Author's note-- just a little something that hit me on a (rainy) afternoon. Had to write it out instead of doing homework of course. Please read and review!!
Disclaimer-- I don't own Star Trek :)
Losing Family
Rain dripped through his already drenched overcoat in rivulets seeping through the heavy fabric and down to the ground where it mixed with the mud beneath his feet, soiling the dress shoes he had only just bothered to wear this once. He studied the shoes, which had only an hour before been shined to perfection, so much so that he had almost been able to see his face reflected back at him when he had put them on. Now they remained an ugly color of smeared brown, all evidence of shine reduced to nothing. He hadn't really cared about the shoes anyway. They felt fake, a useless façade that didn't fit him or how he felt in the least bit. He felt stiff, unnatural, and utterly unlike himself.
In fact, everything about this situation felt unnatural. It wasn't meant to be this way. He wasn't meant to be standing here, in the rain, in Iowa, in the middle of a grassy field marked with neat rows of white crosses, the occasional pathetically drooping bouquet of roses resting at the base of a few of them. He wasn't supposed to be here in dress uniform, flat top of his Starfleet issue hat accumulating a steady puddle of water until it finally brimmed over and leaked onto his sodden shoulder.
To be completely honest, he wasn't sure how he felt staring down at the lonely grave in front of him. He simply felt empty; hollow as if he had been drained of whatever vital substance that resided within him and this feeling—whatever it was—left an empty chasm that hadn't yet filled itself with anything.
It had been unexpected. He had gotten a call from Starfleet command only two days ago with the news that she had died. She had been sick for some time, but had not bothered to tell him about it. Somehow she had found it unnecessary to tell her own son that she had fallen ill with a deadly disease that would kill her within months of diagnosis.
But then again, his mother had never been particularly close with him. He had not been particularly close with any of his family. His mom had been away so much of his childhood that the times that he had seen her remained vague and fuzzy in his clouded memory. She had simply preferred to stay away—stay away from the child that reminded her so much of a broken past and a broken future. Then there had been Frank—a poor excuse for the father that he had never known. Frank had not been physically abusive—merely indifferent to the kids that had been foisted upon him by a badly thought out marriage. And then there was George, the brother that had once inspired him to be more: to stand up for himself and never take no for an answer. But then George had left—abandoned his little brother because ultimately George only cared about the outcomes for himself.
He had been left alone so all that he had left was the ghost of the father he had never met, a dusty old convertible that Frank claimed as his own and a legacy that everyone expected him to live up to. That ghost at first angered him through years of his adolescence, goading him to pretend he didn't care, to pretend that nothing mattered to him but the thrill of exhilaration. He wanted to prove everyone wrong—he was not his father, and never could be. He had been an odd dichotomy as a child, wanting guidance, but not admitting it; wanting family but ashamed to be dependent on a useless dream. Because he had no family, so he might as well man up, grow up, shut up, and move on. Because there was nothing for him on the world or otherwise except for shattered expectations and a long standing anger that he felt compelled to act upon.
And suddenly he felt that he couldn't stay in that place any longer, on that bleak and rainy Iowa afternoon. He couldn't stand there over the grave of his mother, still deep down wishing that he had family. He wanted to get out. He wanted to go until he couldn't go anymore.
So he changed out of his soaked dress clothes, discarding them in a corner of the old hotel he had booked for the week instead of staying at the family farm. He pulled on his battered old leather jacket and a pair of weathered jeans and hitchhiked his way southward as the gray light of day faded to dusk. When the last of the light disappeared from the sky, he thanked the driver of the rusty shuttle who'd given him the lift and opened the gate to the farm—a place he had not set foot on in four years. He did not, however, make his way through the smudged rain to the farmhouse, whose lights glowed in a manner that only made him feel cold in the pit of his stomach. Instead he went across the field through thick mud to the old shed, trusting that the heavy rainfall would mask his figure from the lone inhabitant of the house.
In the relative dry of the shed (relative because the roof had holes in it that leaked water and a constant drip, drip, drip sounded throughout the rotting interior) he stopped just inside the doorway to survey his oldest haunt. Looking around the walls, he smiled faintly as if in greeting to an old and forgotten friend. After his brother had left, he had spent much of his time in this place and he still had a certain fondness for it, though the neglect that it had endured in the last four years clearly showed. The holes in the ceiling were perhaps a bit bigger, the smell perhaps a bit mustier, and the whole place had an air similar to that of a dilapidated old museum—untouched and forgotten. But he liked it better this way. No one came here anymore. The place was still his.
After a moment, he entered in fully, shaking his head like a dog and spraying water all over the already damp walls as he stepped into the gloom. His eyes raked the small apartment for one thing and one thing only. And after a moment his eyes found that one thing: in the corner of the room stood a blackened sheet covering a lopsided shape, weirdly distorted by shadows in the gloom but this did not seem to bother him. He simply stepped forward and pulled the dusty sheet off in one sweep to reveal an old, antique motorcycle. It hadn't been his pride and joy: that one he had given up when he entered Starfleet. This one was merely sentimental and he'd left it in the shed because it had been his first motorcycle. Old and beat up, it still ran fine, especially after he had tweaked it when he had been in the ninth grade. Of course, the years would have done some damage, but it would do fine.
Five minutes later and he was out on the Iowa road going faster than was strictly safe, rain pelting his already saturated form, but he paid it no heed. The rain didn't matter. All that mattered was that he was moving, moving, moving and nothing could stop him.
He didn't know what he was looking for precisely, he just knew he was searching for something that he had lost, or had not previously appreciated fully. And below that simmered that deep anger that he had stored up since youth—a deep seated anger at everyone—at his mother and brother for abandoning him, at Frank, who didn't give a shit about anybody, at the ghost of his father, who still plagued him despite his finally making something of his life. He felt alone. His mother had never wanted him, and he tried to tell himself that he didn't care, but he did. He felt juvenile and petty. He was twenty-seven years old. He was brash and reckless. He was the youngest starship captain ever. He and his crew were the pride of Starfleet, and here he was on a rusty old bike in the Iowa rain wishing that he could come to terms with his dead father and mother and knowing that he had lost, forever, the chance to have that dream of security.
He found himself at a loss as he turned down another random highway in the midst of the Iowa farming industry, thinking to himself childishly I wish… I wish… but unable to find exactly what he wished for.
It was then that he realized where his aimless wanderings had taken him in the dull light of the predawn. Perhaps it was fate—but he didn't really believe in that sort of thing. He sat underneath the monstrous frame of the Starfleet shipyards, construction on another starship steadily under way and realized with a pang of where he really wanted to be—and nothing, no person, no order, no turn of events would prevent him from reaching his destination.
Because the place he wanted to be, the people he wanted to be with most turned out to be the place he had left not two days ago. He thought of their faces—faces that he loved, faces that he would entrust his life to and he knew beyond a doubt that maybe what he wished for he had had all along.
He turned his bike around and headed back up the highway, heading for the Starfleet headquarters to catch a shuttle that would lead him truly home to the people and the place that he held the most dear.
Because maybe, just maybe, losing family meant finding family in the first place.