I messed a little with the timelines - between Khan's first attack, and Jim's pursuit.
oOoOo
A Dream Deferred
Jim is seven when it happens for the first time.
A young child who has learned long ago not to let anything get to him in order to make it from day to day.
That one night, however, his dreams are dark and cruel and vivid, and feel so very real. He wakes up shaking and crying and it takes hours until he understands that he is in Iowa, not on Tarsus, and that he just feels like a thirteen-year-old, but is still seven. He remembers every detail, every emotion he has felt, every word he has said, everything he has seen like one remembers something he has experienced just recently.
He is sick, and terrified, and alone. This is not like waking up after a nightmare, he cannot let reality help him get over his fears, because this is reality.
Only after a day of hiding, being horrified and freaked out, does Jim begin to also remember going to bed the evening before, which feel real as well. Moreover, he realizes that there are six years of memories missing. Six years that have not happened yet.
Night has already fallen when he finally dares to sneak out of his room where he has hidden all day, and to look for his stepfather's newspaper.
Year 2240.
His relief is as overwhelming as his confusion.
Jim returns to his room and tries to get some sleep, but every time he closes his eyes the memories return, and there is no way he will be able to sleep, no matter his weariness and exhaustion. His fear to return to that terrible place is too great.
He spends the night keeping himself awake, and ends up writing everything down.
Every single detail he can remember, from the fear and the anger he had felt, to the cold indifference in Kodos' cruel eyes. Jim is nothing but a wild, almost feral child, but, somehow, he can tell that this is big. That, maybe, it will be important someday.
Writing it down helps him, and he knows that there is nobody he can talk about this with. Sam would not take him seriously, and he would never go to his stepfather with any of his problems, and his mother – well. He is still feeling betrayed by her, those alien emotions burning high. He remembers how she has sent him there. No, he cannot tell her.
Not that she were here, anyway.
He hides himself away instead and falls asleep around noon the next but one day, too exhausted to stay awake any longer, and when he is not sucked back into that dream again he slowly begins to forget about it. He hides that nondescript journal that contains all the details, unable to throw it away, and soon has pushed it to the back of his mind. His life has returned to normal, well, as normal a James Tiberius Kirk's life can be, that frighteningly real dream having faded into obsucurity.
Never does he tell anyone about it, because, damn, it was just a dream, right?
Jim is thirteen when he returns home, shaken to the core and scared like shit.
The experiences he has made on Tarsus IV he would not wish upon his worst enemy. Neither would he wish anyone to have to deal with that kind of crap alone. He is used to coping without any help, getting through on his own, but that his mother never bothers to organize a shrink for him is just beneath contempt.
He has remembered that nightmare from six years ago the moment she has chosen to send him away, but has dismissed it as unimportant. However, over the course of the next weeks, through all that shit that Kodos has brought upon them, he has been doubting that more and more. Everything has felt so damn familiar, like something that he has already lived through once. He has begun to predict what was going to happen, and when it actually does happen exactly that way… it is frightening.
Now that Jim is back home he cannot stop thinking about that dream.
It takes him three weeks to make the decision to dig the old journal back out from where he hid it in the dirt beneath his cupboard, and see whether the story really is the same. He does not really need to look, though. He already knows.
Still, he is scared that he is right. About what that means.
He goes and reads those old memories anyway, written in a barely legible script.
Every single detail fits.
Jim is pretty freaked out. Although no real dreams come to disturb his sleep for the next two years he can never really forget about it.
He is fifteen when he wakes up and is convinced that his stepfather is dead.
Frank is an abusive alcoholic, and Jim does not understand why his mother married him in the first place. Well, most of the time she is off-planet anyway, so he supposes that she just does not care.
When he realizes that this death has just been another dream Jim is actually a little disappointed. Which makes him feel pretty bad. But, well, Sam is gone, and his mom is gone most of the time, too, and he is alone with that animal of a man. Who could blame him?
He digs the journal out again, having put it back into the dirt beneath the cupboard, and writes down everything he can remember.
An aneurism.
He thinks about what felt like his current age in the dream, and counts back. Three years this time. Well, it gives him the chance to make some plans.
And plan he does.
He may hate the guy, but he cannot let him die. For all Frank behaves like a pig he still is a fellow human being, and Jim is not going to let his conscience carry the weight of being responsible for the man's death, no matter how much he may deserve it. Also, he wants to know whether he can change anything.
This time Jim is at home when it happens instead of occupying himself with a stupid brawl in a fucked-up bar.
In his dream he had come home way beyond midnight, and the aneurism had ruptured in the late afternoon. Frank had been long dead when Jim had come home.
Now, though, Jim hears him fall to the floor in the living room, and he rushes downstairs, and calls an ambulance, and rides to the hospital with the man he actually hates. In this age saving his life is no problem for the doctors, and Jim stares at his watch after the surgery, around the time he had returned home from his brawl the last time, and smiles.
Maybe there is something good to make of these dreams.
He checks with his journal, and writes down the changed story, too.
He is eighteen now, and has no idea what to do with his life.
Well.
Maybe he should find out more about those dreams.
Jim dreams about a Captain Pike picking him up in that damn bar one and a half years before it will happen. He is 22, and rather confused.
The dream is not terrifying or disturbing in the least, which overthrows his theory that he only gets to foresee disasters. Well, if he is completely honest with himself, seeing Frank die had not exactly been a disaster for him. He feels like a heartless bastard, thinking something like that, but it is true. He also did not really care when a nurse messed up two days after Jim had saved the man's life and unintentionally killed him. His mother had cared, though, and that had been the disastrous part.
Well.
Jim supposes that it is not about disasters, but about life changing moments. It is giving him the chance to make his own decisions… or so he supposes. Because he knows very well that he would be running after Pike like a love deprived puppy on first instinct.
The man has something about him that fascinates Jim.
Maybe it is that he is the first person who actually seems to care about his future.
Jim thinks about preparing himself for the man's speech, his presence. He has one and a half years, it would be easy to withstand the pull.
Well, whatever. There is enough time to make a decision.
For now, he just writes the details into the journal.
18 months later Jim is basically provoking the fight the minute he steps into the bar, despite knowing that it will earn him an epic beating.
He has spent those last months trying to find out more about Captain Pike, which was not exactly hard – considering that the man's starship is being built in a shipyard in Iowa, not too far from Jim's home. He got to hear all kinds of stories about the man, and making a decision had not been all that hard.
Jim is not sure yet how much influence he can take, how much he can change. Frank had died anyway, only two days later. He supposes he should try to find out, experiment with a situation not life-threatening, but he cannot.
He wants to go with Pike, and join Starfleet, and finally have a life.
The journal is hidden away safely in one of the pockets of his jacket, for he knows that he will not have enough time to collect any of his stuff if he wants to arrive timely at Riverside Shipyard.
Probably, if he really ends up aboard a starship – which sounds awesome – he should know more about his dreams. Out in space, disaster is just waiting to happen, despite today's highly advanced technologies. And with him being a person who always leaps without looking, there surely will come up one or another life changing moment.
Still, he cannot bring himself to find out whether Pike will come back after two days to try again, without a warning, just like Frank's death did. Somehow, Jim doubts that he will.
Thus he lets those stupid cadets beat the shit out of him, and when he hears the whistle, his heart leaps.
He tries to forget about the dream, acts like he would were this a situation he has not been in already, and everything plays out like it already did once, in his memory. Like it should. He has napkins hanging out of his nose, and is all bitchy and brisk, because, fuck, this man is annoying.
There still is something to him, though, and the next morning Jim comes running like the love deprived puppy.
Nine months before it is supposed to happen Jim dreams of a huge mining ship, and of a Captain Nero, and of the destruction of Vulcan, and of Pike being tortured, and of-
This time he wakes up retching, again, and it takes him almost a day to get rid of Bones so that he can write everything down.
Nine months.
He really does not know what to do.
So much will be happening, and he knows so little about the backgrounds of everything. All that he knows is that Pike will be dead by the end of it, and that is something he knows he will have to prevent. Everything else – the six other ships, that had always been at the back of his mind, and the destruction of Vulcan, and the damage done to the Enterprise - he will have to let play out, because there is no way he can do anything about it. He does not know nearly enough to puzzle the whole story together, and he may be brilliant, but he will be alone in this.
Bones finding out that he is having psychic dreams? Just no fucking option.
Jim's fingers are shaking when he writes down how he is running through that huge ship, the Narada, trying to find Pike, and how he finally stumbles upon the right room but in that moment feels the tingle of the transporter locking onto him, and the explosion jarring the ship when Spock crashes into it. With Pike still bound.
He feels numb when, with sharp letters, he pins down the struggle to get the Enterprise out of the gravitational pull, and remembers the pain of knowing that Pike was still there, on the enemy ship.
In the black hole.
Oh, no, he is not going to let this happen. No way.
He has grown way too fond of his academic advisor, who does seem to like him in return.
This time, Jim knows the way.
He feels so very guilty, about Vulcan, and the Enterprise's six sister ships, and the death of the Chief Medical Officer, and everything, really. He had known so much in advance, he could have changed a lot.
Rationally, he is aware that he could not have done anything about it. That he had not known enough, and that it would have been too much.
Also, there had been no time for thinking about anything, making plans, acting against his own instincts. He had been way too occupied with surviving, and saving those he could save.
Now he is rushing through dark tunnels, already badly beaten up, the map he had drawn into the journal burned into his brain. He knows exactly where he is, and which turns he has to take, and this time he is not too late. He manages to free Pike, and when Scotty locks onto them he is holding the Captain, never planning to let go again.
Well, he has to, when Bones and a nurse come running, and he is responsible for getting the Enterprise out of this mess, which he already knows how to do.
And Pike is alive.
Jim has four and a half months to make a plan on how to stop Pike from going to that damn assembly.
Of course Jim could not stop him.
Pike is here, sitting next to him, and Jim is fidgeting, close to panicking. This time he immediately tells them that he thinks this is a trap, and while they do not believe him, at least they are alerted now. The second Khan arrives Jim knows, and he pulls Pike out of the line of fire.
By force.
Which is totally okay, because Pike is shot in the leg, instead of the chest, and cannot move now, cannot risk his life by trying to interfere, and Jim can attempt to get Khan.
He already knows that he will not, but it is still worth a try.
Later he writes down the way Pike had been seething, but still had thanked Jim. Had asked him how he had known.
Jim had not told him the truth.
He will never tell anyone, for he knows how much damage others could do with knowledge like that. Probable he is already doing enough.
He flips through the old, dirty pages, reading eight entries that have clearly been written some time apart each, the script changing every time. Eight entries, for five dreams, three of which he had changed. He feels like a cheater. This is not any better than travelling back in time, really.
Tiredly he wishes that he did not have this gift.
The pressure and guilt that come with every dream are shattering. Every time he wonders what he can do, what he should do, what he must not do. What he did, what he should have done, what he wishes he could have done. He has got this unfair advantage, and still so much bad stuff happens, stuff that could have been prevented, had he just tried harder.
He is aware, he is doing everything he can.
Everything he dares to do. After all, he never knows what a change might cause.
But still, the guilt stays.
Pike will never get out of his wheelchair again. His health was already fragile after the Narada. Yes, he had saved the man from certain death, but now the Captain is disabled. Not exactly what Jim had imagined when he had planned saving him. Also, after taking that shot into the leg, the doctors were not able to repair the nerves for a second time. Pike has left Starfleet, before they could tell him that they have no use for him any longer.
Jim feels terrible.
Two months and a week is so not enough to prepare yourself for your own death.
Of course Jim has realized that the time span between the warning and the life changing moment, as he had once called it, halves itself with every time. Also, the number of those situations seems to be increasing with every year he spends with Starfleet.
Well.
Jim supposes he will not have to worry about this again after this time, because there is no way he can prevent his own death. Not without sacrificing everyone else. And then he would still die.
He will just have to make sure that he crawls back to the door again.
There is no way he will miss that heartfelt conversation with Spock. It already meant a lot to him in the dream, and he supposes that it will also mean a lot to Spock.
Uh.
Writing all these emotions down into the journal feels surreal.
Later he does not know what to do with the small old book. His reluctance to throw it away has not decreased, however, he does not want to give it to anyone. Nobody should ever know about his obscure dreams, not even after his death. In the end he pushes it underneath yet another dirty cupboard in Engineering, and hopes that no one will ever find it.
Surviving is what he expected last to come of him changing nothing.
He does not complain, though.
Khan is back to being a human popsicle, along with his crew, and your own crew is well and alive.
Jim just hopes that the next disaster waits a little before it decides to happen.
Jim has little more than a month two save his ship the next time. After that he gets two weeks, and then one. Four days. Two days. One Day. Twelve hours. Six hours. Three hours.
When Jim wakes up he is aboard the Enterprise, as far from Earth as he can be, and he would have no more than one and a half hours to prevent Pike from meeting her.
He has now idea who she is, just that Pike will be falling for her, and that they will be marrying and riding into the sunset together, and have their happily ever after. Jim knows, not even if he were in the same town as the man, if he could change it, he would not. He wants Pike to be happy, no matter how much it hurts him.
There are tears in his eyes when he closes the journal this time.
One look at the chrono tells him that they have already met.
For a few minutes he allows himself to wallow in self-pity, and what-ifs. Then he pushes his completely inappropriate feelings for the man who was the first to care about him to the back of his mind, like he has been doing for years, along with his personal disaster.
Life changing moments, yeah, right.
It is probably the one missed chance Jim regrets most, and the page in his journal – which stays the last one until he dies for real – is corrugated from all the tears that have fallen onto it over the years.