WIP Amnesty
When in Rome, Remember
ST:XI
A post-Dollhouse AU
PG13
Language, violence
~3,200 words
This is the first chapter of an EPIC SPRAWLING AU, the other chapters of which refuse to come together. I'm posting it here in the vague hope of bullying my brain into gear but, as those of you who requested a drabble a decade or so ago will probably have realised, that's unlikely to happen.
Who Knows, Missouri. 2255.149
Jim eases himself back into the cargo van's driver's seat, retrieves his comm from the passenger side footwell and thumbs through his list of contacts while trying desperately to will his hangover into submission. The pounding in his head is so strong that he feels like his eyes should be bleeding, and he's worried that if he looks directly at the glowing blue screen of the comm he might actually be struck blind.
Which, all things considered, wouldn't even be the worst part of his morning.
He scrubs his hands across his face, takes a couple of deep breaths to calm the rolling in his stomach, then risks another peek over the seatbacks.
The crates are still there. All six of them.
"Fuck."
"The code you have requested has not been recognised," his comm tells him, the voice robotic-sounding and eerily polite. "Please disconnect and try again."
"Fuck."
He climbs over the seats and squats down in front of the crates, keys in the combination for the digital lock. How he knows that and not, for example, where the hell he is, well. That's just another of this morning's little mysteries, like the body armour on the front seat that doesn't fit him, or the fact that none of the numbers stored in his comm work. Both of which, in their turn, form part of a larger, more intimidating mystery which Jim has mentally entitled Where The Fuck Did Last Week Go?
He tries the comm again.
"The code you requested has not been recognised," it reminds him. "Please disconnect and try again."
"Fuck."
He opens the lid of the crate and -. Yeah, still there.
"Fuck."
Now, Jim's not exactly a small-time guy, hasn't been for years, but waking up after what he assumes must have been the mother of all benders with six crates of illicit off-world weaponry and no contact is still enough to mess with his head somewhat, especially as he's self-aware enough to know he's neither a reliable nor an obedient drunk and the last time something like this happened, it turned out he'd pre-emptively taken money from five different buyers.
He'd feel a lot better about the entire situation, he thinks, if he could remember the slightest thing about money this time round.
He closes his eyes. Breathes. Presses at the edges of the dark shape in his brain where his memory ought to be, thinking: money. Thinking: contact. Thinking: woods.
Go back to the woods.
And then it doesn't feel like thinking at all.
He drives on autopilot, his body knowing where they need to go far more than his brain does. Buries the crates in a copse about three miles back, drives two hours in the direction that feels furthest from civilisation and then burns the van, the comm and the armour, the pain in his head and the twisting in his gut so intense he can hardly breathe.
He hitches a lift to the next town, then the next, probing the dark shape at the back of his brain for anything like a clear memory of the job, and finding only the sharp, uniform funk of roadside rest stops and snatches of bathroom graffiti. Terra Prime, 4 Luv, for a good time call...
"Where you headed, man?" asks one of the kids who've picked him up. They're breezy-looking roadtripper types, monied and gullible and liable to forget what Jim actually looks like five minutes after he leaves the car, telling their friends about some dangerous-looking drifter with scars on his face and knife in his boot instead.
"Tell you when I get there," Jim says, smiling, his head feeling clearer and lighter the further he goes. The driver answers with a grin that suggests he's nowhere near fit to drive.
"Cool." The word looks like it takes a lot of effort.
When his girlfriend adds, "We're going to Florida?" it seems like a genuine question.
A signpost for the next exit flashes by and something sharp and bright skitters through the edges of Jim's memory. "And I'm going to piss on your upholstery," he announces cheerfully. "Could you pull over?"
At the truck stop, he makes a point of picking through racks of novelty keyrings and shoplifting junk food before heading off to the men's room, with its uniform breezeblock walls, its uniform unwashed stink, its uniform row of stalls with kicked in doors, it's generic graffiti.
Terra Prime.
4 Luv.
There's a number written in slanted black marker underneath the cistern in the next-to-last cubicle. He doesn't recognise it, but he knew where to look for it.
Good enough.
He sweet-talks the girl behind the counter at the refuelling station into letting him use her comm - some bullshit story about a transport leaving without him that she believes because he smiles nice - and punches in what turns out to be the code for some place called the Carrollton Inn, run by a woman who takes one look at his dirt-encrusted shirt, whines nasally at him about personal hygeine for five minutes and then charges him more credits than he'd like to lift for a single room.
By the time he hangs up, Jim feels weightless. He knows, in an abstract kind of way, that following an unseeable map to an unfamiliar location provided by an unknowable source who seems to have fucked with his brain is not good. But in a far more real, immediate sense, everything feels okay. Better than okay. He'll hole up at the hotel, comm around until someone asks where the hell the goods are, hand them over and be out of there in a day, two at the outside.
He's Jim Kirk.
He's James fucking Tiberius Kirk.
Everything will be fine.
That itch at the back of his head saying that everything's usually fine because he's a paranoid sociopath with loyalty issues who wouldn't wander into the middle of a setup like this for love nor money? Well. That voice is far off and quiet, and it doesn't feel particularly important that he listen to it right now. What's important is getting the gullible roadtripper kids to turn around and head back to Carrollton. Or at least, that's what feels important until he gets within sight of their transport and his skin is suddenly itching, crawling, until he's sweating bullets and rubbing at his face to try and hold back the bleeding-eyeball pain in his head.
The driver kid: "You got any credits?" His girlfriend: "You okay?"
Jim grits his teeth and tries to get it together enough to make a word instead of a sound. "I'm okay," he says. His vision is shot through with black. His skin is peeling away from him, he can feel it, he can feel -
"Just. Gimme a minute, okay? I'll be back. I'll be right back." He dashes for the bathroom, throws himself into the stall with his number in and empties his stomach into the toilet bowl, his head full of hot, white noise all apart from the dark shape at the back - moving on autopilot, lowering the seat, climbing up, shaking hands on ceiling tiles and then and then and then -
And then -
And -
Did I fall asleep?
For a little while.
Shall I go now?
If you like.
If you like.
If you like.
You do what you fuckin' want, kid. Makes no difference to me.
Jim wakes curled up on the floor of the stall, blood under his nails and a sports bag clutched to his chest.
His head feels gloriously cool and empty, nothing rattling round in there but a kind of drunken, rubbery joy. He lies there for a while, luxuriating in the ease of it, listening to people come in and out, listening to some stoned-sounding kid call a name that sounds vaguely familiar but not enough that he bothers to respond.
When he opens it, the bag is full of clothes, credits, ID which uses unfamiliar aliases.
Again, at the back of his head, the voice asking how?
Again, it hurts to listen to it.
The why of that, Jim files away to think on later, when the idea doesn't make his vision grey out.
The gullible roadtripper kids are gone by the time Jim makes it back to the parking lot, and he winds up catching a ride to Carrollton from some haulage guy who likes Jim's smile so much he wants to see it round his cock, which Jim is okay with insomuch as the whole experience only reaches him in a kind of muted third-person, like a movie watched from another room, which. Okay. Jim's pretty sure sure he wouldn't have agreed to that, usually. He's really pretty fucking certain. This isn't the kind of plan he would have made.
He presses his forehead against the cool glass of the transport window and tries to think over the sharp, dark pounding in his head.
He falls asleep and dreams of a machine that feels like home.
He checks into his motel room, strips the bed, pins the thinnest sheet over the window and props the mattress against it. He turns the holoscreen up as loud as he thinks he can get away with. He hides his credits in the thin gap between the back of the wardrobe and the wall, then strips out of his muddy clothes and sends them to the incinerator. He showers, trying to ignore the itching in the back of his mind that tells him he should be busy.
He spreads out all the documents bearing his face. Anything using a new alias goes to the incinerator. Anything using an old alias goes to the incinerator.
The itch in the back of his head turns into an ache, then blossoms into raw, screeching agony.
Would you like a treatment now?
Ever wanted a massive cranial haemorrage, Ty?
What exactly does DeWitt think you contribute that I couldn't?
Ire. How about it, kid?
Tiberius.
I think I'd like a treatment now.
You've never had a thought in your head.
How essential is ire, realistically?
It powers the air con. Now go play your goddamn computer games and let me work.
Jim wakes up trapped in a tangle of sheets under the bedframe, gripping the lats so hard his knuckles are white and his wrists ache. He spends two days mooching round the motel, watching the receptionist reject multiple comm requests for one of the aliases he burned, followed by eight days half-crazy in his room, the noise at the back of his head louder than the holoscreen. The names of the haulage guy and the roadtripper kid slip out of his memory altogether some time during the night, along with any idea of why he might have needed them in the first place. The week he's lost seems to be slipping further away, taking everything that came before along with it, until he's gritting his teeth against the pain and making himself write out every name, every address, every scrap of his history on the bedsheets and tacking them to the walls, staring at them in the hope that he'll remember a face other than his mother's, his father's, Frank's.
Every time he closes his eyes, he sees Manhattan.
He dreams of a house there and wakes standing. He dreams of it and wakes in the street, blissful.
He crawls back to the room and bites his tongue bloody to keep from screaming.
On the ninth day, he says it aloud for the first time. Tells it to the light fitting, in a voice that he almost doesn't recognise.
"I am not going to Manhattan."
"I am not going to Manhattan until I know what I'm going there for."
"My name is Jim Kirk."
"My name is James Tiberius Kirk."
"I was born in Riverside, Iowa. I am going to Riverside, Iowa. I am not going to Manhattan until I know what I'm going there for."
He takes the bedsheet down from the window, writes down the name of every sure friend, every safe house, every formerly safe house. None of them are in Manhattan. None of them are even close. He goes home.
Riverside, Iowa
Getting to Riverside takes a couple of weeks longer than it should, what with Jim's body wanting to double back on itself every five minutes and the dark shape at the back of his head screaming at him, threatening to rush forward at any minute and push away what remains of his memory (he forgets the route twice and loses three bikes, though he at least remembers how to steal one). He pulls a couple of quick jobs for cash and then a couple more once he realises that work flips some switch or other in his head and lets him focus for a moment, like he's doing what he's built for and not even whatever hideous alien brain parasite must currently be getting fat off his cerebral cortex can stop him, but eventually, finally, he rolls into Riverside.
He remembers Main Street as having a kind of decrepit chocolate box charm, like the disused set of a bad holo from the 2200s, but the road he drives down is all neon advertising and Fed-approved signage, as if two decades have passed without his permission. None of the faces look like they could belong to anyone he remembers from high school. None of the stores are where he expects them to be. The road down to the gorge is gone. He'd be deeply freaked by all of it if he could think clearly enough to be, if his mom and Frank's house wasn't exactly where he expected to find it, looking just as he remembered, but it is. Something in Jim's heart sings at that - stupidly, because this house never brought him anything but trouble. That said, its never subjected him to any kind of surprise, either, and he figures he'll be able to settle down into the warm familiarity of resentment and wait there while he finds out what the hell's wrong with him.
He can picture himself drinking in the horsebox at the back of the disused barn, fifteen all over again.
He can picture Frank still tinkering in the garage, cursing a blue streak at something Jim could fix up in five minutes.
He can picture his mom, somewhere high above and happy, her smile a pixelated video-message blur.
He takes a deep breath, curses under it and starts up the path.
The screen's shut but the door's open, so Jim lets himself in. The inside of the house is dark and dry, the closed drapes making everything look muddy. There's a newsfeed playing in another room and a dog barking out back (did they used to have a dog?), but no real signs of life. "Hello?" he tries. "Mom? Frank?"
He moves through into the living room and flips channels before turning the feed off altogether once its obvious there's not going to be anything about him or his stash of off-planet weapons. "It's Jimmy," he shouts into the quiet, and a thump from upstairs tells him a) someone has finally registered his presence, b) that someone is Frank and c) Frank is not the high-functioning alcoholic he once was. "Shit," is all the comment Jim's gonna waste on that, so he busies himself with opening the drapes and selecting a beer from the wall of booze he finds in the fridge. The dog he could hear before turns out to be a collie, chained up in the back yard and yapping itself crazy. The yard itself has mostly turned into a dustbowl, but there's still the barn in the distance, still the same brokedown bits of machinery scattered around, and the familiarity of it all is like a balm.
There are more thumps from upstairs, the noise of something heavy being moved followed by Jesus son of a bitch, and Jim shuffles reluctantly out into the hallway, leaning around the bottom of the staircase with his beer held out like a peace offering. "Frank?" he calls again. "You okay up there, buddy?"
There's a whistle and a hiss, and then a bullet embeds itself into the plaster six inches shy of Jim's head. "Holy fuck, Frank! It's Jim. Jim Kirk. I used to live here a while back, there was a lady sweet on both of us, spent a lot of time in space. Any of this ringing a bell with you?" He steps around his shattered beer bottle, presses himself up against the railing so he'll be harder to shoot at from the landing and slides up the stairs, slowly. "You alone up there, Frank?"
"How did you find me?"
"What?"
"How did you find me?"
"I grew up here, man, I -"
"No, you fucking didn't. You fucking didn't."
Jim's wavering halfway up the stairs, curiosity coming up against self-preservation. He gets as far as "What are you talking ab -", before Frank rounds the corner at the top of the stairs and levels an antique rifle at his head.
"I want you out of my house."
"Okay, okay," Jim says, backing down, hands on his head like this is some kind of fucked up citizen's arrest. "I'm going, alright? I'm gonna pick up my jacket, and I'm gonna go, okay?"
"I don't know who sent you here, I don't care who sent you here, but you tell them - "
"Nobody sent me."
"Bullshit. You tell them, they keep the hell away from me from now on. My contract's up. I don't want to see you, I don't want to see any of you, I'm not interested in whatever goddamn mental illness Adelle's trying to pass off as a sense of humour, I am out. I don't know how you found my house, but if you come back here, I will shoot you. Do you understand me? Do you understand? Is this getting through your programming?"
"It's Jim," Jim hears himself say. "Your wife's son, Jim. Come on Frank, put it down. I'll go, it's okay, I was just looking for Winona, I'm leaving. But you need to put that thing down, okay?"
Frank's face goes slack and for a moment Jim thinks he's getting somewhere, but then there's the barrel of a gun pressed against the soft flesh on the underside of his jaw, and Frank's whining laughter in his ear. "Winona? You're here for Winona? Wow, they've really fucked you up." There's something terrifyingly sober in Frank's expression, the kind of white hot rage that a person can only muster when they know absolutely that they're in the right. "Whatever kind of mess you are, you're not my problem anymore," he says, "so I'm going to give you til the count of five to get out of my home."
Jim has to have run the better part of two miles by the time he flops down at the side of the road and lets himself shake. He can't stop muttering to himself, a steady stream of fuck, fuck, shit, fuck, and everything looks too big and too bright. He clenches and unclenches his hands. The shaking doesn't stop.
Fuck it, he thinks, and sets out to find a bar he remembers.
ST:XI
A post-Dollhouse AU
PG13
Language, violence
~3,200 words
This is the first chapter of an EPIC SPRAWLING AU, the other chapters of which refuse to come together. I'm posting it here in the vague hope of bullying my brain into gear but, as those of you who requested a drabble a decade or so ago will probably have realised, that's unlikely to happen.
Who Knows, Missouri. 2255.149
Jim eases himself back into the cargo van's driver's seat, retrieves his comm from the passenger side footwell and thumbs through his list of contacts while trying desperately to will his hangover into submission. The pounding in his head is so strong that he feels like his eyes should be bleeding, and he's worried that if he looks directly at the glowing blue screen of the comm he might actually be struck blind.
Which, all things considered, wouldn't even be the worst part of his morning.
He scrubs his hands across his face, takes a couple of deep breaths to calm the rolling in his stomach, then risks another peek over the seatbacks.
The crates are still there. All six of them.
"Fuck."
"The code you have requested has not been recognised," his comm tells him, the voice robotic-sounding and eerily polite. "Please disconnect and try again."
"Fuck."
He climbs over the seats and squats down in front of the crates, keys in the combination for the digital lock. How he knows that and not, for example, where the hell he is, well. That's just another of this morning's little mysteries, like the body armour on the front seat that doesn't fit him, or the fact that none of the numbers stored in his comm work. Both of which, in their turn, form part of a larger, more intimidating mystery which Jim has mentally entitled Where The Fuck Did Last Week Go?
He tries the comm again.
"The code you requested has not been recognised," it reminds him. "Please disconnect and try again."
"Fuck."
He opens the lid of the crate and -. Yeah, still there.
"Fuck."
Now, Jim's not exactly a small-time guy, hasn't been for years, but waking up after what he assumes must have been the mother of all benders with six crates of illicit off-world weaponry and no contact is still enough to mess with his head somewhat, especially as he's self-aware enough to know he's neither a reliable nor an obedient drunk and the last time something like this happened, it turned out he'd pre-emptively taken money from five different buyers.
He'd feel a lot better about the entire situation, he thinks, if he could remember the slightest thing about money this time round.
He closes his eyes. Breathes. Presses at the edges of the dark shape in his brain where his memory ought to be, thinking: money. Thinking: contact. Thinking: woods.
Go back to the woods.
And then it doesn't feel like thinking at all.
He drives on autopilot, his body knowing where they need to go far more than his brain does. Buries the crates in a copse about three miles back, drives two hours in the direction that feels furthest from civilisation and then burns the van, the comm and the armour, the pain in his head and the twisting in his gut so intense he can hardly breathe.
He hitches a lift to the next town, then the next, probing the dark shape at the back of his brain for anything like a clear memory of the job, and finding only the sharp, uniform funk of roadside rest stops and snatches of bathroom graffiti. Terra Prime, 4 Luv, for a good time call...
"Where you headed, man?" asks one of the kids who've picked him up. They're breezy-looking roadtripper types, monied and gullible and liable to forget what Jim actually looks like five minutes after he leaves the car, telling their friends about some dangerous-looking drifter with scars on his face and knife in his boot instead.
"Tell you when I get there," Jim says, smiling, his head feeling clearer and lighter the further he goes. The driver answers with a grin that suggests he's nowhere near fit to drive.
"Cool." The word looks like it takes a lot of effort.
When his girlfriend adds, "We're going to Florida?" it seems like a genuine question.
A signpost for the next exit flashes by and something sharp and bright skitters through the edges of Jim's memory. "And I'm going to piss on your upholstery," he announces cheerfully. "Could you pull over?"
At the truck stop, he makes a point of picking through racks of novelty keyrings and shoplifting junk food before heading off to the men's room, with its uniform breezeblock walls, its uniform unwashed stink, its uniform row of stalls with kicked in doors, it's generic graffiti.
Terra Prime.
4 Luv.
There's a number written in slanted black marker underneath the cistern in the next-to-last cubicle. He doesn't recognise it, but he knew where to look for it.
Good enough.
He sweet-talks the girl behind the counter at the refuelling station into letting him use her comm - some bullshit story about a transport leaving without him that she believes because he smiles nice - and punches in what turns out to be the code for some place called the Carrollton Inn, run by a woman who takes one look at his dirt-encrusted shirt, whines nasally at him about personal hygeine for five minutes and then charges him more credits than he'd like to lift for a single room.
By the time he hangs up, Jim feels weightless. He knows, in an abstract kind of way, that following an unseeable map to an unfamiliar location provided by an unknowable source who seems to have fucked with his brain is not good. But in a far more real, immediate sense, everything feels okay. Better than okay. He'll hole up at the hotel, comm around until someone asks where the hell the goods are, hand them over and be out of there in a day, two at the outside.
He's Jim Kirk.
He's James fucking Tiberius Kirk.
Everything will be fine.
That itch at the back of his head saying that everything's usually fine because he's a paranoid sociopath with loyalty issues who wouldn't wander into the middle of a setup like this for love nor money? Well. That voice is far off and quiet, and it doesn't feel particularly important that he listen to it right now. What's important is getting the gullible roadtripper kids to turn around and head back to Carrollton. Or at least, that's what feels important until he gets within sight of their transport and his skin is suddenly itching, crawling, until he's sweating bullets and rubbing at his face to try and hold back the bleeding-eyeball pain in his head.
The driver kid: "You got any credits?" His girlfriend: "You okay?"
Jim grits his teeth and tries to get it together enough to make a word instead of a sound. "I'm okay," he says. His vision is shot through with black. His skin is peeling away from him, he can feel it, he can feel -
"Just. Gimme a minute, okay? I'll be back. I'll be right back." He dashes for the bathroom, throws himself into the stall with his number in and empties his stomach into the toilet bowl, his head full of hot, white noise all apart from the dark shape at the back - moving on autopilot, lowering the seat, climbing up, shaking hands on ceiling tiles and then and then and then -
And then -
And -
Did I fall asleep?
For a little while.
Shall I go now?
If you like.
If you like.
If you like.
You do what you fuckin' want, kid. Makes no difference to me.
Jim wakes curled up on the floor of the stall, blood under his nails and a sports bag clutched to his chest.
His head feels gloriously cool and empty, nothing rattling round in there but a kind of drunken, rubbery joy. He lies there for a while, luxuriating in the ease of it, listening to people come in and out, listening to some stoned-sounding kid call a name that sounds vaguely familiar but not enough that he bothers to respond.
When he opens it, the bag is full of clothes, credits, ID which uses unfamiliar aliases.
Again, at the back of his head, the voice asking how?
Again, it hurts to listen to it.
The why of that, Jim files away to think on later, when the idea doesn't make his vision grey out.
The gullible roadtripper kids are gone by the time Jim makes it back to the parking lot, and he winds up catching a ride to Carrollton from some haulage guy who likes Jim's smile so much he wants to see it round his cock, which Jim is okay with insomuch as the whole experience only reaches him in a kind of muted third-person, like a movie watched from another room, which. Okay. Jim's pretty sure sure he wouldn't have agreed to that, usually. He's really pretty fucking certain. This isn't the kind of plan he would have made.
He presses his forehead against the cool glass of the transport window and tries to think over the sharp, dark pounding in his head.
He falls asleep and dreams of a machine that feels like home.
He checks into his motel room, strips the bed, pins the thinnest sheet over the window and props the mattress against it. He turns the holoscreen up as loud as he thinks he can get away with. He hides his credits in the thin gap between the back of the wardrobe and the wall, then strips out of his muddy clothes and sends them to the incinerator. He showers, trying to ignore the itching in the back of his mind that tells him he should be busy.
He spreads out all the documents bearing his face. Anything using a new alias goes to the incinerator. Anything using an old alias goes to the incinerator.
The itch in the back of his head turns into an ache, then blossoms into raw, screeching agony.
Would you like a treatment now?
Ever wanted a massive cranial haemorrage, Ty?
What exactly does DeWitt think you contribute that I couldn't?
Ire. How about it, kid?
Tiberius.
I think I'd like a treatment now.
You've never had a thought in your head.
How essential is ire, realistically?
It powers the air con. Now go play your goddamn computer games and let me work.
Jim wakes up trapped in a tangle of sheets under the bedframe, gripping the lats so hard his knuckles are white and his wrists ache. He spends two days mooching round the motel, watching the receptionist reject multiple comm requests for one of the aliases he burned, followed by eight days half-crazy in his room, the noise at the back of his head louder than the holoscreen. The names of the haulage guy and the roadtripper kid slip out of his memory altogether some time during the night, along with any idea of why he might have needed them in the first place. The week he's lost seems to be slipping further away, taking everything that came before along with it, until he's gritting his teeth against the pain and making himself write out every name, every address, every scrap of his history on the bedsheets and tacking them to the walls, staring at them in the hope that he'll remember a face other than his mother's, his father's, Frank's.
Every time he closes his eyes, he sees Manhattan.
He dreams of a house there and wakes standing. He dreams of it and wakes in the street, blissful.
He crawls back to the room and bites his tongue bloody to keep from screaming.
On the ninth day, he says it aloud for the first time. Tells it to the light fitting, in a voice that he almost doesn't recognise.
"I am not going to Manhattan."
"I am not going to Manhattan until I know what I'm going there for."
"My name is Jim Kirk."
"My name is James Tiberius Kirk."
"I was born in Riverside, Iowa. I am going to Riverside, Iowa. I am not going to Manhattan until I know what I'm going there for."
He takes the bedsheet down from the window, writes down the name of every sure friend, every safe house, every formerly safe house. None of them are in Manhattan. None of them are even close. He goes home.
Riverside, Iowa
Getting to Riverside takes a couple of weeks longer than it should, what with Jim's body wanting to double back on itself every five minutes and the dark shape at the back of his head screaming at him, threatening to rush forward at any minute and push away what remains of his memory (he forgets the route twice and loses three bikes, though he at least remembers how to steal one). He pulls a couple of quick jobs for cash and then a couple more once he realises that work flips some switch or other in his head and lets him focus for a moment, like he's doing what he's built for and not even whatever hideous alien brain parasite must currently be getting fat off his cerebral cortex can stop him, but eventually, finally, he rolls into Riverside.
He remembers Main Street as having a kind of decrepit chocolate box charm, like the disused set of a bad holo from the 2200s, but the road he drives down is all neon advertising and Fed-approved signage, as if two decades have passed without his permission. None of the faces look like they could belong to anyone he remembers from high school. None of the stores are where he expects them to be. The road down to the gorge is gone. He'd be deeply freaked by all of it if he could think clearly enough to be, if his mom and Frank's house wasn't exactly where he expected to find it, looking just as he remembered, but it is. Something in Jim's heart sings at that - stupidly, because this house never brought him anything but trouble. That said, its never subjected him to any kind of surprise, either, and he figures he'll be able to settle down into the warm familiarity of resentment and wait there while he finds out what the hell's wrong with him.
He can picture himself drinking in the horsebox at the back of the disused barn, fifteen all over again.
He can picture Frank still tinkering in the garage, cursing a blue streak at something Jim could fix up in five minutes.
He can picture his mom, somewhere high above and happy, her smile a pixelated video-message blur.
He takes a deep breath, curses under it and starts up the path.
The screen's shut but the door's open, so Jim lets himself in. The inside of the house is dark and dry, the closed drapes making everything look muddy. There's a newsfeed playing in another room and a dog barking out back (did they used to have a dog?), but no real signs of life. "Hello?" he tries. "Mom? Frank?"
He moves through into the living room and flips channels before turning the feed off altogether once its obvious there's not going to be anything about him or his stash of off-planet weapons. "It's Jimmy," he shouts into the quiet, and a thump from upstairs tells him a) someone has finally registered his presence, b) that someone is Frank and c) Frank is not the high-functioning alcoholic he once was. "Shit," is all the comment Jim's gonna waste on that, so he busies himself with opening the drapes and selecting a beer from the wall of booze he finds in the fridge. The dog he could hear before turns out to be a collie, chained up in the back yard and yapping itself crazy. The yard itself has mostly turned into a dustbowl, but there's still the barn in the distance, still the same brokedown bits of machinery scattered around, and the familiarity of it all is like a balm.
There are more thumps from upstairs, the noise of something heavy being moved followed by Jesus son of a bitch, and Jim shuffles reluctantly out into the hallway, leaning around the bottom of the staircase with his beer held out like a peace offering. "Frank?" he calls again. "You okay up there, buddy?"
There's a whistle and a hiss, and then a bullet embeds itself into the plaster six inches shy of Jim's head. "Holy fuck, Frank! It's Jim. Jim Kirk. I used to live here a while back, there was a lady sweet on both of us, spent a lot of time in space. Any of this ringing a bell with you?" He steps around his shattered beer bottle, presses himself up against the railing so he'll be harder to shoot at from the landing and slides up the stairs, slowly. "You alone up there, Frank?"
"How did you find me?"
"What?"
"How did you find me?"
"I grew up here, man, I -"
"No, you fucking didn't. You fucking didn't."
Jim's wavering halfway up the stairs, curiosity coming up against self-preservation. He gets as far as "What are you talking ab -", before Frank rounds the corner at the top of the stairs and levels an antique rifle at his head.
"I want you out of my house."
"Okay, okay," Jim says, backing down, hands on his head like this is some kind of fucked up citizen's arrest. "I'm going, alright? I'm gonna pick up my jacket, and I'm gonna go, okay?"
"I don't know who sent you here, I don't care who sent you here, but you tell them - "
"Nobody sent me."
"Bullshit. You tell them, they keep the hell away from me from now on. My contract's up. I don't want to see you, I don't want to see any of you, I'm not interested in whatever goddamn mental illness Adelle's trying to pass off as a sense of humour, I am out. I don't know how you found my house, but if you come back here, I will shoot you. Do you understand me? Do you understand? Is this getting through your programming?"
"It's Jim," Jim hears himself say. "Your wife's son, Jim. Come on Frank, put it down. I'll go, it's okay, I was just looking for Winona, I'm leaving. But you need to put that thing down, okay?"
Frank's face goes slack and for a moment Jim thinks he's getting somewhere, but then there's the barrel of a gun pressed against the soft flesh on the underside of his jaw, and Frank's whining laughter in his ear. "Winona? You're here for Winona? Wow, they've really fucked you up." There's something terrifyingly sober in Frank's expression, the kind of white hot rage that a person can only muster when they know absolutely that they're in the right. "Whatever kind of mess you are, you're not my problem anymore," he says, "so I'm going to give you til the count of five to get out of my home."
Jim has to have run the better part of two miles by the time he flops down at the side of the road and lets himself shake. He can't stop muttering to himself, a steady stream of fuck, fuck, shit, fuck, and everything looks too big and too bright. He clenches and unclenches his hands. The shaking doesn't stop.
Fuck it, he thinks, and sets out to find a bar he remembers.