The purpose is to experience fear. Fear in the face of certain death.

[hischair]

When: 17th onward!
Rating: Gross sickly stuff.
Characters: Jim & you!
Summary: Catch-all log for Jim's friends! After the 16th when he felt ill, Jim's Augmented blood has started to fight back like it did during the two weeks he was out cold after dying in a decontamination chamber. His organs will be starting to slowly fail, blood (both his own and Khan's) will be coming up, and he's generally confined to his bedroom in his and Bones' apartment. As time goes on, his condition will be deteriorating until his essence rite is performed. Please put the date of your visit in the subject header! Forward/Back-dating and Prose/Action are all fine, as are video/audio/text which can be directed here for all personal calls while Jim is sick.
Log: 

[ He finds himself thinking of Christopher, more than anything. Of the last time he saw him, specifically, in the Hall of the Missing. Of not being able to let go of him for so long and crying like a son lost in the thickest of woods, longing to find his way home only to briefly find it and have to turn back into the darkness once more. Chris had held him, kissed his hair like a father, soothed Jim in a way he had never had to before, but then again neither of them had died and been torn apart in such violent ways until the Augment came into their lives. Even in death, he's still been there when Jim needed him.

He stares out of the window in his room, propped up against pillows as coughs rumble in the pit of his chest, looking at the City below where the horizon meets a fake, beautiful sky. If he lets the migraines take over for long enough his senses go haywire and a drowsy kind of tactile memory swims under his fingers and into his nose, of an admiral's uniform scented with aftershave that soothes his anxieties almost as effectively as the real thing.

"It's going to be okay, son."

He wishes he could find a bar to drown his sorrows in. Chris always, always found him when he was at his lowest point in backwater dives.

And then on occasion, during his more painful moments where there's no one around to hear his muffled crying into a pillow or witness the sheets crumpling in his fists, his thoughts drift to the decontamination chamber. Jim wakes himself up several times after passing out with Spock's name on bloodied lips and hopes to God he hasn't started doing anything as embarrassing as crying out in his sleep to betray his fright; he has the use of his lungs still, unlike his final moments where he hadn't been able to tell his friend a wealth of things that suddenly seemed so important. Look after the crew, you're the captain now. I'll miss you. I don't want to go, stay with me. It's shameful, but a couple of times he calls for Bones just to have his company, terrified under a firmly schooled expression that he'll die in the here and now, well and truly alone.

If he had been given diagrammatics on his condition in the form of a vessel's specifics, he would have written it off by now. It's as if the effects of his descent into the warp core are being clawed out of his body in slow motion by the deepening fever-tide, leaving Jim to hate every minute of having survived. Which is counter-productive, he knows, because he very much wants to live. ]

Comments

[hischair]

[ Eyes widening, it's not at the Commander part; no, that least of all. ]

Is he okay? I mean, was he? Chekov doesn't know anything about Khan here, he's a couple of years behind.

[directives]

[ a nod, though kirk would lose one of his own in addition to several innocent cadets who were supposed to be on a harmless training mission. ]

He survived the ordeal, though his captain did not. They had originally gone to what they thought was Ceti Alpha VI in order to locate a barren world for Dr. Marcus to test a... [ she falters for a moment, searching for a way to describe this, pushing the boundaries of protocol in touching upon project genesis when the agreement she made with herself was to divulge information about khan -- not genesis. ] The eventual end result of a scientific endeavor that the Federation had great interest in.

Under the influence of the eels, Chekov and his captain divulged classified information in regards to the nature of this project to Khan who decided he was going to seize it for himself. Many scientists died that day to protect that project's secrets, to keep Khan away from it at all costs.

[hischair]

[ There are so many tripwires for her to navigate just by speaking to him and he holds none of them against her, just like he accepts with a nod the circuitous explanations when they arise. He wants to know, certainly, but Jim doesn't indulge his curiosity on the matter. ]

But they didn't, did they? He got it. The ... project. [ Whatever it is, that description fits broadly enough not to touch upon any details for either of them. Fucking temporal laws. ] There was nothing like that for us, all he wanted was his crew back. He used me to get on board Admiral Marcus's ship and attacked the Enterprise.

The Khan you knew, what happened to him?

[directives]

I'm afraid he did, and I'm afraid he used it. Something that was... a momentary blessing in disguise, in it's own twisted way, though ultimately not worth the lives lost in the struggle to obtain it. You see, Jim, at the time, the Enterprise was being used to train command track cadets. When they heard that something fishy was going down in that sector, there were primarily cadets on board with a supervisional staff who were both there to teach and simply along for what should've been a short, harmless ride.

[hischair]

It's always cadets, isn't it?

[ Running a hand over his face, he tries not to think of the equivalent of his old friends from the academy having to die again elsewhere, of Gaila or — It doesn't bear thinking about, yet it's where his thoughts immediately go. ]

How did they take Khan down?

[directives]

It wasn't just cadets that were lost, Jim.

[ she won't say who, but she will confirm if he asks that yes, it was one of his own. saying it was spock when he knows that spock lives would mean unmasking genesis. she isn't willing to do that or to cause this man any unnecessary grief. that was never her intention. ]

They did everything in their power to damage and disable the Reliant. It's believed that he died on the ship's bridge prior to its destruction after he launched the... project.

[hischair]

Should I even ask who else I — he lost?

[ Do you know how many people I've lost? Not one! God, he was such an idiot. No wonder Christopher was so disappointed in him back then, Jim's ashamed to even remember how indignant he felt at the time.

'It's believed' doesn't sit well with him, either. ]

[directives]

[ see, that was the great lesson to be learned in the wake of that tragedy by admiral kirk. he wasn't ready to lose, wasn't ready to experience the death of one of his own like that. it was a wake up call for him in a multitude of ways, a reminder to future captains that even the best can fall, that you have to be ready for every possibility, not just the ones where you win. ]

I can't tell you. Besides, it wouldn't do you any good to know that when it has no bearing on your timeline or Khan's presence here.

[hischair]

[ The look he gives her is steady and long before he blinks, severing the intense scrutiny. ]

Right. [ Pausing to wet suddenly dry lips, he steers the conversation back around. ] I can offer a comparison of the Khan I know, but it bears up pretty much the same.

[directives]

[ she remains impassive as he studies her, unreadable to a fault. she's a little too good at this, and the one person who can read her when she's not giving anyone anything to read isn't here. ]

The augments from that time period aren't as superior as they believe themselves to be. There are numerous genetic flaws in their design, traits like heightened aggression and an innate arrogance. Genetic manipulation has come a long way since then, but back then, those scientists didn't take those mental attributes into consideration when they were so-called "amplifying" everything else. Superior intellect came at the price of superior ambition and ruthlessness. Obsessive personalities and egos that when damaged could breed lethal consequences.

Khan had the project. He had it. He had it, and he could've simply left, gone off and used it as intended. He didn't. Why? Vengeance. There was Admiral Kirk, aboard the very ship he failed to steal. He risked the lives of his people to carry out revenge -- revenge that cost those people their lives, and his own. It's genetic, Jim. A split in the timeline isn't going to change that. It's there, and if he already has it out for you and your people...

[hischair]

The ship he took, the one we broke onto. That was the Vengeance, Dreadnought class.

[ There are too many eerie similarities here to brush aside. That said, Jim's smile is lopsided and humorless, quick to fall after hitching up. ]

He would have blasted us apart if Spock hadn't thought ahead. [ He sits forward, hands draped together. ] The Khan I know is every bit as ruthless as yours, his entire focus is getting his crew back and murdering anyone who tries to stop him. He attacked part of Section thirty-one in London to get a Daystrom Conference to convene to discuss a plan of action. He wanted a chance at killing Marcus, turned up and shot the entire room. [ Lips tighten for a moment. ] He murdered Admiral Pike there.

I didn't know many of the details when I applied to Marcus to go after Khan, or 'John Harrison' at the time. He tasked me to take seventy-two new torpedoes onto the edge of the Neutral Zone, to fire them at Khan's hiding place on Kronos and report back. Instead, Spock, Uhura and myself went there directly to apprehend and take him back for judgment, but we didn't get a chance. The Klingons would have killed us when Khan attacked them, discovered we had the torpedoes and came quietly back to the brig. He gave me coordinates to find out why he'd done what he had and I sent Scotty to find out what was going on.

Khan had put his people inside the torpedoes with the use of cryotubes in an attempt to smuggle them out and Admiral Marcus had wanted to get rid of the augments while provoking the Klingons into open war, so that worked out nicely for him. Our ship had been sabotaged, we dropped out of warp in enemy space as bait. When we got back up to speed, he caught up with us at warp, disabled our engines and refused to spare anyone on board. That's when Scotty reset the controls on Vengeance and bought us more time. I flew over there with Khan to take the ship and once we stunned him he got right back up, beat us down and crushed the Admiral's head in his bare hands ... right in front of his daughter Carol, who'd been trying to help us.

Khan negotiated with Spock for the warheads and beamed us back over. Spock had already armed the torpedoes and they went off, but he'd had Bones put Khan's crew safely out of the way in medbay. That's when the Enterprise started to fall, dragged down by Earth's gravitational pull. I headed to engineering with Scotty as the ship started to come apart. Fixed the injectors.

[ Sitting back, he looks up from where his attention's tilted off to the side near her shoulder. ]

There you have it.

[directives]

[ her opinion is a complicated one, clouded by history and personal entanglements with foes far worse than khan. people she's had to tango with without the aid of the rest of the fleet, without permission from the brass, or any contact with starfleet command. hard, difficult decisions she's had to make and has to live with. and that's why she can understand the need to get rid of the augments. what she doesn't, is the need to spark open war with the klingons. her history is rusty without the federation database open in front of her to give her a refresher, but chancellor gorkon wasn't an entirely unreasonable man -- quite the opposite, actually, from what she remembers. the whole scenario that kirk's just laid out before her invokes a variety of responses, but nothing of which she can in good conscience, or in accordance with the rules that govern her, comment on. ]

That's... quite the ordeal.

[hischair]

According to Scotty, that's what happens when he's off the ship for a day.

[ Which prompts him to hazard a half-smile, inching his way out of completely dour thoughts. ]

We can either ignore Khan , which I doubt will work for long since a bunch of people know me here and saw my first transmission with Bones, or we lay low and try to avoid him while we wait out his first move.

[directives]

Unfortunately, I think the latter is the best available option we have at this time. We can reevaluate later, but in the meantime -- no uniforms, no Starfleet insignias; communicators, phasers, and tricorders kept out of sight; first names, no ranks. For all intents and purposes, we'll be playing the role of civilians until we're recognized or the time to stand up and speak out comes.