2306

Just after T'Sei's fal tor pan

Vulcan

From the reddish cloud of dust that obscured everything still even after the ship touched down on Vulcan's surface, a man and two boys emerged like an afterthought. In the dust, their features were indistinct aside from pointed ears and dark hair. In all but expression, they were Vulcan, but the oldest boy looked ahead with something like rejection of this place clear on his features. Unnamed instinctual calculations told him he would survive here—he could find some way for Rhys to survive as well, if something happened to the man. But he didn't know enough; it was too difficult to see around him, and so he was wary, and held Rhys tighter. The toddler's face was buried in Maiek's shirt, revealing only curly hair and the tips of his ears. The first difference. Maiek's hair was straight and dark and nearly hid his eyes, for which he was sometimes grateful. But Rhys was obviously not of entirely Vulcan ancestry.

Ruanek had tried to speak a few words of Vulcan to them on the ship; he didn't know the hybrid language the boys had learned from their parents. Maiek had turned away. Not unkindly, but—his life had changed.

Maiek felt a brief loss for anything green, any other language, any other planet, then shoved it away.

Some of us are shadows, the boy thought. Some only live long enough to be shadows after they are forgotten. It was not himself he thought of, though his presence on Vulcan was a shadow of the war that had nearly happened and of a long, silent conflict inside Romulus.

We can live here, was all that mattered that he noticed. We can live here, not be killed.

The door opening was a sudden change from the unbroken near-desert outside. Maiek blinked, looking up and tilting his head. He had not known what would happen further than that they were safe, but they would never return to Romulus. Not where they went, or who these people were.

Saavik had agreed, weeks earlier, to take in Tarek's children for a while, as long as necessary. Not because he was her half-brother, but because of the startling realization that these children were like herself when she had come to Vulcan—ripped away from everything they had known, still wary of the strange planet, and utterly foreign to the utterly foreign people who took them in.

She knew that situation so well it was like reading their thoughts as she looked into the older boy's eyes.

Why are you so clean?

Why should I trust you?

How can I leave?

He was so tense it seemed he would break or strike out, staring with that same confusion and determination she had seen in Spock's eyes a long time ago. For the slightest second, his powerful gaze held her in place, until she recognized Ruanek beside him. Looking back at the boy, she saw he was a little older than she had been, maybe thirteen, expression fierce and much older, his body sharp and skinny and in unfamiliar clothes she instantly recognized as Romulan.

Of course, he was much younger than any of the children from Hellguard—she and all those children had grown; Tarek and Rhian, his parents, had been on Hellguard. Saavik had a wild hope right at the beginning as she saw one of the first of the differences and knew he would change beyond the little they had been able to:

Difference. A small, curly-haired child the boy held. Not a younger one attacked or left behind, as the younger children had been on Hellguard, and not his own child—some had mated that young, problems springing from their pasts and the difficulty in caring for another…a difficulty Maiek would not have, hopefully.

The toddler raised his head and looked at Saavik, then upwards. Maiek said something fast in a language Saavik had tried hard to forget. Perhaps it was this, or Ruanek's reply in Romulan based on what little he had understood—or a sudden reason for trust; Maiek may have seen something of his father in Saavik's face—but the tense, guarded boy stepped inside finally after that significant exchange.

He took a cursory glance around and must have deemed the place safe. He sat on the floor beside a couch, despite Saavik's best efforts to make him move somewhere more comfortable, and eventually relinquished Rhys, who, younger, gave T'Sei a squinty smile before falling asleep, oddly reminiscent of T'Sei at that age. Spock was at his parents' house; they had both thought he, more Vulcan, would be trusted later.

It would be a while before he would be entirely open to her. But Saavik guessed that some internal honor would make him stay. And that, as they said, was that.

2308

ShiKahr, Vulcan

The sun had just disappeared over the horizon of the Forge like a warning. If Maiek closed his eyes, he saw a different sunset, a different darkness, the horizon of a different planet marred by a single unmarked grave.

Analek, his half-brother, had been the best of Rhian's children, the most forgiving. Before Maiek could understand most of the danger the survivors of Hellguard had been in, Analek had been a shadow a few years older keeping the other shadows at bay, a large part of his sanity. With Analek's sudden end, part of Maiek had been quietly extinguished. There was no seeing it from the outside; his face had been unmoved as a Vulcan's, the shock still not entirely gone. Spock and Saavik, in whose care Maiek and his four-year-old brother Rhys were for some indefinite time, were like distant, untouchable planets. He still flinched from them or fought them, eyes defiant, the energy within him that made him not Vulcan unextinguished, whether it was from his Romulan and half-Romulan parentage or his loss.

He was not forgiving. His half brother had been.

Maiek looked up in an eight-year-old's shock after the hard impact on the ground. He hadn't considered his brother would disagree with anything he said. His fingers scrabbled in the dust, but at the look in Analek's eyes, the experienced crouch, did not right himself.

"Why?" he spat, seeing the streak of green that ran into Analek's short dark hair.

His older brother's face was serious and utterly…different than Maiek's had ever been.

"They don't belong here but we can't hurt them. Evine can take them to Vulcan."

Maiek shook his head, not looking at the two Vulcan children. "All right. Although I don't understand." It was his bruises, overall, talking. He had defended the children from the Romulans, but their logic...and what they said...

"You will someday."

But Analek would have never thought of what Maiek was about to do. It wasn't a split-second decision, but a long plan. It had started a year ago, a year after he and Rhys had arrived on Vulcan. Rhys had ran out into the desert and asked unsuccessfully any Vulcan he saw if he could charter a spaceflight to Earth—they hadn't seen their parents since before they left. Maiek was too used to finding him for him to be lost for long. As he dragged the younger boy back to Spock and Saavik's house, he had said, "if you're going to run away, run away properly."

The plan had lifted Maiek out of the depths of his thoughts. He was having trouble adjusting to Vulcan. The language would not come easily to him, so he stubbornly kept using Romulan or that hybrid language of Romulan and Vulcan, when he spoke at all—mostly to Rhys. What little Vulcan he managed was oddly accented but clear, spoken to his instructors. He was in a class of much younger Vulcans, since he had difficulty with the language, which "was not going well," Spock had said after Maiek stumbled home grinning and bruised. Spock and Saavik would call him perfectly responsible, just…held back from everyone. Inwardly rebellious. It didn't entirely make sense to them, but while Spock struggled for answers, Saavik let the days pass without troubling Maiek too much. That suited him perfectly.

He would leave before the sun set, this day. Before sunset yesterday, he had crept into Rhys' room, seen his sleeping face, and known that Rhys would not come with him. Maiek knew survival, but cold fear still plated his bones: there was a chance he could die, in trying to reach his parents.

Though only two years had passed since they had arrived on Vulcan, Rhys looked older than he had been. He was four now, not two, some of the baby far gone from his cheeks, some more words added to his vocabulary, all fear gone from him—but he was still so young he most often had to be carried, and Maiek didn't want to fear for him while he found his mother and father. What he would do once he contacted them, he didn't know—but something in him knew he would have to see on his own whether they were alive, what they were doing, and that he was not complete on his own. He wanted Rhian to hold him in her arms if only for a moment, and all of the problems on Vulcan would vanish briefly.

There was so much they understood that Saavik and Spock couldn't possibly comprehend.

And Maiek didn't know himself like he had when he had been on Romulus. He had been sure of his own personality, his vitality—he could run across half of the plain in a single night, could try to ward away assassins, could warn the survivors of Hellguard if needed be. Now, not tethered to any place he belonged to, not kept from learning, not pushing his abilities in any way, he was…lost, changed. He realized he didn't know his thoughts like he should, and this worried him. And that perhaps there would be some danger in the future he couldn't run from, being lulled by the desert and the logic of Vulcan.

He felt a greater presence of thought than he usually did—felt everything more vividly, in this anticipation. He was barefoot, just a little far away from Spock and Saavik's house that just began to catch the sunrise that lit him like a warning he embraced. The sand beneath his feet was not a coalesced hard surface, but different grains, rocks, the pain of feeling them minute. He could only stay to see this place for a moment before he left. But even that was a freedom he felt keenly. Alone, he simply was. He did not answer to any questions, any understanding, any obligation to take care of or avoid anyone. His eyes met the blind disc of the sun and then he sprinted away, noting the direction he left the house from. It was the opposite direction of the wind: by nightfall or before, his tracks would be gone like memories. It was how he had avoided the same assassin who had killed Analek—

A sudden dull thud in the night, strong as surprise, sudden as the stutter in Maiek's heartbeat. He turned around rapidly—there was no shadow across the horizon. Someone gasped, the voice distorted from anything Maiek recognized, but after a moment—eyes narrowed—he could make out the face he saw as his older brother's beneath the green blood that clotted onto the ground, saw Analek dying like a much younger boy, never saw the assassin leave to kill the men and women in the house. Analek's eyes burned across his vision. He remembered a Vulcan boy and girl suddenly, and turned and retched on the dry ground. He was directionless…lost…blindly he searched for Rhys, was only a shadow in the days to come.

He had been watching a Vulcan who came sometimes to the stall he worked at when he was not in school. Spock and Saavik didn't know of this—or perhaps they did and did nothing—Maiek earned a small amount of money in a job that required little speech, and any Vulcan glaring at him for being illogical earned a glare back or a back turned. This one had talked to Maiek, having some weird Vulcan equivalent of sympathy, about starships of all things. Maiek feigned uninterest but asked the man if he had any ships of his own. He did, it turned out. That was not how Maiek would be going to Earth, however. Rhys had made a similar mistake to the one Maiek avoided.

There. He had reached the organized huddle of cargo ships beyond the passenger ones. If he was careful to step aside so he would not be scattered into random molecules by the cleaners, he could leap aboard—this one that would leave in a few hours. It was bulky, and he would be unnoticed. He grinned, tensed his muscles, and leapt. A hard impact told him he was alive. Gratefully he let the air whoosh out from his lungs and hid underneath the cover of a cargo container, chipping away at the material until he could fit inside.

Whatever it was was hollow, he discovered as they moved. He rattled around in it like a bean. It was an interesting shell, however, nearly luminescent, a translucent orange. His dreams—he dreamed briefly—were less weighted than the ones that had come to him nights before, of Analek dying; he thought instead of his father, Tarek. Tarek had told Maiek when he was not much older than Rhys that he had lived on Romulus for a year or two in his life before Hellguard, and the few memories he had had were happy.

That's right, Maiek thought.

Whether you find them or not, you're free. You'll be happy.

He sincerely hoped so. He knew he would return, but the night before, he had been nearly paralyzed with worry, thinking of Rhys. He had to assure himself Rhys would be taken care of properly by Spock and Saavik, so that he wouldn't impulsively snatch his younger brother away, damn everything.

The rumble of takeoff beneath him faded into the silence of space. Maiek let his worries go.

Earth will be completely different than Romulus. Different than Vulcan. Different from what little I know.

He had not been the sort of child to wonder if there was another family somewhere like his, someone like himself only a little different, with the same lives, the same thoughts, just on different planet. He just thought vaguely, different.

He had not thought of how it would be different, just that it would.

He blinked, hearing voices—

Voices.

Maiek grew rigid inside his container, heart hammering as the world skewed sideways. Someone carried it…somewhere. He crouched, tense, for what must have been hours, not daring to move. A bead of sweat ran down his forehead and fell to the bottom of the translucent orange shell-like tube. His foot tapped—he stilled it. His breaths grew shallow. He moved his shoulder, hazarded a glance up, saw only a vast unbroken sky of orange translucent blurriness.

Oh. Right.

He hooked his thumb over the edge of what must have been the top of the container, frowned and swore in a low voice as it didn't come free. The edge bit his finger. He hissed and pushed harder, completely taken by surprise at the lack of resistance as it broke and he tumbled onto the ground in the bright Earth light.

And thus he didn't roll, like he would have if he had fallen when fighting. He felt sore already, looked at the ground. It was silent—they must be gone. He picked himself up slowly. The containers were stacked at the side of some great compound beside a larger building. Everything was metal and looked…strange. Square. The air smelled different, the ozone burning his nose.

"Welcome to Earth," he said in Romulan to himself, a figure against the daylight, flattening himself against the building until he was gone from it.

Earth was strange, what little he saw of it then. Everything was moving, metal, chaos. What wasn't moving or metal was very old—or people. People so confusing and chaotic themselves he couldn't take them in, and let his guard down. He would have to hide in the open. In any case, he didn't know where to go. A sharp, full odor swept through the air and he followed it, finding he stood outside the entrance to a restaurant with unfamiliar writing emblazoned in bright colors over the doorway. He tried to translate into Romulan, couldn't, realized he had no money and that perhaps this was a miserable idea. He walked on, dreaming of food. Somehow he avoided being killed in the traffic. Children with rounded ears stared at him strangely from a strange angle, overhead, zooming away on something levitating. Older men and women and some he couldn't distinguish looked right past him, assuming he belonged here.

He thought he couldn't walk anymore. It was past the length of a day's run he had walked, people staring and not staring. He didn't know his way back. The air was heavy, the sun the wrong color, all of this in the back of his mind like a fever. He found himself underneath an unobtrusive sign, just when he thought he would drop from exhaustion, and nearly called out in the hybrid language as a response, recognizing the lettering above him as either Romulan or Vulcan. Vulcan, most likely. Relief poured through him. He began to step near the gates of this building—some Federation one, but he knew it must be the right one—when something yanked his arms back sharply. He tried to swing around but couldn't break free to scratch whoever it was, and found him staring angrily into the eyes of a Vulcan. Or a Romulan. Someone impassive, murderous. His fighting would do nothing, he knew, and he was in the shadows.

"You're not going in there," the Vulcan/Romulan said in a frustratingly androgynous voice.

"Just on time," they continued. Maiek fumed inwardly, but hung his head. He would die, and what would happen to Rhys…out of the corner of his eye, he looked up, just as his captor laughed, the edge of their face becoming visible in the shadows. It was marred by multiple scars that rippled in the half-light like something Maiek would rather not remember. The sight fell into the back of his retinas and stayed there. The high-pitched sound gave him time enough to think.

His captor was female, he had been able to identify from that sound, and terrifying. He wasn't as afraid as he seemed, however. Her voice was entirely unfamiliar. He hoped to catch some form of accent or other to identify where she was from, but it was carefully masked in what little he had heard. And she had no weapon. She would likely not kill him.

He realized her hand had been held away from his mouth for quite a while but was dangerously close to a nerve on his neck that could kill him. He thought. He could likely speak, quietly.

"You have no weapon. Your disruptor holster is empty, and you have no knife or poison. You're not going to kill me now. Why?"

She laughed the fearsome laugh again. If he wasn't already captive, he would have frozen.

"Why would I answer that?

"You are going to do something very important for me," was all she said, as she led him with the force of fear through some impossible to trace network of small roads or tunnels into the darkness.