AN: …I have decided to operate under the rule of "Better Late Than Never". *cough*
Well! Now that we've tossed that out of the way!
I'm currently working on the next chapter as part of my continuing effort to actually win NaNo this year. Instead of being hyper-organized and working on both West AND my original young!Spy series (or even West AND doing heavy edits on That Novel I Finished), I did hardly anything at all and flailed at the last minute into using all new West writings as my NaNo. It's pretty much cheating, and I'm, like…FORTY THOUSAND WORDS BEHIND, but that's still do-able, right?
…Right?
Also, I'm moving into an epic awesome townhouse in Alexandria! I love that city! It's super close to Old Town, too, which is my favorite wandering spot~ (THERE ARE CUPCAKES TO BE HAD THERE.) And my beloved cat Riddick is finally here with me (he is actually sitting on me as I type this, trying very sneakily to nom the tip of my nose, as though that were something I might not notice if he employed just the right amount of stealth. I've learned to work around this sort of behavior, if you can believe it.), which means I'm 100x happier than I was the last time I posted! School is nearly out for the semester, I have a TON of great classes for the spring, and life is all-around pretty sweet. So!
In thanksgiving, I offer you this chapter! It's pretty long, because that's just how many words it took to get the concepts across, and I think I might get some pretty sweet flailing and general keysmash out of it. Personal challenge for this chapter: Impact of courtroom scenes without ever writing a scene in the courtroom. Let me know how I did!
This is for Mrs. Jerry and D.B. Rae for a quick beta, and for my poor harried Canadian. I hope your naps are filled with beautiful, epic dreams, darling Canadian beta! ILU, all my ladies!
West of the Moon:
True Colors
Uhura found him first.
In the corridors surrounding the courtroom, witnesses mingled and gossiped, spreading news of SA James Kirk like a swarm of buzzing bees.
Did you know? they asked. The consigliere! How can this be?
He's broken so many laws/ruined so many lives/killed so many people.
How can this be?
Uhura, willfully separated from her group, fought the throng in search of him. She knew body language, knew countless little tells that gave sentient beings away. Even Vulcans had them, and she was an adept student, far surpassing her contemporaries.
She had not seen this.
She was a student of human interaction, and she had learned Jim Scaretta. She understood the subtle shifting of his shoulders, the graceful play of his fingers. She had known, to the second, how long he could go without a cigarette before he substituted a toothpick. She had known him.
She had seen nothing of SA James Kirk in Jim Scaretta.
The man who sat on the stand with a badge around his neck was as much a stranger to her as the other agents, or the detectives, or the judges. He knew the right stories, of course. The last three hours of her life were filled with a juicy cross-section of the gruesome, intimate details he carried of the Scaretta crime family. But his body was wrong, the tilt of his head and inflexibility of his spine promising her that this man was not the one she had known.
She knew him.
He was a stranger.
The statements couldn't both be true.
So she left her fellow cadets, pushed through the crowd, and ducked into the corridor that led away from the high-profile witness recess chamber. She walked like she belonged there when the security personnel seemed disinclined to question her, and she ducked out of sight when their posture was more aggressive.
At the end of the corridor, there was a small room with a sunroof and several small gardens. Behind the gardens, washed in sunlight but tucked far away, sitting on the ground with his back pressed against the wall and his forearms propped on raised knees, eyes shut, head tipped back against the concrete, was Jim.
SA Kirk.
Whichever.
She meant to say, "Hello."
What she actually said was, "Who are you?"
He didn't open his eyes or startle or flinch away. She added it to her new compendium of FBI agent tells: He had known she was there. He had known it was her.
The fingers of his right hand twitched. He didn't answer.
"I know who you're not," she continued, crossing her arms as she looked down at him. "I know you're not a Scaretta. I know you're not some mob guy who turned on his family when everyone finally got caught. You were never any of those things you told everyone you were. So who are you?"
"Who do you think I am?" he asked, low but not softly, spoken from somewhere deep and exhausted. "Tell me, since you know so much."
Her grip tightened on her elbows as she fought to maintain control. "You haven't given me any clues about that one," she pointed out shakily. "I don't—I don't know you. I've never seen you…laugh, or smirk, or sigh. I've never seen you when you think no one's paying attention, or when you're interacting with customers or associates or—friends. I don't even know if you have friends. The only thing I know for sure is that you're…the most amazing, prolific liar I've ever met." She shook her head, amazed and distressed. "There wasn't even one part of you that was real, was there? It was all a lie?"
Finally he looked at her, eyes as blue as ever. Tired, maybe, and dull with—
She didn't know. Couldn't tell.
"Do you think it was a lie?"
"How should I know?" she asked, shrugging minutely. "I thought we were friends. I thought…I knew you. I thought you were Jim Scaretta. But then you killed McCoy, and you were in the mafia, for God's sake, and now you aren't even that. I thought I knew Jim, but I was wrong. Now you're SA Kirk, and I don't even— How can you ask me if I think it was a lie? How can you ask me to think it was ever anything else? There isn't any evidence to support it, Agent Kirk. I have nothing. You gave us nothing."
Blue eyes shut as a fair head dropped back against the wall. "Then I don't know why you're here, Uhura."
"That isn't fair, Jim—Agent Kirk."
He exhaled sharply, curling so one hand was tangled in his hair. The other arm pressed across his stomach.
With a start, she remembered he'd been injured somehow, and opened her mouth to ask about it.
"Why are you here, Uhura? The defense isn't exactly going easy on me in there. I can't let the Scarettas get out of this because I'm too out of my mind to respond correctly to a question phrased to trip me up. All I'm trying to do here is get my shit together. What do you want from me?"
She saw it then, in the way he breathed and the subtle twitching of his fingers: The same stress response she's seen in Jim Scaretta when his brain was working particularly hard on a problem he could not share with anyone. (Had she been seeing SA Kirk the whole time, trying so hard not to blow his cover, not to lose his chance to cripple organized crime, not to end up just another agent missing in action? What else had she seen and not understood?)
Uhura sighed, thinking quickly. "Listen," she said at last. "There are some things happening now that are forcing me to…rethink. Mostly everything, really. So…that hatred I feel for you?" She pushed one fist against her heart. "That pain I've been nurturing since you first showed your true colors? I'm going to put that on hold, but not forever. It's just suspended until I know how deep you got into your role. Get it?"
He didn't respond.
"You look miserable," she pointed out with a huff. "You know I don't condone the habit, but if it'll help you keep it together for the rest of the trial, I can try to sneak you a cigarette. Just this once, though, okay?"
The sound he made then might have been a broken laugh, but for the hoarse, hysterical ring of it. He looked up again, something manic in his eyes. "Uhura." The smile that twisted his mouth made her heart ache. "Thanks. But I don't smoke."
Her breath caught in her throat. "But I saw you— We all did!"
Another hysterical laugh bubbled up. "I'm a Federation agent, Cadet Uhura. If I smoked, I'd never pass the required physical." He tipped his head back, laughing in earnest. "That smoker you knew? The one you came here looking for, even though he ruined your life? Stop looking for him. He'd dead, okay? He's dead. I ended him the way I'm gonna end all these other fucking Scarettas, you just watch—"
"Agent Kirk."
Uhura and Kirk both looked over to find the female agent standing by the doorway. Her eyes were calm and cold, settled on Kirk with pitiless understanding. "Stand up, Agent," she ordered. "The recess is over."
"Yes, ma'am," Kirk replied immediately, climbing to his feet with that arm still pressed against his stomach. He crossed to her side, face blank, eyes empty.
A ruined toy soldier.
Uhura covered her face with both hands. When she looked up again, they were gone.
The trial continued.
When the judges finally called a recess for lunch, the two other FBI agents immediately clustered around Jim, vanishing with him down a side corridor. Jim went without struggle, head low, ears filled with the dull roar of incredulous curiosity.
He knew what they were saying. And he knew where it would lead. It had been kind of inevitable from the moment he put on his badge.
That didn't mean he had to like it.
They found sanctuary in a conference room that, under normal circumstances, was reserved for the use of court justices. It was theirs, just this once, only because Director Ross has specifically requested a base of operations that required specialized security clearance. The director made sure they had proper provisions before taking a seat across from Jim, folding her hands carefully on the conference table, and arching one eyebrow.
"The last figure you reported was thirteen," Douglass said for her, deceptively mild as he slid a deli sub in Jim's direction.
"Yeah," Jim agreed. He toyed with the sandwich but didn't move to unwrap it.
"The list the defense read was well over thirty people, Jim."
"…Yeah."
"Agent Kirk." Director Ross leaned forward. "If you didn't report them to us, that means you didn't go through proper channels. And if you were avoiding proper channels, that leaves me with some very important questions."
Jim let out a long sigh, leaning back in his chair with eyes locked on the ceiling. "I bet I can guess what it is."
"Where did you get the bodies, Agent Kirk? Where are the people?"
"Look." Jim sat forward, hands spread palms-up on the glassy tabletop. "This is all going to come out in court within the next few hours or days or however long they decide to torture everyone with it. You know this will be their next line of questions—you know it."
"So, Agent Kirk," Douglass said in a passable mockery of the most vicious defense attorney on the Scaretta panel. "The only reason you sit on the witness stand and not in the defense box with my clients is because you claim to have been working as a deep undercover agent 'the whole time.'" Douglass flickered his fingers through the air in exaggerated quotes that he accompanied with an eye roll. "But if your own testimony is to be believed—testimony which, it is important to stress, has not been proven or substantiated in any meaningful way—you are directly responsible for the deaths or disappearances of thirty-four Federation citizens." Douglass wagged his finger at Jim, whose bland expression was fast morphing into a black scowl. "So then, Agent, it seems there can be only two explanations: Either you are a liar but not a murderer, and all of your testimony is false; or you are an honest murderer, and you, more than anyone, should be the one on trial. Which is it?"
"I fucking hate you," Jim told him. "You know that?"
"We didn't give you the bodies, Agent Kirk," Director Ross said again, leaning forward with a stern expression. "Where are the people?"
At last, Jim sighed, briefly squeezing his temples with the forefinger and thumb of his right hand. "In the courtroom," he said from behind his hand, words heavy and dark, "above all the other seats, there's a balcony protected by a darkened shield. No one can see in. Nothing can get out."
"The special and endangered witness box," Douglass clarified with a nod. "What about it?"
"They don't always use it, Douglass. It isn't always activated. But it is now; it has been since the beginning of the trial, back when I was still a Scaretta."
"You were never," Douglass snarled, "one of those—"
"What exactly are you saying here?" the Director demanded.
"That it isn't a matter of there being only two explanations," Jim replied, mouth twisted in a smirk. "And that sometimes, in order to maintain both my cover and my professional integrity, I had to get…creative."
Douglass' eyes widened. "Then…the twenty-one body discrepancy—"
"I was always on your team, Supervisory Special Agent Douglass," Jim said casually. He sprawled comfortably in his conference seat, snatching up his sandwich to peel the wrapper off in a long, thin strip of paper. "It just wasn't always the only team I was on."
"The missing lab techs!"
"Wait," the undercover agent advised, eyes locked on the Director's. "Watch. It's all unraveling anyway."
For a long moment, Director Ross was silent. "This had better be the explanation of the century, Agent."
"Director." Jim spread his arms, sandwich still clutched in one hand. "When have I given you anything less?"
Sulu burst into the quarters he shared with the other Starfleet cadets and Scotty, sucking in gasping, ragged breaths that had less to do with the sprint from the courtroom than it did with the last round of testimony. He looked around with a helpless kind of desperation, searching for something—anything—that would put the world back into some kind of order. Shoulders high and tight, his hands flexed and curled at his sides while his feet moved him in useless aborted circles, unable to settle on a direction that would mean forward. It didn't—it didn't even—
Chekov barreled into him, a shaking mass of nerves, clutching at one of his arms and babbling incoherently in a Russian/Standard creole. It made him stop pacing but didn't help focus the world. He shook his head at the teen, not to refuse him but just because he didn't—he didn't—
Uhura and Scott came next, an indignant storm of noise and outrage around a third, angry and impossible figure.
"Enough!" the last figure shouted, cutting one arm through the air sharply. He stabbed a finger at the hallway behind him. "Shut that door and shut the fuck up, or I'm leaving! I have shit to do today that doesn't involve mass hysteria, so frankly I don't have time for your infantile tantrums. Get it together, cadets!"
"Infantile tantrums!" Uhura's curled hands reached forward as though she would wrap them around his neck. "How could you—"
"Do you want an explanation," he demanded, "or not?"
"We buried you," Sulu said, low and furious.
Dr. Leonard McCoy, Starfleet cadet and murder victim, huffed, hands fisted on his hips, a scowl twisting his mouth. "Apparently not so well as you'd thought."
"We buried you!" the Command cadet howled, lunging forward. Chekov barely caught him in time, holding tight to his friend to prevent an attack on the resurrected doctor. Sulu relented to the restraint only just, knowing even in his rage that he didn't want to hurt McCoy enough to hurt Chekov too. "You tell us what's going on, and you tell us now!"
"Look," McCoy snarled, "it's complicated, okay?"
"Uncomplicate it," Uhura demanded. "Fast."
"Like I chose this," the doctor muttered. "At least close that fucking door first, alright? I don't know who's allowed to hear this. I'm only here telling you now because Jim said I should."
Scott shut the door, entering a complicated series of codes that would ensure their privacy before turning back to the doctor, expression hard. He crossed his arms over his chest. "Go on then, Doctor McCoy. I imagine you've got quite the tale."
McCoy sighed, scrubbing one hand through his hair. "First thing y'all should know," he said firmly, meeting each of their accusing glares in turn, "is that this wasn't Jim's fault. It was never part of the plan, and it never would have happened if I'd listened to the hobgoblin. But I stuck my nose in Jim's business, and it complicated things for him in a terrible way."
"What are you talking about?" Sulu asked, baring his teeth in a wordless snarl.
Chekov was still wrapped around him, though it progressively became more for the teen's benefit than Sulu's. He was trembling again, legs wobbling and eyes wide as his head shook slowly. "No," he said, a whisper that broke in the middle when his quicksilver mind began rapidly filling in the appropriate blanks. "This is my— When I asked you not to give up on Jim, you—" He blinked as tears built in his eyes. "I caused this."
Sulu switched his hold until he was fully supporting Chekov, whose knees buckled abruptly. Scott fetched a chair, shoving it at Chekov. Sulu, alarmed, set the young genius down before turning another glare on McCoy. "What did you do?"
"No," Chekov insisted, head hanging low even as he shook it again, hands still clutching at Sulu's arms. "No, do not blame him, I am the one who—"
"Enough of that," McCoy rebuked softly, laying a gentle hand on the boy's shoulder. "I would have gone even if you hadn't asked. I would never have given up on him, Chekov. And that's why this had to happen."
"I do not understand," he admitted.
"How much did the Vulcan tell you about…after y'all left for the summer?"
"Almost nothing," Uhura said.
"Spock and I went back to the restaurant first thing once y'all were gone," the doctor explained, straightening but leaving his hand on Chekov's shoulder. "We went over and over, even though he told us to leave, or refused to see us, or stopped us from going in. We made such a nuisance that some detectives—the lead detectives in the trial—pulled us aside and explained to us that Jim was mafia, and the Scaretta family was dangerous, and we'd better stop hasslin' them if we knew what was good for us."
"Did you?" Sulu asked tightly.
McCoy shook his head. "Spock did. I guess logic's good for somethin', 'cause he knew better than I did how quickly everything could go wrong. He said he was gonna leave Jim to his Scaretta business, and I'd best do the same. But I—" He shrugged again, a little helplessly. "I couldn't do that to Jim. He was a good kid, and smart as anythin', and I thought…if I could just get him to listen, if I could show him there was a way out…"
"But he couldn't," Uhura whispered, eyes huge, a hand pressed to bloodless lips. "Of course he couldn't, not if he was undercover. Oh, Len, what did—"
"So one night," the doctor interrupted softly, "Jim asked me to stay after closin'. And I did, of course I did. I thought he was gonna talk to me, finally, and I'd've done anything for that. But then everyone cleared out, and he took me back to the kitchen, and it was just us…"
"And he didn't want an out," Scott guessed.
McCoy nodded, finally removing his hand from Chekov's shoulder to rub it harshly over his face. "No, of course he didn't. He asked me why I couldn't give up, why I had to push it. Then he brought out a gun and—"
"A gun!" Chekov wailed.
"And I still didn't believe it." The doctor shook his head. "I still didn't think— I was naive, and stupid, and a damned fool. That goddamned monster, Anthony, he'd ordered Jim to get rid of me. Well, what choice did he have?" McCoy spread his hands, nearly in supplication, daring them to respond. "He's been working undercover for years. If he let me go, if he didn't make it look like I was gone, all that previous sacrifice was for nothing. There's not a reasonable soul in any world that would ask that of him, or of the people who came before me."
The Starfleet personnel startled. "The ones who—"
"You saw the endangered witness box. I wasn't alone in it, was I? Don't you remember the list they were readin' off?"
Sulu doubted he would ever forget the crescendo of disbelief that began when that dark shield faded to transparency, a roar that grew more and more wild as the detectives read a list of murdered and missing persons that were attributed to Kirk. And as each name echoed through the court, a person in that box stood to be counted, again and again while Kirk's face remained still and impassive, while the main floor witnesses went insane, while the mafia family surged from their seats in rage, and at the end when Dr. Leonard McCoy heard his name and rose to be counted—
They could not be called back into order. The courtroom had been cleared, and Sulu, frantic with his inability to rectify what he knew with what he had seen, unable to stand under the weight of Kirk's passionless blue eyes, ran, the first of the exodus.
"How did he do it?" Sulu whispered, head hanging, hand tight on the back of Chekov's chair. He met McCoy's eyes. "You said there was a gun. And then?"
McCoy sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. "Well, then there was a shot."
"He shot you?"
"No. Y'all remember his staff at the bar? The main staff I mean, the ones who were always there?"
"Aye," Scott said for all of them, but slowly, as though he expected a trick. "A nice enough bunch, I s'pose, for their kind anyway. What of them?"
"They were his staff in more ways than one."
"Y'want t'be a little less cryptic, Doctor, or ye'll never get t'the end of this."
"They were Federation lab techs," he explained, shaking his head incredulously. "He met them at the Bureau, at one time or another, and talked 'em into helpin' him in the field. Most of them just went missin' over time, and everyone assumed they'd been kidnapped or killed or any manner of terrible things."
"How do missing lab techs," Uhura began, falling silent when McCoy raised a hand.
"Now, let me finish first. By this time, Jim'd got pretty slick about substituting bodies. Turns out the FBI technology outstrips even what we've got in Starfleet. They have this machine they use to produce fake bodies usin' donated cadavers and DNA samples from an intended target. Jim has a collection of slides with DNA from each of us that he was hoardin' away for such an event as the one I caused. When Anthony put my head on the choppin' block, Jim got his techs workin' on a fake body coded with my DNA and a special somethin' extra that automatically triggers an FBI subroutine programmed into every scanner in production. It confirmed that the body was mine, then flagged a particular doctor for the autopsy. And that doctor—"
"Let me guess," Sulu interrupted. "He's FBI too."
McCoy nodded. "Got it in one. The flag coded into the fake body uploads an autopsy onto his PADD, and all he has to do is read it back to the recorder as he cuts and then sign off at the end. Even if there's a mole in the ME's office, or with the police or investigating official, the autopsy itself reads as totally legitimate."
"Tha's brilliant," Scott observed, eyebrows lifted high in appreciation.
"It's a massive network," the doctor explained.
"So the person who was shot," Chekov said, realization dawning bright behind his eyes, "it was—"
"The altered cadaver," McCoy agreed. "Yeah. And some of Jim's techs-in-hiding are ballistics and blood-spatter specialists, so they knew how to make everything look just right before they started their cleanup."
"Brilliant," Scott breathed again.
"So the cadaver was shot," Uhura prompted, "and then you…?"
"Had a good old-fashioned freak-out," McCoy admitted. "Jim told me to calm down, but I'd just seen him shoot me, and it was a bit of a tall order. So he passed me to one of his techs, who hit me with a hypo and loaded me into a van. I woke up in a safe house, with Jim sittin' solemn as a bloodhound with his badge in one hand and a hard drink in the other. Fool said he was sorry, can you believe it?" He shook his head again, scowling darkly. "As if my blunderin' into his operation was somehow his fault."
"What happened then?" Sulu asked.
McCoy shrugged. "Should be fairly obvious. Jim bein' willin' to take out a friend on Anthony's order cemented him as consigliere, giving him access to all the information it would take to bring down the family. So his people got 'sloppy', and the ME found trace linking Pretty Jim Scaretta to my and a dozen other murders, and the trial started. The rest you know."
Silence fell over them, crushing in its expanse.
"All those people who stood in the witness box," Chekov whispered.
"My story, or some variation of it," McCoy confirmed. "Repeat and repeat and repeat, for years."
Uhura shut her eyes. "How could we not know this? How did we not see it?"
McCoy snorted. "Y'all aren't that special," he pointed out. "Not you or me or Spock. You think we should have seen it when the mob didn't? They thought of him as family enough to give him their name. If it'd been easy to see through, we never would have met him in the first place. He'd've been dead years ago. Surely his life's worth more than your hurt pride."
"Clearly," Chekov sighed, relaxing against the back of his seat, "it was worth even more than that to you."
"How do you mean?" the doctor asked.
"We buried you," Sulu said for a third time. "You're dead, according to the Academy and Starfleet and the Federation and everyone who matters. They notified your family. Your life ended, and you let it, even though you probably had no way of knowing how long you would have to stay gone."
"He's my friend," McCoy replied firmly. "And he's still alive. There's not one of you who wouldn't have done the same as me in my place. I was just fool enough to be the one pushin'."
"It could have been worse, I guess," Sulu sighed. "At least the media frenzy around the arrest of the Scaretta family kept your specific death from being reported. Imagine how hard it would be to publicize a retraction of that. An unidentified exposed undercover agent just took down the mob; that's the leading story on every broadcasting channel. No one would listen to a story about you not being dead if they could listen to that instead."
McCoy arched a sardonic eyebrow. "Lucky, huh?"
"Oh god." Uhura pinched the bridge of her nose. "Of course. They never showed Jim's picture, either. That wasn't an oversight."
"None of it was accidental," McCoy agreed. "And there are programs in place that will put my life back to rights in less time than you'd think possible. I'll go back to classes Monday after this trial wraps up. The FBI has been doin' things like this longer than there was a Federation. With all that practice, is it any wonder they've turned it into an art form?"
They stared at him, inarticulate with all they wanted to say.
"How is this real?" Chekov wondered helplessly.
"It could be worse," the doctor pointed out with a smirk. "Imagine if you were just dreamin'."
Before anyone could form a reply, the announcement finally sounded to call them back to court. They went to their seats; McCoy took his place in the balcony; Jim settled in the witness box.
And the Scaretta trial continued.
Chekov waited.
He sat with great patience between the other two Starfleet cadets, watching as the trial moved toward its inevitable conclusion. The extent of knowledge Agent Kirk had collected through deception was…devastating. He knew all the family's secrets, and delighted in sharing them. Hour after hour Chekov listened as Jim filled the courtroom with a detailed account of crimes, corroborated by audio recordings from wires sewn into the lining of all his jackets, files from PADDs and computers that he'd written the security programs for, lists of names and dates to explain every missing person associated with the Scarettas.
All told, it took nine days. When it was over, Chekov stood on the observation platform of the court's official hanger and watched as the Scaretta defendants were moved directly into the high security starship that would transport them to the remotest penal colony in all of the Federation. The intent, no doubt, was to separate them as much as possible from society. If they had no visitors, they could not share the truth of Jim's identity with the those of the family who were still free and might be interested in striking back at the one who had destabilized the entire infrastructure of organized crime.
When the ship was gone, Chekov was close enough to watch as one of the detectives approached Jim. "Thank you, Agent Kirk," he said in parting, extending his hand for a brief but firm shake. "What you've done here—it can't be measured. I gotta admit, I never thought I'd see you go from Top Ten Most Wanted to our case's MVP, but we'd hang your picture in the precinct first thing tomorrow if we didn't know it'd get you killed. You dismantled the mafia, Agent. Thank you."
Jim shrugged, expression carefully neutral. "I didn't do it alone, Detective, and you know there's a lot of work left. But if you're sending out thank you notes, you should put Supervisory Special Agent Douglas, who's been in charge of the task force for years now, and Director Ross, who's head of the Organized Crime Division, on the top of your list. If it weren't for them and a specialized support team of agents and technicians, I'd be dead a dozen times over."
"Maybe we'll hang their pictures instead," the detective laughed.
"Sounds like a plan," Jim agreed, tucking his hands into his pockets.
The detectives left. The hanger emptied.
And Chekov waited.
Long after the others in Starfleet returned to their quarters to fill out mandatory reports and accept gag orders, and the other FBI agents were sequestered in a conference room, and the special witnesses were beginning the process of reclaiming their lives, Chekov waited.
Until, at last, no one remained but Jim, who stood with his hands wrapped tight around the railing as he looked out over the empty hanger, and Chekov.
"You know," Jim said after an echoing silence, "out of everyone, the one I regretted most was you."
Chekov blinked. "I do not understand."
Jim glanced back at him, twitching his shoulders in a shrug. "It had to have been…difficult. For you maybe more than anyone."
"I am not sure I agree," he admitted, stepping forward until he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with his friend. "I am not the one who has to now come back from the dead, like Dr. McCoy, or the one who has made an enemy of everyone terrible in the world, as you have. Even, I am sure, Commander Spock has had a worse time than I. He was quite different, after you left."
Jim's mouth quirked into half a smile, and Chekov thought it was an expression he almost, almost recognized from that first day in the rain. "Georgia never had to believe that I betrayed him," the agent said. "He never had to attend a friend's funeral and know that it was another friend who was responsible. He never had to learn to come to terms with the fact that I was a murderer. A monster. Some mafia creature from an old nightmare."
Chekov shook his head and scowled. "But you are not—"
"If the Scaretta counsel had never challenged my credibility, you would never have known that." Jim glanced sideways at him again, eyes so blue and searching. "McCoy was set to transfer from Witness Protection to Witness Relocation contingent on successful convictions. New name, new identity—you would never have known."
"But I do know," the teen protested.
"You wouldn't have. You very nearly didn't."
"I did!" Chekov cried, turning to face Jim at last. His hands flailed as he spoke, as though a physical expression of his distress would clarify his point. "You are hero, yes? A great man! I always thought so, even from that day in the rain when you stopped for me and no one else did. And when McCoy was dead, and you were the one who killed him, still I thought—there must be more I do not see. Surely there is something—"
Jim touched the boy's shoulder comfortingly. "Calm down, Pavel." He waited, pressed close and warm, until the cadet's breathing stopped hitching. "This is what I meant when I said I regretted you the most. It doesn't take a genius to know you didn't have much of a support system before we met. I knew that first day in the rain what it would mean for you if we were…close…when the time came to bring the Scarettas down. I had no business engaging you in any kind of personal relationship."
"You had already begun one with Dr. McCoy," Chekov pointed out stubbornly. "One more could not have mattered."
The agent leaned over to bump their shoulders gently. "You're missing the point, kid." Chekov set his jaw but didn't respond. Jim sighed, long and weary. "Listen," he murmured. "I knew going in that this could only end badly. I should never have started letting all you Starfleet brats hang around."
"Well I am glad you did," Chekov said firmly. "I will never regret you being my friend, not even to have these last months to do again. Dr. McCoy is alive, and the mob family is ruined, and you are free of them. It was painful for a while, having known you, but…still, even then I did not think to wish it had not happened. I did not regret you, Jim Kirk. Even before I knew your name."
"You should."
"But I don't," Chekov insisted. "And I didn't. And I won't. You are the first and best friend I ever had, Jim. And you cannot make me regret you."
Jim's expression then made Chekov ache for him, for the loneliness of years spent living only by the cunning of his own lies. Being the youngest then offered Chekov an opportunity that McCoy or Spock or Sulu could not have taken. When Jim's eyes were bright with the pain of his life, his mouth pulled tight at the corners, Chekov stepped forward and embraced him, both hands fisted tight in the material of his coat. "You are my friend," he whispered into Jim's shoulder, determined to hang on even if Jim never responded. "You will always be my friend."
Abruptly, Jim's arms came up, returning Chekov's grip with interest. "They're keeping me at the field office here in San Francisco until the higher ups can figure out what to do with me," he said, voice rough and face hidden in Chekov's curls. "I'll get you the address and the office number and everything."
"And when you have a PADD of your own, you will give me the contact information."
"Yeah."
"And I will make sure everyone—Sulu and Scott and Uhura and Commander Spock and even Dr. McCoy, if he does not already have the information—know where you are."
"…Yeah."
"We will come to see you often. We will not forget you. Because you are our friend."
Jim held him, hands trembling, and didn't reply.
He didn't have to.
It made a kind of sense to Montgomery Scott that the first thing he heard coming out of SA Jim Kirk's San Francisco office was an argument.
"Ow, it doesn't— Would you stop that? It doesn't even hurt anymore! Except when you do that, fucking stop!"
"They pulled four bullets out of you—metal fucking high velocity projectiles, how many layers of goddamn stereotype does organized crime have to be anyway?—not even a month ago. And you had to be some kind of tough bastard and let the wounds fester for most of that time. Because—what? If you had an actual medical professional look at your sucking chest wounds and perforated abdomen, you'd lose some street cred?"
"They didn't fester— Listen, I'm not even having this argument with you again. I told you it would arouse suspicion if a Federation organization like the bureau was seen wasting unnecessary funds on some shot up mob witness, so we had no way of getting our hands on the kind of advanced medical equipment that you Starfleet brats—"
"I was in the same fucking safe house, how is that a waste?"
"They knew I was shot and you were supposed to be fucking dead, you sadistic— Fucking ow! Stop that!"
"Oh, grow up, you overgrown infant. By the way, when you hear your doctor say the words take it easy for a few weeks, that is not some cue for you to use the kind of bullshit liberal interpretation that results in you—"
"See, this is another one of those conversations I'm not having again, Georgia! Do you have, what…two topics only, and if you can't harp on one you just move on to the other? If I shut this one down, will you go back to the first one?"
"Is this where I'm supposed to be filled with repentance and apology? Damn it, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a—"
"Are we interrupting?"
The arguing men looked up. McCoy appeared startled, armed with a hypospray in one hand and a PADD in the other. Jim, though clearly annoyed with his doctor friend, showed no signs of alarm where he stood behind his desk, leaning back out of McCoy's reach. He either didn't register unexpected arrivals as a threat, or he had known they were there.
"I heard you get off the elevator," the agent explained in response to Scott's curious expression, jerking his head in the direction Scott and Chekov had come from. He offered the teen a teasing grin. "Pavel has an excited kind of walk. It's distinctive."
"I have never been in an FBI building before," the boy admitted, looking around in fascination. "Even though we are with Starfleet, they were very thorough with screening us before we were allowed in. Field offices were first invented in Russia, you know!"
Jim's grin widened. "You don't say."
"Da. It is a long tradition in my country."
"Good tradition. Well, don't just stand there like stalkers. C'mon in, guys!" He waved the two in, motioning toward some chairs scattered around the office. Instead of occupying the plush seat meant for him, Jim walked around the desk to perch on the front edge. "Tell me all about what it's like going to school with a zombie."
McCoy rolled his eyes even as Chekov eagerly pulled a chair closer to Jim. "It is very exciting," the teen promised. "There are so many stories about Dr. McCoy's absence that no truth can be found in it at all anymore!"
"Are there aliens involved?"
"Of course! But not in the way one might expect. It is all quite scandalous, although most often the doctor is shown in, how to say…a very good light."
"Eh, if y'don't mind, Jimmy," Scott said quickly, "I'd like t'borrow McCoy. Have a medical-related question," he added with a sheepish grin. "It won't take a moment."
Jim gestured toward the hall with an arched eyebrow. "He's all yours."
McCoy followed Scott with a suspicious expression. "You know Jim knows you don't actually have a medical-related question," the doctor said once they were out of earshot. "He's an FBI agent, and a damned good one."
"It's not a problem that he knows," Scott dismissed easily, glancing around before crossing his arms and leaning toward McCoy. "What's this you were sayin' about Jim bein' shot?"
The doctor's scowl returned with force. "Damn fool thing. Soon as he was arrested," he explained, "he was moved to a safe house to prevent the mafia from takin' him out before he could testify. Just so happened to be the same one I was holed up in, which had the added benefit of someone finally tellin' me all that I'd missed. Anyway, not too long into it—and I don't know quite how it happened—they found him. Sent guys to make sure he couldn't talk. Jim took 'em down before they could do that, but not before those assholes put four bullets in him."
"From a gun?"
".45 caliber." McCoy's lip curled in a snarl. "Lucky I was there, too, or he'd've bled out before they could get him to a hospital."
"But that was weeks ago, and you're still workin' on him. Couldn't you just use a regenerator?"
McCoy shifted, his frustration mounting with every passing word. A laugh from Jim's office relieved some of the anger bubbling just under the surface, but it was a temporary reprieve. "There's a window," McCoy said furiously, "during which a regenerator can be effectively used on a patient. That window closed long before Jim stopped being pigheaded long enough for me to try and fix him up."
"I dinnea understand," Scott admitted. "Why wouldn't he let you heal him?"
"Idiot said it would wreck his cover. Said it wasn't the FBI's protocol to give that kind of advanced treatment to plain old informants, and if the Scarettas saw him at the trial and he was uninjured— Horse shit," the doctor snapped, "the lot of it."
"How's he doin' now?"
McCoy lifted one shoulder in a shrug. "Better than he was. Not as good as I would like. The worst of it is healed, but he needs—rest. He needs to take a few weeks off to recover, but he won't and I can't make him. These Feds don't listen to me any better than he does, either. He's gonna tear somethin', and then we'll see who's sorry." The elevator opened behind Scott. McCoy looked up, and Scott guessed it wasn't the most favorable of newcomers when his expression soured. "Agent Douglass." His mouth twisted in what he might have meant to be greeting. "More bad news?"
Scott turned to find one of the FBI agents who had been at the trial walking toward them with a tight, unhappy demeanor. "Doctor." His eyes slid sideways to Scott, flickering over his uniform. "Lieutenant. I take it Agent Kirk is actually here, for once."
The doctor tipped his head toward the office. "In there with Cadet Chekov."
Douglass let out a short sigh. "Now I'll get to ruin a rare good mood, too, then." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Fantastic."
"What happened?" McCoy demanded. Douglass glanced at Scott again, but the doctor waved him off. "He's one of us from the bar. What happened?"
"We think they found him."
McCoy sucked in a sharp breath. "How?"
"A leak, somewhere." He motioned exhaustedly. "Who even knows anymore? What matters is he's compromised."
"Wait," Scott said. "What's this about they? Do you mean the mafia? The damage Jim can do them has been done. Why are they still interested? Revenge? They can't possibly care enough about that to risk killing an FBI agent!"
"You'd be surprised," Douglas said with a grimace. "But it's more than that. Worse than that, I mean. It's not just the Scarettas who want him gone, it's everyone. The other families with ties to the Scarettas are scrambling to save themselves from similar fates—and all the other families had ties to the Scarettas. They're worried Kirk knows about those ties, and they're right to because he does. He could testify at any of their trials, if it ever came to that." The agent shrugged. "He wouldn't be as big a witness, no, but you can never tell who's going to be the last nail in the coffin."
Scott felt a cold numbness in his limbs. "So they're comin' for him."
Douglass nodded. "With guns blazing. We caught two mob soldiers in the building today—not near but in it."
"What will happen to him?" McCoy asked, eyes hard, every line of his body tight in anger and fear. "How will you stop them from getting to him? You didn't last time. They just walked in and shot him, like a lamb laid out for slaughter. So what's your strategy for preventin' that mess this time?"
For a moment, Douglass studied the doctor without saying anything. Then he sighed, long and defeated. "If he's very, very lucky," he said softly, eyes trained on the floor, "we'll be able to get him into the relocation program. But he's so ridiculously high profile that it would be nearly impossible to find a place to hide him that was far enough away that the mob wouldn't see his face and know him. Anywhere that far out is gonna be close knit, though, and just his arrival would raise enough flags to call unwanted attention. In all honesty, we probably don't have the resources to hide him. What we'll most likely have to do is keep him active and use him again." The agent shook his head at McCoy's and Scott's protests. "You've seen the results of his work. The higher-ups love him. He's too good to give up when we could use him on another op."
"They'll kill him if you do that," McCoy snarled.
"If they find him," Douglass said with the kind of finality that came with experience, "they'll kill him regardless of what we've done. Man." He scrubbed a hand through his hair in frustration. "This whole thing is just as fucked up as he always said it would be."
"Isn't there anything we can do?"
Douglass shrugged again. "If you see him on the street after we've officially removed him from this assignment," he suggested, "pretend very hard you don't know him."
"Some victory this is," the doctor snapped. "He takes down the mob and doesn't even get a life out of it. The FBI will go out of its way to save everybody except one of their own! No, he just gets thrown to the fucking wolves."
"This isn't what I wanted either," Douglass tried to say.
McCoy cut him off with sharp motion. "There's an entire semester of classes I have to retake now because I got sucked into this. My daughter had to think her daddy was dead. And as terrible as that is, I figured it might be okay, because Jim is my best friend and the cause was important. All you FBI guys kept sayin' it'd get better once we'd won the case. Well now it's over, Douglass, and all I got is wasted time and a traumatized little girl and a friend I'll never see again who you idiots might be fixin' to get killed. It sure doesn't feel like we won anythin'," he snarled, pushing past Douglass to stalk toward the elevators.
"That could have gone better," Douglass observed when he was gone.
"I have a question, now that you've run off the good doctor," Scott said. The agent arched an eyebrow at him. "What, exactly, are you planning to tell Chekov?"
Douglass winced.
The day SA Kirk left for what was to be the last time was the first day Spock ever visited the Federation Bureau of Intelligence's San Francisco field office. Cadet Chekov had ensured that he knew the physical address and contact information, and there had been no shortage of invitations from the others to accompany them on their regular trips, but…
Standing in the recess of the building, he watched Kirk say goodbye to the coworkers who had been his only source of assistance throughout his years as a Scaretta.
Or rather…as an agent of the Federation pretending to be a Scaretta.
Despite all the hours Spock had dedicated to meditating on the problem, he still could not…
He didn't understand. In the shadow of an FBI building, watching Kirk interact with (fellow) agents, all of them clearly displaying their badges, it made no more sense now than it had in the courtroom. Here he was a hero, a legend, a new and impossible paragon for every agent that followed in his footsteps. But once, not long ago, he had been a criminal. A consigliere. A murderer. How could he so easily be two such different men?
Where had Jim Scaretta gone with the rebirth of SA James Kirk?
When the agents were gone and his personal items loaded into his transport and he was alone at last, Kirk turned and saw him. Across the distance, their eyes met. The blue of that gaze held him as it ever had. Spock could not look away.
There was Jim Scaretta.
There was James Kirk.
He was both, and neither. He was without his customary cigarette, and he had foregone wearing either a hat or sunglasses. The long coat continuously pushed away from his body by the wind was the traditional beige of the FBI, not the black that had so well hidden him in shadow. His badge hung around his neck gleaming in the sunlight.
Spock hardly recognized him.
Then, unexpectedly, Kirk's face gentled in a smile. If Spock had not been Vulcan, he would not have heard the agent's parting message.
But he was.
And so he did.
"If I had been," Jim murmured, understanding warm in his eyes, "someone else…"
If I hadn't been a Scaretta.
"Goodbye, Professor."
He slid into the transport. The door shut.
He was gone.
"Wait!" a young voice called. Spock turned as Cadet Chekov was running down the sidewalk. He came to a halt beside Spock, bent over as he panted to regain his breath. When he had recovered somewhat, he looked up at Spock. "Is he still here?"
"No," Spock replied.
The cadet's expression filled with distress. "He left? Why did—Sir! Why did you not stop him?"
"Special Agent Kirk received new orders, Cadet. It would be illogical to make a request the agent could not have granted, even had it been his desire to do so."
"But you could have— Now I must first discover where he has gone before anything else!"
"You will not be permitted to communicate with him," Spock said. "What reason do you have to compromise his position by locating him?"
Chekov motioned wildly. "To get him back, of course! I must find him in order to continue working for his return. He should be with us! We are all his friends!"
"Your emotions are preventing you from accepting that this reality cannot be changed," the Vulcan pointed out.
"What reality is that, sir?"
"The agent is gone. He cannot be returned. The place he should be is exactly where he is, which is under the purview of the Federation Bureau of Intelligence and of no concern to any member of Starfleet."
The cadet rocked back on his heels as though Spock had hit him. "You cannot believe that," he said desperately. "Sir, you cannot think this is the way things should be!"
"What is," Spock replied, "is. There is no logic in wishing otherwise."
"But he is our friend!"
"What you saw as a friend was a construct, Cadet Chekov, nothing more. The man who allowed you use of his establishment is not only gone, he never existed. Your energy would be better spent on your Starfleet coursework."
The young Terran began to display several characteristics indicative of anger: his hands bunched into fists; his jaw muscles tightened; his eyes narrowed. "You are a fool, Commander Spock," he hissed. "I will not let him go so easily as you."
"No part of this experience has been what you might consider easy, Cadet," Spock said dryly, his own hands clenched safely behind his back where no one would see. "In recognition of the emotional nature of our encounter, I will not report your insubordinate conduct. However, I will also not extend this exception. Control yourself now, or remove yourself to a location that will facilitate calm."
Chekov's teeth clenched, and for a moment Spock thought he would lash out physically. But all he did was say, "Yes, sir," snap a salute, and hurry away.
When he was gone, Spock looked in the direction SA Kirk's transport had driven. He lifted one hand.
"Live long and prosper."
He walked back to the academy resolved never to think of James Kirk again.
(He failed.)