lathori asked: Okay, so I just saw Star Trek tonight and spent an hour talking to you about it. I literally cannot believe I am doing this. I am already suffering because of your other Star Trek headcannons but I guess I'm just a fucking masochist. So, my dear Bones, give me (at least) five headcannons on how Tarsus IV happens in the alternate new Star Trek trilogy universe. <3 Your Kirk
HA, and people say I’m the twisted one. Fortunately for you, I am a wee bit of a sadist, and I love talking about Tarsus IV, so heeeere we go. I WAS going to do five people finding out about Tarsus, but that turned into a five thousand word monster so instead here are just some headcanons. For those of you who aren’t aware, Tarsus was a famine and genocide, which Jim Kirk survived as a kid—basically, if you can think of a content warning, it applies, thus: everything is under the cut.
- In TOS, Kirk was on the ‘live’ list, one of the four thousand colonists tagged as genetically preferable. He was brilliant, clever, strong, well-behaved, the whole nine, a eugenics program would have loved TOS!Kirk. On the other hand, AOS!Kirk was definitely one of the four thousand on the ‘kill’ list. Brilliant but aggressive, clever but rebellious, strong and fierce, exactly the kind of person who would be a threat, culled for the good of the ‘revolution.’ He caught on just before the killing started and grabbed as many people who were immediately on hand as he could, dragged them out of the killing chamber.
- He ended up in the lead of a collection of kids he’d rescued from the kill list, probably more than a hundred over the course of the almost-year that the famine raged. It bothered him for about two minutes, that he was thirteen and not the oldest there by a long shot. But none of the older teens stepped up and Kirk–JT, back then–did, so he was the leader by default. It helped that he was a better tactician and fighter than most of them. He stole food from the stockpiles Governor Kodos kept for the guard forces, figured out what plants in the forests were edible, hid his kids from the guards, fought tooth and nail to protect them. He pulled off a near-miracle, almost thirty of his people surviving to the end of the famine.
- Despite this, there was only one kid that he saved from the first escape from the execution chamber who lived to see the end of the famine. He was six when the execution happened, and JT scooped him up and ran with him. His name was Kevin Riley, and by the time Starfleet was finally contacted and arrived with supplies and aid, Kev was half-dead with fever, but comparatively well fed. Kev looked back, once he was older, and realized that JT had been paring down his own food to give to the younger kids.
- JT was captured a month before Starfleet arrived. He broke into Kodos’ private interstellar communications unit–all the others suffered irreparable damage, either intentional or accidental–and sent out a distress call, and was caught slipping out. He was locked up and interrogated for the full four weeks about the location of his kids–he still has the scars from it–but when Starfleet landed, they found almost thirty kids hungry, scared, and alone, but hidden. They thought JT would die of his injuries and malnutrition, but he recovered steadily, and the doctor finally had to put it down to sheer bloody-minded stubbornness.
- It did, however, take him almost three weeks to be willing to eat without having a direct eye on his kids.
- There is no Conscience of the King plotline in this universe. This JT was harder, angrier, more desperate–he wasn’t especially conscious when red-clad Starfleet security officers pulled him out of a cell, but he was awake enough to see Kodos make a grab for a phaser. Acting on instinct, JT whipped one off the belt of the closest security officer and fired without a glance at the setting. It made the open welts across his shoulders scream, and he blacked out almost immediately, but he saw Kodos drop first. Later he found out he’d cranked the phaser up to the maximum setting when he grabbed it–Kodos was tried and convicted posthumously for his war crimes, and JT identified the body himself.
- Kodos wasn’t the first person he killed on Tarsus. Later, Jim Kirk would say that he did what he had to do. The thirty survivors of the kill list agreed. And what were they going to do, convict the son of the Kelvin hero, a genocide survivor, for deaths they couldn’t even prove?
