did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Characters: Winona, Jim, Sam
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 910
Summary: Half an hour. One bag, plus the guns. I'll make pancakes. And AU in which Winona is tryng to raise two boys while on the run from the law.
Notes: Written for a prompt on the Awesome Ladies Ficathon. Title from Pink Floyd; cut text from Jimi Hendrix.
Her comm-the cheap plastic alloy could crack easily if she held hard enough-rings at five a.m. She tenses, hand automatically reaching under her pillow for her phaser. Only two people in the universe have this frequency. It’ll change in a week anyway; she’ll have a different chunk of cheap plastic to carry around.
It makes her feel like she isn’t completely cut off from humanity. It’s a crutch.
She fumbles for it, hand finding her gun. The call is from an unknown number. Naturally; she wouldn’t have expected anything different.
Perks of being a fugitive of the Federation. Along with a dead husband and lumpy mattresses.
“What?” she barks, comm pressed to her ear. She used to be a commanding officer, once.
“They’ll be here in an hour, if you’re lucky,” Pike says, sounding tired, like he has been awake for days. She knows the feeling-she hasn’t slept much, since George died. Even before, maybe. One eye open.
“How many?” She’s in battle mode again. You don’t really lose those instincts, drilled into you for years.
“No way to tell,” Pike says.
“Okay.” She hangs up. They could trace the call. They’d have to find the frequency first, but she’s still alive because paranoia is baseline. Besides, one hour.
She drops the comm. No point in that, now. Her jeans are crumpled on the floor; she tugs them on, tucks the phaser into the back and checks the switchblade in the front pocket.
The door to the boys’ room is silent, disturbingly white in the darkness. She’ll turn the knob, she thinks, slip inside, silent, and they’ll still be asleep, curled together in the twin bed the way they won’t be able to in a year. She’ll smile, put a hand on their foreheads. They’ll wake up quietly, calm, and Jim will lean his head on her shoulder as she drives away from here.
She turns the knob.
Sam is already awake, shaking Jim’s shoulder till his eyes, blue where Sam’s are brown, slide open. Sam looks like an old man, too old for twelve. His eyes are wise and tired.
Jim is all energy. It thrums bright behind the blue.
“Mom-” he says, bouncing out of bed because he’s nine and too young to understand this is not a game. Sam tells stories of her like she’s a superhero. She knows; she’s heard, on nights when Jim can’t sleep and she’s falling asleep at the wheel. She should have warned him to stop years ago, but she’s selfish. She wants someone, her sons, at least her sons, to think of her as the hero. She’s left too much behind not to want that.
So she just says, “Half an hour. One bag, plus the guns. I’ll make pancakes.”
Sam nods, terse. Jim cheers, and she assumes it’s about the pancakes. She hopes, these days.
She stumbles into the kitchen, packing sparse supplies as she tries not to burn the pancakes.
She’s running out of safehouses. Running out of failsafes and firewalls, and George was always the planner. He’d been the one thinking ahead about the stupid stunts he pulled. She was the one who drove her flitter straight through a line of cops with a phaser rifle and her switchblade.
She’s learned to plan, to hide guns in the kitchen, behind the coffee.
Jim thunders down the stairs, duffel bag swung over his shoulder, banging heavily on his knee. She slides a plate of pancakes over to him.
“Eat up,” she says, pouring batter on the skillet. “We’re leaving in fifteen minutes.”
Jim nods, taking a fork out of the drawer and shoveling chunks of pancake into his mouth.
“Chew, Jimmy,” she says. Sam comes down, slow, almost cautious. “Pancakes, Sam?”
He’s quiet. She’s growing used to it, mostly, can read his moods by facial tic. Jimmy’s loud, like her. She doesn’t know what to think about that.
She makes coffee. Instant, which is shit, but she’s running out of time. It burns her tongue, makes her sharp.
“Come on,” she says, grabbing the boys’ bags and the guns. “Grab the pancakes. We need to go.”
Jim grins, a huge piece of pancake hanging off his fork. “’Kay,” he says, shoving it in his mouth and taking her bag. He bursts into the garage, tossing her bag in the back of the flitter. She throws the others in after it. She ruffles Jim’s hair.
“Where are we going, Mom?” he asks.
“Away,” she says, the only answer she has to give. “Let’s go, Sam,” she calls over her shoulder.
“I call shotgun,” Jim cries, scrambling to the door.
Sam doesn’t react, just shrugs. “Okay.”
“Sam,” she says, “are you-”
“Mom,” he says, soft. She squeezes his shoulder.
“Okay. Yeah, okay. Get in.”
Sam nods, sliding into the backseat, curling up among the duffel bags. Jim smiles back at him in the rearview mirror.
Winona drives, keeping just above the speed limit, watching Sam and the road in the rearview. Jim chatters for the first thirty miles, by forty he’s got the radio on, by seventy he’s nodding off, slumped in the chair. By one hundred, she feels his head against her shoulder. She takes one hand off the wheel, driving with two fingers and wrapping her other arm around him. He makes a soft noise, and she cards through his hair.
“Hush, baby,” she whispers. She hums along with the radio, a half-remembered song.