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The taxi is halfway to the spaceport when Jules calls, “Kirk!”
Amsha smiles and reaches into the side pocket of the duffel. She’s devoted one of two carry-on bags entirely to Jules - snacks, toys, craft projects - anything that could keep him occupied while they wait to transport to the ship in orbit. But the stiff rectangle of the padd she’s sure she packed is conspicuously absent.
“Kirk!” Jules calls again, more insistently. Amsha pats the bag down, then opens it and begins a full-on rummage, her stomach sinking.
“What’s he want?” Richard asks, practically shouting over the child between them chanting “Kirk! Kirk! Kirk!”
“His favorite story,” Amsha says, still frantically searching for the padd she’s now convinced isn’t there. As Jule’s demands go, that one wasn’t hard to interpret, she thinks, but pushes down her frustration. Another few weeks, and those problems will be gone. She leans forward and keys their address into the terminal, turning the taxi around.
“What are you doing? We’ll miss the transport!” Richard says, now screaming over what promises to be one of Jules’ nastier tantrums. “We can get a new padd once we’re on the Diego.”
“You want him to be like this all the way through the spaceport?” Amsha can barely make herself heard, and the taxi is suddenly too small, and some part of her just wants to be done with her child and her husband. To land the taxi, step outside, and walk away from them both. She breathes. She takes Jules, now throwing himself against the safety restraints, into her arms. He doesn’t settle, but she moves with him, absorbing his wild flailing.
He’s getting too big for her.
“I’ll run in, grab the padd, and run back out,” she tells Richard. “We’ve got time.”
As it turns out, Amsha is right. The family arrives at the gate with fifteen minutes to spare, Jules clutching his padd in one hand and Kukalaka in the other, either placated or exhausted. Amsha isn’t superstitious. But she figures that if she were looking for a sign - that they’re doing the right thing, that they’re meant to go to Adgideon Prime - this is it.
===
This isn’t his room. This isn’t his bed. There are people he doesn’t know - strange people - in this room. In the hallways. The food doesn’t feel right in his mouth. The water is wrong somehow. He wants to go home. A light blinks on the wall beside him. He wants to look away, but it draws him in, insistent, enthralling. He flinches away from it, tries to sink deeper into the bed, to hide; shoves his hands under the blankets. Resistance. Amma is holding his hand, still. She stirs, smiles at him, her face calling him away from the flashes of light.
“Did you get some sleep?”
He shakes his head. He doesn’t think he’s ever fallen asleep in this room. But that doesn’t make sense, since he remembers waking up.
“Need a story?” He nods. “Kirk?” He nods more emphatically. Not letting go of his hand, Amma gets out the padd, scoots him over in bed, and curls around him. The padd turns on, opening to the front page, his favorite page. It shows a human man, good-looking, steely-eyed, and a tall, scary sort of alien in an unfamiliar wilderness. In the sky is a jumble of thick, curvy lines and the outline of a spaceship.
“The Adventures of Captain Kirk,” Amma says. “Number 23. The Arena.” She moves to advance to the next page, but he holds back her hand, captivated by the drawing. He traces the outline of the man with one finger. He leans into Amma.
He doesn’t remember falling asleep.
===
Jules arrives back on Earth a month after his seventh birthday. Well, not back, exactly. They’re in a new house, in an unfamiliar city. London , Appa says. Jules is… unsettled. That’s the right word for it, he decides. He’d expected to go back to the brick house with the mango tree after their vacation. Amma and Appa couldn’t have forgotten to tell him they were moving. Could they? He... doesn’t remember.
It’s colder here, darker. All the colors seem duller, and yet more distinct, and that can’t be right, either. It’s the light through the clouds , Amma says. You’ll get used to it. You’ll see.
Amma takes him for a walk one afternoon, during a break in the rain. She holds onto his hand, but he’s eager to move, pulling her along, playing balance beam on sidewalk cracks, twirling under her outstretched arm. She smiles. Three blocks down, two to the left, and Amma’s pulling him into a building that isn’t his house. Jules hesitates, drawing closer to her.
“It’s all right,” Amma says. “This is your new library.” She opens the door and tugs on his arm, and he allows himself to be led inside.
The first thing he notices is the padds. Under every person’s arm, stacked next to computer terminals, rolling past on carts, waiting on shelves. High windows that catch what little London sun they can send beams scattering over the padds, jumping from screen to screen, making spots appear in front of his eyes. He blinks.
“Wouldn’t you like some different stories?” Amma asks. Jules glances up at Amma, confused. “How about a different one about Kirk? I’m sure they have some here.” A different one? Jules had only ever thought about the one Amma told to him, with that scary alien - Gorn , he corrects himself. But then, wait - Number 23 - that’s always what Amma would say at the beginning. People don’t start counting at 23. There must be others. Why had he never thought about that before…?
“You still… like Kirk, right, Jules?” And now Jules is totally lost because Amma’s face has changed, and it takes him a second before he remembers what that kind of face means: fear. But the thought of TWENTY-TWO new stories about Captain Kirk and the Enterprise grips him, and now it’s him pulling Amma deeper into the building, and Amma is laughing, and everything about today is perfect.
They settle on one of the reading couches, Jules holding a stack of padds balanced under his chin. Amma carefully sets the stack on the ground, pulls one off the top, turns it on.
“KIRK!” Jules shouts when he sees the cover, loud enough that Amma jumps.
“Yes, that’s right, that’s Kirk,” Amma says, pointing at the human. This time he’s sitting on the bridge of a starship, looking into the middle distance.
“No, there! Kirk!” Jules says, stabbing a finger at a group of straight, thick lines at the top. They suddenly have meaning to him. And the word next to it - Captain. The twisting strokes have put an idea in his brain and how did that happen?
“The Adventures of Captain Kirk,” he says, “Number… one two. Twelve. The-” and here the black lines have left him, though they look similar to some of the other ones. No, beyond that. Some of them are the same.
“The Journey to Babel,” says Amma, squeezing him around the shoulders. She goes to the next page, and there again are the words, jumping out at him, demanding to be heard. Were they always there, in his copy of The Adventures of Captain Kirk, Number 23? How had he missed them before?
“Captain Kirk sits in his ship,” he says. Reads . And the thought of what all these padds contain, all the padds in this room, in this building, crashes over him. Information. This shimmering, glistening place of words, waiting for him, ready for him now that Jules can hear them just by looking.
Jules plows through the stack, moving faster and faster, and the stories start to seem shorter and shorter. He spent hours, days, on Number 23, and it had contained multitudes, but these stories end almost before they begin. Jules tosses the last padd - Number 37, The Lights of Zetar - onto the “read” pile and sighs.
“Wait here,” Amma says, and moves off down the rows of shelves. She’s back in a few minutes with another padd, which she hands to him.
“The Arena,” he reads. “But I know this one.”
“See the little three?” Amma asks, pointing to the corner of the padd’s case. “That means it’s a little harder. It’s longer, and the words are different.”
Jules flips to the first page. The text is smaller, more detailed, and there are answers here, answers to questions he hadn’t thought to ask about Captain Kirk and the Gorn, not in all the time he’s been asking Amma for the Kirk story, and that’s as long as he can remember. He feels the strange world of Captain Kirk come to life: the people of the Enterprise; the harsh landscape of Cestus III; the struggle of the hero, standing alone, defending Earth and the Federation. It’s everything he didn’t know he could want.
The light moves up the walls, then dims. “Time to get home, Jules,” Amma says. “Appa’s probably getting worried.”
“Can we come back tomorrow?” Jules pleads, fingers tight around the edges of the padd.
“Well, I suppose so,” says Amma, “but you know we can choose some to take home with us, right?”
It’s the best day of Jules’ life.
===
The presents have all been unwrapped, the cake destroyed, and the friends sent home. From his room, Jules hears Amma and Appa moving through the house, picking up plates and spilled food and bits of wrapping paper, the carnage left by twelve preteens. He wanders back downstairs, peers around the corner. Amma and Appa have taken positions on opposite sides of the living room, shuffling through it like they’re sweeping for mines.
“Amma? Appa? Are you… forgetting something?”
“Oh no, don’t tell me Javier got left behind again,” Amma says. “How they manage to lose track of that child-”
“No, uh… a present,” he says, feeling himself blush. “The box that came last week. I think it was for me.”
“It was fertilizer for the garden,” says Amma, hands on hips, but he sees the corners of her mouth twitch.
“That’s right, the rat poison!” says Appa. “Or the small box of rocks! Nothing you’d be interested in.” He moves toward Jules and ruffles his hair, grinning. “Can’t put one over on my son, eh? He’s getting too clever for us, Amsha.” Amma’s face cracks, and they each take one of Jules’ hands and lead him into the dining room, clearing the space in front of Jules of the worst of the party detritus. Amma produces a box wrapped in shiny blue paper and hands it off. Jules almost drops it; it’s much heavier than he had expected.
“From Appa and me,” Amma says.
Jules rips into the paper and discovers it’s not a box, but a single object. A book , he realizes. And an enormous one, at that. He’s seen them before, behind glass, but never touched one. Such an inefficient way to store information. But it’s beautiful. He lets it fall open to the middle, pages shuffling, choosing sides. He flattens them delicately, using the sides of his hands, afraid of getting a single grease print on the perfect pages.
“Is it paper?” he asks in astonishment.
“Well, replicated paper,” says Appa. “No trees were harmed, and all that. We had it made especially for you.”
“Go on, look at the cover,” Amma urges.
Jules shuts the book again and sees, this time, the embossed outline of a starship on the front cover, heaves the book onto its side to read the title on the spine aloud: “The Enterprise Missions: 2273-2293.” The bio-novels he’s been begging his parents to let him read for two years, ever since he found out there was a whole other section of the library just for adults.
“We decided you’re old enough,” Amma says.
Jules looks at the book, then at his parents, then back to the book. He knows he’s grinning like an idiot; he can’t help it.
“Well, go on, then!” says Amma, and Jules leaps up, gives each of his parents a one-armed hug (the book held tightly in the other) and slightly-too-loud thank you! and races up the stairs to his room. He makes sure everything is perfect - his lamp at the right angle, a cup of water on his bedside table - before he settles himself under the covers and opens to the first page.
The book is actually a collection of six bio-novels, judging by the table of contents, and Jules hadn’t known he was capable of more excitement, but he flips to the first title page as quickly as he can without damaging it. The physical book feels awkward at first, heavy in his lap, the thin sheets so fragile, but as he reads he feels it has its own gravity, physically drawing him into the story, making it an extension of himself.
The first book is… disappointing. It spends a lot of time on flowery language and new characters, and not nearly enough time, he thinks, on Kirk. They don’t even go anywhere; they barely even make it out of the solar system. He finishes it around midnight and shrugs to himself. May as well keep going.
Five pages into the second book, and things are looking up. Khan’s back, and Jules can’t help but love his particular brand of crazy. Jules always liked the more over-the-top villains in the Captain Kirk stories. He likes the clear lines between the Enterprise crew and the Other, the distinctions between heroes and villains crisp and neat. And he likes how that sort of villain can bring his whole force to bear, no qualms, no hesitation, which makes Kirk’s ultimate triumph that much more satisfying. He sinks lower in his bed and pulls the book tighter.
Two and a half hours later, and Jules is weeping. It was the don’t grieve line that got him started, he thinks, and now he doesn’t know how to stop, but he also doesn’t think he wants to. It feels good, like it’s hollowing him out, the tears coming from some reservoir of feeling he didn’t know he had, leaving him lighter, and he thinks he’s almost reached a stopping point when he thinks again about Kirk and Spock and knows, suddenly, in the core of himself, that he could never have something like that. He loves his parents, has fun with his friends, has even wondered what it might be like to kiss Mei, the girl who sits across from him in math, but the sheer strength of this feeling is something he could never have. And that thought sets him off again, tears welling up from some previously untapped source until he is finally, truly emotionally exhausted.
He could go on to the third book - it wouldn’t be the latest he’s ever stayed up reading - but he closes it instead and turns off the lamp. Jules doesn’t open it again for three weeks. It’s not that he doesn’t like it or he isn’t curious. He just wants to hold this feeling inside himself for a little longer.
===
Julian lies on his bed, staring at the ceiling. He’s got a mild case of the Bolian flu - that’s what he heard Mother telling the school, anyway. He’ll be a little tired for a week or so, but back on his feet in no time.
It’s been a week, and he feels the same.
He told his parents he needed time to think, but all he’s realized in seven days is that he won’t be able to think his way out of this one. He needs to talk to someone. Impossible. There’s no one in the universe distant enough to be impartial, but close enough to be trusted. Not with this.
Mother left a stack of replicated paper and a pen - a real pen, with ink - outside his door on day four. He understood her suggestion: Try keeping a journal, but off the grid, and be sure to destroy it afterwards. He put the items on his desk and hasn’t touched them since. He knows she’s worried about him.
Father’s only worried he’s going to fuck up.
He’s not. What would be the point? Burn it all down, leave his parents to rot in some penal colony, consign himself to scrutiny and mediocrity, and for what? A middle finger to the people who gave him not just life, but his… self? He’s Julian fucking Bashir; he’s cleverer than that.
That name. Julian. The name he writes on forms in doctors’ offices and in standardized test booklets. Is that who he is, now?
His copy of The Enterprise Missions sits on his bedside table where he left it a week ago. Its presence is like an accusation. Captain Kirk has been his frame of reference his whole life - for heroism, for friendship, for facing death, for doing the Right Thing no matter how costly or impossible. He has no frame of reference for this - this changeling occupying his body who is also irrevocably, indelibly, him.
Well, that’s not strictly true. Kirk faced this. Just not in the mirror. It’s why Julian hasn’t moved the book somewhere out of sight. He’s afraid, bizarrely, that it will know.
Julian has always known he’s different, special, destined for glory. But it never once occurred to him that he might be the villain.
Julian said he wanted to think, so he thinks. All this time in isolation, and he only feels more trapped in his own body, his own mind. Nothing, at the end of the day, that he can do about it. Not and still be him. All that’s left: to smooth this gap in continuity, blur the transition between Jules and Julian, play off this listless bitterness, this gaping chasm opening between him and his parents, as typical teen angst.
Julian goes back to school. He starts introducing himself as Julian, and pretty soon his friends, the people he’s known for eight years, have switched over too, without even noticing. He focuses more on his science courses and less on the tennis team. He’s going to do good in the world, dammit, or die trying. He’ll prove it to all of them - to his parents, to the book now safely tucked away at the back of the closet, but mostly to himself.
His singular acknowledgement of the new person he’s becoming, the person he’s always been: When Rose shows him her new illustrated edition of Turnabout Intruder and he sniffs, shrugs. “I found this new biofic series on Erika Hernandez. She’s amazing; I’ll loan you my copy. I just don’t find Kirk that interesting anymore.”
===
Six hours until his transport to the Academy, and he’s only started thinking about what to pack. Mother did warn him. He just figured, once he got the acceptance letter, that all the other details would work themselves out. His parents are proud of him. And once he leaves this house, there’s absolutely no reason for him to come back.
Which really only serves to emphasize the fact that he should have thought harder about what to take with him.
Clothes are easy - he takes the seven best outfits he has, the ones he’s sure are cool. He’ll replicate the rest when he gets to San Francisco and sees what everyone else is wearing.
Kukalaka is a given. If his dormmates want to make fun of him for having a stuffed bear, they can just shove it. The other stuff, though - what he’ll put on his shelves and walls, the music and holonovels he’ll tell people he likes. The new self he’s about to create.
You reinvent yourself every few years, Julian, he thinks darkly. Seems you ought to be getting better at it.
Julian takes a deep breath and starts in on the closet, working top to bottom, tossing keepers into his duffel and rejects into a haphazard pile on the floor. This is his last night as a permanent resident of this house. What does it matter if he leaves a mess? High school biology notes - yes. Xindi mystery holonovels - absolutely. The photo album from his family’s trip to Vulcan when he was 13 - certainly not.
And then he gets to it - the book at the far back of the closet. And damn, that’s a tricky one. Kirk: Definitely cool, especially at the Academy. An actual, paper book: The HEIGHT of cool. He’d probably be the only person on his floor with a book with flippable pages. The sinking, churning feeling in his stomach whenever he looks at it: Less cool.
Two years and change, and he can’t escape it. He wants to be James Kirk. More than anything. To do what Kirk does, have what Kirk has, know who Kirk knows. But he’s the thing Kirk stands against, the thing that, in its opposition, throws Kirk into sharper relief. The best he can hope for is to be functional, useful. He’ll never be the hero, the paragon of virtue, the poster child for the Federation, and that’s the difference, isn’t it, between doing good and being good.
But damned if he won’t try for it anyway. He places the book, gently, in the duffel.