The first time someone bailed out on Jim Kirk, he didn't even know it was happening. He knew only that suddenly the world was bright and loud and cold, and he didn't like it, and he was tired so he was going to sleep now. It wasn't until years later, when he saw that other children usually had two parents, that he realized his father was missing. And it wasn't until then that he blamed the man for it; until he concluded that his dad had given up on him before he'd even taken his first breath of shuttle-stale air.

He was only four when his mother returned to duty, but he knew the moment she'd put on the uniform – all blues and blacks and shipshape sharpness – that it meant Starfleet. He didn't realize it also meant months-long absences and a new stepfather who had enough hatred to beat the snot out of him for no reason but his bleed-me-blue-George-Kirk eyes. After a year of no mother outside vid comms in which she was distant and the conversations awkward and stilted, he thought maybe he was better off without parents anyway, since they just kept leaving.

He began to think it was something he was doing wrong when Sam ran away. He wasn't smart enough, wasn't good enough, wasn't enough; he caused too much trouble to be worth hanging around. Because it couldn't be a coincidence that all these people who mattered so much to him just up and disappeared from his life with the express intent of leaving him behind. His brother was the best person he knew, and wouldn't hurt another good person without just cause, which only led him to one conclusion: he was not a good person, no matter how hard he had tried to be. Frank, his stepfather, had been saying it for years, and the kids at school were distant and scornful enough to prove it, but he couldn't believe it was him until his wonderful, brave, amazing brother left without so much as a hastily scribbled goodbye.

The only logical thing for him to do, it seemed to him, was to leave now, before anyone else could leave him first. A ride into the ravine in his dad's antique apple-red corvette later, he was sent on a shuttle to Tarsus IV – faster paced schooling, his mother said, more suited to his intellect; he wouldn't get bored enough and wouldn't have the time to cause trouble.

Well she was right. He never did get bored on Tarsus. Mostly because he was too busy trying not to die.

It was something of a nasty surprise when Starfleet showed up months too late and he was the only one left out of all the kids who had been attending the special school there. And yet again, he thinks, Good-For-Nothing Jimmy Kirk pulls through when he shouldn't have.

The least surprising thing about his homecoming from the Starfleet hospital in San Francisco is that his mother is not there. The most surprising thing is that Frank isn't there either. Figures, he thinks. It figures.

So he drops out of school because it just doesn't pay to care anymore, and gets an under-the-table job at the local bar, where the customers look at him like he's a piece of dirt on the bottom of a horseshoe. He has his first drink there, and it is there that he learns that he is an undeniably happy drunk. So he stays drunk a lot of the time, and people like him more than they ever did, because he is boisterous and funny and gives them something to define "pathetic" with. And if he sometimes stares up at the stars and wonders how much his father would hate him by now, and wonders if his mother and Sammy are still alive – because he still loves them, even if the one-sidedness of it all hurts, damn it – and spits, pretending it is on the grave that he hopes Frank is under…well, nobody's looking, so it hardly counts. And if he leaves the girls' beds a little faster than most, well…they would've disappeared anyway, and he might as well save them some time. So he drinks, striving to be the nothing that people apparently see in him.

So when Captain Christopher Pike of Starfleet walks into the bar one late night, stares into his George-Kirk eyes without flinching, and tells him that he is something, and can be something even better, it is a Big Deal.

…And he never has been able to ignore a dare.

Leonard McCoy is a cantankerous old bastard of a doctor with a horrible bedside manner, and Jim loves it. When someone's first words to you are, "I may throw up on you," you know that they are honest to a fault, and Jim likes honest people, because they tell him how they really feel instead of pretending to like him and then leaving. So he sticks around. He hacks into the campus database and makes them roommates, in fact. And Mr. "All-I've-Got-Left-Is-My-Bones" doesn't seem to care all that much, so it stays that way.

His classes are easy, and he breezes through them without ever opening a book, and the other cadets hate him for it. But he's used to being hated, so he keeps his distancing routine of flirting with anything with nice legs and a pretty face and getting smashed on weekends (and sometimes on weekdays) because he is a happy drunk, and it's nice to see what 'happy' feels like. Bones joins him more than half the time, because he despises the world too. They bond over lives that have both said, "Fuck you."

The first time he takes the Kobiyashi Maru, it reminds him what it feels like to hate. What idiot, he wants to know, has decided to train the bravery out of Starfleet? Who decided it was a good idea to teach people to be defeated? No. No. Learn fear? Accept it? No win situations? No. Not okay. He has long since given up being what people expect of him, so he decides to return life's middle finger and beat the thrice-be-damned Kobiyashi Maru. He takes it again to make sure he's got the simulation engraved in his memory, and then he hacks a lot of computers until he finds a chink in the armour that is the Fleet firewall. And he changes the parameters. 'You must be the change you wish to see in the world', and he does not like losing, has lost enough already. Now it is their turn.

The admiralty, perhaps understandably, isn't terribly pleased that their test has been hacked, and he is dragged before his gathered classmates and put on trial for his "misconduct". By the time his accuser reaches the opposing podium, he is not only filled with rage, his entire being is comprised of it, and his electric eyes are spitting sparks, he's sure of it.

And then his existence stutters…

"You, of all people, should know, Cadet. A captain cannot cheat death."

And Christ, if that doesn't hit him like a sharp blow to the gut. And meanwhile, the admiralty just sits there, allowing this pointy-eared bastard to pretend that George Kirk's sacrifice was nothing more than an unfortunate destiny that couldn't be avoided. Allowing this know-nothing commander to minimize the bravery of his father's last moments. Oh, hell no.

Cannot cheat death? What, exactly, did this naïve Vulcan jackass know about cheating death, anyway? Little to nothing, Jim is willing to bet; the other end of the spectrum from Jim himself.

He opens his mouth to give the most barbed-wire-sharp retort he can come up with on short notice, but then the distress call from Vulcan comes. And whether or not he despises this particular Vulcan, he knows that he will throw his all into helping the man's planet. Only he is denied the chance, because life has apparently taken umbrage to being told off, and has retaliated by grounding him now, of all times.

And then, in a whirlwind that he's not sure he could follow if he tried, Bones is stabbing him in the neck and dragging him aboard the fleet's brand spanking new flagship, the Enterprise. Which, he knows, is captained by Christopher Pike, one of the few authority figures he actually respects. Then Bones stabs him again, and he's out for what must be only a few minutes, because his brain is re-jolted into action by that phrase, that goddamn phrase: a lightning storm in space. And he's in motion, because they are warping blind into an attack, and how has Pike not realized this? Didn't the man remember his own dissertation?