I tried to climb your steps


AN: Never thought I'd end up here. But in any case, this idea has been, for the lack of a better word, plaguing me for a while, and I figured I would attempt to do it justice.

Don't know why I've fallen into this boat, but I've seen a few wandering around. So, without further ado, what you have come to read:


It had been long time since I felt at home in my own house. Every corner I turn seems to try to press me out, and I can't help but feel unwelcomed. Sometimes I think that if my mother were here more often, this would feel more like a home, but she spends as much of her time away from here as she could. Too many ghosts haunt these halls and she can't stay in the house long before succumbing to them.

I wish there was something I could do for her, but I wouldn't know what to do if I was given the chance to try.

Sam had left the house a long time ago. He still lived in the state, but he steered clear of this house, though he was still a dependent on our mother. He used college, and then graduate school, as an excuse to leave without coming back.

It was four days after my twenty-fifth birthday when mom came back. She baked me a cake and we had a small party, but I could see in her eyes that she couldn't wait to leave again. She knew I saw, and again tried to comfort me, telling me it wasn't because of me; something I had thought when I was younger. I still blame myself, though I don't voice that anymore. When a tear escaped my eye, she pulled me into an embrace, her own tears falling, wetting my shirt.

She stayed at home longer than she usually did. It was going on four days when we got the worst news of our lives.

First class mail from the state exclaimed that one son from each family was to be drafted into Starfleet. The message went on to explain the current crisis, the small section about the Kelvin breaking my mother's heart to read. She got up and paced around the kitchen.

Sam was engaged to be married. He met her in his sophomore year and proposed a year later. She was pregnant; something, while my mother didn't approve, she was ecstatic about. Finally having a grandchild might just be what it would take to ground her. God knows I wasn't enough.

She looked at me with broken eyes before leaving the room. I watched her back as she left, my heart sinking in my chest.

My brother had Aurelan, he had his degree, he would have his son. I had nothing. I knew it hurt my mother to see me live my life so haphazardly, so carelessly, but I was never really given the chance to live. I knew I had to take Sam's place.

I knew that I couldn't tell my mother; she would never allow me to do it, even if she wanted to save Sam from his inevitable fate. She never wanted either of us to join Starfleet. She refused to lose someone else to them. But we both knew that she would have no choice but to give Sam to them. Starfleet, as for some age-old tradition, only ever drafted males. There has never been a female draft in all of history. Even if I were to freely enlist to Starfleet as I am, they would still take Sam.

When I was sure mom was asleep, I logged on the computer, and hacking into the state records, changed my birth certificate. No one would ever know except me. So few people in the town knew me, even though I've lived here nearly my entire life.

I travelled a lot after I graduated college. I had a degree, but no desire to utilize it, and I really felt like an outcast. I had gotten into a few scrapes here and there, still sporting the scars and the crooked left pinky to prove it. My mother was far from proud of me. She lost faith in me sometime after I turned eighteen, where I lost all respect for myself. She could never understand why someone as smart as I was could let myself live the way I did, always between partners and fights. I tried to show her how it felt to have grown up second to my brother, stunted in shadow and guilt. I tried to show her, but she couldn't see. And she never spent enough time at home to see what was happening to me, to try to fix me, to even care.

She didn't see me anymore when she looked at me. She tried to see the same little child, brilliant and happy, but I had lost that child a long time ago. I had lost my innocence and my ability to be happy, and have since lived my life without direction.

I went to my room and packed everything I could fit into my one duffel bag; the few items of clothing I owned, the seven paperback books that had been in my father's collection, several P.A.D.D.'s, and I left the house.

I took my bike and walked it about a mile from home before hopping in it and heading into town, clutching the Draft Order tightly in my fist. I found the address of the compound to which I would report early tomorrow, admiring the large Starship under construction in the field, bulky and nearly unrecognizable. I departed soon thereafter, finding a rundown motel barely half a mile off.

Once in my room, I ran a knife through my hair, shearing it. I paused to look at the golden strands strewn on the floor before gathering them up and dumping them into the trash can in the bathroom. I looked at myself in the mirror then, and my heart jumped. I realized that my plan hitched on whether I could pass for a man, on whether I can pass for a 'James Tiberius Kirk.'

The person staring back at me from the mirror was a broken woman.

I wiped the tears from my eyes and headed back into the room, pulling a handmade corset from the bag I had packed. I laced the back up, pulling it over my chest, which I had previously bandaged. It took a bit of flexibility and ingenuity to pull the strings taut, but after an hour's diligent work, I managed it, and pulling a shirt on, I admired myself in the bathroom mirror again, seeing the desired effect.

I collapsed onto my bed after that, staring down at my hands. They were calloused and worn from farm work and fighting. I knew that I could probably pull this off. My voice wasn't high pitched enough to be recognizably female. Just short of walking around naked, I would be able to keep my secret.

Suddenly my heart raced.

A physical.

If that were required, I would be compromised. I would end up in jail, to my mother's disgrace, and Sam would be drafted. I sighed and brought my shaking hand to my face. What was I going to do?

I didn't come this far to lose. And this wasn't a no-win scenario. There was no such thing. I would find a way.

I needed to. For the sake of my broken family, I needed to not fail this one time.

I logged on to the terminal in my room and faked an entire physical report, hoping that would give me enough time to think of another plan.

Lying on the bed, I could feel the hours rushing by, and the closer the clock raced to seven, the faster my heart beat. I dragged myself off of the bed at six o'clock in the morning, packing all of my belongings back up and I headed back to the complex, seeing that I wasn't the first person there.

Heading towards an official, I swallowed my nervousness and handed the Draft Order over, watching the man's face as he read through it, no doubt running it through records. He looked up at me, then glanced back down and filed the report away, explaining to me which shuttle I was to get on and any formal procedures for the trip. I merely nodded before heading towards the shuttle. Upon entering, I knocked my head on the low clearance doorway, earning a chuckle from two cadets in the front of the shuttle. I shook off the pain and headed toward an empty seat just in time for a show.

As I struggled with the most difficult seatbelt of my life, a stewardess stepped out from the bathroom with a gruff man in tow who seemed completely displeased with her current course of action.

"You need a doctor-"

"I told you people I don't need a doctor; dammit I am a doctor!"

"You need to get back to your seat-"

"I already had one in the bathroom with no windows!"

"You need to get back to your seat now-"

"I suffer from aviaphobia. Means a fear of dying in something that flies!"

"Sir, for your own safety, sit down or I'll make you sit down!"

After that final threat, he ceded to her, not before staring her down briefly. I couldn't help but smile, though I swallowed my laughter. He collapsed into the seat next to me, pulling half of the seatbelt over one shoulder before turning to me.

"I may throw up on you."

My eyebrows knitted together for a moment, but I laughed. I could get to like this guy.

"I think these things are pretty safe." I said finally, though he was quick with an argument.

"Don't pander to me, kid." He started. "One tiny crack in the hull and our blood boils in thirteen seconds. Solar flare might crop up, cook us in our seats. And wait 'til you're sitting pretty with a case of Andorian shingles. See if you're still so relaxed when you eyeballs are bleeding!" His eyes got wide as he said this to me, obviously, he put way too much thought into this. I never once thought about what could go wrong, what the Hell did I care? "Space is a disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence."

"Well I hate to break this to you, but Starfleet operates in space." I couldn't help but point out, looking at him as if he were slightly insane. He just might be. Or that just might be the 'aviaphobia' acting up.

"Yeah, well. I got nowhere else to go. The ex-wife took the whole damn planet in the divorce. All's I got left is my bones." He finished the confession with a swig from a flask he pulled out of his jacket. It seems like neither one of us really wanted to be here, and neither of us really had a choice. I didn't even think about it before taking the flask when he offered it, more than willing to drive out my mother's voice and the Hellish past I was trying to escape.

"Jim Kirk" I toasted, the name rolling off my tongue as if I'd been saying it my whole life.

"McCoy. Leonard McCoy." He answered as the shuttle took off. As it shook and lifted, I really hoped he wouldn't follow through with his earlier threat.

In the midst of my thought process, I remembered something that could work to my advantage. Leonard was a doctor. If I could trust the Southerner like a felt deep in my chest that I could, I might just be able to depend on him to keep my secret.

Only time would tell.

I locked my eyes to the wall in front of me, my mind drifting off to the rhythmic sound of the shuttle.


AN: So, there's the start. No, I don't plan on copying dialogue from the whole movie, but how could I resist writing the shuttle scene without Bones' beautiful speech?

Please review with thoughts!