Fic: Haunted by Geography by Penknife (Star Trek XI, rated G)
Title: Haunted by Geography
Author's name: Penknife
Author on LJ: penknife
Fandom(s): Star Trek XI (reboot)
Main character or main pairing: Winona Kirk & Amanda Grayson
Rating: G
Summary: It's not easy living at the edge of the world.
Notes: For the prompt Winona Kirk, Amanda Grayson, academy. ~2300 words.
Haunted by Geography
Winona has all kinds of dreams for Jim's future when he's a boy, but not Starfleet. It's already taken too much from them, she tells herself, and as much as she loves it -- as much as she wouldn't give up space for anything -- she's not about to give it her boy, too. That's not really why, after a while, though. It's that Jim seems so angry, so ready to fight anyone who gets in his way. She thinks he doesn't need more weapons, more reasons to fight; he needs a home.
Even after she knows he's too old for that home to be with her, she still hopes he'll find one somewhere. He comes home every now and then when she's on Earth, eats a hot meal and sleeps in his old bed for a night or two, and when she watches him sleeping she can't help wanting to wake him up with her hand on his forehead and tell him how many years he has ahead of him, how much time he still has to put his life right. Instead she closes the bedroom door and walks out into the yard and looks up at the bright stars and wishes she were out there, where the choices are harder and simpler.
He's always gone in the morning, if not the first morning than the second or the third. Sometimes he leaves a scrawled sorry behind, a note on the desk where he used to build model spaceships. She wants to be angrier than she is. She's always had that same itch to leave this town behind.
She's usually left with a few more days in her leave, time enough to mow the grass and air out the old house that stands empty too much these days. Frank doesn't come around anymore, her choice but not always an easy one when the house seems creakily quiet, her every step echoing, and the sky is a bleak slate gray. She feels like a visitor here, like she ought to keep her voice down so as not to disturb old ghosts. Sam's off to college, and it's hard for him to get away to come see her while she's home. He says.
And then it's time to pack again, back to Spacedock or Utopia Planitia, or off to a colony that has some engineering project for her to work on, some problem she can solve with numbers and elbow grease. She's on Mars when she hears that Jim's enlisted in Starfleet, and she thinks about trying to pull enough strings to call him, just to ask him if he's sure. Instead she just sends a message back saying she's proud of him.
She wishes sometime he weren't so much like her.
*****
Amanda spends her days at the Vulcan Science Academy, teaching human languages to young students who condescend to her until they discover that she will not react to their satisfaction. Many of them are actually older than she is in years, but they are still young, prone to the very human (in her private opinion) weakness of being unable to learn from someone they dislike. Amanda has learned better. She wouldn't have made it this long on Vulcan if she hadn't.
Sometimes it feels like living in a desert in more than one way, on days when her students have been difficult and her colleagues cold, days when she would give anything for a cup of coffee with real cream. It's not that Vulcan ethics preclude it -- she thinks Sarek was rather addicted to coffee with cream by the time they left Earth -- but ordering frozen milk from Earth would be an absurd luxury. She drinks tea with the local equivalent of honey instead, and meditates on compromise.
One thing she's sure of by now is that living in a desert makes you stronger. She's come to love the bleached sweep of the rock and the sand skating across the desert floor in the distance. She never lived anywhere on Earth where the sky seemed so big, like the world is always waiting quietly for her to speak or move in it. It teaches her to think about what there is to say that's worth breaking that quiet, and to treasure each word, each action written across the chalky sky.
When Spock is a boy, she comes home in the afternoons before Sarek does to be there when he gets home, not so much because anyone expects it as because she wants a few minutes to talk with him in the quiet heat of the afternoon. She always has more questions for him than he has answers, his eyes sliding away from hers to his books or the wide expanse of the desert. She hopes he sees it as she does, a blank slate for him to write himself upon.
Sarek assumes that Spock will attend the Vulcan Science Academy because it is the choice that he sees as most Vulcan. Amanda assumes that Spock will do so because it is the middle path between the part of himself that wants the purifying flame of Kolinahr, to burn out all distractions in the bleak beauty of logic, and the part of himself that looks curiously at the stars. Spock was born here at the edge of the desert, between the city and the open expanse of the Forge, and she thinks that he will stay here, where she has found her own peace in contradictions.
When she hears that he has turned down his place at the Vulcan Science Academy to enroll in Starfleet, she wonders if he thinks it's what she wants him to do. She will gently explain the logic of his position to Sarek, as she always does when Sarek is hurt and angry and insisting that neither is true, but she can't tell him the real reason she thinks Spock is probably right to go: he doesn't know yet how to learn from his enemies.
It's the best kind of victory, Amanda thinks, but she thinks he probably has to learn that for himself.
*****
Winona makes it to parent orientation for Jim's second year at the Academy, and watches him try not to fidget with embarrassment as she tours buildings that haven't changed since the last time she was here. She doesn't introduce herself to many people, because while she thinks a few of the instructors might remember her, she's pretty sure they all remember George. She doesn't want to watch Jim's eyes go distant and hard while people tell her how sorry they are.
"Try and get some sleep," she tells him. "Go to class now and then. Don't get any girls knocked up."
"I'll be fine," Jim says, with a trapped-animal look that suggests that his image as a rebel is being seriously threatened by a visit from his mother. Either that, or he's just genuinely not happy to see her here. She's always let him come to her before this.
She hugs him anyway, although his shoulders are stiff under her hands, because she thinks he owes her that before he goes off into space where every time she hears from him could be the last time. Then she walks very deliberately away, off in the direction of the coffee shops and student hangouts at the edge of campus. She can't face the wait for the public transporter without a cup of coffee.
The first coffee shop she goes into smells deliciously of dark roasted beans, and so she stays and orders even though there's nowhere to sit. A slight woman nursing her own cup of coffee offers her a chair. She's wearing a long dress that's almost a robe, with lines that make Winona think off-world even though she can't place the fashion exactly. She's gotten used to the self-consciously utilitarian styles on Mars, all jumpsuits and work clothes worn by people who'll never do a day's work with their hands.
"Thanks," Winona says. She shrugs, feeling the need to explain her presence that's probably a relic of growing up in a town where she knew all her neighbors. "My boy's starting back at the Academy."
The woman smiles at her. "My son is starting as an instructor there," she says. "He told me very seriously that it would be illogical for him to be nervous, as he is well-versed in what the position requires." Her smile turns amused. "He hasn't had to face any actual students yet."
"It's harder than they think," Winona says.
"Most things are," the other woman says. She raises her coffee and sips at it, looking like she's savoring the taste.
*****
Spock writes Amanda from the academy. I find my students' reluctance to follow clearly-stated rules and complete required assignments illogical, he says. They ignore information that will be to their benefit later, and spend undue amounts of time in socialization and recreational pursuits.
At the same time, I believe I am learning as much as my students are from our classes. It is not always a comfortable process for either party, but I am finding it strangely rewarding. Is it so for you?
It is, Amanda writes. Strangely rewarding. She finishes her letter to Spock, and leaves it open on the computer terminal so that Sarek will see it without having to ask her to show him what their son has written. It's hard to have patience with the two of them. They're good at hurting each other.
But fighting with them won't help. She walks out onto the terrace and breathes under the open sky at the edge of the desert, letting the stark lines of the weathered stone quiet her mind. She's not sure whether either of them has learned anything from her yet about compromise, and how it's more than just another word for defeat, something you can build a life around. There's still time for them to learn, she tells herself, and turns back to the house and her preparations for the day's classes.
She'll come back this evening to her house, her husband, papers to grade, and the desert stretching out bare and harsh just beyond the garden wall. It's where she's chosen to live, and she loves it, and that's enough to make all its frustrations bearable. She knows Sarek would say that's illogical, so she tells him instead, when he worries that this life is too hard for her: I am learning every day.
He sees the logic of that, and when he touches her hand, she shows him what she can of how she feels about this place, like translating words from a foreign language. The desert is the page before the pen, she tells him in Vulcan, and every word is one more thing she's writing on it.
*****
Jim writes Winona from the Enterprise, after he's been made captain and is on his way out further than she's ever been into unexplored space. It's weird being in charge, he says. I'm supposed to keep everybody out of trouble, which you're probably shaking your head about right now. Not that they get into a lot of trouble. Most of them are pretty serious people. But they unwind a little when we're off-duty. Lieutenant Sulu is teaching me to fence, so if you hear I got stabbed, don't worry about me.
Lieutenant Uhura is trying to teach me some Vulcan. She says she feels a duty to make me slightly less shockingly ignorant about the rest of the galaxy. I think she likes me. Mostly now I can say things like "which way to the vegetable?" which I think amuses my first officer. If there weren't the universal translator, I'd be in a lot of trouble.
I don't know what we're going to find once we get out of known space. But we're all ready to find out.
Write me and tell me all about it, Winona writes. She's on Luna, working to upgrade the main docking facilities. It's a long, tough job, and Luna is all her least favorite things about Earth and space combined; it's crowded and noisy and ugly, and there are hardly any windows. She's spending most of her time underground.
It'll be worth it once they get this done, though, and she can get a good look at her handiwork as her shuttle is pulling away. She'll sit back and imagine how her shuttle must look from Iowa, one more light streaking across the night sky, coming back to rest for a while on the ground and then rising again.
She's not sure if this is the life Jim wants, or if he'll find a home out there, escape Earth's gravity altogether and be gone. She wants to hold onto him, crushingly hard the way she did sometimes when he was a boy and she knew she'd be leaving him behind in a few days, but it's too late for that. She imagines them tracing two bright lines in space instead, hers back and forth, chasing its own tail, and his a single bright track like the trail of a meteor, streaking out of sight.
Some part of her would rather be blazing a track like that herself, but she's got work to do, and it won't get done by daydreaming. She's already farther from Riverside, Iowa, than she ever thought she'd be when she was a kid, and if there's some part of her still left behind there, maybe it's not such a bad thing to have the farm and Iowa skies still tangled around her heart, something to lead her home whenever she wants to go.
Author's name: Penknife
Author on LJ: penknife
Fandom(s): Star Trek XI (reboot)
Main character or main pairing: Winona Kirk & Amanda Grayson
Rating: G
Summary: It's not easy living at the edge of the world.
Notes: For the prompt Winona Kirk, Amanda Grayson, academy. ~2300 words.
Haunted by Geography
Winona has all kinds of dreams for Jim's future when he's a boy, but not Starfleet. It's already taken too much from them, she tells herself, and as much as she loves it -- as much as she wouldn't give up space for anything -- she's not about to give it her boy, too. That's not really why, after a while, though. It's that Jim seems so angry, so ready to fight anyone who gets in his way. She thinks he doesn't need more weapons, more reasons to fight; he needs a home.
Even after she knows he's too old for that home to be with her, she still hopes he'll find one somewhere. He comes home every now and then when she's on Earth, eats a hot meal and sleeps in his old bed for a night or two, and when she watches him sleeping she can't help wanting to wake him up with her hand on his forehead and tell him how many years he has ahead of him, how much time he still has to put his life right. Instead she closes the bedroom door and walks out into the yard and looks up at the bright stars and wishes she were out there, where the choices are harder and simpler.
He's always gone in the morning, if not the first morning than the second or the third. Sometimes he leaves a scrawled sorry behind, a note on the desk where he used to build model spaceships. She wants to be angrier than she is. She's always had that same itch to leave this town behind.
She's usually left with a few more days in her leave, time enough to mow the grass and air out the old house that stands empty too much these days. Frank doesn't come around anymore, her choice but not always an easy one when the house seems creakily quiet, her every step echoing, and the sky is a bleak slate gray. She feels like a visitor here, like she ought to keep her voice down so as not to disturb old ghosts. Sam's off to college, and it's hard for him to get away to come see her while she's home. He says.
And then it's time to pack again, back to Spacedock or Utopia Planitia, or off to a colony that has some engineering project for her to work on, some problem she can solve with numbers and elbow grease. She's on Mars when she hears that Jim's enlisted in Starfleet, and she thinks about trying to pull enough strings to call him, just to ask him if he's sure. Instead she just sends a message back saying she's proud of him.
She wishes sometime he weren't so much like her.
*****
Amanda spends her days at the Vulcan Science Academy, teaching human languages to young students who condescend to her until they discover that she will not react to their satisfaction. Many of them are actually older than she is in years, but they are still young, prone to the very human (in her private opinion) weakness of being unable to learn from someone they dislike. Amanda has learned better. She wouldn't have made it this long on Vulcan if she hadn't.
Sometimes it feels like living in a desert in more than one way, on days when her students have been difficult and her colleagues cold, days when she would give anything for a cup of coffee with real cream. It's not that Vulcan ethics preclude it -- she thinks Sarek was rather addicted to coffee with cream by the time they left Earth -- but ordering frozen milk from Earth would be an absurd luxury. She drinks tea with the local equivalent of honey instead, and meditates on compromise.
One thing she's sure of by now is that living in a desert makes you stronger. She's come to love the bleached sweep of the rock and the sand skating across the desert floor in the distance. She never lived anywhere on Earth where the sky seemed so big, like the world is always waiting quietly for her to speak or move in it. It teaches her to think about what there is to say that's worth breaking that quiet, and to treasure each word, each action written across the chalky sky.
When Spock is a boy, she comes home in the afternoons before Sarek does to be there when he gets home, not so much because anyone expects it as because she wants a few minutes to talk with him in the quiet heat of the afternoon. She always has more questions for him than he has answers, his eyes sliding away from hers to his books or the wide expanse of the desert. She hopes he sees it as she does, a blank slate for him to write himself upon.
Sarek assumes that Spock will attend the Vulcan Science Academy because it is the choice that he sees as most Vulcan. Amanda assumes that Spock will do so because it is the middle path between the part of himself that wants the purifying flame of Kolinahr, to burn out all distractions in the bleak beauty of logic, and the part of himself that looks curiously at the stars. Spock was born here at the edge of the desert, between the city and the open expanse of the Forge, and she thinks that he will stay here, where she has found her own peace in contradictions.
When she hears that he has turned down his place at the Vulcan Science Academy to enroll in Starfleet, she wonders if he thinks it's what she wants him to do. She will gently explain the logic of his position to Sarek, as she always does when Sarek is hurt and angry and insisting that neither is true, but she can't tell him the real reason she thinks Spock is probably right to go: he doesn't know yet how to learn from his enemies.
It's the best kind of victory, Amanda thinks, but she thinks he probably has to learn that for himself.
*****
Winona makes it to parent orientation for Jim's second year at the Academy, and watches him try not to fidget with embarrassment as she tours buildings that haven't changed since the last time she was here. She doesn't introduce herself to many people, because while she thinks a few of the instructors might remember her, she's pretty sure they all remember George. She doesn't want to watch Jim's eyes go distant and hard while people tell her how sorry they are.
"Try and get some sleep," she tells him. "Go to class now and then. Don't get any girls knocked up."
"I'll be fine," Jim says, with a trapped-animal look that suggests that his image as a rebel is being seriously threatened by a visit from his mother. Either that, or he's just genuinely not happy to see her here. She's always let him come to her before this.
She hugs him anyway, although his shoulders are stiff under her hands, because she thinks he owes her that before he goes off into space where every time she hears from him could be the last time. Then she walks very deliberately away, off in the direction of the coffee shops and student hangouts at the edge of campus. She can't face the wait for the public transporter without a cup of coffee.
The first coffee shop she goes into smells deliciously of dark roasted beans, and so she stays and orders even though there's nowhere to sit. A slight woman nursing her own cup of coffee offers her a chair. She's wearing a long dress that's almost a robe, with lines that make Winona think off-world even though she can't place the fashion exactly. She's gotten used to the self-consciously utilitarian styles on Mars, all jumpsuits and work clothes worn by people who'll never do a day's work with their hands.
"Thanks," Winona says. She shrugs, feeling the need to explain her presence that's probably a relic of growing up in a town where she knew all her neighbors. "My boy's starting back at the Academy."
The woman smiles at her. "My son is starting as an instructor there," she says. "He told me very seriously that it would be illogical for him to be nervous, as he is well-versed in what the position requires." Her smile turns amused. "He hasn't had to face any actual students yet."
"It's harder than they think," Winona says.
"Most things are," the other woman says. She raises her coffee and sips at it, looking like she's savoring the taste.
*****
Spock writes Amanda from the academy. I find my students' reluctance to follow clearly-stated rules and complete required assignments illogical, he says. They ignore information that will be to their benefit later, and spend undue amounts of time in socialization and recreational pursuits.
At the same time, I believe I am learning as much as my students are from our classes. It is not always a comfortable process for either party, but I am finding it strangely rewarding. Is it so for you?
It is, Amanda writes. Strangely rewarding. She finishes her letter to Spock, and leaves it open on the computer terminal so that Sarek will see it without having to ask her to show him what their son has written. It's hard to have patience with the two of them. They're good at hurting each other.
But fighting with them won't help. She walks out onto the terrace and breathes under the open sky at the edge of the desert, letting the stark lines of the weathered stone quiet her mind. She's not sure whether either of them has learned anything from her yet about compromise, and how it's more than just another word for defeat, something you can build a life around. There's still time for them to learn, she tells herself, and turns back to the house and her preparations for the day's classes.
She'll come back this evening to her house, her husband, papers to grade, and the desert stretching out bare and harsh just beyond the garden wall. It's where she's chosen to live, and she loves it, and that's enough to make all its frustrations bearable. She knows Sarek would say that's illogical, so she tells him instead, when he worries that this life is too hard for her: I am learning every day.
He sees the logic of that, and when he touches her hand, she shows him what she can of how she feels about this place, like translating words from a foreign language. The desert is the page before the pen, she tells him in Vulcan, and every word is one more thing she's writing on it.
*****
Jim writes Winona from the Enterprise, after he's been made captain and is on his way out further than she's ever been into unexplored space. It's weird being in charge, he says. I'm supposed to keep everybody out of trouble, which you're probably shaking your head about right now. Not that they get into a lot of trouble. Most of them are pretty serious people. But they unwind a little when we're off-duty. Lieutenant Sulu is teaching me to fence, so if you hear I got stabbed, don't worry about me.
Lieutenant Uhura is trying to teach me some Vulcan. She says she feels a duty to make me slightly less shockingly ignorant about the rest of the galaxy. I think she likes me. Mostly now I can say things like "which way to the vegetable?" which I think amuses my first officer. If there weren't the universal translator, I'd be in a lot of trouble.
I don't know what we're going to find once we get out of known space. But we're all ready to find out.
Write me and tell me all about it, Winona writes. She's on Luna, working to upgrade the main docking facilities. It's a long, tough job, and Luna is all her least favorite things about Earth and space combined; it's crowded and noisy and ugly, and there are hardly any windows. She's spending most of her time underground.
It'll be worth it once they get this done, though, and she can get a good look at her handiwork as her shuttle is pulling away. She'll sit back and imagine how her shuttle must look from Iowa, one more light streaking across the night sky, coming back to rest for a while on the ground and then rising again.
She's not sure if this is the life Jim wants, or if he'll find a home out there, escape Earth's gravity altogether and be gone. She wants to hold onto him, crushingly hard the way she did sometimes when he was a boy and she knew she'd be leaving him behind in a few days, but it's too late for that. She imagines them tracing two bright lines in space instead, hers back and forth, chasing its own tail, and his a single bright track like the trail of a meteor, streaking out of sight.
Some part of her would rather be blazing a track like that herself, but she's got work to do, and it won't get done by daydreaming. She's already farther from Riverside, Iowa, than she ever thought she'd be when she was a kid, and if there's some part of her still left behind there, maybe it's not such a bad thing to have the farm and Iowa skies still tangled around her heart, something to lead her home whenever she wants to go.