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“A ship in the harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for ” - John A. Shedd
Every story needs a beginning.
They begin differently: “Once Upon a Time”, “It Was A Dark and Stormy Night”, or what would one day become Jim Kirk's favorite, “Let Me Help”. But they all come back to Jim and Spock. You could start with Spock and Jim, but anyone who knew either one of them knew that they were bigger than themselves.
You could start with Amanda and Sarek. Sarek of Vulcan, ambassador to Earth and one of the first vulcans to marry a human; the first vulcan to have a child with a human. Spock, the first child born half-human and half-vulcan, whose blood system delicately balanced the copper-based and iron-based ones of his parents. Who was born destined to be a child of two worlds. He would be called a blessing, had it not taken the bleeding edge of Federation science and nearly his mother’s life to see him born.
Spock is raised on Vulcan, and takes its teachings to heart. He does well in school, despite his parents’ concerns. He is on pace with his peers academically, and in many ways excels and prevails over them. He understands the pre-Surak teachings easier than them, having grown up witnessing Amanda’s emotionality first hand. He is intellectually sound, and he takes the Vulcan principles of logic seriously. He does not get along with the other children, who take every chance to critique the set of shoulders or the twitch of his mouth. They do not see him as belonging among them, a half-human child before the Vulcan half of him. Spock gets into fights. He tends to win, his strength is every bit as strong as his fully Vulcan peers.
When he is six, Spock sets out with I-Chaya his sehlat to undergo his kahs-wan - his ceremony of logic and maturity. He sends himself out into the Forge to survive ten days without food, water, or weapons. He leaves in the middle of the night. His parents had discussed his participation. His father had determined it should be Spock’s choice to try. His mother was worried he would not be capable, that he was not built for its completion. Spock took her emotional argument to heart and set out to prove them wrong. Later came the Tal'oth, which required four months of survival with only a ritual blade, though I-Chaya joined him then too. Spock never completes his Kolinahr - his emotions are too strong.
After the kahs-wan, Spock is bonded to a vulcan girl his age named T’Pring. Spock, in truth, thought little of the bonding himself. There was no guarantee, with his mixed heritage, that it would ever be necessary. No guarantee he would undergo Ponn Farr, no certainty his mind would sustain a bond. But he wished to honor his heritage; wished to make his logic and Vulcan-half proven to be stronger than any emotion he may have inherited. He is, perhaps, too proud to not betray his human half when T’Pau determines he is capable of being bonded. T’Pring is little more than a political match, whose clan wishes to ally themselves stronger with Vulcan’s ambassador. If T’Pring has any feelings of being bonded to a hybrid, she, the flawlessly logical being she would one day grow to be, betrayed nothing of the sort. Her sweet features promised loveliness when grown. They take their bond with grace and continue to lead their separate lives, until the time if and when it would need to be called upon again.
(In either universe:
Spock is born premature, after a long battle to get an iron-based blood system to cooperate with a copper-based one. No one, not even Sarak or Amanda, knew if he would survive infancy. The first of his kind. Spock survives. It is not the end of his struggles.
Spock is raised the youngest of three children. Sybok, his half-brother, is a Vulcan who acts human. His foster sister Michael runs away from home because her humanity puts Spock in danger, or so she feels. Spock sees the way his siblings pain his mother, inferes the pain they cause his father. He forces himself to be as wholly Vulcan as possible. He succeeds, up until the day the Vulcan Science Academy remarks on that very fact, and he becomes the first individual to turn down their admission.
Spock joins Starfleet.
Spock is born four years before Jim Kirk. This course is not undone by the Naruda.
Spock is not so easily categorized by the difference between universes. As in everything, the difference comes with Jim Kirk.)
You could start with Winona and George Kirk. Start when Winona meets George Kirk in Riverside, Iowa. Everything always seems to come back to Riverside, as if the town has gravity, dragging them all back. Some days this will feel like a blessing; many days, it feels like a curse.
Winona is the one Riverside can't contain, she’s all manic energy and too smart for her own good. Winona is the one who runs wild, who looks well after she leaps - ready, fire, aim. She is intelligent, and impulsive. Winona is the one who, two weeks before high school graduation, yanks George up to the roof to propose under the stars. She is the one who wants to leave Riverside in their rearview and never turn back.
But George is the one with his head screwed on right (they say), the one who thinks Starfleet might just be the thing for them, a place to go to get away, if they must. George is the one happy to stay and raise a family on his family’s farm, and who is just as happy to follow Winona out into the black if that is what will make her happy. George is the one who pulls Winona back from the ledge when she’s bordering between “crazy” and “stupid”. Who helps her channel “crazy” into “brilliant”.
Between the two of them, they can take a cornfield in Iowa and build a warp core. George is the one they tend to underestimate. Half the time Winona blows things up, it's because George is right there, egging her along, curious and wanting to see what would happen if they changed just one line of code. George is the sort of kid who pokes at bruises and picks at scabs and asks the questions that give Winona’s flights of fancy direction and destructive power.
George is the one that reins her in when it's time to follow the rules. Winona is the one who pulls them ahead, when it's time to break them. They make a good team.
Nobody is surprised when they get stationed on the USS Kelvin, fresh out of the Academy. It's a part of the story everyone seems to forget, that they were kids once too.
George is the youngest first officer the fleet has seen in decades. Winona is the youngest female head of engineering ever.
Christopher Pike meets George and Winona Kirk on the USS Kelvin.
George is the first officer, and Winona is the Head Engineer, both of them impossibly young.
Chris himself is an ensign, only just out of the academy, and George all but takes him under his wing. When Winona announces her first pregnancy a month later, she jokingly calls Chris their practice child.
This is how it starts.
When Winona gets pregnant, command tries to station them Earthside - they refuse. George Samuel Kirk is born, and once Winona is working again, never having left the ship, the only one she'll trust with him for a good six months is Chris himself. Chris coins the moniker “Sam” because if they're going to treat him like the big brother they can bully into babysitting, then he'll have the privilege of relieving the kid of the awful confusion of being a Jr.
(In another universe, Christopher Pike would never know the Kirks from legend. He’d been stationed on a different ship. The Kelvin never exploded. He never writes his thesis on George Kirk’s sacrifice. He isn’t a part of their story until his story is almost over. Until he is passing his ship onto her next Captain, one James T. Kirk.
But we aren’t there yet. )
And then the lightning storm happens. The unthinkable. Winona is eight months pregnant with their second kid when the Kelvin goes down.
Their son is named James Tiberius Kirk, he is born on a shuttle,seconds after the Kelvin went down, seconds before his father died. His eyes are the color of a lightning storm in space. This is the beginning of the end, or so it seems. At the very least, it is the beginning of the difference between one universe and the next. The difference between two entirely different and nearly identical Jim Kirks.
(James Tiberius Kirk was born on a farm in Riverside, Iowa. His father is the first one to hold him. Everyone tells them how much his eyes look just like George’s - warm and brown.)
Jimmy makes all sorts of fuss. Sam is calm and quiet as can be, until he runs away from home. The ghost of George Kirk is a weight around their necks. Winona, at her best, is little more than a ghost to her children. No one blames her for wanting to get away, wanting to get out.
Winona calls her brother Frank and asks if he'll take care of the boys while she goes away, because the fleet would love to have one of their best engineers back in the black. Winona is good at making excuses, even to herself. She cannot look at her boys without seeing her husband in their smiles. Cannot look at Jim without seeing the storm that killed her husband.
Engines, Winona can fix; it’s people, her kids, that she doesn't know what to do with. She leaves before Jimmy's first birthday. She doesn't want to be here for the anniversary.
Jim hates the stars with all his might. He hates space for taking his father, with impossible blue lightning. The fleet takes his mother away from him, and leaves him with Frank, an uncle who cannot understand Jim.
(Jim loves space with all his might. Swears he'll be a captain one day. Jim has his father's brown eyes and smile.)
Jim drives George's old car off a cliff to get back at Frank for trying to sell it. He’s bitter and angry, but he’s been that way his whole life. He’s upset at being left behind. He’s angry at the world and angry with them and he takes it out on Riverside because there’s only so many ways a kid can rage against the universe. Winona has always been able to understand her son. But that understanding has never helped her help him or fix him or be better for him. She does what she can; she picks up the pieces of the wreckage the way George used to do for her, when her ideas were bigger than she could hold in her hands. She feels like Jim is one of those four-handed two-people ideas - too big and too wonderful and too much for her to handle all alone.
She sends Jimmy to Tarsus IV. She has some friends going and wonders if it'll do him any good. She's out of options when it comes to that boy, and thinks, he'll just have to make do. She wonders sometimes, if that lightning storm did something to him, broke him in some way other than the color of his eyes.
(Jim begs with all his might to go to the Tarsus IV colony. He pouts and screams and argues.
His parents both want to head out into the black.
Jim goes to Tarsus IV, smiling all the way there.)
Jimmy survives the Tarsus IV massacre.
Winona's never been more thankful for her son being exactly how he is.
(Tarsus IV is good at first. It is fun, and happy, and full of interesting people and difficult, fulfilling work.
And then the crops start failing. And then people start disappearing. And then it all goes to hell.
It is twenty years before James Kirk gets to see Kodos dead in the ground for what he did.)
This is what Winona Kirk knows about her youngest son: He goes joyriding and gets arrested a few times. He skips school a lot. He hangs out at the shipyard and likes to watch them build the newest flagship, the one that doesn't yet have a name. He's also too smart for his own good (and where has Winona heard that before). Riverside is too big and too small all at once for James T. Kirk. No one ever lets him forget it, but he stays, because there is no where else to go, and he's certainly not going Starfleet.
(James T. Kirk joins Starfleet the moment he can, barely even recovered from the malnutrition Tarsus IV has wreaked on his body. He overrides his medical files and argues his way to “healthy enough” the way he’s always done.
Feet first, and a leap before looking at what lay below.
Jim graduates top of his class.)
Flash forward several years, the Enterprise is grounded for repairs, and if Pike requests Riverside to pay homage to his mentor, no one up the chain of command questions him. As he checks on repairs, he checks on Jim, and sees the bright-eyed boy he knew, the one smart enough and brave enough to survive Kodos, wasting himself away. And Chris comes up with an idea.
On paper, Christopher Pike is in Riverside, Iowa because he is the Captain of the Starship Enterprise currently being constructed there. The ship could have been anywhere - he still would have made it to Riverside, Iowa.
Chris Pike is in Riverside the night before the shuttle leaves for the next term of Starfleet Academy. He should have been back a week ago and should be preparing for the new term. Should be keeping an eye on preparations for the next voyage out into the black, an eye on his new mentees and advisees. He's hitching a ride with the cadets in the morning. He's drinking in a cadet frequented bar, one he hadn't been to since George Kirk had been alive. He watches Jim Kirk drink, and flirt and use his charisma, which is all George Kirk, but he knows the boy would hate the comparison. George is a spectre of something awful for Jim, a man he never knew and cannot fathom living up to. Jim is so much like his mother. His temper, his arrogance, his smile - all wide and full of teeth, knowing full and well how much smarter he is than you are - is all Winona.
(In another lifetime, Jim is so much, almost too much, like his father. He is more George than Winona in the best of ways and is so proud of the comparison.
When the Winona in him rears its head, it surprises even him. He has always been his father’s son.)
It's only when Jim gets into a fight that Chris intervenes. Jim ends up with a black eye, and a split lip, but he's laughing as much as grimacing around the blood on his teeth. His mother's son through and through, if the adrenaline addiction is anything to go by.
(In other life, this is not how Pike meets Jim Kirk. Pike did not know Jimmy from birth, from Tarsus IV, from a cadet bar in Riverside, Iowa. Captain Christopher Pike first crosses paths with James Kirk when Pike is promoted to Admiral and Kirk is promoted to Captain of the Enterprise. Pike does not know him well enough to know if he trusts him with his ship, but the stories he hears puts him at ease enough.)
Chris dares the kid to do better. George was captain for five minutes. Imagine what his boy could do. The dare comes out angrier than he intends, harsher too. But just as concerned as he is for Jimmy, he is angry with himself, with Winona, with the whole of Starfleet, for putting the weight of a legacy of a man Jim never knew on his shoulders and his alone. For seeing impossible lightning eyes first before seeing a boy. So, Christopher Pike dares James T. Kirk to be better, not than his father, but than himself. He didn't expect it to work, but he had to try.
Jim Kirk grins up at him with a mouth full of blood and bets he can make it in three. Pike might have played the comparison to George, but that response was all Winona.
(In another life, this isn’t how it happens.
Jim Kirk never has to be dared to live up to his father, to be better. Jim Kirk is the first on the shuttle to San Francisco, and George Kirk is the one warning him to be careful what he asks for. Scared for his youngest living life out in the black.)
The next morning, Jim just barely makes it onto the shuttle. Chris knows he'll blow them all away.
(James Kirk is his father's son and wants to make him proud. He has big shoes to fill and an even bigger legacy, whether his eyes are brown or blue. But the one with brown eyes fights for it, for his legacy, rather than against it.)
The thing they always forget when looking for his father in him, is that Jim Kirk never met George. He joins because he couldn't resist the dare to be better, not to live up to a legacy he never wanted in the first place. He says he'll make captain in three, but he doesn't think he'll live through the year.
It isn't being trapped in another universe that frightens Spock, that's happened far too many times in the past for it to worry him, and not being able to return to his own universe is a small price to pay to watch this one unfold.
No, truth be told, the thing that frightens him is this universe's version of James T. Kirk. And for no other reason than this: He doesn't recognize the man, boy really, who is the counterpart to his other half.
In all fairness, this Jim Kirk was wild and young and had blue eyes. His Kirk was old and wise and had steady brown eyes. But that is not quite what frightens him, because he is still James T. Kirk, even with the differences.
No, the thing that frightens him is this: That in this universe, it seems Jim and Spock are not meant to be. Not allies or friends or anything more. Not family. Not like in his universe. And that is why he interferes with his younger self, though it is against everything he has ever known to do so.
It may be illogical, but one does not spend a lifetime with James T. Kirk and come out unscathed, physically, logically, or otherwise.
Newly promoted Admiral Pike cannot fulfill his duties as captain with his injuries. James T. Kirk is the obvious choice for captain; if there is one thing you learn from James T. Kirk, it is this: there is never such a thing as a no-win scenario. It doesn't surprise Spock when they give James Kirk the Enterprise, although he is only twenty-five years old. He is and always will be her captain, in any universe.
It does surprise him how young they all are, though he knows that this universe is both accelerated and less advanced. Everything happens 200 years before it is meant to (according to the stardate), 100 years after (according to himself), and about a decade too soon. They are still children. Though the crew may be young, they are the best. Especially when his younger self is persuaded to join them.
It was not meant to happen this way. But many things were not meant to happen in this universe. Though, if anyone had to do the impossible and survive, he wouldn't bet against James T. Kirk, in any universe.
Jim’s fate has forever been written in the stars. In the end, nothing surprises Spock, because this universe is exactly the same as his. He is not frightened, because he knows this story even if the details have changed. And perhaps that in itself is frightening, nothing has changed. Except for two things: In one universe, James T. Kirk runs to the stars. In the other, he runs from them. In either, their eyes are filled with stardust.
In either universe, he is going to change everything.
Spock is and always will be his friend. And should they lose their way, he is there to guide them. Not because Vulcan logic dictates it, but because it is what James T. Kirk would do.
Either of them.
In this universe, Jim ends up on the Enterprise by mistake. Because Bones smuggled him, and Spock hates him, and Pike has a perverse sense of faith in him. Everything goes wrong and Vulcan dies. But the Earth is saved. They think James T. Kirk could be a hero like his father (after decades of calling him anything but).
They make him Captain of the Enterprise. It's the funniest joke he's ever heard.
(Jim works up from ensign to helmsman to captain slowly but surely.
He meets Bones old enough, the age difference not nearly so staggering.
Both of them are tempered by time and age and distance from Earth. They are fast friends, no matter the universe.
He meets Spock once he's captain, and Spock is to be his first officer.
They are both tempered by age and experience, more sure of themselves.)
Jim meets Spock Prime, on Delta Vega. And can't get the memories out of his head. His first, best destiny. One that he did not earn this time around.
Jim Kirk has blue eyes and a captaincy he doesn't feel he deserves and a lifetime other-and-older than his own, of memories that are his and aren't all at once, muddled in his head.
Emotional transference. Mind-meld side effects. What once and would have been Jim Kirk, without the lightning storm in space. Impossible like his blue eyes. Living up to his supposed first and best destiny in a way that feels wrong. He knows what would have been, the once and future captain. An impending five year mission. Jim Kirk sitting in the captain's chair of the Enterprise. A first best destiny. He opens his eyes. Blue instead of brown. It feels like a lie.
(Everything he touches should turn to gold. Instead it turns to ash.)
(Memories of brown eyes instead of blue eyes. Green shirt instead of gold. Older, wiser but nonetheless James T. Kirk when the bridge crew comes together.)
They are too young, he thinks, to be anything but a mess.
(That other Jim Kirk had it all, it's the worst joke he's ever heard. But then again, that other Jim is dead.)
Jim thinks he deserved better, but then, maybe they both did.
(In other life, he's dead.)
(Jim and Spock are old when they meet and they are older when they get together. So much wasted time.
And it is odd for Spock to see Jim Kirk both so young, and so unsure.
The insecurity is even more off putting than the blue of his eyes.
Jim Kirk has always been the fleet's best captain. One to be dragged into the Admiralty kicking. One who loved space and his crew, and Spock is not quite but nearly equal measure.
Spock has a holo of Jim Kirk singing Happy Birthday in a locket to prove it.
He isn't worried about their younger selves, they have time enough to find their way.
Spock, too painfully shy of his humanity, and Jim Kirk, too caught up in his own.
They have and always will be friends.
Even in this strange new world.)
While the course of James Tiberius Kirk's life was changed with the first coming of Neruda, Spock's had changed with the second. And the destruction of Vulcan. It was a difficult thing to wrap one's mind around, especially when so much personal grief was attached, even for a logical mind. Though Spock himself had not the benefit of a meld with his older counterpart as Kirk had. Once a certain realization came to mind, there was nothing for it but to confront himself.
Because, if his older counterpart came from the Neruda timeline, surely, he could have stopped this. But, as his older counterpart admitted, his role was one of cause, effect, and, in the absence of one James Kirk, failure. Spock himself, did not understand how such an impulsive, illogical youth could be of any help.
Of all the differences he expected in this universe because Jim had never known Georg Kirk; Spock never imagined a universe where Jim Kirk despised the stars.
Jim Kirk has always been one to show off, in this case, he'd make himself miserable to prove a point. Clearly he is still the same man, simply with sharper edges and a more guarded smile. His older self also mentioned that, in any universe, there was none he trusted to captain the Enterprise as James T. Kirk, and theirs would be a friendship that defined them both.
Spock, for his part, did not know what to do with this insight. The best thing he thought he thought he could do was to help his people, whose planet was gone, whose people were endangered now, whose culture was on the verge of eradication.
And, beyond that, his only experiences with the man known as James Kirk, were of a cadet who broke the rules, who defied him at every turn.
(In any universe, James Kirk aborrs the Kobayashi Maru.
The test is, definitionally, an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. A no-win scenario fought by a man who does not believe in unwinnable games.
The older Spock has in the years since their well-worn argument has run its course found humor, and a sense of peace, in Jim’s method of beating the test. If cheating wins the unbeatable war, then sometimes the ends justify the means.
There is a reason Spock had followed Jim Kirk, time and time again, into breaking the Prime Directive.)
But to the younger Spock, Jim Kirk is still little more than a man who stuck onto a starship and committed mutiny. Jim Kirk is a cadet on probation for hacking Spock’s exam, for cheating, for refusing to accept that some actions of consequences you cannot overcome with sheer force of will alone. This did not a captain make. Though if there were anyone he should trust, it would be himself.
This was the dilemma the younger Spock faced.
Spock came from, as Earth would term it, a family of black sheep. His father married a human. His half-brother Sybok, though full-Vulcan, rejected the Vulcan philosophy and acted more emotionally than even his human stepmother, or indeed, any other humans Spock had met at such a young age as he was when Sybok left. They do not speak about Michael, in any universe. And Spock himself, his father's second son, and second chance, ever more determined to prove himself a worthy Vulcan, despite the so termed disadvantage of a human mother.
This past was unchanged by the first coming of the Neruda. The change came after, with the destruction of Vulcan, and the death of his mother.
(In his other life, Spock would have remained in Starfleet. His and Kirk's paths would not cross until much older, when Kirk came by the captaincy honestly, through the chain of command.
Still the fleet's youngest flagship captain in history. And Spock would be assigned as his first officer, to temper his more brash moments.
Then, neither of them had a choice.)
But that was not, in fact, the path Spock had before him now, now there was a choice, to stay on the Enterprise, under Captain James T. Kirk, decades before ever intended, to find the friendship that would so illogically define them both, or to help his people in this time of crisis.
He thinks of which path his mother would have wanted. Thinks she would have said she wanted him to be happy, and finds he does not know the answer to that either.
He has always been a child between two worlds rather than of two worlds. Too human for Vulcan; too alien for humanity. He thinks of being emotionally compromised by Kirk; thinks of Kirk, despite all calculations and prior data concluding otherwise, succeeding in saving Earth. Spock thinks the answers should be simpler than this, but he cannot live his life as defined by another universe. Such would be tantamount to insanity.
In the end, it is not Spock who decides, but his older self. Or, rather, his older self makes the distinction between options much clearer, and in the end, there is no decision, because the choice is obvious.
There are two Spock now, in this universe. One with the benefit of decades more knowledge and experience, who has been irrevocably changed by one universe’s Jim Kirk. And one who has yet to live his supposed destiny, who has yet to tame this version of Kirk into something resembling maturity.
It is, in the end, the locket, that truly decides for him. An old thing wound around his counterpart's neck, obviously weathered with age. With a short holovid of a much older James Kirk singing happy birthday, love in his eyes. Shortly before his death. This sentimentality is what drives his decision.
(The holovid does not show this universe’s Spock the road to that love. How difficult the journey was.
Where Kirk and Spock were both full grown men set in their ways; unwilling to compromise even as their friendship grew. Where Kirk loved and lost Edith Keeler and Carol Marcus. Where Spock nearly died rather than admit to Pon Farr coming.
The holovid does not show Spock’s death, nor Jim’s disappearance.
The holovid does not even speak the word T’hy’la. Friend. Brother. Lover.
But, it is a start. A promise, of what things could once again be.)
Spock Prime travels to New Vulcan.
Spock honors his mother for attempting to embrace his humanity, and what better way to do so than to join James T. Kirk on the bridge of the Enterprise. Someone has to keep him in line after all. And, as it is meant to be, Spock accepts a place on the Enterprise's crew, to define the friendship that will define them both, because Spock will not allow Nero to destroy anymore than he already has by denying it.
Afterwards, Pike will sit and have a drink with Winona, like it's a good 25 years earlier. She'll tell him about that, in another life, “I'd have been able to grow old with her husband, and raise two sons in the same end of the universe. In another life, my son Jim was a brown-eyed steadier child, with fewer ghosts following him, and less pain weighing him down so young.” In that other version, she gets gray hair watching her youngest run full tilt to the stars before he can even walk right, too much like his father for his own good.
In this version, her son has eyes like an impossible storm in space, and grifted about Iowa because he hated the stars with all his might and never much liked being compared to his dad either. This Jim has a shrewder head on his shoulders, and becomes a hero far younger than the original.
Time will tell if he will be better or worse for it.