Darkness.
Floating.
He's not even sure he's alive, but he's thinking so he can't be dead...unless this is death. That thought has him panicking. He can't move...isn't even sure if he has a body that is capable of movement. He can't see, hear, smell, taste or feel.
There is nothing. Nothing but him and his thoughts. Those are cloudy and indistinct...snatches of memory fade in and out of his awareness, like tides of an ocean.
Looking at Pike's dead body lying in pieces of wreckage from daystrom conference….Watching Khan kill Admiral Marcus...Uhura looking at him with fear….Bodies falling around...Running in pitch-black on a deserted planet, two kids at his heels...Curling up in his closet so Frank won't find him...Hurting, Burning, Agony all over. As he can literally feel his skin burning off, his cells exploding, everything hurts-and not just hurt-it's mind numbing excruciating pain until it's over…
He's panicking again at that. And he doesn't know how he knows he's panicking. He can't feel his heart racing-he can't feel his breath quicken-all he has-all he is, is a mind.
Memories come and go, faster and faster, until they're going so fast he feels crazy-then they slow down and he wishes for speed-anything so he didn't have to watch in excruciating detail as the worst moments of his life are relieved.
This must be hell.
It could be a day, a month, a year, a century-an eternity- and he still wouldn't be able to tell. Time has no meaning here-
Here?
He can't be at a physical place can he? It's darkness, and nothingness. Just him all alone. He's terrified, he's scared...and there's no one.
This is hell.
He wouldn't be surprised. He feels so much like he deserved it. How many people died because of him?
Over four thousand on Tarsus IV.
How many at his hands?
Probably at least a hundred after that, when he did unmentionable things across the galaxy as he tried to forget...and yeah maybe some of them-most of them-deserved it without a doubt, but it's still deaths on his head.
Then he has to add the billions of deaths on Vulcan and thousands of deaths on the Starfleet ships, because he should have realised what was happening earlier...an anomaly in space...Nero's ship. He could have saved them. He should have.
And now-then? before? he has countless people that died on the Enterprise during Marcus' attack...because it's his fault. He didn't save his crew-he didn't save his family...and did the ships crash? If so San Francisco is wrecked-he tries to remember how many people live there.-how many people lived and are now dead because of him?
The number is too much..he can't begin to fathom. He's a mass murderer of the worse kind. He deserves to die...except he's already dead. So why is he like this?
Why can he think?
He doesn't have an answer.
He's alone forever.
So dirty, so tainted, that even the supposed afterlife where those who have done unspeakable things go is too good for him.
Instead he has eternity to pay for his crimes.
He's going to go crazy, with nothing but his memories to keep him company. He tries to remember Spock, Bones, Uhura...and all the rest. Times on the Enterprise, away missions, laughing in the messhall, studying at the academy. When that fades he runs over random phrases of alien languages, fragments of knowledge from all the stuff he knows, but even that doesn't work. The other times keep intruding.
"I'll be back in three months Jimmy, you'll be fine." Holding her hand as she pulls away and feeling Frank's hand on his shoulder. Cringing away at the man's touch.
"Run!" Dust stinging his eyes and rocks cutting into his feet, as someone falls behind him and he doesn't dare to turn around.
Crying in the bathtub, his mother holding him...he can't speak a word to tell her what's wrong. He can't even clean himself up or tell her that he can't eat hot dogs again...ever again...because that's all they ate for two days from an old forgotten stasis pod , before ten of the kids with him were slaughtered and he forced himself to watch, hidden crouched in the dirt, a day's worth of undigested food and bile spilling from his mouth at their screams.
Lying half-conscious on some bed, sore and bruised...Too sick and tired to try to run as someone a few steps away negotiates the price for a night with his body. The smell of incense is thick in the air, and blood mingled with some stale drug sours the inside of his mouth.
Every inch of his body in agony, feeling himself dying slowly, and feeling terrified...He's dying, this is it...there's an inch separating him from the one person who could make this better...from the one person he really did this for. Because if he hadn't then Spock would do the "logical" thing and sacrifice himself, instead Kirk is surrendering himself to the waiting darkness.
He feels like he's going crazy, every bad situation, every painful moment, is on replay in his mind over and over again. It's torture of the worst sort.
Kirk vaguely remembers an experiment he read about years ago.
People were sensory deprived for hours a day-those who were able to stop from slowly becoming insane had memories of better times to go back too.
Kirk knows he's not going to do the same...because in his 25 year old life the bad far outweighs the good.