Disclaimer: Still Paramount.

Chapter Seventeen

What was he doing out here?  Kirk asked himself that question once in a while.  Not for a long time though.  He asked it again as he walked down the corridor away from Sickbay.  It was the first time in years.  He didn't know the answer though.  His thoughts drifted back to the night he had decided to go out into space.  He hadn't thought about that in years either…

He'd been twenty-two, three years away from the crushing disappointment of his expulsion from Starfleet Academy.  Three years, and he hadn't really done much of anything with them.  Oh, he'd been busy enough.  Even planned the rest of his life, in a way.  He'd spent the three years in Iowa, and expected to spend the rest of his life the same way.  He was going to go the route of most of the town, and become a farmer.  It was hardly glamorous and it wasn't Starfleet, but it was a perfectly respectable way to spend one's life.  He was satisfied.  Or at least, he'd convinced himself he was.

It was a summer evening, warm with a slight breeze.  He was spending the evening as he had spent many evenings over many years, gazing up.  He picked out the constellations, and looked for all the stars he could name.  He found many of the Federation worlds, Vulcan, Alpha Centauri, Altair, a dozen others.  He liked some of the others better though, like Romulus, Quo'nos, and Andoria.  And then there were his favorites.  The ones that didn't belong to any of the known races, the ones no humans had ever been to, the ones that were way, way out there, somewhere.  He wondered what they were like, what the stars looked like from their surfaces, if they had any people on them and if they ever looked up at the night sky.

He heard the door open.  His mother came out on the porch and stood behind him.  He didn't glance back.  He was occupied looking for Tarsus.  It wasn't a very bright star, and it was particularly faint this time of year.  But if he looked hard enough, he could spot it.  Sometimes.

His thoughts were interrupted.

He heard his mother sigh, and then she spoke.  "You need to get out of here, Jimmy."

He looked at her, startled.  "What?"

She was smiling, but sadly.  "You need to get out of here.  Out of this town, out of this state, even off this planet.  You don't belong here."

Kirk stiffened.  "Sure I do," he said stubbornly.  "I'm going to be a farmer.  There's a great new advancement in genetically engineered seed that could revolutionize—"

"Jimmy.  You can fool the town, and your brother, and maybe even yourself, but you're not fooling me.  I've been watching you.  You're not a farmer.  Farmers don't look up.  They can't.  They have to look down, at the earth, to make sure their furrows are straight and their seeds are in the right place, and don't tell me the computers do that, the principle is the same.  You don't look down, Jimmy; you never have and you never will.  You're always looking up.  Keep on like this and you're going to wake up one morning an old man, and realize you spent your whole life farming by day and dreaming of fighting Klingons at night, and you're going to have a heck of a back problem to boot.  Don't waste your life like that."

He didn't try to argue anymore.  Because somewhere deep down, he had always known the truth of what she was saying.  "What choice do I have though?" he asked softly.  "What can I possibly do about it?"

"Well…" she drawled, "You can stay here moping around about Starfleet, or you can go do something.  Forget Starfleet.  They don't own space.  There's a lot out there.  If nothing else, work your way across the Federation, go do something."

He had applied for a position on board a cargo ship en route to Altair by the next morning.

He wondered, sometimes, how exactly he'd gotten from that summer evening in Iowa to where he was now.

It had been a long trip and it had taken a lot of years, but he'd come a long, long way.  He just wasn't always certain it had been down the right road.

He'd knocked around from planet to planet for a while, from job to job.  No goal, no plan, no aim.  Just a new planet every month and stars out the view port between times.  And for a while, he convinced himself that that was enough.  Maybe hauling cargo wasn't exactly in line with his plans, but who knew what was on the next planet, or the next?

And then it happened.  After two months straight on a run between Hafnium and Yttrium hauling base metals for building purposes, he woke up one morning and came to a conclusion.  The galaxy simply was not the way he had imagined it.  There wasn't adventure around every turn, there wasn't glory and excitement on every world.  There wasn't a new alien to fight or a new planet to save every week.  The galaxy just wasn't like that.  Well, maybe it was if you were Garth of Izar.  But he was James T. Kirk.  And there lay the difference.  It was time he got his head out of the clouds and started viewing the galaxy the way it really was…

And that was that, Kirk told himself very firmly, and he was being ridiculous.  If he had any sense at all he'd go to the Mess Hall and see if he was in time to catch up with Harry.  And so he would.

Sigh…  One more flashback to go I think.  A few chapters in between first though.  I do believe there's a space battle on the horizon.

"Now…bring me that horizon.  [hums] And really bad eggs…drink up me 'earties, yo ho!"

Ahem.  Just ignore the random singing and hit the review button please.