Author: Gyptian
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Genre: kid fic (Tarsus, so be warned, violence and other atrocities ahead), alternate universe, elements of horror.
Author's Note: History, but not as we know it, either in reality or in either of the fandoms.
Summary: "No one ever asked why Jim Kirk's daemon was nowhere to be seen. His file was sealed, but he was in every vid about Tarsus IV, all bone but standing straight."
The Fin du Siècle was not just thought to be the end of the 19th century, but the end of the last era of civilisation. The machines had come to take over life, the cities were cesspools of human refuse, living and not. Between the time the first steam engine was invented and the moment Jim Kirk met Edith Keeler lies a dark period of industrial development and human suffering.
For the first time, daemons were not assumed to be guardian angels sent by God or little helpers from Hades, given a physical form in Hephaistos' forge. They became a subject in several brands of science, like physics, biology and philosophy.
A particular discourse that was an unholy mix of biological engineering and religious philosophy, with a big dollop of racism, died a quiet death in the early twentieth century. It said daemons were the dark side of the human soul. Their instincts, feelings, animal selves.
It was revived during the Eugenics Wars. A group of humans was succesfully engineered and separated from their daemons. They only survived, heartless and strong, if they lacked empathy entirely. History would call them abominations.
By the time the 23rd century rolled around, everyone knew their daemons to be part of their souls, somehow. Vulcans had introduced the idea of katra, the essence of self that was mirrored in everyone's animal companion.
No one believed in 'purifying' humans anymore, right? So the bright-eyed youth boarding a long-distance shuttle to Tarsus IV should have nothing to fear. The merlin perched on his bag twitched its tail in anticipation.
Middle school he'd finished early. It was time to tackle a real challenge.
('-')
Jim Kirk, J.T. to friends, twelve and assistant self-defence teacher, was smart, kind and confident. His capable hands guided many children of the Tarsus colony through their first lessons in falling during the mandatory self-defence course of the colony's only primary school.
Kodos had an eye on him, looking to recruit him when he came of age. Someone else was watching him too.
Hayfever, in the shape of an orange-and-white cat, stalked to the other side of the room when a stranger entered. J.T. was running through some warm-up stretches for his own solo martial arts classes when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned while he bounced on his toes. "Ma'am, are you lost?"
An old lady, of indeterminate Asian descent, smiled at him. "No, Mr Kirk. I am your new instructor. Your previous teacher has been accepted as Kodos' new chief of security." She approached the mat and bowed. He bowed in return and stook off her shoes and stepped onto it. "Call me Ms Sato."
"But...excuse me, but you really don't look like..." He trailed off, not wishing to insult his new teacher.
She smiled again, unoffended. "No, and that gives me an advantage. I'm a retired Starfleet officer, actually."
The teenager dropped his air of skepticism, because in the weeks she was home, his mother had drilled him in the annals of Starfleet until he could dream them. "Wait, you're that Sato? The communications officer from the Enterprise?"
She bobbed her head. "Yes, yes. Now. These classes are advanced, but I understand Mr Yowaral was rather Earth-centric in orientation. Do you know anything about fighting a non-human? People who are stronger, or faster, or who have extra limbs?"
J.T. did not. And so started his first class in Suus Mahna, for that Enterprise had also had a Vulcan onboard.
"Hello," said Ms Sato's chameleon in Cardassian to Hayfever. She blinked, before repeating it imperfectly. The chameleon turned the same orange-and-white stripe as the other daemon in satisfaction. Hayfever promptly turned into a cheeta.
('-')
Eleven months after J.T. started both fighting classes and language lessons with Ms Sato, she disappeared. In fact, everyone not of Indo-European descent disappeared that afternoon.
After waiting for half an hour in front of her door, J.T. broke into her house and personal terminal to use her communicator's signal to locate her.
She was inside Kodos' compound. He figured she had been summoned to advise him as one of the resident security experts. They had been having trouble with getting messages off-world, and everyone was getting hungry.
When he heard of the many other disappearances, he worried.
('-')
That evening, soldiers, many more than should have been present in the colony, came to round up children. J.T. went, mostly because several kids had latched onto him when they'd passed him in the street, herded by armed men, anonymous in their helmets.
Daemons were shape-shifting nervously, mostly settling in small shapes on the shoulders or heads of their people. At fourteen, J.T. was one of the eldest with a daemon that hadn't settled yet, though Hayfever was close. She was feline most of the time.
They were brought to community hall B, the biggest space with a roof on Tarsus. It had a stage for performances, tables, chairs, closets with games and a row of public terminals that allowed for long-distance connections, to Earth and other planets.
The sun shone through the skylights, made beige walls a friendly cream.
Dust played in the sunlight and turned furniture grey. Kodos had closed all public spaces and forbidden people to gather in groups larger than six. He had called for rationing a month after fungus destroyed the spring harvest and most of what was left in the storehouses.
The fifteen children were made to stand before the stage, where Anton Kodos stood, red moustache lifted in a friendly grin.
Small cries rose up from the group. David – a kid he knew from last year's class – squeezed J.T.'s hand painfully. His daemon, Purnaka, was a quivering squirrel in the boy's breast pocket, fluffed tail sticking out of the opening. J.T. hoped the slip-slide of their sweaty hands offered some comfort.
Kodos held his hand out, a benevolent despot blessing the children. "My dears, do not be scared. I have some good news for you. The revolution is finally upon us. The unworthy have been sacrificed so the superior race may survive. Now it is time for the next step in bringing about the Golden Age of Tarsus, our paradise among the stars." He put his hands together before him and stopped for a dramatic pause. It only made the children cringe. A girl that had been inching towards a gap between a soldier and the stage was thrown back bodily into the group. Kodos continued as if it hadn't happened. "...save you from the sin of our forefathers. Happily, this can be done by means of a very minor medical treatment. It is only a little cut." Kodos' left hand mimicked scissors. "Done in a trice. So, you'll go through that door, there," he pointed out the room for full-immersion computer games, kitted out with the latest in holographic technology. It had been occupied around the clock before the fungus came. "Receive treatment and then you're free to go home."
He left. His words had comforted no-one. The first child had to be dragged into the room. Seconds after the door closed, a blood-curdling scream made J.T.'s blood turn to ice. The second scream was just as bad, and the next, the next, the next, the next...
No child came out again with the soldiers.
J.T. had kicked a soldier in the nuts before he was subdued. He was dragged into the room by three of them, twisting all the way. He choked, one soldier's wolf had Hayfever by the throat.
He was strapped down in one half of the room, Hayfever caged in the other. The soldiers left. A force field came down in the middle from the holo-transmitter-box, a laser edge at its lower border. When it reached eye-level, J.T. began to scream in pain, fighting uselessly against his restraints.
Hayfever did two transformations in eye-blink succession, spider and tiger. She ducked below the force field and freed J.T. with four swiped of her claws, wounding J.T. in the process. The teenager didn't feel a bit of the pain, compared to the soul-deep stabbing of the force field. He clutched her head to him, squeezing the tiger's ears.
"Hone your instincts until they're a blade that can cut diamond," Hayfever mumbled into his chest.
"...because sometimes you feel pain and panic and rage and you will need to fight anyway. Yeah." J.T. shivered. Ms Sato had drilled it into him, in training that had sometimes gone deep into the night once she'd decided he was a worthy pupil. He had not remembered it now. But his daemon had, and Hayfever had fought. "You're perfect, you know that?"
The daemon snorted into his chest, unconvinced. "We're two sides of a coin. That's like flattering yourself."
J.T. laughed, which finally gave him the power to stand. Now that amusement had washed fear away, the anger came calling. "Let's go," he told Hayfever, who was already leaping towards, and through, the prefab plastimetal door. It was no match for an angry tiger-daemon.
('-')
J.T. had apparently inspired the remaining kids, because three soldiers lay unconscious and a fourth one, a boy hanging from his back and one with two hands on his nose and a girl butting him in the stomach, fell as J.T. came through the door. The fifth soldier, his gun on his colleagues, might have helped.
"J.T.!" the soldier called out, and removed his helmet. Harun's father appeared. J.T. willed himself not to punch the man in the nose. He motioned for him and the other children to follow him to a fire exit. He punched in the code. "Go, take the kids." He still addressed J.T., who nodded, speechless.
It was Hayfever who growled at everyone to come on, follow, we need to hurry. J.T. stayed at the back. He didn't even notice he and his daemon were further apart than should have been possible.
Behind them came a sound that J.T. had only ever heard in the few full-immersion games he'd played. The hiss of phasers, back and forth. Cover fire.
('-')
They went into uncultivated land. Hayfever chose the lowland forest on the north side for them, the only place with no large predators. Mostly because it was the habitat of a four-legged herbivores whose backs were covered in sharp horns, like a cave floor filled with stalagmites.
So J.T. called them stalacks.
They lost two kids to food poisoning before they learned to scavenge enough from the foodstores to survive.
J.T. would later learn that Kodos had begun recruitment and indoctrination of soldiers from the moment he'd settled the colony eight years earlier. Half of the men, a third of the women obeyed his orders and herded their own children to the community hall in group, and subdued any attempt to stop it. Several parents succeeded in moonlighting as soldiers and let some children escape. Hayfever slunk down to the fire exit every time a group of children was to be separated from their daemons. J.T. stayed behind in the camp.
Because the force field had cut inbetween them, they could move long distances from each other, further than the width of the colony.
The daemon heard every scream. J.T. was not surprised, when she finally settled into her permanent form, that it was a barn cat. Feral, small enough to go unnoticed but big enough to attack a human with her claws. The children who escaped were brought to the camp, little huts made of sticks like they'd made back home for fun. Rain came in unimpeded, until they found big leaves they could tie to the sticks with grass.
Thirty-five children came to the camp.
The food would not have been enough to last them the six months before Starfleet came, not by a long shot, if the four thousand and thirty-one Indo-Europeans present in the colony had survived. But.
The other children, after separation from their daemons, did survive, dazed but responding to their parents. Kodos said it was a passing phase. He believed it. His soldiers believed it. The other half of the adults were powerless.
After a week, the children were done. Kodos, flush with success, proclaimed that the adults, too, could return to a state free of sin. Hayfever listened with one sensitive ear at the fire exit door and reported everything to J.T. later, shivering against her human's chest on a bed of grass shoved unevenly into a sheet.
The adults would be cut free of their daemons too. There was little those daemons could do to their humans without hurting themselves. The daemons dissolved with a scream that echoed their humans'.
Three weeks later, all humans but Kodos were done. J.T. accompanied Hayfever to the community hall now that most adults were not aware enough to be a threat to them anymore. They climbed the roof, and watched through a skylight as Kodos let himself into the room, red hair shining in the sun, broad shoulders straight with self-confidence.
His scream was as high and as heart-stopping as that of the first child. His spotted weasel was no more. He did not come out of the room for an hour, and when he did, it was with the same hesitant stumble as the other adults.
While they seemed dazed but still themselves at first, the daemonless people degenerated quickly. After a month, they forgot how to open the doors to the storage houses, to their houses, to eat, to walk. They died, one by one, of malnutrition.
('-')
J.T. had his shirt, only a pink rag now, knotted over his nose and mouth. Hayfever stayed behind in the camp. The stench of decaying corpses was too much for a cat's nose.
Gustav put a hand on his shoulder and pointed towards storehouse 1A, Kodos' private stash of food. It was a good twenty feet wide, and over a hundred feet deep. After they had broken the lock, they could shove the door open a crack.
They froze, and remained still for a full minute. The entire space was filled with rows of boxes, stacked to twice their height. They closed the door behind them, and walked in, back to back, stumbling and dumbfounded by the bounty. Gustav whirled and pulled his shirt down around his neck. "We're having a party tonight. The meal to end all meals."
J.T. felt hope blaze white-hot up his back from the base of his spine. "Yeah. Yeah!" He pumped a fist, fell Gustav around the neck.
They would eat like crazy, and have food forever.
They would survive this apocalypse and wait for Opal and Chayim to repair a terminal that could call long-distance, and help would come.
It was the end of the world, and they would make it through. J.T. would allow no other outcome.
And then, because he was all of fourteen, he let a few tears of relief fall into Gustav's neck. His daemon, Godelind, leaned against his legs, panting in excitement and waiving her tail until she quivered.
('-')
When Starfleet came and discovered thirty-five human life-signs, all children, the story went like wild-fire through the Federation, the teenager who greeted the away team by the entrance to the camp, one phaser in each hand, his daemon nowhere in sight, recorded by an ensign on a tricorder, would make it into every vid about Tarsus IV.
James T. Kirk became a hero, and Hayfever became invisible, running and running from the screams of Tarsus' children echoing in her head.