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New Orleans.
The French Quarter on the Monday before Fat Tuesday.
The heat, the smell, the noise were like living things that enfolded James Kirk in a suffocating embrace. The street was littered with broken strands of gaudy beads and trampled feathers, souvenirs left from the parades of the days before. He wondered again just exactly what he was doing there, standing in the street in front of one of the Quarter's most famous jazz clubs.
The Café Jazz had survived the centuries untouched, like its musical inspiration, and like the city that gave it a voice. It was small, dark and cramped, half-shabby and half-glamorous, a microcosm of the Vieux Carré, a musical reflection of all that New Orleans had been for the last five centuries.
Kirk hesitated outside the door. This was not a place he had ever expected to be. Jazz had never appealed to him. Too undefined, too undisciplined, too hard to anticipate.
New Orleans had never held much appeal either. The place seemed frozen in time. For a man who had built his life looking towards the future, the Big Easy seemed too mired in its past. But, since the end of his five-year mission, James Kirk had found himself in too many situations that he had never anticipated. Why should one more surprise him?
The crowd on the street pushed him toward the door of the dark and smoky club. Kirk looked around for his crew. No, not his crew anymore. His friends still, he hoped. They were supposed to meet him there. They had clearly taken pity on him, and arm-twisted him into meeting them in New Orleans.
He supposed that he had seemed rather disoriented since the return of the Enterprise and her crew. The parties and the interviews had finally, mercifully, ended. His crew had dispersed, and Kirk found himself at Ops.
Behind a desk.
Another place he had never intended to be.
McCoy had resigned from Starfleet in a rage when the Admirals ignored his recommendations about Kirk's assignment. Spock had returned to Vulcan, and the captain still did not really understand why. Scotty was the only one still aboard the Enterprise, supervising a refit.
He only knew that he felt alone and disconnected from the life that he had led only a few short months ago and the people who had formed the center of that life. He was cut off from the only existence that he had trained for, or had ever wanted.
He found himself wondering what he could possibly to do for the rest of his life.
Kirk figured he'd catch up with his fellow officers inside the club. A bored cashier took his credits without a second glance. He looked around the tiny room and was surprised not to see his companions. Kirk found a small table near the stage. He resolved to stay for one song and then leave as inconspicuously as possible.
The room darkened and when the lights came back up, five musicians stood on the low stage very near to Kirk's table.
Drums, piano, saxophone, bass guitar, and a woman vocalist were draped with a soft glow that seemed to come from within the stage. They stood completely still, breathing in the hazy, humid air, and then without a visible signal from any musician, the music began. The sounds of jazz wove around the room, each instrument, each voice together and yet separate. Kirk heard the music and felt it as if it invaded every cell of his body.
The rhythms of the club became the rhythms of the bridge as they coursed around the captain's command chair. The syncopated drumbeat of engine noise throbbed under the soprano melodies of the computers. Soft voices of the bridge crew came and went, adding their harmonies to the undertones of the air filters, the percussive beat of the warp engines, the smooth timbre of the artificial gravity generators.
Without conscious thought, Captain James Kirk again sat at the center of the music of his ship and absorbed it. He took it in subliminally, as when one hears something so familiar that it is almost unnecessary to listen. He pushed his back against the command chair so that he didn't so much hear the ship as feel it. The heartbeat of the Enterprise vibrated through his skin, and pulsed along with his blood. The ship felt right. It felt alive. Without really being aware of it, the captain drew comfort, a sense of solace from the music of his command.
The resonance of his ship was a source of consolation to the man who was responsible for every thing, every person, every decision that was made onboard the Enterprise. This was the life he had wanted, trained for, competed for, as he had labored to become the captain of a starship. The voice of the Enterprise was a voice that sang to him. The engines beat their rhythms for him. The computers created harmonies out of dissonance for him.
This was his life.
Lost in the music, lost in his memories, James Kirk sat for hours as the five musicians wove their musical spell around him. The jazz seemed to go on forever. He could not tell when one song stopped and another began.
Finally though, it ended. As did everything that he had ever cared about in his life. The musicians played one final chord and began to pack up their instruments. Kirk got up from his table and went to the stage to thank them. But, when he tried to speak, words would not come. There was no way to tell these five gifted strangers that for a few hours they had given him back a part of his life that he thought never to have again. He only hoped that somehow they might know how much they had moved him.
As he entered the street, still warm and humid as New Orleans nights in March so often are, James Kirk wasn't sure whether this evening had been a blessing or a curse. To have something back that was lost forever, even for a few hours was a kind of miracle.
To loose it again was very hard. But, James Kirk was used to hard. He walked down the littered streets, towards the transporter and … what? Not home. Home was orbiting Space Dock. Without him.
Kirk could not help but wonder how he had let this happen. Somewhere, in the night air, perhaps in a club that had not yet closed, the siren strains of jazz softly wrapped their voices around him, and he vowed to himself that somehow he would return home, to the music of the Enterprise and his crew, and the heartbeat of his life.