in our nature 'verse: Dog Years (1/2)

[ninety6tears]

Title: Dog Years
(1/2)
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.
Notes: If anyone is actually inclined to read this as a stand-alone (maybe somebody out there has a hankering for Romulan slash, I don't know), I think it might work. Quite a while back I had already written some stuff from the POV of the ex-slave OCs in ION that I hadn't thought I'd ever post, but somewhere along flowrs4ophelia asked me about how Gene and Alel first met, and some months of occasional fiddling and a few K later I have this thing which is so much longer than I expected and hopefully only a little bit self-indulgent. My gods.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That's not the point."

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

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

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

"What are you trying to say about me?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now a boy.

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

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

He is also walking up to him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gene points to himself. "Gene. You?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yeah."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Mihkshake..."

"Milk."

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

"Yeah?"

"Hmm."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Seventeen."

"Ah."

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

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

"...What?"

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

"Why?"

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

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

"And it's self-deprecating."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom eventually just sighs. "So go."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Gene-"

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

"-Gene? Jolan-tru!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Rai, you need to respect him."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alel lets out a long unsteady sigh. He nods.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What-?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"-Jill, it's your play."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gene changes the subject.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That wasn't-"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Who's Jim Kirk?" Gene asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why?"

"...What?"

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

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

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

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

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

"You don't know that."

"Yes I do."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gene's face squints in tired curiosity.

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

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

"No, I know what you mean."

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

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

"Alel," Tom says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

... Part Two...