Star Trek XI fic: Losing My Favorite Game (pt. 2/2)

[ninety6tears]

Title: Losing My Favorite Game
(2/2)
Characters/Pairings: Kirk/Uhura, Kirk/Spock (this one seems heavier on K/S). References to Kirk/OC and, very briefly, Kirk/Gaila.
Rating: M (Dammit, Jim...)
Summary: Paradoxes, occupational hazards, failure to communicate, and Jim Kirk. Companion piece to "Vulcans Don't Play Basketball" (It can probably be read as a stand-alone, but you might get a bit confused).
Warnings/Contains: Pon farr, and not really the fun kind.



I seem to have a pretty good idea of everything I was dancing around, but I can't completely explain this fact: that some part of me has just flat-out decided that one of these days I'm going to lose him for good.

I have cynically consulted what the psychologists would say and it all has too much to do with my upbringing, which I'm under the impression I very much survived. Maybe I just have this idea that sooner or later anything and everything is going to abandon me, but I would classify my attitudes more in the category of not taking anything for granted. I don't dream or fear or think so vividly: Spock's face does not attach itself to my father or anyone else when he almost gets himself killed. Nothing stitches together or compartmentalizes in any way that makes me able to analyze how particularly fucked I would be without him. It just hurts.

The thing about pain, Bones once said to me on the Academy grounds over a lunch, is you don't really remember it afterwards. I'd muttered that he had clearly never been stung by a jellyfish, recounting a family vacation and the very unique and annoying sort of itching burn of it. I've acquired in space travel a couple other examples of profound and extremely difficult to describe aches and itches, and none of them even come close to what I eventually learned is called pon farr: That first little writhing voice of it was both obscure and overpowering at once, not exactly painful, not uncomfortable in any kind of familiar way when I got the little scraps of it through last week's mind meld leftovers. Was it wanting? It didn't feel like wanting. But my experience is not particularly objective, after all.

All I could think about was the fact that he was possibly going to die, as I somehow, somehow managed to convince Bones that I needed an hour with Spock, alone, in a locked medical bay, and that he did not want to know, and that if Spock was still dying when he came back I would probably just let him kill me so there was really no point in threatening.

In a flickering moment of my life that stripped and packed all of my reservations away, I did anything and everything that felt right, words thoughtlessly mumbling past the constant lump in my throat. I felt the more proximal shocks riding through me, coming off him, as I slipped onto the bed next to him. I needed a moment to gather my senses. The state he was in by then practically looked like some kind of seizure. It just felt like I was talking to myself, comforting myself, when my unrecognizable voice started in with, "Baby?...Come on..."

My hand rubbed down his chest, and I felt it, oh God, how was that happening? Something was clinging farther into me like a flame devouring paper, and-This would be me recounting how absolutely impossible it is to get hard thinking that somebody's gonna die, if not for the fact that I was suddenly terribly turned on, not losing my mind, but quite a bit past uncomfortable at that point. Somehow I guess it gave me more of a sense that it was going to work, so with nervous, patting motions I managed to start undressing both of us, constantly muttering little soothing words to him because it made me feel better. Finally his breath seemed to kick up differently. I thoughtlessly went in, kissed him on the lips.

As far as I was concerned, my mouth was kissing lips that did not kiss, I was touching the untouchable, with an almost destroying and detached sense about the fact that this could even be happening at all. It was just too surreal, after the break-up and coming to know him better and feeling all the lack of this through his many layers of feeling, telling myself I might as well be wanting an inanimate object, it was a fruitless and pointless thing: His body rose up to greet mine like a sheet catching a gust of air, knees up, arms, his ribs nibbling hard into mine and his cock made the checklist too, I noticed, as it seemed like all I could think to do was rub and squeeze my right hand against the back of his neck like it was my only handle on sanity as I touched the rest of him in some shaky mockery of invitation.

In response to his growing urges my voice was weak, a mingling of hissing heat and reassuring softness. "Yeah, hey, hey, come on. Spock..."

All of my control over the situation was slipping, the searing red behind my vision beginning to run its own course and flare up with every surface where we touched. His lips were clumsily responding, and I had time to notice what was uncharacteristically fierce but at least present in his eyes before he bucked over and knocked my body under his, and then, I don't know. Hands came in an unfamiliar hunger to the sides of my face and were clutching through some of my hair and then fingers were grazing deliberately over my pulse and I barely realized anything at all before I was thrown in, something boiling in my veins, senses surrendering to a blurry burn of everything and nothing at once, and I don't remember-I can't remember-

Everyone on the Enterprise knows that Spock means a lot to me. People talk about it, I know they do. There's something peculiar and contradictory about us and I guess constant rumor attempts to define it. Bones, I know, doesn't think much of anything either way because he understands that it is what it is and doesn't care, but I remember that it kind of unsettled even him to see me looking the way I did when he told me that Spock might be dying earlier. When the nurses were still trying to help and I just felt this pull, like I had to see him, an irrational surge that had nothing to do with this scorching in the back of my brain; after how many times, having a job like this, that I tell myself that I would have to be okay under the pressure if something like this happened, even I can think on it and be surprised at the thrashing that was taking over in me, making we want to just shake Bones, plead with him, No you don't understand. I need to, I need, That's my man in there.

I don't know how long it was before Spock came out of it just enough to control the force of his mind moving through mine and slipped himself out of the connection as much as he could manage-thinking he was doing me a kindness, violating me less, I don't even know. But I sort of woke up, and this was me losing control again, and how can anyone even imagine this? Thinking one minute, He's dying, he's dying, and everything just churns and blows over and then I come up on the surface warm and loose, floating on waves and waves of something so fucking good I can hardly breathe, and I'm with him I'm with him I'm with him I'm with him; I feel everything.

There were words I didn't know spanning through his thoughts and every-color flames and senseless memories and also shame and that was only one percent, the rest was a constant sourceless pulsing on every skin cell of yes, this, please, and it rang through me so raw that I felt myself emitting these shouts and moans that never stopped even though I don't know how I ever took a breath. And it went on and on: Getting off was like cleaning out a gun instead of shooting it, wringing me out, reaching in and scrubbing me clean. Something was so separately revving and processing the pleasure in my body that it was impossible to really have a handle on what was physically happening, but when my eyesight recovered from the blaring pressure and I seemed to hear him groaning in every bone of my body, I had never been more thankfully aware of anyone's life, of life at all, he was okay, he was with me, he was okay and after many varying gestured mantras of this fact I came, hard: My head slammed to the backboard and he collapsed into my collarbone, my legs trembling around him as we felt through the aftershocks at the same time.

And I flopped out. Limbs falling tiredly down and just going limp for a moment, our breaths rising and falling, my eyes trained up to the ceiling as our dizzy thoughts tried to flit around each other into some composure. He reached it first and I was Oh God I was under him and I was naked, I pushed him out, off, I said, "Look at me." Clinically.

He did, and my hand went up to brush through some strands of his hair at the back of his neck, tilting him as if there was something in particular I could possibly be looking for. I just needed to be sure, needed his eyes for a second.

The way his stuff surfaces, I can ignore it if I want to, just like you can browse a book instead of reading it. The connection had been aggressively stronger a minute before, and then it was still a sensory connection, a very strong one, but the mental barrier is tricky; I'd have to learn the language all over again for us to be that close. And I browsed. The meaning as it slowly became collected and concrete, was just a swelling sense of confusion, and blunt humiliation. Some bodiless form of me was trying to crawl away from it as fast as possible.

So he let me get away. He reached out and it was fast: I felt the now very familiar brushing of his fingers at my face, and then I gasped sharply at the sensation, not painful but a blunt and ripping discomfort through my head that lasted only a second...

And I turned over, and I got my clothes back on and I got out of there as fast as I could, without looking back at him even once.

In the corridor, after I carelessly waved Chapel back in, it didn't take me long to run into Bones, who seemed to assume the worst when he saw me. He cut out a curse coming urgently up to me, but I stayed him with a hand motion and quickly saying, "He's fine. He'll be okay."

I was stopping and tiredly leaning against the wall without realizing it. I felt sick and tired, sore all over. I finally met his glance more lucidly as he looked me up and down in a sort of horror. In a faint groan, he demanded, "What the hell happened, man?" I don't think he expected me to answer. I don't know if he actually wanted me to. But I do know that the man is hardly stupid.

"Computer," I said. "Comm me to Lieutenant Uhura's quarters."

I found her in the mess; I felt like I hadn't seen her in years. I stumbled into some explanation about trying her cabin first before managing to apologetically confirm that Spock was going to be fine. This assurance was all she wanted before she took her coffee and left. I was glad she took off, because I didn't think I could really talk to her. I was angry with her all of a sudden, for reasons I knew didn't hold water, but all the same. I couldn't remember her ever truly pissing me off before with that cute bullshit superiority, but it all felt like the way she'd sized me up the moment we met as the person who'd whore all over anything sacred, the person you go to to get fucked back into one piece because he'll never say no.

I didn't think she had any idea at all that what I had just done had been hard for me. And it made me feel even crappier that I couldn't just be happy that my friend wasn't dead and be done with it. I needed a shower. I needed stupid things like somebody shampooing my hair for me and promising to kick me out of bed in the morning when I would surely feel like it was impossible to get up. Nostalgia, the kind that comes quaking up with total exhaustion, swept coldly over me. I wanted to go back and start everything over.

I thought, briefly, about just trashing all the information the ambassador had sent me at the start of this mission. There had been a tone of reservation in the kind of "You make up your mind whether you need these" in the good-luck message attached, and it's the last I've heard from him; the rest I read is myself. That Jim Kirk and his own formal accounts of a life that isn't even supposed to be mine but is another world's doctrinal history, I wanted to erase them and I wanted to forget ever being aware of the split, just to see where the pieces might fall without any push of suggested fate.

And then only a few days later, Spock almost got himself killed all over again. And something collapsed and surrendered and yanked the captain clear out of me and into dead space. Between the times I'd been peeking through some of the accounts of a life that was and is not mine with an ambassador who both is and is not my first officer, not understanding half of a fucking thing about Spock and feeling like I'll never be an exception to his laws and now being catatonically so far beyond wanting to punch him in the face out of fear and fury, I decided maybe it was about time destiny just went and fucked itself.

Or something. I was a mess. I can't even remember what the next several days of my life were like and what I did, except for, well. I had clearly been wrong about Uhura.

I'd explained to her, on Iota II, what it is Spock feels about her, what happens when she walks in the room. The best I could say was that she makes him feel safe. I didn't tell her, ever, that she does this to me too.

I wouldn't know how to tell her whether this is only something I managed to acquire mentally from Spock or if it's all me, and to me it doesn't really matter at all. I also wouldn't like having to explain what, specifically, I even mean by that-All I know is she is both put together and full of feeling at the same time, and no one does that. Everyone knows they have to stuff down and suspend their base reactions to things from time to time in this job. Not Nyota, though, she feels and she feels for everyone else every second, but she does the job, maybe with tears in her eyes but her hands don't shake ever.

This is why, when she falls apart, on some level I just completely freak out and I don't know what to do. Like I didn't know what to do when she thought she wanted to sleep with me-did want to sleep with me, it's all the same-all that time ago.

But that week she was put together, she was perfect, when I was off my second shift and she was off hers, and everything glooming to grey around my afternoon stilled and sharpened to this impossible gravity when she put her lips on me. I didn't know what was happening; she was on the table in the formal lounge, hugging me between her legs and tasting so good against me, like I'd never once kissed her before. I was trying not to calm into it too much; I had to be sure.

I don't want to say that what happened next was some sweeter translation of the post-break-up fuck-up, and I don't want to say that it was some action of her making things up to me. So I won't, because to me, that never happened. It was not that Uhura who kissed me in the lounge, it was that clean and cool cadet who blew me off ten different graceful ways all through my academy years; she had her knees shifting around my sides and looked at me all seven letters of earnest, and asked me to make us both feel good, asked me if I wanted to as if that was any kind of question at all.

I could not breathe; my mind was just chanting oh god oh god oh god in a blissful vertigo all the way to my quarters until I was wrapped up and inside her, my heart running brightly for cover in every one of her fingers against my back, every time she whined my name in a way that pulled me sharply back together. This sounds ridiculous, but what it felt like, you would think nobody had ever wanted me before even once. And God knows I wanted her back. I made sure she felt it.

So my days became sleepwalking through my duties, mumbling through paperwork and protocol with Spock, and not all but some of my nights, for a time, against all odds, I was with Uhura. At first it seemed she just had a soft soul after all that was unexplainably more able to bear my company when I was in pain, but I was so much myself, sometimes pretty happy, just being with her.

One time she mentioned I should stop in and was in the shower when I got to her cabin. I crept in after her, gave her a neck massage, and many minutes after I was on the floor licking through the creeks pouring down her body as she came in a long sweet note sitting on my lap. We laughed, untangling our legs in the cramped space so she could reach the soap that she smeared into my hair with a smirk. Before we rinsed and stepped out I held her to me, and she rested her head at my collarbone and in a weird way we were kind of slow-dancing there in the shower, me just rocking her against me.

"Jim."

"Mm."

"Remember, um...when you were able to tell me how Spock feels about me? When I'm around?"

"Sure."

"I don't know why I'm suddenly curious about this. What was it like with you?"

"...With me?"

"Yeah, what...You know, what did he feel like with you?"

"I don't know."

She pulled back to look up at me, brows creasing. "You don't know?"

I was only vaguely pondering it, realizing I'd really never actually thought about it, never bothered trying to piece out that puzzle as I was learning how to read him. I didn't manage to formulate an explanation before some understanding came over her face.

"I guess that would be kind of hard, when you're the...object. You said yourself it's not exactly like you're reading his mind, and there's no way of comparing it to when you're not with him..."

I felt a little stupid, like this was something important I'd been blind to, I'd been putting off and out of my mind. No, I'd never felt any obvious trend in how Spock reacted to me, and I hadn't really sought one out in the way I'd always tried very hard not to make myself a hefty subject to him, out of cowardice or whatever it was. Some time after Nyota said that I just tried to put it out of my mind and I made sad love to her two times that night, before we got to the conversation that made me realize I should face the music before things tipped off an edge I didn't even know we'd been approaching.

Shortly after we'd gotten into bed, I'd said something to her and she'd kind of laughed and said, "All things considered, I think it's okay for you to call me by my first name, Jim."

I had nodded and shrugged and said, "Yeah, I know it is." Meaning okay, but I wasn't going to start. I wonder if she took it the wrong way, but some minutes later she basically told me, in a nutshell, that she wouldn't know how to believe me if I supposedly loved her, and what the fuck do you say to that? The honesty, the lack of judgment and accusation in it, was the worst. It felt like a gracefully placed cue to cut this off, this thing that was really pretty great but didn't have the legs to make it out of the bedroom, at least not yet.

I would like it a lot if we fell in love properly, actually, and maybe we will, maybe we already have, but it's not surprising that anything with Nyota Uhura should end up feeling like we perpetually have to start over, and over and over again. She is, you have to understand, better than me. She's better than pretty much anybody, and if I have her now and then, if we do this a thousand more times, she will always be impossible and she will always be new.

I know fully and badly the infinite nature of circumstances; I've been too exposed for one life to what could or should or would be, but every single time she looks my way now it's like time halts to an impossible shift, morphs and compensates to allow the mere absurdity of the affection. And those are the times during that slump that I ever felt like I could still get what I wanted, regardless of the muddled determinism; I felt the pleasant swell of confidence in my mind and my identity turning back into a declaration: My name is James Tiberius Kirk. I have beat all the odds, I have saved worlds, and I will be loved, or die trying.

It's like all of it with her now, my attempts at chivalry and simple friendship and more sophisticated adoration, is an attempt to say more than thanks. I hope she knows. I can't imagine how I would begin to try to tell her something like that.

On the second night of shore leave I was in the little outdoor bar, stepping a couple seats over to help Gaila get something out of her eye, and then I asked her how she's been. We were both drunk, and we talked, and I started spilling slightly too much of my guts considering our now merely acquainted, only slightly more than professional relationship. Though my every comment about anything that night seemed to just teem with some bitter abandon, a not-so-captainly temporary outlook on the world, it was hard to tell after a point if she was laughing with me or at me. Too playful and careless a person to just tell me to shut the hell up, and I seemed to keep going on just to figure out what was bothering her.

"What?" I finally managed to mumble, when I said something that made her grinning brisk and not exactly unsympathetic, more like pitying.

"Look, Cap," she said through some ironically patronizing giggles, "you just keep going on and on about this stuff, and I'm just sitting here, waiting for you to explain, sir, why I should actually give a shit."

I blinked, leaning a bit hazily over the table. "Well..."

"I mean, next time you want to drop your sad load on somebody, you might try to find someone in the room you weren't a huge jerk to at some point. Like...you know, somebody you didn't blatantly use?"

I was standing up again, still using the side of the table as a crutch. "You're still pissed at me. About the Kobayashi Maru? Really?" I accused almost in a kind of wonder, and she laughed and laughed.

"No. Not really."

"I thought..." I made some struggling, misunderstanding hand gestures, "I thought we were past that, because I sent you that..."

"Oh, yeah, that message you sent me later. Yeah, I didn't open that."

I was grabbing her arm then, feeling like I was gonna choke on my drink. "Wait. Wait wait wait, you never-you never fucking opened that letter? That I sent you after the mission, you never-?"

"No."

My mouth was probably hanging stupidly open, like this was too much, not tonight, good God, this little long-ago thing somehow felt like an enormous and cruel joke. "It...Well, it was an apology, a very good apology, and you didn't even...?! And why the hell did you start being a lot nicer to me some time after if you were still...?"

"Well, you were an asshole but then you went and had to be this big hero and..." She was making these cringing motions, hating that she'd brought it up like the topic was a boring interruption to the night's mirth. "But just cause you're generally a good guy doesn't mean I'm gonna decide you're trustworthy with people's emotions, I mean what could I even know? You can't even keep things straight with your first officer-"

"Oh, don't you even-"

"I couldn't read it because I didn't want to forgive you, and I knew I would have." She rolled her eyes, scoffed at herself as she teetered against the table next to me. "I knew it would proooobably be this sappy, genuine thing, and that was the worst. Cause that's just you, you know, you act like a bastard even though you're not a bastard and then when you need things to even out you just lay yourself open for people, and you've got...Jim Kirk's big fat limitless loving heart, and people see that, and they can't hate you anymore." All this she explained with these seasickish, clumsy motions, immediately interested in somebody else coming up to the bar at the end of her sentences, and I was standing there feeling like I'd been slapped in the face a couple times.

"I was about to tell you how happy I was that you lived," I was suddenly saying, realizing that was exactly what I meant to do, exactly why I brought it up. It kind of took her a few of my words to see I was still talking to her, and she slowly refocused in surprise. "I didn't know where you were assigned. I remember realizing I didn't even know how good you were at what you do, I didn't have any clue if you'd made Enterprise. I would have felt like shit if you'd been dead, you have no idea..."

Now she had this almost sweet and dissatisfied frown on her face, her eyes deeply confused on top of only slightly touched. But after a moment she flatly observed, in that mysteriously oracular way of drunks: "It wouldn't have really made you act any different, though."

And you can forget everything I said about Lisa, because she didn't teach me a fucking thing.

Uhura appeared next to me, apparently having merged across the crowd in curiosity at what looked like a fight stirring up, looking concerned and confused. I just gave her a helpless and dismissing look, honestly kind of afraid of what might come out of my mouth next at that point, but she got the message that she should maybe divert Gaila to something else. When they went off arm-in-arm to play some poker, I kept drinking.

I wondered if Nyota was instrumental in getting Bones to come over and babysit me, though he seemed more interested in getting something out of me he could work with than cutting me off of the booze.

"Bones," I groaned after a gulp. "You love me, right?"

He narrowed a look at me. "What?"

"Right?"

"You know damn well you'd be a dead man by now if I didn't."

I grinned at him. "See, you are a blessing. Really, because, everything's simple with you. You're a very straightforward kind of guy..."

"Christ."

"And I know that you totally adore me even though I'm a pain in the ass," I rambled on. "And I knew this when you met me-You know, people either love me, or they hate me, and they usually have their minds made up the first minute they come to know me, and I can always tell which way it is. Always. Except for...a couple exceptions..." I trailed off heavily, digging the heel of a hand against my eye, reaching for the next drink I'd just ordered.

There was an unusually insightful concern in Bones. Like I've said, the man isn't stupid. But he couldn't think of anything to do other than pat me on the shoulder and grumble, "You're worrying me, Jim."

"I'll be fine."

He apparently didn't try to convince me I'd had enough, unless I was too insistent and just don't remember being a total ass about it, but he made sure I got back up to the ship okay. I allegedly was found over the sink in the bathroom after I splashed some water on my face, just leaning there with my head between my elbows like I wanted to fall asleep there. But I was so far gone I didn't realize I was being half-carried home until I was tripping over one of the bubbles on the transporter pad, feeling solid arms steadying me back up around my waist.

So far gone, in fact, that the first thing that made me realize who was pulling me along was the fact that he'd said absolutely nothing. To that revelation, I had no resistant nor accepting reaction; everything was slogging and pushing on me and all I could think about was getting to a comfortable horizontal surface. That, and I was pondering distantly how Bones thought he had any business being a manipulative son of a bitch.

It was almost completely dark in my quarters and Spock didn't command the lights on as he efficiently walked me over to the bed. Jesus, I was drunk. I would have told him I was fine by myself minutes before if I hadn't known I'd probably collapse straight to the floor. I'd said nothing, but the tension of the quiet was more impersonal rather than anywhere close to hostile. Maybe just comfortable.

He even took my boots off for me and got me under the blanket. Something was weakening in my chest. I'd spent the whole evening missing him so badly until I could hardly see; now his outline was above me and all I could remember about him was everything that remained stubbornly beautiful even with the distance, which was pretty much everything I could think of.

It was never a matter of overlooking things about him. It always felt like I was fumbling for this impossible compromise, because everything he'd done to me I'd also loved. I didn't want him to change because I needed him to be what he was, rational and controlled and strong in a way I wanted to seize into my grasp all the time. When he'd been willing to throw down his life to save the crew, I'd loved that too. He proves continuously how untouchable he is, and it just makes me want in closer. It was a perfect paradox I was willing to skim around with forever, if only I could say so. But I never had, even once, and even if he felt me thinking it a couple times, it couldn't be the same thing. I'm a very smart guy, I'm almost twenty-seven years old and just now figuring this out.

It should seem fitting that my communications officer was instrumental in showing me how completely stupid I've been. I've thought more about what Nyota said to me, about not really sensing myself when I was connected to him. Among the things I used to get off of him that I didn't quite make sense of, there was for example the time I got attacked by some animal on an M class. We'd hurriedly reconnected mentally once I was beamed back and something had slammed me fast like a hockey puck across ice, in a way that only felt like a short disturbance, like the connection was clumsier because he was distracted.

But maybe not. Because that was the most extreme case of it, but there were other times too when I would say or do something that seemed to push that unfamiliar and breezier change in his thoughts which was less like the usual flush of particular feeling, more like I was realizing the movement of a vast continent I was always standing on. An uncomfortable sensation sometimes, like something was pulling or yanking on me, on the very connection, almost like...

Almost like it, the feeling itself, was somatic. Was me.

After he realized that my arm was hanging weirdly off the bed and reached out to reposition me, I looked straight up at him through the darkness. "'m sorry I've never been him."

The shape of him paused, his figure suspended still over me. The sharp, low way that he enunciated the inquiry, "Who?" seemed to suggest a statement, that I had better not be saying what he thought I was saying.

"You know. The other one."

"The other one," he repeated carefully.

"I think I used to be...or would be, should be...better at this." I swallowed heavily. "I mean, you and I aren't supposed to be-"

"You and I are not them," Spock said flatly.

I wondered if that hurt. I nonsensically muttered, "You said 'sorry' yesterday. On the shuttle..."

"I was referring to the stumble," he insisted with a note of familiar annoyance.

"But you don't apologize, ever. Or at least you sure as hell don't say thanks," I mumbled bitterly.

"I will submit that I owe you an apology, Jim," he quickly replied, knowing where I was going. "But I sense we may approach some disagreement on why I do."

"...What."

"My actions on P'ehra may have been influenced by the evaluation that you would go to reckless lengths to preserve my safety. I maintain that risking my life was not wrong, even if I had to deceive you in the process."

I was staring up in silence for a moment, rock still. I repeated, "Reckless."

He said nothing.

My voice was frank in a drowsy groan of, "Oh, God. I think I'd want to smack you if you tried to apologize for fucking me."

Spock shifted in the darkness, but didn't move to leave.

I spoke with even irritation. "I'm sorry I ran out of there right afterwards. I'm sorry I've been a lame excuse for myself and I'm sorry I don't think I can do this without you. I'm sorry for everything and I'm not even the one who's supposed to be apologizing. I'm gonna wake up still mad at you tomorrow and there's nothing I can do about it."

"You are at your most self-deprecating when you are inebriated, Jim, perhaps we should-"

"You are so-" I was hardly even listening to him, I was beyond aggravated, angry with him all over again and all too drunk to think any further than that.

After a moment he let out a sound like a decided sigh. "I would only have you be as I have known you. Goodnight, Jim."

All in a second, I missed myself as badly as I've missed him. And it didn't matter who I was supposed to be or could have been or who my father was or if fate had anything to say about any of it, because I had been better in this life; I had been somebody who would have taken all of this on as just a challenge, something to win, and if my ability to slide through the rough patches had dwindled off a bit it was only because I started caring a hell of a lot more than I used to, and I wanted that back. I wanted Jim Kirk to walk into that room and make Spock stay, and what he would do was on the edge of me but I wasn't quite there, so what I did was I weakly got up on my elbows and sat up and without any kind of permission I pressed a firm statement of a kiss on his lips; and then I dropped back onto my pillow, saying, "Make me forgive you. I dare you."

And I rolled over and fell asleep, but not before the hesitation, the sound of him quietly leaving. I felt something lingering against me after he was gone, a pulling at my mind from a connection that wasn't there, as if I was a phantom limb. I woke up only sad.

...