FIC: Win and Jim (STXI, PG13, Part 4/4)
Title: Win and Jim
Author: Danahid (danahid)
Beta: emluv
Fandom/Spoilers: STXI/Reboot
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairing: Winona Kirk, Jim Kirk, brief Chris Pike cameo (Gen)
Wordcount: 1,922 (Part 4)
Disclaimer: Star Trek is owned by many people who are not me. No profit being made. No infringement intended.
Archive/Distribution: Please ask.
Date: January 23, 2010 (Part 4); (small edits 2.4.10)
Summary: In this part, Jim comes home from Tarsus, and life is complicated.
Previous Parts: 1 | 2 | 3
Author's Notes: Complete fic summary in Part 1. Complete A/N at the end.
WIN AND JIM
A boy's best friend is his mother.
Part 4. here is the deepest secret nobody knows
Jim is not an orphan.
He doesn't have to go to Tarsus, but he does because his mother thinks it's a good idea. His mother needs to go off-world for a posting at a new space station, Sam has summer school classes before his second year of college, and things with Frank are okay, but she'd still rather Jim spent the summer with her sister than leave him on the farm.
It's supposed to be four months. It's supposed to be a fun, easy summer. It's supposed to be a break for Jim after a difficult year. It's supposed to be an opportunity to get to know his aunt and uncle and cousins in a new and different place. Jim's mother knows how much he likes new and different.
In the end, it turns out to be none of these things.
Jim comes back from Tarsus, broken and silent. He used to think that it was interesting or maybe weird that two of the quietest people he's ever met were his mother and his brother, but now he understands. Sometimes you can lose so much that it's better to be quiet. Sometimes you even lose words. Sometimes all you have left are secrets.
Jim comes back from Tarsus, lost inside all his secrets. He's tangled up in all the things he knows and has seen, and all the things he wishes he doesn't know and wishes he hasn't seen. Jim doesn't talk about any of these things.
Jim doesn't talk about much anymore.
Since he came home from Tarsus, Jim hasn't said or done much of anything.
Jim's mother's eyes are grey like the stormy skies above Tarsus, and she watches him all the time now. She took leave from Starfleet to help him through what the doctors are calling post-traumatic stress, and Jim can tell she wishes she could help him process what happened. She wants to console him. She wants to put her arms around him and pull him close like she used to. She wants to tell him soothing things that will make him feel better, even if they're not true. She wants to find words that will help. She wants to find a way through to him, to help him deal with whatever, but despite her own expertise at losing things, it's clear that she doesn't know what to do. She doesn't know how to reach him, not really.
She keeps trying, though, and Jim likes this about her, the way she doesn't give up. She doesn't believe in no-win scenarios. She wouldn't be his mother if she did.
A month after Jim comes back from Tarsus, she knocks tentatively on his bedroom door and steps inside before he can tell her not to come in.
She perches on the end his bed and says quietly, "I heard about the kids."
He glances at her. Her face is grey with exhaustion and concern, and he wants to tell her that he's okay, or that he'll be okay soon if he isn't now, and that she shouldn't worry anymore, but the words are lost somewhere inside him, so he says nothing.
"It was amazing what you did," she says, smoothing her hand down his coverlet. "They told me you saved them. That without you, all thirty of those kids would have died." She picks at a loose thread near her knee. "I'm proud of what you did, Jim."
Jim shrugs. He doesn't have the energy to tell her that he didn't do much, that he did what anyone would do, that it doesn't matter anyway. He rolls on his side, pulling his knees up to his chin.
Her fingers press lightly on his shoulder. "Your dad would be proud of you too."
Jim twitches his shoulder so that her hand drops away, then wraps his arms around his knees and closes his eyes.
"I'm here if you want to talk, Jim," she says as she stands up and steps away from the bed. "I'll be here," she says again as she closes the door quietly behind her.
Jim's mother is always quiet.
Jim curls into a ball, wishing he knew the words to say that would make the quiet helplessness in her eyes go away, but he doesn't.
Three days later, Jim lies in the grass underneath the kitchen window, listening to his mother and his stepfather.
"Why would someone do this to children?" his mother is asking Frank. Jim can hear desperation and anger in her voice, and then underneath them, her secret grief and fear. Jim is better at recognizing these things now. "They were children," she says. "Just children."
Frank doesn't answer. Jim can imagine him biting his lip.
"He was a normal kid, before this happened," his mother continues, her voice calmer, more level. There's a sound of footsteps, then, "Now I don't know what he is." There's a bang of a fist (his mother's, Jim figures) on the kitchen table, and Frank's coffee mug rattles. "I don't know how to reach him. I don't think I can. I keep trying, but sometimes it feels like he didn't even come home from that hellhole."
There's a long silence, then Frank says hesitantly: "What if you can't?"
Jim can imagine the sharp look she gives Frank. "What if I can't what? Reach him?"
"Yeah."
"I don't know." She makes a low, broken sound in her throat, a sound like someone dying. "I don't know. I know I can't do this again though." There's a violent scrape as she pushes back her chair, then a crash when it tips over. Underneath the kitchen window, Jim flinches. "I know that I can't lose him too."
"You won't," Frank says, and Jim can tell he's trying to sound reassuring and supportive, which is nice of him, Jim supposes.
There's another long silence, then a small whisper: "I think I already have."
Jim closes his eyes when he hears the hitch in her voice. He's concentrating on breathing, trying to tune out his mother and Frank's conversation, when he hears Sam's voice above him:
"They say eavesdroppers never hear good of themselves."
Jim opens his eyes. Standing above him is his brother, a tall, dark silhouette against the late afternoon sun. Jim shades his eyes with one hand, watching Sam as Sam studies him with his sharp grey eyes that are exactly like their mother's.
Jim's brother is a scientist-in-training. Jim can tell that Sam is evaluating how he looks, assessing his too-skinny arms, appraising the dark hollows under his cheekbones, counting the sharp ribs visible through his t-shirt. Jim watches Sam's jaw tighten but knows Sam won't tell him what he's concluded. Jim has always liked this about his brother, the way he's always been good at keeping his thoughts to himself.
Sam drops down to sit beside Jim. "She was desperate to come get you, you know. Called in all sort of favors, left and right. Guilted everyone who would listen, reminding them about Dad's sacrifice and how they couldn't let a hero's son die on some godforsaken planet in the middle of a revolution. She tried everything, but nothing worked. No one could get you off that planet. No one. She tried everything she could."
Jim thinks it's the longest speech Sam's ever made, but he doesn't have the energy to reply with anything more than a shrug. He stares up at the secretive blue of the sky, and says nothing.
Sam nods as if Jim's shrug is answer enough, and they're quiet for a while after that.
Eventually Jim sits up, pulls his knees up to his chin, and wraps his arms around them.
Sam looks at him, almost reaches out to touch him, but doesn't.
"You should never have been there in the first place," he says suddenly, violently. "She should never have sent you."
Jim leans his forehead against his knees and closes his eyes. He wants to tell his brother that she didn't know, that no one could have known, but he doesn't.
Sam doesn't stay for dinner. He's too angry, too guilty to stay. He heads back to college as soon as he can, and Jim can tell that it's the beginning of a pattern. Jim misses Sam already.
Sometimes Jim thinks that he hates how Tarsus has changed all of them, not just him.
Other times Jim thinks that Tarsus changed just him, and now he's more like the rest of them, bound up in absences and secrets, mysteries and regrets, grief as infinite as the Iowa sky that no one talks about.
Jim has lots of secrets. He turns his secrets over and over in his head, the same way he turns his glass ornament over and over in his hands. His aunt gave it to him, a mercury-silver ball that's been in their family for generations, and somehow Jim managed to keep it safe and whole through everything that happened on Tarsus. Jim has lost so many things he can't count them all, but he hasn't lost this.
The day after Sam leaves for the last time, Jim's mother notices the silver ornament on Jim's bedside table. She holds it up to the light. "What is this, Jim?"
"Don't," Jim says, snatching it out of her hands and cradling it close to his chest. His voice is rusty, his hands are shaking, and he's so tired of feeling exhausted and lost and alone. He wants to scream these things at her, but he doesn't. He bows his head over the silver ball and closes his eyes.
"Jim..." she whispers, her voice breaking.
Jim looks up at his mother, and he can see his secrets reflected in her eyes, gleaming like shattered glass, and she's holding out her hand, reaching out to him again because she's his mother and she doesn't believe in no-win scenarios.
When he doesn't move, she lets her hand drop to her side and tries to smile, and it's her old smile, and it tells him a lot of things and even some of her secrets. It tells him that she understands, that he'll get through this but he needs time, that she can give him the space he needs, that she's lost things too.
Jim's mother's smile is startlingly sweet and unbelievably fucking sad.
Frank says Jim's smile is a lot like his mother's. It might be, Jim doesn't know.
Most nights now, Jim sits on the steps outside the old barn. His mother comes out to sit beside him. She sits close, but not too close, with her arms folded around herself, as if to stop herself from reaching out. Or maybe she's just cold, Jim doesn't know. He doesn't know what's going on in her head, and she doesn't know what's going on in his. There are secrets each of them carry that neither of them talks about, and Jim wants to lean in to her the way he used to, but he doesn't.
Most nights now, Jim and his mother sit quietly, both of them staring out at the blue-black night sky, which is empty and peaceful and calm. It's something Jim loves about his mother, the way she sits beside him, not saying a word, not pushing for more, just sitting, warm and there beside him. It might be the thing he loves most about her, the way she makes him feel that even if he's not okay yet, he will be.
END
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be a profound secret and mystery to every other.
-- Charles Dickens
Author's Notes: This story was inspired by and includes direct references to a Kelly Link short story (which is a bazillion times better than this) called "Magic for Beginners." The idea of Jim's mother being an orphan raised by feral something-or-others, the notion of her as a secret or a secret agent, as well as the concept of a mother-son roadtrip and traveling back in time are direct allusions to Link's story. Other references and phrasing may have snuck their way in as well. I owe heartfelt thanks to Ms Link for her inspiration and hope that she understands this as the homage it is intended to be.
There are other references to Link, a direct reference in Part 4 to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, and random references to Harry Potter and Alice Munro sprinkled throughout. With thanks and appreciation.
I also referenced a few of my previous stories in other fandoms (because I was lazy), and played with a plot point from one of my recent STXI stories, You Are Whatever a Moon Has Always Meant (because I could).
I did not make reference to any of the cut scenes from STXI, because, um, they were cut and so aren't part of my canon for this story.
Section Divider Attribution:
1. Lemony Snicket (Slippery Slope)
2. Martin Buber (from an older where_no_woman challenge)
3. Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)
4. e.e.cummings ("i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart")
Postscript: I only recently figured out that the epigraph quote is from Psycho. I promise you that Hitchcock's film has absolutely nothing to do with this story. (sigh)
Author: Danahid (danahid)
Beta: emluv
Fandom/Spoilers: STXI/Reboot
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairing: Winona Kirk, Jim Kirk, brief Chris Pike cameo (Gen)
Wordcount: 1,922 (Part 4)
Disclaimer: Star Trek is owned by many people who are not me. No profit being made. No infringement intended.
Archive/Distribution: Please ask.
Date: January 23, 2010 (Part 4); (small edits 2.4.10)
Summary: In this part, Jim comes home from Tarsus, and life is complicated.
Previous Parts: 1 | 2 | 3
Author's Notes: Complete fic summary in Part 1. Complete A/N at the end.
WIN AND JIM
A boy's best friend is his mother.
Part 4. here is the deepest secret nobody knows
Jim is not an orphan.
He doesn't have to go to Tarsus, but he does because his mother thinks it's a good idea. His mother needs to go off-world for a posting at a new space station, Sam has summer school classes before his second year of college, and things with Frank are okay, but she'd still rather Jim spent the summer with her sister than leave him on the farm.
It's supposed to be four months. It's supposed to be a fun, easy summer. It's supposed to be a break for Jim after a difficult year. It's supposed to be an opportunity to get to know his aunt and uncle and cousins in a new and different place. Jim's mother knows how much he likes new and different.
In the end, it turns out to be none of these things.
Jim comes back from Tarsus, broken and silent. He used to think that it was interesting or maybe weird that two of the quietest people he's ever met were his mother and his brother, but now he understands. Sometimes you can lose so much that it's better to be quiet. Sometimes you even lose words. Sometimes all you have left are secrets.
Jim comes back from Tarsus, lost inside all his secrets. He's tangled up in all the things he knows and has seen, and all the things he wishes he doesn't know and wishes he hasn't seen. Jim doesn't talk about any of these things.
Jim doesn't talk about much anymore.
Since he came home from Tarsus, Jim hasn't said or done much of anything.
Jim's mother's eyes are grey like the stormy skies above Tarsus, and she watches him all the time now. She took leave from Starfleet to help him through what the doctors are calling post-traumatic stress, and Jim can tell she wishes she could help him process what happened. She wants to console him. She wants to put her arms around him and pull him close like she used to. She wants to tell him soothing things that will make him feel better, even if they're not true. She wants to find words that will help. She wants to find a way through to him, to help him deal with whatever, but despite her own expertise at losing things, it's clear that she doesn't know what to do. She doesn't know how to reach him, not really.
She keeps trying, though, and Jim likes this about her, the way she doesn't give up. She doesn't believe in no-win scenarios. She wouldn't be his mother if she did.
A month after Jim comes back from Tarsus, she knocks tentatively on his bedroom door and steps inside before he can tell her not to come in.
She perches on the end his bed and says quietly, "I heard about the kids."
He glances at her. Her face is grey with exhaustion and concern, and he wants to tell her that he's okay, or that he'll be okay soon if he isn't now, and that she shouldn't worry anymore, but the words are lost somewhere inside him, so he says nothing.
"It was amazing what you did," she says, smoothing her hand down his coverlet. "They told me you saved them. That without you, all thirty of those kids would have died." She picks at a loose thread near her knee. "I'm proud of what you did, Jim."
Jim shrugs. He doesn't have the energy to tell her that he didn't do much, that he did what anyone would do, that it doesn't matter anyway. He rolls on his side, pulling his knees up to his chin.
Her fingers press lightly on his shoulder. "Your dad would be proud of you too."
Jim twitches his shoulder so that her hand drops away, then wraps his arms around his knees and closes his eyes.
"I'm here if you want to talk, Jim," she says as she stands up and steps away from the bed. "I'll be here," she says again as she closes the door quietly behind her.
Jim's mother is always quiet.
Jim curls into a ball, wishing he knew the words to say that would make the quiet helplessness in her eyes go away, but he doesn't.
Three days later, Jim lies in the grass underneath the kitchen window, listening to his mother and his stepfather.
"Why would someone do this to children?" his mother is asking Frank. Jim can hear desperation and anger in her voice, and then underneath them, her secret grief and fear. Jim is better at recognizing these things now. "They were children," she says. "Just children."
Frank doesn't answer. Jim can imagine him biting his lip.
"He was a normal kid, before this happened," his mother continues, her voice calmer, more level. There's a sound of footsteps, then, "Now I don't know what he is." There's a bang of a fist (his mother's, Jim figures) on the kitchen table, and Frank's coffee mug rattles. "I don't know how to reach him. I don't think I can. I keep trying, but sometimes it feels like he didn't even come home from that hellhole."
There's a long silence, then Frank says hesitantly: "What if you can't?"
Jim can imagine the sharp look she gives Frank. "What if I can't what? Reach him?"
"Yeah."
"I don't know." She makes a low, broken sound in her throat, a sound like someone dying. "I don't know. I know I can't do this again though." There's a violent scrape as she pushes back her chair, then a crash when it tips over. Underneath the kitchen window, Jim flinches. "I know that I can't lose him too."
"You won't," Frank says, and Jim can tell he's trying to sound reassuring and supportive, which is nice of him, Jim supposes.
There's another long silence, then a small whisper: "I think I already have."
Jim closes his eyes when he hears the hitch in her voice. He's concentrating on breathing, trying to tune out his mother and Frank's conversation, when he hears Sam's voice above him:
"They say eavesdroppers never hear good of themselves."
Jim opens his eyes. Standing above him is his brother, a tall, dark silhouette against the late afternoon sun. Jim shades his eyes with one hand, watching Sam as Sam studies him with his sharp grey eyes that are exactly like their mother's.
Jim's brother is a scientist-in-training. Jim can tell that Sam is evaluating how he looks, assessing his too-skinny arms, appraising the dark hollows under his cheekbones, counting the sharp ribs visible through his t-shirt. Jim watches Sam's jaw tighten but knows Sam won't tell him what he's concluded. Jim has always liked this about his brother, the way he's always been good at keeping his thoughts to himself.
Sam drops down to sit beside Jim. "She was desperate to come get you, you know. Called in all sort of favors, left and right. Guilted everyone who would listen, reminding them about Dad's sacrifice and how they couldn't let a hero's son die on some godforsaken planet in the middle of a revolution. She tried everything, but nothing worked. No one could get you off that planet. No one. She tried everything she could."
Jim thinks it's the longest speech Sam's ever made, but he doesn't have the energy to reply with anything more than a shrug. He stares up at the secretive blue of the sky, and says nothing.
Sam nods as if Jim's shrug is answer enough, and they're quiet for a while after that.
Eventually Jim sits up, pulls his knees up to his chin, and wraps his arms around them.
Sam looks at him, almost reaches out to touch him, but doesn't.
"You should never have been there in the first place," he says suddenly, violently. "She should never have sent you."
Jim leans his forehead against his knees and closes his eyes. He wants to tell his brother that she didn't know, that no one could have known, but he doesn't.
Sam doesn't stay for dinner. He's too angry, too guilty to stay. He heads back to college as soon as he can, and Jim can tell that it's the beginning of a pattern. Jim misses Sam already.
Sometimes Jim thinks that he hates how Tarsus has changed all of them, not just him.
Other times Jim thinks that Tarsus changed just him, and now he's more like the rest of them, bound up in absences and secrets, mysteries and regrets, grief as infinite as the Iowa sky that no one talks about.
Jim has lots of secrets. He turns his secrets over and over in his head, the same way he turns his glass ornament over and over in his hands. His aunt gave it to him, a mercury-silver ball that's been in their family for generations, and somehow Jim managed to keep it safe and whole through everything that happened on Tarsus. Jim has lost so many things he can't count them all, but he hasn't lost this.
The day after Sam leaves for the last time, Jim's mother notices the silver ornament on Jim's bedside table. She holds it up to the light. "What is this, Jim?"
"Don't," Jim says, snatching it out of her hands and cradling it close to his chest. His voice is rusty, his hands are shaking, and he's so tired of feeling exhausted and lost and alone. He wants to scream these things at her, but he doesn't. He bows his head over the silver ball and closes his eyes.
"Jim..." she whispers, her voice breaking.
Jim looks up at his mother, and he can see his secrets reflected in her eyes, gleaming like shattered glass, and she's holding out her hand, reaching out to him again because she's his mother and she doesn't believe in no-win scenarios.
When he doesn't move, she lets her hand drop to her side and tries to smile, and it's her old smile, and it tells him a lot of things and even some of her secrets. It tells him that she understands, that he'll get through this but he needs time, that she can give him the space he needs, that she's lost things too.
Jim's mother's smile is startlingly sweet and unbelievably fucking sad.
Frank says Jim's smile is a lot like his mother's. It might be, Jim doesn't know.
Most nights now, Jim sits on the steps outside the old barn. His mother comes out to sit beside him. She sits close, but not too close, with her arms folded around herself, as if to stop herself from reaching out. Or maybe she's just cold, Jim doesn't know. He doesn't know what's going on in her head, and she doesn't know what's going on in his. There are secrets each of them carry that neither of them talks about, and Jim wants to lean in to her the way he used to, but he doesn't.
Most nights now, Jim and his mother sit quietly, both of them staring out at the blue-black night sky, which is empty and peaceful and calm. It's something Jim loves about his mother, the way she sits beside him, not saying a word, not pushing for more, just sitting, warm and there beside him. It might be the thing he loves most about her, the way she makes him feel that even if he's not okay yet, he will be.
END
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be a profound secret and mystery to every other.
-- Charles Dickens
Author's Notes: This story was inspired by and includes direct references to a Kelly Link short story (which is a bazillion times better than this) called "Magic for Beginners." The idea of Jim's mother being an orphan raised by feral something-or-others, the notion of her as a secret or a secret agent, as well as the concept of a mother-son roadtrip and traveling back in time are direct allusions to Link's story. Other references and phrasing may have snuck their way in as well. I owe heartfelt thanks to Ms Link for her inspiration and hope that she understands this as the homage it is intended to be.
There are other references to Link, a direct reference in Part 4 to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, and random references to Harry Potter and Alice Munro sprinkled throughout. With thanks and appreciation.
I also referenced a few of my previous stories in other fandoms (because I was lazy), and played with a plot point from one of my recent STXI stories, You Are Whatever a Moon Has Always Meant (because I could).
I did not make reference to any of the cut scenes from STXI, because, um, they were cut and so aren't part of my canon for this story.
Section Divider Attribution:
1. Lemony Snicket (Slippery Slope)
2. Martin Buber (from an older where_no_woman challenge)
3. Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)
4. e.e.cummings ("i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart")
Postscript: I only recently figured out that the epigraph quote is from Psycho. I promise you that Hitchcock's film has absolutely nothing to do with this story. (sigh)