A/N: A Christmas gift for the followers of 'The First Time'!
Before Laxely (she was just Sonja)
Sonja Laxely grew up in a bar. Sort of.
When her maternal grandfather died, he left a prized possession to each of his children. Her mother, Lita Laxely just so happened to get the bar he had spent his retirement years trying to fix up. When Sonja was still swaddled in blankets, held in the crook of her mother's arm, Lita was knuckling down on finishing the renovations and organizing things to get the bar some actual business.
Her maternal grandmother, Sophia, did not approve. But on the days when Lita needed to duke it out with a contractor, she would graciously take Sonja and her older brother Alex of off Lita's hands.
She doesn't remember any sort of grand opening, but the earliest memories she has in that bar are of laying down in a corner booth coloring, trying to be invisible as her mother conducted business. In the slow hours of the day shifts, she and her brother would have competitions on who could slide the farthest on the floor with just their socks. (At the time, he had longer legs and better balance, he always won.) Alex carved his name on the bar first. But she carved the words 'is a butt' second.
At the age of five (when her love of reading began), her paternal grandmother began to send her brochures for Starfleet Academy.
"Your grandmother on your father's side is Captain of a starship." Her mother explained one afternoon after another brochure came in. At Sonja's jaw-drop of awe, she added: "You've got adventure in your blood, baby."
At the tender age of five she had been exposed to the patriotism of the Federation and the exciting wonders of the galaxy that could be at her fingertips. But all the wonder disappeared in an instant. When she first realized her father was not a good man.
"I'm not going to keep you from seeing him." Her mother sat her down and told her plainly over a mug of hot chocolate. The steam wafted and disappeared into the cold winter air.
Pouted cheeks, hunched shoulders, and a hand me down sweater that was two sizes too big, Sonja stared back at her mother, with eyes that were much too clear for a five-year-old (in her mother's opinion anyway).
"Do you want to visit him this weekend?"
Her heart quivered, because at five years old she had no defense against fear. Her lips puckered and turned pale as she quickly shook her head. If she said no out loud, he could hear. If he heard, then no one was safe.
Her older brother was different. They were like the moon and the sun, Lita would say. He liked their Tio Rubio's garage, but try as hard as he did, he never could quite get the grasp of mechanics. Or their tio's approval for that matter.
"Alex, you're trying too hard, mijo, you're not seeing the bigger picture." Rubio would say before grabbing the scrap from the work table and throwing it in the garbage. "Sonja's got it though, take a look at her technique."
He'd leave them be and Alex would sit next to her on the bench, a silence that was uncomfortable for both.
"How do you do it?" He asked, bitter petulance a natural part of his thirteen-year-old voice. "Does it come natural to you or something?"
Sonja set down her screwdriver and shrugged. "Mom says I'm good with my hands."
They stared at her piece of work before Alex finally mumbled: "She never says that about me."
When she was fifteen, her brother left the house to pursue his dream of becoming a chef in the big city. The whole family gathered in her mother's bar to see him off with cake and booze. The men sat at the tables filled Alex in on personal tales; painting a picture of brilliant places and easy ladies. The women crowded around the food swapping concerns and connections (for just in case scenarios).
Sonja stuck to her closest cousin, Raquel for most of the occasion. But eventually Tio Rubio sat across from her, taking her cousin's seat when she disappeared to get more cake. With a cold bottle of Corona in hand, he laid a proposition on the table.
"With your brother in the city and your mom working here, you should come work at my garage over the summer."
"I was going to help my mom here." She murmured uncertainly.
He just smiled, and she couldn't help but notice a few crooked strands that strayed away from his mustache towards his cheeks. "Mija, you can't work in a bar yet, you're only fifteen! Come work for a week, see how you like it. Raquel will be there too!" He pushed himself up from the table and called out in Spanish to her mother behind the bar. "¡Yo me ocuparé de ella, no te preocupes!" He lifted his beer in salute then shuffled back over to the group surrounding Alex.
Lita froze in the middle of opening another bottle of wine and watched Rubio as he cheered for her son's departure. A heavy sigh wracked her body before her eyes flashed towards her daughter. Sonja tried to smile. Everything was changing and just like her mother, she wasn't sure if she liked it.
"Study hard, get smarter." Her grandmother would tell her whenever she stopped by. At sixteen, Sonja found a comfort in doing her homework on early Saturday afternoons in her mother's bar. The sun would filter through the slanted shades of the windows just perfectly that they landed on and warmed the seat of her booth.
"And then what?" Sonja asked once. Because at sixteen she stood on a precipice, suddenly unsure of herself and the world that was out there. Fingernails short with grime underneath a permanent stain, hair chopped off at the chin and a mess because it was the opposite of the other girls her age. Calculus was her enemy, Shakespeare a bitter acquaintance, history wouldn't talk with her, and science? Yeah, she was better off not bringing that report card home. "What am I supposed to do, Grandma? With an education that I don't even understand?"
Sophia Laxely sat straighter, her gaze intensifying behind glasses as she stared at her granddaughter. "You focus on building a sturdy foundation first. The rest will come after."
"Dating is a distraction; focus on yourself." Her mother would lecture her.
The first time Sonja brought a boyfriend home, she could feel her mother's disappointment even as she acted cordially. The relationship didn't last long for him to come around a second time and anything after that didn't ever make it to the house for a first time.
At seventeen, Sonja actively set aside time for herself. Her brother's room on the other side of her wall was still empty and her mother was working longer shifts training new-hires for the summer. She had a moment to herself and a moment to pause. Her fingers were short and puffy on the bed; flipping her hand over, they were sturdy and capable. But what would they do?
"David's working at a towing company in the city," Raquel offered from across the bar. Sonja set aside the knife, her mother off in another room rounding up the last of the drunks at three in the morning. "He could probably get you in. Get you out of here."
She rolled the lime under her palm, mulling the idea over before shaking her head. Raquel and David had only been dating for four months, that was way too soon to ask such a favor when she wasn't even sure it was a favor she wanted.
"No," her mother declared to both before sliding a disk down the counter to them. "Enough of the mechanics."
Sonja took the disk and activated the holo. It was a brochure for a University four hours away. More specifically, a University celebrated for its wildlife program. Excitement bloomed in her chest as she looked through the different classes, her mind already buzzing with possibilities.
"Focus on something you love."
Her life was packed up into the bed of a pick-up and hauled across ranch lands into the city limits. She roomed with a mousy girl who speedily rattled off facts on history and was quick to discuss political views.
"The name's Megan by the way. What are you studying?" She paused in the middle of sharing her family's history and their involvement in the Angorian peace treaties to stare with wide brown eyes.
"Animals." Was Sonja's short reply, taken aback at the abrupt opportunity to talk about herself.
She loved most of her classes. She cried in others – privately, mind you. Because what kind of person cries in public when forced to perform a dissection on different mammalian creatures? A person who does not belong there, surely. Her head swam with variations of anatomies, habitations, evolutionary theories, and histories of the many that were extinct.
She was in the middle of planning her summer – an internship for the National Geographic or a hiking venture with a couple of classmates for a bit of independent studying – when she received a call from her grandmother.
"It's nothing I can't handle." Her mother stated strongly, slicing through the limes as Sonja quietly filled a pitcher with water.
Her grandmother frowned from the table. Her dark eyes magnified by the glasses that rested on the bridge of her nose. "You collapsed, Lita."
"I'm still standing, I'm fine, mom!" The knife struck the cutting board and harshly brushed the sliced halves away.
"You're always saying you're fine, you're fine. When are you going to admit that you're not? When you're lying on your death bed, saying goodbye to your children?"
The very air in the kitchen vanished, leaving only a suffocating tension. Sonja could see the rage held back in the corners of her mother's mouth. The fear swimming just behind a careful armor in her eyes. Her hands, once so strong and smooth, veined and slightly trembled as her grip on the knife increased.
"You need to hear this, Lita. You have people to look after and no one to look after you. You have to look after yourself."
"You're bringing my marriage status up now?"
Before her grandmother could defend herself, the knife clattered on the counter as her mother stormed out of the room.
Sonja waited a moment before slowly reaching for the limes and finishing up the limeade. As she mixed in the sugar, her grandmother sighed and stood.
"The doctors won't tell me much. Your mother won't tell me anything at all. But she needs someone here to watch her. Sonja, tell me you understand, please."
"I understand, Grandma. I do."
She finished the rest of her term, then withdrew from the university.
She took part time classes at a local community college and helped her mother ease up on the demands in her life. Sometimes this meant covering a late shift so her mother could focus on the office side of things. Sometimes this meant she took care of the laundry, the grocery shopping, and the overall state of the house and land still under her mother's name.
"Hire someone."
Her mother barely paused in her inventory count, her lips silently mouthing numbers and names.
"Mom."
"For what?"
And this was where she drew up every ounce of courage she had. "To manage the bar."
Her eyes flashed upwards, the light from the tablet casting eerie shadows across her face. Shadows that didn't exist years ago. Shadows that bothered Sonja more than she liked to admit.
"Either that or lease the house. You're stretching yourself too thin."
The tablet lowered as her mother scrutinized. "Your grandmother put you up to this?"
Sonja stared her in the eyes. Her grandmother didn't see her mother on a nightly basis. Didn't see her run purely on fumes when ordering her employees around. Didn't count the number of pills taken in the early hours of the morning or the slight limp that she tried to hide at night. Her hands were shaking more. The bags under her eyes were becoming more prominent; her body more fragile so that bruises appeared over the slightest bump.
"I got a job at the renewable farm. I won't be around to help as much." Sonja informed instead.
Her brother blew back into town with a pregnant wife (no one had been invited to the wedding – It was just a short deal at the courthouse he blew off to everyone) and needed a place to stay. They moved into the house and paid rent.
"Father issues." Coworkers whispered when they thought she wasn't listening. "She's just looking for daddy's approval." "I'll be her daddy, she can have my approval."
She would bite her tongue and stare ahead. She was smart. She focused on herself, on the work that she did and could do. Internally she told every single one of them off with colorful words and a helping of heads through walls.
But she could only hold out for so long.
"So what do you want to do?" Her supervisor asked after having to drag her into his office a fourth time. "Obviously not this, everyone can see that you don't care. Sonja, something has to give."
After months of waking before dawn, getting shafted with the shit work, pulling late hours, dealing with lude stares and the fact that no one had her back when she defended herself, she agreed. With her hands covered in grime and a line of grease slashed across her cheek, she turned in her two weeks' notice.
"I'm good with my hands." She reasoned with herself. Cries erupted from the other side of her wall; her nephew waking from his nap and calling for attention. She buried her face into the only tools she ever really had any experience using. The question remained. What would she do?
She walked into the bar early in the afternoon, hoping for sage advice in the guise of an early top-off. Her hand dragged along the well-worn bar top, stopping at a marking she'd carved into the wood years ago. When she was hopeful, she mused humorlessly. The tip of her boot nudged something, making it roll.
A lime. She stooped low to pick it up. Then froze.
A hand lay open, the fingers slim, the skin dry. Her heart jumped to her throat. She scrambled to the other side of the bar and found her mother unconscious on the floor.
The same pick-up she'd used to haul her life across ranch land to a city four hours away sat (covered in dust with insects smeared across the windshield) in a parking lot surrounded by pristinely kept vehicles of doctors and hospital staff.
Arms wrapped around herself, she rocked back and forth as she waited in a room with other equally worried pedestrians. Her grandmother showed up first, her tia and her family followed soon after. Alex showed up last, but she only cared that he showed up at all.
"Let me guess, you're fine." Were the first words Sophia Laxely said as she entered the small room.
Lita looked up at her mother, tears in her eyes. For the first time unsure and scared. "No, mom. I'm not."
"She can't run the bar anymore. She's going to have to let that go." Sophia explained to the family after everyone had had their chance to visit and digest the news that one of their own had a body that was turning on itself. "We can sell that and she can live off of whatever it makes for a while. Most of it will have to go to getting her better though."
"Where is she going to stay?" Alex asked, uncomfortable with the idea of having his mother live with him and the family he was already working hard to keep afloat. It was bad enough Sonja was living in the house still, that she could hear even if he never said it.
"With me." Sophia decided.
Alex worked at a well to-do restaurant in town and his wife, Felicia was taking a break from teaching to be a mother to their son, Lex, but continued to do art commissions. Sonja went back to working for her Tio Rubio, but knew she needed to find something more substantial to help her family.
She called up her old roommate one night. Sitting out on the porch, Sonja felt as if she were laughing for the first time in years. Megan welcomed her back into her life so easily, tears nearly sprang to her eyes in gratitude.
"So what's up?"
"You mentioned once that your parents met in the same line of work, right?" Translation: you once said your parents were financially comfortable and set for the rest of their lives because of their line of work.
"Yeah, they actually met at the same academy and the relationship kicked off from there. They've actually been trying to get me to enlist for the last two years. Can you imagine it, though? Me in Starfleet? I couldn't survive that place on my own. The physical requirements alone, but, with the training too – I'd die!"
The laughter settled into silence. Her fingernail scraped at the wooden armrest. She looked up to the stars and sighed.
"I think I know what I could do. To help my family, I mean."
There was a brief pause, an inhalation of air as her friend weighed her words.
"Starfleet isn't something you choose on a whim." She posed delicately. Sonja was sure that she meant it to be delicately; she'd long ago learned Megan's filter was small and blunt was who she was.
("It's something I'm working on." She'd admitted in the middle of a rant about a classmate who did not see eye to eye with her. "I wouldn't." Sonja had said, wrinkling her nose at the admission.)
"I know." The night was hot and she could hear the cartoons playing inside the house. "I have a technician's certificate, a few college credits in animal science and my mom needs to get better. The wage I'm at right now, I'm not helping anyone and I can't just not do anything."
"That's fair. Have you told anyone?"
Sonja laughed, though it was devoid of humor. "You're the witness to my decision, Meg."
"Oh joy." Whether that was nerves, excitement, or dread, Sonja could not discern. But she knew she had one person on her side. And that was more than she would ever ask for.
Yo me ocuparé de ella, no te preocupes - I'll take care of her, do not worry
mijo - term of endearment for young boy
mija - term of endearment for young girl