1
He's always been lucky.
A minimum of broken bones as a kid, despite all the dumb shit he pulled. Meeting Pike in that bar on the one night he was drunk enough to start a fight with the Starfleet redshirts that always hung around his town. Surviving the circumstances of his birth, and the litany of allergies that came with spending too much time in a completely sterile environment before moving to a small town in Iowa. And so on.
It's luck and natural charisma that's gotten him out of every bad situation he's ever been in. He learned at a young age to channel the flare of fear in his stomach, the one that spiked through him every time he fucked something up (intentionally or otherwise). He got out of it. No one else ever got hurt. And for a while, it justified his recklessness.
His mom smiled at his luck, when he bragged to her through vidcomm. His brother bemoaned it, complaining that his teachers never cut him some slack like they always did Jim. His crew respects it to a certain extent, or at least its results. Starfleet hates it. Hates the inevitability of it running out, and the consequences of that.
2
"What did you say?" Jim asks, because he's never had anyone defend him before. Bail him out, sure, but always begrudgingly. Any defense he's had has been solely by himself.
"I told them the truth," Pike replies, and before Jim can wince he continues. "That I believe in you. That if anyone deserves a second chance, it's Jim Kirk."
Jim doesn't know what to say, because at that moment he feels he doesn't deserve anything. Not Pike's faith, not his ship, and certainly not the captain's chair. He deserves to sit alone in this bar, getting drunk until he gets the shit kicked out of him by some asshole recruits. But here Pike was, getting him out before he got in trouble. Again.
"I don't know what to say," he says, through the wave of shame.
Pike smiles slightly. "That's a first."
3
"Clear the room!" he shouts, and then his vision is filled with shards of glass and light. Through his ringing ears he can hear screams of pain and shouts for help, but he's only conscious enough to crawl towards the hallway. A tiny part of his brain is running in Spock mode, whispering that there's an emergency panel with a gun in it, just a few meters down the corridor.
When he stumbles to his feet, no one else is running out of the room, but a bunch of people are running in. He makes his way to the emergency panel, slamming at it with his hand. Shitty things usually stuck anyway. The gun inside is bigger than the phasers that officers carry, but he grew up in rural Iowa.
It only takes him a few shots to realize that the gunship isn't going to go down. And then he has an idea, the brilliance of which he mentally notes. Spock might not be impressed, but it might be worth another medal once Pike hears about it. The gun is wrapped with the fire hose. It's thrown. The gunship sputters and falls, and Kirk watches with a mixture of triumph and apprehension as Harrison is surrounded by the golden glow of beaming.
Looking down towards the meeting room, he sees Spock kneeling over the still body of someone who likely hadn't made it. A horrible feeling of dread washes over him, and as he runs toward Spock he's shifting through all the people who would be important enough for Spock to stop helping others for.
Time slows, even with the pounding of his steps on the too-white tile. A roaring fills his ears as he falls to his knees, and he's crying before he can really take in any other information. The texture of Pike's dress uniform digs into his hand.
When he stands up, something is changed in him. Spock looks at him a little differently. Before this moment, there had been a certain aura around Jim Kirk – a cocky assuredness, a belief in the inherent good of the universe. Spock never could have explained it to another being without the use of mind meld, because it was almost completely imperceptible, but as Kirk turned away from him, Spock could see that he no longer felt the same anticipation for the future.
4
"I'm scared, Spock," he says. "Help me not be."
Spock is shaking with thinly concealed emotion, his eyebrows drawn harshly down.
"How do you choose not to feel?" Kirk asks, because at the moment his fear of death is overriding all the emotions he wants to feel. He wants to be proud of himself, he wants to feel the triumph of the stability of the Enterprise, he wants to shut out the fucking pain of the radiation poisoning. But even Spock is shuddering with grief, and Kirk supposes that a Vulcan is losing it over his death is the most he could have ever asked for anyway.
"I don't know," Spock replies, and there's a moment where Kirk can see reflected in the glass separating them the inherent qualities that made them the lifelong friends Spock Prime had talked about. "Right now, I am failing."
There's one more thing, before Kirk gives in to the fatigue that is slowing consuming him.
"I need you to know why I couldn't let you die," he says, interrupting himself with small coughs of pain. "Why I went back for you."
Spock almost smiles, in that tiny way of his. "Because you are my friend," he says. And Kirk presses his hand against the glass in a gesture of solidarity, and Spock responds with the customary Vulcan farewell. And Kirk does his best to imitate.
But then he's gone.
And all is dark.
5
He awakens with a start, to blinding white light and the unmistakable smell of sterilization. He gasps in air for a couple moments while his vision adjusts, before Bones interjects.
"Don't be so melodramatic," he says as he bustles around Jim's bed. "You were barely dead."
If Jim weren't so tired, he would laugh at Bones' typical downplay of a pretty major fucking thing. Barely dead was still pretty dead, but arguing would get him nowhere right now. He could save it for later, when his head wasn't killing him.
Spock is waiting patiently in the doorway, while Bones is his usual ornery self. Kirk rolls his head toward his First Officer and imagines the hundreds of thousands of ways this conversation could go. 'Hey, so, turns out I'm not dead and all that scared shit isn't super relevant anymore. Go figure,' or, 'Do I get my ship back now?' were just a couple things that ran through his mind. In the end, he went with simple.
"Thanks," he says.
And it feels good. To be able to count on someone else. To not have to rely entirely on himself.
He's still lucky, that's for sure. But now, when the shit hits the fan, it won't be just his luck pulling him and his crew out of the fire.