Chapter Text
A cosmic joke.
A twisted sadistic nightmare conjured up by the same muses of fate that decided James T. Kirk couldn’t live happily. But by the gods he would live.
One second he’s dying, radiation leaking into him like fire, every nerve in his body screaming in agony as he finally gets to hear Spock call him a friend. He wants to stay. But there’s nothing Jim can do except let his eyes glaze over and unfocus.
Once it’s done, in a way, it’s a relief. He’s been moving for so long, he forgot what it was like to stand still. The crew is safe. He’s done his job. Maybe he finally did something right.
Resentment, neglect, and incident after incident had hardened him. Had left him unbearably exhausted. Born in a cosmic disaster, only fitting he should die in one. He’s scared, terrified even. He has no choice but to accept it.
Not even James T. Kirk can crawl into a warp core and survive.
Then his eyes snap open with a jerk of his head, and he sees Uhura - dressed in cadet reds and looking at him with some level of annoyance.
Exactly as she had the morning after the night they met, on the shuttle to the Academy.
“Once you exit the shuttle you are free to return to your dorms. Those of you who are new, you’ll follow me to registration and physicals,” a vaguely familiar-looking officer says, and Jim’s heart stops in his chest. Surprising, considering it shouldn’t be beating at all.
It is all exactly as he remembers it, right down to the smell of alcohol still clinging to his clothes, making his eyes water. Even the heavy throb in his head from getting the shit kicked out of him the night before at the bar. Every last noise leaves behind a stinging pain in the back of his head where a hangover lives.
Something is wrong. Very wrong.
That familiar feeling in his gut tells him so.
Is he really in the past?
Or is it some kind of illusion? A telepathic projection based on memories? Maybe he’s dead right now and hell is repeating the Academy over and over … or... or maybe he somehow survived the radiation by the grace of Bones and is in a coma?
Because there is no way his first thought is correct. There is no way that he is actually in the past.
But that’s one of the things he’s come to know about himself.
His instincts are usually right.
Not always…but usually.
“Thank God,” he hears the familiar, gruff voice. He knows there’s only five years separating his Bones and whatever this version of him is. But he can’t help thinking that Bones looks better in the future. Well, compared to this drunken mess, anyone would look better. But maybe, somewhere along the way, they both found their purpose on the Enterprise. “I thought it’d never be over.”
Jim feels like he should be the one to say it.
“At least you made it through without throwing up,” he comments, something similar to what he’d said the first time around, almost like an echo. But the words taste like bile on his tongue.
The more he looks around, the more it feels real.
Is it possible that he’s really five years in the past, somehow? Before his death, before Chris’s death, before Nero?
Before the destruction of Vulcan, and billions of her people?
“New recruits, follow me.” And Jim does. He’ll play along until he finds his footing - until he can confirm whether he’s really traveled back in time, or if this is an illusion or hell or a hallucination of his irradiated brain.
Almost instantly, he’s thrown a PADD and instructed to fill out a recruitment form.
Rationally - he dare not think ‘logically’ - he knows that time travel is possible. Ambassador Spock is proof of that; Jim saw it in the mind meld they’d shared. But to suddenly be in his own past, in a body almost five years younger. Still hungover from a last night of freedom.
His face still aches.
It shouldn’t be real.
It feels so real.
He’d been on the Enterprise and as far as he knows they hadn’t entered any wormholes or ion storms or other spatial or temporal anomalies. And if the Enterprise had entered some temporal disturbance, where are the others? It doesn’t seem like Uhura or Bones remember anything - and neither of them are as good at faking it as he is, so he thinks he’d know.
Why would he come back alone? And why in this body, rather than his own radiation-flooded corpse?
“Kirk?” the recruitment officer says, her voice half dubious and half curious. Then he sees the moment she realizes where she knows that name, like she just remembered a history lesson and why the name Kirk rings a bell. The pity sets in.
It’s a look Jim knows all too well.
The officer clears her throat as Jim raises a hand in acknowledgement. “Right, go into that room, there’s a uniform for you there. Wait for a nurse. First is your physical.”
“Thanks,” he says half-heartedly, somehow walking rather than running into the room for the first moment of privacy since his apparent resurrection. Pulling the door closed, he lets out a steadying breath.
An hour ago, Jim had no choice but to come to terms with the fact he was going to die. He’d been choking on his own irradiated airways as he reasoned with himself that the lives of his crew mattered more. Gasping for air, he’d found himself regretting that he’d ever been trusted with the captaincy. The thought loomed in his mind as he realigned the core that another captain wouldn’t have gotten his crew into that much danger in the first place.
He changes into the cadet uniform, and then Jim takes another deep breath. He’s staring at his bruised face in the mirror; he’d forgotten how much he hates this drab red. The shade is terrible for his complexion, the wide shoulders make him appear too broad, and the high collar constantly chokes him.
The shimmering gold of command is far more flattering.
Jim had closed his eyes behind a door, fingers pressed to glass with Spock reaching out. He laid a hand gently to the mirror. Cold to the touch, and he opens his eyes, and the only person looking back at Jim is his own reflection.
What is he now? A dead man walking? A ghost in a man’s shell? A temporal anomaly?
Despite the existential questions weighing down on him, his mind returns - again and again - to: “Because you are my friend.” It makes him want to cry, scream, throw a punch. Something. Anything. But most of all he wants to see Spock. To see that he’s okay. To look into those dark eyes and not see pain or grief - or tears.
He removes his hand from the mirror and takes another deep breath in through his nose.
“Welcome new cadets!” A poster in the small exam room reads, and Jim shuts his eyes again. He’d be lying to himself if he said that the strange pang of nostalgia doesn’t help to push back the rising panic and horror.
If he’s really in the past, this is before it all. Before three years of Academy training. Before the Kobayashi Maru. Before Nero and Vulcan’s destruction. Before Ambassador Spock came back to his past and Jim’s, now, future. Before Chris Pike was killed because Jim wasn’t quick enough, wasn’t able to put the pieces together faster. Before Khan killed him. Before Khan…
Before all of the lives that were ruined because of the political plays for power and the struggles of simple-minded men. Before Admiral Marcus. Before the disillusionment of Starfleet’s shining reputation.
Jim doesn’t know where to start with all of this “before” placed in his lap. There is no way to figure out if this is all some kind of prison meant to punish him or just plain karmic cruelty. After all, every time he tries to do better, to be better, he makes things worse - or so everyone enjoys telling him.
But if this is real, if he really is five years in his own past, then the foreknowledge that he holds is a dangerous map that could lead them all down so many different paths of destruction.
Or salvation.
So assuming he is not dead and in some poetic allegory for life flashing before his eyes, or in a coma somewhere in Starfleet Medical... then he has a lot to do.
He knows the theories of time travel, he’d mind-melded with the Vulcan who’d practically written the playbook on them. But now, as far as he is aware, there is no going back.
And even if he could figure out how to go back - what would he be going back to? His own irradiated corpse?
Besides, doesn’t he owe more than that - to Chris, to Spock?
If Fate, or whoever is responsible for this ‘gift’, thinks that Jim will just stand by and watch the same tragedies come about then they have another thing coming.
Right now, whether this is real or just some crazy fever dream caused by dying, he needs to go out there and get to work. The first concern, of course, is proving (again) that he deserves to be here, no matter who may think otherwise.
Because he’s here now, and if the way the recruitment officer reacted to his name was anything to go off of, still very much without a long-dead hero of a father. Which means things are already in motion, Nero is definitely coming, and there is no way he can stop that.
This time though…
Maybe he can save Vulcan. Save Spock’s mom. Save Gaila and his fellow cadets. Save Chris, and everyone else Marcus and Khan killed.
Now that he knows what waits for him, he can prepare. It is clear enough that he had been painfully unprepared. But now he knows what to expect - exactly what to expect.
All that matters is being ready and able to help - to fix it.
“Kirk, James?” The nurse asks as she knocks on the door. “We’ll begin the physical if you’re ready.”
The nurse is the same one from his memory, a tiny thing with a sugary voice and the kindest of smiles.
“Born ready,” he smiles as the nurse leads the way to a room with a few pieces of exercise equipment.
“We’ll go through some basic workouts, no need to push yourself, just show us what you can handle on a normal day,” the nurse says casually, PADD in hand ready to input the number of pull-ups, sit-ups, speed on a treadmill, blood pressure readings, pulse, and a whole bunch of other things that would determine if he is fit for duty.
“Easy enough,” Jim smiles as he stretches his arms to warm up some. Best to start off easy.
Maybe he’s been spending too much time in the chair over the last 2 years, or maybe the intervening 5 years aged him more than he realized, because he feels great for a man who died an hour ago - and had gotten into a drunken bar brawl the night before.
“Sadists, the lot of ‘em,” Bones comments under his breath as Jim joins him later. Taking the seat next to him in the waiting room before their written test, the man still reeks of booze. “Makin’ a hungover man do sit-ups of all things. I’m a doctor, not a bodybuilder.”
Jim can’t help but to smile as he claps the good doctor on the back. His saving grace is that he still has Bones, and there is no way he’ll allow any timeline where the two of them aren’t friends.
“They even made you shave your scruff. The monsters.”
“Laugh it up, your sorry ass probably didn’t do much better.” Bones quips back, and Jim nods. It's always been his biggest advantage that people expect so little.
“No need to rub it in.”
The written exam was easy the first time. Knowledge of Starfleet regs, computer literacy, computational skills, engineering prowess, simple reasoning, and a myriad of other skills.
But after 3 years of Academy training and another almost 2 years as a captain, it is now almost laughable. Which should have been his first clue that things were about to go wrong.
Typical.
“Mr. Kirk, if we could have a word.” A security officer stops him after the test, a human man almost 7 feet tall and biceps as wide as one of Jim’s thighs. Jim doesn’t remember him from before - and he’s certainly the kind of person that sticks in memory.
Though the placement exam portion took the better part of the day. Maybe last time he’d just been too exhausted to notice security looming outside the door.
“Is there a problem?” Jim asks as the officer escorts him to a private conference room and asks him to sit in one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs. This room must not get used by the Admiralty then; they’d never put up with being uncomfortable for a meeting. Stars forbid.
“Your exam was flagged for potential cheating,” the officer says. “Do you have any explanation for why that may be?”
Jim really shouldn’t be surprised. His answers were by the book, some word for word because Spock has quoted them to him so many times. How could he not have memorized them? (And really, the best way to get around the rules is to know them better than anyone else.)
Not to mention that the physics questions were a snap after he’d taken up reading Scotty’s notes and Spock’s research. If he can keep up with Chekov’s excited, accent-heavy babbling (and he can), then solving a few simple questions to place out of the basics physics classes is a piece of cake.
“I’m unsure what you’re implying, sir,” Jim begins, trying to be careful, trying to stall for time while he decides how to handle this. If he gets accused of cheating right out of the gate - it might keep him out of Starfleet for good.
Jim can’t let that happen. There are too many people relying on him.
Chris.
He needs Chris.
If there is anyone who would believe his innocence, it would be Chris. He’s seen Jim’s previous test scores - he at least has some idea what Jim is capable of.
Plus, Jim...kind of needs to be sure. That Chris is okay. Here breathing, talking, joking.
“Talk to Captain Pike, he’ll vouch for me,” is all Jim says when the officer presses him for information. When the officer just continues to push, Jim holds firm: “I’m not talking to anyone but Captain Christopher Pike - or legal counsel.”
Nearly an hour later, Chris finally enters the room, looking miffed.
“Let me see that,” Chris raves, immediately grabbing the PADD with Jim’s test results.
Jim doesn’t sigh in relief at the sight of him, but it’s a near thing.
Chris is okay. He is safe and alive and actually here - sitting directly opposite Jim, close enough to touch. Staring at him with a sort of fond exasperation.
Not unlike in the bar. The one in Riverside - only the night before for Chris. And the one in San Francisco - four agonizing days that feel like forever ago, for Jim.
A lifetime.
Two lifetimes: Chris’s, and Jim’s own.
Looking over the test results on the PADD handed to him, Chris smirks, reading off one of the questions. “Explain the procedure you’d take if an unknown object on the face of a planet needed inspection.”
“Nothing shall be beamed aboard until danger of contamination has been eliminated. Beaming down to the surface is permitted if the captain decides the mission is vital and reasonably free of danger.” Jim recites without hesitation.
“If a commanding officer is believed to be emotionally biased or unable to continue work in their position, what is the appropriate course of action?” Chris appears to read another, and Jim almost wants to burst out into manic laughter.
The question wasn’t on the test, he would have remembered that one in all its disgusting irony. Chris is testing Jim’s knowledge of the regulations now, not following the script.
“Should their current mission leave a commanding officer emotionally compromised and unable to make rational decisions, they are required to relieve themselves of command until such a time they can be capable or at the mission’s completion.” That is one regulation he could never forget.
No matter how much he might want to.
“This cadet just came off of a transport shuttle with little more than the clothes on his back. He didn’t cheat.” Chris hands the PADD back to the security officer. “You’re taking this seriously.” He comments, eyeing Jim almost warily.
“How else am I gonna keep my promise?” He asks, mustering a smirk when he really wants to smile, still thrilled at Chris being here, right in front of him. “Three years - or less. I’d mark it on your calendar, Captain. I’m just getting started.”
“I could always tell you were a fighter,” Chris says - cryptic to anyone else, but Jim knows what he’s talking about. “From the moment I saw you.”
“I’m not a teenager anymore, sir.” Standing up from his chair, Jim looks to the security officer, waiting for dismissal.
If he were still a ship’s captain, he wouldn’t need to wait for permission. But he’s a cadet now. Again.
He needs to play nice.
“Dismissed, Cadet,” the officer says with a nod, something like respect on his face, “Welcome to Starfleet.”