Title: Brother (#13, The Drabble Bin)
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS, Into Darkness
Characters: Kirk
Warnings: mentions of genocide, starvation, character death
Summary: When Jim’s in trouble, is he ever alone? Slightly AUish.
Previous Drabbles: The Old Four | Those Neighborhood Hoodlums | Trapped | A Cage of His Own | Of Perky Starfleet Bottoms | An Hour Past | War of the Bots | The Best Substitute | Surprise Meeting | Little Help | Dreaming | The Tower

Jim doesn’t have an imaginary friend. He has a brother.

Brother ran away when Jim was four. Days later, he came back dead. He hasn’t left since.

They don’t always get along, Jim and Brother, but Jim is glad to have someone with him—especially now, when Brother is all the family he has left.

“You might die like me,” Brother says, hunched over and picking at the tattered hem of his jeans. Even dead, Brother grows like Jim. His muddy clothes seem to grow with him.

Despite how weak he is, Jim shakes his head in denial. “Can’t,” he argues.

“It’s not so bad.”

“Can’t,” insists Jim again. He swallows and rolls to his side. The dull ache becomes fresh pain, although the wound doesn’t reopen. One of Kodos’ soldiers had nearly gotten him. In fighting back so he could escape, he thinks he might have killed the man.

Brother watches him, expression bland. “You won’t save them all.”

Jim pushes to his knees, then his feet. He hears the whimpering from the other, younger children inside the network of caves. They don’t enjoy the dark any more than he does, but they know why they have to hide. Two of them died yesterday, having not eaten in so long they had no strength to chew the tiny bits of food for which Jim was almost killed.

He couldn’t see those kids after death the way he can see Brother. That makes him wonder just how special Brother is.

Jim creaks along to the entrance of his small cave, feeling as old as his grandfather Tiberius. He thinks his body is changing into someone else’s, someone with less muscle and more bone. There are caverns under his cheekbones and around his eyes, making them look deep-set; his thinning hair, once a burnished gold, is limp with sweat.

“You’re dying,” Brother tells him.

“I know,” Jim replies.

“It’s not so bad, really.”

Jim stops just at the entrance and braces himself against the rock wall. He looks back over his shoulder at the huddle of rags who is his constant companion and accuses, “You want me to die, don’t you?”

Brother ducks his head.

“I won’t,” Jim insists. “I won’t ever.”

Brother shrugs, flicks an invisible finger at a rock, and concedes, “Maybe.”

The ship isn’t like anything Jim has seen before. It’s an enormous honeycomb inside, with ledges instead of walkways and a long, long way to fall between them.

As Jim hangs doggedly onto the edge of a black metal platform, having nearly jumped short of it, there is a whisper in his ear: “Don’t look down.”

“Shut. Up.” Jim grinds this out from between clenched teeth as he heaves himself up and over to safety.

Not long after that, a Romulan has him by the neck and holds him aloft so his feet kick at the air. Jim informs the bastard, “I’ve got your gun,” and proceeds to shoot him.

When Jim is on his knees, safe again, gasping for air, the whisper becomes, “Close one.”

“Shut up,” Jim tells Brother for what feels like the umpteenth time. He adds stubbornly, “I can do this.”

“You always think you can,” Brother replies.

Space is danger. Darkness and disease. Bones said something like that once, Jim thinks. Mostly Jim had hoped to prove the man wrong. He is good at beating the odds.

But it only takes once for the odds to win out against him.

Brother is specter-thin in his filthy t-shirt and ratty jeans. He should be thirty but looks older. He looks sad, too. Yet Jim hardly notices him hovering in the periphery of his vision, a mirror image scaling the warpcore at a similar pace.

It’s difficult not to hear him, though.

Brother is saying, “After everything… I thought you wanted to live.”

Jim ignores that and keeps moving upward. His body feels strange, detached from reality even as he bangs his knees against the machinery. The radiation poisoning must be accumulating too fast. But he is almost within reach of the center of the chamber. He can’t stop now. Too many lives depend on it, on him. This is the only way to fix his terrible mistake.

“Jim?” Brother tries again. “Jim, please.”

“I know,” Jim says, “but I have to.” There is a stinging in his eyes—fumes or a tear.

“You will die this time.”

“It’s okay.”

And it will be okay, Jim convinces himself. He is afraid but he isn’t alone. Never has been.

Swallowing hard, he grips the piping overhead, preparing to swing and kick and force this son-of-a-bitch core to work again. Jim closes his eyes just briefly and, white-knuckled, admits, “Love you. Thanks for waiting.”

Brother appears beside him and grips the piping too. “Same,” he echoes.

They deliver the first kick to the warpcore together.

-Fini

It’s Complicated

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