Title: The Skiff, II
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Characters: Sam Kirk
Summary: Sequel of sorts to The Skiff; Wahoogal06 suggested: …perhaps you could still elaborate on it in a moment where the boys are older; after several years’ estrangement Sam comes upon Jim (who is now Captain of the Enterprise) and maybe have them awkwardly revisit this moment and how it shaped the later movement in their lives. What a brilliant prompt! Here it is – well, in my strange sort of way, without the reunion?
A/N: Sam makes for an interesting concept. In another universe the Kirk brothers weren’t crippled by their family life; they were encouraged to succeed and to pursue their dreams. In this Reboot ‘verse, Jim – already falling into a mad spiral of an existence at a young age – was lucky enough to have Pike dare him to do better, to be better. But, in my mind, Sam left long before someone could intervene. He is the lost Kirk.

By the third colony in his nomadic travels, Sam has not yet discovered how to live with his memory of home. It sits heavy in his mind, a stone that won’t be budged and which, some days, turns him listless.

Earth is far away and years gone; but in his dreams he is still an awkward fourteen, counting the seconds until his stepfather’s Corvette becomes a red dot along the horizon. The farmhouse echoes with the sounds of a holo-vid—missiles firing, explosions, war cries—probably Jimmy’s favorite piloting game. He thinks of their father’s ragged ‘Fleet-emblazoned backpack, hidden under Sam’s bed, already packed with clothes. There are credits in a gray lockbox inside the closet of the master bedroom; Sam knows the code is the eight-digit date of George and Winona Kirk’s wedding day. Leaving would be so easy, just a step past the screen door, off the porch, and onto the road.

In his dreams, when the screen door snaps shut, Jimmy’s child’s voice cries his name—a high-pitched wail of “Sammy!” Sometimes it’s only Sam’s name; other times, there are more words, vivid recollections, like an annoying little brother plea for a sandwich or an urging to come play a game with him.

Then Sam shudders awake, wherever he is, and reminds himself that on the day he ran away from home, he never heard Jimmy utter a word. Why would the boy have, when his adoration for his older brother never allowed for such an unimaginable concept as abandonment?

This stone in Sam Kirk’s mind is a burden he cannot put down when he is weary. It is part of the stitchwork of his past, his present, possibly his future; so when Sam dreams of a ship, he imagines one large enough to carry the stone for him.

He’s on the cusp of twenty when he suddenly craves to be dirt-side. The planet itself is a pretty little gem, with a deep sapphire ocean and white rocky land. But the planet lies at the edge of the Alpha Quadrant, a tiny outpost for ferrying star cruisers, reconnaissance vessels, and small-load freighters. Sam works in an old repair shipyard as a guard over the city’s royal menagerie of rusted rockets and crumbling ship parts. From a tiny shadow of a room in the lofts above the Yard, he can watch steam from the repair plant, bellowed out of pits of the metal and fire, wind its way into the natural mists around the edge of the docks. The mixture becomes a thick spread of purples and grays which tastes of iron and salt. His human lungs, he is told, the air will eventually corrode like second-hand cigarette smoke. This news simply means to Sam that he won’t stay dirt-side indefinitely, only enjoy the steady ground beneath his feet and the pale orangey sky at dawn, until his lungs ache too much, then move on.

When his guard shift lingers between ending and beginning, he watches a single star hanging in the top corner of his loft window. A North star, he thinks, one to steer a ship by. He calls the ship—a her, always—to his mind’s eye. She’s vague in shape but strong with purpose: a sailor’s vessel, when he was younger and fanciful, with sails billowing out like bird wings; now she is a modern replica of space travel, steel-framed and wired and as strong as the rotting hulls of the dismantled starships once were in their maiden voyages. His ship, a beautiful idea in a junkyard of crushed shells. She can cut through the midnight of space like a land vessel’s prow skims over ocean tides.

He lifts his hand to the winking star in the cloudless sky and sends her forth, twining through the Yard’s thick columns of steam, adopting a wistful, pearlescent sheen as she goes. Be quick, he whispers without words, be safe, and come back. She searches to the star, farther perhaps, for his next route and, when he is ready to follow, her boon is there: a merchant trader, arriving at the shipyard for supplies, who has room for one more working hand to keep the massive clunk of his ship placidly treading through space.

Sam joins the merchant’s crew gratefully, tucking his own ship safely away into the back of his mind until he needs her again.

He has lived in places not even ghosts would dare flit through; he has toiled in the engine rooms of city-ships like a ghost himself, nameless to a work-master except by an identification number. Often he wonders why his journey takes him through the parched, desolate husks of life struggling at the fringes of the galaxy; places where misery stretches, and coils, and flows like a black flame.

He wonders what it is he is searching for among ruins, if he is a passing spirit standing witness to events he is too young to remember; and recounting events he was too young (and too far away from) to witness. Yet there are never answers, no matter how far his imaginary ship takes him.

The flashing images of the holo-feed are snapshots of dizzying light at the corners of Sam’s eyes when he emerges from a thin trickle of south-bound arrivals in the underground station. He shields his eyes, only to catch a shockingly vivid glimpse of a man’s face as it breaks through the static-laced lines of the feed. Drawn forward, he positions himself next to a coal-eyed Orion male in fraying robes and listens to the latest news of the ‘Fleet’s youngest starship Captain and Earth’s savior.

Jimmy has the same face, Sam thinks as he stares at the outline of his brother, a brightness festooning the dark of the station. It’s the same face he remembers, only with sharper angles, like a mask of skin pulled too tightly over something feral and tragic.

The creases around Jimmy’s eyes are heavy, if not deep, for his age, much like Sam’s, but the eyes themselves… they glow. And why shouldn’t they? Jimmy has found his ship. Starfleet’s flagship, no less.

Behind Sam, station arrivals and departures are moving with the single-mindedness of fish swimming upstream. No one acknowledges his separate existence. When the holo-feed loses allure (Jimmy vanishes, replaced by another headline of intergalactic import), Sam shoulders his way into the river of bodies and it swallows him whole, crushing against him on all sides until he becomes another bowed, hurried head.

Silently, he shapes his ship and frees her—to seek, to call, trailing white star-fire down the passageways. He follows her, daring to hope, and at the trail’s end signs up for a freighter scheduled to trek to another solar system. Good work, they tell him, good pay. Cheap fare, though it consumes more than half of his meager savings.

Time is passing while he survives on the underside of history.

Until, that is, he makes the mistake of using his real name. “Sam Kirk,” his mouth says with no warning to his brain, during introductions with the newest members of a labor crew. They all are dredgers, wayfarers without destination, enlisting for the mines on a barren moon rich with ore beneath its surface. The work is, in general, perilous, so the earnings are guaranteed to be decent. Sam is weary, like a man who has walked so far the soles are worn out of his shoes, and he can think of no better option than losing time on a moon.

“Kirk?” echoes back to him. Sam tenses, thinking, please, no, and George Kirk is dead and how has that death ever helped me?

But somebody at his back asks instead, “Any relation to the golden boy, Captain Kirk?”

Sam breathes again. He is surprised to find the words are simply there, not hidden like the rest of him (his face by a beard, his accent molded into flat Standard): “He’s my brother.”

And for the first time in years, people look at him like he is worth seeing. Their eyes blink curiously, or take in his dirty gray worker’s jumpsuit and battered boots with suspicion. He is there, Samuel Kirk.

The shuttle lurches off the dock with a groan and the rest of the journey is punctuated with impersonal conversation. No one questions him about Jimmy.

Once Sam steps onto the dust of the moon he is destined to learn a hard truth: mines don’t care who your family is or isn’t. They will kill you just the same.

The main pipe carting toxic fumes from the mine’s drilling cores out of the moon’s engineered atmospheric dome breaks and spews invisible fire; this is when Sam finally sees his ship in stunning detail—and she is nothing like he expected. Her engines are twin narcelles; her neck is slender, branching upward to a huge disc, gleaming like a white beacon against a dancing weave of light flares and shadows from the mine shaft.

No one sees her except Sam at the moment of the catastrophe. That doesn’t matter, however, because this vision means she has found a new path for him—the final path.

Sharp, scattered screams distract him then and he realizes what is happening. Workers dying, fighting each other to get out; the lift has broken under the overload of weight. Sam sinks into a corner, comforted because he feels impervious to the panic.

Jimmy, he tells his brother, vaguely aware of hands dragging at him, slapping him, forcing him to put an air mask over his face. Jimmy, she’s a beautiful ship. I can see her, now.

His eyes are wet from the acid of the fumes; he closes them.

Some time later, Sam returns to himself to find that he is flat-backed inside a sealed emergency hatch. The craggy, sour face peering at him is not his brother’s. It says, in stilted Standard, “Only stupid ones want to die here.”

A handful of commissioned workers, Sam numbering among them, are trapped in the interior labyrinth of the mine, huddled in a twenty-by-ten enclosed space with stale air supply for ten solar days; every hour until rescue seems timeless. Once the airborne toxin is pumped out of their sector of the mine and more air filtered back in without gaseous poisons, the hatch releases them; the survivors, stumbling over bodies, make their way to the surface of the moon, where they are given hazard pay. By then, Sam’s heart is irrevocably intertwined with the phantom ship in his head.

Thus when the question comes from a disinterested union representative, for some report or other, “Intended destination?” the answer is automatic.

“Earth,” Sam says. He is informed which ship—a cold-seal freighter—will bear him in that direction.

The man piloting the shuttlecraft toward a rendezvous with the freighter is monotonously dictating the trajectory of their course across the stars as Sam collapses into a seat—starved, tired, but wondering when he last dreamt of home, when that unkind stone in his mind became easier to bear.

“…Praxis IV en route to sector B-10; moving to stardate…and a drop-run programmed for Deneva Station…”

“I just want to get off this rock,” the passenger complains next to him. “Tell ’em to start lift-off!”

“Yeah,” Sam agrees, and straps himself in.

The humanoid turns to eye him. “You been to Deneva?”

Sam closes his eyes; his ship—Jimmy’s ship—glows brightly on the back of his eyelids. “Never,” he murmurs.

“Civilized colony, for humans, but there’s a bar serving a Cardassian Sunrise that’ll pop your eyeballs out.” His own three eyes blink at Sam, owl-like. “I like to get pissin’ drunk after I almost die, ya know.”

“Yeah,” Sam says again.

Drinking isn’t something he is too enamored of (mainly because he can’t forget how mean of a drunk his stepfather was) but Sam figures it couldn’t hurt to toast his homeward-bound journey, for good luck, for his nerves. First to Deneva… then Earth.

As their craft moves out of orbit of the moon, he summons the Enterprise, admires her beauty, and lets her go, speeding ahead of him with a streaming banner of stars for Sam to follow home.

-Fini

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