Jim is quiet a moment, not sure how to respond, old habits and newer impulses conflicting within him. He's spent a long time trying to fix himself alone. By necessity, by choice, it doesn't really matter. He'd thought he was dealing with it all okay, enough to keep going, enough to bury it all as deep as he could and never look at it again. Halloween proved him wrong.

Talking to his older counterpart had helped, secrets shared with the one person he feels he can truly trust with anything, their differences only casting greater clarity on what he'd done and seen and felt, a shared pain with the only one who would truly understand.

But now even the other captain has gone silent. And Jim has missed being around other people, people who know him and don't want to drive the knife deeper, like so many strangers do this time of year. People who care about James Tiberius Kirk, not the Kelvin baby, not George Kirk's son. Someone who has seen the brokenness inside of him and, instead of sweeping away the pieces, wants to find a way to fit them together again. Not exactly as it was before, scarred and patchwork, forever marked by the shattering, but whole.

"You can do it alone," he says at last, lifting his gaze to meet Hunter's, "but you shouldn't have to."