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“Dr. Marcus finally wants to talk,” Jim answered and left, no apologies.
***
It was the first time Carol had seen Kirk since Enterprise, when he was dead and frozen inside a cryogenic tube. Tonight, Kirk was decidedly neither frozen nor dead. And she was quite drunk; had to be, or else she never would have messaged him, and he wouldn’t be sliding into the seat across from her far less smoothly than his reputation would have.
He smiled tightly. “How are you? How’s your leg?”
“It’s good,” Carol answered with a frenetic nod. She smiled, wide and distraught. “How’s your life?”
The corner of his mouth quirked up. He leaned back against the padded back of the booth and looked at her calmly. That, too, that unfailingly calm of his was nowhere to be found in the stories and rumors that circled around him.
“I still have it,” he said, almost like he meant it. “You don’t seem all right.”
Her smile faltered.
A server brought Kirk a Vintage Liberty and her another Sunrise – oh, she hadn’t seen him order those, or even look at the touch menu – and half of his was gone with the first drink. Now that was definitely part of the reputation.
“Neither do you,” she countered, and not only because it was the first retort that came to mind. For a man who’d been asleep for over two weeks, he looked like he hadn’t slept in days. Lines down his eyes carved out a sort of hollowness and, if she stared hard and long enough, she could see bloody thumbprints and hear the crack of –
There was too much alcohol in the Sunrise. It tasted dryly sour, and it burned. It didn’t matter.
Kirk frowned and his brow pulled tight. “Carol, no one outside of Command has heard from you in weeks.”
“Perhaps you’ve forgotten, but Enterprise isn’t my crew.”
She was pleased: her voice didn’t waver, and she didn’t think her words came out too awfully bitter.
Kirk closed his eyes and breathed deep. When he opened them again, he was no longer a friend, not that he’d ever been. “Please tell me you didn’t ask me here to test the limits of how much bullshit I’ll accept.”
Fair enough. She was, after all, talking to the man who had sneaked onto Enterprise twice – and she wasn’t supposed to know about that, but sometimes “the Admiral’s daughter” meant just that – and easily ended up its captain.
“I regret asking you here. I’m sorry.”
His face crinkled up and he shook his head with a pithy laugh. “Can we just...not. Christ.”
Carol was uncomfortable, the same way she’d been for twenty-nine days. It’d been nine for him; nine, and that blood was something else entirely, wasn’t it? Nine days and he was sitting here, a bottle of beer in his lap, healthy and whole after being torn apart and rebuilt, and she was the one asking for –
“I can’t sleep without having nightmares. If I’m not doing something, I’m panicking. It’s a constant adrenaline rush, and nothing I do makes any of it less.”
Carol didn’t breathe. She hadn’t expected that sort of honesty, that sort of vulnerability, not from him.
Kirk ran a hand through his hair and then two over his face, the bottoms of his palms pressing into his eyes. His hands fell into his lap, fingers curling around the bottle again.
“Spock’s like a... I have no idea. One day he’s this, the next day he’s that, and I can’t keep up with it. I guess it’s always been that way, but, god.”
Kirk shook his head and grinned, just a little. In this moment, Carol could see the Jim Kirk that Christine had described. She didn’t want to.
“That’s essentially where I am. How ‘bout you?”
Carol drew her shoulders closer to her body and pushed away the pit of panic in her stomach. It wasn’t about returning the favor of disclosure; it was about taking the chance to own her fears.
“I dream about it every night,” Carol said, eyes on her glass the entire time. “It’s strange; it’s Harrison’s teeth I remember the most clearly.”
She trailed a line of condensation along the stem of her glass, as though it was the most interesting thing in the entire universe, and didn’t dare look at Kirk. He wasn’t the person you shared your fears with. He was the person you either fucked for a night or reported to for duty; there was nothing in between.
The silence between them dragged awkwardly. Maybe Kirk was expecting her to say more. She wasn’t going to.
“His voice,” Kirk finally offered, before he brought the bottle to his lips. “No, that’s a lie. His blood. Bones says nothing will be left in a few months, but…”
The implication being: something able to put life back into your body and rebuild your every cell must leave a permanent mark. It was absolutely wrong, if remarkably honest.
Carol looked up and found him staring right at her. Any other time, it would be unnerving. Except, everyone said how blue his eyes were, but, here, in the too-dim lighting of this bar, they were nothing at all special. But they were still blue.
“Your eye color speaks for itself,” Carol offered slowly, gauging his reaction as she spoke. She saw weak relief. “Epithelium melanin deficiency caused by low-level beta radiation exposure at birth, right? What color were they supposed to be?”
Kirk took another drink, never dropping eye contact. “Hazel, they think.”
“See?” Carol said. “It didn’t touch everything. It won’t touch you.”
Kirk drained his bottle and gently set it at the edge of the table. “Carol, I was flat on my ass for over two weeks, and…”
He made this grand sort of expression and waved his hands, comical almost, but she understood what he meant. He shouldn’t be alive, let alone unbroken. Here he was anyway.
“I...”
He broke eye contact. His reputation said he was a walking cliché: all confidence, no hesitation, and he could talk, charm, and bullshit his way out of—sometimes, into—any situation. Evidently, not this one.
Carol waited. She watched him smile, bitter and unkind.
“It’s hard to be back.”
Oh. That just wasn’t acceptable. Not at all.
“My father sent you to die,” Carol said, pointed and barbed. “You can’t let him have that.”
“He sent my crew to die,” Kirk countered, and his eyes were back on her. There was life and passion in them, so disconnected from his words. “And... And it’s not like that. Look, there’s a very long list of the dead, and a very short list of those who were dragged back from it, and, on principle, I’m on the wrong damned one.”
Carol opened her mouth to say something but found she had no words prepared. Not any good ones, at least, because she very well couldn’t say that he, of all people, should know how to live with survivor’s guilt by now, even if it was true.
“What do you want?”
“I’m sorry?”
His eyebrows shot up, and he pulled the touch menu from its slot in the wall. “To drink? Wait, no, never mind. I haven’t drank since...shit, last month’s yesterday, so we’re going hard.”
Kirk’s reputation said he didn’t do things halfway. He was the best one-nighter of your life, and, afterward, you could say you had a piece of the legend. So, when a bottle of Tullamore Elite and two shot glasses appeared at the table, Carol was hardly surprised that Kirk wasted no time pouring. His reputation made it clear where he was hoping to go with all of this.
“What are we drinking to?” Carol asked, sliding a glass to her side of the table, fingers clumsy. When she lifted it, amber liquor sloshed over her fingers but she hardly cared.
“Anything you want.”
Carol could think of nothing. She downed the entire shot silently, before she remembered how much she hated whiskey, hated alcohol. There was a good reason why she ordered mixed drinks.
Kirk barely grimaced. His reputation said he was a drinker, not an eater. People couldn’t figure out how he held his liquor, and, the sad part was, he was the sort of larger-than-life celebrity—an awful word—that people actually tried to figure it out. Not many knew about how he’d spent the first year of his teens or what it had done to him; Carol almost felt guilty that she did.
Carol drank again, ignoring his raised eyebrows when she poured for both of them, and squeezed her eyes shut against the burn. When she opened them again, he was a different person: pensive, demolished, man instead of legend. She didn’t want to see that.
“I’ve been...running through everything that happened, trying to make it winnable.” He shook his head and swirled the liquor in his glass. “And this might actually be best-case. I...”
“It’s a wake-up call,” Carol said, pointedly. “It’s horrible, tragic, even, but perhaps...”
“Don’t say ‘needed.’ Because it wasn’t.”
He was so naive, idealistic and blind. It was incredible, given his background.
“You think you’re the only one whose life changed with Kelvin?” Carol asked, voice rising. Of course he did. “Because let me tell you something. It changed everything. It made your father a hero—”
“A dead one.”
Carol put her hand up, before he could dig his heels in. “And it made mine a villain. It made him a person he was never supposed to be. My mother… I didn’t believe her, until…”
She would not cry in front of Kirk. Anyone but him. She took a deep breath.
“My mother realized what person he was becoming, and she left him for it. I didn’t. I spent my life following him, learning how to build weapons and take lives, because ‘war is coming’” – Carol could hear her father’s voice, replaced by that of a madman – “whether it was a lightning storm in space or the Klingon Empire. I knew all of that. You’d be a fool to think Starfleet didn’t.”
“And, so, what?” Kirk asked, voice rising to match hers. “Twenty thousand people needed to die, to prove to Starfleet that our own fear and incompetence turned Kelvin into a kill box aimed at ourselves? Are you kidding me?!”
“You tell me. You were going to fire the torpedoes. Did you even blink when he gave you those orders?”
To his infinite credit, Kirk didn’t falter. “No. But enough good people did.”
“Well, I suppose we’ll have to hope that’s good enough.”
Kirk frowned and shook his head. Something Carol couldn’t place crossed his expression; worry, perhaps.
“It won’t be,” he breathed, more to himself than to her. “Christ, it won’t be. Shit.”
Jim slid his full glass to Carol’s side of the table, at the same time he asked, “Honest opinion?”
Carol was a little distracted by her own empty glass, which she didn’t remember emptying, but she nodded anyway. She wouldn’t remember any of this in the morning anyway.
“What are my chances?”
“Of?”
“Being a good person and making enough of a difference.”
Carol smiled, just a little. His reputation—and his file—said he was all rough edges and life experience, but he was actually a naïve child who got suckered by Christopher Pike. To be fair, she couldn’t say much better about herself.
“Truthfully, you would have been more beneficial as a too-young martyr.”
Kirk’s eyes widened, before he laughed a dorky sort of laugh with a drawn-out “oh my god” in the middle and a snort at the end. She told him he was better off dead, and he laughed.
Carol dropped her head and let out a long breath.
She didn’t want Christine to have been right about him. That for all that was said about Kirk, it either wasn’t true or was far behind him. That he would listen and be supportive. That he cared more than he had to. That if there was anyone’s ship to sneak onto, it was his.
It was much easier to write-off the imaginary version of him. She didn't want to think of the real person inside of that body bag, or of what he'd done to get himself there, and she didn't want to know how close her father had come to manipulating, using, and murdering a good, good person.
“Maybe,” Kirk nodded, his smile nearly gone. “But the right song can bring down dynasties.”
“Oh, you sing?”
“Hope so.”
Carol had no idea what singing had to do with any of this, but what the hell. Why not?
“Can I ask you a question?” When Kirk nodded, Carol tore right in: “Do you really not remember Christine Chapel?”
Kirk tilted his head to the side and smirked, ugly. Carol felt a spike of panic.
“Never said I didn’t. I know my crew, thanks.”
“I—I didn’t mean to offend you,” Carol stammered, all of a sudden unsure of herself. Rare. And also why she tended not to drink.
“Yeah, you didn’t. A while back, Christine wrote this paper about—” Kirk’s eyebrows went high, his hand waving in the air. “—I can’t even tell you. I read it, and I got some of it, but I’m no doctor. She probably should be. It’s a shame she left.”
Carol’s throat was tight. “You read her papers?”
“Reports, papers, whatever,” Kirk answered. “It’s about the only way I’ve found to stay current with a crew that big. Stellar Cartographers are batshit, by the way. If it ever comes up. But don’t tell any of them I said that.”
A smiled pulled at his lips, and there was a happy, contented spark in his eyes, the first she’d seen all night. There was no question, if there’d ever been: Enterprise was his everything.
Carol couldn’t help but smile herself. He was contagious, and not the way his reputation sometimes said.
“Christine told me to trust you. I owe you an apology for doubting her.”
Kirk shook his head. “You owe yourself one. Crew’s family, Carol. It’s something I’m still figuring it out, but there’s nothing else like it.”
Family, he said. What could he possibly know about family, an ugly, horrible part of her wondered. Carol looked down, feeling more distant and alone after his words than she had for nearly an entire month.
She drank his shot, eyes closed tight against the burn.
“Enterprise is a family. You’re already a part of it.”
Carol swallowed, her eyes suddenly stinging—the alcohol, it’s the alcohol—and felt his hand—warm and alive—cover hers.
“You were amazing, Carol. You are amazing. What you did—for Bones, for all of us—is incredible. Your father doesn’t define you.”
Her throat constricted, and her chest tightened. She didn’t... She couldn’t...
It was too much. He was too much.
Carol was out of the booth and standing before she could even think through the decision, mumbling things like “I’m sorry” and “I have to leave” and “I can’t do this.”
The bar spun, her head pounded, and she felt disgustingly, horribly nauseous. Walking was an impossible nightmare and shit, shi—
“Where are you staying?”
Kirk’s arm was around her: steadying, gentle, and absolutely mortifying. He smelled like leather, sonic shower, and hospital.
“Presidio, um, Gardens. Presidio Gardens. It’s just a few blocks—”
“Yeah, I know where that is.”
The outside air was glorious, cool and brisk against her flushed face. She swallowed against queasiness and an awful prickle in the back of her throat. She regretted this entire night: every single bit of it. She’d drunk herself into a incapacitation and needed James fucking Kirk, of all people, to walk her home.
“This is embarrassing. I—”
“You’re too hard on yourself. Ask Bones for a couple of stories about me,” Kirk interrupted, more genuine than anyone had the right to be. “There’s a lot of throwing up, passing out in drool, and poor-me rants involved, I’m pretty sure. Bar fights, too. Too many of those.”
Carol looked up and found him grinning.
“He’ll take care of things,” Christine had said. “It’s his job,” she’d said. “Trust him.”
“I don’t think I have a choice,” Carol had answered, when she really meant but was too polite to have said, “My father’s just handed over an insane payload to a fucknut who got lost after one too many bar fights. I absolutely don’t have a choice.”
Kirk was wrong: she absolutely owed him an apology.
“Who should I comm?” Kirk asked. “To stay with you tonight?”
Carol ignored his question. She could do something better than apologize. If Kirk was really worth a damn after all this, he’d know what to do with it. He’d know how to be a better person and make enough of a difference.
“Mianda Zero.”
“Who?” Kirk asked.
“Not ‘who,’ what.”
Just outside Carol’s building, Kirk’s arm left her body, and he moved to stand facing her. Carol could laugh at the overly serious, oh so determined expression on his face.
“What’s Mianda Zero?”
Carol blinked against the glimmer of the street lamps. Here, on this picturesque curb, under the lights, his eyes were bright, crystal blue. “Touched by space, Kiddo,” her father used to say of his own: the same color, the same depth, the same foolish glory. All the same.
“Carol, what’s Mianda Zero?”
Carol smiled and reached up, only a little bit dizzy and her stomach only a little knotted, and smoothed the collar of Kirk’s jacket. It didn’t need smoothing. She didn’t know why she did it, and she didn’t know why he let her.
“Good night, Captain.”
Carol turned and made her way inside her building. She fully expected but didn’t want him to call out to her, demanding an even easier answer than the one she’d already given him.
The lobby door hissed closed behind her, loud against the silence. She didn’t look back.
--end