TICKET
It's a long road to becoming James Tiberius Kirk. This is the beginning of that road.
Jimmy is three when Winona Kirk remarries. He is dressed in a tiny suit and given a pillow with glittering rings on it. Sammy is dressed in a suit, too, and he stands at the front of the big booming church. Jimmy waits to the side, a grown-up he doesn't know gripping his tiny fingers in a clammy hand. He is told to be on his very best behavior.
He doesn't know why Mommy is so excited. He doesn't like the big scary man that Sammy is standing beside, but Mommy seems so happy every time she sees him that Jimmy is happy too. Everyone is happy. He doesn't understand what is going on.
Frank is a hand-to-hand combat instructor at Starfleet Academy in San Fransisco. After the newlywed's month-long honeymoon, he stays at the academy for most of the week, commuting back to Riverside for the weekends. Jimmy likes that Frank is gone most of the time. Mommy doesn't. She works at the shipyards in town, creating state-of-the-art computers for the Federation's ships. Sammy is at school most of the time, and plays with the other big kids. Jimmy is not welcome among his older brother's eleven and twelve year old friends, and the kids at the daycare don't like him either.
He teaches himself to read and use a computer console instead.
By the end of the first year of marriage, the shiny-newness of things has worn off.
Winona is still in love with Frank, but she's content to have a weekends-only marriage. She knows Frank is probably cheating on her with someone at the academy, but so long as he doesn't take it home with him, she doesn't really care. They argue a bit, mostly because they think they should than because either of them really expected anything more from the other.
She decides to sign up on another long-term mission with Starfleet. She will be off planet for three years.
She passes the care of four year old Jimmy and eleven year old Sam to her mother-in-law, the ancient Cleopatra Kirk. Cleo's husband, Tiberius, passed away more than ten years before, and she had always welcomed her grandchildren into her home with open arms. She said they made the place a little less lonely. She had been the one to look after Sam when George and Winona were in space, and she looked after Jimmy too, when Winona was at work.
Jimmy liked Grammy Cleo. She was old and smelled funny, but she always hugged him tight and had cookies for him. He had to help with chores, but Granny Cleo read him stories from her collection of real paper books and taught him things while they went on their daily walks through the nearby woods. She'd grown up on a farm in the Midwest, and she knew more about making sensible use of nature than most botanists. She told him how to tell one kind of tree from another, how to identify animal tracks, how to find water, ways to always know where north was, and how to figure out what plants were edible. The last lessons were Jimmy's favorites—they would pick bits of whatever Grammy Cleo said was safe and try them. Sometimes they were good—he liked the wild mulberries, but other times the taste was not so great, and he'd scrunch up his little face and stick his tongue out. Grammy would laugh at him, and swing his pudgy little hand in her wrinkly old one, and call him sweetheart.
The year he and Sam spent at Grammy Cleo's house while Winona Kirk was in space was the best one of Jimmy's life.
A/N: So...I've been on a ST kick lately, for no particular reason. So I wanted to start a fic-a multi-chapter, but not too long. I'm publishing this in a burst, so prepare to have flooded inboxes, o you who have followed me. ST's not mine.
