Chapter Text
2239
Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
-Michel de Montaigne
When he woke up, it was with something grabbing his hair fiercely, hands pinning his wrists and probably the thing connected to the hands sitting on his hips.
"Owowowow--!"
Scotty might have put up more of a fight, if this were the first time this had happened to him. But since it wasn't, he just protested about it and finally pried his eyes open to look at his assailants.
Practically sitting on top of his head, with two fists full of his hair and the biggest four-toothed grin in the world, was one of the three finest faces to wake up to. Even if it did mean hair-pulling.
And the accomplice to this mission was the second of those three, grinning wickedly as she had him pinned to the bed.
"Mornin' Joshua," Scotty said, barely managing to close his eyes and move his head far enough not to be drooled on. "Mornin' Jenna," he added, to the strawberry blond sitting on him.
"You're late," Jenna said, with a smirk, as she finally let him go to try to save his hair from the baby who was doing a good job of trying to remove it. "My shift ended," she continued, checking her wrist chronometer, "five minutes ago."
If someone would have told him two years ago that he would end up where he was now, Scotty wouldn't have believed them. In fact, if someone would have told him two years ago that he would ever feel happy again, he would have probably told them to go to hell. That it was impossible.
Life had a funny way of proving people wrong.
He finally managed to untangle his hair from Joshua's fingers and sit up, looking back automatically to make sure the baby wasn't going to end up falling off of the bed or anything. If someone would have told him six months ago that he would do these things as a matter of instinct, he probably wouldn't have believed them, either.
"A'right, a'right. Lemme get dressed, at least." He got up, leaving Jenna to keep an eye on Joshua while he tried to get his head together properly and the rest of his clothes off the floor where he'd left them the night before. "Where's Kayla?"
"In the galley. Just had breakfast."
Scotty nodded, pulling his coveralls on, and then looked around to figure out what he was missing. It finally came to him, and he pulled his boots on, hopping around on one foot at a time; one would think that remembering footwear would be a foregone conclusion, but he'd proven that notion wrong several times now.
"Ye got him?"
"Yeah. I'll let you know when it's your turn," Jenna said, picking the baby up and standing. "Have a good day at work," she added, half-mocking.
Scotty rolled his eyes, kissed her on the cheek, then headed for the galley. He needed a cup of coffee, and he needed to go visit the third of those faces that was so fine to wake up to. And then he could get to work.
The galley of the C/V Ci Bach was tiny, but then, so was the rest of the ship. Two decks, twelve crew members, two passengers, two children. Scotty had been in charge of engineering for a year and a half now, switching off shifts with Jenna, and was as much at home aboard the cargo vessel as he could ever be anywhere.
He knew, originally, that his family had come from Scotland, on Earth; knew that from stories that his aunts and uncles used to tell him. He still sounded somewhat like his heritage, though over the years, he was pretty sure that the accent everyone told him he had was just as much spacer as anything else. He'd been born in space, and was sure that he would die there as well.
Thinking about them didn't hurt like it used to. That, he blamed on the three faces he'd come to adore.
The final of that strange trio was busy driving Shaffer nuts in the galley.
"Kayla, no," Scotty said, the minute he walked through the door and saw the two-and-a-half year old on top of a stool, reaching for a cabinet.
She eyeballed him, paused in the middle of her act of infiltration. "Want chotolate."
"No." He was pretty sure that girl heard 'no' more times, just in the past six months, than he had in his entire life to date. He got an arm around her on the way past, and in one easy motion, without even pausing on his way to the coffee pot, deposited her on the floor.
"I've given up trying," Shaffer said, shaking his gray head. "I don't know how you do it, Scotty."
"Neither do I," Scotty answered with a wry grin, as he pulled his coffee mug down off of its ring and set it on the counter. Behind him, Kayla proceeded to throw a fit. He'd gotten good at juggling children; he had likewise gotten good at tuning them out. He turned around, putting his back against the counter once he had his coffee in hand, and rose his voice enough to be heard, "Did the captain give ye an ETA?"
Shaffer watched the temper tantrum the toddler was throwing, but said anyway, "Four more days. How's the engine?"
"Should be done by then."
Adding warp drive to an independent cargo vessel like Ci Bach was a strict violation of Empire law. In four days, Scotty was going to do just that.
Rebel children; the orphans of the Empire.
Ci Bach was just one of many. Scott had grown up in a rebel family. His family. He'd grown up on little ships like this, which smuggled political prisoners or other rebels or food or supplies, and had only stepped foot on a planet a dozen times in his entire life. He grew up in the engine room of his uncle's ship; his mother, adopted father, aunts and cousins and uncles were all rebels. He knew all of the codes, all of the signals; he'd already managed to make a name for himself in rebel circles as the engineer people went to, to give their vessels as much of an edge against the Empire as they could get.
At fifteen, he became one of the orphans.
At seventeen, he was practically raising two more, practically married to Jenna, practically an adult. Some moments he was certain he was; some moments, he had to stop and ask how exactly he ended up here.
"Well, you're gonna have to live with gruel again for breakfast, until we can pick up our provisions next stop," Shaffer said, gesturing to the pot on the stove.
"I'll stick with the coffee," Scotty answered, with a bit of a joking wince. He carried that in one hand, got the much calmer Kayla under one arm, and headed for work.
Work in this case was the nearly complete warp engine assembly in the cargo hold of the Ci Bach. It had taken a year, and a lot of begging, borrowing and time to get all of the parts; the main part of the reactor had come from a salvaged Empire cargo vessel, and the rest of it had to be put together from odds and ends.
It would only do warp two, and only then in short bursts, but since it was next to impossible to get ahold of antimatter and dilithium crystals, it was still an impressive feat. Running off of the plasma driven impulse engines, it wouldn't be a match for any of the Empire ships, but it might be enough to surprise one and escape. The added bonus being that it didn't leave a traditional warp trail behind, being fuel-based -- the signature would mostly seem like just another impulse trail among many.
It wasn't the first warp engine Scott had cobbled together from next to nothing, and likely wouldn't be the last. His biggest problem, aside getting ahold of parts (or manufacturing them himself and thereby getting ahold of raw materials) was having to serve as tech support for half a quadrant of rebels. It was hard for him to explain over a subspace channel how to repair something; he worked the best when he could see it himself, dive into it, get his hands on it.
He had dropped Kayla off to the ship's medic; while he and Jenna had inexplicably ended up the 'foster parents' of those orphans, there was no way that he was going to try to work with a toddler underfoot, and it was dangerous to boot. Luckily, the Captain wanted the engine more than he wanted a childfree ship.
For Captain Winslow, the choice had come down between losing a damn good engineer, or keeping the children onboard until some genuinely decent place could be found for them. In the end, he chose to keep the engineer, who refused to part with the children.
Scotty still hadn't figured out if it was his wisest move, but he was certain that it was his best. Even if he still sometimes felt like he was playing the part of an adult, without actually having made it there. Even if he had gotten and was still getting a crash course in child rearing.
Even if he still sometimes felt scared out of his mind at this life he'd managed to end up living.
He couldn't stomach the idea of those children being sent to some orphanage; out here in the colonies, it was a guarantee that they would always be little more than shadows. If not for the fact that he'd been fifteen and already a fair hand at his job, he would have ended up the same way -- dropped off, shuffled into the crowd, left behind. Childhood was a very short period in the rebellion.
Winslow had thought he was out of his mind.
"No. They go, I go."
"Goddammit, you're seventeen! You're barely old enough to take care of yourself!"
"I'll learn, then, but they're not goin'. If they go, I'll go with 'em."
Winslow was a decent man, but a practical one. There wasn't a whole lot of room for sentimentality in this life. The colonies, especially, were filled with lost children; these two were just two more mouths to feed, two more little bodies underfoot. But in the end, Winslow capitulated, and Scotty found out very quickly that there was absolutely nothing in the world like pacing the length of an engine room with a four-month-old on his shoulder, after spending three hours cleaning up after a two-year old decided that engine grease was akin to fingerpaints.
There were plenty of times in those first few weeks that he thought about changing his mind, and even more times when he wanted to curl up in a ball and go back to being a child himself, and he wasn't quite sure even now how he'd survived this long.
One thing he knew now, though, was that he wouldn't change it.
Not for anything.
Because at the end of the day, he'd go back to the cabin that he and Jenna shared, and there would be a good woman there who liked him a lot, if not loved him, and two children who would decide that he was great fun to roll around on the floor with, and even though it wasn't the family he once had, it was the one he loved.
It was home.
"Holl amrantau'r sêr ddywedant,
"Ar hyd y nos.
"Dyma'r ffordd i fro gogoniant,
"Ar hyd y nos...
"Golau arall yw tywyllwch,
"I arddangos gwir brydferthwch,
"Teulu'r nefoedd mewn tawelwch
"Ar hyd y nos."
"What does that mean, anyway?" Jenna asked, drowsily, not opening her eyes.
"Not sure. I think part of it means 'all through the night,' but other'n that, I couldn't tell ye."
"It's beautiful."
"Aye." Scotty had a hard time trying to stifle a yawn, and in the end, just gave up on the effort. It was warm, and he was the unwitting pillow for three bodies. A baby on each shoulder, and Jenna laying sideways, using his stomach to prop her head. "My mother used to sing it. It's Welsh, I think; one of her grandfathers was Welsh."
"Mm. My mother used to sing racy spacer songs," Jenna said, and he could hear her grinning. "I think I'll leave the lullabies to you."
"Unless we want these two cussin' like spacers, aye."
She was quiet for a moment, then she sat up and he opened his eyes to look at her. He had a feeling she was going to make that into a discussion, and he was right. "You know I never planned on raising kids, right?"
It wasn't the first time she'd said it. Still, she kept going along with him, despite that. "Ye did say that," Scotty replied, closing his eyes again.
"I'm twenty-one. Jesus, you're seventeen!" She paused when the babies stirred, then quieted her tone. "Do you really think this is sane?"
"Really? No."
There was a long pause there, but he didn't interrupt it. Jenna would, in the end, do what she wanted to. If there was one thing he'd learned about the woman, it was that she had no trouble going after something that she wanted, once she decided that she did want it. There had been plenty of times over the past year or so that he honestly wondered what she could possibly see in him.
She finally sighed, and it was intentionally exaggerated. Then she laid back again.
"Keep singing."
He chuckled, then did as he was told. He didn't know in those moments that this would be the last night he had with them, his entirely unlikely family. Didn't know that he would sing the lullaby his mother sang to him as a child for the last time.
Didn't know that he'd never sleep so peacefully again.
And never forgot that.
"O mor siriol gwêna seren
"Ar hyd y nos.
"I oleuo'I chwaer ddaeraren
"Ar hyd y nos...
"Nos yw henaint pan ddaw cystudd,
"Ond i harddu dyn a'i hwyrddydd,
"Rho'wn ein golau gwan i'n gilydd,
"Ar hyd y nos."