First published in Ampersand, an online fanzine for Original Series genfic (pointy-ears dot com slash ampersand).
Still, O Comrade
Who are strangers, and all brothers...
--E.A. Robinson, The Pilot
He knew (when still so young) that he would never be Jay Kirk. The universe was big, they said, especially his father, but you couldn't get lost in it, there was nowhere you could hide and take another man's name with you. And his father was Kirk, David Jay Kirk, so he answered to 'kid' and learned to write the borrowed name in secret into the tax software and school aps and all the other files that demanded identification for his father's small boy.
On the third-grade school playground he discovered that there were other Kirks in the world. He caught one between classes, in the seething boil of children trying to assert their singularity in too small a space, and tried to beat him into the ground for stealing his old man's name. It progressed to blood and screaming, and he didn't struggle when one of the proctors hauled him off toward the slides as teachers spilled out of the building behind them and the watching kids scattered in feral shame.
The proctor sat him down in the soft gravel under the slides. He was only a few years older than the boy, light-haired and lean, lounging against the bright plastene ladder frame. He looked at his charge with eyes that really saw, and the boy shivered because his father did that sometimes too, and it never ended well.
"I know who you are," said the proctor. "You don't have to say it."
The boy kicked at the gravel and couldn't meet those knowing eyes.
"It's not fun, school trouble," the proctor went on. "But after school is worse. My pop was a security chief, my mom too, so I know how bad it gets. A grownup gets in trouble, it can ruin everything."
He swept his hands apart, drawling the last word as though it was the biggest thing ever, the whole universe. Then he slid backwards a bit as the boy cringed at the expansive motion.
"I'm not coming after you," he said softly, not trying to catch the child's elusive gaze. "You know why I had to pull you off that other kid, right?"
"He needed it," muttered the boy sullenly.
"Maybe," agreed the proctor. "But not from you, and not why you think."
"How many of them are there?" whispered the boy. "Are they all named Kirk?"
"His whole family. And it's a big one. It's not the only one, too. There must be millions of Kirks, even on Vulcan, I bet. And when they get an embassy on Andor, there'll probably be Kirks in it."
"Kirk's a good name," said the boy.
"Yeah. It's awfully popular."
The boy twisted his head far to one side, as though to trap the idea and hold it in.
"That's too many," he said with some satisfaction. "My dad can't count to a million."
"Your dad should have better things to do," said the proctor quietly.
"Don't talk about him--"
"I'm supposed to. In fact, you might say I'm in charge of it."
Now the boy was listening, curious and very wary.
"I go to meetings," said the proctor. "We all do, it's part of our jobs. Someone wants to give you a hand up. They want me to keep an eye on you."
The boy shook his head, uncomprehending.
"So I thought--" the proctor grinned suddenly, his whole face lighting up -- "I thought the best way is if we were friends. Looks like you want one."
The boy didn't say anything.
"If you don't," said the proctor, "all I can do is keep dragging you out of trouble, and that would get aggravating. Can I come over after school and see your homework?"
"No one's allowed," said the boy. He was having trouble swallowing.
"Can you come over, then? We don't mind."
"It's probably too far."
"It's just down the street -- door one zero."
The boy shook his head mutely. He never noticed the neighbors. Noticing was a good way to get in trouble.
"You'll need a free period, then," said the proctor decisively. "That way you can finish your work here and go over it at home. Is there an hour you hate? I'll talk to the coordinator. Can you find me again during recess tomorrow?"
"All right," managed the boy. "My dad won't know? He says I shouldn't mix."
"I think we can keep it quiet." The proctor smiled again. "It's just part of school. Especially if you don't beat up any more Kirks."
He slid fluidly to his feet, waiting for the boy to follow suit, and held out his hand to shake.
"Do you always do stuff this fast?" asked the boy, stalling as he shook gravel out of his shoe.
"Yeah," said the proctor. "I have to be decisive. I'm going to be a captain someday."
"All right." The boy reluctantly held out his hand. Then he drew it back.
"Are you another Kirk?"
"No!" The older boy laughed, and they shook hands. "I'm Leo. Leo McCoy."
-----
Leo McCoy's word was good. The next afternoon they met at the library, and went over the boy's homework together. The following day, and for months on end, they did the same thing, and the boy began to understand what it was to finish his work without interference.
By the end of the year the boy was among his class's top twenty students, and over the summer the school offered him an award for the improvement. This backfired when the report reached his father, who concluded that his normally mediocre son must have cheated. Very late that night the boy knocked on McCoy's door -- for the first time since they'd met -- and the proctor took one look at his twisted face and bloody shirt and called the police.
That was the last night the boy spent in his father's apartment. Slapped with a restraining order, David Jay determined to ride the matter out in court, and never bothered to find out where his son had been sent to live. The hearings were against him from the start; foster care was proposed, and Leo McCoy's guardian agreed to keep him until the matter could be concluded.
Through the following months, the young proctor made himself Jay Kirk's interpreter in the weird continuum of emancipation. Leo's own parents had died on an away mission seven years back, leaving him to an (extremely) old friend of the family -- a woman named Grace, silent and dour, her skin matted like crushed velvet. She tottered around their house, dusting things and giving the boys a suspicious eye now and then, but in most things Leo McCoy was his own master, and he took to serious mentoring with a quiet fierceness that his young charge found hard to deny.
School wasn't any harder, but it took time to forget the hearings -- more time than Jay was willing to spend. For the duration he occupied a cot in Leo's den, a narrow space papered with holographic star charts. It was a larger space than he'd ever called his own. He treated it delicately, disturbing nothing, but covering his head when the charts glowed at night.
Leo McCoy, irritated at his persistent timidity, took to reading at his desk while the child was falling asleep. Gradually he drew the boy's attention to the charts, explaining their cartography and cosmic significance. The Federation had an outpost here; a scientist his parents had known was assigned there; this area was a deadly net of gravity wells that ships avoided at all costs. But Jay's eyes kept returning to a roaring false-perspective graphic of the Eagle Nebula with a starship's shuttle hanging off to one side, a tiny human artifact defying the maelstrom.
"I don't care," he interrupted one evening, as Leo was describing the sentient civilization slowly developing on Mintaka 17.
"What?"
"Why do you have to tell me about this? I'm not going to be a captain! I don't want to know about them!"
"What if they join the Federation?" said Leo reasonably. "Maybe you'll meet one someday."
"I don't want to."
"They're not evil--"
"I don't care." Jay scudded into the corner between his pillow and the wall, dragging most of his blankets with him. "I don't want to meet them, and then they'll stay away from me. Space is stupid anyway."
"It's not!"
"Is too -- everyone sees you, in space. Everyone can find you."
"No." Leo clenched his eyes shut and turned away. Then he slowly reached out and touched the nebula hologram, his fingers seeming to sink into the spires of glowing dust.
"Space is--" His throat closed and he had to start again. "We're hardly there at all. We're just strung along between the known planets with no idea whether the darkness around us is empty, and for everything we don't know about it there's ten million ways to get dead. They're calling it space-death now, when someone dies or disappears and nobody can figure out why. We're so smart, and it's like we don't know anything sometimes. And there's so much more out there..."
"I don't care," whispered Jay angrily. "I'll never care, I don't want to care!"
"That's not going to help." Leo, every inch the proctor, slapped his hand flat on the desk. Jay flinched at the sound, but kept his head up, his face flushed and defiant. "Nothing's going to ignore you if you look the other way -- the only thing you can do is deal with it. And you can't deal if you're stupid!"
"I'm not stupid!"
"Then there's nothing to argue about." Leo stood very still, his back against the wall. "Death's the only thing can always find you. People are just people. Sometimes it's good to be found by something else."
He walked abruptly out, and across the room Jay curled his blankets around himself and couldn't stop shivering.
Half a year later a private jury, bolstered by school records and Leo's cautious testimony, placed Jay in foster care. The new family was kind enough, and let him hang a space hologram over his desk.
-----
When Jay was in fifth grade, Leo launched a Kirks-are-allowed campaign. The two boys visited Kirks all over the city, from the State House to the local jail, and looked up various Kirks in history, after which Jay wrote a report about a significant Kirk who wasn't his father. The next year, when a Samantha R. Kirk was hired to teach geology, Jay exhibited no uneasiness about the name -- except when it was applied to him.
His first name had also become a point of contention. For a month or two, he insisted on being called Roy (which, he explained irrelevantly, was "better than Rex"), but that lasted barely long enough for the teasing to start, and he never got used to signing his name with an R.
Finally, facing his charge over a particularly grueling history report, Leo rebelled.
"You know they're going to keep calling you Kirk."
Jay shrugged. This had become his standard response.
"They can't keep calling you 'hey' in class," persisted Leo. "It's part of respect, being called by your own name."
Jay kept his head down, knotting his hands into fists. "I want to change it," he said, in a tone that most of his teachers would have mistaken for indifference. "I don't want it anymore."
"At least that's a start." Leo leaned back, realizing that the subject should have been brought up long ago. "You could shorten it. Try David."
"No good."
"Dave? Davy? DJ?"
A short scuffling match ensued.
"What does the family call you?"
"Mostly 'hey.' Sometimes, well, sometimes Jamie. Which is so babyish--"
"So what about James? Jim? Jimmy? Jimbo?"
The boy made a face, and Leo grinned and leaned back consideringly. After a moment he started, "Hey," checked himself, and snickered at the slip.
Since that first day on the playground, he had paid close attention to his friend's attitude about the fatal name. The old Kirk had used it as a mark of ownership; the courts had stamped it over the boy's memory until there was nothing left in it of himself, nothing to connect him to anything else.
Inspiration struck, lighting the young proctor's eyes from within.
"Want to share mine? How does Leonard Kirk sound?"
The boy wrinkled his brows.
"But it's yours--"
"No, that's what I've been telling you. It's just a name. The same way Kirks are all over the place. Besides--" he nodded to himself, pleased at the solution -- "if there can't be more McCoys, at least there can be more Leonards, right?"
"The school won't go for it," said Jay. Lately he had begun to copy Leo's habit of referring to the school as an entity, almost an acquaintance.
"Yes they will," said Leo.
And they did. What influence the light-haired boy had brought to bear, or whether it simply wasn't that great a matter, Jay never knew; but the next day he signed his test sheet Len Kirk, and nobody said anything about it.
-----
Time passed. Leo joined Starfleet Academy, and videoed regularly to keep Len's schooling on track. "You need good grades," he said: in Len's opinion a bit too often. "They want the best and the brightest, but they can't tell you're one just by looking at you."
The Academy sounded fascinating -- a place to learn things and then use them, to discover and plan and make the world a better place. There were nonhumans at the Academy; there was even a genuine Vulcan -- the first Vulcan in Starfleet ever. Leo had seen him from a distance, though they shared no classes, and reported that he was something of a cold fish, but there was nothing really wrong with him.
The same year, Len switched schools, and found himself dorming.
To his surprise, it was a wrench to leave the old school. He cared nothing for his hometown and little for the foster family that had afforded him only a tepid tolerance, but the library had become a friendly place, and he was sorry to leave it behind.
Leo finished his training at the beginning of Len's last school year, and was finally posted on an actual space ship. Before shipping out, he obtained a week's leave and showed up at Len's door with an engaging grin and a Yellowstone vacation packet.
Len, who hated camping out, fell over laughing and proposed a hockey game instead. The negotiations were just getting serious when the communicator buzzed -- a tone reserved for emergencies and paperwork -- and Len grimaced and took it outside.
The message was plain text, its return address unfamiliar. He looked it up in the directory, and read half a page of jargon before understanding that a mental institution on the other side of the planet desired to update him on the status of one of its patients -- David Jay Kirk.
"They want me to go see him," he said, baffled. "He's asking for me."
"Are you up to it?"
"No--"
The instinctive response was bitten back almost before it could be heard.
"I haven't thought about him in a long time," murmured Len. "We've both changed since then." Suddenly disgusted, he turned away and spat, "Heck, look at him, he's in the loony bin. I hope to God I didn't put him there."
Leo hesitated, his hand on the banister, and Len could practically see what he was thinking. You don't have to go.
"I have time tomorrow. I wasn't going to do anything -- nothing at all. No plans, no excuses."
Leo only looked at him.
Len, not for the first time, looked away.
"I'm going. I have time, and he's my dad. What can I do? He's my dad."
For the rest of the evening, he talked about everything else in the universe, hoping Leo wouldn't offer to come. He'd have to turn him down, and that would be even more depressing.
Leo didn't offer, but kept up with Len's rapid conversation, his usual invigorating platitudes seeming far louder for being unsaid. The next morning he turned up at the door in a rented skimmer and bundled Len in as though they'd arranged it months ago. Between a few shots of coffee and Leo's ceaseless chatter, the younger boy found himself not only conscious but completely rational by the time they arrived at the building.
The doctors met them in the lobby. It was a dismal place, with awkward chairs and unpleasantly strange plant life, and they sat the boy down and told him about his father.
He was getting better, the doctors had said. He would be good as new, eventually. He knew who and where he was, and what had happened to him, and he'd asked for his boy.
The formalities were simple. Len nodded and signed in all the right places, steeling himself to the use of his birth name, and left his escort on the ground floor. Halfway up, he found himself instinctively hunching his shoulders, and defiantly straightened them.
He wasn't prepared for the transporter.
It was a security device, separating the lower levels from the upper ones. He had tuned out when it was described down below, and the madness of it took him by surprise: a horrible tingling sensation, like wasps digging their way out of every molecule in his body, and then he couldn't see, and then his vision abruptly cleared and he was shaking like a leaf in an unfamiliar room.
No wonder they're all crazy here...
Even that shock was swept aside when they brought him before his father.
The ward was cool and dim, overlooking the front drive: a depressing glimpse into freedom. In one corner stood a curtained bed, and beside it sat a computer console and a man. David Jay had always been slight, but now his shoulders sagged, and he peered at the gangly boy as though looking through several layers of fog.
Len stepped forward slowly, remembering the doctors' cautions to keep his distance. His father stood up, looking from him to the attendants in growing consternation.
Then rage flushed his face and he lashed out, snarling that this brat wasn't a Kirk, looked nothing like one, couldn't fool his old eyes. His sudden violence startled the attendants, and it took them a few minutes to clear the room.
The boy barely noticed the transporter this time.
The doctors offered him a sink in one of the offices, and he cleaned his face and took the gleaming steps down to the garden room, away from the normal people in the front lobby. The plants here were even worse.
He looked down at the bright rubbery stalks, touched one and wondered at his own perfect calmness.
A step on the gravel. Leo, stopping a little too short at the marks on his friend's face.
The boy tried to speak and almost panicked when his vocal cords didn't seem to work. He moved his head and felt the scratches stretch and sting, and looked down at his hands, which were shaking.
Then Leo's hands were on his shoulders, and the tears came and wouldn't stop, and he stood on the sand and cried for a long time.
When he was finished Leo stepped back, giving him space to pull his ragged universe about him once more.
"It won't stay like this," Leo said roughly: a captain's promise. "Things will be different."
The rest of Len's schooling was unremarkable. And that, when he looked back on it, was the most remarkable thing of all.
-----
He graduated at the top of his class, and woke for the first time with no obligations, except to himself. The strangeness appalled him, and he packed whatever he felt like, emptied his savings, took a shuttle to San Francisco, and joined Starfleet Academy... partly for the benefits, partly because of Leo, but mostly because of the wild deep curls of the nebula graphic and the small brightness of the tiny ship against the black.
Three weeks into the Academy's rigorous programme, news came back from the Romulan border.
It had been brewing for years, but Earth generally paid little attention to Federation politics. Until now. Neutral Zone incursions, Orion depredations... four ships discovered as blown-out drifting hulks, scans of cold metal blossoming fantastically like glass spun into the black. And a long list of names, so long, too long: shattered in decompression or vaporized in weapons blasts or simply flash-frozen and left to drift, but all noted, all recorded, all accounted for.
It was the day after Len's eighteenth birthday, and he skipped classes and walked down to the nearest courthouse and did what he'd meant to do anyway.
-----
He got quietly sloshed that night in the quad, drinking his first over-age alcohol to the brother he'd never see again. He sat there for hours remembering the laughter and fierce energy had flared and gone out in the gathering dark, the prospects and history that had lost their only anchor to the universe. He drank until the stars ran together and rained shuddering fire over the rooftops of the Academy, and the flitting colored lights of shuttles and transports glinted like the eyes of everyone he had ever known, except for his father, who wasn't in space.
Phantoms and shadows, the plans they'd made. Yellowstone up in smoke; the great ship a hologram, captained by someone else. No revels with crewmates in distant ports, or trading grandchildren back and forth on rainy weekends. Academy people passed on other paths, blurred in the artificial light, and he sat in the shadows and drank and remembered and mourned until he could feel spacetime falter around him, groping for an equilibrium unsupported by Captain McCoy.
He sat up early in the morning, when the whirling stars began to dim.
Leo was gone, but humanity still had space. Nothing else was talked about; nothing else was important now. Politics and economics were space; defense and exploration knew few grander frontiers. They'd need people badly to fill that great vacuum. There would be room, out there, for the lost and unreturning, the wild hearts who could find safe harbor in an ion storm and only pretended they'd ever wanted to go back.
He'd known -- and early -- that he would never end up in the command corps. The tottering timestream would have to find balance in someone else's heart.
Still:
Doctor McCoy...
Now there was a name with a future.