#jimkirk

From June 27, 2009.

Song is "Leave Out All The Rest," by Linkin Park.

As most of my trekkie moots may know, AOS Kirk x TOS Spock interactions in the Kelvin Timeline hit me a lot harder the any of the other ship interactions do.

AOS!Jim × TOS!Spock is one of those cross-timeline pains that never quite heals because Spock is aware of it. He’s the only one in the Kelvin Timeline who's carrying the full weight of both worlds.

Spock doesn’t just recognize Jim. His instincts do. His very katra does.

There, he meets a Jim who feels right, who sounds right, who fights right, who smiles the same way before doing something catastrophically brave, who argues the same way.

This Jim is still Jim. Brave, reckless, brilliant, stubborn, soft in the exact places that matter.

Too emotional.

Too alive.

But also, he meets a Jim who's not his.

So Spock isn’t mourning a stranger. He’s mourning the one who grew old with him.

The one whose rhythms he already knew in his very soul.

And Spock feels it all at once. Every glance is a lead to a comparison he never wants to make. Every instinct screams this is him and logic has to answer no, it is not.

And Jim.... Oh, boy, he feels it. He may not undertand at first why Spock looks at him like he’s made of ghosts but after the meld he sure as hell undertands that there is gravity there.

He feels that pull. A familiarity that doesn’t make sense and somehow weights within him anyway.

When he melds with Spock Jim has no idea he’s stepping through the echo of a love that already filled an entire lifetime.

He goes throught memories he didn’t make, habits that weren’t learned with him.

He sees a a forever that belongs to another version of himself

When he melds with Spock Jim doesn’t know he’s brushing up against someone else’s forever.

The reason why it’s devastating to watch those two interact it's because that's not unrequited love.

It’s love that already had its time.

Spock has already loved Jim deeply, quietly, irrevocably and he's seen how that love ended so tragically.

And now he’s standing in front of a version who could have been a second chance… but isn’t allowed to be.

And the cruelest part is that Spock already knows how this story ends:

a cold glass, with two hands that never quite meet, and a universe saved at the cost of a life with the one man he cannot live without.

It’s grief layered on grief. He can’t claim him. He can’t reach for him. He can’t even explain why it hurts without breaking the timeline's causality and himself.

So Spock carries it alone. Because that’s what he does.

Because loving Jim Kirk, in any universe, apparently means learning how to survive him.

Please follow the link for the complete recap.

From the recap:

Please follow the link for the complete article.

Paul Wesley plays it mostly straight when the not-yet-captain Kirk (currently the First Officer aboard the USS Farragut) takes center stage in a tense episode of the terrific Trek prequel.