"That's never going to work," Miles said into his whiskey glass referring to the incredibly confusing plan that Aaron had come up with to defeat the nanos.

"How would you know? Do you have two doctorates in mechanical and computer engineering? Did you go to MIT? Did you DESIGN THE NANOS?" Aaron snapped back indignantly.

Charlie had never seen Aaron quite so upset. His face was reddened from exasperation and he seemed like he was running out of fucks to give. Everything that he and Rachel had suggested had come off as something that Charlie had no clue about, but since they were the experts it seemed like they should know what they were talking about. She didn't understand why Miles was fighting them every step of the way. He knew about as much as she did about the nanos and how they were created and what they could do and how the code or whatever that put them into existence worked. She was clueless. She didn't know how to stop them. He didn't either.

Where did he come off being so damn annoying?

Ok.. she was getting angry for no reason at Miles now and it was time to slow down on the drinking, at least for tonight.

"It might work," Bass said.

Charlie could practically hear everybody's head snapping towards him as he spoke from the other side of the kitchen where he sat carelessly on the counter.

"If Aaron could change the code it should make those annoying little mechanical insects docile little pets," he continued sipping from the glass of clear liquid he held.

Charlie had forgotten how smart Bass was. If he'd been so inclined he could have rivaled Aaron with the degrees and smarts, instead he chose to follow his brother/best friend into the Marines. She tried to think of Bass sitting behind a computer screen typing in a series of numbers and letters to create something and no, it just didn't seem to fit him at all. He was smart, sure, extremely smart but with his charming good looks, the charisma and the give 'em hell attitude he would have never survived as a computer yuppy. Now she remembered Miles telling her that Bass was considered a genius by way of IQ testing with the highest score in the whole senior class at their high school. She'd also forgotten how he was actually nice sometimes when his intellectual hat started going and how geeked out he could get about some of the most boring stuff.

Aaron, Bass and Rachel all start talking at once, talking about code this and code that, change this, upload that, blah blah blah, she tuned them out and let her drunken mind wander.

It was late November, the air outside was getting crisper as the days went by. Winter in Texas was never quite cold but the night air had dropped to a cool temperature and she wandered outside and gazed up at the stars. Miles joined her shortly thereafter and sat down with her on the old rickety chairs on her grandpa's porch.

Together they drank and thought, drank and thought, silently gazing up at the stars. Her mind wandered to old traditions and things she hadn't done since before the Blackout. Eventually Miles wandered back inside, leaving her to her thoughts.

Thanksgiving was a holiday that they didn't celebrate since the Blackout. It wasn't like Christmas where it was easy to make gifts for each other, decorate a tree and frolic in the snow while singing out of tune Christmas songs. No, Thanksgiving was something that Charlie hadn't celebrated in years.

She had vague memories of the holiday, the large turkey at the head of the table, her dad sharpening a knife to cut into the turkey while her mother, uncle and her uncle's blonde friend sat around the table with eager anticipation written all over their face. She remembered digging into the juicy turkey, dipping it into the cranberry sauce and picking the tiny white marshmallows off of the candied yams. She remembered afterwards when she'd been too full to move her right pigtail had come lopsided and the blond friend of her uncles had helped her correct it, laughing and saying something about how he helped his little sister fix her hair all the time.

Now, almost 18 years later, she was an adult. Her hair no longer in pigtails and the dirty blond curls hung to her waist and the same blond man and same uncle and same mother were sitting around the table nursing whiskey's trying to decide what they would do on the next step of their plan to overtake the patriots and nanos and all the other bullshit that they'd been putting up with.

It was late November, her family was inside arguing about their next steps and she just had this feeling that it needed to stop. They needed to take a day for just themselves.

And that's when she decided that this year, they were going to have Thanksgiving.

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A/N

This will probably only be a few chapters. I was making a pie in preparation for Thanksgiving today and I got the idea for this.

I don't own anything.