FIC: Win and Jim (STXI, PG13, complete) - repost
This is a repost of a story that I originally posted in four parts in January. I'm reposting it here in a single post so that I can link to it cleanly at teamwinona.
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: 8,718
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 19, 2010 (original starting posting date)
Summary: A boy's best friend is his mother, and Jim Kirk is a lot like his mom, except when he's not.
Author's Notes are many and are noted at the end.
Dedication:
For A, who is complicated and kind and gentle,
and for L, who is small and not yet complicated and still sweet as a button...
I squeeze you both like apple juice
WIN AND JIM
A boy's best friend is his mother.
Part 1. There are secrets everywhere. I think everyone's parents have secrets. You just have to know where to look for them.
Jim's mother is an orphan. Frank claims she was raised by feral librarians, and Jim can actually sort of believe it. She's always poking around in the attic, digging through old book boxes, usually emerging with ink-stained fingertips and smelling like dusty old paper. She often looks disheveled, with her ragged jeans and her sandy hair twisted up in a knot that swallows styluses and pens. She tends to forget the writing implements that she tucks behind her ears, until Frank has to remind her to put them away before they take out someone's eye. Jim likes this about her, that being around her is a little bit dangerous.
Jim's mother's name is Winona (Win to her friends), and she can be as quiet as a librarian when she wants to be, which Jim figures pretty much supports Frank's theory. She's quiet most of the time. Jim's older brother Sam is also really quiet, and sometimes Jim thinks that it's interesting or maybe weird that he's related to two of the quietest people he's ever met. Jim and his stepfather Frank aren't really all that loud, but compared to his mother and his brother, they're the loudest people in Iowa.
Jim's mother isn't really a librarian. She's an engineer (a "damned good one" Frank says whenever he's trying to boost her confidence), but Jim likes to think that she could actually be a secret agent. She's the kind of person who's really good at keeping things hidden. She's crazy good at keeping secrets. Jim thinks sometimes that she's like a secret in human form, with messy hair and ink-stained jeans, and it's something else Jim really likes about her. He likes that she's a little mysterious. It makes life interesting.
Life in Riverside is hardly ever interesting, so Jim appreciates anything that can relieve the relentless boredom, even if it's just him imagining a heroic secret identity for his mom.
There are secrets, and then there are secrets, and Jim knows some, but there are lots he doesn't know. Like, for instance, what's wrong between his mother and his stepfather. He can tell something's not right between them. He knows it the same way he knows the hot and humid weather is about to give way to one of the summer storms he loves, with the booming thunder that rattles his bedroom window and the slanting rain that makes sleeping under the eaves the best thing in the world.
Also, it's a dead giveaway when he finds Frank sitting in the kitchen, looking morose and pitiful, staring down into his coffee cup as if he could figure out the answer to life, the universe, and everything in the grounds at the bottom of his cup.
When Jim asks Frank point-blank what's going on, Frank just hunches his shoulders and tells him to ask his mother. Jim's not really surprised. He shrugs and heads outside to find his mother.
He finds her sitting cross-legged on the floor of the barn, beside a large cardboard box that he assumes she dragged down from the attic. He leans against the barn door, hands tucked deep in the front pockets of his jeans, watching as she flips through a holophoto album. Other people prefer the latest digital methods for preserving images, but his mom isn't like other people. She's a tactile person, and she likes running her fingers over the faces in pictures. Jim likes the way she traces the outlines of landscapes as if she could reach through the holophoto and touch them.
She's intensely focused on what she's doing and hasn't noticed him yet, so Jim scuffs the toe of his sneaker on the floor to let her know he's there. She glances up, arches an eyebrow when she sees his jeans, but doesn't comment on how much she hates them, which he counts as a win. Her lips quirk upward, and she pats the spot on the floor beside her knee, sending dust swirling into the air.
As soon as Jim sits down, she dumps a pile of holophotos in his lap. He sifts through them dutifully. There are pictures of blurry people in Starfleet uniforms, pictures of weird-ass skies above places that must not be on Earth, pictures of him and Sam as babies and small children, pictures of relatives he doesn't know in front of buildings he's never seen, pictures of the farm, pictures of Frank, and then underneath them all, pictures of his dead father. Jim doesn't look at those ones for long. He doesn't like being confronted with his own eyes in a dead man's face, and anyway he doesn't need proof that there are secrets about secrets that he'll never know.
Once he's gone through the stack of hotophotos, Jim hands them back. He chews his bottom lip, considering different ways to start, and finally settles on the direct approach. "Frank said you wanted to tell me something."
She hums and nods, but instead of telling him whatever she wants to tell him, she pulls an old-fashioned ink pen out of the knot in her hair, marks a date at the bottom of one of the holophotos, and shuffles it to the bottom of the pile. She scribbles something on the back of another holophoto, and draws something else in the corner of another. After adding notes and doodles on seven (Jim's counting) more holophotos, she murmurs, "Yeah, I did."
Jim waits for her to say more but she doesn't, and after a minute he shrugs and decides he's okay with waiting. He waits patiently, watching as she writes on a couple more holophotos, then rips a too-blurry one in half and tosses it aside, then reorders her original pile. He waits, stretching his legs out in front of him and thinking that it's kind of peaceful sitting beside her in the old barn. There's golden light streaming through the ancient slatted walls, the dirt floor is softer than it looks, and the air smells grassy sweet. He leans back on his hands and keeps waiting, feeling warm and safe beside her, like when he was still a little kid.
After five or ten (Jim loses track of the exact number) minutes, she sets her pen down and says, "Sam's off at summer camp," as if Jim hasn't noticed his brother's empty chair at the kitchen table during every meal for the past three weeks.
Jim stares at her.
She pretends that she hasn't noticed him staring as she puts the holophoto album and the now-ordered pile of loose holophotos back in the cardboard box. "What do you say if we go on a roadtrip?"
Jim blinks. "What?"
"You heard me, Jim," she chides softly. "There's this invitation, a shindig in San Francisco. I want to go. I want you to come with."
Jim frowns in confusion. "What about Frank?"
"Frank doesn't want to go," she says, and all of a sudden Jim can tell she's angry, angrier than he's ever seen her. Then she tucks the pen back into her hair, smiles at him like she's never been angry a day in her life (which he knows from experience is not true), and smoothes a gentle hand through his hair. "I would rather just have a mother-son roadtrip anyway."
"You want to have a mother-son roadtrip?" Jim repeats, testing each word, thinking he's missing something vitally important to this conversation.
"Yeah." She nudges his shoulder. "You up for it, kid?"
Jim stares at her, harder than before, but his brain is already ticking through the possibilities. A trip out of Iowa? Miles of road and freedom and adventure? Seeing San Francisco, one of the greatest cities in the whole world? Was he up for it? "Fuck, yeah!"
"Jim--!"
"Sorry, Mom," he mumbles. "What I meant to say was that I'd really like to go on a mother-son roadtrip with you. To a shindig in San Francisco. Totally. Yes. Definitely." He nods with each affirmative, then peers at her. "What shindig?"
She laughs and ruffles his hair, and it's one more thing he likes about her, the way her quiet laugh still manages to fill the two-story barn. Weirdly, it reminds him of the electricity he can feel building in the air before the approaching thunderstorm. Also, it's been a long time since he's heard her laugh like that.
"I was thinking we could make it a real roadtrip," she says, getting up and brushing off the seat of her jeans. "We can take the old interstates, drive your dad's car. Sound like fun?"
Jim eyes the canvas-draped antique in the corner of the barn. "My real dad's car?"
She smiles again, but this time her smile is sort of broken, and it makes Jim's chest ache. He wants to close his eyes so he doesn't have to see that look anymore, but he also doesn't want her to see that he's upset, so he does the only thing he can think of: He stares down at his hands and silently hates how lost and alone she can make him feel without even trying.
Neither of them says much for a while after that.
Jim's mother snaps out of it faster than he does. She claps her hands together, sending small puffs of dust into the air, and nods. "We're going to drive your dad's car to California," she says, and she sounds decisive and cheerful, and Jim's sure she has no idea she just turned him inside out. (Jim can't tell what his mother's thinking at the best of times, and anyway this particular subject isn't one anyone in their family ever really talks about. Jim's dead father only ever comes up in conversation like an ambush, and they all go awkward and quiet until someone changes the subject.)
Jim's mother smiles again, a nearly normal smile this time, and bends down to offer him a hand up. "Want to help plan our itinerary?" she asks, changing the subject.
"Sure." Jim lets her pull him up off the floor, thinking that it's better this way (he knows that some things -- lots of things, secret or not -- are better left unsaid), then he remembers their roadtrip, and excitement starts curling its way back up his spine, and-- "Wait. We need an itinerary?"
"Yeah, we do," she grins. "I've got one mostly planned, but there are places that still need fleshing out."
"Gross, Mom," Jim mutters, wrinkling his nose.
"It's a metaphor, kid."
"Yeah, I got that. It's a gross metaphor."
She shrugs and ruffles his hair. "Come on. You can take a look at what I've pulled together already. You can give me your opinion. I know you've got lots of opinions."
"Yeah," Jim grins, rocking back on his heels, "but you love me anyway."
She laughs and wraps her arm around him, squeezing him close. She whispers, "I do love you," and presses a kiss to the top of his head, and Jim doesn't even think about pulling away. He slips his arm around her waist and leans in, close enough to smell her shampoo, and it's one more thing he really likes about her, the way she shortens her stride to match his on the walk back up to the house.
Part 2. All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
Jim's mother is a born-and-bred Midwesterner. She grew up just outside Chicago, and whenever he's frustrated, Frank blames Chicago for her "damned stubborn independence." Jim doesn't think Chicago has dibs on stubborn independence. Mostly he thinks his mother's a pretty typical Iowan, even if she only moved to Iowa after she married Jim's real father. Jim thinks she's like every other Iowan he's ever met. She's practical and self-reliant, quiet and reserved, a hard worker from a long line of hard workers. He likes these things about her.
He especially likes how she takes things seriously.
Jim's mother takes itineraries very seriously.
When they get back to the house, she spreads her maps and datapads across the kitchen table, then sits Jim down near the window so he can read what she's put together so far. She's done an impressive amount of research, and there's a lot to go through.
When Frank walks into the kitchen two hours later and finds them scribbling furiously in near-darkness, he sets his coffee mug in the sink, snaps on the overhead light, and slips out the back without commenting. The creak of the screen door closing behind him startles Jim and he looks up, but his mother doesn't seem to notice.
When Frank offers to help pack the car the next morning, Jim's mother shakes her head. "We're fine," she says as she zips up Jim's duffle bag and heaves it into the trunk. She slams the trunk closed, turns her back on Frank to arrange their maps and datapads in westward order -- Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California -- and then piles everything in the backseat of the car. When she's done, she rubs her hands together like she's a silent screen actress in an old Hollywood movie, announcing: "Okay, we're good to go," and that's when Jim realizes she hasn't looked at Frank once the whole morning.
Jim can tell Frank's realized it too. Jim watches his stepfather watching his mother as he gets into the car. He can pinpoint the exact moment that Frank realizes he's watching because Frank turns away, and the frustration and guilt on his face disappear behind a watery, unconvincing smile.
"Well, then," Frank says in doggedly cheerful voice, "let me know how you're getting on. Give a call every few days." He leans into the car to ruffle Jim's hair. "Try to keep your mom out of trouble, Jimmy."
Jim grins, because he'll try even if his mom won't. "You know me and trouble, Frank."
"I do," Frank laughs, and it's almost a real laugh but it also isn't, and Jim knows the difference. Jim feels his chest tightening with pity he doesn't want to feel, and he hates it. He hates being in the middle. Frank's misery is frustrating and pathetic, and Jim just wants whatever is wrong between his mother and his stepfather to go away. There are some secrets he really doesn't want to know.
His mother settles herself behind the steering wheel, still not looking at or talking to Frank, and Frank tries to convey his regret with sad, mopey eyes, and Jim scrunches down in his seat, wishing he could be somewhere else. It is, he thinks glumly as his mother checks his seatbelt and then her own, pretty much the story of his life.
Once she's satisfied that they're both buckled in, Jim's mother fumbles to engage the starter. When it doesn't catch, Jim stares at her, surprised out of his frustration. He's mystified by the fact that she's having trouble with the car. He knows it can't be that she's unfamiliar with the car's antique controls or unsure it will start. She's kept the car in perfect running order for years, tinkering with it out in the barn whenever she's not searching through book boxes in the attic. That she can't get it to start is profoundly weird, and Jim stares at her for a whole minute before deciding it's something else he doesn't want to know.
Frank comes around to the driver's side to help, but she waves him off. She ignores Frank, smiles reassuringly at Jim, and with one confident flick, manages to start the engine.
"Take care of each other," Frank says as he steps back from the car. His hands are hanging limp and useless at his sides and he isn't even pretending to hide his not-so-secret unhappiness, and Jim hates it.
Jim's mother pauses in the middle of reaching for the antique parking brake to look up at Frank. She tilts her head and nods, her eyes softening with something that isn't forgiveness, not yet, then releases the brake with hard yank.
Frank pats the side of the car. "We'll see you when you get back."
Jim's mother rolls her eyes, revs the engine, and they're off, down the dusty driveway and heading west across Iowa practically before Frank gets out of the way.
It's a beautiful day, the car's convertible top is down, the sky is blue, the fields are green, and after just a half-day of driving, Jim decides that Iowa really is as relentlessly boring as he always thought.
The landscape hardly changes when they pass the old state line into Nebraska. There are green oceans of cornfields on either side of the old interstate, stretching as far as the horizon. Jim has seen countless fields before, but these are new and different fields in a new and different state, and the excitement of new and different shivers along his nerve-ends. The miles and fields slip past, and Jim takes it all in, excitement making him sit up straight, eyes wide as the open spaces in front of them.
They've been traveling in his dead father's antique car for a day-and-a-half, and they haven't really said much the whole time. Every once in a while, Jim's mother looks over at him and smiles. Her eyes are warm and full of secrets the way they always are, but now they're also shining with her own delight in new and different. It's something else Jim really likes about her, the way she's pretty much as excited about their roadtrip as he is.
Nebraska gives way to Wyoming, which is a different kind of new and different. On either side of the interstate, Wyoming is dry and rocky and barren, like the surface of the moon. Jim likes this about Wyoming, that it reminds him of the moon. He likes thinking about the moon, likes thinking about space in general. (Sometimes Jim misses space, even though he hasn't been there since he was born on one of the Kelvin's med-evac shuttles on the edge of Federation space. Jim thinks he misses space like he would miss an arm or a leg, even if Sam always tells him that you can't actually miss something you haven't really known. Jim does miss it. He misses space like a phantom limb: he can't really remember it, so the ache of missing it isn't really there, but it still twinges occasionally. Sometimes it aches.)
Every once in a while, usually when he's thinking about some topic like space that he doesn't want to say anything about out loud, Jim's mother will ask him what he's thinking. "Penny for your thoughts?" she'll say, which always makes Jim grin because he likes it when she resorts to archaic conversation-starter phrases, even if he doesn't feel like talking. Usually he can deflect her question with another question about their itinerary or some fact about meteors or an observation about rock formations, something close enough to the truth that she doesn't probe further, even if she thinks he hasn't told her everything. It's something else Jim really likes about her, the way she seems to understand how he needs to have some secrets too.
They've been traveling in his dead father's antique car for three days when they cross the old state-line between Wyoming and Utah. Jim thinks it's been a good trip so far, filled with unsurprising stretches of quiet (given his mom's natural predisposition for being quiet) and surprising stretches of not-quiet (given his mom's unexpected predisposition for singing along with the radio).
Jim's mother has a terrible singing voice.
"It's my tin ear," she says, nodding seriously, as if she's explaining the workings of a warp core engine to a conference of Starfleet engineers. She ruins the effect by waggling her eyebrows, and it's one more thing Jim likes about her, the way she can be completely serious one minute and utterly silly the next.
Every once in a while, Jim's mother turns up the volume on the car's antique radio and invites Jim to sing along. He never knows the words. She shakes her head and starts to tell him about the Beatles and the Beastie Boys, the Rolling Stones and R.E.M., the Beach Boys and Bob Marley, Talking Heads and Teknik. Miles pass while she explains why he should know and care about what she calls the "classics." She recites lyrics and facts and stories until Jim is as fascinated by these long-dead musicians as she is. By the time they get to Utah, Jim knows enough that he can join in whenever she sings along with the radio.
It turns out Jim has a terrible singing voice too. Anyway, singing together makes Jim feel a little homesick, which is something Jim never expected.
Before they left Iowa, Jim had some basic expectations about their roadtrip. He expected that they would drive west on the old interstate, stopping along the way according to his mom's itinerary, getting back on the road, stopping again for food, driving, stopping for rest, driving, stopping for sleep. He didn't expect that the whole time they would sing along with the radio and talk about music and joke about meteors and make each other laugh. Halfway through Utah, Jim realizes that maybe his mother isn't as quiet a person as he always thought and that maybe she's also his best friend.
Utah melts into Nevada, which seems like an endless golden desert, all dry heat and sand. When they stop at one of the ancient gas stations along the interstate, Jim is fascinated by the antique-looking, fully modern slot machine sitting beside the gas pumps. He asks his mother about it when they get back on the road, and she launches into a history of Nevada’s legalized gambling which drifts into a story about his dead father and how he was terrible at gambling because he couldn't lie to save his life and--
Her voice trails off. She stares at Jim, her eyes filled with a kind of broken fragility, and Jim turns away. He never hears the end of the story. He just stares out at Nevada's starkly beautiful landscape, not really seeing any of it.
Neither of them can think of a reason to say anything else until they get stopped at the border to California.
"It's not really a border," Jim's mother tells him as they wait for the border guard. "It hasn't been a border in hundreds of years." She gives him a tiny smile, a peace offering, as she quotes from their itinerary: "It's a detailed historical reenactment of a border crossing to give travelers the experience of cross-country motoring from a bygone era."
Jim shakes his head, grinning. "It's a tourist trap?"
His mother grins back. "Literally."
The border guard ambles over to their car to ask them about their "destination and business in the Great Golden State," sounding so pompous that Jim can't help snickering.
Jim also can't help not liking him, especially when he catches the glint in the guard's eye when he looks at Jim's mother.
"So," the border guard says, leaning into the car. "Where are you and your little brother heading?" He sweeps his datapad in the air above his head, as if their ultimate destination might be space-ward.
Jim rolls his eyes.
His mother smiles at Jim, gently scolding without words. "We're heading to the Bay Area," she says, glancing up at the guard. "For a shindig."
Jim folds his arms over his chest and frowns when her smile widens and her eyes gleam with something he hopes is mischief but is afraid might be flirtatiousness. Jim hasn't really thought about it before, but he firmly believes that mothers should not be flirtatious.
The border guard doesn't seem to share that belief. "A shindig, huh?" he asks, flirting right back.
"Oh, yes," Jim's mother says and winks.
The border guard winks back.
Jim glares at both of them.
"You wouldn't happen to be transporting any fruits and vegetables across state-lines, now, would you?" the border guard asks in a low, seductive voice.
Jim pretends to gag.
Jim's mother ignores him, keeping her attention focused on the besotted border guard. She flashes him a teasing look from under her lashes. "We don't, officer," she says, then: "Call me Win," and the border guard grins, all teeth and triumph.
When the border guard clears his throat and straightens his uniform trousers, Jim wants to die from embarrassment. He's considering crawling into the backseat to get away from both of them when he notices the expression in his mother's eyes. It isn't flirtatious or playful at all; it's hard and angry, and it reminds him of the swirling dust in the barn and her telling him that Frank didn't want to go to San Francisco. That's when Jim realizes that her flirting is more about Frank than anything else, and he's staring at his mother, trying to understand, not sure he likes this about her, when the guard interrupts:
"Do you have any--" he drops his voice to a purr and pretends to claw the air with both hands-- "wild animals?"
Jim stares at the guard. He exchanges a stunned look with his mother. They stare at each other for a long moment. Then they crack up.
Jim's mother manages to stop laughing long enough to shake her head.
When she starts laughing again, the border guard realizes his flirtation has fallen flat. He backs away from their car to wave them through the fake border, and they are on their way again.
The conifer trees that accompanied them across the Sierra Nevadas give way to flat farmlands all the way to San Francisco, and Jim thinks it's new and different, but also peaceful and weirdly like Iowa, which is definitely something he didn't expect. He settles back, liking how it's different and similar at the same time, but mostly thinking that it's nice things are back to normal between him and his mom.
After six days on the road, they arrive in San Francisco, and right away Jim decides he likes the smell of the ocean. It's late morning, the city is shrouded in fog, and even if Jim can just make out the vast deep blue of the bay, he can still smell the salty sweetness of the Pacific. It's something he really likes about San Francisco, that finally he's some place that's as different from Iowa as it's possible to get.
There are still a few days before his mother's shindig, so Jim and his mother decide to explore the city, even though it's not really on their itinerary. They ride creaky cable cars and explore Chinatown and wander up and down winding paths in Golden Gate Park. As they brave the crowds to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, Jim studies his mother out of the corner of his eye. She looks tired but happy, like some secret weight has lifted from her shoulders. For the past six days, her hair has been braided in two pigtails, and Jim thinks that she almost looks younger than him, as if they've been traveling backward in time instead of just across the continent.
Jim's mother pretends not to notice his scrutiny. She reaches for his hand, gives it a tight squeeze, and smiles, and Jim doesn't try to pull his hand away. He smiles back, and it's one more thing he really likes about her, the way she seems to understand what he's thinking even if he doesn't say a word.
Part 3. No one keeps a secret as well as a child.
Jim's mother is an expert at losing things. She tucks pens and styluses into her hair and forgets them there. She frequently misplaces important papers and datapads around the house. She often has to buy new tools when she's working on the car because the exact tool she needs has somehow vanished from the barn. Jim's mother has a history of losing things, and people. Once she lost Sam in a Riverside grocery store. She lost Jim's real father on the Kelvin. She may be in the process of losing Frank.
The day after they arrive in San Francisco, she loses Jim in the thousand-year-old redwood forests above Palo Alto.
She loses him the day before her shindig, which she finally explains is a Starfleet memorial for the survivors of the attack on the Kelvin. One of the conditional items on her itinerary was: "visit prestigious Bay Area universities," so when they find themselves with one more unexpected day and she proposes they visit Stanford University, Jim isn't surprised. His mother has always been interested in higher education as something separate from Starfleet Academy. (She has never urged Jim or Sam to join Starfleet. "You need a real education first," she likes to say. "If you decide to go to Starfleet later on, that's fine. But you need to have a solid grounding before they get their hands on you.")
So they visit Stanford, and after their campus tour ends, Jim's mother suggests they explore the nearby redwood forest, and Jim isn't surprised by that either. "It's one of the great natural wonders of the American continent," she reads from the supplemental part of their itinerary.
They choose one of the easier hiking trails and are surrounded by the secret life of the ancient forest, by shadowed light and rustling darkness. Their trail winds through dense undergrowth and sharp needles until Jim's disoriented by the rough red-grey bark of the trees and the sense of massive tree trunks closing in around him. He stops to squint up at the sky, trying to determine their direction from the location of the sun, but all he can see is a fragment of blue that flickers and recedes behind the dark treetops.
Jim spins around, searching for his mother, but doesn't see her. "Mom?" he calls.
The towering trees murmur in reply, and that's when Jim realizes he's alone. He has no idea how or when he got separated from his mother. He has no idea what to do. He's not sure if he should shout for her again, or try to find her, or wait where he is, or try to retrace his steps, or find a new path entirely. He's shaking with indecision when he hears her voice.
"Jim?" she calls back. "Where are you?"
He twists his body to follow her voice, but moves too quickly. The trail crumbles under his feet, and he plummets down a crack in the earth.
*
Jim's mother has an engineer's hands. They're callused and dry, delicate and strong, perfectly suited to working with precise machinery. Her hands tremble as she runs them over Jim's body, checking for injury.
Jim is lying in the rubble at the bottom of a crevasse. He wants to push himself up, but his mother tells him to lie still. He tries to tell her that it hurts too much to lie still, but he can't get the words out. It also hurts too much to move, but he doesn't tell her that either.
One of his legs is caught under him, the other weirdly bent. When she runs her hands over his legs, fingers probing carefully, he bites his lip. It hurts so much he almost blacks out.
"I'm going to carry you back up to the trail, Jim," she says gently. "Hold on."
Jim closes his eyes. When she lifts him, he gasps in pain. His eyes fly open then roll back in his head, and he faints.
*
Jim's mother's eyes go flat and empty whenever anyone mentions Jim's real father, who has been dead for 3,812 days. Jim has no idea why he's thinking about his dead father when his mother's frantic voice wakes him.
Jim's mother usually has a quietest voice of anyone Jim's ever met. It isn't quiet now.
"Why is he having trouble breathing?" his mother is demanding. Jim can hear her pacing back and forth across what seems to be a small room. Her steps are too fast, too anxious. Jim concentrates on trying to breathe and counts her steps: one-two-three, one-two-three.
Someone stabs his neck with a hypospray. He winces and mumbles in protest but suddenly he's able to breathe again. "The anaphylaxis should subside now," the hypospray-wielder says. "It was an allergic reaction to the painkillers administered by the on-site medics--"
Jim's mother stops pacing. "An allergic reaction--?"
"The medics were unaware of your son's history," the voice (nurse? doctor? Jim can't tell) says. The voice sounds neutral and professional, but Jim can also hear reproach and a distinct lack of apology threading under the words.
There is a long silence. "My son's history?" Jim's mother asks dangerously.
"If they had been aware of his medical profile--"
"Bullshit," she snaps, and Jim hears a shuffle of steps, as if the owner of the other voice has actually stepped back in surprise, as if she hit him. "With all this modern tech, you should've been able to prevent this happening to a small boy."
"'m not small, Mom," Jim mumbles without opening his eyes.
Immediately his mother is at his side. "Hey, you. You're awake." Jim can feel warm lips brushing his forehead and fingers clutching his.
He opens his eyes, searching for her.
She smiles, and her eyes are shining with relief and no secrets all. "You do have the ability to get into trouble, don't you," she murmurs. Her hand flits across his shoulder, a breath of a touch, and she looks like she wants to ask him something or scold him maybe, but Jim can't keep his eyes open. As his eyes close, he hears her turn back to the medical person and say in a calmer voice: "Tell me what happens now."
Before he succumbs to whatever sedative was included in the epi-hypo, Jim hears a rapid set of taps on a datapad, then: "Your son has no internal injury, although both of his legs are broken. One break is clean. The other leg is shattered. We've stabilized him and are currently prepping Surgical Room 3..."
Jim drifts off.
*
Jim's mother has secrets, things she doesn't tell anyone.
When he wakes up after his surgery, Jim is alone in a standard hospital room. His body feels heavy and weird, like it isn't his. He can't feel his legs.
He can hear his mother's voice, but can't see her. He thinks she's in the hallway outside his room, but isn't sure. He hears her say: "I just don’t know, Chris."
"Starfleet needs you, Win. I couldn't believe it when they told me you were here. I knew I couldn't miss this chance to talk to you, to urge you to reconsider. Win. Re-enlist in Starfleet. With your skills and expertise, we could--"
"Please, Chris. My skills and expertise are hopelessly out of date, and you know it."
"I don't believe it. I know you, Win. I'm sure you never stopped reading the latest journals. I'm sure you've been tinkering with George's damn car for years, building and rebuilding the damn thing for practice as much as to keep yourself out of trouble."
She doesn't reply, but Jim knows her well enough to imagine her shrug.
"If some of your specific domain knowledge is out of date, that's understandable, but it's not a deal-breaker. Win. You're too good, have too many skills we need to not re-enlist. Starfleet needs you, and you know you want to. C'mon, Win. Are you happy being the only genius-level engineer buried in the backwoods of Iowa?"
"There are no backwoods in Iowa," Jim's mother says, and something in Jim's chest clenches at how quiet and thoughtful she sounds.
"It's been long enough, Win," the Starfleet officer (Chris?) says. Jim thinks his voice is soft, like he's gentling a skittish mare.
"It's been too long, Chris," she sighs.
"Not if it's something you want to do."
Jim waits for her to say no, to tell the officer that she can't, that she isn't ready to re-enlist, that she needs to stay with her family, with him. When she doesn't, Jim feels his eyes sting (he tells himself it's the woozy aftereffects of the surgical anesthetic). When he hears her say goodbye to the officer and she still hasn't said no, Jim closes his eyes and wills himself to fall asleep (he doesn't want to see her).
*
Jim's mother's eyes are grey like cat's fur. Her eyes are the first thing he sees when he wakes up next. She's sitting beside him, reading an ancient paperback. Jim's mother likes to read and collect antique books.
"There are secrets in all families," she murmurs, turning the book so he can see the cover. "I just read that in this book. It's Emma by Jane Austen, a good book although I'm not sure you'd like it." She smoothes his hair back from his forehead. "Our family's secrets are pretty well known."
Jim frowns in confusion.
"The Kirks have always been Starfleet. Your father, his parents, my father. Our family has always served."
Jim nods, still not understanding.
Her mouth quirks. "You heard me talking to Commander Pike, didn't you?"
And then Jim understands. He nods.
"I didn't want you to find out like this."
Jim lets his question hang unsaid in the air between them.
"I wanted to tell you myself. I didn't want you to find out through an overheard conversation that I've been thinking about re-enlisting." She sighs. "I've gotten offers for years. And I've missed it. I enlisted before I met your father because I wanted to be out there--" she gestures beyond the window-- "discovering new things, exploring new places, going where no one has gone before. Being a part of per aspera ad astra was all I wanted for so long--" she brushes her finger down his cheek-- "before you and Sam, of course. But you were right, Jim, you're not small anymore. And there's so much that I still want to do out there."
Jim doesn't say anything. He tries to smile, but it's hard to get his mouth to move right. So he nods, because he can understand even if he doesn't want to.
*
Jim's mother keeps herself to herself.
She misses her shindig because Jim is in the hospital. They leave San Francisco without going to Starfleet Academy even once. They take a shuttle back to Iowa, and Jim's mother arranges to transport his dead father's car back separately. Jim stays home from school for the next six months, and life mostly returns to normal, until his mother gets a call from Commander Pike.
Jim's mother re-enlists in Starfleet when the doctors pronounce Jim healed enough to go back to school. She's posted off-world almost immediately. Sam goes away to college, and Jim stays with Frank, and things are okay. Frank's a good guy and an okay fill-in parent, even if he's not Jim's mother, and Jim tries to be normal, he really does.
Five months into his mother's off-planet assignment, everything Jim isn't talking about gets the better of him, and he drives his dead father's car into the Riverside Quarry partly out of frustration and boredom, but mostly in protest.
Jim's mother isn't angry in the vid call later that night. She looks frightened and defeated and a little lost. She tells him that she's requested Earth-based assignments for the next few months, and Jim is happy to have her home again until he sees the regret in her eyes and realizes he put it there.
When she's assigned off-planet nine months after that, Jim and Frank see her off. Jim promises to keep up his grades, to listen to Frank, to not crash any cars into any quarries. He tells her to have a good trip and that he'll see her when she gets back.
He waves as she disappears into the shuttle and doesn't tell her that he'll miss her. He doesn't say that he's lost without her.
She waves at him through the shuttle window, smiling as if she understands everything he hasn't said. Jim's sure she doesn't, but he smiles back anyway.
There are some things they don't need to talk about, and he has secrets too, things he doesn't tell anyone. He's his mother's son, after all.
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)
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: 8,718
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 19, 2010 (original starting posting date)
Summary: A boy's best friend is his mother, and Jim Kirk is a lot like his mom, except when he's not.
Author's Notes are many and are noted at the end.
Dedication:
For A, who is complicated and kind and gentle,
and for L, who is small and not yet complicated and still sweet as a button...
I squeeze you both like apple juice
WIN AND JIM
A boy's best friend is his mother.
Part 1. There are secrets everywhere. I think everyone's parents have secrets. You just have to know where to look for them.
Jim's mother is an orphan. Frank claims she was raised by feral librarians, and Jim can actually sort of believe it. She's always poking around in the attic, digging through old book boxes, usually emerging with ink-stained fingertips and smelling like dusty old paper. She often looks disheveled, with her ragged jeans and her sandy hair twisted up in a knot that swallows styluses and pens. She tends to forget the writing implements that she tucks behind her ears, until Frank has to remind her to put them away before they take out someone's eye. Jim likes this about her, that being around her is a little bit dangerous.
Jim's mother's name is Winona (Win to her friends), and she can be as quiet as a librarian when she wants to be, which Jim figures pretty much supports Frank's theory. She's quiet most of the time. Jim's older brother Sam is also really quiet, and sometimes Jim thinks that it's interesting or maybe weird that he's related to two of the quietest people he's ever met. Jim and his stepfather Frank aren't really all that loud, but compared to his mother and his brother, they're the loudest people in Iowa.
Jim's mother isn't really a librarian. She's an engineer (a "damned good one" Frank says whenever he's trying to boost her confidence), but Jim likes to think that she could actually be a secret agent. She's the kind of person who's really good at keeping things hidden. She's crazy good at keeping secrets. Jim thinks sometimes that she's like a secret in human form, with messy hair and ink-stained jeans, and it's something else Jim really likes about her. He likes that she's a little mysterious. It makes life interesting.
Life in Riverside is hardly ever interesting, so Jim appreciates anything that can relieve the relentless boredom, even if it's just him imagining a heroic secret identity for his mom.
There are secrets, and then there are secrets, and Jim knows some, but there are lots he doesn't know. Like, for instance, what's wrong between his mother and his stepfather. He can tell something's not right between them. He knows it the same way he knows the hot and humid weather is about to give way to one of the summer storms he loves, with the booming thunder that rattles his bedroom window and the slanting rain that makes sleeping under the eaves the best thing in the world.
Also, it's a dead giveaway when he finds Frank sitting in the kitchen, looking morose and pitiful, staring down into his coffee cup as if he could figure out the answer to life, the universe, and everything in the grounds at the bottom of his cup.
When Jim asks Frank point-blank what's going on, Frank just hunches his shoulders and tells him to ask his mother. Jim's not really surprised. He shrugs and heads outside to find his mother.
He finds her sitting cross-legged on the floor of the barn, beside a large cardboard box that he assumes she dragged down from the attic. He leans against the barn door, hands tucked deep in the front pockets of his jeans, watching as she flips through a holophoto album. Other people prefer the latest digital methods for preserving images, but his mom isn't like other people. She's a tactile person, and she likes running her fingers over the faces in pictures. Jim likes the way she traces the outlines of landscapes as if she could reach through the holophoto and touch them.
She's intensely focused on what she's doing and hasn't noticed him yet, so Jim scuffs the toe of his sneaker on the floor to let her know he's there. She glances up, arches an eyebrow when she sees his jeans, but doesn't comment on how much she hates them, which he counts as a win. Her lips quirk upward, and she pats the spot on the floor beside her knee, sending dust swirling into the air.
As soon as Jim sits down, she dumps a pile of holophotos in his lap. He sifts through them dutifully. There are pictures of blurry people in Starfleet uniforms, pictures of weird-ass skies above places that must not be on Earth, pictures of him and Sam as babies and small children, pictures of relatives he doesn't know in front of buildings he's never seen, pictures of the farm, pictures of Frank, and then underneath them all, pictures of his dead father. Jim doesn't look at those ones for long. He doesn't like being confronted with his own eyes in a dead man's face, and anyway he doesn't need proof that there are secrets about secrets that he'll never know.
Once he's gone through the stack of hotophotos, Jim hands them back. He chews his bottom lip, considering different ways to start, and finally settles on the direct approach. "Frank said you wanted to tell me something."
She hums and nods, but instead of telling him whatever she wants to tell him, she pulls an old-fashioned ink pen out of the knot in her hair, marks a date at the bottom of one of the holophotos, and shuffles it to the bottom of the pile. She scribbles something on the back of another holophoto, and draws something else in the corner of another. After adding notes and doodles on seven (Jim's counting) more holophotos, she murmurs, "Yeah, I did."
Jim waits for her to say more but she doesn't, and after a minute he shrugs and decides he's okay with waiting. He waits patiently, watching as she writes on a couple more holophotos, then rips a too-blurry one in half and tosses it aside, then reorders her original pile. He waits, stretching his legs out in front of him and thinking that it's kind of peaceful sitting beside her in the old barn. There's golden light streaming through the ancient slatted walls, the dirt floor is softer than it looks, and the air smells grassy sweet. He leans back on his hands and keeps waiting, feeling warm and safe beside her, like when he was still a little kid.
After five or ten (Jim loses track of the exact number) minutes, she sets her pen down and says, "Sam's off at summer camp," as if Jim hasn't noticed his brother's empty chair at the kitchen table during every meal for the past three weeks.
Jim stares at her.
She pretends that she hasn't noticed him staring as she puts the holophoto album and the now-ordered pile of loose holophotos back in the cardboard box. "What do you say if we go on a roadtrip?"
Jim blinks. "What?"
"You heard me, Jim," she chides softly. "There's this invitation, a shindig in San Francisco. I want to go. I want you to come with."
Jim frowns in confusion. "What about Frank?"
"Frank doesn't want to go," she says, and all of a sudden Jim can tell she's angry, angrier than he's ever seen her. Then she tucks the pen back into her hair, smiles at him like she's never been angry a day in her life (which he knows from experience is not true), and smoothes a gentle hand through his hair. "I would rather just have a mother-son roadtrip anyway."
"You want to have a mother-son roadtrip?" Jim repeats, testing each word, thinking he's missing something vitally important to this conversation.
"Yeah." She nudges his shoulder. "You up for it, kid?"
Jim stares at her, harder than before, but his brain is already ticking through the possibilities. A trip out of Iowa? Miles of road and freedom and adventure? Seeing San Francisco, one of the greatest cities in the whole world? Was he up for it? "Fuck, yeah!"
"Jim--!"
"Sorry, Mom," he mumbles. "What I meant to say was that I'd really like to go on a mother-son roadtrip with you. To a shindig in San Francisco. Totally. Yes. Definitely." He nods with each affirmative, then peers at her. "What shindig?"
She laughs and ruffles his hair, and it's one more thing he likes about her, the way her quiet laugh still manages to fill the two-story barn. Weirdly, it reminds him of the electricity he can feel building in the air before the approaching thunderstorm. Also, it's been a long time since he's heard her laugh like that.
"I was thinking we could make it a real roadtrip," she says, getting up and brushing off the seat of her jeans. "We can take the old interstates, drive your dad's car. Sound like fun?"
Jim eyes the canvas-draped antique in the corner of the barn. "My real dad's car?"
She smiles again, but this time her smile is sort of broken, and it makes Jim's chest ache. He wants to close his eyes so he doesn't have to see that look anymore, but he also doesn't want her to see that he's upset, so he does the only thing he can think of: He stares down at his hands and silently hates how lost and alone she can make him feel without even trying.
Neither of them says much for a while after that.
Jim's mother snaps out of it faster than he does. She claps her hands together, sending small puffs of dust into the air, and nods. "We're going to drive your dad's car to California," she says, and she sounds decisive and cheerful, and Jim's sure she has no idea she just turned him inside out. (Jim can't tell what his mother's thinking at the best of times, and anyway this particular subject isn't one anyone in their family ever really talks about. Jim's dead father only ever comes up in conversation like an ambush, and they all go awkward and quiet until someone changes the subject.)
Jim's mother smiles again, a nearly normal smile this time, and bends down to offer him a hand up. "Want to help plan our itinerary?" she asks, changing the subject.
"Sure." Jim lets her pull him up off the floor, thinking that it's better this way (he knows that some things -- lots of things, secret or not -- are better left unsaid), then he remembers their roadtrip, and excitement starts curling its way back up his spine, and-- "Wait. We need an itinerary?"
"Yeah, we do," she grins. "I've got one mostly planned, but there are places that still need fleshing out."
"Gross, Mom," Jim mutters, wrinkling his nose.
"It's a metaphor, kid."
"Yeah, I got that. It's a gross metaphor."
She shrugs and ruffles his hair. "Come on. You can take a look at what I've pulled together already. You can give me your opinion. I know you've got lots of opinions."
"Yeah," Jim grins, rocking back on his heels, "but you love me anyway."
She laughs and wraps her arm around him, squeezing him close. She whispers, "I do love you," and presses a kiss to the top of his head, and Jim doesn't even think about pulling away. He slips his arm around her waist and leans in, close enough to smell her shampoo, and it's one more thing he really likes about her, the way she shortens her stride to match his on the walk back up to the house.
Part 2. All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
Jim's mother is a born-and-bred Midwesterner. She grew up just outside Chicago, and whenever he's frustrated, Frank blames Chicago for her "damned stubborn independence." Jim doesn't think Chicago has dibs on stubborn independence. Mostly he thinks his mother's a pretty typical Iowan, even if she only moved to Iowa after she married Jim's real father. Jim thinks she's like every other Iowan he's ever met. She's practical and self-reliant, quiet and reserved, a hard worker from a long line of hard workers. He likes these things about her.
He especially likes how she takes things seriously.
Jim's mother takes itineraries very seriously.
When they get back to the house, she spreads her maps and datapads across the kitchen table, then sits Jim down near the window so he can read what she's put together so far. She's done an impressive amount of research, and there's a lot to go through.
When Frank walks into the kitchen two hours later and finds them scribbling furiously in near-darkness, he sets his coffee mug in the sink, snaps on the overhead light, and slips out the back without commenting. The creak of the screen door closing behind him startles Jim and he looks up, but his mother doesn't seem to notice.
When Frank offers to help pack the car the next morning, Jim's mother shakes her head. "We're fine," she says as she zips up Jim's duffle bag and heaves it into the trunk. She slams the trunk closed, turns her back on Frank to arrange their maps and datapads in westward order -- Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California -- and then piles everything in the backseat of the car. When she's done, she rubs her hands together like she's a silent screen actress in an old Hollywood movie, announcing: "Okay, we're good to go," and that's when Jim realizes she hasn't looked at Frank once the whole morning.
Jim can tell Frank's realized it too. Jim watches his stepfather watching his mother as he gets into the car. He can pinpoint the exact moment that Frank realizes he's watching because Frank turns away, and the frustration and guilt on his face disappear behind a watery, unconvincing smile.
"Well, then," Frank says in doggedly cheerful voice, "let me know how you're getting on. Give a call every few days." He leans into the car to ruffle Jim's hair. "Try to keep your mom out of trouble, Jimmy."
Jim grins, because he'll try even if his mom won't. "You know me and trouble, Frank."
"I do," Frank laughs, and it's almost a real laugh but it also isn't, and Jim knows the difference. Jim feels his chest tightening with pity he doesn't want to feel, and he hates it. He hates being in the middle. Frank's misery is frustrating and pathetic, and Jim just wants whatever is wrong between his mother and his stepfather to go away. There are some secrets he really doesn't want to know.
His mother settles herself behind the steering wheel, still not looking at or talking to Frank, and Frank tries to convey his regret with sad, mopey eyes, and Jim scrunches down in his seat, wishing he could be somewhere else. It is, he thinks glumly as his mother checks his seatbelt and then her own, pretty much the story of his life.
Once she's satisfied that they're both buckled in, Jim's mother fumbles to engage the starter. When it doesn't catch, Jim stares at her, surprised out of his frustration. He's mystified by the fact that she's having trouble with the car. He knows it can't be that she's unfamiliar with the car's antique controls or unsure it will start. She's kept the car in perfect running order for years, tinkering with it out in the barn whenever she's not searching through book boxes in the attic. That she can't get it to start is profoundly weird, and Jim stares at her for a whole minute before deciding it's something else he doesn't want to know.
Frank comes around to the driver's side to help, but she waves him off. She ignores Frank, smiles reassuringly at Jim, and with one confident flick, manages to start the engine.
"Take care of each other," Frank says as he steps back from the car. His hands are hanging limp and useless at his sides and he isn't even pretending to hide his not-so-secret unhappiness, and Jim hates it.
Jim's mother pauses in the middle of reaching for the antique parking brake to look up at Frank. She tilts her head and nods, her eyes softening with something that isn't forgiveness, not yet, then releases the brake with hard yank.
Frank pats the side of the car. "We'll see you when you get back."
Jim's mother rolls her eyes, revs the engine, and they're off, down the dusty driveway and heading west across Iowa practically before Frank gets out of the way.
It's a beautiful day, the car's convertible top is down, the sky is blue, the fields are green, and after just a half-day of driving, Jim decides that Iowa really is as relentlessly boring as he always thought.
The landscape hardly changes when they pass the old state line into Nebraska. There are green oceans of cornfields on either side of the old interstate, stretching as far as the horizon. Jim has seen countless fields before, but these are new and different fields in a new and different state, and the excitement of new and different shivers along his nerve-ends. The miles and fields slip past, and Jim takes it all in, excitement making him sit up straight, eyes wide as the open spaces in front of them.
They've been traveling in his dead father's antique car for a day-and-a-half, and they haven't really said much the whole time. Every once in a while, Jim's mother looks over at him and smiles. Her eyes are warm and full of secrets the way they always are, but now they're also shining with her own delight in new and different. It's something else Jim really likes about her, the way she's pretty much as excited about their roadtrip as he is.
Nebraska gives way to Wyoming, which is a different kind of new and different. On either side of the interstate, Wyoming is dry and rocky and barren, like the surface of the moon. Jim likes this about Wyoming, that it reminds him of the moon. He likes thinking about the moon, likes thinking about space in general. (Sometimes Jim misses space, even though he hasn't been there since he was born on one of the Kelvin's med-evac shuttles on the edge of Federation space. Jim thinks he misses space like he would miss an arm or a leg, even if Sam always tells him that you can't actually miss something you haven't really known. Jim does miss it. He misses space like a phantom limb: he can't really remember it, so the ache of missing it isn't really there, but it still twinges occasionally. Sometimes it aches.)
Every once in a while, usually when he's thinking about some topic like space that he doesn't want to say anything about out loud, Jim's mother will ask him what he's thinking. "Penny for your thoughts?" she'll say, which always makes Jim grin because he likes it when she resorts to archaic conversation-starter phrases, even if he doesn't feel like talking. Usually he can deflect her question with another question about their itinerary or some fact about meteors or an observation about rock formations, something close enough to the truth that she doesn't probe further, even if she thinks he hasn't told her everything. It's something else Jim really likes about her, the way she seems to understand how he needs to have some secrets too.
They've been traveling in his dead father's antique car for three days when they cross the old state-line between Wyoming and Utah. Jim thinks it's been a good trip so far, filled with unsurprising stretches of quiet (given his mom's natural predisposition for being quiet) and surprising stretches of not-quiet (given his mom's unexpected predisposition for singing along with the radio).
Jim's mother has a terrible singing voice.
"It's my tin ear," she says, nodding seriously, as if she's explaining the workings of a warp core engine to a conference of Starfleet engineers. She ruins the effect by waggling her eyebrows, and it's one more thing Jim likes about her, the way she can be completely serious one minute and utterly silly the next.
Every once in a while, Jim's mother turns up the volume on the car's antique radio and invites Jim to sing along. He never knows the words. She shakes her head and starts to tell him about the Beatles and the Beastie Boys, the Rolling Stones and R.E.M., the Beach Boys and Bob Marley, Talking Heads and Teknik. Miles pass while she explains why he should know and care about what she calls the "classics." She recites lyrics and facts and stories until Jim is as fascinated by these long-dead musicians as she is. By the time they get to Utah, Jim knows enough that he can join in whenever she sings along with the radio.
It turns out Jim has a terrible singing voice too. Anyway, singing together makes Jim feel a little homesick, which is something Jim never expected.
Before they left Iowa, Jim had some basic expectations about their roadtrip. He expected that they would drive west on the old interstate, stopping along the way according to his mom's itinerary, getting back on the road, stopping again for food, driving, stopping for rest, driving, stopping for sleep. He didn't expect that the whole time they would sing along with the radio and talk about music and joke about meteors and make each other laugh. Halfway through Utah, Jim realizes that maybe his mother isn't as quiet a person as he always thought and that maybe she's also his best friend.
Utah melts into Nevada, which seems like an endless golden desert, all dry heat and sand. When they stop at one of the ancient gas stations along the interstate, Jim is fascinated by the antique-looking, fully modern slot machine sitting beside the gas pumps. He asks his mother about it when they get back on the road, and she launches into a history of Nevada’s legalized gambling which drifts into a story about his dead father and how he was terrible at gambling because he couldn't lie to save his life and--
Her voice trails off. She stares at Jim, her eyes filled with a kind of broken fragility, and Jim turns away. He never hears the end of the story. He just stares out at Nevada's starkly beautiful landscape, not really seeing any of it.
Neither of them can think of a reason to say anything else until they get stopped at the border to California.
"It's not really a border," Jim's mother tells him as they wait for the border guard. "It hasn't been a border in hundreds of years." She gives him a tiny smile, a peace offering, as she quotes from their itinerary: "It's a detailed historical reenactment of a border crossing to give travelers the experience of cross-country motoring from a bygone era."
Jim shakes his head, grinning. "It's a tourist trap?"
His mother grins back. "Literally."
The border guard ambles over to their car to ask them about their "destination and business in the Great Golden State," sounding so pompous that Jim can't help snickering.
Jim also can't help not liking him, especially when he catches the glint in the guard's eye when he looks at Jim's mother.
"So," the border guard says, leaning into the car. "Where are you and your little brother heading?" He sweeps his datapad in the air above his head, as if their ultimate destination might be space-ward.
Jim rolls his eyes.
His mother smiles at Jim, gently scolding without words. "We're heading to the Bay Area," she says, glancing up at the guard. "For a shindig."
Jim folds his arms over his chest and frowns when her smile widens and her eyes gleam with something he hopes is mischief but is afraid might be flirtatiousness. Jim hasn't really thought about it before, but he firmly believes that mothers should not be flirtatious.
The border guard doesn't seem to share that belief. "A shindig, huh?" he asks, flirting right back.
"Oh, yes," Jim's mother says and winks.
The border guard winks back.
Jim glares at both of them.
"You wouldn't happen to be transporting any fruits and vegetables across state-lines, now, would you?" the border guard asks in a low, seductive voice.
Jim pretends to gag.
Jim's mother ignores him, keeping her attention focused on the besotted border guard. She flashes him a teasing look from under her lashes. "We don't, officer," she says, then: "Call me Win," and the border guard grins, all teeth and triumph.
When the border guard clears his throat and straightens his uniform trousers, Jim wants to die from embarrassment. He's considering crawling into the backseat to get away from both of them when he notices the expression in his mother's eyes. It isn't flirtatious or playful at all; it's hard and angry, and it reminds him of the swirling dust in the barn and her telling him that Frank didn't want to go to San Francisco. That's when Jim realizes that her flirting is more about Frank than anything else, and he's staring at his mother, trying to understand, not sure he likes this about her, when the guard interrupts:
"Do you have any--" he drops his voice to a purr and pretends to claw the air with both hands-- "wild animals?"
Jim stares at the guard. He exchanges a stunned look with his mother. They stare at each other for a long moment. Then they crack up.
Jim's mother manages to stop laughing long enough to shake her head.
When she starts laughing again, the border guard realizes his flirtation has fallen flat. He backs away from their car to wave them through the fake border, and they are on their way again.
The conifer trees that accompanied them across the Sierra Nevadas give way to flat farmlands all the way to San Francisco, and Jim thinks it's new and different, but also peaceful and weirdly like Iowa, which is definitely something he didn't expect. He settles back, liking how it's different and similar at the same time, but mostly thinking that it's nice things are back to normal between him and his mom.
After six days on the road, they arrive in San Francisco, and right away Jim decides he likes the smell of the ocean. It's late morning, the city is shrouded in fog, and even if Jim can just make out the vast deep blue of the bay, he can still smell the salty sweetness of the Pacific. It's something he really likes about San Francisco, that finally he's some place that's as different from Iowa as it's possible to get.
There are still a few days before his mother's shindig, so Jim and his mother decide to explore the city, even though it's not really on their itinerary. They ride creaky cable cars and explore Chinatown and wander up and down winding paths in Golden Gate Park. As they brave the crowds to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, Jim studies his mother out of the corner of his eye. She looks tired but happy, like some secret weight has lifted from her shoulders. For the past six days, her hair has been braided in two pigtails, and Jim thinks that she almost looks younger than him, as if they've been traveling backward in time instead of just across the continent.
Jim's mother pretends not to notice his scrutiny. She reaches for his hand, gives it a tight squeeze, and smiles, and Jim doesn't try to pull his hand away. He smiles back, and it's one more thing he really likes about her, the way she seems to understand what he's thinking even if he doesn't say a word.
Part 3. No one keeps a secret as well as a child.
Jim's mother is an expert at losing things. She tucks pens and styluses into her hair and forgets them there. She frequently misplaces important papers and datapads around the house. She often has to buy new tools when she's working on the car because the exact tool she needs has somehow vanished from the barn. Jim's mother has a history of losing things, and people. Once she lost Sam in a Riverside grocery store. She lost Jim's real father on the Kelvin. She may be in the process of losing Frank.
The day after they arrive in San Francisco, she loses Jim in the thousand-year-old redwood forests above Palo Alto.
She loses him the day before her shindig, which she finally explains is a Starfleet memorial for the survivors of the attack on the Kelvin. One of the conditional items on her itinerary was: "visit prestigious Bay Area universities," so when they find themselves with one more unexpected day and she proposes they visit Stanford University, Jim isn't surprised. His mother has always been interested in higher education as something separate from Starfleet Academy. (She has never urged Jim or Sam to join Starfleet. "You need a real education first," she likes to say. "If you decide to go to Starfleet later on, that's fine. But you need to have a solid grounding before they get their hands on you.")
So they visit Stanford, and after their campus tour ends, Jim's mother suggests they explore the nearby redwood forest, and Jim isn't surprised by that either. "It's one of the great natural wonders of the American continent," she reads from the supplemental part of their itinerary.
They choose one of the easier hiking trails and are surrounded by the secret life of the ancient forest, by shadowed light and rustling darkness. Their trail winds through dense undergrowth and sharp needles until Jim's disoriented by the rough red-grey bark of the trees and the sense of massive tree trunks closing in around him. He stops to squint up at the sky, trying to determine their direction from the location of the sun, but all he can see is a fragment of blue that flickers and recedes behind the dark treetops.
Jim spins around, searching for his mother, but doesn't see her. "Mom?" he calls.
The towering trees murmur in reply, and that's when Jim realizes he's alone. He has no idea how or when he got separated from his mother. He has no idea what to do. He's not sure if he should shout for her again, or try to find her, or wait where he is, or try to retrace his steps, or find a new path entirely. He's shaking with indecision when he hears her voice.
"Jim?" she calls back. "Where are you?"
He twists his body to follow her voice, but moves too quickly. The trail crumbles under his feet, and he plummets down a crack in the earth.
*
Jim's mother has an engineer's hands. They're callused and dry, delicate and strong, perfectly suited to working with precise machinery. Her hands tremble as she runs them over Jim's body, checking for injury.
Jim is lying in the rubble at the bottom of a crevasse. He wants to push himself up, but his mother tells him to lie still. He tries to tell her that it hurts too much to lie still, but he can't get the words out. It also hurts too much to move, but he doesn't tell her that either.
One of his legs is caught under him, the other weirdly bent. When she runs her hands over his legs, fingers probing carefully, he bites his lip. It hurts so much he almost blacks out.
"I'm going to carry you back up to the trail, Jim," she says gently. "Hold on."
Jim closes his eyes. When she lifts him, he gasps in pain. His eyes fly open then roll back in his head, and he faints.
*
Jim's mother's eyes go flat and empty whenever anyone mentions Jim's real father, who has been dead for 3,812 days. Jim has no idea why he's thinking about his dead father when his mother's frantic voice wakes him.
Jim's mother usually has a quietest voice of anyone Jim's ever met. It isn't quiet now.
"Why is he having trouble breathing?" his mother is demanding. Jim can hear her pacing back and forth across what seems to be a small room. Her steps are too fast, too anxious. Jim concentrates on trying to breathe and counts her steps: one-two-three, one-two-three.
Someone stabs his neck with a hypospray. He winces and mumbles in protest but suddenly he's able to breathe again. "The anaphylaxis should subside now," the hypospray-wielder says. "It was an allergic reaction to the painkillers administered by the on-site medics--"
Jim's mother stops pacing. "An allergic reaction--?"
"The medics were unaware of your son's history," the voice (nurse? doctor? Jim can't tell) says. The voice sounds neutral and professional, but Jim can also hear reproach and a distinct lack of apology threading under the words.
There is a long silence. "My son's history?" Jim's mother asks dangerously.
"If they had been aware of his medical profile--"
"Bullshit," she snaps, and Jim hears a shuffle of steps, as if the owner of the other voice has actually stepped back in surprise, as if she hit him. "With all this modern tech, you should've been able to prevent this happening to a small boy."
"'m not small, Mom," Jim mumbles without opening his eyes.
Immediately his mother is at his side. "Hey, you. You're awake." Jim can feel warm lips brushing his forehead and fingers clutching his.
He opens his eyes, searching for her.
She smiles, and her eyes are shining with relief and no secrets all. "You do have the ability to get into trouble, don't you," she murmurs. Her hand flits across his shoulder, a breath of a touch, and she looks like she wants to ask him something or scold him maybe, but Jim can't keep his eyes open. As his eyes close, he hears her turn back to the medical person and say in a calmer voice: "Tell me what happens now."
Before he succumbs to whatever sedative was included in the epi-hypo, Jim hears a rapid set of taps on a datapad, then: "Your son has no internal injury, although both of his legs are broken. One break is clean. The other leg is shattered. We've stabilized him and are currently prepping Surgical Room 3..."
Jim drifts off.
*
Jim's mother has secrets, things she doesn't tell anyone.
When he wakes up after his surgery, Jim is alone in a standard hospital room. His body feels heavy and weird, like it isn't his. He can't feel his legs.
He can hear his mother's voice, but can't see her. He thinks she's in the hallway outside his room, but isn't sure. He hears her say: "I just don’t know, Chris."
"Starfleet needs you, Win. I couldn't believe it when they told me you were here. I knew I couldn't miss this chance to talk to you, to urge you to reconsider. Win. Re-enlist in Starfleet. With your skills and expertise, we could--"
"Please, Chris. My skills and expertise are hopelessly out of date, and you know it."
"I don't believe it. I know you, Win. I'm sure you never stopped reading the latest journals. I'm sure you've been tinkering with George's damn car for years, building and rebuilding the damn thing for practice as much as to keep yourself out of trouble."
She doesn't reply, but Jim knows her well enough to imagine her shrug.
"If some of your specific domain knowledge is out of date, that's understandable, but it's not a deal-breaker. Win. You're too good, have too many skills we need to not re-enlist. Starfleet needs you, and you know you want to. C'mon, Win. Are you happy being the only genius-level engineer buried in the backwoods of Iowa?"
"There are no backwoods in Iowa," Jim's mother says, and something in Jim's chest clenches at how quiet and thoughtful she sounds.
"It's been long enough, Win," the Starfleet officer (Chris?) says. Jim thinks his voice is soft, like he's gentling a skittish mare.
"It's been too long, Chris," she sighs.
"Not if it's something you want to do."
Jim waits for her to say no, to tell the officer that she can't, that she isn't ready to re-enlist, that she needs to stay with her family, with him. When she doesn't, Jim feels his eyes sting (he tells himself it's the woozy aftereffects of the surgical anesthetic). When he hears her say goodbye to the officer and she still hasn't said no, Jim closes his eyes and wills himself to fall asleep (he doesn't want to see her).
*
Jim's mother's eyes are grey like cat's fur. Her eyes are the first thing he sees when he wakes up next. She's sitting beside him, reading an ancient paperback. Jim's mother likes to read and collect antique books.
"There are secrets in all families," she murmurs, turning the book so he can see the cover. "I just read that in this book. It's Emma by Jane Austen, a good book although I'm not sure you'd like it." She smoothes his hair back from his forehead. "Our family's secrets are pretty well known."
Jim frowns in confusion.
"The Kirks have always been Starfleet. Your father, his parents, my father. Our family has always served."
Jim nods, still not understanding.
Her mouth quirks. "You heard me talking to Commander Pike, didn't you?"
And then Jim understands. He nods.
"I didn't want you to find out like this."
Jim lets his question hang unsaid in the air between them.
"I wanted to tell you myself. I didn't want you to find out through an overheard conversation that I've been thinking about re-enlisting." She sighs. "I've gotten offers for years. And I've missed it. I enlisted before I met your father because I wanted to be out there--" she gestures beyond the window-- "discovering new things, exploring new places, going where no one has gone before. Being a part of per aspera ad astra was all I wanted for so long--" she brushes her finger down his cheek-- "before you and Sam, of course. But you were right, Jim, you're not small anymore. And there's so much that I still want to do out there."
Jim doesn't say anything. He tries to smile, but it's hard to get his mouth to move right. So he nods, because he can understand even if he doesn't want to.
*
Jim's mother keeps herself to herself.
She misses her shindig because Jim is in the hospital. They leave San Francisco without going to Starfleet Academy even once. They take a shuttle back to Iowa, and Jim's mother arranges to transport his dead father's car back separately. Jim stays home from school for the next six months, and life mostly returns to normal, until his mother gets a call from Commander Pike.
Jim's mother re-enlists in Starfleet when the doctors pronounce Jim healed enough to go back to school. She's posted off-world almost immediately. Sam goes away to college, and Jim stays with Frank, and things are okay. Frank's a good guy and an okay fill-in parent, even if he's not Jim's mother, and Jim tries to be normal, he really does.
Five months into his mother's off-planet assignment, everything Jim isn't talking about gets the better of him, and he drives his dead father's car into the Riverside Quarry partly out of frustration and boredom, but mostly in protest.
Jim's mother isn't angry in the vid call later that night. She looks frightened and defeated and a little lost. She tells him that she's requested Earth-based assignments for the next few months, and Jim is happy to have her home again until he sees the regret in her eyes and realizes he put it there.
When she's assigned off-planet nine months after that, Jim and Frank see her off. Jim promises to keep up his grades, to listen to Frank, to not crash any cars into any quarries. He tells her to have a good trip and that he'll see her when she gets back.
He waves as she disappears into the shuttle and doesn't tell her that he'll miss her. He doesn't say that he's lost without her.
She waves at him through the shuttle window, smiling as if she understands everything he hasn't said. Jim's sure she doesn't, but he smiles back anyway.
There are some things they don't need to talk about, and he has secrets too, things he doesn't tell anyone. He's his mother's son, after all.
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)