Chapter 3: The End of Innocence
It's not the last time Jim sees Christopher Pike.
She wills herself to forget. Tarsus IV was a place for new memories, a fresh start. Jim takes to chess again, and makes friends. Her aunt watches her niece blossom from a guarded teenager, to a smiling young girl who was top of her class.
Jim likes the courses here, you could choose what you wanted to take according to your own interests and levels. The instructors were well-versed in their own subjects, and every class was challenging in some way.
"Such a clever girl." Her aunt Sharon praises as she reads Jim's quarterly performance record. "Just like your father."
Jim preens and tries not to think about the just like your father comment.
She is thirteen, old enough to start doubting herself.
"We've been thinking of starting a chess club," Aaron, who was in the same astrophysics class as she was, a friend, says. "You want in?"
Jim says yes without hesitation.
She looks forward to school everyday, the ups and downs of school life here are new to her. There were no hurtful comments, no shoving and no underestimation. Jim's in academic paradise.
One day, she sees a short woman cursing at the governor's guards in what sounded like Romulan. Jim should know, she knows the lingua franca of Romulan. She could swear in Russian and Cardassian, two languages that had more in common than their consonants.
"Excuse me, are you alright?" Jim says in crisp Rihan.
"These idiots patrolled their way through my flowers." The Asian woman replies curtly in an entirely different dialect.
"Really?" Jim has no knowledge of the other two dialects, but she could surmise that she was angry about flowers.
"Our sincerest apologies, Madam." The patrol leader, who wore a blue armband, apologises. "Please expect full compensation."
"My flowers are ruined!" The woman flings her arms into the air as they leave. She is talking to just Jim.
She was also speaking in Andorian now, which was difficult because 60 different words could have the same translation in Federation Standard.
"That's sad." It was really difficult for her to wrap her tongue around those words. There was only so much you could get from listening to audio tapes.
"Yes, indeed." The woman is speaking in English and has a strange look on her face. Jim had seen that face before, in a book perhaps.
"You're Hoshi Sato!" Jim declares, she had read about Sato's extraordinary linguistic accomplishments at the library. While she typically ignored other adults, she respected any person who could write an entire series of books on the Klingon language.
"And you are James T. Kirk." Hoshi says with an amused smile, glancing at the name tag on Jim's bag.
"Jim, please." She says politely, glad that she didn't mention her father.
"You have a way with words, Jim. Your Rihan is excellent for someone your age." Hoshi praises after she appraises the girl. "But your Andorii could use some work."
Jim blushes. "Sorry."
"Nothing to be sorry about, dear girl." Hoshi grins. "Xenolinguistics is the study of alien languages, morphology, phonology, and syntax. Means you've got a talented tongue."
Though Jim had no idea what the wink at the end of that sentence meant, she asked the linguist to teach her. Hoshi, who had decided to take her under her wing the moment the blonde had said excuse me, pretends to debate with herself dramatically- it was funny watching her student squirm.
"Yes." A relieved smile comes onto Jim's face. "We start tomorrow."
They start with Vulcan, which was a hard language to learn no matter what. It gives Jim a challenge, to deal with those vowels and words. What she read on paper never sounded the same on her tongue.
It helps that there is a Vulcan family on the planet, though it takes a bit of sweet-talking to get them to talk to her in Vulcan. You could win over a Vulcan eventually, it just took time and a lot of effort to get their gazes to soften from steel to rock.
She masters it after nine grueling months, and then they go on to Klingon. The guttural language is an endless source of amusement for Jim, who does it in seven months this time. She loves reading Shakespeare out loud in Klingon, much to the mortification of her aunt.
Jim sails through Cardassian and the two types of Orion in nine months. She has never been happier, even if she wouldn't be a linguist, she was certain that learning these languages would be more useful than swearing in them.
Jim turns a blind eye to the steadily decreasing rations and her aunt's tense expression after every meal. She does not notice Sharon resting her head on Ben's shoulder after reading something on her PADD, her uncle looks hopeless, which is rare for him.
She's busy learning entirely new things, and for the first time in her life, she feels wanted.
They are halfway through Andorii, the day after her aunt cried silently in her pantry and her cousins locking themselves in their rooms, Hoshi grabs her by the arms and looks deeply into Jim's blue eyes.
"Jim. Listen to me carefully." Hoshi continues to speak in Klingon, the safest language on the planet, known to just two. "Governor Kodos is dangerous, he is going to massacre the people, you must hide, girl. Do you understand?"
Jim blinks twice, absorbing this information. "Why?"
"The crops have been destroyed, Jim. That's what they have been hiding from us. Take what you can and run from this place, as far as you can go. Here." Hoshi drops something silver into Jim's palm. "A communicator tuned into Starfleet frequencies. Use it to contact the fleet."
"But I don't know how to use one!"
"You are smart, Jim, too smart for your own good." Hoshi strokes the golden hair of her student tenderly. "You will know what to do."
"What about you, Hoshi?" Jim asks, turning the communicator over in her hand.
A resigned look comes over the woman's features. "I will do what I can."
Jim, overcome by a sudden sadness, hugs her teacher, who kisses her on the forehead.
"Now go!" Hoshi shoos her away.
Jim looks back at the non-descriptive house, with the flowers she had help plant in the summer and the woman standing on the porch, her hand half-raised in the air.
And then she runs, the communicator clutched in her sweaty hand. There is something hammered onto her house's door. It's a list.
Harper, Benjamin Timothy.
Harper, Lillian Candice.
Harper, Sharon Lisa.
Harper, William Connor.
Kirk, James Tiberius.
Her aunt and her cousins are gone, there is no one left in the house. She mustn't think about how this feels like running away from home, instead of trying to survive.
Jim swiftly takes what she can, following Hoshi's advice. She wears two T-shirts and changes into pants, slips off her flats and chooses a pair of hiking boots that belonged to her cousin. Will had the same shoe size as she did.
Flinging on a jacket, she drinks all the water she can.
Filling the large pockets with protein bars, Jim exits the house.
She doesn't know where to go, she doesn't know who the enemy was. Governor Kodos? That kind man who granted that much money to the Chess Club couldn't have caused this much fear.
Jim scales a tree, to see if she could catch a glimpse of the town square.
And when she does, she could see people marching into the center and falling down, never to rise again. Bodies were flung onto piles and burned, the smell reached where she was. Jim gags, she has seen enough.
Her first instinct was to head to the woods, then Jim remembered that higher ground was safer. And the mountains were north.
That's what she does, she walks past the edge of town and doesn't look back.
She meets other children on the second day. There's Natalia, Thomas, Kevin, Julian, Thea, Smith, and Waters.
Jim listens to how they avoided being killed and watch as they scarf down half a protein bar each, leaving her with seven.
"I hid in a tree for two days," Natalia explains. "The soldiers never found me."
"I took my brother and hid under the floorboards," Thea says, holding little Kevin tightly. "The soldiers walked over us."
Jim counts other ways to hide, diving into the woods, on the rooftops, camouflaging themselves.
"Anyone know why Kodos is doing this?" She asks.
Thea coughs and spits into the ground. Her eyes are wild, her face twisted. "The stored food wasn't enough to feed the people when the famine started. That's when he- that's when he rounded up the elderly and killed them first. I lost my grandparents."
"If we're going to survive this." Jim's voice is hoarse from lack of water but it still carries. "We have to go to the mountains. The further we go, the harder it is for them to catch us."
"Aye, aye Captain," Thomas says in a way Jim supposed was sarcastic. She glares at him before breaking out into a bright smile.
"I'll be captain." Jim declares.
"Yeah right." Julian rolls his eyes. "A girl gets to order us around."
"Yes, she does." Jim- no Captain JT, cocks her head up proudly, asserting her territory.
"You know this is genocide, isn't it? You're younger than some of us." Thomas points out. "I'm not sure you can handle this."
"And I bet I'm smarter than a lot of you."
"I'm sure that brain of yours is pretty good," Julian taps her forehead with his index finger mockingly. "But you don't know how to survive because deep down you're just a soft girl-"
The blonde punches him once and he falls to the ground, clutching his face.
"Anyone good with medicine?"
"I'm taking a pre-med course." Smith pipes up. He's the oldest at sixteen.
"You'll be my CMO." JT decides. "Take care of Julian here."
"It's just going to bruise," Smith reassures Julian as he looks at his wound.
"Tommy, you'll be my first officer." The teen nods seriously, he couldn't deny that this girl had a sort of charisma that everyone else lacked.
JT shows them her communicator. "Anyone who knows what Xenolinguistics is?"
Thea raises her hand timidly. "I can speak German and some Orion."
"Great, between me and you, you'll be communications." JT hands her the silver comm. What use would that have, she had no idea, as it was missing its pair but they had to make do with what they have.
"Julian and Waters, you're with me on away missions." At their questioning looks, she rolls her eyes. "Scavenger hunts. You'll be security."
"Natalia." The Russian girl shows some interest at the sound of her name. "You will be navigator and scout ahead for danger."
"Kevin." JT's voice softens as she glances at the four-year-old boy. "You'll be the mascot."
He stops sucking on his thumb and shoots her blinding smile. JT returns it with the shadow of her own and the group sets off to the mountains.
It isn't all fun and games. Water is a luxury they couldn't afford, they sleep on the barren dirt and as the week comes to an end, there are at least ten more additions to her ragtag crew. Survival is the only goal in her mind.
JT hopes for the best, but they have to cover more miles if they were to escape from Kodos' men. The blisters on her feet burst and hurt like hell, her throat is scalding, and her hair is matted and she knows how bad she smells.
Her boots have been worn away to tatters and plastic, and she walks with feet so calloused that she could step on a sharp stone and not feel it scrape against her skin.
It's on the eighth day when she sees Kodos' soldiers, with their armbands and phasers. There are two of them, joking about the massacre and talking about the women waiting for them when they got back.
JT sees red and attacks them, Finn and Harley, her new security officers now that Julian was delirious from lack of water, follow suit.
She fights dirty, aiming for maximum damage.
JT has never fought like this, so desperate for survival, not even with her stepfather.
She goes back to their camp that day, clutching two canteens and phasers. When she drinks, there's barely enough water left for a sip. Smith claims one of them for his patients, Julian, Waters and a tiny mute Orion. JT doesn't mind, her kids come first.
Thea collapses the next day from carrying Kevin, she's losing too much energy too quickly. JT wordlessly takes over and carries Kev across 16 miles of scorching dry grass every day until she recovers her strength.
The next patrol is a welcome respite, fighting comes easily to JT now. Jim is hidden in the darkest corners of her mind, because if she resurfaced, JT wasn't sure if she'll be able to take care of her kids.
"Are you sure…" Tommy trails off, looking into her eyes. He does not need to finish because JT had been wondering about it herself.
"They have noticed," Jim says, licking her dry and cracked lips, tasting blood. "We have to be quick."
Quicker than them, she does not say, but he knows.
More water and supplies are rationed out. Smith is ecstatic to see a medkit among the things the away team found. He has five more children waiting, some were other species that the captain carefully drew diagrams of their biology for him in the sand.
The Orion, who does not offer her name, is good at keeping the younger ones quiet at night.
But the strange coughs that have plagued the children since the time they left the fields are incurable for the pre-med student. Julian is the first to go, JT has no time to mourn the boy who had dared to question her orders since she announced she was captain.
They do their best to hide his body, as turned earth would be too obvious to the enemy. Most of them have never dug a grave before, so JT and her second moves stones and grass, Natalia mutters prayers in Russian for Julian as they trudge on.
The mountains are appearing on the horizon, Natalia estimates three days before arrival.
They make the most of the situation, making jokes and telling stories. JT knows that all things pass, they will endure.
The sickness gets worse as they pick up their speed since Nat and her second, Peters, warn of a regiment tailing them. Thea picks up ominous messages on the comm that JT reconfigured to recognize the signals of Kodos' transmissions.
JT tells Smith to leave some of his more serious patients behind, they were falling behind schedule. He doesn't want to, nobody wanted to leave their comrades behind, but they couldn't be saved even if he tried. Waters, Luca, Paddy, Jen, and the mute Orion make their decisions as Jim thrusts the phaser into Water's weak hand.
She watches with an unreadable expression as Waters shoots each of them in the head and then catches her eye. He salutes her, Jim nods once, returning the gesture.
He levels the phaser against his forehead.
The rest will live. JT will make sure of that.
They are running when the last shot rings out. Thea cannot stop Kevin's wails.
In hindsight, she should've known they were going to be found.
JT blames herself for letting her guard down. The mountains were like Nirvana and heaven mixed together, there was water and red fruit that she identified as lingonberries, perfectly harmless.
Nat was close to figuring out how to reach Starfleet, everyone was relaxing and smiling for the first time in- JT didn't know, time passed sluggishly when you were running for your life. Smith even did a jig because the fresh air was helping his remaining patients.
Then came the guards and everything went to hell.
JT yells at Tommy to take her kids and hide. She fends them off with Finn and Harley until both of them were dead and she was sedated.
She wakes up, chained and dressed in a clean white robe. All the light in this cell is focused on a modest-looking man, he's a bit on the chubby side and has a mustache. The feral light behind his eyes is unmistakable, she knows this is Kodos.
"My dear girl." He chuckles, the sound grating. "Did you really think you could run forever?"
JT is silent and stays that way while Kodos looks her over.
"You're a pretty one, aren't you?" He smirks. "Your 'crew' is very loyal."
"What did you do to them?" JT growls. "If you've hurt one hair on their heads, I swear I'll-"
He slaps her, hard. She's used to it from Frank but this man was in a league of his own.
Kodos has her kids.
"Bring her in!" He calls and two masked men drag a battered Thea in. Her face is bruised but her lips quirk upward when she sees JT.
"Do what you want with her." JT starts at the subtle implication. Thea was only nine. She struggles against her chains, they couldn't do that to a child.
"You dirty son of a bitch!" He punches her in the stomach twice. "Let her go you mother-"
"Language." Kodos tuts.
The soldiers laugh and call for 'reinforcements' as he tore the clothes off Thea's body. JT couldn't look away, Kodos was holding her head forward, forcing her to watch. The brunette is putting up a fight, she needed two men to hold her down.
Thea is screaming profanities in German and is quickly silenced by something JT had would never want a girl of nine to see, much less have her mouth stuffed with it.
She thinks she passes out by the time the sixth suggests two-timing her. JT just wants to sleep.
Someone flings a bucket of ice-cold water onto her, shocking her back to life. JT sputters as a current of electricity courses through her body.
"You're awake. I didn't take you to be one to faint, James." Kodos is smiling, it makes him look almost fatherly, almost. No smiles could hide the thing he had just let his soldiers do to Thea.
"How is she? What did you do to them?" JT snarls. Her voice is cracked and she licks her lips to wet them. "You monster!"
Kodos grabs a lock of her hair, sniffs it, and yanks it until his fist comes away with a few strands of gold. "You will respect me, James."
That's when she notices the chessboard lying a few feet away from her, just out of reach.
"Ah yes, chess," Kodos says somewhat dismissively. "You were the champion of Tarsus IV's chess competition last year, an impressive achievement."
JT glowers.
"You caught my interest, it isn't every day you see a Vulcan defeated at chess." He chuckles dryly, the sound grating.
"What do you want?" JT spits.
"A good game." Another masked man walks in, JT glares at him. "He will be your helper."
She stares at both men distrustfully from under those full lashes. "I'll take white."
"I thought you would," Kodos says silkily.
"Knight to A5." She orders, her voice low. Kodos doesn't know anything about JT, not really.
To her dismay, the helper doesn't move the knight to A5, he moves the pawn to B4. JT could see how it would end, black would checkmate her in six moves.
"You're cheating!"
"So?" Kudos sneers as he takes her bishop.
JT doesn't speak again. He reminds her too much of schoolyard bullies with their cocky smirks and I'm big, you're small excuses.
Jim never liked bullies.
The masked man delivers hits to her face, ten successive blows. She still doesn't move.
He forces her legs open, JT bites down on her lip but her cold stare does not waver.
Kodos looks at her with the air of a disappointed teacher and exits the room, carrying the game with him.
Someone enters, it's a young man, somewhere between twenty and twenty-five. He doesn't wear a mask, one side of his face has been burned off.
The man whips her. She shudders as pain, deep and piercing, shakes her to her core. It's nothing she couldn't handle until it passes the twentieth mark, that's when she starts to scream.
JT hopes the wounds on her back aren't infected. They sting when she moves and she curses whoever thought dangling prisoners in chains hanging from the ceiling was cool.
She couldn't even think properly in the haze that followed the whipping. And then someone has the bright idea to stuff salt into her injuries just as she regains consciousness. It hurts and JT has to bite her lips and recite the periodic table backwards until the pain subsides into a blissful, slightly irritating wave in the back of her head.
She doesn't begin to trust the food and water they give her, so they later have to force it down her throat. Someone wants her alive, that's for sure.
Kodos comes in sometime later, still wanting her to play chess with him.
"As if!" She yells at him, trying to get out of her chains to punch him in that stupid, smug face.
He frowns and hits her personally, splitting her lips and using a knife to cut her arm until he reaches bone.
The food stops coming, with water given a few days apart. A soldier comes in once and breaks two of her ribs before leaving swiftly.
Half the time, JT is hallucinating, her mind making up for the pain her body was suffering. The other half is spent worrying about her kids.
Alone, she counts the names of her crew in her head, she can hardly remember what colour was Nat's eyes, or how Smith's smile lit up his entire face.
But she repeats their names, again and again, clinging to the last bit of hope that they would survive.
Julian. Luca. Paddy. Jen. Little Orion girl. Waters. Smith. Finn. Harley.
JT thinks she'll die in that cell. She knows she's being a pessimist, there was a slight chance Nat contacted Starfleet, but she could see no other way this would end without her death.
It was a no-win scenario, and Jim hated those.
If Pike had a credit for every time he saw the colour blue and immediately thought of a Kirk, he would have enough money to pay off the Terran debt.
He couldn't help it. Kirk-blue was an abstract concept that always seemed to change. It was the sky, with its ever-changing tones; the sea, with all the swirls and colours that seemed to draw you in. But somehow those eyes were distinguishable in a colour palette.
Chris thought George had been wearing contacts or had his irises surgically altered when he first met him. No human could have eyes like those. Or maybe the Kirk family was just special in their genetic luck.
They didn't seem to have much luck elsewhere besides looks and brain power. And Tarsus IV once again proves it.
They haven't heard from the colony in months and finally, Starfleet has sent a ship to find out. The recently promoted Commander Pike leads a team down to the planet's surface.
Chris honestly didn't know what to expect, but it certainly wasn't this. Charred buildings, withered wildlife, nobody in sight. The golden postcard-worthy fields of corn are gone, replaced by bone-dry stalks of grass.
And it gets worse when they reach what used to be the town square, piles of bodies just sat there, some burnt, some rotting. A few officers have to excuse themselves to vomit quietly at the side. Chris feels a bit queasy himself.
It gets worse as they go into the palace, there was nobody there besides a couple of guards playing cards. Matthias and Jon immediately shoot them, Chris doesn't even bother to stop them. Life signs were coming from the holding cells downstairs.
The men don't really put up much of a fight, at the sight of Starfleet officers they shoot themselves instantly. There had to have been instructions but the governor was MIA.
What really makes Chris fume was the small figures in those cells. The first one is a girl, she's been dead for a while, questionable fluids staining her legs. They stand there for a minute, mourning her.
Jon closes her eyes in respect.
The rest all hold children, they are still clinging to life as he frees them, the way their skin stretched over their bones looked too tight for comfort.
The final one they come across is at the very end of the hallway. The two men guarding the door were dead.
Chris breaks down the door. He nearly trips over a chessboard with a half-finished game.
The figure is dangling on chains, her wrists were bloody from straining against them, her fingernails were gone. Bones protrude from under her skin and a brownish robe hung loosely on her. The smell was ungodly. Wilson, a Catholic, murmurs prayers under her breath.
The girl tilts her head up and Chris feels his heart sink. Was she here? How could she be here?
Those eyes, a stormy blue-grey, are wide with recognition, sunken into her face. Last he checked, she was still in Riverside, getting her second degree. "Lieutenant Pike, you again?"
"Jim, you okay kid?"
"Fine, absolutely brilliant. Call me JT." She is laughing hysterically and for a moment he thinks she's gone crazy. "Funny how you ended up here as well."
"Sedate her." Chris orders, sick of the laughter. He could see every outline of her broken ribs, she was hurt and bloodied, hallucinating even. She must have endured so much pain, it was unimaginable to see this sort of abuse on a child.
Just then, Jim sags against her chains and sighs. "You are real, aren't ya? Or is this just another dream. I don't know anymore. I don't know black from white, right-" -A dry cough racks her body- "-from wrong. Take me home."
Her eyes flutter shut, showing the purple welts on her face. Wilson jumps to blast off those chains and shoots a sedative into her neck.
Then she starts to go into anaphylactic shock, Chris shouts into his comm to beam everyone back onto the ship as he carries the too light body of James T. Kirk up the stairs and where his team was waiting.
It turns out Jim (or JT as she was known to the other kids) was allergic to the sedative. Chris exhales deeply and rubs his temples, not bothering to hold back the tears.
Damn Kirk luck.
She heals quickly, but there are some wounds that last forever.
Jim doesn't stay for long after she wakes from her medically induced coma and certified fully functional by Dr. Hartford, the CMO of the U.S.S. Brooklyn.
Chris is brought up to testify about the Tarsus IV Massacre, ensuring that a financial settlement could be reached between the next of kin of all the dead. In some cases, entire families, generations of stories, had been wiped out. There is no one to pay too keep their mouths shut.
The media is calling it Starfleet's dirtiest secret.
Jim refuses any sort of therapy, she buries JT somewhere inside she's sure she'll never find again. And if she's prone to be easily startled by the smallest movement, and also rejecting the visits of her 'crew', it's her own business.
Winona Kirk is notified and shows up a few days later with a stuffed bear that makes Chris want to laugh and cry because Jim was going to take that poor woman apart.
Not if he doesn't first, but as soon as he steps closer to the blonde woman with a thunderous look that demanded Winona do some explaining, she shrinks and walks faster.
Chris wonders where did the other Winona go. The one who would've burst into the hospital as soon as she heard the news, kiss her daughter furiously before hunting down Kodos like a woman on a mission.
Needless to say, Winona Kirk does not visit again. Chris finds the teddy bear in Jim's arms though, a silent observer, as she sleeps fitfully.
Chris honestly doesn't expect her to want to stay with Starfleet, so when he finds her hospital bed empty one morning when he comes to visit, he isn't the least bit surprised.
He retires from flying a few years later, he's seen too much on Tarsus, of what a madman could do to four thousand people. Number One manages to snag him a desk job as Captain of Cadets, so technically he's a captain without a ship.
He sincerely hopes Jim is safe, he wonders if she was somewhere in the universe, stirring up trouble.
Chris is sure he'll never see her in this life again, until he makes a recruiting detour by Riverside, Iowa.
And the rest is history.
Author's note:
Star Trek ain't mine.
This is the longest chapter so far, but it's worth it. I didn't want to shorten any of the Tarsus scenes, what I think is important is the psychological torture Jim goes through. She's a very strong girl who can stay awake during all the pain, but there are some scars that stay with us forever. That's why I've given her PTSD, which will be dealt with sometime later. (I think.)
PTSD gives the person nightmares and mysterious pains, that'll be explained in the academy part. Jim won't be perfect, she'll be reckless and self-destructive, I just really hope I could build her character nicely. Tell me what you think of this in the reviews.
Thank you so much for reading this! :)
P.S. I'm not sure if the chess moves are even accurate, because I don't know how to play chess, so feel free to correct them. And the USS Brooklyn definitely isn't canon.
(Revised 20/1/2018)