AN: Yeah I don't even know, this thing is huge. Not as huge as the next one though, which is ten THOUSAND words long. You're welcome?
This one and the next one and we're DONE. Holy cow. I'm gonna miss you guys!
West of the Moon:
The Crow and the Butterfly
In the great silence that fell after Jim finished telling his story, Spock studied him unabashedly.
He was panting, a ragged sound that seemed to fill the whole room. His cheeks were red, but otherwise his skin was stark white. His whole body trembled finely, which was almost certainly why his hands were curled into fists at his side. The blue of his eyes was fever-bright, manic with the emotions evoked by the memories. His entire body seemed braced as though he were expecting a blow.
Spock resettled his hands at the small of his back and considered his answer. "You appear to be under the misapprehension," he began rationally, "that knowledge of your survival mechanisms-established in a time of great physical, emotional, and mental stress-will, for some reason, change my opinion of your character. Allow me to assure you: It will not." Jim's expression became flatly incredulous, so Spock endeavored to explain his reasoning. "You were a child. Your family had just died in what must have been extremely traumatizing circumstances. Instead of being sent to counseling, you were placed in the path of a madman, who then orchestrated the murder of the only person who managed to establish herself as being of any value at all. You are still, today, not a man who suffers the will of the corrupt for any reason other than to be the key to its eventual destruction. Why should your story shock me? What logic would there be? I now know the name of the place where your ruthlessness grew to become something admired by the mafia. I do not revile your tale. Rather, I am grateful for it."
"The loss of Vulcan hit you harder than I thought," Jim said hoarsely. "You need to get your head examined."
"Illogical," Spock dismissed. "I have already been to see one of the Vulcan healers, and I am, overall, much less impacted by the loss than most others. It could be said that I was lucky. I am in my right mind, Jim. You may believe me when I say nothing of this has changed my original assertion. I will see you captain the Enterprise. If you refuse command, we will follow you, even out of Starfleet. We are not allowing you an option: You are stuck with us."
"Damn you," Jim whispered, neck and shoulders curving in a graceful line of defeat. "God damn you all."
"Perhaps," Spock said.
After a length of silene Jim used to collect himself, he finally looked up with an expression that might have been cut from stone. "Alright," he relented, "I'll do it, since I don't have much choice. I'll take the captaincy, and we'll all go out into the black together. But I still know what I am, even if you're as deluded as the others about it. Our mission will be to seek out new worlds and peoples, won't it?" His smile then was sharp and cruel. "Not all of them will be friendly. Not all of them will be safe. I will protect you from me even if the only way is by throwing myself on an alien sword."
"I will be dead before I permit such harm to come to you again," Spock pointed out.
"Then I guess it's a race." Jim held out his hand. "May the worst man lose."
Spock took his captain's hand, clasping it tightly, and did not tell him what the gesture meant. "You will live," he said instead.
"No," Jim replied with terrible kindness. "But you will."
.
They gave Jim command of the Enterprise in a lavish ceremony. He received his commendation at the same event. At some point between then and the official relaunch of the flagship, he destroyed the award, turning it into a warped lump of metal and blackened ribbon.
Chekov rescued the ruined decoration, cradling it in his hands like a broken bird when he showed it to Spock. The teenager's expression was wounded, as though Jim had hurt him in destroying what should have been an honor.
"I will care for it," Spock said as he lifted it from Chekov's hold, "until Jim is ready to take command of it once more."
Though not fully healed, Chekov at least seemed appeased. "Better you than anyone else," he said, "if it cannot be Jim."
Spock wasn't sure he understood what the navigator meant by that, but he let it pass without comment.
.
The others had believed distance from Earth and the demons of his past would help Jim to find peace. Even after Spock appraised them all of Jim's suicide mission, they clung to that belief. Space would heal Jim; it had to.
They couldn't bear the loss of him.
"We'll just never let him go down without a security team," Sulu said during one of their regular sans-Jim senior crew meetings. "If he always has a protective detail, he can't get into enough trouble to die, right? Right?" he pressed when the others began to look skeptical.
"You're underestimating his ability to get tangled up in all manner of bullshit," McCoy said gruffly. "He might do himself damage tripping on a rock through willpower alone. Plus he does have that little gun still."
"He will not take his life through conventional means," Spock assured them. "That might reflect poorly on his senior staff, particularly the bridge crew and Chief Medical Officer, since we interact with him on such a common basis. He wants to protect us from what he perceives as his intrinsically negative influence, so his death must be accidental and due to his own incompetence."
"Or his valor." Scott shrugged when the others turned to him. "I've seen enough funerals to know a person can die as easily for a crewmate as despite him. It's a way to preserve the reputation we've put such effort into, anyway."
"Then how do we protect him?" Chekov asked a little desperately. "How do we save him?"
"Those are two very different problems with very different solutions," Uhura pointed out. "We protect him the way Sulu suggested, by using the security team, by having them prioritize his protection as a matter of course, like it's second nature. We make them as close to obsessed with his health and wellbeing as we can."
"And the second problem?" Sulu asked.
She shrugged. "That one's up to Jim. He has to be the one to decide he wants to stay with us."
"How?" McCoy demanded, shifting in frustrated little motions in his seat at the ready room's conference table. "We've been trying for years now to make him sink his roots with us. It's not working. He's not doing it. In fact it's making him pull away harder!"
"We must do more than arrange a harbor for him," Spock said, coming to the realization only as he articulated it for the rest of Jim's support system. "We must build again what he lost in a fire as a child, what Tarsus taught him to shun, what the Scaretta family prevented him from finding. We must make this place his home."
"So now we're back to how," McCoy snapped.
"Yes," Spock agreed, "we are. I do not have an answer. I do not know what home would be to him. But home, regardless of what it is or might be, will be the second phase of this plan to keep Jim with us. The first is refusing to let him die. To accomplish this end, we will utilize the security team, of course. However, we will never be able to expect them to be as devoted to this cause as we ourselves, so we ourselves will have to see it. He will never go to the surface of a planet, or meet a new peoples, or attend a formal function, without one or more of us present at all times. We are used to his tricks," the Vulcan said, "and, more importantly, we will be aware that he has tricks in the first place. We will be on guard and ready and with him. And in that way, we will maintain his existence."
"Just stay with him and he'll be fine," Jim's CMO sneered. "Sure. That'll be easy. I didn't know Vulcans could be naively optimistic. Color me educated!"
"No," Chekov insisted, "it will work. We will make it work. It is not a good plan," he admitted with a guilty glance at Spock, "but it appears to be the only we have, since your plan of keeping him in a medically induced coma in the medbay is what might be considered infeasible."
"And unethical," Sulu reminded him. "Don't forget massively unethical. I can't even believe we're still talking about it."
"This isn't getting us anywhere," Uhura interrupted, planting her foot on the edge of Sulu's chair and giving it a good shove. "The plan we have is the best we have to work with for now. We can develop a better one if we figure out what a better one with look like, but since that probably isn't going to happen between now and our first mission planetside, we go with this. He always has a security detail, one or more of us is always part of that detail, med staff is always on hand. Okay?"
"This can only in tears," McCoy muttered to himself.
"As long as it doesn't end in death," Uhura replied anyway, "tears are fine with me."
.
Seven planets and two first contacts later, Spock was beginning to reevaluate the feasibility of his plan.
"I don't understand how this is happening," the Head of Security, a man named Giotto, said, scrubbing both hands through his hair in frustration. "I send my best people with him-my very best people-and he comes back from a survey mission with lacerations-lacerations, Commander Spock! The planet is practically made of bubbles, what in the hell cut him!"
"I will investigate this matter," Spock replied. "Rest assured, I do not think the issue lies with your people. The captain has a...particular inclination toward the improbable, which in this case is a danger to him. We are continuing to develop strategies to counteract this phenomenon. Thank you for your continued support in maintaining his life."
"Continued support my ass," the other man spat. "Protecting the captain is our prime objective and we're failing it. You let me know what you develop, but I'm not waiting around for it. I'm putting my people through their paces until nothing-not even a goddamned bubble-touches Captain Kirk. We will not allow so much as one more drop of blood to be spilt on our watch, or I'm busting everyone back down to ensign, myself included." Giotto snapped a sharp salute for Spock, turned on his heel, and stalked angrily away.
Spock watched him go with a sense of caution satisfaction. Having an entire department trained to protect his well-being to an almost manic degree would doubtlessly annoy Jim, but the captain's crew was clearly getting tired of his troubling penchant for injury.
If Jim didn't want his people developing psychological ticks in response to the suggestion that he might visit a new planet, all he had to do was abandon his current behaviors. If he chose to continue along his current path, well, then, more than four hundred other members of Starfleet would doubtlessly have some visceral reactions to repeated wounding of their captain. It was really all in Jim's hands.
Rather than returning to his quarters to begin the process of writing up yet another report regarding Captain Kirk's reckless exploits (which was always a challenge because of how much delicate phrasing it took), Spock took the turbolift down to medbay. Furious security personnel aside, he didn't really know the extent of Jim's wounds. Lacerations could mean any of a variety of injuries, to literally any part of Jim's fragile human body. The level and quality of McCoy's ranting as Spock approached the main doors indicated damage that looked worse than it was, likely to a non-vital bit of Jim's anatomy.
So not as bad as the previous mission then.
"Oh come on, Bones," he heard Jim complain. "It's just a flesh wound, calm down!"
"Calm down?" McCoy sputtered in outrage. "Damn it, Jim! I'm a doctor, not a saint. I don't just calm down when my patients can't even be trusted to follow a simple course of antibiotics!"
"I told you that was a one-time mistake," Jim said, sounding annoyed now. "I'm not gonna get you brought up on charged of medical malpractice, Jesus."
"So that's where you draw the line, huh? You'll trash your own life, but not at the cost of my medical licence?"
"Well when you phrase it that way, yeah, that's about it."
"I should have you shut in with the ship's counselor all the time."
"Do it," Jim challenged, "see what happens."
Spock stepped in then, as much to prevent McCoy's outraged undertaking of the bet as to not be caught lurking. "Captain," he said in calm greeting. Then he inclined his head a degree to McCoy, who was wrapping Jim's left arm, wrist to elbow, in bandages soaked with antibiotics. "Doctor."
"Hobgoblin," McCoy returned with a facetious little nod of greeting. He finished with the medicinal bandages and began to wrap a protective layer over them. Doubtlessly he'd selected neon pink as part of his ongoing mission to irk Jim in little ways whenever possible as retaliation for the stress of Jim's death wish. "I suppose you've had a chat with Giotto?"
"Yes," Spock agreed. He leveled a bland look on Jim, who probably knew what Giotto had said and so made a disgruntled face. "The security department is doing drills," he informed them anyway. "The entire department, to be more specific. Lieutenant-Commander Giotto seemed quite instant that they, as he might phrase it, 'step up their game'. He would not accept my assurance that the fault was not with his people."
"And I'm sure you tried so hard to convince him," Jim muttered.
"No," Spock said, "there would be no logic to dissuading his newfound resolve. It serves my purposes as well as his. I am only glad I did not have to broach the idea myself."
"Serves your purposes?" Jim wondered. "In what way?"
"You live," Spock said, "still. It is the stated mission of the security team and the unwritten rule of your command crew that your life must be preserved, despite your best efforts to the contrary."
"You think these are my best efforts?"
"Within your self-imposed restrictions, yes."
"I don't see how this is helping," McCoy grumbled. "You'll just make him want to try harder."
"Nah," Jim dismissed, "I've done this before. Not to myself, granted, but it can't be much different than arranging it for someone else. There's an art, really, that can't be rushed."
'We're talking about your life," McCoy said helplessly. "Please, Jim, just stop this!"
"I can't," his friend replied. "You mean too much to me. Give it a few years, Bones, you'll see."
"You're insane," McCoy hissed.
"That is neither accurate nor particularly useful," Spock pointed out. "The captain's reasoning is perfectly rational, if flawed in its premise. The goal is to help him accept and correct that flaw. Insults are irrational."
"See?" Jim teased McCoy, who gritted his teeth and stormed out of the room muttering about "damned fool idiots".
"There is no logic in your treatment of the doctor," Spock added. "You are cruel to him despite your stated goal of somehow saving him from future pain."
"I am saving him," Jim said. "It'll save all of you."
"Your reasoning is flawed," Spock said again.
"Prove it," his captain said calmly.
"I will," Spock promised. "If you will give me the time."
"You know I can't. The longer I stay, the more dangerous it becomes."
"I know no such thing. You have stated repeatedly that we must be saved by your death, but you have failed utterly to explain your reasoning in anything approaching a convincing manner."
"Give me time," Jim echoed.
"I would give you all the time that was mine to give," Spock said, "if I thought you would take it."
Jim shook his head almost helplessly, getting up from the exam table at last. "You're such a smart guy. I don't understand how you're not getting this solution as the logical one."
"Because it is not," Spock insisted. "But I do not need your belief on this matter. We will demonstrate its vitality. You will see."
"I'll see you around, Spock," Jim said in parting, neither acknowledging nor rebutting the point.
It was better than Spock had fared the last time they had this conversation.
"Baby steps," McCoy called from his office. He appeared in the doorway, leaning his weight against it in a manner intended to project casual disinterest. "So what's the plan for demonstrating the validity of your claim?"
"I and a medical professional of your choosing-"
"Me," McCoy interrupted. "If it's to do with Jim, I'll take my own work over anyone else's any day."
"You and I," Spock amended accordingly, "will accompany Jim every time he leaves the ship from this moment forth. Every mission, every event, every meeting, every first contact or survey expedition, we will be there, to support or save him. Given enough time, our tenacity itself must convince him. He will see for himself and accept that we will not, under any circumstances, abandon him."
"The others will want in on this," McCoy pointed out.
Spock inclined his head. "And they will, whenever we can defend the presence of additional crew. He will never have another opportunity to throw himself upon the cruelty of a foreign world or its people. We will be there, and we shall not allow it."
"Smother him with kindness." The doctor nodded. "I like it. Very southern of you. We'll make a real boy of you yet!"
Spock fought against the all too human impulse to roll his eyes and instead left without comment.
.
They arrived at their next new world to explore less than a week later.
It went rather more poorly than usual.
Which, actually, ended up working in the bridge crew's favor.
(Jim didn't much care for it though.)
.
Spock woke up.
Almost immediately, he knew something wasn't right. It was a vague sense, but persistent. He sat up in his bed, surveying the room thoughtfully.
It was his own room, wide and open as Vulcan architecture tended to be. The large windows looked out over the desert, sand on the horizon shining bright red in the sunrise.
Sunrise. Perhaps that was the issue, the source of the lingering sense of...
If the sun was rising, he was already late for his day.
Just as he was thinking about it, his mother stepped into the room. "Good morning, Spock," she said in her soft, customary manner. She smiled, and even that seemed...wrong, somehow. "Did you sleep well?"
"Yes, Mother," he said, calm but cautious. "Why have I slept so late?"
"You aren't late at all," she laughed, walking closer to sit beside him. "That's just your excitement talking."
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"You don't have to be up early for another week." She stroked his cap of dark hair, casual with her affection as she had not been since before he started attending school.
...Oh.
Spock looked down at his hands, finally realizing how small they were, how large the room seemed, how young his mother appeared. "I cannot be more than three," he observed.
Amanda's expression grew concerned. "Spock? What do you mean? Your birthday was last month. Do you feel alright?" She touched his forehead, and he permitted it, shutting his eyes to increase his concentration.
Nothing. She did not register to his telepathy at all.
"Where am I?" he asked.
"Spock," Amanda said pleadingly. "What you mean? You're home!"
"I am the First Officer aboard the Starfleet flagship Enterprise," he said to the room, ignoring the fabrication of his mother. As he spoke, his body expanded, filled out. Grew up. "My absence will be noticed, if it has not been already. You will release me from this illusion or suffer the consequences."
Amanda vanished.
Terminating program, the world whispered.
Spock woke up.
"It's about damned time," McCoy snapped, striding over to his side. He waved a tricorder over Spock with a deeply furrowed brow matching his dark scowl. "You've been asleep for six fucking hours."
"Where is Jim?" he asked. McCoy fussed with his readouts but didn't reply, so Spock wrapped one hand around the doctor's wrist. "Where," he said again, "is Jim."
McCoy glanced back over his shoulder wordlessly, and Spock finally began to catalog the rest of the room.
It was a slate grey color, metallic but somehow dulled. The room was circular, roughly twenty feet across, with no visible doors or windows. The ceiling, forty feet above their heads, was a bank of lights shining brightly upon them. There were no decorations, no furniture other than two reclining chairs strongly resembling examination tables from McCoy's medbay. Spock was sitting in one chair, feet propped on the step at the bottom, arms supported in a relaxed position at his sides.
Jim was in the other.
Spock leapt out of his chair, striding quickly to Jim's side. He appeared to be sleeping, body cradled by the chair, expression calm in a way Spock has never seen. His respiration and heartbeat seemed normal, in all he seemed fine, but he couldn't be sure. (According to McCoy, Spock had been sleeping for six hours. And Jim?)
He was reaching for Jim's temple when McCoy caught his sleeve.
"We don't know what's going on here," the doctor murmured harshly. "We don't know how we even got to wherever 'here' is. You didn't wake up no matter what I tired, and you know how strange that is for Vulcan physiology. Whoever they are, they have to be messin' with his brain somehow, just like they were messin' with yours to keep you under. I don't need you muckin' about in there where I can't help. What if something goes wrong? I might not be able to bring you back out, never mind Jim."
Spock thought over McCoy's objections for a while before carefully curling his fingers into a fist, drawing away from Jim. "I thought I was back in my childhood home," he said calmly. "Not just visiting, but as a child again. A version of my mother was projected into the vision, and she behaved exactly as she had when I was that age in reality. They reproduced the environment, important figures, and the circumstances exactly as they were. To do so, they must have pulled those factors from my mind. I felt no intrusion. When I realized what was happening, I demanded to be let go. A voice said 'terminate program', and I awoke."
"So it's a program of some type," McCoy mused, studying Jim with a professional eye. "I'm worried we can't see any machinery associated with it."
"I suspect the chair is the machinery," Spock said. "Or the room itself, or a combination of those and perhaps something else we cannot see. We are doubtlessly being observed in some manner, thus my prompt release. I suspect they will release Jim in a similar way if he becomes aware that what he is experiencing isn't real."
"And I'm just sure you have no suggestions for how to get in there and help him wake up," the doctor drawled dryly.
Spock flexed the fingers of his right hand. "It need only be a surface touch. I would not violate him by searching his thoughts. I mean only to render assistance to our captain."
"Your powers of persuasion bullshit are just mystifyin'. We sure could have used that talent back at the academy."
"I was absent then," the Vulcan said. "Allow me to make up for that absence by rendering assistance now."
"Fine," McCoy sighed. "I don't see as we have any other choice. But I'm monitorin' your vitals, and if anythin' goes sideways I'm grabbin' you and thinking loud, terrible thoughts until you wake up."
"That is acceptable," Spock agreed easily. He stepped close to Jim, reaching out to touch the fingers of his right hand to Jim's psy-points. A faint glimmer of pure Jim tingled up his arm to settle warmly in his thoughts.
...Perhaps this was not the wisest of ideas.
"I'm ready when you are," McCoy grumbled.
Then the moment for doubt was over, and Spock fell into the mind of James Tiberius Kirk.
.
He woke lying in a field. For a moment, he stayed there, still and quiet, waiting to settle. Briefly he took stock.
He was Spock son of Sarek, previously of Vulcan, First Officer aboard the Starfleet flagship Enterprise. His captain was Jim Kirk. They were on an unknown planet, had been on surface less than a minute before they were kidnapped from the rest of the landing party in some as-yet unknown fashion. He had woken in a something like a dream, then woken from that once he realized the trick of it.
This was another something like a dream. Jim's dream.
But where was Jim?
Spock stood and realized he was in a field of some sort, entirely surrounded by waist-high Earth vegetation. It didn't resemble anything Spock had studied, so he set its classification aside as something to ask of Jim later. The sun was already moving low toward the horizon, and Spock, not having any better ideas on how to find his captain, followed it. If this were reality, he might have walked in the wrong direction. It wasn't reality though.
It was a dream.
"What are you doing here?"
The unexpected voice caused Spock to blink in surprise. When he looked again, he was standing by a road, the field so far gone he could only barely see it in the distance. A boy stood before him, blond hair tousled in all directions by the wind. His blue eyes studied Spock curiously, cataloging his every move for review, and he was so young but Spock would always know those eyes.
"Jim," Spock said in casual greetings. "What is the plant growing in that field?"
The boy Jim Kirk, who could not be more than twelve, glanced over his shoulder in the direction Spock indicated. He shrugged absently. "Just weeds, mostly. Tall grass. No one's tended the field since my father died," he added, turning back to Spock. "Marc wants to try planting something next spring though. Melons or berries or corn or something, I dunno, we have to do more research first. Do I know you?"
"Yes," Spock said easily. "Is Marc a friend?"
Jim eyed him suspiciously. "You know me but you don't know Marc? He's my stepfather, dude. He and my mom got married when I was, like, six. Where have you been?"
"Far away. I am here now, though. Do you not know me?" he asked.
For a moment, he thought he saw recognition bright in Jim's eyes. His captain shown out of the face of his childhood self.
Then it was gone.
"I dunno," Jim said with another shrug. "Are you one of Mom's coworkers from the fleet?"
"That is not entirely inaccurate."
"You should come to dinner then."
Spock studied his young face. "Why?"
"Mom will be there. You'll want to see it."
"You mean I will want to see her?" Spock suggested.
Jim looked away, toward the house in the distance, and stood at perfect parade rest. "No," he said flatly. "You'll want to see this." He turned his attention back to Spock, face grave and drawn, mouth a flat line. "It's the last supper."
Spock blinked, and they were seated at the dinner table. When he first glanced over, Jim was an adult in command gold, watching his family arranged around the meal with an expression of deep pain. It smoothed away in an instant, and he was a child again.
His family carried on as though nothing had happened. They spoke to and interacted with Jim, but Spock was clearly not an active part of the programming. No one but Jim seemed to realized he was even there.
"Jim," he said, low and slightly imploring, "explain this to me so I might understand."
"It's the same," young Jim said. He blinked into his adult form, hand gripping the edge of the table. "We eat and go to bed, and I can't stop it or make it better, make it unhappen. I'm trying, I've been trying since- We eat," he said, a child again, and shut his eyes. "We go to bed." In a heartbeat, there were there, Jim snuggled under a pile of blankets in the dark of night, Spock standing against the wall by the window. The whole house was hushed with sleep. "And then-"
Downstairs, a door creaked open. People moved into the house, three of them by the sound of it, men with heavy but quiet footsteps. Spock felt his heart rate spike and tried to move closer to Jim's bed. He couldn't.
He could move no part of himself.
He was an observer.
"We eat and go to bed and then," Jim's adult voice whispered from every corner of the house. One set of footsteps crept into the room across the hall. Another continued further, slipping into the master bedroom. The third stopped by Jim's door.
Light flashed under the door accompanied by a muffled pop. It happened two more times. The knowledge of what he was witnessing came to him from Jim's own consciousness.
Muzzle flash.
Gunshots.
Assassinations.
Jim's door opened.
The third man stepped inside, brandishing an old Earth firearm equipped with what Jim's mind recognized as a silencer. He approached Jim's sleeping form, leveling the weapon on the lump of child under blankets. He pulled the trigger in a smooth, unhesitating gesture. The muzzle flash lit up his face.
Boss Anthony. Younger. Slimmer.
But Anthony all the same.
Jim's young body jerked upon impact, and he cried out weakly. Anthony looked uncertain, lifting the gun again as though he would shoot again.
One of the other hitmen stuck his head in the room. "You do it?"
"Yeah, but I think the kid ain't dead yet. I must'a missed his head with him under all those blankets, lemme do 'im one more time."
"Forget it, we're torching the place anyway. The fire'll get him."
"Hurry it up," the third said from the hallway. "We're tryin' to send a message here, and that message won't get through if we're nabbed."
"Fuckin' rat Marco," Anthony muttered. "No one'll go Federation's evidence on us ever again."
"Not if we do this right," the hitman in the hall snapped. "Let's go."
Spock blinked, and he was outside. The house was on fire, flames pouring out of the windows hot and fast and angry. Adult Jim was at his side, watching his childhood home.
"They didn't suffer," he said. "The coroner told me the bullets got them first. They didn't suffer.
"I did."
Jim was gone, then he as a child, covered in blood, coughing deeply and pushing himself out of the second story window to escape the blaze. He fell to the ground with a horrifying thud.
Emergency vehicle alarms blared in the distance, fire and paramedic teams rushing to the site.
Jim, Spock knew, would survive.
But he didn't know how.
He blinked. Jim was back. They stood together while trained professionals swarmed the building, trying to save it, then trying to prevent the spread of fire once saving it was clearly not an option. They saw young Jim get noticed, saw the frantic effort to save him too.
FBI agents arrived in a set of dark black vehicles. They took over the rescue efforts, transferring Jim's care from a local hospital to one of the state-of-the-art Federation hospitals in the nearby city. The emergency vehicle containing Jim left at a frantic pace.
Adult Jim and Spock stayed where they were, watching Jim's father's house burn to its foundation.
"Marc was in witness relocation," Jim said. "Took me ages to figure it out, way longer than I should have. I didn't remember Anthony or any of that until much later. Until Tarsus, actually, when I was sitting around that table watching Kodos die. His real name was Marco Scaretta. He moved into the area to hide from the mob after promising to testify. Marc Anderson, if you can believe it. He married Mom after he survived the trial, figured he was safe." Jim's mouth ticked in a bitter smile.
"He was wrong."
Spock blinked.
They stood in daylight at the side of the road, a large house far off in the distance.
It had started again.
How many times had it played through already?
"Jim," Spock said, reaching out to grab both of his captain's shoulders in a desperate grip. He blinked, and Jim was a child. "Jim, you must stop this. It is not real, you cannot change what happened. Do not let this program torture you any further, demand to be released and you will. Tell the program to terminate. Please, Jim, I came to rescue you. Come back with me, Doctor McCoy is waiting. Do you remember McCoy, your Georgia? He met you at the bar, we all did. You have had your revenge against the man who killed your family."
"I took them down," the child Jim Kirk said in a flat, dead voice. "It doesn't matter if I go down too. They're gone. They can't set anyone else's house on fire."
"No," Spock agreed, curling one hand around Jim's delicate neck to cup the back of his head. "You stopped them, Jim, you won. Do you understand?"
"Do you?" Jim asked. "They killed my family and shot me, set the house on fire, set all of us on fire. I didn't die. Everyone else did but I couldn't. The Federation failed to keep Marc and his family safe, and we burned because of it. They wanted to make up for it, so as soon as I got out of the hospital, they hid me in a place they thought I could be happy, a school where I would be challenged. I left the hospital and went to-"
"Tarsus," Spock breathed, shutting his eyes. He bent forward to touch his forehead to Jim's. "You went to Tarsus, and learned not to trust the abilities of others. You returned to Earth and found the Scaretta family still operating, just as they had. And so you went to war with them, a silent war, one they did not even know they were losing. You met us, and it did not matter if we were friends because you were still at war. And then I held you responsible for finishing that war at the expense of my pride. Oh, Jim.
"I failed you."
In a heartbeat, he was still pressed to Jim, but no longer bent over. They were nearly of a height.
"You aren't the one who failed," Jim said. "I am. I'm always failing. Even when I win, I fail, and everything gets shot up and burned all over again. I'm tired of it, Spock. I'm tired."
Spock opened his eyes and pulled Jim close, trying to hide him from the program. All around them, images skipped. The field, the road, the house. Dinner, bed, and then. Bullets, fire, falling. Again.
And again.
And Spock could not stop it.
He could try to get them out though. "Stay with me," he murmured to Jim, holding him tight through the chaos. "I am with you. Outside this place, McCoy is waiting. You have a ship with a loyal crew. Uhura is monitoring you always, with Scott and Sulu beside her. Chekov has already changed the world to accommodate your place in it, do not ask him to survive with that space unfilled. We are with you now, always. You found us in the bar and let us stay, even though you were at war with the world. Now that the war is over, let us keep you. Let us find you in the ashes and help you stand once more. We are with you; I am here. Stay with us."
Jim lifted his arms to grip the back of Spock's science blue shirt. The world went still around them. "I don't know how," he whispered. "I wasn't supposed to survive this far. It should have been the gun, then the fire, then Tarsus. Then I chose my own end in the Scarettas. Now even that's gone. I don't know how to live without an end. I don't know how to stay."
"Then let us teach you. We can show you what you missed. Give yourself to us. We will build a home for you that cannot burn."
"Everything burns," Jim gasped.
"No," Spock promised. He moved back just far enough to cradle Jim's face in his hands. "Stay with us. And nothing will burn, not ever again."
"Please." Jim shut his eyes tight. "Please. Don't lie."
"I am a Vulcan," Spock said imperiously. "Vulcans do not lie."
Jim laughed, a wet, broken sound. "Alright," he said on shuddery breath. "Alright. Teach me how to live without burning."
Spock crushed him close. "I will, Jim. We all will. Come home."
"Program," Jim called into the world. "Terminate."
They woke.