Um.
Title: Swashing Buckles, Righting Wrongs: From the Fabulous Adventures of Captain James Significant Pause Cook, 6/?
Author: possibly_thrice
Rating: R.
Pairing: Pike/Kirk.
Summary: Prompted by st_xi_kink : Kirk never meets Pike or Uhura, and runs off with a broken-heart-crazed McCoy to be a pirate. For a moment, it seems as if there will be an actual plot. Then I reveal that I'm actually just doing this to set up angsty Captain Pike/Pirate Captain Jimmy dub-con.
A/N: Shorter chapter than usual, after a longer wait, because now I fail at anything not porn, shockingly enough.
Pike wakes up from unforgiving half-dreams sore and hollow, tangled in his sheets, uniform sticking him in various places for various reasons, none of which he particularly wants to contemplate. The lights are at 80%, and there are two unfamiliar shadows in the room, one of which belongs to Kirk's partner in crime, or whatever, a disheveled dark-haired man holding what looks like an improvised tricorder over Pike's head, and a phaser in his other hand, although that is leveled at the floor and if he had the energy he thinks it would probably be worth lunging for it.
(He doesn't have the energy. Hell. He aches.)
It's an unnerving combination, the tricorder and phaser, to someone who's used to Starfleet medics, who are pretty much all pacifists, but on the other hand it sort of pales in comparison to the rest of the unnerving shit that's been flying today, and Pike doesn't blink. He does glance at the other figure, who he's pretty sure came with the pirates, given the silvery, outlandish outfit, but who he can't quite make out in detail.
“Hm. Only a minor concussion, amazing. Good morning, sunshine,” Kirk's partner in crime -- Bones, that's the name given in the records -- drawls. Pike can't pin the accent. He spends a minute staring at the man, trying to pin the accent.
Trying to not think about the glut of things he could (should, probably) be thinking about. He can't seem to focus his eyes, skimming over details, shadows seeping into light, sound and silence having sex behind a door in his subconscious.
“...hello?” 'Bones' says, frowning. “Anyone home? Christ, no wonder he looked so goddamn smug.” The last is muttered under his breath, but Pike catches it and just barely stops himself from flinching.
“Who are you?” Pike says, and he supposes he's asking for yet another explanation, regrets it almost as soon as it slips out.
The man leans in and waves his instrument in Pike's eye. There's a flash, an incomprehensible readout, and he nods, apparently satisfied. “Right. What? Oh. Dr. Leonard McCoy, at your service.” The sarcasm is so thick you could cut out blocks of it and patch the thrusters with them.
“Give me your phaser, then,” Pike says, not quite as dryly, because his mouth is bloody and numb.
McCoy snorts. “That wouldn't be doing you a service. Trust me on this one.”
“Really,” Pike says, raising himself up on his elbows. At least that's the theory. He collapses halfway there.
“Yes, really,” McCoy says, rolling his eyes, and reels off words that make absolutely no sense, a mess of spiked syllables and lazy vowels. His confusion undoubtedly shows because the man translates: “You've had the shit beaten out of you, you might have noticed at some point between escaping the black hole and, uh, encountering Jim? You're probably traumatized, too, come to that. You'd be a danger to yourself, armed.”
“Somehow I think I'd be less of a danger to myself than you and your lot,” Pike retorts, falling back flat on his back. Pain needles up through his spine and neck. He winces.
“Only in the long-term,” McCoy says. “Until then, it's my professional recommendation that you hold still.”
“Would that be the professional pirate or the professional doctor speaking?”
“Both,” McCoy snaps, hefting both phaser and tricorder in a weird little parallel gesture that suggests he was a juggler in a past life. Man has a point, though, and Pike obligingly goes as still as possible, easing the tension out of his muscles.
“Well, when you put it like that. How long have I been out?”
“Five hours?” McCoy hazards, glancing at the chronometer. “Yeah. An incredibly boring five hours for some of us, I might add, until you started talking in your sleep.”
Pike winces but doesn't ask. He doesn't particularly want to know what he was saying. However: “I hate to break this to you, but if you don't like guard duty you're probably in the wrong business,” he murmurs, absently.
“Tell me something I don't know,” McCoy sighs.
“I wouldn't presume to.”
“An advantage of being the one with the weapon.”
Pause.
“And who are you?” Pike says to the second shadow, who moves from his position by the door into the light and stares back, deep-shadowed eyes unreadable. A Vulcan, he realizes, focusing in on the ears. God, a Vulcan: the seething guilt tastes sour and cold. He's an ancient one, too, with a face so lined and crumpled and collapsed it looks like a fistful of tea-stained paper. And yet there's something inexplicably familiar about the underlying bone structure, the long outline. The nose, that too. But that's ridiculous, since the only Vulcan he knows well enough to recognize by sight is patently not this one by virtue of being about a century younger, among other things. He hardly looks like a criminal, but what --?
No answer. Pike glances at the doctor.
“Couldn't tell you,” McCoy says, “but he's one of us now, I suppose, so don't get your hopes up. Jim -- the captain, I should say --” a casual smirk through the stubble, and Pike was thinking that under other circumstances he might have liked the man, but that little substitution changes his mind “-- picked him up from Delta Vega along with Mr. Scott. They worked things out.”
“Is that so,” Pike says, raising an eyebrow: to the best of his knowledge, no Federation member has willingly lived on that planet in all of Federation history, and certainly not Vulcans, accustomed to a desert climate.
“Yes. I'd say ask him yourself if you don't believe me, but he's not really the talkative type.”
“Right.”
McCoy scowls at his communicator and mutters something into it about “having everything under control, Jim, and yes, he's just woken up. Captain says hi,” he adds, louder, to Pike, “because he's an ass, which you knew.” Then: “Yes, Jim, keeping away from the communications officer would be a good idea, I don't care how pretty she is, have you seen those heels? Yes. No. Goodbye.”
Then the world flips, and he has to replay what happens next a couple times to make sense of it.
The Vulcan crosses over to the bed, sudden and purposeful, and tilts his head. If that's not recognition he registers in the gray gaze Pike will eat his pillowcase; the Vulcan turns away every bit as sharply, leans over McCoy, who leans back, unnerved. He reaches one thin silver-wrapped arm and before McCoy's hand finishes describing a desperate upward arc does something that Pike can't quite see to McCoy's shoulder. The doctor crumples out of his chair to the floor, a long, creaking fall that the Vulcan gentles, taking most of the man's weight and lowering him to the floor by degrees. It's an odd facsimile of tenderness. Or maybe not a facsimile. Hard to say, it happens so quickly, a chain of implausible succession.
Pike sits up when he's sorted out the tattered, too-fast shapes. Successfully, this time, for no other reason than that he's distracted from the mild agony, probably.
“Captain Pike?” the Vulcan says. His voice is dry and lost. “You will find this difficult to believe, but I am Spock.”
“That explains a lot,” Pike says, and starts to laugh.
'Spock' winces -- visibly winces -- and lifts a hand, fingers splayed and trembling like antennae. “May I explain?”
“Why not?” Pike manages to choke out. “Please. Go for it. Give it your all. Punch it, you know?”
He closes his eyes, trying to bite down on the slight hysteria, because the laughter is shredding his throat like a trapped bird, and feels the fingertips settle on his hairline, thumb against the rim of his ear, pinkie brushing his eyebrow, altogether caging his forehead. The touch is electric, stuttering through his thin skin and bone and slamming into the front of his mind.
Images and grief flare, indistinguishable, behind his eyelids. Someone else's story, joined to his at the hip, malformed, a useless, broken thing.
Well.
When he's done, Spock, who doesn't deserve the air quotes, drops his hand away.
“I'm sorry,” Pike says, because he is.
“I also. I should not have attempted to twist his destiny to my whims. Had I not --”
“Earth would be gone,” Pike says, flatly, “in all probability. No. Don't apologize.” He pauses, as a detail occurs to him. “You showed him all this, correct?”
“Yes.”
Nero. Hah. Haha. Something starts to burn, low in his gut. “I see.”
“Even now, you must understand that I -- I cannot hurt him, or allow him to be hurt. I am more selfish than I once believed.”
“Then why --” Pike says, looking at McCoy, slumped and peaceful.
“Yet you were my captain for eleven years, on the Enterprise,” Spock continues. “And I have always trusted in what the Federation stands for.”
Pike can't imagine what it would be like to be divided so cleanly and so cruelly down the middle. Except he can, now, for instance, when he feels blind, and everything is vagued, bled of certainty, of right.
And then his slow frozen thoughts circle like sharks around the words.
Eleven years, captain of the Enterprise.
Kirk was lying through his shiny fucking teeth.
And Pike's never felt anything like this kind of rage, this fury that rebuilds him from the center out. (Kirk had no right. Kirk had no reasons. Just excuses and hungry, convincing eyes.)
“What do you want from me?”
“If you swear to let him get away,” Spock says, barely penetrating the ringing in his ears, through the fierce, sudden joy, “I will help you save your ship. But you must swear.”
He stares, and swears, because this is the only way.
And if it's a little too easy to conclude that this is the only way, who is there to tell him so? McCoy is stirring, anyway. There's no time to convince Spock that he's insane, that this is beyond fixing, that Kirk can't be allowed away. Besides: he doesn't have the arguments. His newfound hatred is gloriously straightforward, just this side of love, and it leaves no room for contemplation, for negotiation. It will be enough, he tells himself, never to see Kirk again. He's being sane, rational, adult. Revenge is not the goal, escape is the goal.
So it really doesn't matter that deep inside, a part of him is screaming about betrayal as he meets Spock's eyes and makes an oath that tastes like breaking glass.
“What did you have in mind?” he says.
Author: possibly_thrice
Rating: R.
Pairing: Pike/Kirk.
Summary: Prompted by st_xi_kink : Kirk never meets Pike or Uhura, and runs off with a broken-heart-crazed McCoy to be a pirate. For a moment, it seems as if there will be an actual plot. Then I reveal that I'm actually just doing this to set up angsty Captain Pike/Pirate Captain Jimmy dub-con.
A/N: Shorter chapter than usual, after a longer wait, because now I fail at anything not porn, shockingly enough.
Pike wakes up from unforgiving half-dreams sore and hollow, tangled in his sheets, uniform sticking him in various places for various reasons, none of which he particularly wants to contemplate. The lights are at 80%, and there are two unfamiliar shadows in the room, one of which belongs to Kirk's partner in crime, or whatever, a disheveled dark-haired man holding what looks like an improvised tricorder over Pike's head, and a phaser in his other hand, although that is leveled at the floor and if he had the energy he thinks it would probably be worth lunging for it.
(He doesn't have the energy. Hell. He aches.)
It's an unnerving combination, the tricorder and phaser, to someone who's used to Starfleet medics, who are pretty much all pacifists, but on the other hand it sort of pales in comparison to the rest of the unnerving shit that's been flying today, and Pike doesn't blink. He does glance at the other figure, who he's pretty sure came with the pirates, given the silvery, outlandish outfit, but who he can't quite make out in detail.
“Hm. Only a minor concussion, amazing. Good morning, sunshine,” Kirk's partner in crime -- Bones, that's the name given in the records -- drawls. Pike can't pin the accent. He spends a minute staring at the man, trying to pin the accent.
Trying to not think about the glut of things he could (should, probably) be thinking about. He can't seem to focus his eyes, skimming over details, shadows seeping into light, sound and silence having sex behind a door in his subconscious.
“...hello?” 'Bones' says, frowning. “Anyone home? Christ, no wonder he looked so goddamn smug.” The last is muttered under his breath, but Pike catches it and just barely stops himself from flinching.
“Who are you?” Pike says, and he supposes he's asking for yet another explanation, regrets it almost as soon as it slips out.
The man leans in and waves his instrument in Pike's eye. There's a flash, an incomprehensible readout, and he nods, apparently satisfied. “Right. What? Oh. Dr. Leonard McCoy, at your service.” The sarcasm is so thick you could cut out blocks of it and patch the thrusters with them.
“Give me your phaser, then,” Pike says, not quite as dryly, because his mouth is bloody and numb.
McCoy snorts. “That wouldn't be doing you a service. Trust me on this one.”
“Really,” Pike says, raising himself up on his elbows. At least that's the theory. He collapses halfway there.
“Yes, really,” McCoy says, rolling his eyes, and reels off words that make absolutely no sense, a mess of spiked syllables and lazy vowels. His confusion undoubtedly shows because the man translates: “You've had the shit beaten out of you, you might have noticed at some point between escaping the black hole and, uh, encountering Jim? You're probably traumatized, too, come to that. You'd be a danger to yourself, armed.”
“Somehow I think I'd be less of a danger to myself than you and your lot,” Pike retorts, falling back flat on his back. Pain needles up through his spine and neck. He winces.
“Only in the long-term,” McCoy says. “Until then, it's my professional recommendation that you hold still.”
“Would that be the professional pirate or the professional doctor speaking?”
“Both,” McCoy snaps, hefting both phaser and tricorder in a weird little parallel gesture that suggests he was a juggler in a past life. Man has a point, though, and Pike obligingly goes as still as possible, easing the tension out of his muscles.
“Well, when you put it like that. How long have I been out?”
“Five hours?” McCoy hazards, glancing at the chronometer. “Yeah. An incredibly boring five hours for some of us, I might add, until you started talking in your sleep.”
Pike winces but doesn't ask. He doesn't particularly want to know what he was saying. However: “I hate to break this to you, but if you don't like guard duty you're probably in the wrong business,” he murmurs, absently.
“Tell me something I don't know,” McCoy sighs.
“I wouldn't presume to.”
“An advantage of being the one with the weapon.”
Pause.
“And who are you?” Pike says to the second shadow, who moves from his position by the door into the light and stares back, deep-shadowed eyes unreadable. A Vulcan, he realizes, focusing in on the ears. God, a Vulcan: the seething guilt tastes sour and cold. He's an ancient one, too, with a face so lined and crumpled and collapsed it looks like a fistful of tea-stained paper. And yet there's something inexplicably familiar about the underlying bone structure, the long outline. The nose, that too. But that's ridiculous, since the only Vulcan he knows well enough to recognize by sight is patently not this one by virtue of being about a century younger, among other things. He hardly looks like a criminal, but what --?
No answer. Pike glances at the doctor.
“Couldn't tell you,” McCoy says, “but he's one of us now, I suppose, so don't get your hopes up. Jim -- the captain, I should say --” a casual smirk through the stubble, and Pike was thinking that under other circumstances he might have liked the man, but that little substitution changes his mind “-- picked him up from Delta Vega along with Mr. Scott. They worked things out.”
“Is that so,” Pike says, raising an eyebrow: to the best of his knowledge, no Federation member has willingly lived on that planet in all of Federation history, and certainly not Vulcans, accustomed to a desert climate.
“Yes. I'd say ask him yourself if you don't believe me, but he's not really the talkative type.”
“Right.”
McCoy scowls at his communicator and mutters something into it about “having everything under control, Jim, and yes, he's just woken up. Captain says hi,” he adds, louder, to Pike, “because he's an ass, which you knew.” Then: “Yes, Jim, keeping away from the communications officer would be a good idea, I don't care how pretty she is, have you seen those heels? Yes. No. Goodbye.”
Then the world flips, and he has to replay what happens next a couple times to make sense of it.
The Vulcan crosses over to the bed, sudden and purposeful, and tilts his head. If that's not recognition he registers in the gray gaze Pike will eat his pillowcase; the Vulcan turns away every bit as sharply, leans over McCoy, who leans back, unnerved. He reaches one thin silver-wrapped arm and before McCoy's hand finishes describing a desperate upward arc does something that Pike can't quite see to McCoy's shoulder. The doctor crumples out of his chair to the floor, a long, creaking fall that the Vulcan gentles, taking most of the man's weight and lowering him to the floor by degrees. It's an odd facsimile of tenderness. Or maybe not a facsimile. Hard to say, it happens so quickly, a chain of implausible succession.
Pike sits up when he's sorted out the tattered, too-fast shapes. Successfully, this time, for no other reason than that he's distracted from the mild agony, probably.
“Captain Pike?” the Vulcan says. His voice is dry and lost. “You will find this difficult to believe, but I am Spock.”
“That explains a lot,” Pike says, and starts to laugh.
'Spock' winces -- visibly winces -- and lifts a hand, fingers splayed and trembling like antennae. “May I explain?”
“Why not?” Pike manages to choke out. “Please. Go for it. Give it your all. Punch it, you know?”
He closes his eyes, trying to bite down on the slight hysteria, because the laughter is shredding his throat like a trapped bird, and feels the fingertips settle on his hairline, thumb against the rim of his ear, pinkie brushing his eyebrow, altogether caging his forehead. The touch is electric, stuttering through his thin skin and bone and slamming into the front of his mind.
Images and grief flare, indistinguishable, behind his eyelids. Someone else's story, joined to his at the hip, malformed, a useless, broken thing.
Well.
When he's done, Spock, who doesn't deserve the air quotes, drops his hand away.
“I'm sorry,” Pike says, because he is.
“I also. I should not have attempted to twist his destiny to my whims. Had I not --”
“Earth would be gone,” Pike says, flatly, “in all probability. No. Don't apologize.” He pauses, as a detail occurs to him. “You showed him all this, correct?”
“Yes.”
Nero. Hah. Haha. Something starts to burn, low in his gut. “I see.”
“Even now, you must understand that I -- I cannot hurt him, or allow him to be hurt. I am more selfish than I once believed.”
“Then why --” Pike says, looking at McCoy, slumped and peaceful.
“Yet you were my captain for eleven years, on the Enterprise,” Spock continues. “And I have always trusted in what the Federation stands for.”
Pike can't imagine what it would be like to be divided so cleanly and so cruelly down the middle. Except he can, now, for instance, when he feels blind, and everything is vagued, bled of certainty, of right.
And then his slow frozen thoughts circle like sharks around the words.
Eleven years, captain of the Enterprise.
Kirk was lying through his shiny fucking teeth.
And Pike's never felt anything like this kind of rage, this fury that rebuilds him from the center out. (Kirk had no right. Kirk had no reasons. Just excuses and hungry, convincing eyes.)
“What do you want from me?”
“If you swear to let him get away,” Spock says, barely penetrating the ringing in his ears, through the fierce, sudden joy, “I will help you save your ship. But you must swear.”
He stares, and swears, because this is the only way.
And if it's a little too easy to conclude that this is the only way, who is there to tell him so? McCoy is stirring, anyway. There's no time to convince Spock that he's insane, that this is beyond fixing, that Kirk can't be allowed away. Besides: he doesn't have the arguments. His newfound hatred is gloriously straightforward, just this side of love, and it leaves no room for contemplation, for negotiation. It will be enough, he tells himself, never to see Kirk again. He's being sane, rational, adult. Revenge is not the goal, escape is the goal.
So it really doesn't matter that deep inside, a part of him is screaming about betrayal as he meets Spock's eyes and makes an oath that tastes like breaking glass.
“What did you have in mind?” he says.