![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninety6tears[See Master Post]
The sign-up list for the auction goes up before the weekend. Brighton's taking first-price sealed bids all throughout the day instead of doing an open auction, and Jim works that day up until the end of his shift, then strides back in. Brighton gives him a laid-back smile, checking the list over and saying, "You're the last one, it turns out. So I guess you're gonna find out on the spot."
Jim's brows loft high, and Brighton tells him not to have a heart attack, is finishing some cleaning up at one of his shelves while Jim pretty much just stands there tapping his foot anxiously and chewing on his lip.
"Heard you brought in that girl the other day—Hell, I can't believe I didn't mention that yet, man, that's insane..."
Jim's a bit taken aback. "I didn't think that many people knew."
"Well, that tall one came by today and mentioned it. She said it was the most interesting shift she's had all year."
Brighton seems to be looking for something, and Jim just shoves his hands in his pockets to try to still them from anxiously tapping on things.
"Oh, hey, Kirk: Do me a favor and grab that stylus on the table right there?"
"Sure."
Jim gets about five steps away before he stops dead in his tracks.
For a few seconds all he can do is stand there with his eyes closed in fervent silent self-berating, his lips pressing tight together until he finally lets out a bitter, resigned breath.
When he turns around, he expects to see some kind of weapon pointed at him, some expression of grim amusement on the man's face, or maybe anger, maybe malice.
What he sees is just Brighton, his hand clenched harmlessly around the dusting rag and his body leaned into a chair, a look of relative calm on his face. Jim meets his eyes and he bothers no denial with it, knows his fear is written plainly on him, but he doesn't say or do anything.
Brighton is almost casual in how he tosses his rag down and says, "Come into the office."
So this is how it'll go.
He's been in the office many times before; once it was even for a drink and some talking about the weather. He's thinking about the general layout before they're even in there, wondering where he would probably keep a gun. As it happens, he just has to play along, sit down in the knobby chair like this is any other meeting with his boss. Instead of sitting down across from him, Brighton sits on the corner of the desk just to the side; he sets his PADD down to his left with bored abandonment.
He finally says, "You're not gonna have the highest bid."
Jim leans back, not even close to feeling like it's safe to feel relieved, but nodding like he thinks he understands. It comes out fast when he can't help starting to plead, "Listen, I'm just a man, alright? I'm trying to look after my own, that's...That's all."
Brighton lets out a sigh, goes on to say, "I got a very, very high bid today."
Jim clenches his teeth, knowing he has to look steady, like this is a demand he can meet. "How much do you want?"
"I'm not blackmailing you." It's almost like Brighton is confused that he doesn't get it; Jim isn't really sure. "...I'm selling you the heap."
Jim almost chokes. "I'm sorry, you're...?"
"Let me tell you a little secret, in exchange for yours," Brighton says, and it may be an entire minute of Jim's eyes darting in confusion all over him before he even begins: "Four years ago, I was living with my wife over in Tennessee. We'd been married for eight years, no kids, decent life...One day I came home to find our place ransacked, and there was a note left next to the bedroom. It was from my servant, politely informing me that my wife was dead in the bathroom, and that by the time I saw the note, he'd be long gone."
Jim looks somewhere down at his knees as a very complicated sudden emotion has him letting out a long sigh.
"I came here because I thought maybe. There was a chance in hell he'd come here, and I could find him, and I could kill him. And I came here and I told a lot of very good lies, and I started up this place, and I waited, and waited." Brighton's face shifts to something else then, and he shakes his head. "I thought the whole time, up until about a year ago, that the only reason I was being decent to these people was I had to wait it out so I could eventually kill that son of a bitch. I'd stayed around so long, though, it was ridiculous to think that that kid would ever show up. He could even be here, and just over at the Knot where I couldn't get to him.
"...I started to like the business, got used to always having terrible food. Made a couple casual friendships with my employees now and then...Then one day this Romulan kid walks in, wanting to know if I can sell him any data chips. I asked him a couple questions up until he looked me right in the face, and then I recognized him. And he knew. He knew that I knew, and we were standing there looking at each other right in front of this other customer. It felt like hours."
It's another long moment, Brighton sitting there and looking out his window before he finishes.
"And then I told him I didn't have what he was looking for, and he just nodded, and he left. I haven't laid eyes on him since." Brighton looks back down at Jim. "I don't have a story or an explanation of one thing that happened that made me change my mind, you know. What it comes down to is, sometimes you get to a time in your life when you realize maybe you aren't the man you thought you were. And look, I've been watching you, and I've been reading about this James Kirk. And maybe that's your name, but it's not who you are." Now after another moment, he scoffs, cocking his eyebrow. "You might wanna work on not answering to it. Seriously, I thought you were sharper than that."
Something resembling a laugh from Jim as he reaches and wipes a hand over his mouth, nodding. "Yeah."
"So...What's your bid?"
"Why are you..." It feels strange to use his voice again.
"I don't know that I ever really intended to sell this thing to the highest bidder. There's a reason I mostly only told my workers about it. I already wanted to give it to you when you walked in today...cause I just like you. You seem like you'd do something good with it. Not to mention you and yours obviously know how to take good care of a vessel." He smiles wryly as Jim dares a cocky scoff, like that's an understatement. "So, come on."
Brighton's pointing at the bid Jim realizes he still has clutched in an old-fashioned envelope, per his own advice of accepting material records so that nobody could hack into the previous bids. He says, "Seventeen."
"You're not gonna try to do better than that?" Brighton laughs; his features are set back into familiarity, his rugged face cynical and harmless.
Jim blinks, takes a second to realize. Then says, "Ten."
Brighton squints, sitting back. "Fifteen."
"Eleven."
"Fourteen."
Jim feels himself smirking. "Eleven."
"I'm not going lower than thirteen."
"Eleven, and I'll fix and clean your Civilius."
"No shit?" He reaches out his hand. "You got a deal."
He's made it to the little stand where an Andorian lady sells old collectible trinkets when he hears "Did you win?..." And turns to see a slightly grimacing Jill coming up to him with her little backpack on.
He's still a bit shell-shocked by the turns of the last half hour, and Jill's expression drops as she assumes wrong. "Shit," she says.
"'Shit' what? We got it."
It takes him about five more times of rewording the fact for her to realize he's serious, and then it's like the best joke she's ever heard, the way she leans over in never-stopping laughter that Jim has to join in on because it's really starting to hit him too.
"What's so funny?" he demands. Jill has sometimes confused him on some level of undefinable incompatibility of some kind between them, but there are times like this when she just resonates with real laughter in the middle of so much cold, even when it's a cruel joke, when he knows he kind of gets what it is about her that makes Scotty a little crazy. "Seriously, what?"
"It's just..." She points a thumb behind her. "I just had the biggest fight with Khamak. Huge, huge fight. I don't think...well. I know we're not getting married."
"Oh, well..." He can't stop snickering. "That's too bad."
"Shut the hell up."
"No, you should be kissing my ass right now."
"Funny thing is," she's putting a finger up as she says, "I was coming over cause I have something for you. Come on, you wanna go for a walk?"
A while later they're sitting against the wooden wall next to the occasional green patches of grass close to the front gate, which still faintly states those blood-colored words he won't forget any time soon.
"I hoped so badly you guys would win that ship the second I found out you wanted it," she's saying with sudden sincerity. "Even when I was only mostly sure you'd take anyone else...That is kind of weird, though, that he just wanted to give it to you. I guess he just wanted it in good hands?"
"Some good hands." He has a small look of incredulity. "If I was him, I would've sold us out. Hell, if I were you, I would've blown the lid on us so fast..."
"Well. You're not me." She's getting into her bag now. "I told you I was going to make that up to you. I've been working on this for a while."
Jim has almost forgotten she said she had something for him. When she puts something into his hands, it's wrapped in cloth, and quite heavy. He stills, looking at her. He only feels at it a little before saying, "Seriously?"
"Go on." She nudges his arm.
"I can't accept this, you don't even have—"
"Oh, but you have to," she corrects, "I already engraved it for you."
Now narrowing his eyes, he takes the soft cloth off to reveal a very odd-looking handgun. The metal has a slightly irregular texture, marbling between iron and rust colors; the barrel is bulky and almost a cylindrical shape but hollow enough to be balanced by the smirky western-style curved handle. If he overlooks any expectations of what he'd expect a gun to look like, there is something that feels handsome and timeless about it.
Turning it over, he finds the engraving in a smooth feel under one of his thumbs. In a subtle imprint along the barrel where a brand name might run more boldly, it quietly reads,
Some luck for the good captain. Love, J
Jim wants to laugh about the wit inherent in the gift, but something is clenching at him, a toppling sudden emotion and he is simply, deeply moved. A moment passes of him thinking about what he could possibly say, until he finally manages to give her a wry expression. "Anything in particular that makes it lucky?"
Jill grins wide, like she had to wait to see if he'd ask, already motioning for him to give it back for a minute and saying, "You know me better than I thought."
Jim of course invites Jill over, but she seems to succumb to a heavier mood by the time they're walking back, and just says, "Send everybody my congratulations." He knows she isn't exactly avoiding Scotty, but she kind of is. They're still visiting each other, but there's a wall gone up, this fact that sooner rather than later they may really have to say goodbye to each other, regardless of who gets the ship. And as much as it works for people like them not to make anything of it they can't always deny that it's there.
The other three are all waiting on needles on the porch and giving silent looks of expectation when he comes home. Nyota is slowly rising to take the news standing, and he drags it out a bit in a poker face, making Bones go, "Oh no..."
He's shrugging then, breaking slowly out into a grin. "Let's go get it."
"What?!" Scotty's off the step and clapping his arms around Jim during the quick tumble into cheers all around, and Jim can only laugh and forget about any other part of the story.
Jim manages to finally interrupt all the questioning and exclamations, "Scotty, you and I can go get it and put it in the back. After that, I want two things." He counts off with his fingers: "I want booze, and I want fried chicken."
An hour of Scotty cussing the clunky vessel into obedience as if it needs to be broken in and it's finally in the yard, Nyota squinting and laughing from the back door as she can hear how Jim can't stop whooping and yelling, "This ugly fuckin' thing is ours!"
Naturally it attracts a bit of attention around the front of the house, but she and Leonard have to wade through it without comment to go out and happily procure Jim's demands. A couple hours later they've put down an arm and a leg for the chicken and some wine from the mixed abundance of alcohol products to be had from the Knot taverns, and they throw a picnic out back on the huge fleece blanket they keep in the living room. Nyota smiles at the amused reactions when she emerges wearing the dress just because she figures she won't have any other occasion for it any time soon.
"Do you really want to talk shop right now?" Jim is replying to Leonard as he takes a sip of the wine from their plastic cups.
"I'm just asking, cause sometimes it seems like maybe you have some actual semblance of a plan? In your secretive bastard kinda way?"
Jim laughs shortly. "Get as many people out of here as possible, for starters."
Leonard just gives him a prodding look.
"Well, the ship will take anywhere up to three months—that's what Scotty guessed—to fix up, cause it all depends on what we can find, not so much what we can buy. Of course there's other stuff we need." Jim starts to talk more like reading from a mental list. "We could all use some nice sets of clothes. We somehow probably need to have some back-up form of fake credit, anything that even temporarily looks legitimate. And...we need weapons. Like a lot of weapons."
Even though the list should be overwhelming, Jim says it with the kind of intent that feels reassuring after all this time of inner flailing and just trying to keep at the surface of things. They soon fall into a much lighter mood, something that reminds Nyota more of times back from working together. Long after night has fallen the back yard glows with the most bittersweet feeling of a tectonic shift, affection ebbing more richly than before between all of them.
She finally carries her cup over with her to get a look inside the ship. They've already hauled the old couch from the living room into the bridge, which is a much less high-maintenance affair than a Starfleet vessel, only bearing one pilot's seat. The layout of the ship is so much more simple-minded, the function of every room less cut and dry just from looking at it, almost like your average empty house. On the outside it looks long and narrow, the nacelles wing-like and not very large. It's certainly not a beautiful ship, but she could get used to it.
She stays up there looking out the front at where the occasional twinkle of a house light can be seen in the distance until she realizes the noise of talking outside has disintegrated. She then hears somebody on the ship ladder, recognizes Jim by his footsteps. The sound pauses and she realizes he's just leaning in on the ladder looking up at her.
She turns with a little smile to walk over to him. "They've gone to bed?"
He nods, and she makes a motion to the side with her head. And she says, "'Ulysses'? You going to keep it like that?
To her surprise, he rolls his eyes a little bit. "I don't know. Scotty hates mythological ship names for some reason...I think it's bad luck."
"Since when are you superstitious?" She sneers, as if calling his bullshit, saying, "And how is it bad luck?...He got home, didn't he?"
"Yeah, he did." Jim shakes his head, smirking. "But you don't come limping home after losing the rest of your shipmates and get to say you're a good sailor. Not that he doesn't spend a good amount of the epic crying into his soup about it, if I remember right. And hey, I can't shoot an arrow through any axes, so maybe I shouldn't talk."
She gives that smile always accompanied by her eyes moving upwards, as if at some deity that understands her own amusement. "I'd like to see you try with a phaser."
He laughs lowly at that while he gets out of the way so she can come down the ladder, but once she's at the bottom she doesn't move to go in yet. He sits comfortably leaning in on the metal until she finishes her wine and tosses the cup somewhere in the grass. It's getting cold outside and she wraps her arms over herself a little, glancing idly back at Jim.
Something about him sitting on the silver rung like that, his hair tussled up just slightly in the wind, and she has this memory blinking forward in her mind. The kind you remember and wonder the moment you remember if it would've gotten away from you for good if you hadn't had some reason to think of it just then.
Back when they were in San Francisco, she went to a track meet by herself. The place wasn't very crowded, and she thought she had an entire row of a bleacher to herself until she looked and saw Jim Kirk sitting on the other end. And all he did when she saw that she saw him was nod in her direction. Not smile at her in that cocky way he had, not do anything to show he was sitting there to do anything but read a book and occasionally glance at the sport; it seemed like he had come there just to be uninterrupted for a while. Completely out of character for what she knew about him at the time.
After some minutes, she did what she would've done with anyone else she knew from the academy; she sighed and stood up and came over and sat next to him. He didn't look up from what he was reading, but he smiled when she did that. She was the first one to volunteer conversation.
Eventually she mentioned that she used to run the fastest 100 meter dash at her school. "It's been a while since I was in shape for it. I don't think I could do it anymore."
And he said, "Oh, I bet you could," without even thinking about it. Not the way you say something like that when it's to be polite or flattering, but the way you say something when you have no reason other than just believing in somebody. As if he already considered her somebody he really knew.
And while she acknowledged that he might have said it in the more insincere manner if they were around anyone else, she let herself forget that until the half hour or so later when he said, "See you around" and stood up to leave her alone again. She can't remember now what else they talked about, but there's a simple clarity attached to the memory, like a smell you associate with a season, and something moves.
It didn't change the way she thought about him at the time, possibly even irritated her more that he was so inconsistent, seemingly artificial. But remembering it now, it's like some thin thread of possibility that's been following her around for years, precarious and poetic and invisible and maybe in another life it would have never meant anything to her at all. But here now she feels herself sliding into the presence of him, and she wants this thing, she wants to let him make her forget where she is. She wants to ask him if he remembers that day, but it isn't something she could tell him; it's not a fact or a feeling, only a memory.
"I'm sorry if I was an asshole," Jim is saying.
She almost laughs at the sudden comment. "What?"
"When I came home that night. You know." He's lazily slipping down the ladder, gets to the ground but just leans onto it by a hand on the side. "...It's just, I don't know what's going on or what you're thinking but you keep looking at me kind of weirdly since it happened. And if I made you feel like I'm starting to resent you, or something...That's not what I meant."
She thinks about saying about a dozen other things, but ends up quietly replying, "You think I resent you, though."
He gives this low sigh, like he doesn't want to push this. But he says, "Like for not being somebody else?"
Before she can make some pleading assuring reply that's rising in her, he interrupts.
"I mean, we could talk about that. I could tell you that it's not easy for me either, how impossibly unfair the whole thing feels when I think about him and how maybe I get guilty about you because that's the only way I can feel like he's my friend now." There's something self-mocking in his tone, in a little scoff he gives. "Like I miss it even being relevant. Telling myself every little bit by bit that if I could just not fall in love with you, somehow, somewhere, he'd know how much I miss him. As if that makes any sense. As if it even works," he adds, shrugging weakly at the grass. "...But I think you already know."
Jim is resting his shoulder at the side of the ladder when she looks now, and Nyota's thoughts stagger at the sight of him, like she's looking at what she'd see if she hadn't seen him in years as well as through her own eyes. He's wearing torn-up jeans and the same shirt he wore yesterday and the day before, his muscles look half-starved and his eyes a little sunken with ache and exhaustion and he is fifty times the man she ever thought he could be when she met him and she doesn't know why the first thing out of her mouth is a very small and astonished "You love me?"
The look in those eyes is almost startled, blue and open before his gaze wanders back to the ground, before he tries to figure what he wants to convey or say. She takes a few steps forward and as they turn into hers a little more solidly, she gives up on talking, gives up on facts, kisses him.
He makes a sound and there's a pause, no one pulling away but the kiss resting for the motion of other things, his hands meeting around her waist; they have kissed before but it never quite feels like they have. She could not define how he does it; she couldn't say what it's like to kiss him. He does it now very slowly, his eyes open and looking brittle at the edge of abandon until she closes hers. She pushes against him until he's sharply rooted against the ladder and responding in full feeling, one arm tightening around her waist, and the air seems to hit her skin even colder now where he isn't touching it and she burrows in and just—kisses—
One hand is grasping at her face now, and he leads for a little bit now in little shuddering tastes, stilling in the tiniest moments as if to measure, to make sure, but even in the lapses they stay tangled and don't breathe away from each other's mouths for another minute before he finally makes a sweet little sound, kind of a laugh.
"Hmm?" she hums when he kisses his way over to her ear.
"Um." He mutters, "I don't want to get your dress dirty."
She slowly smiles and then tells him to get the blanket back out.
Later when he's unzipping her his mouth reverently finds the place at her neck that still seems to tingle white-hot when she's conscious of it, a chilling sting of a tongue against it and she feels so achingly loved, the shape sharpened into white stars. He lulls into her and the darkness around them sings.
Gene and Jill are bickering snidely where they sit next to the porch on the sunny, festering day when they start taking names for the trip out. People keep coming with cash, and Nyota shakes her head tiredly and says, "It's first-come, first-serve."
"We've got fifteen places left," Jim says to the one Bajoran family that lives close by. "You're good to go, just make sure you don't change your mind. And bring as much food as you can."
"An' a sleeping bag if you've got it," Scotty adds.
"It'll probably be only half an hour more until we're closed," Jill points out as they watch the family walking away. "So he's got that long."
"Would you stop?" Gene snaps, looking miserable enough that Madda instinctively looks up from her pretzels and squeezes his knee; he gets an apologetic look in his eyes and goes back to the messy attempt at plaiting her hair.
A pair of Romulans have been approaching, and Nyota's the one who goes for the list on the PADD; when she looks up she sees a young adult female, accompanied by a younger male. The boy halts, scrutinizing her. She looks back, feeling like there's something familiar about him, until she realizes why.
"You." It's that kid who stole the phaser from Marcon.
The woman as well as everyone else is looking between the two of them, at Nyota's scolding eyes on the suddenly dreading look on the Romulan's face.
"You could have saved me a lot of trouble if you'd just shot that bastard, you know."
"I am sorry," he stammers in an accented mumble.
He looks truly ashamed, even if it's only for the benefit of what he needs. Nyota's wrath is more like she's wringing out a mild grudge than anything else, and she sighs as she lifts up the stylus. "How many?"
"It wasn't because...you...because you're human," he interrupts uncertainly.
"I appreciate that," she says, her voice flatter this time. "...You're just a kid, anyway."
"I don't imagine you're going to explain what the hell you're going on about?" Jim says.
Nyota interrupts by explaining the routine jist in Romulan, since she noticed the woman had an accent, "We are following a lead on the location of a refugee shelter; after that, we don't know, but locations will be democratically chosen within the realm of whatever's reasonably safe. You get let off when you want. We're providing medical care, we're not promising food, but we'll try. Be amenable with everyone else and we won't have any problems. Does that cover any questions you had?"
The woman, recovering from the wide-eyed realization that she's so comfortable speaking the language, nods and thanks her. Nyota asks a couple more questions and then puts their names in. As the two are leaving, nobody gets the chance to ask anything before they notice Alel approaching from the street.
It's not much of a surprise to most of them, but Gene falls into this look almost like he can't believe he has the audacity to be there. Nyota wonders if she's the only one who isn't extremely obvious about looking between the two of them as Alel gives him an inscrutable expression and pointedly looks mostly at the ground after that.
"Madda, go inside for a few minutes?" Gene suggests; it's as if he predicts he's about to have some kind of outburst, and doesn't know whether it's going to be the good kind or the bad kind. The girl submits quietly, and Jim is the first to speak after that.
"What do you do, Alel?" he asks, picking up the PADD. It's the first question he's been asking every potential passenger all day.
Squinting, Gene blurts, "You're not..."
"I've studied a lot of...physics," Alel stammers his reply, and it's like he's already been told by someone else what they would be asking, has been making sure he wouldn't slip up on his Standard. "I have no specific dietary needs or allergies. I am capable of heavy lifting..."
"You're fine. Three spaces, right?"
Jim is already putting it down, but Alel says, "One."
This is when Nyota looks over at Gene and sees him stilled in shock, looking vaguely guilty.
Alel has this defensive, devastated air to him. "It's just me," he clarifies.
Gene gulps out, "But you said, if you couldn't convince them to—"
"I know what I said." Alel rushes out the rest: "I changed my mind. May I put this inside?" Now they all understand the hiking pack he's carrying.
"They threw you out?"
Alel ignores Gene, but not coldly, and Scotty tells him he's welcome to leave it wherever he wants. Nyota meets eyes with Jim as the young man passes politely between them.
There is a second or two after Alel's gone in, and then Jill practically kicks Gene, who just gives her this lost and open gesture.
"What? If he wants to be—"
"Jesus, you kids are hopeless," Leonard is the one to interrupt, which startles all of them. Emphatic, he tells Gene, "He just made quite possibly the hardest decision of his entire life and it landed on you, it's not astrophysics. You go after him."
And Gene, who has probably spoken all of a couple words with the doctor before outside of medical checks, responds as if chastised, muttering, "Uh, yessir" before getting up and going inside.
Scotty is intently communicating something wordless with Jill, and she's making a slow, overwhelmed motion with her head before she seems to dismiss the whole emotion with, "I'm so glad that's over. I was about to kick his ass if he didn't start seeing straight."
Leonard gives her a somewhat taken aback expression.
"Yeah, I'm being insensitive, but after the riots I'm having a hard time feeling sorry for the people who can't take a warning when it slaps them in the face. Alel doesn't go for this messianic ryakna, he's just loyal."
Scotty chuckles darkly. "I thought you thought it was a beautiful religion."
"That's the thing, it's what Alel himself said to me the other day, he comes to me freaking out, cause he doesn't understand it. He said, 'If we're supposed to be so important, if we're so powerful, why can't we take the chance to save ourselves instead of waiting?' But his family looks at this, Romulans leaving with the hevai—What they see is the sheep dragging the shepherds, like it's some test for them to recognize this and wait to be saved by something else...And Gene's been crawling out of his skin thinking Alel's just going to wait around here to get attacked again. I'm not even kidding, I would've kicked the little fucker's ass and dragged him kicking and biting if I had to, I don't care if he's got twice the muscles." Jill's breathing is restless and she fumes, taking out her grumpiness on the unsmoked half of her cigarette. "I'm quitting these," she says as if veering blame at it, and stomps it out under her boot before marching into the house.
By the time they've filled up the list and all had some dinner, even Alel is in a much softer mood. While it's still light out, a lot of them move outside to start digging apart the car for salvageable parts or stock metal that can be made into something else for the ship; Scotty's holding the same list he's been going at a couple times a day for weeks between his lips while he and Gene lift up the hood.
The whole system of parts that the vehicle houses is even more cryptic to Nyota than the few motors she got a glance at when she was friends with a guy who was into cars before she enlisted. Gene knocks on some bulky hollow part. "This is what you want."
"That?" Scotty squints.
"Well, not for that," he says, pointing at what Scotty's holding for reference, something that looks like a hand-sized washer with helical ridges. Jill is just coming up to them and takes it from him.
"You need one of these?"
"I need eighteen of those."
"Yawn," Jill declares, which always amuses Nyota, because she's not sure whether Romulans actually yawn. "What the hell is it, anyway?"
"It's just a boiler coil. You can make 'em out of pretty cheap stuff cause they're eventually gonna break off anyway. That's why we need so many."
"This isn't your cheap shit, so don't waste it on that," Gene continues to babble while Jill goes running off again, then is pointing at some long tubes. "Those are usually reusable even in high-powered vehicles, I don't know about vessels, though..."
Alel appears now looking immersed in thought, but smirks shyly at Gene as he comes up next to him. Gene tells him hey and grabs him by the cloth on his shoulders with no real purpose to it but to trip his hip closer into his side as he keeps talking.
"Where's little sister?" Alel asks once he can get a word in.
"Jill was just in the kitchen with her. Hey, can you help get this thing out? I'm trying, and..."
Gene has lifted the locking mechanism but he's still having trouble removing an extremely heavy part that Nyota is pretty sure by now isn't supposed to be removed manually.
"What is...?" Alel doesn't seem to know what he's looking at.
"This thing, the box...thing."
"Right, well, it definitely won't run without that, so for now we could—" Scotty stammers while Alel taps Gene out of the way, grabs at the sides of the unwieldy thing to get it in a grasp and easily flip it up out of the tricky narrow space, scrutinizing it and turning it over curiously— "or you know, why don't you just set it in the back?"
Nyota and Jim are at the edges of all this laughing silently and at Scotty nervously running a hand over the car. Jim gives him a consolation of "Hey, she gave us a good run," even proudly giving it a farewell slap himself. "Hey, Gene, how come you know so much about cars?"
"I used to steal them. No, let me rephrase that. The last person I escaped from was a car thief."
Nyota is asking, "I thought you were worked by the state before...?" and then realizes it's really none of her business.
"No. I mean, I was, but..." There's a forced nonchalance, that stammer of somebody who's mixed up their own stories. "Before all that."
"Madda!" Alel is scolding from just inside the front door. "E'lev, you not eat those..."
Gene chuckles. "She's probably bored out of her mind, we should go soon. And it looks like you guys have a visitor."
"He's just a patient, I'm sure he'll go around back," Jim says. Jill has come back out of the house, and Jim squints over towards Madda and asks her, "How is she doing?"
"You don't have to worry about her," Jill replies. "There are some people around turning their noses up, but they all know Gene would personally slaughter anybody who did anything to her. And I think she's fine. She's probably been through a lot of changes already, she's adjusting pretty fast."
"He sure as hell seems to like her, it's just...a lot of responsibility."
"Good thing we have Alel too now." Jill scoffs sweetly, realizing, "She doesn't exactly need parents as much as somebody to teach her not to do what she's told, and I can't really think of anyone better..."
"Jim," Nyota says.
She's staring off at the man standing in their yard, not entirely sure what she thinks she's seeing. Jim's too busy laughing with Jill and something Scotty just said to her, distracted.
She says louder, "Jim."
He comes to attention when the man comes up closer to them, and politely enough he asks, "Can I help you with something?"
Even with the sentence complete, there's a trailing off in the air you can practically hear, when he looks directly at him. The company senses something heavy and clears off as the moment suspends itself, until it's just the three of them, and him.
Nyota still remembers pretty vividly what it was like for her, the sleepless depression stretching for months, after her father died. And while it is simply a different kind of pain, not necessarily better or worse, she would never kid herself that she can understand what it's like never to have known one of your parents, to have lost them too young.
And to impossibly be in their presence even once, what it would affect in somebody to actually see them breathing in front of you. She can't imagine this. When something comes over Jim's face that she's never seen in him before she doesn't know if he's going to break down into tears or just pass out or...
Maybe just groan, "Oh, holy shit," his hand knocking into the car as something pushes him off balance.
"Listen, you don't all need to panic, I'm just here to talk. And first of all," he says to Jim with a steadying motion, hesitating as if he's not sure how to say it. "I know that you're not really my son."
Jim opens his mouth, and shuts it, and there's a long, long moment of him blinking and thinking before he demands, "You've been talking to Spock?"
He nods.
"Alright." Suddenly domineering and just nodding several times, Jim demands, "I'm gonna need an explanation, and I mean now."
Jim probably would not have idealized the first reason he had to break out his new gun as something like using it as subtle leverage with a man exactly resembling his late father, which he does by casually setting it at his side as Scotty sits at the rickety coffee table taking apart the only other firearm they own.
"Ah!" Scotty exclaims when he finally daintily holds up a long silvery-white component.
"—Oh that motherfucker!" Jim shouts, shooting up out of his chair.
"EL-90, is it?" George Kirk asks with a half-smirk. "Figures the bastard would have one of those just lying around in his sock drawer."
Scotty explains to everyone else, "This baby is the single most powerful tracking device known to man; you could buy an Enterprise with one of them. Don't get your hopes up, though, the piecemeal components aren't worth half that."
"Son of a bitch." Jim itches his fingers at his eyes in irritation. "What the hell is he after with us?"
"I think he just wanted to keep an eye on you. Observe you, like...an experiment." George shrugs. "He was curious about all of you."
"Thought it would be fun to see how long we'd survive?" Jim suggests with a scoff.
"Wait, can it do that?" Leonard asks, looking at Scotty.
"It scans for basic life signs, yeah. I could maybe fool around with it and make us another tricorder, but I'm not making any promises."
Jim stops his pacing. "Scotty, please tell me you can still put that phaser back together functionally."
The engineer practically balks. "You can't insult me like that when you're not my commanding officer anymore." This earns him an affectionate smirk before Jim turns back on George Kirk, who's already willing to continue.
"Look, Spock's been acquainted with me for a while. I didn't expect to hear anything back from him when I tried to contact him recently, but he's not only safe, he's...got a hell of a plan going on, apparently." George raises his brows incredulously. "I wasn't really interested in the details. That wasn't most of what we talked about, really, I think he just thought it would be a good idea to inform me of what exactly happened to my son."
"So you come here for a little vacation just to say hi. Maybe they should be closing the doors again after all if it's possible for you to get in." Between George fucking Kirk and the slight panic over the tracking device, Jim looks about ready to go out of his mind. He rakes a hand in his hair and slumps loudly back down into his chair.
"I'll admit, it's mostly curiosity. It's not every day an officer of the Imperial fleet meets somebody who persuades him to try to shake things up even when it's not for his own good, just to see what happens."
"I have no idea what you're talking about. I didn't persuade him to do anything, not on purpose at least."
"...Exactly."
"There's still something you haven't explained."
"Honestly, I don't know much of Spock's whole plan at all, if that's what you're..."
"No, that's not it." Jim stares at him a second, sits back as if resigned, as if he's given up on solving a riddle. "How the hell are you alive?"
George Kirk's eyes, blue and innocent and way too much like Jim's, come up from where they were straying a little lewdly up and down Nyota as she took a seat at the table. "...Excuse me?"
"History suggests that the events with Nero still happened with basically the same results here and there, both when Kelvin was intercepted and when Vulcan was destroyed. My father blew himself up to disarm Nero; if he hadn't done it, I wouldn't be alive."
"...But that would've been when you were born."
"I never knew my father."
"Shit." George sits back and gets this old regret in his expression. "We thought we would have to surrender the ship, but I'd been working on this theoretical explosive technique; it uses these ionic interruptions to cause destructive waves, so you can create it almost anywhere in space, supposedly. By some happy accident, in the heat of the moment, I thought of it and was able to use it just well enough to send Nero packing for a while. But I was never able to recreate the results later."
By now Scotty and Leonard are exchanging looks, and they're muttering to each other some excuse to leave, as if it seems like this is all a bit personal. Nyota shifts up from where her elbows were resting on the table and when her hands drop to her lap Jim reaches and squeezes one, and she looks up to see him looking deeply pensive for a few seconds.
"If you have any notes on what you had of that technology..." He's making himself not be optimistic. "Could I look at it?"
The small laugh George lets out is very, Of course you would ask that, and something is both nostalgic and bitter in the way he explains, "I don't have them anymore. My son stole them. When he left home, he copied all the data and then sabotaged all my experiment logs. I guess he just wanted to prove he could do better. I heard that he was still working on it right after he enlisted...but I guess he got bored with the idea by the time he had his own ship."
"So how about Winona?" Jim quietly asks after another hesitation.
"We're not together anymore," George says neutrally. "She's working between outposts on the other side of the quadrant, hardly ever visits home...James was always in better touch with her. I'd tell her what happened to him, but then she'd want to know what's going on with you."
"Not such a good idea."
"No. Definitely not." George scrutinizes Jim for a second. "I'm not about to tell you it's wrong to be here, but there are certain things about it I don't really get. It's not like they've made it illegal to not own napes. You could always watch your own back, hell, just...Pretend one or two of your friends out here is really your slave, it would help everyone out."
"We probably would've been caught if we'd decided to do something like that," Nyota cuts in, and it's the easy argument to make out of so many responses she could say. "People can recognize us, especially out there..."
"Yeah, but I wanted to tell you I could make it work out for you. I own a really big place out in Alaska. It wouldn't be ideal, but it'd be nice."
"What's in it for you?" Jim suddenly asks. George seems a bit taken aback. "It's never going to be as simple as throwing on a pair of shades when we have to run out for groceries." He then thinks to indicate at Nyota, who is already pulling her hair over, exposing the side of her neck.
George's face falls and he even seems speechless. "I'm really sorry. That's just awful."
"Unless you have that reaction to every 'nape' you see in your neighborhood? I really don't want to hear about it." Nyota didn't even think before she said it, but maybe Jim wanted to, judging from how his hand tightens around hers for a second. George looks truly offended, and confused.
"Listen," Jim sets forth, "you may not think something is in this for you, but I don't understand why you're here, and I'm pretty sure you're not going to stay. Maybe you feel some kind of debt to me, maybe it's screwing with your head that you're never gonna see your kid again. But you need to understand that while you might, in some abstract stretch of the imagination, be my father...I'm sure as hell not your son."
They feel just uncomfortable enough about the sudden bitter turn to show him out the front door. Just as George is about to leave, he hesitates, remembering something.
He's handing over a key card for a house."If you're really heading off in that ship soon, you might wanna make a stop at the address that's programmed in there. James had all these houses scattered all over the planet—He hardly ever lived in most of them. This house is the only one he owned under his own name, it's the only one I know about. I'm sure you can handle making a break-in. There may not be any money there, but you'd probably find some weapons."
When he's finally gone, Nyota and Jim are standing on the porch after following him out. Jim flicks the card idly between his finger and then just sets it on the railing and looks at it with an expression on his face like he can't explain the emptiness of a victory. She pulls him in and wraps her arms at his waist, feeling the unrest in how he's breathing, that he's still reeling from everything.
"Tell me what to do," he finally quietly says. "We can't go very long without anybody putting faces to actions, right? It's like...I want people to know us just for what we do, but I'm always going to be seen as this other man. Is it even possible for us to tell everyone the truth?"
"What if it's better that way?" She lifts her head from his chest to look up at him. "If you let people believe that it's always been the same man, that that level of contrition is actually possible..."
Jim's eyes narrow in thought, his mouth creeping up at the edges. He shakes his head. "But it's a lie."
She bites at her bottom lip for a second, her voice a little small when she replies. "Sometimes it's logical enough to lie if it's for honest ends. If everything you stand for is real."
She puts her thumb at his chin, turning his distant eyes onto hers.
"You're not a lie," she says.
The house is hard to find even in its pronounced white solitude out in the middle of the country somewhere in Kansas, as it's surprisingly small for a two-story. They land the ship behind it and it takes Jim several minutes of vague dread to even initiate the first step out of the ship. The air tucks and licks at his clothes like a cold impersonal welcome when his boots hit the dirt off the last step of the ladder.
When they finally go inside, what is the most disorienting is how normal it looks, like a relatively undecorated hunting resort.
No pictures adorn the walls; a broken viewscreen sits in front of the gigantic couch, and there's one pair of boots in the closet he can't bring himself to take even if he could use the extra shoes. The guns to be found there are just displayed in a cabinet, so they don't have to look hard. They pile up the emergency supply of food that's in the chilly little cellar, but they don't find much else to take. Jim wanders about in an anxious haze, dissecting and avoiding corners of the place in equal measure. The medicine cabinet is familiarly stocked with the right medicine for his own allergies and headaches; he owns nothing of what he finds here, but there's nothing he wouldn't use. He's not sure what he expected.
He can't and doesn't explain to the others how it makes him feel. It's almost like the cave again: one of the only times in his life a place has ever really gotten under his skin, made him feel like it could be haunted. The place breathes with some frigid apparition, and it's like his bones know something he doesn't, that it's the loneliest place in the world.
Nyota comes up to hold his hand when he's standing in the middle of the kitchen, and he says he wants to burn it down.
At the end of the long driveway Bones scowls in confusion after tilting his head to see what Jim inscribes on the old-fashioned mailbox by branding at the metal with their phaser, leaving the day's date at the bottom corner under the letters.
Nyota grins a bit darkly and Jim steps back to examine his work and the doctor asks, "You want 'em to think he did it?"
"That's exactly what I want them to think." He tosses the house's key card inside the mailbox.
Jill smokes her last cigarette out under the ladder, and Alel laughs at Jim coming up behind to pantomime a hugging motion around her shoulder that turns into snatching it out of her lips.
He flicks it onto the kerosene trail that swallows and bursts a blazing line across the graying back yard and spits the first explosion of light that ignites up through the window. There is no one around for miles in the middle of the night, and they watch the golden burn devour the house for only a minute before Jim says, "Let's go."
And they board the ship again, the powering up and rising off of the vessel blowing a wind of dust under them that licks into the cinders of the house leaving its lone life. But the mailbox should live to tell the tale:
Jim Kirk was here.
||||| continue to book II
The sign-up list for the auction goes up before the weekend. Brighton's taking first-price sealed bids all throughout the day instead of doing an open auction, and Jim works that day up until the end of his shift, then strides back in. Brighton gives him a laid-back smile, checking the list over and saying, "You're the last one, it turns out. So I guess you're gonna find out on the spot."
Jim's brows loft high, and Brighton tells him not to have a heart attack, is finishing some cleaning up at one of his shelves while Jim pretty much just stands there tapping his foot anxiously and chewing on his lip.
"Heard you brought in that girl the other day—Hell, I can't believe I didn't mention that yet, man, that's insane..."
Jim's a bit taken aback. "I didn't think that many people knew."
"Well, that tall one came by today and mentioned it. She said it was the most interesting shift she's had all year."
Brighton seems to be looking for something, and Jim just shoves his hands in his pockets to try to still them from anxiously tapping on things.
"Oh, hey, Kirk: Do me a favor and grab that stylus on the table right there?"
"Sure."
Jim gets about five steps away before he stops dead in his tracks.
For a few seconds all he can do is stand there with his eyes closed in fervent silent self-berating, his lips pressing tight together until he finally lets out a bitter, resigned breath.
When he turns around, he expects to see some kind of weapon pointed at him, some expression of grim amusement on the man's face, or maybe anger, maybe malice.
What he sees is just Brighton, his hand clenched harmlessly around the dusting rag and his body leaned into a chair, a look of relative calm on his face. Jim meets his eyes and he bothers no denial with it, knows his fear is written plainly on him, but he doesn't say or do anything.
Brighton is almost casual in how he tosses his rag down and says, "Come into the office."
So this is how it'll go.
He's been in the office many times before; once it was even for a drink and some talking about the weather. He's thinking about the general layout before they're even in there, wondering where he would probably keep a gun. As it happens, he just has to play along, sit down in the knobby chair like this is any other meeting with his boss. Instead of sitting down across from him, Brighton sits on the corner of the desk just to the side; he sets his PADD down to his left with bored abandonment.
He finally says, "You're not gonna have the highest bid."
Jim leans back, not even close to feeling like it's safe to feel relieved, but nodding like he thinks he understands. It comes out fast when he can't help starting to plead, "Listen, I'm just a man, alright? I'm trying to look after my own, that's...That's all."
Brighton lets out a sigh, goes on to say, "I got a very, very high bid today."
Jim clenches his teeth, knowing he has to look steady, like this is a demand he can meet. "How much do you want?"
"I'm not blackmailing you." It's almost like Brighton is confused that he doesn't get it; Jim isn't really sure. "...I'm selling you the heap."
Jim almost chokes. "I'm sorry, you're...?"
"Let me tell you a little secret, in exchange for yours," Brighton says, and it may be an entire minute of Jim's eyes darting in confusion all over him before he even begins: "Four years ago, I was living with my wife over in Tennessee. We'd been married for eight years, no kids, decent life...One day I came home to find our place ransacked, and there was a note left next to the bedroom. It was from my servant, politely informing me that my wife was dead in the bathroom, and that by the time I saw the note, he'd be long gone."
Jim looks somewhere down at his knees as a very complicated sudden emotion has him letting out a long sigh.
"I came here because I thought maybe. There was a chance in hell he'd come here, and I could find him, and I could kill him. And I came here and I told a lot of very good lies, and I started up this place, and I waited, and waited." Brighton's face shifts to something else then, and he shakes his head. "I thought the whole time, up until about a year ago, that the only reason I was being decent to these people was I had to wait it out so I could eventually kill that son of a bitch. I'd stayed around so long, though, it was ridiculous to think that that kid would ever show up. He could even be here, and just over at the Knot where I couldn't get to him.
"...I started to like the business, got used to always having terrible food. Made a couple casual friendships with my employees now and then...Then one day this Romulan kid walks in, wanting to know if I can sell him any data chips. I asked him a couple questions up until he looked me right in the face, and then I recognized him. And he knew. He knew that I knew, and we were standing there looking at each other right in front of this other customer. It felt like hours."
It's another long moment, Brighton sitting there and looking out his window before he finishes.
"And then I told him I didn't have what he was looking for, and he just nodded, and he left. I haven't laid eyes on him since." Brighton looks back down at Jim. "I don't have a story or an explanation of one thing that happened that made me change my mind, you know. What it comes down to is, sometimes you get to a time in your life when you realize maybe you aren't the man you thought you were. And look, I've been watching you, and I've been reading about this James Kirk. And maybe that's your name, but it's not who you are." Now after another moment, he scoffs, cocking his eyebrow. "You might wanna work on not answering to it. Seriously, I thought you were sharper than that."
Something resembling a laugh from Jim as he reaches and wipes a hand over his mouth, nodding. "Yeah."
"So...What's your bid?"
"Why are you..." It feels strange to use his voice again.
"I don't know that I ever really intended to sell this thing to the highest bidder. There's a reason I mostly only told my workers about it. I already wanted to give it to you when you walked in today...cause I just like you. You seem like you'd do something good with it. Not to mention you and yours obviously know how to take good care of a vessel." He smiles wryly as Jim dares a cocky scoff, like that's an understatement. "So, come on."
Brighton's pointing at the bid Jim realizes he still has clutched in an old-fashioned envelope, per his own advice of accepting material records so that nobody could hack into the previous bids. He says, "Seventeen."
"You're not gonna try to do better than that?" Brighton laughs; his features are set back into familiarity, his rugged face cynical and harmless.
Jim blinks, takes a second to realize. Then says, "Ten."
Brighton squints, sitting back. "Fifteen."
"Eleven."
"Fourteen."
Jim feels himself smirking. "Eleven."
"I'm not going lower than thirteen."
"Eleven, and I'll fix and clean your Civilius."
"No shit?" He reaches out his hand. "You got a deal."
He's made it to the little stand where an Andorian lady sells old collectible trinkets when he hears "Did you win?..." And turns to see a slightly grimacing Jill coming up to him with her little backpack on.
He's still a bit shell-shocked by the turns of the last half hour, and Jill's expression drops as she assumes wrong. "Shit," she says.
"'Shit' what? We got it."
It takes him about five more times of rewording the fact for her to realize he's serious, and then it's like the best joke she's ever heard, the way she leans over in never-stopping laughter that Jim has to join in on because it's really starting to hit him too.
"What's so funny?" he demands. Jill has sometimes confused him on some level of undefinable incompatibility of some kind between them, but there are times like this when she just resonates with real laughter in the middle of so much cold, even when it's a cruel joke, when he knows he kind of gets what it is about her that makes Scotty a little crazy. "Seriously, what?"
"It's just..." She points a thumb behind her. "I just had the biggest fight with Khamak. Huge, huge fight. I don't think...well. I know we're not getting married."
"Oh, well..." He can't stop snickering. "That's too bad."
"Shut the hell up."
"No, you should be kissing my ass right now."
"Funny thing is," she's putting a finger up as she says, "I was coming over cause I have something for you. Come on, you wanna go for a walk?"
A while later they're sitting against the wooden wall next to the occasional green patches of grass close to the front gate, which still faintly states those blood-colored words he won't forget any time soon.
"I hoped so badly you guys would win that ship the second I found out you wanted it," she's saying with sudden sincerity. "Even when I was only mostly sure you'd take anyone else...That is kind of weird, though, that he just wanted to give it to you. I guess he just wanted it in good hands?"
"Some good hands." He has a small look of incredulity. "If I was him, I would've sold us out. Hell, if I were you, I would've blown the lid on us so fast..."
"Well. You're not me." She's getting into her bag now. "I told you I was going to make that up to you. I've been working on this for a while."
Jim has almost forgotten she said she had something for him. When she puts something into his hands, it's wrapped in cloth, and quite heavy. He stills, looking at her. He only feels at it a little before saying, "Seriously?"
"Go on." She nudges his arm.
"I can't accept this, you don't even have—"
"Oh, but you have to," she corrects, "I already engraved it for you."
Now narrowing his eyes, he takes the soft cloth off to reveal a very odd-looking handgun. The metal has a slightly irregular texture, marbling between iron and rust colors; the barrel is bulky and almost a cylindrical shape but hollow enough to be balanced by the smirky western-style curved handle. If he overlooks any expectations of what he'd expect a gun to look like, there is something that feels handsome and timeless about it.
Turning it over, he finds the engraving in a smooth feel under one of his thumbs. In a subtle imprint along the barrel where a brand name might run more boldly, it quietly reads,
Some luck for the good captain. Love, J
Jim wants to laugh about the wit inherent in the gift, but something is clenching at him, a toppling sudden emotion and he is simply, deeply moved. A moment passes of him thinking about what he could possibly say, until he finally manages to give her a wry expression. "Anything in particular that makes it lucky?"
Jill grins wide, like she had to wait to see if he'd ask, already motioning for him to give it back for a minute and saying, "You know me better than I thought."
Jim of course invites Jill over, but she seems to succumb to a heavier mood by the time they're walking back, and just says, "Send everybody my congratulations." He knows she isn't exactly avoiding Scotty, but she kind of is. They're still visiting each other, but there's a wall gone up, this fact that sooner rather than later they may really have to say goodbye to each other, regardless of who gets the ship. And as much as it works for people like them not to make anything of it they can't always deny that it's there.
The other three are all waiting on needles on the porch and giving silent looks of expectation when he comes home. Nyota is slowly rising to take the news standing, and he drags it out a bit in a poker face, making Bones go, "Oh no..."
He's shrugging then, breaking slowly out into a grin. "Let's go get it."
"What?!" Scotty's off the step and clapping his arms around Jim during the quick tumble into cheers all around, and Jim can only laugh and forget about any other part of the story.
Jim manages to finally interrupt all the questioning and exclamations, "Scotty, you and I can go get it and put it in the back. After that, I want two things." He counts off with his fingers: "I want booze, and I want fried chicken."
An hour of Scotty cussing the clunky vessel into obedience as if it needs to be broken in and it's finally in the yard, Nyota squinting and laughing from the back door as she can hear how Jim can't stop whooping and yelling, "This ugly fuckin' thing is ours!"
Naturally it attracts a bit of attention around the front of the house, but she and Leonard have to wade through it without comment to go out and happily procure Jim's demands. A couple hours later they've put down an arm and a leg for the chicken and some wine from the mixed abundance of alcohol products to be had from the Knot taverns, and they throw a picnic out back on the huge fleece blanket they keep in the living room. Nyota smiles at the amused reactions when she emerges wearing the dress just because she figures she won't have any other occasion for it any time soon.
"Do you really want to talk shop right now?" Jim is replying to Leonard as he takes a sip of the wine from their plastic cups.
"I'm just asking, cause sometimes it seems like maybe you have some actual semblance of a plan? In your secretive bastard kinda way?"
Jim laughs shortly. "Get as many people out of here as possible, for starters."
Leonard just gives him a prodding look.
"Well, the ship will take anywhere up to three months—that's what Scotty guessed—to fix up, cause it all depends on what we can find, not so much what we can buy. Of course there's other stuff we need." Jim starts to talk more like reading from a mental list. "We could all use some nice sets of clothes. We somehow probably need to have some back-up form of fake credit, anything that even temporarily looks legitimate. And...we need weapons. Like a lot of weapons."
Even though the list should be overwhelming, Jim says it with the kind of intent that feels reassuring after all this time of inner flailing and just trying to keep at the surface of things. They soon fall into a much lighter mood, something that reminds Nyota more of times back from working together. Long after night has fallen the back yard glows with the most bittersweet feeling of a tectonic shift, affection ebbing more richly than before between all of them.
She finally carries her cup over with her to get a look inside the ship. They've already hauled the old couch from the living room into the bridge, which is a much less high-maintenance affair than a Starfleet vessel, only bearing one pilot's seat. The layout of the ship is so much more simple-minded, the function of every room less cut and dry just from looking at it, almost like your average empty house. On the outside it looks long and narrow, the nacelles wing-like and not very large. It's certainly not a beautiful ship, but she could get used to it.
She stays up there looking out the front at where the occasional twinkle of a house light can be seen in the distance until she realizes the noise of talking outside has disintegrated. She then hears somebody on the ship ladder, recognizes Jim by his footsteps. The sound pauses and she realizes he's just leaning in on the ladder looking up at her.
She turns with a little smile to walk over to him. "They've gone to bed?"
He nods, and she makes a motion to the side with her head. And she says, "'Ulysses'? You going to keep it like that?
To her surprise, he rolls his eyes a little bit. "I don't know. Scotty hates mythological ship names for some reason...I think it's bad luck."
"Since when are you superstitious?" She sneers, as if calling his bullshit, saying, "And how is it bad luck?...He got home, didn't he?"
"Yeah, he did." Jim shakes his head, smirking. "But you don't come limping home after losing the rest of your shipmates and get to say you're a good sailor. Not that he doesn't spend a good amount of the epic crying into his soup about it, if I remember right. And hey, I can't shoot an arrow through any axes, so maybe I shouldn't talk."
She gives that smile always accompanied by her eyes moving upwards, as if at some deity that understands her own amusement. "I'd like to see you try with a phaser."
He laughs lowly at that while he gets out of the way so she can come down the ladder, but once she's at the bottom she doesn't move to go in yet. He sits comfortably leaning in on the metal until she finishes her wine and tosses the cup somewhere in the grass. It's getting cold outside and she wraps her arms over herself a little, glancing idly back at Jim.
Something about him sitting on the silver rung like that, his hair tussled up just slightly in the wind, and she has this memory blinking forward in her mind. The kind you remember and wonder the moment you remember if it would've gotten away from you for good if you hadn't had some reason to think of it just then.
Back when they were in San Francisco, she went to a track meet by herself. The place wasn't very crowded, and she thought she had an entire row of a bleacher to herself until she looked and saw Jim Kirk sitting on the other end. And all he did when she saw that she saw him was nod in her direction. Not smile at her in that cocky way he had, not do anything to show he was sitting there to do anything but read a book and occasionally glance at the sport; it seemed like he had come there just to be uninterrupted for a while. Completely out of character for what she knew about him at the time.
After some minutes, she did what she would've done with anyone else she knew from the academy; she sighed and stood up and came over and sat next to him. He didn't look up from what he was reading, but he smiled when she did that. She was the first one to volunteer conversation.
Eventually she mentioned that she used to run the fastest 100 meter dash at her school. "It's been a while since I was in shape for it. I don't think I could do it anymore."
And he said, "Oh, I bet you could," without even thinking about it. Not the way you say something like that when it's to be polite or flattering, but the way you say something when you have no reason other than just believing in somebody. As if he already considered her somebody he really knew.
And while she acknowledged that he might have said it in the more insincere manner if they were around anyone else, she let herself forget that until the half hour or so later when he said, "See you around" and stood up to leave her alone again. She can't remember now what else they talked about, but there's a simple clarity attached to the memory, like a smell you associate with a season, and something moves.
It didn't change the way she thought about him at the time, possibly even irritated her more that he was so inconsistent, seemingly artificial. But remembering it now, it's like some thin thread of possibility that's been following her around for years, precarious and poetic and invisible and maybe in another life it would have never meant anything to her at all. But here now she feels herself sliding into the presence of him, and she wants this thing, she wants to let him make her forget where she is. She wants to ask him if he remembers that day, but it isn't something she could tell him; it's not a fact or a feeling, only a memory.
"I'm sorry if I was an asshole," Jim is saying.
She almost laughs at the sudden comment. "What?"
"When I came home that night. You know." He's lazily slipping down the ladder, gets to the ground but just leans onto it by a hand on the side. "...It's just, I don't know what's going on or what you're thinking but you keep looking at me kind of weirdly since it happened. And if I made you feel like I'm starting to resent you, or something...That's not what I meant."
She thinks about saying about a dozen other things, but ends up quietly replying, "You think I resent you, though."
He gives this low sigh, like he doesn't want to push this. But he says, "Like for not being somebody else?"
Before she can make some pleading assuring reply that's rising in her, he interrupts.
"I mean, we could talk about that. I could tell you that it's not easy for me either, how impossibly unfair the whole thing feels when I think about him and how maybe I get guilty about you because that's the only way I can feel like he's my friend now." There's something self-mocking in his tone, in a little scoff he gives. "Like I miss it even being relevant. Telling myself every little bit by bit that if I could just not fall in love with you, somehow, somewhere, he'd know how much I miss him. As if that makes any sense. As if it even works," he adds, shrugging weakly at the grass. "...But I think you already know."
Jim is resting his shoulder at the side of the ladder when she looks now, and Nyota's thoughts stagger at the sight of him, like she's looking at what she'd see if she hadn't seen him in years as well as through her own eyes. He's wearing torn-up jeans and the same shirt he wore yesterday and the day before, his muscles look half-starved and his eyes a little sunken with ache and exhaustion and he is fifty times the man she ever thought he could be when she met him and she doesn't know why the first thing out of her mouth is a very small and astonished "You love me?"
The look in those eyes is almost startled, blue and open before his gaze wanders back to the ground, before he tries to figure what he wants to convey or say. She takes a few steps forward and as they turn into hers a little more solidly, she gives up on talking, gives up on facts, kisses him.
He makes a sound and there's a pause, no one pulling away but the kiss resting for the motion of other things, his hands meeting around her waist; they have kissed before but it never quite feels like they have. She could not define how he does it; she couldn't say what it's like to kiss him. He does it now very slowly, his eyes open and looking brittle at the edge of abandon until she closes hers. She pushes against him until he's sharply rooted against the ladder and responding in full feeling, one arm tightening around her waist, and the air seems to hit her skin even colder now where he isn't touching it and she burrows in and just—kisses—
One hand is grasping at her face now, and he leads for a little bit now in little shuddering tastes, stilling in the tiniest moments as if to measure, to make sure, but even in the lapses they stay tangled and don't breathe away from each other's mouths for another minute before he finally makes a sweet little sound, kind of a laugh.
"Hmm?" she hums when he kisses his way over to her ear.
"Um." He mutters, "I don't want to get your dress dirty."
She slowly smiles and then tells him to get the blanket back out.
Later when he's unzipping her his mouth reverently finds the place at her neck that still seems to tingle white-hot when she's conscious of it, a chilling sting of a tongue against it and she feels so achingly loved, the shape sharpened into white stars. He lulls into her and the darkness around them sings.
Gene and Jill are bickering snidely where they sit next to the porch on the sunny, festering day when they start taking names for the trip out. People keep coming with cash, and Nyota shakes her head tiredly and says, "It's first-come, first-serve."
"We've got fifteen places left," Jim says to the one Bajoran family that lives close by. "You're good to go, just make sure you don't change your mind. And bring as much food as you can."
"An' a sleeping bag if you've got it," Scotty adds.
"It'll probably be only half an hour more until we're closed," Jill points out as they watch the family walking away. "So he's got that long."
"Would you stop?" Gene snaps, looking miserable enough that Madda instinctively looks up from her pretzels and squeezes his knee; he gets an apologetic look in his eyes and goes back to the messy attempt at plaiting her hair.
A pair of Romulans have been approaching, and Nyota's the one who goes for the list on the PADD; when she looks up she sees a young adult female, accompanied by a younger male. The boy halts, scrutinizing her. She looks back, feeling like there's something familiar about him, until she realizes why.
"You." It's that kid who stole the phaser from Marcon.
The woman as well as everyone else is looking between the two of them, at Nyota's scolding eyes on the suddenly dreading look on the Romulan's face.
"You could have saved me a lot of trouble if you'd just shot that bastard, you know."
"I am sorry," he stammers in an accented mumble.
He looks truly ashamed, even if it's only for the benefit of what he needs. Nyota's wrath is more like she's wringing out a mild grudge than anything else, and she sighs as she lifts up the stylus. "How many?"
"It wasn't because...you...because you're human," he interrupts uncertainly.
"I appreciate that," she says, her voice flatter this time. "...You're just a kid, anyway."
"I don't imagine you're going to explain what the hell you're going on about?" Jim says.
Nyota interrupts by explaining the routine jist in Romulan, since she noticed the woman had an accent, "We are following a lead on the location of a refugee shelter; after that, we don't know, but locations will be democratically chosen within the realm of whatever's reasonably safe. You get let off when you want. We're providing medical care, we're not promising food, but we'll try. Be amenable with everyone else and we won't have any problems. Does that cover any questions you had?"
The woman, recovering from the wide-eyed realization that she's so comfortable speaking the language, nods and thanks her. Nyota asks a couple more questions and then puts their names in. As the two are leaving, nobody gets the chance to ask anything before they notice Alel approaching from the street.
It's not much of a surprise to most of them, but Gene falls into this look almost like he can't believe he has the audacity to be there. Nyota wonders if she's the only one who isn't extremely obvious about looking between the two of them as Alel gives him an inscrutable expression and pointedly looks mostly at the ground after that.
"Madda, go inside for a few minutes?" Gene suggests; it's as if he predicts he's about to have some kind of outburst, and doesn't know whether it's going to be the good kind or the bad kind. The girl submits quietly, and Jim is the first to speak after that.
"What do you do, Alel?" he asks, picking up the PADD. It's the first question he's been asking every potential passenger all day.
Squinting, Gene blurts, "You're not..."
"I've studied a lot of...physics," Alel stammers his reply, and it's like he's already been told by someone else what they would be asking, has been making sure he wouldn't slip up on his Standard. "I have no specific dietary needs or allergies. I am capable of heavy lifting..."
"You're fine. Three spaces, right?"
Jim is already putting it down, but Alel says, "One."
This is when Nyota looks over at Gene and sees him stilled in shock, looking vaguely guilty.
Alel has this defensive, devastated air to him. "It's just me," he clarifies.
Gene gulps out, "But you said, if you couldn't convince them to—"
"I know what I said." Alel rushes out the rest: "I changed my mind. May I put this inside?" Now they all understand the hiking pack he's carrying.
"They threw you out?"
Alel ignores Gene, but not coldly, and Scotty tells him he's welcome to leave it wherever he wants. Nyota meets eyes with Jim as the young man passes politely between them.
There is a second or two after Alel's gone in, and then Jill practically kicks Gene, who just gives her this lost and open gesture.
"What? If he wants to be—"
"Jesus, you kids are hopeless," Leonard is the one to interrupt, which startles all of them. Emphatic, he tells Gene, "He just made quite possibly the hardest decision of his entire life and it landed on you, it's not astrophysics. You go after him."
And Gene, who has probably spoken all of a couple words with the doctor before outside of medical checks, responds as if chastised, muttering, "Uh, yessir" before getting up and going inside.
Scotty is intently communicating something wordless with Jill, and she's making a slow, overwhelmed motion with her head before she seems to dismiss the whole emotion with, "I'm so glad that's over. I was about to kick his ass if he didn't start seeing straight."
Leonard gives her a somewhat taken aback expression.
"Yeah, I'm being insensitive, but after the riots I'm having a hard time feeling sorry for the people who can't take a warning when it slaps them in the face. Alel doesn't go for this messianic ryakna, he's just loyal."
Scotty chuckles darkly. "I thought you thought it was a beautiful religion."
"That's the thing, it's what Alel himself said to me the other day, he comes to me freaking out, cause he doesn't understand it. He said, 'If we're supposed to be so important, if we're so powerful, why can't we take the chance to save ourselves instead of waiting?' But his family looks at this, Romulans leaving with the hevai—What they see is the sheep dragging the shepherds, like it's some test for them to recognize this and wait to be saved by something else...And Gene's been crawling out of his skin thinking Alel's just going to wait around here to get attacked again. I'm not even kidding, I would've kicked the little fucker's ass and dragged him kicking and biting if I had to, I don't care if he's got twice the muscles." Jill's breathing is restless and she fumes, taking out her grumpiness on the unsmoked half of her cigarette. "I'm quitting these," she says as if veering blame at it, and stomps it out under her boot before marching into the house.
By the time they've filled up the list and all had some dinner, even Alel is in a much softer mood. While it's still light out, a lot of them move outside to start digging apart the car for salvageable parts or stock metal that can be made into something else for the ship; Scotty's holding the same list he's been going at a couple times a day for weeks between his lips while he and Gene lift up the hood.
The whole system of parts that the vehicle houses is even more cryptic to Nyota than the few motors she got a glance at when she was friends with a guy who was into cars before she enlisted. Gene knocks on some bulky hollow part. "This is what you want."
"That?" Scotty squints.
"Well, not for that," he says, pointing at what Scotty's holding for reference, something that looks like a hand-sized washer with helical ridges. Jill is just coming up to them and takes it from him.
"You need one of these?"
"I need eighteen of those."
"Yawn," Jill declares, which always amuses Nyota, because she's not sure whether Romulans actually yawn. "What the hell is it, anyway?"
"It's just a boiler coil. You can make 'em out of pretty cheap stuff cause they're eventually gonna break off anyway. That's why we need so many."
"This isn't your cheap shit, so don't waste it on that," Gene continues to babble while Jill goes running off again, then is pointing at some long tubes. "Those are usually reusable even in high-powered vehicles, I don't know about vessels, though..."
Alel appears now looking immersed in thought, but smirks shyly at Gene as he comes up next to him. Gene tells him hey and grabs him by the cloth on his shoulders with no real purpose to it but to trip his hip closer into his side as he keeps talking.
"Where's little sister?" Alel asks once he can get a word in.
"Jill was just in the kitchen with her. Hey, can you help get this thing out? I'm trying, and..."
Gene has lifted the locking mechanism but he's still having trouble removing an extremely heavy part that Nyota is pretty sure by now isn't supposed to be removed manually.
"What is...?" Alel doesn't seem to know what he's looking at.
"This thing, the box...thing."
"Right, well, it definitely won't run without that, so for now we could—" Scotty stammers while Alel taps Gene out of the way, grabs at the sides of the unwieldy thing to get it in a grasp and easily flip it up out of the tricky narrow space, scrutinizing it and turning it over curiously— "or you know, why don't you just set it in the back?"
Nyota and Jim are at the edges of all this laughing silently and at Scotty nervously running a hand over the car. Jim gives him a consolation of "Hey, she gave us a good run," even proudly giving it a farewell slap himself. "Hey, Gene, how come you know so much about cars?"
"I used to steal them. No, let me rephrase that. The last person I escaped from was a car thief."
Nyota is asking, "I thought you were worked by the state before...?" and then realizes it's really none of her business.
"No. I mean, I was, but..." There's a forced nonchalance, that stammer of somebody who's mixed up their own stories. "Before all that."
"Madda!" Alel is scolding from just inside the front door. "E'lev, you not eat those..."
Gene chuckles. "She's probably bored out of her mind, we should go soon. And it looks like you guys have a visitor."
"He's just a patient, I'm sure he'll go around back," Jim says. Jill has come back out of the house, and Jim squints over towards Madda and asks her, "How is she doing?"
"You don't have to worry about her," Jill replies. "There are some people around turning their noses up, but they all know Gene would personally slaughter anybody who did anything to her. And I think she's fine. She's probably been through a lot of changes already, she's adjusting pretty fast."
"He sure as hell seems to like her, it's just...a lot of responsibility."
"Good thing we have Alel too now." Jill scoffs sweetly, realizing, "She doesn't exactly need parents as much as somebody to teach her not to do what she's told, and I can't really think of anyone better..."
"Jim," Nyota says.
She's staring off at the man standing in their yard, not entirely sure what she thinks she's seeing. Jim's too busy laughing with Jill and something Scotty just said to her, distracted.
She says louder, "Jim."
He comes to attention when the man comes up closer to them, and politely enough he asks, "Can I help you with something?"
Even with the sentence complete, there's a trailing off in the air you can practically hear, when he looks directly at him. The company senses something heavy and clears off as the moment suspends itself, until it's just the three of them, and him.
Nyota still remembers pretty vividly what it was like for her, the sleepless depression stretching for months, after her father died. And while it is simply a different kind of pain, not necessarily better or worse, she would never kid herself that she can understand what it's like never to have known one of your parents, to have lost them too young.
And to impossibly be in their presence even once, what it would affect in somebody to actually see them breathing in front of you. She can't imagine this. When something comes over Jim's face that she's never seen in him before she doesn't know if he's going to break down into tears or just pass out or...
Maybe just groan, "Oh, holy shit," his hand knocking into the car as something pushes him off balance.
"Listen, you don't all need to panic, I'm just here to talk. And first of all," he says to Jim with a steadying motion, hesitating as if he's not sure how to say it. "I know that you're not really my son."
Jim opens his mouth, and shuts it, and there's a long, long moment of him blinking and thinking before he demands, "You've been talking to Spock?"
He nods.
"Alright." Suddenly domineering and just nodding several times, Jim demands, "I'm gonna need an explanation, and I mean now."
Jim probably would not have idealized the first reason he had to break out his new gun as something like using it as subtle leverage with a man exactly resembling his late father, which he does by casually setting it at his side as Scotty sits at the rickety coffee table taking apart the only other firearm they own.
"Ah!" Scotty exclaims when he finally daintily holds up a long silvery-white component.
"—Oh that motherfucker!" Jim shouts, shooting up out of his chair.
"EL-90, is it?" George Kirk asks with a half-smirk. "Figures the bastard would have one of those just lying around in his sock drawer."
Scotty explains to everyone else, "This baby is the single most powerful tracking device known to man; you could buy an Enterprise with one of them. Don't get your hopes up, though, the piecemeal components aren't worth half that."
"Son of a bitch." Jim itches his fingers at his eyes in irritation. "What the hell is he after with us?"
"I think he just wanted to keep an eye on you. Observe you, like...an experiment." George shrugs. "He was curious about all of you."
"Thought it would be fun to see how long we'd survive?" Jim suggests with a scoff.
"Wait, can it do that?" Leonard asks, looking at Scotty.
"It scans for basic life signs, yeah. I could maybe fool around with it and make us another tricorder, but I'm not making any promises."
Jim stops his pacing. "Scotty, please tell me you can still put that phaser back together functionally."
The engineer practically balks. "You can't insult me like that when you're not my commanding officer anymore." This earns him an affectionate smirk before Jim turns back on George Kirk, who's already willing to continue.
"Look, Spock's been acquainted with me for a while. I didn't expect to hear anything back from him when I tried to contact him recently, but he's not only safe, he's...got a hell of a plan going on, apparently." George raises his brows incredulously. "I wasn't really interested in the details. That wasn't most of what we talked about, really, I think he just thought it would be a good idea to inform me of what exactly happened to my son."
"So you come here for a little vacation just to say hi. Maybe they should be closing the doors again after all if it's possible for you to get in." Between George fucking Kirk and the slight panic over the tracking device, Jim looks about ready to go out of his mind. He rakes a hand in his hair and slumps loudly back down into his chair.
"I'll admit, it's mostly curiosity. It's not every day an officer of the Imperial fleet meets somebody who persuades him to try to shake things up even when it's not for his own good, just to see what happens."
"I have no idea what you're talking about. I didn't persuade him to do anything, not on purpose at least."
"...Exactly."
"There's still something you haven't explained."
"Honestly, I don't know much of Spock's whole plan at all, if that's what you're..."
"No, that's not it." Jim stares at him a second, sits back as if resigned, as if he's given up on solving a riddle. "How the hell are you alive?"
George Kirk's eyes, blue and innocent and way too much like Jim's, come up from where they were straying a little lewdly up and down Nyota as she took a seat at the table. "...Excuse me?"
"History suggests that the events with Nero still happened with basically the same results here and there, both when Kelvin was intercepted and when Vulcan was destroyed. My father blew himself up to disarm Nero; if he hadn't done it, I wouldn't be alive."
"...But that would've been when you were born."
"I never knew my father."
"Shit." George sits back and gets this old regret in his expression. "We thought we would have to surrender the ship, but I'd been working on this theoretical explosive technique; it uses these ionic interruptions to cause destructive waves, so you can create it almost anywhere in space, supposedly. By some happy accident, in the heat of the moment, I thought of it and was able to use it just well enough to send Nero packing for a while. But I was never able to recreate the results later."
By now Scotty and Leonard are exchanging looks, and they're muttering to each other some excuse to leave, as if it seems like this is all a bit personal. Nyota shifts up from where her elbows were resting on the table and when her hands drop to her lap Jim reaches and squeezes one, and she looks up to see him looking deeply pensive for a few seconds.
"If you have any notes on what you had of that technology..." He's making himself not be optimistic. "Could I look at it?"
The small laugh George lets out is very, Of course you would ask that, and something is both nostalgic and bitter in the way he explains, "I don't have them anymore. My son stole them. When he left home, he copied all the data and then sabotaged all my experiment logs. I guess he just wanted to prove he could do better. I heard that he was still working on it right after he enlisted...but I guess he got bored with the idea by the time he had his own ship."
"So how about Winona?" Jim quietly asks after another hesitation.
"We're not together anymore," George says neutrally. "She's working between outposts on the other side of the quadrant, hardly ever visits home...James was always in better touch with her. I'd tell her what happened to him, but then she'd want to know what's going on with you."
"Not such a good idea."
"No. Definitely not." George scrutinizes Jim for a second. "I'm not about to tell you it's wrong to be here, but there are certain things about it I don't really get. It's not like they've made it illegal to not own napes. You could always watch your own back, hell, just...Pretend one or two of your friends out here is really your slave, it would help everyone out."
"We probably would've been caught if we'd decided to do something like that," Nyota cuts in, and it's the easy argument to make out of so many responses she could say. "People can recognize us, especially out there..."
"Yeah, but I wanted to tell you I could make it work out for you. I own a really big place out in Alaska. It wouldn't be ideal, but it'd be nice."
"What's in it for you?" Jim suddenly asks. George seems a bit taken aback. "It's never going to be as simple as throwing on a pair of shades when we have to run out for groceries." He then thinks to indicate at Nyota, who is already pulling her hair over, exposing the side of her neck.
George's face falls and he even seems speechless. "I'm really sorry. That's just awful."
"Unless you have that reaction to every 'nape' you see in your neighborhood? I really don't want to hear about it." Nyota didn't even think before she said it, but maybe Jim wanted to, judging from how his hand tightens around hers for a second. George looks truly offended, and confused.
"Listen," Jim sets forth, "you may not think something is in this for you, but I don't understand why you're here, and I'm pretty sure you're not going to stay. Maybe you feel some kind of debt to me, maybe it's screwing with your head that you're never gonna see your kid again. But you need to understand that while you might, in some abstract stretch of the imagination, be my father...I'm sure as hell not your son."
They feel just uncomfortable enough about the sudden bitter turn to show him out the front door. Just as George is about to leave, he hesitates, remembering something.
He's handing over a key card for a house."If you're really heading off in that ship soon, you might wanna make a stop at the address that's programmed in there. James had all these houses scattered all over the planet—He hardly ever lived in most of them. This house is the only one he owned under his own name, it's the only one I know about. I'm sure you can handle making a break-in. There may not be any money there, but you'd probably find some weapons."
When he's finally gone, Nyota and Jim are standing on the porch after following him out. Jim flicks the card idly between his finger and then just sets it on the railing and looks at it with an expression on his face like he can't explain the emptiness of a victory. She pulls him in and wraps her arms at his waist, feeling the unrest in how he's breathing, that he's still reeling from everything.
"Tell me what to do," he finally quietly says. "We can't go very long without anybody putting faces to actions, right? It's like...I want people to know us just for what we do, but I'm always going to be seen as this other man. Is it even possible for us to tell everyone the truth?"
"What if it's better that way?" She lifts her head from his chest to look up at him. "If you let people believe that it's always been the same man, that that level of contrition is actually possible..."
Jim's eyes narrow in thought, his mouth creeping up at the edges. He shakes his head. "But it's a lie."
She bites at her bottom lip for a second, her voice a little small when she replies. "Sometimes it's logical enough to lie if it's for honest ends. If everything you stand for is real."
She puts her thumb at his chin, turning his distant eyes onto hers.
"You're not a lie," she says.
The house is hard to find even in its pronounced white solitude out in the middle of the country somewhere in Kansas, as it's surprisingly small for a two-story. They land the ship behind it and it takes Jim several minutes of vague dread to even initiate the first step out of the ship. The air tucks and licks at his clothes like a cold impersonal welcome when his boots hit the dirt off the last step of the ladder.
When they finally go inside, what is the most disorienting is how normal it looks, like a relatively undecorated hunting resort.
No pictures adorn the walls; a broken viewscreen sits in front of the gigantic couch, and there's one pair of boots in the closet he can't bring himself to take even if he could use the extra shoes. The guns to be found there are just displayed in a cabinet, so they don't have to look hard. They pile up the emergency supply of food that's in the chilly little cellar, but they don't find much else to take. Jim wanders about in an anxious haze, dissecting and avoiding corners of the place in equal measure. The medicine cabinet is familiarly stocked with the right medicine for his own allergies and headaches; he owns nothing of what he finds here, but there's nothing he wouldn't use. He's not sure what he expected.
He can't and doesn't explain to the others how it makes him feel. It's almost like the cave again: one of the only times in his life a place has ever really gotten under his skin, made him feel like it could be haunted. The place breathes with some frigid apparition, and it's like his bones know something he doesn't, that it's the loneliest place in the world.
Nyota comes up to hold his hand when he's standing in the middle of the kitchen, and he says he wants to burn it down.
At the end of the long driveway Bones scowls in confusion after tilting his head to see what Jim inscribes on the old-fashioned mailbox by branding at the metal with their phaser, leaving the day's date at the bottom corner under the letters.
Nyota grins a bit darkly and Jim steps back to examine his work and the doctor asks, "You want 'em to think he did it?"
"That's exactly what I want them to think." He tosses the house's key card inside the mailbox.
Jill smokes her last cigarette out under the ladder, and Alel laughs at Jim coming up behind to pantomime a hugging motion around her shoulder that turns into snatching it out of her lips.
He flicks it onto the kerosene trail that swallows and bursts a blazing line across the graying back yard and spits the first explosion of light that ignites up through the window. There is no one around for miles in the middle of the night, and they watch the golden burn devour the house for only a minute before Jim says, "Let's go."
And they board the ship again, the powering up and rising off of the vessel blowing a wind of dust under them that licks into the cinders of the house leaving its lone life. But the mailbox should live to tell the tale:
Jim Kirk was here.
||||| continue to book II
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-11-03 03:09 am (UTC)This is one of the most beautiful stories I've read all year, I was feeling a bit let down by the ST fandom since my ship of choice is not very popular and most of my flist who shared and interest for their relationship seems to have forgotten about them but thank you so much for this, you reminded me why I loved this pairing and this fandom. I wish I was more active now and I need to rewatch the movie because it's been about two months since I last saw it.
Wonderful work, I can't wait to read book 2. Seriously, this was breathtaking.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-04 06:19 am (UTC)<3
no subject
Date: 2010-11-03 05:26 am (UTC)You've written a fanfic that doesn't suffer from any delusions of being anything other than a fanfic and yet honors the intellectual depth of the original series and its whole imagining of the mirror universe. You make it always a very personal story about four people instead of any kind of a stuffy commentary, but the relevance is still effortlessly there because you make the world so vivid and based in reality. Reading this actually made me feel mad about certain parts of our own history that we don't like to think about much almost as if I'd only now learned about them.
But you recognized that you don't have to make it all about worldwide reform in order to address those things and make it not a complete downer. The fic realistically shows how futile acts of resistance would be in trying to change the empire and how everyone, especially Jim, has to accept that with a lot of difficulty. Instead you focus on how much of a difference it can make to help just a few people, or to free just one slave. You've got Gene who it seems must have chosen to run away from his lover/owner at the risk of getting captured again because it wasn't enough to be comfortable and taken care of if he didn't feel like he was making his own life. And there's that awesome moment with Jim quitting his job before he turns into someone who always just accepts his place and plays it safe hiding in a basement during an attack. This is everything Jill is talking about in that fantastic scene between her and Jim when she explains why she sometimes despises her own people as much as humans, and it's what keeps the story rewarding and from falling into the relentlessly depressing category.
And it's a beautifully handled development that those seemingly simple actions of defiance and hope, like Jim choosing to get himself out of that situation at Rosetta's and Nyota entering the contest, seem to be the changes that make them finally able to fall in love the right way, no longer with any doubts as if they could just be giving up and settling for what's available and easy. As much as I love the ship and don't really need to be convinced, LOL, the relationship seems to finally make sense at that point, which I'm sure is an appropriate reflection of their own miscommunication/uncertainty about it before.
Also, THE MOST AWESOME ORIGINAL CHARACTERS MY GOD. I mean, I got seriously sad over an OC dying and I might never be able to ship Scotty with any canon characters after this because JILL. ♥
no subject
Date: 2010-11-05 04:31 am (UTC)SERIOUSLY WHAT IS THIS COMMENT I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH THIS COMMENT
I will say your love of my original characters was entirely unexpected and reassuring. I spent so much of the editing process trying to shut them all up as much as possible beyond what was absolutely needed telling myself that nobody cares about OCs. Yeah, guh, IDK. Thank you for feeding the beast.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-05 05:59 am (UTC)Bitch please. I need an entire fic about the Romulans NOW.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-04 10:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-05 10:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-06 07:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-07 07:25 am (UTC)Thanks so much for your reccing and supporting!
no subject
Date: 2010-11-09 06:59 am (UTC)This...this I don't know what to say...
Date: 2010-11-13 07:00 am (UTC)Ari
no subject
Date: 2011-01-22 06:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-23 06:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-23 10:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-23 08:23 pm (UTC)Anyway, I've been doing a lot of outlining for the second book and it's great to get some sudden encouragement :)
no subject
Date: 2011-05-12 10:04 pm (UTC)and um. Brilliant would not even begin to describe this, because it's just... yeah. every single little detail, every description, every action slots so beautifully into the whole of this story, nothing seems overdone or unnecessary and yet the amount of detail is just... delicious. And the fact that you've created an entire history for the rebellions in the Empire, and it's so *true* in how it's presented... wow. just wow.
and I'm feeling ridiculously warm and tingly now, because they got the ship and Jill came with, and Gene and Alel and little Madda (how can you make me adore a character that appears so little and doesn't really have any lines, it's just amazing), and they're taking others with them, and will come back to take yet more. I just love it to bits.
(also, Spock has a plan? would that be how the scales began to tip against the Empire, leading to what we know happened in the original Mirror Universe, with the Klingon/Bajoran/Cardassian Alliance and Terrans being the slaves?)
Aaaand this is why I said I try not to think about your WIPs. Because now I'll go quietly insane with wanting to see what happens next.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-20 01:10 am (UTC)Aw, you like Madda - I can't imagine that she won't have one or two lines in book 2. Hell, I'm totally pleasantly surprised if anyone cares about my original characters :)
As for Spock's plan...Yes? No? Maybe? Yes?
no subject
Date: 2011-05-20 10:10 am (UTC)also, LOL for the gif of Sam's smile. Love it to bits!!
(I just watched yesterday the episode where Death forces his soul back into him. Halfway through the season, yay! And at the same time :( because waiting for season 7 will be the longest I'll be without Supernatural since I started it, lol!)