Fic: Winona Kirk's regrets (reboot, gen, tos)
Throughout her life, Winona has made mistakes. Most of those mistakes were due to the temper that she passed on to her younger son, but some were born out of ignorance and carelessness. In the end, she regrets them all, even the ones she shouldn’t.
She regrets getting onboard one of the shuttles without George, not waiting for him to evacuate the Kelvin with her. There’s a part of her that knows that he would not have abandoned his ship, the safety of his crew, even for her, but she doesn’t care. Nothing in the universe has ever been perfect since George Kirk died, not even, God help her, the son who took his first breaths as his father took his last. In her darkest moments, Winona thinks that Jim’s insane, dysfunctional existence would have been an acceptable sacrifice for a life in which she had never woken up to a universe without her husband.
As much as she regrets not staying with one man she loved, she hates to remember staying with Frank. Frank, the man who was convenient because he wanted to live in Iowa and raise her kids on a farm while she avoided the boy who inherited all of George’s dedication and responsibility, and his brother, who inherited all of George’s brilliance. Frank, whose “aw shucks,” good ole farm boy attitude hid a monster that she did not see until it was too late. Not, thankfully, too late to save the lives of her boys, but much too late to save the family that George had wanted so much. Sometimes, in the darkest of nights, she thinks she sees George looking at her, judging her, and finding her wanting. And she is a mother after all, a mother who loves her children unconditionally and whole-heartedly, even if the loss of her husband killed her ability to express her feelings and handle the day-to-day stress and worries of raising two boys. So as much as it kills her to imagine George’s disapproval, it destroys her to know that she will never have the relationship with her sons that she wanted. She still doesn’t know the true depravity of Frank’s actions; she actively tries not to know, but it is too late to undo them.
One of the things that keeps her up at nights is something that she knows is not really her fault. Still, she will never forgive herself for sending Jim and Sam off to Tarsus IV. But she had just been called home from a Kelvin memorial event because her younger son had almost killed himself in driving Frank’s car off a cliff, and the incident smacked of so much desperation that she had been terrified. She left Frank and sent her sons off to live with her sister and brother-in-law and their kids to recover from the ordeal, despite warnings that Tarsus IV was heating up politically. But it was the Federation, and things like genocide didn’t happen in the civilized regions of space. Logically, she knows that George and she would have probably sent their boys to stay with their cousins at some point as well, that if people had been truly worried her sister would have left some time ago. Logically, she knows this, but logic doesn’t help at nights when she thinks of what her sons have been through. And she knows she’s one of the lucky ones. Even as she identifies what is left of her sister and the man her sister loved, even as she buries empty caskets to represent the children who never got to grow up, even as she takes home her traumatized, half-dead sons, she knows that she is lucky that her children survived. But survival is its own burden; the experience serves to split her children apart and the elephant in the room when they are together makes it easier for them to avoid being together at all.
Winona has a long life to nurse her regrets, and that seems to be the cruelest cut of all. When George comes for her shortly after Jim becomes an admiral, she has already buried her older son and two of her three grandsons. All that is left of her once hopeful, happy family are the babies, Jim and Peter. And she knows now that humans have survived near self-destruction through war, famine and environmental destruction because their capacity to bear unbearable sorrows is boundless. Over the years, she has often wished that people could die of broken hearts, because the decades without George and then George Samuel, the awkward missed connections with Jim, and the constant unnatural sorrow of outliving one’s own child and grandchildren seem far crueler than any death could be.
But even though she has many regrets, and they all visit her in the seconds before she dies, Winona Kirk leaves mortality with no little pride. George may have raised the name of Kirk to the stars, but her progeny are the ones whose sweat and blood made sure that it would stay there forever. And that-that is something she will never regret living long enough to see.
THE END