In Spite of It All

so this is an incredibly self indulgent fic I wrote for two reasons: 1. i'm sick of fics villainizing Winona and find her to be an interesting and complicated character (even though we don't know much about her lol) and 2. i love the genius jim trope/headcanon. so here's this. enjoy.

Work Text:

The thing is.

The thing is, Winona tries.

Mommy gets sad sometimes. That’s what Sam says on the days when she stays in bed all day and the three of them eat cereal with replicated milk in silence for dinner. Sometimes, Uncle Frank comes over and makes them “some real food,” which Jimmy thinks is silly because cereal is real food. It’s food and it’s real. Replicated milk is still real milk.

Some days Uncle Frank comes over and they all have dinner, and then he shoos them away and follows Mommy into her room. Sometimes, things are quiet. Other times, they can hear Uncle Frank shouting. It makes Sam frown, but whenever Jimmy asks him about it he says it’s just a sibling fight, like when he and Jimmy argue over Mommy’s PADD.

It makes sense, but Jimmy doesn’t really think it’s like that at all.

Sam says that when Mommy gets sad, it’s like when he gets sick. Sam calls them her “bad days.” Jimmy doesn’t really get that either, because he doesn’t feel like that when he’s sad, but there are a lot of things he doesn’t understand, so maybe Sam is right. Uncle Frank just says Mommy’s having “one of those days,” and tells them to leave her alone until she feels better.

Jimmy calls them sick days. Sam smiles and messes up his hair when he says so. Uncle Frank just frowns. But when he’s sick, he hates being stuck in bed all by himself. He likes it when Mommy or Sam come hang out with him and read to him or let him watch things on the PADD. So when Mommy takes a sick day, and when Uncle Frank is gone and Sam is asleep or not paying attention to him, he sneaks into Mommy’s room and sits in bed with her.

Sometimes, she cries. He thinks it must be him that makes her cry, because she only starts when he curls up next to her. But it doesn’t happen every time, and she doesn’t tell him to go away like Sam does when he cries, so Jimmy figures it’s okay.

Other times, she smiles at him and says, “Hey, Jimbo,” and rests her head on his head resting on her shoulder.

Sometimes, he says, “It’s okay, Mommy,” because that’s what people say to you when you’re sad.

Mommy always says back, “I know, Jimbo. I know.”

He knows she doesn’t really believe him when he says it, but it’s okay. He doesn’t really believe it either.

Sam says the bad days are the days when Mommy gets sad, but Jimmy thinks Sam is wrong. He thinks she’s always sad. When she smiles, even on good days, it’s the same smile he sees when he keeps her company on bad days.

Mommy is still sad, but the sick days happen less than they did back when Jimmy was four and Mommy and Uncle Frank were still speaking.

Jimmy understands, now, why Mommy is always sad. But she’s getting better. Sam tells him he’s getting too old to sleep in Mommy’s bed all the time, and Jimmy feels like he might be too old to curl up in bed with her on the bad days, but he does it anyways. She still hasn’t told him to go away, and he thinks she’s like him and doesn’t like to be lonely when she’s sick. Or maybe it’s that he’s like her.

Jimmy is glad Uncle Frank never comes around anymore. Not that he’d ever say, but he knows Sam agrees with him. The last time they saw Uncle Frank was when he and Mommy had a huge fight where they screamed at each other and Jimmy could hear through Mommy’s closed door. Sam came out of his room to find Jimmy sitting in the hallway listening and sat down next to him and covered his ears, which didn’t last long, but made them smile for a moment. But after that, after Uncle Frank stormed out and never came back, Mommy went into the office and grumbled as she cleared out the dust. Jimmy climbed on the newly cleaned desk and swung his feet while Mommy cursed and Sam stood in the doorway with his eyebrows raised.

Mommy starts making phone calls and doing official-looking things on her PADD. Jimmy gets into it later and finds a bunch of messages to and from some guy named Christopher Pike, all talking about Starfleet and engineering business and Starships and potential projects. Jimmy tries not to get his hopes up that it’s all going to last.

“Mommy,” Jimmy says one day, lying on the floor of the office while she frowns at the screen.

“Yeah, Jimmy,” she says.

“Who’s Christopher Pike?”

Mommy stops typing, frown replaced with a blank expression. She stares at him for several very long seconds.

“Where’d you hear that name, Jimbo?” she finally says.

Jimmy puts on his best innocent face. “Uh.”

She looks at the PADD in her hands, then back at him. Looks back at the PADD. Locks it and unlocks it. Looks back at him.

“Huh,” she says.

They blink at each other for another few long seconds.

Then, “Come here Jimbo.”

He sits on her lap and watches her work. Reads her messages with her, watches with wide eyes as she scans and manipulates schematics of warp cores. A lot of it goes over his head, but she answers his questions the best she can.

“Would more nacelles make a ship go faster?” Jimmy asks. Because he knows Starships are fast. Faster than light. Which is hard to wrap his head around, but he gets the idea. But wouldn’t it be so cool if they were even faster ? And they only have two, which means they only have one backup if something goes wrong. Space travel is safe and all, but he knows Starfleet ships aren’t invincible.

Mommy’s hands pause where they’re tapping at the screen. “Shit, Jimmy.”

Jimmy twists around to look at her.

“Sorry,” she says. “Yeah, in theory, but the ships we build today can only go so fast before they fall apart under the stress. Or blow up.”

“Oh.”

They spend a few more seconds blinking at each other, both of them wide eyed.

“Shit, Jimbo,” she says. Jimmy frowns. “Don’t tell your brother.”

Jimmy frowns some more. Mommy sighs. “Okay, fine. Just don’t tell him about the swearing. And all of this is classified, so don’t talk to anyone about it besides me or Sam.”

“Okay,” he says. “Do you work for Starfleet now?” Again? Whatever.

“Not really.”

“Is Christopher Pike your boss?”

She snorts. “No.”

“Are you his boss?”

She snorts again, and it sounds more like a laugh this time. “No.”

“Is he my boss? Am I his boss?”

Mommy rolls her eyes and gently cuffs his head. But her eyes are sad again. “He’s a friend. He...he was friends with your father.”

Oh.

Jimmy hates when she gets sad, hates when it’s his fault.

“Was he daddy’s boss?” He makes his eyes go as wide as they can. “Was daddy his boss? Does he know the President? Is he Sam’s boss? Oh! Is he our new babysitter?”

She laughs, but her eyes are still far away. “We all worked together. Nobody’s anybody’s boss. You aren’t babies anymore. And he wishes he knew the President.”

There’s a stretch of silence. Mommy looks at nothing in particular, and Jimmy looks at her.

She sighs. “Okay, Jimothy. Get off me, my legs are falling asleep. Let’s go bother your brother.”

She gives him her old PADD and buys herself a new one. Sam complains about it for a whole week because he didn’t get one until he was ten. Jim argues that it’s a hand-me-down, so it’s not the same. Mommy rolls her eyes at both of them and ignores them.

School is boring. Jimmy’s ahead in all of his classes, acing them, actually. He’s already a grade ahead. He’s already learned all this math, taught himself alongside Sam when he took it. He’d hover over Sam’s shoulder, and Sam would always grumble about it and tell him to fuck off, until one day Jimmy started correcting him.

The first time it happened, Sam had scoffed, but checked over his work anyways, and oh. Shit.

What the fuck , he’d thought to himself. Then, okay . Okay. He could work with this.

Sam started duplicating his homework files and sending them to Jimmy. They’d both work on them and compare answers. More often than not, Sam was wrong and Jimmy was right. It sucked, in the beginning, that his kid brother had taught himself math just by looking over Sam’s shoulder and was better at it than he was. But it was helpful. Sam’s math grades were excellent. Jimmy was a smartass, and annoying, as younger brothers are. He teased him for all the stupid mistakes he made, but when he checked Sam’s work, he never made fun of him for getting things wrong, never bragged about the fact that he was nine and had mastered advanced middle school math. And when he thought about it some more, it was pretty fucking cool, how Jimmy could do that. Sam wonders, distantly, if Mom knows. If any of this is Mom’s influence. If any of it’s Dad’s influence, somehow, not that they’ll ever know.

Jimmy is bored, and his teachers are impressed, but also sick of him. He shows off, for a while, proud that he can solve any problem they throw at him. Always raises his hand, always knows the answers. But even that gets boring, and it alienates his classmates, and school is bad enough without people actively antagonizing him. He wants to not care, he really does, but it’s just easier to keep his head down and quietly ace all his tests and to accept extra work that he burns through just as quickly and to go home and hack into Mom’s pad and read her emails and send himself the interesting stuff.

Mom knows he does it, because she changes her password and her encryption every so often. It gets a little more complicated each time. Still, though, Jimmy still isn’t sure if she makes it easy enough for him, or if he’s just that good, and asking her would mean he’s confessing to the crime, so he doesn’t. His PADD is encrypted, too, because it is Starfleet stuff, and he’s not actually an idiot, and he might be breaking the law by having it, or maybe his mom is breaking the law by letting him get away with it. He hasn’t bothered to actually look up the rules. Plausible deniability and all that.

She still talks to Chris Pike. Jimmy’s looked him up. Public and not-public information. He’s Lieutenant Commander on the USS Pegasus . Father, mother, no siblings Jimmy can dig up. No significant other. Served on the USS Kelvin . He has a paper published, a dissertation on the events surrounding the Kelvin that Jimmy hasn’t yet been able to force himself to read. He wonders if Mom knows, if she’s read it.

Mom still has bad days where she doesn’t leave her room, but they’re few and far between, now. On those days, Jimmy and Sam also take sick days, because it’s a ground rule that they aren’t allowed to drive themselves to school, it doesn’t matter if you know how, I know I taught you, but you’re both too young to legally drive and if you get caught they’ll throw me in jail, and then where will we be?

So they stay home. Which is fine, really. No complaints there. Jimmy hacks Mom’s hacks on the replicator to make ice cream. He replicates chocolate to make the good hot chocolate and takes a mug to Mom’s room, leaves it on the bedside table.

She still says, “Hey Jimbo,” whenever he goes in.

He says, “It’s okay, Mom,” and she tries for a smile, and he tries for a smile, and then he hesitates but leaves anyways, closing the door softly behind him. She always finishes the hot chocolate, though, or makes it look like she does, so Jimmy thinks they’re all doing alright.

Sometimes, he’ll take a mug to Sam. Sam lets him stay until both of their mugs are empty, lets him sit quietly on his bed or on the couch and for a short while they quietly coexist in a way they hardly do anymore.

Mom throws him into the running club at school. He’s surprised to find that he likes it. Running feels good. It wears him out and he doesn’t have to think while he’s doing it.

The running club kids seem to like him. He’s fast. At first, they mostly talked to him because of proximity and a shared activity, but eventually they warmed up to him. They laugh at his shitty jokes. When they do long as fuck distance practice runs, he doesn’t leave them all in the dust even though he probably could. He sticks with the pack and bounces between smaller groups doing dumb shit to make everyone forget for a few seconds that they can’t breath.

He starts running by himself on the weekends around the farm and up and down the backroads around their house. His feet pound at the dirt, and his lungs and legs burn, and he thinks about the breath going in and out of his lungs. It feels good.

He stops at the end of the driveway, bent over, hands on his knees. It’s taking him less time to catch his breath than it used to. That feels good too.

The high school’s cross country team shows up at running club, one day. They recruit him for next year, send him off with all the information for tryouts. He thinks about it.

“Good morning, sunshine. Good morning, starshine. Fuck school, we’re going on a family field trip,” Mom says.

“Jesus, Mom,” Sam groans. “Can we not swear until, like, noon at least? Jimmy’s still a child!”

“Jimmy is eleven. He can handle it.”

“I’m going to make a swear jar. No, Jimmy’s going to make a swear jar program that takes credits from your account because I know you won’t put anything in the swear jar.”

“Jimmy will do no such thing. Jimmy, don’t do that.”

“Sounds kinda fun,” Jimmy grins.

“Absolutely not. Sam, look what you’ve done, now he’s going to get into my bank account.”

Which yeah, Jimmy thinks. He probably will now that he’s thought about it, but he won’t mess with anything. He just wants to see if he can.

“Fuck school,” Mom says.

She takes them to the shipyard.

Mom has a job. Well, she’s been making money somehow anyways, consulting and getting “sorry your husband died in a glorious and violent manner to save our asses, we owe him one but since he’s dead I guess we you one” money.

Anyways. Mom has a real nine to five job. That’s what she calls it, at least. Fucking fuck school is right, this is way cooler. Would Mom let him come here everyday with her instead? Not likely, but maybe a few days. He bets if he talks to his teacher or some administrator that he could get school credit, like an internship.

Mom is Chief Engineer for Starfleet’s new big bad flagship.

“Well, I’m one of the chief engineers,” she says “But this’ll be the USS Enterprise .”

Jimmy isn’t Starfleet’s biggest fan. Hell, Mom and Sam aren’t either, and that’s massively understating things. But he knows Mom loves the stars, misses her job up there finding creative ways to blow things up or whatever it was she did. He knows she’d probably still be out there, in spite of everything, if she didn’t have to look out for him and Sam. Jimmy can’t bring himself to hate her for it, either. He wants to hate the very idea of going into space. But he wants it so goddamn badly. To be as far away from Iowa as possible, to be out of Mom and Sam’s hair.

There are other ways to get to space besides joining Starfleet. If it turns out there aren’t, he’ll figure one out. He could stow away on Mom’s ship when she finally caves and agrees to an off-planet job. He’ll build his own damn spaceship if he has to.

“Hey, Mom,” Jimmy says.

“Mmhm?”

“Can I have a bike?”

Mom looks up at him. “Yeah?”

“Really?”

She narrows her eyes. “Well, yeah, but what do you want one for anyways? Not worth the time it would take to ride it into town. Also not really worth it to go into town in the first place. Also, baby, I love you, but you have chicken legs.”

Okay, thank you, mother. Uncalled for. Jimmy rolls his eyes.

“Not a bike bike, obviously that would be useless. Bike like motorcycle.”

Mom stares at him. “No.”

“But Mom!”

“Jimmy, no .”

“If I had one, you wouldn’t have to drive me everywhere! I could run errands for you!”

“Jimbo, you’re twelve. You need a license to drive a motorcycle. And besides, I know you’d drive it at max speed for fun and accidentally crash into a building, or something.”

“Would not!”

“I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“Well, you’ll never see it if I don’t get a bike!”

Mom grins. “Exactly.”

The thing is, Winona is trying.

She takes Jimmy with her to the shipyard when she can. She’s not there every day, because it’s not like she’s actually building the thing, but god knows the people who are need to be supervised. Well. She’s there almost every day, come to think of it, so flimsy argument, Winona, nice one.

She knows the shipyard is probably Jimmy’s idea of a playground. Sometimes he hangs around and watches her shout at people, sometimes he disappears for her entire shift, reappearing out of fucking nowhere right before her shift is over. It’s probably not a great idea to let him roam free around a bunch of tools and mechanical parts and wires sticking out of the walls, but she knows there isn’t much she can do short of chaining him to the scaffolding, and if she did that, he’d probably pick the lock.

So she lets him out of her sight and tries her best not to think about what he gets up to unsupervised. Every once in a while, she’ll ask him to stick around, and she’ll take him around and explain everything going on. The other engineers and the construction guys like him. Jimmy can be charming when he makes an effort. That, and they’re all a little fascinated by how smart he is, how he absorbs and analyzes all the information they throw at him.

She knows that school is damn near pointless for him, that he’s too smart for his own good. Sam is, too, but even he is smart in a different way and much more quiet about it. She doesn’t know if she should blame herself or George for that one. Maybe it’s both of their faults. Not that he’s here to argue with her about it and to teach them about all sorts of shit they shouldn’t understand yet, but somehow do.

Nothing to be done about it now.

She’s seen how Jimmy is starting to get restless. He fidgets almost nonstop now. Winona put him in the running club at school in the hopes that it would help him blow off steam. He runs cross country style, but he’s fast. He runs like something is chasing him, and he’s only fucking twelve, and maybe she’s projecting, but she knows what that looks like, and she sees it in her son. Her twelve year old son, fuck it all to hell. He runs like he’s running for his life, as fast and as hard as he can, doesn’t matter if it’s practice or a meet or the run from the mailbox to the house. Gives it his all no matter what, even when he’s exhausted and 2 miles into a 5k.

He runs like he’s desperate to get away, and maybe that’s just it. But he’s twelve. She wishes he wasn’t so goddamn smart, because maybe then he’d have stayed naive for a little longer. Then again, she isn’t sure if he was ever naive in the first place.

Maybe that’s her fault. He’s got George’s eyes, and it hurts to look at him sometimes, but she’s trying . George was way more cut out for parenthood than she was, probably than she’ll ever be, but he’s not here. He’s not here, and these are her fucking kids, and she misses him so much it hurts her chest sometimes, which she always thought was bullshit, but here she is. But he’s gone, and he’s never coming back, and Sam has his smile and Jim has his eyes and they both have his hair, fuck is up with that, anyways, and these are their kids, even though it’s just her now, and they deserve her best fucking effort, if nothing else.

She was happy before she ever knew him, and yeah, he made her incredibly happy, but she can damn well be happy after he’s gone.

Mom says he couldn’t get a bike, but she didn’t say he couldn’t build one. Loophole , Jimmy thinks, grinning to himself.

He opens the hood of the corvette in the garage that he has been ordered, explicitly, never to touch. But nobody’s home; Mom’s at work and Sam’s with his friends, and what they don’t know won’t hurt them.

He opens the hood and stares inside. For a while. There’s a lot going on in there. His hands itch to take it all apart, break it down into each individual part and then put it back together and hear it rumble, but he’d need a fucking crane for that or something, god knows he can’t lift the engine out by himself. His hands itch to take it apart, and he ignores the voice in his head that wants him to do it just to see the look on Mom’s face when she sees it in pieces in the garage. No matter that he could put it back together like nothing happened, she wouldn’t know that when she saw it.

Mom doesn’t deserve that.

He closes the hood, pulls the sheet back over the car.

He spends the rest of the afternoon looking at blueprints and schematics and holovids. He stays up late that night, brainstorming, planning, and when he finally falls asleep, he dreams he’s flying down the Iowa interstate on a motorbike, no other vehicles on the long, straight stretch of road, sun shining, endless cornfields on both sides.

He contemplates building a hover bike, but throws that idea somewhere in the back of his mind for a rainy day, because Mom might actually keep him on a leash or handcuff him to Sam if he showed up with one.

Baby steps.

It’s summer, so he begs Mom to take him to work with her every day. She relents. She lets him wander around on his own, most days, so getting all the shit he needs isn’t too hard. He’s a little surprised she’s willing to let him out of her sight in a place like this, but there’s a saying about gift horses and mouths.

The shipyard staff find him endearing. Which is good, because he actually made an effort to seem like a well-behaved, well-adjusted child when Mom introduced him. He isn’t sure if they’re helping him out because they’re humoring him or because they actually believe he’s building something. He suspects at least part of it is curiosity, waiting to see if he can actually pull it off. That, and he did his best to make himself seem harmless. Whatever. The why doesn’t matter. What matters is that they help him out, and they don’t tell his mom, and they answer all his questions when he’s wandering around the half-finished hallways.

He gets the hang of it.

He climbs in the walls, sometimes. Calling them walls is a little generous. But he’s small enough, and all of the wires and pipes and fucking Jeffries tubes are cool to see up close. He slides out of the wall and scares the hell out of some poor engineer, who then goes through the five stages of grief, plus confusion followed by contemplation.

“You want to help me out with something?” she asks. Jimmy likes her already. He hasn’t met her yet, so she either knows of him and doesn’t feel the need to question him based on that or she’s just unfazed by strange kids wandering around a construction zone. He was just inside the wall.

“Yeah, but I can’t promise I’m qualified,” he says cheekily.

She rolls her eyes. “I gathered.”

It’s a low-skill job, which is a bummer, but he still helped! There were loose wires in some console in one of the labs and if he hadn’t come along with his skinny arms they would’ve had to remove the whole panel to fix them, which would have been an ordeal, or so he’s told.

It’s almost the end of Mom’s shift, so he starts to make his way to the transporter room. The turbolifts aren’t fully functional or safe, so it’s been a lot of either staying on your assigned level or climbing a lot of ladders. He’s going to have muscles by the end of summer.

He hangs around by the controls. They should really have chairs in here, or something. Maybe they do have chairs when it’s finished. He’s tempted to sit up on the console, there are areas with no buttons, but that might be pushing his luck. That, and Mom has started telling him he’s too old to do that outside of the house.

After a few minutes, he starts bothering the guy on shift, who knows what most of the buttons and levers do. Jimmy will just have to look up the rest, or ask Mom.

Mom shows up as he’s asking the transporter guy if he can just beam him straight home.

Christopher Pike is a few steps behind her. Here, in the flesh.

“Jimmy, hey, you’re here!” Mom says. She waves her hand. “This is Chris Pike.”

Jimmy doesn’t move. “I know.”

Mom sighs, but Pike grins.

“That’s fair,” he says. “I know you too.”

“Don’t encourage him,” Mom rolls her eyes. Then, gesturing at Pike again, “This’ll be his ship when it’s finished.”

Is that why she took this job? “That’s cool.”

“Nothing’s set in stone yet,” Pike says. “But yeah, pretty cool.”

Jimmy is too young to have a real job, and Mom doesn’t really do allowances. When they need money, they ask, and as long as they aren’t buying crack, she gives it to them. But Jimmy already knew she wouldn’t finance a motorcycle. It had still been worth a shot to ask, though.

Jimmy has money saved up. He made himself a bank account using Mom’s pretend permission and various identification documents for both of them. He’s a minor, so the accounts are connected, and she has access in theory, but she can’t monitor what she doesn’t know exists. Jimmy’s been doing high school kids’ homework for money since the fall he started seventh grade. He already knew algebra thanks to Sam, but everything else he had to teach himself. He didn’t figure out all the math until the winter, but cashed in on a bunch of essays and science projects. Towards the end of winter, he started offering to tutor kids. That took a bit more selling, because half the time it was the parents paying him, but it’s not like he’s not good for it. He knows his shit, and can prove it in front of a small audience if necessary.

So Jimmy’s got some money saved up. He also has some friends who are in high school. Well, maybe not friends. Acquaintances? Students? Clients? They’re people he knows and talks to semi-regularly. Some of them are assholes, some of them are just lazy, some of them are working and don’t have time or enough energy left in them to care, some are athletes who don’t have time and mostly don’t care for school. Some of them have cars.

They all hate him at least a little bit, because he’s thirteen and they’re paying him to do their homework, but most of them aren’t too hung up on it. A few of them are kind of fond of him, in a weird sort of older-sibling way. He bribes the nice ones with free homework or gas money to take him to the salvage yard and auto shop.

He builds it in the garage because no one ever goes in there. The car Mom actually drives sits in the driveway. It goes in the garage only when it snows, which Jimmy isn’t too worried about in the Iowa summer. He works on it whenever Mom’s not home, and since he makes kind of a racket, Sam knows, but doesn’t snitch like the good older brother he is. This also means that Jimmy owes him one, but whatever. He’d cover for Sam anyways if he needed it.

It’s slow going, and it takes a lot of staring and thinking and reading, but it is going.

It occurs to him that maybe he shouldn’t tell Mom at all. She probably won’t let him drive it past the end of the driveway until he’s at least 14 or 15.

He’ll burn that bridge when he gets to it.

Jimmy has to get some welding equipment shipped to a friend’s house because he isn’t sure he can covertly intercept packages if Mom is around, and he can’t guarantee she won’t be there when it arrives.

Sam answers the door and almost tells the tall gangly kid he’s never seen before in his life that’s standing on their porch with a giant box “wrong house,” but it’s kind of hard to end up at their house by mistake. Jesus Christ.

“Jimmy,” he yells. “It’s for you!”

Jimmy clatters down the stairs at a dangerous speed and says, “Jonathan, hey! Thanks a million for this. Can you carry it?”

“Why exactly do you need welding shit, anyways?” Sam overhears they walk towards the garage

“A lot of the stuff we already had was old or broken,” is Jimmy’s reply, and Sam removes himself from the vicinity so he can claim plausible deniability if needed.

The bike is finished by the beginning of August. She’s not perfect, but Jimmy thinks she’s pretty damn good for a thirteen year old’s summer project.

Sam looks to the sky for guidance the first time Jimmy rolls it out of the garage.

“If you don’t wear a helmet, I will tell Mom,” Sam says.

“Deal,” Jimmy says. No one in this family has any faith in him. Of course he has a fucking helmet.

He teaches himself to drive it on the driveway and the roads near his house. If he goes into town and someone sees him on it, Mom will find out, and he won’t be allowed out of his room for a year.

By the time school starts up again, he thinks he’s pretty good at it. He hides it away in the garage anyways and doesn’t tell his Mom. He’ll show her once he figures out the best, least dangerous, most rational way to tell her.

Winona knows Jimmy’s up to something. Either that, or he’s depressed. He doesn’t ask to come to work with her as often as he used to, and when she asks him what he does all day when he’s stuck at home, he doesn’t seem to have any good answers for her.

Watched tv, my ass, she thinks. For a few hours, yeah, she’d believe it. But Jimmy doesn’t have the attention span to do nothing but watch tv all day. He’s also far too smart for that. Not too smart for entertainment, but he can only make it through one or two movies before he gets bored and wanders off to find something else to do.

So she knows he’s up to something. She asks Sam to keep an eye on him, knows he’ll read between the lines. If Jimmy’s about to do something stupid or dangerous and he can’t stop him himself, he’ll tell her. But he has nothing to report, and the house hasn’t burned down, and she likes her job, and it’s nice to not have to worry about Jimmy getting electrocuted or falling to his death at the shipyard when she lets him out of her sight.

He’ll tell her eventually, if whatever he’s doing works itself out. If he takes too long, she’ll figure it out herself.

She doesn’t ask, and she doesn’t investigate.

He better not blow anything up.

School is garbage. Jimmy wishes he could go back in time and tell his younger self to shut the fuck up.

It’s not a scarlet letter situation or anything like that. People are nice enough to him, and no one ever complains when they get paired up with him in class. But these are most of the same kids he went to elementary school with who remember when he acted like he knew everything ever. Obnoxiously intelligent. He’s toned it down since then. Like, all the way down. But people don’t forget, and while he might not be as loud about it as he used to be, he still already knows half the shit they’re learning, and it shows in his grades and the way he finishes his work in about a third of the time it’s supposed to take.

He tutors some kids after school in the library for free. They’re all his age or a year or two above. It’s easier work for him, and it’s all kids who are in the same classes, because charging for his services or teaching a science class he’s not in would only make things worse. He’s hoping it makes him more approachable. He’s kind of an asshole, according to Sam and Mom, but he’s nice enough. He thinks he’s funny.

He’s also the kid with the dead dad, as they’re helpfully reminded once a year.

He isn’t sure anymore if it’s a lack of effort on their part or on his.

He still has all his high school clients. Calling them clients is fun, but he never says it out loud because it sounds pretentious. And also because this whole side business he has might technically be academic dishonesty and could get them all into a lot of trouble. Out loud, he just calls them friends, but that isn’t really accurate either.

They’re all pretty tight lipped about it anyways because Jimmy’s in the eighth grade and it’s embarrassing to admit you pay a middle schooler to do your homework.

Word somehow gets around anyways.

Winona stops short at the bottom of the porch steps.

Jimmy is a little bastard.

Sitting in the driveway next to her car is a motorcycle. It’s bigger than a kiddie bike would be, but not quite as big as a normal one is. Where did he even get the money for this?

If she wasn’t already late for work she’d go inside and demand some fucking answers. But of course she’s late for work. Jimmy knows when she leaves for work. He probably took it outside and set it up all nice when he didn’t hear her leave on time.

She doesn’t have time to yell at him, and by the time she gets back from work she’ll have been thinking about it all day and won’t say anything impulsive in anger that he can use against her.

She’s being manipulated by a thirteen year old. Jesus.

She’s a little impressed, but only because he’s her thirteen year old.

Did Sam know about this? Did Sam help him? God, one day she’ll end up killing herself just so she can go scream at George for ever convincing her to have kids.

Jimmy is hovering in Sam’s doorway.

Sam isn’t really in the mood. But Jimmy never seeks him out anymore, is always at work with Mom or in the garage or hanging out with fucking high schoolers, Jesus. Not that Sam is surprised. Jimmy’s brain is probably more on their level than anyone his age. And they drive him around.

Sam kind of hates him.

But he’s hovering in his doorway glancing between Sam, the window, and down the hall towards the stairs. Sam kind of hates him, but Jimmy is still his kid brother, and it’s nice to feel needed sometimes.

“Either come in or close the door,” Sam says.

Jimmy hesitates. Sam rolls his eyes. “What’s got you all freaked out? Or are you just wringing your hands for fun?”

Jimmy glares at him, but steps inside and sits down, back to the wall next to the door. “Mom knows about the bike.”

“Shit. How’d she find out?”

“Well, uh. It’s in the driveway.”

What. “So you told her about it?”

Jimmy draws his knees to his chest. “I didn’t know how to tell her. I just. Thought it would be easier to show her?”

Sam kind of hates Jimmy. He knows exactly what he’s doing, Sam is certain. Mom has the whole day at work to cool down. And she likes her job, so odds are nothing will put her in a bad mood. Worse mood. Whatever. And it’s actually pretty impressive that a twelve year old built a whole ass motorcycle by himself. Sam hasn’t asked where he got the money for it, but all the options he’s run through in his head aren’t great. He stole it. He conned people into giving it to him. He bartered for it, some-fucking-how. He’s selling drugs. He somehow has a job even though he’s too young to get a work permit. The list gets more outlandish as it goes on, which is why he tries to avoid thinking about it.

“Well, she knows,” Sam says, lifting a shoulder. “She probably won’t let you drive it, because you are actually thirteen, but you had to have known that going into this.”

“What if. I don’t know. She throws it off a cliff or something. Or smashes it with a crowbar.” Jimmy’s been watching too much tv, is what Sam thinks. “Or banishes me to the barn. Or sells it. Or sells me! Or, I dunno, disowns me.” Jimmy’s voice gets smaller. “What if she screams at me like how she used to scream at Uncle Frank. Or puts me on house arrest. Or never lets me go to work with her again. Or—“

“Jimmy. James. Jimberly,” Sam stops him. “It’s gonna be fine.”

“But what if—“

“She’s our mother, Jimmy. She’s reasonable. She isn’t going to disown you, what even--. She’s not Frank. She might yell at you, yeah, but what’s new about that.”

Jimmy doesn’t look convinced. Sam tries again, “If anything, she’ll be impressed that you build a working motorcycle. Pissed, but impressed.”

Jimmy rests his forehead on his knees. “Okay.”

Sam’s heart breaks a little. He hasn’t seen Jimmy like this since he was a little kid. But he’s the one who made this decision. That’s the bed he made himself, and he’s going to have to lie in it. Consequences and whatnot.

Had to happen eventually.

Mom’s going to be pissed, but he wasn’t lying. Winona yells even when she’s happy with them, but she is reasonable. Maybe a little, tiny bit insane, but reasonable.

It’s not that Jimmy thinks Mom is actually going to banish him to the barn. She’s reasonable. Well, she’s crazy, but she’s crazy in the same way that he’s crazy, so it doesn’t count. She tries. She lets him get away with a lot. Makes a lot of exceptions for him. He’s noticed. But he wishes he’d kept the bike hidden away until he was older, maybe 14 or 15 when it would be more acceptable for him to actually ride it. Socially acceptable, at least, if not legally. But he’s proud of it, and he’d been excited to show her, at the time. But that was a whole two hours ago.

Now, he’s just scared.

He doesn’t want her to be disappointed. He doesn’t want her to stop trusting him. He doesn’t want to see her get sad and far away. He wonders where she goes when that happens. He thinks it has something to do with dad, but he can’t be certain and he won’t ask.

He’s an asshole and he never listens. Case in point, the bike. He can’t always stop himself. He doesn’t want her to start hating him.

At least hate can be productive. He’d rather she hate him if it was between that and making her sad.

Jimmy’s sitting on the porch steps when she gets home. She gets out of the car and silently moves to sit down next to him. He stares at the ground. She stares at the bike.

“So I’m assuming you know how to ride it,” she says. “Which is forbidden on multiple levels. But you aren’t dead, or injured, and it doesn’t seem like you got caught.”

“Yeah,” he mumbles.

“Yeah,” she sighs. “Helmet?”

That makes him roll his eyes. “Of course.”

“I expect proof of that when this conversation is over.” She pauses. “How’d you pay for it?”

“I tutor.”

What in fuck. “Who?”

“Some kids my age, some in high school.”

Christ on a cracker. There’s more to that, unless he’s charging by the minute, but one problem at a time here. “Where’d you get it?”

“Built it.”

Winona’s entire brain stutters to a halt for a few seconds. She needs to process that. Sam’s math homework, sure. Starfleet files, okay. Those are organized and comprehensive. Tutoring, high school level shit, she’ll accept. Even the Enterprise has a bunch of qualified adults hanging around to explain things to him. But this, building a whole entire working motorcycle, that’s all Jimmy, maybe with some help from the internet. That’s her kid.

For a moment, she’s terrified. What the fuck is she going to do with him, both now and when he’s older?

Her brain unfreezes, and a hundred questions flood through it about the logistics of a thirteen year old building a functional motorcycle.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“There’s a lot to unpack there, Jimbo. I’ll bother you about it later.”

“Uh.”

“When I said I wouldn’t buy you one, it was implied you wouldn’t get one at all. That was the rule. Granted, this was a hell of a way to get around the fine print. But I know you know what I meant.”

Jimmy stares at his feet again. “Yeah.”

Winona lets the silence settle over them while she gathers her thoughts.

“When I tell you not to do things, it’s not to be mean or contrary. The reasons vary, but they aren’t baseless. I don’t want you to get hurt. Or arrested. That’s why I said no bike. I was not expecting this. But here we are.” She sighs. “I know I can’t stop you.” I don’t know if you can stop you , she thinks. “So. I am putting a tracker in that thing, and in your helmet, and if you mess with either of them, there will be hell to pay. If the helmet is not in the same location as the bike, there will be hell to pay. You can’t take that thing further than our street until you’re 15 at least. That’s a legality thing. Don’t make me deal with cops or social services, Jimbo. You will regret it. You will always tell me before you use it. If you use it when I’m not here, tell Sam. I’ll know how far you’ve gone. And you have to tell us so that we know when we should start panicking and looking for you in the nearby roadside ditches. Are we clear?”

“Yes. We’re clear.”

“Good.” She holds out her pinky.

Jimmy grins and links his pinky around hers. “Good.”

She returns to staring at the bike. “I’m writing all that down and you’re reading it back to me, out loud, on video.”

She can tell he wants to whine about it. He almost does, she can see the ugly expression on his face, but then he stops himself.

“Ugh, fine.”

She ruffles his hair. “You need a haircut, kid.”

“I’m growing it out.”

Winona snorts. He shoves at her arm, says, “I’ll learn how to braid it and everything. You’ll be jealous.”

She smiles. “Okay, Thor wannabe.”

On the way home from work one day, Mom asks him, “If you had the chance to live off planet, would you want to?”

The thing the pops into his head, the instinctual response, is yes. But. Winona is deliberate. When she’s not joking or otherwise being ridiculous, she is deliberate. There’s a reason she’s asking.

“Maybe,” Jimmy says instead. “Why?”

Mom side-eyes him. “Why ‘maybe?’”

“I asked you first.”

“I asked you second, and the speed of light is 3 million meters per second, and there’ll be nine conference rooms on the Enterprise. Are we stating facts or are you gonna tell me?”

Jimmy rolls his eyes. “Y’know, the logistics. Have I lived on the planet forever or have I just moved there? Do you and Sam live there too or is it just me? How far away is the planet? What’s the food situation like, ‘cause I don’t think I could be vegetarian. Is it a Federation planet? Is it in contested space? Are the habitants human? How is it governed? What are the laws like, on the strict side or the lax side? Legal driving age? Legal drinking age?”

Winona sighs. “You just can’t make anything easy, can you.” She’s looking out the front windshield at the road but Jimmy can see the wrinkle between her eyebrows, the shadow of a frown.

“Nope. No fun,” he says. “Besides, you’d be so bored .” He watches the corners of her mouth twitch upwards, and breathes. They drive in silence for a few minutes.

Then, “So, hypothetically, let’s say you move off planet. Let’s say it’s an Earth colony, one of the farther ones. Not in contested space, don’t start. And you’d live with relatives.”

“These hypothetical relatives. They aren’t you and Sam?”

Mom stares straight ahead. “No.”

“And they aren’t Frank?”

She snorts. “No, god. Who do you take me for?”

“His sister?”

“Don’t remind me.” She pauses. “But, hypothetically, what would your answer be?”

“Hypothetically?” he says. The answer is still a resounding yes . Jimmy isn’t even entirely sure why. It’s not like he’s having a terrible time in Riverside. It could be better, sure, but isn’t that just how life works? But this clearly isn’t a hypothetical question. He has no idea which planet she could be talking about, no idea which relatives she means. His grandparents on Mom’s side are dead, and Frank can get fucked. He isn’t sure who’s left. There’s a whole other host of logistics to consider still. But. Another planet .

“Maybe,” he says carefully.

“Why ‘maybe?’” she echoes.

He shrugs a shoulder even though she can’t see it. “Logistics.”

The rest of the ride home is quiet.

Winona doesn’t know what it says about her, the fact that she’s willing to send her thirteen year old kid to another planet. Alone. Not to mention the fact that the trip there is a few weeks, and communications from the planet can be unreliable. It feels a little bit like just sending him out into the void.

She hasn’t seen George’s sister and her wife in years, but they keep in touch. They were never best friends, but they felt like family. Feel like family. She likes them more than she likes Frank most of the time, anyways. Bastard.

It had been their idea, too. Sort of. She’d woke up to a video message one day of them sitting in their kitchen, checkered tablecloth and all, giving her a rundown on what they’d been up to. They’d moved to an Earth colony in the Tarsus system where they now own a farm -- shocking turn of events, some Kirks owning a farm -- and Winona and the boys are welcome to visit anytime for however long they want.

Winona and the boys. Ha. They should start a band.

But they offered, and while it didn’t sound like something she wanted to follow through with based on the fact that it was a farming colony far as fuck away, it did sound like something Jimmy might like. Not the farming. But she’d done her research, and the school was more tailored to individuals, with a progress at your own pace mentality and a lot more practical and mechanical options. The place seemed pretty relaxed; it would be a change of pace and a change of scenery and Claire and Ina are sweet and easygoing, unfazed by most things other people would be fazed by, such as herself and Jimmy and the shit-show that is Starfleet in general. It’s not that they don’t care, either, they just have a way of handling things with incredible grace and accepting things as they are. Winona has a lot of respect for them.

She trusts them, and trusts them not to end up driven to kill Jimmy in his sleep and claim it was natural causes and get away with it. The laws can be weird on early-stage colonies. They’re there, but people just sort of do what they want. It’s easier to get away with things, in any case. But that has more to do with them having relatively small populations and existing in fuckass nowhere, often inconvenient locations in the galaxy.

She loves Jimmy. Loves him a whole fucking lot, but the older he gets the less she knows what to do with him. He’s too smart, too intuitive, and he doesn’t have any close friends his age that she knows of. He hangs out with her, and Sam when he's not sick of him, and the employees at the shipyard. She wants something more for him, something different.

She’s trying not to feel like she’s just getting him off her hands for a little while.

“I can’t believe you even considered it!” Sam says angrily. “And now you’re actually thinking about going through with it?”

“I’m not sending him off to fucking war, Sammy, I don’t--”

“He’s fucking thirteen! He’s barely even left Riverside, let alone the fucking solar system !”

“It’s his decision, I’m not forcing him into anything!”

“He isn’t old enough to make that kind of decision, it doesn’t matter how smart he is!”

“I’m not just throwing him into the void, either, if he goes he’ll be with family,” she argues.

“Family that he doesn’t even know! I’d never even heard of these people until now, and you’re shipping him off to live with some fucking strangers!”

Winona doesn’t immediately respond, and Sam thinks maybe he’s won. But the car slows down, and she pulls them over on the shoulder and puts the car in park. She stares at the wheel.

“Sammy, I need you to remember that I had a life before you.” It stings, and she must know it. She drags a hand across her face. “No, fuck. That didn’t--I didn’t mean it like that. I just mean I existed in the world before you were in the picture. There are a lot of things you don’t know, not because I’m hiding them but because they just never came up or I never had reason to tell you. But I was a whole live person, with relationships and a job.”

Sam doesn’t say anything, just waits for her to get to the point.

“They aren’t strangers,” she continues. Her voice is quiet. “Claire is your father’s sister. We were close. We’ve kept in contact. They’re good people. They moved off planet when your grandparents died. You met them, when you were younger. You don’t remember, you were a baby. They were around right after your dad died, they met Jimmy. You might not remember that either.” He doesn’t. “I thought about this for a while, before I brought it up. And he can come back whenever. I’m not trying to send him away.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Sam grumbles.

“You could go too, you know, if you wanted.”

Sam doesn’t bother replying to that one.

“I want him to be happy, Sam.”

“I know.”

She puts the car in drive. “I want you to be happy too.”

“I know. I am. Most of the time.”

The car pulls back onto the road. “I just don’t know what to do with him.”

Sam looks over at her. “Who says you have to do anything with him. He’s fine.”

She sighs. “It’s not that simple, Sammy.”

The Tarsus system is forty-some light years away. The trip there in the citizen transport is three weeks and change. Jimmy’s going to do something about that at some point. Maybe he’ll ask Mom about it. He wishes he’d thought to bring some books, or to load something on his PADD that wasn’t a textbook, a book he’s already read, or a vid he’s already seen.

He goes the whole trip without breaking anything, (accidentally or accidentally on purpose), blowing anything up, setting anything on fire, or otherwise causing any sort of damage to people or objects. Suck it, Winona. He has seen approximately every inch of the ship and has spent a lot of time in the walls since he figured out how to get into the Jeffries tubes, but since he didn’t mess anything up, it doesn’t count.

He also has managed not to get in any trouble, which was surprising. He was laying low, but ran into more people in the walls than he thought he would. Mostly maintenance people, who sometimes let him hang around, but occasionally cadets and a few passengers, whose reasons are probably less official than the people fixing things and checking systems. Sometimes he asks, sometimes he doesn’t.

There’s a file on his PADD called “Claire & Ina” full of pictures and a few notes from Mom telling him about his aunts so he has a vague idea of what to expect and so he won’t offend or annoy them. They seem pretty nice, based on what Mom said. Jimmy isn’t getting his hopes up. But this is Dad’s side of the family, and the bar has already been set pretty low.

Jimmy has all of the files memorized. He’s bored, far too grateful for the few assignments he has from his high schoolers. He read through everything on his PADD once, then read a few of the books again, then read through the notes and tapped through the pictures in his room in the dark every time he started second guessing himself. This was his choice. What if it fucking sucks?

Mom told him it could be a vacation or it could be home for a year, that it was up to him. But what if he lasts one week then turns around and heads right back to Iowa? What does that mean for him, for his grand ideas about Starfleet? What would Mom think of him, for giving up so easily, or for not being able to handle it?

Claire and Ina seem calm and kind. That’s the vibe he gets from them, based on Mom’s tastefully vague descriptions and the pictures she had. Doesn’t really seem right, or even possible, based on most of the family members that he does know, Sam, Mom, and himself included. But Claire is Dad’s sister, and from what Mom’s said about his parents, they also seemed pretty reliable. That doesn’t account for Ina, though. Ina is a wildcard, and Jimmy is only kind of worried because if Dad was a chill guy with a heart of gold who fell in love with Winona, he figures anything goes.

Jimmy leaves.

Sam doesn’t speak to Winona for a week.

Jimmy steps off the transport and immediately spots Claire waving at him.

Ina grins as he approaches, elbows Claire and says, “He looks like you,” and something loosens in Jimmy’s chest.

Claire pulls him into a hug, then steps back still holding his shoulders to look at him from arms length. “You’re so old now!” she says, then pulls him back in for another hug. Over her shoulder, Jimmy sees Ina roll her eyes and grin. He grins back

Farming on Tarsus IV is nothing like farming in Iowa.

Tarsus IV is a farming colony. Iowa is in a farming region, and Riverside is very much a farming town. They live on a farm. It never occurred to him to do any research on the Tarsus colony because he thought it would be like Iowa, but a little bit off.

They still farm traditionally in Iowa, twenty and twenty first century style. The land there isn’t capable of doing much else, at this point. In theory, they could do better. There are more efficient methods, but some combination of tradition and lack of money keeps them in a rut. The routine is comforting, and people in Riverside don’t like to learn new things. That, and whatever funding they get from the government is limited and can’t be wasted on fucking around with the harvests.

When he thinks farming, he thinks of the endless, rolling fields beneath blue Terran skies.

There are a lot of trees on Tarsus IV. A whole lot. The sky has a purplish tint to it, and the main part of town is in the middle of the woods.

Jimmy can count on his hands the number of big trees in Riverside. Two of them are on their property. The trees on Tarsus look nothing like any of the trees in Riverside, and botany has never really been his thing, so all the other trees he knows of are ones he’s seen on the news and in movies. He can’t recall any that are quite like this.

It must show on his face, because Claire launches into a surprisingly enthusiastic explanation.

“Cool, right?” she says. “Not what I was expecting either, especially after growing up in Iowa. But it’s much better for the existing ecosystem, and all the shade keeps things cool in the hotter seasons. There are only three seasons, too. Warm, warm and rainy, and hot. We have things growing all year, but it’s mostly roots and cover crops in the hottest season. Ina’s telling me to cut it out behind your back, so I will, but only because you’ll learn all of this in school. It’s required coursework. Get excited!”

Jimmy just grins, but he can’t help but get a little excited at her enthusiasm and at the thought of learning something completely and totally new that he’d probably never learn in Iowa. Ina rolls her eyes again and slings an arm around his shoulder as they head towards the house.

School is school is school, even on another planet, Jimmy learns. On the bright side, someone from Riverside, most likely his mother, must have given them a heads up, because he’s in advanced classes. The main difference, though, is he’s not as out of place. The kids in his classes are a bunch of different ages, and Claire was right; there is a course on agroforestry, and a workshop where they learn about farming tech, and a class focused on the politics of small colonies.

He loves them all.

Almost all of the land is covered in forest, so it’s hard to say where the deepest part of the woods is. But the center of town is built into and surrounded by some pretty fucking tall trees. It’s like a giant tree house village, and Jimmy fucking loves it.

He and Kevin are in the trees.

They got there early, and the meeting started late, so.

Jimmy and Kevin are really high up.

They always climb the trees when they come to town, while the adults run errands.

The people below them are moving, shuffling along. The meeting must have started. For a minute, he starts making his way back down. Stops, thinks about how he and Kevin lose Kevin’s parents all the time and always find their way back. They can meet them on their way back out and lie.

“Hey Kev,” he says. “Race you to the top!”

They’re in the canopy, when the shouting starts, then the screaming.

Dead silence.

(It was an antimatter weapon, they find out later. It was over in seconds.)

Kevin is staring at Jimmy with wide eyes. Jimmy is staring back, frozen.

He sees it in Kevin’s eyes, the same fear he feels reflected back at him. Something is wrong.

It’s a long way down. He can’t be sure, looking through all the leaves and the branches, but he thinks he sees bodies lying limp on the ground.

“Go up,” he says. “Kev, climb.”

They’re so high up they’re above the canopy, can no longer see the ground. Kevin is on the branch above Jimmy, and they’re both sitting with their backs to the trunk and their legs straight on the branches, trying to minimize their chance of being seen. On the off-chance that someone comes looking.

It’s peaceful up here.

He’s terrified, and unsure if he’s overreacting. His ass is numb. Maybe they got it all wrong, and Kevin’s parents are going crazy trying to find them.

It wouldn’t be so hard to scan the trees for heat signatures. Jimmy’s trying not to think about it.

And the screams. He can’t shake the sound out of his brain.

They sit up there for hours, well into the night. It has to be past two or three in the morning before they start to creep down towards the bottom.

The square is eerily empty. The bodies he thought he saw earlier are gone, if they were ever there in the first place. Jimmy supposes it’s always this empty at three in the morning, but it feels different, not knowing for sure if people are all safe in bed and not. Whatever they are.

They take the beaten path to Kevin’s house and make it there without seeing a soul.

There’s a light on in Claire and Ina’s window. Kevin’s house is dark. They go inside anyways, check the bedrooms first. It’s cold and empty.

Jimmy leaves Kevin sitting on the floor of his parents room. A hug seems pointless, in the face of all of this.

Jimmy isn’t back yet, which isn’t unusual, but usually he gives them a heads up when he’ll be out late or staying at the Riley’s. Claire is worrying, and Ina is pretending not to. Claire realizes this is what it must be like to have kids, and she suddenly misses her brother.

The Rileys aren’t back yet either. Ina drops the pretense.

“Something’s wrong,” Ina says, and they could just be running late, or gone to dinner at a friend’s and took Jimmy with them, or maybe it’s just a really long meeting. One that her and Ina weren’t summoned to. They have no theories, and no information, but Ina sounds certain, and Claire feels the wrongness settle into her bones.

There’s a girl in Kevin’s kitchen.

She’s young and seemingly non-threatening, staring at him with wide, fearful eyes, but Jimmy wasn’t expecting anyone to be there and startles anyways. They stare at each other.

“Who’re you?” Jimmy says eventually.

“Who’re you ?” she says defiantly.

Jimmy raises his eyebrows. “You broke in first.”

She deflates, a bit, at that. “It wasn’t locked.”

“I’m Jimmy,” he offers. She’s already in the house, he figures. No matter her intentions, she’s got their number.

She watches him for a few moments. “I was in the trees. My mom put me up there. She knew something was wrong.”

Jimmy waits.

“You came down from the trees. You were broadcasting, you were scared. I’m scared too,” she mumbles. “So I followed you.”

She’s young and afraid, and Jimmy hates to have to ask her, but he needs to know. “Do you know what happened?”

She doesn’t answer for a few long moments.

“The governor was giving a speech,” she says quietly.

“Do you remember what about?” Jimmy prompts gently.

She looks down at the ground and shakes her head.

“Do you want to tell me your name?” he tries instead.

She’s quiet for a few moments, perhaps sizing him up, but relents. “Akira.”

“Nice to meet you, Akira.”

He isn’t quite sure what to say after that.

Kevin is upstairs still, so introducing him to Akira will be a problem for later. Right now, he needs to figure out what exactly happened, what they’re up against. If it’s safe to go back to Claire and Ina’s. If it’s safe to stay here, and where to go if it isn’t.

Fuck.

Okay , he thinks. Start somewhere. Where?

His eyes land on the kitchen comm terminal.

He taps the screen on, and under the recent activity tab there’s a colony wide announcement. The preview of the video is the governor sitting calmly at his desk, hands folded on top of it, flanked by two armed men. Dread pools in his stomach.

He navigates to the video transcription. He reads it, uncomprehending. Reads it again. And again.

His ears are ringing.

It doesn’t make any sense. He reads it again, and understands, and it doesn’t make sense.

Something must show on his face, in the tense line of his shoulders, because Akira comes to stand next to him. She’s young, and instinct tells him to protect her, to shield her. Rational thought tells him they’re all in it now. She’ll find out eventually, and he hates people keeping things from him. He tilts the screen down so she can see.

They stand there side by side, still, stiff, faces bathed in blue light, for a long time.

Kevin is cross-legged in his parents' bed, staring blankly at the wall.

“A girl followed us from the square,” Jimmy says when he’s met with silence. “She was in the trees like us.”

Kevin remains quiet. Jimmy leans in the doorway and watches him.

Eventually he looks over, meets Jimmy’s eyes. “Where are my parents,” he says, voice small.

Fuck it all to hell and back, Jimmy thinks. “There was a colony wide comm. You should probably read it,” he says

Kevin stares at him. “Tell me.”

“I think,” he starts. “I think your parents are dead, Kev,” he says hoarsely. “I think they’re all dead.”

Kevin reads the announcement and cries.

“We can’t stay here,” Jim says. “They might come looking.”

It’s a solid plan. Tommy and Kevin are skeptical, and Thrall calls it stupid and risky, but Jim knows he can hack it. Sending out the comm is the part he’s least worried about.

He has the phaser from Kevin’s house, but he takes out the door guard by dropping a rock on his head from the roof several feet above. Jim doesn’t know much about head trauma, but it wasn’t that big a rock, and both the guard and the rock fell to the ground with quiet thuds. A phaser shot would’ve risked unwanted attention.

He takes the guard’s phaser and adds head injuries to his list of things to research when he’s back on Earth.

He gets the door open without too much trouble, and there isn’t a second guard immediately inside. Small miracles.

He has a little less than an hour until the guards outside rotate. He needs to be long gone by then.

There are two guards outside the door to Kodos’ office. Jim stuns the first before they see him, and the second before he can fully raise his weapon. The door is closed, but anyone inside must have heard the phaser fire and the thud of bodies. Jim flings the door open, phaser up and ready, and fires at the first person he sees. They go down. A guard, he notes.

Someone returns fire, and he ducks behind a chair. Crouching low, he can see a pair of feet approaching. When they’re close, but still in front of the chair, he jumps up, already firing. One shot singes the chair. Another goes wide. Another thud.

A girl, a man, and Kodos himself stand by a large wooden desk on the other side of the room, hands up. The man’s eyes keep shifting to the desk, and his hands twitch. Jim guesses there’s a phaser stored somewhere in it. He approaches them, kicking the downed guards’ phasers away from them.

Two shots, two more thuds.

He levels his phaser on Kodos and says nothing.

“Take whatever you want,” Kodos says. “Take anything.”

Jim was expecting more of a resistance from a man who calmly ordered the deaths of four thousand people. His grip on his phaser tightens.

“I assume you were on the list. You may not understand right now, but—” Kodos says, and Jim loosens a finger to switch the setting to kill.

Kodos’ hands, still up in the air with palms facing Jim, tremble. “Now listen, you’re young, you have your whole life ahead of you, don’t be rash, we can forget this ever happened.”

Jim says nothing. He looks Kodos in the eye, and knows there’s no rationalizing what he’s done. Jim’s went through all the scenarios in his head, every last one he can think of, and none of them ended like this.

Kodos moves suddenly, reaching for something in the desk. Reflexively, Jim pulls the trigger.

Thud.

He stands there frozen, phaser still pointed at the empty space where Kodos used to stand.

He just killed a man. He didn’t even hesitate. He knew damn well it was set to kill and he took the shot without a second thought, and of all the people in the galaxy, this is the one might have deserved it, but who is Jim to say?

He just killed a man.

He stands there, frozen, for too long. He doesn’t know exactly, only knows the cut puppet strings and final thud of a body going down to never get back up.

One of the guards he stunned earlier groans, and he jumps. Remembers what he’s here for.

He stuns the guard who groaned, then stuns everyone else again just in case. He drags the bodies inside the room and closes the door, collecting the guards’ phasors in his pack. He doesn’t know exactly how long they’ll be out for, but he figures he probably has at least ten minutes before they stir. He isn’t sure if phasers work like that, but it’s worth trying. He adds phasers and their settings to the list.

It doesn’t take long to get into Kodos’ computer terminal, but he has to figure out what’s been done to the comms before he can fix it. It takes longer than he’d like, but the message is ready and waiting on his PADD.

It’s been almost an hour by the time he sends it, and he needs to leave, but he catches a glimpse of the body and hesitates. He digs out the tricorder, connects it to the PADD, and scans the body. Terran, no pulse. The PADD is equipped with a camera, so he takes a picture of the body, puts it and the tricorder scan together in a file, encrypts the fuck out of it the best he can on such short notice, and sends it to the extra PADD he has that Winona doesn’t know about and to Kevin’s house. He’ll have to dump the PADD, just in case, but the kids will want to know. They’ll want to see.

He shoves the PADD in his pack and gets the fuck out of there.

Winona hasn’t heard from Jimmy in two months. Claire and Ina have also been uncharacteristically quiet, but complications with communications aren’t uncommon on new colonies, especially ones so far away, so she decides she’ll give it a bit more time before she kicks up a fuss about it.

So when her PADD chirps at her at ass o’clock in the morning with the emergency tone loud enough to wake her up, her blood runs cold even as she tells herself not to panic.

The message is from an unfamiliar comm line. It’s from Jimmy. As she reads, rage begins to settle into her bones. She is calm. Murder is not an option, because she can’t raise Jimmy and Sam from prison. Murder is not an option, but she spares a thought for Chris, who could possibly be persuaded. She keeps reading. She should have listened to Sam.

Sam hasn’t fallen asleep yet when he hears Winona’s bedroom door slam open. He hears her make her way down to her office with what sounds like more running and cursing than usual, but it’s not as if this is the first time this sort of thing has happened.

So when she opens his door an hour later, jarring him from sleep, he’s immediately on edge.

Winona’s face is blank. Alarm bells start going off in Sam’s head.

“You told me so,” she says. “Pack some shit, we’re going to the Tarsus system.”

He stares at her, uncomprehending. His head is full of white noise.

“You fucking told me so,” she says, breaking away from his gaze. “I’m sorry, Sammy. We have to go. Be ready in 30.”

She closes his door when she leaves, and he sits there frozen in place in the dark. He told her so. He shuffles through worst case scenarios in his head, thinks, Jimmy if you’re dead I swear to fucking god , but they wouldn’t be flying all the way out there for a body. Would they?

The door opens again more softly.

“There’s been a famine. I think. I--I’m not sure.” She takes a deep breath. “Jimmy commed, somehow. I can’t get through to him or Claire or Ina. We’re getting to Chris’s ship, they’re on their way there already.”

Sam nods mutely. She leaves the door open this time, and he sits there with the word famine running through his head on loop, until the sound of Winona yelling on the phone grounds him, and he thinks what the fuck does she mean a famine and throws the covers off. Twenty or so minutes to pack, and he doesn’t know what he’s even packing for, and this is the most scared he’s ever been in his life but if Winona is still capable of raising hell, there’s hope.

Someone knocks on the door three months in. Ina shares a look with Claire. They haven’t had any sort of polite company come knocking since everything went to shit. Claire moves silently towards the door while Ina hangs back in the threshold between the front room and the kitchen. The back door is locked, but clear. The phaser they keep by the door is already in Claire’s back pocket, hidden under her shirt. Ina’s hand hovers near the kitchen knives on the counter.

She can’t see Claire’s face as she checks the peephole, but she takes a step back, pausing, the tension leaving her body. She flings the door open.

“Winona?” Claire says, shocked.

Winona is here. Winona Kirk is standing on their porch. All of their closest neighbors are dead or missing, and they haven’t seen Jimmy since the day Kodos lost his mind, and Winona Kirk is standing on their porch.

“Hi,” Winona says.

Claire moves aside to let Winona in and closes the door behind her. “How are you here?” Claire says.

Winona’s face is grim. “There’s a ship in orbit. Chris is here. More are coming, Starfleet is shitting bricks. Comms have been fucked since, well. Don’t know for sure, yet, but it’s been a few months now. Someone unfucked them about a week ago. We came as fast as we could. Where’s Jimmy?”

Claire can only stare at her, mouth opening and closing, unable to say it. Winona’s eyes flick over to Ina. She shakes her head.

“No,” Winona says.

“I’m so sorry,” Claire says hoarsely.

“No,” Winona says again. “That’s not--he commed me.”

“What?” Ina says.

“He was the one who sent the comm. About everything. Sent it to me and Chris.”

“What?” Claire says.

Winona frowns. “A week ago, give or take. Message from an unknown number, about the fungus and the—the list.”

Claire sinks onto the couch. Ina moves to stand behind her, and Winona starts to pace. “It had to have been him, he’s the only one from here who has my comm line.”

She’s right, it wasn’t her or Claire, and no one else on this planet would know Winona’s comm line by heart, but, “We haven’t seen Jimmy since Kodos gave the kill orders,” Ina says slowly.

Winona stops, meets her eyes. “It had to have been him,” she says.

“It sounds like, it but--”

“Where the fuck is he then,” Claire whispers. Winona starts pacing again.

Jimmy left with the Rileys to go to the town meeting that wasn’t a town meeting at all. He left with them that afternoon, and by the time word got out that it was a lie to trap them all in one place, it was too late, it had already happened, and they haven’t seen him since. Haven’t seen any of them since.

“Mom?”

Ina nearly jumps out of her fucking skin. Winona stops short. Claire is suddenly standing, staring past Ina’s shoulder. Ina turns around, and Jimmy has somehow materialized in the kitchen. No sound of the door opening and closing, no footsteps, he’s just suddenly fucking there, and if Claire and Winona hadn’t so obviously reacted, she’d think she was losing her mind.

“Hey, Jimbo,” Winona says, voice rough. Seconds tick by. Nobody moves. He looks awful, skinny limbs and hollow cheeks, and he’s grimy, but he’s breathing. He’s alive.

“Did my message go through?” he says quietly, and Winona makes some sort of choked noise and is suddenly on the other side of the room, hugging him fiercely. A few seconds pass before he tentatively raises his arms and hugs her back. “Hey, Mom,” he whispers.

Ina reaches behind her blindly, and Claire grabs her hand.

“Hey, kiddo,” Winona says.

Winona feels his arms loosen around her and forces herself to let go, step back.

“Is Pike here?” Jimmy says.

Fucking Christ, she thinks. “Yeah,” she says, but it comes out hoarse. “Yeah,” she tries again, “He’s in orbit.” Jimmy frowns. “They’re taking stock, figuring out a plan. I made him beam me straight here.” Well, she’d left the bridge as soon as they dropped out of warp and gave the transporter tech coordinates and threatened him with bodily harm when he hesitated, but Chris is a smart boy who knows her pretty well, and she has her comm on her.

Jimmy snorts, probably because he knows that’s exactly how it went down. He looks past her towards Claire and Ina.

“Kevin’s parents?” he says. She looks over her shoulder, and Ina is shaking her head.

“Fuck,” he says quietly. “He’s next door. We’ve been staying in his house for a few days now. Couldn’t risk it before. We knew it wasn’t likely, but still. Sucks to know for sure.

“Kevin’s alive?” Claire says.

Jimmy nods. He looks back at Winona. “Call Pike, tell him to send a doctor. And a PADD, or an officer. I can give him locations,” he says, sounding far, far too calm for the situation. “Uh, only one of you should come next door with me, at first.”

The three of them stare at him for a moment.

“Okay,” Winona says.

He nods again. “Okay.” He turns around and heads towards the back door, and Winona follows him numbly. She can’t tell if the shock is setting in. She doesn’t know what she expected, doesn’t know if she’s finally cracked and that’s a ghost or if that’s really her son, giving her orders to give to Pike, like he wasn’t presumed dead by everyone in the room up until five minutes ago.

She follows him around the side of Claire’s house and towards Kevin’s. He stops on the Riley’s porch and tells her to wait at the front door. “I’ll go in the back and come through to let you in the front. Call Pike,” he says, and then heads around the side of the house. She stares after him, and tries not to panic when he’s no longer in sight.

She calls Pike.

“He’s alive,” she says without preamble. “He’s okay, I think, I mean, he looks awful but he seems okay. Ish. Send a doctor to my coordinates. Preferably one who’s good with kids. There’s another kid with him. My sister in law and her wife are fine. He also said he has intel for you.”

“What the fuck,” Chris says.

“He said send a doctor and a PADD, he apparently has locations.”

“Locations of what?”

“He didn’t specify.”

“What the fuck.”

“I don’t know. I might be in shock.”

“ I might be in shock,” Chris mutters. “I’ll send someone in ten. Don’t think we have a fucking pediatrician, but I’ll do my best.”

“Don’t beam straight inside the house.”

“Got it. See you soon.” He cuts the connection. Winona stares blankly at the front door. There’s a wind chime making quiet noises somewhere to her left. The doormat has a drawing of Sol on it and says “Welcome to the solar system,” in cheerful block letters.

The front door opens, and Jimmy beckons her in. He closes the door behind them, and there’s a fair skinned dark haired boy with a brown-stained rag tied around his upper arm hovering a few steps behind Jimmy.

“This is Tommy,” Jimmy gestures at him. “Tommy, this is my mom, Winona.”

Tommy nods at her.

“I have to go get Kevin, he’s been in his room since we got here. Everyone else is in the kitchen. Is Pike coming?”

Fucking what. “Yeah, ten minutes,” she says. “Everyone else?”

“Yeah. Six besides me, Tom, and Kevin,” he says, and his voice sounds tight. “I’ll explain later, I promise,” and now she might really be in shock, not sure where to start to with the implications of that statement and why it feels like Jimmy’s in charge even though he’s fourteen and traumatized and Tommy looks like he’s at least two years older than him. Jimmy heads up the stairs, and Tommy disappeared down the hall. She stays put.

For there allegedly being nine kids gathered in this house, everything is eerily silent.

When her comm eventually beeps, it scares the living shit out of her.

“We’re outside,” Chris says.

“You could’ve just sent someone, Chris.”

“I know. Let us in.” She hangs up on him.

Jimmy and another, younger-looking fair skinned dark haired kid have emerged from one of the rooms upstairs. There’s a spindly brown skinned girl who can’t be older than 8 hanging onto Jimmy, piggy-back style.

“Pike’s outside,” she says.

Jimmy frowns down at her. “He didn’t have to come, isn’t there other shit to do?”

“He knows. I told him that, anyways. But he’s here.”

When they reach the bottom of the stairs, Jimmy nods in the boy’s direction. “This is Kevin,” he says, then tilts his head to the side to show the girls face. “And this is Akira.” He nods towards the front door. “If he didn’t bring a doctor with him, we’re having words.”

Winona abruptly remembers that Jimmy’s hacked Chris’s personnel file at least once, and therefore knows damn well that he can manage passable emergency first aid and absolutely nothing else. She opens the door. Chris, Number One, and a third man in science blues she doesn’t recognize are standing on the porch. Number One is carrying a PADD. None of them have their phasers.

Chris takes in the four of them, and his eyebrows go up. “I’m Captain Pike, this Commander Number One and Doctor Cohen.”

“This is Kevin and Akira,” Jimmy replies. “Everyone else is in the kitchen.” He turns around and heads down the hall.

Chris catches her eye and mouths, “Everyone else?” Ah. Oops. She shrugs helplessly at him, she doesn’t fucking know either, and holds up six fingers and turns to follow Jimmy to the kitchen.

Tommy and the rest of the kids are in the kitchen as promised, all worryingly thin and ragged. She identifies a Denobulan and a Tellarite.

“So you met Kevin,” Jimmy says. “This is his house. And Akira,” who he’s still carrying on his back. He frees an arm to point around the room. “That’s Tommy. You should check his arm, it’s probably not infected, but we’re not sure. That’s Maisy, that’s Thrall,” he points at the Tellarite.

“He might be concussed,” Jimmy continues, “We’re also not sure. Over there is Maggie, she’s had a fever for a few days now, that’s Lweera, and that’s Yelauna,” he points at the Denobulan. He waves his free hand in Winona’s direction. “This is my mom, Winona.”

He looks expectantly at Chris.

Chris stares back at him, for a second too long.

“I’m Captain Pike, this is my first officer, Number One, and this is my CMO Doctor Cohen. Anyone sick or injured, Doctor Cohen can look you over here. Our ship is in orbit, we can beam you all out of here.

Pike, Number One, Tommy, Lweera, and Thrall beam up first.

Number One rematerializes in the kitchen alone.

“Tommy says, ‘Akira will like it,’” Number One says to Jim.

Jimmy nods, and lets out a breath. “Okay,” he says. “Everybody up.”

Winona and Jimmy are the last ones left. He turns to her. “You should go back and update Claire and Ina.”

She knows he’s right, but she’s still wary of letting him out of her sight. “What do you want me to tell them?”

Jimmy shrugs. “Whatever you think is best.”

Number One rematerializes.

“Just me,” Jimmy says, and that’s that.

“He had other kids with him. Eight others,” she says. “He went up with Pike.” Claire and Ina share a look. Claire nods at her. They don’t ask her any more questions. She loves them for that.

She sits with Claire and Ina in silence in their kitchen, neglecting cups of tea until someone from Starfleet comes knocking on the door to process them as survivors.

Claire and Ina weren’t on the list, as far as Winona can tell. Their house is untouched, still warm and welcoming. There’s no thin layer of dust over everything like there’d been in Kevin’s house. Food in the cabinets, dishes in the sink. They’re processed as survivors. She thinks of the severe hollows of Jimmy’s cheekbones.

It’s not their fault, she knows. It’s hard not to blame them anyways.

Claire and Ina beam up to a separate ship. The officers head to the next house.

Winona stands alone on the front porch. She pulls out her comm.

The forest around her is calm and quiet. It’s peaceful. She resents it.

“One to beam up.”

Jimmy is already in a bed attached to an IV. Sam is already sitting with him.

Sam is still furious with her. She’s incredibly glad he’s here.

She finds a chair and drags it over to the end of Jimmy’s bed, then collapses in it.

She finds she doesn’t have anything to say.

Number One is the one who gets Jimmy’s full report. Chris deems himself too close to it, and Winona agrees that Jimmy is more likely to share with someone who is not Chris.

Jimmy plays his cards close to his chest, always has. She doubts even Number One gets the whole truth.

What she learns from the report is this: Jimmy and Kevin sort of stumbled across the other seven kids and slowly become one big group. All their family that was on-planet is dead. They hid out in abandoned houses and lived in the woods and helped each other out for a few months. They made a plan to try and send a distress call, and Jimmy snuck into the mansion and pulled it off, and a week later, Winona arrived.

What she learns from all eight other kids reports is this: Jimmy and Kevin climbed a tree to escape. Akira found them, and the three of them found everyone else and took them under their wing. Jimmy was in charge. Kevin and Tommy were sort of in charge, mostly when Jimmy wasn’t around. Like when he was breaking into the mansion alone to fix the comms and send a long range one to her and Chris and Starfleet, which was entirely his idea and incredibly risky and based almost entirely on conjecture. It was a group effort, of course, but Jimmy was the one who kept them alive, really.

They don’t know what happened to Kodos. They got his daughter and his aides, but they didn’t get him and they didn’t get a body.

She puts down her padd and stares at nothing, and breathes, for a long, long time.

“They’ll find him,” Winona says. And if they don’t, she will, and she’ll drag Chris willingly with her. “He can’t have gone far.”

Jim begs to differ. He’d be worried, except. Well.

“They won’t,” he finds himself saying. “They won’t.”

Winona turns to slowly look at him.

“What do you mean, Jimbo,” she says quietly.

“They won’t find him. He’s dead.”

She hesitates. “Are you sure?”

“I killed him,” he says hoarsely.

Winona doesn’t hesitate, this time. “Good.”

She isn’t sure Sam ever forgives her.

He graduates high school a year early and moves out. He goes to college on the east coast and studies microbiology. He rarely comes home.

Winona tries. She calls him once a month; sometimes he picks up. When he doesn’t, she leaves messages of her talking at him about anything that comes to mind. She doesn’t know if he listens to them.

Sam leaves, and Jim all but legally emancipates himself. It’s a slow process, at first, then suddenly he’s gone for weeks at a time.

He goes to therapy, not as often as he should, but he goes.

When Jimmy turns 16, she takes a posting as Chief Engineer on the USS Pegasus . She takes Jimmy with her. He dicks around in engineering with her, which isn’t strictly allowed, but no one notices and no one snitches. She likes this crew.

Jimmy disappears into the second starbase they stop at.

Winona doesn’t notice his bag is gone until they’re an hour from departing, and by then it’s too late to really look. Not that it’s likely he wants to be found.

She sends him credits and a note saying she loves him and he better come back alive. She comms him when she can. He never answers, but he sends transmissions, every once in a while. Each one starts like this: Hi Mom, not dead yet.

A week after he leaves, she tracks down another engineer she knew from the Academy and gets drunk on the floor of his shared room.

They aren’t close, but he’s smart and a good man, and his roommate adapts to her presence easily. She decides she likes them.

This makes it easier, seven drinks in, to ask the ceiling, “Am I a bad mom?” because they know that she started this trip with a kid and that she doesn’t appear to have one anymore.

Peter shoots his roommate a panicked glance.

“For not stopping him?” she adds.

“I think you do the best you can,” the roommate says. “I think we all do.”

The assignment is over after nine months. Jimmy’s been gone for seven of them.

Winona goes back to Iowa, for lack of anywhere else to go. She considers stopping by the east coast and forcing Sam to talk to her, but he’ll ask what she’s been up to and she’ll have to tell him she’s been off planet, and no matter what she says he’ll be mad at her for leaving Jimmy planetside, or mad at her for taking him with him, or mad at her for letting him run away across the galaxy.

So she doesn’t visit Sam.

She gets home, and the front porch lights are on. There’s a newer, bigger bike parked out front.

She announces her presence by making as much noise as she possibly can opening the front door and taking off her boots.

Jim is in the kitchen eating mashed potatoes. His hair is buzzed short. It’s also blue, a few shades darker than his eyes.

“Hey,” she says, dropping into the chair across from him. “You aren’t dead.”

He nods, then gets up to grab her a beer from the fridger. She doesn’t bother pointing out that he’s still too young to drink. He clinks his half empty bottle against hers.

“Cheers.”

They end up sitting out on the front porch steps, looking out at the horizon.

She’s only two drinks in, this time, when she asks, “Am I a bad mom?”

Jimmy frowns, takes a sip. “Is this because of Sam? I’ll talk to him.”

“No. No, you don’t have to.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” he says quietly, and it wasn’t, but wasn’t it? Sure, Claire and Ina offered, and she let Jimmy choose, and no one could have possibly predicted what would happen, but. She made the offer, decided to give it a shot. She should’ve just fucking listened to Sam.

“I’ll talk to Sam,” Jim says again.

Winona stays quiet, for a moment. Gathers her thoughts. “Don’t bother. I don’t blame him. He didn’t want you to go from the start.”

Jim doesn’t say anything, and she ploughs forward. “He didn’t speak to me the week after you left.”

“He never told me,” Jim says quietly.

“He wouldn’t have. He feels guilty, too, for not trying harder to get you to stay.”

“It’s nobody’s fault,” he says, and she wonders how he turned out so goddamn good and brave, because he sure as hell didn’t get it from her. It’d be so easy for him to blame her for giving him the option, to blame Claire or Ina for inviting him, to blame Sam for not stopping him. To blame the whole damn town the both of them keep coming back to, the one he’d been so desperate to leave. To blame Starfleet for putting Kodos in charge, for not coming sooner, to be angry at her for going back to them. But he doesn’t. She wonders if he blames himself.

“It was that bastard’s fault,” Jim continues. “And he’s dead, so it doesn’t matter anymore.”

They both fall quiet. Winona takes a long pull and stares unseeing at the stars.

“You’re not a bad mom,” Jim says eventually. “You did your best. We were assholes. Still are. You did the best you could, I think.”

“Hey,” she says, looking over at him. “I’m still your mother.”

Jim smiles, but he doesn’t look at her. “Yeah, I guess you are.”

They both stay Earthside for a year. Winona consults, and Jim works in construction at the shipyard. He takes online classes, does a lot of independent research that he thinks she doesn’t know about, consults her consults, changes his hair to royal purple then to hot pink, and drinks.

On his eighteenth birthday, Winona sits in her office and works from morning to night, until Jim comes home hammered and sits in the doorway and tells her she doesn’t have to stay on planet for him. She sits back in her chair, looks him in the eye, and tells him she’s not leaving him like this.

He frowns mightily at that, then picks himself up off the ground and takes himself to bed.

He’s still healing, she thinks. She doesn’t know how to help, or if he’d even accept it. But she knows she can stick around for him.

The woman, Uhura, she’d said, is pushing back one of the cadets with one hand and holding back the arm of another one with her other hand, cursing up a storm. Jim likes her all the more for it. The third cadet slams him into the bar, and Jim apologizes to the general vicinity and then grabs someone’s half empty bottle and turns around to smash it over the third cadet’s head.

Jim tastes blood, and the fourth guy is pinning him against the bar and winding up another blow when someone whistles, loudly.

He looks to the side.

“Oh,” he says. “It’s you.”

“Jimmy?” Pike says. “The hell?”

He winces. “It’s Jim. These your guys?”

“You know this guy?” the cadet holding his collar asks, incredulous.

“Well, you all seem quite friendly as well,” Pike says pointedly. The guy lets go, and Jim slumps against the bar.

“Everyone outside,” Pike says. “Not you,” he points at Jim.

“Fuck,” Jim mutters.

When he gets home an hour later, Winona is still up. She frowns at him.

“The fuck happened to your face?”

Jim ignores that. “Saw Pike at the bar. He says hi.” He pauses. “He dared me to join.”

Winona stares.

“Should I expect you back for dinner tomorrow night?” she says eventually, and he laughs. They don’t do family dinners anymore, haven’t in years.

“No,” he says, “No, I don’t think so.”

Jim leaves. She gives him three months to get kicked out. When he makes it that long, she calls him, then calls Chris, then shuts down and locks up the house and heads to Old Baltimore where she stays a few weeks to get a change of scenery and to harass Sam. They get lunch twice a week and get drinks the night before she leaves.

“Are you still mad?” she says, standing outside his apartment.

“It is what it is,” he says, gives her a hug, and goes inside.

It’s not a no, but it’s progress.

She heads to San Francisco with a week to go before she’s back in the black. She tracks down Jim and drags him and his doctor friend to lunch. The doctor is southern and introduces himself as Leonard, the man responsible for keeping her son alive. He’s cranky and an asshole. She likes him.

The night before she ships out, Chris tracks her down and drags her to dinner. Jim tracks the both of them down after dinner and drags them to drinks.

“Am I a bad mom?” she asks Chris after Jimmy’s headed back to his dorm.

Chris smiles sadly at her, shakes his head. “I think you did the best you could.”

“That’s what everyone has said. That’s not an answer. What the fuck is it supposed to mean,” she says.

Chris is quiet, contemplating. “That you did the best you could, given the circumstances. I can’t imagine Sam and Jim were easy kids. And they both turned out to be smart and well-adjusted.”

She snorts. “Yeah, well-adjusted.”

She lets him hug her when he drops her off at her hotel.

“Jim and Sam are remarkable young men. You did just fine,” he says quietly, and she isn’t sure she had anything to do with how remarkable they turned out, thinks maybe they turned out remarkable in spite of her, but she just nods into his shoulder, and breathes.

She tried. Is trying.

It’s enough.

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