We too have lived in Arcadia (K/Mc, NC-17, MU), Part 1
Summary: Written for the jim_and_bones Sweethearts Challenge, for the prompt FOR KEEPS: In the Mirror Universe, everyone knows Kirk belongs to Pike...until Pike gives Bones the opportunity to "win" him for himself.
Word count: 13,600 (yeah, I don't know how that happened, either)
Warnings: A milder version of the MU than some, but still: onscreen K/M sex, language, violence, bondage, and implied D/s; offscreen torture, child abuse, and death of a secondary character. But with a happy ending--really!
Beta: My dear and wonderful sangueuk, who did not just fix typos but gave the story a good seeing to, and without which it would be much poorer structurally and linguistically, and without whom I would not be nearly as happy.
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“Do you want to die fast, or die slow?” McCoy asks, brandishing a hypo over the prone form of Ensign Bayar.
“Neither,” Bayar gasps, clutching his bad arm with his good one and struggling to get out of the biobed.
“Hey, hey!” McCoy grabs him by the shoulders and presses him back down. “I’m kidding. For God’s sake, Bayar, you should know that by now. It’s just a simple regen job; it’ll take 20 minutes.”
“Yeah, okay, doc.” Bayar settles down and doesn’t squeak when McCoy releases the hypo of anetrizine into his neck. He doesn’t really need to be knocked out for this, but he’s excitable and has plenty to worry about without watching McCoy stitch his skin back together.
Bayar is a klutz and an underachiever who’s in Sickbay twice a month at least, but he’s outdone himself this time, precipitating an accident that depressurized the shuttle bay just in time for Admiral Pike’s arrival. The sight of one of the Fleet’s most feared commanders gasping like a fish and diving back into his shuttle is one that’s Pike’s likely to try to purge from memory by sending Bayar on a long trip to the Agony Booth. It’s a measure of McCoy’s very moderate influence that he’s being allowed to patch up Bayar before instead of after.
“Do you think we’ll be seeing the Admiral?” Chapel asks, handing him the protoplaser.
“Doubt it.” Any attention to Medical from Fleet higher-ups is usually the negative kind; McCoy is happy to be ignored and have his minor medals and paltry bonus waiting for him during brief trips home. “There’s a senior staff dinner tomorrow night, that’s about it. Mostly, I think he has business with the Captain.”
A second later the door whisks open and the Admiral himself enters, blazing scarlet and bronze and flanked by no fewer than four Imperial Guards.
“Doctor McCoy.” The Admiral gives him a brief nod, and then points to the biobed. “Is that the man who caused the accident?”
“Ensign Bayar--yes, sir.”
“Wake him up.”
“But, Admiral--” a glance at Pike’s eyes halts any further objection. Just like that, McCoy is skidding into mortal peril territory. “Chapel, 3 ccs of cordrazine.”
She hands it to him like they’re defusing a bomb, and Bayar comes to groggy consciousness to see Admiral Pike inches from his face.
“Ensign, you’re the reason I had a very bad afternoon.” The Admiral’s face is open, pleasant, and McCoy realizes he’s in a whole different dimension of scary-ass motherfucker from the blustering threat junkies who make up most of Fleet command. “Would you care to apologize before you die?”
“Don’t sir,” Bayar blubbers. “Please, don’t--”
“That’s not an apology.” Pike’s voice is patient. “Try again.”
“I’m sorry I inconvenienced you, sir, it’ll never--”
“That’s better.” Pike takes five steps back and gestures for McCoy and Chapel to do the same. McCoy’s thoughts of intervening only last a second; Bayar’s had a target on his back from the day his parents bought his way onto the Fleet’s flagship, or at least the day the credits were spent.
Pike pulls out his phaser and shoots Bayar in the chest, disinterested and efficient as if he’s swatting a fly.
“There, I’ve saved you some work, Doctor,” he says, holstering the phaser, as Bayar drops back onto the bed with a terminal whuf of air. “Maybe you could use the spare time to join me for a drink. Does 1800 hours work for you? My quarters.”
McCoy thinks the end of never would work better, but what can he say? “It’ll, uh, be my honor, Admiral.”
“Yeah,” Pike says, blue eyes twinkling at what prospect McCoy hates to think. “Mine, too.”
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The VIP guest quarters on the Enterprise are lavish to the edge of being obscene and heavily decorated with very large, very bored Imperial Guards who make the most of the opportunity to scan, bio-identify, and eventually frisk McCoy. After plenty of all three, McCoy is ushered into the presence of Admiral Pike, who's sitting at his ease in a very big chair holding a very small cup of coffee.
"Doctor," he says, raising the cup to his lips without taking his eyes off McCoy. "You're three minutes late."
"I'm sorry, sir," McCoy says, trying to keep his posture relaxed even though his heart started hammering the second he looked into those pale eyes. "Your guards are very--thorough.”
"They're pigs," Pike says brightly, topping off his coffee and adding sugar with a tiny silver spoon. "But they know how to assess a threat." He waves a generous host’s hand. "Fix yourself a drink.”
Pike's bar is like the Empire in miniature: the nectar squeezed from a thousand subject planets for the pleasure of the powerful. There's Napoleon brandy and Kagari whiskey and Halkan silverwine, and McCoy would be happy for a shot of any of them or all of them mixed together, but he needs to keep his wits about him. He mixes a vodka and soda and settles for imagining the offense Chekov would take if he saw it.
He sits down in an ornate chair opposite Pike and tries not to gulp his drink, though his mouth feels dry as a desert.
“Sorry about that business earlier, in Sickbay,” Pike says with a vague gesture, as if he’s referring to a spilled drink instead of a dead man. “You understand that it wasn’t about my personal inconvenience, yes? It’s not even about the chain of command. It’s about order. And Bayar--” Pike gives a little chuckle. “He was an agent of chaos if I ever saw one.”
McCoy may joke about death with the living, but he doesn’t like jokes about the dead, so he keeps quiet and racks his brain to think why Pike would be sharing his thoughts, his vodka, or anything else with a lowly CMO.
“It’s good to be back on the Enterprise,” Pike continues. “I haven’t been on board her on active duty since--well, you know.” McCoy does, and it appears that Pike isn’t any happier with the memory than he is. Pike keeps his head bowed in thought for a moment, and then reaches for the delicate china sugar bowl and stirs more into his coffee. The clinking sets McCoy’s teeth on edge.
“Well,” Pike says, face clearing. “How are you, Doctor? Anything of interest happen to you on this mission?”
McCoy tenses a little at the change in subject, trying to force himself to think of conquered planets, silent fiery battles, weird alien creatures and odder humans. But only one thing leaps vividly to his mind. He flushes and mentally curses his too-revealing face.
“Well, nothing that hasn’t been in the reports, sir,” he says, forcing himself to meet Pike’s eyes.
“Nothing?” Pike sets his cup down with a brittle clank that makes McCoy jump and leans forward, clasping his hands. “Either you have a bad memory, Dr. McCoy, or you’re hard to impress. Because I really would have thought you’d remember having Jim Kirk’s cock in your mouth.”
The floor tilts away in front of McCoy, and he has just the presence of mind to put his drink down before it ends up in his lap. He does a quick calculation of Pike’s current political capital weighed against Kirk’s, of his own value to either one. The results aren’t promising; Kirk is still the Fleet’s favorite attack dog, but rumor has Pike as its next Grand Admiral.
“Yes, sir,” he finally manages, through a cough. “I remember that.”
“I bet you do,” Pike says, and his smile is tighter, sharper. “That was the first time, but not the beginning, was it?”
“No, sir,” McCoy breaths.
“Good. I’m glad your memory isn’t faulty after all; I know ways to jog it that you wouldn’t like. But this is exactly what I want to talk about, McCoy. Don’t worry,” he adds, probably seeing the veiled panic on McCoy’s face. “I really just do want to talk. For now.” He picks up McCoy’s glass and hands it to him. “I know everything important already, of course, but I’d like to hear it from you.” He smiles easily again. “I find a different perspective can sometimes be useful. You know, in making decisions.”
McCoy pulls an old-fashioned handkerchief from his pocket and wipes his face. He thinks with longing of a time he didn’t know Kirk, or Pike, or what kind of temptation the universe contained.
++++
“McCoy! Arm phasers and--shit!”
The last thing McCoy sees before G forces threaten to suck his breakfast out through his eyeballs is the nose of another fighter meters from his face.
Qazi is practically sitting on her sidestick, forcing their fighter to bank away into open space with a tooth-rattling shudder. By the time McCoy sees stars--real ones, not the hallucinatory kind--he’s got vomit on his boots, a tear in his flightsuit, and a couple of what will surely be spectacular bruises, but he’s alive.
“Fucking maniac,” Qazi spits. “We’re not supposed to get within 200 meters of other fighters. These old rustbuckets can’t maneuver worth shit, and that guy was practically up my colon. I fucking hate these grandstanding asswipes who have to win every fucking exercise.”
McCoy couldn’t agree more. He has a single goal for combat drills, which is to stay alive--the main reason he tries to get paired with Qazi, since she’s nominally less suicidal than the other first-year pilot wannabees. As a rule, McCoy keeps his mouth shut and his eyes on the console and lets Qazi do her thing. It’s been working well enough that McCoy can’t think enough bad things about the hotshot who nearly got them killed. As it is, only a quarter of the Imperial Academy’s entering class make it to graduation, and of the available options--accidental death, execution, desertion, and service in the galaxy’s greatest and most despotic military force--a training accident is the second least attractive.
A half hour later, the fighter is on the ground and Qazi and McCoy are unbuckling and trying to get their Earth legs back.
“What do you think? Jump that guy now, or later?” Qazi says.
“Why wait? Now’s good.” McCoy curls his fingers into his sweaty palms and anticipates offloading some adrenaline.
They find the hotshot’s craft by its tail design, a bunch of green slashes and the name Anaconda, which as far as McCoy’s concerned is what the its pilot can shove up his ass.
The pilot’s standing in the middle of a gaggle of admiring cadets, and the drill instructor is handing him the day’s Double Eagle coin, which makes McCoy even madder. The Double Eagle can get you out of an exam or a drill or an agonizer session and has an astronomical value on the cadet black market, and McCoy’s held one in his hand exactly twice, both times because of Qazi and neither of which she let him keep.
As McCoy waits for the sycophantic little crowd to drift away he sizes up the pilot, a human of McCoy’s height and about half of his circumference. He’s blond and blue eyed and has good teeth, a pretty face, and a way of carrying himself that says richer than the Emperor or somebody’s pet or both.
McCoy doesn’t care. As soon as the pilot’s alone except for a few buddies, McCoy strides up to him. The pilot smirks, shifting his weight to one hip like he’s posing for a holo and waiting for McCoy’s admiration.
Instead, he gets a sock in the jaw that knocks him on his ass.
It’s then that McCoy notices that Qazi has vanished. The pilot’s buddies step forward to grab McCoy’s arms, and the pilot rises slowly to his feet, wiping blood and saliva from the corner of his mouth. McCoy’s pinned and the guy’s conscious and can do whatever he wants, but McCoy, stubborn bastard that he is, is going to make his point or die in the attempt, probably both.
“You son of a bitch. You damn near got us killed up there, all of us. And you got rewarded for it--how precious. Is it mummy and daddy’s money, or are you going to go bend over for the drill instructor now?”
The pilot’s amused expression doesn’t change. He gets up in McCoy’s space, cups McCoy’s chin, and lets grey-ringed eyes scan back and forth over McCoy’s face.
“What a mouth,” he says softly. Then, stepping back, “You were in the Hila, weren’t you? But you’re not the pilot; you don’t look like you could drive a Go Kart. What are you, an engineer? An administrative puke?”
“A doctor.” That makes the cronies holding McCoy crack up, but the pilot just raises an eyebrow.
“Doctor, huh?” The man is practically on top of him now; McCoy can feel the brush of his flightsuit, catches a clean whiff of soap and sweat. “Then tell your pilot that when someone tries a head-on attack in a Reptilia class fighter, a displacement roll is the worst possible defense because you can’t fire aft thrusters until you’re out of the turn.”
McCoy nods slowly, as if he’s following all this jargon but is skeptical. It’s weird, because the pilot is acting more like the Academy instructors would--if they actually cared about teaching--and less like a guy who’s about to knee him in the groin and drop him to pavement.
“So you’re going to end up in front of your attacker,” the pilot continues, pantomiming the maneuver with long, slim hands, “and probably with a torpedo up your exhaust, which is what would have happened except the goal of the exercise was to take out the starship not blow up doctors. Lucky you.”
“Yeah, well,” McCoy says, clinging to his anger because at the moment, it’s all he’s got. “You broke the rules.”
The grin drops off the pilot’s face. “The first rule of combat,” he says in a voice that’s deep and husky and still oddly adolescent, “is that there are no rules.” He reaches toward McCoy’s heart and McCoy tries not to flinch, but the pilot just fingers his ident card. “Coincidentally, also the first rule of life, Dr. McCoy.”
McCoy nods, conceding the truth of the sentiment while he waits for the cold steel of a dagger in his gut. Instead, the pilot nods in turn. A faint smile appears on his wide mouth, and he gestures to his buddies to let McCoy go.
“You know, Doctor, you’ve been the highlight of an otherwise boring and routine day. Tell you what--I’ll buy you a drink to make up for scaring the shit out of you. Kolshari’s at 2200--ask for Kirk’s table.”
The shiny pilot and his gang move off, leaving McCoy with confused feelings and a strange tightness in his groin. He wouldn’t be the first to react to proximity to death that way, but right now he isn’t thinking of death at all.
McCoy finds Qazi in the locker room, giving her boots a lazy polish. She stares up at him in frank surprise at his continued existence.
“Gee, Qazi, thanks for your support. That worked so well with us as a team.”
She gives him a nervous look disguised as a sneer. “Please, McCoy. It was Kirk. Only an idiot would go after that guy, which means you, not me.”
“Who is he?” McCoy asks, blocking her egress out the door. “Some First Families kid trying to put the gloss on a commission?”
Now Qazi rolls her eyes and relaxes. “You really are the dumbest hick ever, McCoy. Kirk. As in George Kirk. Ring a bell? Sacrified the Kelvin to save his pregnant wife? Wife was executed an hour after she gave birth?”
“Oh, the Narada thing. Of course I know about that.” It’s one of those don’t-fuck-with-the-Empire stories every kid hears. “But the baby--oh.” The baby, of course, would now be a man of 22 or so, assuming he’d been allowed to live.
“Yeah, ‘oh,’” Qazi says, spitting a final time on her boot and getting to her feet. “For his parents’ crimes, he was condemned to a life of service to the Empire. And he was making a good start of it, too, in the beryllium mine on Argalon Seven.” McCoy flinches in spite of himself; hard slave labor is one of the few things a full citizen of the Empire is guaranteed to avoid in a short and miserable life.
“So how did he end up at the Academy?”
“Captain Pike pulled him out. Bought his freedom at the age of 14. Bought him, if you believe the stories, even though Imperial citizens aren’t supposed to be for sale. Pike wanted a protege, someone who’d be completely loyal to him.” Qazi looks mystified by the concept of loyalty, which in the Imperial Fleet is abstract and theoretical at best. “That’s the guy you punched, McCoy. What did you do to stop him from killing you? Suck his cock? Offer him your meager worldly possessions?”
“Nothing,” McCoy shrugs. “He asked me out to some bar for a drink.”
Qazi feigns collapsing from sarcastic laughter. “Right, a drink. He’s either going to fuck you blind or kill you dead, and either way it’ll be slow and painful. Too bad,” she says, and gives him a pat on the ass as she heads out the door. “Looks like I’m going to need a new co-pilot.”
+++++
Pike’s being slow and diligent, maintaining the veneer of courtly politeness, but it’s agony all the same because McCoy knows where the story’s headed: to the intersection of what McCoy wants and Pike wants, and the surety of who was more likely to get it in the end.
“It was pure chance, sir,” McCoys, testing a defense. “If I hadn’t met Kirk that day, I doubt we would have met at all.”
“I disagree,” Pike says with another of his pleasant, damning smiles. “I think you were bound to find each other, one way or another.”
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McCoy arrives at Kolshari’s 10 minutes early, enough time to observe that it’s not a bad place to die. It’s got less of the ugly, ornate Imperial decor than a lot of places in the Heights, and there are no fights in progress or Orion women dancing in cages, which is a plus.
McCoy makes his way past the bar to the dim back section where dark shapes cluster around candlelit tables. The air is warm and thick with perfume, and the quiet is punctuated by the occasional burst of laughter or moan.
The host looks suspicious when McCoy mentions Kirk’s name, but when McCoy places his finger on the guy’s PADD to verify his identity, it dings in approval.
Kirk’s table is in the very back, close to the exit and with a good view of the door. Kirk himself is sitting at ease on a low sofa, knees splayed, arm resting on the back, wearing dark civvies that blend into his surroundings. He carries his height and slimness with grace and an understated pride that’s rare in an Imperial Court full of burly arms and heaving bosoms.
And then, of course, there are those eyes. They slide toward McCoy in bare acknowledgement of his arrival, and Kirk jerks his head a little to the left, indicating that McCoy should sit down. He does, a calculated distance, not too close and not too far away.
“T’Vann owes me 50 credits. She said you wouldn’t show.”
McCoy shrugs. “I figured that if you wanted to kill me, it wouldn’t matter where I was, but if you really wanted to buy me a drink...well, I wouldn’t mind that drink.”
Kirk nods slightly as if McCoy has passed a test and gestures for the waiter.
“Bottle of Game Cock and two glasses.”
If Kirk didn’t have McCoy’s full attention already, that would have gotten it. He expected Kirk to know his full name, maybe even where he’s from, but the name of his favorite bourbon is a nice touch.
“You don’t strike me as a bourbon drinker,” McCoy says. In fact there’s nothing about Kirk that ties him to any particular place, or even any class, now that he’s out of uniform. The bottle arrives and Kirk sloshes a few fingers into each glass, clinks them in a toast to McCoy doesn’t know what.
“Yeah, well. I didn’t have Aunt Lida to mold my tastes in the right direction.” Now McCoy’s eyes widen a little. He knows there’s no information that can’t be bought for a price, but wonders why Kirk would pay to find out the name of the woman who raised him. If it’s to intimidate him, it doesn’t work; there’s no one left in the world whose life is valuable to McCoy except his own, and that’s been an iffy proposition since the day he joined the Fleet.
So McCoy just gives a little snort of amusement and lets the first-class bourbon roll over his tongue. The corner of Kirk’s mouth hitches up into something close to a smile.
“What I can’t figure out,” Kirk says, as if they’d been having a conversation. “Is why the fuck you joined the Fleet in the first place.”
“Press gangs were after me. I figured I’d get a better deal if I went in voluntarily.”
“And so you signed up for the Imperial Academy?” Kirk laughs, not a bitter, ironic laugh but the kind that makes the corners of his eyes crinkle. “You have the most fucked-up sense of self-preservation I’ve ever seen. Do you know who set the gangs after you?”
“I have a pretty good idea.”
Kirk nods, as if he knows the story about McCoy’s ex-wife and his rabid pack of in-laws. “You’ll have to tell me about it some time.”
McCoy’s mouth goes a little dry at that; it’s s intimate, much more so than if Kirk had made an actual pass. He cocks his head in surprise, trying to read Kirk’s opaque face. It’s the first time in six months in this rotten-at-heart city that anyone’s expressed a personal interest in him, and he’ll be damned if he knows why it should be Kirk.
“I will,” McCoy says. “If you want.”
Kirk just nods absently and glances away, eyes following a woman in a short silver dress who’s walking out, but his hand moves to rest on McCoy’s thigh, and McCoy can feel his flesh heat underneath it.
The sexual economy of the Academy being byzantine at best and poisonous at worst, the only sex McCoy has had since coming to San Francisco has been what he can buy, which hasn’t been much in either quantity or quality. But it isn’t sex that McCoy’s been craving. Kirk’s got him half-seduced by taking an interest, and the other half by sliding his long fingers up and down the inseam of McCoy’s trousers like he’s trying, very slowly, to light a fire.
McCoy feels his balls tighten, his body racing ahead of his brain. Kirk is reading him like a backlit PADD, watching the effect his touch has on McCoy’s breathing, the way he’s shifting as his trousers seem to shrink a size. Kirk’s watching McCoy watching him, watching the way the sharp point of Kirk’s tongue darts out across his lower lip, leaving it glistening.
McCoy’s used to people--especially people like Kirk--taking what they want as soon as they know they can get it. Kirk’s treating him like an equal, letting him make up his own mind, and McCoy’s mind and body both approve.
To show his approval, he picks up Kirk’s hand and moves it slightly to the left, so that it rests on his groin.
Kirk breaks into a smile that could slaughter thousands. He turns away to grab the edge of the velvet privacy curtain and draws it around the little booth. It must be noise-cancelling, because suddenly McCoy can hear his own pulse in his ears.
“You have five seconds to finish that drink,” Kirk says.
Without hesitation, McCoy slams it down and then Kirk’s half on top of him, hand wrapped around the outline of his dick, lips and teeth buried in his neck.
Kirk’s body is curiously light; McCoy feels like he could push him off if he wanted to, which he doesn’t, never minding the fact that Kirk is probably a walking encyclopedia of hand-to-hand combat tricks. But in this form of engagement, at least, McCoy is an even match. He shoves a hand up the hem of Kirk’s shirt to stroke the warm flesh of his waist and brush across his flat belly, and with the other he cups Kirk’s ass, a flyboy dream, round and taut under the pressure of his fingers.
Kirk is above him, a hard male weight, breathing into his ear, whispering hot, nasty things as McCoy’s senses fill with cologne and candle wax and the music of his own blood pounding in his ears. He threads a hand through Kirk’s short hair and pulls his head down, craving the taste of his mouth.
Kirk pulls back, just an inch or two, and puts a warning finger against his lips.
“No kissing.”
McCoy gives a little groan of disappointment, but his body’s already moving on, as Kirk tightens his grip on McCoy’s crotch and presses up, increasing the pressure almost to the point of pain. It feels wonderful.
“Enough, enough,” McCoy gasps. “I’ll come if you keep doing that.”
“Might as well get the first one out of the way,” Kirk says. He replaces his hand with his knee, uses his free fingers to open McCoy’s shirt, bare his chest, and roll his nipples between his thumb and forefingers while he leans forward and, delicately and precisely, bites McCoy’s earlobe with sharp teeth as he presses up into McCoy’s groin.
McCoy comes with his whole body, every muscle and nerve and vein in on the action. There’s nothing left over for him to make a sound, so he rides it for long moments as Kirk milks him with a hand against damp wool.
When he opens his eyes, Kirk is standing above him, and McCoy is feeling both massively satisfied and faintly embarrassed, even though it’s clear that he’s done what Kirk wanted him to do. McCoy looks down at his ruined trousers and open shirt and imagines his red face and sweaty forehead.
“I must look like an idiot.”
“No,” Kirk says, brushing the stray hair back from McCoy’s forehead. “You really don’t.”
With Kirk’s groin at eye level, it’s impossible not to notice that he’s hard.
“So, uh,” McCoy says, making a gesture toward his fly. “Do you want me to--?”
“Smooth,” Kirk says with a laugh. “You know, you’re hotter when you keep your mouth shut. But no, thanks.”
“You sure?” McCoy reaches toward Kirk’s groin again, narcotized brain wondering why Kirk is being coy.
Kirk grabs his wrist and bends it away, hard enough to hurt.
“I said no. No cocks, no fucking.”
“No cocks?” McCoy is baffled. “But isn’t that kind of the point? Besides, you just--”
“No kissing, no touching bare skin below the waist,” Kirk says tightly, as if he’s a squadron leader rattling off the rules for a drill. “No blow jobs and no fucking.”
“Okay,” McCoy says slowly, wondering exactly what weird-ass shit he’s gotten himself into. It sounds deeply perverted, but he can’t figure out why.
“You’ve got an apartment?” Kirk’s voice continues in that tight monotone, as if he’s angry and trying not to let it show.
“Yeah,” McCoy says before he can wonder if he should say no.
“Then we go back there. We fool around some more, and I come on you.” It’s a proposal spoken like a declarative. Kirk’s eyes give away nothing, but there’s a brittle hardness in his voice.
“It’ll make sure it’s good for you,” Kirk adds after a few painful moments of silence.
McCoy cringes a little inwardly. It might be the endorphins, but McCoy wants to remove the pressure, whatever it is, bring back the easy, smiling Kirk of a half hour before.
“I’d like that,” McCoy says, like it’s a natural and tempting proposition. “My place is a one-room shithole, but you probably guessed that already.”
Kirk relaxes fractionally, and the smile begins to creep back. “If it’s got a bed and less than one roach per meter, it’ll do.”
“I haven’t counted them lately,” McCoy says, and lets Kirk put a hand on the small of his back and pilot him out of the bar and into the chilly night.
Usually, McCoy wouldn’t walk anywhere in the city at night without a well-armed group, but Kirk is an effective deterrent, even with his skinny profile and baby face, his hands shoved into his pockets. It’s in the way he carries himself, the way he processes his surroundings, the strangely proprietary way he looks at McCoy. It’s something way beyond the knee-jerk belligerence that surrounds McCoy from hour to hour, and it pulls him onward, even as the sensible parts of McCoy’s brain tell him he should back away.
In McCoy’s apartment, in McCoy’s hard old bed, Kirk does just what he promised. They strip down to their shorts and Kirk shows him just how many things can be done with lips and tongues and skin. McCoy comes again with his groin pressed into a pillow, cotton-clad ass in the air while Kirk dry-humps him. Then Kirk flips him over, strips off his own shorts, and straddles him, working his own pale, splendid cock until he comes all over McCoy’s chest as if daring him to prove it isn’t a victory.
Afterward, when they’re lounging in bed and eating leftovers from McCoy’s tiny refrigerator, McCoy asks, “Is this because of him? Because of Pike?”
Kirk looks at him blankly, takes the container of food out of McCoy’s hand, and then slaps him, hard, across the face. McCoy, cheek stinging, is too stunned to do anything but stare.
“That’s so you remember,” Kirk says matter-of-factly. “As far as you’re concerned, he doesn’t exist, and as far as he’s concerned, you don’t either. You’re not a secret; I don’t keep any secrets from him. But believe me, you’ll be happier if you put him out of your mind. It is what it is. If it’s not enough for you, you can walk away. I mean that; any time.”
+++++
“Did Jim ever tell you the exact terms of our arrangement, McCoy?” Pike has a way of angling his head that makes it seem like he’s trying to look into McCoy’s brain, not just his eyes.
McCoy’s tried his damnedest to lead the conversation away from that topic of what he and Kirk did or didn’t do, in that bedroom or any bedroom, but Pike keeps steering it back.
“Or how much of it was voluntary on his part?” he presses.
This is a twist that McCoy hadn’t anticipated. It had been easy to view Pike as the the unseen hand keeping him and Kirk from doing what every neuron in their body was telling them to do. The thought that Kirk might have helped design his own prison is unexpected, but given what he knows now about his own capacity for submission, it hardly seems impossible.
+++++
With Kirk as his semi-lover, McCoy’s life gets both easier and more complicated. Kirk’s inner circle consists of the best, the most influential, and the most ruthless, and they accept McCoy because Kirk gives them no choice. McCoy wonders if they assume Kirk’s fucking him, or if they even know about Kirk’s strange operating instructions. There are plenty of distractions to keep McCoy away from his coursework, yet mysteriously his grades improve. On the next live-fire drill, he’s paired with Kirk, and they win. He receives the Double Eagle as a public mark of favor from Kirk while Qazi glares at him, not daring to mutter her suspicions.
None of Kirk’s cronies appear in the bedroom. Instead, it’s a colorful, revolving cast of high-class professionals and Court hangers-on. Under Kirk’s direction, McCoy couples with women and men, sometimes both at the same time, while Kirk watches, eyes bright and hot under half-closed lids, with only his own hand for company. He makes it look like this all he wants, like he’s another jaded, oversexed rich boy content for the moment with visual entertainment.
It’s only when they’re alone, grappling half-clothed until sweat trickles down the hollow of McCoy’s chest and his heart nearly bursts with frustration, that Kirk’s control flickers. Like most things with Kirk, it’s in his eyes, an echo of something he hates and fears.
McCoy tries to follow Kirk’s orders and put Pike out of his head, but he’s with them all the time, and McCoy begins to wonder if that’s the point. When he’s fucked around with Kirk to the point of climax but not of satisfaction, he can’t help wondering whether Pike keeps it for himself, if it’s a fucked-up power game or a tool of control or even a way to keep Kirk focused on the task at hand, the way trainers order their athletes not to screw anything the night before a big game. Sex comes as easily to Kirk as breathing and he insists on doing everything to perfection, so it’s a measure of his trust that he lets McCoy see what, even with the fancy trappings, amounts to constant failure.
One night, when the carnival’s moved on and it’s just Kirk and McCoy lying on sweat-damp pillows, McCoy’s head resting on Kirk’s chest, he dares a question.
“Why?”
Kirk glances down at him from beneath dark eyelashes. “Because some day, I’m going to be captain of the Enterprise.”
It seems like either the wrong answer or the wrong question, but McCoy doesn’t say anything, just waits.
“Pike’s going to get the Enterprise first,” Kirk continues. This much even McCoy, with his hopeless ear for gossip, knows. “I’ll be helmsman. Spock will be first officer, to prevent assassination--not by me, but by any of Pike’s enemies, or my friends. When Pike’s promoted, assuming we both live that long, I’ll become captain.”
“Couldn’t you anyway?” McCoy says, “by killing Pike and Spock?”
Kirk grins at McCoy like he’s a precocious child. “And then what? Spend the next five years sleeping with a dagger under my pillow until I’m murdered in turn?” He reaches out a lazy hand to comb through McCoy’s hair. “When he’s in charge of the fleet and I have the Enterprise, we’ll have something that nobody’s ever had in the Empire. Political control is meaningless without the firepower to enforce it. The Enterprise will be the greatest single weapon in the galaxy, but it’s not ultimately the captain who controls her.”
“But if Pike is Grand Admiral of the Fleet--”
“No one will be able to stop us.”
The us cuts into McCoy with a sharpness that surprises him. There’s not a cadet at the Academy (save McCoy himself, perhaps) who doesn’t have fantasies of Imperial conquest, but McCoy believes Kirk’s. It’s rational and achievable and he knows that nothing short of death will prevent either Pike or Kirk from carrying it out. And McCoy is not part of us.
“And you,” Kirk says, as if he’s overheard McCoy’s thoughts, “you’ll be CMO.”
McCoy has to laugh at that. “Oh, yeah? And preside over a flying torture chamber full of cut-rate assassins and drunks?”
“No,” Kirk says, looking almost annoyed. “You’ll be able to run it the way you want. What would be the point of having you otherwise? I want only the best on my ship.”
“Your ship?”
Kirk gives him a sharp, wary look, as if he’s revealed to much, or is getting tired of McCoy’s backtalk.
“Our ship,” Kirk says, and it’s punishment enough.
+++++
“He told me about you after the first night, you know,” Pike says. McCoy doesn’t know; he doesn’t know anything anymore, including how long he’s been in Pike’s quarters, letting Pike rake through the coals of his past.
McCoy has nothing to say, so he keeps listening.
“He told me I should put you on the Enterprise, make you CMO. I might have right away, except Puri’s brother-in-law is the Emperor’s second cousin. It was funny; he was going on about your medical skills and how you weren’t a sniveling drunkard like half the doctors in the Fleet. And I could see that his lips were swollen, and that there were bite marks on his neck.” Pike seems almost affectionate in the retelling. “You must be good, McCoy, because you had him dazzled. He said he’d never met anyone like you.”
Pike rises and stretches, taking a short turn around the room. “Excuse me,” he says. “I get stiff if I stay sitting for too long. Old injuries, I guess, or maybe just old age.” When he circles around behind McCoy’s chair, where McCoy can’t see him, the hairs on the back of his neck rise.
“What I can’t figure out,” Pike continues, “is why you wouldn’t make the most of it. You had Jim Kirk wrapped around your little finger, promising you the stars, asking nothing in return but--well, I’ll spare your blushes, McCoy. Maybe you were just too pure or notice? Or maybe you weren’t getting everything you wanted after all?”
Pike waits for an answer, so McCoy moistens his dry lips with his tongue and says, “I’d tell you if I knew, sir, but I’ve always been a piss-poor judge of what’s best for me.”
+++++
It’s an ordinary evening in Kirk’s dorm room--at least, the one that’s officially his but that he clearly doesn’t live in. They’re sprawled on the small bed, Kirk hacking away on some fiendishly complicated computer program and McCoy studying for a xenobiology exam given by the Academy’s worst and most belligerent instructor.
McCoy looks at Kirk’s face, at the dense eyebrows knit together in concentration, the full lips slightly parted, the body lax against the pillows, his whole posture free of the tightly coiled potential energy that define Kirk everywhere else. Kirk’s relaxation--what McCoy is tempted to call trust--hasn’t happened overnight, but has been slowly won, day after day, at considerable cost to himself, and still McCoy feels no closer to getting what he wants. It isn’t just sex, but that would be a start.
As he watches Kirk from beneath his half-closed eyelids, something that’s been flapping around his addled brain for weeks finally comes in for a landing.
“I can’t do this anymore.”
“So, time to have Professor Altair killed,” Kirk says, fingers still flying over his keyboard. “I can get you the name of a good assassin.”
“No, I mean this.” He doesn’t, can’t say us, but he gestures around.
“Are you fucking someone?” Kirk asks with mild curiosity. “I told you, I don’t care.”
“No.”
“Then am I boring you?” There’s a hint of warning that McCoy doesn’t heed; for better or worse, he’s always had the strength of his most suicidal convictions.
“No. These last couple of months have been--” McCoy searches for a word that Kirk won’t find embarrassing, that reveals enough but not too much. “It’s the first time in a long time that anything’s made sense.”
“But?” He can see the muscles clenching in Kirk’s jaw, twitching in his forearms. He’s an overloaded warp core ready to blow.
“I only know one way to do things,” McCoy says. It’s a confession, not an excuse, and it’s the best way he can explain it. Kirk’s had the whole sorry story of his divorce, how he clung to Jocelyn with stupid faith against mounting evidence of her betrayal until he almost forced her to kill him. He assumes that’s the quality that Kirk values in him, but if he’s wrong, he could but just as dead, and for much less. “If I keep on with this--it’s getting to the point I can’t concentrate. I’m going to get myself killed. Or expelled, which is almost the same thing.”
“I see,” Kirk says, with a look that goes straight through McCoy to his heart. Kirk’s focus swivels back to his keypad and he resumes typing. “Get out.” Kirk’s voice is even and controlled.
“Jim--”
“Get your things and get out.” That quickly, McCoy has been consigned to the discard pile of things that no longer fit into Kirk’s plans.
McCoy nods, unregarded, and scoops his stuff into his backpack.
A damp, bone-chilling wind sweeps the Quad, and McCoy feels like he’s been cast into the outer darkness. If Kirk is as economically ruthless as McCoy thinks, he’ll go back to being what he was: a hick doctor with a 50% chance of surviving the Academy and no greater ambition than to be posted as a missing-limb-cauterizer to some remote Imperial garrison. If Kirk is vindictive--which, by McCoy’s calculus, would mean he’d actually cared--there’ll be retribution.
McCoy isn’t sure which he’s hoping for.
Part 2 >>
Word count: 13,600 (yeah, I don't know how that happened, either)
Warnings: A milder version of the MU than some, but still: onscreen K/M sex, language, violence, bondage, and implied D/s; offscreen torture, child abuse, and death of a secondary character. But with a happy ending--really!
Beta: My dear and wonderful sangueuk, who did not just fix typos but gave the story a good seeing to, and without which it would be much poorer structurally and linguistically, and without whom I would not be nearly as happy.
+++++
“Do you want to die fast, or die slow?” McCoy asks, brandishing a hypo over the prone form of Ensign Bayar.
“Neither,” Bayar gasps, clutching his bad arm with his good one and struggling to get out of the biobed.
“Hey, hey!” McCoy grabs him by the shoulders and presses him back down. “I’m kidding. For God’s sake, Bayar, you should know that by now. It’s just a simple regen job; it’ll take 20 minutes.”
“Yeah, okay, doc.” Bayar settles down and doesn’t squeak when McCoy releases the hypo of anetrizine into his neck. He doesn’t really need to be knocked out for this, but he’s excitable and has plenty to worry about without watching McCoy stitch his skin back together.
Bayar is a klutz and an underachiever who’s in Sickbay twice a month at least, but he’s outdone himself this time, precipitating an accident that depressurized the shuttle bay just in time for Admiral Pike’s arrival. The sight of one of the Fleet’s most feared commanders gasping like a fish and diving back into his shuttle is one that’s Pike’s likely to try to purge from memory by sending Bayar on a long trip to the Agony Booth. It’s a measure of McCoy’s very moderate influence that he’s being allowed to patch up Bayar before instead of after.
“Do you think we’ll be seeing the Admiral?” Chapel asks, handing him the protoplaser.
“Doubt it.” Any attention to Medical from Fleet higher-ups is usually the negative kind; McCoy is happy to be ignored and have his minor medals and paltry bonus waiting for him during brief trips home. “There’s a senior staff dinner tomorrow night, that’s about it. Mostly, I think he has business with the Captain.”
A second later the door whisks open and the Admiral himself enters, blazing scarlet and bronze and flanked by no fewer than four Imperial Guards.
“Doctor McCoy.” The Admiral gives him a brief nod, and then points to the biobed. “Is that the man who caused the accident?”
“Ensign Bayar--yes, sir.”
“Wake him up.”
“But, Admiral--” a glance at Pike’s eyes halts any further objection. Just like that, McCoy is skidding into mortal peril territory. “Chapel, 3 ccs of cordrazine.”
She hands it to him like they’re defusing a bomb, and Bayar comes to groggy consciousness to see Admiral Pike inches from his face.
“Ensign, you’re the reason I had a very bad afternoon.” The Admiral’s face is open, pleasant, and McCoy realizes he’s in a whole different dimension of scary-ass motherfucker from the blustering threat junkies who make up most of Fleet command. “Would you care to apologize before you die?”
“Don’t sir,” Bayar blubbers. “Please, don’t--”
“That’s not an apology.” Pike’s voice is patient. “Try again.”
“I’m sorry I inconvenienced you, sir, it’ll never--”
“That’s better.” Pike takes five steps back and gestures for McCoy and Chapel to do the same. McCoy’s thoughts of intervening only last a second; Bayar’s had a target on his back from the day his parents bought his way onto the Fleet’s flagship, or at least the day the credits were spent.
Pike pulls out his phaser and shoots Bayar in the chest, disinterested and efficient as if he’s swatting a fly.
“There, I’ve saved you some work, Doctor,” he says, holstering the phaser, as Bayar drops back onto the bed with a terminal whuf of air. “Maybe you could use the spare time to join me for a drink. Does 1800 hours work for you? My quarters.”
McCoy thinks the end of never would work better, but what can he say? “It’ll, uh, be my honor, Admiral.”
“Yeah,” Pike says, blue eyes twinkling at what prospect McCoy hates to think. “Mine, too.”
+++++
The VIP guest quarters on the Enterprise are lavish to the edge of being obscene and heavily decorated with very large, very bored Imperial Guards who make the most of the opportunity to scan, bio-identify, and eventually frisk McCoy. After plenty of all three, McCoy is ushered into the presence of Admiral Pike, who's sitting at his ease in a very big chair holding a very small cup of coffee.
"Doctor," he says, raising the cup to his lips without taking his eyes off McCoy. "You're three minutes late."
"I'm sorry, sir," McCoy says, trying to keep his posture relaxed even though his heart started hammering the second he looked into those pale eyes. "Your guards are very--thorough.”
"They're pigs," Pike says brightly, topping off his coffee and adding sugar with a tiny silver spoon. "But they know how to assess a threat." He waves a generous host’s hand. "Fix yourself a drink.”
Pike's bar is like the Empire in miniature: the nectar squeezed from a thousand subject planets for the pleasure of the powerful. There's Napoleon brandy and Kagari whiskey and Halkan silverwine, and McCoy would be happy for a shot of any of them or all of them mixed together, but he needs to keep his wits about him. He mixes a vodka and soda and settles for imagining the offense Chekov would take if he saw it.
He sits down in an ornate chair opposite Pike and tries not to gulp his drink, though his mouth feels dry as a desert.
“Sorry about that business earlier, in Sickbay,” Pike says with a vague gesture, as if he’s referring to a spilled drink instead of a dead man. “You understand that it wasn’t about my personal inconvenience, yes? It’s not even about the chain of command. It’s about order. And Bayar--” Pike gives a little chuckle. “He was an agent of chaos if I ever saw one.”
McCoy may joke about death with the living, but he doesn’t like jokes about the dead, so he keeps quiet and racks his brain to think why Pike would be sharing his thoughts, his vodka, or anything else with a lowly CMO.
“It’s good to be back on the Enterprise,” Pike continues. “I haven’t been on board her on active duty since--well, you know.” McCoy does, and it appears that Pike isn’t any happier with the memory than he is. Pike keeps his head bowed in thought for a moment, and then reaches for the delicate china sugar bowl and stirs more into his coffee. The clinking sets McCoy’s teeth on edge.
“Well,” Pike says, face clearing. “How are you, Doctor? Anything of interest happen to you on this mission?”
McCoy tenses a little at the change in subject, trying to force himself to think of conquered planets, silent fiery battles, weird alien creatures and odder humans. But only one thing leaps vividly to his mind. He flushes and mentally curses his too-revealing face.
“Well, nothing that hasn’t been in the reports, sir,” he says, forcing himself to meet Pike’s eyes.
“Nothing?” Pike sets his cup down with a brittle clank that makes McCoy jump and leans forward, clasping his hands. “Either you have a bad memory, Dr. McCoy, or you’re hard to impress. Because I really would have thought you’d remember having Jim Kirk’s cock in your mouth.”
The floor tilts away in front of McCoy, and he has just the presence of mind to put his drink down before it ends up in his lap. He does a quick calculation of Pike’s current political capital weighed against Kirk’s, of his own value to either one. The results aren’t promising; Kirk is still the Fleet’s favorite attack dog, but rumor has Pike as its next Grand Admiral.
“Yes, sir,” he finally manages, through a cough. “I remember that.”
“I bet you do,” Pike says, and his smile is tighter, sharper. “That was the first time, but not the beginning, was it?”
“No, sir,” McCoy breaths.
“Good. I’m glad your memory isn’t faulty after all; I know ways to jog it that you wouldn’t like. But this is exactly what I want to talk about, McCoy. Don’t worry,” he adds, probably seeing the veiled panic on McCoy’s face. “I really just do want to talk. For now.” He picks up McCoy’s glass and hands it to him. “I know everything important already, of course, but I’d like to hear it from you.” He smiles easily again. “I find a different perspective can sometimes be useful. You know, in making decisions.”
McCoy pulls an old-fashioned handkerchief from his pocket and wipes his face. He thinks with longing of a time he didn’t know Kirk, or Pike, or what kind of temptation the universe contained.
++++
“McCoy! Arm phasers and--shit!”
The last thing McCoy sees before G forces threaten to suck his breakfast out through his eyeballs is the nose of another fighter meters from his face.
Qazi is practically sitting on her sidestick, forcing their fighter to bank away into open space with a tooth-rattling shudder. By the time McCoy sees stars--real ones, not the hallucinatory kind--he’s got vomit on his boots, a tear in his flightsuit, and a couple of what will surely be spectacular bruises, but he’s alive.
“Fucking maniac,” Qazi spits. “We’re not supposed to get within 200 meters of other fighters. These old rustbuckets can’t maneuver worth shit, and that guy was practically up my colon. I fucking hate these grandstanding asswipes who have to win every fucking exercise.”
McCoy couldn’t agree more. He has a single goal for combat drills, which is to stay alive--the main reason he tries to get paired with Qazi, since she’s nominally less suicidal than the other first-year pilot wannabees. As a rule, McCoy keeps his mouth shut and his eyes on the console and lets Qazi do her thing. It’s been working well enough that McCoy can’t think enough bad things about the hotshot who nearly got them killed. As it is, only a quarter of the Imperial Academy’s entering class make it to graduation, and of the available options--accidental death, execution, desertion, and service in the galaxy’s greatest and most despotic military force--a training accident is the second least attractive.
A half hour later, the fighter is on the ground and Qazi and McCoy are unbuckling and trying to get their Earth legs back.
“What do you think? Jump that guy now, or later?” Qazi says.
“Why wait? Now’s good.” McCoy curls his fingers into his sweaty palms and anticipates offloading some adrenaline.
They find the hotshot’s craft by its tail design, a bunch of green slashes and the name Anaconda, which as far as McCoy’s concerned is what the its pilot can shove up his ass.
The pilot’s standing in the middle of a gaggle of admiring cadets, and the drill instructor is handing him the day’s Double Eagle coin, which makes McCoy even madder. The Double Eagle can get you out of an exam or a drill or an agonizer session and has an astronomical value on the cadet black market, and McCoy’s held one in his hand exactly twice, both times because of Qazi and neither of which she let him keep.
As McCoy waits for the sycophantic little crowd to drift away he sizes up the pilot, a human of McCoy’s height and about half of his circumference. He’s blond and blue eyed and has good teeth, a pretty face, and a way of carrying himself that says richer than the Emperor or somebody’s pet or both.
McCoy doesn’t care. As soon as the pilot’s alone except for a few buddies, McCoy strides up to him. The pilot smirks, shifting his weight to one hip like he’s posing for a holo and waiting for McCoy’s admiration.
Instead, he gets a sock in the jaw that knocks him on his ass.
It’s then that McCoy notices that Qazi has vanished. The pilot’s buddies step forward to grab McCoy’s arms, and the pilot rises slowly to his feet, wiping blood and saliva from the corner of his mouth. McCoy’s pinned and the guy’s conscious and can do whatever he wants, but McCoy, stubborn bastard that he is, is going to make his point or die in the attempt, probably both.
“You son of a bitch. You damn near got us killed up there, all of us. And you got rewarded for it--how precious. Is it mummy and daddy’s money, or are you going to go bend over for the drill instructor now?”
The pilot’s amused expression doesn’t change. He gets up in McCoy’s space, cups McCoy’s chin, and lets grey-ringed eyes scan back and forth over McCoy’s face.
“What a mouth,” he says softly. Then, stepping back, “You were in the Hila, weren’t you? But you’re not the pilot; you don’t look like you could drive a Go Kart. What are you, an engineer? An administrative puke?”
“A doctor.” That makes the cronies holding McCoy crack up, but the pilot just raises an eyebrow.
“Doctor, huh?” The man is practically on top of him now; McCoy can feel the brush of his flightsuit, catches a clean whiff of soap and sweat. “Then tell your pilot that when someone tries a head-on attack in a Reptilia class fighter, a displacement roll is the worst possible defense because you can’t fire aft thrusters until you’re out of the turn.”
McCoy nods slowly, as if he’s following all this jargon but is skeptical. It’s weird, because the pilot is acting more like the Academy instructors would--if they actually cared about teaching--and less like a guy who’s about to knee him in the groin and drop him to pavement.
“So you’re going to end up in front of your attacker,” the pilot continues, pantomiming the maneuver with long, slim hands, “and probably with a torpedo up your exhaust, which is what would have happened except the goal of the exercise was to take out the starship not blow up doctors. Lucky you.”
“Yeah, well,” McCoy says, clinging to his anger because at the moment, it’s all he’s got. “You broke the rules.”
The grin drops off the pilot’s face. “The first rule of combat,” he says in a voice that’s deep and husky and still oddly adolescent, “is that there are no rules.” He reaches toward McCoy’s heart and McCoy tries not to flinch, but the pilot just fingers his ident card. “Coincidentally, also the first rule of life, Dr. McCoy.”
McCoy nods, conceding the truth of the sentiment while he waits for the cold steel of a dagger in his gut. Instead, the pilot nods in turn. A faint smile appears on his wide mouth, and he gestures to his buddies to let McCoy go.
“You know, Doctor, you’ve been the highlight of an otherwise boring and routine day. Tell you what--I’ll buy you a drink to make up for scaring the shit out of you. Kolshari’s at 2200--ask for Kirk’s table.”
The shiny pilot and his gang move off, leaving McCoy with confused feelings and a strange tightness in his groin. He wouldn’t be the first to react to proximity to death that way, but right now he isn’t thinking of death at all.
McCoy finds Qazi in the locker room, giving her boots a lazy polish. She stares up at him in frank surprise at his continued existence.
“Gee, Qazi, thanks for your support. That worked so well with us as a team.”
She gives him a nervous look disguised as a sneer. “Please, McCoy. It was Kirk. Only an idiot would go after that guy, which means you, not me.”
“Who is he?” McCoy asks, blocking her egress out the door. “Some First Families kid trying to put the gloss on a commission?”
Now Qazi rolls her eyes and relaxes. “You really are the dumbest hick ever, McCoy. Kirk. As in George Kirk. Ring a bell? Sacrified the Kelvin to save his pregnant wife? Wife was executed an hour after she gave birth?”
“Oh, the Narada thing. Of course I know about that.” It’s one of those don’t-fuck-with-the-Empire stories every kid hears. “But the baby--oh.” The baby, of course, would now be a man of 22 or so, assuming he’d been allowed to live.
“Yeah, ‘oh,’” Qazi says, spitting a final time on her boot and getting to her feet. “For his parents’ crimes, he was condemned to a life of service to the Empire. And he was making a good start of it, too, in the beryllium mine on Argalon Seven.” McCoy flinches in spite of himself; hard slave labor is one of the few things a full citizen of the Empire is guaranteed to avoid in a short and miserable life.
“So how did he end up at the Academy?”
“Captain Pike pulled him out. Bought his freedom at the age of 14. Bought him, if you believe the stories, even though Imperial citizens aren’t supposed to be for sale. Pike wanted a protege, someone who’d be completely loyal to him.” Qazi looks mystified by the concept of loyalty, which in the Imperial Fleet is abstract and theoretical at best. “That’s the guy you punched, McCoy. What did you do to stop him from killing you? Suck his cock? Offer him your meager worldly possessions?”
“Nothing,” McCoy shrugs. “He asked me out to some bar for a drink.”
Qazi feigns collapsing from sarcastic laughter. “Right, a drink. He’s either going to fuck you blind or kill you dead, and either way it’ll be slow and painful. Too bad,” she says, and gives him a pat on the ass as she heads out the door. “Looks like I’m going to need a new co-pilot.”
+++++
Pike’s being slow and diligent, maintaining the veneer of courtly politeness, but it’s agony all the same because McCoy knows where the story’s headed: to the intersection of what McCoy wants and Pike wants, and the surety of who was more likely to get it in the end.
“It was pure chance, sir,” McCoys, testing a defense. “If I hadn’t met Kirk that day, I doubt we would have met at all.”
“I disagree,” Pike says with another of his pleasant, damning smiles. “I think you were bound to find each other, one way or another.”
+++++
McCoy arrives at Kolshari’s 10 minutes early, enough time to observe that it’s not a bad place to die. It’s got less of the ugly, ornate Imperial decor than a lot of places in the Heights, and there are no fights in progress or Orion women dancing in cages, which is a plus.
McCoy makes his way past the bar to the dim back section where dark shapes cluster around candlelit tables. The air is warm and thick with perfume, and the quiet is punctuated by the occasional burst of laughter or moan.
The host looks suspicious when McCoy mentions Kirk’s name, but when McCoy places his finger on the guy’s PADD to verify his identity, it dings in approval.
Kirk’s table is in the very back, close to the exit and with a good view of the door. Kirk himself is sitting at ease on a low sofa, knees splayed, arm resting on the back, wearing dark civvies that blend into his surroundings. He carries his height and slimness with grace and an understated pride that’s rare in an Imperial Court full of burly arms and heaving bosoms.
And then, of course, there are those eyes. They slide toward McCoy in bare acknowledgement of his arrival, and Kirk jerks his head a little to the left, indicating that McCoy should sit down. He does, a calculated distance, not too close and not too far away.
“T’Vann owes me 50 credits. She said you wouldn’t show.”
McCoy shrugs. “I figured that if you wanted to kill me, it wouldn’t matter where I was, but if you really wanted to buy me a drink...well, I wouldn’t mind that drink.”
Kirk nods slightly as if McCoy has passed a test and gestures for the waiter.
“Bottle of Game Cock and two glasses.”
If Kirk didn’t have McCoy’s full attention already, that would have gotten it. He expected Kirk to know his full name, maybe even where he’s from, but the name of his favorite bourbon is a nice touch.
“You don’t strike me as a bourbon drinker,” McCoy says. In fact there’s nothing about Kirk that ties him to any particular place, or even any class, now that he’s out of uniform. The bottle arrives and Kirk sloshes a few fingers into each glass, clinks them in a toast to McCoy doesn’t know what.
“Yeah, well. I didn’t have Aunt Lida to mold my tastes in the right direction.” Now McCoy’s eyes widen a little. He knows there’s no information that can’t be bought for a price, but wonders why Kirk would pay to find out the name of the woman who raised him. If it’s to intimidate him, it doesn’t work; there’s no one left in the world whose life is valuable to McCoy except his own, and that’s been an iffy proposition since the day he joined the Fleet.
So McCoy just gives a little snort of amusement and lets the first-class bourbon roll over his tongue. The corner of Kirk’s mouth hitches up into something close to a smile.
“What I can’t figure out,” Kirk says, as if they’d been having a conversation. “Is why the fuck you joined the Fleet in the first place.”
“Press gangs were after me. I figured I’d get a better deal if I went in voluntarily.”
“And so you signed up for the Imperial Academy?” Kirk laughs, not a bitter, ironic laugh but the kind that makes the corners of his eyes crinkle. “You have the most fucked-up sense of self-preservation I’ve ever seen. Do you know who set the gangs after you?”
“I have a pretty good idea.”
Kirk nods, as if he knows the story about McCoy’s ex-wife and his rabid pack of in-laws. “You’ll have to tell me about it some time.”
McCoy’s mouth goes a little dry at that; it’s s intimate, much more so than if Kirk had made an actual pass. He cocks his head in surprise, trying to read Kirk’s opaque face. It’s the first time in six months in this rotten-at-heart city that anyone’s expressed a personal interest in him, and he’ll be damned if he knows why it should be Kirk.
“I will,” McCoy says. “If you want.”
Kirk just nods absently and glances away, eyes following a woman in a short silver dress who’s walking out, but his hand moves to rest on McCoy’s thigh, and McCoy can feel his flesh heat underneath it.
The sexual economy of the Academy being byzantine at best and poisonous at worst, the only sex McCoy has had since coming to San Francisco has been what he can buy, which hasn’t been much in either quantity or quality. But it isn’t sex that McCoy’s been craving. Kirk’s got him half-seduced by taking an interest, and the other half by sliding his long fingers up and down the inseam of McCoy’s trousers like he’s trying, very slowly, to light a fire.
McCoy feels his balls tighten, his body racing ahead of his brain. Kirk is reading him like a backlit PADD, watching the effect his touch has on McCoy’s breathing, the way he’s shifting as his trousers seem to shrink a size. Kirk’s watching McCoy watching him, watching the way the sharp point of Kirk’s tongue darts out across his lower lip, leaving it glistening.
McCoy’s used to people--especially people like Kirk--taking what they want as soon as they know they can get it. Kirk’s treating him like an equal, letting him make up his own mind, and McCoy’s mind and body both approve.
To show his approval, he picks up Kirk’s hand and moves it slightly to the left, so that it rests on his groin.
Kirk breaks into a smile that could slaughter thousands. He turns away to grab the edge of the velvet privacy curtain and draws it around the little booth. It must be noise-cancelling, because suddenly McCoy can hear his own pulse in his ears.
“You have five seconds to finish that drink,” Kirk says.
Without hesitation, McCoy slams it down and then Kirk’s half on top of him, hand wrapped around the outline of his dick, lips and teeth buried in his neck.
Kirk’s body is curiously light; McCoy feels like he could push him off if he wanted to, which he doesn’t, never minding the fact that Kirk is probably a walking encyclopedia of hand-to-hand combat tricks. But in this form of engagement, at least, McCoy is an even match. He shoves a hand up the hem of Kirk’s shirt to stroke the warm flesh of his waist and brush across his flat belly, and with the other he cups Kirk’s ass, a flyboy dream, round and taut under the pressure of his fingers.
Kirk is above him, a hard male weight, breathing into his ear, whispering hot, nasty things as McCoy’s senses fill with cologne and candle wax and the music of his own blood pounding in his ears. He threads a hand through Kirk’s short hair and pulls his head down, craving the taste of his mouth.
Kirk pulls back, just an inch or two, and puts a warning finger against his lips.
“No kissing.”
McCoy gives a little groan of disappointment, but his body’s already moving on, as Kirk tightens his grip on McCoy’s crotch and presses up, increasing the pressure almost to the point of pain. It feels wonderful.
“Enough, enough,” McCoy gasps. “I’ll come if you keep doing that.”
“Might as well get the first one out of the way,” Kirk says. He replaces his hand with his knee, uses his free fingers to open McCoy’s shirt, bare his chest, and roll his nipples between his thumb and forefingers while he leans forward and, delicately and precisely, bites McCoy’s earlobe with sharp teeth as he presses up into McCoy’s groin.
McCoy comes with his whole body, every muscle and nerve and vein in on the action. There’s nothing left over for him to make a sound, so he rides it for long moments as Kirk milks him with a hand against damp wool.
When he opens his eyes, Kirk is standing above him, and McCoy is feeling both massively satisfied and faintly embarrassed, even though it’s clear that he’s done what Kirk wanted him to do. McCoy looks down at his ruined trousers and open shirt and imagines his red face and sweaty forehead.
“I must look like an idiot.”
“No,” Kirk says, brushing the stray hair back from McCoy’s forehead. “You really don’t.”
With Kirk’s groin at eye level, it’s impossible not to notice that he’s hard.
“So, uh,” McCoy says, making a gesture toward his fly. “Do you want me to--?”
“Smooth,” Kirk says with a laugh. “You know, you’re hotter when you keep your mouth shut. But no, thanks.”
“You sure?” McCoy reaches toward Kirk’s groin again, narcotized brain wondering why Kirk is being coy.
Kirk grabs his wrist and bends it away, hard enough to hurt.
“I said no. No cocks, no fucking.”
“No cocks?” McCoy is baffled. “But isn’t that kind of the point? Besides, you just--”
“No kissing, no touching bare skin below the waist,” Kirk says tightly, as if he’s a squadron leader rattling off the rules for a drill. “No blow jobs and no fucking.”
“Okay,” McCoy says slowly, wondering exactly what weird-ass shit he’s gotten himself into. It sounds deeply perverted, but he can’t figure out why.
“You’ve got an apartment?” Kirk’s voice continues in that tight monotone, as if he’s angry and trying not to let it show.
“Yeah,” McCoy says before he can wonder if he should say no.
“Then we go back there. We fool around some more, and I come on you.” It’s a proposal spoken like a declarative. Kirk’s eyes give away nothing, but there’s a brittle hardness in his voice.
“It’ll make sure it’s good for you,” Kirk adds after a few painful moments of silence.
McCoy cringes a little inwardly. It might be the endorphins, but McCoy wants to remove the pressure, whatever it is, bring back the easy, smiling Kirk of a half hour before.
“I’d like that,” McCoy says, like it’s a natural and tempting proposition. “My place is a one-room shithole, but you probably guessed that already.”
Kirk relaxes fractionally, and the smile begins to creep back. “If it’s got a bed and less than one roach per meter, it’ll do.”
“I haven’t counted them lately,” McCoy says, and lets Kirk put a hand on the small of his back and pilot him out of the bar and into the chilly night.
Usually, McCoy wouldn’t walk anywhere in the city at night without a well-armed group, but Kirk is an effective deterrent, even with his skinny profile and baby face, his hands shoved into his pockets. It’s in the way he carries himself, the way he processes his surroundings, the strangely proprietary way he looks at McCoy. It’s something way beyond the knee-jerk belligerence that surrounds McCoy from hour to hour, and it pulls him onward, even as the sensible parts of McCoy’s brain tell him he should back away.
In McCoy’s apartment, in McCoy’s hard old bed, Kirk does just what he promised. They strip down to their shorts and Kirk shows him just how many things can be done with lips and tongues and skin. McCoy comes again with his groin pressed into a pillow, cotton-clad ass in the air while Kirk dry-humps him. Then Kirk flips him over, strips off his own shorts, and straddles him, working his own pale, splendid cock until he comes all over McCoy’s chest as if daring him to prove it isn’t a victory.
Afterward, when they’re lounging in bed and eating leftovers from McCoy’s tiny refrigerator, McCoy asks, “Is this because of him? Because of Pike?”
Kirk looks at him blankly, takes the container of food out of McCoy’s hand, and then slaps him, hard, across the face. McCoy, cheek stinging, is too stunned to do anything but stare.
“That’s so you remember,” Kirk says matter-of-factly. “As far as you’re concerned, he doesn’t exist, and as far as he’s concerned, you don’t either. You’re not a secret; I don’t keep any secrets from him. But believe me, you’ll be happier if you put him out of your mind. It is what it is. If it’s not enough for you, you can walk away. I mean that; any time.”
+++++
“Did Jim ever tell you the exact terms of our arrangement, McCoy?” Pike has a way of angling his head that makes it seem like he’s trying to look into McCoy’s brain, not just his eyes.
McCoy’s tried his damnedest to lead the conversation away from that topic of what he and Kirk did or didn’t do, in that bedroom or any bedroom, but Pike keeps steering it back.
“Or how much of it was voluntary on his part?” he presses.
This is a twist that McCoy hadn’t anticipated. It had been easy to view Pike as the the unseen hand keeping him and Kirk from doing what every neuron in their body was telling them to do. The thought that Kirk might have helped design his own prison is unexpected, but given what he knows now about his own capacity for submission, it hardly seems impossible.
+++++
With Kirk as his semi-lover, McCoy’s life gets both easier and more complicated. Kirk’s inner circle consists of the best, the most influential, and the most ruthless, and they accept McCoy because Kirk gives them no choice. McCoy wonders if they assume Kirk’s fucking him, or if they even know about Kirk’s strange operating instructions. There are plenty of distractions to keep McCoy away from his coursework, yet mysteriously his grades improve. On the next live-fire drill, he’s paired with Kirk, and they win. He receives the Double Eagle as a public mark of favor from Kirk while Qazi glares at him, not daring to mutter her suspicions.
None of Kirk’s cronies appear in the bedroom. Instead, it’s a colorful, revolving cast of high-class professionals and Court hangers-on. Under Kirk’s direction, McCoy couples with women and men, sometimes both at the same time, while Kirk watches, eyes bright and hot under half-closed lids, with only his own hand for company. He makes it look like this all he wants, like he’s another jaded, oversexed rich boy content for the moment with visual entertainment.
It’s only when they’re alone, grappling half-clothed until sweat trickles down the hollow of McCoy’s chest and his heart nearly bursts with frustration, that Kirk’s control flickers. Like most things with Kirk, it’s in his eyes, an echo of something he hates and fears.
McCoy tries to follow Kirk’s orders and put Pike out of his head, but he’s with them all the time, and McCoy begins to wonder if that’s the point. When he’s fucked around with Kirk to the point of climax but not of satisfaction, he can’t help wondering whether Pike keeps it for himself, if it’s a fucked-up power game or a tool of control or even a way to keep Kirk focused on the task at hand, the way trainers order their athletes not to screw anything the night before a big game. Sex comes as easily to Kirk as breathing and he insists on doing everything to perfection, so it’s a measure of his trust that he lets McCoy see what, even with the fancy trappings, amounts to constant failure.
One night, when the carnival’s moved on and it’s just Kirk and McCoy lying on sweat-damp pillows, McCoy’s head resting on Kirk’s chest, he dares a question.
“Why?”
Kirk glances down at him from beneath dark eyelashes. “Because some day, I’m going to be captain of the Enterprise.”
It seems like either the wrong answer or the wrong question, but McCoy doesn’t say anything, just waits.
“Pike’s going to get the Enterprise first,” Kirk continues. This much even McCoy, with his hopeless ear for gossip, knows. “I’ll be helmsman. Spock will be first officer, to prevent assassination--not by me, but by any of Pike’s enemies, or my friends. When Pike’s promoted, assuming we both live that long, I’ll become captain.”
“Couldn’t you anyway?” McCoy says, “by killing Pike and Spock?”
Kirk grins at McCoy like he’s a precocious child. “And then what? Spend the next five years sleeping with a dagger under my pillow until I’m murdered in turn?” He reaches out a lazy hand to comb through McCoy’s hair. “When he’s in charge of the fleet and I have the Enterprise, we’ll have something that nobody’s ever had in the Empire. Political control is meaningless without the firepower to enforce it. The Enterprise will be the greatest single weapon in the galaxy, but it’s not ultimately the captain who controls her.”
“But if Pike is Grand Admiral of the Fleet--”
“No one will be able to stop us.”
The us cuts into McCoy with a sharpness that surprises him. There’s not a cadet at the Academy (save McCoy himself, perhaps) who doesn’t have fantasies of Imperial conquest, but McCoy believes Kirk’s. It’s rational and achievable and he knows that nothing short of death will prevent either Pike or Kirk from carrying it out. And McCoy is not part of us.
“And you,” Kirk says, as if he’s overheard McCoy’s thoughts, “you’ll be CMO.”
McCoy has to laugh at that. “Oh, yeah? And preside over a flying torture chamber full of cut-rate assassins and drunks?”
“No,” Kirk says, looking almost annoyed. “You’ll be able to run it the way you want. What would be the point of having you otherwise? I want only the best on my ship.”
“Your ship?”
Kirk gives him a sharp, wary look, as if he’s revealed to much, or is getting tired of McCoy’s backtalk.
“Our ship,” Kirk says, and it’s punishment enough.
+++++
“He told me about you after the first night, you know,” Pike says. McCoy doesn’t know; he doesn’t know anything anymore, including how long he’s been in Pike’s quarters, letting Pike rake through the coals of his past.
McCoy has nothing to say, so he keeps listening.
“He told me I should put you on the Enterprise, make you CMO. I might have right away, except Puri’s brother-in-law is the Emperor’s second cousin. It was funny; he was going on about your medical skills and how you weren’t a sniveling drunkard like half the doctors in the Fleet. And I could see that his lips were swollen, and that there were bite marks on his neck.” Pike seems almost affectionate in the retelling. “You must be good, McCoy, because you had him dazzled. He said he’d never met anyone like you.”
Pike rises and stretches, taking a short turn around the room. “Excuse me,” he says. “I get stiff if I stay sitting for too long. Old injuries, I guess, or maybe just old age.” When he circles around behind McCoy’s chair, where McCoy can’t see him, the hairs on the back of his neck rise.
“What I can’t figure out,” Pike continues, “is why you wouldn’t make the most of it. You had Jim Kirk wrapped around your little finger, promising you the stars, asking nothing in return but--well, I’ll spare your blushes, McCoy. Maybe you were just too pure or notice? Or maybe you weren’t getting everything you wanted after all?”
Pike waits for an answer, so McCoy moistens his dry lips with his tongue and says, “I’d tell you if I knew, sir, but I’ve always been a piss-poor judge of what’s best for me.”
+++++
It’s an ordinary evening in Kirk’s dorm room--at least, the one that’s officially his but that he clearly doesn’t live in. They’re sprawled on the small bed, Kirk hacking away on some fiendishly complicated computer program and McCoy studying for a xenobiology exam given by the Academy’s worst and most belligerent instructor.
McCoy looks at Kirk’s face, at the dense eyebrows knit together in concentration, the full lips slightly parted, the body lax against the pillows, his whole posture free of the tightly coiled potential energy that define Kirk everywhere else. Kirk’s relaxation--what McCoy is tempted to call trust--hasn’t happened overnight, but has been slowly won, day after day, at considerable cost to himself, and still McCoy feels no closer to getting what he wants. It isn’t just sex, but that would be a start.
As he watches Kirk from beneath his half-closed eyelids, something that’s been flapping around his addled brain for weeks finally comes in for a landing.
“I can’t do this anymore.”
“So, time to have Professor Altair killed,” Kirk says, fingers still flying over his keyboard. “I can get you the name of a good assassin.”
“No, I mean this.” He doesn’t, can’t say us, but he gestures around.
“Are you fucking someone?” Kirk asks with mild curiosity. “I told you, I don’t care.”
“No.”
“Then am I boring you?” There’s a hint of warning that McCoy doesn’t heed; for better or worse, he’s always had the strength of his most suicidal convictions.
“No. These last couple of months have been--” McCoy searches for a word that Kirk won’t find embarrassing, that reveals enough but not too much. “It’s the first time in a long time that anything’s made sense.”
“But?” He can see the muscles clenching in Kirk’s jaw, twitching in his forearms. He’s an overloaded warp core ready to blow.
“I only know one way to do things,” McCoy says. It’s a confession, not an excuse, and it’s the best way he can explain it. Kirk’s had the whole sorry story of his divorce, how he clung to Jocelyn with stupid faith against mounting evidence of her betrayal until he almost forced her to kill him. He assumes that’s the quality that Kirk values in him, but if he’s wrong, he could but just as dead, and for much less. “If I keep on with this--it’s getting to the point I can’t concentrate. I’m going to get myself killed. Or expelled, which is almost the same thing.”
“I see,” Kirk says, with a look that goes straight through McCoy to his heart. Kirk’s focus swivels back to his keypad and he resumes typing. “Get out.” Kirk’s voice is even and controlled.
“Jim--”
“Get your things and get out.” That quickly, McCoy has been consigned to the discard pile of things that no longer fit into Kirk’s plans.
McCoy nods, unregarded, and scoops his stuff into his backpack.
A damp, bone-chilling wind sweeps the Quad, and McCoy feels like he’s been cast into the outer darkness. If Kirk is as economically ruthless as McCoy thinks, he’ll go back to being what he was: a hick doctor with a 50% chance of surviving the Academy and no greater ambition than to be posted as a missing-limb-cauterizer to some remote Imperial garrison. If Kirk is vindictive--which, by McCoy’s calculus, would mean he’d actually cared--there’ll be retribution.
McCoy isn’t sure which he’s hoping for.
Part 2 >>