Thought it was about time to start a catch-all dumping ground for the AOS, given how many bits and pieces cut from other stories I have floating around my drafts. Enjoy.
Warning for language.
No one aboard this ship really knows how to mind their own business.
Some of that is to be expected. There are no secrets on a 'Fleet starship, only public truths and classified truths. The Enterprise is no exception to the usual 'Fleet rumor mill; despite her size, despite her professionalism, she is inarguably the most tightly-knit crew in the 'Fleet, and a consequence of that is the fact that it's basically impossible to keep your secrets to yourself. Jim is just lucky that most of the crew have some common sense, and those that don't are at least smart enough to not get caught in the middle of said rumor mill.
He's also lucky that he'd trust these people with anything, without question or condition or stipulation, classified or not, embarrassing or not. It's truly terrifying, but at the same time knowing that safety net is there? That's something he'll never take for granted.
But it does make it hard to keep a secret, even if it's a fairly harmless one, and familiarity certainly breeds a kind of brazen, unabashedly nosy contempt among his primary command staff.
He is well aware that at least half the Bridge crew today is intensely curious about why he told Uhura to pipe this particular transmission down to his cabin instead of his ready room, and promptly left Spock the conn so Jim could go take the call. But he needs to ensure the right privacy filters keep it from well-intended prying eyes, and that is only available on the captain's private terminal.
Command will likely send him a warning for using the official channels for such a purpose, but he's no real stranger to that, let's be real here.
That said, he can't exactly blame Uhura for looking very, very wary as she enters the cabin fifteen minutes later at his specific request, because her summons has to be generating even more chatter. And she hears all chatter, by literal job description. At least after all this time, there's no one aboard who would think he's calling a crewman to his cabin for any kind of inappropriate fraternization.
"Nothing's wrong," he says, without preamble, and sees some of the tension leave her face. "Not that it'd be anyone's business if it was."
Her smile has no real annoyance in it. "Don't route your private business through the Bridge, then. Why exactly do you need me, if nothing's wrong?"
"It's…sensitive." He doesn't realize he's been absently tapping a stylus against his desk until he points it at the chair opposite. "And I think you're the best person to handle it."
"What is it, exactly?" The caution is back, though she sits readily enough, tossing her ponytail behind her impatiently. "Are you in trouble? Do I need to bury something in our paper trail?"
"What? No!"
"It's not exactly an unreasonable assumption, given historical data."
"You're a pain in my ass sometimes, Lieutenant."
"You really think that's not mutual, sir?"
He snorts, but shoves the padd across the desk to indicate the fun time is over and he needs her to be serious. "Take a look at this for me."
She pulls the padd closer, and seems to be briefly taken aback at the retinal privacy scan before the first clip starts playing. Her hand flies to her mouth a moment later, and she looks back up at him, eyes glimmering.
"How did you…seriously, Jim. How did you find this?"
"You really don't need to know," he replies, though the humor falls flat under the weight of the subject matter.
"It's been so long…"
"Too long. It shouldn't have taken years to dig it up and get what I could restored," he says quietly, guilt still eating at him like a never-ending disease, deep inside. "Gods, I wish I'd had the same connections five years ago that I do now."
"How much –"
"There's only about an hour of footage, taken at different times over the course of two years. It's all I've been able to find. Most places wipe surveillance footage every thirty days due to privacy laws, and even Terran Embassies do it every two years, no more. This is the only full copy, by the way. The download link was intentionally a one-time-only thing."
"Jim..."
"It'll be fine, I promise. I've already started a backdated report, suggesting the Embassy declare it classified as recently discovered historical data. If they do manage to trace it to me personally, it'll just look like I was working on a side project with not-entirely-Federation assistance. Given how rare anything of the kind is right now, even on the black market, it'll be fine. There's official precedent."
Enough incentive can create geniuses out of average beings, and networks out of mere acquaintances – and Jim has had plenty of incentive over the years, well knowing that it's highly unlikely they've seen the last of Section 31, no matter what the Admiralty says. He might need civilian help someday, and he will not be caught off-guard again.
Weaving an ever-increasing web of very smart beings of all backgrounds which he's conveniently saved from death or destruction by various genocidal maniacs has proven to be super helpful, not just on this particular unsanctioned side project.
Said project, being a sad little 58 minutes of restored surveillance footage of a very young Vulcan ambassador, his human wife, and a small Vulcan child; but it's something. Something that was deleted on Earth long before the Battle of Vulcan, and so likely was never thought of again (much less thought of retrieving), in the years of rebuilding since.
It's nothing more than a spectral artifact now, but one he hopes Spock will appreciate.
Uhura flicks a finger over the controls, forwarding a few minutes, and smiles to herself at something. "Have you watched it, Captain?"
"No." At her surprised look, he shrugs. "I mean, it's not really mine to watch. I did spot-check it enough to know it was the real deal. We had a false alarm about six months ago, someone who looked very similar and flagged the recognition program. But that's one of the reasons I asked you down here, so you could verify." No one in the Federation knows syntax, spoken language, and body language like she does, and he wants to be absolutely sure.
She flips the screen, paused on a picture that makes his heart ache, both for Spock's loss and the fact that even though Jim's mother is still alive, he has no memory of being held like that, ever, much less with that much visible human love.
Winona wasn't a bad person; in fact she was, and is, a very good Starfleet officer. Just a bad parent.
Uhura must see something reflected in his face, because she takes the padd back hastily. Forwards the clip a few seconds, grins, and turns it back to him.
"Oh my god, he's adorable."
"Right?" After briefly tracing the outline of a solemn dark-haired toddler clutching an incongruously smiling stuffed bear, she finally gets down to business, skimming a finger over the controls with the well-practiced ease of a senior communications officer accustomed to summarizing lengthy comms. "And it all looks legit, at least at first glance. I still can't believe you managed it. How long have you been working on this?"
"Off and on? Since right after Khan." He's weirdly gratified when she looks surprised, and a little impressed. "I was super bored for many, many months there in Medical. I needed a hobby."
"And instead of learning to knit or something sensible, you taught yourself how to splice, copy, and restore Class Five encrypted public surveillance files?"
"Not exactly. My hacking skills improved a lot, yeah, but I wasn't able to find anything in public footage, no matter how far back I went in San Francisco. I tried New York, given its high-visibility inter-planet transport system, but came up empty there, too. His mother was a teacher in Seattle, and that looked a little more promising initially, but security restrictions around children being surveilled meant none of that footage was retrievable, either. I'd just about given up."
"Does anyone on the Board know that the Vulcan Embassy's surveillance footage is retrievable?"
"They do now." He grins at her horrified expression. "Relax, it's fine. Like I said, I already sent them a full report and closed the back door we found, any state secrets I might have dug up are safe. Also, probably inapplicable, all things considered."
"How did you even manage it?"
"I didn't. I'd tried everything I could think of, but this was beyond my capabilities. So I started making important connections instead, that first year after we launched for real. Originally, I was just trying to see if anyone was selling Vulcan artifacts on the black market, but that's still a work in progress. It wasn't until I met someone on Yorktown two years ago that I thought we might have a shot at finally succeeding with this."
It's taken a lot more time than he thought it would, unfortunately. In some ways, perhaps this is better; time and distance can heal more than fractured trust, and they all have worked very hard to repair and strengthen that trust. But in some way, he's never going to quite forgive himself for not succeeding when he first tried, back when this troubled crew were just ships passing in the night, so close to connecting properly and never quite managing it until his own death had been the rude awakening they all needed.
"It's not much, really."
"It's fantastic, Jim." Uhura pauses the video, and sets the padd back on the desk. "But you said one of the reasons you called me down here. What's the other reason?"
"I was hoping you'd be willing to pass it on to him."
"What? Why?"
"Because…" He waves a vague hand in the air, dismissive. "There's a lot of baggage there."
"Which I thought you'd both dealt with. Years ago."
"We have, at least I think we have. I hope we have. But…I dunno, I just don't feel right about it."
"Jim, you put in a lot of work on this."
"I cannot express to you how much that doesn't matter, Nyota. I don't care how he gets it, just that he does." He wilts under the force of her incredulous look. "What, I can be mature."
"You can be ridiculous," she retorts, but her eyes are gentle.
"This isn't about me. Just make sure it gets to him, yeah?" He fidgets with the stylus again. "It'll be better coming from you, I think. I thought about saving it for like, the Remembrance Day or Mother's Day, but the last thing I want is to resurrect something that's been put to rest. You decide."
"If that's really what you want."
"100%."
"Then I'll make sure he gets it," she says quietly, and reaches across the desk to squeeze his hand. "And in advance, thank you."
The rest of the evening passes in relative peace and quiet, as the interest around the brief communications anomaly of earlier that afternoon soon fades under usual ship's business; and the next day seems to follow suit. Relatively boring, incredibly basic ship's business, almost so basic as to be insulting to their extremely talented crew. They'll be climbing the walls if there are two more weeks of this mundane, unexciting star-charting run, and he's already thinking about what can be done to keep energy levels up. Bones will have ideas, he's sure.
Uhura messages Jim at her lunch break to tell him she plans to pass the footage to Spock this evening, and that she waited a day because Spock's off-duty tomorrow. She doesn't specify, and doesn't have to, that she chose this particular timing because it'd give Spock a day to control, corral, and otherwise eliminate any pesky human emotion that might result from the unexpected.
Jim approves, not that she needs his input.
Bones is buried in a last-minute medical report all this evening, most of the crew are involved in ongoing projects or recreational pursuits, and Jim's just finished the series of novels he was engrossed in, so he's a little at loose ends tonight. He decides to spend the unusually free hours completing a backlog of paperwork he's been putting off, secretly hoping someone on his staff will get tired of waiting for his review and just do it themselves.
Apparently, said staff knows that's exactly what he was doing and said haha no, do your damn job. Sir.
He's matured, okay, not become perfect.
Three hours of carefully data-checking and spinning out more detailed reports and addendums to their last four planetside missions is taking a toll on him after that long, however. He decides to pause when he catches himself ten seconds prior to sending Montgomery Scott a Priority memorandum, ordering him to for the love of God use the spell-checking and context functions. The second smartest person on the ship should not be turning in reports that even colloquially call his crewmen redshits.
Jim really is getting old, if he regards fetching a cup of tea from the sad little beverage replicator to be a calming highlight of his evening.
He nearly drops said tea all over his keyboard, however, as his cabin door opens without anyone chiming for entry permission, an unheard-of event of boundary-stomping that not even Bones has done more than a few (medically urgent) times, and what the hell?
Barely has he managed to put the steaming mug down on the desk before he's attacked by what appears to be a rampaging Vulcan on a human mission. He barely gets a blurred glimpse of Spock's face before he's being strangled again, but…no, not really, that's…
That's actually his impassive, restrained, supposedly unemotional Vulcan First Officer hugging him, and did he say what the hell, yet?
It's been a very long time since anyone hugged him (glad-you're-not-dead one-arms don't count) without an agenda, and he suspects it's been even longer for a Vulcan, if ever. Their lives and childhoods are so undeniably messed up that Jim still has no idea how they both function, much less function so well together.
So, this is kind of…nice?
At least he's gotten over the initial knee-jerk reaction of the fuck is happening abort abort and can return the gesture with slightly less painful force. It doesn't make up for the fact that he was a horrible human being several years ago about the subject in question, but at least it's steady and reassuring when clearly needed by someone who just as clearly is unaccustomed to the urge.
But still, Spock shouldn't have even known...
"She told you," he sighs into a blue-shirted shoulder, and isn't surprised when there's no verbal confirmation, just a quick, jerky nod.
Damn it, Nyota.
"She wasn't supposed to. I…oh, hell, Spock." He firmly swallows the slight shake in his voice, because that's the last thing either of them need, and closes his eyes for a second against the burn of regret. "Do you have any idea how much I wish I'd done things differently?"
It still keeps him up at night, sometimes. Many times. Not just that, also the horror surrounding it and a dozen more tragedies since; but that one in particular, because of its undeniable impact on the trajectory of their lives.
His life. In the span of mere hours, he'd nearly torpedoed the only family other than Bones, that he's ever really had, long before they became that, this strange little band of misfits that through no real skill of his own, he's managed to pull into his irregular orbit. Nothing short of a catastrophic event would drive them apart now, but it was almost destroyed before it began. He can't regret the outcome, but he can regret the method he chose in achieving the first step that direction.
Destiny has been far kinder to Jim Kirk than he deserves, and he lives and loves with that knowledge every day.
"All right, easy," he murmurs, as the tension which had been enforcing a painfully tight grip slowly eases, and there's an uneven exhale, whisper-quiet, near his ear. "You're good. We're good." He pauses, frowning, because he honestly sucks at this and there's little reason to just assume that's magically changed somewhere along the way. "We are good, right?"
A broken, slightly brittle sound that on a human might have been a laugh, and his First Officer steps back, shaking his head. "We are," Spock finally says, and though the words are soft they're steady enough. "I apologize for my lack of control."
"For the record, I've seen your lack of control. Up close and way too personal," he points out. "I'm not complaining about this new and improved version of it."
"Nor I, this new and improved version of your predilection for subverting encryption programming."
He snorts, trying not to laugh. "Fair point. Look, are you okay, though? I thought –"
"I am aware of your thinking processes," Spock replies quietly. "And I am grateful, Jim. More than I am currently capable of vocalizing."
"Yeah, well." He scuffs a boot-toe absently along the edge of the polished desk base. "I was trying to be all awesome and anonymous, and your girlfriend ruined it."
"Nyota believes, as I do, that credit should be assigned to the most deserving being."
"Well, now you tell me." He finally looks up again, smiling but still hesitant. "I'm sorry it took so long. And that there's only like, an hour of it."
"Fifty eight minutes, thirteen seconds."
He winces. "Not even an hour, right. I –"
"You misunderstand my specificity," Spock hastens to add, taking a half-step forward in his clear agitation. "Fifty-eight minutes I did not have, previously."
"Oh."
"You said once, under the duress of our initial conflict, that I never loved my mother."
"Jesus." He drags a hand over his face, but he's pretty sure those words will never really leave them, no matter how much time has passed. He has to face them as much as any mistake he's made since. "Yes, I did. It was a horrible thing to say."
"We have discussed the matter on multiple occasions," Spock replies, readily enough. "I no longer harbor anger toward your person for performing the actions required to achieve our mutual goal of saving Earth."
"That makes one of us."
"And while your words were certainly untrue, I have long regretted that I am unable to recall a time in which I actually expressed that sentiment to her in the human fashion."
Jim shakes his head, silent. This is water under a long-burned bridge, but it still isn't pleasant to confront.
"She had to know, Spock."
"Perhaps."
"No, no perhaps." He folds his arms, leaning back slightly against the desk. "Look, I'm the least qualified person to talk about functional family relationships, but if my emotionally stunted ass could see it from lightyears away, she had to have known. I promise you, she knew."
This, too, is an old discussion, one which has lost any resentment with the passage of time. But perhaps Jim has more credibility now, because Spock's expression doesn't hold the same doubt it used to.
He keeps his voice carefully neutral for the addendum. "Because you clearly loved her enough to carry a cute little teddy bear through a Federation embassy at what, four years old?" He'd bet his career on the fact that True Vulcans don't need any such material reassurances in new situations, so that had to be her.
"It is a sehlat," Spock replies, icily.
"Tomato, tomahto. It's a Vulcan teddy bear."
"I do not recall requesting your commentary on the matter."
"Oh, you're lucky Bones hasn't seen it. I'm definitely the lesser of two evils, there."
"…Your point is taken."
