A/N: In which Nero starts to get at least a little inkling of just what he's got himself into, and vice versa. I eased up on poor Winona in this chapter (a little), but Nero's only getting more miserable, the poor bastard.

----

A week passed, and then two, and almost against her will Winona found herself settling into a routine.

Breakfast was shared with Doctor Sy, in one or another's quarters, after which the doctor gave her a check-up--slowly but surely her health was improving, until she was almost back to normal. Physically, anyway. Often as not after that Sy would head off to sickbay, though what she did there Winona never asked. She was grateful to have the rest of the morning to herself, alone with Jim in her quarters.

She often talked to George in the morning, hoping he could hear her from wherever he'd gone beyond the grave, or talked of him to Jim. Her son might never know his father, but she was determined he'd know of him--his kindness, his strength, his bravery and love, and though Jim was much too young to understand, she wanted his eventual first thoughts to be of his father, of the stories she told.

To her relief, after that disastrous walk the Romulan largely left her in peace--she'd seen him only twice since then, and then briefly. Onen was a much more frequent--and welcome--visitor; Onen, and occasionally one or two of the other Romulan women. Winona even visited the area they'd rigged up for a women's rec room, should any of them want a break from the seemingly inordinate amount of men on the ship. She'd quickly learned that, while Romulans made no societal distinction between men and women, mining wasn't a very popular female occupation, especially not if a woman had a family. There was no room nor place for children on a mining ship, and it seemed to be general Romulan consensus that children left for extended periods of time with fathers didn't turn out half so well as those left with mothers. Onen herself, so she told Winona, had planned to quit once she was married and find a job closer to home.

Indeed the majority of the Romulan women Winona met did not seem terribly different than many of her sister-officers in Starfleet. Oh, there were cultural differences, some of them quite baffling, and many of them were a lot rougher around the edges than she was used to, but it seemed Shakespeare had been right when he said all women were sisters under the skin. If she could not feel precisely at home among them, she at least felt less bleak and isolated.

They often spoke of the families they'd lost on Romulus, and the depth of their sorrow was another thing she had in common with them. None of them ever cried--tears seemed to be an anathema among Romulans--but the force of their grief seemed almost the worse for that lack. And finally, one evening, Onen asked about George.

The question hit Winona hard. She was sitting on a chair that had been cobbled together from unused packing cases, Jim in her arms, and her eyes took in the curious assemblage around her. The lights in the rec room were the same greenish things to be found all over the ship, and their illumination made her companions seem all the more alien. For a moment she quailed, but then found, to her surprised, that she wanted to respond.

"George was…the other half of me," she said, the words little more than a whisper. "He was the kindest and bravest man I ever knew, and he always knew how to make a person laugh. I met him at Starfleet Academy, and I hadn't known him a month before I knew he was It--the one I wanted. We were married a week after graduation, just before we received our ship assignments--half our class was there. Two years later I had Jim's brother Sam, and we both took six months' family leave. It was--"

She broke off, too choked to continue--she didn't want to cry in front of these women who would never cry themselves. Not until Onen laid a hand on hers.

"We know that humans weep," she said. "There is no shame in it." Her hand was warm on Winona's, fever-hot, but it didn't make her recoil like the Romulan's. There was nothing in Onen's touch but compassion, and that almost hurt worse than cruelty. It broke every barrier Winona had built around her heartache, and she wept until there were no more tears left in her--until she woke Jim, who immediately started fussing. Onen took him from her, and shared a silent glance with Idan, one of the ship's engineers. What that glance meant, Winona didn't know, and just now grieved to deeply to ca re.

Finally, after what seemed half an eternity, Onen touched her hand again, and Winona lifted red-rimmed eyes to hers.

"Romulan tradition is to wear your grief openly," she said, touching one of the delicate tattoos on her cheek. "We have made ours permanent, but ordinarily they are only temporary, a natural dye that fades in time, marking the progression of mourning. If you like, I can give you some."

Winona inwardly recoiled at that--she didn't want to ally herself with the Romulans in any way. And yet…these women were her supporters, in their odd way, and she knew they offered this only out of kindness--of sympathy. And…they would not last forever. Whenever she escaped--and she was determined she would escape, even if it took her years to figure out how--they would be gone.

Silently she nodded, and saw out of the corner of her eye several women rise and move off, presumably to fetch what was needed. If there was any chance of catharsis in this, she was willing to try it--and maybe, if she had some tangible outward sign of her hurt, the Romulan would take the hint and leave her alone.

When the others returned, they bore a very strange assortment of things--a black paste in a white plastic bowl, smelling faintly like henna, and delicate brushes she was surprised to find anywhere on a mining ship. She wondered what they were ordinarily for as Onen dragged her makeshift chair around, sitting directly in front of her. Idan set the bowl on a packing case beside Onen, and laid out the brushes.

Winona shut her eyes when Onen started, drawing a delicate pattern along her forehead. The paste was cool, smelling more strongly of henna now that it was closer, and tingled faintly.

"An etching on your brow," Onen said as she worked, "to show he is always in your thoughts." Winona felt the brush trace along the crown of her hairline before moving just above her eyebrows. "Did your husband stroke your cheek?"

"He did," she whispered, fascinated in spite of herself.

"Then also along your cheeks, in remembrance of his touch." The brush drew another complicated pattern over each of her cheekbones, light and ticklish, and it did indeed remind her of the feel of George's fingers. One faint curve extended to the corner of her eyes, branching delicately beneath them. "Because he is always in your sight," Onen explained, carefully intent on her work. When she was finally through, and Winona opened her eyes, she said, "Where is the human heart?"

Winona silently laid her hand over it, feeling it beat steady beneath her fingers.

"I will paint one there too, if you'd like," Onen said gravely. "A tattoo above the heart is the most intimate, for the deepest pain that cannot be shared."

Winona nodded, and twitched aside the collar of her shirt. She didn't shut her eyes this time; now she looked at the other women, several of whom were tending to Jim. She wondered, not for the first time, how many were mourning the children they would never have, in addition to the living they'd lost. She might hate the Romulan, but she couldn't hate these women, who had done nothing but follow their captain's orders when he destroyed their ship. They were as much victims of circumstance as she was, and had lost as much--more, in fact--than she had. And it wasn't their fault that same insane captain had opted to keep her for his equally insane reasons.

"How long will these lasts?" she asked, when Onen finally sat back, finished.

"On a Romulan they last around a hundred days. Human skin is slightly different, so for you it may be more, or it may be less."

One hundred days. Assuming, as she had to for sanity's sake, that the Romulan would leave her alone so long as they lasted, that gave her almost a third of a year. Surely that would be long enough to regain her mental strength as well as her physical. And she could try to find out if there was any feasible way out of here.

"We'll leave that on an hour," Onen went on. "You can wash it off before you return to your quarters. That gives it enough time to set."

Winona nodded again, careful to keep her hair out of her face so as not to smudge any of the paste. It felt so…so alien on her skin, but maybe that was good right now--if she could maintain recognition of the alien, she could hold on to what was familiar. What belonged. She had to keep differentiating the two.

"Thank you," she said, and her words had more meaning than any of them could know. Maybe more than she knew herself.

----

It wasn't difficult for Nero to find enough to keep him busy and thus away from Winona's quarters. Though the Narada was capable of repairing much of itself, there was still plenty to set in order before they figured out where in all hells they were going to go next.

They'd been moving, albeit not in warp, for the last week and a half--he didn't want anyone attacking them until the ship was back operating at optimum. After that, he thought, they might go deal with the Federation outposts along the Neutral Zone--though he couldn't let Winona know he was doing if they did. Indeed any move he made against the Federation would have to be done with utmost secrecy, or he'd wreck whatever progress he might make with her in the meantime. But he was in no hurry; he wasn't yet sure how much time he had to kill before Spock arrived, and wouldn't until he could finish analyzing the data the Narada had collected on the black hole.

Maybe we shouldn't antagonize the Federation any more yet, anyway, he thought, as he calculated supply lists. He'd cordoned off what was effectively an office, a little room built with bulky black crates and a desk soldered from mining scrap. Computers had been haphazardly cobbled together, black cording snaking over the floor waiting to trip the unwary. We can't take care of Vulcan without the red matter, and if we give the Federation too much warning too soon… If they did, who knew what defenses Starfleet might come up with. He had to know when to expect Spock before he could decide any concrete course of action. Timing, he thought morbidly, was everything. With the Federation, with Vulcan…with Winona. He desperately needed patience, and quite often he was desperately short of it. Something had to give, sooner or later. He only hoped it wouldn't be his sanity, not realizing how far it had slipped already.

He let the stylus slip unheeded from his fingers, his eyes staring unfocused at nothing. Winona wasn't the only one subject to bouts of crippling grief--Nero, cracked though he was, occasionally seemed to half drown in his own misery. He'd retained enough sanity to realize, in brief, infrequent flashes, just how very damaged he was--but they were brief, and those revelations never lasted long. Invariably they led to blinding rage, rage he sometimes took out on his crew but most often turned inward, freezing it rather than letting it burn itself out. Which was, though he did not realize it, much, much worse, because it didn't actually go away when he did that--it simply added to the glacier in his fractured mind, that would sooner or later crack apart in the mother of all avalanches. And Fate help whoever was in his way when it did.

He touched a button on his keypad, bringing up his last hologram of Mandana. Her clear eyes were happy, filled with laughter, her hair spilling down her back and over her shoulders in loose, fair curls--such unusual hair. It was often difficult to remember his life Before, though it was not so long ago at all--to remember a time when he still knew what hope was, when he wasn't so at the mercy of his nigh-ungovernable temper.

He wondered what Winona was like, in her Before--if her sea-grey eyes ever danced with mirth like Mandana's. If her face lit up when she saw her husband as Mandana's had for him. A fierce stab of unwarranted jealousy ripped through him at the thought, and he was so fast approaching the deepest downswing of his depression that he couldn't see what was wrong with that jealousy. That he should be allowed to mourn Mandana where he expected Winona to forget George struck him as in no way unfair, for Nero's grief was an insanely selfish thing. Fate had gifted him with Winona and Jim; nothing would ever convince him otherwise, and if Fate meant him to have them, they ought to be happy. She ought to move on, even if he never fully did. And she would--he'd see to that. He'd make her laugh again--he'd make her love him, make her forget George Kirk and all her Before.

Somehow.

The fact that he did not yet know how in no way dissuaded his purpose. He had time, and he fully believed he could force himself to have however much patience it might take. The fact that he could never put the phantom feel of her hair on his fingers from his mind was in no sense ominous to him, any more than was the fact that he never stopped wondering how smooth her cheek might feel. How smooth all her skin might feel, cool human skin--and wondering what his touch might feel to her. How long it would take her to stop recoiling when he did touch her--for she did, in ways that were barely perceptible. She probably wouldn't admit it even to herself, but he saw it, and it hurt him unreasonably. Then again, so did everything else that didn't infuriate him.

He put his head in his hands, suddenly bone-weary. He wanted Mandana--he wanted Winona--he wanted someone. But Mandana was dead, and Winona was for now out of reach. For now, he was on his own.

----

When Onen came on shift, she found Ayel at work already.

They had, most unusually, the bridge all to themselves. So many of the crew were tied up elsewhere that they weren't bothering with more than a skeleton crew up here, not so far out in deep space. That suited Onen; she and Ayel had an Agreement, and it was easiest to honor it when no one else was about.

She'd almost completely repaired the weapons controls, and navigation was as good as it had ever been--a maze of cords and piping wound around beneath the console, but it worked and that was the main thing. She'd even cleaned the black surface of the console itself, feeling obscurely that she wanted to do something for her poor battered ship besides what was necessary. The Narada was all the home they had, now.

Ayel wasn't in the captain's chair--instead he was standing in front of the view screen, staring out at the stars. Nero had never actually forbidden anyone sitting in his chair, but nobody wanted to. It was the captain's chair, and however unstable he might now be, he was still the captain.

"You spoke with her?" he said, not turning around.

"I have." Onen paused. "We gave her the markings."

That did make him turn, startled. "Was that--wise?" Fate alone knew how Nero would react.

Onen shrugged. "She deserves it," she said simply.

None of the crew knew what to make of this strange whim of their captain's, but it made most of them vaguely uneasy. Destroying the Kelvin they could understand, given his rage at discovering how far into the past they'd come, but this…it was the mercy of it that disturbed them, for it was easy enough to believe that mercy might not last, and none of them were yet so hardened that they wanted to see Winona die.

"How is she?"

"Grieving. Miserable. Unstable." Onen paused again. "How is he?"

Ayel sighed. "The same. Even I don't know what he plans to do now. I'm not sure he knows."

To that Onen said nothing. No matter what happened, she couldn't see this ending well--the smaller picture or the bigger. They all knew Nero didn't intend to return to Romulus yet, but beyond that they knew…nothing. Less than nothing, because none of them could even guess and hope to have anything like accuracy.

"She may do him some good," she said at last, "if she doesn't crack. What he will do for her, though…" That was the part she simply couldn't see working. Winona hated Nero with, even Onen had to admit, very strong justification. And she could not see that ever changing; she, Onen, could certainly not imagine forgiving the man who murdered her husband, however benevolent he might be after the fact. No sane person would, let alone be able to love him, which seemed to be Nero's goal. Not unless he somehow broke her mind--which was, Onen thought, a distinct possibility, though she knew he'd never do it on purpose. She had no idea what Stockholm Syndrome was, but if she had she would have thought it to be the only way he would ever get what he wanted.

"We have to take care of that baby," she added. "If it weren't for him, I'm sure she'd give herself Final Honor." Which was a Romulan euphemism for suicide.

Ayel shuddered, and she knew what he was thinking--only Fate knew what Nero would do if that happened. He was already so obsessed with the woman that if she did die it might well shatter what was left of his fragile sanity. It placed a burden upon Winona that Onen would never wish on anyone. Logically, for the safety of the entire ship, she ought to try to steer Winona toward Nero, but even the thought went entirely against her grain. Nero's want was a very selfish one--once upon a time Onen would have thought him a good husband for anyone, but now…now Oren, the captain she had known and respected, was gone, and though she would serve Nero as loyally as she always had, she didn't have to like what he'd become.

As though he'd read her mind, Ayel said, "It's possible she might bring him back. Maybe. Make him stop and think about what he's doing."

Now it was Onen who sighed. "I think she already is," she said. "But…not enough. Not yet. And if he gets angry with her…." she trailed off, not wanting or needing to finish that statement.

Ayel, who had known his captain much longer than Onen, shook his head. "It would take a lot, I think. He's gone…strange about women. You might not have seen it, but he's been much harder on us than he has on any of you. I don't know how long it will last, but as you said, she's making him think."

"Until we deal with Vulcan. I don't think there would be any way to keep that secret from her."

Ayel let out a frustrated sigh, pacing before the view screen. "She might well be an old woman by then," he muttered. "How long do humans live?"

The question troubled Onen. "I don't know, exactly," she said. "Not as long as we do. Even if she didn't give herself Final Honor…." Once again, she didn't have to finish the sentence. If her lifespan was too short, they'd still have to deal with Nero when she died, and who knew if he'd be any more capable of handling it in thirty years, or forty? Onen would guess Winona to be little older than herself, but she had a hazy idea that humans rarely lived more than a century. Nero was only forty--still quite young for a Romulan; assuming they didn't die violently, they could reach three centuries, maybe even more.

But that was a problem they could stave off for another day--Onen didn't need another worry, and neither did Ayel.

"Do you think she'll try to escape?" he asked, pausing his pacing to look at her. Onen shook her head.

"Not yet," she said, "and probably not for some time. She's not stupid, Ayel; I don't think she'd try anything if she wasn't absolutely certain it would work. Especially not with her son." Thank all Fate for that child--he and his safety tied Winona here far more effectively than anything else could have. And when he was older--old enough to walk, think, speak--he might, if Nero was good to him, become quite attached to the Narada. Onen couldn't see Nero not being good to the boy, because he wanted the son he lost as much as the wife. What Winona might make of that, Onen didn't know, and didn't want to speculate. Nothing good, she was sure.

Her answer seemed to relieve Ayel, though he clearly had one more worry. "How will you explain her markings to him?"

Fortunately, Onen had already thought of that. "I'll tell him their fading will let him know when the worst of her grief has passed, and so will know when to…pay her more attention. He really doesn't want to force her into anything, and this is--tangible deterrent. He will look at her and remember how deeply she mourns, and will let her alone--more or less--until they fade." Of that she was relatively certain--broken and half-mad though Nero was, he wasn't a complete monster, and it was Onen's hope that Winona's presence might keep him from becoming one. She just also hoped the poor woman wouldn't break in the process--but then, she was strong, and once the worst of her grief was spent might well bear up under anything. So long as Nero continued associating her with Mandana, he'd never be cruel to her--her or her son. And maybe she'd just learn to make the best of it. As Onen said, she wasn't stupid--she wouldn't try to escape unless she was damn sure it would work, and none of them would give her the opportunity. Much as Onen felt for her, she had the best interest of the Narada's crew at heart--and that interest meant Winona had to stay, whether she wanted to or not. They'd try to make her life as easy as they could, but none of them would ever let her go.

----

Alone in her quarters--alone but for Jim, anyway--Winona was inspecting her markings. She didn't quite know what to make of them.

They were beautiful, in their way--Onen could easily have been an artist, had her life been different. Flowing green-black patterns, some delicate, some strong, all painted with intense care, and she thought of their meanings as she touched them. Onen was right; they were cathartic, in some odd sense she could not wholly define--visible signs of thought and pain, rendered into an art form. There were, Winona knew, many cultures on Earth that displayed their mourning openly, whether through dress or jewelry or, ironically, face paint. There were native tribes in North America who cut their hair, and did not cease official mourning until it had grown back.

She sat back on her bunk, staring at the walls--like seemingly everything else on this ship, they were dull black, and she wondered just what kind of metal they were made out of. She'd been thinking, since she and Jim came back here--thinking of escape.

Onen had also been right when she told Ayel that Winona wouldn't even consider trying unless she was absolutely and completely sure it would work. And to gain that certainty she needed three things--to be able to speak Romulan, and to read it, and to learn the layout of this bloody huge ship. The groundwork for the first two could be laid with the holovid--she suspected that was why the Romulan had given it to her--but the third would require outside assistance. And a great deal of cunning.

It was beginning to dawn on her that sooner or later she'd have to toss the Romulan some kind of bone, if only so he wouldn't grow suspicious of her curiosity. She didn't think she could ever give him all that he wanted--she just couldn't bring herself to do it--but she could, eventually, let him believe she actually enjoyed his company. It wouldn't be easy, but if nothing else it would be the kind of endurance test she'd never got at the Academy. She could let him think he had her genuine companionship, if nothing more; perhaps she could even force herself to pretend affection, in time. Something told her he craved that even more than…the other. That he could likely get from at least one of the women in his crew, but it wasn't all he wanted. Not by half. And she could give him some sign, however false, because she had a feeling he was so blindly obsessed he'd look no further than whatever she gave him.

Later. Later, when she wasn't so mazed with grief she could hardly think straight. She'd need all her wits about her when she did start implementing her plain, and that…would take a while. It was just as well, since it would look odd if she tried it so soon anyway. But eventually….

Eventually, she was going to escape. It might take years, but she was determined she wouldn't live out the rest of her life on this ship--her or Doctor Sy. And she'd be damned if she'd let Jim grow up here, so far from his own kind. Someday, they were going home.

----

Poor Winona, she's got the entire deck stacked against her and doesn't even know it. She's stronger than she thinks, though, and a lot more cunning than any of the Romulans would give a human credit for. As for Nero, the poor bastard's so broken I can't help but feel a little sorry for him, creepy though he is. Anyway, thanks to all my reviewers--you guys make my day. :)