(OOC:
The song I was listening to while typing this.)
When they had returned to Earth, it was to madness. News had traveled far faster then they ever could have on impulse power. Earth and all of its people were grieving the loss of Vulcan, the ships that had been destroyed by the Narada, and the thousands of people that had been on those ships by the time they had finally gotten back with a formal escort. Kirk had immediately banned anyone from transporting up to the ship - only off until he gave the word. It hadn't lasted terribly long, they had told him to report immediately after all, but he didn't want to leave until he was sure everyone else was off. He had walked his empty ship until he had found Bones, tucked away in transport room one. Together, they had gone down to the space station.
It had been madness there. Reporters in thousands, security in red trying to hold them back, trying to get information. Kirk had said nothing, just held his head high and walked to the relay transporter down to Earth where the same thing occurred when he took his first breath of non-recycled air. Still he said nothing until he got into the large room with the Board.
It had been silence there. Kirk had stood for five hours and forty six minutes, his body aching and starving, until he had wanted to scream. Even after time in sickbay, he was still sore all over, but bruising would take time to heal. Five hours, forty six minutes of being drilled in every moment of what had occurred.
How had he gotten on the ship? What happened on Delta Vega? (There, he lied. Lied a
lot. Amazingly, he had gotten Scotty to agree to lie with him. Kept their stories simple - Scotty had been tracking the sudden something in the atmosphere after sensing the Enterprise's passing, had managed to find him, had perfected his transwarp theory while working on the base.) What happened on the Narada? Tell them everything about Nero and his crew and the ship. How had he known about the lightning storm in space? Why hadn't they gotten information to the other ships faster?
Question after question after question. Kirk told them every bit of truth that he could, lying only when it came to the elder Spock he had met. Finally,
finally, they had released him, telling him that they would speak to his crew one by one. Kirk had already known that, but he thought it was their not-so-subtle way of saying 'If you're lying, we'll know'.
He didn't care. He wanted to vanish.
So he did. For five days, though keeping his comm open in case the Board did try to contact him, James T. Kirk vanished. He had slipped out of the building through a small service entrance to avoid the reporters, got back to his dorm, packed up some things, got his cycle, and left. In a leather jacket and jeans, no one knew who he was. When someone recognized him in a bar deep in south... somewhere... he had laughed and said with a shake of his head that he wouldn't be caught dead in Starfleet. They had believed him because he was a charasmatic bastard and because why would someone who had become a star over night be in some shitty bar?
Kirk looked up to the sky that night, laying out on the grass in a big empty field in the middle of nowhere, staring silently at where as a child he had learned Vulcan sat. It was still there, a beautiful crimson dot in the sky that was all a lie. He knew it would take years (but how many?) for the light to stop reaching Earth, for it to vanish from the sky forever.
It was there, with no one at all around for miles, that he could let himself grieve.
No one except one damn old Vulcan knew what he knew. He had been there, lived it himself, the end of Romulus, the black hole, the destruction of Vulcan from two completely different view points. He had, standing there with Sulu with every part of them throbbing in pain, watched the planet collapse on itself. He had, standing on the ice in the bitter cold, watched the sky turn to darkness in his mind.
He closed his eyes on all that remained of Vulcan and let the tears fall, swishing his mouth out with moonshine that burned bitterly on the back of his throat. He carried, and would always carry, that deep seated guilt that he had failed, and that his world had vanished because of those actions.
Emotional transference Spock had called it.
Guess that was supposed to explain all the other memories that had come with that damn mind-meld, but it really didn't.
He had come back only when the Board told him too, and it was only for more questioning. He ignored all other attempts to each him for almost another week.
When his mind had finally agreed to deal with people, he had started where few would have - the reporters. He sat down and did a long but casual with the source that offered him the most amount of money that would agree to his terms - he wasn't stupid.
We do this nice and casual, just me, the person you chose to speak, and a single camera guy. No crowd of people outside, you don't release where we'll be doing this interview. I don't tell Starfleet I'm giving it, and they can shove it if they don't like it.He'd be wealthy for a long time with how much the offer had finally been.
He had given that interview - one hour long on the dot - and felt better after it. Starfleet was evidently happy with it because they had said nothing on it. He had been careful about the information he gave, making sure to watch every scrap of available information that the media had before he did the interview to make sure his edited facts matched up.
When everything had been said and done... people knew the rest. They had agreed to give him the Captaincy of the Enterprise. Parties happened.
And now... this.
James T. Kirk laid awake in his bed, staring up at the ceiling of sickbay, thinking. This time, there were no reporters. No Board drilling him. Just the slow, silent beeping of his heart monitor from the bio bed.
He closed his eyes again and imagined the stars. It was silent here, the rest of the world very far away. He imagined the smell of greenery all around him, the heat of late summer, and let a few tears fall.
He could deal with people later.
A captain could never cry.
So for right now, he was just Jim.
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