The Pressure of Command
AN: This is my first StarTrek fic so feedback would really be appreciated. Set some time after the first movie. Thanks for reading!
"No pressure."
They say it jokingly.
But they don't know that this is the third time he's commanded a crew, not the first.
They don't know of his brother and him playing secret games of spaceships to avoid his mother's anger or his stepfather's wrath, that he desperately conducted raids and rationed food to feed his children when the famine struck.
They don't understand that he knows the pressure of responsibility all to well, and certainly don't care that he is desperately trying to prove that this time he won't fail them.
He doesn't quite feel it as pressure to be fair, because at least this time they choose to be part of his crew, just as overwhelming responsibility that haunts his nights and fills the daytime with the constant feeling of people depending on him.
Depending on him to do his job, to make the right decisions, to get it done, and to above all; not make a single mistake that ends in them dying.
Or at least to not let them die for nothing, if that was the best he could do, all he could do.
And it hurts, oh how it hurts, to think that one day he might have to leave Bones, Spock or Pavel or some other crew member behind to save the rest.
And that people will shout and scream and misunderstand.
(Or tell him, unknowing of the irony, that it was for the "greater good".)
He'll crack.
He knows he will - one day he'll get it wrong.
One day he won't be bright enough, or quick enough, or lucky enough.
One day his temper or his pride or his weaknesses will show and...
...and he'll lose them forever.
And he knows it will happen, he just knows it (because already they are precious to him and universe will never let him keep something he loves).
The alternative to losing them to death wasn't much better.
Because then, the only way they would ever disappear from his life is if they walked away from him in disgust, when they realise what a fake, a freak he is. Both appear in his nightmares. He'll lose them to a coffin in the big black or he'll watch them become ghosts, professionals who don't laugh or cry or live or love.
But right now surrounded by their happiness and affection he can't bring himself to care (to do the best thing for them and walk away, to save their lives from James T. Kirk).
It will happen one day. And he will weep and curse himself for not acting differently, for being too selfish to let them go.
But as he always said to death when it stared him in the face, not today.
Not today.