Moving Day
Posted on Tue Apr 4th, 2023 @ 5:28pm by Caithlin t'Leiya & Ieliene t'Leiya & Lieutenant Gunnar Arnason
5,043 words; about a 25 minute read
Mission:
Pressure
Timeline: Before the Captain Goes Missing
Once again, for second time in a year, everything Ieliene and her family owned had been stuffed into packing crates and was now being pulled out of them, as the couple of the other locals they'd managed to rope into helping move larger items had brought over the last of the big furniture pieces a couple of hours ago. While moving things from Earth all the way to the colony had been no doubt a complicated effort for most any of the place's residents, she knew it had been further so in their case mostly based on the adult's desire not only for a new, custom-built house; but on waiting to have said house finished until after they had arrived on the colony and could personally oversee or complete certain elements (mostly, a variety of security measures wired into the walls that they refused to leave to anyone else). But finally, the last touches on the house had been completed the week before, freeing them from having eight people stuffed into the temporary quarters ('family sized' ones, yes, but still).
The teenager was peering into a hidden compartment built into one wall that she was about to put a painting over after re-sealing the hidden seam (her mother had built a small, localized cloaking effect to conceal further conceal it like a seamless piece of wall, which even she had to admit was just cool) when what on first glance appeared to be a box with legs walked by. A rather tall box with legs.
"You can just put that one over on the couch." Ieliene closed the wall up and turned to follow Gunnar and the box over towards the couch in question, and started pulling things out and plopping them on end tables or setting aside to hang on walls later. "This place is way bigger than the rowhouse in Boston. We're gonna have to get more stuff to fill it." Perhaps like a lot of teen girls, she seemed to consider this last part a welcome challenge; but then got thoughtful for a moment. "Still kind of weird when you see it all together as a collection, though, and realize there's almost nothing older than Kali is."
The very lack of history in the boxes of their possessions was in a sense itself the more recent history of the teenager's family, really: In '53, her mother and father had arrived on Earth with quite literally not much more than the clothes on their backs and the few small things they'd been able to smuggle with them. And in 2390, though the border was far more open than it had been 40 years prior to that, her aunt and her cousins had arrived with not much more than that: Whatever Caithlin had which had not been lost in the nova had instead been sold, traded, abandoned or destroyed a mere few years later to survive in the aftermath of the collapse of the Empire.
Setting the box down as ordered, Gunnar took a moment to stretch while Ieliene unpacked. It was the second time in a year that he'd helped the family move, and the 3rd or 4th - 3.5th? - since having been accepted as 'not a threat' to the extent of being trusted to help care for the children. What was weird to him was not that nothing here was older than Kali - for most of his adult life now the little he'd moved between various Starfleet assigned quarters that was even that old - but that Ieliene herself had grown up so much in (relatively) few years since he'd first been pressed into service as a babysitter for Tal and Ali. "It's the nature of moving around much - you don't hold onto a lot. And when you have to leave somewhere suddenly," he pulled a set of framed pictures from the box, handing her parents' wedding picture to Ieliene to place. "you only take what's most meaningful." If that. he added inwardly, thinking of so many of Romulan refugees who had made it out with only the clothes on their backs.
"Yeah..." Ieliene eyed the wall behind the couch, and then flicked the attachment point on the back of the frame which obligingly burrowed itself into the wall, then reached into the box for the similar one to place next to it, featuring instead her aunt and the uncle she had never met. While both images featured the same elaborate formal robes in house colors, the divergence in them was clear enough as well: Tal and Ali were young in their wedding photo, probably younger than Kali was now even, maybe in their 40s at most; going through with a match made by their respective grandparents decades earlier to cement an alliance made when they were no more than toddlers. Caithlin and V'Lan were much older in theirs, probably in their 70s or 80s, and she'd listened carefully enough for what was and wasn't said the last few years since being let into more and more 'adult' conversation to piece together the likely story there, too: A pairing either arranged by or perhaps just encouraged by her grandfather, after her great-grandmother died in the aborted coup '78 and things started to look more and more politically untenable and it started to look advantageous to him to pair his heir not to the scion of another noble house, but to a man or woman with acquired power; settling on a man who was a proven survivor who had worked his way up the ranks from sublieutenant all the way to vice admiral without any family connections. An escape hatch of sorts, Ieliene wondered, in the dead man's mind?: 'In case of fire, break glass for extinguisher'...'In case of political collapse, vice admiral brings his wing of warbirds to collect my daughter'.
"I, uhh, think they've been looking for someone for me. Now that there's, like, options." Ieliene said somewhat awkwardly as she hung Caithlin's wedding photo next to her parent's. "Waved a couple PADDs with boys on 'em by me. But I'm sorta just setting them aside for later, especially since they don't live here so it's not like I can really get to know them right now. I want to cast a wide net, find the perfect one." It was an interesting combination of 'not rejecting the idea of an arranged or facilitated pairing' combined with a clear expectation that she'd have the final say in the pick and intended to take her time to do so, and a bit of a teenager's sky-high romantic dreams...which in and of itself was a change from even the year prior, to have even a cursory interest in such.
On some level, he'd been aware that this was going on, but Gunnar felt his brows lift at the news. There was an odd emotional tug at the idea, a sort of 'our little girl is growing up' - a feeling he had to admit meant that for all he'd had no say in Caithlin deciding he somehow counted as a quasi-member of the household, that hadn't been decided entirely one way. He wasn't quite sure when it had happened, but for better or worse (worse according to some senior officers and intel types who had not held back on their opinions), the t'Leiyas had become a sort of extended family to him. It was one of the reasons he had decided that once the fall out from the bubble incident died down, he approach Luka about making his assignment here permanent.
"You have plenty of time," he said simply, choosing a life partner being an area where he really wasn't much qualified to offer advice. "At least 20 or 30 years to decide what 'perfect' means for you."
"Yeah; I'm old enough it doesn't really work the way it would've worked if I was like - " The teenager held a hand out around knee height, like she'd been when they'd first met almost nine years ago " - little late to, like, raise us both from a young age with a lot of contact to sort of shape everything." It was, possibly, one of the reasons why the trio of adults in the household generally worked at least outwardly so seamlessly with one another: It wasn't just Ali and Caithlin who had been raised together from birth to do so; but Caithlin, Ali, and to some degree Tal, her intended mate. "Now it's more you gotta find something that works. And I think...I think a lot of the other kids my age are maybe sorta still just trying to figure out who they are, even for this age."
At almost-15, most of Ieliene's Romulan agemates in Federation space would have been born in the Empire, but left it when they were very small children; passing in many cases through resettlement camps or bouncing between planets as their families searched for permanent homes. And now it seemed to her the few times she'd met some that they were not quite one thing and not quite the other, much like she was, but with the added complications of any (carefully hidden) trauma along the way: Sometimes, even her cousins seemed a bit of an enigma that way; as if perhaps they somehow still subconsciously remembered what they'd endured as toddlers in the collapse of the Empire or during the time they and Caithlin had spent in custody of Federation intelligence, that even now her aunt refused to discuss.
"That very perceptive," Gunnar said, feeling a touch of pride that he might have contributed to that emerging bent for cultural analysis. "First generation in a new place usually has to mark out their own path, something between their family way and the ways of the new place they're in. If it's any comfort, to some extent everyone in your age group - even kids from families who have been in the Federation from the beginning - is doing that in a sense. You've got an added level of difficulty, but figuring out who you are, as opposed to who your family, or society in general, expects you to be is pretty typical," he explained, continuing to unpack the box. "And it's not necessarily limited to your age." He gave her a half-smile. "I have a better idea of who I am than I did at 14, but I wouldn't say I've really it figured it out yet."
"Make sense. I mean, you're not that old. You're like what, barely over 30?" And just like that, Ieliene's beyond-her-years perceptive bent was gone in a poof!, forgetting the rather different aging curves their two species started to diverge on by Gunnar's age, for all that they might follow a similar one in the earliest years of life.
"Remember, our species mature on different timelines," he reminded. "But thank you. You can tell that to the people wondering when I'll think about settling down," he added with a chuckle and a wink.
"Yeah. Though, if I had more surviving relatives, you might have to worry my aunt and your grandma would start cooking up a match with one of them..." Ieliene's took the last thing in the box out and set it on the couch; upstairs, she could hear the scuffles and bangs occasionally of her sisters and cousins unloading stuff in their bedrooms, or her father in the basement moving crates around, but her eyes flicked over to one of the windows with a view towards the back yard - "yard" perhaps being an understatement when the back lot of your property backed up against the treeline of the local woods, plus a literal barn built a few hundred meters to one side for the horses - where Ali was steadying a ladder while Caithlin completed the tail end of what she'd been doing for a few hours now, hanging little silken pennants of sorts off the branches of various trees on the property. You had to know a lot to know exactly what she was truly doing and the resonance of it, though: Enough xenocultural knowledge might get you to 'memorial for the dead'; but only knowledge of that plus knowledge of the woman herself and her history would get you to the realization that in Caithlin's eyes, nearly everyone she hung one for (save certain older relatives like her father or grandmother) fell into just one of two categories, if they'd died from '87 onward: Those she had failed to be able to save...And those whose sacrifice she had ordered or allowed, for the good of the whole. A whole she had also then been entirely unable to save, whether it was the Empire, its people, or the rest of her own kin. It was the other side of the coin, from the expectation that Caithlin would see to the protection and support of those in her house; the expectation that she would also where necessary instead spend their lives in service of its larger goals. One could perhaps draw the conclusion from the lopsided numbers of dead vs living amongst her kin that she had been more successful at the latter than the former; but then again perhaps not, since having any living family left was more than many Romulans could say.
The teenager watched carefully for a moment, secure in the knowledge that due to the type of windows in the house, while she could see out, those outside could not see those inside. "...I think that'll be the last one." Ieliene's voice was quieter now, but if she squinted she could make out the characters on the one that had just gone up on a tree closer in to the house itself, and was pretty sure her aunt would have picked that one to finish with: For Katera, the cousin who had given her life for Arenn and Telek's. Her eyes flicked around the living room and she set the empty crate on the floor and looked over at Gunnar as outside, Caithlin climbed down off the stepladder and Aliereth pressed the button to make it fold itself up. "I think maybe we should go upstairs, get out of here before they get back in here. Wanna see my room?"
Gunnar had blinked at the idea that anyone would try to fix him up with members of the House. Surely he was not considered so much a part of the family for that? He felt both flattered and somewhat alarmed by the suggestion. However, at Ieliene's next comment he followed her gaze out the window. His knowledge of Romulan culture and the family was fairly extensive (for a human), so Gunnar had perhaps a better idea of the meaning of the banners than most, but he knew he probably didn't get more than surface level of what they meant. But Ieliene had swung back to a higher level of maturity in recognizing that her mother and aunt might want some privacy now. "Yes. I'd like to see your room."
The winding stairs up to the second and then third floor of the house looked ordinary enough; but Ieliene knew that in a pinch, you could flip the switch to a variety of forcefields, illusions, and other measures to thwart or bewilder an intruder. Right now though, it was quick enough to get up them, then to one of the six bedrooms on the uppermost floor: One for each of the kids in residence, and one for the one now elsewhere in the galaxy. A couple of extras had been built in on the second floor along with the bedrooms for her parents and Caithlin; Ieliene somehow suspected that there was at least half a plan to try and fill them in the next few years with new additions, though she wasn't exactly sure whose: If Caithlin was hunting for a new match for herself, she was keeping it very quiet; so it was possible she was hoping her sister would be doing the...adding. A couple of the areas in the finished basement, too, were suitable for such use; or moreso she suspected meant for eventual use by the children and their eventual mates when they started having children of their own. She wouldn't have put it past her aunt to already have a set of blueprints drawn up for a variety of additions to put on the place later.
"Here it is!" An thoroughly nondescript door popped open into what was for the most part a thoroughly teenage-girl room that could've come at least 80 percent straight out of Earth: A perfectly-matched neon purple bedding set with enough pillows piled on it to drown in; with a desk, dresser, and vanity to match the bed, the latter scattered with boxes of makeup and hair products to put away later, and a full-length three sided mirror with storage on the sides for jewelry stood in one corner near where various trendy teen clothes - and a respectable amount of high-quality winter gear - spilled out of the closet. A couple of posters were hung on the walls already or laid on the bed waiting to be, the largest of them for a popular Andorian rock band. The possibly incongruous additions were a weapons safe built into one wall, and some of the little pieces of decor or objects here and there that were clearly Romulan in origin, like the ornate, silky formal robes stuffed in amongst the other clothing. "Check this out!" Ieliene reached a hand into her pocket and must have triggered a control stuffed in there, because a portion of the wall and floor in one corner suddenly shimmered and opened up like the wall downstairs, revealing what was probably one of several hidden compartments built into the room. Unlike the little cubby downstairs though, this area was large enough that it probably could, in an emergency, conceal the room's occupant herself.
Not in the least surprised at a built in hidden panic room, Gunnar simply nodded approval. He understood the impetus behind it, both intellectually and, more recently, personally. In fact, given that the terrorists that had taken him had first breached a supposed safe room, he found himself glancing around the hidden compartment for evidence of second weapons locker. And sure enough, there it was. Small, probably holding only a disruptor and spare knife, but the Romulan approach to protective parenting did not disappoint. "A nice touch," he remarked, before turning back the main - knowing contingency planning had been thought out was all well and good, but he didn't like to think too much about real danger touching the lives of the children.
He chuckled, looking at the spill of clothes and jewelry around the 3-sided mirror. "Divash would approve."
Ieliene grinned at this, but her next words were exasperated in the way of older sisters about younger sisters for centuries. "Raikael keeps trying to steal my clothes and jewelry, though." She rolled her eyes. "And the clothes don't even fit her yet!"
"She's always been a little magpie," he observed with a small smile, remembering how she tried to snatch a sparkly scarf from Divash's outfit the first time they met. "But I don't know what to tell you there. I was the younger brother and got stuck with hand-me-downs, at least the ones Thorgil didn't completely wear out first."
"Hey; family heirlooms are even better than new stuff in a lot of ways." Ieliene grinned, but with a touch of melancholy to it at the end, and it was the statement of both a culture who valued such things highly; but also had the wistful touch of longing of a member of such who would never have very many of them...A spot Ieliene and her sisters and cousins were now far from alone in, after the destruction wrought by the nova and the aftermaths of it. Then the annoyance was back in her voice and on her face with her next words and another classic teen eyeroll. "The question is, did you go around stealing Thorgil's stuff while he was still using it; because that's what happens here..."
It was hard to hear the way Ieliene said 'heirlooms'. She'd never had those things, so the loss was primarily a matter of being old enough now to have an awareness of what had been lost, both to her family and more broadly to her people. Still, the realization that she was feeling that empty space he'd seen in her parents' and aunt's eyes, hurt in a way he couldn't quite define, especially since he was at a loss for what to say. Though he'd taken no heirlooms with him when he enlisted - he'd joined in peaceful times, but he grown up during the Dominion War and understood the potential risks - so he had no mementos of home beyond a wool sweater and a rune tattoo acquired by semi-inebriated consensus with a group of other nursing students. But all of the things that were touchstones to centuries of family history existed, and despite all his affinity for different worlds and cultures, that sense of place and people grounded his sense of self.
However, with the next comment the question of how to offer sympathy or comfort was gone.
He pursed his lips and tipped his head side-to-side. "'Steal' is a strong word. I mean, my parents and grandparents bought all of it so, technically, it was community property."
Instead of an argument, or any other sort of reaction one might have expected from most teenagers, this got a laugh from Ieliene. "You've been taking lessons from my aunt, maybe, with that answer." In the end, Caithlin's tendency to such verbal turnabout was reinforced not just from being a lawyer, but even moreso as someone who had been raised to someday be a senator, or a senator's chief of staff, and head of a Romulan great house or member of its inner circle; Ieliene got the distinct feeling from what she'd been able to glean of her aunt and mother's upbringing that clever misdirection or the exploiting of loopholes in your opponent's argument - and the need to attempt to make your own free of them - had been a staple of their childhood; training for their intended and eventual lives. "Though, my dad's answer was basically that I need to get better at hiding my stuff. Which will hopefully be easier here than it was in the temp place." As she spoke, as if considering the issue, Ieliene reached out a hand for a pair of earrings hanging on the side of the mirror, and stuffed them into the underside of a seam in one of the pillowcases. "Horses come on Thursday, though, so maybe she'll be too busy to filch much for awhile after that."
"Why thank you," Gunnar replied with a joking grin and a semi-bow. "But I had an aunt who was a lawyer too, so it's not solely your aunt's influence. And you Dad is right, though I suspect the main outcome here will be that Raikael gets good at locating secret compartments." Which is probably an outcome her parents will be just as happy with. He didn't say it, instead jumping at the opportunity to turn the conversation to a topic much nearer his heart: horses. "I think I'm looking forward to the horses at least as much as anyone here, if not more. If I didn't know better, I'd think someone bribed you to move here and import them so I'd put in for a permanent transfer."
"I wouldn't put that past your grandma when she sold them to us, actually; but this isn't where I think would've been her first choice if so." Ieliene cocked one pert eyebrow. The teenager wasn't entirely certain exactly how this particular planet had been selected: Maybe in part for the Bray job; or for Gunnar's presence there at the time? Or maybe on some list of approved sites to move to when they'd expressed interest in leaving Earth given to the adults by the solemn suits and bland uniforms who'd come at first every week, then later every few months, back on Earth to collect her aunt, always returning her later looking spent and drained in an existential way. "No idea what they discussed; all us 'kids' got kicked outside when that deal went down."
Gunnar suppressed a chuckle at how easily his joke had been taken as a real possibility, especially one schemed by his grandmother. Caithlin had seemingly decided Amma counted as head of House, which had probably amused Afi no end since it had been a running joke between them for as long as he could remember, but it was Caithlin herself that he had meant as the instigator of such a plot as it provided her House with a trusted child minder. Still, he was mildly surprised that Ieliene hadn't been privy to the negotiations - at her age his family had more or less regarded him as 'adult-in-training' and so made sure he was an observer, if not participant, in such family business. "I may have to ask what did go down someday. But for now, I'm just happy there will be horses."
"Lots of them, really. I think we got something like five or six." Ieleiene counted human-style on her fingers, bedazzled in purple sparkling nail polish but cut short and neat for proper ability to practice everything from rock climbing to martial arts. That over abundance of equines, perhaps, had been Gunnar's grandma's influence, one had to wonder; to ensure an available mount for her grandson. Then Ieliene rolled her eyes yet again. "As for what went down from my perspective...Dad made me go with Arren and Telek to the barn to look at 'their' horses with your cousins little kids 'cause he thought otherwise they all might do something stupid."
Ieliene lowered her voice for this last bit, perhaps fearing her cousins overhearing and making an issue of it; but it was another clue to the oldest-of-the-younger-set's growing place of responsibilities in the family; beginning in fact to be called up in the rather 'divide and conquer' style of child rearing and protection; rather like Gunnar had been slotted into when she had been half her current age. "The horses are cool, but I'm more looking forward to seeing how this place is for snowboarding."
"Your Dad is a wise man," Gunnar observed solemnly. "You should take it as a compliment that he trusts you so much." Though he wasn't as sure of her judgment, at least where past times were concerned. Then again, when he'd first arrived, he had been somewhat excited at the prospect of good snowboarding. Of course, there hadn't been any horses or expectation of any arriving. "To each to their own, I suppose. The snowboarding is good, but you're probably going to be in so many layers of winter clothes, it'll be an effort to do much. Horses though, those you can enjoy even inside."
A dubious, quizzical teen eyebrow quirked up; running through in her head in there was anything big enough on the colony to ride a horse indoors on. Maybe he just meant hanging out in the barn like her sister did? "I don't think outside will be a problem, though; for riding or snowboarding." She grinned. "I got the good winter gear." She reached over and rummaged one handed through some clothes, pulling out what to unknowing eyes was a relatively thin winter bodysuit with matching and removable gloves, hat/headband, and even a partial facemask you could add or remove; in black and electric blue. "Got that thermal insulating stuff and windblocking tech, plus a mesh of heating elements throughout it you can use if you have to." Ieliene shrugged. "I know my aunt and parents bitch about the weather, but we grew up in Boston winters, and then visiting your grandparents since Raikael got into horses, too."
Much like the story of the first generation of anyone growing up in a new place, while there might be challenges from balancing expectations and cultures, on the flipside Ieliene and her sisters and cousins adapted better to their environments in various needed ways without the stress or preconceptions their parents brought to such efforts; and if no one knew exactly what the 'we' of the younger generation would turn out to be yet exactly, they seemed perhaps less bothered by that than Kali had been, perhaps because there was practically a small army of them facing it together. "Found this company that does custom or targeted winter gear for the colder-sensitive species without looking ridiculous. Vulcanoids, Saurians, Klingons, that sorta thing. Waaay better than the stuff I had a little kid. You can show me where the best hills are."
He expected that despite the tech, her parents would insist on limited exposure, and truth be told there had been some days last winter when even he stayed indoors. But managing that was months away (though he made mental note to ask about weather during the t'Leiya's visit the next time he comm'ed home. Just for reference, and maybe something to keep in a backpocket). "I'll be glad to show you," he said with a smile, then glanced back out toward the newly constructed stable. "Not as glad as I'll be to ride a real horse again, mind you, but if you need to get away from your sister for a bit, I can show you the best hills. A hoverboard works nearly as well after all."
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