Chapter 45

A February sun is rising behind a copse of eucalyptus as Kirk ascends the shallow hill to the place where Lori lies, cradled beneath a canopy of white-blossomed pear trees. The Ciana family stone rests in a quiet corner of Mount Hope cemetery, screened from the noise and motion of the city by carrotwoods and out-of-season oleanders: a dark granite obelisk that reaches to the stars that have fired their blood for generations, and which now casts a long shadow over the mound of freshly tilled soil that marks the entry of one more member to the ranks of memory. Her name is missing from the brass plaque, but that, Kirk supposes, will come in time. She feels very close here, as though, if he turns over his shoulder, he might see her disappearing into shadow.

He came to San Diego on the back of an instinct that carried him out of his billet and into the waiting arms of the first airtram to dock at the station: bound for Tijuana, and he considered, for a long moment, just staying the course, pillowing his head against his rolled-up jacket and riding on into Mexico, another name on a long list of places he's never seen. An unspent ticket on the PADD in his overnight bag testifies to his indecision, but, in the end, he knew even before they began their descent over Point Loma, bathed in the dark blue shadows of the city by night, that he'd reached his destination. He knew where he was going, he guesses, before he'd even left his apartment.

Exhaustion planted him face down into thick, dreamless sleep at the first hotel he came to, but the habit of too many years woke him before the sun was up and Kirk spent no more than half a minute contemplating the filigree network of cracks and stains on the ceiling before he realized that the only thing keeping him running at the moment is action and motion; the last thing he wants is space to think. A perfunctory shower under poorly calibrated sonics stripped the last traces of Enterprise from his skin and hair, and he set out into the sleeping city in search of something he doesn't quite know how to name. Closure? Maybe. But he can't help feeling that what he's after is more like absolution.

She'd have hated the stone, he thinks, letting his eyes travel along the length of its smooth, polished surface and into the lightening sky above. Lori liked memories but scorned ostentation; she'd have been content with one of the simpler concrete tablets laid flat against the ground elsewhere on the hill: a name, her dates, perhaps the Starfleet crest. It occurs to him now, bouquet in hand, that she'd be rolling her eyes at him if she could see him now, face etched with a kind of disappointed exasperation at his complete failure to think past convention and nicety; what she'd have hoped from him, Kirk thinks, is that he'd maybe choose to honor her memory in a way that was meaningful to her, though he's not sure where he's supposed to pick up a bottle of forty-year-old Scotch at this time of day, and at least part of him suspects that she'd be as inclined to punch him on the arm as to thank him for pouring it onto the soil. He can't help but think that, if it were him in the ground, she'd have been better at this. But, then again, that's the way it's always been for them. Some things never change.

The air is soft and warm and smells of recent rain. Kirk reaches out a hand to the cool surface of the monument and feels nothing but stone beneath his fingers. Goodbye, Lori, he says in the silence of his head, but he can't make himself say the words out loud.

-o-o-o-

About eight months after the end of their marriage, they found themselves off-world together at the Morenian negotiations on Chel, and Kirk took his ex-wife out to dinner at the end of a long and particularly trying day. Lori had just started seeing Ostergard a few weeks earlier, and their post-marital entente was fragile enough yet that they were still pretending that Kirk didn't know this, so he's not sure how they got onto the subject of things that could have been, other than the fact that Chelarian wine, as it turns out, is more than 30% proof by Terran standards. Lori would have started the conversation, he's certain, but he let himself follow her lead, encouraged, perhaps, by the sense of intimacy renewed in a manner that demanded very little from him in return, and they talked more easily that night than they had since before they were lovers.

She asked why he hadn't married Ruth, which was something he thought she already knew, but that, he guesses, was always one of their problems: assuming that they'd said more than they really had. So he told her about a bright September morning in San Francisco; about sitting down to breakfast at the table of their little two-room apartment off Clement Street and knowing straight away that something was wrong; about the tight lines of his fiancée's face as she told him that she loved him, that she would always love him, and that loving him just simply wasn't enough. Lori listened quietly as he remembered feeling nothing much of anything at all, that distant day, just a blanket of hazy detachment where the sadness ought to have been, and, afterwards, as Ruth was packing, he'd pulled on his uniform and made his way to the Academy and aced his astrometrics paper with a score so high that he'd asked his professor to re-mark it because he was certain there'd been a mistake.

She'd laughed at that, a soft sound that broke the shell of sadness that had frosted around them, and her fingers had flexed against the table, as though she were fighting an urge to reach out for his hand. Yeah, she'd said. That sounds like you.

And Kirk had smiled, because the memory had long since ceased to hold any particular bitterness, and he's old enough now to remember himself as a cadet with fond chagrin. But Lori's laughter had faded as she'd raised her wine to her lips and sipped, and she was quiet for a long moment after that, hair twisting gently in the warm breeze that wandered in from the ocean as her eyes drifted out of focus over the pale ochre skies of a Chelarian dusk.

I don't know, she'd said at last, and he remembers that her lipstick, a deep cherry red that Kirk had never seen her wear before, had left a crimson stain on the lip of her glass. You get body-slammed like that, there's an instinct that tells you to take the hit and keep running. Because the only win you have left at that point is invulnerability.

They weren't talking about Ruth anymore; he knew that even then. Thinking back now, he's not even certain that she was talking about their marriage, because her ex-husband's continuing solitude disturbed her, in a way that Kirk never understood while she was alive, and he knows her too well to think that she didn't understand why he made no effort to correct that, once she'd given up on trying to find a place for herself in a heart that wasn't his to give. But the thing is, she never expected that there was an end to this story of his; if she was trying to find meaning in what they'd lost, it was by making him make something of what was left so that he hadn't just locked her out for no better reason than to immolate himself on the fires of isolation. She'd wanted, in spite of everything, in spite of what she'd felt and what he'd felt and the way it had all fallen apart, to make sure that he had a way to be happy. Because she was smart enough to realize, in the end, what Kirk himself could not admit until three days ago: that there has never been anyone for him but Spock; that the years before he knew him were just filling in time; that his life was set in stone the day he beamed aboard the Enterprise and found himself staring down a steely Vulcan glare that admitted of no possibility of solidarity until the day that it did; and that any attempt to deny or deviate from this simple truth was always going to crash and burn.

So if she's going to let him go, if he's going to let her go, then it has to be for this. This is the only real memorial he can give her now: to make sure that he didn't throw away what they had for no good reason. Nothing else is worthy of a woman like Lori Ciana.

At the airtram station in Boise, he comms Kaplan to let her know that he'll be working on his handover dossier in absentia, and she tells him that Nogura's office has been in touch, but, though she declines to go into detail, it doesn't sound as though Kirk's job is on the line, and he wonders if, perhaps, word of his replacement has filtered through and it's not Kaplan. Nogura has Kirk's recommendation on record, but Kaplan is young and new to tactical command; it was never likely to be her. It's likely to be Boudin, thinks Kirk, and isn't that just going to make for a few interesting situations once he's back out in the field, but, on the whole, it could be worse. Much worse. It's possible the stripes are finally going to come in useful.

An optimistic call to Alisoff evidences a triumph of hope over expectation, but she's no better disposed than her late CO to offer the updates that Lori never got around to giving him after she made him leave for Africa, and then, duty and motivation exhausted, Kirk puts in a final comm to Bones to tell him where he's going and why.

"Idaho, huh?" says his friend's disembodied voice as the swaddled hordes filter past the soundproof booths beyond, tightly wrapped in parkas and scarves and gloves. "What happened—San Francisco wasn't cold and wet enough for you?"

It's an excellent point, particularly given that Kirk is no better prepared for the journey than he was the last time he made it, and the fingers gripping his communicator are once again turning a worrying shade of grayish lilac. "Something like that," he says, and hears the beginnings of a weary smile warming his voice as he speaks. "It's as good a place as any to kill time."

"Guess so," says Bones. A speculative pause. "Anyone comes looking for you, guess I know which way to send them."

Unseen and unregarded, Kirk closes his eyes, rests his head against the chill formica-plated wall, exhales. "I'd appreciate that," he says.

"Sure," says his friend. A beat. "Can't promise they're gonna be too happy about it, mind."

A breath of quiet laughter curls steam into the air, frosts the concourse wall with beads of moisture. "Probably not," says Kirk. His head feels light, reeling, full of clouds. "I'll be on comms anyway. This is only partially a vacation."

"'Partially,' my mother's britches," says Bones conversationally. "'Partially's as near as you get, Jim. Lord knows, there wasn't a man or woman in Starfleet was surprised when you found a way to get out of that last one early. I'll see you in a couple of days—there'll be a bottle of Salurian rum waiting in sickbay, soon as you get the old silver lady out of park."

The last time Kirk drank Salurian rum, he was twenty-one years old and alleviating the pain of his second failed attempt at the Kobayashi Maru. He woke up three days later in the library bathrooms, with no shirt, no memory of the intervening seventy-two hours, and a tattoo on his left buttock of a face that he didn't recognize, which took four sessions with a dermal regenerator to remove. Bones knows this story. He probably doesn't have Salurian rum, but Kirk makes a mental note to bring his own liquor, just in case.

"Isn't that illegal?" he asks, for the show of things, and, as predicted, his friend's rumble of laughter rolls back over the comm wave, like ripples across a pond.

"Only in three sectors," says Bones cheerfully. "Four at most."

The concourse is emptying as the tide of passengers ebbs, and the sun is sinking behind the Rockies in a blaze of iced gold and purple, lengthening shadows draining what little heat remains in the air. Kirk has wrapped himself in an extra shirt and his uniform jacket, but the temperature is diving towards zero as night approaches and he needs to get out of the cold.

"Fine," he says, and he makes no effort to hide the grin in his voice. "But let's wait until we've cleared Jupiter station before you break out the contraband, all right? I'll see you in a few days—Kirk out."

The communicator snaps shut as Kirk signs off, a muted click in the artificial hush of the booth, and he pulls his coat more tightly around him as he makes his way out through the static sound-dampening field and into the cavernous roar of the central atrium. The past is everywhere here. It's three years since Kirk last made this trip; three years since he found himself ejected from command and the only place that has ever truly felt like home, and scrambled, reeling, to find a way to make his peace with a new reality. Three years since he lost sight of the one face he wanted to see in a room full of strangers; three years since he commed his new CO from the Gem State to explain that he'd turned and run like hell from his brave new world; three years since she struggled out of sleep to speak softly to him and let him know that she understood. As he makes his way across the lobby towards street doors banked either side with snow, he hears her voice all around him, catches flashes of her golden smile beneath every pair of blue eyes that pass him in the crowds. She's everywhere, but she's retreating from him: the gaze behind the eyes is sharp, the smile that lights her face is knowing, and she nods, turns, disappears into shadow. Didn't waste much time, huh? she whispers from the edge of recall, and there's a note of laughter behind the words. Did he spook you that bad?

He'd hold onto her if he could. He knows that, now that it's too late. But she just smiles, sunshine in the shadows, and shakes her head. It's not me you want, she says, and she's right, of course, but she's also wrong. Because the trouble with wanting is that it can mean many things, and it wasn't ever a woman who broke Kirk's heart.

He knows that, now that it's too late.

-o-o-o-

The last traces of daylight are a ribbon of burnished orange on the horizon as the rental car descends towards the snow-scattered yard of his uncle's old homestead, and the sky above is dark and clear and shot with starlight and constant motion. The last time Kirk was here, he'd tethered his gaze to the ground beneath his feet to avoid all memories of what he'd left behind, but tonight, as the passenger door opens and he steps out into the frozen shadows, he turns his head upwards and sucks in a deep breath of mountain air, sharp and clean as broken glass, and searches the black vaults above for his sleeping ship. It's easier to love this world uncomplicatedly, in all its savage beauty, when he's only passing through.

The house is cold and bathed in gloom, but the environmental controls spring to life as he opens the door, and the air inside smells fresh, mobile with recent use. The grate is neatly swept and the dust that layers onto the open surfaces between his parents' infrequent visits has been cleared, and, though Kirk knows it has been more than four months since anyone last stayed here, the signs of care-taking are evident, and bode well for the prospects of hot water in the shower. He drops his bag on the couch on his way through to the kitchen in search of coffee, rubbing warmth into his hands as he goes, and notes with a sudden twist of hunger that the synthesizer has been upgraded since his last visit, and that fresh fruit is now on the menu. He'll pass on that, he thinks, and dials up a grilled cheese sandwich with a side of fries and a carafe of Java as hot as the machine will make it, in the knowledge that he has fewer than seven days' dietary freedom left before Bones is in charge of his meals once more, and it's time to make that count. The thought makes him slightly giddy with irrational joy: it means he's going home again.

Firewood is stacked in a geometric pile on the hearth, but it's been sitting in the cold too long, and damp has seeped into the fibers. Kirk contents himself with dragging a screen into place in front of the grate, to shield the room from the worst of the draft, and drops onto the couch closest to the heating vent, where the temperature is creeping towards comfort. In a moment, he thinks, cradling his steaming mug against his chest, he will get up, make his way to the master bathroom, where the water always runs a little warmer, scrub the day off his skin and make a play for some real, genuine sleep; maybe start the process of reclaiming a little bit of his humanity. He's going to sink into bed, wrapped in a frost-scented comforter, and close his eyes and let sleep wash over him, and he's not going to remember that it's thirty-eight hours into his seven-day countdown, or that he has no idea what he's doing here, or that he stood this morning in front of his ex-wife's grave and left flowers in lieu of a goodbye, or that there's an empty space on the wall above the fireplace beside the holo of Sam and Aurelan on their wedding day, a black line of residual dust ghosting the outline of another picture, now removed.

He's not going to dream.

-o-o-o-

He wakes early again, surfacing into consciousness before the sun has finished rising, but, for the first time in days, Kirk feels rested. The house controls have molded themselves to his presence overnight, and the blackout glass of the windows lightens as he swings his feet out of bed, spilling pre-dawn gray through the pale curtains in all the shades of an overnight dusting of snow. The floorboards are warm, gently heated beneath his feet, and this, he thinks, is as good a sign as any that it's time to get up.

Fifty-some hours down, barely one hundred more to go. Not that he's counting.

Not that he's worried.

His mother has been campaigning to get the chimney closed for almost as long as the house has been in his parents' name, but not too strongly, Kirk thinks, or the fireplace would have been defunct long before now. It's impractical and drafty and a whole lot of thankless effort to maintain, but there is something primal, something satisfying, about the work it takes to light it, and so it's almost a disappointment when the chopped kindling catches on his second attempt. Almost, but not quite: Kirk dials the lights down to zero and lets the flames light the room as he carries his coffee to the wide picture window to watch the rising sun streak the snow-capped mountains in coral and amber. He wonders if he'll miss the dawn when he's back on his ship, but he doubts it. Deep space has its compensations; he never has before.

Beyond the graveled yard, a path stretches through the trees that fringe the property, curling down the hillside towards the distant state highway. It's a difficult drive but a challenging hike; perhaps he'll tackle it later today, or tomorrow, or the day after, once the sun takes the edge off the ice in the air. It's bathed in shadow now: the clear crystal darkness of a winter morning, and it's silent, still and deserted. Kirk is not expecting a figure to make his way out of the gloom—tall and angular, even buried beneath a thick coat and a woolen hat that fails to hold back the frozen chill, imperious eyebrow arched against the discomfort written across his face—but he watches the empty road for a long moment just the same, and a fragment of poetry, heard once and long forgotten, skitters across the corners of his conscious thought:

Even if I now saw you

only once,

I would long for you

through worlds,

worlds.

Japanese, he thinks, and old: one of Lori's favorites, perhaps; something he's learned from her, once upon a time. He tries to remember the context, the occasion, and comes up blank. Was she talking about him? Or herself? Or something she saw in her husband's face when he thought she wasn't looking? On the edge of his vision, a golden smile flares in the retreating shadows of the room, a yellow-haired head shakes indulgently and turns away, and she's gone again without a word, leaving him to draw his own conclusions. But he guesses he's earned that by now, and Kirk smiles softly in the paling light of the oriel, drains his coffee, and turns to make his way back upstairs.

-o-o-o-

He finds things for to occupy himself that first day; things to keep him busy. A handover dossier for a job that never really felt like his, comm chatter scattering the airwaves: organizing, finishing, squaring away. Updates from an idling Enterprise, Scotty smiling cheerfully out of the screen of the homestead's old terminal as he runs through lists of last-minute improvements he wants to make, confident in the knowledge that Kirk's not likely to refuse. Negotiations with Personnel about replacements for the crew who transferred off his ship in the early hours of the Vejur crisis; with Supplies about refitting the captain's quarters so that Kirk doesn't feel as though he's invading a dead man's privacy every time he ends his shift; with PR about the inevitable cabaret that must accompany the official return of James Kirk to starship command. The morning is lost to Starfleet, and it's a surprise to look up from his work when a growling stomach deposits him back into the moment and find that the sun is already on the far side of its apex in the ice-blue winter sky.

Damp is creeping in beneath the sill of the gable window in the second guest room, and the last flurry of fall leaves still block the gutters beneath the eaves. A faucet in the downstairs bathroom has a tendency to stick in cold weather, which is eleven months of the damn year up here, and its constant dripping is like needles in the back of Kirk's skull in the silence. Paint is peeling from the outside windowsills, and the weathering is coming away on the back door. There is work to do, if a man wants to work. The farm is set low into a southwest-facing slope, and the high ridge to the north has held back the worst of the snow, but there are clouds on the horizon that promise a fresh flurry overnight, and so Kirk decides to start by clearing the yard: it's the kind of honest, physically demanding labor that his restlessness requires. He finds a shovel in the woodshed, along with a half-empty caulking gun for the leaking window and a tin of weatherproofing lacquer that will have to wait until the air dries up a little, and sets to work clearing a path that's already tolerably passable, but that's not really the point. Last's night's drift has dusted the surface of the older snow below, and, though it's frozen into a crust in the shaded areas where the sun is weakest, it offers little resistance to Kirk's underarm swing, shovel biting deeply into a blanket of white. Ice crystals sparkle as he pitches a spadeful of powder into the corner of the yard, and this is good; this is exactly what he needs.

It's not deep—no more than two inches in places—but the path is long and open to the sky, and there's a lot to clear. Kirk has bundled himself into his father's old overcoat and utility gloves, but he shucks off the jacket after fifteen minutes' work and feels the cold air bite into his sweat-dampened shirt sleeves. Meltwater darkens the hem of his pants as the frozen ground appears, snow creeping in around the tops of his boots to trickle down his heels and pool beneath his soles. The blade of the shovel grazes shale as he slices, gathers, swings back over his shoulder, a visceral crunch of rock and ice, the soft, scattering rustle of snow on snow. Slice, gather and swing, and a bird, disturbed by his footfall on the gravel, rises, complaining, from the boughs of a nearby tree, a lonely chatter of wing and song against the hush. Slice, gather and swing, and frustration rides a wave of energy along his arms: frustration, disquiet, and impatience. Slice, gather and swing, and there is no answering footfall on the road beneath him and no rumble of approaching engine from the sky, and he knew there wouldn't be, he knew this, but he's been listening for it just the same and each quiet, empty minute rings in his ears like a confirmation of every dark thought he doesn't want to acknowledge. Slice, gather and swing; slice, gather and swing, and nothing but silence behind it.

The truth is, he has no idea what he's doing here. The sane thing, the rational thing, would be to walk back into the house and throw his clothes into his bag, close the door behind him, and head back to San Francisco before the storm sets in. He knows he's hiding, here on the mountainside, and he's not sure why, beyond the general sense of redundancy waiting for him in an office he's about to leave and the knowledge that there aren't enough pieces of James Kirk to satisfy everyone who wants a part of him this week. And they're good reasons, he guesses, but they're not good enough to let him pretend that's all that's going on. If ever there were a time when Kirk did not want to be difficult to find, it's now, and yet this knowledge makes him angry in a manner that he cannot explain to his own satisfaction. Maybe it's just that he feels as though he's always taking that first step forward only to find that he's reaching into empty space; maybe he wants to see what will happen if he pulls away for once. And maybe it's just that a James Kirk who can skulk about his apartment, waiting to see if anyone shows up, is not a man he recognizes, and he's sick of looking in the mirror and seeing someone he doesn't know.

He said he was coming back. Seven days, he said; fewer if he departed at Sigma Cilicia IV. There are many reasons to doubt this and only one real reason not to, and that gets a little harder to believe with every passing hour. Seven days, he said. It's been two and a half. Kirk sinks the blade of his shovel into a bank of soft powder and tries to make his brain stop counting.

He works steadily all afternoon, but winter is long in the Rockies and night comes early in February. As the shadows lengthen beneath a sky the color of flame, Kirk tosses the shovel up against the side of the house, kicks snow off his boots on the step, and makes his way indoors to find that the fire in the grate has long since banked. Tomorrow, he thinks, he'll top up the kindling from the timber pile nestled beneath a frost-scattered tarpaulin in the woodshed; for tonight, he builds a pyramid of tinder from the dwindling pile on the hearth and warms the feeling back into his hands as it catches slowly from the heat of the embers. His communicator is sitting untouched on the table where he left it more than four hours earlier, and he gets to his feet with the idea of comming in to the office for an update, but he walks past it before he knows he's going to do so and makes his way to the liquor cabinet instead, where his father keeps the kind of whisky that would have lit up Lori's face in connoisseur's delight, had Kirk ever brought her here. He's not going to check his messages, he decides, as he pours two fingers of Scotch and carries it back to the fireside, stretching out the stiffness in his shoulders as he walks. He's not going to scroll through line after line of congratulations and gratitude and personal questions he has no intention of answering, in search of a word, a name he knows he won't see. He knows better than to do this to himself. He's an idiot for letting it happen again.

He should have stayed in San Francisco. In San Francisco, he'd be easier to find. But there are too many ghosts haunting those familiar roads; he came here on instinct, and he needs to trust in that, for at least a little longer. Kirk sips whisky by the firelight until his eyes grow heavy, heat and dancing shadows soothing his unsettled mind, and he wakes on the couch in the small hours of the morning with an aching head and muscles like granite that protest all the way up the stairs to bed.

He dreams that night. But he doesn't remember them in the morning.

The blizzard has blown itself out to the northeast by sunrise, and the path across the yard remains clear. Searching through the sideboard for a flint or a fresh book of matches, Kirk comes across the chimney breast's missing holograph: a picture he doesn't remember posing for over beakers of orange juice in a function room in Horseshoe Bay. He peels back the linen teacloth that someone has wrapped around it for safekeeping and stares for a moment into the past, at the face of the woman he married, at the face of the man who married her. Lori's smile always translated poorly to holo: captured for posterity on her new husband's arm, dress golds a flash of summer against the gray winter sky at the window, she looks beautiful, radiant with easy joy, but the sunlight is gone from her eyes. Something is missing from her in reproduction, something that he'll never see again, and Kirk slides the picture back into the drawer as his chest tightens and his throat constricts.

He stacks the fire, clears the ashes from beneath the grate, and sets off upstairs to re-seal the guest room window.

Kaplan comms mid-morning, as Kirk is proofing the third draft of his handover report and wondering idly if he needs to mention the fiasco with the Argelian swimming pool and the trade delegation from Brannigan's Colony, to let him know that Xeno are making tentative advances in Fleet Ops' direction and that there's talk about maybe possibly calling a provisional meeting in a couple of days. Hypothetically. Alisoff is playing her cards close to her chest, and Kirk understands that—she's not Lori, she doesn't have a pre-existing relationship with his department, and, most importantly, she doesn't know who's going to be in charge of making Kirk's decisions this time next week—but he still has to fight the urge to cut the call and redial her office, try and talk her down from her defensive reticence. That he doesn't do this is out of respect for Kaplan and her place on the Starfleet stage: she's going to have to stand her ground, these next few weeks, and he doesn't want to make her look sidesteppable now. If this is something he needs to know, if it's the information he's been looking for, he trusts his deputy to tell him. She knows enough to know why it's important.

He finishes his report, sends it through to Kaplan for comment, resists the impulse to tack a fussy little codicil to the bottom of the message, wondering if Alisoff's office gave any hint as to what the meeting might be about. Is it significant, he wonders, that the overture has come only after Kirk's tenure as the Chief of Starfleet Operations has entered its final days? Is it significant that it has come from Alisoff when it never came from Lori? Is it significant that her office won't say what she might—potentially—want to talk to Fleet Ops about? He doesn't know her well enough to answer these questions, and he's not used to being so out of sync with Xeno, so completely out of the loop. It feels like the latest in a long list of reminders of how violently the world has shifted. How much they've all lost.

The sun gains strength as the morning goes on, and Kirk wraps himself in his father's coat and deerstalker, and a thick woolen scarf that might be Peter's, and carries his lunch out onto the porch. The swing is clear of snow but slick with melted frost, and so he sets his coffee on the seat and stands at the railing instead, resting his elbows on the crossbar as he chews absently on his sandwich. The white-capped peaks around him glow like earthbound stars against the clear, cool blue of the sky, and he can hear what he thinks is a solitaire singing in the aspens. Kirk feels a wry smile playing at the edge of his mouth as he reaches behind him for his mug. It figures that his only company out here would be a bird named after seclusion.

The fire has burned down to embers when he brings his plate back inside, and he never did find that flint; he can't afford to let it go out. So he leaves his dishes in the sink and makes his way out to the woodshed, where logs are piled beneath a tarp, soft and damp from the snow, and spends a little time pulling out the driest wood from the back. And there's something cathartic about the effort it takes to swing an ax and shatter timber: mindless repetition and focused destruction, action and reaction, the antithesis of handover reports and press conferences and diplomatic paralysis. The ax rises and falls, the wood shatters beneath the blow, and, when he's worked for five, ten, twenty minutes, there's a pile of kindling at his feet: tangible evidence of his exertions, and isn't that a damned change for once. Kirk gathers up an armful of snow-scented pine and wonders again just how the hell he's managed to survive the last three years of his life.

Fire replenished out of immediate danger of extinction, Kirk wanders back outdoors in search of a ladder with which to tackle the guttering, maybe the second-floor window frames, a couple of loose shingles on the north-east eaves. There are stables at the back of the property, screened from the house by a thick copse of cottonwood, where Kirk's mother hopes to keep Appaloosas when his father finally gets around to retiring; for now, they've been pressed into service as a kind of holding pen for anything not useful enough for the woodshed, and he guesses that if anywhere on the grounds is likely to inspire his restless mind with ways to avoid thinking for the rest of the day, it's going to be out here. He's not disappointed. An eighteen-foot ladder rests against the near wall, hung with cobwebs and patched with waterlogged dust, but it's sturdy enough to take Kirk's weight when he tests it, and the rung locks hold when he snaps them into place. Three eight-gallon drums of whitewash gather leafmold in a damp end-stall that could do with a little weatherproofing of its own, depending on how long he stays and how bored he gets. A carpentry bench, which Kirk is privately certain has never seen use at the hands of a single member of his family, promises a treasure chest of power tools that he can almost certainly use to do something if the snow keeps him indoors one day. And there, by the near wall, a tackroom door yields to a little gentle pressure to reveal the jewel in the diversionary crown: a wooden rack, slung with a tarp and two woolen blankets, beneath which rests Kirk's uncle's old trail saddle.

Yes. This will definitely do.

It's years since Kirk has been on horseback—deep space is not precisely the ideal environment for equestrian pursuits, though you'd think there might have been a few more opportunities when they made planetfall, given half the places they visited—but the passion has never left him, and the smell of tempered rawhide, shot through with the dusty musk of horsehair and sweat, will always, he thinks, have the capacity to drop him abruptly back into childhood days beneath an infinite Iowan sky. His brother's shadow is at his shoulder as he carries rack and saddle out into the yard in front of the stables and sets to buffing the dust from the tooled-leather ridges of the fender and housing, and the scent of saddle soap conjures memories of sunny, late-summer days on the edge of a cornfield: two sandy-haired boys on a pair of Pasa Finos, racing along a dusty trail, with nothing but possibility stretching out ahead. Sam was always the horseman, always the rancher; in another life, another family, he'd have been content to tether himself to the prairie lands and raise cattle and children beneath his native sun. He looks so young in his wedding picture, so full of life and hope, and Kirk can't help but remember that, of the four faces that hung together on that wall, three of them are gone now forever.

He doesn't know what to do with that. Other than to make it count.

And this, at least, he thinks he can do, if he can just get the chance. It wasn't ever a woman that broke your heart, said his mother, the day he got married, and, Kirk guesses, he ought to know better by now than to ignore his mom's advice. It wasn't ever a woman that leveled James Kirk, that got inside his head and his heart and hollowed him out. A beautiful face, a sharp mind, hair the color of an Iowa meadow—these are the things that catch his eye, but they're never the things that keep him. He may love them, but he won't fall in love with them, and it will never be enough, for him or for them. Small wonder they all chose to leave in the end, and he thinks he might have stopped to notice before now how he's never sat boneless by a window, staring blankly into a colorless sky, for Ruth, or for Carol, or for Janet, or for his wife. It meant more than the Enterprise, said Lori, once upon a time: strong words, brave words, and he'd turned and walked away so that he didn't have to hear them. It meant more than command or deep space or any of it. You loved him and he left you, and you just kind of… stopped.

Yes. He thinks she understood him very well in the end. Better than he was prepared to understand himself.

He wishes he could still tell her that she was right, though, of course, she already knew. There wasn't much that got past the all-seeing gaze of Lori Ciana, and he has no idea what it was about him, about them, that made her turn her back on all reason and good sense and let him start something that she knew was bound to fail. He wishes he could tell her that he finally understands what she was trying to tell him: that night on Chel, the first night they spent together, the last; he wishes he could tell her that she was right about almost all of it-except for one thing. It turns out that this story of his has an ending after all.

Because Spock is coming back. He is. There's no reason to believe this, and every reason not to, but the truth is, there's just no way that it ends like this; they've both tried too many times to walk away. Like warp and weft, like binary stars, like quantum entanglement, there is no one without the other: they've spent eight years in a decaying orbit; collision was always inevitable. So he's coming back. He said he was, and he will.

And so, because his ears have never stopped listening for it, Kirk hears the hum of an approaching engine before it's much more than a disturbance in the air, a vibration on the edge of sound, and he knows, immediately, what it means. Finding a lonely mountainside ranch in the foothills of the Idaho Rockies was never going to present much of a logistical challenge for a man like Spock; the real question was whether or not he could take that final step. Kirk has spent so many years reaching forward; he guesses he just needed to know that he wasn't grasping at air.

He slings the blanket back over his uncle's half-cleaned saddle, carries it back into the barn. It's a shame, really, he thinks, as he pulls the big doors closed and walks back towards the house, brushing soap and dust from his hands; it looks like it's been some time since the leather was last treated, and he'd have liked to have finished the job. Maybe he will yet, though he doubts it. If he's right, if the knot of apprehension now tightening in his gut isn't completely off target, then everything is about to change, and that job belongs to the limbo of anticipation and uncertainty that's haunted the past few days; a restlessness that's already passing into memory. And, besides, it's leather. Vulcans don't approve of products made from hide.

The trees of the foothill are rustling now in the updraft of an oncoming car; the engine hum is creeping up the octaves, and, in a minute, a vehicle is going to appear above the ridge. Kirk sucks in a deep breath and lets his eyes fall closed for just a moment, takes a second to center himself, to feel the last traces of his old life dissolve into history. This is it. This is what he's been waiting for, and now, faced with the reality of it, he knows he's not prepared, but, then again, he's not sure he ever really will be. There's no way to prepare for this. It feels a little bit like freefall, he thinks. It's felt that way ever since they met.

Kirk opens his eyes, squares his shoulders, smiles. And he makes his way indoors to wash his hands.