#bb jim

Still with no title

Part one

USS Brighton, star date 2245.04

“Happy fucken’ birthday to me,” Jim muttered. His breath fogged up the viewing port and he doodled a vector equation in the condensation. He had the navigation from Earth to Tarsus IV all plotted out on his PADD, and had re-plotted the course several times with imagined variables. An attack from a Klingon warbird sending them off course, navigating around a previously uncharted spatial anomaly, a failure in the ship’s computer sending them 20 light years off course, 200 light years, 200,000 light years. And that was just in the first week of their trip. Since then, Jim had first broken into his PADD’s code and rewritten it, and then he’d disassembled the thing and put it back together with a few upgrades he’d acquired from engineering so it could run his software.

He had a personal comm waiting on the terminal in the passenger lounge. He’d only looked at it long enough to see it was from Sam before logging out of his account. It wasn’t like he’d expected anything from his mom, and even if she had sent anything, she probably would have been drunk. Or crying. Or both. Jim’s birthday was never a happy occasion, and thanks to the whole Starfleet Hero coverage, Jim knew down to the second how long he’d been alive before his dad died. He could see his mom counting the seconds every year, looking at him and adding up in her head how many more seconds he’d been alive than George Kirk.

Birthdays sucked on the cosmic level of a singularity.

In 32 days, the USS Brighton would enter orbit over Tarsus IV and shove all her passengers out along with her cargo, pick up a bunch of the same, and head back to Earth. Jim had been trying to get the captain to make him a midshipman, but so far no dice. She was a tough nut to crack, and had about as much sense of humor as a Vulcan at a funeral. After the fourth time she’d told him that no, she was not going to take on a juvenile delinquent as a midshipman, she’d warned him that if he tried to stowaway on her ship, she’d send him back to Tarsus IV in a life pod. Jim believed her. Captain Hathaway was not a woman he wanted to go to toe-to-toe with, not least of all because she was 6’4” and looked like she could pick him up – life pod and all – and throw him a few light years.

Jim smudged his sleeve across the viewport and then breathed on the surface again. He tried to calculate the amount of energy that would theoretically be necessary to create a wormhole from Earth to Tarsus IV, but he couldn’t create enough space with his breath on the window, and the equation kept fading before he’d finished it.

“You could always use a PADD,” Captain Hathaway said from behind him.

Jim had seen her reflection in the glass just a heartbeat before she’d spoken, so he didn’t jump. He wiped his sleeve over the last of the fading equation and crossed his arms over his chest. She watched him for a moment, and then took a seat at the table behind him.

The observation lounge had been empty for hours, and it wasn’t used much anyways – the ship’s designers had obviously put it in as an afterthought, as the only way to get to it was to squeeze past the coolant tanks in Engineering and take the service corridor. It was a weirdly shaped room, like someone had taken a slice off of a tear drop. One wall was curved so severely that Jim could have used it for ricochet practice. The opposite side of the room narrowed down into a point so narrow that the best use of the space had been a rack of pool cues. A smaller-than-standard pool table had a folded board under it that could convert it into a holotable, and the deck of cards and case of plasisteel chips on a nearby shelf proved it was also used for poker as well. Otherwise, the lounge boasted one round table with three chairs, and a couch that looked like it was used for a lot of naps.

“We don’t often see passengers back here,” Hathaway said after a long moment of quiet where Jim just stared at the stars sliding slowly past the viewport.

“Probably don’t get captains back here a lot either,” Jim mumbled. Maybe it hadn’t been an afterthought – maybe it hadn’t even been designed in, but instead retrofitted by the engineering staff.

Hathaway didn’t respond. After a breath she said, “Pretty advanced math you’re doodling on my window.”

Jim shrugged again. He liked math. Might not be able tell from his transcript, but that was just because he never did his assigned homework – and why should he? He could plot out an astronavigation course to describe the dancing he could do around 7th Grade math homework.

(read more)

I’m six years old and my three brothers are going away with my mother for the weekend ... a treat for something or other. My dad’s staying behind and my mother says that he’s to look after me. That it would be a chance for us to bond. So they’re gone and me and my dad are sat at the kitchen table looking at each other. Like we’re looking at each other for the first time, you know. He asks me what I want to do, and straightaway I say I want to go and see the penguins in the zoo. When I was six I was going through some mad penguin obsession. I used to dress up as a penguin at dinner times and always ask for fish fingers ... stuff like that. If it wasn’t penguins it was cowboys. Cowboys were cool. A penguin dressed as a cowboy was always a step too far, funnily enough! So we go to the zoo and I wear my cowboy outfit ... get my gun and holster, my hat and all that. We get the bus and it’s sort of funny to see my dad on the bus and away from the house. We start to have this chat about when I was born and what a really fat baby I was ... but how after a day or so I stopped eating any food and everyone was dead worried. That he was very worried. That he was so happy when I got better and they could take me home. We’re in the zoo, and I go straight to the penguins. Standing in my cowboy gear ... looking at the penguins ... having such a great chat to my dad on the bus ... it was a perfect childhood day. [Slight pause] He lets go of my hand and say she’ll be back with my choc-ice. And he goes. He’s gone. I’m happy looking at the penguins, but it’s an hour since he’s left and I go to look for him. I’m walkin’ about the zoo, and I’m not worried yet. And I don’t talk to anyone. I leave the zoo and I go to the bus stop we got off at earlier. I get on the bus. I tell the driver my address. He asks where my parents are and I say they’re at home waiting for me. I stay on the bus in the seat nearest the driver. After a while we end up at the end of our street and the driver says, ‘So long, cowboy.’ He was nice. I get the key from under the mat and openthe door and go inside the house. And I’m alone there and I suppose I still think my dad will be coming back soon. I take off my cowboy clothes and hang up my hat and holster.