see someone about your need to control the direction of the galaxy."
It comes out tarter than she means it to, mostly because somewhere in there her throat has gone shaky and her knees have gone weak. She starts to try to clarify, but he chuckles. "Perhaps I should," he agrees.
She doesn't know any other Vulcans who laugh. Suddenly his uniqueness comforts her. She's been alone on an unspoken path for a long, long time, and here is the only person who knows it. She blinks back the slight burn in her eyes and swallows. "I thought I'd blown it," she says. "He was twenty, and nowhere near the academy. Nowhere near Starfleet. I didn't know if I'd pushed too hard, made him too resistant to authority…"
"Yes, I saw," Spock says. At her quizzical look, he adds, "In order to explain my identity to him, a meld was required. In it, a great deal of who he is, and what made him, bled through." He pauses. "It was, indeed, a close call. However, it was the correct close call. I could not have asked for more."
She has no idea what to say to that.
After a pause, he continues. "The duration of my wait, between the sending of the message and the arrival of Jim literally on my doorstep, was sixteen-point-two-two hours."
"Fuck. Shit, sorry."
"No, I appreciate the sentiment. For you, it was a quarter-century of uncertainty." He looks at her closely. "I am sorry, to have asked it of you."
She shakes her head. "Don't be."
They remain for a while, looking out at the repairs being made to the Bay Bridge, and then she asks, "Does he know?"
"I did not tell him."
She nods. "Then I think we should both--all--just go on, as though this was the way the world was meant to be."
"I concur." He turns to face her. "If, however, you eventually find you wish for me to help you forget--"
She shakes her head, and he stops. The offer is made, and she won't ever take him up on it.
The clock chimes noon, and she has somewhere to be. Her son (her whole, healthy, basically happy son) and a few friends are having lunch, and to her great surprise, she's invited. She nods at Spock one more time, and stands to go.
He remains, watching the ocean as though he sees something from another life.
She wonders what it is, and hopes it's a memory he's glad to keep, but she doesn't ask (about that, or any of the hundred questions she has about her other life, or how to send a message back in time to exactly the right place and moment), and walks away.
I originally posted this at http://florahart.dreamwidth.org/1029268.html, and you are welcome to comment there. OpenID and/or anon comments are allowed.