Fic: When James T Kirk's Life Flashes Before His Eyes, PG-13, Romance
Title: When James T Kirk's Life Flashes Before His Eyes
Author: le_culdesac
Pairing: K/S (duh.)
Rating: PG-13. Very mild swearing.
Summary: As Kirk faces his last moments, his life flashes before his eyes. Set roughly forty years from the end of the film, we're given a glimpse into their life.
When the other Spock finishes speaking, he falls asleep in his chair. His face is content. There is comfort to be had in the idea that he and Kirk are together in whatever alternate reality, whatever parallel permutation.
That they alone are the universal constant.
Notes: A drabble piece that just popped into my head and wouldn't get out so I punched it out in about fifteen mins. It's not the fic I promised but it be a fic. I was falling asleep at the keyboard when I was writing it soo... It'd be great if I could get a beta. Shifty eyes. Uhhh I'm very sleep deprived atm. Not sure why it ended the way it did. I will have to fix it up when I'm not falling asleep over the keyboard fdfrfe. Goodnight, all. ARGHH TIRED
When James T. Kirk’s Life Flashed Before His Eyes
The water under the ice is cold but James Kirk’s oxygen deprived brain has more important things to worry about. The ice sheet has already frozen over. It's heavy and he knows it’s useless to struggle against it, but blind panic and evolutionary instinct are a potent drug. He feels his lungs expand in his chest, struggling against the pressure of trapped air. His muscles begin to spasm and the only sound he can hear is his wildly pounding heart. The sound of his fist against the ice is both slowed and muffled by the water.
Perhaps forty years ago, he’d have been able to pull off another notorious miracle and find a way out of this. He would come out against insurmountable odds and spend a few days under McCoy’s watchful eye as the story circulated through Starfleet. That’s how it was supposed to be. James Tiberius Kirk. Invincible.
But he’s not twenty six anymore. It’s harder to wake up in the mornings and every gamma shift seems to be taking a toll. He feels winded if he takes the stairs at a run and the time it takes to recover from a hangover stops him from drinking. Bones weakened from decades of fracturing and mending hurt during the night and he’d lost count of his scars a long time ago.
He’s not twenty six anymore.
And this isn’t how he’d pictured his death. It would take one fucking morbid individual to come up with 'drowning alone under the ice' as their death wish.
They say your brain chemistry goes haywire as it shuts down. The surge of endorphin sparks, adrenaline and serotonin from a brain that realises it’s at its end causes you to have the most beautiful, vivid hallucinations. Some who come back say their lives flash before their eyes. Others hear impossibly beautiful music. Still, there are those who say there was nothing.
Kirk closes his eyes to the water. He feels lighter as he stops struggling, giving in to the images in his mind.
***
Seven years old. It’s pitch dark and Kirk is sitting outside on the porch. He doesn’t go inside because he knows his mother’s in there with a man. He doesn’t want to stuff a pillow around his ears to muffle the sound of bedsprings through the thin walls.
Nine. He’s staring at his shoes, pretending he doesn’t care. He thinks it’s corny and stupid to have a school picnic anyway, so it doesn’t matter when nobody shows up with a picnic blanket for him. He ignores the sounds of the other kids with their parents. He gets in trouble for punching Neil Waterman when he comes over with a sandwich for him.
Twelve. He finds a bottle of whiskey in the basement and gets drunk for the first time. He throws up in the toilet bowl, retching. His mother isn’t there to scold him and boyfriend number three is too baked to care.
Fourteen. His stepfather tries to auction off his dad’s car when his mum’s offshore. So he does what any normal fourteen year old kid would do. That is, he acts completely irrationally. Some rediculous part of him that was fixated with the idea of earning his license and driving the car himself, as though it was his. It was childish, but in his head, it made more sense for the car be a heap of useless metal in the bottom of a gorge than anywhere else, being driven by a stranger. He’s angry enough to bite through metal but the stinging, dirt-ridden wind against his face is soothing. He doesn’t even know why he’s so angry. All he has of his dad is a few holograms. He drives against the endless roads, ready to go forever and never stop.
Seventeen. He has sex for the first time at a party, with a girl from his homeroom. The sofa is sticky and the room smells like gasoline and booze. “I love you,” she says. He says it back, because for a moment, just one moment, it’s true. Afterwards, he can’t figure out why he feels sick with himself.
Nineteen. He’s been doing odd jobs around the place. Supermarket hand. Car repairs. Deliveries. He saves up and he buys the bike he’s been wanting for five years. The guy who sells it to him is a pretty shifty character but he doesn’t question it. He doesn’t want to know where it came from. It doesn’t matter because it’s his now. He moves out with a girl he’s been kind-of seeing. He leaves a note on the dinner table with the address scrawled on it. All of his things fit into one box. He isn’t surprised when his mom doesn’t call.
Twenty one. He’s working as a bouncer at a few of the local clubs. He meets a lot of interesting characters at the door. They tell him about giant planets made of light, aliens with the ability to read minds and spaceships so powerful they can escape black holes. He knows it’s supposed to be true because he’s seen it on the ‘spheres, but it’s too different from anything in Iowa. He’s not sure he believes them. He brings a lot of them back home with him. Men, women, aliens. He isn’t picky and none of them stick around until the morning.
Twenty three. He’s making a living by scamming local businessmen into buying stocks from a company that doesn’t exist. He spends his nights in bars, picking fights with anyone who’ll talk to him. He doesn’t’ feel alive unless he’s in pain or drunk. He thinks about killing himself every couple of days because there doesn’t seem to be much point to anything. He buys a bottle of aspirin in case.
Twenty four. He’s finishing off his first year at the Academy and he feels more at home here than anywhere else. He’s good at what he does and organises study groups to help out the ones who are having trouble. There’s a girl he’s seeing and it’s pretty uncomplicated but he doesn’t feel much chemistry when they’re not having sex. He often sneaks over to the medical school building to cajole McCoy into going to a bar with him.
Twenty five. He’s standing in front of four hundred people and he wants to disappear. Most of the students are too young to remember the USS Kelvin so it’s been his secret until now. As Spock talks, it’s as if a part of himself he thought he’d left behind in Iowa is threatening to tear out of his chest and become something violent, ugly. He thought he'd grown out of all that blinding anger. He hates him for it.
Twenty six. He’s made captain of the Enterprise. He spends most of his time alongside his first officer. Animosity becomes replaced with respect. Then longing and, eventually, actual love. He’s glimpsed their life together in another universe, a parallel timeline, so he waits patiently for Uhura to leave. She can have her four months with him. He knows he’s going to live and die with this man.
For the first year, he’s scared almost every day. He wonders sometimes if he’s not still that reckless kid who blindly leaps. If he is, nobody calls him out on it. Spock stills his more rash decisions.
Twenty seven. He kisses Spock for the first time. They mind meld and neither of them really know what they’re doing or why, except that it feels too right to be illogical. They spend most of their first year together in bed, having sex and wading through one another’s thoughts, sharing the same mind.
Twenty eight. They have their first lover’s spat when Kirk is caught having sex with one of the new ensigns. Spock kicks him out of their room and he’s forced to live in the sickbay for a month with nothing but a bottle of brandy to keep him company during the nights. Their days on the bridge are hell-- thinly veiled verbal attacks and insults. Things are beginning to look irreparable until Bones beats some sense into him. He stands outside Spock’s door with an antique wireless radio, threatening to sing if Spock doesn’t let him in. It's corny and Spock probably doesn't get the reference anyway, but it works. That year, they spend their leave in San Francisco, cluttering up Spock’s apartment.
Thirty. Spock nearly dies. For three weeks, he lies comatose in the sickbay. For three weeks, Jim lives in the shadows. In a cruelly Shakespearean turn of events, he risks his own life to bargain with the Fek’Lhr for Spock’s. Every time he’s asked “Is it worth it?” he screams yes.
When they’ve both recovered, Jim wastes no time in proposing. Spock doesn’t say no. It takes Kirk two sleepless nights to learn his vows in Vulcan. They exchange rings in San Francisco, mostly for Winona’s sake. There's too much left unsaid between them, but she makes sure he's wearing his father's cuffs. The life he's chosen is one that will ultimately leave her behind to her ghosts, so they're civil. She cries at the reception. The crew and many of Starfleet’s finest are present. The Vulcan ceremony, conducted by Sarek, is far more intimate, more spiritual. After that, Spock calls him t’hy’la.
Thirty four. Their first pon farr together. Jim understands why some human women don’t mind waiting around for seven years. He considers himself lucky for having the best of both worlds. Afterwards, they take their accumulated shore leave together. They leave their communications devices on the Enterprise and nobody hears from them for half a year. When they come back, they have the most exotic souvenirs for the crew. The cards read, “From James and Spock,” though nobody needs the clarification.
Thirty five. They become god parents to Uhura’s twins. Kirk is surprisingly good with them. He becomes the butt of a few jokes, but he doesn’t mind. Spock doesn’t tease him in front of the crew, but he laughs for the first time in the privacy of their rooms. Kirk doesn’t expect he’ll ever forget the sound. He carries it inside, like some hidden well of strength during danger. It urges him back to safety. Home. His t’hy’la.
Forty. After a disastrous attempt to mediate negotiations between two warring species, Kirk finds himself bleeding out through his brachial artery. Spock is swearing in what he suspects is Spanish, but that could just be the light headedness talking. Without another word, Spock tears strips from his shirt to wrap the gaping wound. With the rudimentary medical kit they’ve brought with them, he uses a hypo-syringe to draw vials of his own green blood and perfuse them into Kirk. He does this for fifteen minutes as Uhura coordinates a retrieval team. Beads of sweat form on his forehead. Superior Vulcan physiology or no, there wasn’t a creature in the universe that would be immune to the effects of regenerating three litres of blood in the space of a quarter of an hour.
McCoy later growls at Spock for being so reckless; endangering himself and the captain by risking a transfusion reaction. Human blood was notorious for its rejection of Vulcan antigens, save for rare and exceptional circumstances. When McCoy asks him how he could possibly have taken such a risk, Spock gives him the eyebrow, as though the idea that he and Kirk were incompatible even on a cellular level was beyond illogical, it was stupid. The doctor feels sheepish when it turns out that not only did the perfusion save Kirk’s life, it also effectively doubled it. Lucky bastards.
Forty five. He becomes the most decorated officer in the history of Starfleet. Spock becomes High Chancellor of the New Vulcan Science Academy. Neither of them care all that much.
Fifty. They visit New Vulcan. Spock-the other Spock-seems glad to see them. He tells them of his relationship with Kirk in the other timeline. The same devotion, the same two halves of the one soul.
They had often mused between themselves how their lives may have unfolded had Kirk not been struck by a desperate craving for key lime martinis the night that Captain Pike’s car broke down outside the only bar in Iowa that served the cloyingly sweet drink. The fact that the bartender had only known Kirk’s name from having sold him a stolen motorcycle five years prior made the trajectory of their lives follow providence more so than chance; As though every event in their lives had been dealt to lead them to one another.
When the other Spock finishes speaking, he falls asleep in his chair. His face is content. There is comfort to be had in the idea that he and Kirk are together in whatever alternate reality, whatever parallel permutation.
That they alone are the universal constant.
***
The first thing he’s conscious of before he opens his eyes is Spock. He can feel him in the same room. Blinking the sleep from his eyes and shielding them from the painfully bright surroundings of the sickbay, he wonders how long he’s been out. For that matter, he wonders why he’s alive at all.
Spock is by his side in an instant, fingers threaded over his pulse.
“How do you feel?” he asks, concern wrinkling his brow.
“I should be asking you that,” Kirk brings himself to grin, though it feels like the sky is falling. “You look like crap.”
Spock raises an eyebrow. “It would be unreasonable to expect me to be well groomed in this moment. As far as I am aware, the sickbay lacks the amenities necessary for such shows of vanity.”
Kirk rolls his eyes. As if ‘it would be unreasonable’ wasn’t Spock for Fuck you, I’ve been sitting here for the past twenty four hours. Gently probing the Vulcan’s mind, the concern is obvious.
“I’m all right,” he says, wrapping a hand around the one covering his pulse. “I’m ok. How the hell did you find me?”
“How I found and retrieved you is irrelevant. You were submerged beneath the ice for at least three minutes. It is a miracle your brain has not sustained any permanent damage,” Spock pauses. “Alternatively, it may be that your normal state so closely resembles that of a brain dead individual that I am incapable of distinguishing the difference/.”
Kirk rolls his eyes.
“Spock?”
“Jim?”
“I think it’s time we retire.”
“I concur.”
Finish.