Once more into the breach, Part I
This is the first half of a story titled Once more into the breach. It's supposed to be one-part Reboot Gary Mitchell Bible, one-part proper retelling of Where No Man Has Gone Before. I have no idea what happened to the ending, so I will give you the beginning instead.
Once more into the breach
Or, How Gary Mitchell Hit Rock-Bottom, and Decided to Do It All Again
This story is a rewrite of Gary Mitchell's backstory, based on the TOS novelizations, comic books, and various other non-canon source material. Clearly I have taken a lot of liberties with the timelines. There are also a few small references to Gary Lockwood in this story as well, the original actor to portray Gary in TOS. This story features Mitchell/Kirk, Kirk/McCoy, Mitchell/McCoy, Mitchell/Kirk/McCoy, Mitchell/Lee Kelso, and several references to Sulu/Chekov and Kevin Riley/Gaila. It also was loosely inspired by the events of Lady Gaga's Marry the Night video, and for that, I regret nothing.
The sky above Delta Vega burned electric. It was a fragmented borealis of blues and pinks and purples, all turned inside-out like a fading signal dying out in the wilderness. Gary Mitchell could taste the voltage on his tongue; feel the current in his fingertips where it ran from behind his eyes and down, spreading everywhere that the bitter chill couldn’t cut through. He was beyond that now, the heat and the cold and the need. At his feet Jim Kirk was bleeding in the snow and the Valiant was splitting overhead in a million tiny dancing pieces of shrapnel. Everything, from the redness spread across Jim’s bruised mouth in the shape of Gary’s fists to the last fireflies of the explosion gently falling down, just seemed right.
Gary could taste that too, and smiled.
“Hey.”
From the ground, Jim spat blood between his teeth and looked every bit the kicked dog. “Gary, you can stop this. Please.”
“Hey.”
“What?”
“You like it?”
Gary’s eyes were blown-out in silver, catching the ember rain. Jim looked sick with himself, shook his head, and asked anyway.
“Like what, Gary?”
“What I’ve made here.”
This was a familiar story, even if the pieces didn’t quite fit together the same. The words were jumbled, the pictures disarticulated, facts and dates and smells and faces bleeding together, running to the floor and in the corners of Gary’s recollections. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to remember, just that the context had changed into something novel and alien, and he had to reimagine all the memories in new ways. This was Gary Reinvented in Universe 2.0. It just felt more honest that way.
But through the visceral kaleidoscope of past, present and other-time, other-Jim and other-Gary, he knew that it had something to do with the day he met Jim Kirk.
And so Jim lied and said, “Yeah, Gary. Of course.”
--
There were concrete spires on the edge of Van Nuys, just where Los Angeles melted into the Santa Monica Mountains. That was what Gary always remembered most about Van Nuys, the way the city looked so tiny from the roof, whenever he crawled out of his bedroom window and sat alone at night to look at the stars. The endless concrete spires where his parents disappeared every day, twinkling from the pink of dusk to the blue of dawn. He had never seen them in person. He was certain he never wanted to.
His father Thomas worked in one of the skyscrapers, his mother Dana in another, during long hours that had them both home late for the dinner that his sister Chelsea prepared for the younger children after their homework was done. Chelsea never complained, each night that she cooked dinner for Gary and his little sister Hannah and put them to bed. Each day Chelsea earned a kiss on a cheek and a pat on the back from their mother when she finally stumbled home after a ten-hour day at the office. Gary knew she probably should have complained.
After his youngest sister Lauren was born, Gary knew he had to get away, too. Chelsea had already run away to college to study anthropology then, and to live with a boy with three holes punched in his nose that their father hated. She was twenty-two by the time she finally got away, having put her dreams and acceptance letters aside to watch the younger kids while their parents worked to maintain the lifestyle to which they were accustomed. It was Gary’s turn to watch Hannah and Lauren, because that was the way of things. No one even asked, and once their mother was ready to go back to work, Gary was given a set of keys, emergency numbers just in case, and a pat on the back.
He was fourteen then, and had no interest in babysitting.
So each night, after dinner and homework and once the girls had gone to bed, Gary climbed out of his bedroom window to sit on the roof and chart the stars.
--
Gary never stood out.
There wasn’t much of him to write home about, if one was ever so inclined. Long and lean like his father, with his mother’s lighter coloring and dark hair and eyes. Rounded eyes that looked a little wide sometimes like he had been staring into the sun, his face defined by the attractive but unassuming features of a (somewhat bored-looking) young man. His history and civics grades were only slightly above average. His logic and philosophy essays were only slightly above average. He didn’t bother to study most of the time, looking out the window across the classroom instead to where the city met the sky. There was little need to he discovered, when the answers just seemed to pop into his head most days, if he stared at his PADD long enough.
Even his girlfriends, plain and pretty as they were, coming from good homes with nice families, were only slightly above average, too. They liked his magic tricks, the sleight of hand he picked up here and there, when he could guess their cards or their favorite colors with just a glance. It was intuition and dumb luck that kept him afloat in school. It was the kindness of dumb girls that kept him company, too young to know a bad guy when they saw one. They probably resented that, most of all.
These things held little interest for Gary. Even his father’s disapproval and mother’s eye-rolls didn’t mean that much to him after a while. Not a whole lot did. The one thing he ever really cared about was the stars. Stellar cartography, navigation systems, tinkering with flight consoles pulled out of old ships from the junk yard outside El Centro. Gary made maps of constellations, read up on warp engine design instead of finishing his literature homework. He only paid attention in his science and math classes, because they were easy and they helped when he was piecing busted Federation hardware back together and thinking about the stars. He didn’t want to just read about starships, hauling their broken parts home to poke and prod at on Saturday afternoons, if only to see what made them tick. He wanted to make them scream, right through warp ten into the cold, cold black.
Then one day he was eighteen, out of school with a decent grade point average and a backyard full of salvaged scrap and the antique telescopes his father hated. Staring down another four years at home before Hannah was old enough to watch Lauren and he would be free to run away like Chelsea did, the sister he only saw through vids and on greeting card holidays. On Thanksgiving, sitting on the roof together drinking cheap beer, Chelsea smiled and toyed with her latest piercing. She had just been fighting with their father again, but she didn’t want to talk about that.
“You should join Starfleet,” she said instead. “Put all this junk you collect to good use.”
Gary just laughed. “Yeah, right. Starfleet is like a think-tank of geniuses and shit, Chels. You need aptitude tests off the charts for that.”
“You’d have them, if you ever bothered to take the entrance exam.”
Thumbing the lip of his bottle, he shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. I doubt they’d have room for somebody like me. I’m not exactly special.”
“I think you should do it,” Chelsea said, still smiling. “You know you want to fly. I think you’d be really good at it.”
It would be two more Thanksgivings before Chelsea could will herself home again. Gary couldn’t blame her for that. Two days after she hugged him goodbye at the shuttle station, Gary found himself outside the Van Nuys Starfleet recruitment office. There were two men inside, older men in slick gray uniforms, one blonde and the other graying. Important-looking men. He stared at the bold lettering on the glass door - the wide rays of sunlight behind the Golden Gate Bridge, Ex Atris, Scientia - and shoved his hands into the pockets of his thrift store bomber jacket and felt stupid about the whole thing. After ten minutes of staring, Gary licked his lips and walked away down the strip of Van Nuys Boulevard, where Los Angeles twinkled in the distance.
“Can I help you, son?”
Gary turned around, saw the man with the graying hair standing in the doorway, the door held open.
“I was just leaving, thanks,” Gary lied.
“You were out here for ten minutes. You must’ve had something on your mind.” The man smiled, a small sort-of smile, like he knew something Gary didn’t. And that almost never happened. “I’m sure you can waste another ten on me.”
After a moment, Gary nodded. That was how he met Christopher Pike and joined Starfleet, just like Chelsea said. And not unlike Chelsea, he had to run away first, from Van Nuys and Thomas and Dana Mitchell, but for different reasons altogether.
--
All the psychologists and psychiatrists and physicians clucked their tongues whenever Gary’s name came up. They kept saying things like world’s first and highest recorded score and off the charts. Gary never really knew what to make of that. Flight tests he could quantify and understand, spelled out in aptitude scores and piloting simulations. He was a skilled navigator by nature with a basic understanding of warp technology and a fire in his belly to know more. Pike had liked that about him, and that made Gary feel good.
Sitting in a sterile little room, staring at a sterile Doctor Elizabeth Dehner, Gary didn’t know what to feel.
“To be quite honest with you, Mr. Mitchell, I don’t know what to say,” she said. She was wearing a clean and pressed blue Sciences uniform, reading through his chart for the tenth time. She looked like every nice girl Gary ever dated but didn’t care about, blonde and blue-eyed and that sad kind of pretty. “Esper, Apperception, Duke-Heidelberg - your tests results are incredible. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
“Is that good or bad?” Gary asked, feeling peculiarly naked under her eyes.
“Good or bad?” At that, she smiled. It seemed like a rare event at the time, like the muscles in her face weren’t used to it. “Mr. Mitchell, you’re uncanny.”
Gary Mitchell didn’t stand out until Starfleet. Then he started to shine.
--
San Francisco meant freedom. Starfleet meant a home. There people knew his name.
The Academy Flight Range was run by Commander James Doyle, a big wall of a man who hated every cadet that walked through his shuttle bay. They were all raw cookie dough as far as he was concerned, and he worked them like dogs until they were made out of steel. Flight sims, drills, dry-runs and shuttle maneuvers. Being turned inside-out in cockpits and watching other pilots splatter their hopes and dreams on shaking hands and botched landings. Sometimes they splattered more than that, but it was never talked about on the deck. Gary Mitchell arrived as raw dough and within his first semester broke Doyle’s long-held record for successful maneuvers in a lunar orbit. That was when things started to change.
After every successful drill, his flight instructor Doyle slapped a fat hand on Gary’s back and grinned through his buck teeth, “You better watch it, kid. You’re going to put us other bubbas out of a job.” The upper classmen in the squadron hated Gary for that, in the not-too-subtle way that they glared when he walked by in the mess hall and on the quad between classes. They called him a bagger for all his flight time, accused him of blowing Doyle, taking it in the ass on weekends to stay on his good side. That was the some of the nicer gossip he had heard.
Gary didn’t care about any of it. Every day he passed their tables without a glance and took lunch with the junior classmen. Lee Kelso with his abundant laughter, Kevin Riley who was quick with the jokes, and Hikaru Sulu who seemed to be good for just about anything, from piloting a ship to growing a garden to fencing. Gary was one or two years older than each of them and they were easily impressed by anybody who had Doyle smiling after flight sims. And maybe Gary liked that about Kelso and Riley and Sulu most of all.
Gary was good at flying, beyond just the simple dumb luck and intuition he was known for. Better than he ever was at guessing games or magic tricks, or watching the sky from his rooftop as the stars slept between the concrete spires dotting the horizon. Flying was easy, in a way that few things were. He had a gift for it, the way the engine system thrummed behind him, the way the shuttle’s skeleton trembled gently whenever he banked on a tight turn. Gary felt it deeper than anybody ever could, just a few seconds ahead of the other pilots flanking him, like little flashes forward to tell him when he was too close to the next shuttle or when to cut the throttle. He was at home in a cockpit, the way he never was in Van Nuys.
Gary stopped going back to Van Nuys for Thanksgiving just like Chelsea did. It didn’t even occur to him to feel bad about it. By the time he came out of flight training and returned to San Francisco, he was solid gold, Van Nuys’ chief aeronautic export. Behind aviator sunglasses and the old bomber jacket he took with him when he enlisted, Gary walked around campus like nothing mattered. He aced flight sim after flight sim, until the upper classmen stopped talking to him altogether. Gary liked it better that way.
--
It was getting easier and easier to lean on people.
To flash a smile and get out of trouble when a cop pulled him over for speeding, or tell a pretty girl exactly what she needed to hear to get her number. Whatever it was, whatever Gary wanted, he could get it if he wanted it badly enough. Like whistling or riding a bike, it was just a matter of practice makes perfect. And these days, Gary was a quick learner.
So when he took the seat across the desk of Delores from the base housing office, he told her just how badly he needed that bunk in the officer’s dorms. The big one, with a nice view of the city and no roommate to speak of, and she smiled and gave him the keycard. Grinning, he thanked Delores twice and left to move into his new room.
--
Gary never spent much time in Los Angeles growing up. He was the stay-at-home type, content to drink his parents’ beer and make-out with his girlfriend Emily in the back of her dad’s borrowed car. The city always twinkled in the distance like an electric lure of alcohol and music and excess, promising things Gary could only dream of in the smutty machinations of a high school boy. But after putting Hannah and Lauren to bed, Gary was usually too tired to do much else but grope under Emily’s shirt on squeaky upholstered bench seats. It wasn’t ideal, but it was what he had.
San Francisco, on the other hand, was ripe for the taking.
Weekends were spent cruising bars with Kelso, Riley and Sulu, drinking beer and dancing with boys and girls with glitter on their eyelids. Gary liked the boys more than the girls, the way their skin smelled like sweat and whiskey, trying to fuck him through his clothes the way the nice girls back home wouldn’t dream of. It was easy to lose himself like that, to lick his lips and put his hands all over them and whisper hot and filthy in their ears about how much they wanted it. Because these boys did want it, a heat that he could feel slip like liquid behind his eyelids and down his neck in pins and needles, and it was the most amazing sensation Gary had ever known. It made them so much easier to lean on until he had them in the men’s room or a corner booth-seat out of the way, licking his way between their lips and rutting against them shamelessly, pulling his hair and coming for him. Just for him, because he said so and they wanted it and it was a beautiful, perfect cycle of want and need.
Afterwards it was on to another bar, Sulu already a little drunk as he hung off Riley’s shoulder, Kelso laughing harder than ever. For a few hours a night in San Francisco, the two pilots and two navigators could live like kings in the flush and sweat of neon and glitter. In that tiny slice of time, Gary Mitchell was the warm little center of everything.
--
It was a Friday night in a cadet bar called The Red Room, as Gary would later recall, when something changed. It was the last week of leave before the new term, and he was eager to drink and fuck his way through his last hours of freedom. Gary tried to avoid cadet bars as a rule, tired of the same old faces from class every day, but Sulu said he wanted to stop in because he knew the bartender. Riley was chatting up the redheaded Orion girl from his Warp Theory class who was laughing at his jokes, and Kelso was discussing the finer points of good, old-fashioned American baseball with some guys from Philosophy. Sulu had apparently lied about the bartender, and was busying himself with some young-looking navigator drinking cranberry juice at a table in the back. Nursing his third beer at the bar, Gary was dying of boredom.
Across the bar, where some of his classmates were embarrassing themselves on the dance floor, Gary spotted someone new. Tall and well-built, blonde all over with big, stupid blue eyes, a tight t-shirt and even tighter jeans, like he was just begging everyone in the room to notice him. Gary couldn’t help himself. The blonde was alone it seemed, making his way through the crowd, not particularly interested in any of the bodies grinding against him beyond a quick and cursory glance. Sliding off his stool, Gary aimed to change that as he made his way onto the dance floor, edging into the herd until he found himself at the blonde’s back.
The music stopped between tracks. Around him, the crowd paused, took a deep breath. Then the music started up again and Gary put his hands on the blonde’s hips, turning him around.
“Hey,” he smiled. “You want to dance?”
The other man looked him up and down with a lick of his lips, which were fuller up close than Gary had anticipated. Tilting his chin up, his eyes got a little lidded, still big and stupid and blue, and he smirked crookedly. “Yeah,” he said, “I think I do.”
Above them the lights dimmed, changed from muted red to deep purple and the whole crowd pulsed around them to the thumping bass. Gary kept his hands on the blonde’s hips as they moved together, a slow grind bone and denim, sweating under their shirts and along the lines of their necks where the light lapped at their skin. The blonde danced like he just didn’t care, head tipped back, eyes shut, the heat coming off his body making Gary dizzy. Gary didn’t even have to whisper anything this time, didn’t have to lean or reach out. The hands on the other man’s body was enough to make him open to the press of Gary’s lips against his hair, the shell of his ear, turning the blonde around to mold their bodies together, chest-to-back. It was almost too easy.
“What’s your name?”
Gary splayed his fingers under the other man’s shirt, over the flat of his belly. The blonde caught him by the wrists, a little jumpy, and then settled again in with a lick of his lips. He looked at Gary from over his shoulder, eyes only half-open.
“What’s yours?”
“Touchy,” Gary smirked. “I don’t think I’ve seen you around here before, and I’m really good with faces.”
“I come here every weekend, and I’ve never seen you here before.” The blonde smirked back, that same crooked little smile. “So you’re lying.”
At that, Gary shrugged. “That change things?”
“Not really.” A hand reached back to card through Gary’s hair, just enough for a handful. “It’s Jim. Jim Kirk.”
“Gary Mitchell.” Biting into the flesh of Jim’s ear, he reached for Jim’s belt buckle in a tug. “You want to get out of here?”
Before Jim had a chance to respond the song faded out, the lights flashed purple to pink. Jim moved away, just out of reach, not at all bothered by the fact Gary had just been pawing all over him. Something across the bar caught his eye in a jerk of his chin. Following Jim’s line of sight led Gary to some guy that had just walked into the bar, a few years older, brunette and broad-shouldered under a tired-looking jacket and jeans to match. Gary couldn’t help but feel a little left out.
“Meeting somebody?” he asked, a little colder than he meant to sound.
“Yeah,” Jim said, like it was nothing. “Kind of already made plans.”
“Your boyfriend must not like you dancing with strange boys, Jim Kirk.”
For it, Jim laughed. “I know your name, you’re hardly a stranger.” He clapped a hand onto Gary’s shoulder with a rise of his eyebrows. “See you around, Gary Mitchell.”
With a sick fascination Gary watched Jim Kirk walk away, throw an arm over Leonard McCoy’s shoulders and hang off like he belonged there, sweat making his t-shirt translucent where Gary’s hands had just been all over him. He felt a voyeur to the quiet little exhibition going on between them as Leonard sat at the bar to order two glasses of whiskey, spelled out in glances and touches and standing just a little too close. It was a bright hungry package of want and half-truths, conversations only half-had, and Jim Kirk was like its beating, sucking heart. With his stupidly blue eyes and his curved mouth and the way Leonard just looked at him and the way he told Gary no, like it was nothing, when hardly anybody did that these days.
Leonard McCoy was going to go home and fuck Jim Kirk that night, Gary Mitchell knew that much. He also knew he would be next.
--
It wasn’t until the new term started the following week that Gary met Jim Kirk again. Sliding into an open seat in Advanced Warp Theory, Gary tossed his aviators aside and yawned, still a little too drunk for his 0700 class. He didn’t even bother bringing his PADD to class anymore. It wasn’t worth the additional effort, not when the answers appeared out of thin air the way they always did these days, if he concentrated hard enough. The first day of class was no big deal, in any case, and Gary was already ready to go back to his dorm and sleep off the rest of the previous night’s tequila before Elementary Temporal Mechanics at 0930.
Three rows below was the familiar back of Jim Kirk’s blonde head. He was skimming through his PADD for the day’s assignments, the dictation application already running for lecture notes. Gary immediately sat up, forgetting all about the tequila still softening his brain. It was hard to pay attention to Commander Ngige’s sweeping pontification on gravimetric field displacement when he couldn’t keep his eyes off Jim. Once the clock above Ngige’s desk chimed, Gary slid out of his chair, down the steps between rows to the door where he followed Jim out into the hallway.
Right out of the engineering complex, across the quad to the mess hall on the other side of the campus. Jim took lunch at a table by himself, scrolling through his PADD until Gary slammed a tray down beside him and took up the nearest chair. Jim looked up, and then finally shook his head with that crooked smirk. Up close again, Gary could feel another heat coming off of him. Something like fire and stardust in soft focus, lapping at the edges of his eyelids and under his fingernails where the tequila didn’t quite dampen his perceptions. Too far away to get a solid feel for it, still too far down the line to understand.
Gary probably should have gotten up and walked away, but he always loved a challenge.
“Small world, huh?” Gary asked, leaning over into Jim’s space, looking him over from behind his sunglasses. “I guess they let just anybody into Advanced Warp Theory these days.”
“Or they let just anybody into The Red Room,” Jim said easily and tossed his PADD aside. “Gary, right?”
“And you’re Jim Kirk.” Gary pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head. “Told you I was good with faces.”
“I can see that.”
“So, look, I was thinking. We’re in the same class, and we’re obviously pretty well-acquainted already, right? How about we be smart about this whole thing and work together? Help each other with assignments and all that. I’m really good at the subject, if I do say so myself.”
“Yeah, thanks, but I don’t think I need a tutor. Besides, you’re not that great a dancer.”
Gary chuckled. “Ouch. I don’t exactly remember being wowed by your physical prowess, either. Your ass, maybe, but not the dancing.”
“That’s because you were busy trying to get my pants off. Not that I was all that offended.”
“Good. Then it’s settled.”
“What’s settled?”
“I’ll meet you in the library after class on Wednesday. Don’t bother bringing your notes, I’ll have mine. I can probably break it down better than that windbag Ngige anyway.”
Along with the answers to the next three quizzes, but Gary didn’t say anything about that. Cheating was still frowned on in most circles.
“You seriously want to be my study-partner?” Jim asked, only half-kidding. “What, does that mean we’re going steady now?”
“Well, we can study, or we can go dancing. Whatever you feel like.”
Jim laughed. “Yeah, I don’t think so.”
“You must have not gotten the memo yet, Kirk - I’m offering you a guaranteed hundred-percent in this class. So you ought to be a little nicer to me.”
“And you’re not going to let this go until I agree, right?”
“Basically.”
“And just why is that?”
“Because I like you, and I don’t like a lot of people. And because I don’t like a lot of people, I tend to lean on the ones I do to make sure they stay around. Consider it a compliment.” Standing from his seat, Gary gave Jim a wink and pushed his aviators down again. “See you around, Kirk.”
Shaking his head, Jim gave in with a smirk. “I’ll see you there, Mitchell.”
Leaving the mess hall, Gary forgot all about sleeping off the last of his tequila fog and cut across the campus to the registrar’s office. There a cute Andorian in records handed a copy of Jim Kirk’s personnel file over with a grin and a quirk of her antennae. All Gary had to do was lean on her desk with a smile and tell her how sweet it would be if she did him one teeny, tiny little favor. It was getting too easy sometimes, and after his courses Gary retreated to his bunk to read all about Kirk comma James Tiberius.
There was the last eleven minutes of the USS Kelvin and the dearly departed George Kirk, the daddy Jim never had. There was Winona Kirk, too, with her stern eyes but loving smile, and her cabinet of accolades for the years spent-off planet while George Samuel Jr. and little Jimmy stayed at home with Frank and his drinking. Kodos and the fires when he cleansed Tarsus IV, six stays at the Washington County Juvenile Detention Center, two school expulsions for fighting, and even Christopher Pike. Pike who pulled Jim bloodied and half-drunk out of a bar in Iowa and shipped him off to San Francisco to make something of himself, just like he did for Gary in Van Nuys.
Jim Kirk had spent his whole life running toward the stars. Gary could appreciate that, more than most could. That was when he knew he couldn’t stay away from Jim. Not then, not ever.
--
The semester passed in a liquid blur of flight drills, long nights out and coursework assignments. Sometimes Gary dreamt of fire, but he said nothing of that in the morning when he slid into the seat behind Jim in Advanced Warp Theory. Sometimes he still went out to dance with the lonely wild boys of San Francisco, with glitter in their eyes and sex on their minds, but mostly he thought of the stars and Jim Kirk and fucking him until he screamed.
--
Jim and Gary stopped meeting up after class, and started hanging out on weekends instead. Gary didn’t need to study anyway. He always had the answers, even before their instructors could ask the questions. At first Gary brought his friends along, Kelso and Riley and Sulu, but that got old fast. Gary was getting bored of them, little by little, with their familiar jokes and hang-outs and personality quirks. With Sulu chasing that little twink navigator all over campus like a love-sick puppy and Riley spending more and more time with that Orion girl, there was little time for anything but the odd Saturday night out with the guys. And the one thing Gary hated more than anything was being bored.
But Jim, Jim was never boring. Jim liked to get trashed on school nights and fuck girls in the backs of cars and play poker and ride his bike on the weekends. Gary always liked that about Jim, that he just didn’t care. There was a kind of beauty in the recklessness, a charm in his sense of self-destruction. Everybody on campus knew Jim Kirk, because everybody knew about his test scores and his aptitude tests. They had all read about his dad or his mom, or they had a friend who had a friend who had fucked him or fought him, or both. He was like a rock star on campus, but he was the first to throw a punch or get a drink flung in his face, or end up in the drunk-tank for the night.
And so Gary just slung an arm over Jim’s shoulder, wiped the blood from his lip or pat at the collar of his whiskey-soaked shirt, and smiled.
“Easy, tiger,” he would always say. “Let’s go back to having fun.”
The only problem was Leonard McCoy, six years both their senior and climbing the ranks of Starfleet Medical, barring a nasty case of aviophobia. He was Jim’s best friend, well-adjusted in all the ways Jim wasn’t, and too put-together to be of use to guys like them. When Jim got thrown into the drunk-tank, it was Leonard that got him in the morning. When Jim was fucked-up after a fight, it was Leonard that took him home and put his face back together, even if he complained every minute of it. Leonard was the one trying to carve Jim into the approximation of an upstanding young man, something he could take home to meet the family. Jim was his pet project, his own little personal fixer-upper.
Jim didn’t see it, not the way Gary did. It was kind of pathetic. Jim could do so much better for himself than that.
They spent most of their time together, Jim and Leonard. They took meals between classes, went out for beers, and took leave on Jim’s bike to Yosemite and disappeared for days at a time. Sucking, fucking, whatever other filthy things that came to Gary’s mind when he saw them together, in the hallway after class or at a table in the mess or across a crowded bar when he didn’t dare get too close. If Gary was the devil on Jim’s shoulder, Leonard was the angel. Where Jim went, Leonard always eventually followed to pick up the pieces. And once Leonard showed up, Gary was always, inevitably, invisible.
Gary hadn’t been invisible since he left Van Nuys, and he wasn’t about to be again.
Part II
Once more into the breach
Or, How Gary Mitchell Hit Rock-Bottom, and Decided to Do It All Again
This story is a rewrite of Gary Mitchell's backstory, based on the TOS novelizations, comic books, and various other non-canon source material. Clearly I have taken a lot of liberties with the timelines. There are also a few small references to Gary Lockwood in this story as well, the original actor to portray Gary in TOS. This story features Mitchell/Kirk, Kirk/McCoy, Mitchell/McCoy, Mitchell/Kirk/McCoy, Mitchell/Lee Kelso, and several references to Sulu/Chekov and Kevin Riley/Gaila. It also was loosely inspired by the events of Lady Gaga's Marry the Night video, and for that, I regret nothing.
The sky above Delta Vega burned electric. It was a fragmented borealis of blues and pinks and purples, all turned inside-out like a fading signal dying out in the wilderness. Gary Mitchell could taste the voltage on his tongue; feel the current in his fingertips where it ran from behind his eyes and down, spreading everywhere that the bitter chill couldn’t cut through. He was beyond that now, the heat and the cold and the need. At his feet Jim Kirk was bleeding in the snow and the Valiant was splitting overhead in a million tiny dancing pieces of shrapnel. Everything, from the redness spread across Jim’s bruised mouth in the shape of Gary’s fists to the last fireflies of the explosion gently falling down, just seemed right.
Gary could taste that too, and smiled.
“Hey.”
From the ground, Jim spat blood between his teeth and looked every bit the kicked dog. “Gary, you can stop this. Please.”
“Hey.”
“What?”
“You like it?”
Gary’s eyes were blown-out in silver, catching the ember rain. Jim looked sick with himself, shook his head, and asked anyway.
“Like what, Gary?”
“What I’ve made here.”
This was a familiar story, even if the pieces didn’t quite fit together the same. The words were jumbled, the pictures disarticulated, facts and dates and smells and faces bleeding together, running to the floor and in the corners of Gary’s recollections. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to remember, just that the context had changed into something novel and alien, and he had to reimagine all the memories in new ways. This was Gary Reinvented in Universe 2.0. It just felt more honest that way.
But through the visceral kaleidoscope of past, present and other-time, other-Jim and other-Gary, he knew that it had something to do with the day he met Jim Kirk.
And so Jim lied and said, “Yeah, Gary. Of course.”
--
There were concrete spires on the edge of Van Nuys, just where Los Angeles melted into the Santa Monica Mountains. That was what Gary always remembered most about Van Nuys, the way the city looked so tiny from the roof, whenever he crawled out of his bedroom window and sat alone at night to look at the stars. The endless concrete spires where his parents disappeared every day, twinkling from the pink of dusk to the blue of dawn. He had never seen them in person. He was certain he never wanted to.
His father Thomas worked in one of the skyscrapers, his mother Dana in another, during long hours that had them both home late for the dinner that his sister Chelsea prepared for the younger children after their homework was done. Chelsea never complained, each night that she cooked dinner for Gary and his little sister Hannah and put them to bed. Each day Chelsea earned a kiss on a cheek and a pat on the back from their mother when she finally stumbled home after a ten-hour day at the office. Gary knew she probably should have complained.
After his youngest sister Lauren was born, Gary knew he had to get away, too. Chelsea had already run away to college to study anthropology then, and to live with a boy with three holes punched in his nose that their father hated. She was twenty-two by the time she finally got away, having put her dreams and acceptance letters aside to watch the younger kids while their parents worked to maintain the lifestyle to which they were accustomed. It was Gary’s turn to watch Hannah and Lauren, because that was the way of things. No one even asked, and once their mother was ready to go back to work, Gary was given a set of keys, emergency numbers just in case, and a pat on the back.
He was fourteen then, and had no interest in babysitting.
So each night, after dinner and homework and once the girls had gone to bed, Gary climbed out of his bedroom window to sit on the roof and chart the stars.
--
Gary never stood out.
There wasn’t much of him to write home about, if one was ever so inclined. Long and lean like his father, with his mother’s lighter coloring and dark hair and eyes. Rounded eyes that looked a little wide sometimes like he had been staring into the sun, his face defined by the attractive but unassuming features of a (somewhat bored-looking) young man. His history and civics grades were only slightly above average. His logic and philosophy essays were only slightly above average. He didn’t bother to study most of the time, looking out the window across the classroom instead to where the city met the sky. There was little need to he discovered, when the answers just seemed to pop into his head most days, if he stared at his PADD long enough.
Even his girlfriends, plain and pretty as they were, coming from good homes with nice families, were only slightly above average, too. They liked his magic tricks, the sleight of hand he picked up here and there, when he could guess their cards or their favorite colors with just a glance. It was intuition and dumb luck that kept him afloat in school. It was the kindness of dumb girls that kept him company, too young to know a bad guy when they saw one. They probably resented that, most of all.
These things held little interest for Gary. Even his father’s disapproval and mother’s eye-rolls didn’t mean that much to him after a while. Not a whole lot did. The one thing he ever really cared about was the stars. Stellar cartography, navigation systems, tinkering with flight consoles pulled out of old ships from the junk yard outside El Centro. Gary made maps of constellations, read up on warp engine design instead of finishing his literature homework. He only paid attention in his science and math classes, because they were easy and they helped when he was piecing busted Federation hardware back together and thinking about the stars. He didn’t want to just read about starships, hauling their broken parts home to poke and prod at on Saturday afternoons, if only to see what made them tick. He wanted to make them scream, right through warp ten into the cold, cold black.
Then one day he was eighteen, out of school with a decent grade point average and a backyard full of salvaged scrap and the antique telescopes his father hated. Staring down another four years at home before Hannah was old enough to watch Lauren and he would be free to run away like Chelsea did, the sister he only saw through vids and on greeting card holidays. On Thanksgiving, sitting on the roof together drinking cheap beer, Chelsea smiled and toyed with her latest piercing. She had just been fighting with their father again, but she didn’t want to talk about that.
“You should join Starfleet,” she said instead. “Put all this junk you collect to good use.”
Gary just laughed. “Yeah, right. Starfleet is like a think-tank of geniuses and shit, Chels. You need aptitude tests off the charts for that.”
“You’d have them, if you ever bothered to take the entrance exam.”
Thumbing the lip of his bottle, he shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. I doubt they’d have room for somebody like me. I’m not exactly special.”
“I think you should do it,” Chelsea said, still smiling. “You know you want to fly. I think you’d be really good at it.”
It would be two more Thanksgivings before Chelsea could will herself home again. Gary couldn’t blame her for that. Two days after she hugged him goodbye at the shuttle station, Gary found himself outside the Van Nuys Starfleet recruitment office. There were two men inside, older men in slick gray uniforms, one blonde and the other graying. Important-looking men. He stared at the bold lettering on the glass door - the wide rays of sunlight behind the Golden Gate Bridge, Ex Atris, Scientia - and shoved his hands into the pockets of his thrift store bomber jacket and felt stupid about the whole thing. After ten minutes of staring, Gary licked his lips and walked away down the strip of Van Nuys Boulevard, where Los Angeles twinkled in the distance.
“Can I help you, son?”
Gary turned around, saw the man with the graying hair standing in the doorway, the door held open.
“I was just leaving, thanks,” Gary lied.
“You were out here for ten minutes. You must’ve had something on your mind.” The man smiled, a small sort-of smile, like he knew something Gary didn’t. And that almost never happened. “I’m sure you can waste another ten on me.”
After a moment, Gary nodded. That was how he met Christopher Pike and joined Starfleet, just like Chelsea said. And not unlike Chelsea, he had to run away first, from Van Nuys and Thomas and Dana Mitchell, but for different reasons altogether.
--
All the psychologists and psychiatrists and physicians clucked their tongues whenever Gary’s name came up. They kept saying things like world’s first and highest recorded score and off the charts. Gary never really knew what to make of that. Flight tests he could quantify and understand, spelled out in aptitude scores and piloting simulations. He was a skilled navigator by nature with a basic understanding of warp technology and a fire in his belly to know more. Pike had liked that about him, and that made Gary feel good.
Sitting in a sterile little room, staring at a sterile Doctor Elizabeth Dehner, Gary didn’t know what to feel.
“To be quite honest with you, Mr. Mitchell, I don’t know what to say,” she said. She was wearing a clean and pressed blue Sciences uniform, reading through his chart for the tenth time. She looked like every nice girl Gary ever dated but didn’t care about, blonde and blue-eyed and that sad kind of pretty. “Esper, Apperception, Duke-Heidelberg - your tests results are incredible. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
“Is that good or bad?” Gary asked, feeling peculiarly naked under her eyes.
“Good or bad?” At that, she smiled. It seemed like a rare event at the time, like the muscles in her face weren’t used to it. “Mr. Mitchell, you’re uncanny.”
Gary Mitchell didn’t stand out until Starfleet. Then he started to shine.
--
San Francisco meant freedom. Starfleet meant a home. There people knew his name.
The Academy Flight Range was run by Commander James Doyle, a big wall of a man who hated every cadet that walked through his shuttle bay. They were all raw cookie dough as far as he was concerned, and he worked them like dogs until they were made out of steel. Flight sims, drills, dry-runs and shuttle maneuvers. Being turned inside-out in cockpits and watching other pilots splatter their hopes and dreams on shaking hands and botched landings. Sometimes they splattered more than that, but it was never talked about on the deck. Gary Mitchell arrived as raw dough and within his first semester broke Doyle’s long-held record for successful maneuvers in a lunar orbit. That was when things started to change.
After every successful drill, his flight instructor Doyle slapped a fat hand on Gary’s back and grinned through his buck teeth, “You better watch it, kid. You’re going to put us other bubbas out of a job.” The upper classmen in the squadron hated Gary for that, in the not-too-subtle way that they glared when he walked by in the mess hall and on the quad between classes. They called him a bagger for all his flight time, accused him of blowing Doyle, taking it in the ass on weekends to stay on his good side. That was the some of the nicer gossip he had heard.
Gary didn’t care about any of it. Every day he passed their tables without a glance and took lunch with the junior classmen. Lee Kelso with his abundant laughter, Kevin Riley who was quick with the jokes, and Hikaru Sulu who seemed to be good for just about anything, from piloting a ship to growing a garden to fencing. Gary was one or two years older than each of them and they were easily impressed by anybody who had Doyle smiling after flight sims. And maybe Gary liked that about Kelso and Riley and Sulu most of all.
Gary was good at flying, beyond just the simple dumb luck and intuition he was known for. Better than he ever was at guessing games or magic tricks, or watching the sky from his rooftop as the stars slept between the concrete spires dotting the horizon. Flying was easy, in a way that few things were. He had a gift for it, the way the engine system thrummed behind him, the way the shuttle’s skeleton trembled gently whenever he banked on a tight turn. Gary felt it deeper than anybody ever could, just a few seconds ahead of the other pilots flanking him, like little flashes forward to tell him when he was too close to the next shuttle or when to cut the throttle. He was at home in a cockpit, the way he never was in Van Nuys.
Gary stopped going back to Van Nuys for Thanksgiving just like Chelsea did. It didn’t even occur to him to feel bad about it. By the time he came out of flight training and returned to San Francisco, he was solid gold, Van Nuys’ chief aeronautic export. Behind aviator sunglasses and the old bomber jacket he took with him when he enlisted, Gary walked around campus like nothing mattered. He aced flight sim after flight sim, until the upper classmen stopped talking to him altogether. Gary liked it better that way.
--
It was getting easier and easier to lean on people.
To flash a smile and get out of trouble when a cop pulled him over for speeding, or tell a pretty girl exactly what she needed to hear to get her number. Whatever it was, whatever Gary wanted, he could get it if he wanted it badly enough. Like whistling or riding a bike, it was just a matter of practice makes perfect. And these days, Gary was a quick learner.
So when he took the seat across the desk of Delores from the base housing office, he told her just how badly he needed that bunk in the officer’s dorms. The big one, with a nice view of the city and no roommate to speak of, and she smiled and gave him the keycard. Grinning, he thanked Delores twice and left to move into his new room.
--
Gary never spent much time in Los Angeles growing up. He was the stay-at-home type, content to drink his parents’ beer and make-out with his girlfriend Emily in the back of her dad’s borrowed car. The city always twinkled in the distance like an electric lure of alcohol and music and excess, promising things Gary could only dream of in the smutty machinations of a high school boy. But after putting Hannah and Lauren to bed, Gary was usually too tired to do much else but grope under Emily’s shirt on squeaky upholstered bench seats. It wasn’t ideal, but it was what he had.
San Francisco, on the other hand, was ripe for the taking.
Weekends were spent cruising bars with Kelso, Riley and Sulu, drinking beer and dancing with boys and girls with glitter on their eyelids. Gary liked the boys more than the girls, the way their skin smelled like sweat and whiskey, trying to fuck him through his clothes the way the nice girls back home wouldn’t dream of. It was easy to lose himself like that, to lick his lips and put his hands all over them and whisper hot and filthy in their ears about how much they wanted it. Because these boys did want it, a heat that he could feel slip like liquid behind his eyelids and down his neck in pins and needles, and it was the most amazing sensation Gary had ever known. It made them so much easier to lean on until he had them in the men’s room or a corner booth-seat out of the way, licking his way between their lips and rutting against them shamelessly, pulling his hair and coming for him. Just for him, because he said so and they wanted it and it was a beautiful, perfect cycle of want and need.
Afterwards it was on to another bar, Sulu already a little drunk as he hung off Riley’s shoulder, Kelso laughing harder than ever. For a few hours a night in San Francisco, the two pilots and two navigators could live like kings in the flush and sweat of neon and glitter. In that tiny slice of time, Gary Mitchell was the warm little center of everything.
--
It was a Friday night in a cadet bar called The Red Room, as Gary would later recall, when something changed. It was the last week of leave before the new term, and he was eager to drink and fuck his way through his last hours of freedom. Gary tried to avoid cadet bars as a rule, tired of the same old faces from class every day, but Sulu said he wanted to stop in because he knew the bartender. Riley was chatting up the redheaded Orion girl from his Warp Theory class who was laughing at his jokes, and Kelso was discussing the finer points of good, old-fashioned American baseball with some guys from Philosophy. Sulu had apparently lied about the bartender, and was busying himself with some young-looking navigator drinking cranberry juice at a table in the back. Nursing his third beer at the bar, Gary was dying of boredom.
Across the bar, where some of his classmates were embarrassing themselves on the dance floor, Gary spotted someone new. Tall and well-built, blonde all over with big, stupid blue eyes, a tight t-shirt and even tighter jeans, like he was just begging everyone in the room to notice him. Gary couldn’t help himself. The blonde was alone it seemed, making his way through the crowd, not particularly interested in any of the bodies grinding against him beyond a quick and cursory glance. Sliding off his stool, Gary aimed to change that as he made his way onto the dance floor, edging into the herd until he found himself at the blonde’s back.
The music stopped between tracks. Around him, the crowd paused, took a deep breath. Then the music started up again and Gary put his hands on the blonde’s hips, turning him around.
“Hey,” he smiled. “You want to dance?”
The other man looked him up and down with a lick of his lips, which were fuller up close than Gary had anticipated. Tilting his chin up, his eyes got a little lidded, still big and stupid and blue, and he smirked crookedly. “Yeah,” he said, “I think I do.”
Above them the lights dimmed, changed from muted red to deep purple and the whole crowd pulsed around them to the thumping bass. Gary kept his hands on the blonde’s hips as they moved together, a slow grind bone and denim, sweating under their shirts and along the lines of their necks where the light lapped at their skin. The blonde danced like he just didn’t care, head tipped back, eyes shut, the heat coming off his body making Gary dizzy. Gary didn’t even have to whisper anything this time, didn’t have to lean or reach out. The hands on the other man’s body was enough to make him open to the press of Gary’s lips against his hair, the shell of his ear, turning the blonde around to mold their bodies together, chest-to-back. It was almost too easy.
“What’s your name?”
Gary splayed his fingers under the other man’s shirt, over the flat of his belly. The blonde caught him by the wrists, a little jumpy, and then settled again in with a lick of his lips. He looked at Gary from over his shoulder, eyes only half-open.
“What’s yours?”
“Touchy,” Gary smirked. “I don’t think I’ve seen you around here before, and I’m really good with faces.”
“I come here every weekend, and I’ve never seen you here before.” The blonde smirked back, that same crooked little smile. “So you’re lying.”
At that, Gary shrugged. “That change things?”
“Not really.” A hand reached back to card through Gary’s hair, just enough for a handful. “It’s Jim. Jim Kirk.”
“Gary Mitchell.” Biting into the flesh of Jim’s ear, he reached for Jim’s belt buckle in a tug. “You want to get out of here?”
Before Jim had a chance to respond the song faded out, the lights flashed purple to pink. Jim moved away, just out of reach, not at all bothered by the fact Gary had just been pawing all over him. Something across the bar caught his eye in a jerk of his chin. Following Jim’s line of sight led Gary to some guy that had just walked into the bar, a few years older, brunette and broad-shouldered under a tired-looking jacket and jeans to match. Gary couldn’t help but feel a little left out.
“Meeting somebody?” he asked, a little colder than he meant to sound.
“Yeah,” Jim said, like it was nothing. “Kind of already made plans.”
“Your boyfriend must not like you dancing with strange boys, Jim Kirk.”
For it, Jim laughed. “I know your name, you’re hardly a stranger.” He clapped a hand onto Gary’s shoulder with a rise of his eyebrows. “See you around, Gary Mitchell.”
With a sick fascination Gary watched Jim Kirk walk away, throw an arm over Leonard McCoy’s shoulders and hang off like he belonged there, sweat making his t-shirt translucent where Gary’s hands had just been all over him. He felt a voyeur to the quiet little exhibition going on between them as Leonard sat at the bar to order two glasses of whiskey, spelled out in glances and touches and standing just a little too close. It was a bright hungry package of want and half-truths, conversations only half-had, and Jim Kirk was like its beating, sucking heart. With his stupidly blue eyes and his curved mouth and the way Leonard just looked at him and the way he told Gary no, like it was nothing, when hardly anybody did that these days.
Leonard McCoy was going to go home and fuck Jim Kirk that night, Gary Mitchell knew that much. He also knew he would be next.
--
It wasn’t until the new term started the following week that Gary met Jim Kirk again. Sliding into an open seat in Advanced Warp Theory, Gary tossed his aviators aside and yawned, still a little too drunk for his 0700 class. He didn’t even bother bringing his PADD to class anymore. It wasn’t worth the additional effort, not when the answers appeared out of thin air the way they always did these days, if he concentrated hard enough. The first day of class was no big deal, in any case, and Gary was already ready to go back to his dorm and sleep off the rest of the previous night’s tequila before Elementary Temporal Mechanics at 0930.
Three rows below was the familiar back of Jim Kirk’s blonde head. He was skimming through his PADD for the day’s assignments, the dictation application already running for lecture notes. Gary immediately sat up, forgetting all about the tequila still softening his brain. It was hard to pay attention to Commander Ngige’s sweeping pontification on gravimetric field displacement when he couldn’t keep his eyes off Jim. Once the clock above Ngige’s desk chimed, Gary slid out of his chair, down the steps between rows to the door where he followed Jim out into the hallway.
Right out of the engineering complex, across the quad to the mess hall on the other side of the campus. Jim took lunch at a table by himself, scrolling through his PADD until Gary slammed a tray down beside him and took up the nearest chair. Jim looked up, and then finally shook his head with that crooked smirk. Up close again, Gary could feel another heat coming off of him. Something like fire and stardust in soft focus, lapping at the edges of his eyelids and under his fingernails where the tequila didn’t quite dampen his perceptions. Too far away to get a solid feel for it, still too far down the line to understand.
Gary probably should have gotten up and walked away, but he always loved a challenge.
“Small world, huh?” Gary asked, leaning over into Jim’s space, looking him over from behind his sunglasses. “I guess they let just anybody into Advanced Warp Theory these days.”
“Or they let just anybody into The Red Room,” Jim said easily and tossed his PADD aside. “Gary, right?”
“And you’re Jim Kirk.” Gary pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head. “Told you I was good with faces.”
“I can see that.”
“So, look, I was thinking. We’re in the same class, and we’re obviously pretty well-acquainted already, right? How about we be smart about this whole thing and work together? Help each other with assignments and all that. I’m really good at the subject, if I do say so myself.”
“Yeah, thanks, but I don’t think I need a tutor. Besides, you’re not that great a dancer.”
Gary chuckled. “Ouch. I don’t exactly remember being wowed by your physical prowess, either. Your ass, maybe, but not the dancing.”
“That’s because you were busy trying to get my pants off. Not that I was all that offended.”
“Good. Then it’s settled.”
“What’s settled?”
“I’ll meet you in the library after class on Wednesday. Don’t bother bringing your notes, I’ll have mine. I can probably break it down better than that windbag Ngige anyway.”
Along with the answers to the next three quizzes, but Gary didn’t say anything about that. Cheating was still frowned on in most circles.
“You seriously want to be my study-partner?” Jim asked, only half-kidding. “What, does that mean we’re going steady now?”
“Well, we can study, or we can go dancing. Whatever you feel like.”
Jim laughed. “Yeah, I don’t think so.”
“You must have not gotten the memo yet, Kirk - I’m offering you a guaranteed hundred-percent in this class. So you ought to be a little nicer to me.”
“And you’re not going to let this go until I agree, right?”
“Basically.”
“And just why is that?”
“Because I like you, and I don’t like a lot of people. And because I don’t like a lot of people, I tend to lean on the ones I do to make sure they stay around. Consider it a compliment.” Standing from his seat, Gary gave Jim a wink and pushed his aviators down again. “See you around, Kirk.”
Shaking his head, Jim gave in with a smirk. “I’ll see you there, Mitchell.”
Leaving the mess hall, Gary forgot all about sleeping off the last of his tequila fog and cut across the campus to the registrar’s office. There a cute Andorian in records handed a copy of Jim Kirk’s personnel file over with a grin and a quirk of her antennae. All Gary had to do was lean on her desk with a smile and tell her how sweet it would be if she did him one teeny, tiny little favor. It was getting too easy sometimes, and after his courses Gary retreated to his bunk to read all about Kirk comma James Tiberius.
There was the last eleven minutes of the USS Kelvin and the dearly departed George Kirk, the daddy Jim never had. There was Winona Kirk, too, with her stern eyes but loving smile, and her cabinet of accolades for the years spent-off planet while George Samuel Jr. and little Jimmy stayed at home with Frank and his drinking. Kodos and the fires when he cleansed Tarsus IV, six stays at the Washington County Juvenile Detention Center, two school expulsions for fighting, and even Christopher Pike. Pike who pulled Jim bloodied and half-drunk out of a bar in Iowa and shipped him off to San Francisco to make something of himself, just like he did for Gary in Van Nuys.
Jim Kirk had spent his whole life running toward the stars. Gary could appreciate that, more than most could. That was when he knew he couldn’t stay away from Jim. Not then, not ever.
--
The semester passed in a liquid blur of flight drills, long nights out and coursework assignments. Sometimes Gary dreamt of fire, but he said nothing of that in the morning when he slid into the seat behind Jim in Advanced Warp Theory. Sometimes he still went out to dance with the lonely wild boys of San Francisco, with glitter in their eyes and sex on their minds, but mostly he thought of the stars and Jim Kirk and fucking him until he screamed.
--
Jim and Gary stopped meeting up after class, and started hanging out on weekends instead. Gary didn’t need to study anyway. He always had the answers, even before their instructors could ask the questions. At first Gary brought his friends along, Kelso and Riley and Sulu, but that got old fast. Gary was getting bored of them, little by little, with their familiar jokes and hang-outs and personality quirks. With Sulu chasing that little twink navigator all over campus like a love-sick puppy and Riley spending more and more time with that Orion girl, there was little time for anything but the odd Saturday night out with the guys. And the one thing Gary hated more than anything was being bored.
But Jim, Jim was never boring. Jim liked to get trashed on school nights and fuck girls in the backs of cars and play poker and ride his bike on the weekends. Gary always liked that about Jim, that he just didn’t care. There was a kind of beauty in the recklessness, a charm in his sense of self-destruction. Everybody on campus knew Jim Kirk, because everybody knew about his test scores and his aptitude tests. They had all read about his dad or his mom, or they had a friend who had a friend who had fucked him or fought him, or both. He was like a rock star on campus, but he was the first to throw a punch or get a drink flung in his face, or end up in the drunk-tank for the night.
And so Gary just slung an arm over Jim’s shoulder, wiped the blood from his lip or pat at the collar of his whiskey-soaked shirt, and smiled.
“Easy, tiger,” he would always say. “Let’s go back to having fun.”
The only problem was Leonard McCoy, six years both their senior and climbing the ranks of Starfleet Medical, barring a nasty case of aviophobia. He was Jim’s best friend, well-adjusted in all the ways Jim wasn’t, and too put-together to be of use to guys like them. When Jim got thrown into the drunk-tank, it was Leonard that got him in the morning. When Jim was fucked-up after a fight, it was Leonard that took him home and put his face back together, even if he complained every minute of it. Leonard was the one trying to carve Jim into the approximation of an upstanding young man, something he could take home to meet the family. Jim was his pet project, his own little personal fixer-upper.
Jim didn’t see it, not the way Gary did. It was kind of pathetic. Jim could do so much better for himself than that.
They spent most of their time together, Jim and Leonard. They took meals between classes, went out for beers, and took leave on Jim’s bike to Yosemite and disappeared for days at a time. Sucking, fucking, whatever other filthy things that came to Gary’s mind when he saw them together, in the hallway after class or at a table in the mess or across a crowded bar when he didn’t dare get too close. If Gary was the devil on Jim’s shoulder, Leonard was the angel. Where Jim went, Leonard always eventually followed to pick up the pieces. And once Leonard showed up, Gary was always, inevitably, invisible.
Gary hadn’t been invisible since he left Van Nuys, and he wasn’t about to be again.
Part II