"I didn't mean to make him..."
A hand came up, palm facing him, to stop his apology. Uhura's calm tore a hole through Jim. Screaming rage would have been easier to handle.
"What happened today?"
"Can I apologize first?"
"No. You made a little boy eat to vomiting. I want an explanation."
The absence of rage left Jim with no clues to her thoughts. His eyes never moved from hers. Whatever punishment she dished out, he'd take.
With a sigh he flopped onto the opposite side of the couch, slowly leaning his head against the wall and staring at the ceiling.
"I'm just like Frank!"
His palms rubbed at his stubble, releasing nervous energy.
"I wanted to teach Gray that food shouldn't be taken for granted. I blew it. What do I do? I bully him - just like Frank!"
"You've never done that before. What happened on the Merlin?"
Rolling his head along the back cushions to face her, he gazed at her again.
"Tom Leighton rescued us from Tarsus IV."
Nyota checked her instinctive recoil at his words.
Tarsus IV. Where a despotic "governor" solved the colony's unanticipated famine crisis using genocide. Kodos elevated himself to Lord High Executioner, summarily deciding who benefited the colony and would live as well as who drained the colony and would die at his command.
Tarsus IV. Whose details remained classified 15 years after the Federation rescue and whose colony, rumor believed, had not been populated with anything but Federation scientists and Starfleet Security since the horror.
Tarsus IV. Where a young Jim Kirk - who'd already survived one historical disaster - managed to find himself firmly planted in another of equal impact.
Tarsus IV. Nero and the near destruction of Earth. Khan and the near destruction of the Enterprise and Starfleet HQ. Marcus and the bare avoidance of war with the Klingons or the Romulans or both.
Uhura questioned which cosmic entity hated Kirk so much that he seemed to land in the middle of these mythic disasters. More time would pass before she'd realize just how substantially their joint timeline had been altered - and her role in that alteration.
"We'd been running for months... Couldn't've held out much longer. It was just Carl and me by then. Tom came with the advance emergency response team. He was a physician before he re-certified for command. His team tried to talk us out of our hiding place for days but I knew better than to come out. I didn't trust anybody. Couple of the gangs got me that way... when Carl needed something..."
"The gangs attacked you?"
"Yeah... No worse than Frank did."
"What else?"
Discussion of Tarsus IV during their academy days, when she'd accidentally discovered his secret, never revealed the coming details.
"What else?" came whisper-quiet across the room at him like a super nova.
"You don't have the clearance -"
"I don't care. What else?"
"What do you think?..."
Exquisite control tamped her instinct to scream in horror and curl in on herself at his silence.