Sweet Dreams Are Made of These [1/2]
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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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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