Disclaimer: Jim Kirk's not mine, more's the pity. Title from the Gordon Lightfoot song of the same name, some lyrics sampled but it's not a songfic, per se.
Sometimes I think it's a sin when I feel like I'm winning when I'm losing again. -- Gordon Lightfoot
The fire on the horizon was just starting as Jim settled himself on the edge of the quarry cliff. Cirrus clouds swelled with pink and the sun was already orange and hanging low. Jim scuffed his palms through the loose dirt and folded his fingers around the edge of the rock wall, from the right side this time.
After three years, Iowa hadn't changed. The cornfields were still there, as was the shipyard, empty and eerie after the harvest. His mom was still keeping artificially busy, even though she'd come home to see him off. The same butts occupied the same barstools, and everybody still gossiped about the same thing—about that Kirk kid and what kind of future he had ahead of him. The fact that he'd just saved the Federation, escaped a black hole, and been awarded captaincy of the fleet's flag ship built right there in Riverside with Iowan pride hadn't changed the hometown attitude a whole lot. That classic Midwestern reservation of judgment was still in every pinch-lipped, doubt-laced Well, we'll see.
Because Jim had seen the stars at warp speed, seen an entire world swallow itself, seen another man's future, Iowa's stubborn sameness was almost insulting. So he went back to the first place everything changed for him, the place he'd first dared destiny not to drop him and clawed his way into juvenile delinquency. He'd started out a squeaky-clean kid, good at everything but not really doing anything. But after driving that Chevy off the cliff he'd gotten good at being bad and did everything anybody told him he couldn't. The cosmic irony, of course, was that as the new poster boy for Starfleet and captain of the queen ship of every officer's dream, now he had to get back to where he'd started.
He scooped up a handful of pebbles and idly began to toss them, one by one, at the deepening shadows in the canyon below.
Some of what had happened on board the Enterprise during the battle with the Narada was now classified. A lot of it wasn't. The entire bridge crew had been hit up for interviews from news outlets galaxy-wide, Jim most often. They all continued to decline, but juicy details and unattributed quotes spread over the subspace network regardless, and Starfleet was apparently content to trade on the tragedy of its loss and spotlighting the promotion of its youngest-ever captain to increase recruitment numbers.
The James T. Kirk in the tabloid stories was exactly that squeaky-clean, corn-fed, small-town genius, homegrown from heartbreak and hard work, that Jim was supposed to be, and everyone (residents of Riverside excepted) adored him. Jim could picture what it might be like to get lost in all that loving—let it go to his head and make him into the asshole narcissist some people already thought he was—but he wasn't willing to make that his first mistake. Whether or not anyone else realized it, Jim knew he was a hero by accident as much as by legacy, he'd spent years fighting that legacy—fighting his parents' past, everyone's expectations, himself. He picked fights to forget all of it, and he learned to love the anonymity of fists in the process. Eventually his reputation as a fuck up overshadowed expectations that he'd be anything else, and he took pride in the fact he never disappointed as a disappointment.
But starting tomorrow he'd have to straighten up and fly right. Not only would he have to be good at everything, he would have to be damn near perfect. Jim kicked the heels of his boots against the rock face and listened to the loose shards skitter down the long fall. The sky was the purple of a light bruise.
There were a thousand ways Jim had found to succeed at being a fuck up, but fighting came easiest, or at least most often. He fought full force, not with sleek specialized training they teach at the academy but dirty and hard. He fought with the blunt force of beer bottle and smack-crack of knuckles, and he liked it that way. At the height of it—just before Pike dared him to join Starfleet—Jim developed a taste for feeling like he was winning when he was losing again. He never sought to be outnumbered or outmatched, but coming out of those situations okay and mostly alive carried a kind of high and felt like victory even when it wasn't.
He'd have to be careful about that now. Since he boarded the shuttle to San Francisco he had stopped torpedoing every opportunity for positive attention that came his way and found enough pleasure in bending rules without breaking them outright to satisfy him. But patterns repeat and habits are hard to break—Spock's choking him with the intent to kill on the bridge of the Enterprise resulting in Jim winding up captain of the ship within a matter of minutes was no small reinforcement. The one thing Jim had always been careful of, though, was not to fuck up other people's lives and that was basically the same kind of damage control he'd face as captain. His responsibility to his crew would trump any of his own shit. He could do that.
Across the quarry hot red bled along the horizon. It would be another two or three years until he saw another sunset from Earth, and even though he'd made a point to watch it, he felt apathetic about it now.
The messed up thing was that sometimes he thought it was kind of a shame when he was feeling better—when he was feeling no pain and it had nothing to do with the numbing effect of alcohol. After a fight he could count on the tight rip in his shoulders from throwing punches and the sore ribs or jaw from taking them. It was a twisted equivalent of a job well done, and part of him didn't want to live without it. But, he huffed a laugh, patterns repeat, habits are hard to break, and destiny has a fast hold on him—he'd be willing to bet there would be plenty of wounds in his future. In fact, Bones would probably even side with Spock that it was a statistical certainty. So maybe some things didn't change even outside Iowa.
Jim sat at the edge of the quarry until long after the last sliver of sun hit the horizon, letting the sky blackout and the cold Iowa night creep up behind him. He waited for the first of the stars to blink into view before inching back from the cliff and dusting off the seat of his pants. Tomorrow he would be back among them. Tomorrow he would board the shuttle that would take him back to Starfleet, to his ship and his crew, and to the future he'd finally stopped fighting.
-end-