Chapter Text
Yorktown, Stardate 2263.2
Shore leave. No matter how much everyone on board the Enterprise loves their job, there comes a time when each member of the crew needs some time off. To see something different than the vastness of space and the bluish tinted light of stars as they swoop by at warp speed. To experience the feeling (or to have a resemblance, at least) of being on firm ground again. To escape the constricting confinements of regulation standard cabins, mess halls, and limited recreation spaces.
To reconnect with old friends, family, and loved ones. And maybe get away from a few people they spent too much time with.
Shore leave really is what keeps the crew morale up, even through the longest, most taxing voyages into deep space.
But the leave everyone so desperately needed - the break for Jim to get away from all of this and think - is cut short before it has even really started when a non-federation vessel reaches the star base with alarming news.
A few hours later, their mission is clear. Jim knows what he has to do and is ready to leave the commodore’s office to get to work.
“Captain,” the Commodore starts, and Jim turns around again. “Starfleet Command sent me your application for the vice-admiral position here in the installation.”
“Yes, ma'am,” Jim replies as she looks at him intently. He feels something heavy pull at his gut. “Erm… If I may, I would recommend Commander Spock replace me as captain of the Enterprise. He is an exemplary Starfleet officer. He’d make a great captain.”
She’s still looking at him, studying him with that particular look that, despite her having a completely different personality, reminds him of Pike.
“It isn't uncommon, you know,” she starts, her tone softer, more personal. “Even for a captain, to want to leave. There is no relative direction in the vastness of space. It is only yourself, your ship, your crew. It's easier than you think to get lost.”
“It’s not about--” Jim wants to interrupt her.
“I’ll bring it up with the General Council,” she continues before he can finish. It is advice she’s giving him to consider during the mission. “We'll discuss it when you return.”
“Ma'am,” Jim says and takes his leave.
If only it were just that…
Three and a half years earlier
When Jim came to, the first thing he saw was a dim, white-ish light around him and a blurry glow of blue. His first thought, before his conscious mind could have protested such nonsense, was that this must be heaven. He had died, after all. When his gaze was able to focus properly, however, and he saw Bones’ face looking as grumpy as ever, he was pretty damn sure that he couldn’t be in heaven.
“Oh, don’t be so melodramatic. You were barely dead,” was how he was greeted, and for a moment he easily believed it.
“It was the transfusion that really took its toll. You were out cold for two weeks,” Bones continued to explain as he scanned Jim’s vitals.
“Transfusion?” Jim asked, still trying to catch on. He definitely had died, he remembered it all too vividly. The warp core and his desperate attempt to fix it. The excruciating pain of his entire body being destroyed inside and out…
“Your cells were heavily irradiated. We had no choice.”
Jim frowned, trying to piece together the puzzle. “Khan?” he asked then, catching on faster than he would have thought himself capable after such an ordeal.
“Once we caught him, I synthesised a serum from his super blood,” Bones explained as if the whole matter had been nothing more than producing flu medicine, and Jim was grateful for it, not yet ready to let his mind drift to the direction of what his death must have meant for his best friend. “Tell me, are you feeling homicidal? Power mad? Despotic?”
“No more than usual,” Jim replied, humouring him. “How'd you catch him?”
“I didn't,” Bones replied and, after a short pause, stepped aside from the bed to give Jim a line of sight to the door. The figure he saw standing there approached the medbed with a solemn expression and careful steps that seemed a lot less determined than his usual brisk stride. The sight made something in Jim’s chest flutter. With gratitude, affection, and a residue of the sorrow he had felt then. Behind the glass in his last moments.
“You saved my life”, he said softly, his weak smile barely able to convey the extent of gratitude he felt for his first officer. For his friend.
“Uhura and I had something to do with it, too, you know,” Bones piped in, now on the other side of his bed, by the screen monitoring his immediate vital signs. Jim just ignored him, although he would have rolled his eyes at him, had he the energy for it.
“You saved my life, Captain,” Spock countered, his voice softer than Jim had ever heard it. “And the lives of--”
“Spock,” Kirk stopped him, not wanting this to be a quid pro quo. “Just. Thank you.”
There was an almost-smile on Spock’s lips as he looked down at his captain. “You are welcome, Jim.”
He felt the urge to reach out, to complete what he could not have done with the glass separating them before everything had gone dark. But something in him stopped Jim, and he didn’t bother contemplating whether it was just his tiredness and the fact that Spock stood in his typical fashion with his hands behind his back, or something else.
But he hoped Spock knew, that he could see it on his face just how grateful he was, how lucky he felt to be alive. He was actually alive. Actually alive, despite all odds. It was funny how that fact only slowly started to fully sink in. He had died. And Spock had watched him do so, had been there with him till the end. He vaguely remembered his face, stricken with pain and sadness, and everything that had stood between them in the days leading up to that moment, the feeling of betrayal, of thinking Jim didn’t mean half as much to Spock as Spock did to him. That all had crumbled as if it had never happened, had never been real.
Jim still felt the aftertaste of sadness for his friend, a bittersweet weight in the pit of his stomach, sweet for knowing he was mourned and bitter for knowing he had been the cause for Spock’s grief.
He didn’t know what else to say, the brief boost of energy he got for awakening after… what had Bones said? ...two weeks? of a coma dissipating in a fatigue that hit him full on, warm and lulling. His doctor didn’t seem to have missed it.
“You should rest now,” he told Jim, who barely could keep his eyes open long enough to see Bones exchanging a glance with Spock. The Vulcan’s face, looking at him once more with a similar speechless reverie, was the last thing Jim saw before sleep fell upon him.
~*~
In the following two weeks of Jim’s recovery, he received more visitors than Bones would have liked. He showed his disapproval clearly by insisting Jim needed rest, and that four Ensigns there at the same time was a bit too much. Jim, however, was grateful for the visits, exhausting as they sometimes were, because - who was he kidding - dying and coming back from the dead through the super blood of a genetically engineered maniac was kind of taxing. Nevertheless, they kept him busy, kept his thoughts in the here and now and farther from then.
It was a strange thing that the true impact of what he had been through had only started to manifest in his consciousness in the days following his waking up. He frequently dreamed of the blinding light inside the warp core chamber, of the burning feeling in his lungs as if each breath he took was poison. Of the seemingly thin pane of glass separating him from the world outside, from any chance of survival. From Spock. And Spock’s face - the memory of it refreshed and deepened over the days as well - was haunting him even during his waking hours, whenever he was alone in the hospital room.
He had long ago learned that the outwardly reserved Vulcan was, indeed, capable of emotions, of caring for others. What he never would have thought possible was to see Spock so wrecked with grief that he’d actually shed tears. His angular features softened by sorrow, eyes glistening with moisture, voice cracking as he told Jim he’d saved the crew. It was the most empathic, kind thing Spock could have said in that moment. He’d known it was what Jim needed to hear above everything else. Must have known that this fact alone had made the pain in Jim’s body and his fear of death somewhat bearable. To help him find the peace that he so desperately required in those last moments.
He hadn’t wanted to die. There’d still been so much he hadn’t done, hadn’t seen. Discoveries to be made, memories with his friends and everyone he cared about uncreated. Truths to be shared and found out. Maybe finding someone to complete him, the way Uhura and Spock obviously completed each other. And if not all that, at least to say goodbye to all of them. To Scotty, Uhura, Chekov, Sulu and Bones. Poor Bones who, despite all his exasperation with Jim, cared about him deeply and who was more of a brother to Jim than his estranged sibling had been for years.
But Spock had been there, and strangely, from all the people that could have come to the glass, to be there with him in his final moments, Jim would have picked none other than his first officer. Or maybe he would have, before. Memories were tricky like that and often made you believe that a truth you learned at some point had been true for you all along. But the truth was, now, and in those final moments, that having Spock there by his side while he felt his strength, his life, leave him, just felt right. As if, in all the universe, there had never been a different option. And maybe, if he allowed himself to believe for just a moment in something like destiny, the chain of all those random events that had brought them together as captain and first officer was precisely for that moment. So he wouldn’t have to die alone.
When Jim replayed those moments in his mind - often involuntarily, but sometimes deliberately - this feeling of rightness became more and more pronounced. At first, he had thought that Spock, being Vulcan, could help him find solace, be it by words or his mere presence alone. After all, Vulcans could control their emotions, their fear and anguish over certain death. Maybe, if just by being there or by saying the right words, Jim could have found the same ability in himself. But then, Spock had told him that he was failing at not feeling, and tears had fallen from his cheek, and in a way that felt like contradiction itself, it had somehow made it easier for Jim, while making it harder at the same time.
In those last few moments, last breaths he took, last seconds his eyes had been able to see, he’d not been eased from feeling but filled with it. Loss, grief, sympathy. Affection and the knowledge of being cared for, being grieved. It had drowned out the physical pain, had replaced the sizzling, throbbing fire in his every fibre of his being with something warm and lulling, and heavy and dark at the same time. It had been amazing and horrible, but it had been something, something that gave worth to his death and his life.
Somewhere, in the back of his mind, Jim wondered how much self-worth he had had in him before then. But it was something he didn’t want to dwell too much on.
Jim wanted to thank Spock, not only for saving his life, as he had already done, but for being there with him. For showing him how deeply he cared and easing the moment of his death. But Spock never came alone again after that first day, always with Uhura, or just briefly when Bones was fussing over Jim, and the urge to tell him faded slowly as Jim’s condition improved. Maybe it would have been awkward - for Jim himself and for Spock as well. And so, two and a half weeks after waking up in the hospital, Jim was finally released, and he hadn’t told Spock anything.
He wouldn’t get a chance to do so for the next two months, with everyone being much too busy and Spock being Spock. After that, he had no more than two, maybe three minutes alone with his first officer between meetings with the admiralty or engineering teams who undertook repairs and modifications. Business as usual, strictly professional. No soft, teary gazes full of regret and emotion, or the level of closeness Jim had felt then. And - he kept telling himself - that was okay.