Your Daddy's Hands

…Daddy played piano,
Played it very well.
Music from those hands could
Catch you like a spell.
He could make you love him
'Fore the tune was done.
You have your daddy's hands.
You are your daddy's son…

Her cries filled the air of the medical shuttle that was missing one critical person from its interior. The one person who had sworn to be there, to always hold her hand, to love and cherish her, to comfort her. He was her husband first, not some Captain of the Federation! Why wasn't he in the god damned shuttle with her?

'George, the shuttle's leaving. Where are you?' she cried into her communicator as she felt the shuttle begin to take off from the landing platform.

'Sweetheart, listen to me, I'm not going to be there.'

And with those few simple words she knew why. The logical Star Fleet officer in her understood that something had gone amiss and that his sacrifice would mean the protection of not only her and her son, but every single Kelvin crew member who was trying to escape from this nightmare. But she didn't want to be logical.

'This is the only way you will survive.'

She began to babble about him being next to her, trying to remind him of the vows that they had made at their wedding, to always be together. That was why they had fought so hard to be posted to the Kelvin together, even after her becoming pregnant.

'The shuttle's will never make it if I don't fight them off.'

One last plea to him. 'I can't do this without you.' George please don't make me do this alone, please come be at my side. And then the doctor was telling her to push and it was all confusion for a few minutes. Distantly she could hear George over the comm telling her that she was loved, and that he would be there so soon darling, and to hold on.

And then she heard cries that were not hers. And she held her son.

'What is it?' came George's fervent request. They had never asked the Doctor on the Kelvin, they had wanted it to be a surprise for the two of them to share in the happiest moment together that they could. The not knowing had made Sammy's birth all the more special.

'It's a boy,' she sobbed in reply. Another boy to look at her with George's eyes and his smile.

'A boy! Tell me about him.' He sounded so just as excited about the prospect of another son as she was, but this meant that they could play catch and cars together. And Sammy would never be lonely again.

And all she could tell him about their son was that he was beautiful. 'George you should be here.'

George's determined voice came over the comm, drowning out the sounds of the computer in the background. 'What are we going to call him?'

'We could name him after your father.' She smiled, since he's going to only know him as a father figure, came the unspoken reason.

'Tiberius? You kidding me? No, that's the worst,' he joked back at her, trying to make her last memory of him as happy as he could. She knew him too well now to not understand what he was trying to do. 'Let's name him after your dad. Let's call him Jim.'

Laying on her side, looking into her son's bright cyan blue eyes that were his father she agreed, 'Jim. Okay, Jim it is.' I will let you name our son, if only so that I can remember your last words to me for all of time.

'Sweetheart, can you hear me?' The panic in his voice was as plain as the wisps of brown hair on Jim's fair head. She sat up and looked around, as if to conjure him by some force of nature.

'I hear you,' she responded back, knowing that the end was coming, but watching the screen that told her that she was connected to the bridge of the Kelvin.

'I love you so much. I love you…'

Connection lost she read, and knew that half of her heart had been torn asunder and burned alive in the cold abyss of space. George was never coming back, and all she had now left of him was a house full of heart-wrenching memories and two sons.

…Couldn't hear no music,

Couldn't see no light.

Mama, she was frightened,

Crazy from the fright.

Tears without no comfort,

Screams without no sound…

'Mommy, see what I made in school today! Today we had a speaker from the Federation in to talk to us about the important stuff that they do, and then we got to draw pictures of stuff we wanna do in space. And I wanna be a Starship Captain like Dad was and save people like him too cause he was a hero. At least that's what the Officer said Dad was.'

She stood in the kitchen, making plans for her next tour of duty as her five-year-old son bound in from the front door waving a sheet of paper with some figures drawn on it. Sammy had thankfully lost those baby looks that made him look like a miniature George, but Jim seemed to grow more and more like him every day. He was fascinated with space and everything to do with the Federation; every time the teacher talked about space exploration, he came home with several PADDs full of data that the librarian had helped him to find about the star and comets and nebulas. It was just like George's mother had described of his childhood.

And it burned a hole in her chest.

She couldn't hold her son without seeing George, couldn't smile at him without thinking of the way her George used to smile back at her, couldn't even carry on a conversation without trying to get her son to talk like an adult. She didn't want this child here, she wanted her George.

For five years she had struggled on alone, helped by Tiberius and his wife, in raising her sons for what sort of praise? For badly drawn pictures of her husband, she saw as Jim tapped the picture to the front of the cooling unit? No, she was not going to take this. Her son, she didn't want him. And she certainly didn't want anybody looking like George going anywhere near the Federation.

The little grasp of sanity that she had clung to snapped.

'That's it!' She screamed at the confused little boy in front of her. 'I don't want to hear any more of this talk of exploring space! You will stay here on Earth like a good child should and you will have nothing to do with space. Space is a terrible could place that does nothing but suck the happiness out of you and destroy all your joy and dreams. It killed your father, do you hear me? It killed your father.' She knelt in down and grasped him by the shoulders and shook him. 'Don't you ever talk to me about exploring space again mister? And don't you ever talk to those Federation assholes again, you will never have anything to do with them, do you understand me, boy?

She didn't even wait for his agreement before she let go of him and stalked upstairs to begin packing for her mission aboard the USS Kepler. Not another moment in this house, no sir, not another moment would she stand around that child with George's eyes and his smile. She was going to go as far as the Federation would let her and stay away for as long as her family would let her. And her sons be damned.

And all the while she packed she missed the sound of her younger son crying softly, not understanding why his mother now hated and loved him with all the passion in her heart.

…Only darkness and pain,

The anger and pain,

The blood and the pain!

I buried my heart in the ground!

In the ground-

When I buried you in the ground…

Winona Kirk had not seen Jim for about 1.2 standard Earth years, and had done all within her meagre powers to ensure that she would not have had to see him for at least another 1.2 years by sending off to live with some distant cousins on Tarsus IV. Her plan had backfired.

She had been called in to speak to her commanding officer and Captain aboard the USS Sputnik where she had been serving for the last 6 months as they studied the GU-5731 nebula's gas structure in the middle of her beta shift unexpectly. She had given a report along with the other scientists in the mission the previous day, so she knew this meeting had nothing to do with her performance. When they had told her of the food crisis on Tarsus IV and the mass genocide, her mind had gone numb. She had sent her son away to the colony to learn how to live a normal happy life, one that she realized she could no longer provide him with. Representatives of all the families of the survivors of the massacre were bringing brought to the planet as fast as Star Fleet could manage, she was to be transferred to the USS Yankee in 6.3 standard hours and from there she would meet with grief counsellors who would prepare her for meeting her son. And that's all she had been told.

Standing in the medical bay of the USS Nastra, one of several ships sent to care for any of the survivors, and looking at the emancipated form of her eleven-year-old son surrounded by some of the brightest medical minds in the Fleet, she felt her heart begin to falter.

What if he didn't wake up? Kudos had captured Jim as he had made a raid on the main colony for food, and then proceeded to try to torture the location of the missing twenty-three children out of him. Jim had resisted the worst sort of human brutality for three days before Star Fleet had picked up the weak heavily encoded distress signal that he had managed to send out and had arrived. Now, a week later, her son still lay in a self-induced coma as his mind and body tried to heal; his allergies had caused so many problems for the doctors who could not give him the proper medications to speed up the healing process. Instead, her son was being forced to fight off the infections and pneumonia by himself with limited medical assistance.

Ironic, that while there was so much technology and science all about her, all of it was worthless in ensuring that she would see George's eyes again. That was truthfully the whole reason that she had agreed to come to the USS Nastra, not that she hadn't been interested in the well-fare of her child, but the thought of losing those bright blue cyan eyes and cat-ate-the-canary grin that her George had possessed was heart wrenching.

'I'm sure that he will be fine Winona, you just have to let the doctors do what they think best. His father liked to be a pain about getting medical attention, but once the hypos started flying he would just sleep them all off—we used to think he had died on the couch.'

Lieutenant Chris Pike came to stand beside her as she continued her vigil over her sickened son. They had met while serving upon the USS Kepler, he had been under her command during a scientific mission that had gone awry and left them stranded on a planet for 4.3 days while trying to contact their ship. There had been no danger while they studied the local flora and fauna other than small indigenous life forms that were frightened by high frequency pitches. But since their ill-fated mission, a bond had formed between the two and Winona was grateful that he had been in the landing party that had found her Jim—not grateful that Chris had seen those atrocities, but that someone she trusted in Star Fleet had found her son.

'I know Chris; I just wish he would wake up so I could know that he is awake and remembers who I am. Doctor Phlox said that in traumatic cases like his, children may awaken with complete amnesia or with distorted memories of past events. I just want to hold my baby.' I just want to see his eyes.

She turned to face the of Jim's biobed as soft alarms began to ring out from there, alerting medical staff of a change in his condition. Used to such things meaning a new problem with the medications that they were using, Winona almost turned back to Chris until she noticed that more than just the duty nurse and doctor had arrived to Jim's side. Dr Phlox had come streaming from his office at a cry from one of his staff and was hunched over the bio readouts at the foot of his bed. A smile grew across his face that she could see even in the reflection of black glass in front of the doctor over something that he saw in the information there.

Phlox whipped around to the window where she had been playing sentry during her vigil and yelled out to her, 'He's waking up and his brain functions are higher than usual for someone coming out of a coma.'

But all that Winona processed was that her son was about to awaken and that the wait for George's eyes would now be over and she would be comforted by those blue eyes as full of hope as the Iowa sky in Spring. She dashed to through the door and to the end of the bed, pushing aside the critical medical staff to be there and to be the first person who saw those eyes.

Slowly and slightly, Jim's head began to roll side to side on the pillow and her excitement began to build like a fist underneath her breast. And then, fluttering gently like a butterfly, his eyes began to open; they cast about the ceiling, taking in the details, blinking as they tried to focus on objects. He glassy gaze took in the doctors trying to make him move his feet or toes or whatever they pleased before looking at the foot of his bed. Before looking at her.

And that haze was immediately gone from his eyes, eagle-eyed he pinned her to her place with a piercing stare that seemed to reach into her soul. And that stare, oh the hatred it held. George's eyes were looking at her with both disappointment and pure hatred.

When she had finished ensuring that Jim would be given the best care by Frank, Winona ran back to the stars in order to hide from those eyes that knew what she had done to her son. Those eyes that had once filled with love and adoration for her now screamed of a reckoning for all her deeds and she wanted to be as far away as possible from them.

…Daddy played piano.

Bet he's playin' still.

Mama can't forget him.

Don't suppose I will.

God wants no excuses.

I have only one:

You had your daddy's hands.

Forgive me…

It seemed that the world came around in circles, Winona mused as she sat in the front row of the auditorium at Star Fleet Academy. Her George had been captain of a star ship for less than ten minutes and had managed to save over 400 lives; Jim had been a captain for a little over ten hours, but had managed to save the entire Federation from the same Romulans.

She wasn't sure who had had the crazy idea of inviting the estranged mother of the heroic captain to the Enterprise awards ceremony, but they had obviously not spoken to the captain before hand—she just wanted to know how they had tracked her down. Being part of Star Fleet still, they may have just done some digging in Jim's file for his mother's name and gone from there, but she had made certain parts of her file, namely her personal past, unreachable to most of the world with some help from a very happy young Lieutenant. But never mind how they had managed to find her, once the invitation had arrived, delivered by her captain no less, she had been obliged to go.

So she sat in the front room, the area reserved for close family members to those seven crew members who had made the daring rescue possible. There had been others, certainly, that had ensured the Enterprise's success, but none of them had risked as much as the Alpha Shift crew. And what a mix they were. As the Admirals droned on about the honour and integrity of Star Fleet, Winona measured the strength of the crew. The dark-skinned human was the only female, and the boy with the mop of curly blonde hair couldn't even have been twenty for all that he was working on the Enterprise, and the oldest person of the seven looked like the formal uniform was trying to slowly strangle him.

But her Jim was sitting ramrod straight in his seat, proudly showing off the qualities of a starship captain—brave, calm, and self-confident. When Admiral Archer pinned on the Award of Heroism to her son's chest, Winona felt the sting of tears in her eyes. He didn't search the crowd for family, he most likely had assumed that no one would come, but instead gazed into the crowd of admirals on the stage and smiled at Chris Pike who smiled right back at him.

Standing there with the award on his breast and giving a speech about the troubles facing the Federation in the time ahead, he had never looked more like George. And that's when her plans of meeting her son crumbled to the ground. He was better off without ever seeing her again now that he had a family in the form of a crew; they would care for him and protect him in ways that she was never capable of doing. It was straight out unhealthy for her to corner him and force him to look at her with those bright blue cyan eyes, those eyes that had haunted her for the past twenty-three years.

Instead, as the crowd dispersed, marking a finish to the days proceeding, she melted away into the cluster of people trying to make their way out of the room. Winona would never gain forgiveness for the horrible way she had treated her younger son, and now realized that she had never deserved to go looking for her. She had allowed the memory of George over power her mind and twist it until she could no longer see her son.

She didn't deserve any forgiveness her son may give, and she had the feeling that he would never extend it anyway.

…You were your daddy's son.

A/N: The song is from the musical Ragtime, which I suggest listening to the recording done by the original cast. When Audra McDonald sings this piece, your heart will just shatter into a million pieces like mine did; and when I heard it I immediately thought of Winona trying to explain to her son why she didn't love him like she loved Sam. All because Jim was George's son. Anyway this is a hail back to my previous pieces in the Star Fleet universe, but I plan to get back to my Troublesome Trio collection as soon as inspiration for that comes back around again; if you enjoy Sherlock Holmes, I suggest reading it.