nexus_sages | (no subject)

"I'm sorry." Losing friends and colleagues is never easy, no matter how long ago it was.

Thank you.

*Her gratitude is genuine, and she takes a long sip of her drink. She'll let the quiet go on. It's his turn to share.*

The trouble is, there's so much that he doesn't even know where to start, and he contemplates that while he tops off his drink. "It doesn't feel right," he says at last, "that I'm alive when so many others are dead." He's far too familiar with survivor's guilt, since this is hardly the first time he's been in a situation like this, but this time he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he should be six feet under. "It's not that I... regret being alive, though."

*She nods; it's a familiar feeling.*

You don't regret that you're alive, just that they aren't. You try to think of all the things you could have done to save them, the ways you could have stopped it sooner.

"Yeah," he agrees quietly, looking down into his glass as if it would hold the answers. "The ninety-six crew I lost... their deaths are on me. I knew something was wrong but I wanted revenge so badly, I didn't listen to anyone else trying to get me to stop and think." He raises his eyes to meet hers and gives a faint, humorless smile. "I know, playing the 'what if' game is pointless, but I can't help it."

No.

*Her tone is stern, her gaze level.*

The "what if"s are important. If you don't learn from this, then your crew's deaths were wasted. At the same time, you can't let yourself be trapped in it, either. Regret is like fear--a useful advisor, a terrible master.

That's certainly not the usual line he's heard from others, but if he's taking away one thing from this whole clusterfuck, it's that really listening to other perspectives and using them to reexamine his own assumptions is crucial. He's silent for a moment as he takes that in, and turns it over in his thoughts. "Good point."

*Samus is a font of unusual perspectives. When she's feeling generous, she'll share them. She'll also share them when she's feeling cruel, but in ways that make you wish she wouldn't.*

So. What happened? How did it start, and how did it start to go wrong?

"It's a bit of a long story," Jim answers, but not in a tone that indicates he's trying to excuse himself from telling it. He takes a moment to try to gather his thoughts, pin down exactly when things started going off the rails, and how much he can tell. A lot happened all at once, or one after the other, and not every detail is relevant. Or non-classified.

"I guess it really started before we even got back to Earth. We were on a survey mission that went south, and I made some bad decisions because I thought I could get away with it. Reported back to find out my stupidity got me demoted to first officer." He toys with his glass a little, needing to do something with his hands, because trying to talk about Pike without some kind of distraction is probably going to lead to some embarrassing tears, mood-boosters or not. "I told you before about my mentor, Admiral Pike, the guy who dared me into enlisting. He was going to be the captain - my captain." And even though Jim knows he would have hated playing second in command of his own starship, a part of him wonders what it would have been like, under Pike. The first man who ever gave a damn about Jim Kirk, who gave him a second chance when he shouldn't have had any left.

"I found that out about thirty seconds before we got called to an emergency session at Headquarters," he continues, and this is the hardest part of the whole story, the one where the loss was the most personal. "Captains and first officers only, for every vessel in range. There'd been a Starfleet data archive bombed in London, and we were being pulled for a manhunt to find the guy responsible. We didn't get that far. It was a trap to get us all in the same room together. No shields, giant window to the outside." He shakes his head slightly and takes a deeper drink from his glass. After the fact, now he wonders if anyone at Starfleet had seen it coming, or if Jim truly was the first person to put the pieces together. Too late, of course. Did Marcus's warmongering go that far? He can't dismiss the possibility.

"I managed to take down the jumpship before Khan could shoot everyone," he says, his voice a bit unsteady, "but he got away. Beamed out. And he'd done plenty of damage by then. Everyone but me, Spock, and Marcus got hit. Pike was gone before I got to him." And that truly hurts, that he didn't get a chance to even say goodbye, that their last words to each other was an argument, no matter how professional it was. His voice falters. "He wouldn't have even been there if it wasn't for me."

Edited 2017-06-23 13:30 (UTC)

*She nods soberly, quietly refilling his glass. She isn't inclined to interrupt--they can work over the details later, for now it's important to get a whole coherent thread out in the open.*

Just as well. Jim has to take a moment to rally his composure, to move his thoughts past that horrible moment to what came next. "Once we found out he'd fled to the Klingon homeworld, things went fast after that. Marcus reinstated my captaincy, gave us a load of experimental torpedoes, and sent us off with orders to kill Khan. Justified it by saying our target was in an uninhabited province, but shooting at their planet unprovoked... well, I told you how they feel about ambushes." He shakes his head. "I knew it was wrong but I was too angry to care."

"Spock tried to talk me out of it, and I did decide to capture him alive instead of just torpedoing Qo'NoS, but not for the right reasons. I didn't care about what was legal or right, I thought it'd be too quick and merciful." Now comes the tricky part, where he has to stay within the confines of the cover story that Starfleet has established. But he refuses to outright lie about what happened, especially not when he's nowhere close to home or anywhere else where it'd matter, and not when he's getting outside support. "The Enterprise needed repairs anyway, so we parked near the Neutral Zone and took a confiscated civilian ship down to the surface to find him and take him into custody, and that's when we got caught by the patrol. I don't know if we would've been able to talk our way out or not, because Khan attacked before we were done negotiating and killed them all. But we got him."

"Another Starfleet ship showed up to take the prisoner onboard," he says, and he's still somewhat outraged that Marcus's role in the whole situation is being sanitized by Command. Understandable, since they hardly want a public relations disaster of this magnitude, but Jim still chafes at the omission. "When Khan was transferred to the Vengeance, he killed Admiral Marcus and took over the ship. The Enterprise got chased back to Earth, and that's when the warp core got knocked out out of alignment and lost all power." Never mind that it's tweaking the order of events a little, it's all still technically true. "Things... kind of get fuzzy for me after that. I remember going into the core to fix it, and trying to drag myself back out, but the next thing I really remember clearly is waking up in the hospital weeks later."

"Apparently, what happened next is Khan set the Vengeance on a collision course with HQ and crashed it into San Francisco," he says, and while it's a horrifying event, he's somewhat distanced from it all. Partly because he was dead at the time, and partly because his meddling doctor friend decided he didn't need to know about it until recently.

*She's following most of the story, and suspects some details are being left out, but there's a point in the crash-a-starship-into-it plot on which she isn't clear.*

Is HQ a station, or planetside?

Oh. He should've remembered that she's probably not familiar with the minutiae of Earth geography. "Sorry, planetside. San Francisco's an old Earth city."

He crashed a starship into a planet. Into a city on that planet.

*She gives a wince and takes a pull of her drink. She put a starship on a collision course with a planet, once. Happily, cleanup is running ahead of schedule, and the hemisphere she hit is expected to be habitable again in another twenty years. That's on the scale of what she's imagining at the moment.*

"Yeah," he says, taking a long drink from his glass. "Took out most of downtown. I don't know exactly how many casualties there were, but it was thousands dead at least. Tens of thousands lost homes or jobs. Even my own apartment's buried under it somewhere."

Thousands dead.

*Alright, she needs to adjust her mental image of what happened.*

Alright. From the top, then. What went wrong on that mission, and how can you prevent it in the future?

He did mention it earlier, but she's more than forgiven for forgetting, because Jim has too. And it's probably a good thing he doesn't know what her assumption was, because then he might not be able to stop thinking about how much worse it would have been if the Vengeance's warp core had breached in the crash.

It takes Jim a moment to realize that by 'the mission,' she doesn't mean going after Khan. "The survey mission?" God, it seems like a lifetime ago. But he can still hear Pike's blistering reprimand like it was yesterday. I wouldn't have risked my first officer's life in the first place. "We were supposed to observe this pre-industrial humanoid culture from a distance, absolutely no interference, but they had a volcano in their backyard about to blow. We came up with a plan to stop it by cooling it off with this device Spock rigged up, but the ash screwed up the shuttle and he got stranded setting it up. I sent the Enterprise to go get him and the natives saw us, so I lied in my report and said nothing happened. Got caught because Spock didn't."

This brandy really is great stuff, blunting the edge of his self-recrimination and letting him try to look at it more objectively. "It was the falsified report that got me demoted, but that wasn't the only thing I could've done different. We could've rigged up a remote delivery system, or put it in a torpedo or something. We could've tried to relocate the natives with point-to-point beaming, maybe knocked them out first, and just let the volcano do its thing. We never even called Command for permission or other ideas because we assumed the answer would be no." He pauses for a moment, but he's unable to dismiss one of the last things Pike ever told him. "Or we could've done nothing, like we were supposed to." It doesn't sit well with him, and it probably never will. But it was an option, and he has to include it.

Edited 2017-06-24 12:11 (UTC)

*She sniffs derisively at the suggestion of doing nothing.*

Don't apologize for saving lives, you weren't sent into space to see if volcanoes kill people.

*She shakes her head a little, then turns to another part of his explanation.*

While there were certainly options, I'd say the chief mistake there was in making a questionable choice--falsifying your report--without ensuring you had the support and cooperation of your crew. Again, I'll ask: how much advice do you want? Because I could go into some depth on this.

In some ways, the cocky, arrogant part of him is what died down in the warp core, the part of him that always felt he had to prove himself by finding his own solutions without relying on other people's ideas, as if that somehow meant he was better. And she's not the one he really wants to have this conversation with. But the one he does is dead, and he's done ignoring legitimate criticism of his command style and attitude, not when it got so many people killed, and him too. "I won't be a good captain if I don't learn to listen to those with more experience than me," he answers, aware that he probably won't like at least some of what he hears. He hadn't liked Pike's scathing lecture, Spock's criticisms, Bones' objections, or Scotty's very real reservations about taking on a shipment of unknown, classified tech. And look where disregarding them got him.

Edited 2017-06-24 15:41 (UTC)

*She gives a slight nod, accepting his answer, and fixes him with a level gaze. This isn't the glare of a scolding--rather, she is laying out the elements and mechanisms of a philosophy in line with her own that she thinks would suit him.*

Then on that point, my first advice is: own what you do. Yes, you broke a rule by interfering, and yes, your first officer's life was at risk. So what? The rule that can't be flexible enough to save lives isn't worth honoring in the first place, and risk is your people's job. You didn't order your first officer into certain death against his will, did you? So. It wasn't wrong until you admitted it was wrong by trying to hide it, and hiding it told people you thought it was wrong.

*She's just said a mouthful, so she takes a sip of her drink while that settles in.*

Second point: you were caught in a lie because you didn't coordinate with your first officer. If you're going to lie on a report--and yes, sometimes that will be necessary, for a variety of reasons--then you need to know what's going to be in the other reports on the subject. If your subordinates won't coordinate with you on the lie, then you need to work around what they're putting in their reports. You need to know your crew, what they think, how they feel, and you need to earn their loyalty. A loyal subordinate may not agree with your decision to, say, falsify a report, but they will know you well enough to believe that whatever odd thing you're doing is well-meant, and done for the best possible good.

*Another sip, a quicker one.*

Yes, you need to earn their loyalty. You command by rank, but your crew are people and they'll only follow you into danger if they believe in you. You're the captain of a starship; the day will come when you have to look one of your crew in the eyes and tell them to go die in the line of duty. It'll come again and again. Your crew will watch their friends die at your order; before they do, you need every last one of them to trust that those orders only come when every other alternative is worse. They need to know that you, personally, will be doing everything in your power to ensure that their lives aren't wasted--that you'll save them if anyone can, and that if you don't, no one could have.

She did him the courtesy of listening to his rundown of the whole clusterfuck without interrupting, and he does the same as she speaks, just listening. And he was right; he wants to object to some of what she says, a lifetime of defensive habits saying that he needs to justify his actions, to lean on his own assumptions and beliefs that make him feel better about himself. But he does none of that. He just sits, and drinks, and listens to every word that she says, forcing himself to face the pretty undeniable fact that he doesn't know everything, and that continuing on as he has been without learning from his mistakes will only lead to disaster. And while he knows that she isn't infallible either, that he shouldn't simply place blind faith in what someone else tells him, there's certainly enough sense in what she says that it's not worth dismissing.

Besides, he did ask for it.

At the very least, some of the things he's hearing are things that he's never heard from Starfleet counselors. And though it's uncomfortable under her stare, it's far more tolerable than the rage and almost paternal disappointment in Pike's eyes, during the dressing-down in the admiral's office.

He's silent for several moments after she finishes, just trying to absorb all that and see things from her perspective. "So my biggest mistake there was not realizing that Spock and I weren't on the same page. And why."

*He takes it well, and she approves. No few people have asked for her brand of wisdom in the Nexus and then instantly rejected it. Jim is at least thinking.*

That, and hiding what you did, yes. If you had placed the account in your report, you would have controlled how your superiors received it. You would have framed the narrative--controlled the ground on which you engaged them. Instead of diverting and dividing them with questions of the morality of a sit-and-let-die rule or which of your officers are to be commended for their particular actions during the mission, you were ambushed and the only subject on the field was "Jim Kirk hid his actions in shame." Shame is an admission of guilt, you handed your enemy the win in that engagement.

Jim hadn't thought about his actions as being motivated by shame, but it burns in him now. He opens his mouth to protest, and deliberately closes it again without speaking. Think before you say something, Kirk. This is how you got into this mess.

"I gave them nothing to even debate," he agrees, once he's reflected on it for a few moments. "With Spock's report, it was clear-cut that I lied. They'd made up their minds before we even got back to Earth, way too late to explain or defend myself."

*She nods, letting slip a sly smile.*

Exactly. Always control the terms of the engagement. A report to your superiors is as much a battle as any other--fight to win.

A few months ago, if she'd told him to treat reporting to his superiors like facing an enemy, he would've laughed and ignored the advice. But after what Admiral Marcus did, it's already a surprisingly literal reality. "I pretty much always do," he says instead, "but I think part of the problem is I didn't know which battle I was really fighting."