AN: This first oneshot takes place before the academy. It might turn into a series of linked oneshots that span the movies and beyond. Tell me what you think!

Multitudes

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

~ Walt Whitman

Jim Kirk is only twenty-two, but he feels ancient. He has lived and died a thousand times, has met a million people, has explored a hundred new planets. He has been a farmer, a professor, an engineer, a criminal, a detective, a Starfleet officer. He has loved, both men and women, Vulcans and Andorians and Orions and humans, and each precious name is scrawled across his heart in blood-red ink. He has hated, for wanton destruction and deaths that have not happened (might never happen) in this universe.

He has never told anyone about the lives inside his head, the James T. Kirks that are not him, but might as well be. They have lived in different worlds and different times (some better, but others worse), but he knows the nuances of their characters as well as his own name. (Not that he'd forget that – there are thousands of Jim Kirks in his brain.)

He's not quite sure where he fits in. There's not much left to do (and so he drifts). James T. Kirk has been a criminal and hero, and has even lived several lives of concentrated mediocrity (there's not even failure left untouched, and that's more bitter than it should be). Jim doesn't know if he wants to even try to match the feats of the other James Kirks. He had tried, on Tarsus IV, armed with the knowledge of hundreds of plans, the circumstances of thousands of deaths, but he had forgotten that pure chance rules all universes equally, and his group of children was mowed down by a squadron of soldiers that had never been in that particular cave before (stupid stupid stupid, and others paid in blood). By a cruel twist of fate, Jim survived. It was the first time in this existence that he wanted to die. It has not been the last.

He doesn't know why he's been cursed with this useless, paralyzing knowledge of other Kirks. Perhaps it has something to do with the circumstances of his birth. The lightning storm could have given off some mysterious radiation or something; Jim can't find a scientific consensus on the nature of the storm that appeared in space just before his father died (he would have done better, would have scanned the anomaly even in the midst of destruction, because he had won Nobel Prizes for his work in astrophysics). Sometimes, he thinks that he's simply insane (Dissociative Identity Disorder, he'd learned all about it while getting his MD for psychiatry), but then he'll find a familiar face that he shouldn't have recognized, and he will have to confront, yet again, the unpleasant truth (that he's not unique, and can't even fix his predecessors' mistakes).

So Jim moves through his life with the grace of a dancer (he learned from an Andorian and the stage called to him. Died of venereal disease at 35), speaks with the tongue of a linguist (Klingons had killed his father and his mother lived on Vulcan, so it made sense to learn. Died of a failing heart at 141), and strides with the confidence of a starship captain (Enterprise, Farragut, Reliant; it seems that James T. Kirk is drawn to space). But the alcoholism, the brawling – they are all his own. (Self-destruction isn't supposed to feel this rewarding.)