Work Text:
April 4th, 2285
He is standing in the east-facing window before he opens the front door. The farmhouse sits snaggle-boned and dry in the spring wind. There is the seething of it in the hollow grass, it plays the reeds like instruments up to that lone and dusky figure. The light, which is so plentiful it seems to overpour from every vestige of the land, slashes off the glass.
‘Admiral Kirk?’
‘Good morning,’ he does not offer a hand to shake, they are firmly at his sides. They couldn’t be pried with a crowbar. The door is white, the jambs are white, the paint is fresh though the house is old. Very old.
‘I’m Richard Gow. The writer.’
‘Yes, I know who you are,’ he says, ‘I’ve been expecting you.’
‘Yes. Of course. I’m sorry for your loss, Admiral.’
He raises his chin as if it has not yet occurred to anyone else to say it. ‘Thank you. Did you walk?’
‘Only from the gate.’
‘You better come inside.’
The beams of the house are as exposed as an old vessel, boughs coming through the brickwork. The wooden floors are scratched and softened by doldrums of rugs overlapping or in discordant archipelagos. All the rooms converge at the front hall, and he leads the writer left. A chill comes from everything, the brightness is not warmth. He shows him into a modest sitting room warmed by a low fire. In preparation, he has pulled two chairs up and arranged them across from each other.
When Gow sits, Kirk remains standing, lingering on the precipice of the proceedings. He is dressed plainly, and arcanely; blue jeans, and a cream sweater. His steps are muffled by grey house-slippers. There are instances of white at his temples. Anything to drink? Customary offer made, accepted — coffee.
While he is in the kitchen, taking a long time without a synthesiser, (bringing water to a boil, pulling upturned mugs from the drying rack - no, not that mug, it’s chipped - opening the tin, pouring sugar and milk into smaller containers. Where are the trays?) Gow unwraps his scarf and peels out of his coat and drapes them across the back of the chair. The ceilings are tall and there are few photographs in the room, bearing family members that could scarcely be named since the centuries that have passed. Only the house might remember sitting at a frontier, Iowa, 1846. He takes out his PADD and a pocket-recorder and lays it on the short table between the two chairs. Lower to the ground a cat catches his eye by the wall. The skirtings are almost chipped to nothing. There is a more recent photograph, black and white, on the mantle. It carries no dust. The men in the portrait are stoic and handsome and dreadfully young. In fact, their youth is so precarious it seems to project a dare for all the universe; strike me down if you can.
Kirk returns from the kitchen with a wooden tray.
‘Do you take milk?’
‘No.’
‘Neither do I,’ he says, putting the tray between them, and sitting. He takes the saucer out from under his cup and puts it on the ground beside the chair, then carefully takes the miniature jug of milk, reaches down and pours. When the saucer is brimming, the cat appears in a pinch and begins to lap it up.
‘Is she your’s?’
‘No,’ he says, ‘He just wondered in.’
Gow takes a polite sip of his coffee, black, before unlocking his PADD.
‘Have you read what they’ve been writing?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘Do you know who, in particular, I’m referring to?’
‘Flores?’
‘And Gallia too.’
‘Yes, I have read their pieces.’
‘But you get the scoop,’ Kirk smiles thinly. It is a bitter thing to say.
‘That wasn’t my intention.’
‘No, but some part of you must have known that when you came here.’
‘It’s-’ Gow re-evaluates carefully, ‘Your perspective is the one that everyone wants.’
‘Do they?’ Kirk’s eyes are hard, there is the impression of him tonguing his teeth. There is rage close to the surface, ‘It certainly doesn’t seem that way.’
‘I suppose it might be because you refused to give any other interviews.’
‘They’re not really interested in my perspective.’
‘Maybe.’
‘It’s been almost a week — and they’re tearing apart every command, every decision, every move. There’s hardly a breath we took during that last day that they haven’t speculated about.’
There is nothing to say to that. Gow pretends to take notes, then realises these are noteworthy things in any case and scratches them down. It is well past time for the first question. He leans forward and presses record and Kirk nods imperceptibly.
‘So, why Iowa, of all places?’
He takes a moment to gather his thoughts, ‘It’s just the quietest place I know, and I couldn’t imagine going back to San Francisco yet.’
‘Well you’ve lived there since the first five-year mission ended, anyone else would be comfortable calling it home by now. Captain Spock lived there too.’
His name is like the first shot across no-man’s land.
‘Everyone assumes I want to be home - I don’t want to be home.’
‘I meant, you don’t seem to even think of it like that.’
‘Because it’s not,’ he says tightly, ‘There’s an obsession with having somewhere permanent after all these years of living in a starship, I don’t know how to take that.’
‘People like to be in familiar, comfortable places during difficult times.’
‘Maybe it would help in some cases,’ he picks up his cup and takes a sip. ‘But you don’t want to talk about Iowa anymore than anyone wants to read about it…as soon as anyone gets to me it’s like his death becomes a secret — I know he’s dead as well as you do —- so why don’t you ask.’
Gow hesitates. Captain Spock’s death has been brutally cut-and-dry. It has been a hero’s death to such an extent that it is almost cliché. His crew and Kirk may feel it readily, but to the public, a unique and brilliantly strange figure has fizzled out like hundreds of others in the collective memory. He has become so noble that he is no longer real. It was perhaps the reason his sacrifice had been so sensationally lauded, his body speculated on as cargo.
WHERE IS CAPTAIN SPOCK NOW? — that was a headline from April 3rd. KIRK IN RETREAT—END OF ONE CAREER OR TWO?—ENTERPRISE SAFE AGAIN: CAPTAIN SPOCK’S LAST ACT—KIRK AGAINST KHAN: IS THERE A COMMAND FOR SELF-SACRIFICE?—and on and on.
‘There has been no funeral yet. Was that your decision?’
Kirk stares at him for a long beat. He puts down his cup and rubs his hands together, ‘We had a ceremony before we returned to Earth.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I didn’t want to bring him back here. Th-’ he stutters and collects himself, thumbs his brow, ‘It was a five-day journey - at warp two - to come back to Earth. And there are…are no caskets on starships. Standard procedure is a sealed body bag in the sickbay’s morgue, which isn’t like a hospital’s, it’s an empty cold-room designed for a maximum capacity of fifty bodies. We had lost five others, and they were there.
When we have had casualties in the past, I would go with my CMO - McCoy - to the cold-room to see the crew to their ports safely. I’d always be his orderly for that. The main part of that job is to check the tags, and to scan them and make sure they match the DNA of the person who has passed. And…well, you don’t forget who’s died, but you reach out, thinking it’s one body - but then you’re wrong more often than you’re right…’
His eyes have become foggy, and his voice drones on, stringing between memory to possibility.
‘I didn’t want to lose him between the other bodies,’ he says, ‘A-and I didn’t want to spend five days thinking of him bellow me, and to think of him being shaken every time the ship moved. And to think of him in that cold place.’
‘So you had an impromptu ceremony.’
‘You think it was the selfish thing to do?’ his head snaps up, ‘That, I should have brought him here, so that Starfleet could give him the funeral they give their martyrs and broadcast it and have grim fanfare and speeches from his students…’
‘It would have been the conventional thing to do.’
Kirk’s mouth quivers, his voice is thick in his throat, ‘Maybe how I sent him off wasn’t right and maybe it was weak, but it was all I was capable of, then.’
‘Did you have legal guardianship of his body?’
He is silent for a long time. The dying fire licks at their tenacious equilibrium, the cat has finished his milk and slinks to the windowsill, springs up and curls by the glass. It fogs where his breath spreads. There are birds he is watching weasel-pop in the night-dewed grass. His tail twitches attentively.
‘You’re not asking me about his body,’ Kirk says, and Gow is confused — then he goes on, ‘Reporters have been asking us about—asking me, about Spock and I, for the last fifteen years. And you’re not asking me about his body - not really.’
‘Under Starfleet regulations,’ Gow begins, ‘a spouse is responsible for the arrangements, if not - it falls to the next of kin.’
Kirk’s eyes glass over at last and become red. He rubs his eyes preemptively, ‘That’s as rotten as a segway as there is.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be insensitive,’ Gow winces and straightens up.
‘I said it first, didn’t I?’
‘You and Captain Spock had one of the longest tours of intact duty despite promotions,’ Gow recollects the conversation, logic - perhaps there’s shelter in that. ‘It was natural that throughout the years there was speculation about your relationship — not to mention you worked through some of the most lucrative cases to come out of the explorative vessel sector. By the end of your second five-year mission, you weren’t like any other command team.’
‘There cannot be a worse time for me to say what we were…’ Kirk intones and drifts, ‘Not after the way Flores has cheapened Spock’s sacrifice.’
‘You mean the insinuation that Captain Spock entered the irradiated chamber because you were on the ship?’
‘Me,’ his voice rips up from him like tearing bark. ‘This is why I’m giving you this interview. Spock didn’t die for me - of all people. And my point isn’t to be modest. And it’s not to say he was just a colleague either—that’s not the point.
I have never known anyone to treasure life like him. Life in all its diversity, even life we couldn’t understand or couldn’t understand us - which was somehow more difficult to treat accordingly — Spock never forgot that, and he worked damn hard to make sure that we didn’t forget either. And there were—there were times that he was attacked for this conviction, you can’t know how many times I watched people turn from frustration and helplessness on that Bridge against him. As if he wasn’t their commanding officer, less than even—’
Kirk catches his own running breath. Forces an exhale, ‘The things I heard people call him…it’s easy to have convictions when no one is fighting you for them. When no one is spitting terms like half-breed at you. That’s easy. And it never was easy for him. Planets we landed on…peoples we met, who would object to him just on the b-basis of his ears,’ he laughs suddenly, a terrific, bubbling noise of agony and joy, ‘Once we made orbit and were captured and a-at gunpoint someone asked him what he called those and he just said, I call them ears, as if it hasn’t occurred to him to give it a second thought.’
He falls into an abrupt silence again, staring at his knees and Gow lets him and takes down as much as he can — respect for all life above personal gain or standing — he writes.
‘So no,’ Kirk says eventually, ‘He didn’t die for me. If he were acting on my behalf, he would have stayed on that Bridge, because I’m not half the person that he was. If I were to give a command it was to ask him to stay.’
‘But the destruction of the Enterprise was imminent according to the sources.’
Kirk swallows, ‘Then, so be it,’ he muttered, ‘but I wasn’t the one calling the shots.’
Their coffees have gone cold. Outside, it is drizzling and the light has become bone-white, and the Admiral’s face is pale and his hands are clawed into the arms of his seat. Gow suggests they take a short break, but Kirk shakes his head and says,
‘It took an hour and twenty-three minutes for the radiation levels to normalise. And I sat on the other side, waiting. I barely moved for them to open the door, and when they did he just—fell out all out once—and I don’t remember if I caught him, but I tried to - and then, I eventually did - and I think, I think people were trying to move us, but we were too heavy to separate.
He had been blind at the end, and I remember his skull made this…awful sound when he bumped into the plexiglass. So, when I was finally holding him…when I was finally holding him, I understood that he was really gone. But he was s-somehow coming apart in my hands...what radiation poisoning does to a body…it eats flesh from the inside out. There-there was a smell like short-circuited copper and his blood looked like grass-stains on me—that’s the thing about being a Human, you somehow never stop expecting blood to be red, and when it isn’t, you don’t entirely understand…
Regardless of who he was to me, Flores and Gallia and the rest of them - are wrong,’ he meets Gow’s eyes. His tears have overrun his skull and filled it with brine, but they do not fall. ‘If it were true, for even a minute, that Spock did what he did just for me — if I held him thinking that he was dead for me alone…well.’
Gow is sore from how quickly he is taking down the words. They will be on the record, but he somehow needs to catch them in his own hand, and test their weights and counterweights in the syllables of the handwriting that is as native to him as his own thoughts. He thinks, he may understand what Kirk is saying. He thinks it is tragic. And he thinks these words are how this event will become desterilized in the public’s eye. And he realises that that’s what Kirk wants - or more importantly needs - for Captain Spock to be more than a myth or an icon.
‘We can take a break now,’ Kirk mutters, ‘If you want.’
‘Yes.’
He stops recording and Kirk offers to show him the grounds. It is unlikely that he cares for him to see the farm, the rotting wooden-posts and the overgrown ferns and wildflower bunches freshly thawing from their sleep. It is far more likely that he can no longer breath in a contained space. They put on their coats and when they open the door the draught is cleaved into a white-water rush of cold air. The cat escapes by their ankles and hustles up a half-chopped pile of wood; Kirk’s work: breath crystalising in the cold, naked hands snapped tight around the handle of the axe—thwack—thwack—thwack until he was hacking at Khan’s lost, now disintegrated body. There were a few falls of the steel in which he saw sinew and meat coming apart on his block. But he was weak and his gut was weak and it would have abhorred Spock to no end and he forced himself to stop.
The smoke drifts thinly and signals to them from the chimney’s mouth when they have walked far enough. Their boots glisten with the wet. On the west corner there is a barn where the slats have necrosed through and through and inside there is rancid hay and rusting tools. They are custodians of a family Kirk is not thinking of now.
‘Did you ever bring Captain Spock here?’ Gow asks after they circle the barn, leave it for millennia more, maybe. He does not know what compels such a personal question.
Kirk looks at him with his patented little smile the fleet has profited from on recruitment flyers and posters for twenty-something years. He will humour him, but not because he cares to tell him. He will tell him because he loved walking these grounds with Spock. Because they did so before sunset, and rise, and spent six months here upon returning from their second five-year mission. No, it is not home, but it is good.
‘Yes,’ he says, pocketing his pinked hands, ‘But it was always a little cold for him.’
‘I won’t write any of this,’ Gow says, suddenly desperate.
‘You mean this part?’
‘Yes.’
‘Alright,’ Kirk thinks about it for a second, ‘I guess it isn’t significant.’
Gow nods because he thinks it will make him seem professional, but in reality, he simply would not know how to go about writing it. We walked and he looked as if he would be pleased if a bear trap were to spring shut on his shin, and he was left to bleed out slowly, and I watched his red-dotted body from the back of the hovercar window and would feel more at peace than if I were to leave him intact and alone in that cold and hollow and awful house with the ghosts of his people — no, it will not make for good editorial. It would frighten the readers because it frightens him.
‘I asked him to marry me two years ago,’ Kirk says. Gow wishes he would stop talking. He wants to be as far away from this reality as possible, and he is slipping into it feet-first.
‘What happened?’
‘It was in the middle of the second tour — let’s see,’ Kirk’s smile is like a poison apple brought to shine on the breast of a woollen blue coat. He sinks, with his hazel eyes and hair going to curls (trembling atop in the breeze), into that time. ‘We were in the Iadara sector, and we were en route to a colony. It was as routine as any day gets on a starship. We played chess, and I won, and he was always so wonderful when he lost—he would spend time figuring out where he went wrong—he hypothesised, that I would eventually run out of unpredictable moves.’
Kirk stops talking, their footsteps are as loud as entire forests being felled.
‘Then?’
‘Then?’ Kirk looks up in confusion. ‘I asked like anyone else would ask.’
‘So you eloped?’
‘No,’ he huffs a laugh, he stops and picks a single baby’s breath, it is limpid with the wet and mewls to his fingernail. Kirk flicks it away, ‘we put it off for when we came back, and then we put off again and again — sometimes that happens with these things — and then kaiidth.’
Gow does not ask what it means. Could he write anything at all now? On the transport in, he assumed that he would glimpse a man in grief who had lost a friend or maybe even a lover and that he would insist that Captain Spock was respected and honoured in memory. But no—what he has come to find is something else entirely; two sacrifices by the hand of one. Still, uncontested. Still, so brutally accepted. Graceful and grotesque as a broken wing, the bones and cartilage through. Kirk’s mourning will never end. And Gow feels entombed and compelled to think of him and his grief often and always carry the sympathy like a scar.
Back in the house, it is a little warmer. Gow looks down his list of planned questions while Kirk returns to the kitchen to put on a fresh pot.
Will you be taking another command, if Starfleet offers it?
How did you break the news to Captain Spock’s family?
How did your friends react?
His eye is elasticised back to the photograph above the mantle. Those two men. It must have been taken during the first mission, and it is likely they did not know one another when they looked into that lens. There is a certain unfamiliarity between them. They are sweetly awkward and shy.
What would have that meeting have been like? — Gow cannot help but gnaw at its potential. Did they immediately know that they could work well together? There have been a lot of stories, but he can’t bring himself to believe any half-truths now. The reality is much rawer. It is still bleeding.
He looks down at his notes, and his eyes teeter in focus and he realises that he has tracked in some water on his cuffs. Shallow pools basin at the edges of shoes. He is wearing light-grey slacks: there are grass-stains around his ankles in slashes. Kirk spends a long time making coffee.