singularity

Title: Swashing Buckles, Righting Wrongs: From the Fabulous Adventures of Captain James Significant Pause Cook, 1/?
Author:

possibly_thrice
Rating: Let's say R for now. Will rise, haha.
Pairing: Pike/Kirk. I AM SO VERY UNPREDICTABLE, ISN'T IT AWESOME?
Summary: Prompted by

st_xi_kink . AU. Kirk never meets Pike or Uhura, and runs off with a broken-heart-crazed McCoy to be a pirate. For a moment, it seems as if there will be an actual plot. Then I reveal that I'm actually just doing this to set up angsty Captain Pike/Pirate Captain Jimmy dubcon.
A/N: Believe me when I tell you no one is sorrier than I that this isn't funny. Also: if you are allergic to gratuitous semi-meta explanations less than cleverly disguised as fic, just skip to after the asterisk. :'D

What Captain Christopher Pike remembers from his Academy conceptual astrophysics courses:

There is nothing simple about the universes, the multiverse, which unfolds like a flower, not like a pair of trousers or a hand-held mirror; in a glory of half-hidden pleats and budding histories, not mere hemispheres. Smaller differences are easy to lose track of in identical velvet hollow, in the bowl of dark petals full up with stars, but they matter.

What Captain James Tiberius Kirk knows how to do with his handful of borrowed understanding, still warm, curled up in the Vulcan fingerprints blooming on his cheekbone:

Cross-cut the bulb and find, in one half, the Narada; in the other, silence.

What you know that they don’t:

Slice slantwise and peel the layers of possibility within the microcosms that breed in a displace mining ship’s wake, and you will arrive at other splits, other deep paradoxical divides.

There’s a story about one side of one split. It’s a good story.

There, a young man walks into a bar, gets flirty with a confident, red-suited girl drinking a Cardassian Sunrise, gets beaten up, gets a dream set on fire by a handy father-figure, goes to San Francisco, goes to space, saves a possible day with his heroics, while his mentor steps down because he can‘t stand up and smiles proudly as he shakes his hand.

This is not that story.

Here, a young man walks into a different bar, gets flirty with a drunk, desperate man drinking a straight Kentucky bourbon, and vanishes. The same day is still saved, thanks to rather fewer heroics and rather more cunning exploitation of the distraction offered by a smuggler‘s ship that attacks the Narada from the rear. And no one steps down, or smiles proudly; they’ve other things on their mind, this time around.

Presumably there is even a story along those rough lines where James Tiberius Kirk never meets Christopher Pike at all. Both men die too early, or crack too early, again and again and again. Somewhere. In potentia, as it were.

Unfortunately for both, this is not that story, either.

*

Without a handy plot to steer by, the day Vulcan is destroyed, and two new black holes are formed, and some kind of Romulan craft appears about a century too soon, and he risks his neck and his ship on someone else’s problem strikes Jim as a fucking weird day, not a first adventure. And no, thinking about it logically doesn’t help sort out the chaos in his head, despite the fact that Bones makes the joke twice, the words spilling out too slow, too old, too tired of this fight.

It’s been hellish. When he blinks he can see a lingering afterimage of spikes, Serenity’s metal nose caving in on itself. Half of the crew is simply… no longer there, the emptiness in their wake so huge and prosaic it seems profane, without a single echo of the ugly, hard-mouthed strangers he was, you know, relying on, there, tied to by ridiculous codes and instinctive loyalties.

For the first time in forever, he is haunted by his father’s actual smile, thanks to the ancient Vulcan who’s been forcing his hand through an admittedly brilliant application of some other man’s -- no, some other Jim’s -- grief, that unfamiliar desire to avenge what could have been and wasn't.

And worse than that, the fucking Vulcan is still onboard in the face of his best efforts, is still staring dark-eyed and silent at his back.

On the other hand… new engineer, no, two new engineers, with plenty of reason to hate Starfleet and at least one of them (bit hard to talk to the little green guy) with an intimate knowledge of fermentation that surpasses both his and the good doctor’s, no small feat. Future intoxication plans looking up, which definitely helps compensate for the ache that strings his frame.

His head is full and throbbing with his father, and he owns these memories now, he can do what he likes with them. Pervert them. Scorn them. Bones complains a lot about his daddy issues, well, happy days are here again, right?

But more than any of that, it’s today that he’s received proof that miracles happen after all, proof suspended like a bubble in ink before his appreciative gaze.

Because the silhouette of a Federation starship has just limped around the rim of Saturn, backlit by sunrise. It’s the Enterprise, in the name of all that is holy. Or whatever. Even like this, with a bite taken out of the side, and dull, pale, where it should have been glowing blue-white as the warp drives fire up, the ship’s ruined curves are ridiculously beautiful, its crooked outline afire as it rises, gravity or no gravity. He can’t wrap his head around what it -- what she must look like whole. He’s seen her once before, longer ago than he cares to think about, because years matter when you’re in a profession with an average life-expectancy of approximately negative seventeen months, when Bones was slumped against his back and they were driving away away away and as they blazed their escape across protected fields, there she was, half-built and shining. That he’s seen her at all is by any self-respecting religion’s standards more than he deserves, let alone twice, let alone in flight.

But now?

Now he can take her. Maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe, his fingers trembling on the controls. Bones, peering over his shoulder, raises an eyebrow. “You’re not seriously considering it.”

“So what if I am?”

“We are so out of our league --”

“Look at her,” he says, the excitement rising thick and hot in his throat. “She’s a mess.”

“A mess of the most advanced ship ever made by humans, and mostly intact under the pretty facelift.”

“A mess.”

“So’re we!” Bones snaps, jerking a thumb at the cracked ceiling.

“Not as much of one,” Jim says, sliding down into his seat and pouting. “We were far away from that second black hole.”

“It’s the goddamn Federation flagship. Crewed by Starfleet’s best. The odds are bloody awful.”

He waves a dismissive hand and pulls himself back up while the chair creaks miserably. “And your point…? I don’t do odds, whatever what’s-his-face, the engineer, says. Besides, this is ‘Fleet we’re talking about here. They’re good at --” he adopts a high-pitched and mincing tone that he’s been told bears remarkable similarities to a certain ex-wife “-- training scenarios. Regulated risks. They‘re going to have enough to deal with after Vulcan, they can just say the ship was lost there along with the other six.”

“Yeah? And what about the Enterprise’s captain?”

“Who’s the captain?”

“Pike. You might remember him, he’s he one who was almost court-martialed for, oh, I don‘t know, ignoring their suggestions of discreet bribery entirely, that kind of thing. And I’m pretty sure I don’t need to bring up the Alpha Quadrant incident --”

He winces. Bones definitely doesn’t need to bring up the Alpha Quadrant incident. They weren’t there, but pirates are pirates, at least where the ubiquitous horror of surprise raids is concerned.

“Let’s cut our losses and get the hell out of here,” the other man says, softer. Pretty much the only time he quiets down is when he thinks he’s won, the captain reflects, with a certain savage fondness. Three years of being whatever they were, friends, brothers by amount of unfortunate bodily fluids shed (mostly his, frequently all over the good doctor’s ‘borrowed’ biobed, but hey), and the man never remembers in time that he will do something, no matter what, if he thinks showing a smidgen of sanity and/or restraint is surrender. It probably goes with the crazy. Even so.

Or maybe Bones does remember, maybe it’s a calculated triumph he‘s injecting into his suggestion. There’s a curving line of light reflected in his red-rimmed eye as he glares up at the miniature ship on the view screen, at this distance not much bigger than a salt shaker. Slicing across the thin ring of dark gray iris, a strange highlight on his contracted pupil, it lends a hint of strangeness to his gaze. And that could be all it is, that strangeness, a borrowed glint, or, then again, it could not.

“Tell you what,” Jim says, playing at resigned acknowledgment of the wisdom in his best mate’s words. “I’ll just have a little chat with the man, first, and then we can decide. Huh? How about that?” He puts on his best magnanimous face, for good measure.

Bones hits himself on the forehead, which makes a nice change from him hitting the captain on the back, often with the hand ‘accidentally‘ yet in possession of a hypospray. “How about, no, you dumbfuck.“

Jim can‘t imagine why Bones would say something like that. “I can’t imagine why you would say something like that,” he tells Bones, and leans over to see that he is totally still staring through the fingers he’s left splayed across his face. Good enough. He turns to the comm. “Engineering, can you hook us up with the Enterprise?”

“Aye aye, sir. Going for the long-shot, are you? Can‘t say I blame you. Wouldn’t mind getting my hands on her ample nacelles, no sir -- if you’ll excuse the engineering parlance.”

“Thanks, Scotty.”

“No problem.”

“Isn’t it amazing how his accent can leer?” says Jim, dreamily. Bones snorts.

“You --”

He shuts up, though, when Captain Pike’s face shimmers into place, and sucks in a surprised breath that morphs into a grateful prayer halfway down his throat. Jim doesn’t move from where he’s slouched against the arm of the chair, propped up on his elbow, chin in hand, but inside that painful hope is bleeding up, expanding like bread.

Because Pike is absolutely hosed, as broken as his ship, and dead-pale in the unkind glow of the bridge’s white, white interior, the only blood in his face welling up just under the skin where someone’s fingers, judging from the shape of the marks, have left bruises. The subdued crew -- each of them startlingly familiar, as the memories of another life flood his head for a brief, disorienting moment -- behind him, paused in their work, looks nearly as bad. He knew the black hole must have taken it out of them.

“This is Captain Christopher Pike,” the man says, low and hoarse, his eyes skimming over the Serenity’s rather shadier insides, not that he’ll glean much from the damp moldy gloom. “To whom am I speaking?”

Jim leans forward, resting on his knees, so that he’s directly under what working bulbs they do have. “I am --” he begins, with his best charming smile, which has proved very effective for menacing nervy officers; but he doesn’t get a chance to finish his standard, uh, inspired introduction, which is definitely not gratuitous melodrama, whatever Bones says, and which is already hovering behind his sore teeth, because Pike rises to his feet like he’s seen a ghost and says,

“Kirk?”

The man’s knees actually buckle a little when all his weight is on his feet, although the woman behind him is quick to steady him with both hands on his shoulders. Jim notes the small aborted motions absently, barely registers her pretty profile. He can feel something tighten in his gut at the name, at the way the man says it, mouths it a second time, incredulous, and he can feel all his amused indifference, that was verging on pity, drain away.

Pike recognized him. Recognizes him, for fuck’s sake. Pike knows his father’s dead face so well he made the connection in the instant Jim showed himself properly. He’s the first in a long line of Starfleet captains who’ve run into misfortune at Jim’s hands to say that name, to leap to that conclusion.

Jim is coming to his own conclusions as they regard each other. Pike knew his father, yes, and Pike outlived his father -- the father abruptly alive through his recollection, not a hero but his father -- in a way no other of the ridiculous, self-satisfied men had, and he decides, then and there, that there is no forgiving it. He can feel something tighten in his hands, feels the tendons in his wrist draw taut as loathing seeps in to replace all that former chaos of measured consideration, exhausted ironies. It seeps in bone-deep, and knots him, an anger that is marvelously cold.

It’s wrong, that chance dealt the hand so that someone like Pike has this ship and his father doesn‘t.

Wrong means simple. He can fix this.

No more maybes, then. Sorry, Bones, he thinks, and says, “Is there a problem, officer? I usually go by Captain Jim… Cook,” he drawls. Pike looks like he’d blanch further if that were possible, nice to know his reputation‘s getting around. “But yes; my name is James Tiberius Kirk.”