"You - " says Jim, and on the heels of what he'd been thinking, what she's saying now, for a long moment his throat is too tight for speech. Growing up, he'd hated his father with as many breaths as he'd spent loving him. George Kirk died a hero, but with Winona gone so often, he'd left little more than an orphan behind. The true fault had lain with Jim's mother's neglect, but forced to choose between hating a father who wasn't around and hating a mother who might change her mind and love him again someday...young Jim had taken the simple approach and run with it. Even now he feels a stir of instinctual anger in his gut, but he swallows it down.

"People do crazy things when the world is ending," he says, recalling Spock's face on the transport pad, the wild determination to beam onto a dying planet to save his mother. "You wouldn't leave people now. I know you wouldn't."