Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

Anonymous asked: for the random fic titles: "spring will be here soon"

Since you didn’t specify a fandom….this is the story of the girl Jaylah.

Her people are from a high tundra part of their world–even after she forgets the name of her planet, the name of her people, the name of her family, she will remember this.  The shimmer of the sun at midnight, the dance of stars at pitch-black noon, and the song of the wind over the snow-layered ground will stay in her dreams all her life, a tiny scrap of peace.  Winter on the high tundra is dangerous, even in the cities-and-starships age, and Jaylah’s people never quite managed to forget their heritage of cold nights and terror.  The promise of new life, of melted snow and living things, is the hope their people holds up to get through the days of unbroken night, the vow they make in the darkest moments of their life to fight on.  

As a little girl wondering if the sun will ever come back, Jaylah’s mother strokes her hair back from her face and whisper that spring would come soon, so soon that Jaylah wouldn’t even believe it.  

In Krall’s dungeons, as Jaylah sobs silently, hands pressed to her mouth so hard that her teeth draw blue bruises on the white skin, her father hugs her to his side.  “Spring will be here soon, you’ll see, precious girl,” he whispers–a lie, but the familiar words soothe her tears and make her mother, bleeding out slowly from a gash to the leg, and her mama, pressing her hands to her wife’s skin, smile faintly.  

When her mama is taken, still smudged blue with her mother’s blood, she kisses Jaylah forehead and her cheeks and promises, “Spring will be here soon, little snowflake, little darling.”  A lie, but a warm and gentle one, bittersweet.

When her father dies, and she runs until she can’t breathe for tears, she curls up in a mountain cave, far too close to the search parties scouring for her, and she lies to herself, “Spring will be here soon, Jaylah.  You just have to stand up.”  And she scrubs her face with her palms and pulls herself upright.  

She tells the lie a thousand times, a hundred thousand times, every time a new circuit breaks or she hasn’t eaten in twelve days or she is run off from a precious salvage or she can’t stand the loneliness any longer.  Spring will be here soon, Jaylah.  Get up and meet it on your feet.

Years from now, she’ll be an ensign sitting cross-legged on a chair in the Enterprise mess hall, surrounded by the bridge crew and Montgomery Scotty and Doctor Bones, her red Operations uniform a bright contrast to her white hair and a glass of scotch from Montgomery Scotty’s illicit still in her hand.  (She will know, by then, what a nickname is, but she will insist on her old names for them, at times like this, when they are together and laughing.)  Captain James T will smile at her, and Montgomery Scotty will clap her on the back as he tells them about how she repaired the replicators and stopped them from turning all the food purple, and she will think that perhaps she was not lying to herself all along after all.  

singelisilverslippers asked: hey so i think tumblr maybe ate my ask or it went to you when you were in the middle of moving/conferencing, but i find myself kept awake at night by a pressing question: What (whom) did Jaylah eat all those years she was living in the wrecked spaceship by herself?

wildehacked:

Her house tries its best to feed her, but the foodbox is missing a piece.

Sometimes after eating, with the ugly ache still in her belly, Jaylah will thumb through the foodbox settings, just to see what she could have eaten, on some other world, in some other time. The options light up in dull orange: taquitos. Caesar salad.  Pizza of pepperoni. 

“What is taquitos,” she asks her house, carefully, in its tongue. Her house tells her it is meat in rolled dough, fried in oil. It has been a long time since Jaylah has eaten dough. No nuts grow here, to grind to flour. No axeroot powder to leaven it, should she find some. 

“Give me taquitos,” Jaylah says wistfully, and listens to the gears of her house whir and grind, trying to obey an order it is too damaged to fulfill. 

“What is the meat,” she asks her house, when she tires of the sound of it trying and failing her. 

The house tells her it comes from a cow. 

“What is a cow,” Jaylah asks. 

The house tells her it is an alien animal which lives on a world far away, bred for milk and slaughter. On her world, no beast lives for slaughter alone. The custom strikes her as barbaric.

The fist in Jaylah’s belly tightens, and for weeks she dreams of cows, their big eyes, their funny spots, their slow, fat bodies, designed for violence.

*

For a year, she survives on these things: 

Whistling leaves, boiled down to soft coils in pale green water. 

Salt sucked straight from mountain rocks. 

She finds a strange artifact in the house, a box full of many thin leaves, covered in markings. The house says it is a book, but Jaylah knows books, and they are not these things to be held in the hand, to smell of dust and distantly of plants. She eats the pages of the book, one yellowed leaf at a time, and has the house tell her of its provenance: Around The World In Eighty Days, by Jules Verne. A story of an incredible voyage, to a primitive species. 

There are fish in the river, when she dares go to the river. It is hard to make herself do it, though, and she is too rigid with fear to stay for long, so often her catches are small and scant, hardly worth the risk. 

The yellow beetles, ground into paste. They are more palatable if she can wait and let them dry into powder, but often she is too hungry, and licks the yellow slick right off the pestle. 

Thin-winged lizards, dumb enough to fly into her traps. They are mere mouthfuls the size of her first, full of bones, and stink of sulfur, but meat is meat. Jaylah plugs her nose to cook them, and tries not to breathe while eating. She spits the sucked-clean bones into a pile, and boils them the next day for broth. 

A bee who falls from the sky, body and ship too badly damaged to fly home to Krall. She drags the bee two terrifying miles to her house, flinching at shadows, but no one comes to collect it. Under the shelter of her house’s cloak, she separates the meat from the metal, and tries to tell herself that the waste should go in the ground. But her belly hurts, and the meat is not soured, and there are only the beetles to eat that night. 

*

There are other flesh-eaters Jaylah knows of, besides the men of Krall, who do not eat the meat of others but devour them whole, body and spirit both. She has had to avoid ending up in the cookpots of fellow survivors more than once. Jaylah is not like these people. Jaylah is smarter, stronger, better protected. She has not forgotten her father, her planet, herself. Yes, she is eating the meat of a dead man, wrapped in the leaf of a dead book to mimic the dough she does not have, but Jaylah did not kill this man to eat. It’s a distinction she feels is important.

She brings the rest of her meal to the captain’s seat, and puts her legs up on the arm of the chair. The meat is delicious, lean and good. 

“Tell me again about cows, house,” she orders, rejuvenated despite herself, the animal pleasure of being fed making her dumb body glad. “Tell me what food can be had of cows.” 

The house obediently recites the byproducts which should be available in its foodbox: butter, hamburger, steak, stew, half-and-half, cream, milkshake. 

“I don’t know what is a milkshake,” Jaylah says, although she does–the house has explained before, that it is ice cream made soft, to be drunk through a straw. That ice cream is milk made cold, made sweet, and milk flows from a mother cow to her calf, a willing gift. 

The house tells her about milkshakes again, and tells her to program 987 into the replicator should she wish one. 

“You can’t give it to me,” Jaylah says, and takes a savage bite of her meat. “So no. I don’t wish one.” 

The house sighs itself into perfect silence, until the only sound is Jaylah herself, chewing, swallowing. 

“Play me some music, house,” she says hoarsely, and the house gives her beats and shouting. 

* 

Ten days after eating Krall’s man, Jaylah cannibalizes the fallen bee’s secondary systems–nothing that could help her fly, or reinforce the shields. Just the air temperature and the sound in the pod. She finds a little metal construct that lights up a connection in the back of her mind, although she has never seen it before. 

The part slots perfectly into her house’s foodbox. 

Her hands shake too badly to install the part that day. She ends up leaving the work undone for a full week, until the next time she finds a lizard in her trap. It isn’t yet dead, when she comes for it, only one wing broken, the wound reeking of sulfur. It mewls in pain when she reaches for it, and Jaylah finds herself crying wildly over the poor stupid lizard, crying harder than she did for her own father. 

She can’t let it go–it would only end up food for someone else, unable to fly. 

She splints the lizard’s wing–a reckless, foolish indulgence. She fixes the foodbox, and feeds the ill-tempered hissing thing little crumbs of taquitos, little saucers of milk. 

* 

When the lizard is healed, Jaylah grabs it up in her hands, and carries it to the roof of her house. It bites the pad of her thumb, drawing blood.

“Fuck you too, lizard,” Jaylah tells it, and throws the small thing into the sky. The lizard wavers briefly in the air, testing its wounded wing, and then lets out a joyful trill and soars over the cliff, leaving the protection of Jaylah’s house for the uncertain freedom of the dark.

Jaylah stands there looking over the cliff for a long time, sick with envy over the little lizard’s escape. 

“I am leaving this place,” she swears to herself, and although she has eaten well for weeks, she feels a familiar twist her gut, the hollow ache of hunger. 

coming2usoon:

Imagine Jaylah at the Starfleet academy after Star Trek Beyond.

-Like the first day she gets there and is settling into her room Scotty is there to help her move in. And he’s just so happy she’s going to the engineering part of the academy but is also scared to death that she’s going to become a red shirt.
-Her roommate isn’t that fond of Jaylah’s taste in music and hates the banging and loudness of it all.
-In her first few classes she doesn’t even pay attention due to knowing all the material.
-the only class she actually listens in is language and communications class.
-Uhara is happy to hear the girl is taking an interest in communications though she knows Jaylah will always stick with engineering.
-she video chats with the enterprise crew quite often and they usually help her with her course work.
-Uhara with communications of course.
-Sulu with the mandatory pilot classes that all cadets have to take.
-Chekov helps her with learning the constellations that she forces herself to learn in case she ever gets lost.
-Kirk is just her chatting buddy and they’ll discuss classical music together along with other things.
-Usually Bones is the one to call her. He does this when Jim has pissed him off or something idiotic has happened and he needs to rant it to someone.
-Spock is the one who listens to her troubles with classes and helps by suggesting things that may help.
-Scotty is the one she always calls when she’s excited about something that happened in class. He feels like a proud father whenever he hears about what she built that day.
-No one at the academy believes Jaylah when she says she knows the famous enterprise crew. Even the teachers scoff at the possibility.
-Everyone jokes about how she’s making up knowing the crew until they show up one day.
-the Enterprise had docked and the crew had practically a month of shore leave so the first thing they did was head to the academy.
- they burst into the room in the middle of one of her history of Starfleet classes. They’re all beaming while the Class and teacher just stare shocked and confused at the sight of the crew.
-Scotty’s the one to yell, “Lassie!” When he sees her.
-Jaylah’s up in a heartbeat and runs over to the crew hugging Scotty first.
- She moves to hug the entire crew after that saying hello to each of them.
- “How you doing Jay?” Kirk asks her.
- “As well as I can James T.” She answers grinning.
-Kirk chuckles and the crew drag the girl out of class.
-No one really sees Jaylah for the rest of the month outside of classes. They’re even shocked when she stops coming to a few of them.
- When she finally does appear again she’s bombarded with people wanting to know how she knows the crew of the enterprise.
-She just grins and answers, “They made my home fly.”
-After that everyone knows not to mess with Jaylah, not only in fear of getting their butts kicked by the woman herself but by the crew that stands behind her as well.
-A few years later at her class’s graduation no one is surprised at all when she’s assigned to the Enterprise or when the entire crew showed up to the ceremony.

(via windbladess)

wildehacked:

james-tee:

Okay but - imagine Bones calling Jaylah sweetheart.

He’d try to take it back instantly, because he still flinches whenever he remembers the one (and only) time he called Uhura that. And he doesn’t want to be condescending, not at all - he’s a southern gentleman, dammit, and these terms of endearment just slip out sometimes.

But Jaylah stops him mid-apology, and goes “explain to me this word, Leonard Bones.” 

He does - and from then on, not only does she insist he calls her sweetheart - she calls him that as well.  

CANON.

(Source: chrisfine)

janey-jane:

entrenous88:

No, but seriously, Scotty and Keenser are going to be such proud uncles to Jaylah as she rips her way through the Engineering track at Starfleet Academy

#can you imagine scotty and keenser pouring over her written comms?#and putting up pics of jaylah dominating at combat training?#and giving her advice that she takes SUPER SERIOUSLY#and sending her really weird care packages#of vegan haggis#and these really hard smelly biscuits that emit tiny eeping sounds#which are treats wherever keenser is from?#star trek found families

YES. A THOUSAND TIMES YES. I AM HERE FOR ALL OF THIS.

(via lathori)

some thoughts about jaylah the magnificent

ink-splotch:

- Within her first week at Starfleet Academy, Jaylah hacked into the environmental controls and security systems of her dorm– because she was bored and twitchy, because she didn’t know what to do with a home she had not taken apart and re-wired herself. 

- She broke into the cafeteria after hours and told herself it was just to see if she could. She skipped class to go wander the streets and build a map of the city, of these concrete canyons and glass-and-steel cliff walls, of which way she would run if she needed to. She played her music too loud. Kirk wrote her from deep space, further and further away as the months and maydays of their mission moved on, to ask if she was trying to beat him in demerits earned in an Academy tenure. She took that to mean he approved.

- Jaylah had had a big brother, once. Elah had taught her about engines, about how to wrestle, and a lot of really terrible jokes, once. But Scotty walked her through the Enterprise’s engines, when she was rebuilt and shining. They got grease and fluids all over their overalls. Kirk and Spock sparred with her while they waited for the Enterprise’s next mission to come through– Academy martial arts and Vulcan holds and corn-fed Idaho brawling tricks. Uhura provided the bawdy humor, parsed out smugly at the edges of social gatherings. 

- They had set the ruins of the Franklin up as a museum, tucked into the floating bubble of Yorktown. Schoolchildren would take field trips to wander the halls of her house. They invited her to the opening ceremony, cut the ribbon while she and the Enterprise crew were still wandering, limping, through those clean curving streets, but she did not attend. 

- Instead Scotty showed up at her doorstep with a bottle of Scotch stolen from Chekhov. They played her music so loud it shook the walls and earned them a dozen pissed off texts from Bones and a single sternly disapproving note from Spock. They ignored them all and toasted the Franklin, a good lady, a fine home. 

- When Jaylah boarded a transport ship for Earth, for California and San Francisco and the Academy that lived in the shadow of that golden bridge, the whole surviving crew of the Enterprise came out to the loading dock to wave her good-bye. It had been so many years since she had known any faces so well, living, other than her enemies’. She pressed up against the window and watched them– peach and blue and brown and black and green– disappear. 

- No matter how hard she fought and hoped, she had thought she would never get off that planet. The moment she saw her father go down, she had thought she would never be able to survive that stab in his gut, that light that went out of his eyes. She had been small, willow limbs and shaking hands, and she had thought she would never see another sky again. 

- She got up early on cold mornings and walked through the swirling San Francisco fog. She greeted the sun as it climbed up over the Bay and burned the sky back to blue. 

- The crew pooled their credits and bought her a motorcycle for her next birthday, to replace the one they’d left on the planet. Jaylah had left a lot of things in that boneyard. She drove the steep streets on her humming bike and felt like perhaps she had not left everything. 

- When Jaylah took the Kobyashi Maru her final year, she watched her classmates complain and rant afterward about unfairness, about no win scenarios. She did not speak up, just took her results and left. The lesson was one she had already learned, already buried in herself. Sometimes you cannot win, no matter how good you are, no matter how brave, no matter how much you love your daughter and want to live and live and live for her. Sometimes all you can do is die the best way you know how. 

- (When the ruckus had finally died down on Yorktown Base, after the smoke had settled, after the crowds had parted, Jaylah had seen Demora Sulu run to her father’s arms. She had seen Hikaru kneel in the rubble and lift his daughter into his lap and hold her safe in his arms. She had thought, I would have died for this. I am alive, and I am glad, but I would have died for this, I would have, I would have died for this)

- (Her little sister Jessy had been about Dem’s age, the last time Jaylah had seen her alive). 

- She didn’t declare an emphasis in her Academy studies for two years. Scotty thought she should go into engineering, because as a traumatized, escaped child she had reverse-engineered repairs on the Franklin that could only be matched by his own genius. Kirk thought she would make an excellent command officer. Uhura, impressed by how she had taught herself Federation Standard from the Franklin’s logs, made sure the communications department paid friendly attention to her. 

- Instead, Jaylah took the introductory classes for every field of study in the Academy, ignoring the disapproving cries of her guidance counselors. In combat she was years ahead of her peers. She found languages easy, but their technical underpinnings were unengaging and confusing. In engineering she was gifted, but decades behind the state of technology. Scotty had happily dragged her through the Enterprise’s rebuilt engines, but her heart and her blackened fingers would always belong to engines lifetimes older.

- The Enterprise crew were on their second five year mission when Jaylah graduated from Starfleet Academy. They gathered in the main mess hall, all the crew that had survived the Enterprise’s first death, and the new crew members who had heard stories of this adopted daughter of the ship for years. They live-streamed the ceremony. Scotty wore a ‘PROUD BIG BROTHER OF A STARFLEET GRADUATE’ shirt Sulu had hand-lettered for him. Bones opened a bottle of good ol’ Earthside bourbon and pretended not to tear up when her name was called. 

- She wore medical blue.  

- After years of Academy schooling and medical training, Jaylah stepped onto a Starfleet ship, her badge pinned to her chest. The corridors curved into the distance. The lights hummed and lit up as the ship floor murmured under her feet. It felt like coming home. 

- But there were no rocky hills out her shipboard window, no dull sky, no shimmering shield to hide her from her enemies. There was just space– black, cold, endless; brilliant, star-studded; full of discovery and danger and things worth dying for. She was ready to boldly go. She was ready to bravely go. She had thought she would never see another sky and here she was, older than her oldest brother had ever gotten to be, with hands that could defend lives and save them and heal them. The universe was spreading out before her, endless stars lighting the skies of endless planets. She was ready. 

(via im-lost-but-not-gone)