This Fire | STXI | PG-13 | 3/?
Title: This Fire III
Series: STXI AU
Rating: PG-13
Length: ~2,000
Warnings: Allusions to a very troubled past. Also, unbeta’ed & mistakes are mine.
Summary: A year in the life of one mutant James T. Kirk, age seventeen, and his time spent in Pike’s Institute for Higher Learning.
Disclaimer: Somewhere over the slash rainbow of my mind, it happened. But not in Kansas, unfortunately.
A/N: A reference of what Jim’s full mutant form looks like HERE.
Chapters: I, II
“You are not prepared for me.”
Jim smirked at the utter confidence in Spock’s voice. “I think I can hold my own.”
“I am sure you do,” Spock said in a tone that bristled over Jim in all the wrong ways. “But this is not a course in which to rid ourselves of aggression. We are here to master skills of defence and non-fatal offense.”
Jim rolled his eyes and ignored the crowd of student that had begun to congregate around them.
“Anyone ever tell you how completely boring you are?”
“You will not illicit a response from me, Mr. Kirk,” Spock said blandly as he pulled at the edge of a glove that stopped above the knobby bone of his wrist.
For a moment Jim was distracted by the movement, and the way the knuckles of the glove were cut out in neat holes. Spock’s pale skin flashed and teased, stark and snug amid the dark material with every shift and tighten of his fists.
Shit, those gloves could do crazy things to a guy’s imagination - which only sent Jim’s hackles rising higher.
He grinned, keeping up his unperturbed appearance. As Jim spoke he slowly circled Spock, his smile only growing when Spock didn’t react or track his movements.
“But don’t you wanna see what I got before we start?”
Spock’s nostrils flared. “That is not what this class is about, and you are wasting everyone’s time. Now fall in line and await today’s lesson.”
“Oh, come on,” Jim goaded as he stepped up into Spock’s line of sight and blatantly sized him up. “Just throw a punch - one little punch.”
Spock’s jaw worked tightly under his clean-shaven flesh. “No.”
Jim surged into Spock’s personal space, stopping a couple of inches from Spock’s unflinching frame. His smile went predatory.
“Yes.”
Jim was aching to hurt something. His bones cracked under the weight of Jim’s ineffectual anger, his frustration.
His mother had died three days ago.
Three days ago she had been alive.
Now she wasn’t.
Now she was ash and dust, blown away in the wind - and Jim hadn’t even been able to bury her.
Professor Pike had appeared beyond the fire and flames like a phoenix or the devil, telling him that they had to leave now or else Jim would be prosecuted as a mutant - or maybe killed.
The Federation liked to play at perfect peace and harmony and that bullshit, but not when it came to muties. Potential dangers to society - uncontrollable and volatile - deadly.
Jim had sent his mother up in flames; sent his step-father to an early grave all because -
When Jim had been secured in a hovercar with Pike and a very quiet driver whose name and face meant nothing through the haze of sorrow, Pike had faced Jim.
“I’m taking you somewhere safe.”
“Nowhere is safe if I’m there,” Jim scratched out, his throat still scorched from smoke.
Pike was silent for a long time as he stared out one window, and Jim did the same.
Finally the Professor said, “You’ll be able to heal here. You’ll be able to mourn.”
Jim’s nails dug into his soot-stained palms, cut through skin and oozed blackened blood.
“I’m fine,” he croaked. “I’m fine.”
So despite hating being trapped here - despite despising this prison full of sickeningly altruistic freaks - Jim dove right in. Because he was fine. Just fine.
Jim just wanted to break someone’s face, was all.
And Spock’s pretty one had been very near to Jim since he’d arrived.
Spock’s eyes flashed and hardened as he inclined his chin and looked down his nose at Jim. “We do not fight each other here. Not in the manner in which you wish.”
“And how would you know what I wish?” Jim fired back. “Oh - oh yeah. Telepath, right - empathy too? You find anything exciting? Tell me, Spock - does it ever bother you to feel everyone’s emotions but your own?”
“I will not be goaded into -”
“Do you ever wonder what’s you and what’s the rest of the world?”
“Your assumptions are asinine and -”
“Must piss you off to have no idea who or what you are, huh?”
Jim would know. He wondered it all the time.
Spock’s top lip twitched in the most subtle snarl as he cocked his head and leaned in towards Jim. “I -”
“Vulcan, mutant, computer? Which is it, Spock - what the hell are you that you can’t even feel you own -”
A psychic shockwave catapulted Jim across the quad; blasted the air from his lungs and left him gasping on the ground as his spine screamed from the fall. A familiar black veil closed over Jim’s vision, seeped into his blood and pumped through his heart. Everything began to burn and spark and curdle, and fuck did Jim feel alive again.
Jim inhaled the scent of charred grass just as he rolled on his stomach and pressed his palms to the ground to stand. The earth beneath him was scorched; crisp and dusty like a bolt of lightning had struck this single spot.
But it wasn’t lightning. It was Jim. And judging by the few distant gasps and the foreboding silence descending upon the group, everyone was beginning to get just what the hell was wrong with Jim Kirk.
He only had to look at his hands, his forearms - all streaked and shot through with what looked like tar, thick and toxic - to get the gist of what they saw.
This wasn’t even a full transformation. Jim knew that, because the first and last time it had happened had been - well.
Jim chuckled as he brought himself to his unsteady feet, ignoring the nausea roiling in his stomach. His grin stretched over a face he knew would be mapped in roads and rivers of black - just as he knew the blue of his eyes would be seeping into glimmering white and orange, like the sky relenting to a blinding sunset.
Spock remained several feet away, his expression as openly horrified as a Vulcan’s could be.
Jim felt a spark of shame flare within him; felt it ripple and spread like wildfire through his limbs as he looked at Spock’s face, looked at his peers’ faces. Maybe they were just surprised - maybe they just wanted Jim gone as soon as possible - or maybe they were disgusted. Whatever the play of emotion on their faces, it was directed at Jim, who felt it like another solid psychic blow to the gut.
Despite his growing sense of dread and fury at being swatted aside like a fly, Jim choked out a laugh. He captured Spock’s wide gaze from across the grass and began to stalk forward in a steady march, his hands fisted at his sides.
Jim smelled acrid burning and realised it was his clothes beginning to singe off his frame. They were breaking out in holes like open sores against the heat that licked at Jim’s flesh. Another side-effect he’d discovered while secretly testing his abilities when no one had been around.
See, Jim couldn’t let anything lie. He had to poke, had to prod and look at angles and turn things on their head. It didn’t take long for him to learn that he didn’t simply burst into flame or anything.
Jim was a sunspot - he wasn’t the flame. His body was like a microwave, slowly heating and heating and eventually destroying everything in a thick, slow burn. Jim was the sun that baked the earth and set forests alight. He was a heat that couldn’t be doused - he never stopped, couldn’t stop.
Most of all, he didn’t know how to stop.
So he prowled forward with his teeth bared in a smile-snarl and spread his black-shackled arms out as if to hug Spock.
“Felt good, didn’t it Spock? Wanna try again? Gotta admit you caught me off guard there.”
Spock’s face shut down like a maximum security prison. The silence that blanketed them was more deafening than the blood pounding in Jim’s ears.
“Whaaat? I thought you liked it - Hey!”
Spock yanked Jim’s wrist in a cold, iron grip and literally began to drag him away.
“Gaila, I regret to inform you that I will be unable to lead class today,” Spock said in the most fucked-out voice Jim could imagine. “Please take care of the lesson.”
Jim didn’t hear Gaila’s reply because he was busy spluttered and flailing to no avail. A growl surfaced from the depths of his chest as he watched his arm bruise midnight and fervid from the force of Jim’s emotion.
“Fuck you, don’t touch me!” Jim flared and gasped as he watched Spock’s glove begin to melt and peel away around the heat of Jim’s skin. “Let me the fuck go - your glove is burning through, you pointy-eared bastard!”
Jim was being wordlessly dragged inside and pulled up the grand staircase - and his initial reaction of utter contempt was beginning to dissipate as he realised how little control he had against Vulcan strength. He could see and feel the darkness receding as more blotches of tanned skin shyly reappeared.
“Spock - Christ, talk to me, you asshole!”
Spock whipped around at the top of the stairs, his fingers like steel and his eyes just as cold. “Shut up.”
Jim blinked and boggled, obediently silent due to minor shock. He shivered, the chill originating from the blistering, bright green fingers still clasped around his tainted wrist.
“What do you think you’re gonna do?” Jim asked as he allowed himself to be led like a dog on a fucking leash. No way in hell he was keeping quiet. “Tattle to Pike again - get me kicked out?”
Spock mumbled something under his breath about childish antics and then said, clear and crisp, “Pike will hear of this whether I inform him or not. As for expulsion, I fear for a society that might bear the brunt of your tantrums.”
“Tan-tantrums?”
The new sear of Jim’s skin against Spock’s palm, and the accompanying faint flinch from the Vulcan, had Jim’s aggravation boiling over. If Spock wanted to get burned, then let him! Masochistic bastard.
“You threw the first punch, man. I didn’t even touch you -although neither did you, really, but that’s not the point. The point is it’s not my fault if you can’t keep your shit together. Chill out.”
Spock prowled down the hall with Jim in tow, all smooth loping strides that Jim had to skip and hop to keep up with.
“Where are you taking me, dammit!” Jim demanded even as Spock jerked open the door to one of the shared bathrooms near their bedroom. “Sorry - what - wait.” Jim gulped, all of a sudden feeling incredibly claustrophobic and confused. “What are we - I don’t swing that way, dude.”
Spock actually might have rolled his eyes, but the action was masked when he whipped open the fogged glass door of the shower and literally shoved Jim in.
“What the f- AH!”
An icy spray rained down on Jim and a great plume of steam hissed and rose off Jim’s bared flesh. Jim was too shocked to even form proper swears as frigid water sluiced over his head, plastered what remained of his charred clothes to his body, and clung to his eyelashes.
Spock stood at the open door; cool as a fucking cucumber, with his arms crossed over his chest and one eyebrow raised.
“As you say, chill out.”
“You b-bastard,” Jim gritted between clenched teeth and shivers.
Spock looked down at Jim’s feet - so did Jim. His sneakers were melted blobs and clumps around his feet, now coagulating into errant cooled lumps.
Spock pursed his lips and looked back up, his face utterly expressionless but for the triumph in his glittering eyes.
“I believe you need new shoes.”
Jim scowled and spat water in Spock’s general direction as it trickled into his mouth. “I believe you need a new soul.”
Fuck. Spock had helped him again. Would the nightmare never end?
To Be Continued...
Series: STXI AU
Rating: PG-13
Length: ~2,000
Warnings: Allusions to a very troubled past. Also, unbeta’ed & mistakes are mine.
Summary: A year in the life of one mutant James T. Kirk, age seventeen, and his time spent in Pike’s Institute for Higher Learning.
Disclaimer: Somewhere over the slash rainbow of my mind, it happened. But not in Kansas, unfortunately.
A/N: A reference of what Jim’s full mutant form looks like HERE.
Chapters: I, II
“You are not prepared for me.”
Jim smirked at the utter confidence in Spock’s voice. “I think I can hold my own.”
“I am sure you do,” Spock said in a tone that bristled over Jim in all the wrong ways. “But this is not a course in which to rid ourselves of aggression. We are here to master skills of defence and non-fatal offense.”
Jim rolled his eyes and ignored the crowd of student that had begun to congregate around them.
“Anyone ever tell you how completely boring you are?”
“You will not illicit a response from me, Mr. Kirk,” Spock said blandly as he pulled at the edge of a glove that stopped above the knobby bone of his wrist.
For a moment Jim was distracted by the movement, and the way the knuckles of the glove were cut out in neat holes. Spock’s pale skin flashed and teased, stark and snug amid the dark material with every shift and tighten of his fists.
Shit, those gloves could do crazy things to a guy’s imagination - which only sent Jim’s hackles rising higher.
He grinned, keeping up his unperturbed appearance. As Jim spoke he slowly circled Spock, his smile only growing when Spock didn’t react or track his movements.
“But don’t you wanna see what I got before we start?”
Spock’s nostrils flared. “That is not what this class is about, and you are wasting everyone’s time. Now fall in line and await today’s lesson.”
“Oh, come on,” Jim goaded as he stepped up into Spock’s line of sight and blatantly sized him up. “Just throw a punch - one little punch.”
Spock’s jaw worked tightly under his clean-shaven flesh. “No.”
Jim surged into Spock’s personal space, stopping a couple of inches from Spock’s unflinching frame. His smile went predatory.
“Yes.”
Jim was aching to hurt something. His bones cracked under the weight of Jim’s ineffectual anger, his frustration.
His mother had died three days ago.
Three days ago she had been alive.
Now she wasn’t.
Now she was ash and dust, blown away in the wind - and Jim hadn’t even been able to bury her.
Professor Pike had appeared beyond the fire and flames like a phoenix or the devil, telling him that they had to leave now or else Jim would be prosecuted as a mutant - or maybe killed.
The Federation liked to play at perfect peace and harmony and that bullshit, but not when it came to muties. Potential dangers to society - uncontrollable and volatile - deadly.
Jim had sent his mother up in flames; sent his step-father to an early grave all because -
When Jim had been secured in a hovercar with Pike and a very quiet driver whose name and face meant nothing through the haze of sorrow, Pike had faced Jim.
“I’m taking you somewhere safe.”
“Nowhere is safe if I’m there,” Jim scratched out, his throat still scorched from smoke.
Pike was silent for a long time as he stared out one window, and Jim did the same.
Finally the Professor said, “You’ll be able to heal here. You’ll be able to mourn.”
Jim’s nails dug into his soot-stained palms, cut through skin and oozed blackened blood.
“I’m fine,” he croaked. “I’m fine.”
So despite hating being trapped here - despite despising this prison full of sickeningly altruistic freaks - Jim dove right in. Because he was fine. Just fine.
Jim just wanted to break someone’s face, was all.
And Spock’s pretty one had been very near to Jim since he’d arrived.
Spock’s eyes flashed and hardened as he inclined his chin and looked down his nose at Jim. “We do not fight each other here. Not in the manner in which you wish.”
“And how would you know what I wish?” Jim fired back. “Oh - oh yeah. Telepath, right - empathy too? You find anything exciting? Tell me, Spock - does it ever bother you to feel everyone’s emotions but your own?”
“I will not be goaded into -”
“Do you ever wonder what’s you and what’s the rest of the world?”
“Your assumptions are asinine and -”
“Must piss you off to have no idea who or what you are, huh?”
Jim would know. He wondered it all the time.
Spock’s top lip twitched in the most subtle snarl as he cocked his head and leaned in towards Jim. “I -”
“Vulcan, mutant, computer? Which is it, Spock - what the hell are you that you can’t even feel you own -”
A psychic shockwave catapulted Jim across the quad; blasted the air from his lungs and left him gasping on the ground as his spine screamed from the fall. A familiar black veil closed over Jim’s vision, seeped into his blood and pumped through his heart. Everything began to burn and spark and curdle, and fuck did Jim feel alive again.
Jim inhaled the scent of charred grass just as he rolled on his stomach and pressed his palms to the ground to stand. The earth beneath him was scorched; crisp and dusty like a bolt of lightning had struck this single spot.
But it wasn’t lightning. It was Jim. And judging by the few distant gasps and the foreboding silence descending upon the group, everyone was beginning to get just what the hell was wrong with Jim Kirk.
He only had to look at his hands, his forearms - all streaked and shot through with what looked like tar, thick and toxic - to get the gist of what they saw.
This wasn’t even a full transformation. Jim knew that, because the first and last time it had happened had been - well.
Jim chuckled as he brought himself to his unsteady feet, ignoring the nausea roiling in his stomach. His grin stretched over a face he knew would be mapped in roads and rivers of black - just as he knew the blue of his eyes would be seeping into glimmering white and orange, like the sky relenting to a blinding sunset.
Spock remained several feet away, his expression as openly horrified as a Vulcan’s could be.
Jim felt a spark of shame flare within him; felt it ripple and spread like wildfire through his limbs as he looked at Spock’s face, looked at his peers’ faces. Maybe they were just surprised - maybe they just wanted Jim gone as soon as possible - or maybe they were disgusted. Whatever the play of emotion on their faces, it was directed at Jim, who felt it like another solid psychic blow to the gut.
Despite his growing sense of dread and fury at being swatted aside like a fly, Jim choked out a laugh. He captured Spock’s wide gaze from across the grass and began to stalk forward in a steady march, his hands fisted at his sides.
Jim smelled acrid burning and realised it was his clothes beginning to singe off his frame. They were breaking out in holes like open sores against the heat that licked at Jim’s flesh. Another side-effect he’d discovered while secretly testing his abilities when no one had been around.
See, Jim couldn’t let anything lie. He had to poke, had to prod and look at angles and turn things on their head. It didn’t take long for him to learn that he didn’t simply burst into flame or anything.
Jim was a sunspot - he wasn’t the flame. His body was like a microwave, slowly heating and heating and eventually destroying everything in a thick, slow burn. Jim was the sun that baked the earth and set forests alight. He was a heat that couldn’t be doused - he never stopped, couldn’t stop.
Most of all, he didn’t know how to stop.
So he prowled forward with his teeth bared in a smile-snarl and spread his black-shackled arms out as if to hug Spock.
“Felt good, didn’t it Spock? Wanna try again? Gotta admit you caught me off guard there.”
Spock’s face shut down like a maximum security prison. The silence that blanketed them was more deafening than the blood pounding in Jim’s ears.
“Whaaat? I thought you liked it - Hey!”
Spock yanked Jim’s wrist in a cold, iron grip and literally began to drag him away.
“Gaila, I regret to inform you that I will be unable to lead class today,” Spock said in the most fucked-out voice Jim could imagine. “Please take care of the lesson.”
Jim didn’t hear Gaila’s reply because he was busy spluttered and flailing to no avail. A growl surfaced from the depths of his chest as he watched his arm bruise midnight and fervid from the force of Jim’s emotion.
“Fuck you, don’t touch me!” Jim flared and gasped as he watched Spock’s glove begin to melt and peel away around the heat of Jim’s skin. “Let me the fuck go - your glove is burning through, you pointy-eared bastard!”
Jim was being wordlessly dragged inside and pulled up the grand staircase - and his initial reaction of utter contempt was beginning to dissipate as he realised how little control he had against Vulcan strength. He could see and feel the darkness receding as more blotches of tanned skin shyly reappeared.
“Spock - Christ, talk to me, you asshole!”
Spock whipped around at the top of the stairs, his fingers like steel and his eyes just as cold. “Shut up.”
Jim blinked and boggled, obediently silent due to minor shock. He shivered, the chill originating from the blistering, bright green fingers still clasped around his tainted wrist.
“What do you think you’re gonna do?” Jim asked as he allowed himself to be led like a dog on a fucking leash. No way in hell he was keeping quiet. “Tattle to Pike again - get me kicked out?”
Spock mumbled something under his breath about childish antics and then said, clear and crisp, “Pike will hear of this whether I inform him or not. As for expulsion, I fear for a society that might bear the brunt of your tantrums.”
“Tan-tantrums?”
The new sear of Jim’s skin against Spock’s palm, and the accompanying faint flinch from the Vulcan, had Jim’s aggravation boiling over. If Spock wanted to get burned, then let him! Masochistic bastard.
“You threw the first punch, man. I didn’t even touch you -although neither did you, really, but that’s not the point. The point is it’s not my fault if you can’t keep your shit together. Chill out.”
Spock prowled down the hall with Jim in tow, all smooth loping strides that Jim had to skip and hop to keep up with.
“Where are you taking me, dammit!” Jim demanded even as Spock jerked open the door to one of the shared bathrooms near their bedroom. “Sorry - what - wait.” Jim gulped, all of a sudden feeling incredibly claustrophobic and confused. “What are we - I don’t swing that way, dude.”
Spock actually might have rolled his eyes, but the action was masked when he whipped open the fogged glass door of the shower and literally shoved Jim in.
“What the f- AH!”
An icy spray rained down on Jim and a great plume of steam hissed and rose off Jim’s bared flesh. Jim was too shocked to even form proper swears as frigid water sluiced over his head, plastered what remained of his charred clothes to his body, and clung to his eyelashes.
Spock stood at the open door; cool as a fucking cucumber, with his arms crossed over his chest and one eyebrow raised.
“As you say, chill out.”
“You b-bastard,” Jim gritted between clenched teeth and shivers.
Spock looked down at Jim’s feet - so did Jim. His sneakers were melted blobs and clumps around his feet, now coagulating into errant cooled lumps.
Spock pursed his lips and looked back up, his face utterly expressionless but for the triumph in his glittering eyes.
“I believe you need new shoes.”
Jim scowled and spat water in Spock’s general direction as it trickled into his mouth. “I believe you need a new soul.”
Fuck. Spock had helped him again. Would the nightmare never end?
To Be Continued...