Chapter Text
After Kodos
Iowa wasn’t rolling green hills and quiet sunsets for Jim Kirk. It was long stretches of nothing. Cornfields that swallowed the horizon, roads that led nowhere, and a sky too wide to outrun.
Jim runs. He disappears off the grid, slipping through bureaucratic cracks. Officially, James T. Kirk is back in Iowa, in Winona’s custody. But in reality? He never goes back to that house. He avoids social workers, skips school, and steals what he needs.
He sleeps in train stations, in abandoned cars, in shelters when the weather gets bad. He learns how to navigate cities without being seen.
He never tells anyone about Tarsus.
No one knows he was there.
No one asks about the burn scars on his arms from scavenging too close to a fire, or why he doesn’t flinch at violence.
He picks up odd jobs where he can; washing dishes, sweeping floors, running errands for people who don’t ask questions.
He gets into fights.
He’s good at taking a punch. He’s even better at throwing one.
He teaches himself everything; using libraries, reading late into the night, devouring knowledge like it’s food. Physics, engineering, survival techniques, star charts. He gets his GED.
Jim doesn’t look at the stars.
Not for years.
Not after Tarsus.
Not after watching the sky every night, praying for a ship, for help, for anything that never came.
Not after the hunger, the fire, the bodies.
Not after dragging Kevin Riley through the dirt, whispering, Just one more day, kid, one more day and they’ll find us.
Not after they never did.
So Jim doesn’t look at the stars anymore.
Earth is Small. That’s Fine.
He keeps his feet on the ground.
He sticks to the streets, to the city lights, to places where the sky is choked by buildings and neon signs.
He stays in bars where the only thing overhead is a cracked ceiling and a flickering light. He sleeps in the backs of cars, under bridges, in places where the sky doesn’t press down on him like a weight.
Because the thing about looking up? It makes you feel small . And Jim is so goddamn tired of feeling small.
It happens in the middle of nowhere.
He doesn’t mean for it to happen. He doesn’t want it to happen.
But he’s been driving all night, the stolen speeder humming beneath his hands, and he’s exhausted. So when the engine sputters, he curses, pulls off the empty road, and kicks at the wheel for good measure.
He’s surrounded by nothing.
No cities. No lights. No noise.
Just silence. Just wind through dry grass. Just-
Jim exhales. And then, before he can stop himself, before he can think, He looks up. It’s still vast. Still endless. Still the same sky that hung over Tarsus IV while people starved beneath it. Still the same sky that never answered him when he begged. But it’s also the sky that his father died in. The sky that his mother disappeared into.
The sky that he used to stare at when he was a kid, back when he thought space was full of possibilities instead of emptiness . And for the first time in years, Jim doesn’t hate it.
Maybe the stars aren’t for him.
Maybe they never were.
Maybe he’ll keep running. Keep moving. Keep getting by, scraping out a life on solid ground where nothing can touch him.
Maybe he’ll never leave Earth at all.
Or-
Or maybe-
He will. Someday.
Hustling pool games in bars, picking pockets, and running small cons. He’s got charm, he’s got brains, and he knows how to read people.
The first time he hustled someone, it was an accident. He was at a dive bar, watching an older guy butcher a game of pool. Jim laughed, and the guy, drunk, cocky, challenged him to a game. Jim played dumb, let the guy win a few rounds, then bet him for cash and cleaned him out. That was the night Jim realized two things:
- People wanted to be scammed. They just needed the right story to believe in.
- Winning felt better when you made them think you’d lose.
Jim works illegal street races, sometimes as a driver, sometimes just fixing engines.
He’s good at machines. Knows them better than people. Short stints in juvie; a few arrests for trespassing, theft, reckless driving.
Nothing that sticks.
He’s a minor, and the system doesn’t care enough to hold onto him.
He spends a few months in Montana, working under the table at a scrapyard.
He learns how to rebuild engines, how to fix shuttles, how to jury-rig tech that’s decades out of date. It’s here he picks up the mechanical skills that later make him a nightmare in Starfleet engineering courses.
Gets close to enlisting in Starfleet. Stumbles onto a recruitment fair in Chicago. He scoffs.
It’s not for people like him. But for the first time, he considers it. This is where he drunkenly sends off an application and does the entrance exams in some booth near Michigan Avenue.
Jim Kirk didn’t have a home. Not really. Home was a word people used when they meant safety.
Belonging.
A place where someone waited for you to come back.
Jim had places he’d been.
Places he’d left.
Places that had never been his to begin with.
But home? Home had been an old farmhouse with warm light spilling through the windows; until his grandma died. And Sam left him.
Home had been running and playing with the others on Tarsus IV after helping out in the farms all day; until a child’s desperate grip around his wrist, whispering JT, I’m hungry; until Tarsus IV burned.
Home had been the road.
The city.
The cold steel of stolen speeders, the hum of engines under his hands, the ache of bruised ribs and cracked knuckles in the aftermath of another bar fight.
Home had never stayed. So Jim didn’t stay either.
People called him reckless.
They weren’t wrong.
Jim took corners on his bike too fast.
He picked fights with men twice his size in seedy bars all over the mid-west.
He leapt headfirst into trouble like it was daring him to get hurt.
Because the thing about almost starving to death at twelve was that, after a while, nothing else scared you.
Pain was nothing, hunger was his normal. Fear was just an old instinct his body hadn’t quite let go of.
There was a kind of power in that, it was a kind of freedom, really the only freedom he knew.
And yeah, maybe there were nights when he’d push things too far, testing the edge of what his body could take, seeing how close he could get to the end of the line before he had to pull himself back.
But if he wasn’t afraid of dying, then no one could control him. If he wasn’t afraid of anything, then no one could hurt him. If he didn't own anything, and nothing was his,
And if he didn’t have anyone to lose- Well. It was just better that way.
Jim learned early that people liked to be charmed.
Adults looked the other way when he smiled just right.
Strangers gave him free meals if he played his cards well.
Flirting and fucking meant a place to stay for a night.
It was easy; flirting, grinning, saying what people wanted to hear.
It didn’t matter if he meant it, so he got good at it.
He could talk his way out of a fight just as easily as he could talk his way into one.
He could get his hands on almost anything he wanted because people wanted to believe him.
It was a skill. A weapon. A way to survive. And if James Kirk knew one thing, it was to survive.
Jim knew how to get away with things.
There were rules, and then there were ways around the rules.
There were locks, and then there were ways through locks.
He figured out early that no one noticed a kid hanging around if he acted like he belonged.
He could slip into buildings, sit in on lectures, steal an extra sandwich off a cafeteria tray. P
eople only saw what they expected to see. So Jim made sure they never expected much of him.
He made himself easy to overlook. Easy to forget.
Confidence was armor. If he acted like he was the smartest guy in the room, people believed it.
If he acted like nothing could touch him, no one would try.
Cockiness kept people at arm’s length. Made them think he was untouchable.
Because the second you admitted you needed something, needed someone, that was when they could hurt you. And Jim wasn’t getting hurt again.
Someone drops a metal tray in the mess hall.
Jim flinches hard enough to spill his drink.
For a second, just a breath, it’s not a tray. It’s a gunshot. It’s someone screaming. It’s a ration crate cracked open by force, and hands reaching, reaching-
And then it’s gone. The room tilts back into place. No one notices.
He breathes out through his teeth and wipes his palms on his pants.
He hasn’t been hungry in years, but he still eats like someone might take it away.
The thing about not having a home was that there was nowhere to go at the end of the day.
Jim spent years drifting from city to city, sleeping in stolen cars, on couches, in bus stations.
He had enough sense to keep moving. To never stay long enough for someone to get tired of him. But that meant there was no one waiting for him. There was no one to check if he was alive.
Sometimes, he’d sit in a crowded diner with a cup of coffee, listening to other people talk. Families. Friends. And he’d sit there, eating slow, making it last because the longer he sat, the longer he could pretend he was just another person with somewhere to be. Then he’d leave before anyone could see through him. And the next morning, he’d wake up alone. Again.
He didn’t know why he did it.
Why he always stopped when he passed a newsstand.
Why he always scanned the headlines for something bad. He told himself it was curiosity. Just habit. Just something to fill the time.
But every time he saw an article about a missing kid, a child who’d been hurt, some tragedy on some distant colony, he felt sick.
It didn’t happen often. But when it did, when a headline hit too close to home; he’d break down. Not in public. Never in public.
But later, when he was alone, he’d press the heels of his hands against his eyes, furious with himself, breathing too hard, telling himself he wasn’t crying.
It was stupid. It was so stupid. Because he didn’t even know those kids. But sometimes, when he looked at their faces, all he could see were the ones he’d left behind. The ones who had survived. The ones who hadn’t.
And maybe, just maybe, that was why he read every single word. Because someone had to. Because someone had to remember. And if it had to be him, then fine. He could carry that weight. He always had.
The problem with running was that eventually, you ran out of road.
And Jim Kirk? He didn’t know how to stop. Didn’t know how to land.
There was no big moment. No breakdown in a rainstorm. Just the slow erosion of motion; jobs that paid less, bars that got meaner, nights that got longer. He wasn’t building anything. Just surviving. Just spinning the wheel and waiting for it to fall apart.
Sometimes, that was enough. Other times, it wasn’t.
Doesn't care about remembering peoples names. everything is temporary. Nothing sticks anyway.
The night he should've died; Jim got jumped.
Thrown against the hood of a speeder, punched so hard his vision blurred.
Someone pulled a knife.
Jim didn’t think, just reacted; grabbed a piece of scrap metal from the ground and swung.
He didn’t even check if the guy was breathing before he ran.
He crashed in his usual spot that night, heart hammering, hands shaking.
It wasn’t fear. It was something worse .
A realization.
This is it. This is my life. I get into fights, I run. I win money, I lose it. I survive, but I don’t go anywhere.
Starts working at a shipyard in Riverside, Iowa, fixing up shuttles, salvaging parts, trying to keep himself from burning out.
Waiting.
Looking for a sign.