Chapter Seven: Finnegan's Old-Fashioned Irish Pub and Grille
The Academy had a rosy afterglow after his panic attack.
("...he had the unfortunate gift...")
Well, more so after Bones' subsequent agreement to not ask jack shit about it, but it was still there. Sure, some of his classes are crazy easy, but a few are educating and the occasional one is actually interesting, but he's enjoying them for the most part.
His obsession – the Academy in three, a berth on the Enterprise when she ships out, and getting his own ship as soon as humanly possible – was new, was fresh, and every experience was only deepening it. He can almost pretend that he's happy like this, slowly falling into the abyss that is Starfleet and its rules and regulations and uniforms and jargon, almost drowning in everything there is to learn. He's only happy when he doesn't have to think about life, his in particular, and there are only two ways he's found so far to stop the memories that will never end, the thoughts that he cannot seem to silence: one's the mixture of alcohol, blood, and adrenaline he'd been seeking out in every bar between Riverside and Ithaca without ever truly finding; the other's jumping down the rabbit hole, taking an idea and running with it, following it down every winding path and darkened alley until the only ways left were dead or so over-trod they might well have been.
Both are dangerous, Jim knows. Both are familiar to him, more familiar than any of the few people who've managed to stick with him through the years. Still, as dangerous as alcohol and obsessions both are, neither can last for ever and, though this plans haven't changed, there's really not much further he can go without resorting memorizing the regulations verbatim, not at this point in his Academy career, and he's starting to feel bored. Bored, and not a little cheated.
It was stupid, but he did, and he blamed it all on Bones. Because, if it hadn't been for Bones, he wouldn't have had the panic attack in the first place. And, if Bones hadn't gone and been so nice about it (read: didn't ask a single fucking question, which was more than most people in his position would have), Jim wouldn't have gotten it into his head that things could work out and, oh, he didn't know, not be the screwed up shit the 'verse was trying to pass off as his life. And if he hadn't gotten that messed-up thought into his head, he wouldn't feel so let down now, three weeks after the initial attack.
It wasn't like he was expecting that much excitement or adventure or really wild things – not 'til he graduated and shipped out, anyway – but he wanted more excitement than this, certainly. This being the fourth straight night he'd spent in his dorm trying to be a good little boy and doing his homework and all that shit rather than, well, the genius-level repeat-offender shit that had gotten him in this mess in the first place.
("... of seeing things as they were...")
And it was all Bones' fault.
Which, again, sucked, because he couldn't even bring himself to be mad or anything at the doctor, 'cause, well, he had been nice about it. And he's not asked Jim where the library was that they were keeping all his issues nor so much as even looked at him like he wanted to ask something, not once in all these weeks. Bones had just gone on exactly as he had before, the only notable exception being his discovery of a coffee shop tucked into some strange corner of Starfleet Medical and the subsequent rants over idiotic west-coast hippies with their fruffy drinks who'll come crying to him when the heart attack comes and the lack of decent coffee north of the Mason-Dixon. He's actually even starting to like the doctor's constant dudgeon in some strange, sick, fucked-up way, 'cause it's nothing like Jim, who doesn't give a shit about anyone or anything or Jim, who's the type of clean-cut, well-adjusted all-American boy scout the 'Fleet wants for an officer or any of the other masks he's picked up over the years. It, like everything else about McCoy, is so authentic and genuine that it fascinates him and is, slowly, threatening to become his newest obsession even though, as a rule, he doesn't obsess over people, only ideas.
He still hasn't figured out what strange, fucked-up reasons are keeping Bones with him though.
("...and the reality which was offered him...")
Frank, he knows, puts up with him out of some misguided loyalty to Mom's memory and some hint of guilt for not fighting harder when Jim wanted to go live with Mom's sister on Tarsus after the funeral.
The laid-back way he'd taken Mom's constant off-planet deployments had carried over to him and Sam. It wasn't that he was neglectful – never that, though there'd been one or two times right after Mom's diagnosis and her death a short while later that had ended in Frank drinking himself into a silent, morose daze which nothing could break, no matter how much they yelled or cried or pleaded, - it was just he was never very involved. So long as they did their homework, Jim and Sam, and were home before curfew, Frank didn't really care what they got up to. Jim, who'd always kinda lived in his head even then had loved it. But Sam... Sam had been six when the Kelvin happened, and, though Mom and Dad had been deployed as often as not, he'd been used to more than Frank could give.
Jim still thinks that's why Sam left, to find whatever it was that Jim had never known, that had disappeared from their lives the moment he was born.
("... differed too terribly from the ideal of his dreams.")
And Cheryl, who'd been Jim, who was such a failure's advisor through all three of his degrees, she only put up with him because, the year before he'd arrived at Cornell, her son had finally lost his battle with addiction and overdosed on some combination of alien drugs and alcohol in a bathroom stall in a nameless club somewhere outside of Berlin. The kid had been about Jim's age then when he'd started using, and the club was the type he, like most young college kids, had favoured at the time, all pulsing music and pulsating lights and pulsant people. That, combined with the fact that he was a fifteen-year-old kid on his own, tackling one of the most challenging majors an ivy league college could offer in this day and age, had brought out the maternal in Cheryl. Though she never said as much, she vowed not to fail him as she had failed her son, that much was obvious. She never asked him outright to change, just gave him these sad, terrible looks on the occasions he'd stumble into her office for a meeting high or hung over that almost – almost – made him want to change. He never did, but she always took his jail-house calls and, when he was in Ithaca, picked him up from the nameless dives he'd taken too after he could no longer take the unbearable flavour of naivety present in even the dirtiest dance clubs.
Jim knows that, even at the end, all she saw when she looked at him was the ghost of her dead son.
("He did not know how wide a country...")
Sydney's the only other one to stick around for any length of time, and she's another ghost story, one he's never gotten all the parts to, despite the fact he's been crashing her comp labs at Riverside for almost three years now. She's from Australia originally, as cliché as it sounds, and is a regular bushwhacker, with this amazing blonde hair down to there and the bluest eyes he's seen outside of a mirror. For a while, he was sure that she only let him touch her computers 'cause Frank ran security at the yard and she was trying to hook up with his step-dad (he has no idea if this is true or not, but that hasn't stopped him from teasing both mercilessly about it, despite the fact both claim their relationship is purely professional), but that was before he started stumbling across parts of her past: comm-calls in locked rooms with raised voices that can never quite be made out, questions about her home answered with the wistfulness of one who knows she'll never see it again; a holo of Sydney from five years ago with a boy who could only be her brother in an unmarked folder at the back of her filing cabinet, behind even the chief programmer's override codes she'd thought she'd hidden well enough.
Jim's fairly sure she sees her brother in him and that – not Frank, not the master's he'd literally pulled out of his back pocket, the diploma bent and a little torn – was why she let him in.
("...arid and precipitous...")
He's not a genius for nothing, Jim. Even he can see the pattern. The people who leave see Dad's ghost in him. The people who stay see someone else's. The thing is, though, Bones doesn't seem to be seeing any ghosts when he's with Jim. It's the most brilliant thing in the world, part of that honesty thing of the doctor's that Jim doesn't know quite what to make of.
But, ghosts or no ghosts (or, perhaps, because of them), Jim still feels himself falling out of love with one obsession and standing on the precipice of another, enough so where the idea of memorizing the Starfleet Code of Conduct is starting to look like less of a good idea than say, oh, rooting around Bones' things or using some creative computing to find out about his past. Normally, Jim wouldn't have any issues with either – after all, the first rule that anyone, criminal or otherwise, should remember is that, if you don't want something to be discovered, don't write it down, don't tell anyone about it, and, by God, if you talk in your sleep, don't sleep either; once something's put out into the real world, there're no take-backs, no telling who might have overheard, no telling if there's someone smarter who might be able to hack the mainframe – but, for one, Bones came with only the clothes on his back and an impressive but dull med-kit he's already seen the inside of and, for two, it's kinda pushing even Jim's scruples to spy on a man who doesn't seem to hide anything. Which is surprising, 'cause Jim wasn't aware he had any scruples. Apparently he does, and that gives him something to chew on for a good hour.
After that he decides to hit the bars even though Bones is working a shift at Starfleet Medical. He's not going to be able to keep himself from digging into the doctor's past for much longer if he stays in his dorm, and maybe it's just because he can't bring himself to care after a month of self-enforced good behaviour, but he finds he'd rather risk the damage he might do off-campus to what he'd do if left alone with his padd and four bare walls. He tells himself it's because he's growing as a person and not because he's rather interested in learning about the doc the old-fashioned way, 'cause that would be just crazy.
("...must be crossed...")
Crazy just so happens to be the story of his life, though, and he should know better than to expect otherwise by now, 'cause, just as he's slipping out of a hole-in-the-wall called Finnegan's off Divisadero, a pair of lagers making him feel more light-hearted than he had since the rosy glow had started to fade, he hears a scream coming from further down the alley. Light-hearted or not, he's still Jim, who never met a fight he didn't like, and, if he needed any more incentive, the scream sounded kinda feminine, and if there was one thing Jim didn't like, it was guys who thought they could prove how tough they were by beating up girls. That just wasn't kosher, not in his book
Before he consciously could make the choice to go and help ('cause, in his experience, people didn't scream quite that way if things were consensual), he was there, at the midpoint of the alley, behind a collection of foul-smelling and graffitied trash bins, were a pair of guys Academy uniform attempting to pin a girl with hair that shone fire-engine red even in near-dark. They seemed young, the guys – plebs, like him, probably, only fresh out of high school – but were burly and, from the looks of it, had managed to corner the girl as she was making her way towards Finnegan's from Scott Street. Still, by the way the girl was fighting, even pinned with her face pressed into the wall, it was clear that they must've gotten incredibly lucky managing to catch her in the first place.
("...before the traveller through life...")
All this he took in quickly, accessing the danger to the girl as, without thinking of the consequences to himself, he almost casually announced, "You know, even if your universal translators are broken, a scream like that generally means 'no' in every language."
Naturally, the young cadets didn't take well to being snuck up upon and tried their hand at fighting him. Their swings were wild, though, and, once they let go of the girl, she turned out to be very adept at helping to subdue her attackers. Not that they very particularly talented would-be assailants, but one managed to get in a couple of good punches, bloodying his face and bruising his side as he'd come into contact with the side of one of the dumpsters before Jim managed to knock him out.
"Thanks," the girl said brightly when both were down, and, only now able to see her face, Jim realized that the girl was an Orion, which probably explained why the cadets had thought they could get away with attacking her. "Didn't expect anyone one be waiting when I came down the alley. Hardly anyone takes this shortcut... Name's Gaila by the way."
"Jim Kirk," Jim said, somewhat taken aback by her causal brushing off of her attack and subsequent rescue, even in his slightly-drunken daze. Still, her grin was infectious and, even with his split lip, he found himself smiling back. That and, even bruised and tousled as she was, she was, like all Orions, she was drop-dead gorgeous. He'd never seen one with red hair, though.
"Oooh," Gaila squealed, cutting off his thought. "I've heard so much about you from my roommate. I kept on asking her to invite you out for drinks with us since you sounded so interesting, but she always said no... I don't think she likes you very much. I don't know why. You seem nice enough... Say, what do you say about going for those drinks now? Maybe not at Finnegan's. I don't want to be there when these guys' friends come looking for him. The Orange Peel, maybe? You been yet? It's on Marina Street and has the widest selection of off-planet alcohol in San Francisco and the best music and the greatest theme parties, though I don't think they have one going on tonight..." Gaila frowned at this, then smiled again, and, putting a hand on his arm, said in the same cheerful tone she'd said everything else in, "But, still, it's the greatest. Wanna come?"
"I-" he began, then looked back at the two cadets unconscious in the alleyway next to them. "Shouldn't we wait and comm the cops first?"
"What's the point? They never believe it when I say the boys started it."
Finding it odd to be on the other side of the call-the-cops argument for once (and slightly heady from the beers and the fight), Jim pressed, "Hey, just 'cause you're an Orion doesn't mean they have the right to assault you like that. Even if you don't want to press charges for yourself, letting them get away with it will make them think they can get away with it. And shit-heads like this," he toed the nearest one with his boot, trying to keep his blood from boiling. Orion or not, no one deserved to be assaulted or asked to be attacked, "don't deserve to be wandering around free." Hell, he'd been in jails too good for the likes of them. The only saving grace to all of this was that it looked liked he'd intervened before they'd a chance to rape her.
Gaila's smile, if possible, grew even brighter. "That's possibly the sweetest thing anyone's said to me in ages," she announced, leaning forward and kissing him on his unbruised cheek.
("...comes to an acceptance of reality.")
And, the 'verse being what it was, that was when the cops arrived.
a/n: So, yeah. Slightly different chappie, again. Skipped ahead a couple of weeks, so now we're at the start of June '55. Got most of this written last week, but Thanksgiving and the "vaction" involved took me away from my comp for a couple days... The last thousand words were all written in, oh, the last hour or so after I got back from my trip. Which did give me this whole 'nother crazy idea for a ST:IX AU that's scribbled away in my notebook and which, if I can translate it, might be posted. One day. If I ever finish it. It's not like I don't have a thousand things to be working on as it is... *rolls eyes*
So, anyway, the quote's part of one of my favourite bits from W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, one of my favourite books ever, despite the fact it was written in 1915. It's one of the few books from that era that I actually like and, for those of you interested, is a bit like A Prayer for Owen Meany, another great book and the closest I can get to describing Of Human Bondage to someone who has never read it.
That being said, I've also delved further into my obsession (see last chappie's a/n; thanks to everyone who expressed support, it truely helps) and discovered this whole 'nother ST:IX fic site that I've devoured almost everything on already... le sigh. Anyway, read, reveiw, please, thank you.
