in our nature 'verse: Dog Years (2/2)

[ninety6tears]

Title: Dog Years
(2/2)
Characters/Pairings: In Our Nature OCs + AOS (non-mirror) characters (Gene/Alel, Jill/Scotty, Tom, McCoy)
Rating: M
Warnings: Non-graphic violence, implications of psychologically abusive (past) relationships, mentions of slavery and related abuse, semi-explicit sex.
Summary: Placing trust in a handful of former imperial soldiers is hardly easy for a group of slave-born Romulans on the Terran Empire's home world, even if the four humans may not be what they seem. It's hard enough to separate friend from foe among their own species, to confide in each other, to trust that they could be loved.
... Part 1...



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why not?" Alel is looking to Jill.

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

"I have."

"When?"

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

"Jill has training."

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

"Charlie has ears."

"And where is Charlie?"

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

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

Gene says, "Your family's waiting."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Are you fucking serious?!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Jill."

"What?" she replies quietly.

"Why is this happening?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Jill..."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Somebody needs to tell her," he says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Are you gonna trust me?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yeah, fuck off."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Thanks," Gene mutters.

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

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

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

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

Robert doesn't know what to say.

Gene asks, "What have you been doing?"

"Oh, you know. Same old."

"Same old," Gene repeats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert had to scrub down the lavatories.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Along comes Di'ranov.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Really?" Jill replies.

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

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

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

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

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

Alel says, "I have to go."

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

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

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

"Gene?..."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I have to stay."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"...But you don't."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It was his mother and his sister."

The kitchen is deafeningly silent for a moment.

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

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

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

He manages a half-smirk about that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

end.