Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/13910901.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Star_Trek, Star_Trek:_Alternate_Original_Series_(Movies)
  Relationship:
      James_T._Kirk/Spock
  Character:
      James_T._Kirk, Kevin_Riley, Thomas_Leighton, D._Eames, E._Molson, Lenore
      Karidian, Leonard_"Bones"_McCoy, Spock_(Star_Trek), Governor_Kodos
  Additional Tags:
      Tarsus_IV, Tarsus_IV_aftermath, Starvation, Angst, Minor_Character_Death,
      Dark, Cannibalism, please_don’t_be_scared_by_the_tags_it’s_really_not
      that_bad, Recovery, It_Gets_Worse_Before_It_Gets_Better, Very_eventual
      spirk, mostly_just_tarsus_and_Jim_being_a_mess_after_tarsus, then_he_gets
      better, Underage_Drinking
  Stats:
      Published: 2018-03-08 Updated: 2018-03-17 Chapters: 15/? Words: 20571
****** Tarsus IV ******
by GenericUsername01
Summary
     The guards started firing into the crowd.
     People were screaming—children were screaming—and flesh was burning
     and the building was burning and smoke was filling the air and it
     smelled like cooked meat. Jim’s stomach growled, and the only thing
     that kept him from stopping to throw up was the knowledge that it
     would get him shot.
***** Into the Woods *****
It started as whispers. Rumors. The odd, misplaced word spoken during class and
quickly dismissed.

Then the whispers got louder. Then people were banging on the doors of the
governor’s palace demanding answers. Then there were riots in the colony and
things set on fire and some people got hurt.

A farm caught fire and whole fields burned down in the blink of an eye and then
there was even less food.

Kodos tried to send out a distress signal. It didn’t work. Something about ion
storms and background interference and long distance comms being unreliable.

Some people said that he only claimed he sent out a distress signal and in
reality he was keeping Tarsus IV cut off from the Federation intentionally, his
own private empire where he was the final authority, refusing to ask for help
in order to fuel his own god complex. Jim couldn’t believe that. He knew Kodos.
Kodos was nice to him. He taught him how to play chess. How can a governor be
that involved with their citizens and still have people thinking the worst of
him?

In truth, Kodos could do no wrong in Jim’s eyes. The man was like a father to
him.
===============================================================================
He started with the criminals.

Two days after Jim got out of juvie. He had been so hungry and he was thirteen
and stupid, and so he had stolen a candy bar and got caught. It nearly got him
killed.

His neighbor’s oldest kid wasn’t so lucky. He had stolen food for his little
brother and been executed for it. His mother cried for days.

Desperate times called for desperate measures. There were too many people
consuming too much food. Kodos had declared all criminal offenses to be death
penalty offenses.

That went against dozens of Federation laws and legal protections, but what was
anybody going to do about it?
===============================================================================
The next to go were the disabled, mentally and physically. Jim very nearly
didn’t make the cut, with all his allergies and his immune system being what it
was. It was his off-the-charts aptitude tests that saved him. That, and his
famous father.

Kodos expected great things out of him. He always had.

It still hadn’t sunk in. It was still some distant, not-real thing, that Jim
was only concerned about on the periphery. Kodos was a good man. He was only
doing what he had to do. It was necessary. It was logical.

What alternative was there? Let everybody starve?

There were still some people defending Kodos and Jim was one of them.
===============================================================================
Age limits were drawn. No one over 65 or under 18 was allowed to live.

It was simple logic, really. The elderly were a burden on the colony. Kids were
a burden. Teenagers ate way, way too much, and no matter how much work they
were made to do, they consumed more than their fair share. People so old or so
young that they needed others to look after them… The gains just weren’t worth
the costs.

It made perfect sense when you thought about it, really.

Kodos called an assembly at the colonial school. All the children filed into
the gym and took their seats, waiting to hear their leader speak.

“As you all know, an exotic fungus has come to our colony and infected our
crops. All of the planet’s food supplies are now diseased and inedible.
Communication is impossible. The next Federation check-up isn’t scheduled for
another five years.

“The revolution is successful. But survival depends on drastic measures. Your
continued existence represents a threat to the more valued members of society.
Therefore, I have no alternative but to sentence you to death. Your execution
is so ordered, signed Kodos, Governor of Tarsus IV.”

The guards started firing into the crowd.

People were screaming—children were screaming—and flesh was burning and the
building was burning and smoke was filling the air and it smelled like cooked
meat. Jim’s stomach growled, and the only thing that kept him from stopping to
throw up was the knowledge that it would get him shot.

He ran out the doors with a crowd of other kids and the guards kept firing
after them. The kid in front of Jim went down, and he jumped over his falling
body, heart pounding at the delay.

Another kid fell at his side and another and another.

They were clear of the school, clear of the colony, still sprinting into the
woods, adrenaline carrying them far past their normal breaking points. The
sound of phaserfire and the smell of smoke became distant. The guards didn’t
follow them off the school grounds.

There were still kids to be taken care of inside. And nature would run its
course with the kids who made it to the woods. As long as they weren’t eating
food from the colony, nobody cared.

A big kid went down with a sudden cry, clutching at his face. Jim peered
around, but there were no guards in sight. He stopped and knelt down beside
him. Some of the other kids followed his cue. A good portion, actually.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” Jim asked. Too in pain to speak, the kid moved
his hand away to reveal a massive phaser burn covering half his face and
seeping blood. His left eye was completely gone, a massive dripping with gore.
The eye appeared to have exploded from the heat like a squished grape. His skin
was a mangled, half-melted mess, rippled and red and raw and emanating the most
disgusting smell. Several kids gasped. One ran over to a bush and retched.

Jim set his mouth grimly and tore off his shirt, wrapping it round the other
kid’s face as a makeshift bandage. It covered it completely. The kid had to
resort to breathing through his mouth. It was the only way to cover the entire
wound, though.

“Here, take my hand. I’ll guide you,” he said, slipping his hand into the older
boy’s. They started walking again, and the rest of the kids followed.

Somehow Jim ended up leading.
===============================================================================
They set up camp.

Camp was a clearing in the woods about three miles away from the colony. It
took them two hours to get a fire lit, even though multiple kids insisted they
knew how to build one.

Jim led the wounded boy to a log and sat down with him. Soon all the remaining
kids were sitting in a circle around the fire, solemn-faced and silent.

“What are we gonna do?” a little girl asked.

Nobody said anything. Jim looked down at his hands, watching the firelight make
shadows play off of them.

He felt eyes on him and looked up, startled, to find everybody staring at him.

“Um,” he said. “I guess we’ll stay here for the night. We can come up with a
long-term plan in the morning? For now, we’re all tired and need to sleep.”

A couple of kids nodded. “What’s your name?” one asked.

“JT,” he said. “That’s a good idea. We should probably—Do you guys wanna stick
together? We can help each other out.”

More nods.

He took a breath. “Okay. Um. We should probably all know each other’s names,
then. And ages. Why don’t we, uh, go around in a circle?” he said, feeling
slightly ridiculous. He sounded like a teacher. “I’m JT and I’m thirteen.”

The kid with the wrapped head went next. “Tom Leighton. Fifteen.”

“My name is Angela Martin and I’m seven years old.”

“Uh, Jen. Jenny Tyler. I’m twelve.”

“Tamara Sinclair. Fourteen.”

“My name is Kevin. Riley. Kevin Riley. I’m five.”

“I’m Dani. I’m nine. This is my brother Hunter, and he’s eight. He’s mute.”

“I’m Bobbi. I’m nine too.”

“Gavin Drewes. Fifteen.”

“My name’s Shravan. I’m thirteen.”

“I’m Erin Molson and I’m eleven.”

Thirteen kids total. Thirteen kids.

Jim could keep thirteen kids alive.
***** Gavin *****
The older kids stayed up talking while the younger ones slept.

“We need a plan for food,” Tamara said.

“Yeah? Like what?” Gavin asked.

“We could steal,” Jim suggested.

“From starving people?” Shravan asked.

“Hey, we’re starving too,” he shrugged.

“Kid’s got a point. Survival of the fittest. I think Kodos has made that pretty
clear,” Tom said dryly.

“Great, so we steal,” Jim said. “Daylight robbery. Hit while all the adults are
at work.”

“What work? This is a farming colony, and the farms are dying,” Gavin said.

“Not everybody is a farmer, though. There still has to be teachers, and
plumbers, and carpenters, and janitors, and… all kinds of people,” Tamara said.
“We can at least one house that’s empty and sneak in without anyone even
seeing.”

“Okay,” Gavin said, folding his arms. “But who’s gonna do it?”

“Well, can’t be me,” Tom said, gesturing to his bandage-shirt-blindfold. It was
now soaked through with blood and keeping the remnants of his eye from falling
out. “But it has to be one of us. We can’t send in a little kid.”

“I am not doing it,” Gavin said defiantly.

Shravan bit her lip and looked around nervously. “I, uh—“

“It’s okay,” Tamara said. “JT and I’ll handle it. Ain’t that right, JT?”

He gave a crooked grin. “Sure. I’d love to.”
===============================================================================
They watched the woman get into her hovercar from the bushes. The engine
revved, and it lifted off the ground and carried her away. Jim and Tamara snuck
out of the bushes and sprinted low to the ground to the door.

“Shit,” Tamara hissed. “Security lock. We’ll never get in.”

“Yes we will. I can hack it.”

“Are you sure? If you set off the alarm—“

“I can hack it,” he said confidently. He slipped off the outer casing and set
to work, fingers flying across the keys, pulling wires and rearranging them
occasionally. In two minutes, the panel beeped and a green light came on. The
door swished open.

“Great! Let’s get in, grab some food, and get out before the neighbors call the
cops,” Tamara said.

They dashed into the kitchen and began raiding the cupboards, pulling out cans
and boxes of food and stuffing their shirts with them. They were just about to
leave when suddenly the woman ran back in, phaser drawn, and on instinct Jim
chucked a can at her.

It hit her in the head and she went down, head slamming back into the wall,
onto the floor, and blood pooling out around her. Jim clapped a hand over his
mouth.

“I didn’t mean to!” he said. “I swear I didn’t mean to! I never would have—Oh
my god!”

“JT,” Tamara grabbed him by the shoulders. “Shut up. Calm down. Pick that food
back up. We need to leave.”

He nodded shakily and went to do as she said.

A baby cried.

“Shiiit,” Tamara said. Jim’s mouth dropped open, tears threatening to spill out
of his eyes.

Tamara’s mouth set in a grim line. “We’ll have to make two trips.”
===============================================================================
They dumped their stolen food in the center of the camp, just to the side of
the fire, and the other kids cheered.

“Hey, wait, where are you going?” Jenny asked.

“Back. We left some stuff there,” Tamara said.

“Isn’t that—a bit risky?” Tom asked.

“Just trust us. We have to,” Jim said.
===============================================================================
They came back with more food and a baby.

“What is that?” Gavin asked.

“What’s it look like?” Jim asked.

“Guys, I can’t see. What’s going on?” Tom asked.

“They brought back a fucking baby! Where’d you even get that thing?”

“The house we robbed,” Jim said.

“It’s a long story,” Tamara said.

“We got time,” Gavin said.

Jim bit his lip and looked at the ground. Tamara tried to catch his eyes,
couldn’t, and told the story herself.

The camp went silent.

Little Kevin looked around in confusion. “So what’s the baby’s name?”

“We’re not naming it!” Gavin said.

“Why not?” Jenny asked, hands on her hips.

“Because it’s not ours! We don’t need another mouth to feed!”

“So what do you propose we do? Just leave her to die?” Jim asked.

“That’s what you did with her mother, isn’t it?”

He reeled back as if slapped.

“Hey!” Tom snapped. “Let’s not go there. What JT did was an accident. And like
it or not, this kid is our responsibility now.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t name her though,” Shravan said, surprising everyone. “I
mean… It’s just—she’s so little. I feel like—like maybe she won’t last long
enough to need a name.” She was looking down at the ground by the time she
finished.

Jim looked at the little baby in his arms and held her tighter.

“How about for now we call her Baby?” Dani said.
===============================================================================
Things were okay for the next week. No one came by and bothered them. They
didn’t run into any of the other kids who had made it out or any adults. They
stayed in their little camp and ate dry oatmeal and uncooked noodles. They
found a fast-running stream not too far off and got water from it.

Jenny and Dani quickly became best friends. Tom took to taking care of Baby as
his way of contributing. Shravan wrote poetry in the notebook she had in her
backpack from school and shared some of it if you went up to talk to her. Erin
tried to make a homemade knife out of a rock she sharpened and a short stick.

For a while, things were okay.

Then they ran out of food.

“We could try to rob someone again,” Jim said.

“Right, because that went so well last time,” Gavin rolled his eyes.

“Hey, we got food, didn’t we?” Jenny said.

“Yeah, and a baby! Someone died!”

“That won’t happen again,” Jim said. “And do you have a better idea?”

“Yeah, actually,” Gavin said. “We go out to the fields and steal from those.
It’s much safer.”

“That food’s all diseased though,” Tamara said.

“It’s just a little fungus. We can scrape it off and it’ll be fine. Like eating
around the brown part on a banana.”

“Sure, if the brown part were mold,” Erin said.

“It’s not mold,” Jim said.

“See?” Gavin crowed.

“That doesn’t mean I think it’s safe,” he added.

“Well, whatever. This isn’t a fucking democracy, and nobody here is in charge.
I think it’ll be fine, and so I’m gonna eat it, and then you’re all gonna eat
your words.”
===============================================================================
Gavin got sick. Bad sick. He was shaking and feverish and sweating. His skin
was flushed red and hot to the touch. He kept vomiting up nothing.

The other children avoided him like the plague.

He died alone three days later.

The kids dug a pit and dragged his body into it. Tom stood over it, rocking
Baby, and cleared his throat.

“Here lies Gavin Drewes. He was a nice guy. Sort of. I mean! Um. He was a nice
guy. We’re all going to miss him. And I’m sure his family will too,” he said.
“May he rest in peace.”

“May he rest in peace,” some of them echoed. Angela threw a few dandelions on
top of the body.

They covered it with dirt.
===============================================================================
Jim woke up that night to the sound of something being eaten. Sloppy, wet
chewing and tearing. Flesh being rended.

He sat up with a jolt.

There were three wild dogs tearing into Gavin’s body. Feasting.

“No!” he cried, leaping up and running towards them. “No no no no no!”

Other kids started waking up and shouting similarly when they saw what was
happening. They beat the dogs back with sticks and yelling and a log from the
fire.

But it was too late. Gavin’s body was a mess. The putrid stench of death was
everywhere. His intestines and organs were spilling out, weak skin flayed and
torn, muscles shredded and half-eaten underneath. His throat was missing.

Angela started crying, and Tamara ushered her away, shushing and comforting.

Now they knew why people were always buried at least six feet under.
***** Hunter *****
They ate grass.

Grass fucking sucks.

They started getting jumpy with each other. Agitated. On edge. It was weird
because the hunger didn’t seem that bad anymore. Jim knew in his head that that
was a very bad sign. But he couldn’t bring himself to care. He felt less
hungry.

And really, wasn’t that a good thing?

They weren’t drinking as much either. Didn’t feel thirsty for some reason.
Their skin got dry and cracked, and they all had to go to the bathroom a lot
less. They were all so sleepy too.

Things mattered less and less. Drinking didn’t matter. Eating didn’t matter.
They went through the motions when they could, and barely that.

Angela got scurvy.

Her mouth got all kinds of messed up. At first they thought she was just losing
baby teeth. But then she was losing far too many and her gums looked weird and
so did her tongue. Her skin was cracked and bleeding all over and covered in
bruises, the slightest bump injuring her way more than it should and then
simply not healing.

It takes eight to twelve weeks to fully starve to death. They had no intention
of letting it get that far.

They engineered traps in a wide perimeter around the camp. They caught a couple
of squirrel-like things and one native creature that was a bit similar to a
rabbit.

They ate squirrels. They drank water. They ate grass. It wasn’t enough. They
were all suffering from malnutrition within a month.

They needed more food.
===============================================================================
Jim led Tom by the hand over to the stream. Tom carefully peeled the
bloodstained shirt off his face, wincing as he went. He dipped the thing in the
water and washed it clean, scrubbing for a solid fifteen minutes to get all the
dried blood off.

Wordlessly, he handed the shirt over to Jim.

He picked it up and carefully dabbed at the older boy’s face, gently washing
blood away. He cleared all of it off his face, his throat, his ear, some of it
was in his hair. He gave the gave the empty eye socket a wide berth, and handed
the shirt back.

Tom rinsed it off again and then tried to clean his wound. He hissed and pulled
the shirt away. Stoically, he steeled himself and tried again. He dabbed into
the socket and grit his teeth, cleaning with feather-light touches.

He washed the blood off the shirt for the third time and wrapped the soaking
cloth back around his head. Jim dimly registered that that had to be cold. Tom
was probably going to catch a head cold. That was just what he needed.

“You’re gonna need a better bandage,” Jim said.

“Yeah, you probably want your shirt back, don’t you?”

“No, that’s not what I meant. I mean—we need to do something about your eye or
it’s going to get infected.”

Tom grimaced. “Do you see any dermal regenerators lying around?”
===============================================================================
Jim, Dani, and Hunter were checking the traps and wandering around. It was a
good excuse to get out of the camp. It was a chore and it was gruesome and it
sucked, but it beat sitting around and thinking about how hungry they were.

Jim slung a low-crawling mammal of some sort over his shoulder. Dani was
carrying three dead squirrels, and Hunter was on the lookout for any predators
or prey that might be lurking around, as he was the most observant one in the
camp, even moreso than Shravan.

Suddenly, he tugged on his sister’s sleeve and started signing rapidly. Dani
passed off her squirrels to Jim and replied.

“What? What’s going on?” he asked. Dani put a finger to her lips and glared
sternly. Jim took the hint.

Hunter started creeping towards the base of the mountain, and the other two
followed. He led the children to a cave hidden partially by a large bush.

Dani got ready the spear Erin had made for her, hoisting it up, poised to
strike. Jim looked around and grabbed a big rock.

They snuck into the cave. Their footsteps were mouse-silent and slow going,
careful, cautious. Hunter put a hand up and they all came to a stop.

There was a massive creature curled up in deep slumber at the back of the cave.
It had thick gray fur and a long snout and the general physique of a bear, but
slightly more wolfish. It was huge, bigger than the three of them combined. It
would take at least five kids to carry its corpse back to the camp. Its meat
would be enough to feed them all for weeks.

Dani threw the spear.

It bounced off the creature’s back and it blinked awake, eyes latching onto
them.

“Run!” Jim shrieked. He whipped the rock at the bear-wolf as hard as he could,
and the thing growled and stood to chase them. The kids sprinted out of the
cave like their lives depended on it.

They were running, weaving around trees and jumping over logs and rocks and
running. The bear-wolf was gaining on them with every bound. They weren’t gonna
make it. They weren’t gonna make it. They weren’t gonna—

Hunter tripped.

The creature was on him in an instant, and Jim heard a sickening crack as it
snapped through the eight-year-old’s leg. Hunter was howling in pain,
screaming, crying for his sister, crying for Dani to turn back and help.

They kept running.

They ran until the adrenaline wore off and they were hopelessly lost and it was
close to sunset and the others had to be worried by now. Jim had dropped their
haul for the day somewhere along the way, probably early on. When they returned
to camp, it would be empty-handed and minus one child.

One less mouth to feed.

Jim cursed himself for even thinking that.

They slowed to a walk and started heading back, retracing their steps. It was
quiet. Jim could hear his blood pounding in his ears. He wished more and more
that they still had Dani’s spear.

“I tripped him,” she said suddenly. “I knew we weren’t gonna make it, and so I
tripped him. Would’ve tripped you, but you were too far away.”

Jim looked at her.

“I don’t know why I did it. I didn’t even think about it. I just—I wanted to
live, and so… And so I tripped him,” she said. “I killed my own little
brother.”

He had nothing to say to that.
===============================================================================
“Where’s Hunter?” Bobbi asked.

“And the food?” asked Kevin.

“Hunter’s dead,” Jim said, because Dani couldn’t. The whole camp stilled.

“What happened?” Tamara asked.

“Some bear-wolf thing attacked us,” he said. Dani looked at him fearfully,
expectantly. He didn’t say anything more, and the group left it at that.
===============================================================================
Tarsus IV didn’t have a hospital. There was only eight thousand people. They
had a doctor’s office with a fully equipped operating room just in case. It was
rarely ever used.

The doctor had a lot more patients lately.

Jim and Tamara broke into the office in the middle of the night and stole a
spare dermal regenerator. They slipped out quietly, unseen and unheard.

“You sure you know how to use that thing?” Tom asked nervously.

“No,” Tamara said bluntly. “I am not a doctor.”

“I betcha I could figure it out,” Jim said. “I’m real good with technology.”

“You sure?” Tom asked. “This is serious business, JT.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know exactly what I’m doing, but no one else here knows
any more than I do, so I think I’m your best shot.”

Tom laughed hysterically. “Well isn’t that just reassuring?” He shoved the
dermal regenerator into Jim’s hands and took off the shirt-blindfold, his
remaining eye closed.

Jim flicked the machine on and set to work.
===============================================================================
The results were not pretty.

The bleeding had stopped, at least, and where there once had been a gaping hole
there was now a mangled knot of skin. Dermal regenerators are meant to be used
by trained professionals only. The entire side of Tom’s face was a mess of
warped and rigid scars, bumpy and raised. The skin was too thick in some areas
and too thin in others.

He looked like a monster come to life.

“Thank you,” he said.

Jim’s mouth quirked. “No problem.”
***** Angela *****
Angela got sick.

She developed a hacking, wheezing cough that made her throat scratchy and dry.
She was running a high fever and couldn’t stop shivering. She kept puking.

Tamara held her hair back while she vomited into a bush. Suddenly, she frowned.
“Angela, have you been eating bugs?”

“Yeah? I was hungry,” she said.

Tamara closed her eyes.

“It’s the same thing Gavin had,” Jim said. “Bugs eat the crops, crops are
covered in fungus, you eat the bugs, and…”

“And what?” Angela asked. Tom glared at him.

“…And you get sick,” he finished.
===============================================================================
She died in her sleep that night, while Tamara was holding her. She cried
silently until dawn when the other kids woke.

They buried her in a much tinier, much deeper grave next to Gavin. Bobbi put
dandelions on top. Tamara gave a eulogy, wiping tears the whole time, and Kevin
was sniffling.

“Where did Angie go?” he asked.

“In the ground,” Jenny said.

“When does she come back? We were gonna play tag later. She promised.”

“She isn’t coming back, Kev,” Tamara said.

“Why not?” he whined.

“Because she’s dead!” Dani snapped. Everyone turned to look at her. “She’s dead
just like Hunter and Gavin and she’s never coming back. She’s dead.”

Kevin started bawling, which set Baby off bawling, and then Bobbi was holding
back sniffles too. Dani rolled her eyes and stormed off.
===============================================================================
“Hey,” Jim said, taking a seat next to Dani, where she was leaning against a
tree and angrily pulling up grass. “You okay?”

“No! Why the hell would I be okay?” she snapped. “Sorry. Sorry, I didn’t mean
to—I’m just… mad, I guess. None of this should be happening.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “It sucks.”

She nodded.

For a while, they just sat there, and Jim pretended not to notice the tears
rolling down her cheeks. Then her crying grew more fervent, her breathing
becoming ragged, and he pulled the nine-year-old in for a hug, shushing and
rubbing circles on her back.
===============================================================================
It had been two months since Kodos shot up the school. Fifty-eight days, to be
exact. Erin kept track, carving tally marks into a tree with her knife every
morning. She was quickly becoming the camp’s very own weapons specialist. Half
the traps they had out were her design.

Shravan’s poetry got darker. Her blue skin had a new pallor to it, and
something about her eyes had changed too, but Jim couldn’t pinpoint what. Her
antennae seemed more… droopy.

Jenny got even more aggressive and confrontational. Her friendship with Dani
quickly dissolved into a bitter rivalry. Neither girl would speak to the other
except to deliver cutting insults.

The overall mood of the camp was grim. Baby was constantly crying and they had
no diapers for her. They were forced to improvise with fern fronds, and her
diet of ground-up grass mush and the occasional bitter leaf was definitely not
healthy or well-received.
===============================================================================
Andoria was a frozen moon, covered in ice and snow. On Tarsus IV, the air felt
like hot soup sometimes. Shravan was not doing well.

She cut her jeans into shorts and tied her shirt up around the midriff. She
started wearing her long, thick white hair in two braids to keep it off her
neck. She had a bit of a teenage alien cowgirl vibe going on, and it would be
cool if it wasn’t a medical necessity and she wasn’t sweating buckets the
entire time.

There were some days she couldn’t even get up. Things were better at night,
when the temperatures dropped and she would sleep on the edge of camp, as far
away from the fire as she could get and spread out on the cold ground and cool
pine needles. She started staying awake at night more and sleeping during the
day.

Tom made her drink a ton of water and was constantly checking her temperature
with the back of his hand. He would make her sit in the shade and rest with him
and Baby a lot. She wasn’t allowed to go check the traps or exert herself too
much. She stayed close to the stream most days and sometimes just sat in it
like it was an icy, shallow Jacuzzi.

Tom worried.

It was fine.
===============================================================================
“We need to go on another raid,” Erin said, sharpening a newly-made spear.

Tamara shook her head. “Uh-uh. Too risky.”

“But necessary,” she said.

“Getting caught means getting killed. The situation at the colony has to be
even worse by now. Everyone’ll be on high alert and paranoid. You step foot in
that colony, you’re dead.”

“If we don’t go, we’re dead then too,” Jim said. “Grass and meat isn’t enough.”

“It’s working for now. Look, it’s not worth risking your lives to try and get
some cans of green beans or whatever,” Tamara said.

“When will it be? We’re just gonna get weaker and weaker if we don’t do
something,” Jim said. “For pete’s sake, just look at Bobbi! She looks like a
skeleton with skin stretched over it.”

Tamara bit her lip. “Well I’m not going.”

“Fine. I’ll do it myself,” he said.

“No, you won’t,” Erin said. She strapped her knife back into her belt and
hefted the spear to her other hand. “I’m coming with you.”

“Me too,” Dani said.

“Guys, this is a terrible idea,” Tom said. Baby cooed in his arms and he
shushed her, bouncing her up and down gently.

“You got any better ones?” Jim asked.
===============================================================================
They saw a man get into his hovercar and leave for the day. They crept over to
the door and Jim set to work hacking, Dani and Erin covering him and keeping
guard, homemade weapons pointing outward.

A click and a hiss as the door whooshed open.

They slunk inside and closed the door after them.

They began methodically raiding the kitchen, loading down their shirts with
cans and boxes. Jim checked the stasis unit and found containers full of
leftovers, leftovers from actual home-cooked meals.

“Jackpot!” he said. He began loading up.

A heavy-set man appeared at the doorway, glowering, and the kids froze.

The man thought fast and yanked out a butcher’s knife from the block sitting on
the counter and the kids took off running, Erin dropping food as she fumbled
for the door. Jim and Dani rushed out ahead of her, and the man lunged,
catching her in the arm just as she slipped out. She cried out, and the man was
screaming obscenities, chasing them, but the kids were small and quick and
light on their feet and he gave up soon enough.
===============================================================================
They dropped their winnings by the died-out fire and heaved, slowly catching
their breath. Erin clutched at her upper arm in apparent pain, doing little to
stop the bleeding.

“What happened?” Tamara asked.

“There was more than one person in the house,” she said dryly, still
breathless. She winced and sank down to the ground. Jim got out the dermal
regenerator from its designated spot against a nearby tree and went to sit next
to her. She rolled up her sleeve, revealing a large, deep gash running across
her upper arm, bleeding heavily and with fibers from her shirt stuck in it.

“Get me some water,” he said. Dani nodded, and ran off to get one of their
water bottles from the backpacks. She brought it back along with a few leaves.

Only two of the kids had had water bottles in their bags on the day of the
shooting, so they didn’t really use them for drinking that often. They mostly
just went to the stream, and the water bottles were refilled there and used
when it was the middle of the night or someone was too weak or sick to get up.

Jim ran water over the wound, then got a leaf wet and wiped the fibers out with
it, Erin hissing in pain as he did so. He cleaned it as good as he could get
under the circumstances, and then started up the dermal regenerator.

The cut had been extremely deep. The regenerator patched up the skin alright,
but it left a large, angry pink scar in its place, raised and bumpy, the type
that would fade to white in the sun after some time.

Erin rolled her sleeve back down and it was soaked to the cuff in blood. She
went to the stream to wash it off before it could dry that way.
***** Jenny *****
Jim dug little pits in the ground and put pebbles in them. He taught Kevin how
to play mancala.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” he asked.

“The king of the universe,” Kevin said. Jim nodded.

“That’s cool. I wanna be a scientist.”

Kevin wrinkled his nose. “But then you have to do science.”

“I like science.”

“I don’t. I think school’s boring.”

“You’re a kindergartener. You’ve only been in school for like, half a year. You
gotta give it a chance.”

He rolled his eyes. “Okay, Mom.”

Jim laughed and ruffled his hair.

“Hey! Give that back!” Shravan yelled across the camp. Jenny turned her head
back to stick her tongue out, still running.

Tom set Baby down and stormed over to the two girls. “What’s going on here?”

“Jenny stole my food!”

“I did not!”

“Yes you did!” She shoved her.

“It’s not like it matters! You’re gonna die anyway!”

Shravan gasped and Tom glared, ready to cut in with a reprimand, when suddenly
the Andorian launched herself at Jenny, the two of them quickly becoming a
tangle of flying limbs as they fought over a half-eaten bag of chips.

Jenny decked Shravan straight across the face, breaking her nose with a loud
crack and making blue blood spill out everywhere. Shravan kicked her legs out
from underneath her, and Jenny went down, the bag flying out of her hand and
spilling chips all over the grass. She was back up in an instant, grunting and
throwing punches and kicks wherever she could.

The girls were pretty evenly matched, twelve and thirteen, only one year apart.
But Jenny was an athlete and a fighter and Shravan was a quiet, peaceful kid at
heart. Even though she was younger, it looked like Jenny was gonna win.

Tom, Jim, and Tamara were all screaming, trying to pull the girls off each
other, to no avail. Jenny yanked at one of Shravan’s braids, whipping her head
forward straight into her fist. Shravan yelped and slammed her foot down on the
girl’s toes, then shoved her hard.

Jenny stumbled back and tripped backwards over a rock. Her head made a
sickening crack as it connected with a tree trunk. Her eyes fell closed, and
she was completely still.

Nobody said a word. Shravan clapped a hand over her mouth, tears springing to
her eyes.

Baby cried in the silence. It sounded deafening.
===============================================================================
They dug a third grave.

“Here lies Jenny Tyler,” Tamara said. “She was a good kid. She had a big heart
and she loved life. She was a soccer player, a baseball player, and tough as
nails, through and through. She will be missed.”

Bobbi put more dandelions on top of the grave. So did Dani.
===============================================================================
“You know what my last words to her were?” Dani asked Jim later, by the fire.
Her voice was hoarse and strained, like she was trying really hard not to cry.
“I called her a bitch.”

“You didn’t mean it,” Jim said automatically.

She shook her head. “I did. When I said it, I did. And then she stuck her
middle finger up at me and walked away.” She sniffled. “We gave each other our
comm numbers, on the first day. We wanted to keep in touch. After.”

Jim draped an arm over her shoulders and pulled her close, feeling numb.

She was only nine.

He was only thirteen.

Every single one of them was too young to be here.

Tom rocked Baby by the fire, softly singing her a lullaby, and all the other
kids pretended they weren’t listening to it as if it was for them.
===============================================================================
Things were okay. There were nine of them left, and things were okay. They ran
out of the food they had stolen in the raid, and that was okay too. Baby got
colic and wouldn’t stop crying, at all, ever, and that was annoying and meant
none of them got any sleep but ultimately it was okay.

Then the real hunger set in.

Erin’s tally count reached 73 days. They were all malnourished. They were weak
and lethargic and lots of them had scurvy now and were starting to lose teeth.
They could all count their ribs. Their limbs looked like knobby bones that
happened to be covered in skin. Their eyes were sunken and dull, deep dark
shadows around them.

They were dying.
===============================================================================
“We need to do another raid,” Jim said tiredly.

“Hell no,” Tom said.

“What else are we gonna do, then? Just die?” he snapped.

“Maybe!” Tom bit back. Jim rolled his eyes and scowled.

“It’s like Gavin said. This place isn’t a democracy. I’m doing another raid
whether you guys agree to it or not.”

“I’m coming with you,” Dani said.

“No. No, you are not,” Tamara said. “You are nine and you are staying at the
camp where it is safe. If JT wants to risk his neck, then that’s fine, but I’m
not letting him risk yours too.”

Dani glared. “You aren’t the boss of me. If I wanna go with JT, then I’ll go
with JT.”

Tom gave Jim a look that told him very clearly what was expected here. He
sighed.

“Look, Dani… Maybe they’re right. Maybe you should stay behind,” he said.

“No! Why?!” She looked near tears.

“It’s too dangerous. Erin got hurt last time, and me and Tamara both nearly got
shot on the first time. You could get killed if you get caught. You’re too
young.”

“We’re all too young! You’re only thirteen! How come you get to go?”

“Because—Because it’s different with me.”

“How?! You aren’t even that much older than I am!”

“Dani, you’re like a little sister to me, and I want you to stay behind and be
safe,” he said.

She glared. She rose up from her seat and stormed away.

Tamara rubbed Jim’s back consolingly. “You did the right thing.”
===============================================================================
He wasn’t going to rob a house this time. He was going straight for the big
guns. Kodos’ warehouse.

He lurked outside of it for an entire day, sixteen hours. There were two guards
stationed outside the door. They changed every eight hours. For three minutes
during the shift change, the warehouse was unguarded.

He could hack the security lock in under three minutes.

He waited until both guards went away and then ran the short distance to the
door, fingers flying over the keys rapid-fire. He slipped in in two minutes and
nineteen seconds.

Now he had to wait eight hours for the next shift-change in order to leave.

He decided to take two huge bags of grain that weighed almost as much as he
did. The bags would be useful after they were emptied, too; they could use them
to carry food away on future raids.

Eight hours passed in mind numbing boredom.

He had been away from the camp for over a full day now. This was officially the
longest raid ever. Thankfully, it wouldn’t take this long in the future, now
that he knew the schedule. He figured it would take a round eight hours and
that’s it.

He watched the warehouse clock tick down.

This sucked.

Finally, the clock chimed the end of the final hour. Jim heaved a sigh of
relief, hefted the two grain bags onto his shoulder, and headed for the door.

The guards weren’t quite around the corner yet when he opened it.

“Hey!” one of them shouted.

Jim dropped the bags and ran.

A large hand jerked him back by the collar of his shirt and spun him around.
“So you’re the little brat who robbed the Carruthers a few weeks back.”

“Let’s bring him to Kodos,” the other said. “He’ll wanna execute him
personally. And find out how he did it.”

“Please!” Jim cried. “Please don’t! I’ll do anything! Please just let me go!”

The guard looked him up and down hungrily, but it was a different type of
hunger than Jim was used to. The guard looked back to his companion, who nodded
and grinned lecherously.

“Get down on your knees.”
===============================================================================
He returned to camp empty-handed and sniffling. He felt anxious and sad and
dirty and violated and a thousand other things that he couldn’t put a name to.
He was sure the other kids would be able to tell what had happened just by
looking at him somehow. They would be disgusted. They would probably kick him
out of the camp.

He was disgusting. And he hadn’t even gotten any food.

He was lucky, he supposed, that they kept their word and let him live. They
could have just as easily killed him afterwards.

They probably figured he would get hungry enough to come back eventually and
then they could do it again.

They had slapped him and pulled his hair and called him all sorts of names the
entire time and he could still feel them everywhere, in him, poisonous, worse
than the fungus. He felt like he knew what it was like to be infected like
that, to be rotting from the inside out. He would if that was what Gavin and
Angela had felt like.

His face was burning and his heart was pounding and he walked back into the
camp looking sheepish and holding back tears.

“JT!” Kevin yelled. He ran up and hugged him. “Where’s the food?”

“Sorry, Kev. I didn’t get any.”

“What happened?” Tamara asked, concern clear on her face.

“I, uh, a guard saw me. So I ran.”

“Well, thank god you got away,” she said, and gave him a hug too. Jim buried
his face in her shoulder and held on tight. The older girl kissed the top of
his head, almost motherly despite barely being older than him. “That must have
been so scary for you. No more raids, okay?” She ran her fingers through his
hair, soft, and it felt good on his aching scalp.

“No more raids.” He smiled weakly.
===============================================================================
He cried himself to sleep that night, biting his lip to keep silent, his back
turned to the others so they wouldn’t see.
***** Bobbi *****
Tom sang a lot. It was near-constant. It became the accepted background noise
of their camp. In name, it was to keep Baby quiet, but it kept the mood from
dropping too low for the rest of them too.

His favorite song to sing was—oddly enough—the unofficial Tarsan colonial
anthem. Beyond Antares, it was called. It was a running joke in the colony.
Tarsus IV actually was beyond Antares, and in the song that was used as a
metaphor for something being ridiculously far away.

They used to say—jokingly, of course—that Tarsus IV was so far away that it
could implode on itself and the rest of the Federation wouldn’t even notice.
The Tarsan star would have to go nova and then maybe the Council would send out
a science vessel to observe it or something.

It just really wasn’t that important of a colony. And there were so, so many of
them.

Tom’s voice drifted gently on the breeze.

“The skies are green and glowing
Where my heart is
Where the scented lunar flower’s growing
Somewhere beyond the stars
Beyond Antares

“I’ll be back, though it takes forever
Forever is just a day
Forever is just another journey
Tomorrow is a stop along the way
And let the years go fading

“Where my heart is
Where my heart is
Where my love eternal is waiting
Somewhere beyond the stars
Beyond Antares.”

Jim dreamt of green skies and white flowers and a stomach full of food.
===============================================================================
Jim vowed that if he ever got off this planet, he was never going to eat
another salad again in his life. That was what Tamara and Tom told them to
imagine the grass was. Just pretend it’s a salad and then it’s not so bad.

It tasted fucking nothing like a salad.

Jim hated salad now.

His mouth hurt constantly from the scurvy and he would be willing to give up a
minor appendage in exchange for a toothbrush. He had lost five teeth so far,
one of them being one of two front teeth. It made him feel like a
kindergartener.

His head was fuzzy all the time now. The pain came in waves. It was pain now,
not hunger. Hunger seemed too small of a word. Jim felt like his stomach was
trying to eat itself. If he remembered his biology correctly, then it probably
was.

When your body goes into starvation mode, it takes away your muscle mass before
going after your fat stores. Fat stores are like insurance, the last resort,
saved for when all hope is lost. The result was the kids got weak fast without
losing any noticeable amounts of weight at first.

At first.

Then they started burning through their fat stores.

Multiple organ failure wasn’t far away now.

They were catching less and less in their traps. They weren’t the only ones
hunting, of course. The animal population was taking a nosedive. Soon there
wouldn’t be any prey left.

The camp was a wide circle of bare dirt in a clearing now, all the grass long
since crushed, trampled, or eaten. They were having to go farther and farther
into the woods to get it. They started eating leaves off the trees to
supplement it.

The leaves tasted disgusting and were hard to keep down and gave them bathroom
troubles. They weren’t supposed to be eaten. They were a temporary solution at
best.

Then the fungus spread to the trees and their temporary solution was gone.

They ate dandelions, which actually were edible.

There weren’t that many dandelions.
===============================================================================
The kids kept food communally and rationed it out to each individual according
to their need, the little kids getting more. The food was in a pile near where
Tom usually sat.

It wasn’t that he was guarding it. They didn’t need to guard it.

Until Tamara caught Bobbi stealing from the pile while Tom slept.

She yanked her hand up and ripped the piece of charred meat away. “And just
what do you think you’re doing?”

“I—I was hungry, and—“

“Bobbi, we have rules. This food is for everyone. You’ve already gotten your
fair share for the day.”

“But it wasn’t enough!” she cried. “I’m so hungry! We have food, why can’t I
eat it?”

“Because we all need to eat it! We’re all hungry, Bobbi. You don’t see Dani
stealing food, do you? We all have to leave some for everyone else.”

Bobbi glared through her tears and lunged for the piece of meat, stuffing it in
her mouth before Tamara could react and eating it ravenously. Tamara took a
step back, shocked.

Bobbi dove on the pile of food and tore into it like a wolf, like a starving
person. She ate a whole day’s worth of rations within three minutes. Tamara
moved to pull her away, and the nine-year-old growled and scratched her,
drawing blood in long streaks and making Tamara yelp.

Bobbi was still feasting, and now Tom was awake, trying to shoo her away. Jim
leapt into the fray, trying to help Tamara pull her away, but Bobbi was savage,
kicking and screaming and elbowing them wherever she could.

She lurched suddenly and ran away from the pile. She braced herself against a
tree and puked up everything she had just eaten.

“Great,” Erin snarked.

Bobbi glared up at her, eyes feral.

“Bobbi, what the hell?” Jim asked. “That was days’ worth of food you just
wasted! It wasn’t yours to waste!”

“You can’t get away with this,” Tamara said. “We’ve let this shit go on long
enough. You need to be punished, and we need to have rules.”

“And what? You’re just in charge now?” Dani asked.

“No,” she said. “Maybe this place should be a democracy.”
===============================================================================
They held a council. They voted to make rules.

The Rules of Camp Sucky (as Dani insisted on calling it):

1. No stealing food.
2. No murder/violence.
3. Break a rule and you’re banished from the camp.

That was all they could really think of.

“So what? I’m banished now?” Bobbi cried.

“No, it’s not an ex post facto law. The rule wasn’t in place when you stole the
food, so you can’t be punished after the fact for breaking a law that didn’t
exist then,” Jim said.

Dani looked up at him. “You’re a nerd.”

“Just don’t do it again,” Tamara said.
===============================================================================
Bobbi did it again.

She lasted three whole days under the new rules.

They caught her raiding the food pile late at night when everyone else was
asleep. She had only gotten caught because Baby cried and happened to wake Tom
up right then.

She had probably been doing it every night.

The kids stood around her in a circle, unsympathetic, while she cried and
pleaded.

“Please! I swear I won’t do it again! I’ll do anything! Don’t kick me out! I’ll
die on my own!”

Jim suppressed a shudder.

“Shoulda thought of that before you decided to steal food from the rest of us,”
Erin said.

Her chin trembled, and she caught every one of their eyes, looking for pity,
for hope, for anything.

Tamara folded her arms. “You know the rules.”

Bobbi’s face crumbled. Fat tears rolled down her cheeks. She turned and fled,
sobbing the whole way.
===============================================================================
They found her body a week later. She had broken her ankle. That was the cause
of death—a broken ankle. Infection set in in her blood, she hadn’t been able to
walk to get food or water, she hadn’t been able to defend herself from
predators.

Bobbi Wilkins died of a broken ankle at the age of nine.

They took her body back to camp and buried her.
***** Shravan *****
The dead:

Gavin Drewes—death by fungus
Hunter Eames—murdered by his sister
Angela Martin—death by fungus
Jenny Tyler—killed in a fight over a bag of chips
Bobbi Wilkins—died of a broken ankle

The survivors:

Jim Kirk
Thomas Leighton
Tamara Sinclair
Kevin Riley
Dani Eames
Shravan Okch’l’noktway
Erin Molson
Baby

There were eight kids left. Jim could keep eight kids alive.
===============================================================================
Shravan was getting worse by the day. The heat was getting to her. The
environment was simply unsuitable for an Andorian. It had been fine when she
lived in the air-conditioned colony, but it wasn’t so fine anymore, at the
height Tarsus IV’s summer.

Erin chopped her hair off for her with a knife, shearing it into a haphazard
buzzcut. Long ropes of white hair fell to the ground. They used it as tinder.

Her antennae drooped more and more each day. She practically spent the entire
day laying down in the shade or in the stream, sweating out gallons of water
and dehydrating far faster than the others were.

Her skin dried to a paler shade of blue. It cracked and bled everywhere. She
had the worst case of scurvy of all of them. If the heat didn’t kill her, an
infection would.
===============================================================================
Jim’s fourteenth birthday came and went and he felt no need to tell the others.
He didn’t celebrate it.

109 days.
===============================================================================
One day, the traps caught nothing.

It wasn’t a big deal. They had some food stockpiled up. They just didn’t
acquire anything new that day, and it wasn’t a big deal.

They didn’t catch anything the next day either.

The next day they caught a single squirrel.

It became a pattern. The pattern started to dwindle. Pretty soon, they were
lucky to catch something—anything—even once a week.

Once every two weeks.

Two months passed since the first day they didn’t catch anything. It was day
178.

Shravan didn’t make it to day 179.
===============================================================================
“Are we gonna bury her?” Erin asked.

“What do you mean, ‘are we’? Of course we’re gonna bury her,” Jim said.

Tamara looked at Erin, seeming to catch something that Jim didn’t, and then she
looked to Tom.

“Seems… like a waste,” Erin said.

“What do mean? A waste of time? What else are we gonna do with it?” Dani asked.

“No,” Tom said. “She means… a waste of meat.”

Blood rushed past Jim’s ears. He heard nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing. This
was insane. This was insane.

“No,” he said. “No, we aren’t doing that to Shravan. She deserves a real burial
like all the other kids got.”

“JT—“

“No!”

Kevin looked around in confusion. “I don’t get it. Do what to Shravan?”

“Eat her!” Jim shrieked. “They want to eat her!”

Kevin’s eyes widened almost comically, his jaw dropping open. “But she’s our
friend. She read me poems for bedtime and always gave me hugs.”

“We’re not eating her,” Jim said.

Tamara and Tom looked at each other.
===============================================================================
They butchered Shravan into steaks and cooked her body over the fire.

Jim’s mouth watered at how good it smelled and he hated himself.

Within a half an hour, he was the only one in the camp still stubbornly
refusing to eat. Dani came and sat next to him and offered him a steak cut from
Shravan’s calves.

His stomach growled. Dani looked at him with big, wide eyes.

He took the steak.
===============================================================================
Andorian tastes like chicken. If Jim had some seasoning, he wouldn’t have known
the difference. It tasted divine. It was the best meal he’d had in months.

He forced himself not to puke it all back up.
===============================================================================
Shravan’s meat lasted them one week and then they were right back where they
started: starving.

The word starving was starting to lose all meaning to Jim. It didn’t seem
strong enough. ‘Starving’ was what you said you were when you skipped breakfast
that morning. This, this was a whole nother level.

Famished. Ravenous. Wasting away. To be hungry.

None of them fit. None of them even made sense. Standard needed new words to
describe what Jim was going through. None of the current ones were good enough.
===============================================================================
Kevin was getting too thin. He would be the next to go if something didn’t
change.

Jim smiled at him and played mancala and talked brightly about the future,
always implying that they would have one. Kevin became his little best buddy,
practically attached to his hip and having no small amount of hero worship.

He had big brown eyes and curled up next to Tom when he sang Baby lullabies.

He didn’t deserve to die.
===============================================================================
Jim snuck out of camp that night and walked the three miles into the colony.
His heart was in his throat. He felt sick to his stomach, but then, he always
felt sick to his stomach.

He sorta wanted to die rather than do this.

He thought of Kevin, he thought of Dani, and he steeled himself.

He walked straight up to the guards at the warehouse. They immediately levelled
their phasers at him. He kept walking.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” one of them barked.

Different shift. Different guards.

“I’m a kid,” he said. “Not supposed to be alive. But if you let me in the
warehouse for five minutes, I’ll make it well worth your while.”
===============================================================================
He came back in the early morning carrying two huge bags of grain on his
shoulder like a trophy. A returning champion. He plastered a huge, victorious
smile on his face. The kids clamored up to greet him, shouting praise and
exclamations.

“How did you get this?” Tamara asked, eyes lit up with hunger and approval.

“Robbed Kodos’s warehouse,” he said cockily. The kids gasped and exclaimed.

They all sat around the fire, passing around handfuls of grain like it was
popcorn, and Jim regaled them all with a tale of his great heroism. He told
them all how he had lain in wait until just the right moment, how he had hacked
the panel with lightning speed, how he had slipped out under the cover of
darkness, undetected, like a super spy.

They laughed and told stories and jokes all around. Tamara kissed Tom, to Dani
and Kevin’s very vocal protests of how gross that was. The kids wouldn’t stop
thanking Jim. Or smiling.

For the first time in months, they were happy.

So Jim figured it was okay. He would be okay. It was just sex. It’s not like it
mattered. Lots of people had sex with strangers whose names they didn’t know.
It was just one of those things that adults did. Jim had just gotten there a
little faster than most people, but whatever. He had always been a fast
learner.

It was just sex. It didn’t matter. It was just sex.

It was just sex.

Jim kept telling himself that all night. He looked at Tom and Tamara, at the
way Dani laughed, at the hero worship in Kevin’s eyes, and he reminded himself
that things were okay. This was okay.

He had done it for a purpose. He had done it for these seven kids. He’ll be
damned if he lets anything happen to them.
What happened to Shravan was never going to happen again. He’d do anything to
ensure it.
***** Tamara *****
Chapter Notes
     I’m going to stop killing so many characters soon I promise
It became a thing. Once every month, Jim took the two empty grain bags to the
warehouse and came back with them full to the brim. No one ever questioned it.
Why would they? He was JT. He was just that good.

Tom and Tamara kissed a lot more often and took to sleeping next to each other.
Some nights they would sneak off into the woods, and Jim pretended really hard
not to notice. Thankfully, the other kids were always asleep.

They seemed to actually be in love. Something about that struck Jim the wrong
way. Made him feel a slight edge of fear. He wasn’t sure why or who for, but
all of his instincts were screaming that that was a terrible thing. That
something bad would happen because of it.

After all, when did anything good ever happen on Tarsus IV?
===============================================================================
“It’s day 365,” Erin said. “We should do something.”

“Like what? Celebrate?” Jim asked.

“Well, yeah,” she said. “We survived a whole year.”

“We didn’t survive. Almost half the camp has died.”

“Yeah, but not the entire camp,” she said. “And that’s sort of a miracle, isn’t
it?”
===============================================================================
They couldn’t exactly do anything special to throw a party or anything. But Jim
surprised them. He made an extra trip to the warehouse and spent a whole
twenty-four hours there and he came back sore and drained but carrying a bounty
of the most delicious foods.

They made hard, flat biscuit things. Dani almost cried with joy.

It was worth it, Jim told himself. He was doing what he had to do. He was
keeping his kids safe and fed.

===============================================================================
They’d all had birthdays by now. Jim was fourteen. Erin was twelve. Dani was
ten and Kevin was six. Tamara was fifteen and Tom was sixteen.

They were thin and lean and too short for their age, especially the younger
kids. Scrawny. Underfed. Not growing like they should.

But they were no longer in danger of dying, and that was all thanks to Jim. So
it was worth it. He had to do it. He had no choice. The alternative was death
for him and all his friends.

He had no choice.
===============================================================================
Tamara’s stomach started getting rounder. Jim noticed. They all noticed. No one
was talking about it. It became the elephant in the room.

Sometimes she and Tom would whisper furiously at each other when they thought
no one was looking. Tom seemed drawn, worried. Way older than sixteen. Tamara
took to biting her nails.

They started giving her bigger rations without ever discussing it or saying
why. She accepted the change without comment.

Tom started trying to teach Baby to walk and use the restroom on her own. It
was slow going. She could now happily babble and crawl around the camp. The
kids had to keep a closer eye on her. They didn’t particularly mind. Baby was
adorable, all blonde curls and big blue eyes and happy baby squeals.

“We should name her,” Erin said. “She might actually live. She’s what, one and
a half now? We have a steady source of food. She might get to grow up. And we
can’t keep calling her Baby forever.”

“Yeah, especially if—“ Dani looked to Tamara’s stomach and trailed off.

“Okay. Who votes that we give Baby a real name?” Tom asked. Every hand in the
camp shot up.

They started throwing suggestions around and voting and vetoing them all. It
was the most excitement the camp had seen in months, since the one-year party.

They settled on the name Lenore.

“Lenore what? Doesn’t she need a last name too?” Erin asked.

“Lenore Fungus. I still say we name her Fungus,” Kevin said.

“We’re not naming her Fungus,” Dani said.

“Why not?”

“Because that’s a stupid—“

“What about Lenore Tarsus?” Tamara asked. “She is the Tarsus baby.”

“Or Lenore Leighton,” Jim said. “Tom’s practically adopted her anyway.”

Tom blushed furiously and Jim held back a laugh. Dani didn’t.

“I like Lenore Leighton,” Tamara said. Tom’s eyes widened comically huge. He
let out a breathy, excited laugh and pulled her close, placing a kiss on her
cheek.

“Then Lenore Leighton it is.”

Erin made a mock retching sound, and the kids laughed, Tamara and Tom blushing
and smiling.
===============================================================================
418 days.
===============================================================================
Jim approached the guards, already taking his shirt off and flashing them a
seductive smile. He knew exactly what they liked by now. All the guards that
worked the warehouse knew of that little arrangement. He suspected that they
were all covering it up from Kodos, too.

A guard grabbed him by the wrist and slammed him against the warehouse wall,
his other hand going down yank at Jim’s pants and spread his legs apart
forcefully. He bit down on his neck hard, and Jim allowed himself to hiss in
pain loudly, just what he wanted. He writhed underneath the guard, making a
pretense of struggling.

The man was already half-hard in his pants.

A gasp sounded from the nearby bushes. Tamara walked out, jaw dropped, eyes
horrified.

“This is how you’ve been getting food?!” she shrieked.

Both guards levelled phasers at her, the one making sure to still keep Jim
pinned to the wall.

“You fucking rapists!” she raged. She flung herself at the guards, fists
flying, doing her best to yank Jim away from them, and he was yelling, telling
her it wasn’t like that, that he agreed to this, but she wasn’t listening or
that just made her angrier and—

A guard shot her in the head with a phaser set to kill.
===============================================================================
Jim walked back to the camp in a daze.

“Where’s Tamara?” Tom asked. Jim dropped the bags of food by the fire.

“Why did she follow me?” he asked quietly.

“Wanted to see how you did it. I, uh… It’s pretty dangerous to rely completely
on just one person for all our food,” he said. “I know in the past, whenever
someone offered to go with you, you always said no, but that’s just
strategically a bad move. And Tamara knew that. So… she followed you. You
aren’t mad, are you? And where is she, by the way?”

“Tamara’s dead,” he said numbly.

Tom froze. “What?”

“Tamara’s dead,” he repeated. “A guard saw her. She got shot in the head with a
phaser.”

The camp went still. No one had died in eight whole months, not since Shravan.
They had started to think the rest of them might all survive or something crazy
like that. They had gotten complacent. They had started to think they were
safe.

“What happened to the body?” Tom choked out.

Jim shook his head. “Guards took it. Burned it.”
===============================================================================
They had a memorial service anyway. They put a marker in the ground and Erin
made a flower chain to go around it. Like a wreath.

They made ones posthumously for Hunter and Shravan too.

Tom sang Beyond Antares and the kids stood around their little homemade
graveyard. A few of them even found it in themselves to cry.
***** Erin *****
Chapter Notes
     I realized I had just killed over half my characters, so here’s a
     fluff chapter to make up for it before the real shit starts going
     down
Things went back to normal and Jim dimly registered how morbid that was, that
death had become normal. The only thing that changed was Tom. He got more
withdrawn. Quieter. He sang more, but it wasn’t like it used to be. Now it was
like he was afraid what would happen if he stopped.

Jim heard him crying sometimes. The other kids must have too. No one mentioned
it. What could they say? Sorry for your loss? That was—They weren’t adults
making platitudes. This was real life. This was their reality.

For a while, they had forgotten it included death. Stupid of them. Stupid of
Tom. Falling in love was the dumbest thing a person could do.

Jim cursed himself. It wasn’t Tom’s fault. It had been an accident. He had
forgotten how dangerous things were. That had to be it. Towards the end, even
Tom and Tamara had known the baby would only mean bad news. It had been
doubtful that either of them would have made it through childbirth, or if they
had, then not much longer after that. Even if by some miracle they had both
lived, the last thing this camp was equipped to deal with was a newborn.

Jim watched as Tom held Lenore close and inhaled her hair. He had been even
more affectionate with her, since. Like he was afraid he would lose her too.

Jim was running the camp now. Tom was in no position to do it, and he was the
second-oldest. Everyone else had died.

Gavin. Tamara. Shravan. Jenny. Bobbi. Hunter. Angela.

Tom. Erin. Dani. Kevin. Lenore.

Oldest to youngest, dead to living. Their little graveyard had almost two full
rows in it.

Maybe it was a good thing Tamara had only gotten to her second trimester. If
she had carried the baby to term… Jim didn’t think Tom could take walking past
that tiny of a grave every time he had to go to the stream. He was having a
hard enough time as is.
===============================================================================
“Jim,” Dani said. “Truth or dare?”

“Dare,” he said automatically.

“Oh, come on, you always choose dare,” Erin said.

“Yeah,” Kevin agreed.

He shrugged. “Sorry, guys. I already chose it, and you know there are no take-
backs. That’s the rule.”

Dani narrowed her eyes at him. “I dare you to choose truth for your next five
turns in a row.”

Jim blanched.

“Ooh yeah! That’s a good one!” Kevin said.

Jim rolled his eyes pointedly. “Fine, whatever. I’m not chicken. I’ve got
nothing to hide. Tom, your turn. Truth or dare?”

“Truth,” he said.

“What is the most illegal thing you have ever done?”

“JT, we’re fugitives.”

He waved his hand at that. “Doesn’t count. There were extenuating
circumstances. Now give us a real answer.”

“Umm, well aside from all the shit we’ve done to survive here, which apparently
does not count, uh… One time I littered?”

Erin coughed. “Nerd.”

“Whatever. Erin, your turn. Truth or dare?”

“Dare,” she said without hesitation.

“I dare you to climb that tree.”

“Oh, that’s a wuss dare. Give me something better.”

“Dare her to jump out of it,” Jim suggested.

“Yeah!”

“I’m not sure that’s such a great—“

“Too late, I’m jumping out of the tree.”

She took the knives out of her belt first, just in case, and set to climbing.

“Erin, don’t do this. You’re gonna break your neck,” Tom said.

“Yeah yeah, whatever, Dad,” she said. Dani snickered.

She stood on the lowest sturdy branch of the tree and took a deep breath. And
then launched herself into space.

Crack!

She cried out in pain. The children rushed to her side.

Erin’s leg was twisted at an unnatural angle. White, shiny, blood-slicked bone
was protruding through her skin, having shredded muscles and arteries on its
way out. Blood gushed from the wound in copious amounts. Several key, important
vessels had been severed.

Erin was screaming.

“Quick, get the dermal regenerator,” Jim yelled. Dani nodded, and went to fetch
it, all but shoving it into his hands. He set it on the ground and took the two
halves of Erin’s leg, preparing to set it.

“You might wanna brace yourself,” he said. She nodded, and Tom produced a small
stick for her to bite down on.

Jim set the break as closely as he could and she screamed.
===============================================================================
The skin over top and the veins themselves were repaired with a dermal
regenerator but what lay underneath was still a mess. Erin needed a bone
knitter and about an hour in a bioregenerative field to repair the muscle
damage. As it was, her leg was currently being held together by a stick, scraps
of fabric, and artificially grown skin cells. It was not an ideal situation.

It got infected.

The skin around the break was red and inflamed and puffy, looking entirely
unhealthy and very painful. It got worse every single day.

“We need to cut your leg off,” Jim said. “Before the infection gets to your
blood.”

Erin stared at him for a long moment. She sucked in a breath and nodded. “Do
it.”

She was brave for a twelve-year-old.
===============================================================================
They burned Erin’s leg.

They couldn’t just leave it out to rot. It would attract predators—if there
were even any left. And they couldn’t eat it either, because it was infected
and filled with pus.

So they burned it.

It smelled putrid. The kids watched it shrivel and pop and fall apart with
morbid fascination.
===============================================================================
“We never finished our game,” Erin said. Jim looked at her questioningly. “Of
truth or dare.”

“I reserve the right to veto any and all dares from now on,” Tom said sternly.
And Tom’s stern glares were really something, with the one eye and the half-
melted face.

“Yeah yeah. JT! Truth or dare? Wait, you have to choose truth, don’t you?”

“Oh, come on. You aren’t seriously going to hold me to that, are you?”

“Oh yes we are,” Erin said.

He rolled his eyes. “Fine. Hit me. What’s your question?”

“Have you… ever been kissed?” she asked. Dani giggled.

“No,” he said. “Kevin, my man. Truth or dare?”

“Dare!” he grinned widely.

Jim’s eyes danced around the camp. “I dare you to lick that rock. One from the
fire.”

The fire was dead now, had been for hours. The rocks inside the pit would be
cool and burned free of germs.

Kevin took one warily and stared at it. Closing his eyes, he licked it, real
fast, to the other kids’ cries of how gross that was.

“JT, I choose you,” he said. “Uhhh… What’s your favorite color?”

He shrugged. “Uh, green?”

The color of healthy plants and thriving life.

The skies are green and glowing.

“Alright, Dani. Truth or dare?” he asked.

“Truth!” she said.

“Have you ever had a crush on someone?”

She blushed hard. “Maybe.”

Erin snorted. “That’s a yes.”

“Oh, whatever, Erin! JT, let’s do you again.”

“Why is everybody picking on me today?”

“Because you never tell us anything. Y’know, we’ve lived together for a year
and four months now. You’d think you’d trust us,” Tom said.

“I do trust you,” Jim said. Erin rolled her eyes.

“Okay, I got one. What’s the most useless thing you know?” Dani said.

“This oughta be good,” Tom said, smiling slightly.

“Easy. Mitochondria are the power house of the cell.”

“Don’t you mean is?” Kevin asked.

“No. Mitochondria is the plural form. The singular is mitochondrion, M-I-T-O-C-
H-O-N-D-R-I-O-N.”

“Woooow. And I say it again: JT, you are a nerd,” Erin said. “Were you in the
spelling bee?”

“No. That was for seventh and eighth graders only. I never made it that far,”
he said. “Okay, now Tom. Truth or dare?”

“Truth,” he said easily.

“Who do you think is the Beyonce of the camp?”

“Oh, you, JT, it’s definitely you.” He grinned. “And would you look at that,
it’s your turn again. What’s the weirdest thing I should know about you?”

“I almost choked to death on that last tooth I lost to scurvy. Would’ve been a
hell of a way to die,” he said. “Kev! What about you? Truth or dare, my little
man?”

“Truth,” he said, wrinkling his nose, obviously displeased with his previous
dare.

“What’s your favorite color?” Jim smiled.

“Orange!” he said. “JT! Your turn again!”

“It’s his last truth; make it a good one,” Erin said.

“Who’s your favorite person at the camp?”

“You, little buddy,” he said, slinging an arm around Kevin’s shoulders and
pulling him close. The five-year-old beamed like he had just given him the
stars.
***** Lenore *****
Jim turned fifteen the day Erin broke her leg. It wasn’t worth mentioning.

They tried to saw a tree limb into a rudimentary prosthetic for her, but it
hurt so much that it wasn’t worth it. So Erin made herself crutches instead.
She took to helping Tom take care of Lenore. She built more and more traps that
continued to catch absolutely nothing, but Jim still checked them every day
with Dani.

“Do you think we’ll ever get out of here?” she asked one day.

“Course we will, Dani,” he said. “And then I’m gonna be a doctor and Kev’s
gonna be president of the universe and you’re gonna be… What are you gonna be?”

“A superstar,” she said plainly. He chuckled slightly. “What?” she asked.

“You know what the name Danica means?”

“No, what?” she asked, now interested.

“Morning star,” he said.

Her eyes widened. “Screw singing, I’m gonna be a spacewoman and have my own
star named after me!”
===============================================================================
It is day 495 when everything goes to shit.

The guards take Jim in the warehouse. They’ve been doing that lately. More
paranoid about getting caught, he figures.

It’s when they come out, Jim laden down with two huge bags of food, that they
see the angry mob. Headed up by Kodos himself.

Kodos looks furious.

But under that, Jim sees fear. The man is being held at phaserpoint by his own
citizens.

The revolution is successful.

“What the hell is going on here?”

“What, is that your kid? Have you been hiding that kid?”

“Oh, I see. The rest of us starve, while this privileged brat gets to eat like
a king!”

The crowd’s accusations grow louder and angrier and suddenly they’re shoving
their way into the warehouse, trampling Jim and the guards on their way in,
some pausing to throw in a few extra kicks at him for good measure. A boot
lands heavy on his chest and knocks the air out of him, clipping his chin on
the upstep. He curls in on himself protectively as feet thunder past.

His bags of food are yanked away and fought over viciously, adults tearing into
each other like savages. Someone gouges a woman’s eye out for a can of expired
ravioli. The mob quickly turns on itself, everyone trying to steal each other’s
loot, and the warehouse devolves into chaos. Barrels are upturned, boxes are
shredded open, fists and blood are flying everywhere.

Several people dropped their torches. The stored grain goes up like tinder.

People are screaming. People are running.

Some stay in the warehouse to fight, to eat, and Jim knows they’re gonna die in
there.

He grabs some nearby boxes and takes off.

People are fleeing the warehouse like rats off a sinking ship. The fight
spreads outdoors, never ceasing, adults clawing and fighting and biting for the
barest scraps of food. They’re chasing each other, wild dogs, rabid.

Some of them follow Jim, intent on stealing his food, or maybe they think he
has a stash hidden somewhere—he doesn’t know. He doesn’t care.

He drops the boxes in his arms and that makes some of them stop but apparently
the others are still mad, still out for blood over his special treatment while
they were suffering and they keep up the chase.

He can’t lead them back to the camp. He can’t.

He veers off and goes in an unknown direction in the woods. Adults are still
following him, a line of swaying torches and pounding feet.

Maybe they’ll eat him, he thinks grimly. They’re certainly hungry enough.

He hears shouting, higher-pitched, softer, and no. The kids. The kids saw the
torches. Or heard the shouting. He went too close to the camp and they saw him
and now they’re coming and fuck, they’re going to get themselves killed.

The kids are rushing after him, yelling, vengeful. Angry on his behalf.

“No! Turn back! Don’t follow me!” he calls.

“Fuck you, JT!” Erin yells. She’s holding a wailing Lenore, the only one not
moving. Even Tom is stumbling half-blind through the woods.

They’re gonna break their necks tripping over a damn tree root.

The forest is on fire now too. The whole planet is on fire. The fields are
burning like tinder, wheat going up like a box of matches, smoke filling the
air so thick it was hard to breathe. Jim ran back to camp to find Erin hunched
over on the ground, coughing her lungs out. He yanks her up by the armpits and
half-drags her away from the flames.
===============================================================================
They had prepared for this. If the camp was ever compromised, they were to meet
up at the cave where they found the bear-wolf that killed Hunter. The creature
itself was long since dead, leaving the cave unoccupied and almost completely
unnoticeable unless you knew where to look.

Tom was the last to show up, all but falling into the cave at almost noon the
next day.

He let his eye adjust to the darkness and then looked around at all of them,
frowning. “Where’s Lenore?”

“We thought you had her,” Dani said.

“No. Last I saw, she was with Erin.”

Erin paled. “Oh my god,” she said. “Oh my god, I left her at the camp!”

Kevin’s jaw dropped. Tom froze. He looked like he had just been stabbed to the
heart.

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to, I swear! I would never—I—I started
coughing, and I fell down, and everything got so mixed up in my head, and—“

“It’s okay,” Jim said. “It was an accident. She might still be okay. I’ll go
look for her right now.”

“I’ll come with you,” Tom said.

He bit his lip, just slightly. “Maybe it’s best if you didn’t.”

Tom looked at him in confusion. Then understanding dawned. Resignation.
Heartbreak. He nodded, and Jim pushed back the bush covering the entrance of
the cave, heading out.
===============================================================================
He didn’t find Lenore.

He didn’t find her body either. He kept expecting to. He kept expecting to find
a horribly tiny set of charred bones hidden under some dead tree or behind some
rocks somewhere. He didn’t.

He searched everywhere. Everywhere.

Someone must have taken her, the way they intended to take him. Jim felt sick
to his stomach.

She must have made a good meal for someone.

He dug a tiny, empty grave just to fill it back up with rocks and fresh dirt.
He put a marker and a flower wreath over it and practiced what he would tell
Tom.

I found her. It was the smoke that got her, not the flames. I hear it’s like
falling asleep. Peaceful.

I took care of the body. Figured you wouldn’t want to see. Maybe you should go
visit the grave though, get some closure.

Yeah. Yeah, that’d work.
===============================================================================
There was truly nothing left to eat within fifty miles of the Tarsus IV colony.
Everything had already been eaten, burned, killed.

Erin redid her tallies on the cave wall. 512.

They were down to a diet of grass and water. They tried eating tree bark. They
got tongue splinters and nausea for their trouble. Figures.

Jim decided that if he ever grew up, he wanted to live in a place with no
grass. He fucking hated the sight of it now. He was always going to associate
grass with starvation and Tarsus IV.

What was worse was there wasn’t even that much grass left. Every survivor of
the colony was in the woods now, desperately trying to survive just like they
were. The fire had been devastating though. It had decimated the forest,
burning up trees and grass alike.

It was like the whole planet was dead.

Jim knew that logically, that wasn’t true. That there had to be places on the
planet where the vegetation hadn’t all burned up and the wildlife hadn’t been
hunted to extinction. That there had to be food somewhere, if they could just
get far enough away from here to find it.

They started walking on day 514.
***** The Walk *****
They started walking south, perpendicular to the sun’s direction no matter what
time of day it was. It was an easy way to ensure they didn’t end up going in
circles.

They sang made-up songs and Beyond Antares and childish pop songs from two
years ago. They sang the entire way, when they weren’t talking or laughing or
joking. It seemed vitally important.

They walked for what seemed like forever.

Forever is just another journey. Tomorrow is a stop along the way.

Tom was supporting Erin as she hobbled along on one leg and Jim was carrying
Kevin on his back. The little kid had tuckered out far sooner than they had
anticipated.

“Dani, you doing okay back there?” Jim called.

She pushed a dark lock of sweat-soaked hair out of her face. “Uh-huh. I’m
fine.”

Dani and Tom honestly looked like they could be siblings: pale skin, dark,
almost black hair, and chocolate brown eyes. Kevin didn’t look that different
either; mousy brown hair and rich hazel eyes. Erin and Jim seemed almost
brightly colorful in comparison: Jim blond and blue-eyed and Erin strawberry
blonde, covered in freckles, and with pale celery-colored eyes.

Erin had three knives tucked into her belt and a spear strapped across her back
that was almost as long as she was tall.

She was only twelve. She was only twelve.

Suddenly Dani cried out in pain.

The other kids whirled to find an arrow sticking out of the child’s shoulder.
They quickly formed a circle around her, scanning their surroundings like
lightning. Kevin whimpered and cowered against Jim’s back.

“There! In that tree!” Jim yelled. He shrugged Kevin off his shoulders and
started running towards the offending adult, who dropped out of the tree
gracefully and took off sprinting.

Jim chased her until she was out of sight and then reluctantly, he turned back.

“What was that all about?” Tom asked.

“Think she thought Dani would go down silently and we wouldn’t notice,” Jim
said.

“Was—“ Dani swallowed. “Was she gonna eat me?”

“Let’s keep walking,” Erin said. “We don’t want to lose any more daylight than
we already have. Dani, why don’t you come to the front of the group? You can be
our leader.”

She nodded, and the kids walked single file now, Dani heading up the group,
followed by Jim carrying Kevin and then Tom supporting Erin. The kids had
treated Dani’s wound while Jim chased the attacker. The arrow had been pulled
out and Tom’s shirt was tied tightly around the wound to staunch the bleeding.

Tom started singing. “The skies are green and glowing…”
===============================================================================
There was no stream nearby anymore.

Stupid of them. They should’ve just followed it instead. Jim should have
thought of that. He had been the one to suggest going south; this was his
fault.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

Kevin wouldn’t stop whining. Erin was getting increasingly sarcastic and short
with him. Tom was still obviously in mourning, and the only one who wasn’t a
mess right now was Dani, and she was nursing a fresh wound and starting to get
increasingly feverish and weak.

Jim had never realized what a big deal infections were until he didn’t have
access to a clean, safe environment with abundant free medical care. He hadn’t
even realized how nice his life had been before. Sure, Frank beat him
sometimes, but he had never before come this close to dying.

Kodos had probably killed Frank. The thought sent a trill of satisfaction
through him. And then he felt guilty. He shouldn’t be glad that someone had
been murdered, no matter how bad that person had been, right? That was one of
those uncrossable lines, a hard and fast moral rule.

Wasn’t it?

They kept walking. They ate grass. They tried not to vomit. It was hard.

And then Jim wavered on his feet and nearly went down while holding Kevin.

“That’s it, we’re taking a break,” Tom said. “Sit your ass down, JT.”

“You should have told us if you were that exhausted,” Erin said.

Jim slumped down against a tree obediently and closed his eyes. “It’s not that
bad. I’ll be fine in like, five minutes.”

He didn’t see Erin roll her eyes.

Dani went and sat by his side, draping his arm over herself and snuggling
against his chest for a nap. Kevin joined them quickly, practically crawling
into Jim’s lap.

Soon all five of them were asleep.
===============================================================================
They walked for three more days before they saw their first squirrel.

Erin whipped a knife at it too fast to be seen and it splintered straight
through the creature’s skull. Her eyes were dead-set and determined.

It is pretty hard to split a tiny squirrel between five starving kids, but they
made do.
===============================================================================
They kept walking for five more days before they set up a new camp and started
laying out traps.

Blood wasn’t the most rehydrating substance to drink, but it was better than
nothing and it was easy to come by. Jim just hoped they didn’t get any diseases
or anything.

Then on one day he saw Tom wincing while eating a squirrel.

“Bite down on a bone or something?” he asked. They sometimes didn’t get all of
them out.

“Nah, it’s nothing. Just a toothache.”

It wasn’t just a toothache. It wasn’t a simple cavity either, or just another
tooth lost to scurvy. It was an abscess. On an upper tooth too, the worst place
for it.

Tom’s jaw started to rot. He was feverish and sweating. The tooth infection had
spread to his bloodstream easily. It would be a matter of days before it
reached his brain.

“You can’t die of a toothache, right, JT? Tell me I didn’t survive all of this
just to die of a fucking toothache.”

Jim gave him a plastic smile. “Don’t worry Tom, I’m not gonna let you die from
a lack of dental care. This isn’t the 1600s anymore.”

“Wait, are you saying it’s actually possible?”

“It, uh… It used to be one of the leading causes of death back on Earth. But
that was centuries ago. We have dentists now.”

Tom looked him straight in the eye. “No, JT. No we don’t.”
===============================================================================
Tom’s organs were shutting down. His brain was literally rotting.

Your upper tooth roots are just a bare three inches from the brain. It doesn’t
take an infection long to travel that far.

Erin held Tom’s head still and Jim yanked the infected tooth out with his hands
but they were already far too late. They had caught it too late, and they had
no antibiotics. Tom needed a hospital, not grubby kids pulling his teeth out
with their bare hands in the middle of the woods.

They didn’t even have any water to rinse it out with. Just animal blood. Which
they figured wasn’t a good idea.

Tom Leighton had survived 527 days of the Tarsus IV famine and now he was going
to die of an abscessed tooth.
===============================================================================
“What’s that?” Dani asked, pointing up at the sky. Jim looked and saw a
twinkling speck of light, like a star in the daytime.

“Huh,” he said. “I don’t know.”

Shimmering light wrapped itself around all five of them and Jim felt his
molecules dissolve as he was suddenly transported.
***** The Hospital *****
They materialized in a transporter room.

There were three adults in the room. The kids immediately grouped together and
assumed defensive stances, Erin and Kevin holding onto each other in the center
of their little attack circle.

A man took the phaser out of his belt and set it down on the control panel. He
approached them slowly, hands up.

“My name is Captain Christopher Pike,” he said. “You’re on board the USS
Enterprise. We’re here to rescue you.”
===============================================================================
They were taken to sickbay. The five of them were placed in biobeds and hooked
up to IV lines feeding them fluids and nutrients.

“Can we have some food?” Jim asked.

“I’m afraid your body couldn’t handle solid food at this point. I can get you
some water, if you sip it slowly,” Dr. Boyce said.

“What?!”Jim squawked. “You aren’t gonna give us any food?!”

The kids protested loudly, and Dr. Boyce was trying to shout to be heard over
all of them, and it wasn’t working, and finally he threatened to sedate all of
them if they didn’t shut up.

Five mouths snapped shut.
===============================================================================
Jim waited until the lights were out and the doctors had all gone to bed before
slipping out of his biobed.

“JT, what are you doing?” Dani whispered.

“Getting us some food,” he said. He walked over to the door panel, intent on
hacking it, but it slid open automatically on his approach.

Well, that was easy.

He didn’t know where the mess hall was, and he couldn’t risk trying to find an
empty officer’s quarters for a replicator, so he would just have to wander for
a while. Thankfully, there weren’t that many people up and about. It was the
dead of night on gamma shift, and everyone who wasn’t working was in bed.

Well, almost.

He did pass a few crewmen who gave him strange looks, but he just flashed them
a cocky grin and kept walking as if he belonged. He had learned long ago that
you can get away with almost anything if you just act like you’re allowed to.

He eventually found the mess and replicated a goddamn feast. Chocolate cake,
pizza, biscuits and gravy, pancakes, ice cream, Cheetos, you name it. He ran
back to sickbay with an overflowing bounty in his arms.

When he got there, Dr. Boyce was glaring at the other kids, demanding to know
where he was. He spun around when he heard footsteps approaching.

He eyed all of the food in Jim’s arms and sighed.
===============================================================================
Apparently when you get up out of a biobed, it is no longer able to read your
vitals, and so it registers as flatlining and immediately alerts the nurses and
doctors.

Boyce took all of Jim’s food away. They were given water. Clean, cool water,
but still, just water.

And they had to sip it slowly.

Kevin didn’t, too hungry for anything, and spent the rest of the night puking
it all back up into a wastebasket.
===============================================================================
There were 4006 survivors total. Only nine had witnessed Kodos give the kill
order. Only nine could actually say for sure what had happened to the other
4018. The five kids in the Enterprise’s sickbay, and four of Kodos’s guards.

Jim knew one of them.

They were kept separate.

Jim and his kids had been the only ones who had been on the kill list and made
it out alive. Boyce told them they were lucky.

Gavin. Hunter. Angela. Jenny. Bobbi. Shravan. Tamara. Lenore.

Lucky. Technically, eight out of thirteen had died. These five had defied the
odds.

Tom received dental care. He wasn’t going to die. He was put on antibiotics to
fight the infection. The doctor tried to repair the mess that was his face as
best he could, but there wasn’t much he could do at this point.

He gave Tom a black half-mask to wear instead. He still got stared at, of
course, but now the stares weren’t of revulsion and disgust. Just curiosity.
Some pity from adults who put two and two together.

They couldn’t give him a new eye. Whatever Jim had done with the dermal
regenerator had fucked up the socket too bad for it to be able to take.

They were all treated for scurvy and given dental implants to make up for their
lost teeth. Dani’s shoulder wound was treated and cleaned, and she was started
on antibiotics.

They fit Erin for a prosthetic. It was difficult because the end of her leg
wasn’t exactly the smoothest and the surgery performed hadn’t exactly been done
under ideal conditions, so it didn’t wield the greatest results.

Jim wouldn’t stop apologizing. He had permanently maimed his friends in his
efforts to help. They kept saying it was fine, but Jim knew that it wasn’t.
===============================================================================
He snuck out again the next night.

He programmed the biobed to continue a feed of the last hour’s readings on
repeat. The kids very carefully did not cheer or get excited so that their
heartrate spikes wouldn’t show on the monitors.

He returned with a feast of heavy, filling, rich food and passed it out to all
his friends. They all gushed immense gratitude.

“Eat slowly,” he reminded them. “Don’t wanna puke.”

Their stomachs had all shrunk considerably due to internal atrophy back on
Tarsus, so they ended up eating a lot less food than Jim had expected and
hiding the rest under their beds.

Kevin was the first to start puking. Then Tom. Erin’s food was tossed back up
over the side of her bed; she was still too unused to her prosthetic to make it
to the bathroom in time.
===============================================================================
Dr. Boyce came. He searched the sickbay and took all their food away. He tried
to lecture them. Jim called him Kodos. All the other kids chimed in agreement.
He ended up leaving in a huff.

He took away their food and Jim had a panic attack an hour later.
===============================================================================
They were given thin broth, and a small portion at that. Jim let it sit, only
sipping from it occasionally, as if to reassure himself that it was there.
===============================================================================
They arrived at Earth and were whisked away to a real hospital.

Starfleet swooped in and made the list of survivors classified and had them all
sign confidentiality agreements. They issued an official statement.

The colony of Tarsus IV fell victim to crop blight and criminal mismanagement
and abuse of power by its Governor Kodos, resulting in widescale death.

That was it. That was all they said. Standard procedure was that the details of
any massacre stay classified for ten years to give the survivors privacy and
time to recover on their own.
===============================================================================
They put all the kids in separate, solitary hospital rooms. Jim snuck out of
his every night to check on everyone and relay messages back and forth. He gave
everyone some small piece of storable food to hide and keep with them, just in
case.

Tom gave him a strange look when he did it.

They were all given psych evals. It did not go well.

Kevin talked openly and easily about things that were supposed to be traumatic
and horrifying. He told the doctors more than any of the other kids combined.
He told them about Shravan.

The doctor had to excuse himself and go out in the hallway for five minutes to
calm down.

They took Erin’s weapons away, and she went berserk. She stabbed an orderly,
and it took three nurses to restrain her. And they did restrain her. She was
handcuffed to the hospital bed and diagnosed with PTSD.

They talked to Tom. Asked him if he felt responsible, since he was the oldest.
He told them about Tamara, and the baby they’d almost had. He told them about
Lenore and how she had died in the fire.

Survivor’s guilt and clinical depression.

Jim refused to talk. He would only talk to the kids, and only if he was
unsupervised. He didn’t give them anything.

Dani followed his lead just as stubbornly, much to the doctors’ chagrin. But
they were able to trick her into talking. They rewarded her with small portions
of food for every detail she disclosed.

Jim felt sick to his stomach. He always felt sick to his stomach.

Family members came to visit.

Erin was going to live with her cousins, of which there were many. Dani was
being taken in by her now-dead mother’s fiancé. Tom was applying for status as
an emancipated minor rather than go live with his grandparents.

Kevin’s whole family had been killed. He was going into foster care. He had no
living relatives willing to take him in.

Jim begged his mother to adopt him.

“Jim,” she said tiredly. “I’m off-planet more often than not. I can barely take
care of you, especially now that Frank’s gone. There’s no way I can take in a
six-year-old.”

“You won’t have to take care of him, I’ll do that! Please don’t put him in the
system, Mom.”

“I’m sorry, Jim. I can’t.”
===============================================================================
Starfleet officials came and took statements from all of them. Jim still
refused to talk. He wouldn’t even tell his mother what had happened. Hell, not
even the other kids knew everything.

And if he had his way, no one ever would.
***** Return to Riverside *****
It was three months before they were discharged to go home. The kids ended up
scattered across the Federation, half of them off to different Terran colonies.
Only Jim and Kevin stayed on Earth, Jim going back to Iowa and Kevin heading to
a San Francisco orphanage.
===============================================================================
The first thing he did when he got home was order a large stuffed crust pizza
and gorge himself.

He was medically cleared for solid food and he all but dared his mother to try
and stop him.

He spent the entire evening hunched over the toilet, puking it all back up and
hating himself for the waste. It had been enough food to feed the entire
camp—all they needed for the day—back on Tarsus. And now it was sitting,
wasted, in a toilet bowl.

He was disgusting.

He was disgusting.

He had eaten so much more than his fair share and all of it had gone to waste.
He remembered Bobbi’s rabid binge-fest, where she ate enough to make the whole
camp go hungry for the rest of the week, only to puke it all back up.

He knew why gluttony was one of the seven deadly sins.
===============================================================================
He went back to school.

The whole damn town knew he had been on Tarsus IV. They didn’t need to know the
details to all but drown him in pity. He felt like he was suffocating.

When he didn’t do his homework on time or at all, the teachers would just give
him sad looks and say that’s okay, he can have an extension. He got snappish.
Started talking back. Even moreso than he had before Tarsus. He had never
exactly been one of the best-behaved students in the school, but now he was one
of the worst.
===============================================================================
He drank. He partied. He read on his padd all night, every night and tested out
of sophomore year. He took the most advanced classes he was allowed to and got
straight A’s on the tests and in-class work but completely bombed all of his
homework. He just didn’t do it. He couldn’t. He couldn’t focus when he was at
home, at least not on something as menial and un-challenging as homework.

It was the way that Winona looked at him, he thought.

He spent as little time at home as possible. It was easy to wash away his
sorrows in alcohol and aircar races and upperclassmen girls. He liked the
challenge, and they liked the troubled-genius-daredevil thing.

He seemed to have a knack for knowing exactly what someone wanted out of him.
He knew when to play up the young and innocent act. He knew when to be the all-
too experienced whore. He knew when someone wanted him submissive and compliant
and when someone wanted him to struggle a bit. He was willing to do anything.
Everything.

He gained forty pounds and shot up like a weed and looked like real teenager
rather than an undernourished kid now, but he was still technically a hair
underweight. He didn’t plan on changing that. He didn’t feel like him if he
couldn’t see his ribs. That was what made it real. He needed some permanent
reminder on his body that it had been real, it had happened, he had survived.

He lived off the unhealthiest junk food he could get his hands on and his diet
was a huge point of contention between him and Winona. He tried explaining it
to her one day and she started screaming at him to get a tattoo then, just
follow his eating plan and get a fucking tattoo.

He slammed the door behind him and didn’t come back for two and a half days.
When he did, he had a brand new tat on his left ribs—two stalks of wheat
overlapping and the letters ‘IV’ emblazoned over them.

Winona pursed her lips and didn’t say anything.
===============================================================================
Johnny was a class-A asshole. He was a senior, had been held back a year, and
was the oldest kid in the school and very bitter about it. He did not enjoy
taking the same classes as some cocky fifteen-year-old.

Not that they had many classes together. Just some basic ones that were
mandatory for graduation, ones that Johnny was being forced to retake and Jim
wasn’t allowed to test out of.

In exchange for not regularly getting his ass kicked, Jim allowed Johnny to
copy off all of his work for Government & Econ. Jim was subtle, at first. He
started it out slowly. It was one more question wrong on every assignment.

He began to fail the class.

He got called down to the guidance counselor’s office.

“Sup, Ms. G,” he said, kicking his feet up to rest on her desk. She gave him a
stern glare. He smiled cockily and refused to move.

She physically pushed his legs off her desk. “Mrs. Beiderstedt says you’re
failing her course. Three weeks ago, you had straight A’s. What’s happening,
Jim? Is something going on at home?”

He shrugged. “Nah.”

“Do you need to get a tutor?”

“Please. That course is so easy, a kindergartener could pass it.”

“If it’s so easy, then why are you failing?”

“Oh, it’s intentional. I’m failing on purpose.”

“Why, Jim?”

He grinned. “To fuck with you.”
===============================================================================
Johnny beat the shit out of him.

He had stolen a dermal regenerator from a hospital long ago, and was able to
repair most of the damage on his own. Bruises, however, were the result of
burst capillaries—minor internal bleeding under the skin—and even though the
actual damage had been repaired, the visual effects would remain behind for a
few days.

Winona gasped and dropped a pot of boiling noodles when she saw him.

“Jim!” she cried, rushing towards him and cradling his head in her hands.
“Jimmy, sweetie, what happened?”

“Nothing, Mom, I’m fine.”

“No, you aren’t, sweetie. Who did this to you?”

“I, uh, I never actually got his name.” He bit his lip and looked down at the
ground. Then glared, changed his mind, and met Winona’s gaze head on.

“…Were you jumped?” she asked.

That was a lot better than the ‘rough sex’ explanation he had planned on using.
“Yes,” he said instantly.

She looked at him doubtfully.
===============================================================================
Jim flunked over half his courses that year. He had detentions and Saturday
schools almost as often as was physically possible. He got called down to
guidance more than any other student. The guidance counselor got permission to
speak with his therapist, and they emailed each other and his mom back and
forth constantly, a little triad of concern.

Faux concern, in Jim’s eyes, mixed with a hearty helping of disapproval. He
didn’t care. He didn’t give a shit. It didn’t matter if he graduated or not. He
was already destined to have a shit future. That had been decided long ago,
when he was thirteen years old and the colonial guard walked in and shot up his
school.
===============================================================================
“Jim,” his therapist said. Alicia. Her name was Alicia. “Were you ever—Sorry to
be blunt, but were you ever sexually abused?”

“No,” he said. Then he leered. “But you can ‘sexually abuse’ me any time you
want.”

She frowned.
===============================================================================
“Jimmy, we need to talk,” Winona said. She gestured for him to sit down at the
kitchen table. He did, wound tense as a bowstring.

“It’s been seven months since you got back from Tarsus,” she started. “I’m
almost out of leave.”

For a moment, they were silent, as she allowed that statement to sink in.

“I turn sixteen in like, a month and a half,” he said. “I can apply for status
as an emancipated minor then.”

“Do you want to?” she asked. “Because I can retire. If you need me to.”

“I don’t need you to,” he said.

“Are you sure, Jimmy? Because—“

“Mom, I’ve been on my own since I was thirteen. Getting emancipated would just
be a formality. I know you love the stars. You don’t have to… put your whole
life on hold just because I went a little hungry for a while. I’ll be fine.”

“Jimmy, it wouldn’t be a burden. You’re—you’re more important than my career. I
love you.”

He smiled. “I know. I’ll be fine, Mom. I can handle it.”

She looked at him for a long moment, and then nodded, obviously relieved.
***** Emancipation *****
On January 4th, Winona took Jim to the courthouse and they petitioned for
emancipation.

It was granted and finalized within a week. Winona resumed her interrupted
mission with Starfleet.

The first thing Jim did was catch a ride to San Francisco and show up at every
orphanage there until he found the one Kevin Riley was in.

He tried to adopt him. He was told no.

He tried to take him in as a foster child. He was told no.

The adults didn’t even take him seriously.

“I’m sorry, Kev. I tried, I really tried,” he said.

Kevin wrapped his tiny arms around him. “I know, JT.”

He kicked around San Fran for three days, sleeping in parks or on benches,
before he figured he should head back to Riverside.
===============================================================================
He dropped out of school. He had been failing anyway. It didn’t fucking matter.
It’s not like he had a real future anyway.

He stopped seeing his therapist. She called him every day for two weeks before
giving up. He never answered.

He worked odd jobs that never really panned out or lasted too long and then he
realized there were other ways to make money.

People started betting on him in the aircar races. It was illegal as fuck but
it was good money and it was fun as hell.

He had a lot of sex. He sometimes got paid for it. He didn’t see what the big
deal was or why that was illegal in the first place.

He got arrested three times and left off with a slap on the wrist each time
before the judge said enough was enough and sent him to juvie.
===============================================================================
He spent six months in juvie for child prostitution. He tried to argue that it
shouldn’t count as child prostitution since he wasn’t legally considered a
minor anymore. It did not work.
===============================================================================
Tom came to visit him one day.

“How the hell did you find me?” he asked.

“It wasn’t easy,” Tom said. “You never told us your last name. Or even your
full first name. It was always just JT. But then Kevin told me that you stopped
by and tried to adopt him, and I looked up the records and found a sixteen-
year-old James T. Kirk listed on the visitors’ log.”

He waited for a response and Jim didn’t give him any. He had nothing to say.

“You coulda kept in touch, you know,” Tom said. “The other kids miss you. They
keep asking if I’ve heard anything.”

A spike of panic hit his chest. “Don’t tell them about… the charges. Can you
just… not tell them I’m in juvie at all?”

Tom nodded. “Of course. Anything.”

“So what’s new? What’s going on with the kids?”

“Dani has amnesia. Sorta. She has really big memory gaps when it comes to
Tarsus, and they’re getting worse as time goes by. Her stepdad’s trying to
limit her contact with the rest of us. Thinks it’s bad for her.”

“Asshole,” Jim said. Tom nodded.

“She’s been taking dance lessons. She’s really good, apparently. She’s doing
well.”

“And Erin?”

“Still traumatized as shit. Her aunt and uncle caught her sleeping with a knife
under her pillow. They took it away. She’s been getting in a lot of fights.
Acting out, you know?”

“I’ll talk to her.”

Tom raised an eyebrow dubiously, but didn’t comment. “Kevin’s gone through two
foster families already, and I don’t think the current one’s gonna keep him
either. He keeps freaking the parents out. They all say he’s too much work.
He’s a special case, you know, he requires special attention.”

“I tried to adopt him.”

“I know.”

“What about you? How are things going for you?”

“Okay. I’m in this advanced program at school where you can take college
courses while still in high school. I’m thinking about going into agricultural
bioengineering.”

Jim laughed. “Damn, you actually have your life together.”

He smiled wryly. “You’ll get there too, JT.”
===============================================================================
Before he knew it, it was September 17th, the three year anniversary of the
school shooting that had started all of this for Jim.

He drank.

It was a rager that some kid from his old high school was throwing and he was
crashing. He drank himself straight into oblivion and beyond.

He woke up in a hospital bed being treated for alcohol poisoning and being
given a rape kit. He felt numb, so incredibly numb.

Except for the splitting pain that was trying to rip his skull in half. And he
thought he’d had bad hangovers before.

He laughed bitterly at that and a nurse gave him a strange look.
===============================================================================
He was in and out of juvie a lot after that. If he was perfectly honest, his
life was going its greatest while he was there. Things were stable. Things were
reliable. There was a steady, predictable routine and nothing ever deviated.

Sometimes he got in fights. Sometimes he got sent to solitary. It was okay. It
was all okay.
===============================================================================
He was eighteen suddenly and he was drinking and fighting and fucking his way
through life and hoping one day, one of those things would kill him.

It didn’t.

That wasn’t okay.

But damn if he didn’t give the Grim Reaper an open invitation. He all but drew
a bullseye on his forehead. He wasn’t just flirting with death, he was taking
death out on the best date of its life and trying his hardest to get lucky.
===============================================================================
“Come on, baby, kiss me,” Raina pouted.

“Sorry, honey, I don’t kiss,” Jim said.

“So what, you’ll fuck me but you won’t kiss me?” she asked, angry now.

“Yep,” he said. He downed his glass in a single swallow.

She huffed and turned away, furious.
===============================================================================
Winona’s three-year mission ended. She came back to the farmhouse.

She looked around in dismay. The place was trashed. Bills and junk mail were
piled up in a huge stack. Empty and half-full bottles were littered everywhere.
The place didn’t look like it had been fully cleaned since she had left.

Jim was passed out on the couch, half-wrapped in a blanket, an empty pizza box
and a pool of vomit on the floor next to him.

“Jim!” her voice cut like shards of sharp glass. He jolted and nearly fell off
the couch.

“I’m up, I’m up.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing? Everything’s fine, Mom.”

“No! No, everything is not fine! You can’t live like this, Jim!”

He rolled his eyes. She scoffed, indignant.

“Jim, you either shape the fuck up or you get out of this house,” she said.

He looked her dead in the eyes, his gaze hard as stone and just as unyielding.
He stood up, wavered on his feet a bit, and walked out.

He never looked back.
***** Tom’s Wedding *****
Homeless shelters didn’t always have a bed open, and they were a great place to
get robbed, catch lice, and get eaten alive by bedbugs anyway. So Jim came up
with a different solution.

One night stands.

Only that seriously cut into his working hours and his profits, and it soon
became unsustainable. So he took to sleeping on park benches, on fire escapes,
in back alleys away from everything.

He got mugged. So. Often.

And that was a really bad thing, because his good lucks was how he made 90% of
his credits, and getting all beaten up and bruised really put a damper on that.
There was only so much that he could make up for in the aircar races,
especially since he didn’t have his own suped up aircar.

And that worked for a few years and he didn’t drink himself to death,
surprisingly. He got arrested. He got STDs. He kept in touch with Tom.

“JT,” he said, smiling over the vidscreen. “You’ll never believe this. I have
huge news.”

He looked at him warily. “And it’s good news?”

“Oh yeah, it’s great,” he said. “I’m getting married, JT.”

For a second, he was back on Tarsus, watching Tom and Tamara whispering at each
other, tension and nerves clear on their faces, Tamara resting one hand on her
rounded stomach.

He had always thought…

“That’s great,” he said, forcing himself to smile. “So who is this lucky
person?”

“Her name’s Martha, and she’s, um, sort of my boss. You’ll love her, JT. She’s
amazing.”

He sounded lovestruck. A knot of dread formed in Jim’s stomach. Nothing good
ever came out of love. Hadn’t Tom learned that?

“I have something important to ask you,” Tom said.

“More news?”

“No,” he shook his head. “JT… Will you be my best man?”

His breath caught in his throat and he felt like he was suffocating, every
thought in his head screaming danger danger danger.“Of course,” he choked out.
===============================================================================
He was twenty-two and he realized that seven years had passed since he left
Tarsus but somehow it didn’t register that all the other kids would be seven
years older too, and he would be seeing them again at Tom’s wedding, like it
some fucked up trauma reunion.

It also didn’t occur to him that most of the other kids were no longer kids.

He was floored to see a twenty-year-old Erin wearing an updo and an evening
gown, moving confidently through the reception hall on her prosthetic. She
didn’t hide the deep slash of a scar on her upper arm and didn’t seem to care
about the stares that it garnered.

Dani was eighteen. Eighteen. She actually went by Danica now, and she was
wearing a dress that was entirely too low-cut. Jim immediately offered her his
jacket. She gave him a dry look and said no thanks.

Tom was, of course, twenty-four and getting married to someone who wasn’t
Tamara.

Kevin was fourteen now, bored, covered in acne and constantly tugging at the
collar of his tux in annoyance. His eyes lit up when he saw Jim. And then he
quickly suppressed the reaction and went back to being a cool and disinterested
teenager.

Dani—Danica—had come out of politeness or obligation, but she didn’t sit with
them at the reception. She had almost no memories of Tarsus IV and was
perfectly content to keep it that way.

Jim couldn’t blame her. Hell, he wished he was in that position.

“It’s so nice to finally meet you, JT. I’ve heard so much about you,” Martha
said.

“Oh. Wow. That’s ominous,” he said, forcing out a laugh.

“Oh, don’t worry. Tom does nothing but sing your praises. He says if it wasn’t
for you, he never would have made it out of Tarsus alive.”

Oh, and now they were going to talk about it. That’s just great.

“It was nothing,” he said.

Erin rolled her eyes. “It was not. Man’s a goddamn genius and he saved all our
lives. We were the only survivors who were on the kill list, and that’s all
because of JT.”

“You make it sound so noble. I was just doing what I had to do. I—Shit, guys,
we stole from starving people. It’s not something I’m proud of.”

The table went silent at that.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “So what’s new with all of you these days? What are you
all up to?”
“Well, I just got married,” Tom grinned. Martha swatted at his arm lightly, a
matching grin on her face.

“I’m studying at the Rigellian Institute of Technolgy, majoring in weapons
specialization,” Erin said.

They murmured their congratulations.

“Thanks. Two more years and I’ll have my degree. I wanna go for a doctorate
afterwards, at the Vulcan Science Academy if I can.”

“It’s tough to get in there,” Jim said.

She scoffed. “I can handle it.”

Jim laughed and bumped her shoulder affectionately.

“What about you, Kev?” Tom asked.

The teen blushed bright red. “I, uh… I ran away from my last foster home. The
police found me though, and took me back.”

“You can come stay with me any time,” Jim said automatically, briefly
forgetting that he himself had no place to stay. “I can try to adopt you again,
if you want. I’m older now, they’ll probably let me.”

“No, I’m fine,” Kevin said. “They… The social worker assigned me to a new
family.”

“They treating you right? ‘Cause I can beat ‘em up if not,” Erin said.

He smiled, slightly, shyly. “No, I’m fine. They’re nice people. And I’m
starting to make friends at my new school too, so.”

“Well, still. You ever need anything, you comm me,” Jim said.

“That’ll be a change,” Erin said. “You gonna give us your number?”

“Yeah. Sure. Why not?” he said. He scribbled it down on a nearby napkin and
pushed it across the table. Tom and Erin quickly inputted it into their comms,
and after a moment’s hesitation, Kevin did too.

“You still kicking around in Iowa?” Tom asked.

“Yeah. Place I’ve got’s in a real small town, you wouldn’t have heard of it,”
he said. “What about you? Still on the Benecia colony?”

“No, Tom and I are planning on moving to Planet Q after the honeymoon,” Martha
said, taking her husband’s hand and looking at him fondly. He returned the look
with an almost suffocating amount of affection.

Jim waited for Erin to make the appropriate gagging noise, but she didn’t. She
just smiled slightly at the happy couple. Jim frowned.
===============================================================================
He was working a bar, chatting up a pretty young cadet who looked like she had
credits to burn on a night of fun or would at least have a nice hotel room they
could go back to, which would mean a safe place to sleep and room service in
the morning, if he was lucky.

A bunch of Starfleet cadets were in town on a fucking field trip to the George
Kirk Memorial Shipyard to see the Enterprise being built. Jim was having a
very, very good week.

And just as he was starting to figure out what the cadet liked, what she wanted
him to be, a group of four oversized male cadets came over and took issue with
that.

He called one cupcake and was rewarded with one hell of a right hook to the
jaw.

Just as he was accepting that he was going to the hospital with a concussion
for sure this time, a professor strode in and gave a shrill whistle, ordering
every cadet in the building to go outside.

He gave him napkins for the bloody nose and sat him down.

“My name is Christopher Pike,” he said. “Y’know, when the bartender told me who
you were, I couldn’t believe it.”

“Yeah? Who am I, Captain Pike?”

“Your father’s son.”

He suppressed the urge to roll his eyes. He’d heard this speech a thousand
times. Everyone thought he was a stain on the great Kirk legacy. Everyone
thought he was a disappointment. Everyone thought he should be better than
this. Everyone was disgusted by what he had turned out to be.

A disgrace.

“For my dissertation, I was assigned the USS Kelvin. Something I admired about
your dad, he didn’t believe in no-win scenarios.”

“Sure learned his lesson,” Jim muttered.

“Well, it depends on how you define winning. You’re here, aren’t you?”

Yes, because his life was such a prize.

Pike continued. “You know, that instinct to leap without looking, that was his
nature too, and in my opinion, it’s something Starfleet’s lost.”

“Why are you talking to me, man?”
“’Cause I looked up your file while you were drooling on the floor. Your
aptitude tests are off the charts, so what is it? You like being the only
genius-level repeat offender in the Midwest?”

Ha. As if it was that easy. As if being smart alone could get you shit in this
world. As if it mattered that he was a genius when he was also an unemployable
high school dropout with a record.

“Maybe I love it,” he said.

“Look, so your dad dies. You can settle for a less than ordinary life. Or do
you feel like you were meant for something better? Something special?” he
asked. “Enlist in Starfleet.”

“Enli—“ the word died on his lips with a laugh. “You guys must be way down on
your recruiting quota for the month.”

“If you’re half the man your father was, Jim, Starfleet could use you.”

Like so many others before.

Sounded so fucking appealing.

“You could be an officer in four years. You could have your own ship in eight.
You understand what the Federation is, don’t you? It’s important. It’s a
peacekeeping and humanitarian armada.”

“We done?” he asked. This was seriously cutting into his working hours.

“I’m done. Riverside shipyard. The shuttle for new recruits leaves tomorrow at
0800,” he said. “You know, your father was captain of a starship for twelve
minutes. He saved eight hundred lives, including your mother’s. And yours. I
dare you to do better.”
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