How delightful, I too am in love!  That post actually got hella popular, I’m glad everyone liked it.  I wanted to tag a few people who left remarks that they wanted to read more of it, but my computer’s not letting me, so please feel free to tag people.  @thegoodelixir did send me an ask about it a couple days back, so here, friend.

Mmmmkay so the Kirks bonding a little, yes?  Also if anyone has an overwhelming desire to read more Star Trek pain, I have some thoughts on AOS Tarsus IV here and here. Oh, and if anyone wants to read something really specific in this ‘verse, hit me up (one of those people I can’t tag wanted James meeting Bones?).  It’s all going to be in the tag ‘two kirks au,’ I guess.

• Jim is startled when his older self—James, on his own insistence, saying that he was the interloper in this universe and Jim should keep his name—appears at his table one day in the Academy mess hall.  The entire rising class has been graduated without further debate, the simple act of surviving  qualifying them for their diplomas in the eyes of the board.  The fate of the Enterprise is under debate today, and Jim is trying not to hyperventilate about it—thus his presence in the mess hall, with an unsolved physics equation open on his PADD.

• “You missed a t on the left of the equals sign,” a voice says, and Jim, fixing the problem, mutters something appreciative before he looks up into ice blue eyes and freezes.  James smiles at him, hesitant.  “I did the same thing when I was trying to get through that equation the first time—I mean, I was almost thirty, but I figured…”  He trails off, looking awkward.  “D’you mind if I sit?”
• “Um.  No?” Jim’s not sure what the etiquette is in this sort of situation.  There’s something vaguely unnerving about seeing his own eyes looking back at him. James takes a seat beside him—he sits differently, Jim notices with something that borders on obsession, much more precise and controlled than Jim’s own pointed ease—and folds his arms on the table.  “What can I do for you?”
• “They’re going to let you keep the Enterprise,” James says with absolutely no preamble.  “Spock—my Spock, not your Spock—told me.  I think he meant for me to keep shut about it, but I thought it would be better for your blood pressure to tell you.  Make sure to act surprised.”
• This is how they interact, mostly.  Stilted sentences and facts offered like olive leaves—not whole branches, but bits of them.  Jim thinks they should be able to understand each other better than this, marks it down in his mind as a failure of self.  Of selves.
• “That’s—God, wow, I never thought—thanks,” Jim blurts, feeling his heart race like he’s just run a mile, relief washing through him like adrenaline.  He wants to laugh, or jump up and shout, or steal a car and scream down a road at a hundred miles an hour.  “I—really? They’re going to give her to me?”
• James grins a little.  “Yeah.  Apparently saving the Federation carries some weight.  Congratulations, Captain.”
• Jim smiles back.  It might be the first time they’ve ever really smiled at each other, happy and light.  Then his smile twists a little and he says, “The famous name probably helps.”
• He appreciates that James doesn’t deny it, gives a nod and a vague motion that Jim interprets as ‘yeah, but you still earned it, don’t fish for compliments.’  “She’s a good ship,” James says wistfully.
• Jim doesn’t dare ask if James wishes he was taking the Enterprise out, too desperate to have this thing he’s dreamed of to hear his older self admit it.  Instead he just smiles again, bigger, and says, “The best.”  

• The Enterprise has a long repair time—half the fleet is being repaired or rebuilt—and so they’re still earthbound when Jim’s birthday rolls around.  The general populace doesn’t remember that, though, and Jim’s time-honored solution to the affair is to avoid the Kremlin memorial like the plague, usually by drinking with Bones.  The smooth memorial statue is vastly outmatched by the memorial being constructed in the Academy center, an obelisk with the names of all the cadets and officers who died at Nero’s hands, but—this year even more than most—the Kremlin is honored.
• This year, he manages to find James there are the memorial, looking shaken.
• “I didn’t realize,” James mutters.  “It’s…eerie.”
• “Yeah,” Jim says dryly.  “Come on, there’s no point hanging around here all day, it’ll just get worse.”
• Jim doesn’t look at James as they walk away from the memorial, nor at anyone around them, but he still notices James noticing the way everyone looks at them.  Like ghosts, or maybe holograms of a dead man.  Jim wonders if George Kirk would look like James—they’d be about the same age, he’d maybe have a few years on his doppelganger, but not many.
• “You deal with this every year?”
• “Every year,” Jim says flatly.  He chews on his lip for a moment and then admits, “It’s not as bad as it was with Mom.”
• “She’s not–?”
• Jim shakes his head.  “No, she’s alive, back in Riverside, on leave for a while.  She invites me home for my birthday every year.”
• “And you don’t go?” James asks, seeming startled, and Jim wonders what his Winona was like.  Mom is caring, sure, but distant, off in space a lot when he was little, trying to get close to the ghost of George Kirk.  She doesn’t really know how to deal with her youngest son, never did, not when he was a precocious kid with her husband’s blue eyes, not when he was an angry teenager fresh off the Tarsus massacre, and certainly not now that he’s a reasonably well reformed Starfleet cadet—a captain, now.
• “No,” Jim finally says, coming to a stop near the road, where their uniforms get a nod but their faces don’t draw any looks. “It’s not much of a birthday.” The two of them stand there for a moment and Jim blinks, looking at James with a sigh.  “I have a bottle of Romulan ale in my apartment,” he says, a statement rather than an offer, and James nods silently.
• “Happy birthday, kid,” James says quietly a few hours later, his still-bright hair rumpled over his lined face.
• Jim snorts a laugh, pushing a hand back through his own hair and passing it over his eyes as if to ease a headache he doesn’t have.  “Happy birthday, old man.”

• James comes to the Enterprise’s second launch, he’s allowed onto the bridge to see them off.  He smiles at Jim, and Jim doubts he could look so honestly happy for the man flying away with his ship.  James is a better man than he is, maybe, because Jim is too selfish to imagine being able to watch James in his place.  But James smiles, genuinely glad.  The wistful look comes back into his eyes when he strokes a hand along the sleek line of the bridge rail.

• “She’ll take good care of you,” he tells Jim, before the rest of the bridge crew arrives.  “She’ll give you everything she has, rip herself apart at the seams to save you, if you take care of her.”
• “Best ship in the fleet,” Jim agrees, soft, and James gives him another one of those easy, flashing smiles before he leaves to stand with the rest of the families.
• Jim’s never had family to see him off before.  
• He doesn’t know if James qualifies, his strange not-brother with their awkwardly cobbled-together friendship, built on not-shared experiences and James’ generous refusal to be bitter that Jim has his crew and his ship and Jim’s corresponding struggle not to interrogate him over how the other timeline is so clearly better.  It’s not like Bones waving goodbye to his daughter, or like Sulu kissing his fiancé, or even like Uhura peeling herself away from her little sisters.  It’s…odd.  Uncomfortable, in a way.
• But James stands there and Jim nods to him and he gets a smile in return, so maybe it’s something.