Work Text:
Jim greets each member of the boarding party as they step off the transporter, as he is expected to. Thank God for Uhura, who prepared him in advance for the species representatives; he offers the ta'al to the Vulcan, clicks and trills for the Arubesh, drums his fingertips in the appropriate sequence across the leading tentacle of the Gallordian.
Smiles the appropriate amount - enough warmth to seem friendly, enough muted sorrow to seem appropriate for the knowledge of why the party is here - and tries not to feel flayed alive.
As the fleet flagship, the Enterprise is the natural choice to deliver this delegation to Tarsus IV: the staff of the museum Starfleet has funded, five admirals to attend the opening, and an entire fleet of holo-technicians to scan every inch of the museum and its environs to create simulations for the rest of the universe.
Jim’s fought and scraped and demanded his place aboard Enterprise despite his weak heart and shit liver and kidneys, his chronic dry eyes and limp that becomes too obvious when he’s tired. He’s learned other styles of self-defense to compensate for his weakened bones, excelled in enough courses to make up for the disabilities that tried to keep him from the captain's chair, earned it, and yet if he could be a captain of some freighter right now, he’d prefer that.
Are they holding his gaze through his glasses a beat too long because they want to see James T. Kirk, son of George Kirk, youngest captain in Starfleet history? Or because they know, somehow, where he has been and what he has done? Are they connecting his eyes with the famous photograph - 'Boy on Tarsus IV' - that still makes his stomach twist and clench to even think about?
His hips and spine ache from the prolonged standing, and for a moment he considers whether he should ask Bones for another bone density shot. Tarsus IV played merry hell with his health, no matter that he left that doomed planet behind over a decade ago.
"Welcome," he says to the last aboard. "This is Ensign Ortiz, who's been assigned as your assistant for the journey." One of Uhura's minions steps forward to offer guidance, and at last, he's free. He taps the button on his glasses to redarken the lenses, the burning in his eyes easing with the lenses’ cooling effect. His eyes were sunken with dehydration for too long, his lids too dry to close fully beneath the blazing heat of Tarsus, and even now the scars remain.
The transporter room empties except for him and Bones, standing with his arms folded near the doorway and a scowl on his face.
"I'd say something," Jim says, "but your face is already stuck like that, so it's a lost cause."
"Ha ha." Bones' dark gaze moves from Jim to the closed door. "Never intended to have to potentially treat a pack of fucking vultures."
Bones has never said whether he knows or just suspects, but he's a smart guy; Jim wouldn't be surprised if he's put two and two together. Bones is the only doctor Jim trusts with his mostly-complete medical records, and even the nutritional supplementation he received after rescue hasn't been enough to completely cover over the atrophy marks along his optic nerves, growth lines in his bones, or the scars left on his heart: the weakened myocardial fibers and the lighter mass of his cardiac muscle, no matter how diligently he trains by swimming in Enterprise's main gym.
"This is really getting to you," Jim observes, joining Bones at the doorway and following him to the lift. Bones adjusts for Jim’s slower gait - consequence of the small hip fractures he sustained from osteoporosis - without comment, and Jim loves him for it, as he always has. "Is it Tarsus in particular?"
"I'm not a fan of any museum about history that doesn't take all the survivors' wishes into account." Bones sidesteps several ensigns pushing a cart laden with dishware. "And doesn't it seem a mite ironic that we're memorializing a mass starvation event with food?"
"Just a bit." Jim and Bones step into the lift, Bones hitting the button for the medbay level. "How do you know they didn't ask the survivors?"
In their infrequent communications - not for lack of affection, but for how raw any contact leaves them - Thomas and Kevin had mentioned no one reaching out to Lian, the only one at the age of majority when rescue came. The other eight were still young enough to be shielded, and Starfleet buried them deep.
"Did you not see the news? Those two competing survivors' groups went head-to-head over the museum, and the museum only talked to the one in favor of its existence."
Jim hums an acknowledgment, his gaze fixed on the number flickering down on the lift wall. Four thousand survivors, and three thousand and ninety-one of them the ones who bent to Kodos's will; the ones who cooperated; the ones who turned around upon rescue and sworn upon every holy text and concept known to the universe that they had not known, had not wanted this, had not hunted down the unchosen ones like beasts in the street.
His jaw aches with tension, and he runs the tip of his tongue across the thin line of scar tissue on the inside of his bottom jaw where they’d re-anchored his adult teeth after rescue. Like the rest, his bones had gone soft with lack of food.
What use was there in the nine of them speaking out and painting the remaining survivors with the traitor's mark? What use, when Starfleet itself wanted the story plowed under like so many dead crops in Tarsus's fields?
"You got one of those appetite shots for me?" Jim follows Bones to his office, stopping long enough to wave at Chapel, who rolls her eyes. "Since we have to host the reception and all."
"Yeah, have a seat."
Jim flops onto the overstuffed leather couch Bones picked up at some long-gone starbase and watches Bones fuss over his hypospray and tricorder.
"Your electrolytes are imbalanced, but nothing too beyond your norm," Bones says, glancing up at Jim. "Are you planning on any alcohol?"
"Nah." It was going to be hard enough without the impact alcohol had on him. He'd never learned to handle it well, his liver and kidneys still struggling to handle filtration beyond the minimum. "I'm not really hungry, either."
"You're never hungry, to say nothing of how bad you are at actually digesting." Bones grabs several vials from the rack on his desk and slots them into the hypospray, giving it a good shake. "Sometimes it's all I can do to stuff a damn apple down your throat."
After rescue, they'd given them thin broths and dense paste, taken blood samples what seemed like every hour to monitor for phosphates, even once threaded a feeding tube down Jim's throat when he'd grown too weak to chew.
When the worst was over, the first thing he'd been allowed to choose to eat for himself was an apple.
"Head to the side," Bones says, and Jim bares his neck obligingly, hissing between his teeth as the hypospray bites at his skin and floods his carotid with a rush of coolness. "That’s an appetite stimulant, some B-vitamins, and something to top up your blood pressure; it’s a bit low for my taste. Give that a good hour or two and you should start to feel the appetite kick in. Now get out, I have to get ready for this damned reception."
"Bedside manner as charming as ever, Bones," says Jim, but he obeys. Goes up to the bridge to check in on Spock and the crew, where, of course, nothing of interest is happening; the route to the Tarsus system had always been boring, just as Tarsus IV itself had been for a few shining months. Even Chekov, who can entertain himself for hours with plotting alternate routes and calculating the effects of gravity wells on sublight travel, has locked in the coordinates and now sits with his cheek propped on one fist, staring at the warp tunnel around them.
"Keep up the good work," Jim starts to say, but then his PADD buzzes. He fumbles it out of his pocket, irritated despite himself at how off his game this mission has him, and taps at his glasses to shift the lenses to their reading preset.
An update to the reception itinerary?
Now not only a reception with - his chest tightens - light refreshments and drinks, but a lecture built in, and the title-
His knuckles go white around the PADD. The flimsy casing threatens to creak.
'Unmasking the Tarsus Nine' by Dr. Imira Nagi, the museum director. No description of the content, but a vague promise of revealing new information.
The floor sways beneath him, his heartbeat pitching into a gallop. Gray swarms the edges of his vision.
What unmasking? Of what? Their faces, their movements, their names?
Bile roils in his gut. Whatever expression he is making must be terrible, for when he drags his gaze up from the screen, the blue and black blur of Spock is turned towards him. Fuck.
"Captain, are you well?"
"Peachy," Jim croaks. "Spock, you have the conn."
He whips around and strides back to the lift while concealing his limp as much as possible. He flicks through apps on his PADD as he goes until he finds the oldest one he wrote, back when he returned to Riverside and the others scattered to families and homes across the planet. The app opens - a basic interface, black and white, for he hadn’t cared about making it pretty, only functional and as locked-down as possible - to their group thread.
It's been months since any of them posted. The last message is a warning from Lian about a Starfleet Academy student working on a dissertation on the movements of the Tarsus Nine during the famine. She has become their unofficial shield, self-appointed to monitor the universe for any mention of their name.
A role no one asked her to take, and yet she plays it, haunted by guilt that Jim - younger than her - had, in her estimation, done more for their survival.
'I've checked the access logs,' she'd written, the text blown up large and black for Jim’s sight, 'and so far no one has allowed decryption. Be on your guard; she's moving towards discussing theories of our movements at the start of the famine in her next chapter.'
Jim’s stomach twists where he leans against the lift wall to give his heartbeat a chance to settle. 'Famine,' as if what happened on Tarsus IV were a consequence of something natural - a climactic cycle, a volcanic eruption, a flood - and not the intentional and precise carrying out of a plan to its final conclusion. As if there had not been enough food, when if the projections had been done correctly and rationing had been implemented effectively, there would have been enough for the vast majority of the colony to make it through-
But the food was where the starving people were not, and the starving people were where the food was not.
'Has anyone heard of this guy?' Jim shares the screenshot of the lecture title and synopsis, shoulders out of the lift with gaze fixed on the screen. 'What does he mean?'
Dots fly onto the screen and bounce: Lian, Thomas, Kevin, Adalia. The others are out in the black, if Jim remembers correctly; Kareem is stationed at the edge of Federation space on a dilithium mining rig, so it'll take a bit for the message-
'Imira Nagi?' Adalia writes. 'He pioneered using larger-scale quantum processing to analyze old images and geologic surveys for identification purposes; got famous for identifying several forgotten sites from the Eugenics Wars on Titan and recreating troop movements from the images. Why is he there?'
'Unmasking?' Thomas says.
'He's used his models to identify Cardassian war criminals,' Kevin writes. 'Even got one of them convicted in Federation Court based on matching her facial structure and measurements to cleaned-up holo records.'
Jim's breathing stalls. The gray clouds seep closer and thicker across his vision. His thumbs fly on the screen. 'So it could be analyzing our movements or our faces. How many photos of us are there?'
There's at least four he knows of. One of them being carried by Starfleet medical officers, the adults' blues drenched dark with blood, the children's faces covered by blankets. The doctors' expressions - hard, hollow, and devastated - had told the story, even without the wasted limbs cradled against their uniforms. The blurry still image from the security footage of their last raid on Kodos's supply depot, but they'd hidden their faces with what rags they could scrounge. The drone shot of their first camp in the foothills, Kareem just visible as he peered out of their dugout and up through the roof of fallen timber and leaves.
The last one, 'Boy on Tarsus IV,' that dries Jim's mouth and shallows his breath to even think about. Him, beaten and strung up in the square before the governor's mansion as an example: the protruding ladders of his ribcage, skin burned and blistering from the heat of Tarsus; the roundness of his belly, mocking the emptiness within; his face with its sunken eyes and cracked lips, tongue lolling where it swelled from his mouth with dehydration.
The photo doesn't show his face in detail, for he'd been too weak to hold up his head.
It shows enough. The wide berth everyone gave him as he suffered. The signs, hammered into dry earth, declaring that anyone who tried to give him food or water would be shot.
The photograph is famous. The photographer is valorized as a great documentarian of human suffering, someone who made sure that Tarsus IV would never be forgotten. The photo won nearly all the mass media prizes in existence the year of its publication, and the identity of the photographer is, like so much of Tarsus IV, hotly debated.
The first time Jim saw it, he'd vomited what little he’d had in his stomach. The angle is too clean to be covert. Whoever the photographer was, whoever they are, they are someone who stood in broad daylight on that distant summer morning and feared nothing when they photographed him dying.
No doubt that's why they've never come forward. There would be too many questions about the shot: how they got so close, found such good sightlines, got exactly the quality of light necessary to highlight the starved and mangled lines and concavities of Jim's body.
Jim shakes himself and looks back down at the PADD. The others have joined in on the conversation, but so far, his memory aligns with theirs: just the four photos. There's hundreds of thousands of Tarsus IV itself from the Starfleet investigations, but those had been of...
Everything else. The governor's mansion. The granaries. The empty villages. The great humps of earth, carpeted in golden flowers, outside every settlement to hide the mass graves.
'Sounds like it could be anything,' Jim types. He forces himself into motion towards his quarters. 'I'll keep you all updated.' His gut churns, the same queasy mixture of hunger and revulsion that accompanies him throughout his days.
'Somehow I am unsurprised Starfleet chose to host a reception involving food,' Nikhil writes with his usual crisp disdain, and Jim just manages to stifle a hysterical giggle by finally reaching his own door. 'You'll have to let us know if they use Tarsian Gold for the flower arrangements.'
'There wasn't any on the cargo manifest, but you never know.' He ends the chat with another promise to keep them updated, then tosses the PADD and his glasses aside as he simply falls face-down on the bed. Fuck, his jaw aches. His hips feel unsteady beneath his weight. His mouth waters with nausea, but he hasn’t eaten much today so there’s nothing to vomit, and even closing his eyelids doesn’t help the acrid itch and burn smearing across his eyes.
He can't simply decide not to attend the reception; he's the captain and it's on his damn ship, of course he has to go. If he begs off as sick, either Bones will come down on him with the fury of a thousand mother hens or Spock will insist upon checking on him in his stubborn way. Either way he'll have to talk.
He takes a moment to dig his fingertips into the rock-hard lines of muscle along the back of his neck, hoping despite himself that it’ll ease the tension running taut like guide wires up his back. Sometimes it helps to release his muscle strain, but evidently tonight is not his night.
Not his night, not his week, perhaps not even his year.
-
Jim slams to a halt at the reception entrance. His mouth floods with saliva. His breath shallows, and it's all he can do to lift a hand to his glasses and cue them to turn down the lens opacity.
"Captain?" Spock asks from his left, and Jim shakes himself awake, manages to propel his body into entering the hall with as confident a stride as he can force. The limp is visible, but not too much, and he’s learned to compensate with his other leg, even if it leaves his hip hurting like a bitch at the end of the night.
"I wasn't expecting them to bring in holodeck technology," he says, and if his voice is a little thin, no one seems to notice. "I guess they needed to find something for the scanner crew to do."
The reception hall has been transformed into evening on Tarsus IV. To one side, low-slung stone buildings, half-sunk in earth for climate control in characteristic Tarsus architecture, pour golden light from their windows onto the beaten-down path taking up the majority of the hall. Jim swallows against the remembered taste of yellow dust rolling over his tongue, breathes through the sudden wrench in his gut, the swollen ache of his body trying to digest something never meant to be eaten.
They had eaten dirt before the end.
To the right, carefully-measured paddies of rice, and beyond them, rolling hills carpeted with gleaming Tarsian Gold that stretch off to the deepening blue of the horizon. Above it the unfurling expanse of night, velvet-dark and shining with constellations. In the dugout, pressed together, clawing to keep what warmth they could, Jim had pointed at the brightest star he could find, night after night, and said that there was Sol, there was Starfleet. Starfleet would come.
They were more than nine, then. The indifferent stars watched as they dwindled down to single digits. As they died, believing Jim's words.
"The verisimilitude is lacking compared to a purpose-built space," says Spock. He stands with his hands locked at the small of his back, and it is only Jim's familiarity with him that reveals the disquiet in his expression. "Still, the rendering is adequate."
"Very adequate," Jim manages around the horror and the sheer absurdity of the situation sitting thick in his throat. He slips his glasses off his nose for something to do, turning them over in his hands as he looks around the hall.
"Champagne and canapes?" offers a yeoman from his left, a floating platter at his elbow. "The museum committee has recreated several dishes characteristic of Tarsian foodways."
Jim's gaze drags, unwillingly, as if pulled by a magnet, to the tray.
The sight slams into his chest like a hammer blow. The firm green flesh of late summer fruit, cut into squares and left clinging to the rind, then everted for ease of nipping off the best pieces; crispy purple fritters, gently steaming, stuffed to the brim with meat and shiny with oil; a little bowl of shelled yellow nuts, dusted with the crimson salty condiment Tarsus IV loved.
His mouth waters even as his stomach rolls over. His heart speeds, vision blurring and head going light as a balloon.
"No, thank you." There. His voice is steady.
"Aye, Captain," the yeoman says before turning away to enter the circulating crowd.
"That appetite shot not enough?" Bones joins Jim and Spock, one hand cradling a tumbler of something brown - bourbon, if Jim had to guess - and the other curled in a fist. "Can't say I'm all that interested in eating myself." He surveys the room with its collection of admirals and museum officials, with various members of the off-duty crew taking the chance to indulge. "Still don't know why they're insistent on starting the reception with this: gives me the willies."
Around them, the crowd murmurs low conversation while strolling through the dream of a dead planet.
"It is likely they want to remind us that Tarsus IV was more than just a tragedy," says Spock. "Hence the scenery and cuisine."
Jim turns back to the false horizon, squinting at the last bronze rays of Tarsus's light as the planet settles into night. The visual, however blurry it is to him now, is correct, but so little else is: no lick of cooling wind at the back of his neck, the air fragrant with Tarsian Gold; no low cries from the rice paddy banks where the great mudskippers made their homes and chanted for mates; no fruit bursting on his tongue and sticky on his chin, carefully cut for him by his great-aunt as they sat on the roof and watched the night advance.
There had been more to Tarsus IV than madness, famine, and death. There had been moments of joy: the first time he'd fixed his great-aunt's paddy planter; the silver flash of a mudskipper darting between his ankles, and the plop-plop-plop of mud hitting his calves as it burrowed into the paddy wall; the sunrises and sunsets smeared bright and colorful as any painting across the sky, haloed with atmospheric dust; the forests and fields he had learned by heart.
The holos shift, and Tarsus dissolves around him like it does in his dreams. The room becomes the reception hall again, and at the far end, Dr. Imira Nagi steps to the podium.
"Welcome, everyone!" His voice is jovial, and the audience turns to him with one accord, quieting. "I am so pleased to introduce the program for our museum dedication."
Jim slips his glasses back on and stands up straight, folds his arms at the small of his back to hide the tremor threatening to start. Lifts his chin and fixes his gaze on the professor, flanked by the various members of the museum staff. On the screens surrounding them, the program scrolls past: 'Unmasking the Tarsus Nine,' followed by remarks from Admiral Achukwu, followed by a virtual tour of the museum and its environs, closing with a memorial.
Nagi is, Jim's forced to admit, an engaging speaker. He explains his background with verve and humor, covers the methodology of his scans and anthropometrics-matching algorithms with such clarity even Spock nods in approval at Jim's side, and then comes, at last, to his topic.
"The identities of the Tarsus Nine are one of the greatest mysteries remaining to those of us who specialize in Tarsus IV," Nagi says. He gestures at the holos, where a list of historical questions appears, each neatly aligned with a brief answer.
'What organism killed the rice crop on Tarsus IV?'
'What subpopulations did Governor Kodos prioritize for extinction and why?'
'What health effects continue to appear in the cohort of Tarsus IV survivors?'
'How did Governor Kodos command loyalty from his troops?'
More questions and answers fly past, and Jim bites at the inside of his cheek until it threatens to bleed. Shifts his weight, feet sliding apart to balance for a strike even as he knows it's pointless.
"These are the only photos we have of the Tarsus Nine as a group." Nagi gestures again, and the photos shimmer into existence around the room: Starfleet Medical, too late, and them, wrapped in rags and fed on hatred, crouched behind a supply crate as they readied their attack. A murmur rolls through the crowd: pity, or something so close as to make no difference, and Jim's jaw tenses so tight his teeth grind in their custom-made sockets. "With an anthropometric algorithm and image recognition, crosschecked with data Starfleet kindly allowed me access to, I was able to match the Nine in each image and begin building preliminary profiles."
A number appears above each blanketed body and feral, twisted form, and Jim's gaze flicks between the photos. He's 8, Kareem is 2.
"Then, with those profiles in hand, I could turn to the individual photos."
The drone photo takes pride of place, and even though Jim’s eyesight is weak, it plays across the theater of his mind: Kareem's upturned face, carved skeletal with hunger; his wide, terrified eyes; the vague shadows of the rest of them behind his body. Measurement lines fall into place across the various parts of his face and '2' marks his forehead in scarlet as Nagi says,
"This individual, Tarsus 2, was a male Human with an estimated age of twelve. His phenotype of African descent places him as coming from one of three settlements on Tarsus IV, and as we know that Governor Kodos prioritized the health of the central communities over the outlying villages, that narrows it down further." He looks aside at Kareem's face, forever etched in horror, and an expression of sympathy that Jim itches to lunge at crosses his face. "I will warn you that the next photo is distressing."
Fuck.
"Fuck," Bones echoes, low and grim, dropping his gaze.
'Boy on Tarsus IV.'
It swallows the air, the sound, the light in the room. Jim stares at himself: silhouetted against the blank white wall of the governor's house, his wrists and ankles raw and bloodied with flies coating the wounds, his body contorted in its hanging position, now illuminated with measurements and guide lines like an object to be consumed, an animal for the slaughter.
'8' slashes across his chest like a brand.
"Tarsus 8 had an estimated age of 14," Nagi says, "with a phenotype more common among the colonists than Tarsus 2. However-" the photo shifts and expands, highlighting a circle of needle-puncture scars on the boy's shrunken bicep, "-these marks are unique. They are scars from prophylaxis for Arcturian Greatpox. Only two people on the colony rolls match all characteristics."
Bones's inhale is tight and sharp, the glance he casts at Jim burning. He's thumbed over that scar more times than Jim can count, cursing the incompetence of the doctors who administered the jabs and then didn't do proper regeneration.
"Jim," Bones says, and his voice churns with fury and a slow-building horror. "He-"
"I know," Jim says. "I know, Bones."
A few of the audience near them shift and cast them curious glances, and it's all Jim can do to keep his face straight as Nagi goes through the rest of the Tarsus Nine, sparing only a moment to wave off Tarsus 9 herself as "Doctor Shi Lian, who we are all aware of." He says this with the faintest undertone of a sneer, of a man who has demanded their names of Lian and been rebuffed, every time.
Lian is one of the greatest xenobiologists the universe has. She has dedicated her life to fighting fungal and bacterial plant infections, and this man condemns her to history with a wave of his hand.
"Captain," Spock murmurs from his side, and Jim becomes aware that he is near trembling with rage, his body drawn so tight that every muscle aches, his vision misted gray and red. "If what is distressing you is what myself and Doctor McCoy have assumed, how may we assist?"
"Nothing yet," Jim manages through numb lips.
"Using Shi Lian as our known data point and the profiles we had built," Nagi continues, "we were able to use sociograms and probability analysis to identify the most likely members of the Tarsus Nine."
Jim steps forward, ignoring Uhura's sidelong glance of irritation. The floor sways beneath him. "Dr. Nagi. A question."
"There is a question and answer session-"
Jim bares his teeth in something no one could ever call a smile. It had been the last thing some of Kodos's guards had seen before his jaw closed on their throats.
Nagi shifts at the podium. Some dim recognition flickers in his expression, an acknowledgment of the starving thing in Jim, the beast that has never quieted, never fed full.
"When the Tarsus Nine were found, Starfleet deliberately concealed the identities of the eight survivors under the age of majority. None of them have come forward in the decades since." Another step, and the two admirals closest to him exchange looks before angling towards him, as if preparing to stop his motion. "What gives you, or anyone else, the right to remove their chosen privacy from them?"
"An astute question, Captain Kirk," Nagi says, with the air of someone covering over insult. "The public has a right to know, and none of the Tarsus Nine are children now."
Jim stills. A pit yawns in his chest, black and empty as a grave. They had not been children then. They had not been children when they buried the youngest of them with their bare hands to remove the temptation, or ate the rotten flesh of mudskippers, or killed adults for the mere chance of sustenance.
"They are not children anymore," he says, soft and cold, each syllable precise as a blade. "But I wager they’d remember the names of those who tried to hunt them down. Who turned to Kodos and laid their morals in his hands, because a full belly and a night's safety were worth more than the lives of their children. They’d remember Starfleet's delay in arriving."
"Now, see here, Captain Kirk, Starfleet-" one of the admirals blusters, and Jim turns to him. Cocks his head, and lets the hunger stare out through him: ancient and unhallowed, this shadow that has walked beside life from its conception, a circling predator that even millennia could not sway, burned into his bones, his organs, his mind.
The admiral falls silent, cowed, and Jim's attention swings back to Nagi.
He takes another step. His hands hang loose at his sides. For a moment, he is there again, in the earth and darkness, his stomach raw and his skin cracked, his thoughts faded to pallid confusion from the body devouring the mind itself.
"Starfleet talks a good game," Jim says, "about protecting the Tarsus Nine. About leaving them their privacy." Another step. Pain lances up from his hip.
His emaciated body stares down from a hundred floating holo screens. A symbol, a memory, comfortably contained in photographs as an object of pity - a reassurance that the world is better than it was.
"I'm sure they had only good intentions," the woman next to Nagi - some associate director of the museum - begins.
One corner of Jim's mouth twitches into something mirthless. "Sure. Easy to promise protection in exchange for silence." He halts beneath the podium and stares up at Nagi, and around him, the crowd shifts and mutters. "What do you think that silence costs?"
"I wouldn't dare to presume," Nagi says, clipped.
Jim's laugh is a wretched, wracking thing, drawn up from lungs that have choked on dust and grief. "You presume now, Doctor. You presume that they have kept silent out of fear, or anonymity, or in Shi Lian's case, stubbornness. You assume that they say nothing because they choose to, and not out of mercy."
"You are throwing out accusations, Captain Kirk," Admiral Achukwu says from her spot nearby. Her gaze is narrow, and it slides off Jim's awareness without a trace.
"It's not an accusation if it's a fact," Jim retorts, heart hammering with each word. "Four thousand survivors, Admiral, and only nine of them resisted to the end. The rest collaborated with Kodos. The people who shot children now chair the boards of museums and memorial societies. The captains who came too late are now admirals."
The survivors of Tarsus IV - those willing to trade upon it - have done quite well for themselves.
Jim’s survivors had agreed upon their silence, in those long, terrible months back on Earth. Had argued and ranted and wept over the plain text of Jim's communication app, and still, still, it crushed them:
They were powerless, and against them lay the entire weight of a bureaucracy and a people ready to burn away the past, to leave truth unexamined in all its ugliness.
They were young, and in front of them lay unnumbered years to live, to fill with the shapes of lives and names unburdened by the shadow of Tarsus IV.
Jim's hand curls into a fist, and he half-imagines he feels the growth arrest lines in his bones creak. "Starfleet buried the Nine's voices deep and called it kindness, called it freedom. Called their silence payment. And you want to make that payment worthless?"
"The public has a right to know!" Nagi's voice cracks for the first time. The geniality has burned away, leaving him harsh, his expression wild.
Jim swallows down the false perfume of Tarsian Gold.
His last sight of Tarsus IV, before the doctor covered his sunblasted eyes with a damp towel, had been the mounds of mass graves, shining beneath the carpet of Tarsian Gold Kodos's men planted over the bodies. Roots growing amid the bones, over the empty paddies with their dried mudskipper burrows, into the blurred depressions of forgotten water sources.
"Besides, Captain Kirk," Nagi says, recovering some of his bluster, "I hadn't realized you were so passionate about Tarsus IV studies. Have you written a paper?"
A laugh ripples through the crowd, and Jim lifts his gaze to the giant holo screen behind Nagi.
He hangs there for the viewer's inspection, for their consumption, a sacrifice to their endless, voyeuristic hunger without his consent. A glimpse of the worst that the universe can offer, titillating the viewer while they know themselves safe.
The boy in the photo is still. Bound. Dying, and yet resistant, hoping despite himself.
Footsteps scrape against the deck, and Spock and Bones flank him, Bones' hand sliding to the small of his back to still the swaying threatening him, Spock's strength a pillar at his side.
"A paper," Jim repeats. His stomach twists, and he leans into the steady weight of Bones' hand and Spock's presence. A chill rolls over his skin, as if all the fat and muscle he’s put on with the years has faded in one swoop, leaving him trembling in Tarsus night. Slowly, he drags his gaze down to Nagi's expression, triumphant and secure.
"No paper could reflect what Tarsus IV was."
Distantly, out of his peripheral vision, the blood drains from Sulu's face.
"No paper could tell you what it is like to fight over the corpse of a baby to keep the others from eating him," Jim says, steady with effort. "Listening to your friends' voices become fewer with each night. Killing one of Kodos's guards with a rock for the rice bun she carried."
On the dais, the dignitaries' faces have gone gray. Nagi grasps the podium, swaying, mouth working soundlessly.
"Or-" and Jim's mouth twists, "-hanging in the public square for five days as your classmates and teachers and neighbors walk past you, too cowed to kill you to spare you suffering."
The room is silent as the square was.
"We would name them all," Jim says, remorseless, vicious in a way he'd wanted to believe had died with Tarsus IV. "Every one of them who hunted us. Who gunned down the unchosen in their homes. Who manned the sentry stations. Who took the rice. Who withdrew into Kodos's walls while the rest of us fought for scraps."
He meets Nagi's eyes. Lets his smile widen and brighten with hatred. Says,
"Can I put Tarsus 8 in my byline, Doctor?"
"You," Nagi breathes. His eyes shine, his mouth hangs slack, and he looks at Jim like an icon: something pure and holy, something profane in the weight of what he has endured.
Jim inclines his head in a mocking bow. His hands tremble at his sides. "Me. Let me make one thing clear to you, and Starfleet, and anyone else interested in revealing the others’ identities-
Leave the names buried with Tarsus IV. Drag them to the light at your own risk." His teeth ache. "We buried our dead, but the grave is shallow, and our memory long."
The hunger coils around his stomach, as faithful a friend as could ever be wished, and Jim’s smile sharpens.
"I-" Nagi glances aside at the admirals, as if for quarter, and finds none. Instead, Admiral Achukwu mounts the dais and strides to him, and they speak in rushed tones.
Jim ignores them, his attention returned to the emaciated form glowering down at them all.
"You know," he says to Spock and Bones, "I always hated that photo."
"Understandable," Spock responds, his hand sliding to Jim’s bicep to guide him back upright. Low blood pressure - another fun gift of Tarsus IV.
While Jim watches Nagi and Achukwu confer, the rest of the museum staff on the dais circling them, the others melt from the crowd:
Uhura, Scotty, Sulu, Chekov, Chapel.
They surround him, and over their shoulders, the assembled dignitaries either stare openly in awe or glance with furtive pity, as if disbelieving that he still stands here, alive. The glances rake over him, cold, assessing, and his skin prickles beneath them.
One delegation member takes a step towards them, and whatever look Uhura gives them must be so terrible they halt and turn away entirely, and Jim's chest aches with swallowed laughter.
"Well," Scotty says, "you certainly know how to throw a spanner in the works."
"It's a talent," Jim agrees. The holo screens flicker, and 'Boy on Tarsus IV' fades from its accusing place on high, replaced by the windows and walls of the reception hall. "Oh, thank fuck."
"Captain!" Chekov says, scandalized, but then seems to think better of it and adds on, "This is the most appropriate time, I suppose."
"Did the others know?" Uhura says, low, her gaze fixed on the dais. "The other eight?"
Jim rolls his shoulders and tries to let the anxiety ease beneath his skin. Probably does a piss-poor job of it, if Bones’ glance is any indicator. "Yeah. They knew about the reception. They were just as happy with it as I was."
"You've revealed yourself as a Tarsus survivor-" Spock meets Jim's gaze, his brow faintly furrowed, "-and threatened Starfleet and its new museum."
"To say nothing of several important government members," Bones adds.
"Are you not worried about insubordination charges?" asks Spock.
"No." Jim draws in a deep breath to clear the memory of Tarsian Gold from his lungs.
Up on the dais, Nagi gestures, a sharp, frantic chop of his hand, and Achukwu shakes her head.
"We were silent in return for privacy," Jim says, "and even if the bargain was unspoken, Starfleet knew the terms. Maybe they thought we were all dead at last, or that we wouldn't care; maybe they thought we'd be too cowed to name the others' crimes."
Achukwu and Nagi glance his way over Sulu and Chekov's heads, and Jim meets their gaze.
There is a sliver of him, forged and honed in the darkness of Tarsus IV, that has never softened, never learned to fit its way back into the container of civilization, and it slides to the forefront, pushing against the boundaries of his skin.
The same calm, ruthless calculation ticks over in his mind, as it does every moment. A pound of human flesh: six hundred calories. A pound of human fat: three thousand five hundred calories. When the hair on the head cracks and dries and pale down sprouts up across the body, the end is near. Three minutes without air. Three days without water. Three weeks without food.
Three heavy stones smashed into Kodos's face, and the nine of them standing around his bloodied corpse when Starfleet opened the door.
"They thought wrong." Jim's swallow clicks dry. "And for the others to live, my identity is an acceptable sacrifice."
Nagi turns his back, shoulders trembling, and Achukwu steps off the dais and forges through the crowd towards Jim, the assembly falling away around her as she nears.
She halts into parade rest, gaze looking Jim up and down, and something unsettled shines in her dark gaze. "Captain Kirk."
"Admiral."
"As always, you have made your point in a rare form," Achukwu says. "I don't suppose you can be convinced to let Dr. Nagi continue his speech."
Jim says nothing. He doesn't need to. His pale face, his scarred eyes, the tremble in his limbs - they say more than enough.
Achukwu nods. "The reception will end here," she says. "The Tarsus Nine's identities will continue to be protected by Starfleet and removed from any exhibits in the museum, but as for the people in here, there are many."
"Just have them sign NDAs," Bones growls, only to silence at Achukwu's quelling glance.
"An NDA is only as good as the consequences for breaking it," Jim says, a sardonic smile tugging at one corner of his mouth. "After Tarsus IV and this, forgive me if I'm unsure of Starfleet's commitment to our protection."
"Starfleet knows what we risk in leaving you unprotected." Achukwu inclines her head in something near respect. "You have reminded us quite vividly, Captain Kirk, of the cost you and yours have paid. It is not our intention to diminish that cost."
Jim meets her gaze. "We'll see."
The weight of years and lives presses down at his shoulders, and only the solidity of his crew around him keeps him upright.
"We'll see," he repeats softly, and the words taste of dust.