Title: Above Ground
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Characters: Kirk
Summary: There are things a young Jimmy understands, and some he doesn’t, even when he’s up against the enemy.
A/N: I know I’ve been out of the loop for a while. One week’s vacation led to two weeks of chaos at work and there’s literally been no time to do anything except eat, sleep, and audit. My brain has been too tired to even consider the word ‘fandom’ until now. I hope y’all will forgive me.
That said, I have some news: I signed up for a fic challenge by picking the prompt of Kirk and McCoy becoming roommates after the events of Into Darkness. The fic will be posted the second week in July.

Here’s a little bit of story for practice purposes.

Down in the cemetery, Finnegan’s gang was laughing. They had another box open. Axe blades gleamed. Knives, too.

Jimmy hung back by the lopsided gate post, caught between joining them and returning the way he came. It didn’t seem right to disturb the graves, and it wasn’t right to trespass. But he’d never seen a dead body before.

In the distance, something flashed: sunlight on metal, maybe a passing car on the road although it was early morning. It reminded Jimmy of the cost of being discovered here. The boy expelled a breath and took a step away from the gate, towards the open field that separated his grandfather’s farm from the rest of the county.

“KIRK!”

The echo shattered the surrounding stillness. Finnegan had spotted him, marked him. Goosebumps formed along the boy’s thin arms. If he turned away now, it would mean a chase. When the older kids caught him (and they always did, eventually), he would be dragged back. Surreptitiously he prodded at the old bruises around his ribs and wished for the growth spurt Gramps kept promising.

Finnegan bellowed Jimmy’s last name again. “KIRK!”

Jimmy pushed past the gate and trudged down the sloped, pock-marked ground. When he arrived abreast of the other boys, he stopped and gave the gang’s leader a bland look he’d seen a man in the bar his uncle had owned for a while level at another man before they started breaking each other’s heads open with beer bottles. “What?” he almost demanded. Finnegan was the kind of bully every age group had, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with him.

One corner of the older boy’s mouth lifted in a smirk. Finnegan didn’t challenge the belligerence in Jimmy’s tone, however. He just said, “Welcome to the land of the dead.”

Jimmy’s gaze automatically tracked to the new hole in the earth. He couldn’t see the coffin, it was too far down, but he could smell an odor that made his stomach cramp. A dead animal rotting by the road had the same smell.

He should have expected the shove from behind but didn’t and gasped aloud when it happened, stumbling. A second shove came quickly from another pair of hands and a different angle. Jimmy dug his heels into the ground to stop his forward momentum.

“Stop!” he cried, suddenly recognizing what the others were about.

They didn’t stop. Couldn’t, he had figured out long ago. Mercy was beyond them when Finnegan stood at the head of their mischief.

A third and fourth shove in rapid succession sent him to his hands and knees at the lip of the open grave. Dry dirt crumbled beneath his fingers and fell in. For a moment, Jimmy couldn’t look away from what was laid bare below him. There was a thing, an ugly nest of bones, grinning up through dark wood. It wore something lacy, white and half-eaten.

“Jimmy Kirk,” Finnegan was saying from somewhere behind him, “you ever seen a dead man? I mean, real up-close and personal?”

“No,” Jimmy heard the reply, unable to think in time to stop himself.

A hand gripped the back of his t-shirt, wrenched him into a painful, backward arch. Jimmy twisted but could not get away, caught in his own clothes. And he couldn’t tear his shirt, he thought desperately, because he didn’t have many of them. He’d have to ask for another, and the way she frowned at him, sounded so disappointed in him, always…

A knee pressing into his spine brought his thoughts circling out of a fear which had nothing to do with bullies and graveyards. The breath whistling past his ear belonged to Finnegan.

The anticipated command came: “Get in there.”

Jimmy shook his head.

Finnegan cuffed his ear. “I said get in there, Kirk!”

“No! Lemme go!” Jimmy jabbed an elbow backwards but met only air. The others laughed at his struggles.

Suddenly the tight hold on his shirt vanished, and he dropped heavily back to the ground. But there was no reprieve—not this time, not ever, he knew. They wanted him down that hole, and so down the hole he would go. A vicious kick to his stomach slid Jimmy’s shoulders over the edge. Jimmy curled inwards to protect himself and, just as he looked up to see a leg rise again to deliver the second damning blow, he made a snap decision. The kick missed by several inches as he rolled himself the rest of the way into the grave.

The laughter might have stopped then, but Jimmy couldn’t be certain because in too quick a time the side of his head impacted with a hard surface, and nerve-endings sang with pain. The surface he fell onto wasn’t the ground, and it made a loud splintering sound under his weight, parts of it threatening to spear him in the ribs. A small cloud of dirt and something alive, like black flies, had risen up upon impact, and with it came the rot, no longer just a smell but a stench which overpowered everything. Jimmy had no choice but to breathe it in, and his stomach heaved and flopped in protest of the foul air. He turned his head to the side, spitting out the taste of blood in his mouth from where his teeth had cut into his bottom lip and slowly, reluctantly, opened his eyes.

The corpse met his stare, its grin somehow wider than before. A small, white worm wiggled in the left eye socket.

A noise rose in Jimmy’s throat, turning into a hiccup as it left his mouth. He scrambled back, as far as he could go, and tumbled off the side of the coffin. Panic threatened to become tears.

“That’s so gross,” someone squealed.

“I bet he’s gonna cry for his mommy!” another voice chimed in.

Jimmy swallowed the lump in his throat and blinked several times, clenching his fingers into the dirt wall at his back until he had some semblance of control over himself. The earth was cold under and around him but it wasn’t what made him shiver. He didn’t think, even with the presence of mind not to cry, he could get up.

“Can you see?”

“Hey, what’s he doing?”

Dirt trickled down into Jimmy’s hair. Voices rose and fell. Feet shuffled against the grass, and the shadows of the children high above him moved restlessly as they tried to catch a glimpse of his terror. The boy closed his eyes for a moment, picturing the smug look which had to be on Finnegan’s face, and forced himself to reach out and take a hold of the wooden box. He levered himself to his feet, hardly daring to breathe as he glimpsed the fleshless woman in her wedding gown, and turned his eyes up to the sky.

Finnegan was standing close to the edge of the hole, arms hanging loosely at his sides. He wasn’t grinning, or even smiling, just watched what was happening closely.

Jimmy met that scrutinizing gaze and studied the boy in turn. He lifted his chin to project a courage he didn’t feel. “Wanna come down?”

Something strange passed across Finnegan’s face. The rest of the gang fell silent at Jimmy’s question.

Finnegan answered him with a question of his own: “How do you like being with the dead, Kirk?”

“I’m not the one messing with them,” Jimmy said, trying to mimic the even tone his grandfather always got when Frank tried to make the man angry. “You are. I think you’re gonna pay for that someday.” The statement had an ominous ring to it. Jimmy had heard it before, though he didn’t remember where.

“I’m not scared,” retorted the other boy, as if Jimmy had accused him of precisely that.

Jimmy found a corner of the coffin that hadn’t been caved in by the blows of an axe and sat down on it, crossing his arms to hide the way they trembled. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. Finnegan, he knew, would hate his silence more than words.

Finnegan disappeared from sight and returned with an axe over one arm and a sneer on his face. “Let’s go,” he barked at his wide-eyed gang, giving Jimmy one last baleful glare.

One of the youngest boys glanced nervously in Jimmy’s direction, at the breadth and depth of the grave they had uncovered. “Maybe we should—”

“He’ll never get out of there,” Finnegan interrupted, “and that’s the way I fucking want it. We’re going.”

Jimmy wasn’t sorry to see them leave, any of them—even the one who might have had enough of a conscience to help him. When he was certain the sounds in the cemetery had nothing to do with Finnegan or his followers, Jimmy slid off the coffin and felt his face crumple. Choking on a silent sob, he reached for the closest root poking through the dirt wall and braced his feet for leverage. The root came free in his hand when he tried to pull himself up.

He tried several more times to climb out but the walls of the hole crumbled the more he touched them. His knees and elbows were bruised; he’d fallen against one of the juts of wood, cutting his cheek; and time seemed to be moving slower than it should. The sun had barely inched towards its apex. Would anyone come and find him?

No, of course not. That was why Finnegan had wanted to dig up an old backwoods cemetery with tiny markers and knee-high weeds. It was a burial spot for the poor and unwanted. No one watched over the dead here because no one cared to. And young Jimmy Kirk—he might become one of them.

He grabbed the nearest thing to hand and flung it away from him with a cry of frustration. The broken plank hit the dirt with a thump. Jimmy stared at it for a long time before it occurred to him what he could do with it.

In the end, he had to break up what remained of the coffin lid to have enough wood that wasn’t completely rotted through. Then he had to, much to his disgust and subsequent gagging, strip off pieces of the corpse’s clothing to bind the boards together. He wasn’t heavy (his small stature and lack of growth spurt saw to that) but the long plank he created creaked and groaned unhappily under him as he used it for a makeshift ladder. When his fingers, after stretching his arms as far as he could and begging aloud please, please, please, found purchase on the ground above, he clung to the edge of the hole for all he was worth. A last burst of energy got him up and over that edge. There he laid in the weeds and broken headstones of the cemetery finally free of a grave Finnegan had hoped would hold him. He was too tired to do anything except breathe.

This, James T. Kirk learned that day, was what it felt like to face hopelessness and survive. He wondered what other bullies he would stand against in his lifetime; wondered what other dangers he would face. Grandfather Tiberius said Kirks didn’t believe in no-win scenarios. Jimmy’s mother hated to hear that; it made her angry, and it made her sad.

But wasn’t Gramps right? Jimmy had turned Finnegan’s scenario into a win for himself.

Eventually the boy sat up, muscles aching but feeling immeasurably calm, and shook clumps of dirt from his hair and clothes. He went to the big pile of earth displaced by Finnegan’s gang’s digging and pushed as much of it as he could back into the grave. Only then he felt he was able to walk away and did, pausing at the cemetery’s rickety gate to look back and peruse the place of the dead.

He thought to himself if he had to see another corpse in the future it wouldn’t frighten him so much. What was it but empty flesh and bones, left behind for the earth to feed upon?

Jimmy trekked across the adjacent field, feeling vaguely satisfied with all of his conclusions.

The truth he did not understand, nor could understand until years later on a small colony called Tarsus IV. When the dead body had a familiar face—a cousin’s face, an aunt’s face, an uncle’s—then it was infinitely more terrible than anything the imagination could conjure. And he would remember in that moment Finnegan staring at him over the lip of a grave, expectant but not expecting fear, asking, “How do you like being with the dead?”

-Fini

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