taxonomites | xxvi [ visual ].

Kirk stood outside the doors to the severed bridge of the ship he hadn't seen in over a year. There used to be a hallway here - to the right, sickbay and to the left, the transporter room. Both were gone, sent home along with the people they'd accompanied. Sickbay had vanished months ago with Doctor McCoy, but the transporter room was a more recent disappearance, gone with Uhura. Both she and Spock were now absent from Taxon.

Part of him was glad they were gone. No-one deserved to be here. Better they be home, leading the lives they were supposed to than here in sometimes apocalyptic hamsterland. The other part was angry and jealous; felt abandoned and alone. Irrational, he realized, but hey, he was only human.

He took a step towards the doors and they parted obediently, granting him access to the Enterprise's remaining piece. Once on the bridge, he lifted the tablet he'd known was on all along into view so he could look at the screen directly. For once, he'd actually turned it on himself and wasn't just the tablet glitch that plagued Taxon's residents.

"To those of you who knew them, Commander Spock and Lieutenant Nyota Uhura have been sent home."

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"Oh, I want to hear it." If only because it would give her an idea of what to do with him. She didn't know Kirk well, but they were from the same universe and B'Elanna couldn't help but feel and certain degree of kinship. Besides, she actually liked him. "But you can let me in first."

Kirk was already on his feet, abandoning his tablet in his chair to go to the door and press his hand to the panel that opened it manually. He stepped to the side and back, gesturing for her to enter. "Welcome aboard the Enterprise, Lieutenant."

B'Elanna was momentarily distracted from the task at hand by the sight of a ship she'd only ever read about it text books. She was sleeker than the engineer had been expecting, and bit more polished, but no less beautiful.

"Wow," she breathed, stepping past Kirk to take in every inch of the sight in front of her. "She's ... wow."

She wasn't Voyager - she wasn't home - but she was pretty impressive nonetheless.

Kirk was well aware of his ship's beauty. She was smooth, sleek, bright and held comforts, both aesthetic and physical, that other ships in the fleet lacked. She was still relatively fresh out of spacedock, a new breed of starship that would no doubt give way to ones that would outshine her in the future - especially the future B'Elanna hailed from. A future that would no doubt be vastly different, for her future was something, technically, from his past.

"If only there were more of her to show off," he lamented. "But, I'd rather have this, than no part of her at all."

He patted the wall he stood next to with something akin to affection; classic captain's love for his ship.

The unconscious gesture made B'Elanna smile. Finally, she turned her attention away from the Enterprise to look back at her captain. She'd momentarily forgotten Nero and the real reason for her visit to the bridge.

"The schematics don't do her justice," she said, then: "There are Starfleet officers who would kill for a chance to stand where I'm standing."

The company would have made them even more determined.

"I can imagine," he said, though he couldn't. Not really. He'd seen glimpses of the future when Ambassador Spock had mind melded with him, but it was things on a Vulcan that hadn't been destroyed, Romulan Senators and that ship that the man had arrived in the past in with the red matter device. Kirk had an ego the size of Jupiter, but even he had a hard time seeing himself as this great man who was a household name throughout the known regions of the quadrant.

"I doubt it."

She'd met a lot of Starfleet officers with impressive egos, but none of them thought that highly of themselves. They often wanted to be the next Captain Kirk, but they didn't expect it to happen.

"And right now, it doesn't matter. Who's Nero?"

"Someone from your time," he began, "or around your time. Something's going to happen in your future - to the Alpha Quadrant. Before I continue, I need to know: Are you sure you want to hear this? I've got no qualms with telling you, but if you have any with hearing it, then consider the topic changed."

"I want to hear it," she said, immediately. Nero was clearly important, whoever he was. Once she had the missing piece of the puzzle, a lot of things - about Kirk and his crew and his ship - would start to make sense.

"I'm from a different version of the timeline," he put it, bluntly. "Our timelines run the same up until Stardate 2233.04, when Nero, a Romulan miner from 2387 in your timeline, arrives in the past and attacks the USS Kelvin and subsequently killed my father, who took the helm when everyone abandoned ship. Nero was caught in the wake of the Romulan star going supernova, which created the rip in fabric of time and opened opened a door to the past for him."

It was a lot to take in, obviously, but it didn't occur to B'Elanna to question him. For a start, she'd been in the city long enough to know that he really was who he said he was and, secondly, nobody would lie about something like that.

"I'm sorry."

She wasn't sure what else she could say.

"I guess that explains a lot."

There wasn't much to say and what there was, he'd heard already. All his life he'd been that kid, the baby who'd been born on the shuttle, George Kirk's boy. It was a bit cruel of Taxon to drag him here so soon after he made a name for himself that didn't involve his father's sacrifice, that first step towards becoming the 'great man' that Nero said the other James T. Kirk had been.

"I met the other Spock," he began to add. She didn't ask, but he felt like sharing, anyway. This part, he hadn't with anyone - not with Bones, not with Buffy when they were together, not with anyone. Just himself. (He was unaware that Spock had met his other self, still.) "The one from your time. He...was caught in the temporal singularity, too. Emerged from it twenty-five years after Nero did."

"And let me guess," she said, "He said exactly what I've been saying? About who you're going to be?"

B'Elanna remembered one of the earliest conversations they'd had in Taxon. She'd been a recent arrival and had struggled to understand why James T Kirk - the James T Kirk - had been on the edge of giving up. Now it made sense. He had to live up to the legacies of both his father and his other self.

"You should have explained things to me sooner," she said, with a shake of her head, "But it doesn't change anything. I still think you're a good captain - and, believe me, it takes a lot to impress me - and I still trust you. You can become whoever you want to become."

"Pretty much," he confirmed. "Along with stuff about how he and I-- I mean, him and the other me were practically defined by our friendship. I don't really have that with my Spock. It's a work in progress and one I'm not even sure is going to end in friendship."

Kirk smiled at her and those comments. "I wanted this." He gestured around the bridge, indicating the Enterprise. "And I got it. And then I was brought here. I'd only been her official captain for a few weeks before the hamsters decided it was my time to be here. I didn't rush my way through the Academy to sit in a cave on some unknown planet doing...whatever this is."

Edited 2010-10-12 05:47 (UTC)

"It's difficult to develop a friendship with someone who isn't even here," she pointed out, "Just give it time. A lot of time."

She and Captain Janeway hadn't exactly seen eye to eye at first, but now they were closer than B'Elanna would ever have imagined. And she and Tom ... she couldn't even remember how many arguments they'd had over the years.

"I didn't even make it through the Academy," she said, which was something that she'd never confessed before. It wasn't common knowledge on Voyager and she'd kept the information to herself since arriving in Taxon. "But I didn't finally find a family to lose it again a few years later. We are going to get out of here, Captain."

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