Mea Culpa
It isn't my fault. No really, it isn't. Ask anyone who has met me, anyone at all; I'm a good, stable guy and the Kirk kids are troublemakers. More than that, the kids have an attitude problem, especially towards authority.
Well, I thought that might have changed after the wedding, and it became clear that I was going to be home more often than their mother.. They weren't being left with dotty old Grandparents who let Jim run wild and Sam ditch his brother along with everything else when he got upset. I was more stable than that; wasn't that the word Winnie had used, early in the morning the first time she left after the wedding? I walked her to the shuttle so I could kiss her goodbye right there on the platform, and she said I was a stabilizing influence on all their lives, I made her want to come home again, because she knew I could make sure that her two boys would be presentable and, more importantly, present, when she returned from the short little missions she went on every few months. She was counting on me; I wouldn't let her down. I love her.
Except things didn't go down like that; Sam still ran, never too far, always returning, but he still ran. It didn't matter what I did: I could yell myself hoarse, I could bribe him with sweets and a later curfew, I could lock him in his room over the weekend, it didn't matter. Sam would run.
Jim though... Jim fought. He snarled, and kicked, and was just a general, all around pain in the ass. I couldn't yell at the kid without being insulted, and sending him to his room was like running a fucking marathon, that's how much effort it was.
"You aren't my father!" He would always scream. Loudly.
And that was the problem. Their entire lives they'd been told about the big damn hero who saved Winnie and Jim, and it didn't matter what I did, I just wasn't going to measure up, was I? Sometimes it even felt like she would compare me to him and find me lacking. I never actually met the guy, but I hated his fucking ghost.
I was drunk, that first time. Drunk, because Sam had been missing for almost two days now and Jim was suspended from school and Winnie would be calling later and I didn't think. I just smashed that silly wooden replica of the HMS Kelvin to the ground, and stopped it for good measure. Who wanted a model of the namesake of the ship you were serving on anyway?
George Kirk had. He never got to build it, though; Winnie and Jim did that the last time she was home. They'd left it on the kitchen counter to dry and it had never gotten put away. I just sort of stared at it for a bit. Like I said, I was a bit drunkish and hadn't been thinking, and I don't I'd really started again when Winnie's call came through and I told her Jim had done it.
She believed me, because it was exactly the sort of shitty thing he'd have done. She believed me when I got Jim up and she yelled at him for it and he told I must have done it, because lying was something he did too. He exactly that sort of little shit, even at eight.
I thought he might get better, after that. I mean, if your own mother doesn't believe you, that's got to send you a signal that something wrong with you and you have to shape up, right? But he got even worse! He started trying to attack me; he bit my arm once, broken the skin and everything, see the scar?
That's when I hit him first. It was self-defense, not child abuse! He could have hit an artery or something- so I smacked him around a little. You know what? It worked! It was the only fucking thing that did. So I had to slap him a few times each month, maybe kick him once or twice. He stopped being such a pain in the ass and started listening to me.
Sam got worse though. He was always good about going to school, even if he didn't come home, but I started getting calls from the truancy office that I couldn't answer, because fuck if I knew where the kid was at that point. Finally, I caught him sneaking back in the house one day, stuffing my coin collection into his knapsack. Jim was helping him pick out the really valuable ones, and so help me, I wasn't going to smack him or kick him that time, I was go to full on beat the kid until he listened.
Of course, Sam walked out before I could so much as open my mouth, and I had to follow him if only so I could figure out what to tell the truancy people. Jim followed me, yelling at Sam all the time not to go, to come back, like he hadn't been helping just thirty seconds ago. I told him to wash the car. I let Sam walk out and then called the cops to come pick him up.
Jim washed the car, and then he drove it off a fucking cliff.
That car was a classic. Do you have any idea how much classics are worth? I was so fucking angry and the cops had called Winnie and it really wasn't my fault. He tripped. It might have been over my leg, but it was a fucking mistake. I was going to hit him, probably, but I wasn't going to push him down the stairs.
Winnie somehow managed to get back here the next day. She was so angry, I swear, I thought she was going to hit me for a second there. Instead, she pressed charges.
We're divorced now, obviously. She got a job on some tiny little colony and took her kids with her for a change; and I'm sitting here in fucking jail. And it isn't my fault! I'm a good person! Don't look at me like that, if you'd been there, you would have done the exact same thing.