Chapter Text
Jim was thirteen when he found himself staring down the barrel of a pistol for the first time.
Matte black, black-ops coloring, serial numbers acid-burned clean. His mother always told him to run from those, because she had a few around too.
For the first time in his life he found that everything had gone very still. He saw and heard clearly. The screaming in his head stopped. The lucidity of epinephrine hit like a shock of cold water and the sky was grey and crisp and arced above his head into clean black, distant from the smoke from the burning fields.
Jim tasted adrenaline sharp like ozone. He tasted the promise of a future on his tongue and his irises blow black.
And just like that, James Tiberius Kirk, who hadn’t ever believed in anything, began his long descent towards fate.
Later he’d mistake that feeling for entropy. Later still, he’d mistake entropy for survival.
By the time he knew the difference, it was too late.
—
Because his story starts in media res: Jim, in the middle of a summer downpour on a planet seventeen million klicks from home when he said “How many times do I need to say get me the hell out of—”
He cursed as a hand tugged on his sleeve. His combat boots hydroplaned across wet ferrocrete as he ducked through market stalls.
It was that long hour before the sun set on this planet, an hour he’d mapped to memory. The stim girls poured the streets as the first lights cycled on, the neon glow of their handhelds dancing like lanterns in the gathering dark.
“If this is payback for Tycho, Nyota, I had a hell of a worse hangover than you,” he hissed, sweat pooling at the base of his spine.
She did this sometimes. Made him repent, because she thought she was a god up there, blessed with a divinity of tongues, and she’d be first to tell him even gods gloat, too.
Spock was still in the lower sectors somewhere, though Jim would bet not as lost in the tangle of tents and market stalls that made up the capital port slums of Akozi’i.
Jim stopped to huddle in the shadows behind a guy selling protein skewers that reeked of sulfur compounds. He shoved his wet hair back with both hands.
The humid air was heavy with overripe fruit and incense. The crush of bodies created a thermal map nightmare, making it impossible to track who's following him.
Never kiss and tell, Jim whispered to the Akozi’i escort after extracting her eldest brother’s hideout coordinates. Then he blew a kiss of his own and ran. Getting inside the compound was child's play, but he hadn't gambled on her being a double agent for the Bajoran separatists.
That spy-versus-spy bullshit only happened in sim-stims, but there he was, huddled in artificial rain as the protein vendor tried to shoo him away with increasingly hostile gestures. There was a data crystal containing nuclear launch codes in his jacket pocket and the commandos of a joint Cardassian-Bajoran terrorist cell tracking his heat signature from the rooftops. Jim was running out of options.
He thought of trying his comm for the ninth time when there was a crash outside and the sort of carefully clipped speech that passed for shouting in this sector.
A low-altitude garbage tow clipped a produce stall, sending synthetic fruit cascading into the narrow walkway already choked with hovercycles. At the sound of opportunity, Jim snapped his communicator shut.
The Akozi’i escort and her friends rounded the corner and she locked eyes with Jim like she’d just realized what was going down. She raised her gun.
“James Kirk of the Terran Empire!” the girl shouted. “You are under arrest for murder, collusion, and grand theft! You are not required to participate in questioning without the presence of an attorney or fleet representative!”
Her wide eyes were almost jittering with fear. Never having played with the stakes this high before, clearly.
Jim sighed, lowering his gun. “Ask me,” he said slowly, “if I understand.”
“What?” the girl shouted. Her hair whipped in the exhaust of the garbage tow.
“You’ve read the charges and made the questioning statement. Now you have to ask if I understand.”
“Do you understand?” she asked.
“Good, better,” Jim nodded. “I do. Now go fuck yourself.”
A moment after that and Jim vanished into the city’s underbelly.
He picked up another tail deeper into the market— more tenacious this time, the kind whose employer viewed failure as a terminal career move.
Jim wove dizzying patterns through service corridors, following emergency maps etched in his memory. The two or three voices growing behind him sounded like a well-drilled team, some higher security or corporate extraction team.
Citizen, what is your name?
He darted into the first maintenance hatch he reached, moving as fast as he dared without sabotaging his chances of disappearing among the city. He crashed through a holo-ad, neon orchids exploding around him. By some great misfortune, the shaft ran parallel to the main promenade he just left, refusing to open up into the labyrinth he expected.
Spock told him “Don't go to Bajor to die, Captain. It’s unbefitting of your status,” delivered with cold precision, as though Jim bleeding out on this rock was merely poor resource allocation. Spock told him many things. Eventually Jim might start listening.
He pulled out his comms unit and yelled once more for good measure, now’s your last chance to avoid getting spaced, lieutenant and ducked around a corner.
He turned right, shouldering his way through a cramped tea house to its back alley. A few hundred yards away, red and blue security strobes reflected off the rain, closing in.
A hand grabbed his elbow—"Where do you think you're—" and Jim spun, phaser already drawn, until he heard, "Captain."
Spock, in racing leathers, carbon-fiber jacker and polarized helmet reflected the neon of the overhead signs as he leaned over the handlebars of a military-grade hovercycle.
Jim’s breath caught. He pulled the trigger. The sound of the body hitting the concrete was lost in the deafening rain on the palms.
“Where’d you get this?” The hovercycle's gravitics vibrated Jim's boots through the road.
And then Nyota made her appearance, says, staticked: the mission, Captain, focus on the mission, but the cut of Spock’s jacket was tailored and snug and his trouser-legs smooth, all too sure of themselves, an arrogance Jim’s relied on and despised equally during their three months in deep space, and Jim felt that the whole thing was a joke and got a look when he voiced this feeling aloud.
“I had assumed you possessed at least halfway professionalism,” Spock said, and Jim responded with a quick smirk, sharp-edged and predatory.
“Only halfway, Commander? Standards have dropped.”
“I never established standards for you.”
“You’d be the first.”
“I would advise you to hurry,” Spock said, clinically, like they’re going to miss a dinner reservation.
But Jim wouldn't have survived this long without recognizing fortune's rhythm when it played. He swung a leg over the seat and gripped tight as Spock kicked the cycle into motion. They merged into the flow of highway traffic and slipped into it with a rev of the engine. With any luck, no one will have thought to look for two riders.
“When did you learn how to drive?” Jim remembered to ask, fingers tightening in Spock’s jacket.
“Seven and a half minutes ago.” Spock banked hard, veering into oncoming traffic. Transport lights streak past, reflecting off Spock’s helmet, and Jim’s grinning.
Spock downshifted, a quick click clack click clack, twisted the throttle, and they rocketed through a gap in the traffic that appeared from nowhere, closing just as suddenly behind them as phaser fire trailed past Jim’s head.
“Our mass distribution is suboptimal,” Spock called over his shoulder, expression hidden behind polarized graphene. “Shift forward.”
“That how you seduced Uhura?” Jim shouted over the engine.
He inched closer until he was pressed against Spock's back between his thighs, close enough to feel every muscle shift with each control adjustment, the tension in his thighs as they banked past a cargo hauler.
Jim recentered his gravity and hooked his boots in the stirrups. The new position gave him enough leverage to spare both hands for his phaser, and he took out a Bajoran and a pair of police droids in a quick one-two.
The security skimmers were coming in on them from above now; it was becoming increasingly difficult for Jim to hold them all off. The only flaw in their plan was possibly losing the data crystal in the chase, but as Pike said, this was war, and sometimes that’s just how the chips fall. Jim’s just enjoying the ride.
They crash, inevitably.
Even Spock lacked the skill to recover from a tactical EMP as they banked onto the ramp that would have delivered them to the orbital docks. The cycle's gravitic field collapsed, the front stabilizer locking up. Spock was thrown clear, while Jim ended up tangled with the bike, his pelvis crushed under the weight of it. He could feel the superheated metal of the exhaust pipe branding his skin.
Hands grabbed at him, yanking at him—Bajoran hands, brutal and clumsy. A phaser discharged, twice, three times, and the hands were gone. There was sound everywhere: shouting, air sirens, the growl of freighters overhead, and then his vision cleared and Jim could see all the red, the tarmac slicked with it.
Someone was saying, Spock, Spock, in a desperate voice. Jim had the sinking realization that the last one might be his.
Strong arms extracted him from the cycle wreckage, and he felt the sharp kiss of a hypospray at his neck, numbing agent and synthetic adrenaline flooding his system, making him light-headed. He started laughing as he collapsed behind an abandoned shuttle next to Spock, the surface beneath them streaked rust-red amid leaking hydraulic fluid.
“Captain Kirk, you have something we want,” somebody shouted.
“Half the quadrant wants what I have,” Jim yelled back, unholstering the gun in his waistband.
Spock looked like he was about to drag him out by the neck when energy fire ripped up the road around them. The emergency lights flickered twice and then go out, safety polymers shattering around them.
Nero didn’t just destroy their ships, he killed their spirits, crackled over an open frequency. The Empire isn’t the great power we used to fight, eshc’kiel.
Jim raised his weapon above cover and took down two Bajorans with headshots, both jerking twice before collapsing, then slid down beside Spock who's still crouched behind the tire.
"Fuck," Jim repeated, pressing a hand against the mess of his thigh. "Fuck this."
“Automatic beam up is in—“ Spock ducked as car windows shattered around them, “approximately four minutes.”
Jim and Spock didn't clear out every gunman in the spread of road, but they did a fine job at it. Only then did Spock sling his rifle and pull Jim by the wrist to follow his jump over the barriers into a drainage channel below.
Jim's pulse hammered against his ribs as Spock methodically wiped down their weapons for fingerprints, then tossed them into the reclamation water.
“Ain’t your first rodeo,” Jim said to him, grinning through the chemical rush.
The recycled wind caught Spock's hair as Akozi'i's glowing skyline silhouetted him into perfect sharpness. "I have always had reason for rebellion.”
Spock still wore the perfect bruise-print of Jim's fist on his left cheekbone, and they observed each other with careful calculation—curiosity mixed with distrust, the way only killers could recognize their own.
Before either could move, the transport signal scrambled the air. It bathed the world gold as the phaser fire arcs above their heads, emboldened by their stillness as the light took them.
—
Along with a hundred years of emotional transfer that left him fucked up for probably good afterwards, Jim came out the Ambassador’s mind meld knowing a single immutable fact.
He and Spock would never have what the other them did.
The Spock on his ship, under his skin, in his head—he was all razor edges where time and a different set of circumstances dulled the other’s bite. Calling him defiant rather than diplomatic would be a generous understatement. The other had departed his timeline as one of galactic history's most accomplished peacekeepers. This Spock was born into a world on the knife’s edge of war, a member of an endangered species whose extremity had only intensified with their near-extinction.
The energy burning at his Spock’s core was as deafening and as pervasive as cosmic background radiation. When he locked his hands around Jim’s throat, body pressed against his own like a live current seeking ground, Jim had felt the onslaught of his mind like a star going supernova. All that violent potential with nowhere to discharge but expand outwards, searching, consuming.
He’d never admit it to anyone, but he was terrified of Spock, and James Kirk isn’t intimidated by anything.
But the thing was, that terror got crossed in his synapses and came out the other side feeling a lot like the rush he gets just before a zero-G freefall, a gut-hollowing thrill of testing whether your luck had finally run out. Blame the sin, not the sinner, Bones would say. He was halfway right.
Jim couldn't recognize himself in the Ambassador's memory construct, but that was hardly surprising. The world no longer existed in the way it once did. Empires rarely turned brutal without causal factors. External and internal pressures typically drove such transformations. The old Federation's defeat at Tau Ceti against its own shadow government had birthed fascist regimes throughout every major Terran alliance. A new phase of colonialism began, borders eaten away by proxy wars and resource conflicts as dilithium reserves approached depletion curves. By 2233, Terra's population had plummeted to 1.5 billion. The resistance movements across the North American Trade Zone made Earth a dangerous environment for raising children, which is why Jim's story truly begins on Vega IX.
But that comes later.
—
It was an unseasonably hot August night in San Francisco. The bay moved in the darkness around the silent shadow of the drill. Jim had a cigarette between his lips when he slid onto the barstool. His back to the bar, elbows leaning, hips angled in silent invitation. The low-spectrum lights cast harsh shadows across Jim's cheekbones. He resembled a bullet in mid-trajectory, collar askew with the smooth tan of his throat exposed. These are the things McCoy remembers.
Jim gave him a look as he settled, a quick dart of a glance from underneath his lashes. Something twitched at the corner of Jim’s mouth, the ghost of a smile, or perhaps a snarl.
“How did it go?” McCoy said, glancing at him, waving down a bartender. Tomorrow was deployment. If you looked hard enough through the haze, you could see the Enterprise’s lights pulse in low orbit. It gave him a strange thrill, something beyond anticipation or dread—something more fundamental, like a magnetic lock engaging. Inevitability. A consequence of Jim Kirk intersecting his life.
“The standard outcome” Jim said. He crushed his spent cigarette against the scuffed plasteel, flicking the butt carelessly onto the floor.
“So he rejected your offer.” Not a question. McCoy had tired of this conversational loop. “Find someone else, kid. There’s dozens of good officers who would accept the position tonight.”
“It’s just—he submitted his resignation,” Jim said, ignoring the hint. “Never thought he’d run back to the colony and spread his seed or terraform the planet or some shit. That’s not the Spock I know.” He shrugged and scanned the crowd.
“That’s the issue. You don’t know him, kid,” McCoy reminded him.
Jim flashed McCoy one of his dangerous smiles, but it was tight around the edges. “Well, if I can't have him, nobody in the Fleet gets him either."
McCoy studied him. “Is that so.”
Jim pushed away from the bar with one hand. "I'll see you shipside."
He disappeared into the crush of bodies, the fool’s gold of his hair disappearing into shadow.
McCoy allowed himself a moment of sympathy for the green-blooded bastard. Once Jim had you in his sights, there was no escape. He’d reach Spock eventually, the question was how many bridges he’d have to burn to get to what he wanted, just like all the others who'd preceded Spock. And the poor fucks who would follow. Inevitability, like men with their own gravity fields often have.
He turned and downed the last of Jim’s drink. He caught the eyes of a cadet at the other end of the bar. He slipped on a smile, and raised the bottle to his lips.
To last nights on Terra.
—
Three months after Nero died, Jim was alone. He was leaning against a hotel room minibar, smoking his one cigarette of the day.
They had nowhere else to put him. All official accommodations were requisitioned by Starfleet personnel flooding the city from off-world to reconstruct a fleet with nine capital ships reduced to orbital debris. He would have preferred his former dormitory since, technically, he was still a cadet, but technically, he was also on disciplinary probation too, so realistic expectations were justified even after receiving the Palm d'Orion for being the designated hero of the hour.
He tapped his pack against the counter, restless. The prospect of losing the Enterprise made everything seem like a dream. Like he'd spent twelve weeks in suspended animation, waiting for something, for anything. For entropy. For events to accelerate. He floated in zero-g, lacking navigational reference points.
It’s been days and Jim’s charging overpriced beer from his hotel minibar to Pike’s account, falling back on old habits, considering what to do with his increasingly specialized skill set if he was never going to see the inside of a starship bridge again. Maybe secure transport to the Neutral Zone, hit up old contacts that he promised to burn once. Take up a contract with a private gas freighter, maybe see what opportunities presented themselves in the Syndicate.
Jim tapped the cigarette’s filter on the edge and watched the embers dance in falling light. In the quiet light of early evening, the smoke triggered memory associations: burnt circuitry after hull breach, leather jackets, Iowa autumn. Hardwired comfort.
Suddenly, his door chimed. He froze, waiting, considering pulling his phaser from his waistband. It chimed again.
“Cadet Kirk.”
That familiar accent that compressed vowels into precise consonants, turning his name into an admonishment.
Jim pushed off the counter, pulse accelerating. Christ. Did he come for an apology or a fight? Jim thought he’d be a trillion clicks away by now, burning hard into the Vulcan system.
He waved the door open and Spock’s silhouette cut against the corridor’s low-light, looking like a stranger again. He hadn’t seen Spock in three months.
Spock escorted him to HQ in silence, appearing more unapproachable than ever in their brief, fraught relationship. The only sound on campus this late was the whisper of their boots across wet grass. Jim didn't look back, refused to acknowledge this felt like marching toward his execution.
But four minutes to midnight, he would have the Enterprise, given to him with Pike’s word that the Federation needs a Napoleon. An Alexander.
“Except that Napoleon lost in the end, and Alexander flamed out and died young. We need a Julius Caesar, except that he made himself a dictator, and died for it.” Pike leaned forward, and said the words, and that was it, that was the bolt of fate sliding home. “We need someone not afraid to kill for the cause, but strong enough to live with his decisions.”
But there, in that moment, the cicadas of late summer reaching their crescendo, Jim felt half-feral under the moonlight, flooded with nerves and chemicals, and asked: can I trust you, if I get command?, against all his better instincts.
And Spock glanced down at him, moonlight wetting his lashes obsidian-black, and said, “Dungau gla-tor etek.”
For the first time that summer, Jim smiled. The look in his eyes was a gun going off.
(We shall see. )
—
The Enterprise hummed its subliminal messages all around them. Stars within me, above me, all around me. It shook the walls, the recycled air between them, the blood that pooled on the deck.
Bones leaned over Jim while Nyota watched the doctor work after Akozi’i. The oxycodone had made him hazy, but he could hear Bones instructing Chapel about necrotic muscle tissue, ordering her to clamp the femoral artery in his thigh. His eyes cracked open and his head bended to survey the damage.
"Don't look," Chapel commanded, and for the first time, Jim obeyed, exhausted.
Later, Jim found Nyota in the psych lab, watching Sulu’s shadow move in the holo suite. He tossed the Bajoran chip in his hands, a slow arc in the air.
The flesh on his right leg was already starting to heal, the engineered stem cells Bones shot into him already going to work on the dead tissue. He rubbed a hand down his thigh.
"Do you want this assignment?" Jim asked. "I don't recall offering you a choice."
Nyota met Jim’s gaze. She looked vicious. “I’ll be here until this ship stops being the best,” she answered, before turning back toward the holo suite, the deck’s solitary light source.
A week later, he was in the same spot, staring at Spock from across the room as Bones leaned over him to press a bandage to the cut along Jim’s cheek. Blood drained across his face; it had only been a minor thing, the wounds superficial, but Jim bled heavy. Spock stood motionless, hands behind his back, somehow displacing all available oxygen in the room.
Jim broke eye contact with Spock to hiss in pain as Bones ran an alcohol swab across his split lip. The doctor's brows compressed with concentration, no sympathy for Jim's condition.
That time it had been over away team assignments, a small disagreement with Spock that had blown into a fistfight in the corridor outside hydroponics. Nyota stood between them now, her arms crossed as she surveyed the damage to Jim’s face.
"Stop being such an asshole," Bones commanded, roughly cupping his face in his hands, tilting it as he looked for broken bones. Jim wanted to tell him to go to hell. He wanted to tell him that if his XO could do his fucking job without getting in Jim’s way, there would be no problems. He wanted to tell him that he's not a fair-weather motherfucker, that he didn't need anyone’s help.
Spock and Jim stared down one another across the hydroponics bay for the seventh time in the last month for these reasons but also because Jim never yielded. He had to be broken each and every time; he had to be taken apart and forced into compliance. Because the stars could go fuck themselves. They made him but they don’t define him. He could say the same for the man stood in front of him.
Surrounded by night-blooming jasmine and a black eye blooming like a different kind of pain, he shut his eyes. When he opened them, he was all alone.
—
The first moment that shaped his command, as Jim will remember, later.
They entered orbit around Nos Astra forty-eight hours since the Enterprise left the Luna Orbital Docks. The first night there, the representative of the human colony took them up the mountains.
"Our greatest natural wonder," Aku told the Enterprise officers, "as we live our days in darkness, so we must find light where we can."
Nos Astra was a terrestrial world so small, it retained only a trace atmosphere of low-lying fog blackened by carbon. Chekov told him that the planet surface was frozen and composed mostly of magnesium silicates with carbonaceous deposits. But as Jim's boots contacted the ice sheet, hundreds of meters above the helium-3 reserves valued at billions of credits that lay frozen in the seas below, he thought of only one thing: how many people he'll have to kill to commandeer this world.
His orders left no ambiguity: acquire through any necessary means the fuel required to reconstruct the first fleet, currently drifting as orbital debris around Vulcan's remaining moons.
They ascended for hours. He could detect only his crystallized exhalations and the disembodied bob from personal lighting units. The atmosphere at this elevation was thin and crisp; the void above stretched endless and silent in its expansion.
Finally, Nyota turned around at the front of the group, just a shape in the dark. “Captain, look.”
The leader removed her hood and motioned for Jim’s officers to deactivate their torches. The snow-covered peaks fell into absolute darkness, but they looked up and in the sky above was a nebula so close Jim thought for a moment they were suspended in its gravity well.
As he stared into the stars, he saw a sudden wilderness. A certain danger, vanished and dispersed in that unreachable clarity of light. Jim's throat caught as he swallowed. He'd viewed nebulae through starship viewports and holographic displays. He'd never anticipated experiencing anything comparable from any world.
He shut his eyes, and when they reopened the image changed, not just above him but in lines from horizon to horizon, were streaks of green and blue and gold—debris fields and radiating plasma from cooling drive systems. Incandescent energy signatures marked propulsion systems. A tendril of gas metamorphosed into a gauss round impacting a distant moon.
He crouched there for a moment, watching a water ejecta geyser rising into the void before falling as snow. It was beautiful. The strategist in him attempted to calculate the energy transfer when a rail-launched tungsten impacted a moon. The effect would be like an extinction-level detonation without all the messy radiation contamination. He wondered if the round would stop before it hit Nos Astra’s nickel-iron core.
Aku spoke. “My people believe that faith has its place in the universe.”
Jim blinked, and suddenly the nebula snapped back into his vision. The attack ships and tracer fire slipped out of sight.
“Beauty's persistence amid chaos serves as continual evidence of divine intelligence underlying creation. We have traversed millions of light-years to establish outposts because science brings us closer to something greater than ourselves.”
She smiled. “The stars remain indifferent to our political structures and ambitions. But they give light to our discoveries. Isn’t that why we leave home to leap into the great unknown?”
Three hours later he held seventeen of Aku’s scientists at gunpoint, as they bartered a deal for the Federation to reclaim and mine this world. Nyota played with the sword in her hand, fingers tracing its edge. A blood droplet formed, joining crimson on white ice. At his right, Spock maintained silence, his gaze steady.
There was never any beauty in the end, just seventeen bodies, the snow accumulating at their sides. He had his orders, just as Aku had her beliefs. There was little conversation to be had about divine reason in a universe Jim had never believed to be fair, nor compassionate.
Afterwards, in the shuttle, Spock said to him, “Every action constitutes violence. The distinction lies merely in scale.” He folded his hands in his lap, eyes fixed forward.
Jim wasn’t sure then if that was supposed to be justification for what they just did, or a comfort.
Years later, Jim would recognize it might have been a warning.
—
Every new crew had its growing pains. Every new captain must establish operational parameters. That was expected.
The day after Akozi’i, Scotty appeared in the ready room where Jim was going through the data padds scattered on his desk.
“Red sand,” he began, brogue cutting sharp over the name.
“It’s found its way to the fellas down in engineering, making them slow. Causing accidents. I know I push them hard, harder than what they’re used to, but it’s no excuse.” Scotty shakes his head. “Lost an ensign today, cut in half. Fell asleep at the mech. Gonna get more killed.”
Jim liked Scotty. He was on Titus Theta before Jim arrived, but spent most of it in the brig before Jim got wind that the guy who engineered the biggest hydrogen bomb in vacuum was onboard and broke him out with the promise that he could use a guy like him.
Jim had never excelled at computational analysis compared to instinctual response, so when Scotty came to him with a problem, he listened. By the time he’d finished his dinner, he had a name and a data packet given to him by Giotto. On it was a photo of the kilo of the drugs in the ensign’s quarters, who was currently kneeling in front of Jim in the engineering airlocks, nose dripping blood onto the scuffed metal deck.
Jim read his files as he was getting the shit kicked out of him. His name was Nagata, twenty-seven, a year older than Jim and born on a backwaters Orion station in the Exodus Cluster. Likely enlisted at a fleet recruiting station in whatever slum he grew up after recognizing the terminal nature of his existing circumstances.
He was one of the lucky ones. Most never escape a life lived on Federation basic spending their days at their terminals, watching drama sims and pornos and living on the textured protein and enriched carbs that came out of their standard issued replicators. For most, forays into crime were halfhearted affairs—a backroom brewer making weak, unregulated beer; a few kids selling x-rated holo suite sims to classmates; bands of scavengers with salvaged tools harvesting metal from the buried infrastructure of abandoned urban zones.
But maybe Nagata was opportunistic, couldn’t trade drug running for that level two electrical systems technician badge he got before shipping out. Maybe he was addicted himself. It really didn’t matter, though. Not when it got one of his crew killed.
Nagata was whimpering his apologies, forehead almost pressed into the deck like prayer, hands tied behind his back.
“Any of those found with red sand contraband will be thrown in the brig, court-martialed, and transported to the nearest starbase for incarceration on a penal transport. Those are the Captain’s orders,” Scotty shouted over the growing audience gathered around the airlocks.
“Giotto,” Jim nodded, and the security chief grabbed by his uniform and forced him into the airlock chamber, the containment barriers engaging behind him.
Jim entered the emergency release sequence as Nagata stared up stunned, crumpled on the floor. The exterior hatch cycled open. Within microseconds, Nagata's body was extracted into vacuum, then vanished.
Velocity was a great and powerful thing. You established a vector, and you maintain trajectory toward its logical conclusion, identical to all other objects in motion.
He turned to address his crew. “You think this is all you’re good for? Running diagnostics on waste recycling systems and tightening pipes in the crawlspaces you’ve sweated and bled in that the rest of us don’t know fucking exist? Maybe that’s what Starfleet let you believe, when they put a red shirt on your back. But you’re wrong. Some of you have what it takes to be part of something bigger than yourselves. To put yourselves on the front lines knowing you’re protecting the asses of your crew back on this ship. Because that’s all that will matter to you from now on. This is your fucking ship, and you won’t let anything or anyone take it from you. I want fifty officers who want to be better. Names on my desk by the end of the day.”
The crowd of red shirts had grown during Jim’s speech, and it included flight and science officers too. They were energetic, hushed, some already on their terminals typing furiously, a few fearful faces glancing at the airlock where Nagata had been, but most looking uncertain as they assessed their new Captain.
It was a foreign feeling for them all, finding something worth protecting out here.
“Clear the docks!” Scotty shouted. “It’s over, done. Back to your posts.”
—
“Captain, if I may have a word in private.”
Spock hovered at his right shoulder. Jim kept his eyes on the viewscreen even though there was nothing but empty space.
“Yeah, let’s stop pretending you have social hesitation.” Jim said. “If you wanna beat the shit out of me again, you can do it here, Commander.”
A few aborted laughs darted before they were extinguished by Spock’s stare. Nyota glared at them from her station, Sulu grinned as he turned back to the viewscreen.
“Your ready room is optimal.”
Jim’s expression shuttered, something mean and young. “Not gonna happen, and if you mention it again I’ll consider it as a chain-of-command violation.” He momentarily reveled in the small satisfaction he got that Spock occupied the subordinate position now.
“Dismissed,” he said, waving up the nav HUD.
Jim thought their little stint on Akozi’i, mainly the escape of certain death and the mutual trauma of seeing the inside of Jim’s leg might be enough to relent this endless argument they have going on. This thing where Spock had made it his personal mission to undermine Jim's career at every turn, and Jim punching walls in return, because, fuck, he was trying his best to learn how to play nice when it would be so easy to get rid of problems through his established methodologies, involving airlocks and obscene gestures.
His leg hurt like a bitch and he was on about two hours of sleep and he didn't want the fight today. He just wanted Spock to get off his fucking back.
At the end of beta shift, Jim stalked off the bridge, waving the lift doors close before anyone could join him.
The crew had learned to avoid him during moods like these, and he locked himself in his quarters after evading the throngs of officers that parted eagerly for him. He set his sonic shower to its max thermal output. The water stung the new skin on his thigh, and the anger building in his chest had a similar kind of heat.
His door signaled with the XO override as he roughly dried his hair.
"Go fuck yourself, Spock," he announced conversationally from the bathroom.
Spock entered anyway, because he was the only one that could possibly match Jim's own brand of obstinate asshole.
Spock got out a crisp “Captain,” before stopping at the sight of his room.
The bed was unmade, and the state of the floor indicated a series of emotional outbursts occurred. Jim found he didn't care, he was done with putting up appearances. This was what Spock got.
Spock had a look in his eyes like the whole universe was beneath him, his height giving him the advantage of looking down at everyone he spoke to. Much like the rest of his race, his brows gave him a permanent arrogant dismissal, but Jim had known Spock just long enough to realize that he meant it too.
“I find myself unsurprised—“ Spock began.
Jim approached from the bathroom, towel gripped in a threatening manner. ”Yeah, I was unprofessional, but that's hardly unprecedented. I know the lecture, so spare me, sweetheart.” He patted him once on the cheek, thoroughly enjoying Spock’s full body jerk he got for it.
Spock clasped his hands behind his back. “You have been charged with the protection of 553 crew members—”
“Really?” Jim interrupted. “We’re doing this?“
“Your pathological need to exercise violent retribution as you see fit threatens—”
“I wasn’t gonna sit back and watch—”
“—both the crew morale and mission at expense of your own personal motivations—”
“—everyone get fucked up and killed on red sand.”
“—and an apparent sense of perverse pleasure in undermining established procedural frameworks—”
“That do fuck all—”
“—demonstrates an alarming behavioral pattern that I cannot permit—”
“Permit?” Jim asked incredulously. “I emphatically don’t need permission from you. Or have we forgotten who’s giving orders here?”
Spock observed Jim, contempt visible on his face.
“Answer me,” Jim demanded. “Do you need a reminder?”
“Captain—"
Jim invaded his space, all hot-blooded machismo and posturing in the way growing up in dark, precarious spaces taught him. “Don’t captain me when we both know you don’t respect my command.”
Spock stayed still. Jim suddenly wanted to break him. He wanted to plant his fist in Spock’s face—but he wouldn't, because over the last three months and through nineteen different fuck-ups on twenty-four different planets, he had more than ample opportunity to witness Spock’s complete and utter disregard for an opponent’s life once the first hit’s been thrown.
He tilted his head instead and said: “I think you’re just pissed that I took your ship. Too bad they didn’t want a Vulcan in the captain’s chair, not with all what happened. Couldn't trust a ri-telsu with weapons codes."
Spock’s silence broke, and he locked his eyes onto Jim’s. He could feel a deep fury that’s not his own lick at his skin. Two sides of the same coin, Pike called them.
“How do you know of ri-telsu—“
“Backdoor access to most deep-space communication relays. The Vulcan encrypted channels are particularly interesting,” Jim grinned. “How tragic that those who survived face extinction. Unbonded. Gone crazy, fucking themselves on anything that moves. I doubt Uhura signed up for that. No wonder she left you.”
Every pilot light flared in Spock’s body, every emotion in his neural network, shut and honed down with savage precision to that lucid anger, an outrage so innate it sealed him into an impenetrable barrier. Platinum alloy and inhuman, beyond Jim’s reach.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Jim laughed.
“I believe the human idiom is ‘needing to get some air.’ But perhaps you relate better to ‘going out for a smoke’” His eyes slid sideways, a little curl of malice twisting his mouth. “A more familiar phrase, Captain?”
Spock had never been kind, nor had he ever met anyone’s expectations, but Jim knew that better than anyone. His biggest mistake was underestimating Spock’s ability to turn getting even into a weaponized art form. Jim felt it with perfect clarity, the taut push followed by the lax release of his patience snapping. But worn tethers cave in at the lightest pressure. They’ve been fraying since they left Luna docks, down to fibers by now.
“Yeah. Acknowledged. Get the fuck out then.”
At that, Spock smoothed down his shirt with a hand, a gesture so him it almost stung. His face was so full of disdain that Jim couldn't remember if they’d ever looked at one another with anything else. “I intend to,” only a second before the door shut with a hiss, a spiteful sound.
A friendship that will define you both. Like fuck.