Work Text:
Jim doesn't quite remember how long it's been since he began cradling the galaxy in his hands, but he knows it's been far to long. The weight that used to feel like a marble has become equivalent to that of a boulder while he was turned away, his arms feel like jelly and his palms have begun to blister with the effort of supporting something so terrifyingly massive and minuscule at the same time.
Not just this, but Jim is afraid, afraid that if he lets go for just one second that the boulder will crumble to dust, that everything good will fall away once there's nothing holding it in place. He's afraid that if he loosens his grip, the cracks that have been pasted together by his blood and sweat will break away, exposing his broken treause's nasty wounds to the rancid air that fills his very lungs.
So he keeps holding on, even as the boulder begins to burn his tender hands and his body starts to wither, because he can't let go, he can't allow his precious world to end. Even when his flesh becomes irradiated and his hair begins to fall out. This galaxy is his to protect, his home, his universe, his world. And when his brittle fingers finally turn to bloody muscle, and then to bone, a shining sphere slips from his grip, polished to a glimmering finish by the blood and care and tears of its holder.
His body becomes mere molecules, they spread throughout the universe. Many finding a place and growing bright and warm there, stars, thousands of pieces of Jim, shining in tandem, enveloping their precious treasure in light, but never touching it, as it journeys out on its own. He continues to watch when he can keeping one eye open at all times, one still blazing with the fiery protection he'd promised to provide, and the other milky and battered, at peace, the sun and moon.
That shimmering sphere drifts out into the cosmos, no longer shielded by Jim's choking embrace, finding companions similar to it in form. The memory of Jim remains however, in the deep fissures where he'd dug his thinning fingers in so deep, and in the running water that flows within those fissures, dropped there from his overtired tear ducts. It remains in the wind, the remnants of his puffing, pleading pants for breath as his withered heart collapsed beneath the brittle bone of his rib cage. He is remembered in the burning warmth, deep within the core of his shiny treasure, brought there by the blood that had seeped from his blistered palms into the very layers of its being, occasionally finding it's way back to the surface, scorching the surface and rolling over the lands with a fiery vengeance.
Jim watches, in the silence of space as his planet begins to flourish, as creatures emerge from salty depths. He watches when they begin to crawl, and even still when they learn to stand upright. He desperately wants to weep when sentience takes hold in the minds of the products of his efforts, but finds his tear ducts as dry as the deserts of his precious world. When they learn to build, they create a way to travel to the stars, to him, and he welcomes them readily.
And when a disintegrating starship leaves behind the ruins of a family, James T. Kirk opens his radioactive blue eyes and screams, for he has been ripped away from the cosmic blanket he's always known. He'll dream of the stars for the rest of his eternity, and he'll find another treasure to protect, to carve his very being into. Something to hold on to so tight that the hull will creak under his grip, a starship, and a family, and so, so many new worlds to protect and to leave in the hands of those capable enough to make them shine like the stars he had once been. To polish the riches they have been entrusted with until no one can look upon them without a sense of wonder, for how could something be so beautiful.
So Jim runs, and he explores, and he loves, and he keeps on running, but this time there are others and he cares for them just like he did for his first treasure. He bleeds and he sweats and when he's become too fixated on protecting his jewels, instead of disintegrating like he did once before, his jewels love him back, they mend his cracking bones and raw hands, he'll never waste away, not if a few enterprising young people and their home, and their allies have anything to say about it. How could they let someone who cares so much destroy himself in his attempts to hold them close, and if sometimes, out of the corner of their eyes, they see Jim glowing an unearthly glow, luminous like the stars above, dazzling and dizzying at the same time, they'll say that it's fitting. After all, how could anyone but a beautiful deity be so like Jim, so kind but so vain, so brave, but so fragile.
When they see him gazing into space, as if it's the only place he wants to be. Like the pull of the cosmos is overwhelming, as if he wants to stretch his arms out as far as he can and embrace every inch like he's greeting an old friend. They say nothing, because how could you? Who could separate such dedication from a man. His family watch silently from their seats on the bridge as a strange melancholy fills their Captain, a sad indecipherable joy. They know not of the time before, the time before his sentience filled the cosmos, the time before he was ripped away. The have no idea that his very blood and bone ripples through the universe like it was always meant to be there. They'll never fully understand his longing to touch the stars that he used to be. Jim acknowledges this in the ways he he keeps them close, in the way he pulls them back from danger. He acknowledges it with a firm hand on their shoulders or a nod of encouragement, because they don't know how silent the universe can be, they've never heard the echoing waves in the empty expanse or listened to a red dwarf go supernova with nothing to muffle the sound.
Oh yes, Jim loves his treasures, he cares just like he always has. He'll never be ready to let go, and eventually they'll slip through his fingers of their own volition, but this time he'll watch it happen with glee. He's seen what his treasures become without him, watched them flourish and sing and glimmer, and this time Jim won't mind seeing them, dancing like flames through his memories, coming and going and shimmering just as brightly.
The universe may have been dark and lonely in the beginning, but now it's filled with light, almost blinding in it's intensity. The glow of a million lives and a billion carefully polished planets. They're singing in harmony, unaware of their creator who walks among them with a mischievous grin, allowing a glimpse at a set of glimmering teeth and he pats their shoulders with hard, callused hands, reassuring and comforting and his presence a shield in and of itself.