Cradlekind
Posted on June 22nd, 2021 by Hannah Ziredac

[content warning: sibling abuse]

Ziredac Residence
Dellenville, Colorado
June 10, 2383

‘Alright, smile! That means everybody, Steven Eagle; this is Graduation Day, not a military funeral. And Jesus Christ, boys, will you scooch in and take a picture like friends for once?’

‘Just take the holo, Mom.’

‘George! George, get in there with the boys.’

‘Mom, just take the holo, Dad doesn’t want—’

‘Babe, I’m trying to get this cake frosted in here.’

‘See?’

‘Well put the frosting down and come in here and take a picture with your son at his graduation party! Hannah, you get in there too.’

‘No.’

‘Go stand in front of your brother, sweetie! It’ll look so cute next to your graduation holo in fourteen years.’

‘Mom, Hannah doesn’t need to be in the picture.’

‘Nor do I want to.’

‘Hannah, just—’

‘Mom. Take the goddamn holo.’

‘Okay-okay-okay, fine. Steven, where’d that smile go? Joey, scooch in closer. Jason honey, your hair’s doing that thing again, will you…? There you go. Alright, in three, two, one…’ Snap. ‘Was that so hard?’

Jason Ziredac, Steven Eagle, and Joseph Neromiger gave a unison, ‘Yes,’ stripped off their formal cadet jackets, and descended hyena-like upon the potluck table. Uncles, aunts, and cousins crowded the boys with all the standard queries: Do you have an assignment yet? Oh great, which ship? Have you met the senior staff yet? How long before you make Lieutenant Junior Grade?

Of course, golden boy Jason Ziredac had all but already received that next pip. The USS Meridian had scooped up his assignment just before half of their Science department, including the chief officer, hopped off to take up a glitzier assignment (or something). As Jason was so fond of regaling: ‘Admiral Rhee took one look at my file and knew I was good for the position, but that the chief couldn’t be just an ensign.’

The uncles and aunts and cousins, they all loved that. ‘You’re such a fine officer already, the admiralty can’t promote you fast enough!’ Never came to anyone’s mind that maybe he got the assignment out of desperation.

Hannah crossed her arms and compressed herself harder into the armrest of the sofa. Why she had to sit in a room with a bunch of grownups all congratulating themselves on jobs yet to be done was beyond her. Not like she could disrupt a party while quietly doing anything else in her room.

Rina was here, at least: definitely Hannah’s favorite cousin, if she had to choose. She was the closest to Hannah’s age (though, at fifteen to Hannah’s ten, Rina might as well have been another one of the grownups) and was the only one to treat Hannah like she wasn’t a baby anymore.

‘Hey Hannah Banana.’ Okay, maybe aside from the stupid nickname. ‘You look bored. You bored?’

‘How’d you guess?’

With a muted chuckle Rina said, ‘It was a tough one to piece together. Wanna show me some more of those antique video games you’ve been messin around with?’

‘My mom said I had to stay down here.’

‘Perfect time for me to exploit the uncle/aunt rule.’ Rina leaned in, theatrically conspiratorial. ‘Your mom can’t get mad at me unless I do something really bad. Making her kid show me video games is hardly bad under the uncle/aunt rule. Come on!’

They climbed the stairs to Hannah’s room, where Hannah turned on her new MonoCon™ and started flipping through the games by decade.

Rina let out a prolonged, ‘Wow,’ as the user interface rolled through what must have been hundreds of thousands of games. ‘I can’t believe this all goes back this far. Wild to think they were playing VR games in the 2100s.’

‘Early 21st century’s the earliest,’ Hannah said. ‘Actually they tried it in the late 20th century too, but it didn’t catch on right away.’

‘Whoa, you’ve been playing games from the 1900s? Are they any good?’

‘If you like 2D gaming, yeah.’

Rina took up the second-player control, kept whispering, ‘Wow.’

‘Okay, so, this one’s called Mario Kart 64.’

‘They made sixty-four of these?’

For the next hour Hannah guided Rina through the blocky world of late-20th-century Nintendo games, whooping her ass at Mario Kart, Perfect Dark, and Super Smash Bros.

‘My favorite Nintendo games are Zelda games, though. They’re single-player so they’d probably be boring if I showed you. They’re really good though. The 64 one is called Ocarina of Time, and there’s a brave adventurer with a sword and a bow, and a powerful princess who uses the power of Light and stuff, and this evil guy with green skin who wants to just destroy everything. And they each have a piece of the Triforce, so they’re bound together by Destiny… It’s really cool.’

Rina smiled. ‘That sounds real gellish, Han! I’ll have to get a MonoCon™ and try that one. Zelda, it’s called?’

‘Yeah.’

Hannah’s bedroom door opened; no knock. ‘Hannah, Mom wants you downstairs, we’re cutting cake.’ Jason’s face bore the dour sag of a young man doing something he wished he didn’t have to do.

‘Ooh, cake!’ Rina nudged Hannah with her elbow again. ‘Let’s go get some!’ She hopped up, shuffled past Jason, and went downstairs.

Cake was an easy consolation. Hannah stood up, turned off the MonoCon™, and turned to follow downstairs. Jason remained in the doorway, that tired petulance morphing into exhausted contempt.

‘You could at least pretend to give a shit,’ he said.

Hannah’s guts turned cold and heavy. She froze, didn’t say a word.

‘This is a big day for me. Me and Joe and Steve. I don’t need a sulky kid making everyone at the party uncomfortable.’

Hannah shrugged. ‘It’s boring.’

Jason’s eyes widened. ‘Only to you, which is all you ever think about. People are trying to have a nice time, and you’re making it hard. So lighten the fuck up, huh? I’ve watched you fake tons of shit to get what you want, so do us all a favor and fake being in a good mood. I’m tired of this shit.’

There was nothing Hannah could say.

=Λ=

USS Meridian-A
Brig
June 16, 2400

All fucking six of the Sec officers remained outside Hannah’s brig cell: one on each side of the cell’s forcefield, and two each on either side of the door leading out into the corridor. A seventh Sec officer arrived. Human, pallid and freckled, black hair, reptile-cold eyes; she walked in unhurried, stood perpendicular to Hannah, and turned that frigid stare upon her for an unreadable five or six seconds. Without a word the woman took the guard station opposite the cell and continued her stare.

‘Ooh,’ Hannah said. ‘Tough girl, huh?’

Silence.

‘Bet that nothing-behind-the-eyes look really impresses the newbies.’

Silence.

‘I mean, it’s impressing me. Wanna make out a little bit?’

One of the guards next to her cell said, ‘Hey. Shut up.’

‘Mind your beeswax, teacher’s pet, I’ve almost gotten through to Lieutenant Anglerfish over there.’

The other guard barked, ‘Shut up.’

‘Will you guys stop steppin on my game, here? She’s putty in my hands at this point. We’ll be moving in together in a month; mark my words.’

Cutting off any further riling, the door hissed open, and Jason’s voice said, ‘Everyone is dismissed.’

The guards filed out, both glaring at Hannah as they went. Jason came into view, hands in his uniform jacket pockets, face looking more and more like Dad’s each year—disappointment and all.

Lieutenant Anglerfish came to his side, said, ‘Sir, I recommend not being alone with—’

‘That’ll be all, Ms. Martin.’

‘Sir, with all due respect, she got out of an FSA interro—’

‘I said that’ll be all, Ms. Martin.’

Martin gave Hannah one more frigid regard for the road, then followed her captain’s orders.

What followed was an uncomfortable silence that broke easily into the top five uncomfortable silences of Hannah’s life: a caesura of such stultifying weight that she, for a moment, felt like no living human would ever speak again. Jason pulled a maneuver right out of Dad’s playbook: he flew an eyebrow, cinched one side of his mouth in a bleak half-smile, and let his head waver in a slow nod that said, Yeah, you know what you did, and you know what you’re in for.

Hannah snorted. ‘Whoa, Dad, what are you doing here? I thought my condescending asshole of a brother was the captain.’

‘How did you delete your records?’

‘We went over this years ago: I didn’t delete my record, I just changed a few grades. Trigonometry’s a real pain the ass.’

Another Dad-move: Jason kept his voice at a maddening mid-low volume but upped his annunciation. ‘Don’t make me ask again.’

‘Well, if it’s not my high school records, what records are you talking about?’

Jason sighed, stared at her for a long lump of seconds. ‘Hacking into the FSA and Starfleet’s network is enough of a crime to land yourself in a penal colony until you hit menopause. And it’s doubtless that the tech required to do so isn’t something a civilian would’ve legally acquired. Now. You’re in a unique and potentially fortunate position here, Hannah. You can—’

‘Oh, eat shit with your unique and potentially fortunate positions. I’ve done nothin wrong, but since I live the kind of life I live, you just want to punish me f—’

‘And what kind of life is that, Hannah? What honest line of work do you do in a stealth ship that can cripple an FSA vessel and teleport out of sensor range?’

‘Perfectly legal traversal through neutral zones, you fucking dickhead.’

‘You can lie to everyone else all you want—I can only imagine what you’ve told the Atlantis crew—but you can’t lie to me. I saw your records. I saw your warrants. Just because you got it out of the database, that doesn’t mean no one remembers it anymore.’

‘Oh, yeah, sure, I’m sure you—’ Hannah flew air quotes. ‘—“saw” whatever records you wanted. Christ, you really would do anything to punish me for existing.’

Jason made the quietest, evenest, and possibly most effective use of the low-volume annunciation, prefacing it with a slight raise of the chin. ‘Don’t go there.’

‘Why the fuck not, Jase? Shit, I remember being fourteen; if there’d been an infant in the next room screaming all through the night, I’d resent the little fucker too.’

‘Hannah, don’t—’

‘And if I’d grown up as an obedient kid who listened to my parents, and my kid sister was the exact opposite, I’d be angry at her all the time, just like you were.’

‘I’m not going t—’

‘Maybe I’d even resent my parents too, for not being harder on me. Maybe I’d take it upon myself to give her the real discipline she needed.’

‘Hannah, I swear to g—’

‘You know, get in her head, get her feeling ashamed for expressing herself. Use my grownup size to intimidate her, make her scared. Then one day, when she’s ten years old, maybe I’d just up and—’

Jason’s stepped as close to the forcefield as he could without touching it. ‘Shut the fuck up!’

Hannah did not allow his outburst to daunt her. She staved the startled jump, then stepped up to the forcefield so they were almost toe to toe. And now it was time to pull out the Mom-move: the even-quieter, even-evener, even more cutting voice, with the full half-octave drop in her throat. ‘Maybe I’d just up and punch my kid sister in the head, just for being in a bad mood. Then threaten her with worse if she told anyone.’

There was nothing Jason could say.

=Λ=

Ziredac Residence
Dellenville, Colorado
June 10, 2383

The only place to go was the closet. Quivering, the left side of her head throbbing, some small laceration stinging in the throb’s epicenter, Hannah crawled into the closet and slid the door closed. Nausea set in. She hugged her knees to her chest in the darkness, tensing every muscle she could to stop herself from crying.

Footsteps outside. She had not been aware that Jason had left the room, but now he returned, paused, then deduced her location. The door slid open, and he towered over her for moment, in which Hannah cocooned up and wished upon every star in the galaxy that he’d fuck off forever—just go get on this Meridian and get blasted out of space by a dozen Romulan warbirds on his first fucking day.

He squatted before her, put a hand on her arm. ‘Hey,’ he said.

Hannah squirmed, pulled away.

‘Hey,’ he said again. ‘You want your face to keep bleeding? Come here.’

She looked up. Jason shook the dermal regenerator in her face. Conceding naught else, Hannah allowed him to repair the gash on her left temple. When he was done, he held her face in place and said, ‘Look. I’m sorry. Okay? But you have to shape the fuck up. Acting like this isn’t gonna cut it in the real world. If you’re like this as an adult, you’re gonna get much worse. Trust me.’

Jason stood up and added, ‘Now come downstairs so Mom doesn’t have to find out about all this, huh?’

The rest of that weekend was one celebration of Jason Fucking Ziredac after another. He went on smiling, laughing, having the picture-perfect summer experience with his best friends and family, and no one could get enough of his joy. The Ziredacs all caravanned out to Lake Granby, rented a couple campsites and a boat, had all the wholesome fun-in-the-sun bullshit you could ever ask for. Her cousin Chris even had his stupid guitar and sang a bunch of stupid covers around the stupid campfire. And Hannah had to watch Jason get the sendoff of his life, front and center.

Hannah was allowed to invite a friend out to the lake, and of course that friend was Erika. Erika was the only one who ever knew about the terror of Jason Ziredac.

‘Fuck that guy,’ Erika said, in all of her Erikaness. ‘It’s good he’s so much older than you and is leaving.’

‘Seriously.’

They sat on a small peninsula on the lakeshore while everyone else drank beer and grilled burgers and dogs nearby. Hannah didn’t think she could ever love anyone in the galaxy more than she loved Erika Batten, and she thanked whatever drunk and deadbeat higher power there was that she was here with her.

‘You should tell your mom though. She’d be on your side.’

‘I know she would be,’ Hannah said, ‘but that ain’t the point. Jason would just do something worse to me to get back at me.’

‘Then he’d lose everything! Starfleet wouldn’t want some fucking rab who punches kids.’

‘But then where would he be?’ Hannah let it set in. ‘If I don’t say anything, he goes away on mission, and I hopefully don’t see him for a long time.’

‘Okay, good call.’

‘I hope he fucking dies out there.’

‘Me too, girl. Fuck that guy.’

Hannah and Erika tossed rocks into the wakes, watched the jet-skiers zip over the distant waters.

‘It’s cuz of Destiny,’ Hannah said.

‘Huh?’

‘His girlfriend. She died.’

‘Of what?’

‘Shuttle crash.’

‘Oh fuck.’

‘Yeah. She was nice. From what I remember.’

‘Why is she to blame, though?’

‘She’s not to blame; her death is. Or… I dunno. When she died, Jason didn’t have anyone. Mom and Dad supported him but they’re not, like… What’s a psychologist called when they help people who lost a loved one?’

‘I dunno.’

‘Well, Mom and Dad aren’t that, whatever it is. And Joey and Steven, they were Destiny’s friends too, so they were also hurting. And Jason wouldn’t go see a…a… whatever they’re called. And I remember him saying that because Destiny was gone, there was no one he could ever love again. I think that kinda…you know. Made him like this.’

‘That sucks, but it’s no excuse.’

‘Ain’t sayin it is.’

‘Real sad though.’

‘Yeah.’

They stopped throwing rocks and just watched the lake exist for a minute. Erika took Hannah’s hand, made sure it was hidden behind a rock so no one would see it. This was the third time they ever held hands, and it still sent a thousand volts up Hannah’s arm and into her heart.

‘If you die,’ Erika said, ‘I swear not to become an asshole.’

‘Me too.’