Work Text:
Then
Captain Bethany Blackthorne watches as her security operators and officers shove the remaining pirates towards the rally point for prisoners. She grins as she thinks of the term that her Master-at-Arms—the Jaunty, in ancient Royal Navy parlance—had coined for the three squads on the surface of Jednack III, engaged in gathering up the remaining pirates.
The Mopshots.
She takes a deep breath, then inhales the acrid smell of smoke from the burning vehicles. Medical teams are sifting the prisoner enclosures. Most of the hostages had been freed from the combination of Orion pirates and Klingon Imperial Navy rejects who had been terrorizing this sector.
The Enterprise had taken out the ships; her ship, the Yorktown had been tasked with mopping up the small base that the pirates used. Hence the term for her hard-chargers.
Of course, her weapons crews had gotten some stick time when a couple of ex-Klingon light cruisers had tried to break bad with them when they had warped into the system.
She stops for a second, cocking her ear. She hears something in one of the fallen down buildings near her. She moves over, locking onto the sound. She sees the Jaunty, Master Chief Sholmgren, as well as her new teenaged yeoman, Lily Akhmetova spot her and move over.
As they clear away some of the light debris, the sounds become more distinct.
A small voice.
She strains to listen, then sends her hands down a small hole as it is cleared way. As her face gets closer to the hole, the sounds morph into words, albeit in a different language.
One that she recognizes, but doesn’t understand. Her hands touch a small, squirming body. She is able to bring the body up. Her hands move through feather soft white hair, brushing against a twitching antenna. She quickly checks for any type of injury; she finds nothing more than some light cuts. The girl had been protected in the subsurface area of the shed.
A pair of small arms move around her neck. She gazes into a pair of the blackest eyes she has ever seen on anyone, much less an Andorian child. The blue cheeks are streaked with tears.
Bethany looks at the girl, probably about two years old, then intentionally crosses her eyes.
The slight sobbing and vocalizing stops. Bethany reaches over and plants a kiss on the girl’s grimy cheek. The girl buries her face in Bethany’s shoulder.
“A new member of the Betts Blackthorne fan club,” a familiar voice says. She looks up to see Jim Kirk walking towards her.
“Maybe,” she says. “She might be your competition for President.”
“Oh, no,” he says with a mock-wounded look on his face. He reaches up and touches the girl’s cheek. She leans into the touch.
“Great,” she says. “Typical female reaction to Jim Kirk and his glands-for-brains.”
“She knows charm when she sees it,” he says. His grin cuts through her. Her heart stops for a moment with thoughts of what could’ve been.
If both of them hadn’t been married to those fickle ladies, sisters of the Constitution class.
And she didn’t already have a seven-year-old little man with her green eyes and his father’s crooked-ass grin.
She pulls her communicator as the girl starts to fall asleep. She start to ask the child’s name, but remembering Jamie at this age, she tries another tack. She lifts the back of the girl’s top and sees the label.
Bethany can just make out a basic word, written on the tag.
Vilaah.
Now
The ensign feels the ship of her dreams form around her. She doesn’t remember too much of the ship, but she smiles with pride as she steps down and moves to touch her hand to the identity scanner on the console. She comes to attention in front of the Federation insignia, then at the officer-of-the-deck, with the telescope under her arm.
After her bonafides and orders are confirmed, she moves out of the transporter room, her seabag slung over her shoulder.
She stops at the formal portrait of a woman in her mid-forties, a broad, proud smile on her face.
The green eyes set in the light brown skin, with the scar through her left eyebrow.
The young Andorian girl remembers that face, from being held close to it on a burning world.
Vilaah G’atorin lets the smile grow as she remembers.