DISCLAIMER: I don't own it.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: The premise of Pike's departure from this mortal coil is based on his entry in Memory Alpha. Once again, I altered the dates and a few other things to suit my fanfictional whims. This is written as a tag to "The Good Shepherd," but it can stand alone. It is set some number of decades after the movie.
To clarify about Pike going "before his time": Since McCoy shows up in the pilot for The Next Generation at 137 years old, it's safe to assume people are living a lot longer in Star Trek times. Therefore, even if Pike was in his eighties in this story, he'd be dying young.
I don't know if Starfleet Academy would actually call its head the commandant, but it sounds good so I used it.
THE MEASURE OF A MAN
by Christina TM
"He's dead, Jim."
The call hadn't come as a surprise. Everyone in and out of Starfleet had heard about the indescribable tragedy aboard the Arbiter. It might have been a more indescribable tragedy had one Adm. Christopher Pike, commandant of Starfleet Academy, not been leading the training mission and sacrificed himself to save every cadet in the engine room during the warp core breach. It was only because one of them had ejected the core that there was even a body to bury.
The radiation exposure left Pike heartbreakingly disfigured, unable to move and barely able to speak. "Let me go. Please, just let me go," he'd reportedly begged Bones. The renowned physician had tried to conjure a method of life support to keep Pike alive, but even Bones had known it was hopeless. The damage was irreversible and even if Pike could live, he would have been in unmanageable pain the days of his life.
In all the years they'd known each other, Kirk had only seen Bones cry twice: after saving the galaxy from Nero and after spending twelve hours listening to Christopher Pike plead for his life to end.
There hadn't been much longer left anyway. Bones had recently confided in Kirk that the treatments keeping Pike on his feet weren't as effective as they once were and he'd be confined to a wheelchair permanently sometime within the next five years. He would have hated that. And he could never have lived with himself if he survived while all those kids died in the core breach.
It didn't change the fact that one of the best men who ever wore the uniform was gone before his time.
Kirk shifted in his seat and gazed at the paper in front of him. He'd agreed to give the eulogy only because Pike's sister, Dr. Sarah April, had asked him to. Kirk put up a fight, but Sarah proved as difficult to refuse as her little brother. So here Kirk was, fourteen hours before the service in a rented room at Starfleet Academy without a darn thing to say. "Jim Kirk: Life on the edge," as Scotty would say.
Oh, there was so much that could be said. So much that needed to be said. Christopher Pike was one of Starfleet's most decorated and accomplished officers. Commandant of Starfleet Academy, for goodness sake. That was nothing to sneeze at.
Kirk let out a weak laugh as he remembered Pike's ill-fated attempt at retirement a few years ago. In a gross violation of regulations, about a third of the students printed T-shirts to wear over their uniforms that proclaimed "WE LIKE PIKE" in bright red letters. The campaign had been effective, and the offending cadets gladly accepted their punishment of getting up at 0400 for a week to keep the Academy grounds.
Everyone in attendance would know of Pike's professional achievements. Kirk wanted to hit on something more personal. Something that couldn't be discovered just as easily from looking at Pike's file.
What do I say? What on earth can I possibly say? Pike had been Kirk's mentor, his sounding board, his shoulder to cry on, and as Kirk had grown older, his friend. How could he capture all that in a ten-minutes-max speech?
Come on, James. You've saved the universe more than once; you can write a eulogy. Kirk picked up the pen and began to write.
There are many people in this room, and a lot of us don't even know each other. But today we have one thing in common: We are here to honor the memory of one of Starfleet's finest officers, Adm. Christopher Pike.
There. That was done. Not a bad opener.
"One of Starfleet's finest officers." By what measure was Christopher Pike one of Starfleet's finest officers? He certainly had his share of commendations and awards. But as anyone who sat through one of the admiral's lectures knows, there is far more to being a fine officer than that.
Christopher Pike was a good officer because he was first a good man. He never had his own children. After all, if Starfleet wanted him to have a wife they'd have issued him one.
Kirk smiled to himself as he recalled Pike's time-honored excuse for lifelong bachelorhood. Some cadets in the class above him had set Pike up on a date as their senior prank. He had been entirely unamused and even interrogated Kirk as to whether he was responsible. "I had no idea about it, captain," Kirk had said. "But I wish I'd thought of it." Both sentences were true.
But he was as good a father as many a wayward recruit ever knew, including the one speaking to you right now. No matter how much we might have deserved it, or how angry he was, Adm. Pike never uttered a cruel word to anyone. Firm, yes. Blunt, most certainly. But unkind, never. And I'd know; I spent enough time on the receiving end of the Christopher Pike Hand of Vengeance.
Kirk idly drummed the pen on the desk. Well, now what? Common sense told him to say a bit about the Nero Death Experience, as those who lived through the ordeal had dubbed it. But that would be nothing everyone didn't know. He owed it to Pike to at least come up with a eulogy people would remember.
The doorchime sounded, and Kirk jumped. Who is it at this hour? He went to the door.
"Adm. April," Kirk greeted dumbly. Pike's brother-in-law, retired Adm. Robert April, was standing at the door.
April waved it off. "Please, Kirk. I haven't been an admiral for a long time. It's Rob now."
Kirk nodded, but doubted he'd ever be able to call April by his first name. "Chris. Kirk, please. We're both old. You can call me Chris now," Pike had said on more than one occasion. Kirk had never been able to pull that off, either.
"Um, come in, sir," Kirk invited belatedly, stepping aside.
April entered.
"What brings you here?" Kirk asked. "Oh, sorry, have a seat."
April sat on the couch, and Kirk sat in the chair across from him. "Kirk, I came here to apologize."
Kirk blinked. "Sir?"
April took a breath. "I was at that recruiting stop in Iowa. You probably don't remember. I told Chris not to bother with you. I said you were a lost cause."
St. Jude. The patron saint of lost causes. Some cadets had bestowed that nickname on Pike for his propensity for taking hard-luck cases under his wing.
"But he didn't listen, like I knew he wouldn't," April continued. "He ever tell you that I told him if you showed up he had to get plastered?"
Kirk looked up in surprise. "Seriously?" He'd never seen Pike drink, ever. It was something of a rarity in Starfleet.
April nodded. "He made good on it, too."
Always a man of his word, Kirk thought. Too bad I can't stick that little anecdote in the speech.
"We had a lot of long discussions about you," April said. "I usually wanted to toss you out on your ear. Sometimes he did too, but the difference was I actually was going to do it and he was going to call you into his office, give you a Dutch uncle talk, and send you on your way."
April leveled his gaze at Kirk. "He was right about you, Kirk. Righter than he or I could have imagined. If I'd had my way Earth would have suffered the same fate as Vulcan and Chris would have died at Nero's hands. Neither of those things happened because of you. Because Chris took a chance on you…" April shook his head. "All of history changed.
"This is long overdue, but I want to apologize for not believing in you," April said.
"You don't have to apologize, sir," Kirk said.
"I feel I do," April said. "If I'd had my way you would have been bounced long before you had time to pull that little stunt with the Kobayashi Maru. I would have been responsible for the destruction of the planet and much of the human race. I didn't see what I should have in you, and for that I am sorry."
For one of the few times in his life, James Tiberius Kirk was speechless.
April took that as his cue to leave. "Good night, Kirk," he said quietly.
Kirk sat unmoving for a moment, and then leapt off the chair and back to the desk. Thank you, April. Thank you, thank you, thank you. He could finish the eulogy now.
One of Christopher Pike's most outstanding characteristics was persistence. He believed in cadets anyone else would have dismissed without a second thought. Some of his students even referred to him as St. Jude, the Catholic patron saint of lost causes, because he was seemingly unable to resist a chance to take a lump of carbon, turn up the pressure, and make a diamond.
There was one such hard-luck case you may have heard of: a kid from Iowa. Pike recruited him off the floor of a dirty bar. Pike should have left him there. But instead he dared that kid, that delinquent ne'er-do-well from Iowa, to join Starfleet and do better than his father, who commanded the USS Kelvin for only twelve minutes, but saved eight hundred lives.
That kid was me. And I won't deny the importance of the actions everyone in the Fleet took the day Nero tried to drill a black hole into our planet. But if not for Christopher Pike, if not for a dare issued late at night in a dingy dive, I would not have been there. If he hadn't believed in me, I would have been sucked into a vacuum along with most of humanity. For this reason Christopher Pike was the real hero of that day, though nobody thinks to count him as such.
The quality of an officer is not measured by the medals on his chest, but the heart that beats within it. And by that standard Christopher Pike surpassed any expectation, any standard, and any call of duty that could ever be set for him. That is why he deserves to be remembered as one of Starfleet's finest officers, and why it was an honor and a privilege to know him.
"It is beautiful, Jim."
Kirk cocked his head at his half-Vulcan friend. "'Beautiful,' Spock? Coming from you, that's extraordinary."
Spock handed the paper back. "I believe the expression is: There will not be a dry eye in the house?"
Kirk took the pad with a sad smile. "Thank you."
"Will you be able to deliver the speech, Jim?" To anyone else Spock's voice would have sounded dispassionate, but Kirk knew him well enough to hear the concern.
Kirk felt his smile falter. "This is one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, Spock."
"You are Adm. Pike's greatest legacy, and he had no wife or children. It is logical for you to give his eulogy."
"I'll get through it," Kirk said resolutely. "Even if Bones has to give me a tranquilizer, I'm going to do it." He ran a finger along the edge of the pad. "After everything he did for me, it's the least I can do for him." He shook his head. "If not for him I probably would have done something dumb enough to get myself or someone else killed."
Kirk stared out the window at Starfleet Academy's grounds. The campus was blanketed in darkness and nobody was out and about at this hour. Pike had complained about the "desk job" as commandant, but from what Kirk heard Pike was hardly ever at that desk. There was hardly a day that someone didn't see him about campus ensuring the Academy was running smoothly.
"He was your friend." As usual, Spock had managed to use a sentence where most would need a paragraph.
Kirk blinked fresh tears from his eyes. "Yes. Yes, he was."