Welcome! I used to write fanfiction a long time ago when I was a young little 17 year old freshman in college. (I think I've deleted my old stories hidden in fandoms [that are not TP from what I remember] because I couldn't find my old account or the stories that I wrote through Google.) I recently was very bored and ran across an old Treasure Planet fic that someone else wrote that I reread and remembered what fun this all was. (Hiding In Plain Sight by RomanyChic if you haven't read it before. It's still on this site and it's phenomenal.) That fic prompted me to rewatch TP and do some Google searching to find out that a sequel had been planned but scrapped because of the money loss. I thought it might be fun to try my hand at fanfiction again and write the sequel that never was to fill the hole in my heart from the lack of closure in the movie and the old fanfic I still love today. Grad school will keep me from posting too much, but let me know what you think. My fiction writing is still rusty so any constructive criticism is welcome.

Chapter One: In Which Katherine Blake Visits The Dean

Katherine Blake was an unstoppable force of nature. The half-canid was only seventeen years old and a shoo-in for an early graduation, complete with ribbons and honors and a position as a midshipman in her Majesty's Imperial Navy. There was only one problem.

Jim Hawkins.

She'd heard of him, yes. Any aspiring spacer worth their salt put a little too much faith in the veracity of Treasure Planet, and every one of them had felt justified when the rumors that the Dean of the Royal Interstellar Academy had run off to hunt for buried treasure turned out to be real. Kate's roommate, a tentacled, many-eyed girl from Febsdirth had been thrilled to regale everyone in the mess hall about what she'd overheard the assistant dean saying about three months after Captain Smollett had slipped away from the campus.

"I heard that they found Treasure Planet," Smi, the Febsdirthian, whispered theatrically, her eyes rotating and bending at their stems. "There was a mutiny though, and the ship went down in flames due to the teamwork of Captain Long John Silver and a giant Vikhensian spider. Lucky for Captain Smollett, though, some genius called James Hawkins was with her, and that man built a solar surfer in under 10 seconds out of scrap ship parts and rescued the crew that hadn't been murdered in the mutiny."

The students all blinked suspiciously, confused to whether or not Smi's story was true. There were just enough fantastical elements that it was incredible, yet still believable. For some, anyways.

"How could someone build a solar surfer in under 10 seconds?" Kate demanded, her ears perking up. She had recently begun showing off her ears again, despite the teasing it had originally garnered her when she had started the Academy two years ago. She was a sturdy girl, with crooked teeth and a humanid face, but with the nose and ears of a canid. Her mother was supposedly humanid, but had passed away in childbirth. Kate had never dared ask her father for a picture. "Wouldn't it be inherently unstable, even if this Hawkins guy managed to even get it running in the first place?"

"Why do you have to be so logical all the time, Kate?" Smi sighed, slithering down off the table she had perched on to peddle her gossip to passerbys.

"I'm not always logical," Kate said, logically. She tucked a strand of her hair behind her ears. There were a few pieces of her orange-blond garish mess of hair that someone – obviously not her father – in her gene pool had straddled her with non-consensually that never stayed in place, no matter how many pins she poked. And Kate poked pins. She spent at least three or four odd coins a week buying new bobby pins to keep her nest of hair out of her face. Some people – Smi included, due to the girl wearing a light striped sundress today rather than her uniform – didn't give two hoots about the dress code. Teachers didn't usually enforce it, beyond for formal occasions, when everyone was in their best brass. But Kate was unstoppable, and she wasn't about to let a dress code violation stand in her way from being the best spacer out there.

"Do you even believe this gossip you're spreading, Smi?"

"It's not gossip. I heard the assistant Dean telling his secretary about it. It might be hear say, but it's not gossip."

"Now who's being logical?" Kate laughed, hefting her bag of books over her shoulder. Smi and Kate were here for very different reasons – Smi wanted to work at a spaceport. She was hoping to become a sailmaker at a local shop. Kate was far more ambitious. But the girls got along well enough, and enough time together with a person will make them, at the very least, bearable.

"I'd love to ask Captain Smollett what it was like," Smi said, dreamily, probably thinking of the "hearsay" she could spread for weeks with that kind of ammunition.

Kate agreed wholeheartedly.

Smi quickly forgot about her desire to talk to Captain Smollett, but Kate did not. Two days later, she heard one of her calculus professors mention that the dean had returned in case any student had needed her for something important. Kate wondered what would happen if she slipped into the Dean's office and struck up a conversation.

She wasn't a stranger to the Dean, that was for sure. Captain Smollett was only an officer that happened to teach a navigation course during Kate's very first semester. Commander Smollett, she'd been called, and she'd noticed that Kate had seemed nervous and self-conscious. The intelligent felid had taken Kate under her wing for a few weeks, before the semester was over and she'd gotten a promotion. That being said, Amelia had always checked in on Kate in her own fashion, which usually involved running into her in one of the building's hallways and brusquely asking, "And how are your classes, Miss Blake?"

After her very last class of the week, Kate saw Captain Smollett storming off to her office, shouting something about mountains of paperwork and being roadblocked by total idiocy. Kate took a breath, and without thinking very much, walked over to the heavy oak door that Captain Smollett had already slammed shut. The Arkington building was where administrative offices and astronomy classes were housed: a narrow brick building far younger than many of the cold steel and glass buildings built eons ago.

Kate knocked.

"What." Captain Smollett was not asking a question from the other side of the door – she was issuing a challenge, a dare for the knocker to open the barrier between them and continue to ruin her day. Kate started stepping away from the door slowly. It had been a mistake. She didn't make them often, but sometimes she didn't realize how people felt things so strongly sometimes. Kate was not the best with human (or canid for that matter) emotions. She assumed she got that from her father. It was one of his defining features.

Before Kate had walked too far from the door, it flew open. Captain Smollett was only halfway in her uniform – her jacket, hat and medals had disappeared in the ten minutes she'd been hiding, leaving the woman in leggings, a baggy white shirt and clumping space boots. Kate loved clumping space boots.

"Miss Blake," Captain Smollett seemed mollified. "I apologize. I thought you might be someone else. Do come in. I just put on a kettle and perhaps I poured a little too much. Join me."

Kate's ears were still ringing from the door slamming open, and her heart was pumping just a little faster than a normal heart should, but she nodded her assent and went into Captain Smollett's office, which she'd never officially been inside. It was all dark wood paneling, with medals and letters and pictures on the walls, purple velvet curtains and armchairs and cushions and an enormous desk tucked away to the side with at least three two foot stacks of papers. Captain Smollett caught Kate's stare.

"Blasted paperwork keeps growing. I knew it would grow while I was away, but I didn't know that it would breed."

"I didn't realize there was so much paperwork involved with running the Academy," Kate said politely, walking over to a contraption on a side table. It seemed to be a small solar panel affixed to a round piece of metal that was boiling a kettle. Captain Smollett laughed at Kate's interest.

"That's a glorified hot plate," she said, "A friend of mine gave it to me the other day. Said he thought my tea addiction could be satiated in my office, rather than having to go to the mess hall with my pot."

If Kate had noticed a small blush creep across the Captain's face when she said "friend," Kate didn't say anything. The Captain pulled out the said pot, a large brown ceramic monstrosity and poured the boiling water into it.

"What brings you here, Miss Blake?" she asked, measuring out tea leaves from a container that had the tea fields of Vikhens crudely painted on. "I don't think you've ever visited me in my offices."

"I wanted to say hello," Kate began, uncertainly. "I hadn't seen you in the halls for a while and some interesting rumors were beginning to fly."

"You never struck me as a gossip feeder."

"I'm not. But I'd have to have lost my ears to not have heard any of it."

"So you're here to get it straight from the horse's mouth," Captain Smollett was amused. Her eyes had widened playfully as she poured tea into two large mugs that matched the teapot. "Have a seat, Kate."

The Captain had never used Kate's first name before and it sounded odd in her clipped accent. Kate took the armchair nearest to the desk and took a sip of the hot tea, which was a little weak to be perfectly honest. Captain Smollett sat behind her desk and started sifting through the paperwork while drinking her tea, silent for a few minutes. Kate didn't push anything, already amazed at her luck at getting into the office and being given tea. She continued to drink the weak tea, peeking around the office without trying to be rude. The large window behind the desk looked out to the common area which was bustling with young spacers getting ready for a few days free from classes. Two boys were passing a bottle of cheap wine back and forth and laughing at something.

There was a comfortable silence in the office. It hadn't stretched long enough for Kate to consider if she was imposing, or if the Captain was trying to bore her out of the office.

"Goddamnit!" the Captain exclaimed, breaking Kate's interest in the rowdy boys in the commons.

"What's wrong?"

"I forgot to finish up Hawkin's paperwork. I was supposed to file it with admissions today. Goddamnit." Captain Smollett swore again.

"Hawkins…as in James Hawkins?"

"Heard of him, have you?"

"In one of the rumors, yes," Kate said, uncertainly. "I was told he was a mechanical genius…I assumed – assuming he was real that is – that he was a bit older than an Academy student."

Captain Smollett barked out a laugh. "Hardly. The boy's barely seventeen. He is a mechanical genius, I will give the rumor that. The boy found Flint's treasure map back during the rainy season and I swear to the heavens that he was the only one who could work it. Saved us from a lot of trouble towards the end, there, too, though I'm not sure I agree with his methods of dealing with hardened criminals."

"Long John Silver?" Kate's uncertainty was gone and she let her burning curiosity shine through. "I'd heard my father talk of him before."

The Captain's ears perked quizzically. She knew of Kate's father and found the girl's offhand comment interesting, but didn't say anything about it. "The very same. He and his crew masqueraded as a legitimate crew for hire and the benefactor of our journey fell for their ploy. I won't disagree that Silver had a change of heart towards the end of the journey…quite a bit after the mutiny…but Hawkins seemed to think that the easiest way to deal with the problem was let the pirate escape from the ship. The two had bonded before the mutiny when Silver was trying to blend in, and then afterwards when the pirate saved the boy from a certain death."

Kate shook her head incredulously. She would have never let a criminal escape from justice. "And you want this boy in the Academy, Captain? He seems a bit…unorthodox." Her uncertainty was creeping back in. She didn't want it to seem as though she was questioning the Captain's judgement.

"The boy is a genius, Kate. And I'd much rather deal with his authority problems through excessive schooling than have to track him down and shoot him when he joins some smuggling gang."

"Genius." Kate repeated. Something was gnawing at her. She wasn't sure what it was. She wasn't good with strong emotions, so she wrote it off as a stomach ache from too much fried purp at lunch.

"A diamond in the rough," Captain Smollett agreed. "Moody, unpredictable and more often than not a pain in my ass on the voyage, but he has a cool head under pressure, and a good heart. And I've never seen someone throw together a solar surfer in less than a minute. It was unstable, sure, and he almost killed himself, but the Navy needs that kind of man sometimes."

Kate wasn't sure what to say to that, but Captain Smollett's tongue was finally loose. The entire story of the voyage to Treasure Planet unfurled and Kate listened, rapt by the Captain's factual account. She didn't need to embellish the story – it was wild enough as it was.

Hours later, when Amelia had finally sent the girl packing, Kate walked out into the commons, where the three moons were shining down on the two boys who were far less raucous that earlier. She ignored their calls to her to come join them as she marched back to her dorm, digesting everything the Captain had told her.

The Captain had been Kate's favorite professor. When she had awkwardly sat in the back of the room, unsure of how to behave, Captain Smollett had pushed her out of her shell and gotten her to participate in the classes. Kate knew that the Captain had seen some of the bullying that had happened during the first semester. Kate's father was the admiral of the Royal Navy, Stevenson Blake, a seven-foot tall, stoic canid with a strong jaw and no tolerance for mediocrity. Some of the older students had targeted Kate early on, telling her she'd only gotten in due to her father's position. Captain Smollett had found Kate holed up in the library one day after class.

"Don't listen to those imbeciles," the Captain had offered, without needing an explanation. "I've seen your homework, Miss Blake, and I've met your father. I know you are here on your own merit."

"I just wish people didn't mention it," Kate had mumbled.

"Well, keep your chin up; you're level-headed and sharp. The Navy needs that kind of man sometimes."

"The Navy needs that kind of man sometimes." Kate finally recognized that stomach ache – it wasn't too many fried purps. It was jealousy.