Author's Note: In case you missed the warning in the summary: this contains semi-graphic genocide, and is not suitable for everyone. Please don't read if you feel this will harm you.
This is it, Jim thinks, unsure of how he feels. Anger and relief, reluctance and gratitude? His breathing is even as he grasps the younger boy to himself while his heart tries to escape from his chest. We're going to die. He'd tried so hard to save them both. Laughter or grief bubbled deep within him but shock held it in check. Jim clutched the boy closer, turning in vain to shield the crying child. They were surrounded by other colonists, all despairing for their lives. Panic had started to spread, rippling through the crowd, but Jim was oblivious to everything except the child and his own mind.
"Close your eyes." Words Jim had spoken dozens of times. This time would be the last. The boy obeyed as he always did, silent in his terror. When police started firing, chaos erupted. People screamed and ran, but had nowhere to go in the sealed room. Kodos had long since fled. Some like Jim hunkered down to protect their charges. Others used strangers and loved ones alike as shields. None of it would matter in the end.
Still, James Tiberius Kirk was well experienced in futility. It had never stopped him from doing what he did best: fighting. Jim dragged them both into the thick of the chaos to shield them and tried to avoid being trampled. A few had already died that way; those were the only corpses in the room. The phasers annihilated their targets completely, save for a thin spattering of dust that would have been negligible if not for the sheer amount of victims.
There is nowhere left to go. The words pounded in his mind like the death toll Jim refused to let it be.
"You okay?" Tom asks ridiculously sometime after it was over. Jim is quiet for a moment.
"No." Silence hangs between them, empty without the screams. Jim wishes he knew who to hate. He wants to find his mother and step-father and scream at them for sending him here. The thought of making his mother cry shames him. She never could have known. Neither could his step-father, and Jim hates to admit anything in favor of the man, but he's grown up a little bit even while he remains so young. Kodos, then, but the man is dead, presumably, and hating the dead brings no relief. It will be many years and a lot of pain until Kirk learns that hate will never soothe his wounds.
In the meantime he settles with numbers to numb the horror. Only nine of four thousand, and somehow he is one of them, a survivor again.