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James Tiberius Kirk is twelve years old the first time he consumes human flesh.
It’s not his first time killing-not really. He’s killed animals before, back on Earth and here on Tarsus. It was good practice. He knew he’d have to kill someday, if he wanted to serve the Empire like his parents. He always assumed he’d be older when he killed another person, though. But the food is gone, and the animals are gone, and it’s just humans now. And what is a human anyways, except a large, smart animal? A hungry animal?
Jim feels like a hungry animal.
He never wants to feel this way again.
He doesn’t even cook the flesh. Just tears strips of meat from the man’s starved body with his knife and shoves them into his mouth, still raw and bloody, scarcely chews before he swallows. He’ll take more with him, as much as he can carry, and he can try to cook that later. But he’s too hungry now to wait.
The meat sits heavily in his stomach. He hasn’t eaten this much in months, hasn’t eaten at all in days, and it takes every ounce of his willpower not to make himself sick on it. It’s a near thing.
It feels wrong, once he has the clarity to think about it. Something primal, something instinctive, telling him not to eat his own. But the fullness feels right and good, and he wants to live. Wants to kill everyone on this dying colony, if he has to, if it means a warm meal in his belly, if it means he can slit the throat of the man who sentenced him to die for some imaginary inherent weakness.
He eats Kodos’s heart, in the end.
He’d say it was for revenge. But, really, he was just so, so hungry.
His mother is proud of him.
How could she not be? Just thirteen, and her boy has a body count and a taste for vengeance. What more could a mother ask for?
She wraps her arms around his small body, and she cries, and she tells him he was strong, and that he should be proud of everything he did to survive. Of every life he took to preserve his own.
She smiles when he tells her he ate people.
“Good job”, she praises, when Jim was expecting disgust. He feels disgusting, felt disgusting doing it. The killing…that was a lot too, it was harder than he expected it to be, but it was his life or theirs and he wanted to live. She must be able to see the discomfort, the confusion, on his face, because she pets his hair and continues.
“They died so you could live, Jimmy. Because they were weak, and you were strong. Come here,” and she pulls him in closer, soft and affectionate in the way that only parents can be with children, when their mutual loyalty is all but guaranteed. He’ll miss this when he’s grown, when he’ll be considered a credible threat. But it’s nice now, and he craves the comfort more than he wants to admit. “You are a survivor. Keep that up, and you’ll conquer the stars”.
Jim allows himself a moment to bask in his mother’s praise, a balm to his fear, his pain, his disgust. She is proud. He should be proud, to have killed and lived, to have eaten flesh.
And with his discomfort soothed, he is simply left with his hunger.
He dreams of human flesh.
He thinks it will go away, at first. Everything else does, mostly, or he finds ways to ease them, work around them.
He learns to eat regular meals again, at normal times, in front of people, without the irrational fear that it will be taken from him, that it will be the last thing he gets. He does not learn to stop looking at other humans and, on some level, consider them as meat.
He takes comfort in a stock of emergency supplies, non-perishable and nutritionally sound and hidden away, to ease the fear of going without. He takes comfort, too, in the knowledge that as long as there are people that he can kill, there will always be something for him to eat, supplies or no.
But it is not just a last resort to him, not anymore. He doesn’t want it to be. He dreams of it, now, still, when everything else has passed and he is confident and strong and thriving. Craves it like comfort, like safety. The reminder that he can kill, and he can live.
He does not kill again until the academy. Until a fellow cadet sees him as a threat, seduces him into her dorm and pulls a knife on him.
He cannot help himself from licking the woman’s blood from his fingers, warm and salty and familiar, so terribly familiar.
He wants more.
He needs more. Needs it like breathing, like nothing else. He wants to eat her flesh, because he knows it will taste of strength and safety, of the surety that he can feed himself, of survival.
James Tiberius Kirk can kill, and he will never go hungry again.
He develops a reputation, first at the academy, then through the galaxy.
Cannibalism is not unheard of, but to indulge so openly, to revel in it? That is terrifying, that is unusual. That strikes fear into the enemy and awe into the subordinate.
And a healthy dose of fear into the subordinate as well. It’s good for the underlings to fear him-keeps assassination attempts down.
He’s strict about limiting the act to those he’s killed directly. That’s the point of it, to him, the thing that makes this feel like safety and comfort and control, to see his enemies die by his hand before he drinks their blood still hot from their wounds. To stay comfortable with flesh, to know that he's not out of practice if it comes to be necessary. You never know what could happen in space. What could happen anywhere. It’s no good going soft, no good feeling like a horrified, desperate child. And if it gets his enemies to fear him and his subordinates to respect him, all the better.
He thinks about his ship. There are just over 400 people aboard, and he cares about very few of them, few enough to count on his hands with fingers to spare. Still more than most Captains would, but he got lucky, got a decent crew to begin with and managed to weed through it for the best ones, the bright ones, the ones with something to prove but either no real eye for captaincy and all the work and danger associated with the position, or enough brains to know he’s not the Captain to try and usurp. Managed to intimidate, punish, threaten, and occasionally reward them into something resembling loyal.
(It was more than that, truly, but it was dangerous and strange for any of them to admit to it, to this feeling of camaraderie and family. So it was simply loyalty, already a rare enough resource).
And he knows without a doubt that he would kill every single one of them, if he had to.
He would not enjoy it.
He would do it last, if he could. He would avoid it all together, if he could. But it would be foolish not to be willing to if it was between them and him.
He intends to never let it come to that.
As for everyone else, the other four-hundred-some souls on this ship? He would kill them, every last one, without a second thought. He would give the order for those precious few he cared for to do the same, and they would carry out those orders flawlessly, because that number was truly his crew; they were his , and Jim cared for his things.
Possessiveness is a wonderful mask for the weakness that is love. It’s all masks, really, all the way down. Possessiveness to hide love, loyalty to hide trust.
Aggression to hide fear.
He never stopped being afraid. Not really.
But he can kill. Despite the fear, he can kill; with a phaser, with a knife, with his own god damn bare hands.
And if he can kill he can eat, and if he can eat he can live.
He digs his teeth into the meat of a shoulder, and swallows the hot, sticky flesh of a recently thwarted assassin.
He and his crew will live another day.