Chapter Four: Dark Nights of the Soul
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At some point someone tells Jim Kirk to go home, that he's in the way. The dead and wounded have been moved. The clean-up crews are busy shoring up damaged building supports. The evidence team is piecing together the attack ship, sifting for clues. There's nothing for him to do here.
Like most Starfleet officers, he maintains a small apartment in San Francisco, a one-bedroom walk up with little to recommend it except for a view of the bay from Russian Hill. Briefly he considers going there now, but the idea of being alone is more than he can bear.
Vaguely he considers beaming up to the Enterprise. Earlier in the evening Spock had suggested it, but Jim shook his head silently, aware that the Vulcan watched him closely for a few moments before disappearing in the crowd.
The second time a uniformed officer approaches him, Jim makes his way out of the building and across the park to Starfleet's largest medical complex. From the glassed in waiting area of the 27th floor, he watches the recovery vehicles buzzing around the gaping hole in Daystrom as the sun slowly rises. From time to time, he hears a surgeon updating family members on the progress of the wounded.
No one asks him why he is here. Only later, after Spock calls him with news that Scotty has found something important in the wreckage, does Jim even realize that he's keeping vigil, that somewhere in this building Christopher Pike lies dead in the morgue.
At some level Jim knows he's in shock, that his responsibility to the ship precludes his need to grieve this way, but he doesn't care. 24 hours ago he was waltzing into Pike's office, confident the Enterprise was being given a plum assignment. A few minutes later he stumbled out angry, shocked by Spock's betrayal, stunned about losing the ship.
He isn't sorry for the way the Nibiru mission played out. But he is sorry he disappointed Christopher Pike, sorry he put him in a position to have to plead to have him assigned as his first officer.
"I believe in you," were some of Pike's last words to him, conferring on Jim such a measure of absolution that all night he replays the words in his head, his throat as tight as a tourniquet.
It's a contrast to Jim's last words to Spock before the emergency session.
"Where I come from when someone saves your life, you don't stab them in the back."
That wasn't true, of course. Where he came from, your back was never safe.
Not that his mother hadn't tried. Her marriage to Frank, for instance. Before Frank, Winona had been forced to move in with her parents, her Starfleet career taking her off-planet for months at a time. Jim's memories of his grandparents are vague—his grandmother already suffering from the progressive, incurable dementia that would kill her—his grandfather lost in a bewildering haze of caring for an ailing wife and his two young grandsons.
Jim and his older brother Sam rarely talk about those days. Cold cereal for most meals—they remember that. The smell of perspiration in their poorly washed clothes. Their mother appearing periodically like Christmas, then disappearing as quickly.
Loneliness and a drifty sense of purposeless days after Sam started school. A hazy memory of his grandmother's funeral, his mother holding his hand, slicking back his cowlick. His worry that when she left again she would have no reason to come back.
And then Frank came into their lives and the memories were plentiful and vivid.
The way Frank was at first a godsend, their mother laughing easily in his presence, her face lighting up when he told a joke or picked up her sons and swung them around until they were dizzy, letting them go and guffawing at the drunken way they wobbled and collapsed.
A metaphor, in some ways, for the marriage—though none of them knew it at the time.
Things started to fall apart after Winona's new posting on a border scout ship and Frank moved the family to an old farmhouse surrounded by cornfields and cow pastures. Isolated and bored, the boys were restless—and Frank soon soured on the reality of single parenting.
The abuse started then—not actual physical blows but words as hurtful, as damaging. Reckless. Stupid. Dummy.
Jim had no actual memories of his father, of course, and Sam had only a few. Under different circumstances their shared loss and mutual suffering would have made them allies, would have driven them together in the kind of protective siblinghood Jim observed in some of his friends and longed for with Sam. Rather than being in league with each other, they were competitive for Winona's infrequent attention, nursing their grievances against Frank in private.
When Jim drove his father's antique Chevy into the quarry he might as well have stood up and announced right then that his actions were the symbolic gestures of a desperate 12 year old. A year later when he was sent to the juvenile detention center in Sioux City, he felt angry and abashed and defiant and also relieved. As fraught as life was in juvie, it was a relief not to hear the daily shouting and grinding drama of life at home.
That first time he stayed for eight months—almost long enough to catch up on two years of schoolwork. He was sent back the second time for burning down a neighbor's barn—a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, hanging out with a small group of older boys who indulged their taste for arson by setting wildfires and lighting hay bales, sometimes igniting things too big to easily stomp out. Jim wasn't one of them—not really—just a lost boy along for the ride, but the authorities sent him away for another year and a half, and when he got home after that, Sam was gone and his mother had finally divorced Frank.
Several more years passed before Chris Pike found him in a bar at Riverside, a swaggering young man full of so much sound and fury that he'd already been thrown out of the only other bar in town—the one that catered to the locals, the one Starfleet personnel were warned away from.
He'd taken up Pike's challenge and shown up for the recruitment shuttle out of that same sense of reckless desperation that had pressed his foot to the gas pedal of his father's Chevy, as much for the rush as from any real hope of success. To his surprise—and to Pike's as well—he'd adapted to the regimented life at the Academy, perhaps even easier than his well-fed and well-heeled companions, the schedule of rising at dawn and studying past midnight a proverbial piece of cake after reform school.
At the end of the first quarter he had already distinguished himself in his leadership class. His athletic trainer stepped up his routines. His academic advisor sent a note to Pike which he later shared with Jim, a single sentence that he's never forgotten: Your young recruit is exceeding all expectations.
Every few weeks that first year Pike would stop by for a short visit, usually just for a few words, but once taking Jim on a flitter hop to Riverside to see the progress of the Enterprise, the flagship whose building Pike was overseeing. Although he had grown up with the shipyards in view—had seen them so often that he no longer made note of their ghostly silhouette on the horizon—Jim was still impressed when Pike shepherded him past the security gate and led him aboard the ship itself.
It was love at first sight.
If he saw Pike less the next two years, it was partly his own fault. As the Enterprise's launch date drew closer, the captain was in Iowa more often than he was in San Francisco. And more often than not when he dropped by the Academy unannounced, looking to take Jim for a drink or a talk, Jim was busy earning the reputation that would later make Cadet Uhura warn her roommate against dating him.
Coming back to his dorm room for a change of clothes, Jim might find Pike's neat handwriting on a card slipped under his door, a quaint relic of another time when people used paper to communicate.
Catch you later.
The note would make Jim smile and grimace in short order, sorry to have missed his mentor, grateful that he was being looked for.
Losing that—Jim knows that he will never fully plumb the depths of that loss, that standing vigil in the medical center waiting room is the first step of a very, very long journey.
When Scotty reveals Harrison's destination on the Klingon homeworld—when Jim bullies his way back into the captain's chair and pulls Spock along with him—when he lets Scotty resign rather than lose any more time in the chase—when he finally has a moment to hear what Spock has been telling him about the immorality of what they are doing and declares to the crew that their mission is to capture and return the fugitive, knowing that contravening his orders this time will certainly cost him his ship—even then he is driven by an almost unthinking rage about being forced to travel this road.
And then the firefight on Qo'noS, the obsessive need to strike Harrison again and again—just another way station of grief, and a damned ineffective one at that.
"Cuff him," he says when he can catch his breath, and he walks away to look for his fallen security officers, leaving Spock to cover Harrison with a phaser rifle while Uhura puts the manacles on.
Lt. McCabe is on a raised platform, folded into an unmoving heap like a doll, his leg bent in an unnatural angle, a dead Klingon warrior at his feet.
Hendorff is further away, flat on his back, his jacket soaked with blood, blaster residue on his hands and face.
Jim stands over him, looking down at the unseeing eyes.
Of all the security officers on the Enterprise, Jim knows Hendorff best. Long ago they had come to a truce over a drink in Moe's, the bar nearest the Academy. Before leaving on the Enterprise's shakedown cruise, Jim took him for a drink, lifted his palm upright, and solemnly swore never to call him Cupcake in public. He watched as a slow grin slid over Hendorff's face.
"And I promise never to beat you to within an inch of your life again," Hendorff said, raising his shot glass in salute.
"It wasn't that bad!"
Now that memory is overlaid with Admiral Pike's impressions. "An epic beating," he had called it yesterday afternoon when he found Jim hunkered down with a glass of whiskey in his hand. "You had napkins hanging out your nose."
And what had Jim bragged about earlier? That he'd never lost any crew on his watch?
Now he has.
With a start, he realizes that it is his duty to notify their families. Realizes with another start that he doesn't actually know anything personal about either McCabe or Hendorff—where they were from, what they did or thought about, whether they had family or people who loved them, who will meet their bodies at the transport hub and begin learning to live without them.
The trip in the K'Normian ship back to the Enterprise is somber, Harrison secured in the cargo hold. At the last minute Jim refuses to stow the bodies of McCabe and Hendorff with him, laying them almost tenderly in the main cabin near the flight controls instead.
The security forces that greet them back on the ship are even more grimfaced than usual as they take care of their fallen own. Still, they resist any temptation to treat Harrison with unnecessary roughness, handling him with such caution and professionalism that Jim is ashamed of his own behavior on the planet's surface, behavior that left him unsatisfied and with nothing more than scraped knuckles to show for it.
As the redshirts surround Harrison and start moving toward the brig, Jim follows, Spock and Uhura right behind.
"I need to tell you something," he hears Uhura say, and for a moment he thinks she is speaking to him. He half turns to answer her and catches a glimpse of her profile, her eyes on Spock.
Spock says nothing but some signal seems to travel between them, some question asked and answered, and she says, "I could have been killed back there."
At this Spock raises an eyebrow.
"Indeed, you almost were."
"I thought I could buy us some time," she says, her voice cracking. "I thought—I thought I could get them to listen. But I was wrong. They were going to kill me anyway. If Harrison hadn't, hadn't—"
She stops herself by pressing the fingers of her right hand against her mouth. Then she looks down, her eyes shiny with unshed tears.
Jim opens his mouth to say something—anything—but Spock beats him to it.
"You are disappointed in your performance," he says, and she nods and looks up at him.
"I failed," she says, her voice full of misery.
"Nyota," Spock says, and Jim has to look away at the intimacy of the word. "You risked your life for the needs of the many. You did not fail, no matter the outcome."
If she replies Jim doesn't hear it. For a few moments he is busy directing the security detail to the brig, making sure Starfleet gets the word that Harrison is captured, that the Enterprise will be underway as soon as Chekov can restart the engines.
Until then they are sitting ducks.
He turns to say so to Spock and sees him fifty feet behind him, leaning into a kiss with the lieutenant.
Again Jim feels like an interloper and he looks away quickly.
But not before sees what he would have missed if he hadn't been seen if before. There it is, a look not just between lovers but between people who have declared themselves family.
Then the lieutenant fairly dances away, lighter on her feet like someone shriven of guilt and blame, with a different understanding of the measure of sacrifice.
And Spock. He pivots in place and watches her go, the way a compass needle swivels north, pulled and bound by forces unseen and magnetic.
It's a scene that stays with Jim as he composes the letters of condolences to Hendorff's and McCabe's next of kin.
"On a ship," he writes, "everyone is family. Today all our families are one in grief."
A/N: Walking a fine line between retelling what we already know in the movie and skipping around filling in the holes is turning out to be trickier than I imagined! I don't want to belabor the action by retelling what is familiar, but I also don't want to confuse anyone by jumping over too much. I worry that this chapter does just that, since it starts on the morning after the attack on Daystrom and ends after Harrison is captured—in movie time, less than a day. If it was confusing, let me know. And if it wasn't, let me know that, too!