A/N: This chapter was far too much fun to write -- the great thing about the ST movies (although they got progressively cheesier) was that Jim and Spock and their crew were heroes of the galaxy . . . and grumpy old men. It's just too fabulous and totally unique to the fandom. I mean, it's not like we get a doddering, eighty-year old Han Solo wandering around space and having adventures (or at least not that I know of). It takes balls to have your main characters star in the show at an age where they should be chasing kids off their lawns. God, I freaking love oldman!Kirk.

Apparently my account was being an ass a few weeks ago, and some of my replies to your reviews didn't get through the private messaging system. If you didn't receive a reply to your comments last chapter, please let me know -- I don't want to miss anyone. Thanks for reading!

Disclaimer: Don't own Star Trek.

VI. Polarity

In Which Jim Learns that Vulcan Mysticism Might Have Something Going for It


They'd been wandering in circles for days like a pair of clueless fuckwits. If there really was some sort of god/alien/mythical being pulling strings up there, it had to be laughing its supernatural ass off at them right about now.

"We passed this place three times already," Jim grunted, pausing at the edge of the ravine and wondering whether he should just fling himself off it and end his suffering.

Admiral Kirk's hand shot out and gripped his elbow, leading him away from the cliff. "Don't even think about it."

Reluctantly, Jim followed, letting his older self tug him on down the path -- footprints mingled in the dirt, shuffling together. Their gaits were different, he'd noticed: he moved quickly, loose-limbed and casual; the admiral was slower, but his strides were longer and confident in a way Jim didn't think he could emulate even if he tried.

They hadn't talked much, actually -- it seemed to Jim as if a little clock was ticking in the back of his mind, warning him to hurry, and judging by the pace he'd set, the admiral was feeling some pressure as well. The only thing they had discussed was Nero and the destruction of Vulcan; Kirk had seemed driven to know all the details of Ambassador Spock's life in the new universe, and once Jim had said all he could, the admiral hadn't asked anything more, choosing instead to walk even faster.

Silence be damned. Keeping his mouth shut had never been one of Jim's fortes. "Kirk, don't you think we should try somewhere else? Obviously we're not getting anywhere here."

Of course, that wasn't entirely true, as there was something seriously wrong about this place, and all their tramping around the planet had reinforced his initial feelings of unease. Besides that, there wasn't much to do; this wasn't some sort of diplomatic fete or exploratory mission -- he couldn't charm his way out of this situation, and there wasn't anyone to punch. That didn't leave many options. Fear was nothing, but helplessness absolutely sucked.

"We could try," Kirk said after a moment of thought, "but if we haven't found any inhabitants or any sign of outside influence after all this time, it seems unlikely that there's anything out there."

"Now don't be pessimistic -- we don't believe in no-win scenarios, right?"

"I don't remember being quite so arrogant when I was your age."

"Seems to me that you're still pretty arrogant."

The admiral looked disgruntled.

Way to crush the old man's spirit, dumbass. "Look, I'm sorry," Jim sighed. "I just . . . I . . . man, I just want to get back to my ship. I can't stand this -- I hate waiting -- and my ship ---"

"I know," Kirk murmured.

And it occurred to Jim that he did know.

"Right," he said uncomfortably. They began walking again, and Jim noticed that the man was favoring his left foot slightly. "Do you need to stop for a minute?"

Kirk glared at him, and damn if Jim still didn't find that intimidating. "I'm old, not an invalid."

"Didn't say you were," Jim flashed him a shit-eating grin, "Gramps."

The admiral rolled his eyes but didn't argue when Jim parked his butt on a nearby patch of grass along the river. They'd been following it in the hopes that it might lead to a lake or a clearing of some sort. What exactly they'd do once they got there, of course, Jim didn't have the faintest idea. Kirk had been mumbling something about smoke signals.

Apparently Jim had early senility to look forward to.

"Maybe we shouldn't keep by the river, Kirk," he wondered aloud. "We could try going down toward those hills tomorrow and see if we have any luck."

There was no answer, and Jim realized that Kirk had gone off somewhere, probably to scout out the area for bears or some shit like that. Never mind that they hadn't seen any wildlife more threatening than a pheasant -- the guy was a regular boy scout.

Bitter curiosity churned in his gut when he thought of what those different quirks implied. He wanted to ask about what kind of life Kirk had had, what he'd been like as a kid, where he'd been before Starfleet . . . what kind of man his father had been.

Jim wouldn't ask now and wasn't sure that he ever would. A part of him wondered if this was one of those things that was just better not to know, that the knowing would hurt more than all the questions.

Pushing those thoughts away, Jim leaned over the stream and let the cool water lap against his fingers. It felt like water, it tasted like water, it even smelled like water. He frowned, leaning closer to the water to watch a large, violet-blue fish of some sort coast lazily past his thumb.

"Do you think the Enterprise is out there?"

He jumped a little, not having realized that the admiral had returned. Trying not to let on how rattled he was -- because the last thing he and his ego really needed right now was losing a contest of courage to a sixty-year-old -- he looked over his shoulder and shrugged. "Of course." He paused. "Whether they're still in the same quadrant is another question."

The admiral was quiet for a moment. "Tell me about them," he said suddenly.

"Who? The crew?"

"Everything, everyone. Tell me what you've done and where you've been. Obviously you started out much earlier than I did in my universe, so we can't have come across the same things . . ."

Jim rolled back onto his side so he could look at Kirk. "I kinda suck at campfire stories."

That was bullshit, and both of them knew it. Kirk settled down next to him, folding his legs crisscross style with a groan of effort and a crackle of joints that made Jim wince. "So, about your crew -- does Chekov have a fetish for the Motherland?"

"Yeah." Jim grinned despite himself. "Russia this, Russia that; it drives Sulu frickin' crazy, but no one even tries to correct Pavel anymore."

Kirk suddenly looked a bit shifty. "You want to know something?"

Jim leaned in closer. "What?"

"He's messing with you."

"No way."

"He knows exactly what he's doing," the admiral said. "Gets a kick out of it, I swear to god."

"That little shit," Jim breathed. He threw back his head and let out a bark of laughter. "Well, fuck me sideways. Wait till I tell Bones about this." Still chuckling, Jim rolled back onto his stomach and let his hand dip back into the water -- a cold, unpleasant feeling bled into his insides, and he stilled. "Kirk," he whispered, suddenly tense and alert. "Look at this."

The older man didn't argue, immediately dropping to the ground and peering over the bank.

Jim's fingers were trembling, but he didn't dare move his hand as the violet-blue fish brushed up against his thumbnail before swimming away. "That fish," he croaked. "I swear that same exact fish went past me a while ago."

The two men exchanged glances before turning their attention back to the water. For several long, anxious seconds neither one moved.

It didn't take too long for another blue fish to swim blithely past Jim's hand, and Jim knew -- he fucking knew -- it was the same fish.

"It's repeating," the admiral said, sounding as shocked as Jim felt. "It's on a repeat, a loop."

Jim scrambled up onto his knees. "Follow it, hurry."

They ran, jogging alongside the water -- Jim didn't dare take his eyes away from the blue scales that glinted up at him. Calculations ran through his mind in streams as he tried to guess the fish's path, tried to figure out how it could return to one spot so quickly.

And then suddenly, he wasn't running anymore. He was on the ground, his chest burning, and Kirk's panicked voice was yelling in his ear.

"M'okay," he groaned, propping himself up on his elbows and blinking in an attempt to clear his foggy vision. "Ow."

Shifting to his knees, Kirk leaned over Jim's legs, stretching out his hand in front of him toward the nearest tree.

His hand disappeared, sliding right through the trunk.

The admiral jerked his arm back with a grunt of pain, but his hand was thankfully still attached. He flexed his fingers, looking equally fascinated and freaked out.

"What the hell was that?" Jim said.

"This is it," Kirk marveled, astonished and a little excited. "We're literally at the end of the world."

Jim closed his eyes. "Um, could that have been more vague? This isn't fucking Symbols and Linguistic Metaphors class. Plain Standard, please."

The admiral pointed at the water. "The fish vanished, and there's nothing else past this point. No water, no trees, no ground, no air -- you saw what happened to my hand. It looks like this place -- this illusion -- actually has a physical boundary, and you slammed through it face-first."

"Cool." Jim rubbed his stinging chin. "So, what, this is some sort of . . . program? Like a computer program?"

"No, I don't think so." The admiral got his feet and offered a hand; Jim refused it, not quite ready to get up yet. "It doesn't seem that way to me," he continued, "and believe me, I've faced some interesting technology in my time. It seems more like a . . . virtual reality, like someone's idea of what life looks like." His face lit up with renewed energy. "It reminds me of a place we visited once. It was a pleasure planet, harmless in the end, but the entire world was an elaborate machine, a factory that took a person's thoughts or desires and made them real. But they weren't real, even though they physically existed.

"I mean, Bones was killed on that planet. I saw him get run through, and I could have sworn that it was real, but he wasn't even hurt. Not a scratch, and I watched him die."

Jim made a mental note to keep Bones away from pleasure planets. "You think this might be a machine?"

"No, not a machine -- I don't know what it is, but I don't think it's computer-generated. More like . . . universe-generated. Does that make any sense?"

"Sort of." Jim scrubbed his palms across his face before standing up carefully. "Let me see if I can sum this up: this planet we're on is actually some sort of physical illusion, and there's not really something on the other end that's controlling it, but it's fucking with the natural laws of physics so much that Scotty's brain would implode if he saw it."

"That sounds about right." Kirk gestured at the tree trunk. "And it also seems to have glitches."

"And if it has glitches, we can get out," Jim finished. He took a few shaky steps toward the tree. "What do you think is on the other side of this? Open space?"

"I wish I knew. When you walked into it, it looked like you were dissolving; I pulled you back, and then everything was in place again. You saw what it did to my hand."

"Well, whatever's on the other side, it's probably not hospitable -- it hurt like hell, anyway, and who knows what would have happened if I'd gone through it. Thanks for saving my ass, by the way," he added.

There was a wry little twist to Kirk's lips. "Don't mention it."

Jim paced for a while, needing an outlet for the restless energy that always plagued him, and Kirk let him walk in circles without comment, presumably riffling through his own thoughts for a solution.

A memory was gnawing at the edge of Jim's brain, just stubbornly beyond his ability to recall. That feeling -- the mixture of nausea and disorientation and free-falling adrenaline -- was too familiar to put aside -- a lurching, gut-churning feeling, like falling through a turbolift shaft, everything plummeting and weightless . . . . and then he remembered. "I know what's out there!" he blurted, his voice sounding far too loud in wake of such intense silence. "Well, not exactly, but when I first got zapped over here, I was stuck in limbo for a bit -- it's hard to describe. It was this absolute void, and I thought I was out in open space, but I was still breathing, so that was a definite impossibility, but then I tried to kick my way out -- I don't know how there was some kind of solid ground to stand on, but it was there," he paused long enough to suck in another mouthful of air, "and I sort of just fell through the bottom of whatever-it-was, and then I ended up crash-landing down here and you found me." Kirk's quizzical expression deflated his enthusiasm. "Uh, did that not happen to you?"

"Fascinating." Kirk tapped his chin twice before moving over to stand in front of the tree. "It sounds like some kind of intermediary portal between what's out there and what's in here." He hesitated. "Jim, what's out there is different for both of us. I came from one universe, you came from another, but somehow we ended up in the same place. Which universe would we arrive in if we were able to get out right now?"

That was a chilling thought, because Jim didn't particularly want to escape this place only to end up in a timeline where everyone he knew had already died. "I'd assumed . . . Wait. If we both arrived here, this has to be the connecting point between our two timelines, right?" His palms were beginning to sweat, and that tingling feeling was curling up his spine, that little spark that told him that he was about to have a freaking epiphany. "Maybe this isn't an illusion -- maybe it's just a bridge between universes."

"And the dates are different," Kirk added. "The time-streams are different enough that normal time-keeping doesn't apply."

And then all the pieces snapped together.

"This is a time vortex!" Jim crowed. "That place, that intermediary, must be the rift between your timeline and mine -- it's not a physical barrier, it's the absence of space-time!" Somehow they'd stumbled across a temporal rift of space-time that wasn't in conjunction with a black hole but was the result of interconnecting parallel universes. That was fucking mind-blowing, and the (well-concealed) part of Jim Kirk that was an honest-to-god, bona fide genius was busy having a geekgasm at the possibilities.

"An absence of space-time," Kirk repeated. "How were you able to survive in a rift?"

"Beats me. Do you think we should try going through?" Jim eyed the tree, trying not to wince at the thought of inviting in that gut-rotting pain again. Still, it would be more than worth it if it meant escape.

His mouth tightening into a determined line, the admiral strode forward, and, before Jim could stop him, barreled directly into the trunk. His head and upper body disintegrated before Jim stumbled forward, grabbed his arm, and yanked him back. The two of them went tumbling back onto the grass, all important body parts intact.

"And Bones said I had a martyr complex!" Jim hissed, rolling up onto his knees. "What the hell was that? Did you think you could just waltz straight through?"

The admiral didn't respond, frozen and stiff-backed, not responding even when Jim tentatively pushed his shoulder.

Shit. Was the guy having an aneuryism or something? "Kirk!" Jim said loudly, shaking him again. "Hey, Kirk, snap out of it! C'mon, man!"

Kirk's eyes flew open. "The bond," he said shakily. "It's still there, it's ---" He cut himself off. "The Enterprise must be somewhere close. I could feel --" The sound that came out of his mouth was too close to a sob for Jim's comfort. "Goddammit, I thought it was severed. It had to have broken, it's been so long. I thought --"

"Whoa, geez, back up! What are you talking about? What was broken?"

Kirk blinked up at him, opened his mouth to say something, and then apparently thought the better of it.

Jim shook his shoulder again, gently. "Hey, it's okay. What happened just now?"

"Do you know anything about Vulcan telepathy?" Kirk said, apropos of nothing.

"Don't touch a Vulcan unless you want your mind read?"

The admiral groaned, scrubbing a hand through his hair. "This might be a problem."

Jim shifted awkwardly. "Why? What does telepathy have to do with anything?"

"I'll give you the condensed version: Vulcans are touch-telepaths, and all Vulcans form mental bonds as a tool for communication and social order. There are dozens of different kinds: every Vulcan has synapse connections to every other Vulcan in the community -- " Kirk flapped his hands impatiently, searching for the right words. "Vulcan societies are like a huge, interconnected web of mental links. The strength of the links vary with different relationships -- there are bonds between parent and child, friend to friend; there are family bonds and peer bonds and neighbor bonds and lovers' bonds, and they're put in place when a Vulcan is young. It keeps them anchored down and gives them a sense of unity and stability. Emotional control and shielding often depend on the health of a Vulcan's bonds."

It took a second for Jim to process the implications, but when he did, it felt like he'd been sucker-punched. "So when Vulcan was destroyed . . . ?"

"Imagine billions of mental links being ripped out of your brain within a few seconds," Kirk said grimly. "It's a wonder the survivors didn't die from telepathic shock." He took a deep breath. "What I'm trying to say is, mental connection is essential to Vulcans, and they're generally very close-mouthed about it to offworlders. The only reason I know about it is because," he shot Jim a sideways glance, "Spock and I had a bond."

"Spock?" Jim laughed nervously. "You're saying you had some kind of Vulcan mind-link thing . . . with Spock?"

"Yes."

"Well, that's weird. I can't believe Spock would let you do that." Jim remembered the gentle, almost loving, way the Ambassador spoke to him and then it didn't seem so weird after all. "So how did that work, sharing brains with each other? Could you hear him in your head? What did he think about?" Briefly, Jim wondered what it would be like to be inside his Spock's head. Frustrating and unbelievably logical, probably. "Do Vulcans ever think about sex?"

"We didn't share brains, exactly," Kirk corrected. "Our minds were compatible and the initial link formed on its own. I couldn't hear him inside my head unless we . . . uh, melded and he chose to project his thoughts, but I could transfer a few short thoughts to him if I concentrated on it. Most humans are psi-null."

"In other words, you could take it but you couldn't put out?" Jim frowned. "Did that sound dirty to you? It sounded dirty to me."

"A little," Kirk said absently. "Jim, have you ever melded with Spock before?"

"Yeah, but that's not the same, is it? I mean, I couldn't hear Spock's thoughts or anything. He could hear mine, but it was like there was a wall in front . . . " He trailed off, his body recalling the phantom sensation of Spock picking gently through his thoughts, threading around his mind and keeping him awake and alive while they waited for Bones to come and sew his guts back inside his body. It had been an utterly alien sensation, and, dulled by pain and blood loss, Jim hadn't been aware enough to fight the intrusion.

The second meld had been less traumatic and a hell of a lot less messy, and although Jim was fascinated with the sensation of having someone else in his head, the experience had been vaguely unsatisfying. There was a barrier between Spock's mind and his -- he felt the Vulcan's mental presence but nothing of his actual thoughts.

"So, you and Spock could share thoughts," Jim repeated, mulling over the idea.

The admiral swore softly. "If there was only some way I could get within range of Spock -- my Spock ---"

"Could you contact him, if he was close enough?"

"Maybe. Probably." He rubbed at his temples, looking very tired. "It's been a long time, and I'm not certain whether this place has some sort of force field around it or not."

"Can telepathic signals usually broadcast through interference?"

"It depends on the configuration. Ion storms, particle clouds, yes. Space-time rifts -- I don't know."

Something was tickling at the back of Jim's mind again. "You said that your bond with Spock formed because your minds were 'compatible' and that you didn't even notice it at first."

"Yes." Kirk was curious, doubtful, but something was brightening in his eyes. "Do you ---?"

"Spock and I -- my Spock -- we could have formed a similar bond without either one of us knowing too. If you could show me how to do the mind-thought-transmitting-thing, maybe I could get to him."

Kirk took a steadying breath. "We're not telepaths, Jim, but . . . " He paused. "It might work. How did you react to the melds?"

"I don't know. Weird, I guess, but not . . . bad, if that's what you mean. They did give me headaches, though."

"It's probably only a very shallow link," he said doubtfully. "I can teach you some meditation techniques and try to guide you through all the steps. It's a strange process, and it will probably be uncomfortable for you. The human brain really isn't formed for telepathy -- when Spock and I were linked, I spent two days out cold in a Vulcan hospital while my brain tried to cope with it. I always came down with headaches when we melded after that."

"Well, that sounds like fun. Why did you keep the link?"

Kirk's smile was secretive and just a little disturbing. "The benefits outweighed the disadvantages."

"Okay, so what am I supposed to do if by some miracle I really can get into Spock's brain? Give him directions and a map? He won't have the answers either, because somehow I think this is outside the realm of possibility even for Spock, and that's saying a lot."

"Give him some credit, Jim," Kirk said. "All you have to do is let him know you're out there -- maybe give him a general summary of what we know about this place. At least he'll know what we're dealing with here, and the two of us can keep working to find a way out in the meantime." The words were positive, but Kirk's tone was less than certain.

"You really think you can teach me to do this? Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're saying our only chance of getting out of here is giving Spock a telepathic comm call, and if he hangs up on me, we can't ever get the connection back."

"That's about it."

"Oh, god," Jim moaned, letting his head drop forward onto his knees. "We're fucked, aren't we?"

"Royally," the admiral said dryly.