A/N Another thing from the new kink meme goin' on over at lj. The prompt concerned Winona and how likely she was to have suffered from post-partum depression after the events of the move. I decided that I was officially in love with the prompt, and proceeded to disgrace it by writing it. ;) Enjoy!
Smile
1.
He is three years old, too smart for his own good, and in desperate need of maternal attention.
Granted, he doesn't know the two latter facts; all he knows is that it is a Special Day (because Sam had told him last night), and that it is a Special Day because it is the day Jim was born.
Jim knows that there is something special about birthdays. He knows because Freddy, another boy in his preschool, had a birthday party, and so did Melanie and Ashley and John. Even Sam had a birthday party, and it was fun – Jim got poked in the eye by a weird spiky paper hat and so Mrs. Murnik from next door gave him a kiss and some chocolate, and there was a brightly colored donkey hanging from the ceiling that people hit with a stick, and there was a really big cake. Freddy and Melanie and Ashley and John had had cake at their parties, and Ashley had had a swimming pool, and everyone had given them presents.
So Jim is creeping down the hallway and the creaky wooden staircase towards the kitchen, because he wants to see his cake. He's a little bit excited (really, really excited), because he knows that it will be an amazing cake, just like Sam's, because his mom will bake it herself, and she bakes the best food in the whole wide universe.
He reaches the archway that leads into the kitchen and pauses, peeking around the door so just his eyes are showing.
His mom is sitting by herself at the table with a glass half-filled with weird yellow liquid. She's holding an old, crumpled paper, and tears are dripping down her face and onto the table.
Jim is worried.
His birthday cake isn't made – he can't smell anything – but the cake is far away from his mind right now, because his mom is crying, and people don't cry on other people's birthdays, especially moms, because it's a Rule. It just doesn't happen. It's not right, and Jim resolves to fix it.
He will make his mom smile.
"Don't cry, Mama," he begs, running as quickly as he can into the kitchen and attaching himself to her leg. "You don't need to be sad. Promise." He buries his nose in the softness of her robe, and for a moment there is silence in the kitchen. Then, cold, long-fingered hands are prying him away from his mom, and he fights back against them, but –
But they are his mother's hands.
He stops struggling, and lets her tug him away from her legs. Her face is wet and stony, and her eyes are a thousand miles away.
"Mama," he pleads, water in his own eyes now – but he won't cry. He won't cry, because it's his Special Day, and in two hours he will be four years old and a big boy, and Sam says big boys don't cry.
"Go back to bed, Jimmy," she says, and he knows, with a child's instinct, that she doesn't remember that it's his Special Day today.
"Okay, Mama," he whispers. He pushes back the tears, and it takes the most willpower he has ever needed. "I love you, Mama."
There is only silence.
2.
He's brought home straight As.
He's done all of his chores without complaint.
He's fixed the broken electrical equipment.
He's even been nice to Frank, which even oblivious Sam noticed.
And still, all his mother ever does is give him a swift and tepid hug when she gets home, her eyes flitting from his face the moment anyone else enters the general vicinity. He decided that maybe he wasn't being good enough for his mother, ignoring the insidious little voice in the back of his head that whispers that he is just as good as Sam, and Mom loves Sam, but he won't think about his brother or his mother that way. At eight years old and still more intelligent than he should be, he realizes why she doesn't celebrate his birthday, and that's okay. He can understand that.
But maybe she can learn to be happy with him and to be proud of him in ways that aren't centered around his dad's death. So he actually applies himself in school, and he works diligently around the house, and he's civil to the jerk his mom married (and Jim really, really hopes that she'll un-marry him soon, because he's been giving Jim these creepy looks that make Jim's skin crawl).
And Winona doesn't say a word.
She smiles and nods when Jim's teachers call the house to tell her about the sudden and amazing spout of knowledge her son is becoming, and signs the forms needed to advance him one full grade, and that's it. She remarks to Sam – Sam! – that he's doing a good job with keeping the house clean, and waves aside his protests. Jim overhears her with his brother one night: "Now Sam, we both know that Jimmy could never clean the house like this," she says, and he feels his heart break a little bit. She smiles at him, and hugs him sometimes, and tells him "good job" for being nice to Frank – but that's all. And Jim wants more.
He decides that he's going to eat a peanut.
He's never supposed to eat peanuts – the nurse said that they could even kill him, if he wasn't gotten to a hospital in time. So he makes sure he eats it in a classroom, when the teacher is handing out candy, and he "accidentally" picks the one with peanuts in the center.
He wakes up in a hospital with a tube up his nose and a needle in his arm, and does he kinda hurt? Yeah. His throat is sore, and his stomach feels like it was punched, and his eyes are nearly swollen shut. But all of that fades away in light of the fact that his mother – his mom – is sitting on the hospital bed, her eyes shining with worry, petting his hair and kissing his cheeks and making him feel loved.
He closes his eyes and basks in the glow, and thinks, Maybe…
If nearly dying got him his mother's attention, he would do it all the time.
3.
He is sixteen years old, and he realizes that he's an idiot.
A genius-level idiot, but an idiot all the same.
He's eaten a peanut, driven a car off a cliff, nearly been caught in a burning barn (not his fault), hitchhiked to San Francisco and back, ridden motorcycles at illegally high speeds minus helmet, broken into Starfleet bases, and driven his teachers to the brink of insanity. He drinks, he smokes, and he even found enough balls to do a gateway drug one or six times.
And all he wants is for his mother to see him. It used to be that he wanted her to look at him and be proud, that he wanted her to just look at him, even, but he's only just realized that even when she's looking right at him, she's not looking at him.
He only realizes this because he decided to go up to the attic for a few drinks while Sam was in San Fran and his mom was off planet. Frank was gone, thank somebody, because he had been caught beating Sam. No mention was made of any abuse of little Jimmy, who was considered lucky to have gotten away. Lucky, Sam had hissed in fury. Jim had held him down until his elder brother gave up. You should tell them, Jim. He should get sent to a penal colony for what he did to you.
He shakes his head, downs another shot of some sort of cheap-ass alcohol, and settles back on a massive, disgustingly ugly couch he had found. He looks again to the pictures in his hand and curses his luck, curses, for the first time, his father.
His father, who, in the photograph in Jim's hand, is leaning up against a very familiar, infamous car. His shoulders are slouched in, again, a very familiar fashion; even standing, his legs seem to sprawl outward in a way Jim recognizes all too well. His hair, in the picture, is the same length and style as his youngest son's, and his eyes, piercingly blue, stare out onto the world, set above a devil-may-care grin, with too-sharp, curved canines and a perfectly even bite. Jim recognizes everything about the man in the picture, and if it weren't for the caption (and the fact that the car was resting at the bottom of a mining quarry), he would think it was a picture of himself.
George, age sixteen, 19 April, that is what's written in a curving, loopy handwriting that Jim just recognizes as his mother's. His mom's.
The whole box at his feet is filled with papers with his mother's handwriting. He tosses the picture back in and rummages through, eyes closed, head spinning with cheap whiskey and the force of memories. He tugs out the first edge his fingertips make contact with.
It's an old-style letter, and the handwriting isn't his mothers.
Darling Winnie, it begins. The script is spiky and somewhat uneven, and – Jim realizes with a start – basically a carbon copy of his own writing. He suddenly feels like the weight of the entire world is on his shoulders, and he didn't even know things like handwriting could be handed down in genetics, he thought they were inherited, god, no wonder his mother never really looks at him.
He wouldn't look at him.
So he sits alone in the attic and not-cries, while his mother, far away, is not looking at Jim and not thinking of Jim, but remembering the same face and the same smile and the same handwriting and posture and slouch and captioning those memories in curving, loopy mental handwriting: George.
And all he wants is just a little bit of love.
4.
He left Iowa without a word or a message to anyone and joined Starfleet.
He wondered if his mother would even notice.
5.
She looks older than he remembers, and he wonders how much his memory of her was fabricated. Her blond hair is graying at the temples, and there are faint worry lines near her eyes and pulling at the corners of her mouth. Still, she looks comfortable in her own skin.
She is less comfortable talking to her youngest child.
"Hey, G-Jim," she says, and the only reason he catches her slip-up is because he's spent all day translating Spock's nuances and he's sort of ultra-sensitive to the smallest things at the moment. He also catches her slight cringe as she corrects her mistake –
But he's a good son, despite all his trouble, so he doesn't comment on it.
"Hey, Ma," he says, smiling best he can, toweling away the last of the damp from his shower out of his hair. It is clipped shorter than his father's ever was (he knows, he made sure), and he is not wearing any regulation clothes at all, just some flannel pajama bottoms and a white undershirt. "How's everything back home?"
She bites her lip. "I don't know, Sam wants to sell the farm. I don't really want to let go of it, but I spend more time in San Francisco than I do here at this point, and nobody's out there with it at the moment…"
"But you're retiring soon," he pointed out, hanging the towel around his neck and tugging absently on the ends. He's not really paying attention to the conversation, because it's basically scripted, and he's scanning through a PADD of readouts Spock just sent to him.
"Well, yes…"
"And you don't want to stay in San Fran forever," he continues, giving lip service to the conversation while his mind is a thousand miles away. He only snaps back into it when a knock comes on the door.
"Come," he calls, and his mother looks faintly curious.
"Jim, I do not mean to intrude, but there was an error in the readouts I sent you that has caused a slight glitch in the mitigation trial system of the second deck." Spock is all the way in the room at this point, his own PADD in hand, his shoulder a hair's width away from Jim's own. He points the error out to Jim, who wonders why he didn't catch it earlier. They toss solutions back and forth until a consensus is reached, and it is only as Spock straightens to leave that the Vulcan realizes that he has intruded.
"My apologies, Captain," he says, immediately nothing but a ranking Starfleet officer.
"No problem at all, Commander Spock," smiles Winona, and Jim blinks.
"Mom, I've told you about Spock; Spock, this is my mother." He almost - almost - misses the way Spock's face sags, for just a fraction of a second, in grief.
"It's nice to meet you, Spock. Jim, I've gotta go; there's some official at my door asking for something…"
He waves her away. "Nice talking to you, Ma."
"You too, G - …Jim. Jim. Nice to finally meet you, Commander," she smiles.
The screen flickers and fades to black.
"Your mother is very different than what I had imagined," his first officer confesses, raising an eyebrow.
"Yeah, well…she's real different from what I imagine, too," replied Jim. Spock frowned minutely, dark eyes focused on the empty screen.
"But you still love her."
"Sometimes a little too much," he confesses with a sigh. Enough to try to kill myself.
"And she loves you."
There is no answer he can give – what is he supposed to say? "She loves the father she sees in me," "She loves me abstractly," or even just "No"? He can't say that to Spock, Spock who would give anything for his own mother to be returned to him, Spock whose mother loved him with all her heart. How can he possibly tell his friend that his mother only even sees him as her son when he's lying, broken and bleeding, in a hospital bed?
And so he says nothing…but somewhere, in the back of his mind, he is still wondering…
Why won't my mother look at me?
+1
He has given up trying to catch his mother's eye; he thinks of her now only with fondness, not with upset, and he no longer schemes to ensnare her attention.
It is on his wedding day that he discovers that he no longer needs to.
He is laughing with Nyota over some inside-the-Enterprise story involving Scotty and Saurian brandy, and then there is a cool, slim hand on his arm.
"Would you if I borrowed my son for a minute?" she asks, and Nyota smiles.
"Of course not, Mrs. Kirk."
"Oh, darling, call me Winona. That title belongs to somebody else now," his mother jokes, and Nyota chuckles.
"I wonder which one," she responds, and Winona laughs. She pulls Jim away gently, out of the wide, beautiful reception area and into the hallway outside the overly large room. It is quiet, the soft music even softer, with the rustles of Jim's tuxedo and of his mother's formal dress overlapping each other.
"Ma?" he questions, worried. "Is everything okay?"
"I…I haven't been the best mom to you, sweetheart," she says, and he feels a sudden rush of something, because she's looking at him and she's seeing him - she's seeing Jim, her son, not George or anybody else. "I wasn't there when you needed me – Sam told me, and I… - and I was always just so absent. You never even…god, I never even gave you a birthday party, did I? What kind of horrible person does that make me?"
"It doesn't make you horrible, it makes you normal," he says, and he is surprised, because they are suddenly on opposite sides.
"But it was horrible to you – because Jim, I never…I never…"
She gives a frustrated huff, and Jim swears that she stomps her foot.
"When I looked at you," she begins, and her eyes are sparkling with tears, "I never saw you, and I'm so sorry. I don't know if you noticed, but you probably did, because you're too damn smart, always have been…I always saw your father. Always, even when you were small…and I looked up at the altar today and it was like I'd been blind for twenty five years. There was suddenly this man in front of me, and he was a starship captain and he had saved the world and he was in love and getting married and he was my son…and I had no idea how he came to be.
"And I sat there, while you two went through your vows, and I realized that I couldn't really remember you as a baby, or your first birthday party, or your first steps or word or anything, and it was because I wasn't there. And now I can't be there anymore, and you're all grown up, and you did it without me." Her voice breaks, her lips tremble, and tears cascade down her wrinkling cheeks. "Jimmy…"
He steps forward and pulls her close, and her face is wet against his neck, and maybe there are tears falling on the back of her dress, but she isn't saying anything. They stay like that for what feels like hours, and when they pull away both their faces are wet.
She takes his face in her hands, presses a kiss to his forehead, and returns to the reception. Jim remains in the hallway, and when he looks up, Spock is standing in front of him. He manages a smile to his husband, who offers two fingers in return. Jim presses gently with two fingers of his own, and brings Spock's hand up to his mouth to kiss it.
"What occurred between yourself and your mother is truly not my business, but…"
"You're my husband now," sighed Jim. "Of course it's your business. Plus you have, you know, a link into my mind and whatnot."
Spock shoots him decidedly bedroom eyes, and Jim appreciates the cut of his lover's tuxedo all over again. "Yes, but to use the link in such a fashion would be intrusive."
"Nah, not really," Jim insisted. He pressed his palm flat against Spock's and smirked when the Vulcan shuddered. "My mom…we had really bad problems…basically since I was born."
"Your father's death had something to do with them, I presume."
"Basically. My birthday was on the day my dad died, and I looked like an exact replica of him, even from when I was a kid. When she looked at me, it wasn't me she saw."
Spock nods and steps closer, pressing his forehead to Jim's and rubbing their noses together slowly, soothingly. "Is this the reason for your criminal record? Psychology would suggest…"
"Yeah, a bit. I mean, Frank probably had something to do with some of it –" (here Spock very nearly growls) " – but most of it was just because she only really saw me as a kid, and as her son, when I was messed up."
Spock stills in his motions, and it is only now that Jim realizes Spock's arms had encircled him, gently swaying up until that moment.
"Jim…sometimes, relationships are outlets for rebellious feeling against parental stresses. Perhaps…did you begin this simply to attract attention from your mother?"
Jim pulls away sharply, eyes wide, searching Spock's face. "You can't really believe that. There's no way. Can't you tell? Can't you see that?"
"The mind is not simple, Jim. There are many, many layers – as I recall, you yourself had to tell me of Frank, and of incidents and impulses you wished buried. Some instincts are ingrained so deeply into the mind of a child that they carry over as subconscious needs in the mind of an adult. I merely assumed that this was the case…"
Jim sighs softly and presses a gentle kiss to Spock's cheekbone. "No. I actually…decided that I didn't need her attention anymore, before I even started dating you. It was right after that shoot-out on Roma-4, when we lost half of our security team. And I remember waking up in sick bay and thinking, My mom isn't here, and I'm okay with that." He kisses Spock again, sucking on a full bottom lip. "I would never –" kiss " – ever –" kiss "- ever start a relationship with you…because of something like that. I love you because of who you are, not what you represent."
"Very well," Spock replies, leaning in for another mind-blowing kiss.
No more words are spoken, but around the corner, Winona Kirk closes her eyes and smiles.