It was two days later; two days of driving and laughing, two days of getting lost and arguing over directions and whose turn it was to drive. The lived off of the junk food Winona brought and the picnic food George had made. They slept in the back seat because George had convinced her that there would be bedbugs in any motel they went to, which in hindsight was probably a ruse to not spend more money than they had to, so they slept shoulder to shoulder, Winona's purple duvet covering them as they dozed.

Two days, just the two of them against the world.

Winona had a destination in mind, New Orleans. Looking back, she had no idea why she chose it as she did and George didn't question her. That's just how things were between them, that's what George was like. If she wanted to play hopscotch on the monkey bars, they would play hopscotch on the monkey bars. If she broke her arm playing hopscotch on the monkey bars, George would tumble after her and sprain his ankle in a very heroic but ultimately pathetic attempt to rescue her.

So, it took two days. Two days before George wised up and thought, Hey. Maybe I should call my dad so he knows we're actually alive.

Winona knew that, in the official capacity of things, she was not the Chief Engineering Officer. She wasn't even a senior ranking officer. She's twenty-seven years old with three years of active service if you don't count her year of absence, and has serviced a grand total of three spaceships, one blew up rather famously and the other two were in her academy days as a cadet, sort of as a work placement, to gain experience.
She knew she didn't have very powerful connections or influence. At least not outside being the George Kirk's widow and oh how she resents that particular title.

Winona held no delusions of grandeur.
That said, taking over the engineering department of the Nottingham just sort of happened.

Fradaduitt, the Chief Engineering Officer, is a lazy motherfucker and not only that an incompetent one. He's a second rate mechanic at best and certainly does not belong in space, let alone working on an actual spaceship. Somewhere along the line, people –good people, her people- would die, and it won't be in a blaze of glory saving the lives of people who want to go down with the ship as badly as they do.
No, it will be because the there's a hole in the ship that sucks out all the air or virus that attacks the ships mainframe that could have been avoided if they updated with the software she recommended. The weapons could jam. The electromagnetic field for the shields give out. All of the diltherium crystals could crack and they'd be stranded without a fuel source in the middle of space. All the commutation channels could get blocked. Fire, since the beginning of space travel the one thing you never want to happen on a ship is a fire.

Paranoia, she had told herself at first. The Kelvin was a one off, unlikely to ever had again. She knew this in her rational mind but irrationally… Starfleet never found out who attack in the first place, and if there was any chance they were still out there…
The thing is, Fradaduitt did not inspire confidence. She didn't trust him, didn't like him and frankly despised how he was in charge.

Syruk informed her -because Syruk informed and didn't ever participle in the human convention known as gossip, don't be such a silly human - that Fradaduitt knew it all in theory but in practise was disturbingly less than adequate. Winona understood on an intellectual level, people used as replicator in every life for food, some managed to get other things like materials for clothes or more recently buildings out of theirs as well with some modifications and sophisticated coding but not everyone understood how it actually worked. Really worked, not just pressing buttons and then your lunch appears but on the inside.

She got it, she did.
She still hated the git.

It was the most terrifying experience of her young life, the two of them strolling down Bourbon Street arm in arm only to see Tiberius Kirk with his arms crossed, looking directly at them as if he could see into their very souls; as if he had been lying in wait. His expression was the darkest she had ever seen it, meaner than her own father's and there was a flash of fear, a second of doubt of whether Tiberius would keep his promise to never ever hit her no matter what.

How he found them, Winona would never know. George swore he only told his dad they were alive and heading southwards and she believed him. He was as scared as she was, his sweat soaked hand seeking out hers. He squeezed her hand hard then but she didn't notice, she was busy pushing her fingernails into his knuckles.

Tiberius Kirk was a super spy; they had grown up with this knowledge. He worked intelligence and didn't elaborate further. For them, he didn't need to. It made sense. Tiberius Kirk knew everything about everything so of course he worked intelligence. He was the smartest man on earth, in the universe, period.

It wasn't until that precise moment that Winona realized how badass this actually made him.

First Contact was made in the late 2060's if Winona had her history right, which was during the post-atomic horror made from the aftermath of world war two. No, three. World war three, final answer.

(History was never her strength; George liked history but he also leaned more to (xeno)biology and surprisingly enough pre-warp E whereas Winona preferred (astro)physics and hard numbers, chemistry was a mutual hell they both dropped as soon as they could. Winona like the cold uncompromising logic of mathematics (algebra didn't count asshole) and George like the fluidity of langue, a big reader on fiction and non-fiction alike (Dork))

It was something Winona had wondered about when she was younger and something no one could ever answer for her. Why- what possible, logical explanation- did Vulcans have for allying up with humans? Or, more accurately why would they bother? As a species human's didn't have much to offer Vulcans, practically infants in comparison and wildly irrational.

During in the early 2060's a lot of changes went underway for humanity. The world wide relief project was one of the big ones Winona could remember, everyone everywhere had to rebuild. Old "Third World" counties would have emerged as a superpower if off-worlders hadn't intervened, George had been adamant although Winona hadn't been one to think on the what if's (not back then)

Winona could read between the lines on any text on the matter; historians artfully implying how the Vulcans – and there was no other word for it- bullied the human race into cleaning up their planet all without stating it outright. She couldn't stop laughing for full twenty minutes the first time she saw it, George had timed her.

(Vulcans were the coolest fucking people, she had decided right then and there.)

Now that Syruk was in her life she could ask. She could.
She doesn't. She's terrified the answer will be something along the lines of pity or charity and it would kill her if that were the truth. (Any other time it wouldn't hurt as much but now, but now -)

That doesn't stop her asking other questions. Questions that shouldn't have answers to them really, the fact that they do is not only disturbing but... wrong. Winona isn't the epitome of moral righteousness or whatever else Starfleet spewed about her late husband. She wasn't perfect, she knew that. Nobody's perfect that's just life.

But Jesus Christ, if Vulcan's weren't pacifists?

Winona shudders.