fic: face the blackened sky (gaila, st xi)
gaila, r, ~3500
includes possibly disturbing concepts, fifth in a series
beta by cruiscin_lan, who saved my sanity
Five people she'll feel no shame for loving.
Gaila’s taught anything of use by those who love her mother.
She learns what to say and what not to say, how to build muscle in her legs, her middle, her arms so that she can use her own body. Her mother teaches her what to do against the few women who are just as dominating as the men. “We’re all equals,” her mother says frowning to the group of women who have turned against them when given the chance and shove the younger girls ahead as fodder without blinking. They have their own reasons, and her mother doesn’t care. “Never let anyone make you think your weakness makes anything they do to you okay, Gaila.”
They never go hungry, and they receive proper medical attention with anything that would leave a mark.
By the age of twelve, she knows more than the back of the ship where she was born; knows the names of stars she’s never seen and species she’s never met on planets she’s never walked on. She learns songs that others have forgotten, and memorizes dances that aren’t shared with anyone that may buy them. History tilted by time but still remembered by the girls like her, born and raised by women that know, and strings of numbers she puts together to find answers. She learns Standard, of course, but also some Andorian and even a few words in Vulcan picked up from a woman bought and later sold back.
(“Some of the Vulcans used to turn a blind eye when a girl slipped past. They could say they didn’t have information when they were asked about us. We have to do it for ourselves now,” her mother explains as she drags the brush through Gaila’s hair. Then, quietly proud: “I think we’re doing it better anyway.”)
When Gaila is thirteen, her mother says goodbye and has her sold off to black-eyed humanoids in small ships that mother her almost more than her own mother does (used to). They don’t call themselves “Federation” and tell her “You could go far” like they are already proud of her accomplishments, have her memorize a few names and send her to someone else. She moves again, and then again, meets another Orion girl her age and then moves again before either of them say goodbye.
After a few months in an orphanage that they say she’ll be at for five years, she sneaks to the research station several miles away to explore. The scientists stare at her warily but then she asks the questions the women hadn’t been able to answer and she’s unembarrassed by the glee she feels when they respond. She asks more and they fill in what they can, tell her they’d like to see her pursue her study if she’d consider it. They give her PADDs that they can spare, explain anything she is unsure about and then give her more.
At seventeen, Gaila accepts a scientist’s offer to take Gaila with her when she leaves the colony for another closer to Earth. There, a half-Denobulan shares Federation theories on interspecies ethics and protocol, and prods her for her opinions on the subject. A young Vulcan woman only a few years older than her named T’Mar explains warp core engines, smiles with her eyes in a way humans don’t seem to notice when Gaila comes up with more questions. “I am specializing in biology,” the woman informs her more than once but shares all that she knows anyway. (When Gaila realizes how the other Vulcans there so pointedly avoid T’Mar, she scowls at them openly and feels too protective of the older woman. Kindness is nothing to be ashamed of.)
The next time Dr. Y’Rath asks her to consider Starfleet, she has a different answer.
At the Academy, Gaila enjoys the conversations she has with men and women in cadet uniforms who she talks to about the colonies she’s been on. She gets to take classes and labs, is taught hand-to-hand combat and survival training. She gets to flirt when she wants to and not just when somebody tells her to. She gets to go out to bars and clubs with groups of others who teach her drinking games and how to throw darts.
A brown-eyed human training to become a security officer is her first female human, adding a new understanding to some of Gaila’s anatomy studies. A male close to graduating buys her lunch, kisses her outside her dorm room and touches her hip and pulls away. There are soft and hard people here that wear dresses and pants and blend into groups that she was intimidated by on the colonies but isn’t here.
Gaila learns how much she likes sex, likes touch, and how much she’s allowed to like both but sometimes when she sleeps, she dreams that her mother’s gotten away.
Dreams that her mother has come to Earth and is with her.
Those nights she puts a pillow behind her back and pretends it’s a larger body curving around her protectively, pretends that Uhura’s breathing in the other bed is slow and sure the way only her mother’s is.
She’s nineteen when the little boy from Russia shows up, walks too fast into the classroom and hides in the middle of the front row behind a too-big bag. He talks a little too loud when anybody speaks to him, and then tries to hide in his own skin when he thinks no one is looking. By the end of the class, her heart twinges in sympathy and she’s considering ways to track him down.
Gaila never has to.
The next day she sees the same boy wandering the library looking too-sure and utterly lost all at once, helps him find the files he needs and then sits down with him when he looks at her like he’s waiting for her to just poof and disappear.
“I’m Gaila,” she informs him, and taps the screen of his PADD in an order to go ahead and get started. He squints at her a little and her heart twists again. She listens to it. “We’re friends now,” she tells him without holding back words because this isn’t going to be a secret, a hidden thing. There’s no shame in companionship. “If you need anything, you come to me and I’ll help you, okay?”
He says “da” like he’s still unsure (she’ll ask Uhura later) but shows her what he’s studying, a blur of numbers and lines and ideas. “I can know all this,” he insists in his thick accent after he seems to realize that she’s not going to bite, “but I do not know it yet so I need some assistance.”
He’s trying so hard. “How old are you, sweetheart?”
“Fourteen.”
He’s so little for fourteen, and so smart. Gaila reaches out, twirls a few of his curls and then smoothes them back. “I have a class,” she says at the last minute, “but I’m going to be here tomorrow too. You can help me with my statistical mechanics homework, huh?” He flushes just slightly and she beams, pats his hand where it grips his PADD and isn’t sorry about being late for class.
Gaila learns that Pavel Andreyevich Chekov is an orphan, had lost both parents at the age of three and has long since healed from the pain of it. He’s shy, though, and not comfortable in his skin, and squirms when people stare at him too long. He speaks too much of Russia and too little of himself, and his sense of humor would be glorious if he’d let himself actually tell the jokes he has.
“My father was not like this,” he admits one night while helping her with her studies. “My grandmother says that he stood in the front of the auditoriums and talked for hours. She says that he never looked even a little bit nervous.”
“You just need to grow into yourself,” Gaila assures him.
Pavel’s already special but he’s really going to be special when he gets a little older. He’s going to do great things, she’s sure of it. (“You will, too,” he always says, and she can’t help but smile and believe him.) When he looks doubtful, too small and too smart on the other side of the desk, she drops the stylus and makes sure he’s staring at her. “Everybody’s equal,” she tells him in a tone that she recognizes as her mother’s. There’s a swift pain inside her, the jagged loss bittersweet with what it’s brought her, but she survives it because she can. “Never let anyone make you think that you being smaller than them makes anything they do to you or anybody else okay.”
He says “yes” but doesn’t meet her eyes.
It’s fine, though.
She’ll help him along.
She loves Uhura even if Uhura is sometimes frustrating.
At first Gaila thinks she’s trying to control her, put her on a leash- but then she realizes her friend is only worried about her being out too late and who she spends her time with, frets that Gaila is being used and doesn’t realize it. She says sometimes, “she’s only out for one thing” or “he might be using you” and is so sincere in her desire to protect that Gaila can’t be annoyed.
Uhura’s wrong, though.
Gaila knows the difference between sex and love, and she knows that thing that pretends to be sex can be hurtful, harmful, can kill a person or make them want to die- except that isn’t really sex, not really, and some people don’t understand that. Sex is just stolen and used like clubs or barbed wire or being traded like currency. Sex is just sex, and love is love, and sometimes they can meet but they don’t have to, they’re not joined at the hip.
Her mother and the other women loved her, and she them.
Gaila still loves T’Mar, hopes she’s happier than she’d pretended she was while the other Vulcans had pretended she didn’t exist. She still loves Dr. Y’Rath even though it’s been years and she still loves Geoff the way she did before he left for Vulcan, waits for the day he comes back to be stationed and tells her what the other planet is like. She loves Uhura and Pavel, and wants to protect them.
But she’s known Uhura for over two years before she finally learns about Uhura’s father, learns about the ship lost and not yet found that Uhura will not admit that she is still waiting for.
“Did your father help raise you?”
Uhura pauses, stills, stares oddly at the distant wall. Then: “He used to take me off-world.”
Gaila is curious, endlessly so. “Did you enjoy it?”
“Yes,” Uhura says too calmly after a too long minute, and Gaila knows the discussion is closed. She accepts it without distress, rolling onto her back and returning to her studies, understanding this even if Uhura does not realize she does- some things are too painful to talk about so easily even after you’ve moved on.
“It sounds like your father loves you.” Uhura doesn’t look at her, focused on work she cannot focus on, and Gaila understands pretending in the night that horrible things will somehow end in a miracle. “My mother loved me,” and then, because Gaila somehow knows it’s true: “She still loves me.”
Gaila is one of only three students on campus that gets to exchange words with the engineer known as Montgomery Scott between him rushing around for Admiral Archer and the work he does around the world for Starfleet. “You’ve got talent,” he says all the time, and then throws something else at her with a grin and easy patience, disappears and shows up again to lazily look through her work. “You have to love it to do any of it.” She says “aye” too happily, giddy with knowledge being freely shared, openly offered, and he looks so pleased to be talking to someone who doesn’t look at him like he’s a “crazy nutter” for once.
“But you’re very smart.”
“People aren’t impressed,” he grimaces, and then tosses her a PADD with his notes, a blur of words and numbers that she is desperately excited about because she can understand them when she just… unravels them a bit. “There’s one other girl who’s good, little blonde… Band, Sand, maybe, don’t know, something like that, but she doesn’t have the heart for it, eh? More of a take command kind of a girl than operations, probably gonna be someone’s captain someday…”
Then he disappears again, and she learns until he pops up again to offer advice.
Uhura immediately thinks she is fostering a crush (“he isn’t even a real instructor, Gaila”) and, again, Gaila does not understand how she can be both so good and so bad at communication with others.
“Don’t be silly. He’s nice, I like spending time with him, but he’s not very attractive. His head is already going bald. You know I like holding hair when someone gives me-” Uhura makes a fuzzy warning sound and she adds quickly, “I think this is how having a paternal figure feels.” She stops to consider for a moment. “I like the other male better, from our hand-to-hand class. Jim?” Uhura sucks in a breath, strangely emotional in regards to the male she insists is not a friend, but Gaila doesn’t blink. “His eyes are beautiful.”
“It’s a medical side effect, Gaila-”
“They’re still beautiful,” she defends without shame because they are.
Gaila refuses to be ashamed of anything she thinks and feels and wants.
The day Mr. Scott is sent away, a box of PADDs and a handful of broken mechanics is delivered to her dorm room. Watch these for me, the note requests without a hint of shame and she puts them away carefully, sure he’ll be back for them soon and warmed that he’d trust her over anyone else.
Gaila wakes up once after the world ends.
There are voices around her, palms hooking under her arms as her body is lifted, dragged across metal like she’s something to be moved to the side or completely tossed away. She twitches, defiant in what she’s calmly sure are going to be her last moments, and manages a muffled infuriated sound that escapes with a shudder. She’s calmer after this but fiercely proud and she drifts away again, pleased to have made a last sound.
Then she wakes up a second time, jerks out of nightmares of hands that curve into her thighs and twist into chains and hold her down while she tries vainly to catch Uhura and Pavel as they fall from the sky. Her stomach lurches inside her and then someone helps when she manages to lift her head, turns her onto her side as she vomits and shudders and cries a little because her head hurts and she knows the smell.
It’s not filth-they have to be careful to keep diseases from becoming dents in their profits-but there are too many bodies in a closed space, too much warmth and too much muffled stillness.
More voices then, and she’s settled back down, tucked in again, the moisture wiped from her face.
They took her uniform.
This, somehow, is the worst of where she’s found herself, of what has happened.
But it’s still painless, the easy way she understands what happened when she recovers from the head wound and the blood loss. Distantly she has enough understanding of psychology to know it’s emotional shock, that she’s been traumatized. She puts together the fragments and holds onto her anger over losing her uniform, resists the urge to crawl into a corner and cry the way she remembers some girls doing.
Gaila remembers the destruction of the ship around her and the emergency protocols kicking in before the main power went down, remembers that awful grinding sound that she’d felt in her bones before the lights went out. Between please don’t let me be here and I hate them, I hate them, she wonders how long it was before the scavengers were crawling through the wreckage of the armada.
Worst is when she imagines them picking through what’s left of the Farragut, when she can only hope futilely that it was fast and painless and then starts sniffling again.
Gaila is self-aware enough, in those first two weeks, to know that she’s barely coping.
For every bit of physical pain that eases, the emotional pain weighs her down more.
She has no stomach for the food the woman that’s been assigned as her nurse brings her, drinks only the water offered and then rolls back to face the wall again. Doesn’t cry but dozes, dreams of Uhura and Pavel where they used to be, and dreams of a hundred other people who never made it back from Vulcan.
She doesn’t know why she’s here but thinks it’s only spite- grab the girl that got away, drag her back to the ship even though they’ll never be able to sell her, not the shape she’s in and besides, she’ll die before she accepts what her mother saved her from. They know they can’t use her like they can use broken pieces of ships but they can hurt her, and she thinks of her mother and Uhura taken from her and little Pavel gone, and before she realizes it, she’s crying in her corner.
It lasts for a week and a half.
Lasts until she first notices the scrawny girl that flits around the women and then walks past her a dozen times a day, casting her furtive glances before one of the older women always shoves her pointedly into the younger girls’ direction. Gaila decides to ignore her at first, stubborn in a desperate need not to feel any kind of optimism, but the girl keeps circling her and she finally breaks.
Gaila finally sits up against the wall, the first time in days that she’s moved for any reason other than the basic hygiene the guards demand, and crooks a finger until the girl slinks over, hovers near her feet. When Gaila realizes the girl’s just going to stand there, she narrows her eyes in something of an order and the girl eases down beside her, the eagerness on her face a pointed contrast to her hunched shoulders. They can talk here, the other women won’t be able to hear past their own conversation, but the girl stares and keeps quiet, and Gaila blows out a breath, frustration tempering the hurt inside her.
“How old are you, sweetheart?”
“Eleven.”
She’s pretty, hair heavy and dark and gathered loose from her face to tumble messy against her back. It’s brushed but barely, the clumsy fastening a sure sign Gaila remembers that the girl’s missing a caretaker to give her anything more than food or clothes and once the awareness is there, Gaila can’t ignore it.
“I saw them bring you in,” the girl starts beside her, is silent for a moment and then starts again, more determined as the seconds go by. “I tried to get your clothes, I thought you’d want them, but- but they took them with them when they left.” Another moment of silence, the girl visibly weighing how much she’s willing to risk saying. “You threw up on me,” she finally adds, and then finishes: “I’m Vari.”
Gaila sniffs, shakes herself and straightens against the wall. Considers. The burn on her arm aches vaguely and the dislocated hip they had fit back into place is a steady ache, but she stays where she is now that she’s up, shakes out her blanket and pulls it up to wriggle her toes, bend a foot.
Vari is watching, young and helpless but right in front of her.
“I haven’t eaten much,” she says at last, remembering her mother giving her jobs and chores, keeping her busy to keep her from thinking. The memory leaves her oddly sure of herself. “Go get us something to eat, enough for both of us.” She smoothes her hair from her face, breathes through the pain the movement causes and keeps breathing, grief-stricken but alive. “And a brush,” she decides, “so I can do something with my hair.”
The girl skitters off immediately and that’s that.
Gaila breathes and eats the food that’s brought back and starts wrestling the tangles from her hair.
Makes sure her legs will be strong enough to carry her weight the next time the door opens.
includes possibly disturbing concepts, fifth in a series
beta by cruiscin_lan, who saved my sanity
Five people she'll feel no shame for loving.
Gaila’s taught anything of use by those who love her mother.
She learns what to say and what not to say, how to build muscle in her legs, her middle, her arms so that she can use her own body. Her mother teaches her what to do against the few women who are just as dominating as the men. “We’re all equals,” her mother says frowning to the group of women who have turned against them when given the chance and shove the younger girls ahead as fodder without blinking. They have their own reasons, and her mother doesn’t care. “Never let anyone make you think your weakness makes anything they do to you okay, Gaila.”
They never go hungry, and they receive proper medical attention with anything that would leave a mark.
By the age of twelve, she knows more than the back of the ship where she was born; knows the names of stars she’s never seen and species she’s never met on planets she’s never walked on. She learns songs that others have forgotten, and memorizes dances that aren’t shared with anyone that may buy them. History tilted by time but still remembered by the girls like her, born and raised by women that know, and strings of numbers she puts together to find answers. She learns Standard, of course, but also some Andorian and even a few words in Vulcan picked up from a woman bought and later sold back.
(“Some of the Vulcans used to turn a blind eye when a girl slipped past. They could say they didn’t have information when they were asked about us. We have to do it for ourselves now,” her mother explains as she drags the brush through Gaila’s hair. Then, quietly proud: “I think we’re doing it better anyway.”)
When Gaila is thirteen, her mother says goodbye and has her sold off to black-eyed humanoids in small ships that mother her almost more than her own mother does (used to). They don’t call themselves “Federation” and tell her “You could go far” like they are already proud of her accomplishments, have her memorize a few names and send her to someone else. She moves again, and then again, meets another Orion girl her age and then moves again before either of them say goodbye.
After a few months in an orphanage that they say she’ll be at for five years, she sneaks to the research station several miles away to explore. The scientists stare at her warily but then she asks the questions the women hadn’t been able to answer and she’s unembarrassed by the glee she feels when they respond. She asks more and they fill in what they can, tell her they’d like to see her pursue her study if she’d consider it. They give her PADDs that they can spare, explain anything she is unsure about and then give her more.
At seventeen, Gaila accepts a scientist’s offer to take Gaila with her when she leaves the colony for another closer to Earth. There, a half-Denobulan shares Federation theories on interspecies ethics and protocol, and prods her for her opinions on the subject. A young Vulcan woman only a few years older than her named T’Mar explains warp core engines, smiles with her eyes in a way humans don’t seem to notice when Gaila comes up with more questions. “I am specializing in biology,” the woman informs her more than once but shares all that she knows anyway. (When Gaila realizes how the other Vulcans there so pointedly avoid T’Mar, she scowls at them openly and feels too protective of the older woman. Kindness is nothing to be ashamed of.)
The next time Dr. Y’Rath asks her to consider Starfleet, she has a different answer.
At the Academy, Gaila enjoys the conversations she has with men and women in cadet uniforms who she talks to about the colonies she’s been on. She gets to take classes and labs, is taught hand-to-hand combat and survival training. She gets to flirt when she wants to and not just when somebody tells her to. She gets to go out to bars and clubs with groups of others who teach her drinking games and how to throw darts.
A brown-eyed human training to become a security officer is her first female human, adding a new understanding to some of Gaila’s anatomy studies. A male close to graduating buys her lunch, kisses her outside her dorm room and touches her hip and pulls away. There are soft and hard people here that wear dresses and pants and blend into groups that she was intimidated by on the colonies but isn’t here.
Gaila learns how much she likes sex, likes touch, and how much she’s allowed to like both but sometimes when she sleeps, she dreams that her mother’s gotten away.
Dreams that her mother has come to Earth and is with her.
Those nights she puts a pillow behind her back and pretends it’s a larger body curving around her protectively, pretends that Uhura’s breathing in the other bed is slow and sure the way only her mother’s is.
She’s nineteen when the little boy from Russia shows up, walks too fast into the classroom and hides in the middle of the front row behind a too-big bag. He talks a little too loud when anybody speaks to him, and then tries to hide in his own skin when he thinks no one is looking. By the end of the class, her heart twinges in sympathy and she’s considering ways to track him down.
Gaila never has to.
The next day she sees the same boy wandering the library looking too-sure and utterly lost all at once, helps him find the files he needs and then sits down with him when he looks at her like he’s waiting for her to just poof and disappear.
“I’m Gaila,” she informs him, and taps the screen of his PADD in an order to go ahead and get started. He squints at her a little and her heart twists again. She listens to it. “We’re friends now,” she tells him without holding back words because this isn’t going to be a secret, a hidden thing. There’s no shame in companionship. “If you need anything, you come to me and I’ll help you, okay?”
He says “da” like he’s still unsure (she’ll ask Uhura later) but shows her what he’s studying, a blur of numbers and lines and ideas. “I can know all this,” he insists in his thick accent after he seems to realize that she’s not going to bite, “but I do not know it yet so I need some assistance.”
He’s trying so hard. “How old are you, sweetheart?”
“Fourteen.”
He’s so little for fourteen, and so smart. Gaila reaches out, twirls a few of his curls and then smoothes them back. “I have a class,” she says at the last minute, “but I’m going to be here tomorrow too. You can help me with my statistical mechanics homework, huh?” He flushes just slightly and she beams, pats his hand where it grips his PADD and isn’t sorry about being late for class.
Gaila learns that Pavel Andreyevich Chekov is an orphan, had lost both parents at the age of three and has long since healed from the pain of it. He’s shy, though, and not comfortable in his skin, and squirms when people stare at him too long. He speaks too much of Russia and too little of himself, and his sense of humor would be glorious if he’d let himself actually tell the jokes he has.
“My father was not like this,” he admits one night while helping her with her studies. “My grandmother says that he stood in the front of the auditoriums and talked for hours. She says that he never looked even a little bit nervous.”
“You just need to grow into yourself,” Gaila assures him.
Pavel’s already special but he’s really going to be special when he gets a little older. He’s going to do great things, she’s sure of it. (“You will, too,” he always says, and she can’t help but smile and believe him.) When he looks doubtful, too small and too smart on the other side of the desk, she drops the stylus and makes sure he’s staring at her. “Everybody’s equal,” she tells him in a tone that she recognizes as her mother’s. There’s a swift pain inside her, the jagged loss bittersweet with what it’s brought her, but she survives it because she can. “Never let anyone make you think that you being smaller than them makes anything they do to you or anybody else okay.”
He says “yes” but doesn’t meet her eyes.
It’s fine, though.
She’ll help him along.
She loves Uhura even if Uhura is sometimes frustrating.
At first Gaila thinks she’s trying to control her, put her on a leash- but then she realizes her friend is only worried about her being out too late and who she spends her time with, frets that Gaila is being used and doesn’t realize it. She says sometimes, “she’s only out for one thing” or “he might be using you” and is so sincere in her desire to protect that Gaila can’t be annoyed.
Uhura’s wrong, though.
Gaila knows the difference between sex and love, and she knows that thing that pretends to be sex can be hurtful, harmful, can kill a person or make them want to die- except that isn’t really sex, not really, and some people don’t understand that. Sex is just stolen and used like clubs or barbed wire or being traded like currency. Sex is just sex, and love is love, and sometimes they can meet but they don’t have to, they’re not joined at the hip.
Her mother and the other women loved her, and she them.
Gaila still loves T’Mar, hopes she’s happier than she’d pretended she was while the other Vulcans had pretended she didn’t exist. She still loves Dr. Y’Rath even though it’s been years and she still loves Geoff the way she did before he left for Vulcan, waits for the day he comes back to be stationed and tells her what the other planet is like. She loves Uhura and Pavel, and wants to protect them.
But she’s known Uhura for over two years before she finally learns about Uhura’s father, learns about the ship lost and not yet found that Uhura will not admit that she is still waiting for.
“Did your father help raise you?”
Uhura pauses, stills, stares oddly at the distant wall. Then: “He used to take me off-world.”
Gaila is curious, endlessly so. “Did you enjoy it?”
“Yes,” Uhura says too calmly after a too long minute, and Gaila knows the discussion is closed. She accepts it without distress, rolling onto her back and returning to her studies, understanding this even if Uhura does not realize she does- some things are too painful to talk about so easily even after you’ve moved on.
“It sounds like your father loves you.” Uhura doesn’t look at her, focused on work she cannot focus on, and Gaila understands pretending in the night that horrible things will somehow end in a miracle. “My mother loved me,” and then, because Gaila somehow knows it’s true: “She still loves me.”
Gaila is one of only three students on campus that gets to exchange words with the engineer known as Montgomery Scott between him rushing around for Admiral Archer and the work he does around the world for Starfleet. “You’ve got talent,” he says all the time, and then throws something else at her with a grin and easy patience, disappears and shows up again to lazily look through her work. “You have to love it to do any of it.” She says “aye” too happily, giddy with knowledge being freely shared, openly offered, and he looks so pleased to be talking to someone who doesn’t look at him like he’s a “crazy nutter” for once.
“But you’re very smart.”
“People aren’t impressed,” he grimaces, and then tosses her a PADD with his notes, a blur of words and numbers that she is desperately excited about because she can understand them when she just… unravels them a bit. “There’s one other girl who’s good, little blonde… Band, Sand, maybe, don’t know, something like that, but she doesn’t have the heart for it, eh? More of a take command kind of a girl than operations, probably gonna be someone’s captain someday…”
Then he disappears again, and she learns until he pops up again to offer advice.
Uhura immediately thinks she is fostering a crush (“he isn’t even a real instructor, Gaila”) and, again, Gaila does not understand how she can be both so good and so bad at communication with others.
“Don’t be silly. He’s nice, I like spending time with him, but he’s not very attractive. His head is already going bald. You know I like holding hair when someone gives me-” Uhura makes a fuzzy warning sound and she adds quickly, “I think this is how having a paternal figure feels.” She stops to consider for a moment. “I like the other male better, from our hand-to-hand class. Jim?” Uhura sucks in a breath, strangely emotional in regards to the male she insists is not a friend, but Gaila doesn’t blink. “His eyes are beautiful.”
“It’s a medical side effect, Gaila-”
“They’re still beautiful,” she defends without shame because they are.
Gaila refuses to be ashamed of anything she thinks and feels and wants.
The day Mr. Scott is sent away, a box of PADDs and a handful of broken mechanics is delivered to her dorm room. Watch these for me, the note requests without a hint of shame and she puts them away carefully, sure he’ll be back for them soon and warmed that he’d trust her over anyone else.
Gaila wakes up once after the world ends.
There are voices around her, palms hooking under her arms as her body is lifted, dragged across metal like she’s something to be moved to the side or completely tossed away. She twitches, defiant in what she’s calmly sure are going to be her last moments, and manages a muffled infuriated sound that escapes with a shudder. She’s calmer after this but fiercely proud and she drifts away again, pleased to have made a last sound.
Then she wakes up a second time, jerks out of nightmares of hands that curve into her thighs and twist into chains and hold her down while she tries vainly to catch Uhura and Pavel as they fall from the sky. Her stomach lurches inside her and then someone helps when she manages to lift her head, turns her onto her side as she vomits and shudders and cries a little because her head hurts and she knows the smell.
It’s not filth-they have to be careful to keep diseases from becoming dents in their profits-but there are too many bodies in a closed space, too much warmth and too much muffled stillness.
More voices then, and she’s settled back down, tucked in again, the moisture wiped from her face.
They took her uniform.
This, somehow, is the worst of where she’s found herself, of what has happened.
But it’s still painless, the easy way she understands what happened when she recovers from the head wound and the blood loss. Distantly she has enough understanding of psychology to know it’s emotional shock, that she’s been traumatized. She puts together the fragments and holds onto her anger over losing her uniform, resists the urge to crawl into a corner and cry the way she remembers some girls doing.
Gaila remembers the destruction of the ship around her and the emergency protocols kicking in before the main power went down, remembers that awful grinding sound that she’d felt in her bones before the lights went out. Between please don’t let me be here and I hate them, I hate them, she wonders how long it was before the scavengers were crawling through the wreckage of the armada.
Worst is when she imagines them picking through what’s left of the Farragut, when she can only hope futilely that it was fast and painless and then starts sniffling again.
Gaila is self-aware enough, in those first two weeks, to know that she’s barely coping.
For every bit of physical pain that eases, the emotional pain weighs her down more.
She has no stomach for the food the woman that’s been assigned as her nurse brings her, drinks only the water offered and then rolls back to face the wall again. Doesn’t cry but dozes, dreams of Uhura and Pavel where they used to be, and dreams of a hundred other people who never made it back from Vulcan.
She doesn’t know why she’s here but thinks it’s only spite- grab the girl that got away, drag her back to the ship even though they’ll never be able to sell her, not the shape she’s in and besides, she’ll die before she accepts what her mother saved her from. They know they can’t use her like they can use broken pieces of ships but they can hurt her, and she thinks of her mother and Uhura taken from her and little Pavel gone, and before she realizes it, she’s crying in her corner.
It lasts for a week and a half.
Lasts until she first notices the scrawny girl that flits around the women and then walks past her a dozen times a day, casting her furtive glances before one of the older women always shoves her pointedly into the younger girls’ direction. Gaila decides to ignore her at first, stubborn in a desperate need not to feel any kind of optimism, but the girl keeps circling her and she finally breaks.
Gaila finally sits up against the wall, the first time in days that she’s moved for any reason other than the basic hygiene the guards demand, and crooks a finger until the girl slinks over, hovers near her feet. When Gaila realizes the girl’s just going to stand there, she narrows her eyes in something of an order and the girl eases down beside her, the eagerness on her face a pointed contrast to her hunched shoulders. They can talk here, the other women won’t be able to hear past their own conversation, but the girl stares and keeps quiet, and Gaila blows out a breath, frustration tempering the hurt inside her.
“How old are you, sweetheart?”
“Eleven.”
She’s pretty, hair heavy and dark and gathered loose from her face to tumble messy against her back. It’s brushed but barely, the clumsy fastening a sure sign Gaila remembers that the girl’s missing a caretaker to give her anything more than food or clothes and once the awareness is there, Gaila can’t ignore it.
“I saw them bring you in,” the girl starts beside her, is silent for a moment and then starts again, more determined as the seconds go by. “I tried to get your clothes, I thought you’d want them, but- but they took them with them when they left.” Another moment of silence, the girl visibly weighing how much she’s willing to risk saying. “You threw up on me,” she finally adds, and then finishes: “I’m Vari.”
Gaila sniffs, shakes herself and straightens against the wall. Considers. The burn on her arm aches vaguely and the dislocated hip they had fit back into place is a steady ache, but she stays where she is now that she’s up, shakes out her blanket and pulls it up to wriggle her toes, bend a foot.
Vari is watching, young and helpless but right in front of her.
“I haven’t eaten much,” she says at last, remembering her mother giving her jobs and chores, keeping her busy to keep her from thinking. The memory leaves her oddly sure of herself. “Go get us something to eat, enough for both of us.” She smoothes her hair from her face, breathes through the pain the movement causes and keeps breathing, grief-stricken but alive. “And a brush,” she decides, “so I can do something with my hair.”
The girl skitters off immediately and that’s that.
Gaila breathes and eats the food that’s brought back and starts wrestling the tangles from her hair.
Makes sure her legs will be strong enough to carry her weight the next time the door opens.