i.

When he told the others to run, he ran too.

(Just not the same way.)

He was almost a feral child. Blood dripped down from cracked and broken skin, and sweat beads dripped down his face. The hand that held the stolen phaser was shaking, but that didn't stop him from jumping on top of one of Kodos' men and blasting his head off with a well aimed hit in the juggar. The blood and brains that splattered on his threadbare clothes didn't even make him flinch, as it dripped down his collarbone and stained his shirt; Jim fell on top of the body when it crashed against the ground, but there was no emotion in his dull eyes when he stood up and ran to catch up with the younger children.

There were few of them still hiding on Tarsus IV, and that made it all the more dangerous to run.

ii.

The first person they lost was Jacob.

It took Jim two seconds too long to reach him, before the Governor's men had taken one of their knives and slashed him from the stomach up to underside of his jaw. Jim didn't even see the body fall (although he knew Sh'ala, the second oldest besides him, was the one to carry it back to their most recent camp) before he had taken the gun from one of the fallen enemies and shot him three times in the head.

It was a waste of bullets; the two extra could have helped Jim later as he tried desperately to reload the gun, after Kodos caught up to them twenty miles to the south and had managed to cut down two more of the members of their group and had burned Thomas' left eye till there was nothing for Jim to do to help him.

Jim's group, after the encounters, had ended up down to twelve.

iii.

The youngest in the group was two and a half. Her name was Loria. The eldest, Jim, was sixteen.

Only half of them had some kind of weapon. Only three didn't have some kind of injury. They hadn't eaten in two days because of the lack of resources, and Jim had broken his collarbone after his most recent stand against Kodos.

They didn't have very good odds.

Jim wasn't known as someone who gave up.

(He couldn't, for so many different reasons.)

The next time the men came after him, fifty miles north of where they last were found and getting closer to the mountains where last Jim had heard were less affected by the fungus, Jim didn't stop fighting until the last man was dead.

Twenty two of Kodos' men perished, although there were too many bleeding cuts and fractured bones on Jim for it to be too much of a victory. He fought like he was, a wounded wild animal; his teeth were stained red and cartilage was under his overgrown nails. Bodies surrounded him with bloody smiles on their necks and holes that went all the way through the bodies- just wide enough in their ribcages for a phaser and a malnourished arm to go through.

Maybe it was the way Thomas and Mara smiled at him, when he came back, that made it acceptable.

iv.

Sh'ala died with parched lips and sweat on her brow, her wrists so thin (just as thin as Jim's and everyone else's) that it would take less effort to break it then to rip paper.

It had been six months since Kodos killed off half the colonists, and there was no food left.

They couldn't bury her, not with the men on their tracks, and Jim didn't even think as he ran with her body for sixteen miles in one day, and staged an accidental rock slide as far away from the mountains as he could.

Jim didn't look back.

There were eleven of them left.

(But Jim, he only counted as a half at this point. Then again, so could all of them.)

v.

Kids dropped like flies after that.

Loria died a day after Sh'ala, and Jim took the chance to set her to rest next to Sh'ala, doing another sixteen mile run all day to where he placed the body. Two of Kodos' men caught sight of him, after he was running back, and he killed them quickly before they had a chance to take a good swipe at him.

(It took so much less effort to snap a man's neck then Jim thought.)

Ten of them left, and then nine, eight. Mara fell asleep one night after a ten mile run and didn't stand back up.

Jim found a kid, Kevin, screaming under the floor of his home five days after Loria's death. His parents were on the kill list, Kevin wasn't, but his mother still hushed him and hid him from sight.

Jim dragged him along with them. They were back to nine.

vi.

It started all out with the fungus, which grew and destroyed the food crops. There was not enough in the food reserves to feed the eight thousand colonists, who rioted and ate as much of the store as they could. There was no way to send a distress signal to Earth or Starfleet.

Kodos did what he could to save the colony, and the desirable colonists. He wanted to play god- at least, that's what Jim and the rest of the living got out of it.

(His idea of eugenics was sickening.)

Four thousand people, half of the colonists, were picked as the subjects Kodos deemed useful for the survival of the planet. They were the ones with desirable traits, helpful skills, lack of anything abnormal.

The rest were going to be rounded up and killed.

Besides Kevin, everyone in Jim's group were names on the execution list.

(Winona Kirk and George Kirk were not on Tarsus IV, although Jim thought that maybe they wouldn't even care if he lived or died on the miserable colony.)

vii.

Six months, two weeks, and four days into the colony's demise, Jim gets stabbed through the stomach.

It's a bad wound, bleeding sluggishly with dark blood, and Jim turns paler every second (although he was already as white as the bones he frequently broke). There's Kevin panicking, god forbid he was only six, and Thomas was pressing as much as he could on the open wound, uncaring about the blood staining his hands, only focusing on how Jim's body shook with every breath of air he took in.

"Goddammit Jim!" Tom screeched at him. "You can't die on us! You can't die on us now!"

viii.

There were a lot of things Jim regretted in that moment, when his chest burned and his heart beating far too much. He regretted not killing the bastard immediately, the one who stabbed him after Jim turned his back too quickly after downing the man. He regretted not being able to help the kids continue on, because there was no more time or food and every single one of them was running on empty.

He regretted being so afraid.

Jim killed without a second thought. He bit and scratched and he would do anything for the kids to stay alive, more than once giving up his own food just for Kevin or anyone else who was sickly or close to dying. Jim wasn't inhumane, no matter what Kodos or anyone else thought. He wasn't the hero the rest of his group seemed to think.

He was a victim, and a survivor. And there was only so much a person could do before they began to fall apart at the seams.

And it was when the blood continued to gush out of his open wound and the screams in Jim's ear that Jim decided he was so sick of fighting to survive. But he wouldn't stop. He couldn't. And he doubted he ever would. He was so fucking afraid to continue on, but he was more afraid of what would happen if he didn't.

With Tom's help, he tore off the soaked part of his shirt and the rest of it, and tied it around his stomach.

(Even so, James Tiberius Kirk knew that he wouldn't make it.)

ix.

It was sometime afterwards (six months, three weeks, and two days into the disaster) that Starfleet showed up, and Kodos was apparently killed.

(Jim wouldn't believe it if he wasn't the one who had done it, or seen it.)

There was enough food for the four thousand or so kept in Kodos' regiment, their food supplies hadn't run out. All the officers who had participated had been burned to death by the desirable group, who had rioted and sent signal after signal up to Starfleet.

There wasn't four thousand of them left, Jim had later learned, because sometime during the six months, three weeks, and two days into the emergency, that number had fallen to ninety seven.

There was enough food for so many of them it didn't make sense to call them survivors of the famine. Jim didn't blame them, but he resented them.

(It seemed that Kodos even had to kill some of his desirables, but they hadn't suffered so much as the rest had.)

It took three days of Starfleet being on the planet for them to locate Jim and his group, and by then Jim had been so delirious with infection that he had barely been able to recognize Tom, and even then half the time he didn't even know who he himself was.

Jim was taken into emergency surgery. The rest of them were separated.

x.

Jim woke up with a nurse at his bedside and an oxygen mask over his face. Too many tubes to count were intertwined within each other, and Jim nearly panicked when he couldn't move.

"One of the survivors?" One of the doctors' asked, although Jim thought it should have been obvious.

"Yeah. Apparently he was one of the nine found in the wilderness. According to one of the kids, he was the leader."

"Have you seen the scars on the kid?" One of the nurses commented. "The poor kid, half of them look like knife wounds and the other half phasers."

"Yeah, well, I've heard that this kid singlehandedly killed over half of Kodos' group."

There was silence. Jim could nearly twitch his finger at his point.

"You're kidding!"

"I'm not. He probably knows more ways to kill a man then we do."

The hand that was checking Jim's pulse moved away quickly. "How long will it take for him to regain consciousness?"

The nurse spoke, "With how serious his injuries were, it could take another week or two. Of course, he could wake up now as well, but that's less likely."

"And his mental state?"

There was another pause.

"That's more unknown, sir. After going through such a trauma-"

"I see."

Jim gave up on his finger and starting trying to move his toes.

….okay.

I got so interested into tarsus iv I was like HOLY MOTHER SHIT LOOK AT THIS INTERESTING TERRIBLE THING

and of course i don't do it justice and half my ideas of it were spoiled into this terrible unoriginal thing but hey. love me anyways.

i dont own star trek.