FIRST REAL REAL CHAPTER WHOOO

All Jim can really remember when he comes to is the feeling of his body slowly shutting down and the looks of despair on his crew and the searing anger he'd felt at Kahn, and then he'd opened his eyes and oh.

He'd been demoted and transferred, Spock had been pissing him off. And then Kahn had shown up and killed hundreds in a berserk rage and sent them on a goose chase. And now he was- what, dead? There was no way he could have survived that radiation.

He supposed he'd have to accept the kick in the stomach that he'd never see any of his crew again. Drink with Bones. Banter with Spock. Play poker with Scotty and Hikaru.

Fuck.

"You're finally awake!" A relieved voice said above him, and he finally focused his eyes, blinking as a teen- had to be, way too short- sharpened into a recognisable shape. The kid looked like some punk from the 21st, with a curly mohawk and the odd piercing. The only reallllyyy disconcerting thing was, well, the wings.

"Where am I?" Jim asked, choosing to ignore the potential existential crisis flowing up in his mind. He sat up with a hiss, his muscles and joints on fire.

"Hold on there, kiddo, you're gonna be sore all over what with going out how you did." Who the hell you callin' kid? The teen pulled him up with a surprising amount of ease and guided him to a recliner that was blessedly plush, and he sunk down onto it with a sigh. The teen puttered around the room some more, looking for something, he assumed. It had to be an office, he thought, no other room could be as boring a shte one he was in. Grey walls, blue carpeting, and no windows made for a dull space, with the only breaks in colour being the sofa, some filing cabinets, and a desk. He noted with some interest that the desk itself was littered with pictures and post-it notes.

"Where am I?" He asked again, twisting to see the teen. He was rummaging through one of the larger cabinets. "Hell? Purgatory? Heaven? Nowhere? Am I getting sentenced?"

"Hold off on the questions for just a- there! ST-K-1395536!" The kid pulled out a frankly large file with a triumphant grin, hurrying back to the sofa and flopping down hard enough his wings rustled. "Now, to answer the first one, you are technically in Perdition- it's the word everyone uses down here, much nicer and better than what the feathery assholes upstairs call it."

"But..." Jim paused, eyeing the wings large and at attention. "Aren't you a feathery asshole?" The teen, and he should really learn his name, this was getting annoying, snorted and waved a hand.

"These are Perdition-created, believe me. They were more like tumours than wings for the first two and a half decades I had them. And I'm Ambrose, just so you know. And older than you by centuries, so you can get your nouns right." The teen, well, no, Ambrose said with a small smile. Could he read minds?

"Yes. It helps the job."

"Oh."

"Yes, oh. Now, you, little Terran, are a special case, what with the universe altercations and general shittery that seems to be in your file. And I hate to say this, but you'd get the short stick if you actually went through the system. Probably be locked in the nothingness for a few centuries to serve out all that lust and wrath of yours. Luckily for you your life was screwed over, I guess." Ambrose said this all with an absent, slightly smiling expression as he flipped through what Jim supposed was his file.

"So... what? I'm getting booted back or something? Because of some emo Romulan?" He asked warily, feeling the need to shift away from the man. The- probably demon?- laughed, a genuine but sad one, and gently patted him on the hand.

"Yeah, sure. Let's put it that way. See, something to understand is that down here, every universe imaginable is managed and put through the works. We're only the European-American subdivision too- there's multiple Asian divisions, Interplanetary ones- I know your Vulcans have one involving a form of reincarnation, to put it simply- even ones that go through more loops than the Upstairs Bureaucracy. And down here, we're always the ones getting the special cases. Beings who've essentially been fucked with- to the point where their lives have been altered and their world's balance changed- get sent down here, processed, and then sent back to the living. But. In another world. I mean, you wouldn't believe it, but the Japanese division actually sent this ginger kid over to us, whole botch-up of species, and he was shot off to be y..." The demon trailed off, glancing away with a grimace. Clearing his throat, he began again. "That's-uh, not important. What's important is that we've got to get you processed." He jumped up suddenly, startling Jim, and circled his desk, beginning to rummage in this drawer or that one. Jim chose to numbly sit back and try to figure out how the hell his life had come to this.

Well, he knew, didn't he, because of fucking Nero of all people. Now he was stuck going through some cycle of reincarnation- and he'd apparently been someone else stuck with this shit before? His IQ was above 150 for a reason, and he could figure out a slip like that easily. But that wasn't the point, because he was going to be shipped off to some new universe, and wasn't that fucking scary on some level, and he wasn't even going to remember-

"Wait!" Jim lurched forward, panic written plainly on his face, flinching slightly at the twinges of pain. "Am I going to remember anyone? Am I going to even know about-about any of this?" The expression on Ambrose's face told him that the demon hadn't even thought about it.

"I... don't know if that's allowed, kid." He hesitantly replied with a frown. He stared down at the whatever-he-was-holding, contemplation seeping into his features. "But... there's always loopholes. Good loopholes. Sometimes, it's required to keep something like that because of your position."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Jim started, be he was abruptly cut off as Ambrose swung forward with a lunge and knocked him in the head. It felt as though he had been branded and he fell back with a yell, scrabbling at his forehead with pain. The burn spread downward, into his chest and limbs and everywhere else. The satisfied expression on that winged asshole's face wasn't helping, and neither was his blackening vision.

The last thing he could make out through the static in his ears was someone whispering, "Hey, tell Tony that the Cold War wasn't cold enough, could you?"

And then he blinked his eyes open to a light cream ceiling.