Back again! Sorry for the double-update. Kinda awkward...well anyway...enjoy!
2. Beautiful
His definition of the adjective 'beautiful' changed over the years.
He used to think that Winona-not-his-mother was beautiful, based on her outward appearance. But that was when he was very young, long before he understood the difference between living and existing.
Then, during elementary school, he sat next to a girl called Susanna with beautiful soft, brown curls that bounced whenever she moved. For Jimmy, it was love at first sight. From the cute way she couldn't quite pronounce her r's to the shiny hair clips and pretty dresses she wore every day, there was nothing not to love about her.
Or so young Jimmy thought.
One day after school, he'd gone behind the big barn outside the school to practice his lines. He'd liked Susanna for some time by that point in time, and he'd determined (along with some enthusiastic…encouragement from his older brother Sam) to man up and let her know his feelings in hopes that she returned them.
Just before he got to the part where he finally confessed that he'd had a crush on her for who knows how long (Hey, there had to be a proper introduction, right? And it had to be casual conversation too; after all, there was protocol involved in situations like this. You couldn't just up and tell a girl you liked her out of the blue!), he heard the voices of two girls.
Quickly, he ducked deeper into the shadows. One of the voices had sounded like Susanna's high-pitched, musical tone.
"Car-lee, give my hairpin back!"
Yep, that was Susanna alright. She treasured those hair accessories of hers. A dumb smile slowly spread across Jimmy's face as he imagined the expression on her face after being presented with a whole room full of the clips.
Carly was one of the better-looking girls in his class, Jimmy reflected. Then he humphed quietly. What Carly looked like didn't matter. All that mattered was that his Susanna was practically an angel!
Ironically, right after he had this thought, he heard the sounds of a scuffle. He wrinkled his nose in puzzlement – he hadn't thought Carly would have the nerve to do that to a sweetie like Susanna, but you never knew.
Suddenly, a scream pierced the air.
He rushed forward to the edge of the barn's shadow then stopped in his tracks.
Susanna, his Susanna, was practically beating Carly up! She was slapping, kicking, even biting – Jimmy winced when Susanna grabbed Carly's blonde hair and tugged with all her might – and all he knew was that he had to stop this somehow because this was all wrong –
"What do you want, Jimmy?" Susanna practically simpered when he rushed out from the other side of the barn (pretending to have come from the classroom).
Unprepared for her belligerent attitude, the poor boy raised his hands innocently. "We heard the scream, and so I went outside to see why – you know, saving the day!" he finishes, raising a hand triumphantly like all knights did.
Carly picked herself up, slightly bruised and battered, off of the blacktop and frowned. "You, saving the day? No, Jimmy, that was what your father did. And look where that got him. Is he around now?" she asked, pretending to search the school's surroundings for George Kirk.
Susanna laughed then and continued the taunts. And that, that was the final straw for poor Jimmy, who yelled at the two of them for a full twenty minutes afterward about common sense and empathy and shutting up and other, meaner phrases before the teacher came out and broke them apart.
The next day, he'd transferred to another school.
For some time after that, he'd hesitated to call anyone beautiful. Susanna had corrupted his view of the female half of the population from then on – if such a pretty girl had been capable of saying such things (and unfortunately none of the other girls he met lit a candle to her appearance), what things would less-than-pretty girls be capable of saying?
Or at least, that was how his nine-year-old mind justified his reasoning (which incidentally led to his conclusion during his teenage years that women were predominantly sex objects).
But then on Tarsus, when he'd met his aunt's family, he'd immediately admired the strength and willpower apparent in the females' stances and actions. The way they jutted their chins out when things didn't go their way; the fluttering of their waist-length hair in the wind; the firm, confident planting of their feet on the ground; geez, even the attitude with which they overwhelmingly disabled a male who dared to cross them was beautiful to him, in a way.
And over time, that admiration turned into first grudging respect (especially because they used their skills against him quite a bit for the first few months), then affectionate adoration, and finally unbridled adulation. It had grown to the point where his Aunt Lucy didn't even bat an eye anymore, while his cousins Abigail and Hayley just rolled their eyes in mock exasperation.
Kodos (He clenched his fist just thinking about that vile name)… Kodos had taken all of that, had snatched it from under his nose. And a week later, when he'd returned to the ruins in search of food, their strength and willpower – those qualities which had made them beautiful to him – were completely gone. Vanished. Stolen.
And he would never forgive either himself or Kodos for having taken that from them.
By the time he'd returned to Iowa-not-his-home, he didn't think he'd ever find a truly beautiful woman ever again. Or maybe it was simply that the universe just couldn't stop screwing him over, so that whenever he thought someone beautiful she was taken from him somehow. With Winona-not-his-mother, it was emotionally; with Susanna, it was in every frickin' way possible (though that time had been by choice, true); with his aunt's family, it was physically.
Hence the sex object view.
Yeah, he'd had issues that "slipped through the cracks" in the eyes of the quack psychologist he'd visited two times a week for almost a year afterward. Heh, more like were hidden behind his shut, locked, and dead-bolted mask where no one could see them.
At any rate, for almost ten years afterward, none of the women James T. Kirk came across were in the slightest beautiful. Sure, the vast majority of them could definitely be described as pretty, and all of them were at least slightly attractive, but they all lacked his aunt and cousins' qualities of fierce determination no matter the situation (especially when men were involved).
Until Nyota Uhura waltzed through the doors of the bar and thus into his life.
He imagined that if he'd chugged all the drinks she'd ordered on that fateful night, he would have been delirious enough to call her either Auntie or Abby or Hayley. And then she would have considered him even more of a dumb hick than before, but hey, it would have been worth it for the momentary illusion of being back in his aunt's household.
When he slowly bled to his death one day (he was pretty sure that was the way he'd pass on; that situation seemed to come up in too many away missions to not be a message of some sort), he'd tell her. He'd tell her how much joy his fruitless pursuit of her during their Academy years had brought him, and for once since Tarsus not for the challenge of adding another 'object' to his 'collection.'
No, he couldn't have told her about just how frickin' much she reminded him of his aunt and cousins, how sometimes the four of them were so alike it hurt, how she brought back one more childhood memory of his every time they argued. If he'd told her, she either wouldn't have believed him, or… yeah. Wouldn't have believed him.
But then, of course, his dreams had all come crashing down in that one transporter room scene. Darn the pointy-eared bastard to the ends of the world, she was already taken. Of course, he couldn't resist taking another dig at her every so often, though for a mix of reasons now (yes, he did have enough of a troublemaker's instincts left in him to want to poke fun at his First Officer sometimes), including the fact that he needed to keep up his appearance of James T. Kirk, playboy so that people wouldn't ask questions.
So after the Battle of Vulcan, he was right back at square one. Almost in desperation, he would sometimes only do half-night stands in his attempts to find another woman like those four now inaccessible to him.
Then, abruptly, the truth had come to him, and he'd ground to a halt. Women like Aunt Lucy, like Abby and Hayley, like Uhura, were one of a kind. What was the point in going through the rough when, if he was patient enough to wait, the diamonds would shine before him?
So he'd slowed down dramatically. He'd given command of the Enterprise to Spock temporarily, for two weeks, so that he could gather his thoughts and wrap his mind around this sudden new perspective.
It helped that the anniversary of the Kelvin's destruction (not his birthday, of course, not at all) occurred during that two-week period.
For some time, it had almost seemed to work. But old habits died hard, so Jim reluctantly decided to allow himself a certain number (not telling) of relationships every month. He hoped to eventually work the time period up to that same amount every quarter-year, then half-year, then year, then… well, he hoped he'd be enough out of the loop by that point in time.
A couple more years had passed. He'd felt a faint kindling of something, a queer feeling in his stomach, around Dr. Carol Marcus (ah, he was getting better if he also considered their titles when thinking about women), but it just wasn't quite the same.
But then, after the memorial service honoring those fallen due to Khan's terrorism, realization had hit him, quite suddenly. What the heck was he doing just searching for such a woman among humanoid species?
Weren't ships considered female?
He'd grinned afterward, thinking back on that moment of epiphany. The Enterprise definitely shared those four women's fierce determination – there was almost nothing she couldn't do, thanks to him and Scotty. And about willpower? Heh, they definitely weren't lacking in that compartment. Heck, she was the premiere ship in the entire fleet, probably even in the entire federation!
Even better, she was always so alive. He'd promised himself after the warp core incident to never let his girl come that close to death ever again. What with the purring of the engines, or the humming of the computers in the labs, or the informing of her built-in voice, she was never sleeping, never caught dozing off.
But perhaps best of all, she was his, and that more than anything else set his definition of 'beautiful' in stone. Oh, yes. James T. Kirk, captain of the USS Enterprise.
She was absolutely gorgeous.
Anyway, please let me know how I did with this one. The first prompt was easier than this one, I think.