Chapter 4: Kirk

Jimmy's first language is sign, baby signs for hurt, tired, play, hungry evolving into phrases, sentences, paragraphs as his coordination improves. He exchanges a trach tube for a face mask, but keeps his PEG tube for food when he's moved out of NICU and into a pediatrics room. There are three other children around his age with him, most of them bed or wheelchair bound. He knows doctor, nurse, patient, boy, girl, brother, grandpa, learns name-signs and kid terms from a girl across the room who signs because she can't hear.

He's two years old and learns to read because he's not old enough, strong enough, healthy enough to play with the other children. He can't sit up on his own long, can't be let out of bed. But, he can scroll through a child-locked padd with thousands of picture books. He signs the stories to the girl when she rolls her chair carefully across the aisle to the foot of his bed. She's four and can't read yet, but that's okay. As time passes he goes from signing a few pages to one story, two, three before needing to rest.

He's two years and three months old when the doctors start weaning him off the machine that pumps oxygen into his lungs. His chest hurts and he stops breathing because he has to think about it, think about moving his chest up and down and it's exhausting, but it's worse when he forgets, when he's distracted and almost passes out before a nurse rushes over with a mask. He's never had to breathe on his own before. It's hard and scary and he hates it. It scares the other kids too, like the girl across from him, which might be worse.

He's two years and eight months old and breathing consistently they begin easing him into eating and he has to learn how to swallow, chew, eat. The flavors - the girl says their boring, dull, plain, flat - are overwhelming to his tongue. He works his way from liquids to soft foods to solids. The scars in his throat from the tracheostomy make things challenging.

Jimmy is three years and five months old when he first speaks out loud, propped up on pillows of his hospital bed that has been his home for most of his life.

His nurses cry when he says hello, good morning, voice mirroring hands that have known the words for most of a year. They cry again when he's sent home for the final time, three and a half, Tiberius Kirk rolling up to the hospital in an antique car with Sammy in the back.

Sammy and Grandpa Ti know sign, learned right along side him in the hospital when Jimmy was a baby and no one knew if he would ever be able to live off the machines. Being home long-term is a wonderful new adventure. Grandpa Ti and Sammy aren't careful about where they keep the padds. The computer is always logged on. There are books, endless shelves of books on everything imaginable. Jimmy grows stronger dragging ancient text books off the lower shelves, climbing to his feet with the steadying help of the table and chasing after his brother. He's sick, constantly, outside the sterile environment of the hospital, but he pets a cat for the first time and gets bruised playing with other children.

Jimmy is three, four, five and still uses sign as his main language, only speaking out loud when he really wants someone's attention because it hurts his throat and it his tongue trips and stutters, too slow to keep up with his mind. Sammy is seven, eight, nine and never gets mad that Jimmy catches up to him in school work within the year, that he has play gently because Jimmy is still fragile. He speaks and he signs and he listens when his baby brother explains algebra and quadratics and the beginnings of physics while Sammy works on geometry and literature.

Grandpa Ti is old, older, dead and Jimmy meets his mom for the first time. She sweeps in like a hurricane, packing the boys away from the funeral. Grandpa Ti's city apartment by the park is traded for a dusty farmhouse out in the cornfields of Iowa. She sweeps out just as quickly. Jimmy and Sammy are left with Uncle Frank and the memory of a crisp Star Fleet uniform and blonde hair.

Jimmy doesn't like Uncle Frank. He doesn't like him first because he's not Grandpa Ti, but he understands death - the boy two beds over at the hospital died in his sleep, no reason, just died, and his biofunction monitor screamed loud enough to wake all the kids in the room - even if he doesn't like it.

He's hospitalized three times that first month for allergic reactions. Jimmy is five and he knows his medical chart inside out and backwards. He knows what he's allergic to. He knows the scientific name of every food, pollen, and medication he's reacted poorly to. He knows he gets colds every time it rains and catches the flu even if he's vaccinated. His immune system teeters on the edge of compromised and overreacting most of the time, but he's allergic to immunoboosters. He learns to watch what he touches because Uncle Frank doesn't.

Jimmy learns the first stirrings of resentment.

Sammy is smart. This is known fact. He's nine and fluent in sign language, ten and tests out of elementary school, middle school, and starts breezing through high school courses. He has Winona's hair and eyes, Grandpa Ti's face. He's good at sports, when he has time to play. He's eleven and interested in medicine, good with smaller children, and doesn't come across as a smartass when talking to adults. He's fourteen and graduates, starts college with a scholarship the school practically begged him to take. Uncle Frank totes him around like a prized dog. Look at my nephew, George Kirk's son, Winona Kirk's son. Isn't he wonderful? So smart, so talented.

Sammy tries, but apparently the riles for Jimmy are different because Jimmy is different and Uncle Frank does not like that. At five, Jimmy is small, quiet, and moves too much. He stutters when he speaks. He can't run or play rough. He gets tired and cries when he's frustrated. He takes things apart to find out how they work. Jimmy isn't something to brag about, which makes him a burden on Uncle Frank. Uncle Frank does not like burdens and does not like Jimmy.

Jimmy learns this before he turns six. He learns to not like Uncle Frank back, because Uncle Frank isn't something to brag about either. The other kids in his class - kindergarten, everyone learning to count and spell their names, and Jimmy wants to die - talk about parents and siblings with glee. Uncle Frank slaps Jimmy's hands when he signs instead of speaks. Uncle Frank calls Jimmy stupid when he stutters, calls his a useless klutz when he falls, calls him retarded when his feelings boil over into tears because he can't do anything else to express them.

Jimmy is six and learns the feel of a slap and a shove. He learns to shut up, to keep his hands still and quiet. He goes to school and learns that the other kids are mean, that they don't understand physical limitations. He goes to school and learns that other kids are - not stupid, that's what Uncle Frank calls him - slow. They take forever to learn anything. Class time drags on at the pace of cold syrup - a, b, c, d - a is for apple, e, some apples are red, r e d - one plus one is two, two plus two is four, three plus three is - and Jimmy could prove that he's faster than this, could prove that he's like Sammy, smart and fast and pulling ahead, if anyone would just take the time to listen!

No one wants to listen. Jimmy is six, seven, eight and he learns how easy it is for resentment to twist into anger, rage, hatred. He stays up late and does Sammy's work in the dead of night, fingers quick on a padd where he still struggles with writing. He gets into his first fight when one of the other boys calls him stupid like Uncle Frank does. He gets into another when he sees someone picking on a smaller kid. Then another and another. Always another fight and he learns to grin with blood on his teeth. He punches someone in front of a teacher - the jerk deserved it, but doesn't get in trouble because apparently physical altercations are worse than slowly degrading a child's mental health - and is suspended for a week. He's ten and finally, finally at a similar speed to the rest of his age group and the teachers start paying attention.

Or, rather, one teacher does. She catches Jimmy with Sammy's second padd during lunch one day and watches as he breezes though calculus and astrophysics and star charts. She gives him a placement test. Jimmy shares a secret smile with Sammy when she yells Uncle Frank into letting him test into high school.

Jimmy is ten like Sammy was when starting high school. The classes still move too slow - Jimmy learns that boredom is destructive, as do his teachers, but they won't let him move up again citing emotional and social development - but most of the teenagers tend to leave him alone. Sammy just graduated, so the teachers know his name, know the stories Sammy would tell of his brilliant, flighty little brother. The other kids are older. Most don't give two shits about the ten-year-old genius. He stops getting into as many fights at school and settles into a twitchy restlessness during the daylight hours.

Home is still an issue.

Jimmy is eleven and Sammy is living in a dorm at college when Uncle Frank progresses from a dismissive slap to throwing his nephew clear across the room. Six years he's been yelling at Jimmy to speak up, bruising Jimmy's hands when he tries to sign, and now he shouts about mouthy brats who don't know when to shut the hell up. Jimmy hits his head on the door frame and lays there, stunned, for several minutes before dragging himself into his room.

He start showing up to school with bruises again. He already has a reputation. People already know he gets into bloody, bruising fights. Everyone thinks he's started causing trouble again. He gets picked up by the police once, twice for loitering around corners, not wanting to go home. He gets a disappointed call from Sammy - I thought you were staying out of trouble, Jim - and snarls through a promise to do just that.

Jimmy's just barely twelve and he runs away for the first time. It's the middle of January, Iowa. The snow is thick under his boots and he only makes it a couple of miles outside of town before he's stopped on the side of the road. A police officer, a new one, and it's cold enough out that Jimmy allows himself to be taken in without fuss. He tries again when the snow clears, Uncle Frank's fist a lurid purple bruise on his jaw, fingerprints around his wrist. He tries again and again and again, sometimes not even waiting a day between getting caught and setting out again.

It becomes a habit. He gets better at it, gets further, each time, coming up with more creative ways to escape and it all culminates in stealing Uncle Frank's convertible. It's freedom the likes of which he's never felt before. He never wants it to end. Then, for one breathless moment, he's flying, the car diving out from under him and he's weightless in comparison. It feels like he can breathe for the first time in his life. There's nothing holding him down. Just him and the wide, empty sky.

The cliff slams into his chest. There are cuffs around his wrists, papers are signed, and Jimmy is on the first ship out to Iowa 2.0. The reform school calls him Kirk, JT. He runs with it. No one here knows him as Frank's screw up nephew Jimmy. Here he's just one of a couple dozen, so JT he is.

He meets the doctor within a few days of being on the planet. McCoy. Leonard. Bones, JT decides, because the man just sighs and rolls his eyes. He sees Bones several more times after the first. Fights. Although, JT doesn't start them anymore. He finishes them. He's come a long way from the kid who couldn't breathe on his own. Then he meets Spock and is introduced to a wide range of racial discrimination that he hadn't been aware of before. Spock is fifteen, but he doesn't mind hanging out with a mouthy twelve year old and Jimmy starts signing for the first time in years.

JT doesn't so much hear about the blight as he realizes the school's crops are failing. The school receives a packet of ration cards all at once. They're a ragtag bunch of humans and aliens all between the ages of mostly between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. They've all been in trouble with the law in one form or another. The teachers get yellow cards. The students get white.

It takes JT meeting up with Spock a few days after the cards are passes out that the color distinction isn't because of age.