My first Star Trek:2009 fanfiction...so reviews are welcome. Disclaimer: I don't own Start Trek:2009.
Chapter One
"Promise me that you'll be safe, Leona."
"I will, Aunt Beth." Leona hitched her backpack higher onto her shoulders, feeling a sharp thrill of excitement deep in her stomach as the Airbus flashed into sight, a silver dot growing closer on the horizon. Other passengers at the station stirred as they saw it, too.
"Write home often." Aunt Beth pressed her palm to Leona's cheek, a surprisingly kind gesture. She had never before shown much affection to the girl, and Leona had not expected it. Beth Ponderly was not her relative by blood; rather, they had taken her in as a child and raised her, though not as their own. Leona had often felt distanced from the Ponderly children.
"I will." She said, and turned as the bus lurched to a stop at the depot. It levitated a few yards above the gritty road, suspended on pressurized tracks the likes of which Aunt Beth had clearly never seen.
"What'll they think of next?" She muttered as she nudged Leona toward the bus. The girl waved goodbye and climbed aboard.
"I'll make you proud!" Leona cried, surprising herself. She quickly turned back to the driver, an older man who gave her a sympathetic smile.
"You from the country?" He asked as he punched her ticket. Leona nodded silently. The driver handed her the ticket and raised his eyebrows.
"Headed for the city?"
"Starfleet."
"Jeez." He said. "Jeez." And then, "You look too young, you know?"
"Seventeen, sir." She took the ticket, crumpling it in her hand, and made her way to the back of the half-empty bus. A few weary-looking travelers dozed or read their digitized books on personal reading devices, one of the many futuristic inventions that Beth had never allowed. She claimed to not see the point of changing their ways when everything had been 'just fine' the way it was.
Leona chose a seat near the window, a good distance away from any of the other passengers. She stared out the window at the passing landscape: fields and dirt roads that were punctuated occasionally by a dry dusty little town or farmhouse. It was a lonely landscape, but one that she had grown up with and come to tolerate.
She knew that she was leaving her home behind, and everything that she had ever known: racing the other Ponderly kids home from school, going barefoot on a summer afternoon, reading big, thick-paged storybooks from the shelf in the living room. The thought of abandoning her old life for a new one made Leona nervous, but it was a good kind of nervous, she thought. Like a snake shedding its skin for another, bigger one.
Leona was that snake. She leaned her head against the window and hoped that her new skin would fit.