In Which Fiction is Attempted on a Semi-Regular Basis

Behind the Curtain [1/1]

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 00:13:46 GMT

Name: Behind the Curtain [1/1]
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Jim Kirk moves in next door, and the still-married Leonard McCoy is a total peeping tom.
Notes: Written for this prompt at the kink meme. LOL, IDEK what this is. Like, modern-day!AU? Something like that. Also continuity nods to fics that I’ve written before… I've got to get around to finishing "In Which Jim Kirk..." is soon. One last part and I can't figure it out AUGH.

Also note that this marks about 108,000 words and 250+ pages of Star Trek XI fic that's written. Many of those fics aren't even finished, or they're just random ideas that hardly got started. Dear God, it's like some mad ficcing spree.

Unbeta'd, btw.

It was a Saturday when Jim Kirk moved into the subdivision called Whispering Oaks. Leo remembered this because Saturdays were the nights Kirk brought people home, and the day he moved in was the first day McCoy realized that there was something a little… different about the man.

He’d been up late in his tiny office on the second story of his and Jocelyn’s small ranch-style house, finishing up some paperwork for the base’s hospital, and it was only when black spots started to eat at the edges of his vision that he decided that, yeah, maybe it was time to go to bed. So he stood to turn off the glaring fluorescent lights overhead, and that’s when he saw it.

Maybe Kirk didn’t have his curtain up yet. He’d moved in earlier in the day, and had gotten all of his boxes into the house in under an hour. Leo knew this, because Jocelyn had perched herself on the desk in this very office, with a pair of rather useless binoculars (the house was only twenty feet away, for God’s sake), and she’d given Leo a play-by-play of Jim’s every movement.

(“Look at that lamp, Leo, it’s godawful!”

“I really hope he isn’t planning on putting those flamingos on the lawn. I’ll get the homeowner’s association to castrate him if he does!”

“Any man with that amount of Christmas lights is bad news, I’m telling you, Leo.”)

He’d nodded and tried to continue (or, at least, attempt to start) enjoying his day off. She’d finally grown tired of watching the new neighbor, and she’d thrown down the binoculars and gone off to rant to her friends from the country club about the “weird new guy who’s just moved in”.

And now it was late night, and he was looking through the exact same window to see Kirk going at it with two rather well-endowed women, lights on and in perfect view of Leo’s office window.

And damn, was he skilled. It was like he was everywhere at once, pleasing both women simultaneously, and it didn’t look like he was even breaking a sweat. Well, a metaphorical sweat: sure, he was sweating, because c’mon, it was sex, but it all looked very easy to Kirk. The women were writhing on the bed and in the air, but he seemed almost bored.

Leo didn’t even notice that his hand had gone for the binoculars until his view of the whole ordeal was suddenly magnified, and he could see that Kirk did indeed look bored as shit. And then he’d looked up from the woman underneath him, seemed to focus on Leo, and then winked.

Leo slammed the curtains shut, tossed the binoculars across the room, and flew across the hall to the master bedroom, where he promptly changed and dropped into bed next to Jocelyn and stared at the ceiling, waiting for his heart to stop beating a hole into his chest.

He didn’t see, did he?

__

He definitely didn’t see. That was the consensus Leo had reached by the time he’d showered and dressed the next day. The curtains had only been open a peek, just enough for Leo poke the binoculars, through (why, oh why, had he picked up the binoculars?), and it had been pitch black outside. There was no way Kirk could have seen him. No way.

So when Jocelyn coerced him into visiting Kirk with a gelatin mold in the shape of an oak tree… well, Leo was a little wary of playing the friendly neighbor, but he wasn’t scared or anything.

He adjusted his tie slightly, superfluously, and rang Kirk’s doorbell. He sat only for few seconds before the door swung open to reveal the new neighbor.

Kirk was shirtless, wearing a pair of damp jeans and running a towel through sunstreaked blond hair. It appeared that he’d just gotten out of the shower. And, fuck, he was all glistening and wet and gorgeous, with a well-defined, muscled chest and torso and dazzling blue eyes set in a equally attractive face and fuck, Leo was staring, wasn’t he?

He definitely was, because Kirk was smirking, leaning on the frame of the front door with a hip cocked and one eyebrow arched. Dammit.

Leo cleared his throat and thrust the plate holding the gelatin mold in front of him. “Greetings to Whispering Oaks, courtesy of the homeowner’s association.”

Kirk stared at him for a few moments, dropping his gaze to the wiggling food in front of him, then lifting his eyes to look at Leo again. “Let me guess: the wife send you over?”

Leo shifted uncomfortably. “Yeah. She’s the secretary for the association in her free time.” He paused, and figured that he might as well introduce himself. “Leonard McCoy.” He spared a hand from holding the plate in front of him, and Kirk shook it.

“Jim Kirk, but you probably already know that.” He flashed Leo a brilliant smile.

The name sounded familiar, just as it had when Jocelyn had first told him who was going to be renting the empty house next door. But God, he was distracting. What was Leo here for, again? Oh, right. The gelatin. And now his job was done. “Uh, yeah. Listen, Mr. Kirk--”

“Jim.” Jim blinked those blue eyes at Leo, and crossed his arms over his naked, wet chest, still smiling. “Call me Jim.”

Okay. Whatever. Leo was late for work, and every second he spent in the company of Jim Kirk made him feel ten times more awkward, like he was back in high school and trying not to take a peek in the shower rooms. “Sure, Jim. See you later.”

He shoved the plate into Jim’s hands and darted across the lawn (grass be damned) to his car, where he jumped in and sped off as fast as the speed limit would allow. Which, at ten mph, was not very fast at all.

__

Leo had always known that he was a switch-hitter. It’d felt so natural in high school, and then in college, that he’d never really questioned it. But when he’d met Jocelyn, he’d realized that his time for fooling around with guys (and girls, too) was over. Marriage was one big step, one he was willing to take, because Leo was in love with Jocelyn and, above all, loyal. Cheating? He’d never even considered it.

Not until Jim Kirk, that is.

Jim threw a wrench into every plan he’d ever made for his marriage with Jocelyn. It was bizarre and, frankly, a little scary how much Leo wanted to be the lucky man or woman that Jim brought home every Saturday night. Because, apparently, Jim was a switcher-hitter, too, and had no qualms with displaying that fact. He’d hit on pretty much everyone at the meetings of the homeowner’s association (much to Jocelyn’s horror and much of the community’s embarrassed delight). He’d probably slept with anyone in the neighborhood who was of age and wasn’t married. And probably some of those who were.

He also had a schedule, one that Leo quickly became accustomed to:

Sundays: Sundays were basically identical to the day that Leo had given Jim the Jello mold. He got up, went to work, and then came back to find Jim lazing about on porch, if he wasn't inside already. Maybe Leo shouldn't have started watching Jim from the hidden safety of his curtains on the second story, but someone had to tell him to go inside if it started to rain, right? The kid was liable to fall asleep in the sun, and then it might start pouring, suddenly, what with it being hurricane season and all, and then he'd get sick and die, any nobody would ever know because nobody had been watching.

So of course Leo took the initiative in watching Jim. It was for his own good, after all.

Mondays: Jim spent the earliest hours of the day, from eight to ten, mowing his lawn. Shirtless. The hot Florida sun would beat down upon him, covering his body with a thin sheen of sweat. Jim would push the lawn mower from one end of the lawn to the other, pausing only occasionally to wipe at his face and smile up at the sun. Leo knew this because he left early in the morning on Mondays. Jim had waved to him as he pulled out of the driveway, and he’d given a hesitant wave back.

Most of the residents of the houses surrounding Jim’s had taken to watching for Jim’s weekly lawncare sessions. It said a lot, perhaps, that in a neighborhood full of people who paid workers to trim and pesticide their lawns to green perfection, Jim Kirk was apparently the only person who was willing to get his hands dirty, to take matters into this own hands. That, or perhaps the rest of the residents of Whispering Oaks were just as hot for Jim as Leo was.

When the nurse at the hospital who organized the duty roster asked someone to take the graveyard shift on Mondays, Leo figured he should volunteer. Not because he wanted to spend the mornings watching Jim from his home office or anything. No, he just wanted to spend Monday mornings sleeping in. With Jocelyn. His wife.

(Even if he wasn’t in bed with her.)

Tuesdays: Jim sat on the patio. Shirtless. He mostly flipped through books or spent the time on his laptop, but often he just sat there with sunglasses on, basking in the semi-tropical sun. Again, Jim had an audience, this time joined by the people across the pond at the back of his house, who were elated to finally be included in the rapidly-growing sport of Kirk-watching. He did it mostly in the early afternoon, when the sun was still high in the sky, but soon to begin its descent down into the Earth.

So, you know, Leo got off work early in the morning, got some rest, and then woke up to see Jim Kirk reading in the sun. He was a great indicator of time, after all: if Jim wasn’t out when Leo came to, then he had a few more hours to sleep (or wait for Jim to come out onto the deck), or Jim had already gone inside and he was late for work. He was like a human sundial, and that was the only reason why Leo watched him.

Wednesdays-Fridays: Jim disappeared during these days. At first Leo wasn’t sure where, but he wasn’t about to go and ask the guy. How exactly would he go about phrasing that question? “Hey, I’ve noticed, through stalker-like observation, that you don’t come home until Friday night. Where do you go during that time?”

Not a chance.

So Wednesdays through Fridays, Leo spent his time working and eating and sleeping with... oh, right, he had a wife. This wasn’t metaphorically “sleeping with”, unfortunately for Leo. Usually they’d just climb into bed at the end of the day and literally fall asleep. Whoever said that sex ended with marriage was certainly right, in this scenario.

The few overtures he’d tried usually had Jocelyn complaining that she was tired, or that she had a headache, or maybe she was just stressed. So he’d settled into the rather unfulfilling routine of getting himself off in the morning shower. All too often, fleeting images of blonde hair and blue eyes and a muscular physique popped into his head during those times, only to be consciously shoved away.

It was only after a few months when he learned where Jim went those three days out of the week. Leo’d been home that night, and Jocelyn had been visiting one of her friends from the country club again. Jim had shown up on his door and spoken the first words he’d heard from him since Leo had welcomed him.

“I hear you’re a doctor?” Jim shot Leo a weak smile, its beauty tarnished slightly by the blood dripping down his face.

“Jesus Christ!” He pulled Jim into the house and set him down gently on a chair at the kitchen table. He ran back up to his office, where he kept some extra medical supplies from the hospital, and returned to find Jim slumped up against the table. Leo snapped on his gloves and began to work.

“What did you do to yourself, kid?” He busied himself with cleaning Jim’s wound. It was actually mostly superficial, despite the heavy bloodflow. Probably wouldn’t even need real stitches, let alone leave a scar.

“M’not a kid,” Jim muttered in a tired voice. “I’m a photographer.”

And suddenly the name clicked, and everything made sense. “You’re that Jim Kirk? From National Geographic?”

Jim nodded, then winced at the action. “That’s m’name,” he mumbled.

Well, then. He was in the presence of a legend, wasn’t he? Jim Kirk was the winner of a wide spectrum of photojournalism awards across the world. You name it, he’d probably won it at some point. The most important subjects, and topics, the best angles and shots… his keen eye was said to catch every one of them. Not only that, Jim Kirk didn’t stray from warzones and conflict like most journalists, who were unwilling to risk their lives to cover the truth. No, Jim Kirk went straight to the heart of the matter and told it like it was, while bombs burst overhead and bullets whizzed past his ears. He was practically a household name.

“What’s a guy like you doing in a town like this?” Leo muttered, more to himself then to Jim. He’d cleaned away most of the blood and now set to the task of closing up the wound with a liquid adhesive. “Better yet, why the hell were you bleeding out on my doorstep?”

“Don’t like hospitals,” was Jim’s reply. “Just got back from an assignment,” he pointed at his head, here, indicating that he’d probably been injured on the job, “and some of the neighbors’ve said you had medical training. As for living here… well, needed to set up base somewhere, right?”

They were silent for a few moments as Leo applied the adhesive to Jim’s forehead. Jim didn’t wince at the pain, nor did he close his eyes as Leo worked. Instead, he stared up at Leo with those impossibly blue eyes of his. “You’ve got an accent. Southern, but not from around here. What’s a guy like you doing in a town like this?”

Leo couldn’t help but laugh. “Nothing gets past you, does it?”

“That’s why I make a great photographer.”

“I’ll bet. No, I’m from Georgia. After we got married, Jocelyn—my wife—she wanted to moved down here to Florida. Said she wanted to get in an up-and-coming community, wanted to be part of the crowd, you know? Reminded me of high school, but it’s what she wanted.”

“You don’t sound very happy about it.”

Leo avoided Jim’s eyes as he stripped off his gloves and moved to throw them in the trashcan. “Had to sell most of the family land, the home… even the horses, just to move into this overpriced shithole.” He blinked his surprised—he’d never told anyone that. It was the closest he’d ever gotten to telling someone that he felt a little trapped, in this crowded suburbia, full of retirees and plastic people. “Don’t tell Joce I called this place a shithole. She’d eat me alive.”

“That’s dedication.” Jim’s voice was quiet. “You gave up everything, huh?”

Leo nodded, still avoiding Jim’s gaze. He rearranged the items in his medical kit in an unnecessary fashion. “Yeah, well, I suppose that’s what love is: when you’re willing to give up everything but your bones for that one special person, right?”

There was silence again, and Leo finally turned to look at Jim. The other man’s eyes were on the floor. He looked distant, and almost gloomy. “Right,” Jim finally responded.

He looked up, then, and suddenly he was all smiles again. “Thanks, Bones.” He stood, gave Leo a firm pat on the shoulder and a small salute, and then he left.

It was the last time he spoke to Jim for months.

Saturday: Saturday was the big day. Leo lived for his surgery, and for Saturdays. Because on Saturdays, Jim would bring a lucky lad or lady home for the night. This activity was also, unsurprisingly, shirtless.

It always started the same. Leo would rush back home, give Jocelyn a peck hello, and then wait in anticipation up in his study. Jim had never put the curtains or blind up on his bedroom window, and it appeared that he never would.

Vaguely, at the back of his head, Leo realized that this was really fucking wrong. He was being gross and sick and voyeuristic, and he had a wife, for Christ’s sake!

That didn’t stop him from watching Jim assume a variety of interesting positions with his conquests. It certainly didn’t stop him from sitting there with bated breath, watching as Jim guided each man or woman to orgasm, or was brought to that point by his lover. And it didn’t stop him from letting a hand creep down to the zipper of his pants and stroking his cock in time with Jim’s thrusts.

But it also didn’t stop him from feeling guilty. God, did he feel guilty, each time he finally came in unison with Jim, albeit twenty feet away. He’d feel so fucking guilty that he’d stay in his office for an extra hour or so, berating himself for his stupidity, and then he’d climb into bed with Jocelyn and sleep facing the wall. How could he look at her, or even hold her, when he’d just been jacking off to what was essentially free, live porn?

He disgusted himself… and yet, every Saturday, he came back for more.

__

Leo spent so much time watching Jim that he didn’t even notice that his marriage was falling apart until Jocelyn pointed it out to him.

“Leo, I’m moving into my mother’s house,” she said one day over breakfast.

“Sure, Joce— what?” He’d been in the middle prying a toaster waffle from the depths of the mechanical contraption that held it hostage, and her sudden admission he prompted him to stick his hand into the still-hot grid. He wrenched it out and immediately went to run it under the tap. “Fuck!”

“Yeah, about that. You know those times I’ve gone to see the girls from the country club? I’ve actually been sleeping with Dr. Prury. You know him.” Jocelyn had always been rather blunt.

Leo nodded weakly. He felt his mind and his body going numb, except for the pain in his burnt hand. “Runs the ER, right?”

“Yes.” Jocelyn took a final sip of her orange juice before standing and moving toward the door, where Leo realized she’d placed an armada of packed bags. How could he not have noticed? “Dr. Prury is an expert on triage in emergency situations. He knows how to separate significant damage from an inconsequential injury. He knows how to pay attention to what’s important.”

She picked up her bags and moved them to the car, and then she drove out of the driveway and out of his life.

She never did any more than say those words before she left. Never laid a hand on him. Her words felt like a slap to the face, nonetheless. Even four hours after she’d left, he’d still had his head down on the kitchen table. He still felt the sting of her speech against his cheek, and against his heart.

__

It didn’t take too long for the word to spread that Jocelyn Hatfield had left Leonard McCoy because he’d paid more attention to the next door neighbor than to her. The neighborhood wasn’t small, but it was connected. Whispering Oaks was completely devoid of anything even vaguely resembling an oak tree, but it was, unfortunately, full of a shitload of whispering. So Leo wasn’t surprised, really, when Jim showed up at his door about two months after Jocelyn had left.

He hadn’t descended into drunken misery, like much of the neighborhood had hypothesized. He hadn’t gone on a self-mutilation spree, and hadn’t thrown himself into his work (well, any more than he already did). He’d continued on, the same as he always did. He showed up to work, did his job, went home and finished up excess paperwork, and went to bed. There were two exceptions to his routine.

One: The bed was depressingly cold without the warmth of Jocelyn’s body next to him.
Two: His days were now completely devoid of Kirk-watching.

Leo continued on, as though things were the same, but inside he was falling apart. He was sure he had loved Jocelyn, sure that she had loved him, but everything was blurring together. If he’d loved her, why had he spent so much time ignoring her in favor of looking out a stupid window? If she’d loved him, why hadn’t she given him a chance to rectify his mistake? If they’d loved each other, why hadn’t they tried to make it work?

Leo wanted to pin the blame on Jocelyn, on Jim, on anybody and everybody, but when it came right down to it, he knew it was mostly his fault. He’d become obsessed. Jocelyn hadn’t made any attempt to stick around and try to sort things out, but really, who could blame her? He was a pitiful man, with a crush on that bordered on creepy, on a man who hardly knew he existed. Leo excised Kirk-watching from his daily activities, but he didn’t do more than call Jocelyn to find out that she’d moved safely, that she was okay. Because in his mind, he didn’t deserve Joce, and he didn’t deserve the sick pleasure he got out of watching Jim perform day to day tasks.

The divorce papers came a month into their separation. He gave her the house, because everywhere he looked he saw evidence of his betrayal and his failure. He gave her everything, because he didn’t deserve to keep anything.

So when he opened the door to find Jim on a sunny day two months after Jocelyn’s departure, he was disgusted by the sudden heat of desire that flushed through his body. “Kirk,” he acknowledged, voice quiet and polite.

“Jim,” Jim corrected. “Listen. This is my fault.”

Leo resisted the urge to let out a cackle. “No. No, this isn’t anybody’s fault but mine, Jim.” Still polite, but now his voice was strained. He could see the neighbors across the street peeking through the windows in the master bathroom. “I think you should go.”

“No, it is my fault,” Jim persisted. His voice sounded pleading. “I knew you were watching. I saw you the first time, and I kept doing what I was doing because… I don’t know, I guess I liked it. You, watching. God, that’s pathetic, isn’t it?” He threw one arm across his face and sagged against the door frame.

“Exhibitionism versus voyeurism. I’m not sure which is worse,” Leo said dryly.

“I think we’re both pretty bad.” Jim shifted uncomfortably, and Leo was reminded of his first meeting with Jim months earlier, where he’d stood in the exact same position, looking just as uncomfortable. Except that he hadn’t said these words: “Can I come in?”

“No,” was the automatic response, but Jim pushed past him and entered the house, anyway. His eyes scanned across the kitchen and the living room, where boxes were piled against the walls and across the floors. “Moving out?”

“Yeah. I gave Joce the house.” Jim looked a bit confused, so he elaborated. “We’re getting divorced.”

”Shit. Really?” Leo nodded, and Jim went a bit pale at that. “I’m really sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’d say it was inevitable. She was already going at it with someone else, and I was otherwise occupied.” ’With watching you’, were the unspoken words that didn’t really need to be voiced. After all, Jim had known he was putting on a show. That was the whole reason why he’d done it. Leo turned away from Jim and climbed the stair to the bedroom, where he had been putting away the few things that held any importance to him. Soft footsteps behind him alerted Leo that, yes, Jim was following him to his room.

“Well…” They’d reached the master bedroom, and Leo resumed folding his clothes and stacking them in his suitcases. “Now you’ve really lost everything, haven’t you?” Jim’s voice was soft, but almost a bit playful.

Leo spun around and shot the other man a glare. “Well, thanks, Captain Obvious. Way to make me feel better.”

“I prefer ‘Captain Kirk.’” Jim had a small smile on his face now. “I’m just saying that, by your definition, you’re in love with me.”

Well, that certainly came out of left field. “I don’t follow.”

“’Love is when you’re willing to give up everything but your bones for that one special person.’ You said it yourself.”

“One, Jim: this isn’t exactly the kind of situation I was talking about when I said that was what love’s all about. Two: this isn’t love I’ve got for you. It’s obsession. It’s a horrible, sickening obsession that I’m going to try my hardest to get rid of when I get back to Georgia.”

Jim stepped forward, and Leo step backward at the same time, almost subconsciously.

“What if I don’t want you to go back to Georgia?” Another step. “And what if I don’t want you to get rid of this obsession?”

“It’s not really your choice.” Leo tried to appear firm with that statement, but his voice sounded shaky with want and need. He backed up again and fuck, the back of his knees were already against the bed. How the hell did he end up in the kind of story where that shit always happened?

Jim stepped forward again and in one swift movement, he had pushed Leo down onto the bed and climbed on top of him. He dropped his head slowly, at an almost agonizing pace, until their lips were only millimeters apart and Leo’s heart was pounding painfully against his chest. And then he said: “Does your wife own the bed?”

Again, out of left field. “W-what?” Leo managed to stutter.

Jim gave a small smirk. “I asked you if you gave your wife the bed. In the divorce.”

Leo wracked his disoriented mind for what had been divvied up as his and hers, and Jim settled his hips on top of Leo’s and gave a teasing little thrust. “Y-yes!” Leo gasped out. “I mean, yeah, I gave her the bed.”

“Alright, then. Let’s make some memories for her.” And with that, Jim dropped those few extra millimeters and pressed his lips against Leo’s.

God, it was months of burning desire and need and lust all rolled up together and expressed in one deep, monumental moment the stretched from second to minutes to hours, days, and years. Jim was against him and suddenly, he was inside him, all hot and slick against his tongue. Leo let him push deeper and deeper still, because he was tired of fighting his attraction, tired of denying the fact that he wanted this. That he needed this.

He couldn’t help but feel embarrassed at the whimper of protest he made when they finally surfaced for air. Jim simply gave him a coy smile before slipping a hand down the front of Leo’s jeans and giving the older man’s cock a firm squeeze. Leo’s hips bucked up against Jim, and they grinded together in one brief moment of ecstasy that threatened to overtake him altogether.

He might have shouted a few nonsensical praises lauding Jim’s sexual prowess at that point, but it was hard to really remember anything at all, when Jim was suckling at his neck, then at his nipples, through his shirt, and then finally at the inside of his thighs. (When had his pants come off? It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but this—oh God, yes.) His clenched at the mattress, devoid of sheets, thrust his head back and squeeze his eyes shut as a kaleidoscope of pleasure clouded his vision.

Jim moved a little closer to his member and let a breath of warm air glide across it as he whispered, “I’ve wanted to do this since you brought me that Jello.”

All Leo could think of as Jim proceeded to wrap those full lips around his cock was ‘Fuck, I need to buy more Jello.’

He had been right, so fucking right, about Jim being skilled at this, because it felt like all of him was encased in a heavy, wet warmth that had no beginning and no end. He shuddered and moaned and clenched even harder at the mattress to keep from thrusting upward into Jim’s mouth. Jim took even more of him into his mouth and sent his tongue traveling down Leo’s length before coming back up to circle about his head. It was slow and meticulous, and it was driving him fucking insane.

It wasn’t until Jim began humming, strangely, that Leo finally fell over the edge and succumbed to a brilliant firework show of pleasure. He went still at the very moment he came, then sank, shuddering, against the naked mattress.

He came to his senses what seemed like eons later to find that Jim had been, and was still humming, the Fanfare for the Common Man. Like a fucking victory march.

“Asshole,” Leo muttered. He smacked Jim lightly, and Jim merely chuckled as he drew back and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Leo made a move to stand, but his wrist was caught by the Jim’s surprisingly strong grip.

“C’mon, Bones. You’re not going to leave me hanging, are you?” Jim gestured to his burgeoning erection, and Leo gave a sigh. Of course he wasn’t going to leave Jim hanging. That would just be rude, right?

__

Leo figured Jocelyn would probably want to buy a new mattress after everything they’d done last night. Actually, she’d probably want to buy an entirely new bed, seeing as how she’d liked to hang her hats on the bedposts, and Jim and Leo had… well, the posts certainly weren’t hygienic, anymore.

He rolled off the now unbelievably sticky mattress and pulled his pants back on before continuing in the task he’d set out to do yesterday: fold and pack all of his shit before Jocelyn moved back in. He’d only been going at it for a few minutes before he felt someone’s gaze boring into his back. He turned his head slightly to see Jim lying in the mess they’d created on the mattress, blinking lazily at Leo through the light streaming in from the window blinds. It was almost picturesque, in a ‘I’m-getting-divorced-and-I-had-sex-with-the-neighbor-I’ve-been-secretly-ogling-for-the-past-six-months’ sort of way.

“What’re you doing?” Jim asked through a rather loud yawn. He stretched as he said this, and Leo could hear tendons and ligaments pop into place all over the man’s body. “Come back to bed,” he cooed, in a scarily-domestic sounding voice.

“No,” Leo snapped, and because that sounded a bit petulant, he added, “I’ve got to get my stuff ready for the move. The truck’s coming today, and Joce is supposed to move back in tomorrow.”

He packed in silence for a few minutes, before a pair of strong, warm arms suddenly wrapped around his torso.

“You’re still leaving?” Jim’s words fell across his ear in a warm breath, and Leo fought to keep an involuntary shudder from running through him.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Jim. Of course I am.” He spoke a little more quietly as he said, “I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

“Well, that’s simple enough.” The arms around his body tightened until, yes, he was being pulled into a hug. Jim dropped his head on Leo’s shoulder and cocked it slightly so that they could see eye to eye. “Come with me.”

Leo shoved away the small tendril of hope that coiled in his chest at that suggestion. “I can’t, Jim. I just fucked up my marriage because of you. What makes you think I’d follow you to... where are you going, anyway?”

“I go wherever the story takes me. I’ve been doing local shit for the time being, but I can’t stay here forever—wanderlust, and all that.” Jim smiled a wide, sincere smile. “And I know you’d follow me because you’re obsessed with me. You also just asked me where I was going, which means you’re actually interested in knowing my next destination. Finally, we just had sex. It was totally awesome, and I’m pretty sure you’d like to repeat the experience.”

“Asshole,” Leo repeated in a disgruntled tone.

“Fair enough,” Jim said, sounding rather lighthearted despite the name-calling. “More importantly, though, is the fact that you haven’t thrown me off, yet. I didn’t major in psych or anything, but that small detail tells me that you want to keep me close.”

DamnJim Kirk and his unorthodox-but-somewhat-correct psychological analysis. He shrugged Jim off of his shoulder and tried to return to packing. “Sex doesn’t make everything suddenly work out, Jim. I’m still getting divorced, and I’m still pretty fucked up. Nothing has changed.”

“But things can change. Come with me,” Jim repeated.

Then he seemed to pause for a moment, and then his eyes seemed to light up as he changed tactics. “Riddle me this, Dr. McCoy: obsession isn’t healthy, right?

Leo didn’t like where this conversation was suddenly heading. “No,’ he said slowly, “generally, obsessive love is detrimental to both the obsessed individual and the object of their affection.”

“So let’s turn that into something positive, huh?” Jim began to pace around the room, nodding to himself as if his idea was unparalleled in its genius. “Since you’re already halfway there, what with losing everything, let’s make it all the way to love.”

Jim spun on his heel and jabbed a finger in Leo’s direction. “I’m going to make you love me.”

There was a brief moment with a complete absence of sound, which Leo took to reflect on the complete absurdity of his life so far. “You can’t make someone fall in love with you, Jim.”

“I can do anything I want,” Jim replied, a cocky grin on his face. “Besides, you’ve got nowhere else to go. Said so yourself.”

“Stop repeating shit I’ve already said so you can use it to your advantage,” Leo shot over his shoulder, but he could already feel himself giving in. This wrong on so many levels, running off with the man who was essentially the cause of his marriage’s implosion. It was so fucking wrong, so why did it feel so right?

He dropped his head against the suitcase he was packing and struggled to win a losing battle, but eventually want and need managed to suppress rhyme and reason. “Fine. I’ll come with you,” he heard himself say.

“Excellent!” Jim’s arms were suddenly around him again, and he was spun about on the spot so that Jim could press a firm kiss to his lips. Then Jim bounded out of the room and down the stairs, calling over his shoulder, “I’ll schedule tickets for a flight next week! There’s this civil war going on in Asia that I’ve been wanting to cover for ages now!”

Leo groaned, dropped his head back upon his suitcase, and tried not to think about what the fuck he’d just gotten himself in to. Instead, he closed his eyes against the fabric of the clothes he’d been folding and lamented the fact that Jim Kirk had never thought to put up his fucking curtains, that first night he’d moved into Whispering Oaks.

____________

Oh my God, I just realized that this seems like the perfect setup for a ridiculous investigative-photojournalist-team!AU with lead-reporter!Jim, team-medic!Bones, second-in-command!Spock, translator!Uhura, information-man!Chekov, pilot/muscle!Sulu, and technician/cameraman!Scotty. Someone should get on that shit.

Also, fun fact: McCoy would totally be working in this airforce base in Florida… you know, if it wasn’t gone now.

Vacation's all I ever wanted...

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:12:27 GMT

Well, not fic, but I am going to be out of the country for an extended period of time... until mid-August, actually. Unfortunately, this means I'll probably have intermittent access to the internet. :P

That'll give me a lot of time to write, but not so much time to upload. I'll try to make it work somehow, because I'm almost done with "In Which Jim Kirk is a Stellar Childcare Provider" and I don't want to have to wait six weeks to upload that last part! So I'll find the internet. Somehow.

Friends, without the Benefits [1/1]

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:12:39 GMT

Name: Friends, without the Benefits [1/1]
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy
Rating: PG
Summary: Somehow McCoy gets saddled with the not-as-awesome-as-it-sounds job of being the Captain's "wife".
Notes: Written for this prompt at the kink meme. Finally got around to archiving it up here. (I should really get around to writing some Spock/Kirk again. Just to even things out, you know? Or maybe some hot threesome action, if I could ever figure out the semantics of that...)

1.) Dissolving Tension

“He’s been like this for days,” Sulu mutters.

“I swear to God,” Uhura says, “if he glares at me one more time I’ll—”

“Consider your next words carefully, Lieutenant,” Spock says, shifting his eyes from left to right, than left again. “While the Captain remains in this disagreeable mood, I would not put it past him to tag you for insubordination.”

The small group at the mess table goes silent, because while the words describe an almost out-of-character nature for Captain James T. Kirk, it is also undeniable that what Spock is saying is true. Kirk has been on the warpath for three days, after a particularly condescending call from Starfleet Command. No one really knows the details of the transmission, but a few unlucky ensigns recall being near the ready room when he received it. Those ensigns are still stuck on shift in the hydroponic lab with the man-eating plant. Actually, nobody’s really heard from them since yesterday.

“Clearly,” Chekov says, “we must find way to get him relaxed.”

Everyone nods. There’s no doubting that.

“Well then. Good look, Dr. McCoy.” Sulu stands, pats McCoy on the shoulder, and leaves the table with his tray.

“Godspeed,” Uhura says, her voice halfway between sarcastic and sincere, and she leaves as well.

McCoy gets different variations of those same well-wishing words of good luck as each member of his lunch group leaves. Even Spock says, “I am hopeful that your methods in helping the Captain release some of his tension are successful.” He gives a curt nod, actually rests a hand on McCoy’s shoulder, then pivots on one heel and exits the mess.

McCoy sits there and stares at his plate for a few seconds, dumbfounded. He slowly raises his head to see the rest of the occupants of the mess hall giving him various looks of admiration, expectation, and determined hope. Someone even gives him a thumbs up.

McCoy stands and moves toward the exit. A slow clap begins to start.

By the time he’s reached the doors, the whole mess has burst into a riotous round of applause.

2.) Diplomatic Exchanges

“For the last time” McCoy struggles to keep his rage restrained, “I am not. A suitable. Bargaining chip.”

The dusky-purple Santelloid shakes its head (it could have shaken its elbow, though, McCoy’s not too sure). “Au contraire, Doctor McCoy.” (How the hell did the universal translator pick up French?) “We have studied your kind, your ship, and its people. We have chosen who we perceive to be the most valuable to the master and his subjects.”

McCoy snorts. If Jim’s his master than… well, actually, McCoy doesn’t really have anything to follow that up with.

It sure does feel great to be called valuable, though. Granted, this comes from an alien being that’s about to flay his skin from his body before boiling him an a tub of what looks like molten bubble gum, but at least he’d been complimented before all of that got started.

Of course, Jim chooses that second to burst into the strange cellar he’s in, sic Spock on them, and shoot the cuffs that are holding McCoy to the wall.

“Bones, you really need to stop getting kidnapped. That’s the third time this month.” Jim chuckles before heading to the entrance of the cellar and contacting the Enterprise to beam them up.

“Yeah,” McCoy mutters as he feels the tell-tale tingle of dematerialization take hold of his body. “People might start to think I’m important or something.”

3.) Bargaining Chip

“So,” Scotty begins as he sits down in the chair at McCoy’s desk, “I need to ask ye a favor, Doctor.”

McCoy arches an eyebrow. “Scott, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t care what you do with the Enterprise when you’re alone in the Jeffries tubes, but if it’s a serious injury then it has to go on file. No matter how embarrassing, unfortunately. Trust me, the Captain’s had a lot of experience—”

“Ah, er, actually…” Scott fumbled his hands in the air for a few seconds before continuing. “This has do with the Cap’n…” he trails off and looks at McCoy. He’s unusually bashful, the doctor decides. Normally Montgomery Scott obliges in giving informative recounts of even the raunchiest sexual encounters without so much as twitching. But here he stands in the small office at the corner of sickbay, actually blushing.

“Dammit, man,” McCoy says as his eyes widen, “you don’t—you don’t have feelings for him, do you?”

Scotty actually jumps at that. “Oh! No! No, God no, Doctor—I just wanted ta ask ye.. the annual budget memo for the Enterprise came in yesterday, and I was, ah, wondering if the Cap'n could spare a few credits for some new power couplings.”

McCoy looks at the engineer, really looked at him. He stares, long and hard, until Scotty turns his eyes away and clears his throat nervously at the ceiling.

“Why the hell,” McCoy asks, “are you asking me about the damned budget?”

Scotty flushes even more so, if possible, and starts to wave his hands in the air frantically. “No, it’s just, well, you and the Cap’n at close, ye know, and I’ve got it on good authority that you’re the man to go to when ye need somethin’ from the Cap’n...”

McCoy, again, feels dumbfound. “What?”

“If ye ever need anything special, anything electronic of the sort, I’ll be happy to help,” Scotty says hastily. “Just, ye know, do your thing and then remind the Cap’n that Engineering’s been lookin’ a bit shoddy without those new couplings. Listen,” Scotty leans in close now. “I can get you some a prime brew, some quality scotch or a fine old whiskey, even. We’ve got quite a few secrets hidden in those Jeffries tubes.”

“I’m sure you do,” McCoy says, giving Scotty a look that clearly says ”this-conversation-is-over-and-has-been-over-for-the-past-several-minutes-so-what-the-hell-are-you-still-doing-here.”

McCoy can say a lot with his looks. He feels like he should start getting them patented.

Jim Kirk says so much more with just a smile and a wink, though, which is what McCoy gets when he suggests the new power couplings over their breakfast in the mess together. Jim Kirk says so many things with so little words, and yet McCoy can’t even begin to understand half of what he’s said. He does get one thing, though: a certain Chief Engineer’s going to be feeling rather happy in a few weeks time, and McCoy’s going to be getting drunk on possibly-illegally-obtained liquor soon enough. So everyone wins, right?

4.) Protection

Wrong.

“—the hell?” McCoy shouts as the doors to the Sickbay burst open to reveal some neon orange gelatinous creature that surges forward and begins to overtake the pristine walls of the room.

McCoy would have given the situation a proper cursing (because, really, “the hell?” wasn’t an accurate reaction to the scenario at all) but before he can say any more, he’s tackled by two nurses and dragged toward a supply closet at the other end of the room.

“What the fu—let me go, dammit!” He struggles valiantly, but he’s taken off guard so quickly that his medical staff manages to throw him in the storage room and barricade the door before he can really fight back.

“Sorry, sir,” a nurse’s voice—Nurse Parrel, McCoy remembers—sounds from the other side of the door. “But Kirk would kill us if we ever let anything happen to you.”

McCoy pounds on the door, but the nurse retreats, presumably to save the few patients in the sickbay and fight off the terror that threatens to overwhelm its habitants.

McCoy is finally released from the closet after an hour of banging on the door. He tumbles out as Jim pulls the door open, and before the younger man can say anything, McCoy is striding forth to check on the damage.

Apparently the life form that had entered was some sort of creature that had escaped from the one of the labs on another deck. The science division had been monitoring the organisms growth when it had suddenly accelerated rapidly and overtaken the poor scientists within. Though there were only a few injuries (the creature had been mildly acidic, but brief contact didn’t cause too much damage), McCoy has to complete a headcount on his staff and patients, anyway.

Two are dead. One, a patient who was unfortunate enough to lack the mobility to run from the strange organism and had been almost completely eroded by its strange acidic body mass. The other death was Nurse Parrel, who had apparently fought courageously to keep the creature from advancing further into the sickbay.

At Parrel’s memorial, McCoy says a few words. He didn’t know the man too well beyond his medical skills (he'd been a fairly quiet person), but when he goes to sleep that night, McCoy hears the nurse’s words echo in mind far into the night.

”Kirk would kill us if we ever let anything happen to you…”

McCoy slips on his uniform before exiting his quarters and heading toward the Sickbay. He won’t sleep tonight. He can’t.

”Kirk would kill us if we ever let anything happen to you…”

Yeah, well, it’s too late for that, McCoy thinks to himself.

5.) Co-host Boring Parties

McCoy stands at Jim’s right and shoots the man a glare as he launches into another diatribe about some botched diplomatic mission that had saved Starfleet’s ass once again. It’s probably hilarious to the crowd of admirals and captains, who laugh quite openly at Jim’s humorous retelling, but put them in a room with six man-eating plants, two wounded security officers, and a plastic knife as a weapon. Let them see how funny it is, McCoy fumes.

He doesn’t even know why the fuck he’s here. All he knows is that when Jim’s called in to host the some Starfleet charity benefit, the crew of the Enterprise had unanimously voted him to be Jim’s co-host/verbal buffer. Unanimously! Four-hundred people had voted fucking unanimously to put him through this torture!

It was about time, McCoy decides, that the crew got around to updating their inoculations. Complete with incredibly invasive health protocol and procedure, when deemed necessary. Nevermind the fact they’d only set out on their five-year journey about year ago.

So he stands on the stage with what he hopes to be a smile on his face, occasionally interjecting Jim’s speech to get him back on topic or steer him away from some details that probably wouldn’t go well with Starfleet Command. You know, the stuff that even Spock had deemed “unnecessary” to report. Unnecessary, in this case, was Vulcan for “will get us all decommissioned and sent to Delta Vega.” (Come to think of it, McCoy thinks, that’s probably why Scotty suddenly looks frightful whenever Spock uses the word.)

After the opening address, Jim gets around to schmoozing with the admiralty while McCoy hovers near the bar and debates whether or not he should get completely shitfaced to avoid the mind-numbing world of politics. He decides against it (wouldn’t look good for the flagship’s CMO to throw up on somebody’s shoes, after all) and instead grasps a small glass of champagne from a passing waitress and sips in moderation.

He jumps slightly when Jim appears by his side, almost like a ghost. “So Bones,” he says, “enjoying the party?” He has that smirk on his face, that trademarked Jim Kirk “I’ve-always-got-everything-under-control” look. It really makes McCoy want to punch it right off his face, sometimes, though sometimes the urge tends less toward punching or more toward kissing that smug look into oblivion…

McCoy stifles that train of thought immediately. It had taken a while for him to recognize his feelings for his best friend. As it turned out, the crew had figured it out long before him. It was only after Parrel’s death that McCoy really began to look at what he meant to Jim Kirk, and what Jim meant to him.

And McCoy has decided that while his affection for his captain borders on something like love, Jim’s feelings toward his CMO are purely platonic. Jim’s smiles and winks and grins may say more than McCoy can properly interpret, but they can’t possibly be anything more than companionable vibes. Jim is smart and strong and sexy and a million other things, and here, when they’re standing at the wall in this wide room full of hundreds of people, Jim is still the center of attention. He can have any one of these people in his bed at a moment’s notice, McCoy thinks, without even trying. So why settle for less? Why settle for Leonard McCoy when he can grab something younger, prettier, more amiable than McCoy can ever hope to be?

He stops this train of thought because it always gets obscenely depressing. He’s resigned to the facts and that’s just about it. Jim is Jim, and he’s always do what he wants. If that includes bedding just about whoever he wants, well… the best McCoy can do is give him hypos and keep him clean for his next encounters. And he’s okay with that, really. Not happy, but okay.

Jim nudges him a bit, and McCoy raises his eyes to meet Jim’s piercing blue. “What’s the matter?” Jim asks, his smirk fading to a slightly concerned expression. “You’re never usually this quiet at these things. I mean, look, there’s a million people to covertly insult and you’re not taking a stab at a single one!”

McCoy shrugs a shoulder, takes a sip of his champagne. “Just not up to it, I guess.”

Jim rolls his eyes and a smile breaks out upon his face. “Well, get up to it, then. I brought you here because you’re the only one who’ll keep me sane while I’m forced to lick some admiral’s boots. If it were anyone else, I’d probably have offended half the crowd to tears by now.” He shrugs a shoulder, mimicking McCoy. “Or I’d have set them on fire. Either way, the night would have gone to complete shit.”

McCoy tries to hide his smile, but Jim sees it, and returns it. And then he says something that streals McCoy’s breath away, even if it’s just intended to be an offhanded, friendly remark.

“I need you, Bones.”

McCoy freezes up a bit, turns and looks at Jim with wide eyes. And Jim’s eyes are looking up toward the ceiling, fixed on the chandelier as if it’s the most amazing thing to have been invented since transparent aluminum. He makes no attempt to clarify his words, and in the dim light McCoy can see the faintest tint of red flushing through Jim’s cheeks.

Jim Kirk, blushing. Well, now McCoy won’t be entirely surprised when they show up at a planet where pigs have wings, that’s for certain.

1.) "Relationship"

So McCoy’s been acting sort of like the Captain’s wife in the short year that they’ve been out in the black, but so far he hasn’t gotten any of the benefits besides their friendship. All of the hard work and only some of the benefits, really.

That all changes the night of the charity ball when they get back to the Enterprise.

Jim grasps McCoy’s hand as they step off the shuttle and pulls him through the corridors and up a few decks until they arrive at the Captain’s quarters. McCoy, in his confusion, tries to protest. Each time Jim holds a finger to his lips and smiles a small, sincere smile. When they get to Jim’s quarters, the younger man pulls him into the bedroom and pushes him onto the bed, all in one swift moment.

“Jim,” McCoy is excited and confused and just a little bit scared, because he knows what’s going to happen and he’s powerless to stop it. He’s been powerless against Jim Kirk ever since their meeting on that shuttle. “This is a bad idea, Jim.” He squeezes his eyes shut and prepares to launch into an explanation as to why sleeping together would be a horrible-yet-extremely-appealing idea.

Instead, he hears Jim laughing. Laughing, for Christ’s sake. He cracks open an eye to see Jim wipe a tear of mirth from his eyes. “What the hell’s so funny?” McCoy asks.

“Bones,” Jims says, and that small smile that looks paradoxically innocent on Jim Kirk appears again. “This is a great idea. This the best idea I’ve had in… probably forever, actually.”

McCoy narrows his eyes, turns his head slightly. “What?”

Jim has finally recovered from his laughing fit and he drops onto the bed with a rather unceremonious plop. “Y’know how long I’ve been trying to say that, Bones? What I said at the party… I’ve been trying to say it forever and I could never really find the words…”

“You need me,” McCoy echoes Jim’s earlier words, feeling a little skeptical.

Jim inclines his head slightly as a response. “I need you. Not just to keep me from going insane at diplomatic parties or bouncing off the walls or going psycho on the crew. I need you because you’re my best friend, and because you look after me when I can’t look after myself. Because you sort of anchor me to reality, keep me from floating off and getting lost out there.” He gestures to the port at the edge of his room, where the black of space greets them with unending darkness.

“I need you,” Jim says, and his voice drops an octave, “because I want you.”

McCoy’s breath hitches in his chest.

“Sexually,” Jim adds.

McCoy can’t help it: he snorts at first, then cracks up outright. Jim begins to laugh too. “Way to kill the mood, Casanova,” McCoy manages between cackles.

Jim rolls his eyes. “I’m just trying to get it across that I want you, and I want to, you know, be with you, but I don’t want this to change, us being friends. Because some people get together and when they get intimate, things get weird. They start getting secretive and bitchy and distant, bizarrely enough, and I don’t want us to be like that—“

“I get it, I get it,” McCoy says. And he does get it. How they feel doesn’t have to affect how they act toward each other. They can be madly, hopelessly, ridiculously in love with one other, but first and foremost they’ll be best friends. They always will be, and nothing will change that, even a relationship upgrade like this. He’s been looking after Jim Kirk since the day they’d met, and in his own roundabout way, Jim’s been doing the same.

So maybe he’s always been the Captain’s Wife, in a sense. Now he’s just made it a little more official.

Starfleet Academy Annual Newly-Enlisted Cadets' Orientation Carnival [1/1]

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 17:25:53 GMT

Name: Starfleet Academy Annual Newly-Enlisted Cadets' Orientation Carnival [1/1]
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy
Rating: PG-13
Summary: "Forget canon, Bones first met Kirk at the Academy's Annual Carnival. AT THE KISSING BOOTH."
Notes: Written for the kink meme. This may actually be my favorite thing that I've written for the ST XI fandom so far. Considering there's 65 pages of fic sitting on my computer at this time (not including this one), I think that's saying a lot. Un-beta'd.

Leonard McCoy hated carnivals. He hated balloons. He most especially hated clowns, those creepy little bastards. In fact, one might even say that he hated fun. It would be an incorrect assumption (he liked certain activities, none of which were present at the moment), but fairly close to the truth, nonetheless.

So what was he doing at Starfleet Academy's Annual Newly-Enlisted Cadets' Orientation Carnival? Well, it went something like this:

Leonard had climbed on a shuttle, half-drunk and all-miserable, thrown up on a few cadets, flown into Starfleet, and showed up at the main building to complete the enlistment process. Then he'd been assigned a room (thankfully, a single with an attached kitchenette and bathroom) and given a selection of uniforms to choose from. They came in red, red, and, unsurprisingly, red. Leonard chose the red one, and was given a few pairs of them to change into later.

He didn't have much else to his name at that point, so he settled in to his small little dorm room and fell asleep on the mattress, using his jacket as a blanket and his newly-acquired uniforms as a pillow.

Then next day he'd woken up (rather early, might he add) to a rather annoying alarm ringing from the comm installed at the front door. He accessed it using the credentials he'd been given yesterday to find a vivid picture of a Starfleet admin who looked rather bored.

"Oh, Dr. McCoy. We've been ringing you for a while."

"Some people like to sleep at this time," Leonard informed her.

"That's nice," she had said. "Your presence is required at the Starfleet Academy Annual Newly-Enlisted Cadets' Orientation Carnival, as one of the newest members of Starfleet's medical track."

"The whatsit?" Leonard asked.

She had repeated the name, which was much too tiresome for Leonard to think about that early in the morning. "Why-- my classes don't even start until Monday!" He wasn't whining. Whining was for children and immature college students and bitchy ex-wives.

"You're a new cadet, so you're acquired to attend the Starfleet Academy blahblahblahblah. Think of it as New Student Orientation. You remember it from college, right? Or maybe you don't: it must have been a long time ago for you--"

Leonard terminated the connection. It was way too early in the morning for this shit.

____

So he'd arrived at the stupid carnival and made his way over to the medical information booth, where the second-year cadets who were running it became simultaneously frightened and impressed by his attitude and his status as a doctor, despite being a cadet. And then they'd done the unthinkable.

One cadet, a short boy with greasy hair, approached him timidly. The group he'd departed from watched him from the other side of the booth, looking wary for their comrade. "Hey, um... Len. Can I call you Len?"

"No. Never," he replied with a glower.

"Oh, uh... alright then. Well, the other cadets and I were thinking that since you're already a doctor, maybe you'd be more qualified to handle the booth-- you know, just for a while. Because we want to get lunch, and you got here late so you haven't been here this whole time, and--"

Leonard sighed and pressed a hand to his face. There was no need to scare the kid off. He'd just been in a terrible mood since he'd left what had been his home a scant month ago, and he couldn't help taking it out on the people around him. But he was in Starfleet now, turning over a new leaf or whatever idiom was appropriate for the situation. A fresh start.

So he took pity on the kid and inclined his head slightly in agreement. "Yeah, fine. Go get some food, kid."

The boy's eyes widened in surprise and he almost seemed to lift off the ground with relief. "Thanks, Len! You're the greatest!" He dashed toward his group, which in turned vanished from the tent just as quickly.

"Don't fucking call me Len!" Leonard yelled after them.

Still. He felt pretty good about himself, trying to be nice despite all the shit he'd been put through in the last few weeks. He wasn't particularly angry at the other cadets for ditching him to run this stupid information booth all by himself.

Ten minutes later, he still wasn't angry.

Fourteen minutes later, he was kind of pissed.

Fifteen minutes passed and he was fucking livid.

He muttered some curses to himself and left the booth to find the bathroom. He had to piss, dammit, and it wasn't like anybody was inquiring important information.

So he made his way to the bathroom and damn, the line was long. So far back he'd had to walk to the front to verify that it was, indeed, the bathroom, and then he'd had to walk back and get into the line, which had extended by twelve people while he'd been checking.

So he stood and he stood and he fucking stood until there were only a few people left in front of him. And then he realized that he was in the wrong line. Because somewhere along the road, the bathroom line had merged with the kissing booth line. Which, Leonard noted, was equally long, if not longer. He wondered if he'd even gotten into the right line in the first place.

He tried to scoot toward the bathroom line, but the few murderous glances he got indicated that trying to slip in would probably be a bad idea. And by the time he'd realized that, he was the next up in the kissing booth.

"Well, hey," a smooth, almost cocky-sounding voice intoned. "Finally, someone who looks like they won't be a fountain of saliva."

Leonard snapped his head forward. Sitting at the booth, with one foot up on the table as he casually reclined in his chair, was a young blonde man in cadet reds. The jacket was left open to reveal strong, toned flesh hidden by a tight black shirt underneath. The man looked younger then Leonard, with eyes that sparkled blue with youth, an attractive, almost ridiculously pretty face, and cropped blonde hair that was being brushed this way and that by the slight breeze blowing across the open green.

"Uh." Leonard stood frozen for a moment. He did not think this cadet was pretty. He did not. (He totally did.) "Actually, I'm just here for the bathroom. I got in the wrong line."

The blonde laughed. "Yeah, so did I. Didn't realize it till I got to the front. Then they recruited me to take over the booth." He snorted. "Hell, I would have volunteered. Jim Kirk." He stuck out a hand.

Leonard eyed it warily. "Yeah, I think I'll just go back and wait in line."

"You're going to piss yourself," Jim grinned at him even as he withdrew his neglected handshake. "Listen. Do you know why they put the kissing booth next to the bathroom?"

"No. And please don't tell me. I might throw up on you." He glanced behind him. People were peering over the shoulders of those in front of them, eager to see what the fuss was all about. Those who could see what the hold0up was did not look happy at all. "Seriously, though. I'm going to get in line for the bathroom now."

"They put the kissing booth next to the bathroom," Jim continued in a conspiratorial voice, as if Leonard had never said anything, "because I'm so good that people have to go and relieve themselves after they're done. If you know what I mean." He winked.

Leonard felt a scowl spread across his face. "Yes. I do know what you mean, there's no need to wink. Also, that doesn't make sense: you got in line for the bathroom: so obviously, the booth has been here for a while. Now, I'm going to leave--"

"Oh, c'mon!" Jim pouted a bit. "That may not be why the booth's next to the bathroom, but it is why the line is so long! And it's true, too." Then he smirked. "I think you're just afraid that I'll be right, and you'll have to do the walk of shame."

"God." Leonard pressed a palm to his face and dragged it downward. "How the hell does Starfleet let people like you in?"

"Hey, hurry up!" someone down the line yelled, and many others called out similar phrases, some less polite. Jim smirked even more, if possible, and raised a suggestive eyebrow. "C'mon, you heard 'em," he said, leaning in toward Leonard. "Hurry up."

Leonard sighed, resigned. He'd already lost his home, his dignity, and basically most of his old life. What else was there to give up?

"Fine, whatever. Let's get this over with. Don't make it gross--"

Jim clutched his chin, pulled him in close, and pressed their lips together. Leonard's mouth opened in surprise, and the younger man took this as his invitation to enter his mouth. Jim was moist, hot, slick against his tongue, pushing and pulling and sucking in all the right places, at all the right times. Leonard felt his knees go weak, felt his arms slip around Jim's neck, felt a warm embrace as Jim's arms wrapped around his waist. And it didn't seem like it was possible but then Jim went deeper, pushed and then retreated to drag his teeth his teeth over Leonard's bottom lip.

And Leonard was reciprocating. By God, he was just as active in the kiss as Jim, if not more. It'd been so long since he'd been so close to someone, so long since he'd been touched so intimately. He'd been divorced a month ago but their marriage had ended long before that, and he hadn't-- they didn't-- Jim's hands were sliding southward, brushing against the small of his back and then lower--

And then they broke apart for air. And then Leonard realized that, yes, his mouth had just been thoroughly fucked by a frisky young cadet who now wore the biggest shit-eating grin he'd ever seen. In public. In front of everybody. The line behind him was silent. The booths around them were silence.

And he was hard.

"Goddammit!" He shoved his way into the bathroom line, opened the door, and then thrust the poor cadet who'd been on the seat into to open air. And then he locked the door, dropped his pants, and gave himself a few quick, hard strokes before coming into the ceramic bowl below.

Of course, he didn't leave right after that. Hell no. He sat on the seat cover and told anyone who came by to go fuck themselves, and after a good twenty minutes he decided it was safe to come out.

Of course, it wasn't, because even though the line for the kissing booth was completely gone, it was only because Jim Kirk was leaning next to the door, all smiles and blue eyes shining with glee.

"I'm giving you a nickname, now. It's totally appropriate. How does Bones sound? You know, to commemorate our first meeting?"

A million things ran through Leonard's mind, few of which actually made sense and all of which were just a bit murderous, and in the end he decided not to think at all. "It's Leonard McCoy." He didn't offer a hand because, hello, it was obvious what he'd been doing in there, and he wanted to wash his hands first.

"So, Bones." Jim smacked his hand against Leonard's back as they walked toward the area where the sinks were located. "I think this is what people would call the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

"They'd be wrong," Leonard grumbled.

(But it totally was.)

Sweet Dreams Are Made of These [2/2]

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 03:27:20 GMT

Name: Sweet Dreams Are Made of These [2/2]
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Pairing: Spock/Kirk
Rating: PG...13? (still no porn, sorry)
Summary: When Jim meets the older Spock in that horribly cold ice cave, only a small part of him is shocked. Of course, he thinks to himself. Of course I can see the future and dream of my as-of-current-arch-enemy fucking me senseless and then meet his alternate-older self on an icy hellhole where he basically left me to die. Of course. Life is never fucking simple.
Notes: Written for this prompt at the kink meme. Leave it to me to pick the most obvious title in the world. Apologies for the disproportionate length of this part as compared to the first one. Beta'd by the super special awesome igrab who totally rocks my socks.

Part 1 | Part 2

Another year or so passes and then comes The Bar Brawl (appropriately capitalized for its importance), the big bar brawl to end all bar brawls. It isn’t the worst that he’s endured, but it is quite honestly “the brawl to end all brawls” because after that he’s off to Starfleet Academy, where beat-downs are not acceptable for cadets who want to keep their record clean and eventually command their own ship. Jim has finally looked deep inside himself, said a good ol’ healthy fuck you to the ball of self-loathing at his center, and he’s decided to do something with his life. Maybe he won’t save eight-hundred people in twelve minutes like dear old dad. But if he can help people, really help them, explore new worlds and promote peace and all that shit, maybe his father wouldn’t have died in vain. Maybe he’ll be proud, wherever he is. Whatever it is, Jim can’t deny that something inside him pulls him toward the stars, just like it did his father, and still pulls his mother. Maybe it’s in the blood.

So… Bones. Bones is everything he wants in a friend. Snarky and cynical and caring and even loving, though he tries not to show the last one. They’re close, they’re best friends, they’re brothers, and Bones makes those little moments of existential crisis fade into the background. Jim is curious, at first, if this is the love he’s dreamt of, but decides against it, after a while. It’s love, true, but of a completely different kind. Not overtly romantic or remotely sexual, but love nonetheless. Jim’s doing research (ugh) on pre-twentieth century philosophy when he finds the right word: philia, love between friends. It’s eros, romantic love, that he dreamt about.

All this thinking of love makes Jim feel uncomfortably girly, even if it’s the truth. So he doesn’t tell Bones, apart from the occasional drunken I love you, mans that Bones may realize are not entirely in jest. But Jim has the feeling that they don’t have to speak about it. It’s mutual, and it’s understood, no questions asked.

Bones does ask a shitload of other questions, though. “What the hell were you thinking, Jim?”, “What is it this time, Jim?”, and even “Where is it that you’re bleeding, Jim?” become almost a staple in his friend’s vocabulary. Because while there aren’t brawls anymore there are the occasional fights, one-on-one scuffles that are usually just attributed to the alcohol and overlooked by Starfleet administration. And this is because while Bones does offer an incredible friendship that he’s been missing all these years, there’s still something huge that’s not there, either. It’s frustrating. And when he’s feeling especially frustrated he goes and sleeps with a girl/guy/other that’s ready and willing, only to learn that it’s not sexual frustration, really just mental frustration which is still there, and that the girl/guy/other’s significant other is pretty pissed about the sex he’s just had. Which definitely isn’t his fault: he doesn’t aim for taken people, after all.

But he’s promiscuous nonetheless, which makes Gaila the perfect partner, because she’s just as loose as he is. And the night before the third time he takes the Kobayashi Maru is his victory, his little reward to himself because he knows he’s going to succeed. It might not be love (contrary to what Gaila might think in the heat of the moment), but damn, the sex is good. Or, well, it would have been, if Uhura hadn’t interrupted them.

Jim’s glad that she does, because it provides him with enough evidence to confidently reveal to the bridge the trap the Enterprise is heading into, once he pieces it together. But he also sort of regrets it, because that failed night is pretty much the last time he’s able to have sex for almost two years. At times, Jim truly wishes his dreams came without all the strings of responsibility attached, because he would really have liked to know about that dry spell before it happened.

__

It’s during the hearing for his work the Kobayshi Maru (he’s not going to call it cheating: it’s too awesome for such a mundane word) when Jim first meets him. He asks for the right to face his accuser, and when the man stands, Jim feels the color drain from his face and his throat close up and his hands get sweaty.

This… this is the person from his dreams. He’s sure of it. Everything about him screams it to be so. Eyes, deep and calculating, his face passive and shielded. He makes his way down the steps toward the floor of the auditorium, and each inch the accuser comes closer to Jim makes his heart pound even more loudly. He can feel the blood rushing in his ears and he blinks rapidly to clear his vision. He can’t pass out or throw up or anything, not now. He can’t show weakness to the admirals before him or the student body behind him. But in his dreams… in his dreams the person—Spock, an admiral supplies—is supposed to love him, not-- not condemn him.

He feels helpless, and the sentiment only increases as he debates with Spock about the nature of the Kobayashi Maru. Trying to argue his case against impeccable logic, especially from this man, is threatening to turn Jim inside out. This can’t be him. This can’t be the accepting and overwhelming feeling of affection that he’s experienced in dreams past. Except if they weren’t premonitions: if they were just regular old fantasies of the night. But Jim shakes that thought immediately: he’s never had problems differentiating the two. Still, it can’t be. It can’t. It doesn’t matter that Spock is, admittedly, quite attractive, with a commanding voice and an appealing visage. It just can’t be.

Some voice at the back of Jim’s head questions if this is supposed to be what’s referred to as “love at first sight”. Jim quashes that thought immediately: you don’t fall in love with people who get you kicked out of school.

He's on the verge of losing his case—and just losing it, in general—when the unthinkable happens and they’re called to the battlefield. The graduating class is called to take up arms and rush into the expansive black for rescue or combat or something equally dire. Students rush out of the assembly half in groups and pairs and sometimes alone, but Jim’s closest friend makes his way to the floor and braces him with a pat on the shoulder.

“Who was that pointy-eared bastard?” he hears himself ask McCoy, because he’s really not too sure himself, now.

“I don’t know,” McCoy responds, “but I like him.”

And for a moment Jim gives him an incredulous stare. He can’t be serious, can he?

___

Ooooh, God. Mud fleas? Jim has no idea what Bones has injected him with, but he’s starting to rethink that whole philia thing right about now. Everything hurts and the world’s spinning and he’s going to hurl… he’s even pretty sure that he’s wet himself. He changes clothes (or, is made to change—he moves his limbs weakly while Bones does most of the work for him). And then he’s given a sedative and things fade to black.

Black. The blackness of space. He’s looking at space, and absently realizes that it’s another dream. Fuck, and it’s been almost four years since the last one. Jim is about ready to curse his luck when a large metal something swoops past his field of vision and toward a large reddish planet that appears in front of him.

Actually, the space all about him is filled with these large chunks of metal, obscuring the cosmos around him, and certain to make interstellar travel a pain in the ass for the people who live on that planet. Kessler Syndrome, his mind supplies lazily, but he pushes this fact away to peer more closely at the large metallic obstructions. He’s never dreamed this vividly before, he realizes vaguely, never seen this much detail. He can make out all the little windows on the hulking object, the tiny fires going on inside and the people being ripped from their grip on the broken ships and flung into the vacuum of space, where they boiled or froze or—

Fuck. He realizes what he’s watching. It’s not interstellar space ballet with asteroids and metal and planets floating through the black, it’s a massacre of the small armada of Starfleet cadets. And there, there it is—the Enterprise’s hull floats by him, ripped apart like aluminum foil. Devoid of life.

He struggles, kicks, screams, fights as much as he can to wake up. It’s a trap, he screams, to no one in particular because no one here is alive; the cadets already know it’s a trap because they’re dead. He has to get out of here, has to fight this because it’s going to become true any second now. But the sedative, it keeps him here, stuck in limbo while he watches cadets and crew die from space exposure and fire and lack of oxygen, contradictorily enough. He watches people he knows and likes shredded to pieces as shrapnel glides into their bodies—

Jim shoots upwards in the biobed and resists the urge to scream a variety of expletives. Instead he mutters something about a lightning storm, because he knows, he knows what’s going to happen, can feel the rush of adrenaline through his body and fear almost overpowering his senses. He has to tell the captain. It might be not be too late to save some cadets, if any. It might not be too late to save themselves.

As it turns out, it is too late. Not for them, but for the others.

___

The chair. Spock’s only sat in it for a short period of time but Jim can almost imagine his long limbs fitting comfortably against the smooth, black material of the seat. He can almost feel the warmth of the otherwise cold Vulcan in the armrests, feel the arch of a strong back against the back of the chair. Spock (despite his obvious disdain for Jim, or at least Jim’s actions), and the chair, and the Enterprise… it feels like home. More like home then his real home ever did.

“Out of the chair,” Spock interrupts his internal monologue, and Jim scowls at him. Spock might be the Captain of the Enterprise at the moment, but he certainly can’t be the person from Jim’s older dreams. He can’t. In Jim’s dreams he feels love, but from Spock he feels nothing but cold disinterest. Spock feels familiar, like Jim’s gotten to know him if solely through his nighttime “encounters” in slumberland, years long past, but from the way it looks now, the two of them definitely won’t be approaching that relationship any time soon.

Especially not when Spock Vulcan Nerve Pinches the shit out of him and then tosses him onto Delta Vega.

___

While Jim’s en route to the icy planet (entirely against his will), he dreams again. This time it’s Earth getting the ever-living hell drilled out of it, but for once this is something Jim already knows is going to happen if he doesn’t stop it. It’s just more fuel for the fire.

There are dreams that have outcomes Jim can change, if he’s fast enough. The incident with Ms. Rhymer was one attempt at that. But there are many that Jim simply can’t do anything to alter, futures that remain the same, regardless of how he tries to fix them. Like the deaths of their fellow Starfleet cadets. Jim’s learned long ago that it’s useless to beat himself up over things he can’t fix, but an overwhelming number of “ifs” still cling to him, accumulating over the years to form a heavy armor of guilt. If he’d just woken up faster… never mind that the sedative that had put him to sleep had allowed him to see what was coming for the Enterprise. If he’d recovered from the effects just a little quicker, he’d have been able to—

No. He’ll save all the “what ifs” for later. Now it’s time to focus on the present (and the future!), rather than the past.

If there’s ever been a dream that Jim Kirk has wanted to prevent from happening, it’s this one.

___

When he meets the older Spock in that horribly cold ice cave, only a small part of him is shocked. Of course, he thinks to himself. Of course I can see the future and dream of my as-of-current-arch-enemy fucking me senseless and then meet his alternate-older self on an icy hellhole where he basically left me to die. Of course. Life is never fucking simple.

And then Spock says that he has been, and will always be his friend, and Jim can’t bring himself to be angry at the guy. Not as much, at least. So he’s got no clue what this Spock’s going to do when he reaches toward Jim’s face, but he allows it because wouldn’t it be great if this universe’s Spock came to be able to touch him that casually, too? And then the meld starts, and Jim can’t think about anything but the death of billions of Vulcans, the destruction of a planet and almost all of its culture, and the simple story, a failure, that started it all.

When they break apart, a million things try to explode out of his head at once. He knows now that the other Jim Kirk couldn’t see like he could—he really is alone with the ability, and that realization is probably the most depressing thing he’s ever felt—but the thing that surprises him the most is the other Spock’s pure love for his Jim Kirk. He sees and feels so many things in the brief instance that Spock allows through the bond, and yet he yearns for more. It’s not fair, he realizes, that this Spock can so readily and openly love the other Kirk, while he and his own Spock are practically mortal enemies. It’s unfair, and he’s intensely jealous.

He wants to say all of these things at once, but it comes out weird. (Probably for the better.) “So you do feel,” he says, panting out harsh breaths in the cold air.

The other Spock simply gives him the Vulcan equivalent of a sad smile before suggesting that they get the hell out of dodge. In more Vulcan terms, of course.

Jim agrees.

___

“It’ll work.” He interrupts Spock’s ‘tell her I love her’ speech to assure his friend (?) that they’ll be fine. Because they will: even though Jim’s had that dream of the Earth being torn to shreds, he grasps on to the hope that the dream of unconditional love is still true. For once, he really wants it to happen, because if it does It’ll mean that the both of them survive, and that the crew of the Enterprise (hopefully, by proxy) will have survived, too. And the Earth, too, he guesses. The events of the future are changing as they speak.

So he assures Spock, and assures himself with another, “It’ll work!” Because it damn well has to, if anybody wants to make it through this.

___

It does work. It works and he’s commended and not only is the Enterprise saved, but it’s given to him. He, Jim Kirk, Fuck-up Extraordinaire, gets a goddamned ship! He’s giddy with glee: if he had dreamed this before the day of the commendation ceremony, he would have thought it anything but a premonition. He’d liken it to those dreams people had about flying, or fighting crime, or obtaining desires that they never would in real life. He would never have thought it to be real.

But it is real, really real. It’s “the best of all possible worlds”: his mind even throws forth this quote from ancient Terran literature to celebrate the occasion. But Jim stifles the thought almost as soon as it rises, because it’s not the best of all the worlds, all the universes they live in. The best possible world doesn’t have a decimated Vulcan, doesn’t have a destroyed Kelvin and a distant Winona Kirk and a Starfleet Academy with the smallest graduating class in the organization’s history. Jim doesn’t know which alternate universe is the best: maybe the other Jim Kirks hate the circumstances they’ve been thrown into. But it’s certainly not this one, that’s for sure.

Jim tries not dwell on what could have been, even though he’s told himself that he could do so once the whole ordeal was over with. Because he’ll drive himself made with grief if he keeps wondering about the cadets he could have saved or the planet that could have lived to see another day, year, millennia. He attends funerals and wakes and memorial services and doesn’t let himself break down, because if he did, he’d never be able to build himself back up again. And then who would captain the Enterprise, huh?

Jim doesn’t go and see his mother during shore leave for this reason. Even if she’s proud, accepts him into her arms with all the joy and pride the mother of a hero can have, he’ll still see that look in her eyes, he knows it. That look that brings back all the “what ifs”. So he sends her a message and packs up his shit (which actually isn’t very much: came to Starfleet with the shirt on his back, and he leaves with little more), and moves it into the spacious captain’s quarters on the starship Enterprise. He says goodbye to the people who matter and aren’t coming with him: Pike, a few professors he liked during his stay at the Academy, and then it’s thrusters on full, to go where no one has gone before.

Jim realizes that those brief feelings he’d had in the chair in that moment forever ago, that feeling of belonging and home: it’s true. The Enterprise is home. He’s never felt more comfortable than he does in the command chair, plotting courses and giving orders, and more often than not just messing around with his bridge crew when a mission isn’t pressing.

He learns that Ensign Chekov can hold his liquor and has somewhat of a crush on Lt. Sulu, who finds the thrill of maximum warp exhilarating and has just a tiny crush on Ensign Chekov. He sets plans into motion to bring the two together. Jim Kirk has been said to be a lot of things, but never a matchmaker; he’s never been happier to remedy that fact.

He discovers Uhura’s love of music and talent for singing, and makes sure they stop by a planet that’s known throughout its galaxy for its breathtaking choirs and heart-rending orchestras. Uhura’s eyes tear up at the beginning of a particularly dazzling overture, and Jim will never admit it, but he sort of tears up too, seeing her so happy. She might have Spock, but every day she becomes more and more like a chiding-older-sister figure to Jim, rather than a rival. He kind of likes that.

He finds out about Scotty’s dislike of solitude after Delta Vega, and endeavors to join the engineer and his companion Keenser for a drink (Bones and Chekov and sometimes everyone else shows up for this), or a game of pool, or just simply sit around and shoot the breeze. It helps that Scotty’s set up an ~~illegal distillery~~ entertainment venue in the depths of the ship somewhere, but Jim can honestly say that spending time with his zany chief engineer is one of the more enjoyable parts of being the captain of the Enterprise.

And there’s Bones. Good god, he didn’t think there was any more he could learn about Bones, but it seems that his best friend is a bottomless well of stories and secrets that come out when Jim isn’t fucking around or getting beaten up all the time: the things that come out when he’s just listening. It makes Jim feel a little guilty for all the one-sided wailing he’d done back at the Academy, but at the very least he knows he’ll be a better friend in years to come.

Then there’s Nurse Chapel, who has become enamored with the Terran activity know as “tap-dancing”, and Lt. Riley who, despite a great love of singing, couldn’t carry a tune in a bathtub, much less a bucket (and much to Uhura’s upset). And the myriad of other security officers and engineers and nurses and science officers and weapons masters on the Enterprise who Jim’s come to regard as a bizarre extended family.

But Spock is still somewhat of a mystery.

___

And then the dry spell. Jim becomes somewhat celibate, to his occasional horror. Occasional, because most of the time he doesn’t even notice that he’s gone without intimate physical contact (other than a fist in the face, he’s gotten a lot of those) since just before the Kobayashi Maru. There’s too much work to be done. Starfleet may have given him a flagship, but they sure as hell don’t trust him with it yet, not completely. Jim isn’t the perfect captain, he knows this. He fucks up a lot and isn’t all that great at diplomacy. He needs to show Command, needs to show his crew and himself that he can be a damn good leader when he puts his mind to it.

So that means no sleeping around with crew members (though he isn’t above the occasional “all in good fun” sexual harassment), no more getting piss-drunk at bars (sure, he can have a few drinks, but he’s gotta be able to get back to his own quarters by himself, that’s the rule now). And absolutely no pining over your first officer - goddammit, that isn’t a rule! Well, it is a rule. But that’s the fraternization rule, not an eerily specific “Captain Kirk, please stop daydreaming about getting it on with your second-in-command” rule. These are regulations Jim sets for himself, and he’s doing a pretty good job at keeping them, dammit.

(Then there’s the weird fact that he hasn’t really wanted to have sex. Well, that would be an outright lie: he has wanted to, definitely, but just with one specific person. But he shoves that thought to the back of his mind because it’s easier to ignore the desire than to act upon it.)

Still, Jim can’t help but spurt orange juice from his nose when Bones mentions the captain’s unusual period of chastity and Spock sagely comments: “A man and his hand.” The table at the officers’ lounge goes silent before bursting into fits of laughter, as Spock continues to inquire as to why this human colloquialism he’s heard for masturbation is so humourous. Everyone else is laughing because, hello, Spock using idioms is always hilarious, but Jim’s laughter is also sort of secretly hysterical because the idea of Spock implying that Jim masturbates frequently hits it a little too close to home, what with the Vulcan being the frequent subject in Jim’s fantasies whenever he jacks off.

He has a horrible moment of frozen fear, like, Vulcans are fucking touch telepaths and he has touched Spock when absolutely necessary, what if Spock knows, oh my God, but kills the thought immediately. Spock would definitely have said something along the lines of: “Captain, I have noticed that you harbor intense sexual urges toward me, and while I realize that most humans would find this infatuation ‘flattering’, I would suggest that you find another object of desire to focus your more carnal urges toward, as I am rather committed to my relationship with Lt. Uhura at the moment. The sex is fabulous, by the way, thanks for asking.”

Still, though, after the incident in the officers’ lounge Jim tries to avoid touching Spock so much as he did before (which already wasn’t a lot, to tell the truth). No more aggressive slaps on the back or pats on the shoulder. He knows how to keep his hands to himself: learned as much when he found out (the hard way) that Jennie Dooley didn’t want to go any farther than kissing.

And if Spock looks a bit more solemn, if he’s a bit more quiet… well, Jim has no idea what’s up with that. He’s gotten a lot better at reading the Vulcan after the time they’ve spent in the black, but he can’t figure out what the absence of emotion from an already emotionless façade is supposed to mean.

___

Somehow, Uhura and Spock part on amicable terms about a year and a half into their five year journey. “We followed the relationship to its logical conclusion,” is all that Spock answers when asked about the break-up. Uhura says about the same (though in more understandable terms, of course).

And it’s about two months of denial and desire, of pining and pain before Jim finally gives it all up, says fuck it to the universe and marches straight to Spock’s quarters, overrides the entrance code, and just does it, just kisses Spock senseless, until he needs to come up for air.

“How did you know?” Spock asks, breathless and panting and eyes deep with something Jim can’t identify. And, wow, does that look hot.

But how did he know? Jim simultaneously blesses and curses the universe, both for giving him Spock, but letting him angst over it for years. If there’s some supreme governing force out there, they must have a fucking field day when they’re messing with Jim Kirk’s life.

“I- I had,” oh, look at that, he’s breathless, too, “I had a dream about it, once. A few times.” He doesn’t know why he’s being so honest. Lie, Jim Kirk, lie! Spout deceit from your experienced lips! He yells these commands to himself, but they all fail to intercept the words that tumble out of his mouth. “A lot of times, actually. Back before—before I joined Starfleet.” He ignores the fact that he didn’t know, that he’s only acting on selfish desires and on a whim, and he doesn’t even know if they’ll ever reach the stage of affection which graced his dreams so many years ago.

Spock goes silent for a moment, and Jim tenses. If he gets more anger, more fear, more rejection, he doesn’t know what he’ll do.

“I see. You possess the uncanny ability to see events that will happen, far before they have occurred,” Spock says, posing the phrase as more of a statement than a question.

Jim blinks and nods, a little dumbfounded. Spock’s taking this with all the ease Scotty had when Jim and the elder Spock had showed up at the Starfleet base on Delta Vega. He’s almost sure that Spock is going to ask if he sees sandwiches in their future. “I used to,” he clarifies, ignoring that one he’d had when he was kicked off the ship. And the one he’d had while under the influence of the sedative. He’d been doing so well in the whole “not-seeing-things” department; it was only natural to ignore a random occurrence in otherwise flawless data, right? “Not anymore.”

“Do you know why?”

Why. How. Questions Jim has stopped asking a while ago. He has, however, formulated a pretty skewed and unreliable theory. “I think it might be….” He pauses to look at Spock, to see if he should continue with an obviously crazy conjecture. Dark brown eyes watch him closely, free of judgment. He continues.

“I think it might be because of my birth. I mean, I guess it was a normal pregnancy but then Nero—well, I mean, how many kids are born at pretty much the exact same time a space-time anomaly occurs? Not many, I’m guessing, so I can’t be sure.” He chuckles to himself, a bit darkly. “But it kinda makes sense, in a weird way, that a rip in the fabric of reality, some weird tear in time, would cause me to be able to see things before they happened.” He sees Spock open his mouth to say something along the lines of “that doesn’t make sense at all,” but it’s really more intuition then premonition that allows him to guess at what his first officer’s going to say. Goddammit, and things were just getting interesting. Why did they have to start talking now?

“I know it doesn’t actually make sense,” Jim mutters before Spock can form the words, “but it’s the best explanation I’ve got.”

“That is not what I was going to ask,” Spock says instead, and Jim finds himself blinking with surprise again. The usually predictable Spock, surprising him not once, but twice within five minutes? He is really slipping, isn’t he?

“Although that is an… interesting hypothesis, I was about to inquire as to why you do not receive these forewarnings any longer.”

Jim freezes up. No. He is absolutely not going to talk about this. The feelings of guilt and abandonment and more guilt that he’s harboured over the years. It won’t make sense to Spock. It’s inane and illogical, but what about his fucked-up life has ever been logical—

“I made them stop,” he blurts, and then flinches visibly at this admission. Still, there’s no going back from that whammy. “I didn’t—I couldn’t deal with them. It was so much easier to be normal, to not worry about the things that were happening or were going to happen or what could have been.” It seems so contradictory, that James Tiberius Kirk wants to be normal, but it’s the truth.

There’s silence again, and Jim feels like he’s going to implode. Either that or he wants to go crawl into a small corner somewhere and die. He feels so vulnerable, so bare, telling Spock these things. Especially when he’s just put himself on the line to show this burgeoning affection toward him.

Then Spock speaks, and Jim is surprised, shocked even. Because Spock says: “I believe I understand your situation, Jim.”

Oh.

Shock turns to confusion, and then confusion turns to annoyance, and annoyance turns to anger. “H-how the hell do you think you understand this?” Jim finds himself snapping, though he doesn’t really mean to, it just comes out loudly. “How could you possibly-- I don’t even understand this, and I live this! There’s no way you can ever—”

His first officer puts a hand on his shoulder, and he falls quiet almost instantly. Spock has initiated touch, and not out of anger, this time (thank God), but of… comfort?

“I believe I understand what you are feeling,” Spock repeats, “because it not dissimilar to my own situation.” At Jim’s apparent confusion, he elaborates. “There is something about you, some characteristic, perhaps, that distinguishes you from the others. You are no longer like them, but there is no world that you truly belong to. And so,” he takes a deep, calming breath, and Jim realizes that this is the closest he’s seen Spock come to really and truly exhibiting emotion without provocation, “you purge yourself of what makes you different. Life becomes much more simple and… efficient, if you are more easily accepted by your peers. And your progenitors,” he adds this last part as an afterthought, perhaps more for himself than for Jim, but it strikes home nonetheless.

“In the short time that I have spent as the first officer on the Enterprise,” Spock resumes after a short pause, “I have realized something. It is, perhaps… unfitting of us to deny what makes us different. You and your ability, as I have just discovered, and I with my human heritage. If we embrace what sets us apart, even in the slightest, we can only serve to gain.” Spock maintains the same, neutral expression that he always has, but his eyes are smiling. “It is only logical, after all,” he concludes.

And Jim realizes suddenly that Spock understands him more than anyone he’s known. More than his mother, obviously, more than the friends he’d made and subsequently lost at the Academy, more than the crew he’s become family with, and more than Bones. Maybe even more than Jim understands himself, because now Spock really knows what it’s like to be alone, to feel different and hate yourself for it, to feel this immense and illogical guilt over events that you couldn’t control. Because Jim inhibits his own dreams, and Spock strives to remove himself from his human heritage, they both deny themselves the things that make them who they are. Each is, in short, living as only half the person they were born to be.

Jim recognizes this all at once, and realizes that maybe, just maybe, they can try to help make each other whole again.

He leans toward his first officer, pushes himself up on the tips of his toes, and kisses Spock again. It’s slower, this time, more passionate and full of reassurances and comfort and promise, and he guides their bodies toward the inviting bed at the corner of the room. He knows they probably won’t go far tonight, but there’s time. They’ve got all the time in the world, in multiple worlds and in multiple universes. He doesn’t have to dream to know that. So he kisses Spock and lets the rest wait for all the tomorrows they’ll have in the future.

Jim falls asleep with comforting arms around him.

When he sleeps, he dreams.

This time, he doesn’t try to stop it.

Fic: Reasons to Not Give in to Sex with Your Best Friend (#2)

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 04:05:21 GMT

Name: Reasons to Not Give in to Sex with Your Best Friend (#2) [1/1]
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy
Rating: PG-13...ish?
Summary: Written as part of a round-robin post for the McCoy-a-thon. The first reason, written by an awesome anon, is here.

Two: Because it just might break you if/when he moves on to his next catch. Captain James Tiberius Kirk is many things: brash, daring, loquacious, loud, bat-shit insane at moments (he thinks that here is where Jim would interrupt with an “okay, okay, I get it already!” if he were privy to Bones’ internal monologue), but one thing he isn’t is stupid. Far from it, in fact, judging by his scores back at the Academy. Jim is smart, and so most of the time he avoids sleeping around with the crew members aboard this ship. Sure, there’s a chance that he’ll only see past lovers (victims, Bones likes to call them) every once in a while, in passing, but even then, who knows what tension may come about? A ship is a well-oiled machine (“Damned right it is!” a voice suspiciously similar to Montgomery Scott’s interjects inside of his head), with all its crew being cogs and gears and levers and pulleys and whatever the hell else goes inside it. If one cog is rusted, or misaligned, or just pissed because the Captain isn’t sleeping with them anymore, the whole ship might not function at its highest capacity for success.

There is, on occasion, though, a crewmember who happens to trip/fall/simply get lost and find their way into Kirk’s bed. And then he starts hearing things through the channels of gossip on the ship. About how amazing it was. How fantastic. How they’d never experienced anything like it. And how they all knew it was probably a one-time thing. And Bones continues to stock supplies in a cabinet (with a bit more gusto), or tie a bandage (maybe a little tighter than the injured person had wanted), or stab a hypo (okay, just saying stab is enough to know that it had been applied a little harder than he had intended), without comment. Jim’s a free man. A smart man. A smart captain. And Bones likes to think of himself as a smart doctor. Two smart people, best friends who are smart enough to know that their sex lives will never, ever, coincide. At least, he hopes that message is clear.

Jim usually settles around to bedding off-worlders. Bones is sure that he’d have developed a wide variety of nasty space STDs and whatnot if the good ol’ CMO on the ship weren’t so dedicated. But then again, Jim is smart. He looks for signs and does research and generally knows whether or not he should stick his package in an eagerly awaiting mailbox. What Bones isn’t sure of is if Jim even really sleeps in beds anymore. He know it’s” illogical” to think like that (he curses his inner-Spock for using such a word), but to him, “Jim T. Kirk” and “hitting the hay” are synonymous with getting to hit something… just not getting to sleep, is all.

So when Bones stumbles into his quarters after a grueling shift of broken bones and space diseases and petty injuries, it’s completely understandable that he’s freaked out about James T. Kirk, bedswerver extraordinaire, lounging carelessly on his covers. Freaked out, and just a little turned on. Just a little.

Jim flashes him a trademarked grin as Bones enters the room, and gives him a lazy salute. “Finally. I’ve been waiting forever.” He’s fully dressed, of course, but that doesn’t mean he can’t look incredibly sexy. He curses Jim for being the only man in the universe to look just as inviting with clothes on as he is when they’re off.

Bones turns away a bit, shifts his glaze somewhere other than Jim sitting, laying there, almost, on his bed. He is definitely not thinking about Jim without clothes, though, Jim naked and writhing in pleasure underneath him. No way. It takes more than this to rile up Leonard McCoy. Way more than this.

“Yeah, well, some of us have actual work to do,” he mutters as he toes off one shoe, than the other. “We can’t all sit in the captain’s chair and give orders all day.” He moves toward his desk and idly begins to sort through the stray papers on it.

“Aw, now, that’s not accurate at all.” Jim falls back onto his bed and kicks his feet up, crossing them to create the image of perfect relaxation. “I do a lot of work. You know I do.” He feigns a wounded expression.

“…yeah.” Bones grudgingly acknowledges this and mutters as such. Jim’s a hard-worker, despite the almost legendary image of lackadaisical airs that he cultivates. He makes things look easy. Even when he’s getting the shit beaten out of him he makes it look easy. People think he passed his aptitude tests with all the grace of a genius slacker, but they’re only partially correct: Jim’s a genius, yes, and a slacker, at times, but no one works harder than him at what they want to achieve. Those people never saw Jim studying late into the night before exams at the Academy, working meticulously to ace his tests. Those peopledo, however, see Jim at bars, flirting and fighting and just generally behaving like an ass. Bones has never understood why someone so smart would try so hard to make it appear as if he weren’t.

“But,” Jim says, and Bones looks up at him from whatever he’s been examining on his desk. (A pen, he realizes. He’s been staring at a pen and trying to distract himself from the fact that Jim-fucking-Kirk is laying across his bed.) “But,” Jim repeats, “you work harder. C’mon, man, when’s the last time you were even in here?” He gestures around the room and arches an eyebrow.

It’s been fifty-four hours and twelve minutes since he’s last been in here, but Bones isn’t about to mention that to Jim. Instead, he rolls his eyes and fixes Jim with a mocking glare. “The pot calling the kettle black,” he snaps back. (Inner-Spock resurfaces to point out that pots can’t talk, and Bones shoves him further into the deeper regions of his mind.) “You hardly ever leave the bridge. I’m not going to—“ He pauses midsentence as Jim stands and takes a step in his direction. Then another step. And another. He’s not walking. He’s stalking.He knows the look Jim is giving him, too. He remembers it from those days at the Academy, when Jim’s sights would focus on a particularly beddable man or woman…

“…I’m not going to… going to-” Bones tries to continue admonishing Jim but suddenly Jim is inches from his face, a hand on his chest, eyes locked with his own.

“You need to relax,” Jim says. “You’re running on empty. Every time I see you, you look like you’re about to pass out.”

Bones is about to pass out, but for an entirely different reason. The blood in his veins is threatening to rush somewhere else entirely, and with the little (read: no) sleep that he’s had in the past three days, he’s afraid that an erection will literally knock him out.

Somehow Jim has maneuvered it so that he’s backing Bones up now, towards the bed and towards certain doom. “Let me help you,” Jim suggests, and is that a hint of… desperation that Bones detects in his voice? “I want to help you.”

The back of his knees hit the edge of the bed and suddenly he’s flat against the sheets and Jim is kneeling over him, pressing a knee against the crotch of his quickly tightening pants. Bones gasps and immediately regrets making the sound (goddammit, he’s a doctor, not a teenage girl!), because it only makes Jim grin a feral grin and lean down to press a soft kiss at the edge of his jaw.

His eyes flutter shut and he gasps again. Damn. He’s feeling lightheaded and woozy and nothing’s even happened yet. It’s the sleep deprivation, he reasons, it’s got to be. Jim Kirk can not be making him feel so weak, so helpless to his advances. And yet, as Jim lazily leaves a trail of kisses ending at his mouth, Bones feels like he’s going to succumb to all of this. He’s going to give it all to Jim Kirk, he can feel it.

But he can’t. He pushes Jim off of him, breaking the kiss (oh, God, the kiss is incredible) with some effort. “I-I can’t,” he stutters weakly, repeating his inner monologue for Jim to hear. “I can’t.” This time he says it with more conviction.

Jim blinks once, twice, confused. “…what?”

His expression is almost comical. It screams “this shit just got real and you’re attempting cock-block yourself?” But Bones shakes his head, adamant. He can’t do it. Not if Jim will love him and then leave him and then move on to some hot guy or girl, some other hot ticket. Bones couldn’t deal with that. Having Jim, really having him, and then losing him? He would die, quite literally. Jim is one of the last things in this life that he’s really and truly close to, and if sex (as wonderfully as it would be) drives a wedge into their friendship, he might just drop dead.

Not “might”, he corrects himself. “Most definitely” is a better phrase. Jim is that important to him.

They lock gazes for a moment, and it seems like an entirety stretches between them, between their eyes. And then Jim laughs a bit to himself, shrugs, and stands up as he straightens his uniform out. He looks a bit… disappointed? No. Bones is imagining that. He has to be.

“Well,” Jim says, as he approaches the door with a conspiratorial smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes, “if you ever change your mind, the offer still stands.” And then he leaves.

Bones lays there for what might be a minute or an hour or even the whole day, and stares at the ceiling of his quarters. He convinces himself that what he’s just done was right. It was necessary. It was self-preservation at its finest.

Hell, it was smart.

That doesn’t make him feel any better, though.

Sweet Dreams Are Made of These [1/2]

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:24:31 GMT

Name: Sweet Dreams Are Made of These [1/2]
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Pairing: Spock/Kirk
Rating: PG (sorry, I don't think the porn is coming for me, if you'll excuse the pun)
Summary: When Jim meets the older Spock in that horribly cold ice cave, only a small part of him is shocked. Of course, he thinks to himself. Of course I can see the future and dream of my as-of-current-arch-enemy fucking me senseless and then meet his alternate-older self on an icy hellhole where he basically left me to die. Of course. Life is never fucking simple.
Notes: ETA - title fix. :)

Part 1 | Part 2

James Tiberius Kirk realizes at an early age that he is different from most people.

When he sleeps, he dreams.

Not normal dreams, where people fly or fight crime or simply indulge in the desires they do not allow themselves to experience in the waking world. Though he does dream of these things, on occasion.

More often than not, when he is younger, he dreams of reality. More specifically, a reality that hasn’t happened yet.

At first it’s cool. Pretty kickass, actually. Although the dreams were often vague and usually didn’t reveal a large amount of information, there was always something neat about knowing exactly what was being served in the cafeteria that day. About how Jennie Dooley was going to kiss you behind the dumpsters after fifth period. (Almost) exactly when someone was going to throw a punch at you during a fight. “Almost” is the modifying word: Jim realizes after one too many lost fights that standing and waiting for things in reality to line up with the events in your dreams isn’t exactly the best way to win a scuffle.

He doesn’t tell anyone. Not Johnny, not Kara, not any of his other friends at school, not even his mother. There’s something cool, at that age, about being secret, special. He likes having the edge on people.

The first time Jim realizes that this whatever-he-has is not all unicorns-and-flowers-and-monster-trucks cool, not all good all the time, is when he dreams of a house. It’s well past his ill-enforced bedtime: his mother’s off-world until tomorrow, doing something or other for Starfleet, and Frank is downstairs, passed out in front of the couch with a beer hanging precariously from his fingertips. Jim is in his room, trying to best Johnny’s high score on an arcade game… and sometime in the night he drifts to sleep in front of the console, controller slipping out of slack hands.

He dreams of a house. There’s a woman in the house (brown hair? No, but it’s not vibrant enough to be called red), and then there’s a crash of something, maybe a window, and she’s walking, moving toward another section of the house (it’s auburn, that’s what it is). And she gets there, in what must be the living room (the colors of the dream fluctuate between intense saturation and monochrome here), and the glass panes opposite a couch are smashed to bits and there’s a dark figured with something, something in his hands and there’s a flash! And there she lies, eyes wide with shock and fear and death, on the floor while that figure reaches toward clocks on the wall and shining things on the mantle place and ornate, expensive objects on desks and anything and everything that looks valuable—

He wakes, disoriented, and immediately realizes that he has to do something. It’s that woman down the street, the only lady with auburn hair he knows, the one who shoos kids off her front lawn and scowls at them from her doorstep on Halloween. He can see the white-washed wooden paneling of her house from the window in his room. And he doesn’t care for her at all, doesn’t even like her, but she’s in danger and he can help her.

He doesn’t bother talking to Frank, who’s probably too blitzed on alcohol to understand what he’s saying. Instead he goes right to the source, calls the police and explains in rushed tones that something’s going on, something bad is happening, some has broken into Ms. Rhymer’s (that’s her name, he remembers) house and if they don’t hurry something they might come to find a dead body. And then he sits tight and waits.

Of course the whole thing blows up in his face. The police get there after the window’s been broken, but the would-be assailant hears the sirens coming and makes a run for it. Jim sees the dark shadow emerge and run down the street in the opposite direction. The police don’t. So Jim pulls on mismatched shoes and leaves the house and runs to find whoever-it-is, but he’s gone, long gone.

The police, after they trace the call with ease, find him at his doorstep, breathless and sweaty and locked out of his fucking house. And of course the youthful little blonde kid with the attitude and obvious lack of an alibi (goddammit he should have woken Frank up, after all) is the culprit. Ms. Rhymer hates kids, any and all of them, enough to agree with this statement wholeheartedly, to even claim that she saw a “flash of blonde” flee her lawn. Never mind the fact that the idea that he would turn himself in, in such an outlandish way, is completely inane. He was driven by guilt to make the hurried, third-person confession on the phone. That’s the consensus.

Jim is smart. He knows that much; doesn’t need his grades and aptitude tests to prove it to himself. So when they ask, ‘how could he possibly know’… well, like hell he’s going to tell them he saw it in a dream. He’s seen too many movies, too much television to know what happens to people who claim that they can see the future. And it’s television, yeah, not the most realistic thing, but art imitates life, right? There’s bound to be some other people like him, who’ve claimed (truthfully) that they see what’s coming, and they must be thrown into asylums and institutions, too. So he stays quiet. He’s smart like that.

But the police think “smart” means “imaginative”. Everything’s a lie, a dirty maneuver by an attention-starved, genius preteen who’s angry at his mother for being off and away with Starfleet instead of looking after him. He has to admit, if he weren’t the one being labeled and served and charged, he’d think the same thing, too.

He gets his first misdemeanor from this incident.

His mother comes back the day he’s served and she’s pissed. He tries to explain that he knew. He had known that the crime was in process and if it hadn’t been for him, that crazy woman would be dead by now. But his mother will have none of that. She won’t listen to vague explanations. And so he tells her the truth.

The blowout is incredible. At first she’s on him for lying, for lying with the stupidest shit ever, because basically (and he agrees with this sentiment) there are a lot of better explanations for his knowing then fucking “premonitions”. But he’s told her and he can’t take it back, so the only thing he can do is insist. And he proves it, too, tells her that it’s going to rain today, that someone spills coffee on her desk at the base, that a shuttle is exactly twenty-two minutes late because the pilot had been suffering from a killer hangover and they’d struggled to find a sober replacement on short notice. They’re little things at different times, but they’re true things and Winona Kirk eventually realizes that maybe her son is a little more special than she’s thought before.

And her response isn’t awe, or excitement, or even confusion. It’s anger. It’s fear. It’s rejection. Nobody normal sees the future, she snaps. It’s weird and fucked up and hardly believable, and how much does he see, anyway, she asks? Did he see that house to streets away catch fire and watch the family burn alive inside, and do nothing? Did he see that earthquake rock through some city on some continent somewhere, watch people die as buildings fell and debris crushed and death rained from above and surfaced from below? Did he see his father die, see him while he was in the womb and barely even sentient?

Some questions are valid, some (like the one about his father) completely absurd. They come out in a rush, slap him in the face with their harsh, tearful delivery. He tries to explain, tries to tell her that he only sees things that pertain to him directly, and even then it’s vague, but that seems to make her even angrier. Somehow she blames herself, and him by proxy (or maybe it’s the other way around?) for George Kirk’s death. If she had this thing inside of her (he flinches visibly at being called a “thing”) that could see what was going to happen before it did, why couldn’t she do the same? Why couldn’t she see the Narada, and spare George from his heroic but untimely fate? Why?

It’s all in one quick, flurried outburst that this comes out, when she finally realizes that he isn’t lying. And it’s short, maybe only a ten-minute-tirade, but it hurts. It changes their relationship forever. It makes them both accessories to a crime. They’re both responsible for his father’s death, in some way, because he couldn’t alert her to what was happening. She continues mothering, being there for the requisite parent-teacher conferences when she can, scolding him when he’s been bad, rewarding him when he’s done something good. But she always has a look in her eye, whenever she sees him. It’s haunted, and filled with “what ifs” and “whys”. And he hates himself just a little bit more, every time she lays her eyes on him.

After that, the dreams aren’t nearly as cool, not even remotely as kickass as before. He still sees good things, but he’s hesitant to act on them. What if someone finds out? What if he can’t fabricate a lie fast enough to cover for his good fortune or mysterious know-how? An even better question: does he deserve it? Does he even deserve to know what the future’s got in store for him when he failed his mother and his father in the past? What makes him more special than any of the other kids, to know what’s going to happen before it does? Why? How?

“How” has never been a question for Jim before now. Just never even occurred to him. He’s fifteen, now, and reading everything he can about people like him. He’s searched the web and scoured libraries, and he’s even resorted to perusing the old and dusty collection of paper books at the local libraries. Everything’s fiction, or skeptical, and the worst thing is when Jim finds something that looks like it might shed some insight, he doesn’t know if it’s real or if the person’s just crazy. Maybe people like him never even chronicled their tales or told other people of their… “abilities”. They’d probably know better than to broadcast their knowledge to the world.

The obvious solution is just to let things happen to him. To shove whatever enters his head at night to the back of his mind and forget about it. He ignores the dreams and takes the punches, quite literally. If he fights a little more, or fucks a little more, well… it’s clearly not a means of escape. Not from that little bundle of self-loathing he keeps tucked inside of him. Because it doesn’t exist. Not at all.

(Jim never gives it a name, this ability. Before, it went nameless because he didn’t know what they were, and then because calling them “visions” sounded downright ridiculous, in a campy, psychic-hotline, ‘chai-drinking-hippie’ sort of way. But now it’s just denial, plain and true. If he gives it a name than he makes it real and he quite honestly can’t deal with that fact.)

Somehow, the dreams subside for a while, for years, and he almost manages to convince himself that they were indeed lies that he spoke. He never saw anything, and the police were right than one time, so many years and offenses before. Almost is the modifying word, here.

He’s twenty and settled into the comfortably undemanding life of being a dead-end screw-up when the dreams suddenly resurface, and with a vengeance, more vivid than ever before. Except, this time, it’s more accurate to call it a dream. The dream.

He dreams of touches tender and fleeting, of warm skin against his own, guarding him and keeping him safe. Dark hair, deep eyes, pointed ears (?), pleasure erupting from his every pore. He dreams of a love so deep, so unconditional, so accepting, that it transcends words. The feeling is indescribable. It’s all-encompassing and perfect and wrong. He can’t feel so good about something, not when he’s been a failure in the past. It isn’t allowed.

And yet, the dream comes back the next night, and the next. Soon it’s reoccurring and hardly a week goes by without one short moment of true affection shining through the darkness of the night. And he hates it and he loves it because he’s not supposed to be having dreams of the future, and it isn’t normal at all, but the fact that anyone could love him, Jim Kirk, so completely is sometimes what drives him to keep going, keep living. His life is pretty ordinary besides the dream, and while he’s not incredibly depressed, at times he just doesn’t know if living is worth it. Those times are few and far between, but they do happen. And the lack of feeling or desire for life in those moments honestly scares the flying fuck out of him.

And so he pushes the dream farther back into the dark regions of his mind, next to the tight little ball of self-hate. Because to find that kind of love, and then lose it? It would kill him, quite literally. And Jim knows that he would lose it, because he can’t ever do anything right ever.

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