[ La'an breathes against him, shaky though it is, and Jim's arms don't move. He holds her because he wants to, because it feels right in a way he can't pin down--the same way he can't pin down the connection he has to this woman but he also can't fight it either--and because he thinks she might need it. Of the people he's met in his life, and there have been many, Jim thinks she might be the one that's earned a chance to cry in someone's arms the most. To let go of the pain she's been carrying. To be vulnerable. To finally show someone how wounded she is, under all that armor she keeps up.

He's also quickly realizing he wouldn't mind being the person she trusts with that part of herself.

Carol. Right. Jim's eyes drop closed and he drags in a breath; heavy and deep. His head falls forward to press against the side of hers for a second before he admits, quietly: ] Remember how I said it was complicated?

Nothing's--changed, exactly.

But.

Carol isn't thrilled with the knowledge that I wasn't planning on giving up my Commission when I heard she was--

[ He's got the angry PADD messages to prove it; saved videos and lines of text, all of it making him realize that maybe he's more his father than he ever meant to be, in the best ways and the worst, too. He lets the sentence trail off, a wave of the hand not wrapped around her to encompass everything. He doesn't know how to explain it. How to reconcile the two people they are. He doesn't know how to walk away from being James T. Kirk, youngest first officer in Starfleet History, and he doesn't know how to make Carol understand the importance of it. His bone-deep, desperate need to be in the stars. Doing something.

Jim's need for it all to matter.

But he also doesn't know how to be--he wants to be a better father than his Dad was, except his Dad is the reason he's done everything with meaning in his life, so what does that say about him? ]

Will you tell me about them? Your family? The things you do remember?