A woman gives birth in the cramped confines of medical shuttle thirty-seven, her cries eclipsed by those of the newborn baby boy shortly placed in her arms. He is small with wisps of blond hair plastered to his head and settles uncommonly easily when gathered close. A conversation continues over his head, for his father is not present; over the expanse that separates the craft from the U.S.S. Kelvin, he stirs at the deep voice laughing over the comm.
"What, 'Tiberius'? That's awful, no, no. Let's name him after your dad. Let's call him Jim."
George Kirk dies telling his family I love you, I love you so much — and then everything continues as before as the acting captain of the starship buys his family and eight-hundred other lives enough time to escape a Romulan vessel called the Narada by riding out a collision course. The boy knows no different.
He likes to climb on the roof with Sam, small and whiny when the cuff of his pants gets caught on a nail and his big brother has to half-drag him out of harm's way.
"That's the Big Dipper, Jim. See?" Sam is clever and wonderful and everything Jim ever wants to be. There's nothing but love and trust put in him as Jim nods and cranes back so far that a hand automatically swings out to support him. Sam laughs when a six-year-old Jim exclaims I want a star! "You want one? Okay, let's figure out which is the best."
Downstairs, far below in the kitchen of the shambling old house, Winona Kirk argues in her son's favor as her new partner rails against the mess her youngest has caused. A can of paint lies open in the yard next to the antique Corvette that belonged to her husband, dotted all over one side with tiny fingerprints.
"You can have all the stars," Sam solemnly promises, "if you swear never to paint them on dad's car again."
Jim nods enthusiastically.
The day that Sam leaves without so much as a hug, Jim drives the Corvette off the quarry. The exhilarating experience (freedom, strength, speed) is soundly quashed when the officer takes him back home to a furious Uncle Frank. He sits at the kitchen table for ten minutes before exploding back, something that rocks his guardian with surprise. Jim knows why. He's the good kid, just like Sam said, always making the best grades and doing what he's told. If that means he has to let his big brother walk away, he doesn't want anything to do with that kind of person.
"You're not my father!" he yells, twelve-years-old and standing up to a man twice his size, blue eyes blazing. Breathless, fierce as a dog backed into a corner with no way out.
Fifteen minutes later, he's up on the roof where Frank can't chase such a small boy, even one with newly forming bruises on his arm from where he was shaken. Frank doesn't usually do that, Jim knows. He yells and looms and terrifies Jim sometimes but there's a limit, even if said limit is currently off the planet. By the time the stars come out he's hungrier than he can ever remember being before and rolls onto his back to get the cramp out of his side, dirt-smudged tear-tracks staining dry cheeks.
Sam is gone. He left Jim the stars, but what good are they when they're so far away?
On his eighteenth birthday, he slips out in the dead of night with a backpack and doesn't look back. I can't be a Kirk in this house, he said earlier, parroting his brother when his mother asked what was wrong. She probably knew he was going to leave. Taste in Frank aside, she's a smart lady.
Jim starts to walk and he doesn't stop for years, aimless and frustrated with everything on the planet, until a man in a bar gives him a small plastic starship and says, "I dare you to do better."
There's a ruckus in the bathroom, one that shortly makes itself known. An unkempt man argues with the officer threatening him into his seat and finally leans over. Jim's eyes might flicker away a few times, but for once he's quieter than usual, watching with interest.
"I may throw up on you," and then shortly after making himself known, "Ex-wife took the whole damn planet in the divorce. All I got left is my bones."
Leonard McCoy is Southern, cranky, a little sad and messed up from the get-go, but Jim thinks that's alright because he hits most of those achievements too. They're both oddities on the shuttle stuffed with regulation uniforms. Jim knows he's broken a dozen rules in getting on board and doesn't want to use Pike's name if he can help it, so he chats to Leonard all the way to the Academy to help distract both of them from causing more trouble.
Over three years, Bones fills the aching place in Jim's heart that his brother abandoned in Iowa. For a time, he forgets about looking at the stars and starts working on ways to live amongst them with his best friend at his side.
"Jim, you've got to see this."
I'm going to throw up on you, he mutinously growls, craning his head for a look out the porthole at a ship he saw in pieces on his homeland three years ago. U.S.S. ENTERPRISE NCC-1701. Now, amongst the heavens and endless possibilities she's been built to explore, her hull is smooth and sturdy. The unfinished maw of her insides is complete, sound and ready for action. Everything about her sounds like a scream through the silence of space that only Jim can hear, his own personal siren's song. This is his ship, he wants her badly. Somehow, if he isn't kicked out of Starfleet for breaking onto her with Bones' assistance, claiming her is going to be his new objective in life.
Once upon a time, he told himself that you didn't sleep with a starship, you slept on it. Now, Jim wishes that the beautiful ship before him really could turn into a woman so he could put those rules to the test.
En route to Nibiru, it's the middle of the night, ship-time. A skeleton crew works the bridge, four officers, and Jim sits in the captain's chair recently usurped by April. Taken back, more importantly, and rarely left since. It's the only place he can begin to doze off, connected to the heart of his vessel and in complete control of her after being so abrasively severed by ghost-protocols in her memory-banks. They've been wiped now, yet it makes no difference; he does not move.
On the viewscreen, there are stars drifting past that remind him of sitting on a rooftop with an arm around his shoulders, safe and content. Pike's old chair provides the support he needs in such quiet, personal moments.
"Do you have any idea what a pain in the ass you are?"
I think so, sir, Jim says. He's standing in Christopher's office, the Admiral bristling nearby.
"Then tell me what you did wrong, what's the lesson to be learned here?"
Never trust a Vulcan.
Chris whirls on him in frustration, "You see, you can't even answer the question! You lied on an official report. You lied. You think the rules don't apply to you because you disagree with them."
That's why you talked me into signing up in the first place, it's why you gave me your ship.
He doesn't understand. He saved Spock's life, that was more than enough of a reason to break the Prime Directive. He didn't want to, it was just the morally right thing to do.
"I gave you my ship because I saw greatness in you, and now I see that you haven't got an ounce of humility."
Chris sounds tired. Disappointed. Trying to explain, Jim quietens under the overwhelming flaws thrown back in his face.
"I wouldn't have risked my first officer's life in the first place. You violated the Prime Directive and almost got everyone under your command killed. You think you can't make a mistake, it's a pattern with you! The rules are for other people." He doesn't take kindly to Jim stating Some should be. Infantile and indignant, and not understanding. Chris grits his teeth. "What's worse is you're using blind luck to justify your playing God!"
Silenced, it doesn't last long. The moment Jim is told that the Enterprise is being taken away as per Starfleet mandate on the matter, he creases desperate arguments in wherever he can, but the Admiral wants none of it.
"You don't comply with the rules, you don't have respect for anything but yourself and you don't respect the chair. You know why? Because you're not ready for it."
And just like that, Jim loses contact with his insides for a moment. His home is gone and the stars are plucked beyond his reach.
It hurts to crawl back to the decontamination chamber and he's ashamed to say he almost didn't bother. Slouching heavily against the wall, he stares up at his equally tearful first officer, a hazy unpleasant heat pulling at his vision.
I'm scared, Spock, he confesses on a labored sigh. Help me not be. How do you choose not to feel?
"I do not know," Spock chokes out, wide-eyed as they stay as close as the glass allows. Jim wishes he could have seen him this open before, emotional and raw. So human that it clearly hurts both of them. "Right now, I am failing."
Jim's hand presses with as much clumsy haste as his weakening arm will allow right against the door, splaying for traction. Spock places his palm over it on the other side, and Jim matches the Vulcan salute that says everything his failing organs will not allow him to put into words. Suffocating, his vision darkens.
It is not the comforting expanse of space, there is nothing waiting but terror and darkness without a single light to guide his heart home. Disjointed from both, every second pierces his mind with agony until he can no longer even feel frightened; Jim's hand slides to his side, having lost all feeling where death closets him away from family, comfort and lights.
Essence Rite Dream, JAMES T. KIRK ; to all Starfleet crewmates & close friends
There are stars innumerable. Stars and screams.
A woman gives birth in the cramped confines of medical shuttle thirty-seven, her cries eclipsed by those of the newborn baby boy shortly placed in her arms. He is small with wisps of blond hair plastered to his head and settles uncommonly easily when gathered close. A conversation continues over his head, for his father is not present; over the expanse that separates the craft from the U.S.S. Kelvin, he stirs at the deep voice laughing over the comm.
"What, 'Tiberius'? That's awful, no, no. Let's name him after your dad. Let's call him Jim."
George Kirk dies telling his family I love you, I love you so much — and then everything continues as before as the acting captain of the starship buys his family and eight-hundred other lives enough time to escape a Romulan vessel called the Narada by riding out a collision course. The boy knows no different.
He likes to climb on the roof with Sam, small and whiny when the cuff of his pants gets caught on a nail and his big brother has to half-drag him out of harm's way.
"That's the Big Dipper, Jim. See?" Sam is clever and wonderful and everything Jim ever wants to be. There's nothing but love and trust put in him as Jim nods and cranes back so far that a hand automatically swings out to support him. Sam laughs when a six-year-old Jim exclaims I want a star! "You want one? Okay, let's figure out which is the best."
Downstairs, far below in the kitchen of the shambling old house, Winona Kirk argues in her son's favor as her new partner rails against the mess her youngest has caused. A can of paint lies open in the yard next to the antique Corvette that belonged to her husband, dotted all over one side with tiny fingerprints.
"You can have all the stars," Sam solemnly promises, "if you swear never to paint them on dad's car again."
Jim nods enthusiastically.
The day that Sam leaves without so much as a hug, Jim drives the Corvette off the quarry. The exhilarating experience (freedom, strength, speed) is soundly quashed when the officer takes him back home to a furious Uncle Frank. He sits at the kitchen table for ten minutes before exploding back, something that rocks his guardian with surprise. Jim knows why. He's the good kid, just like Sam said, always making the best grades and doing what he's told. If that means he has to let his big brother walk away, he doesn't want anything to do with that kind of person.
"You're not my father!" he yells, twelve-years-old and standing up to a man twice his size, blue eyes blazing. Breathless, fierce as a dog backed into a corner with no way out.
Fifteen minutes later, he's up on the roof where Frank can't chase such a small boy, even one with newly forming bruises on his arm from where he was shaken. Frank doesn't usually do that, Jim knows. He yells and looms and terrifies Jim sometimes but there's a limit, even if said limit is currently off the planet. By the time the stars come out he's hungrier than he can ever remember being before and rolls onto his back to get the cramp out of his side, dirt-smudged tear-tracks staining dry cheeks.
Sam is gone. He left Jim the stars, but what good are they when they're so far away?
On his eighteenth birthday, he slips out in the dead of night with a backpack and doesn't look back. I can't be a Kirk in this house, he said earlier, parroting his brother when his mother asked what was wrong. She probably knew he was going to leave. Taste in Frank aside, she's a smart lady.
Jim starts to walk and he doesn't stop for years, aimless and frustrated with everything on the planet, until a man in a bar gives him a small plastic starship and says, "I dare you to do better."
There's a ruckus in the bathroom, one that shortly makes itself known. An unkempt man argues with the officer threatening him into his seat and finally leans over. Jim's eyes might flicker away a few times, but for once he's quieter than usual, watching with interest.
"I may throw up on you," and then shortly after making himself known, "Ex-wife took the whole damn planet in the divorce. All I got left is my bones."
Leonard McCoy is Southern, cranky, a little sad and messed up from the get-go, but Jim thinks that's alright because he hits most of those achievements too. They're both oddities on the shuttle stuffed with regulation uniforms. Jim knows he's broken a dozen rules in getting on board and doesn't want to use Pike's name if he can help it, so he chats to Leonard all the way to the Academy to help distract both of them from causing more trouble.
Over three years, Bones fills the aching place in Jim's heart that his brother abandoned in Iowa. For a time, he forgets about looking at the stars and starts working on ways to live amongst them with his best friend at his side.
"Jim, you've got to see this."
I'm going to throw up on you, he mutinously growls, craning his head for a look out the porthole at a ship he saw in pieces on his homeland three years ago. U.S.S. ENTERPRISE NCC-1701. Now, amongst the heavens and endless possibilities she's been built to explore, her hull is smooth and sturdy. The unfinished maw of her insides is complete, sound and ready for action. Everything about her sounds like a scream through the silence of space that only Jim can hear, his own personal siren's song. This is his ship, he wants her badly. Somehow, if he isn't kicked out of Starfleet for breaking onto her with Bones' assistance, claiming her is going to be his new objective in life.
Once upon a time, he told himself that you didn't sleep with a starship, you slept on it. Now, Jim wishes that the beautiful ship before him really could turn into a woman so he could put those rules to the test.
En route to Nibiru, it's the middle of the night, ship-time. A skeleton crew works the bridge, four officers, and Jim sits in the captain's chair recently usurped by April. Taken back, more importantly, and rarely left since. It's the only place he can begin to doze off, connected to the heart of his vessel and in complete control of her after being so abrasively severed by ghost-protocols in her memory-banks. They've been wiped now, yet it makes no difference; he does not move.
On the viewscreen, there are stars drifting past that remind him of sitting on a rooftop with an arm around his shoulders, safe and content. Pike's old chair provides the support he needs in such quiet, personal moments.
"Do you have any idea what a pain in the ass you are?"
I think so, sir, Jim says. He's standing in Christopher's office, the Admiral bristling nearby.
"Then tell me what you did wrong, what's the lesson to be learned here?"
Never trust a Vulcan.
Chris whirls on him in frustration, "You see, you can't even answer the question! You lied on an official report. You lied. You think the rules don't apply to you because you disagree with them."
That's why you talked me into signing up in the first place, it's why you gave me your ship.
He doesn't understand. He saved Spock's life, that was more than enough of a reason to break the Prime Directive. He didn't want to, it was just the morally right thing to do.
"I gave you my ship because I saw greatness in you, and now I see that you haven't got an ounce of humility."
Chris sounds tired. Disappointed. Trying to explain, Jim quietens under the overwhelming flaws thrown back in his face.
"I wouldn't have risked my first officer's life in the first place. You violated the Prime Directive and almost got everyone under your command killed. You think you can't make a mistake, it's a pattern with you! The rules are for other people." He doesn't take kindly to Jim stating Some should be. Infantile and indignant, and not understanding. Chris grits his teeth. "What's worse is you're using blind luck to justify your playing God!"
Silenced, it doesn't last long. The moment Jim is told that the Enterprise is being taken away as per Starfleet mandate on the matter, he creases desperate arguments in wherever he can, but the Admiral wants none of it.
"You don't comply with the rules, you don't have respect for anything but yourself and you don't respect the chair. You know why? Because you're not ready for it."
And just like that, Jim loses contact with his insides for a moment. His home is gone and the stars are plucked beyond his reach.
It hurts to crawl back to the decontamination chamber and he's ashamed to say he almost didn't bother. Slouching heavily against the wall, he stares up at his equally tearful first officer, a hazy unpleasant heat pulling at his vision.
I'm scared, Spock, he confesses on a labored sigh. Help me not be. How do you choose not to feel?
"I do not know," Spock chokes out, wide-eyed as they stay as close as the glass allows. Jim wishes he could have seen him this open before, emotional and raw. So human that it clearly hurts both of them. "Right now, I am failing."
Jim's hand presses with as much clumsy haste as his weakening arm will allow right against the door, splaying for traction. Spock places his palm over it on the other side, and Jim matches the Vulcan salute that says everything his failing organs will not allow him to put into words. Suffocating, his vision darkens.
It is not the comforting expanse of space, there is nothing waiting but terror and darkness without a single light to guide his heart home. Disjointed from both, every second pierces his mind with agony until he can no longer even feel frightened; Jim's hand slides to his side, having lost all feeling where death closets him away from family, comfort and lights.
The stars go out.