Fic: Two Summers, 1-14
Maybe grief is another aspect of living.
As he steps out of his self constructed shell, he finds that practically every single one of his crew has a story. The circumstances aren’t the same, the details don’t match, the relationships are different, but it’s like a common denominator. Not all species have love, not all aliens think the same way, not everyone smells or sees or hears or whatever the same, but they all know death, just as they all know life. Those are the two things that bind them all.
At times, he wants to rage at them and recoil. You don’t know what it’s like. You don’t know who Spock was, you don’t know what he was to me, you don’t know what I lost what everyone lost when he died. You’ve never felt that kind of bond that kind of love so you’ll never understand.
It’s true. They’ll never understand. Just as he’ll never understand what it’s like to lose a son to a transporter accident or a best friend to the Klingons or a brother to madness or a baby to miscarriage. Just as he’ll never really understand his mother and all she went through. He doesn’t have a toddler and a newborn who are upset and crying and can’t understand exactly what death means but knows that something’s wrong something’s very wrong and nothing can sooth the wrongness because she feels so empty inside and she feels she has nothing she can give these children but she tries as best as she can, tries her hardest through the grief and leaning on love.
They don’t understand, but they’ve seen. Their eyes give them away. Sometimes Jim feels like he’s stepped into another world because he sees so many things he hadn’t seen before.
Everyone has their own story.
There are some who don’t. There are some who haven’t seen and can’t understand, and Jim finds that he doesn’t resent them for it. He’s glad for them, he wants them to keep living carelessly, without a second thought about grief. They’ll have to face it sometime-it’s inevitable. He’s not in a hurry to introduce them though.
Maybe that’s why Spock gave him a second chance and forgave him so easily, even though he didn’t know exactly how much was being forgiven. Because in the depths of those dark eyes and the rigidity of his logic, there was a generosity and compassion beyond words, something that can’t be taught or bought except at an unbearably high price that no one would ever willingly pay. Did he see in Jim the same obliviousness that Jim now sees in others?
No. Spock knew him better than that. He saw the different kinds of hurt that had been inflicted on Jim. He knew that Jim felt the loss of Vulcan because his counterpart couldn’t help but transfer the overwhelming emotion to this willing outlet, a man who once comforted him in every way in another timeline. Spock knew the holes that riddled Jim’s life and he slowly filled each one, unbeknownst to them both.
When Spock died, Jim thought everything was ripped out from him again.
But that’s not quite what happened. Things were ripped, new holes were made, but a lot remained intact. Spock’s love healed him from his past hurts in a way that couldn’t be reversed. They didn’t have the lifetime that they should have had, but in the time they had together they experienced more than some people will ever have in a lifetime.
These are new hurts that he’s dealing with, ones that he’s never had to face before. Everyone has their own story. Jim has more stories than most people.
It should make him bitter. It should leave him raging at the universe at the fucking unfairness of it all. He’s already raged at the universe so many times. And it seems so cruel that right when he feels like everything is going well, for once for just this fucking once in his life, Spock dies. Scratch that-it doesn’t seem cruel, it is cruel.
In some ways, it does leave him bitter and hard, closed off and guarded. Spock would be only one who could coax him out of it.
But Jim’s not that kind of person. He just isn’t. There’s no reason for it that you could pinpoint, nothing in his genetic code that marks him, aside from the fact that he’s his mother’s son and father’s legacy. Aside from the fact that he’s a survivor of Tarsus and has literally been called the savior of Earth. Aside from the fact that he’s the captain of the Enterprise and best friend of Bones, commanding officer of the finest crew in the Federation and Spock’s lover.
No one understands, no one understood except Spock, but there are others out there who see. They can’t replace Spock, but they make things bearable. His crew makes every shift tolerable. And as time goes by, as two summers come closer, he knows he’ll probably be okay in all the places where it counts.
Somehow he knows that if Spock is alive, continued as a soul or katra or nebulous spirit, he’s smiling. Because this-James Tiberius Kirk-is the man Spock fell in love with, and he would expect no less from the man he chose to be t’hy’la.