Chapter Text
George wakes up with a gasp and he jolts straight up in bed. His vision goes fuzzy at the sudden headrush but he can’t find it in himself to care at all, really. He’s awake. George is awake in a hospital bed and the sight of New York City outside of the window is quite possibly the most comforting thing he’s seen in a while.
He’s alive. His arms and legs feel too heavy and he has a headache the size of Maine but he’s alive.
Just as he realizes that his throat feels dryer than any desert, a woman who he assumes is someone from the army walks into the room. “Hello, Captain. How are you feeling?” She smiles sweetly at him and it’s the first time in this whole thing that George gets the feeling of something being wrong. He can’t really peg it, but something definitely is not right here.
The radio is playing in the corner of the room. It’s a baseball game that has the announcers sounding extremely excited. He glances around the room: the beige cotton curtains, neatly made bed, and view out of the window don’t point to anything being wrong. Nothing in this room gives off any obvious sign of there being anything off but he can’t get rid of the nagging feeling in his gut that says he’s missing something. Something he should have noticed right away.
“Captain Kirk?” Oh right, the woman. She’s standing just inside the door wearing a perfectly ironed brown skirt that hits her just below the knee and a white button down with a brown tie. She’s dressed almost identically to how Winona used to when she was working.
Winona. It hurts to even think her name. Last time he spoke to his wife, they were both sure it would be the last time.
“And it’s a homerun for Mills!” The voice from the radio yells and George knows something is wrong now.
-
Jim wakes up to the vibration of his bed, same as every morning. And, same as every morning, he regrets setting a pointless alarm. He has absolutely no reason to be waking up so early in the morning but something feels wrong about waking up after eight.
He’d call it something like genetics but he doesn’t actually know any specifics about his parents. Never met them, probably never will.
Rather than letting himself lay in bed and stew for the rest of the day, as he has been wont to do on occasion, Jim pushes himself out of bed. His feet make contact with the too cold wood flooring and he reminds himself for the millionth time to get carpeting installed.
He won’t do it, but it’s certainly a nice thing to think.
He feels around on the nightstand for the small black square that seems to control his life and the amount that other people can stand him. He slips it into the pocket of his gray sweatpants, not bothering to actually use it. He’s not going to see anyone anytime soon and today feels like one of those days.
Jim trudges into the kitchen, limbs still feeling like they have actually been replaced by lead. He opens the too-nice-for-his-entire life fridge and glares at the cartons of leftovers, milk, and vegetables that Carol probably broke into his apartment and put there. It takes him five full minutes of glaring at the contents of a refrigerator he didn’t even buy for himself to realize that he has absolutely no appetite, same as every day.
He pops in a keurig cup thing (He can almost hear Ny yelling what they’re called at him but then again he can’t really hear anything right now.) and settles back against the counter, still gazing far too angrily at kitchen appliances.
The only thing he really feels any sort of love for at this moment is the coffee maker, and he’s always had a soft spot for that thing. Well, both of them. He has to resist the urge to reach out and comfort his traditional full pot one because he’s opted for the single cup Keurig this morning. He feels bad about it, truly.
He’s been through a lot with that thing and it’s plainly obvious judging by the state of the dingy white machine compared to the sleek silver of his kitchen. (Once again, not picked out by him. It was all Nyota and Carol, just like the rest of his apartment and life.)
Jim cannot help but feel like he’s lost control of his own life some days and only coffee and the knowledge that he will always have it can ever make him feel sane. It’s the sole reason Nyota decided having an actual Starbucks in her building was completely necessary. Say what you will about her, but Jim can respect that she has some amount of respect for him.
His coffee finishes and fills the entire space with the rich scent of it. He inhales deeply and lets his eyes fall shut. He reaches out for his cup with relish just as the phone starts flashing and beeping. The shock of it caused him to knock the cup over and spill coffee all over the counter. “Aw, coffee, no.”
He groans and reaches for a towel. Whoever was calling can definitely wait for him to get back to them. Anyone who makes him spill his coffee gets no special treatment. Pavel learned that the hard way. (Jim still feels bad about that some days.)
Anyway, nobody ever really needs anything that urgent from Jim.
-
“Where am I?” George demands of the woman, who is clearly trying to mask her reaction of surprise with confusion.
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re asking.” She purses her lips and smiles at the same time, which does not help to make her seem any less suspicious.
Really, the whole thing stinks of a cover up but George can’t quite figure out what it is they’re trying to cover up. And they did a damn good job, whoever they are. If it were anyone but himself, they probably would have pulled it off with no problems but he’d like to consider himself a bit smarter than that. “Where am I?” He repeats himself, this time more firmly.
He pushes himself out of the bed and onto his feet as the woman looks behind herself nervously. “Sir, I think it would be best for you to stay in bed at this point.” She offers a half smile, obviously growing more and more uncomfortable with each passing second and step that George takes toward her.
“That game.” He points behind himself at the radio. “I was at that game.” He rounds on the woman. “So I’m going to give you one last chance. Where am I?”
The woman opens her mouth as if to speak but just as she does, the room fills with men dressed all in black, trying to restrain him. “What the hell?”
He struggles against the grip of these obviously highly trained agents or whatever they are. It’s not very hard for him to fight them all off, even after who knows how long asleep. He’s driven mostly by the need to see Winona again. Something in the back of his mind pulls at him and says that if he can just fight them off, he can get back to his wife.
He would kill everyone in this room to get back to Winnie at this point.
“Code Thirteen, we have a code thirteen!” He heard the woman shriek as he burst out of the door and found himself in the hallway, surrounded by men and woman in suits.
George isn’t exactly sure what ‘code thirteen’ could possibly mean, but he’s pretty sure it has to do with him and it could not possibly mean anything good for his chances of getting back to his wife and settling down.
Starting a family.
Even as he’s running through unfamiliar halls chased by strange men in uniforms that are too similar to the ones he saw just before he thought he died, he lets his mind wander back to her. The conversations they would have about starting a family. George had always wanted a son.
He was sure they could figure something out now.
He spies a set of glass doors that lead outside and without thinking or even really looking, he bursts through them and into the middle of the road.
This is not the New York he knows. It’s familiar, for sure, but it is so different that it’s almost unrecognizable as his city. This new version of New York is full of bright lights and screens and cars that look completely different from anything he would have driven.
It’s enough to stop him dead in his tracks, to say the least.
“We wanted to ease you into it.” A voice behind him chuckles and George whips around to face the source.
Standing behind him is a man in a suit, leaning on a cane with a slight smirk. His hair is graying and his face is covered in wrinkles but George can tell that this man was once handsome. He exudes a sort of authority that he cannot quite place. “What are you talking about? What’s going on?”
The man takes a few steps toward him and extends a hand which George takes automatically, albeit with some measure of trepidation. “Christopher Pike.” He smiles and gives his hand a shake before releasing. “I think I have a story you need to hear.”
George nods and frowns, drawing his eyebrows together. “I think you’re right, Chris.”
-
Jim sighs as he throws the towel into the sink. He wipes his hand on his sweats. Reaching into the pocket of said pants, he withdraws the small square. He clicks the largest button and closes his eyes as his whole world bursts into the hum of appliances and distant sounds of cars. It sparks a sharp but swift pain behind his eyes that quickly dissipates.
He picks up the phone and presses the callback button without looking. Nobody has this number unless he wants them to. Nobody could even get his personal number without his knowledge, his friends made sure of that.
He listens to the ringing with chagrin. It’s only about twenty seconds before the person on the other end picks up. Twenty seconds which Jim struggles through with the disgusting ringing in his ears that seems to echo around his head. There are certain noises that sound absolutely terrible with the aides and the ringing of the phone is one of them.
“Hawkie!” The voice on the other end of the line chirps. Jim breaks out into a grin.
“I should have known it was you. Nobody else would call me at eight am.” He teases. “And what’s with the nickname?”
“What’s with not answering your phone?” Carol shoots back without missing a beat. “I was about to come break into your home and make sure you hadn’t died.
Jim rolls his eyes and leans against the counter again. “I might have been sleeping.” He knows that she knows he wasn’t sleeping but sometimes, even Jim likes to entertain the idea of being a slightly normal person.
Carol scoffs, as is to be expected. “You act like I haven’t known you for years.” She laughs at him amicably. “You have never-not one day in your life-slept through your ridiculous alarm. Not even when you were sick with the worst case of the flu I’d ever seen.”
Jim grins at the memory of it. He was practically hallucinating and babbling on to Carol but he still woke up at 7:30 sharp. He fell back asleep eventually but was definitely awake when he was supposed to be. “Yeah, that was fun.”
“Not the word I’d use, but sure.” Carol somehow manages to sound perfectly wonderful and collected and just nice despite her evil ways and mean behavior. Jim scowls at the phone. Must be the accent. “So, I have news.”
“I assumed as much.”
He can practically hear Carol rolling her eyes on the other end of the line. Well, see. But seeing through the telephone is not exactly possible and it’s easier to just say hear. Even if his brain supplies sarcastic remarks every time he does.
Fucking brains.
“We have a code captain.” Carol breathes through the phone, her voice suddenly much heavier than before. “A real one, this time.”
Jim’s whole world stops at that moment and the pain behind his eyes comes back all at once, more intense than before. He presses the heel of his hand to his forehead and squeezes his eyes shut. “Carol, this isn’t funny. Don’t joke like that. We all know he probably won’t ever wake up.”
“They lied. He’s been stable for weeks and he woke up today.” She speaks quickly, sounding almost panicked. “I’m not joking, James. George Kirk is awake and he’s running around Manhattan looking extremely confused.”
Jim lets out a breath once he realizes that she’s not lying. He knows Carol’s lying voice, has always been able to pin it down even when nobody else could possibly tell the difference. He used to have to see her face-to-face but since Uhura made him his new aides, it’s a lot easier to tell simply aurally. “George Kirk has no idea that he has a son.”
-
“You are expecting me to believe that you found me frozen in ice seventy years after everyone thought I died-Including myself, I might add-and you brought me back to life?” George crosses his arms and leans back in the leather chair across from Pike’s desk.
He doesn’t believe it and he knows that Pike knows he cannot believe it. If this is true, then Winona is close to death and probably wouldn’t even recognize him. He doesn’t believe it and he can’t believe it.
Christopher Pike, head of SHIELD, has to understand that no matter how many pictures he shows him or facts and figures get thrown around, George cannot believe it.
“George, you have to believe it. You have to believe that this is 2014 and you are here. There’s no going back now.” Chris fixes him with a hard stare. “Now your only choice is whether you live up to what you’re meant to do or you go and sit somewhere, wasting everything that countless people have risked for you.”
George knows what he had to do. What he should do. Still, he can’t rid himself of that overwhelming lost he feels every time he moves or speaks or looks around at this strange new world. Seventy years and everything is so different.
Suddenly the tight white t-shirt they dressed him up in feels like it’s squeezing him too tightly, like he’s going to run out of breath at any given moment. “What do you need me to do?”
Pike leans forward with a smirk and rests his elbows on the desk, steepling his fingers together. “You’re not the only hero out there anymore, Kirk.” His voice had become serious but not the terrifying kind George used to hear from men who carried the same sort of authority on their shoulders. “You are one of many people with extraordinary abilities and we want you to use those abilities the way you should be.”
George narrows his eyes at Pike and cannot help but get a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. It sounds like he’s going to be used as a military puppet again and he doesn’t really want that. At all. “What happened to Winona after I left?”
“I don’t see how that-“ Chris starts, obviously perplexed by George’s sudden questioning.
George holds up a hand to stop him talking with a frown. “What happened to my wife? I’m sure you can understand why I’m concerned.” He stares hard at the ring on Pike’s left hand.
Chris instinctively grabs the ring with his right hand. George wonders what they did with his own ring, if it got lost when he crashed. “Winona Kirk went missing about a year after everyone thought her husband died.”
If he was feeling lost before that, George isn’t quite what to do now. In all of the situations he had thought up for Winona, none of them included her dying alone in something that was probably bloody and painful. She was supposed to live a great life, surrounded by people who love her. Even without George there beside her, Winona was supposed to be happy. “Disappeared?”
Pike looks extremely uncomfortable at this point and he tries to occupy himself with papers on his desk so that he doesn’t have to make eye contact with George. “She was going after the last few agents that Romulus had out there and she got lost somewhere.” He frowns at the desk. “Nobody knows what happened. She was just gone one day and so were the people she was looking for.”
George holds his breath for the words that he knows must be coming. He can hear it before Chris even starts to say it. He doesn’t want to hear it said, doesn’t need to, will fall apart if it happens but he knows it’s coming. He braces himself.
“We can only assume that she died not long after. It would be cruel to wish that she didn’t.” Pike continues to stare at the desk like it holds the answers to what happened to the woman.
George’s heart drops down to his feet at the words and he wants to bolt out of the office. Feels the desperate need to run, run, run as far away as is humanly (or super-humanly) possible, as if running will take it all away, will bring him back to Winona and everyone he loved.
Everyone he lost.
“Cruel?” George manages to get out, voice slightly hoarse.
This time, Pike manages to pry his gaze away from the glass top of the workspace and meet George’s gaze. “After you died and we couldn’t find you, the serum was lost. Some people determined to recreate it. We found proof of…human test subjects from Romulus. The testing was brutal and inhumane. If Winona wasn’t killed, chances are they tested on her and tortured her.”
George stares at his knees, clad in perfectly ironed khakis that don’t belong to him. He doesn’t belong here, in this place, in this time, without Winona or anything familiar. “I don’t think I can do what you want me to do, Chris. I can’t just put on the uniform and be that hero again.”
“There’s someone I think you should meet, Cap.”