They smoked the last of McCoy's cigarillos with a bottle of whiskey, sitting against the observatory window just after 0200. Jim had just requested the time from the computer and he pronounced, "Three hours" before he let his head thunk back against the wall. The time left was just a flat number now; there was really no good reason for her to be late if she was coming back at all, and it seemed like a motion of respect to meet her departure with such a long dilemma. Hanging in their present location was practically just an act of mourning. Bones took a swig.
"I never got to introduce her to Pike," Jim muttered sadly. "Would've liked Pike."
"She could still meet Pike."
"Yeah. Right. She's just hopping over to Starfleet Academy to hand in an application right now..."
"Stop it, Jim."
"I'm woeful, Bones," Jim said in a bitterly edged double-negative kind of sarcasm. "Woe is me, what have I done..."
"You didn't do anything and you know it. She didn't even make it up to you. A lot of those people probably owe her their lives, I'm not gonna—"
"Yeah, but what the hell, I still wanna know, what the fuck was with you?" Jim complained, not accusingly, just in frustrated confusion. "The woman talks a little crazy now and then, she talks like it's an accident that she's alive, and you tell me to let her go on this golden opportunity to go and—crucify herself..." His voice trailed off with more of a dry delicacy.
"No...No, it wasn't like that," McCoy protested, sure. "I think maybe you've been too careful with her. You've been expecting you're gonna slip up with her since day one, and I know, she can be crazy, but...If you can't stop the bomb from going off, you gotta at least point it in the right direction. Tell her there are lives to be saved and she'll get it done."
"Otherwise, what?" Jim bluntly said, "She'll blow herself to pieces?"
McCoy gave a resistant cringe, shaking his head. "Tell you what it's like: What kind of a wasted mess do you think you'd be if you'd never saved anybody?" He let Jim turn that over for a second before going on. "I've never told you this, but maybe there are people...like you, like your father, that just won't settle for looking after their own lives. I think something she was always holding onto just fell out of her hands when she found us, and she's got to find something, she just has to do this big thing before her life is really hers."
The captain took a swig, wiped his mouth off. "I guess you'd think that way, I mean...you're the spiritual one." He said that with a lofty gesture, returning McCoy's puzzled glare with a look that meant, 'Yes, it's that obvious.'
"...I'm not talking about fate, Jim, I'm just talking about people."
"People. I tell you something, though...There is something about her..." He shook his head, collecting his thoughts. "I used to read about a lot of old, like twentieth to twenty-first century psychology and philosophy stuff. She got me thinking a lot about this school of dream analysis that talks about what they call a 'shadow'...basically how everybody has something in them, this dark stuff, this bad thing they want, that they're attracted to. And supposedly you can be a whole person, you can be better, if you just confront these awful things that you want to do. You have to confront it and move past it, but theoretically I never really got...how. Especially if someone wanted to die, cause how do you compromise with that?"
McCoy was giving Jim a guarded, slow sidelong glance.
"I don't even know what I'm saying, just..." Jim shook his head again slowly. "She has this whole life behind her it sounds to me she was never able to fully live, and I kinda wonder now which half of her was ever here."
McCoy speculated for just a second, then lifted his eyebrows and reached to take the bottle out of Jim's lazy grasp. "That's it. I'm cutting you off."
"What?—"
"Jim..." McCoy sighed, nearly laughing grimly. "I don't want to fucking talk about this anymore, cause the crazier you sound, I just hear 'Dead, dead, dead'."
"I don't think she's dead," he muttered. "She's just gonna go haunt somebody else for a while..."
"For Christ sake. Don't try to tell me she's dead," McCoy rebuked gruffly, not able to collect that that really was pretty far from what his friend was saying. Putting out his cigar as he stood up, he almost angrily argued, "She just isn't coming back, is all."
Jim watched him starting to leave, not managing anything out of his mouth that would do any good; he reached into his pocket and his hand closed around something, but then it cringed back out empty.
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She took off her helmet and threw it into the sand.
The beach stretched before her with its water hushing up and off of the shoreline, the sky above a serene blue, and she took her gloves off and walked forward from where she'd landed the vessel, meeting it all with a look in her eyes like it needed to explain itself. She was overwhelmed and out of place and exhausted, didn't know exactly what she was doing when she dropped onto her knees and clutched some of the sand into her palms, angry, interrogating. For the first time in a long time she sort of prayed, but it was demanding, it was I could use a hand or a SIGN or something, if you've got a frakking minute, please.
It was all pretty enough, but that couldn't matter to her anymore. She came here to say she found it and then leave, but here she was: alone on a beach, feeling like it put something literal to how alone she'd been for months now and wanting to cry or scream because she wasn't supposed to get here by herself. It would be sick to feel lucky. It would be pointless to feel guilty. There was nowhere to stand and that was why she was here, running from something, feeling like she'd just have to keep running on and on until something finally snuffed her.
She wasn't able to tell how much time was going by, a murky blur moving with the water as she realized she was crying after all. Crying, for the first time in gods know how long. After a while the tears dissipated into restless anger, her head crooked down into her forearms as she rocked back and forth and let out a few abstracted curses. She'd damned every grain of the sand to hell just getting it out of her system before her hand fell clutching through it into something that pointed into her palm. Her mind interrupted itself with a meek Ow.
The two-inch something came up in her fingers and this might really be the boring part, the story she'll never care to tell, because it's so simple; she brushed the sand off and blinked at it, its slight weight on her palm, as distantly confused as if someone had just used a word she did not know. And it was good after all that she came here alone, because how would anyone understand, how she fell into looking as if she'd just found something she was looking for, how she closed it in her grasp and brought her wrist up somewhere to her mouth and just laughed through the last of her tears. Like, oh, what the hell. She had to let something save her.
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She managed to get out of her suit and just stow it in a wad inside the vessel, but she still got a look about a block later from a twenty-something man who seemed to have watched her land. When she started up the walkway next to a glittering lake, he stammered, "Are you allowed to park that around here?"
She looked back and just shrugged. "I don't know."
The guy narrowed his eyes at her. "Isn't that a Starfleet logo on your shirt?" She rolled her eyes. "Where did you come from?"
"Oh my god." This came excitedly from the skinnier one sitting next to him on the bench. "Are you—no...You're not Kara Thrace?"
She cut to a sharp stop in her lazy tracks across the pavement.
"Who's Kara Thrace?" the first one asked.
"She's—Are you really? Wow. Wow. What are you doing here, I must have missed something..."
"Who is she?"
Kara interrupted, flatly demanding, "How did you know that?"
"Your picture was in the news," the enthusiastic one said with a shrug. To his co-worker, he just said, "You really should read the Federation Journal, it's interesting stuff. She's this big deal refugee...Not much on her yet, though." He looked at her as he added, "The captain won't let the press send anything to you."
"I didn't even know anybody wanted to talk to me," she replied with a look of distaste.
The young man laughed. "I'm Tim."
"Hey, Tim." She cocked her head down the street towards a place with a logo that Tim had on his shirt. "You work that fancy-ass looking tattoo parlor?"
He was still recovering from his excitement, but he managed to say, "Sure do."
"Is it a good place to go?" she asked, in her own particular way that demanded comfortable honesty.
"If you want the real thing," he replied proudly. "We use Romulan ink, so it's not removable, and would definitely take longer than the ones you've gotten before..."
"Romulan?" she repeated, slightly bewildered.
"Yeah." He shrugged. "Tattoos are symbols of grieving in their culture, so it goes without saying they take it pretty seriously."
She slowly put on a crooked smirk, looked down the street again. "Symbols of grieving, huh?" Her hand went up to her neck before she remembered where her dog tag was, and then she asked, "You got something I can draw with?"
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It was unusual for Kirk to take an alpha shift off for having too little sleep, but everyone knew that probably wasn't really the reason he gave the conn over to Spock. Once the clock was up he probably just didn't want to have to give the order to leave. The sect of the regular bridge crew who were there waiting for the round number were unusually quiet, even for their most tired mornings, not saying anything about their lost pilot but exchanging regretful looks instead of quick greetings.
It was eight minutes till, when Sulu sat up in his chair, followed by a mirroring motion from Chekov next to him.
"Did you see—?"
"Yes—Werifying..." Chekov made some tiny anxious oral sounds, then pointedly swiveled his chair to address Spock as well as the general bridge, smiling. "It's her, sir."
Uhura's hand was already over the channel switch just before she announced, "Vessel initiating message..." She put the signal on open audio and said, "Welcome back, Starbuck."
Spock added, "You have clearance to dock on starboard at your will, Thrace."
"Thanks, Mr. Spock." A couple grins played over the crew as her laugh rang crisply through. She sounded happy and tired. "You know, I never thought I'd say this, but it's pretty damn nice to hear your voice."
Sulu was laughing the loudest at that, and there was a pause before Spock leaned back into the comm receiver and replied, "Likewise."
A couple minutes later when Kara was pushing her helmet off and crawling out of her Firebird, she sighed, trying not to smile at the sight of the captain, who had his hands at his waist down at the bottom of the ladder and was most certainly inot/i smiling.
He caught her helmet with a slap when she threw it down to him. "I bet you thought that was pretty funny."
"No," she shook her head, still at the top. "Not really. But this is..."
She put a finger up before she leaned back into the cockpit; Kirk's face scrunched up and he demanded, "Where the hell did you go, I was—"
She made it quickly down the ladder after producing what looked like an old-fashioned souvenir postcard you could still get from some recreation areas, usually in the kinds of places Kirk could never imagine actually wanting to visit. He was still putting on his agitation when she handed it to him and impatiently gestured for him to turn it over. He ignored the doodle she'd scribbled on the white side, revealing the other to have a yellowy sketch of a tree, a large logo of fat letters that read: "IOWA."
He lost it. "No fucking way..."
"Yeah," she laughed back with him, with that confident tilt of her head, and his hand was grabbing hers in a shake that turned quickly into a hug that turned quickly into snuggling her up enough to spin her feet back and forth a little with an affectionately annoyed grunt.
"I lifted that from the gift store at the local museum. Speaking of which, you never told me your dad was such a big shot," she accused. "The exhibit's a frakking joke, though."
"I've never visited it myself," Kirk confessed with a shrug. "I guess that's another story to tell."
There was a pause of the captain really weighing in where she'd gone and what else she might have done, understanding more now why she'd had to run off for a while. He looked like he was being dragged into the grey area between drunk and hung-over; since her head was remembering its migraine from hours and hours before, she gave him a wince.
"So..." He quietly asked, "Why'd you come back?"
She scoffed softly and kicked him in the foot, but then her answer was muttered with more vulnerability. "I don't know, just...Disappearing on people gets old after a while."
He smiled and returned the little kick with similar affection as she started looking around. "Oh, yeah...You might want to track down my chief medical officer? Make sure her he got the message that you're alive?"
She said nothing for a few seconds, just staring him down. "I hate you."
"Great. Want a job?"
"Frak you..." In the middle of reaching to stab Jim a smack in the arm she stepped back, hands going up in a guarded way that preceded a giddy vocal noise that approached fast over Kirk's shoulder. The captain jumped back a little as Gaila came storming up to squeeze Kara and plant a quick giggly kiss on her cheek. "Ugh, stop," Kara cringed. "You'll get green on me."
"Aw, fuck you! Love you, honey," she chimed before she went running off again.
Kirk watched her skittering away, then looked back at Kara, glaring at her for a few seconds. "Oh, wait a fucking minute—"
"—I got things to do." Kara gave a raise of her brows and patted Jim hard on the shoulder before wandering off.
"...Oh, hey."
She turned back when she'd gotten several steps away, and he was bunching and flinging something; she caught her dog tag in a swoop down above her waist, weighing it in a grasp and just looking back at Kirk for a second. Her smile was calm and clever, resonating the best of her as she put the chain quickly around her neck and walked away.
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He'd gone looking for her after he heard the quick rumors, and when he finally gave up into asking the computer, he didn't know why it surprised him that she apparently might have been trying to find him.
She was in medical, only wriggled halfway out of her space suit she had bunched down her waist, muttering, "Hey, no, take it easy" to Parnev. She was laughing with Gaila who was on his other side explaining something in Orion as far as she could keep a straight face.
He didn't realize he had stopped in his tracks and begun blatantly just staring until she saw him, but he didn't bother looking away. Her grin faded to a different fainter smile. She met his piercing glance for a short moment before just sort of shrugging. It was like "Sorry" and "I'll never apologize for anything" rolled into one expression, and the doctor bit down what he might have actually said if he could remember the last time he'd been so damn happy to see anybody.
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"What is—What the hell...?"
He'd started checking her over a couple minutes before as if that was actually the reason they'd escaped into his office, and his tricorder was going a bit haywire when he passed over the back of her shoulder. "Wanna see?" Kara was offering eagerly, turning her back fully and shucking off her shirt to then pull her sports bra up by her thumbs, far enough for him to get a look at the tattoo that started above her right shoulder blade.
"...That's what you did?" McCoy demanded, then shook his head. "I swear, the way you spend your shore time..."
"Shut up."
"—No, I do want to see."
He lightly lifted her bra up just a couple inches after she started to turn around; she leaned forward into the table, still, as he examined the image of an ancient flagship that stretched a narrow sketch down half the length of her back. It was a markedly different style from her other tattoos, a little more detailed. The ship's handsome angular flag carried the phoenix emblem he recognized: it was on her dog tag, but he remembered it from the side of her sleeve on her old flight suit.
"Why that kind of ship?" he asked.
"I don't know." She laughed weakly. She was turning something over and around in her fingers, something she'd been fiddling with since she came in. "I guess I just like old things."
He smiled. "What is that?"
She turned and hoisted herself up to sit on his desk, finally setting the little figure down. It was pretty: some kind of angel with an archaic simplicity in its shape, a bronze color. "I found it on Earth. It uh...It looks just like something I used to have."
He gave one look at it, then his eyes traveled back to hers, an eyebrow going up.
"I know, it's not the same thing...the same one. It can't be. That's not the point." She was already laughing at her own absurdity, but she shook it off and just asked, "If you were going to, like...forget that you'd been someplace...is there anything you can think of that you or somebody else could leave, just to tell yourself that everything's fine?"
His gaze on her was more somberly considering, but she couldn't really tell in what way. She cleared her throat and said, "I know this sounds crazy, but I can't just keep trying not to sound crazy because—I found this and somehow it was like somebody was trying to tell me something. And I just know that everything was okay, like in some way I never actually left them, and somehow...they made it. To Earth..."
Her voice just dwindled off. She finally met his eyes like she was expecting the worst. He didn't look particularly different.
"I don't think you're crazy." He itched at the back of his neck, shrugged. "...I just don't."
She looked like she wasn't prepared to respond to that, and he just chuckled.
"Some doctor I turned out to be, huh?"
"Well, it's your fault anyway..." She smiled, shaking her head.
"How's that?"
She brushed a lock of hair off her forehead, looking away for a moment. "You drive me somewhere past all the crazy and back to sane, I guess."
He scoffed it off with an amused headshake, but she wasn't laughing. She watched him go over something on his PADD for a few seconds with her hands sitting at her sides and him just leaning against the desk a couple steps away. He hadn't really touched her at all, not even for a brief hug or anything; he'd been pointedly as detached as possible, just skimming against her, when he examined her, when she let him look at her tattoo. Somewhere inside Kara, a voice was counting to three.
"I love you."
There was a hesitation almost like it was possible that she had been talking to somebody else. Then he very slowly looked up at her, and he looked at her for a very long time, before he demanded, "What?"
"It's like this," she began with surprising certainty. "For years I have been able to count the people that I really know and care about on my two hands, and ever since this...hiccup landed me here, I've been down to even less. I just hiked all the frakking way to Earth and saw enough people to be pretty certain of the fact that maybe I'm okay with that, maybe I even prefer a small crowd, but the fucked up thing is I've just become more and more of a lousy person with everyone I've lost and that's not gonna cut it anymore. I still don't know why I'm here, but I've figured out why I'm staying, and you can stand there looking uncomfortable because you don't know what it's like, that's fine. It's not like I'm proposing. It's not like I'm even saying I want to be with you. I just don't want to wait, until we've spent shore leave together or until I've met your daughter or until one of us starts to fuck it up so bad that I start to panic, cause I probably need all of you a lot more than you need me and you can afford the bullshit, but I can't. So I don't know what the hell it even means, but—I love you."
It didn't matter that her voice cracked off at the very last because it was almost like he couldn't focus on what she was really saying past a certain point, past the instinctive feeling that probably made him want to ask if this was the first time she'd ever strung this many words together that hadn't ended in something closer to "Go to hell." He was baffled, softened, paralyzed, but finally something reached up and pulled him by the roots: In a blunt movement he came over and he stepped in between her legs and he pulled her in and pulled her in, nestling her tight where she rested herself around him. His hand massaged at the back of her neck where her head landed into his shoulder, his other arm nesting around her waist. They both took in a sigh, his breath coming out in a half-formed word of profanity like he was letting something finally hurt and finally feel good at the same time.
It was like this, kind of terrifying and perfect. Snug against him and frantic, she laughed out just one word: "You."
He needed nothing else before he finally kissed her like he'd just about had it with not being able to, exhausted by longing as she was the one to frame her fingers in a clinging hunger at his stubble, opening slowly, then not slowly. And quickly he was pulling her over to the bright red futon and zipping, ripping her out of the bottom of her jock suit as she urged his hands astray to the soft skin, waist and hipbones and legs like a gust of hidden perfection all unraveling from the noisy tangling garment and her softer clothes that slipped off with sighs.
And she pushed him undone and he carefully lifted her over him, indulging in the bend of her limbs on either side of him as she rhythmically took and frayed it all apart. His hair came spiking up by the clutch of her tough fingers when he moaned half-words against her mouth, everything he'd ever called her, anything he thought of. The only time she said anything it was a short hitching groan, just "Doc," like always. He didn't seem to mind.
After, when she lay on her back and he was reaching for the blanket still wadded under the couch from when she'd used it, she had a longer list of things to do than she could remember having in a very long time. She could use a hell of a sandwich and fifteen showers and about as many hours of sleep and her body was currently picking sleep first, but after that she had reading to do, and after that she was going to look into finding something to paint with, and maybe some time after or among that she was going to sit down and talk to somebody until things started running their course and she started saying some names out loud she hadn't even let herself think of in a long time. Maybe...
After a while he scooped himself slowly out of bed and in a few seconds was tucking the blanket back around her, and she sure as hell heard him this time when he kissed her temple firmly and just said, "You too," must have because she stole one more kiss on the mouth before her eyelids won the war and she was out with his smell, both the sour-clean of hospital and something more sharply rooted in his skin that didn't remind her of anything but him, washing against her. She felt bone-tired, pained and raw, and new.
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"I don't think I've ever been in this room before..."
"Shh, shh..." Kirk gave an anxious quieting motion at McCoy without steering his eyes to the side, looking through the glass at where an Orion teenager sat at a table with his arms crossed, next to Lieutenant Bratch, a translator. Equipped with only a standard security uniform and messing with the core of a pear she'd been casually eating, Kara was now kicking the third chair out of the way to sit on the table, mimicking his crossed arms, and speaking to him in a mocking chattiness. There was a quick echo of flat murmuring from the specialist.
McCoy supposed he was talking to Spock, then, when he muttered, "Is that really effective? Interrogating in an unknown language?"
Spock was eager to note to him, "Fascinatingly, his physiology is indicating slight anxiety in response to Thrace's remarks before they are even translated." Jim turned a quick indulged grin back at McCoy in response to that. The doctor smirked.
"Captain..."
"What?"
"I am becoming wary of how Thrace plans to proceed, considering that her experience in interrogation was in a setting that permitted resorting to methods of torture..."
"Are you really second-guessing this? It was your idea, wasn't it?"
Spock raised an irritated brow that indicated that the captain was pretty much right, even as he protested, "I merely pointed out that every person aboard the Enterprise who was trained in interrogation techniques had failed to successfully extract information from any of the Prenyd's Orion allies, save one passenger."
"It was your idea, Spock." McCoy granted this one to Jim, amused by the science officer's little miffed twitch. Now that Jim's attention was momentarily less intent on Kara's work, he just grunted, "Since when is this our job anyway?"
"Well, it wouldn't be." Jim scraped an itch at the back of his neck, sighing. "But we pretty much volunteered to deal with it ourselves when we took off for the rendezvous instead of waiting out more help."
McCoy watched Kara, the way she put on a crisp little aloof show of being fed up because she had better things to do, and he wasn't sure how her impatience was more convincing than any of the half a dozen officers who had been trying this already, but apparently it was. "You think she's dealing with it?"
"I think she is dealing with it," Jim confirmed without looking McCoy's way.
When the doctor came back from popping out for some coffee he immediately took in an excited stirring, Jim getting up out of his chair as Kara appeared in the surveillance room slapping a list in front of him. Acknowledging McCoy and his drink she immediately asked, "Where's mine?"
"How...?" Kirk was incredulous. "I don't even..."
"Miss Thrace." Spock had been listening in, and his tone was patiently chastising. "You may not yet be a serving member of Starfleet, but the fourth paragraph of Starfleet's forty-ninth security protocol dictates that—"
"Yeah, I read that policy," Kara cut off with a motion of her hand. "Nothing in it that says I can't...suggest the possibility of torture to a subject who may not be aware of the regulations."
Spock blinked, his frame tensing noticeably in response to this. "Are you saying that you threatened the prisoner in a non-verbal manner?"
"Did you hear me threaten him verbally? Like I said. I implied." Kara shrugged. Jim broke out into a barking fit of laughter, clapping his hands.
"Lieutenant Giotto," Kirk said, suddenly on the comm. "I'm gonna let Starbuck hold onto the uniform for a while. If you've got somebody to train a cadet, I've got an off-planet recruit for you."
"...Absolutely, sir."
In the last moment Kara's eyes had lit up, incredulous, but Spock cut in, "Captain?"
"Yes, Mr. Spock?" Kirk replied innocently, and he already had the next part memorized. "Protocol follows that in a time of war or emergency, foreign aid can be promoted to a status comparable to rank they hold among their own people, and in the case that this happens on a full-length mission, said crewmember can serve for a period of up to two years without their position coming under review by the Federation board. This is, by the way, the second article of that policy. The third you may be more than familiar with..."
"Regulation 571, which concerns immediate promotion of cadets in cases of emergency, which allowed your promotion to the position of first officer which then allowed you to assume and keep my former place as captain aboard this vessel..." Spock's recitation was terse and also absent-minded; he was distracted by the fact that this had all gone researched and figured out right under his nose, and if he had no problem with the captain's logic or decisions, that was entirely beside the point. He opened his mouth to say something else, but then his lips snapped shut.
Kara snickered, and as she went by Spock she gave him a hearty smack on the arm. "Through the nose, commander."