Chapter Text
Jane was never the biggest fan of change.
Patterns were her favorite thing in the world. Constant, yet slightly variable. Repetitive in motion yet never stationary. Closed to outside influence, yet open to adaptability.
Change was none of that.
However, no matter her feelings about it, change came anyway. She found comfort in the patterns gleamed over time after change, but the initial shock was always jarring.
One of her favourite patterns was this: kids will be kids will be kids.
“Miss Jane!” She could hear little Charlotte Brown hollering up a storm on her porch. “ Miss Jane! ”
Sobek and T’mira, her two post-grad students, bristled at the interruption to their studies by the loud and clumsy display from Charlotte. The two Vulcan teens, while always finding displays of emotions illogical, never failed to react like an annoyed cat at the local children’s sticky fingers and healthy set of lungs.
“I’m coming, I’m coming!” Jane yelled back as she set aside her historical copy of Handmaid’s Tale. “Hold your horses!”
Sobek takes the book from her hands, “I will continue analysing this as a potential source for your bibliography.”
“Thanks,” She said. “T’mira, finish that vocabulary analysis for me and then start Sobek’s next chosen passage.”
“ MISS JANE!”
Jane rolled her eyes, leaving her two students behind to go yank the farmhouse’s door open, “Charlotte Brown!” She mimicked the younger girl’s tone.
Charlotte, with her messy pigtails and her missing front tooth, grinned up at her. “Hi Miss Jane.”
Jane crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow, a trick she had learned from her Vulcan coworkers while at a dig in Egypt. “Yes, Charlotte? Is there a reason you’re screaming my name on this fine afternoon?”
“Ma told me to go tell you that ‘there’s Starfleet officers hanging around the town again’ and she thought you should have a head’s up,” Charlotte explained, putting on her mother’s thick accent when she quoted her.
“Right,” Jane sighed. Charlotte may have been the first messenger to show up on her porch with this piece of news, but she was far from the first to tell her this. Since the crack of dawn, messages from neighbours have been pouring in to warn her of the presence of Starfleet in town.
Riverside was a tiny community, less than five hundred of them in total, mostly families that have been here for at least two hundred years. The small collection of farms were self-sustaining, and all their surplus was brought out by Starfleet looking to feed their own workers that live in the Shipyard a few miles away from Riverside proper. Those workers never cause any trouble, unless one of them decides to get too close to Jane to bug her on her parents, but the town has long learnt to keep Jane Kirk and Starfleet separated.
“Good job playing messenger, kiddo,” Jane opened the door wider so Charlotte could slip inside. “Lemme get you some lemonade and some cookies for a job well done.”
Charlotte’s family, the Browns, lived in the town. Her Ma and Pa owned the only bar in a ten mile radius, and they often sent their older boys to help out on the Kirk Farm. Jane has been the unofficial student job place and babysitter for the town since she’d turned fifteen and gotten herself emancipated so she could inherit the family farm early. Liam and Parker Brown had been here last night, helping out with cleaning out the chicken coop, and Jane had sent them off with a crisp 20 each and some zucchini for their troubles.
“Doctor Jane,” T’mira interrupted Charlotte’s happy chatter detailing how the Starfleet recruits were slowly paying her family’s monthly bill as the sun got lower in the sky. “Sobek and I have completed analysing the chapter for indications of socio-political influence from the era, with 3 passages with a 83.4% chance of being references to current events.”
“Good job,” Jane told the girl. “I’ll review that tomorrow morning. It’s getting late, do you and Sobek want to pack up? I’ll pick up dinner for us while I go return Charlotte to her family.”
T’mira immediately tensed. She and Sobek were both students of the Vulcan Science Academy, Jane’s patrons. The xenology Anthropology department at VSA (and why Vulcan classified Anthropology as a science rather than an art was beyond Jane) had sponsored Jane after her PhD dissertation made waves in the 20th and 21st centuries anthropological fields by suggesting that the Eugenics War was equally influenced by the growing governmental control of female’s bodies and the economic instability as it was to the known racial-prejudice of the era. T’mira and Sobek had applied to complete their thesis’ on Sex and Gender in Terran disasters and Economic Instability prior to Human War under her tutelage, and she had taken them both in over a year ago. They were well-versed in how Starfleet and Jane did not tend to mix well.
“Is she not to sleep in the guest bedroom tonight?” T’mira turned her nose up as she continued, “There will be many Starfleet officers in proximity to the Brown residence tonight. It would be illogical to journey so far to return a child with a past of inviting herself as an overnight guest.”
T’mira has always been uncomfortable around human children, she finds them rude and disruptive, although she gets along well with the teenagers.
“While I’m sure Donna wouldn’t mind Charlotte sleeping over, I want to know why there’s Starfleet recruitment in my town, and Donna always knows everybody’s business.” Jane explained, though it was partially a lie. She’s pretty sure she knows why Starfleet is back after she sent them running eight years ago.
“My bike’s out front,” The ten-year-old told Jane. “Can we ride the horses back?”
Kirk Farms was the only place that had horses in Riverside, the species had declined in population during the Eugenics War’s bombings of farmlands and wild horses were critically endangered. This, somehow, did not mean that preteen girls have found a different animal to have a fascination with.
“Prince and Duke are asleep,” She told the girl as she grabbed an extra scarf. “And Gingin is having foals. We’re taking my truck.”
“Aww,” The girl pouted, but was already running off to climb in the back of Jane’s truck. Kids will always be kids, she supposes.
In the drastic shift between centuries, from living in a pre-warp society to being reborn in space, Jane always found comfort in patterns.
“Tell Sobek that if I’m not back by morning, it’s for him to take my bike into town and talk with Donna, alright?”
T’mira’s eyebrows pinched ever so slightly in disapproval, she finds Sobek’s appreciation of Jane’s ‘primitive’ vintage transportation modes illogical, but she nodded.
“Good,” Jane smiled. “I’ll bring dinner if I’m back within the next three hours; otherwise, I think we still have vegetarian pizza leftovers from two days ago. Please sleep tonight, don’t just meditate, I want at least two hours from the both of you, don’t just go back to researching if I’m not back by midnight.”
She doesn’t give T’mira time to reply with a ‘logical’ argument of how Vulcans don’t need as much sleep as humans because Jane knows that T’mira could put stubbornness above logic if pushed to, and so she just held up a quick ta’al before shutting the door behind her.
There’s a lot of patterns in Star Trek: hope, love, found family, and utopias. They’re often positive abstract ideals, although occasionally, there are some more concrete ideals given voice. Jane’s favorite pattern, back when she was a young woman a lifetime ago, was the constant good that the adventures of the Enterprise would bring to the galaxy.
She started the truck after making sure Charlotte was buckled in properly. To Boldly Go, indeed.