Chapter Two: Like Father, Like Son
Disclaimer: No money made here! Enjoy!
Jim Kirk almost never drinks alone. He used to—back when he nursed his resentments as carefully as he nursed his beers, itching to throw the first punch at some noisy drunk in a bar fight—but Starfleet has given him discipline, and more than that, a reason to grow up.
Hand him a glass of prosecco or a dirty martini or Romulan ale at a friend's birthday celebration, a snooty cocktail party, or a rollicking beach dance and he's perfectly happy to drink and socialize. Occasionally he meets Bones in the officers' mess for a taste of bourbon, but he doesn't keep alcohol in his quarters and he is suspicious of people who do. He remembers all too well what a drink or three would do to his step-father.
But tonight he's tempted.
Scotty keeps good Scotch in his quarters and would gladly give some to his captain. And Chekhov has offered to share his stash of authentic handcrafted vodka.
Jim stands a few feet from the turbolift and considers whether to go ask. With a sigh, he turns and heads up the corridor to sickbay instead.
Bones is at his desk in his office and barely glances up when Jim walks in.
"Gimme a minute," he says, his attention on a mounted medical monitor. In no hurry, Jim eases into a chair in the corner.
Bones half-rises from his desk and yells at the open door behind him. "Chapel!" A young blonde nurse appears at once—Chris, or Christine, one of Carol's friends, a recent transfer from a tour of duty in the Outer Ring sector. Seeing her brings a fresh stab of regret about how things had ended with Carol. "Tell Edgars to up his dose of ditropamine to 10 milligrams. Got that? Twice a day until that rash completely disappears."
Chapel murmurs her assent and glances briefly at Jim. Before he can acknowledge her, she's gone.
Bones sits and swivels his chair around to face Jim, his expression dark. "I hope you're coming to tell me that the Enterprise is getting the hell outta here."
"You know we can't leave until we finish the survey of the star," Jim says, trying not to sound as tired as he feels. He's had this argument with Bones already once today. At their morning department meeting, Bones was annoyed when Jim sided with Spock's recommendation that they remain in orbit around Procis 241.
That meeting hadn't gone well. Bones had been louder and more emphatic than usual.
"Jim, the longer we stay here, the more often the crew are having these weird dreams, or hallucinations, or whatever they are," Bones had almost shouted, the other department heads eying him warily. "Half of the engineering department is complaining of ringing in their ears." He gestured toward Scotty who nodded.
"Aye, Captain, but we're hanging in there. No one's missed a shift."
McCoy darted a look of annoyance at the chief engineer. "Engineering might be limping along but the chemistry lab is shuttered until enough staff get back up to speed to run it safely. Dizziness, double vision, anxiety attacks—and for what? We aren't any closer to finding out what's causing this than we were three days ago!"
"On the contrary, doctor. We are caught in a temporal interphase and are seeing ourselves in the future," Spock said, his voice hitching slightly, "or we are experiencing delusions brought about by some property of the star itself."
Bones threw up his arms in exasperation. "We've gone over that already! Tell me something I don't know!"
Spock canted his head to the side and blinked. When he spoke again, he sounded as if he were humoring a difficult child. "Astrophysics is investigating a radiation signature that may be the source of the anomaly. We are not certain as of yet."
"As of yet! Meanwhile I have people all over the ship showing serious signs of distress while you ignore the obvious solution. Move the ship out of harm's way!"
"You are ignoring our primary purpose, doctor," Spock said, his voice rising. "We are tasked with exploration, often at great risk. No one on this ship is unaware of the dangers of space travel. Rather than spend your energy telling the captain what he already knows, your time could better be used to find an antidote to the symptoms—"
"I can't find an antidote when I don't know the cause!"
"Precisely why we need to remain in orbit to gather more data. If we depart now, we lose the opportunity to discover how this star operates."
"Sounds like a good plan to me."
"As I said, doctor, our primary mission—"
Jim rolled his eyes at the almost-unfriendly squabbling Spock and Bones have fallen into lately, a habit that grates on Jim's nerves as often as he is bemused by it. By the time the meeting adjourned, the tension in the room was palpable.
Hours later, Bones is still clearly smarting from Jim's earlier lack of support. He swivels his chair back around and fusses with his keyboard. "If that's all you came here to say, then I have things to do, Jim."
"Actually," Jim says slowly, "I was hoping you might join me for a drink."
"I don't fraternize with the enemy."
Despite himself, Jim feels a spark of genuine anger. Bones is many things—curmudgeonly, hypersensitive, blunt—but he's never been passive-aggressive before.
"Is that what I am? Your enemy?"
"Dammit, Jim, I'm thinking of the health of the crew. Why aren't you?"
"Do you really—I mean, really—think the crew is in serious danger? That these symptoms are doing permanent damage?"
Suddenly Bones leans back and shrugs, the wind out of his sails. "I don't know. Permanent? Probably not. But I can't promise that. None of the brain scans show anything other than heightened stimulation in the cerebral cortex. I'm starting to wonder if this isn't some mass hysteria spreading among a really tired crew—"
"I hope not," Jim says with an abruptness that immediately catches Bones' attention.
"What is it? You been affected?"
Jim nods. "I thought I saw someone. Someone I know couldn't be there, on the observation deck. He was in the shadows, but I saw him." Rubbing his hand over his jaw, he adds, "What about that drink, Bones?"
Bones uncrosses his arms and sighs. Reaching down, he pulls open his desk drawer, takes out a flask, and hands it to Jim.
"How do you know he wasn't real? You said it was dark."
Jim upends the flask and takes a long swig. "It was my dad."
When he closes his eyes, the image is still there—a glimpse...no, more than a glimpse...of his father standing by the observation window, younger than he is in any of the holos his mother keeps on the mantle over the wood-burning fireplace at her Iowa farmhouse, but the same slim build, the same messy blonde hair.
Bones hooks his finger towards the flask. "Give me that."
They sit in silence for a moment, the only noise the whir of the air exchanger overhead.
"Well, damn. Your dad, huh? You know what this means, don't you?"
"That I didn't see him. Not really."
"I think you've stumbled on the answer, Jim. This isn't some weird interphase time travel. Remember what Spock thought he saw? A future daughter. But you saw someone from your past. Temporal interphases don't jump in two different directions. There's no way the two of you could have seen both the past and the future. And it's not likely that one of you is delusional but the other one made a time jump."
"So we both imagined what we saw." Jim feels a throb of disappointment. His father's absence has always pulled like a melancholy undertow in his life.
Standing up, he says, "I'll get Spock to put together a second survey crew to make a closer orbital run. Meanwhile find some way to stop these...visions."
"You'd make my life a whole lot easier if you'd just move the damn ship outta here."
"You know that's not possible," Jim says, setting the flask on Bones' desk. The doctor picks it up, shakes it, and gives Jim a rueful look.
"That's what I was afraid you were going to say."
XX
For the few months that Carol Marcus shared his cabin, Jim kept the temperature several degrees too hot—the kind of selfless gesture that should have garnered him more credit than it did. Even so, Carol always complained of the cold, muffling herself in a misshapen nubby knit cardigan and wearing thick socks to bed.
He found one of those socks tangled in the bed covers after she transferred off the ship, her acceptance of a teaching position at the Academy as a weapons instructor completely catching him off guard.
"You have your world," Carol said, waving her hand to indicate the Enterprise when she told him she was leaving. "I need a place that feels like mine, on my own terms."
At the time he'd been too surprised, too hurt, to argue. If she needed more space—if she wanted to live a life apart from him—he was willing to let her. Or if not willing, at least resigned to it.
Now he keeps the temperature in his cabin several degrees too chilly, even for him, a talisman against invoking her memory. No matter that he's kept her sock, tucked away in the corner of a drawer where he won't see it. He knows it's there.
If he dims the lights and tells the computer to wake him in an hour, he can get enough rest to clear his head before the survey crew checks in. Seeing his father—or rather, imagining his father—on the observation deck has shaken him more than he wants to admit, like Hamlet after seeing the ghost of the murdered king, or Macbeth startled into suspicious ranting by a visit from dead Banquo.
Shakespeare was on to something, alright. And now that Jim thinks about it, neither play turned out well for their poor, haunted namesakes.
But he's not haunted. Just star-addled. Or something. Bones will come up with a way to make the visions go away, and the Enterprise can finish mapping this sector, leave a warning buoy for future travelers, and, as Bones would say, get the hell out of Dodge.
As soon as his head touches the pillow, he feels his limbs grow heavy, the way they do when he exercises hard with the gravity dialed up. He closes his eyes and prepares to give into his exhaustion when he hears the unmistakable scrape of a boot heel on the floor.
"Lights!" he calls out, his heart pounding in his ears.
There across the room is the same young man from the observation deck.
"Who are you?" Jim says before he can stop himself. Ridiculous to speak to an imaginary phantom, but the young man—his father—looks so solid, so present, that Jim closes his eyes and rubs them. No luck. When he opens his eyes, his father is still there. With a sigh, Jim slides off his bunk to head to the wall intercom to alert sickbay. Perhaps Bones has found something by now to help counteract these hallucinations.
"I've always wandered what your starship looked like," his father says with genuine delight. "I've followed your career. I looked up all the places you visited, read all your logs when they were made public." He takes a step forward and tips his chin down. "Of course, I never told Mother. She wouldn't understand."
Once when he was sick with Rigellian fever his first year as a cadet, Jim spent an entire afternoon watching ants the size and shape of French baguettes walking across the ceiling of the infirmary. Even in that fevered state, however, the rational part of his brain had assured him that what he was seeing wasn't real.
His father—this hallucination—is nothing like that. Nothing about the young man standing in his cabin seems illusory. Not just that he looks real—the weave of the fabric on his shirt as clear as his tousled blonde curls—but Jim feels that he is an actual living, breathing, corporeal being. More than that, he knows that they are bonded in some indescribable way, tethered together in time.
Yet something is wrong, too. Something in what his father said doesn't square with reality as Jim knows it.
"Who are you?" he asks again. Instead of answering, his father laughs.
"I've always heard you had a sense of humor."
"How could you hear anything about me? You aren't...you weren't...there."
"Mother still has friends on your ship. I've met some of them."
Again Jim has the sense that something isn't right, that their words are flying past each other towards the wrong targets, perhaps because this is his young father as he could never have known him.
He crosses to the wall and reaches for the intercom.
"You want me to leave?" His father's voice is almost plaintive. Jim lowers his hand.
"You can't leave because you aren't really here."
His father's expression darkens. "That wasn't my choice. No one asked me what I wanted."
Again Jim has the sensation that they are speaking at cross-purposes. As a small boy, he'd often fantasized talking with him. His list of questions changed as he grew older—who was your favorite baseball team, what track should I choose at the Academy—but in every imaginary conversation, his father listened carefully and answered wisely. This conversation, by contrast, is spectacularly unsatisfying and disjointed. Whether his father is a time traveler or an imaginary construct doesn't matter.
Jim reaches up and presses the intercom button. "Dr. McCoy, I need you."
From the corner of his eye he sees his father shake his head. "This was a bad idea. Mother said it would be. But, you know, every kid wants to know his dad."
The room is cool—uncomfortably chilly—but Jim feels the temperature drop so far that he shivers uncontrollably. "Who are you?" he says, an edge of pleading creeping into his tone. They are standing so close that Jim can see that the young man's eyes are light hazel, that a patch of sparse stubble is scattered across his jaw. "At least tell me that before you go."
The image flickers like a poorly-powered hologram. The young man turns and looks into the distance as a rising buzz slowly resolves into the sound of a woman calling out.
"I have to go," he says.
"Wait!"
The unseen woman calls out again, a pair of rising and falling syllables. A poetic trochee. A revelation.
"David! David!"
Jim shivers, this time not from the cold.
"You're Carol's child."
"I'll tell her you said hello, Captain Kirk," the young man—his son—says, his expression changing from sad to amused. Jim hears the door to his quarters open and he turns to see Bones with a medkit in his hand.
"This better be an emergency, Jim," Bones grouses.
"What we've been seeing," Jim says, "is real. Look!"
But even as he says it, he knows there's no one else in the room.
Author's Notes: David Marcus is a nod to TOS canon. Whether he fits in this universe, we shall see!