She Was There (2/?) PG-13
Title: She Was There (2/?)
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Nyota Uhura, James Kirk (Spock, McCoy)
Disclaimer: Characters and canon belong to Paramount, Roddenberry, Abrams and many others, but not me. All rights reserved. No copyright infringement intended. No profit is made by the author.
Summary: She felt his hand grope for hers as they awaited the conclusion of the tribunal. Twisting her hand, she pressed her palm to his, threading their fingers together as the verdict of a life sentence at a maximum security penal settlement was read
Upon arriving in her own quarters, Nyota quickly changed into loose-fitting pants and a long-sleeved t-shirt. Bundling her hair atop her head in messy knot, she grabbed her personal datapad and settled into a comfortable chair with a mug of hot, sweet tea.
Searching her mail, she quickly found the captain’s message and tapped it open. Using the code he had provided, she clicked open the first file.
I am a very foolish fond old man,
fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less;
and, to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
Shakespeare? she wondered. Specifically King Lear, if she was not mistaken. Accessing the computer, she delved deeper, verifying the source of the quote and the speaker as Anton Karidian.
Curiosity peaked, she tapped open the next file. Again, the same sonorous voice sounded.
The revolution is successful, but survival depends on drastic measures. Your continued existence represents a threat to the well-being of society. Your lives mean slow death to the more valued members of the colony. Therefore, I have no alternative but to sentence you to death. Your execution is so ordered.
A chill crept along her spine as the words tickled a memory.
“Computer,” she called out. “Review last quote. Cross reference with any historical files.”
Working. Quote allegedly attributed to Kodos, former Governor of the colony Tarsus IV. Also known as Kodos the Executioner.
“Stop,” Uhura ordered, nerves jumping.
“Computer. Background - Kodos, Governor of Tarsus IV.”
Working. Kodos, Governor of Tarsus IV fourteen Earth years ago. Systemic crop failure caused planet-wide famine. Governor Kodos ordered the execution of half the colony’s population to ensure the survival of the others.
“Stop.” Uhura wiped a hand over her face as bile churned in her stomach. She took a hasty sip of her tea.
“Computer. Verify whereabouts of Kodos today.”
Kodos is believed to be deceased. Burned body found when Earth forces arrived at colony. No positive identification made. Case closed.
“Provide background information on Anton Karidian.”
Working. Karidian, Anton, founder and director of Karidian Company, a traveling company of actors.
“Stop. Provide information on Karidian fourteen years ago.”
No information exists on Karidian, Anton prior to fourteen years ago.
Uhura laid a trembling hand over her stomach. My God, she thought. Without even listening to the rest of the files he had provided, she understood the captain believed Anton Karidian and Kodos the Executioner to be one and the same man.
Was it possible? Could Kodos, a man believed to be dead for fourteen years - one of the most reviled men in history - have been living in plain sight all this time? If so, she marveled at the audacity of his having lived in so public a way for so many years.
Rising from the cushioned chair, she moved to the small desk built into one corner of her quarters. Booting up the terminal at her personal workstation, she got to work.
***************
Bleary-eyed, Nyota leaned back in her chair and stretched her arms high over her head, wincing with relief as the vertebrae of her spine clicked back into place. She had begun with the tangible - allowing the computer to run a spectrogram over the voice files the captain had provided, generating a comparison of the psycholinguistic features of the sample audio files including the pitch, the mean frequency and trajectory of the formation of the vowels along with the distribution of the formant energy and other idiosyncratic features. The data quickly led to what she was sure was the same conclusion reached by the captain when he ran a similar study - that Karidian and Kodos were one and the same person.
Unwilling to rely on so few small voice samples, she found additional audio files - soliloquies from various performances by the Karidian Company over the years as well as speeches and interviews given by Kodos in the years leading up to his appointment as governor of Tarsus IV, including one file recorded only months before the outbreak of the famine.
Each time the same conclusion was reached, and though she would have comfortably submitted a report stating that Anton Karidian was Kodos based solely on the data provided by her study of the spectrogram, she knew that alone was not what the captain needed from her.
And so she had continued on long into the night. Pulling a pair of headphones over her head, she dimmed the lights, blocking out everything but the sounds of the voices in her ears. Eyes closed, she compared the resonance of the two voices, the pitch, the inflection, the articulation.
Karidian spoke in the rolling, flowing classical tones which had become the hallmark of Shakespearean actors throughout the ages. The hundreds year old dialogue tripped off his tongue with a rhythmic musicality at stark odds to the clipped, militaristic cadence of Kodos’ manner of speaking. To the average listener the two men could not have sounded more different.
But Uhura, who had a love of the spoken word in all forms and languages, heard the aural cues that others would not. The peculiar speech characteristics that even the melodic tempo of Shakespeare’s words could not disguise. The commonality of the breath patterns of the two men, the pitch, the grouping of the syllables, the peculiar emphasis given to certain words.
Hours later, any doubts she had held - any hopes she had entertained that the captain was mistaken - were put to rest. The Enterprise was harboring the man responsible for the deaths of thousands of colonists on Tarsus IV.
Saving her work, she laid her head on the top of her desk, enjoying the feel of the cool surface against her flushed cheek. Rising to her feet, she willed her legs to stop shaking. She toggled a switch and drew in a deep breath, forcing a note of calm she didn’t feel into her voice.
“Uhura to Captain Kirk.”
“Go ahead, Uhura.”
“I know it’s late, sir, but you said…”
She heard the long exhalation of breath over the open channel and then Kirk’s quiet voice.
“It’s okay, Lieutenant. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like you to come here and tell me what you’ve found.”
“Aye, sir. On my way.”
Not wanting to be bothered slipping back into her duty uniform at 0200 hours, Uhura snatched a long sweater from the back of a chair and jammed her arms through the sleeves. Clutching it closed over her midsection, she slipped into the quiet corridor and made her way to the captain’s quarters.
The door slid open before she had a chance to announce her arrival and she stepped inside the dimly lit room. She studied him for a long moment and noted that he had taken some of her advice as evidenced by his damp hair and more comfortable attire. But he was still seated behind his desk, his face bathed in the glowing light of the screen he was squinting toward.
“Trying to catch up on some work,” he said with a sheepish nod at a precariously teetering tower of PADDs. Pushing them off to one side, he looked up at her expectantly.
“Well?”
“I’ll prepare a formal report for you later,” she promised. “But I didn’t want to keep you waiting…”
She hesitated, swallowing hard as the words seemed to lodge in her throat.
“Kodos is on my ship, isn’t he?”
“Yes, sir, I’m afraid he is.”
He ran a hand over his face, his bristled jaw making a loud, rasping sound against his palm in the otherwise quiet room.
“Sonovabitch!”
His arm lashed out, sweeping the stack of PADDs from the desk with violent force. Though Uhura flinched at the sudden display of rage, she stood her ground.
Kirk looked up, his eyes gleaming with a sheen of tears - or perhaps simply hatred of the man in question.
“You were supposed to tell me I was imagining things.” He leaned his head against the high-backed chair and kneaded his eye with one fist.
“I don’t like to be wrong.” He opened his eyes and flashed a sardonic smile. “But I was hoping you were going to tell me that I was in this instance, Nyota.”
Uhura relaxed and, moving closer, leaned a hip against the space on his desk created by his violent housekeeping.
“And you know I like nothing more than to prove you wrong.” Her words were teasing though her face remained serious. “I wish I could have done so this time.”
“Yeah.” He propped an elbow on the armrest of his chair and looked up at her, his temple resting against a loosely clenched fist.
They stared at one another for a long moment.
“You should get some sleep.” He waved his free hand in the air.
“What are you going to do now?”
His laugh was a quiet, bitter sound.
“Start dealing with it, I guess. Computer,” he called out. “Give me the whereabouts of Kod -”
He cut himself off with an irritated grunt.
“Give me the whereabouts of Anton Karidian,” he gritted out.
Anton Karidian is located in Deck Two guest quarters.”
He exhaled slowly.
“Where did you think he’d be?” Uhura wondered.
“I don’t know,” he sighed, thinking privately that Kodos was his own personal bogeyman.
“I guess there’s really nowhere for him to go,” he mused, and then as if doubting his own words, he contacted Security and made arrangements for Kodos’ quarters to be kept under video surveillance.
He looked up and met her knowing gaze.
“Now the real fun begins.” He rubbed the tips of his fingers across his aching forehead.
“Sir?”
“Now I have to convince Starfleet that the Enterprise is harboring a mass murderer.”
She winced sympathetically as she considered the enormity of that task.
“How is it that they never did a DNA analysis on the body believed to be Kodos’ all those years ago?” she wondered.
Kirk shrugged, his eyes fixed on a distant point across the room as he relived the confusion and pandemonium that had engulfed the colony.
“I don’t know, Uhura,” he sighed. “I just don’t know.”
Arching his back against his chair, he stretched his arms over his head.
“It’s late.” He glanced at the time. “You should get some sleep and then I’m going to need that report from you before I contact Starfleet.”
“Do you want me to be there when you make the call?”
He shook his head. “Not right away. But, uh… yeah. I’m sure they’re going to speak with you.” He looked up at her with a wry smile. “More than once, I would imagine.”
Her face contorted in a faint grimace at the thought of another debriefing by the brass.
“Go on.” He flicked his fingers dismissively. “I appreciate your help, Uhura, but go to bed. Get some sleep.”
Uhura nodded and moved toward the door. She had only taken a few steps when she stopped. Turning back to face him, she caught the edges of her sweater in her hands. She opened her mouth, hesitated. Wrapping her arms protectively around her middle, she took a deep breath.
“Were you there?”
Brows raised, he gave her a curious look. “You didn’t check?”
“No.” She shook her head emphatically. “It seemed too cold - finding out by doing a computer search on you. I’d like you to tell me… if you want to.”
His gaze locked with hers for a long moment and she held herself rigidly while awaiting his response.
“I was there.” His words punctured the tense silence.
Though she had already known the answer, a tremor ran along her spine and she pressed the palm of her hand against her mouth to muffle any sound.
Moved by the emotions playing unchecked across her beautiful face, he smiled kindly and rose. Crossing to her, he laid the fingertips of one hand against the small of her back and led her to a small sofa tucked along the far wall of the room and drew her down onto the cushioned seat.
“It’s okay.” He perched on the edge of seat beside her and spoke in a soothing tone. “It was a long time ago.”
“You… you couldn’t have been more than, what? Thirteen?”
“I was twelve when I got to the colony and I lived there for a little more than a year before… before -”
He waved a hand about in an impotent gesture meant to wordlessly convey the horror that had befallen the colony.
“But why were you… where was your family?” She wracked her brain for information on his family and knew his mother was retired from active duty and that he had a brother who was a research biologist and was married with at least one child.
He leaned into the cushioned back of the sofa with a tired sigh.
“While my brother and I were very young my mother was stationed at the Riverside Shipyard as an engineer,” he began. “She remarried when I was about eight and started taking occasional trips off planet for her job - usually for short periods - a couple of weeks at a time. Maybe a month.”
He rested his head against the cushion and closed his eyes.
“Sam and our stepfather always butted heads but while Mom was home, it wasn’t too bad. But then Sam was a teenager and my mother was away more and more and he and Frank just didn’t get along at all. They were constantly at one another’s throat and then one day Sam decided he’d had enough and he left home.”
“I felt abandoned - by Sam, by my mother - by everyone - and then I started acting out.” He opened his eyes. Staring at the ceiling he was transported back in time. He could almost hear the roar of the antique car’s engine, feel its powerful vibrations and remembered the combined sensations of freedom and terror as the car flew over the edge of the ravine... And then he remembered the devastated look on his mother’s face when his stepfather had commed her.
“When my mother received orders that would send her off planet for the better part of a year, it was pretty clear that leaving me alone with my stepfather all that time would be a bad deal for everyone involved.”
He rolled his head toward her.
“There was a cousin - on my father’s side of family - living on Tarsus IV with his wife and kids. I didn’t know them but I was bored in Iowa and always had an itch to travel in space and that was my first chance so I jumped at the chance to go.”
He let out a cynical laugh.
“And that as they say was that.”
Nyota shifted, pulling her legs up onto the cushioned seat. Wrapping her arms around her calves, she rested her chin on her knees and studied him carefully.
She had so many questions. Everyone knew the history of the Tarsus IV massacre. That Kodos had divided the colonists and ordered the deaths of half to ensure the survival of those he deemed fittest. Which list had the captain been on? And what of his cousin and his family?
“Were you -” No, she could not bring herself to ask.
“How is it that this has never come out?” she asked instead. “I mean, you’ve been on the press’s radar from the moment of your birth and you’ve been the media darling of Starfleet in recent years,” she said, thinking of the multitude of interviews and articles written about him after theNarada, after his meteoric rise through the ranks and after the events in San Francisco.
“How has the press never gotten wind of this story?”
“There was so much confusion - so many stories, I don’t think they knew where to look first. And I was pretty sick,” he admitted. “I spent a lot of time on a medical transport ship and then weeks recovering in the hospital. I’m sure my name is on the list of survivors but at the time Starfleet did make some effort to protect the survivors from the press and the information is not readily available in my records. You’d have to be specifically looking for it to make the connection and no one ever has.”
He paused, gave her a helpless look. Plowing his fingers through his hair, he gave a tiny shake of his head and pressed his lips together to cut off an angry torrent of words.
Uhura squeezed her eyes closed as if to block out the harrowing images playing in her mind’s eye of a young Kirk, ill from the effects of malnutrition and living through the nightmarish aftermath of the slaughter which had taken place on the colony. She bristled at the knowledge that he’d now have to relive it all under the harsh and unrelenting glare of the media spotlight.
Shifting onto her knees she edged closer, pressed her lips in a lingering benediction against the muscle ticking madly in his rigid jaw. Nestled against his side, she wrapped her hands around one tightly bunched bicep and with a sigh, rested her cheek against his shoulder.
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Nyota Uhura, James Kirk (Spock, McCoy)
Disclaimer: Characters and canon belong to Paramount, Roddenberry, Abrams and many others, but not me. All rights reserved. No copyright infringement intended. No profit is made by the author.
Summary: She felt his hand grope for hers as they awaited the conclusion of the tribunal. Twisting her hand, she pressed her palm to his, threading their fingers together as the verdict of a life sentence at a maximum security penal settlement was read
Upon arriving in her own quarters, Nyota quickly changed into loose-fitting pants and a long-sleeved t-shirt. Bundling her hair atop her head in messy knot, she grabbed her personal datapad and settled into a comfortable chair with a mug of hot, sweet tea.
Searching her mail, she quickly found the captain’s message and tapped it open. Using the code he had provided, she clicked open the first file.
I am a very foolish fond old man,
fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less;
and, to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
Shakespeare? she wondered. Specifically King Lear, if she was not mistaken. Accessing the computer, she delved deeper, verifying the source of the quote and the speaker as Anton Karidian.
Curiosity peaked, she tapped open the next file. Again, the same sonorous voice sounded.
The revolution is successful, but survival depends on drastic measures. Your continued existence represents a threat to the well-being of society. Your lives mean slow death to the more valued members of the colony. Therefore, I have no alternative but to sentence you to death. Your execution is so ordered.
A chill crept along her spine as the words tickled a memory.
“Computer,” she called out. “Review last quote. Cross reference with any historical files.”
Working. Quote allegedly attributed to Kodos, former Governor of the colony Tarsus IV. Also known as Kodos the Executioner.
“Stop,” Uhura ordered, nerves jumping.
“Computer. Background - Kodos, Governor of Tarsus IV.”
Working. Kodos, Governor of Tarsus IV fourteen Earth years ago. Systemic crop failure caused planet-wide famine. Governor Kodos ordered the execution of half the colony’s population to ensure the survival of the others.
“Stop.” Uhura wiped a hand over her face as bile churned in her stomach. She took a hasty sip of her tea.
“Computer. Verify whereabouts of Kodos today.”
Kodos is believed to be deceased. Burned body found when Earth forces arrived at colony. No positive identification made. Case closed.
“Provide background information on Anton Karidian.”
Working. Karidian, Anton, founder and director of Karidian Company, a traveling company of actors.
“Stop. Provide information on Karidian fourteen years ago.”
No information exists on Karidian, Anton prior to fourteen years ago.
Uhura laid a trembling hand over her stomach. My God, she thought. Without even listening to the rest of the files he had provided, she understood the captain believed Anton Karidian and Kodos the Executioner to be one and the same man.
Was it possible? Could Kodos, a man believed to be dead for fourteen years - one of the most reviled men in history - have been living in plain sight all this time? If so, she marveled at the audacity of his having lived in so public a way for so many years.
Rising from the cushioned chair, she moved to the small desk built into one corner of her quarters. Booting up the terminal at her personal workstation, she got to work.
***************
Bleary-eyed, Nyota leaned back in her chair and stretched her arms high over her head, wincing with relief as the vertebrae of her spine clicked back into place. She had begun with the tangible - allowing the computer to run a spectrogram over the voice files the captain had provided, generating a comparison of the psycholinguistic features of the sample audio files including the pitch, the mean frequency and trajectory of the formation of the vowels along with the distribution of the formant energy and other idiosyncratic features. The data quickly led to what she was sure was the same conclusion reached by the captain when he ran a similar study - that Karidian and Kodos were one and the same person.
Unwilling to rely on so few small voice samples, she found additional audio files - soliloquies from various performances by the Karidian Company over the years as well as speeches and interviews given by Kodos in the years leading up to his appointment as governor of Tarsus IV, including one file recorded only months before the outbreak of the famine.
Each time the same conclusion was reached, and though she would have comfortably submitted a report stating that Anton Karidian was Kodos based solely on the data provided by her study of the spectrogram, she knew that alone was not what the captain needed from her.
And so she had continued on long into the night. Pulling a pair of headphones over her head, she dimmed the lights, blocking out everything but the sounds of the voices in her ears. Eyes closed, she compared the resonance of the two voices, the pitch, the inflection, the articulation.
Karidian spoke in the rolling, flowing classical tones which had become the hallmark of Shakespearean actors throughout the ages. The hundreds year old dialogue tripped off his tongue with a rhythmic musicality at stark odds to the clipped, militaristic cadence of Kodos’ manner of speaking. To the average listener the two men could not have sounded more different.
But Uhura, who had a love of the spoken word in all forms and languages, heard the aural cues that others would not. The peculiar speech characteristics that even the melodic tempo of Shakespeare’s words could not disguise. The commonality of the breath patterns of the two men, the pitch, the grouping of the syllables, the peculiar emphasis given to certain words.
Hours later, any doubts she had held - any hopes she had entertained that the captain was mistaken - were put to rest. The Enterprise was harboring the man responsible for the deaths of thousands of colonists on Tarsus IV.
Saving her work, she laid her head on the top of her desk, enjoying the feel of the cool surface against her flushed cheek. Rising to her feet, she willed her legs to stop shaking. She toggled a switch and drew in a deep breath, forcing a note of calm she didn’t feel into her voice.
“Uhura to Captain Kirk.”
“Go ahead, Uhura.”
“I know it’s late, sir, but you said…”
She heard the long exhalation of breath over the open channel and then Kirk’s quiet voice.
“It’s okay, Lieutenant. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like you to come here and tell me what you’ve found.”
“Aye, sir. On my way.”
Not wanting to be bothered slipping back into her duty uniform at 0200 hours, Uhura snatched a long sweater from the back of a chair and jammed her arms through the sleeves. Clutching it closed over her midsection, she slipped into the quiet corridor and made her way to the captain’s quarters.
The door slid open before she had a chance to announce her arrival and she stepped inside the dimly lit room. She studied him for a long moment and noted that he had taken some of her advice as evidenced by his damp hair and more comfortable attire. But he was still seated behind his desk, his face bathed in the glowing light of the screen he was squinting toward.
“Trying to catch up on some work,” he said with a sheepish nod at a precariously teetering tower of PADDs. Pushing them off to one side, he looked up at her expectantly.
“Well?”
“I’ll prepare a formal report for you later,” she promised. “But I didn’t want to keep you waiting…”
She hesitated, swallowing hard as the words seemed to lodge in her throat.
“Kodos is on my ship, isn’t he?”
“Yes, sir, I’m afraid he is.”
He ran a hand over his face, his bristled jaw making a loud, rasping sound against his palm in the otherwise quiet room.
“Sonovabitch!”
His arm lashed out, sweeping the stack of PADDs from the desk with violent force. Though Uhura flinched at the sudden display of rage, she stood her ground.
Kirk looked up, his eyes gleaming with a sheen of tears - or perhaps simply hatred of the man in question.
“You were supposed to tell me I was imagining things.” He leaned his head against the high-backed chair and kneaded his eye with one fist.
“I don’t like to be wrong.” He opened his eyes and flashed a sardonic smile. “But I was hoping you were going to tell me that I was in this instance, Nyota.”
Uhura relaxed and, moving closer, leaned a hip against the space on his desk created by his violent housekeeping.
“And you know I like nothing more than to prove you wrong.” Her words were teasing though her face remained serious. “I wish I could have done so this time.”
“Yeah.” He propped an elbow on the armrest of his chair and looked up at her, his temple resting against a loosely clenched fist.
They stared at one another for a long moment.
“You should get some sleep.” He waved his free hand in the air.
“What are you going to do now?”
His laugh was a quiet, bitter sound.
“Start dealing with it, I guess. Computer,” he called out. “Give me the whereabouts of Kod -”
He cut himself off with an irritated grunt.
“Give me the whereabouts of Anton Karidian,” he gritted out.
Anton Karidian is located in Deck Two guest quarters.”
He exhaled slowly.
“Where did you think he’d be?” Uhura wondered.
“I don’t know,” he sighed, thinking privately that Kodos was his own personal bogeyman.
“I guess there’s really nowhere for him to go,” he mused, and then as if doubting his own words, he contacted Security and made arrangements for Kodos’ quarters to be kept under video surveillance.
He looked up and met her knowing gaze.
“Now the real fun begins.” He rubbed the tips of his fingers across his aching forehead.
“Sir?”
“Now I have to convince Starfleet that the Enterprise is harboring a mass murderer.”
She winced sympathetically as she considered the enormity of that task.
“How is it that they never did a DNA analysis on the body believed to be Kodos’ all those years ago?” she wondered.
Kirk shrugged, his eyes fixed on a distant point across the room as he relived the confusion and pandemonium that had engulfed the colony.
“I don’t know, Uhura,” he sighed. “I just don’t know.”
Arching his back against his chair, he stretched his arms over his head.
“It’s late.” He glanced at the time. “You should get some sleep and then I’m going to need that report from you before I contact Starfleet.”
“Do you want me to be there when you make the call?”
He shook his head. “Not right away. But, uh… yeah. I’m sure they’re going to speak with you.” He looked up at her with a wry smile. “More than once, I would imagine.”
Her face contorted in a faint grimace at the thought of another debriefing by the brass.
“Go on.” He flicked his fingers dismissively. “I appreciate your help, Uhura, but go to bed. Get some sleep.”
Uhura nodded and moved toward the door. She had only taken a few steps when she stopped. Turning back to face him, she caught the edges of her sweater in her hands. She opened her mouth, hesitated. Wrapping her arms protectively around her middle, she took a deep breath.
“Were you there?”
Brows raised, he gave her a curious look. “You didn’t check?”
“No.” She shook her head emphatically. “It seemed too cold - finding out by doing a computer search on you. I’d like you to tell me… if you want to.”
His gaze locked with hers for a long moment and she held herself rigidly while awaiting his response.
“I was there.” His words punctured the tense silence.
Though she had already known the answer, a tremor ran along her spine and she pressed the palm of her hand against her mouth to muffle any sound.
Moved by the emotions playing unchecked across her beautiful face, he smiled kindly and rose. Crossing to her, he laid the fingertips of one hand against the small of her back and led her to a small sofa tucked along the far wall of the room and drew her down onto the cushioned seat.
“It’s okay.” He perched on the edge of seat beside her and spoke in a soothing tone. “It was a long time ago.”
“You… you couldn’t have been more than, what? Thirteen?”
“I was twelve when I got to the colony and I lived there for a little more than a year before… before -”
He waved a hand about in an impotent gesture meant to wordlessly convey the horror that had befallen the colony.
“But why were you… where was your family?” She wracked her brain for information on his family and knew his mother was retired from active duty and that he had a brother who was a research biologist and was married with at least one child.
He leaned into the cushioned back of the sofa with a tired sigh.
“While my brother and I were very young my mother was stationed at the Riverside Shipyard as an engineer,” he began. “She remarried when I was about eight and started taking occasional trips off planet for her job - usually for short periods - a couple of weeks at a time. Maybe a month.”
He rested his head against the cushion and closed his eyes.
“Sam and our stepfather always butted heads but while Mom was home, it wasn’t too bad. But then Sam was a teenager and my mother was away more and more and he and Frank just didn’t get along at all. They were constantly at one another’s throat and then one day Sam decided he’d had enough and he left home.”
“I felt abandoned - by Sam, by my mother - by everyone - and then I started acting out.” He opened his eyes. Staring at the ceiling he was transported back in time. He could almost hear the roar of the antique car’s engine, feel its powerful vibrations and remembered the combined sensations of freedom and terror as the car flew over the edge of the ravine... And then he remembered the devastated look on his mother’s face when his stepfather had commed her.
“When my mother received orders that would send her off planet for the better part of a year, it was pretty clear that leaving me alone with my stepfather all that time would be a bad deal for everyone involved.”
He rolled his head toward her.
“There was a cousin - on my father’s side of family - living on Tarsus IV with his wife and kids. I didn’t know them but I was bored in Iowa and always had an itch to travel in space and that was my first chance so I jumped at the chance to go.”
He let out a cynical laugh.
“And that as they say was that.”
Nyota shifted, pulling her legs up onto the cushioned seat. Wrapping her arms around her calves, she rested her chin on her knees and studied him carefully.
She had so many questions. Everyone knew the history of the Tarsus IV massacre. That Kodos had divided the colonists and ordered the deaths of half to ensure the survival of those he deemed fittest. Which list had the captain been on? And what of his cousin and his family?
“Were you -” No, she could not bring herself to ask.
“How is it that this has never come out?” she asked instead. “I mean, you’ve been on the press’s radar from the moment of your birth and you’ve been the media darling of Starfleet in recent years,” she said, thinking of the multitude of interviews and articles written about him after theNarada, after his meteoric rise through the ranks and after the events in San Francisco.
“How has the press never gotten wind of this story?”
“There was so much confusion - so many stories, I don’t think they knew where to look first. And I was pretty sick,” he admitted. “I spent a lot of time on a medical transport ship and then weeks recovering in the hospital. I’m sure my name is on the list of survivors but at the time Starfleet did make some effort to protect the survivors from the press and the information is not readily available in my records. You’d have to be specifically looking for it to make the connection and no one ever has.”
He paused, gave her a helpless look. Plowing his fingers through his hair, he gave a tiny shake of his head and pressed his lips together to cut off an angry torrent of words.
Uhura squeezed her eyes closed as if to block out the harrowing images playing in her mind’s eye of a young Kirk, ill from the effects of malnutrition and living through the nightmarish aftermath of the slaughter which had taken place on the colony. She bristled at the knowledge that he’d now have to relive it all under the harsh and unrelenting glare of the media spotlight.
Shifting onto her knees she edged closer, pressed her lips in a lingering benediction against the muscle ticking madly in his rigid jaw. Nestled against his side, she wrapped her hands around one tightly bunched bicep and with a sigh, rested her cheek against his shoulder.