Fic: Two Summers, 1-9
For the first time in Jim’s life, he thinks he can understand his mother.
For the first time in Jim’s life, he thinks he can forgive his mother for all her faults, all her shortcomings. She tried her best. It must’ve been hell.
He’s seen the pictures of his father. There’s a definite family resemblance there. Jim never thought it was enough for her to see George Kirk in his eyes, but now he understands. It’s not just the image, but layers of memories and the brute force of shock and the trauma of having a child while you’re listening to your husband die. He’s never listened to that last conversation his mother had with his father, the one that gave him his name. He doesn’t think that his mother ever listened to it again either.
Jim can’t bear to listen to Spock’s logs, the ones that he recorded when Jim was off getting himself endangered on some planet. He doesn’t want the rush of memory, doesn’t want the tightening in his groin listening to that deep, placid voice relating the relevant facts. If he did, he’s be able to see Spock sitting in the captain’s chair, brows furrowed, worry evident in the light in his eyes but never explicitly expressed.
His heart squeezes, almost skips a beat.
When his mother unexpectedly sends him a transmission, he opens it. It’s been how long since Spock died? Jim doesn’t care to count the days, the hours, every fucking creeping minute. Time kind of oozes along, melting everything together to yesterday today tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Without Spock.
His mother unexpectedly sends him a transmission and he opens it. She just looks straight into the camera, that look in her eyes that Jim grew up with, the look that Jim now sees reflected back in the mirror. That look in her eyes. Deep lines in her face-time has not been particularly kind to her. That look in her eyes and says “I’m sorry.”
Jim keeps watching, expecting her, wanting her, needing her to say more. For just this once, please be a mother, for just this once make it all go away and tell me this is just a dream, a nightmare. For just this once, give me the words to make it all right.
Or say something to make me rage at you. Say something about how you understand, how you know what this heart stopping feeling is like, tell me that everything will be okay so I can scream yell curse that you don’t fucking understand I can’t fucking breathe so don’t tell me that everything will be okay. Just please, say something. Say something.
But she says nothing else. It’s the look, and the transmission ends.
He wants to curse her anyway, yell at her for being a terrible mother. Where was she when he was driving a car off a cliff, where was she when he was getting into scrapes at school, where was she when he was getting into bar fights? When he graduated Starfleet, when he got his captain’s commission, when he was decorated for conspicuous gallantry. What did she see-the life of George Kirk playing out before her eyes? Is that why she was never on Earth, despite the fact that she remarried?
He wants to ask her these questions that have always been in the back of his mind, but he doesn’t. Because for the first time in his life, he thinks he can understand his mother.
It’s something he never would have predicted in a millions years. There’s always been a gulf between him and her, connected by a rickety bridge. The gulf remains, but somehow they’re more connected, and it’s not by bridges. It’s by something deeper, more fundamental, like the plate tectonics that make up Earth’s meager crust.
Funny how Spock’s death brings him closer to his mother.
His heart squeezes.
In the back of his mind, Jim vaguely wonders if he’ll turn out like her, an eternal wanderer. She’s made a name for herself in her own circles. She did the best she could by him and his brother. She moved on, carried her grief with her, kept living through the grey dusk. Jim wants to ask her how she did it. Somehow, he knows that all she’ll do is turn those eyes to him. No words. Only looks.
It had been that way with Spock, sometimes. All the time. The connection between them was so strong that Spock only had to look at him and Jim knew what those dark eyes were saying. Even before the bond, they were like that. In his dreams, Jim keeps searching for those eyes that face the elegant angle of those eyebrows that will sooth away all fears and tell him without words that everything will be okay. That this is just a dream.
It’s just a dream. It’s just a fucking dream because every time, he wakes up with a hole in his heart and a hole in his head, gasping because Spock felt so real, despite the blurriness the mist and fog, despite the fact that in these nighttime encounters he is incorporeal and translucent. It feels real because Jim wants it to be real, Jim wants Spock to be alive. It’s just a dream.
Did his mother feel this? Yeah. Those eyes tell him everything. His mother’s eyes tell him everything of the long years and the grief and sorrow and the gaping place that she, even today, carries in her heart.
“I’m sorry.”
And he understands what she’s sorry for. For so many things. She’s sorry for his loss. Jim’s not even sure Spock and his mother have ever met. But she’s his mother and despite the fact that she fell short in so many ways, she knows her little boy and knows, perhaps better than anyone, exactly what he’s going through. She’s sorry for all the times she ran away from her own memories, she’s sorry that he understands what she’s saying at all. No mother would ever want that for her child. Jim is strong-he’s her son. But she’s sorry all the same.
Jim realizes that maybe deep down, she’s sorry that he’s her son at all. Grief seems to hound them at every turn. His mother isn’t superstitious, but they both know that their family history is littered with more stories exactly like this than should be allowed for a single bloodline. Or maybe she’s sorry that he was born in space, as though she made a bargain with the void that if they lived, if she and her son survived those days in the shuttle, Jim would belong to space forever. Like a sacrifice to a greedy deity, she bought their lives by selling his future. Her future.
None of this makes any sense.
But he understands.
Jim doesn’t think her apology heals all things. But something inside him settles, momentarily. His heart relaxes.
And in the darkness of his quarters, staring at the black screen of a terminal, he whispers.
“I forgive you.”