Title: Just Another End
Author: klmeri
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Characters: Kirk
Warnings: Angst, Character Death
Summary: For flash-fic challenge at jim_and_bones; in response to kayim‘s prompt Their world ends, not with a whimper, but with a bang.

There have been plenty of endings in Jim’s life. Jim’s father’s end is woven into his very beginning; Jim’s brother ends his tattered, patchwork childhood by walking out of it; his innocence—Jim’s belief in the goodness of people, his trust in them—finds its own end when Governor Kodos says to a particular half of the Tarsus IV colony, “Each sacrifice will be life for a deserving man.” By sacrifice Kodos means the opposite, end of a lesser existence. Even the smallest children, the babes, comprehend their value (the end of them) to Kodos.

Jim is done with endings. Sadly, however, they are not done with him.

The breach in the hull of the Enterprise is initially miniscule but fatal. A crack under pressure becomes a fissure, which then becomes a gaping hole that devours men—dragging them into the vacuum of space—like a hungry maw. The shrill alarms on the Bridge warn Jim that an ending has begun, and only through quick action do the Captain and his Bridge crew manage to seal off that section of the starship before the death toll rises past forty.

Kirk sits shaking in his command chair, panic a muted static roar in his head. His fingers tremble as they skim the buttons on the chair’s arm until his index finger pushes down on one in particular, activating the speaker.

Noise still pulls at him from all corners, crying “Captain!” and “Sir!” in jumbles of words.

“Sickbay?” Jim croaks, and it comes out as an almost whisper.

The medical bay is protected in the heart of the ship.

Everything—everyone—falls away suddenly, obliterated by the nearly painful thumping of Jim’s heart.

Bones does not answer. Instead a woman comes through, sounding hurried—another doctor, not McCoy—and reports the status of an emergency triage in progress.

He may be captain but a report isn’t what Jim wants to hear. Needs to hear.

And his gut, the core of his being, the very part of him that feels connected to a man he has secretly been in love with for over six years, is saying what you need to hear is gone. It sounds like his mother calling goodbye as he boards a shuttle destined for a small farming colony, quite alone, when he is thirteen; it sounds like an empty dream, his father telling him I’m proud of you, son when Jim is asleep and once again a lonesome child.

This ending in Jim’s life is not his death, nothing so grand; but it is meant to reform his world, and it does. Mercilessly.

Jim’s crew is reduced by thirty-six people within seconds, numbering among the fatalities: Leonard H. McCoy, Senior Medical Officer of the Enterprise.

McCoy was with the first medical response team on the scene of the compromised outlying section of Deck 5. Jim watches the security vid repeatedly, following the swiftness of Bones’ hands as he treated burns and wounds of those men and women tossed into hard surfaces of the ship. Then the shields failed—as Jim was far, far away, safe on the Bridge—the metal walls protecting them from space imploded, and McCoy glanced up from his work, at first startled then with a look of dawning horror. The feed goes black at that point, but Jim knows Leonard died in the crushing grip of an unforgiving force and his body was carried away, snatched like paper by a strong wind.

McCoy and thirty-five other names on a list; as quietly and quickly as they die, their deaths are not simple or easy for those who survive them. Death lingers like an echo of a gunshot. The mind wakes from the nightmare of it to realize the nightmare is undeniably real.

During the aftermath of the hull-breach and loss of officers, there is no asylum for Jim, only reports and letters of regret and an unrelenting clamor from Command (to Jim, crows cawing) repeating over and over the words “CMO” and “immediate replacement” until Captain Kirk barks at them that he doesn’t care, whatever works, and (mostly in his head) leave me alone!

Finally, inevitably, when a measure of peace comes, Jim is uncertain of what to do with it, cannot handle it, so he shatters it by ripping apart McCoy’s quarters, searching for an elusive something but finding only an emptiness instead. He grabs the nearest thing to hand in a sudden realization, like a cold splash of water, that he isn’t supposed to be in Bones’ room (Bones would bitch about that, except Bones won’t ever again) and escapes. Whoever packs up Doctor McCoy’s belongings later makes no report of the mess, and Jim remains ashamed in silence of his wild behavior long afterward.

But safely tucked away between a standard-issue pillowcase and the pillow it encompasses is a blue tunic. Kirk lies in darkness, sometimes, and presses his nose into scratchy fabric, breathing while trying to slow time. A familiar scent—a Bones scent—lets him know it’s all right to drift and dream—he’s all right.

A sweet lie, of course, because no Captain is allowed to fall apart on duty and yet James T. Kirk does just that. The offer of counseling he declines; the friendly shoulder to cry on Jim pats and says “no thanks, I’m fine”; the final intervention of concerned individuals drives Kirk out of his own quarters and high, high into the ship to hide. There, at last, is where Jim recognizes that the ending of his world (their world, his and Bones’) has long since come and gone.

Months ago, almost a year.

And Jim still regrets that he did not go with it.

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