Written for this drabble prompt at where no woman has gone before
Written for the prompt drabble at "Where No Woman Has Gone Before"
# 25. "There was nothing passive about her aggression."
In the modern world, there is no such thing as money. Every citizen of the United Earth is given enough credits to cover basics such as a simple living space, food and things necessary for basic human life.
Those who take on the most dangerous or difficult jobs have the potential to earn more credits to allow for the additional living expenses those jobs warrant. The owner of a large corporation earns credits to compensate for the extra time he spends at his job. Starfleet officers earn a pension of credits that would cover their estimated Starfleet career until retirement, in order to give them peace of mind that their families will be provided for in a career with a high casualty rate.
In theory anyway. In actuality, Starfleet uses any excuse they can to hang onto those credits, and Winona Kirk rather thought they believes she would let them keep them without a fight. In that they were mistaken. There was nothing passive about her aggression. She was a mother lion fighting for her cubs, and they didn't know what they were in for.
"Mrs. Kirk, do you understand the position that George Kirk's death has placed Starfleet in?"
"Please, enlighten me. I'm only familiar with the position it has placed me in. I have a four year old son and a newborn to raise alone. "
"Your husband died a hero, yes. However, his orders were to evacuate The Kelvin and that was all. By making the decision to stay and crash into the Romulen vessel, he for all intents and purposes, killed himself."
The admiral across from her didn't look at all apologetic. He looked smugly certain that the hero's widow, distraught as she was after only a few weeks back on Earth, would meekly leave and accept their decision. Apparently they let complete fools be promoted in Starfleet.
"Mrs. Kirk, there is no provision for the widows and dependents of a Starfleet officer who commits suicide. His pension for death in the line of duty will not be released."
"I won't even dignify what you've said with a response. The only reason there were any survivors of The Kelvin was because of George's actions!"
"Perhaps. Perhaps not. The fact remains that you don't qualify for his benefits."
Suddenly, the fact that she had been refusing media interviews since returning to Earth gave her an advantage. Every media outlet she contacted was thrilled to speak with her about what a hero George had been. If she just happened to mention in the interviews that George Kirk's children were being denied the monetary assistance he would have wanted them to have, it wasn't her fault if it resulted in public outrage.
A day later, the admiral and a number of higher officials called her into a meeting.
"After reviewing the circumstances surrounding George Kirk's death, we have determined our human resource office was…rash in denying his pension to his survivors. "
"That said, Lt. Kirk, it has been noted that your own contract is to serve Starfleet for eight additional years. You do realize if you do not plan to do so that all benefits will be revoked in lieu of your going AWOL."
So this was their revenge for bringing in the media. Instead of allowing her to break contract and remain to raise their sons as would normally happen when both spouses were enlisted, Starfleet was going to force her to serve her remaining time if she wanted any kind of financial future for her family.
"My paid maternity leave lasts for 21 more months. At the end of that time I will, of course go wherever Starfleet assigns me. "
"Then we look forward to your serving Starfleet again soon."
She thinks they really didn't expect her to go back. They assign her to do repetitive soil composition sampling on a backwater station and pretend it isn't a punishment. She supposes she is lucky she wasn't assigned to an ice planet instead. She uses half her luggage weight allowance on holos and data disks of her sons, because she knows she will need them more than any other possession.
Jim is 2 years and six days old when she kisses him and George Jr. goodbye at the shuttle pad. Winona is crying, her boys are crying and her mother is hugging all of them and reassuring Winnie that she will take good care of the boys until they see her again.
She spends the next month crying and feeling detached, until the CMO diagnoses her with depression and prescribes a treatment that makes her insomniac but less miserable. She calls her sons weekly for the 15 minutes she is allowed, and wishes it were hours. On her birthday, the other members of the science department donate some of their allowed time, so she can speak with her boys and mother for almost two hours, and by the end she is crying like a baby. So many times, she nearly resigns and books transport back to Earth.
But in the end she doesn't. Because she thinks about the farm that belonged to George's grandfather that he always wanted them to own, and a possibility of having the necessary credits to send the boys to continue their education on any country or planet they want when they are grown so they never have to join Starfleet to satisfy the space lust they inherited from both she and George. She can't deny that the alternative of never being in space again and never being surrounded by the stars causes her heart to catch in her throat. She chooses what she and George always loved doing, over the people she wants to be with, and hopes it will work out.
Three years later, there is a shore leave home. George Jr. is sullen and doesn't want to hear about any of her adventures in space. Jimmy is shy, hiding behind his grandmother, but curious. When Winona describes aliens she has met and planets she has visited, the five year old's eyes sparkle and she wonders is he will be a spaceman, like his father. She's home with them for 2 weeks, and then she doesn't see them again for 2 more years.
She begins counting down the remainder of her contract. By the time it is complete George will be twelve and Jim will be only eight. Still young enough to be a family for a few years until they are grown.. The time passes, with calls focusing on George's acting out in school and Jim's excelling in it.
But five years into her contract, her mother passes away suddenly. Win is placed on a one year leave in order to find adequate "placement" for her sons, time that will not count towards her contract and keeps her from them longer in the long term, but after losing the woman who has raised them, her boys need her desperately. She comforts them and wonders what they will do.
There are options. Space stations with communal living for children and boarding schools all over the galaxy where George Jr. and Jim could stay together. Foster families she barely knows. There is no more family on either side to care for them except her sister who is living on a farm in some backwater colony and isn't enthusiastic about adding two boys to her own sizable family. But all those options mean taking them off the farm that has been the only home they have ever known, and Winona doesn't want to do that.
She calls someone to help with repairs that need to be done on the farm not long after, and the man who shows up seems like the answer to their prayers. Frank is strong and steady. Seemingly, a gruff but good man, who falls in love with her the moment they meet, and if he can't ever compare to George in intellect or charm, well at least he is there and alive. She decides it is time to stop living with ghosts, and marries him in sheer hope.
It's hard for he and the boys to get used to one another. For too long, George and Jim's grandmother loved them unconditionally but with a sort of benign neglect. She had been too old to keep up with two active children, and they had pretty much been allowed to do what they wished. The only thing that kept them from being real hellions had been their love for the elderly woman and desire not to disappoint her.
George especially dislikes his stepfather. Frank hasn't much experience with children, and is somewhat authoritarian and Winona tries to balance that and smooth things out between them. Jim follows his brother's lead by not accepting any of Frank's overtures of friendship, but is more accepting of the entire concept of his mother remarrying. It isn't as though he actually remembers his father.
When she leaves again to complete her contract, Winona wonders if she is making a mistake and if George and Jim would be better off in a different situation, but Frank assures her they will be fine and waiting for her. She leaves.
If the boys seem quieter and more subdued over communications, she chalks it up to their growing up and some resentment towards her leaving them.
A few years later, with only a year left on her contract, Winona receives an urgent message. Her oldest son is missing and apparently has run away and her youngest son had crashed his father's antique automobile off a cliff and nearly gone over with it. Most disturbing, Jim was brought to the hospital after with a number of injuries that the policeman on scene claims were not sustained in the crash.
By the time she can return to Earth two months later, investigations show that Frank has been steadily drinking away their credits (thank god a large part of it was put away for the boys when they reached maturity). When money ran low, he apparently planned to sell George's car, despite not being listed as an owner. When the boys found out, George confronted him and ran away. Her quiet, good little Jimmy on the other hand, decided to take action, and his stepfather had beaten him afterwards for daring to destroy the car.
She divorces Frank over transmission from the ship. Local enforcement removes him from the farm and ensures he takes nothing that doesn't belong to him. The Amish family that sublets land on the farm from them offers to care for Jim until she can return, and she is grateful for it.
When she gets back, George Jr. is still missing and it tears her to pieces. Jim is older and quieter, when she asks "Why didn't you call me?"
"What good would it do? You were too far away…"
"I could have called police. I would have stopped him."
"He said you told him to sell the car. You loved him."
"Even if I had told him to sell the car, you still could have discussed it with me. I cared about Frank, but you are my child and I love you more. Understand?"
"Okay…", he replied, and it broke Winona's heart that her sons had ever thought that she was too inaccessible to contact for any reason.
This time when she contacts her sister on Tarsus IV, she is only asking her to accept one additional mouth for a single year. Her sister's children are older now, and she doesn't think one more will be much bother. Jim goes to stay with his aunt while Winona fulfills her last contract year and then she promises they can all be together. It will all work out.
Three months after returning to her ship, she receives word that George has been found. There is a tearful reunion across space over a transmission. She finds a boarding school that will take him still in Iowa and begs him to finish his education there. He agrees, as long as she will come back soon.
It's all working out. She feels like she can breath again.
Then communication with the Tarsus IV colony cuts out. There are rumors on 'net of a military coup, and famine and genocide. Starfleet takes weeks to actually investigate and during that time there is no word from her sister or her son. She lives in terror of every transmission, that she will have lost her child on a peaceful, backwater agricultural colony. It is unthinkable.
Winona cries when she sees his name on a list of survivors, and again when she finally holds him in her arms a week later. His face is drawn, he is too thin and his eyes are just… old. Like he's seen all the secrets of the universe and found them lacking.
While in the Tarsus II hospital with Jim, who is receiving yet another treatment to attempt to rebuild his lost muscle mass, Winona receives orders to leave her son and return to The Endeavor.
She contacts Starfleet's public relations office on Earth and makes it quite clear that unless they release her from her contract six months early, in exchange for the role Starfleet played in the Tarsus IV disaster, she will be contacting the media. She promises to not only give full details of Starfleet's treatment of their favorite martyr's wife and children, she will allow interviews with Jim regarding what happened on the colony, with an emphasis on how Starfleet failed to prevent it.
Four hours later, Captain Ayala smiles over the transmission as he informs her that she has been honorably released from duty due to extenuating circumstances with her dependents and that she will be missed.
Winona thinks this is what Starfleet should have had the decency to do for them when her son was born, and that the loss of his innocence was worth far more than a mere six months, but she simply thanks him for the honor of serving on his ship.
They wait until Jim is discharged, and then they head home.
Once there, she pulls the credits that were meant to pay for Jim's future travel and education and spends the next few years using them to pay for extensive therapy for him to help him recover for the trauma of Tarsus. She never does decide is the therapy actually works or if Jim simply learns to hide his demons better and deceive the therapists.
George Jr. returns home, and he is calmer once she is back. He does well in school, finishes his university credits in Science and falls in love. When Starfleet attempts to recruit him, he laughs in their face and claims they've had enough time and blood from the Kirk family. His mother is inclined to agree.
The credits that aren't spent on Jim's therapy tend to go towards Jim's constant brushes with the law. He is charged and fined mainly for assaults, but there are a sprinkling of public intoxication and excessive speeding charges on the antique replica motorcycle that Jim adores.
By the time he is eighteen years old, Jim has finished all the normal coursework for his age and most of those necessary for a basic university degree. He's brilliant, in a way even his father never was. He develops George's ability to charm everyone around him, although instead of it being a result of his own self-confidence it seems more like a mask to his mother. Jim has not close friends and he often keeps his mother and brother at arms' length, except for the rare times he comes to them for a hug or some other physical comfort.
Winona worries about her youngest son, especially when he chooses to remain in Iowa rather than take any of the opportunities to leave Earth that present themselves. He could have a job in any shuttle or port if he wanted space, or any company on Earth with his test scores. But he stays, and makes trouble.
It's 4 a.m. one morning when she is awakened by a knocking at the door, and it is Jimmy coming by for the first time in months. He's bruised and battered, but there is more joy in his eyes than she has seen in years and he wants to talk. When he tells her he is joining Starfleet, all she can do is hug him and cry. She doesn't dare speak.
He asks her for an old holo of she and his father when they were at Starfleet Academy, hugs her again and leaves.
A week later, Jim messages that he has arrived and is settling in fine. All the messages that follow tend to be short and seem to describe how well he is fitting in there.
Then three years later, a huge proportion of Starfleet officers and older cadets are dispatched to the disturbance over Vulcan. Within hours, there are reports that the planet is gone and all the vessels are destroyed. She sits numbly and waits for more info over the data net.
Nearly ten hours later, she finally receives word that her youngest son is alive, and that is all she cares about. It isn't until the press conference after they return weeks later that she hears the whole story. The fact that Jim was made acting captain, just like his father, terrifies her.
When Starfleet finally releases him from days of briefing, she is there to hug him and cry over him. He puts up with both good naturedly, and she would strangle him if she didn't know two other aliens had already done so.
Winona can't bring herself to attend the ceremony where James Tiberius Kirk is officially made The Enterprise's captain. She sends congratulations, just as he brother did from off-world. She can't stand to be part of building her son up into Starfleet's newest poster boy. She knows what happens to heroes in Starfleet and she can't stand to lose him like she did his father. She braces herself to receive the transmission one day that his ship has blown up or he's been killed by hostile natives, but it never happens. Jim is happy, and she simply smiles and cheers him on when he calls. If she cries, she waits until he has said goodbye and can't see. She'll always be terrified for him.
Time passes. Winona continues her research without ever again working for Starfleet, on principle. She travels the stars she loves, and knows that sometimes both her sons are among them, looking at them from a different point of view. She marries a truly good man who works in her science division and visits her new grandson Peter.
There are times when Winona Kirk-Arra tries to imagine a different life in a world where George Kirk Sr. didn't die screaming in the black. She tries to imagine her boys growing up with a real father in their lives, even if he would have been out in space most of the time. She even tries to imagine giving up her career to be on Earth and raise her children. She wonders is George Jr. and James would have grown up less damaged, if she and George would have still loved each other years later and grown old together, or if the strain of living different lives across the universe would have taken it's toll.
But all she has is this life and all its imperfections, so she just keeps pushing on despite everything.
In spite of her mistakes, Winona is proud of her sons, both the scientist and the Starfleet captain, and she thinks George would have been too.
It's enough. It is because it has to be and she is content.