Chapter Text
Jamie Kirk has not had the best lot in life. Her father dying the day she was born was really just the start to it. She’s eighteen and hasn’t done much with herself. She knows her big brother Sam doesn’t approve. But she doesn’t really give a damn what he thinks.
Two years ago she’d seen the worst of the universe while working on Tarsus IV. It was supposed to teach her something, it had been that or a juvenile detention facility down in Florida. Her mother had said it would be good for her, hard work on a farming colony would teach her a good life lesson. No one could have known about the strange infection that would take over sixty percent of the crops and forty percent of the food supply. Nor that the Governor of the colony, Kodos, would seize full control with a small band of guards and implement his own theories of Eugenics to choose who lived and died even as the people began to starve.
The farm she’d been working on had been on the outskirts of the colony and had been hit hard. When they got a whisper that Kodos and his men were on the way Jamie and one of the boys studying botany on the farm, Thomas, had grabbed every kid in the place and made a run for it. The nine of them had hidden in a cellar.
Thomas had grabbed everything he could that left a sign of the kids in the house. The adults lied, that the kids had been sent off planet before the fungus began to eat away at the food. They’d watched between the slatted floor as every adult in the building had been killed.
The man behind it all had deigned to show his face, reading off a long winded speech about how these deaths would serve to save the other half of the colony. She would never forget having to hold her hand over Kevin’s mouth and eyes to keep him from crying out, or seeing his parent’s killed above them. He was only eight. No one should have to go through that.
The Federation had arrived nearly a week later. Long enough for the hunger to set in, long enough for her and Thomas to split the food between the other kids, all of whom were younger than them. It was gone by the time the door above them burst open again.
Jamie had been the one to look up between the floor, stained with long dried blood, and spotted the red shirts she knew to be Federation security officers. It was her who had recognized the wild blond hair falling around her mothers blue uniform as she pushed through the security officers.
It was one of the only times her mother had really looked happy to see her when she and Thomas got the door to the cellar unblocked. It hadn’t lasted long. Winona had gotten her aboard the rescue ship and cared for as long as it took for them to get back to Earth. Then she’d dumped her back on Uncle Frank’s doorstep and ran back to Starfleet, probably to crawl back into a bottle.
Jamie had tried that but it just made her sick, comparing herself to Frank and Winona with every shot. So she’d turned to another vice, violence.
Now she was sitting across from Captain Christopher Pike of the USS Intrepid. Who was offering her another way out. Technically she’d had an open invitation since Tarsus IV, but Starfleet was what had gotten her father killed, what her mother ran to to forget about Jamie. What Sam had run to the moment he turned sixteen and could test in.
But it was that or sit in Riverside and rot. Something wouldn’t let her do that. Even as the dawn air stung her still split lip, she knew that there was more in the universe, more kids in cellars who needed someone to bust down the door and help them out of that situation. Life had screwed her over too many times. It was time to take it back, on her own terms.
“Four years huh? I’ll do it in three.” She snarked at Captain Pike who grinned as she took her seat, winking at the beautiful cadet, Uhura, who had been the excuse to start the fight. A scruffy man was forced to sit next to her.
“I might throw up on you.” He said grimacing.
“Not a fan of flying?”
“Not a fan of dying in space. Not got much choice though, the ex wife took the whole planet in the divorce. Not much left to me, just the old bones.”
“You’re funny Bones.” Jamie shot back.
“Leonard McCoy, you?”
“Jamie Kirk, slightly hungover, so I might throw up on you right back. If you can aim it at the guy down the row though, he’s an asshole with a sharp left hook.” She joked. McCoy laughed, seeming to have not actually noticed they’d taken off.
“You’re funny kid. You remind me of my daughter, though I can’t say she was ever that much trouble. He the one who rearranged your face?” He asked.
“Him and a few of his buddies.” She said wiping her lip. “Don’t let them fool you they clearly got looked at last night, I broke his nose.” She said pointing to the one who’d called her cupcake. McCoy laughed again.
“Oh this is going to be a disaster, I can already tell.” He said shrinking further into his chair.