knowing I would never find you - Star Trek reboot ficlet - PG
Title: knowing I would never find you
Fandom: Star Trek reboot
Disclaimer: not my characters; title from Anne Sexton.
Warnings: spoilers for film
Pairings: none stated
Rating: PGish
Wordcount: 655
Point of view: third
Notes: thanks to acarbonatedgirl for reading over this
Jim’s baking on a desert world while his Enterprise is chased by pirates across the system. Of the away team’s six members, he’s the only survivor. Of course, he thinks, collapsed on the sand. Of course, I’m alive.
Not for long, though. No water, no shelter, and an open wound in his side. No, he won’t survive for long.
o0o
He has a fuzzy dream, there in the desert. Beings of light come to him and ask him, in one vibrant, echoing voice, What would you change, James Tiberius Kirk?
He doesn’t understand. He knows he’s in a desert worse than any of Earth, but he’s cold. Tired. His ship’s gone, everyone he loves with her, and if the little light-things would just shut up, he might be able to get some sleep.
James Tiberius Kirk! they say again. Had you the chance, what would you change?
It’s an easy enough question-Vulcan’s destruction, of course.
Interesting, the light-people muse. And what would you give up, to change that?
Anything, he thinks.
The light pours into him and he doesn’t have the strength to scream.
o0o
Jim wakes in his dormroom on Earth, at Starfleet, to Bones yelling, “Up and at ‘em!”
He slowly sits up, glancing around. “What?” he asks.
Bones throws his uniform at his head. “You’ll be late for the test, if you don’t hurry, Jim,” he says. “I’ll meet you there, okay? There’s an experiment I need to check.”
Jim nods because Bones expects a response. He can’t be here. It’s a dying dream or something.
You know the future, human, the voices say in tandem, so loud he flinches. Change it.
“How?” he asks aloud, throwing his blanket off his legs. “No one’ll listen to me.”
The ensuing silence seems pensive. Where in the timeline would be better?
Shrugging, Jim lets his head drop and closes his eyes. “I don’t know,” he says. “I guess… put me on the drill, or the Narada. Let me take ‘em out before they drop the red matter. Or-” He pauses. “Could you get Old-Spock’s ship off the Narada?”
No. We can only place your consciousness in your body. We can only let you know what, for you, has not yet come to pass.
“Right,” Jim mutters. “Of course. But I was never in the position to actually destroy Nero, or the Narada, or the red matter.”
Find a way, James Tiberius Kirk, the voices command. We have given you a gift no one not our own has ever experienced.
“Okay,” he says.
o0o
Jim Kirk doesn’t show up for the Kobayashi Maru. No one ever really figures out what happened to him, but there’s a small shuttle missing from a minor San Francisco shipyard and reports of a firefight in Klingon space, but the events are not connected together.
Leonard McCoy wonders what happened to his friend; Christopher Pike wonders where his wunderkind went. They’re the only ones who realize he’s gone.
Eventually, they both forget.
o0o
How he does it is beyond extraordinary. Chekov and Scotty would be thrilled by his brilliance and then tell him how he could’ve done it better. Spock would call him a foolish human and show him an easier, quicker Vulcan method. Bones would berate him for his foolhardiness and Uhura would mutter about his ego. Sulu would fly circles around him and still leave time for the beaming aboard.
A mere hours before Nero would’ve captured Old-Spock, in the same stretch of space where the Kelvin met her end, Jim beams into the engine room of the Narada and blows her up from the inside out.
Old-Spock makes his way to Starfleet and asks after Jim Kirk. He never finds his dearest friend.
o0o
On a desert world, far from the busy hum of civilization, beings of light cradle close the soul of James Tiberius Kirk and vow to tell their children of how selfless bodied-beings can prove to be.