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Battered, bloody, and upside down on a barroom table, Jim Kirk is still capable of flashing a smile.
He shouldn’t be surprised.
“Hi, Uncle Chris!”
Christopher Pike is immediately aware of the way his cadets fall into tense, startled stillness at that remark. His entrance at all had been enough to shut them up, but Jim adding this new layer of connection to the situation has everyone freezing in place, they only movement in their eyes as they dart across to each other, silently asking, did you know? and what happens now?
“Hi, Jim,” he says, sighing heavily.
Jim, the only person in the bar still moving, sits up on the table with a groan and then spins around to face Chris again with a hand pressed to his ribs. His eye is already swelling and his teeth are stained with blood, but he grins at Chris as if he doesn’t have a care in the world. Sometimes, he almost managed to convince Chris that he doesn’t; smiling and laughing and staring at the stars, rolling his eyes at the suggestion of doing something with that brain of his. Chris had been intending to visit Jim in the early hours of the morning, to attempt once again to get him to enlist, and he wouldn’t be altogether surprised to learn that this—a bar fight with the people who are supposed to be Chris’s best cadets—wasn’t Jim getting the jump on him, making a concerted effort to show that he doesn’t belong here, as if it isn’t in his blood twice over.
Once he’s positioned with his legs dangling off the side of the round table, Jim shifts the hand from his side to his face, pressing it to his chin in an approximation of innocent curiosity. “What brings you to my neck of the woods? Did I go too long without calling Mom again?”
“Yes,” Chris says, because apparently Jim has decided they’re having this conversation in front of everyone, and Chris might not be a Kirk but he still doesn’t back down from a challenge. “She’s in deep space using up all her credits trying to reach you and then yelling at me when you don’t answer. But that’s not why I’m here.”
Jim drops his jaw and puts on the best depiction of faux-shock that Chris has ever seen. “Then why, O Uncle of mine? Not to recruit me again, surely?”
Chris is unsurprised at the murmuring that breaks out at that, but he shoots a glare towards the most vocal of his cadets and watches with some satisfaction as they respond and then pass it on to everyone else. Silence, uncomfortable as it is, descends again.
“I’m not interested in being a legacy,” Jim is spitting when Chris looks back at him, his face twisted in anger that is mostly pain. It’s the same arguement they’ve had a hundred times before, but Chris is prepared this time. He’s known for weeks what he was going to say to his psuedo-nephew this time around, and he can’t deny there’s a certain opportunity in front of him to really drive the point home.
“Looks to me like you’re right on track to build your own reputation,” Chris says, nodding at the mess they’ve made of the bar. “You’re growing up. I’m so proud.”
Finally, Jim shuts up too, setting his mouth in a line and glaring at Chris with a bitterness only reserved for family, blood or not, who have managed to strike a nerve.
“Do you wanna be a footnote in your daddy’s story, the one everyone here is gonna study soon as our shuttle lands, because he did more in twelve minutes than most captains do in twelve years? Do you want the most impressive day of your life to be the one you were born?”
Jim sucks in a sharp breath. Chris isn’t sure if it’s pain from the beating or if he’s hit the right chord. It might be both. “That’s not—”
“Or,” Chris continues pointedly, “do you finally wanna be your own man?”
This time, when the cadets start to murmur and speculate, Chris doesn’t silence them. He lets them talk.
“You’re an asshole, you know,” Jim tells him the next morning, but he’s standing in front of the loading dock for a shuttle he always swore he’d never set foot on. “A meddling, conniving asshole who thinks I’m too dumb to see through your manipulative fucking dare.”
“I never dared you,” Chriss points out, smiling.
“Good as,” Jim snarks back, looking every inch the petulant teenager Chris knew a decade ago. When his face softens, a little bit of wonder peaking through his careless veneer, Chris is reminded of the five-year-old boy who played with toy starships and asked for ‘space stories’ everytime he visited. The wonder doesn’t last for long, shifting to an ill-disguised anxiety as his eyes flick over the shuttle and back to Chris’s face. “I don’t want to just be my parent’s son,” he says. “My dad’s or my mom’s. I could do a million other things than this to be my own man.”
“Yeah. Would you be half as happy, though?”
Jim blinks slowly and then turns over his shoulder towards Riverside. “Probably not. I hate that you know me.”
“Comes with the territory, kid,” Chris says, fondly. “Your mom’ll be proud. Your dad woulda been.”
“What about you?”
Chris shrugs, purposely swallowing a smile. “Depends how well you do.”
Jim flips him off, but there’s a humour in his face that wasn’t there before. Chris follows him onto the shuttle, grinning at the back of his head, and lingers for longer than he should, watching the cadets and new recruits mingle and find their seats.
Watching Jim Kirk’s wary eyes find Leonard McCoy’s for the first time.
(Leonard McCoy is one of Chris’s little secrets, which sounds far more scandalous than it is. Starfleet Academy has a habit of keeping an eye on good prospects, and although Chris still considers himself a captain before an academic, he’s very aware of the goings-on at the school he works out of, and he has a few of these potentials that he particularly likes the look of, McCoy among them. He’s made a point to personally extending an invitation on more than one occassion, taking time out of his not-so-busy schedule to dole out advice and stories in vain attempts to garner a positive response.
He’d taken up a post earth-side, semi-retiring from startravel, after Winona had shot off back to the stars when her boys were barely teens. She hadn’t asked him to; she didn’t have the foresight for that sort of thing. But Chris had never liked her husband much and he loved her sons plenty, so it had been an easy choice to make. He gave them someone in their corner and a place to hide and help when they were ready to get away, and in return he earned the title Uncle Chris and the trust of two wild, amazing men, and he thinks it’s the best trade he ever made.
Leonard, who popped up time and time again on lists of potential recruits and rejected anyone who came to his door but still let Chris hang around anytime he stopped by, had scowled at this story. “Good for you,” he’d said. “Dunno what that has to do with me.”
“I’ve been staying in one place with no career growth because I had something that made it worthwhile. What have you got holding you here, Doctor?”
With a snort, Leonard stared at him with a certain incredulity. “That’s quite the pitch, captain. A step down from your last attempt.”
“I’m offering you a fresh start.”
“You’re mocking my divorce is what you’re doing.”
Chris shrugged. “If that's how you want to see it.”)
And whether or not that is how Leonad McCoy had decided to see it, the fact of the matter is that he’s here, now, buckled into a seat next to Jim, who’s watching him with a frank, if wary, fascination that Chris thought he reserved for Starfleet posters and the stars themselves.
Leonard looks back without the same immediate intrigue, but with a stern warning on his tongue that makes Jim laugh. Leonard doesn’t soften, Chris doesn’t think, but he does share his flask. That might be the end of it, of course, but a little bit of human connection is what both of them need to break from their self-made shells and mountains of bitter resistance. As far as introductions to Starfleet go, for the two of them, he can’t quite think of a better one.
He’s not expecting Jim to follow him from the shuttle all the way to his office, strangely silent and serious, but he’s not complaining about it, either. Chris would gladly give Jim a private, personal tour of the entire campus if he asked for it, just for the excuse to spend a bit more time with him. Jim doesn’t ask, just trails behind him with an air of expectation, until Chris kicks out a chair for him and they take seats on the same side of his desk.
“I want to room with McCoy,” Jim says.
Chris raises an eyebrow. “You just got here, Jimmy. Already making demands?”
“Making a request,” he says. “I like him. I want to room with him.”
“Why?”
“Because I like him,” Jim says slowly, as if Chris is being particularly obtuse about the matter. “He’s smart and rough and kind of an asshole, but we both know that I like that kind of influence in my life. You want me to thrive here?”
“You’ve known him for the length of one shuttle ride,” Chris points out.
Jim just smiles a crooked smile. “Your point?”
“This ain’t first contact, kid. You don’t have to jump in with both feet to create some kind of alliance.”
“I’ve never understood that expression,” Jim muses. “Jump in with both feet. Is there a way to jump in with only one?”
“Not for you, apparently,” Chris mutters. “Even if I didn’t think this was a crazy thing to demand, you know that I have very little to do with housing, right?”
“Very little isn’t nothing,” Jim says, and from the expression on his face, Chris knows that he knows he’s won. He’d be more annoyed about it if he didn’t know it was true.
“Do you want to room with Jim Kirk?” Chris asks, falling into step beside Leonard.
He doesn’t quite startle, but he looks at Chris sidelong and frowns. “The blond from the shuttle?” he says, and if that’s supposed to make Chris think he isn’t interested, it fails. “I s’pose it wouldn’t be bad.”
Chris grins, and shakes his head, and calls in a favour.
Later, during an orientation demonstration that Chris doesn’t usually attend, he watches the faces of the recruits for the year as they awkwardly mingle and pick up packets of class assignments and door keys. It’s honestly endearing, seeing the wide-eyed nervousness on the faces of the brightest minds in the universe. Especially when they’re contrasted with Jim’s easy swagger and Leonard’s impassive scowl.
Chris grins to himself, leaning against the wall, as Jim flips open his packet, beams, and all but launches himself across the room to throw an arm around Leonard’s shoulder, pulling them close together and already talking a mile-a-minute. Leonard shrugs him off and pushes him away, but he’s already fighting a smile.
Jim grins and doesn’t stop talking, and the two of them walk off towards their accommodation, their shoulders brushing every other step.
Yeah, Chris admits to himself, he thinks he’s already proud.