A/N: Ugh, I am SO SORRY this update has taken so long. The holidays ate my soul, and ever since then I've been both too busy and too lost for inspiration on all my fic. Hopefully that will change now. In this particular chapter, everyone is bewildered except for Jim, who is just small and adorable.

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Doctor Sy was not quite sure what to think.

She saw Winona every morning, and while she was satisfied with the woman's physical recovery, her mental state was…worrisome. Which was perfectly understandable; the doctor herself wasn't in the best mental shape, but she was better off than Winona--she'd lost her shipmates, but at least she hadn't listened to her husband die, and looking after Winona gave her an anchor, something to do.

Eventually, when Winona no longer needed constant monitoring, she'd gone to the Narada's sickbay. The ship had a surprising number of medics and one full-blown doctor, and after some initial suspicion they'd started teaching her to use their medical technology, and the intricacies of Romulan physiology. After all, she'd said, what else was she to do with her time?

After two months of that, when she'd come to know them all better, she'd started covert therapy, under the guise of curiosity. They'd never accept it if they knew what she was doing--too damn proud--but through seemingly-casual questions she learned much about their histories and where exactly they were in the various stages of grief. She'd like to think she did some good, too.

Winona, though…her mental state deteriorated at a slow but steady pace for months, until, perhaps three weeks after she began her lessons in Romulan with the ship's captain, it at least leveled off and grew no worse. That ought to have been an encouraging sign, but since the doctor had no idea why,it still concerned her. It was by now obvious Nero meant her no physical harm, but how in the Universe he'd halted her deterioration Sy couldn't begin to guess. So one day, when Ayel stopped by the infirmary with a mild cut on his hand, she cornered him and asked.

"I realize this is an odd question," she said, as she bandaged his hand, "but you work with your captain closer than anyone, and I want your opinion."

"On what?" Aye asked warily, though he had to already know.

"On he and Winona," she said bluntly. "He's not made her any better, but he seems to have stopped her getting worse. I want to know if you have any idea why."

Ayel was silent a moment while she cleaned the blood away. In what little she'd seen of him, he seemed more stable than any of the other Romulans she'd met so far, his tattooed face neither so fierce nor so anguished. "I think," he said slowly, "he's started looking at her as her and not his wife. He brings her up to the bridge a lot, and the way he looks at her is…different."

Perceptive, this Romulan. "How?"

Ayel seemed to grope for words. "Not so…hungry. I don't know how to describe it. She's been…good for him, in a way. He can still have a terrible temper, but it's not constant anymore. He's a little--a very little--like he was Before."

She'd long ago noticed that all of them seemed to infuse 'before' with a capital B, without even realizing they were doing so. "Is that a good thing?" she asked.

"It has to be. The navigator and I have talked it over often. It seems like he wants her to be happy just so she'll be happy, not because he wants anything from her. That's…much more like he was, Before. He went insane when he lost his wife, and he's--not so much, now."

"I thought she'd go insane herself, for a while," Sy said, tidying up her instruments. "Now I don't think she'll get any worse, but I don't know if she'll get better. It's not just her husband she lost--she had another son back on Earth, and I don't think she lets herself think of him too often because she knows, on some level, it would break her. But that's not healthy."

"No one on this ship is healthy," he said, to her surprise. "You don't know what we were like, Before. We're lost in space right now, until the Captain decides where he wants us to go. Going back to Romulus--we just can't yet, none of us. It's home but it's also not. Not this far in the past. And Romulus in this time is much more dangerous than it was in ours--it's our planet but not as we knew it, and going there now might be even worse than staying out here."

Yes, very perceptive. And after the destruction of the Kelvin they could hardly seek a place on any Federation world…they'd left themselves in something of a jam. Their own small world, aboard this ship, had little choice but to find an uninhabited planet if they ever wanted to settle. And it might take years for them to decide to do it.

"The Captain wouldn't do it yet, anyway," he said. "We're waiting for someone, and I think he'll keep moving up here until he's worked out when that someone will arrive. He wants justice for the destruction of our home planet." He looked away. "We deserve it, but--not in this time. What he would do would only allow most of this quadrant to be destroyed in a century and a half."

Sy stared at him, her huge dark eyes even wider.

"The Alpha Quadrant is eventually invaded by something called the Dominion. If he does what he wants, we'll lose that war. All of us, not just the Federation. It took the Federation, the Empire, and the Klingons to defeat them."

Anything that could actually unite all three had to be bad beyond all imagining. "What is it he wants?" she whispered.

"To destroy Vulcan," Ayel said flatly. "In our time they promised they would save Romulus, and they failed us. I understand why he wants it, but it would do much more harm than good. Vengeance is our right, but the consequences…."

He looked back at her, his dark eyes burning. "I think your Winona will help. He already…behaves much better when she's around, and if he doesn't realize it yet it will eventually occur to him that if he did destroy Vulcan, he'd also destroy any…anything she might come to feel for him. And I don't think he'd risk that."

That…was far too much for Sy to process just yet. Future wars aside, the cataclysmic effect the destruction of Vulcan would have on the Federation beggared all imagination. Ayel was right--his captain had gone insane.

She was quiet a very, very long time. Finally she said, "But you really think Winona's having a good effect on him?"

"Everybody who works with him does. He used to be very different, Before," Ayel said quietly. "We all were, but he's changed the most. If you'd known him Before you'd think him then and him now were two different people. What he's like when he's near Winona…makes me think Oren isn't dead after all."

"Oren?" Sy tried to repeat it, only to completely mangle it.

"His true name. Our names are usually impossible for humans to pronounce--if we simplify them and flip them backward you can. He'll never be Oren again, but maybe she can make Nero…closer to what he was." If he weren't a Romulan, Sy would swear there was almost something wistful in his tone.

"The only question, then," she said softly, "is what he'll make of her. She too was very different, in our Before."

"Onen says she's seen that. The women have tried to help her feel more…at home, her. The grief-markings were Onen's idea. Most of us had never seen a human before--she's as alien to us as we are to her, and they've been trying to learn about her as well as teach her about us. She's been giving them lessons in Standard when she's not learning Romulan from the Captain, and Onen said she even smiled once when one of them made some mistake."

She'd smiled? That had to be a positive sign. Sy at least had realized long ago that escape simply wasn't going to be possible, but she knew Winona held onto the dream like a lifeline and so never said so. The best they could hope for was a decent life here, and it was a relief to know the women were trying. Most of the Romulans, she'd come to realize quite a while ago, weren't really a bad sort--angry, grieving, but not so murderous as their captain. Very difficult to understand, at times, but they were a truly alien culture, one with whom the Federation had no experience. She'd been slowly learning about them, and it was a relief to know Winona was, too.

"Thank you," she said, when she'd finished putting away her things. "I appreciate your opinion."

He gave her a nod that said you're welcome without words, and for the first time she got the impression he was nodding as to an equal. Somehow they'd become something like cautious allies, and she didn't think that was necessarily a bad thing. Resistance till the bitter end might be noble, but it was also fatal and impractical. Like Winona, she was trying to make the best of what she had here--as were all the Romulans, for that matter. Now that she'd gotten to know a few she could see them as people, not a collective of monsters; the only one she'd still regarded so was their captain, and if Ayel was to be believed, even he was changing, or trying to. She could only hope he'd change enough before he had the ability to destroy Vulcan.

----

Ayel resumed his station when he left the infirmary--he had the bridge for now, as the captain was inspecting something in Engineering. Onen was there as well, and though there were others on the bridge he didn't lower his voice when he asked how Winona was. Ninety percent of the crew were personally invested in that whole thing now, because he and Onen weren't the only ones who'd seen the change the human woman had brought about in Nero.

"Well enough. She says Jim is finally sleeping through the night."

"Human children grow so quickly," Idan put in. "He will be tall, I think. Tall and strong, for a human anyway." It might prove difficult to know what to allow the child to do or not do when he got older, since human children were even more alien to them all than Romulan. And that…raised another question that had occurred to Ayel, that he didn't yet know how to raise in turn to Nero. Right now they were all still far too grieved to even consider it, but in the years to come…well, there were a lot of people on the Narada, and sooner or later at least a few of them would form relationships, and relationships occasionally resulted in children. Especially given the fact that they hadn't much they could use in the way of birth control--it just wasn't something that came up on a mining ship. He had no idea how Nero would react to the thought, and so said nothing--time enough for that later, whenever the subject of interpersonal relationships came up. Technically they weren't supposed to happen aboard any ship, military or civilian, but the Narada…was something of a special circumstance. As the human doctor had realized, the ship was its own small world, a civilization set apart, and so was not always going to follow standard ship protocol.

They all came to somewhat stricter attention when Nero entered the bridge, each and every one of them covertly assessing his mood. It was almost impossible to predict what sort of temper he'd be in if they didn't know when he'd last seen Winona, but this time they seemed to be in luck, for he only gave them all a nod before assuming his place in the captain's chair. The intensity that disturbed even his crew was still there, but he no longer looked nor felt like he might devolve into violence if anyone so much as breathed wrong. All things considered it wasn't technically much progress, but it was a beginning.

"Find me a planet, Ayel," Nero said, without preamble, and the entire bridge stared at him. "Something uninhabited, something the Federation will not find."

"A…planet, Sir?" Ayel asked, wondering if he'd heard right.

"A planet. I still have not fully worked out when what we need will be arriving, but it will not be for at least a Standard decade, and I don't intend to spend all those years up here." It seemed Nero was in one of his more manic stages, but this time at least the edge of instability was decidedly blunted. Fortunately.

Ayel glanced at Onen, a glance that communicated far more than words could have done. Much could happen in ten years--perhaps…perhaps it would work. Perhaps Winona would change Nero even a little, even just enough to make him forget his insane revenge by the time Spock and his ship finally did arrive. Certainly nothing else in the entire universe was likely to.

"Aye, sir." He fed the request into the computer, feeling the console hum warmly beneath his hand. Much as he loved the Narada, he was relieved his captain had decided against lurking in it forever; he and all his crew were miners, unused to spending prolonged periods of time away from an actual atmosphere. The ship was gigantic--over six Standard miles long, and still growing--but it wasn't equal to open ground, open sky. On a planet they could grow food, modify their existing mining tools--and grieve. Properly grieve, with all the ritual Romulan mourning customs entailed; there was much more to it than the facial markings, but up here many of the rites were impossible to carry out. They could grieve, and who knew--maybe they could even heal, a little.

----

They were not to find one right away, but Nero had not expected to. Finding an uninhabited Class M planet wasn't terribly difficult; the trouble was finding one where the Federation wouldn't spot them. This far in the past their patrols were not nearly so regular nor so efficient as they had been in the Narada's proper timeline, but it wasn't something any of them wanted to risk. Nero had an especial paranoia about it, because if the Federation did find them, they wouldn't just take his crew prisoner, they would take away Winona. And he knew, in his broken way, that she hadn't yet reached a stage where she wouldn't leave if given the opportunity.

For Nero wasn't stupid. Part of him knew full well that what he was doing was terribly wrong, and quite unfair to her, but that was hardly going to stop him. He was determined that in time, even if she were given the chance to leave, to return to Earth, he'd make it so she wouldn't want to. He'd make her trust him, make her love him--but first he needed to make certain she wouldn't go insane.

He didn't tell her about the planet until they'd found one. It had taken a month for Ayel to locate something suitable, and in that time Nero and Winona had continued their Romulan tutorials, and occasional walks around the ship. He knew she still wouldn't have a chance of finding her way around on her own, but the walks made her think, made her ask questions, drew her out of the rather perilous pit within her own mind. She even took Jim along, sometimes, carrying him in a kind of makeshift back-brace--he would stare at everything with those amazingly blue eyes, occasionally giving his mother's hair a cheerful tug. He at least out of the three humans seemed perfectly content on the Narada, curious and cheerful, even if he did have a tendency to throw up on whoever was holding him. Winona had assured Nero, when he'd had to clean his coat for the fifth time, that was just something babies did, and it didn't mean the child was ill.

"We might have a problem, when he moves to solid food," she said one day, cradling the sleeping boy. Nero didn't know if it was his imagination, but she looked marginally less worn--the dark circles beneath her grey eyes had faded, and her complexion now was only pallid because of lack of sunlight rather than poor health. She always did look different when she held Jim; the child seemed to focus her, to draw her whole consciousness to the immediate present. "Your food is very--spicy, and human children have incredibly sensitive taste buds, as well as sensitive stomachs." She tickled Jim's face, and when the baby gurgled up at her she actually--wonder of wonders--smiled. It was a faint smile, and fleeting, but it was there, and that more than anything that had yet happened here eased some of Nero's inner tension.

It also gave him an opening. "I told Ayel to look for a planet," he said slowly, "and yesterday he found one. I think we could--establish a colony there." Part of him dreaded her response to that--dreaded the thought that she might take that and ask why, if he intended to settle anywhere, he didn't just send her home. In all the months after her arrival, she had yet to ask for or demand release--from him, anyway, and he suspected it was because she was too proud to beg. If she ever were to ask, there would be no satisfactory answer he could give her. I don't want to wouldn't cut much ice, nor would it help his case any. He took the fact that she was thinking that far ahead as a good sign--that she was thinking of a future life with the Romulans, and not of escape.

Winona looked up at him, sharply, her grey eyes piercing. "Not Romulus?" she asked, and Nero shook his head.

"No. We are our own world, now. It is…if you were thrown a century and a half into your world's past, would you still consider it home?"

She paused a long while before answering. "No," she said, her tone both thoughtful and unreadable. "No, I certainly wouldn't. Earth then was…very different."

"And this Romulus is very unlike mine," he said gravely. "To set foot there now would be pain beyond measure."

There was nothing Winona could say to that. It had grown much easier in the last months for her to comprehend just how much pain all the Romulans had suffered--that she was hardly alone in that. They'd become people to her, distinct individuals, but Nero at least had always been the monster, the enemy--the one she had to fight, if only mentally. And she had, for a time, until she'd grown too weary and her mind too fragile, and then…this…had settled in. She had no word for it, no name, but it was that 'this' that allowed her to think of a future among these people, to look beyond the beginning and end of each day and week and month and see some kind of life instead. And she'd been away from her home and her family long enough that the thought of making planetfall with the Romulans wasn't something unendurable; Jim was nearly a year old now, and she wanted her son to see sky. She didn't want his first memories to be of this strange ship, which at times seemed suffused with the grief and misery of its occupants.

"Tell me more," she said, when the silence stretched too long and Jim started trying to gnaw on her hair. It had grown long in the last year, longer than she'd ever had it, and she'd taken to wearing it as some of the Romulan women did, drawn back from her forehead in a single braid. It was practical, and for some bizarre reason she couldn't bring herself to cut it. Many of the women had hacked theirs off, as a sign of grief, but Onen had kept hers--because, she'd said, her fiancé had liked it so. George had always enjoyed playing with her hair, so Winona kept hers as well. Even if it meant she occasionally had to pry the braid away from a curious baby.

"It is a little cooler than Romulus, though a bit warmer than Earth. Very small polar caps, and only two massive continents. The gravity is somewhat less than Earth's, and the air more oxygen-rich--it might take some getting used to, for all of us."

He was watching her closely, as he often did, and as usual she didn't quite know what to make of it. She'd never seen him seem so genuinely pleased, so strangely happy in spite of his obvious reservations, and it occurred to her that he wanted off this ship as much as she did, for all it had been his home. Something about that happiness disturbed her a little, because it offered a more concrete glimpse than ever just what kind of person he'd been before all this, which only made the contrast between that idea and the reality of what he was now even sharper. Winona had given up trying to fathom him weeks ago, though, since it really seemed to be practically impossible--and the fact that he was still obviously unstable didn't help. She doubted he could fathom himself, if asked to; possibly because, like her, he was afraid to look too deep. Winona herself didn't dare allow anything like true introspection, because she didn't want to know what she might find inside her own slightly fractured mind--her psyche had glued itself back together with only the most tenuous of bonds, and she wasn't about to jar it just yet. If it smashed again, she might not be able to put it back together.

"I think I would like to see the sun again," she said at last, giving Jim her finger en lieu of her hair. "I would like to see this planet, for myself." And no, she wouldn't let herself think about Earth, wouldn't compare any of it to home, because that way lay nothing good. She'd taken all her love of Earth, all the happy memories of her own Before that brought such crippling homesickness, and locked them carefully away in a trunk at the back of her mind. They were still there, and she'd never let herself forget them, but for now they slept where they couldn't torment her.

She'd swear he actually smiled, brief and quick as lightning, and gone as soon. "We land at the continent's dawn. Ayel found a place where we might realistically settle, with conditions conducive to Romulans and humans. I…would like you to come with me, when I go out to inspect it. If you…would."

The strange pauses in Nero's speech to her were fairly new, and Winona still wasn't sure what to make of them. Though it had been going on for quite some time, she still couldn't reconcile the idea that he was asking her, that he was giving her a chance to say 'no'.

Not that she was about to, in this case. "Of course I will," she said, without hesitation. This at least needed no thought, no consideration--it was outside, it was a world with fresh air, under a proper sky with a proper sun…no, she wasn't going to say no. And, for the first time in nearly a year, she felt that she had something to look forward to.

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A/N: Aaand planetfall is going to introduce a whole host of other complications, as everyone's dynamic is going to be quite different than it was on the Narada, not just Nero and Winona's. At least I've left off being quite so cruel to them both? (For now, anyway. We'll see what happens later, because apparently I'm evil and can't be properly nice to anybody.)