"This is complete bullshit!" Jim exclaimed, tossing his PADD angrily on the conference table. "Do they honestly expect us to believe that it wasn't a bomb?"
Alice found herself staring at Jim, thankful that she had decided to pick one of the soundproof rooms in the library meant for group studying. She had never seen him so angry before. Sure he could get threatening, he had done so a few times in front of her right before she or Leonard pulled him away from an incoming fight; but there was never any honest rage in him.
"Maybe it wasn't a bomb," Leonard offered weakly, his voice betraying his own doubt.
"Tell me, what part of a spark caused by malfunctioning equipment being sucked in through their air intake system, resulting in an explosive like combustion within the vents of the Science Complex resulting in the destruction of the northern wing sounds plausible to you," Jim asked cynically. Leonard merely shrugged, shaking his head in an I don't know fashion. "They had two whole damn weeks and that's the best they could do?"
"Just because something is highly unlikely doesn't mean it's impossible, Jim," Alice finally offered. All she wanted to do was just put the whole mess behind her, finish out the semester strong, and not find herself in another situation of extreme malfunction.
"Don't tell me you're buying this crap," he scoffed. "You said so yourself that it was a bomb."
"And maybe I was wrong," Alice snapped quickly.
"In the four months that we've known you, you've never been wrong, sweetheart," Leonard added softly, taken slightly aback by Jim's anger as well.
"I don't exactly have much experience with explosive ordnance," she argued. "And I'm not sure what critical malfunction sounds either."
"But you did hear something," Jim countered, picking up on her slip. "That's how out knew to take cover, right?"
Alice grimaced unwillingly. Sometimes it was easy to forget just how much of a genius Jim was when he hid it so well behind a carefully constructed, pretty-boy persona. Of course, he caught her mention of hearing something. Damn it, she cursed herself quietly. She was under orders not to disclose any information even after the formal statement issued by Starfleet. It was classified. However, Starfleet didn't count on Jim Kirk managing to weasel out information out of her.
"I don't know what I heard," she said, the tone in her voice all but begging him to stop. Why can't he just drop it?
"Come on, Alice," he said disbelievingly, "don't you want to know what happened? Don't you care?"
"No, I don't care, alright?" she bit back, frustrated. "It's not my place to care. We're just cadets, Jim. What do you expect us to do? Solve the case like some junior detectives?"
"How can you sit here and do nothing?" Jim asked in near disgust. "You could have died in that explosion. You'd think you'd at least want to know what or who was really responsible."
Shaking her head, Alice glanced over at Leonard, hoping that maybe he'd be able to help her. He had asked her about that night every now and then for past couple of weeks, and each time she had told him she didn't want to talk about it. The number of times he had asked her about it dwindled, and when she told him no, Leonard wouldn't push it. Unlike Jim.
"Here's a grand idea," Leonard interrupted, "how about we just focus on studying for our finals and finishing out the rest of the semester without any more catastrophes like everyone else."
"I agree with Leon on this one, Jim." Alice piped in.
"Of course you do," he scoffed, annoyed. "You'd rather roll over and show your belly every time something gets even a little bit intimidating."
Alice couldn't help but recoil at that, frowning as she stared at him, mouth agape. She had no idea what was going on with him. It was so unlike him. All she knew was that she no longer wanted to be seated across from Jim. Every inch of him was coiled for a fight, his absurdly blue eyes ice cold and empty except for the hard edge that made him terrifying.
"Jim, that's enough," Leonard warned him quietly.
But Jim just shrugged him off. "You know what, no it's not." Jim's crystal blue eyes held a piercing malice Alice had never witnessed before. It made her heart beat quicken. "Your father is cleaning up this mess, tidying away the truth; and you're doing nothing about it like it doesn't even matter despite that fact you were blown up because of their cover-up in the first place." He chuckled bitterly. "But you didn't get hurt, and you heal quick, so it doesn't matter." His voice took on a dangerous edge as he leaned forward across the table. "But it does matter because maybe next time someone dies."
"Jim—" Leonard growled, but he was cut off.
"Not that we should be surprised you don't care." Jim leaned back in his chair. "After all, what do you expect from someone who was created instead of raised?"
There were a lot of things that ran through Alice's mind after Jim spoke. Anger, understanding, disbelief, resignation; Alice knew what she was: inhuman, augmented. And she knew that she was lesser because of it. But the one thing that tore at her chest was a sense of betrayal and self-loathing that she had expected anything different from Leonard and Jim. There was a reason she didn't tell anyone about her past. What Jim said was the reason she didn't tell anyone. The reminder wasn't necessary when she was perfectly capable of doing so herself.
But Alice didn't say anything as she rose from her chair. She didn't utter a word as she calmly collected her notes and study materials, placing them fluidly into her messenger bag. She didn't look at either of them or speak to either of them as she turned the handle on the study room door and pushed it open gingerly. There was nothing but silence from her as she had a white-knuckle grip on the edge of it and whipped it backwards—
Slamming it with enough force to shatter the glass wall explosively from the vibrations that rippled violently through them. But Alice did not look back as everything behind her crashed to the floor, nor did she care as the cadets who had been furiously studying now stared at her in shock and disbelief as she strode confidently towards the stairwell. The only thing that was coursing through her mind was blood red anger at herself for expecting any different from what the universe—and those who inhabited it—had cruelly taught her: she hadn't been born a human, she wasn't raised like a human, and she'd never be treated as a human for as long as she lived by those who knew the first two truths. And she had been a fool to think otherwise.
If Jim—lighthearted, obnoxiously friendly Jim—couldn't accept her for what she was, wielding it against her at a moment's notice when she didn't respond to social situations as most normal people would then Alice doubted that there was anyone who wouldn't do the same exact thing. Except for maybe Leonard, and Alice couldn't begin to imagine how he must think of her now.
Not that we should be surprised you don't care. After all, what do you expect from someone who was created instead of raised?
It wasn't that she didn't care. Alice did. She cared so much about it that she was terrified for Jim and Leonard, always focusing on everything around them, listening, waiting, all but praying that she didn't miss something and, in the next moment, she would be pulling herself from the rubble, staring down at their mangled corpses.
"Miss, Miss!" a shrill voice chased after her as Alice stormed through the offices. "You can't go in there!" The secretary was now following her, having to jog every few steps to keep up. "Captain Pike is in a meeting with Admiral Marcus, you can't go in there!"
But Alice didn't pay any mind to the weak willed secretary as she all but tore the door from its hinges as she ripped it open. The noise startled Captain Pike, stopping him mid-sentence as he stared at her, dumbfounded. Admiral Marcus whipped around in his chair to see the determine the source of the noise, equally as confused as Pike was.
"Admiral Marcus, while I have no authority to speak of," Alice said, her voice dangerously cold and breathless as she spoke, "I must insist that you reschedule your meeting for another time. There is something I must speak with my father about urgently."
Marcus smirked knowingly. His daughter had pulled the same stunt on him several times and there was no mistaking the fury of a daughter that was about to tear her father a new one. "I'll make the funeral arrangements for you, Chris," the admiral chuckled, giving Alice a nod in respectful dismissal as he exited the office.
Captain Pike waited for his friend to close the door behind him before he turned to his daughter. He opened his mouth to demand she tell him the reason for her violent intrusion, but Alice was enraged and silenced him before he had a chance to say a single word.
"You honestly think that I would believe a freak malfunction was the cause of the explosion?" she snarled accusingly. "You honestly think that anyone is going to believe that?"
"Whether or not they believe it isn't important," Pike explained flatly, his own voice growing harsher. "It is the truth."
"Like hell it is!" Alice exclaimed, continuing to stand, staring down her father in a bitter rage. "You don't hear spontaneous malfunctions," she argued. "You don't detect trace elements of a chemical compound right before a random spark gets sucked into the air intake and combusts."
"Perhaps you were mistaken," Pike said dismissively, his voice betraying nothing but his own annoyance at her behavior. "There are a number of things in the Science Complex that could have accounted for both the noise and the smell."
"I wasn't mistaken," she growled maliciously. "If I had been, you'd be down one Vulcan Commander and a daughter. Not that you'd care," she echoed. "You're too busy covering Starfleet's ass, helping them hide the truth just like they did for me—"
Just like they did with Tarsus IV, Alice realized, the sudden understanding stopping her from continuing to yell at her father. That's why Jim was so angry. Starfleet had a habit of burying things that reflected poorly on them, and Jim was just as much a victim of this as Alice was. If only knowing this could make her feel better, less damaged and hurt by what he had said.
"You want us to speculate, create a mass panic?" Pike countered, trying to match his daughter's ferocious wrath if he couldn't quell it. "It's for the greater good."
"And just how well do you think that greater good…bullshit will go over when someone dies in the next one?" Alice could all but hear Jim's own rage he had directed towards her creeping into her own voice, and it only served to anger her more. How dare he say that to me, she screamed quietly. After everything—"
"You are way out of line here, Alice!" Pike threatened.
"As your daughter, as a cadet, or as an augmented? Which one takes priority for you?"
"All of them!" he snapped. "You're asking for information that is above your security clearance and could put you in danger. Everything about the incident is on a strictly need-to-know basis for a good reason."
Need-to-know basis...? When do you not tell the victims of a crime what that crime was? she thought in a riddle to herself. When you don't know what the crime was. "Meaning, you have nothing to share even if you could, "Alice said, her voice growing quieter. "You don't know who set the bomb, do you?"
Her father's silence was enough of an answer.
"Do you know why it was set?"
"No. We don't," Pike finally forced out, giving her information he could easily by court-martialed for, but Alice was his daughter. He couldn't afford to alienate her by continuing to keep her in the dark.
"Do you have any leads at all?" Alice frowned, the rage smoothed over by the fact that she was more at fault here than her father. If he had no information to give, how could he meet her demands for it?
"We have intelligence reports of an underground organization that is hostile to Starfleet and the Federation based out of San Francisco," Pike admitted. "We believe it was them who targeted the Science Complex, but who the members are or why they would target that building… we just don't know."
"Have they made any demands or taken credit for the bombing?"
"No."
Alice crossed her arms. "Then this is all just speculation then."
"Speculation on good intelligence," Pike corrected her.
"Speculation on hearsay," she corrected him, turning to leave in a less violent manner than when she had arrived.
"Alice," Pike said, stopping her before she could turn the handle on the door. "Please stay out of this. For me. I don't want you getting hurt."
But Alice didn't say anything as she left his office, her mind already coming up with various plans of how to infiltrate the Science Complex without getting caught by the constant patrols in place to keep curious and mischievous cadets out.
Jim had been so adamant about doing something, and that's just what she was going to do.
It was the fourth time Leonard had called her since Alice had destroyed the study room walls, the soft chiming from her pocket drawing her out of her thoughts, breaking her concentration from the task at hand. It was the fourth time he had called her, and the fourth time she silenced her comm. unit, only this time, Alice finally turned it off. There was a pang of guilt in her heavy heart as she did so. She didn't doubt that he was calling her out of concern for her well-being. Leonard's genuine kindness and compassion for her only made it that much more difficult for her to maintain the complete slice that she had instilled between herself and the two of them.
Alice pulled the hood of her jacket over her head, tugging it down so that it just covered her eyes enough to obscure her face should someone catch a glimpse of her but not enough to obscure her vision before she ran out from her hiding place, quickly hopping the barricade before the next set of security personnel came by. Keeping to the shadows, Alice was able to sneak inside, her movements barely registering sound as she slipped inside the scarred north wing,
The Science Complex had always been much more ominous and foreboding in the dark and it was even more so now that it had been partially destroyed. The crunch of glass underfoot as she glided through the building was the only noise within the broken walls. And this was only the lobby, nowhere near the center of the blast. If it had been, there was a chance that even Alice wouldn't have been able to survive it.
Soot and residue from the fire covered nearly every inch of the elevator shaft, particles that dislodged themselves tickling Alice's nose as they drifted downwards. Looking up, Alice could see the bowing out of the shaft from the explosion along with several large pieces of metal that had either been torn off or shot into the walls.
Alice observed her surroundings, plotting out her next move. The lobby clearly wasn't where the bomb had been set off, meaning it hadn't been the target. Purely out of comical behavior, she very nearly reached out and pressed the button to summon the elevator. She couldn't help but smirk as she realized it was something that Jim would do.
With one hand gripping the entrance to the shaft, Alice carefully swung herself inside, her feet just barely having enough room on the seam between floors. Turning her feet sideways in an attempt to give herself more stable footing, she let go and braced herself against the wall shimmying further along it.This would be easier if elevators still required cables, Alice grumbled. Then she would be able to just ascend using them instead of having to find a way to climb up 15 feet of smooth, rounded metal walls to the next seam one more floor up.
It wouldn't have been such an intimidating distance if she were taller, but at 5'9" she was just over being one-third of the height she needed to clear.
Looking up threw Alice slightly off balance. There was no way she would be able to jump straight up and grab the edge, not without knocking herself backward in the effort or scraping against the wall and reducing how high she could travel due to the friction.
No. I'm going to need to find another way, she thought, and as she glanced around, careful not to lose any of her precious balance, she found it.
The seam between floors wrapped around the entire elevator shaft. She could jump towards the seam behind her. But once she started moving, she couldn't stop. If she killed her momentum, she'd be stranded on the seam with no way to pull herself up and get her feet on the ledge without losing her balance and falling.
Carefully with slow grace, Alice turned herself around so that she was no longer facing the wall, her eyes flickering up and down as she planned out her next five steps. After that, she would have to just react, her movements instinctual. And that was just fine, it was what she had been trained to do between the tests at the facility. All she had to do was just make it up without unintentionally coming down.
Alice became still, tensing her body calmly before she launched herself from the ledge, using all of her strength since her accuracy would be affected by her poor footing. Her hands met the next seam for the floor above, her feet coming against the wall louder than Alice would have liked, but she couldn't bother herself with concern as the soles of her shoes gripped the wall enough to propel her upward, keeping up the momentum so she could push herself off the wall once more, jumping towards the next seam opposite of her.
Strong hands and surefootedness kept Alice going as she climbed her way up the smooth walled elevator shaft, going from seam to seam. Occasionally, she would have to clamber over to a different side when there were gaping holes where sections of panel had been blown out or where shrapnel had lodged itself; but as she continued upward, she encountered it much more frequently and found it to be useful, giving her an extra foothold or handhold even if it did slice her hands open, the blood trickling down her arms as she hung onto ledges.
Roughly ten floors up from the lobby, Alice finally found the elevator. It was a warped and mangled corpse of its former self that had been battered so greatly by the explosion it was twisted sideways within the shaft, creating an effective road block lodged in her path. As she drew closer to it, Alice could see that it was nearly completely black with soot, charred to a crisp.
It might have been what delivered the bomb, Alice thought, fully aware of just how cliché it was as she reached out to it, grasping the edge where the doors would have been if they hadn't been blown out.
Her movements were slow and calculated as she climbed hand over hand to the center of the elevator, hanging by her fingertips, the potential energy begging for her to be dragged down into the abyss that was beneath her. As she pulled herself up, biceps flexing with her quietly hidden, augmented strength, the elevator groaned weakly at the extra, moving weight. A soft hiss escaped Alice's pursed lips as she carelessly sliced her arm open on a shard of glass from where the doors had been as she hauled herself inside.
Alice reached for the flashlight she had in her pocket, turning it on since the industrial lights placed on every floor by the investigative team couldn't reach her in the elevator. She began to search for any indication of explanation for what happened, moving with extremely slow grace, painfully aware of the metal crying out in the unstable elevator.
The walls were pitch black from the flame, and what was left of the controls were warped passed recognition. Small flecks of shrapnel infected the wall directly across from the entrance, and the upper and lower portions of the floor and ceiling immediately surrounding the entrance were the cleanest portions, clean being a relative term.
There are no reverse shadows from the bomb being planted in the elevator on the walls, ceiling, or flooring, Alice documented, and the shrapnel is only on the side opposite of where the door was. The elevator is warped and convoluted, but it isn't warped outwards, just dislodged. Alice very carefully stood on the tips of her toes and reached for a piece of the shrapnel, pulling it out from the wall as the elevator creaked in protest, moaning like an old ship. The bomb was placed on the door with some sort of adhesive, she hypothesized, and positioned so that the blast was directed outwards from the doors. Meaning that this shrapnel was from the explosive device, and not the elevator itself. Alice tucked the piece of metal into her pocket before she cautiously gripped the edge of an opening in the wall of the elevator, a viable option of getting around it and continuing up.
Protests against her groaned loudly as Alice hauled herself on top of the elevator, making her slightly nervous. Not for her well-being, though. She could easily make to the next ledge without any trouble, but if the elevator fell now, it would clamor all the way down, alerting everyone in the area to her presence. Getting caught trespassing made her nervous.
Alice was careful in where she placed her weight as she inched over to the other side gingerly, slowly reaching for the nearest ledge and pulling herself up, reopening the cuts on her hands she had received from the sheered metal handholds she had used earlier.
Blood trickled delicately down her wrists and onto her palms as Alice climbed higher as she went from hanging, to gripping, to standing and balancing. The higher she went the more she became dirty from the soot and ash the scorched the walls, ledges, and shrapnel that served to help her ascend, tarnishing her skin and clothing as she scraped against it, even managing to smudge her face somehow.
And finally, she stopped climbing.
There was a gap in the charred walls about the size of an elevator, and Alice realized that this was her floor, leaping to the exit hole where the doors once more, catching her leg on the bottom edge of the exit, creating a new gash as she caught herself on it.
The floor was almost completely unrecognizable as she surveyed the area. It was as if she were walking through a construction site, the area was so bare and unfurnished. Only when she pressed forward, passing through the hallway that she found scorched remembrances of tables, chairs, and desks.
Soot, ash, scorch marks and charred remains, she surveyed, trailing her fingers along the walls as she walked further into the depths of the floor. Why create an incendiary bomb? Their archaic, unreliable, and highly ineffective. Cobalt, fusion, plasma, trilithium, hell a warp core would make for a better explosive. Alice then realized just how thoroughly covered she was in the residue from the bomb. It was to make a statement. To make a scene, to be seen as the crime was committed. It was meant to be heard.
But was the message? Alice wondered as she continued forward as if she knew exactly where she was going. And she did, only realizing it when she came to the door.
Alice reached out and scraped off the ash that coated the plaque on the wall, tracing her hand over the letters: Commander Spock.
The sound of glass shattering was now desensitized to Alice as she rounded the corner began to approach Joe's bar on her way back to her apartment. A man was thrown through the window, crashing to the ground roughly on the shards.
Two men followed him through, dragging someone out with them and shoving him towards the fallen figure. It was only as one of the aggressors threw a punch at the person still standing that Alice realized who it was getting their asses handed to them: Leonard and Jim.
Leonard staggered back as the larger aggressor caught him on the jaw, recoiling at the force and pain, nearly tripping over Jim who was still struggling to pick himself out of the glass either because of the drinks or the blows that were landed before he made it through the window.
Working her way up twenty floors in an elevator shaft had blown off some of the rage and agony that had coursed through her earlier, but guiltily, Alice was glad that she was now given an opportunity to hit someone, even if it was for the benefit of Jim Kirk.
A piercing whistle caught the two aggressors' attention right before Alice caught the larger one in the chest with her knee, crashing into him from a full on sprint, jumping at the last minute so that her knee could connect at the sweet spot right in the center. She could feel the air forced out of his lungs by the blow and hear the creaking of his bones as they fractured.
The larger one was forced back, staggering and wheezing as Alice deflected the blow from the smaller guy who threw a careless punch more out of surprise by her intervention than intent. Her fists quickly connected with his ribs, giving way to her force with the soft cracking of twigs accompanying them as they fractured.
With a non-devastating kick meant to move and not severely injure, Alice knocked the smaller one away from her so that she could grab the larger one by the arm as he charged her, using his momentum to flip him over her as she ducked and pushed him, tossing him easily to the ground on the other side.
He landed heavily on the ground, heaving in both pain and frustration as Alice caught his buddie's crazy haymaker with one hand, twisting his arm so that it buckled behind him, continuing on until there was a sickening snap followed by pained screams.
Forcing the smaller one to the ground, allowing him to clutch his broken arm, Alice blocked the next two blows from the big guy with her forearms, ducking under a third before she gripped him by his shoulders and driving her knee into his crotch, delaying for half a second before she caught his nose with her forehead, a tell-tale crunch chasing after the movement.
Blood poured from the larger man's newly broken nose as Alice dragged him by his shirt and propelled him towards his friend who was still laying on the ground, moaning pitifully over his arm.
"Psycho bitch!" the larger man coughed out, nasally and pained. "You broke my nose!"
"And I'll break more than your nose and his arm unless you leave," Alice warned her voice cold, but not unpleasant. "Now."
The larger man hesitated, still cupping his nose before he reached down and dragged his friend to his feet. "Get up, moron. Let's go. This bar sucked anyway," he said to his friend quickly, trying to hide how damaged his pride was.
As Alice watched them leave, she could feel the hot and sticky blood pooling in her still clenched hands, slipping slightly between her fingers. She had reopened the wounds she sustained earlier, much to her own annoyance. And adding to her annoyance, she could feel the eyes of Jim and Leonard boring into her.
"Joe," she called out, finally relaxing from her defensive stance, "go ahead and put the bill for the window on my tab. These two idiots certainly won't be able to afford it." The last portion of her statement came out as a slight growl.
Jim looked like shit. His face was broken and bloody again, as if he had to go out and wreck after it just healed from his last fight. With torn clothes that had all kinds of glass and sticky liquid clinging to his jacket and matted in his hair, he finally managed to haul himself from the ground, glass crunching underfoot as he did so. Alice couldn't tell if he was the one groaning or if it was his body that was groaning in protest against his movements. But it didn't take much for her to realize that Jim was completely wasted, almost belligerently so.
Leonard didn't look nearly as bad as Jim. He was sporting a black eye that was turning darker by the second and a busted lip, crimson red trailing down to his chin. His hair was messed up, giving him an almost feral look. Clearly, he had joined the fight only when Jim started to lose, coming to the aid of his friend. My friend too, she remembered, eyes flickering from Jim to Leonard, and then back again as all three of them waited tensely for someone to make the next move.
He's my friend, she repeated, a little more conviction, and while he may have pissed her off with his insensitively cruel insults, he was still her friend. Because she certainly knew how to pick 'em.
"Come on," Alice sighed, relenting at being the better person. "You can patch yourselves up at my place."
Leonard and Jim regarded one another momentarily before Leonard, "That's very kind of you sweetheart."
Alice met Leonard's hazel eyes, calm and soothing before she turned her attention to Jim. "Can you walk?" she asked quietly.
"Well enough," Jim grimaced, placing a hand over his ribs.
She nodded faintly in understanding before leading the way back to her apartment, attempting to use the ends of the sleeves on her jacket to keep some pressure on the wounds on her hands and stop the bleeding as she walked. Alice knew that Jim would have a hard time keeping up with her, but she wasn't expecting Leonard to catch up with her, figuring that he'd stay back to keep an eye on Jim.
"Are you alright, Alice?" he asked, his voice low enough for Jim to just barely catch the words. "You didn't answer when I tried to get a hold of you."
There was no mistaking the honest concern in his gently gruff voice and the guilt she had felt before her ascension came back with a vengeance as Alice allowed herself to get caught up in his caring gaze.
"I'm well enough," Alice echoed, her answer being ambiguous yet truthful. "And I turned my communicator off."
Alice wished selfishly for a moment that Leonard would stop being so understanding, looking at her with such warmth in his forested hazel eyes. "Alright," he breathed, continuing to watch her. "Sweetheart, about what happened—"
"Don't bother," she quickly cut him off. "I'm fine, Bones."
"You're clearly not," Leonard insisted, and by the slight twitch in his fingertips, Alice could tell he wanted nothing more than to reach out to her. To reassure or stop her was something she couldn't tell, though.
"You should go check on Jim," she tactlessly changed the subject. "Make sure he doesn't die in some ditch."
"If that's what you want," he said, the warmth of his eyes all but begging her to give up her cold and distant behavior, if only for him.
And it almost worked. Alice hesitated before responding, "It is right now."
Leonard nodded, slowing his pace so that Jim could catch up to him and allowing Alice to walk ahead of them alone. Hearing them walk behind her, Jim with his slightly labored breathing and one of them favoring one of their legs, it was very difficult for Alice to stay mad at them. Concern gnawed hungrily at the edges of her anger, eating away at it until it was almost nonexistent. Was she a fool for having taken such great offense to what Jim had said to her?
Alice held the door for them once they had finally reached her apartment before she squeezed passed them and retrieved her medical supplies from the counter beneath the kitchen island, tossing it onto the counter before digging out some gauze and antibacterial solution for herself.
It was the first time either of them had seen her in any other lighting aside from dim streetlight, and both were taken slightly aback by her messy appearance. Alice was covered in soot and ash, smudging her face, chest, and clothing; and as she shrugged off her ruined jacket, they were privileged to see the gash on her arm still oozing from being reopened during the fight and the blood that stained her hands.
"What the hell happened to you?" Leonard asked, bewildered.
Alice ran her hands under the water of her faucet, taking a seat next to it on the counter, medical supplies placed beside her. Pouring the antibacterial solution over her hands, wincing as it stung a little, she finally deigned to answer. "I went…climbing."
"In a mine?" Leonard forced Jim to sit down, getting a slight grumble in protest from him, but not much more as Leonard went about picking the glass out of Jim's face and arm.
Careful not to agitate either of the wounds on her hands, Alice wound the gauze around them in a simple bandage not bothering to look up at either of them as she kept her movements cautious yet quick. She did have somewhere she needed to be, recalling the angered and annoyed voices from both her father and Commander Spock as she insisted that they meet tonight in her father's office.
"In an elevator shaft," Alice finally admitted, her voice matter-of-factly. "One that had been a victim of an explosion. I only had to go 20 floors up in it, though." She motioned to her hands. "Sliced 'em open on some of the shrapnel and sheared metal inside of."
"That also how you got the one on your arm and leg," Leonard growled protectively. If Jim didn't need his help, Alice knew he would have been by her side in that very instant.
"The one on my arm is from what remained of the glass doors of the elevator I had to crawl through," she answered, using a nearby cup to pour water over said wound, cleaning it up but not bothering to patch it up. It was mostly healed anyhow. "The one on my leg," she continued, placing her foot on the counter and rolling up the hem of her pants to get a look at it, "was from trying to get out of the destroyed exit on the 20th floor." It had healed some, but every step served to reopen parts of the long gash, causing it to continue to ooze and slowing down the healing process.
Her eyes locked on Jim, "I guess it's a good thing I heal quick, huh?" And she wouldn't deny the slight twinge of pleasure it brought her to see him wince before she began to wrap up her leg.
Jim couldn't hold her chaotically intense gaze for very long. "Did you find anything?" he asked, finally speaking to her, his voice gruff and his words slurred.
"I did," Alice answered, sliding off the counter now that she was done patching herself up. She walked over to a nearby closet and grabbed another jacket to replace the one she had to throw out it was so torn up from getting snagged in the elevator shaft. "Lock up once you're done bleeding in my apartment?" she asked, raising an eyebrow as she went for the door.
Leonard finally tore himself from Jim's side, almost causing him to fall now that he was no longer supported by the doctor. "Alice, stop!" he commanded, grabbing her arm.
The look of shock on his face when she didn't pull away from him or react negatively to his abrupt and forceful touch was almost humorous. Alice had grown to trust him, and he clearly wasn't used to not having to treat her like she was made of glass yet when it came to touching her.
Alice raised an eyebrow, waiting for him to get on with it. "About what happened this morning—" Alice interrupted him with a roll of her eyes. "No, listen!" he snapped, his grip on her hardening. "You don't understand—"
"I do, actually." She refused to let Leonard apologize for Jim. "I understand. On December 8th, 2246, Starfleet Command issued a statement in regards to what they found on Tarsus IV in the wake of responding to a call for aid received from the colony in regards to their food supply," she explained informatively. "Upon arriving they were witnesses to the horror of mass graves where half of the population now resided in order to preserve the remainder of their supplies, executed the day before. Today's December 8th."
Her eyes moved off of Leonard and on to Jim, who may have been dazed in his overly drunken state, but he wasn't confused. He stared at her with a mix of bewilderment and horror. Unquestionably, it was the reason he had gone drinking with Leonard.
"And I get why that makes you angry, Jim," she addressed him. "I understand why you're angry." Alice tugged on her jacket violently. "I may not have been born, I may have been created in a lab, and I may not have been raised by a family, but that doesn't mean I feel any less than you do." Alice's cold blue was harrowing as she met Jim's hazy glacier blues. "We're both victims of a cover story, Jim. And you can apologize to me when you're sober."
As Alice stalked out of her apartment, careful to slam her door gently enough not to damage her home, she hoped that Jim felt like guilty for what he had said to her; and the idea that he did made her feel so much better. His words had hurt her if they could hurt him as well… Alice would be selfishly satisfied.
If only she could realize that, that desire and feeling she was having right now was one that was just as human as she was.
~~.O.~~
So, I didn't think you guys would want many chapters over the same thing and I decided to do all this plot stuff in one big one. That way we could get back to Leonard and/or Jim and/or Spock instead of this Alice-centric stuff.
Anyway, please let me know what you think.
I continue to love every second of your time and support as I continue onwards.
Thank you for reading! :)