universal_charm | SANCTUM IC CONTACT

For a long moment he's quiet. Still and squeezing Jim's hand to remind himself it's not that- it is and it isn't that awful. That he's gotten through it. That he's endured.

"And I...had some rough times for awhile. Lived outta hotels till I got a flat. Fought with lawyers till I could prove I was me and got my shit back, but not much of it. Just what was left after it got put into the public archives or data logs back up at Bifrons." He pushes through. Skips to the part where shit ain't so awful- but it's always awful. That's just life here.

"Kieth died, I got the house- moved in. Moved Delta and Foxtrot and Golf it. Delta retired, got sent back with his family. Golf retired, headed back to work in the private sector in D3."

Fingers grasped Leonard's, squeezing back, patiently listening as he got it all out. Or most of it anyways. He knew that Whiskey was skipping over some things, but he didn't blame him.

A rarity for him, but he owed that to Whiskey. To listen to it. To hear it all and actually pay attention instead of turning to it with half an ear. In some ways he didn't want to hear it. Hearing it made him feel like he had somehow failed, like he should have been there when all this shit went down. But the rational part of him said no, there wasn't anything to do for it. Wishing to turn back time was pointless, and he already knew what going back in time could do to someone.

He wanted to say he was sorry, but that wasn't right. Well, he was sorry. He was sorry all of this had happened to Leonard, that he had to live that kind of life. But it wasn't the right thing to say, wasn't what the other would want to hear. He wouldn't want it from Leonard.

"And the rest is history?" he asked, though there wasn't a flippant tone to his voice. It was quiet, giving him an out if he needed it, realizing he had gotten quite a bit of a very difficult story out of the other already.

"...More or less." THe rest this guy was here for. Anything more feels like digging up old hurts just to show them off and while he's plenty scarred in many places and didn't do much to patch 'em over after the fact, he doesn't stand with his shirt open for everyone to enjoy his wounds. They're healed, or as healed as they're gonna get without him cutting on them just to share.

Jim's heard enough. He's said plenty. All he wants right now is to just. Sit and listen to the flow of water, breathe in the scent of something green and remember what the stars looked like.

"Jim." A beat. "What's it like, sailing between them? The stars. What's it like in space?"

The question caught him by surprise, making him blink those baby blues at Leonard.

"It's.... amazing," he said, thinking aloud as his thumb rubbed the back of Leonard's hand, more to help him think than anything else. Think and help him remember, because some days he worried he was forgetting, that it had been to long. Hell, it had been - years, even, and the reminder of that hurt in ways he had not expected.

A breath, turning his head up to look at the blank Dome overhead, hating it in that moment more than he ever had.

"Everywhere you look there are stars. They try and describe it as an ocean, but it's so much more than that. It's endless, and every light is a possibility for new life, for something wonderful. When you got into warp, they stream together around you, like you're rushing down a river. It feels like if you just reached out you could trail your fingers through the light stream and pull them back in full of stardust. You have no idea what will be on the other side, but that's the great thing about it. You can always be surprised. It's this great, vast, unexplored territory that we'll never be able to fully map - the possibilities of it endless."

A pause, blinking rapidly as the pain of missing the Enterprise - his home - hit him. Missing his family. Bones and Spock had said that they were okay, but the truth was he didn't really know anything for fact after he died. He needed to believe what they had said, or else he'd drive himself insane, but some nights he wondered. For a second his grip tightened, swallowing back those thoughts, that grief.

"It's the most beautiful thing you'll ever see."

"From what i heard there wasn't anything to see when ships went through the warp gates. NOt a lotta windows on the craft used to colonize this planet. Just solid bulkhead." Which was a comfort to him in more ways than one. "...I think Jojo would love to see 'em."

No matter how Ringer, how Jim, or how anyone else is so goddamn sure he'll live to see this shit fixed he knows he's gonna die trying. He's too banged up to make it and too used to this rock to matter if everything changes again. Better to hold out hope for his baby girl- for his friends and family.

He bounced his leg, thinking back to the times he'd come out of the warp and seen something beautiful, something new and wondrous. He thought of all the things he could have come upon if he had been around to get the five year mission, his wanderlust burning bright for second. Remembered the few times it had been horrible, they had come out to fire and death, how the sanctity and beauty of the warp had been violated by Marcus.

"I'd love to take her. She can sit with me on the bridge in the Captain's seat - get the best view on the ship," he promised him, hoping the other didn't notice the tightening of his hand as he thought back to that, the small shiver that passed through him. "She can even pick the next star we go to."

Whiskey could kick and throw as many fits as he wanted, Jim would drag him by the scruff of the neck into the new day if he had too, through the fires and the long nights, pull him back from the edge of the grave. One way or another, he'd see the people he cared about through, like he always had, like he always would.

"SHe'd get a kick outta that." There are so, so few people he'd trust to keep an eye on Jojo after he inevitably kicks it. Jim's on that list. Frank, Jack, Christine. It's a precious short list. Mostly Immune. It's not enough to keep her safe- they have to get her out of here. One way or another- all the elder McCoys were of the same mind. If there's a way to get Jojo the hell off Zeus and somewhere safe? Taht is what they work for. Their own lives are lived through. It'll break his heart if it happens and he can't go and ain't dead yet but-

She needs to live. Not just survive, and that's all any of them are do'n under this fuck'n fishbowl, surviving. She needs to see the stars, to wonder and dream and not worry about the sky falling down or the air she breaths shredding her lungs.

Jim could give her that. And he'd love her just because she was Whiskey's. That's more than enough for him.

He would love her. He did love her. She was beautiful and bright, the best of Whiskey. He'd do anything for her - simply because she was Whiskey's. That was all that mattered. He'd whisk her and everyone else out of this place if he could, leave this place behind and find somewhere where everyone could thrive again. He'd make sure Whiskey was on that ship, him and Jojo and the whole family. Everyone he cared about.

Blue eyes watched Whiskey for a moment, thinking. He wanted to tell him so many things - the good and the bad. But he didn't know if this was the time for it. Or maybe it was. They were feeling each other, understanding what made them different from the men each of them knew. And as much as he wanted to be the shining beacon for Whiskey, it wasn't really a fair representation, was it? He should make his decision based on truths, all of them and not just the happy moments. He'd scraped it, sort of, that night, but....

"I wish I could show her Vulcan," he began softly. "I wish I could have shown her the people that made First Contact with us Earthlings, made everything I am possible."

Edited 2015-02-21 05:23 (UTC)

"Not your fault, Jim." He knows that tone. He saw guilt and regret less and less in his own as they got older- that this man still feels it is a point in his favor. Even if it's over shit he couldn't help. He reaches over, curling his arm around Jim's shoulders for a moment, a soft squeeze before he lets his arm drop.

He knows the feeling.

They're sitting in the middle of a wall marked with his regrets. Sure he was only 12 at the time but he comes here to remember that he could always do more. Be more.

He shook his head, the squeeze of his shoulders not enough this time. Whiskey was being honest with him, and he needed to do the same in turn. Baring sins and pain. It was the only way to move them past the assumptions.

"Yes, it was. Part of it was," he told him. "It was my job to go down to the drill and stop it. Me, Sulu, and another guy, a red shirt. We failed, and ten billion people lost their lives for that." It should have been simple and it wasn't. He didn't know that he'd ever forgive himself for that particular failure. People could tell him again and again it wasn't his fault, but he'd never believe them. Not entirely.

For a minute he hoped Whiskey didn't think he was trying to upstage him. He wasn't. The guilt for Vulcan was nothing compared to the wall in front of him. But Whiskey should know of his failures and judge him for those as well. He didn't want anything they might have to be built on half-truths.

"You can't blame one man for the loss of a planet." AT least, you can't blame a man for it and expect him to keep living. "It's not on you. It's on the sonovabitch that decided torch'n Vulcan was a good idea."

It was. It was on Nero for thinking that revenge would make things better. That making innocents suffer for something Spock and the people of the future could not control was right. But it didn't take away his sense of duty, the bit inside of him that said he could have stopped it, saved them all. That if he realized sooner what was waiting on the other side he could have told Pike to hail the other ships, that his friends, his classmates wouldn't have lost their lives for nothing.

"Maybe," he acknowledged, but it wouldn't stick. He licked his lips, looking down at his hands, his next failure bubbling up, running through his very veins.

He shook his head, the old instincts rising up.

"Sorry. This is all heavy enough without me throwing shit out there too," he said, a part of him lashing out at himself, telling him it wasn't fair to expect Whiskey to share in these burdens he carried. Bones did. But Whiskey was not him and it was not fair to ask that of him.

"Kid the first thing any doctor learns is that you can't save everyone. It's impossible. Maybe they need t'find a way to teach Captains that much too." Maybe there was some kind of test they could take, some sort of lesson in futility- because sometimes fights are just that. Futile. you hold the line. You hold it till you die and it won't save you or the guy next to you, but it might save the guy behind you. It might give the people back home another few minutes, few hours before everything roils over.

He snorted, shaking his head.

"They have a test for that, actually. You know what I did to it?" He looked at him, smiling a bit, missing those old days, his red uniform, missing when things had been innocent and the sky just full of stars. "I hacked it and changed the program."

There was no such thing as a no-win scenario. You could find a way to win, to pull everyone through that fire or die trying. Teaching people that sometimes you had to lose - fuck that.

"...kid, that's not how you do those things. You can't hack reality to change it." For all that Bifrons tries to do the same to their heads, every day they can. "It is how it is. You gotta deal with the reality in front of you, not run from it by trying to change things that can't be changed."

He rubbed the back of his neck.

"I know. Believe me, I know that. I hacked it because I didn't agree with the premise of the test. Spock said it was to teach us fear, to teach us that some situations you can't find a way out of way, that they're hopeless. And I don't believe that. I don't believe that's what you should teach people. Teach them to think on their feet, to think outside the box, outside damn regulations and find the way out. Don't teach them to give up!"

He took a breath, his voice maybe haven risen a little, feeling like he was on trial again.

"If I had done that when Marcus turned on us - or, I guess, when I finally figured out he'd backstabbed us, my crew wouldn't have made it through that. We'd all be dead, not just me."

"That's not the point, and if that's what Spock said the point was he's as much a dumbshit as the rest of your Fleet Brass." Exploration and discovery, sure, but everyone needs to know when to hold the line. "It's not to know how to die with dignity. It's not to know ow to work through fear and be'n hopeless. It's about holding the line till the job is done or until you've put more of them in the ground than there are of you."

"And I held my line, Leonard," he said, clenching his hands together, voice rough. "I've always held my line. I'll continue to hold my line. The people in it just have changed over time, that's all." He sighed, rubbing at his eyes and cracked his neck, looking over him. "You know I will, don't you?" he asked him. That he wouldn't leave Whiskey hanging. He'd told him once before, but he'd wondered if Whiskey actually believed him or if he had just nodded his head, placating the kid with the bright blue eyes.

"Can you?" This isn't about his Jim anymore. It's about what this kid has weathered, what he's done, what he's died for- its' about how he looks this Jim in the eye and doesn't see a soldier. And that? That's a benefit. "Can you hold position and kill whoever comes at you to protect who's at you back? Can you put a bullet in someone without blinking? Cuz that's what it'll take. And that's what I never want to see you have to do, kid."

There's a pause, a long one as he considers. His Adam's apple bobs, blinking for a second as he recalled one of the worst weeks of his life.

"To late," he whispered.

He wiped at his mouth, thinking back to the days in that village, to listening to the people scream in the night, walking through the streets lined with their bodies the day after.

"We got got sent to this place call Zompania by the Malnosso - I've told you that before, right? We got told we had to fight the cultists or some new shit enemy that popped up and they wouldn't fight themselves. Somewhere along the way my phaser lost power cause I'd been shooting so much. In the end I took up an iron pipe, and I simply beat their heads in to keep moving, make it to nightfall and pull people along with me or back them up when they were stronger."

And he hated it. He hated the crunch of bone, the stink of blood, adding to the piles of bodies, the slickness of the mud. But he had to - because the people around him had needed it, because he couldn't lay down and give up. He had a job to do, and people to protect and people to get back to. He didn't necessarily feel bad about what he had done then, they weren't exactly human, and they deserved it for what they had done to that village. But it didn't mean he liked it. He had never been proud of himself for that day. He never would be.

"..." This. This is his sympathetic face. Hell if anything he reaches up to cuff the back of Kirk's head, trying to knock some of that ill gotten sense of self pity out. Guilt, remorse? Sure. Self pity due to some kind of assumption that he's lost all his innocnece?

That's bullshit.

"Kid if it was 'too late' you'd be Hob motherfucking Ravani. Or me. Or my Jim. You ai'nt any of us, you're you. You still feel bad about what you had to do. The day that shit stops bother'n you? That's when it's too late."

"Ow," he muttered, rubbing the back of his head, looking at him.

In truth he hadn't been looking for pity. He hated pity, really he did. A part of him had more been scared, admitting it, saying it. Afraid that somehow it would shift whatever foundation they had been building and scatter it. No, he wasn't proud of the things he'd done. He wasn't proud of sending Nero's ship into a void, he wasn't proud of how things had gone down with Marcus and Khan, he wasn't proud of surviving Zompania. He didn't want Whiskey to be proud of him for it either. He just didn't want him thinking him less for them.

"I can get messages without smacks to the head," he grumbled, reaching out and smacking his shoulder.

"The message is so you know it. The smack is so you'll remember it." He mutters, nudging Jim to help him settle. "It is what it is. You did what you did. Now you move forward."

"You going to keeping moving forward with me?" he asked him seriously.

"Kid I move forward whether you're there or not. Ain't nowhere to go but forward."

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