fic: The Apocalypse Clock (Star Trek XI/Watchmen)
The Apocalypse Clock
Star Trek (2009)/Watchmen; Spock/Kirk, Manhattan/Veidt; slash, dub-con.
6000 words.
R for sex and some language.
Written for this anon at st_xi_kink, and it should be noted that much of this totally awesome concept was anon's invention. I worked some stuff in, but really you guys. Pilgrims from the kink meme, stay anonymous if you like; IP logging is always off!
Notes: Crossing movieverses primarily here. There are a couple of truly epic plotholes going on, b-but I can explain: time flies when you're having a good time. Also, I apologize for being such a dork.
11:55
The crew of Enterprise was granted special leave for up to a standard month if they wanted it, and they didn’t. A general consensus had been reached in the week that followed the destruction of the Narada, carefully cultivated in a number of Academy-sponsored celebratory galas and a graduation kegger (which Chekov had most certainly not attended, no, they hadn’t seen him), and it was this: they were going everywhere together anyway, and the entire Federation was understandably rattled, probably very much aware of the potential threats to intergalactic co-habitation that had been filed away in the expectation that none of them would ever grow teeth, or a revenge complex or whatever. In the week that his people been surface-bound, Kirk guessed that Starfleet Command had likely been stepping up security procedures to the point of paranoia, tearing through old emergency dispatches and reports of open hostility, looking for those that needed to be dealt with immediately. Choice assignments were going to be handed out very soon and the greeners who actually took the full vacation being dangled in front of them would be the greeners who spent the next six months patrolling the Neutral Zone, staring across a bank of stars at some very uneasy Romulans and generally getting on each other’s nerves.
As soon as Enterprise was fit to cruise, they were all on deck, demanding orders. Dispatch was unnerved by their enthusiasm and tried to recommend a little more downtime, so Kirk threw a very fancy and very professional tantrum, insisting that he had the authority to call in a personal favour from Admiral Pike. So dispatch got Pike on the holo comm.
“Oh, hi,” Kirk said, genuinely pleased by the sway he obviously held. “I want orders, is all.”
“You’re insane,” Pike said instantly. “Why did you drag the entire crew onboard? Even if I got Command to issue something to you right now, you can’t just blaze off without prep and clearance.”
“Captain needs a crew,” Kirk replied. “I’m a captain. Crew needs orders. They’re a crew.”
Everybody waved a little. Even Spock.
“I had hope for you kids once. What do you want, exactly?”
“Something awesome!” Kirk said.
“Some-” Pike started to mutter, but he was smiling a bit and trying not to let them see it. “Well, don’t get used to this because I’m not going to make a good sugardaddy; I hate the administrative channels. I’ll see if I can get you something by tomorrow, though.”
Clapping his hands together sharply, Kirk turned and flashed Spock a thumbs up. He’d turned the tide, without a doubt; who could bear to disappoint a benign, somewhat tourist-y Vulcan? All he got in return was a faint frown that may or may not have been a general reaction to the indignity of it all. “Thanks, Admiral. You’re the coolest dad.”
“If you sleep on the ship, I will know there’s something wrong with you.”
Of course Kirk had some wiseass thing to say about that, but Christopher Pike clearly did not get what he had in life by being overly polite either. He cut the feed before he could hear anything he didn’t need to envision.
11:56
For: James T. Kirk, Captain
Commanding: NCC 1701 Enterprise
Issued: Stardate 2258.53
Officer(s) as named above are ordered to locate and take into custody one altered humanoid Doctor Manhattan (born: Jon Osterman) for the purpose of interrogation by Federated officials and trial for crimes committed on Earth in the pre-warp era, including crimes against humanity (kidnapping, torture of civilians, murder of civilians, killing of intellectuals, use of chemical and biological agents), crime of genocide, destruction of state property, and conspiracy. Subject considered active. Last confirmed sighting on Earth, 1985.292. Reports of unconfirmed sightings in Vulcan system (2085 and later), Romulan Neutral Zone (2183 and later).
For the completion of these orders you are granted permission to use excessive force as outlined in official Starfleet regulations.
Receive supporting documents:
Audio/visual media
Image stills
Personal history
List of war crimes
Data crystal
Transcript/ID page corresponding to data crystal
11:57
“So I don’t know if he’s making fun of us or not.”
McCoy flicked him a practiced look of offended impatience. “Jim, your request wasn’t even remotely formal. If he’s punishing you, it’s justified. And all he said is that he’d get us something quickly, which he did. And you’re pretty ungrateful, did you know that?”
“For first offisheyl assignment, obyectif does look pretty aussome,” Chekov commented, scrolling through the supplementary data sent along with the orders file. “Ties to anshieynt Earth historwy, specificully end of Cold War between Ameryika and Rusha! Wery cool. Deh partickular entity we are charged wis finding is rejisterd as ‘altered humanoyd’ Dokter Manhyetten, mastyrmind of capityal disasters in nineteen eighty-five.”
“Right,” Kirk said miserably. “See how relevant the date is? And where did he go? The report gives us no ideas, none.”
From the other side of the bridge, Uhura called: “Maybe they’ll send us more later, Captain. In fact, this could be a small test. Give us an apparent cold case and see what we do with it. I think we were right to assume that the Federation would be spreading its hottest files around. This could be very important, so much that they can’t give us everything at once. Make it look dusty.”
“Basic subterfuge,” Spock agreed. “A precaution and a way to determine what manner of assignment we deserve in the future.”
“Optimists, everywhere I turn. What else came with this stuff?”
All eyes went to Scotty, who was snapping his fingers for attention and then just for fun. “There’s the thing they beamed us right away. The thing. I gave it to Miss Uhura because, well, I don’t know what that thing is supposed to be.”
“It’s an encrypted data crystal,” Uhura said, producing a small, opaque chip of the most hideous colour Kirk had ever seen. “At least, that’s how it’s catalogued, but I can’t open it. I can’t even hack it. And the transcription file doesn’t list its contents, just that it’s intended to be ‘given to Doctor Manhattan on contact by direct post-mortem requistion of Adrian Veidt’.”
“If there are people running around doing everything I want centuries after I’m dead, life will be good,” Kirk said.
Sulu nodded. “Over, but good.”
“Keypten, some of the addishional media looks like it wyll be wery waluable. Here: footyge ov Doktor Manhyetten, old photygraffs, dockuements from his colleborashuns with Veidt.”
Clips and still frames were tossed up onto Enterprise’s viewport screen, an array of damaged photo scans and restored film cels. Most were washed out, completely colourless; others were barely discernible, aged completely off of the medium. There were a few decent shots from an interview session, though, and they showed a perfectly structured man in a black suit gazing impassively at a crowd of reporters. He was humanoid but perfectly hairless, and his skin was electric blue.
“Oh. Hey,” Kirk said, suddenly animated and restless again. “P.S., on Delta Vega, I was almost eaten by two monsters - thanks fully, Spock - and while I was maintaining a firm grip on the situation, I saw a very blue man like him. Just for a minute. Very, very blue.”
“Well, it is pretty cold there,” McCoy said.
“Do not start telling me about what’s pretty cold. Anyway, in this case, who cares what the dispatch means if we’ve already got a lead? We could wrap this thing up in a few days. Days. ENTERPRISE, LOCATE THE FUGITIVE KNOWN AS ‘DR. MANHATTAN’ BECAUSE, HAHA, WE’VE ALREADY GOT ENOUGH ELBOW GREASE TO LAST US A WHILE. Then, before Bones can say ‘Dammit, Jim’, we’ve already tracked him down. You know how impressive that would look? Pike will be all, ‘Slow down there, kid, I’m starting to feel totally inadequate in the shadow of your heroic deeds’ and I’ll say, ‘Sir, we both know I’ll never achieve as much as you already have in your prestigious career’ even though we actually both know that I definitely will.”
“I swear, Captain,” Uhura remarked, her eyes narrowing to razors.
“Okay, okay.” Easing back in his chair, Kirk drew a short breath and held it, willing his body not to shake in a frenzy of anticipation. It couldn’t be; but what if it was? He exhaled, clearing his lungs of the sweet, recycled oxygen that made him so fond of hyperventilating on the bridge. “It’s just that I saw him. It’s unbelievable but I might know where to find him. He looked at me.”
Sulu made a bit of a face. “Could you have been hallucinating? I mean, if he was there, wouldn’t he have helped you?”
“I,” Kirk began, and then fell silent. Everyone watched him with pointed interest. “Well, I don’t know. I looked toward him in the first place because I felt like I was being watched. He was at the mouth of a cave and I started going that way; when I got there, he was gone. I got the sense that, whatever he was, that’s all he did, he just ... watches. You know?” And Kirk glanced around for support, received only a few shrugs.
“I guess it might be worth checking out,” McCoy ventured, nearly lodging the last word in his throat when Uhura rounded on him and said very quietly, “Wait a minute.”
Oh, Kirk thought, and felt like an ass. “Mr. Spock, you, uh, haven’t said anything on the matter. Your opinion is paramount in this. Do you ... want some time to consider my suggestion?”
For a while, Spock just looked at him. A perfectly serene exterior. A sign, Kirk was coming to recognize, that he was wrestling with particularly troubling thoughts.
“Is your conviction absolute?” he asked at length. “Refusing to investigate Delta Vega prevents us from obtaining a result, either positive or negative. Eliminating that location from a list of possibilities will allow us to build an unbiased case for any other leads that present themselves. Or, if he is there, I would only be delaying the successful completion of our orders. So. Are you truly confident in this hunch of yours?”
“I saw him,” Kirk said, leveling his voice and his eyes to match that clean slope of Vulcan sincerity he’d come to hate and admire so much in the last few weeks. “Or someone who looks so much like the image in the references that we should find out how they knew his aspect well enough to imitate it.”
“I understand, Captain, and I trust your judgment.”
“Thank you,” Kirk said, and managed not to add: you must be totally crazy but not as crazy as me. Please please don’t let me be wrong or I’ll look like a such a tool.
11:58
He was right. Search operations weren’t necessary; that’s how right he was. In fact they didn’t even have to enter the planet’s gravity well before he was completely and inescapably right. Normally Kirk enjoyed being so right, but he wasn’t enjoying it very much this time.
Manhattan appeared before them, a mote of blue fire that snapped impossibly to life in vacuum while they approached Delta Vega at a wary speed in realspace. Though he’d seen readouts confirming that the singularity over the space once occupied by Vulcan had evaporated, Kirk still didn’t like the idea of trying to hop another event horizon. He didn’t have his crew drag their ship out of a black hole just to trip headfirst into the one Nero had used to destroy Vulcan in the first place. Pike would kick his ass, wherever it ended up. So they had been creeping toward the planet, being crafty, when Manhattan suddenly materialized in front of the viewport.
Draped in darkness, he was a very pure, pleasant colour all over, about the shade of a summer sky on a cool morning. He suspended himself before them - and it suddenly clicked for Kirk; in airless space - looking in at them, letting them look at him, and then he sank through the viewport. Kirk recoiled without moving; all the breath in his body seemed to crawl timidly into his sinuses. Doctor Manhattan was hanging in his ship like a very expensive ornament, so ... mission accomplished?
“James Kirk.” As if out of a sense of etiquette, Manhattan lowered himself until his toes nearly touched the deck. He was still taller than most of the human officers on board, but it was thoughtful of him not to leave his crotch at eyelevel. “I see you’ve suffered no lasting harm from your previous visit to this system.”
Under his breath, Kirk said: “Bones, why does everyone know my name?”
Before McCoy could pin him with a discreet glare, Manhattan turned his head to Spock - the first physical motion beyond speaking that Kirk had seen him make, he was like a reptile - and said something unintelligible. Then: “It is very good to make your acquaintance through direct contact.”
“Sorry, what was that?” Kirk asked no one in particular.
"My name," Spock said. He didn’t blink away from Manhattan’s white-point eyes for an instant. “You are Jon Osterman of Earth?”
“I have not been called such a thing for a very long time. But I am that.”
“How have you come to be in this sector of space? What are you doing here? What connection did you have to Vulcan?” Each word lifted Spock’s voice by the faintest degree. He was not shouting, but at some point he began to demand rather than ask.
Manhattan tilted his head like a lizard. “I made Vulcan. Not the physical planet, of course. Its civilization. Your civilization. It did very well, you should be gratified by its degree of cultural maturation. I will take much of what your people taught me to the next project.”
Chairs swivled and hissed, fingers clattered on crystal casing. A note of nervous laughter rose like a bird, barely audible.
Shaking his head, rather violently for a Vulcan, Spock said: “I cannot accept that as fact. You propose that the Vulcan race, culture and history in its entirety has existed since Gregorian date 1985, a total of 273 years and 58 days from the present.”
“Yes.”
“That is impossible.”
“That is not,” Manhattan said. “The probability of it is extremely low in nature, and your generational memory perhaps competes with the validity of the idea. But I assure you that it is possible, as a result of having happened. I left Earth to better serve Adrian’s experiment and came to the planet that would eventually be called Vulcan at the date you have submitted. Its environmental conditions were ideally habitable for the type of species I wished to encourage. Upon my arrival, I formed an accelerated time field around it through a manipulation of the substance that has been referred to in your presence as Red Matter; which, I must admit, has recently been employed in ways that imply most cognizant lifeforms are still quite mentally and emotionally infantile even at a very advanced stage of development.
“In any case, time was not experienced differently by anything within the field, of course. There’s nothing to worry about. You and your people evolved at a perfectly normal rate, with minimal intervention. Millions of years for us, a span of decades for the universal community at large. After your first contact with extraplanetary species, I thought it best to permit the field to lapse permanently, and you have been in standard temporal synchronization ever since.”
Nobody spoke. For one thing, they all felt out of their depth reaching for that little gem; and for another, it was hard to think of some argument or exclamation that would really do the thing justice. The most immediate worry for Kirk, though, was Spock. Nothing about him had changed. He hadn’t moved or looked incredulous or scoffed at a single word. His face was a pale, bloodless mask, as still as Manhattan’s, while he was informed that his race had been created in a time capsule and then abandoned in front of scavengers by the figure casting frigid shadows through their starship. Not that anyone could be believing a word he said; but he believed it and there was a strangeness to him that showed Kirk exactly why the Federation found him menacing centuries after his disappearance from Federated territory.
First to gather a fistful of wits was McCoy. “You did this,” was all he said, the tactful man. He looked like a spacer who’d just had artificial gravity cut out on him; he put out a hand to steady himself on the rail and his knuckles gasped white.
“I did nothing.”
“Exactly,” Kirk said, finally beginning to feel more angry than afraid.
“Is such a thing not in theoretical correspondence with your Prime Directive?” Manhattan asked mildly.
“You will allow us to escort you back to Earth.” The room itself jumped at the sound of Spock’s voice. Only he and Manhattan did not flinch. “You will be delivered to Federation officials and interrogated in connection with disasters experienced on pre-warp Earth.”
“I will not comply, as it would bring the integrity of Adrian Veidt into question.”
“Reconsider, as a sign of respect for your lost,” the word seemed to rise in Spock’s mouth like an unpleasant flavour, “creations.”
“The most interesting evolutionary variation, the Rihannsu, departed some time ago and continue to flourish elsewhere,” Manhattan said, his eyes tracking empty spaces as if there were people flowing around him. “They have been synched to standard longer than the Vulcans. Through them, my wards do, in fact, still prosper.”
Kirk peered at him. “What departed?”
“You call them Romulans.”
“Are you crazy? I mean, are you completely offworld? It was a Romulan who destroyed it, your planet if you have to call it that. Did you even know?”
“Yes. I know everything, which is to say, I know that now. Truthfully, I would have preferred to avert the ironic catastrophe that befell the planet called Vulcan. It was an unusual and regrettable event in this continuum. But there have been so many of those, and there will be more.”
“Well, you obviously could have prevented this one if you’re telling us the truth.” His unshakeable tranquility was getting to Kirk. He’d thought Spock was bad, but this was like yelling at an asteroid and expecting it to stop. “Why didn’t you?”
“I could not anticipate the circumstances at the time. The tachyon array that follows a typical time slip or sudden formation of a singularity impedes my ability to foresee coming events. That was what made the Vulcans so fascinating; inhabiting their sense of time prevented me from knowing what they would do, who they would eventually become. I was drawn into the experience of awe and disbelief at the complexity of life, simply by observing it.”
“That’s enough,” Spock said. Something in his tone made Manhattan seem to crystallize in place; the racing, burning pulse of his presence withdrew, and the ship was suddenly very cold. “You will submit to the authority of the United Federation of Planets and surrender yourself to us now.”
White pupils in ice-nine eyes. Manhattan’s head swivled with perfect smoothness and regularity, taking them all in. He smiled vaguely, but it was the imitation of a smile rather than the expression of what a smile should mean. “It has been a long time for me. I have nearly forgotten how I ever saw pleasure in conversation with short-lived biological constructs; however, I remind myself to be patient. You are only a child, and you are - by a feasible extension of logic - my child. You answer to me. Would you like me to prove it?”
“Yes,” Spock said frigidly.
The bridge went dark. Comparatively. The lights were up and Enterprise’s panels and curves were gleaming ferociously, but Kirk aburptly had the sense that he’d been staring into the sun for hours and would never see more than shadows again. When he managed to blink most of the tears and static from his eyes, he saw that Doctor Manhattan had vanished the same way he’d entered.
“Was anyone else just looking at his dick the whole time? Because I’m not gonna lie.”
“We should destroy Delta Vega, Captain.”
Still wiping at tears, Kirk coughed and nearly poked himself in the eye. “Holy shit, Spock.”
“That does not qualify as an informed response.”
“Are you nuts? I don’t know if this is a staple of your childhood or not, but remember ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’?”
Many of Spock’s most finely nuanced emotions made it into his idle gestures. Kirk was starting to get that and even though he could only read one or two of them, he still felt pretty good about identifying them when he managed it. This one was familiar: Spock settled his expression carefully, folding his hands neatly behind his back. Meant he was getting impatient, in the order of a starvation victim who’d just been promised a proper meal. “We have encountered our target and found him to be unstable, delusional, an accessory to murder and a murderer himself. Orders grant us permission to use excessive force if necessary. We are young, after all, and accidents happen.”
“Accidents.”
Driving a hard edge into the bubble of their argument, Sulu leaned away from his station and called: “So Captain, there are ... hundreds of what the computer insists are Romulan warbirds breaking the cloud belt on that planet right now.”
Silence. “No, there aren’t.”
“Yeah. There are. No answer from them, either.” Very deep furrows drew themselves down into the smooth skin between Sulu’s eyes. “Scanner says they’re unpiloted.”
Silence. “Scanner’s wrong.”
“A.I. navigation?” Scotty wondered aloud. “That’s clumsy, though. We might have issues with the sheer number, but they’ll fart about and collide with us accidentally more often than they land a shot.”
Three pairs of fighters had already leaped the short distance from atmosphere to move within firing range of the Enterprise; early birds, after a fashion. A good way to find out what was going on, Kirk thought.
“Open fire,” he snapped, startling McCoy a step back. The crew scurried to comply and streams of photon torpedoes flared on a sharp track into the warbirds’ faces.
At once, they banked, scattered and regrouped more loosely, taking on a more complicated offensive formation all in one elegant maneuver.
McCoy shook his head. “No. Just no.”
“Oh, come on,” Uhura whispered, watching them split slightly to return fire.
A few warning shots blazed at them, and Enterprise kicked under the impact, more as if she’d been insulted rather than hurt. Everyone fell into their stations, barking damage reports. Nothing bad. The lady didn’t appreciate it, though. More ships were swirling up to feed the vanguard of six, dozens more, their sides cold and shining like calculating sneers.
“Shiyelds, Keyptain?” Chekov shouted, because Kirk hadn’t issued the order and everyone had their hands full. So did he, of course, but he was the better multitasker. “Keyptain?”
Uhura spun to see why he wasn’t answering. Uhura said, “Um,” and everyone on the bridge turned to look at her, and then everyone on the bridge followed her line of sight.
11:59
The crew of Enterprise had seen Kirk and Spock come to blows before, but the context had been different, somewhat more socially acceptable as a public event, and the ship hadn’t been under immediate attack at the time. After a short pause, everybody locked down and got to work without speaking; they found they didn’t actually need spoken orders to wind together an elegant ratio of power distribution between defense to offense, trading percentages, trusting Sulu to dodge as much of the incoming attack as possible. Meanwhile Spock had laid his captain out on the deck with just the right kind of violence, destroyed his clothes and stuck his tongue in his ear, was tracing his musculature with long, precise fingers, muttering inaudible things against his throat, splitting his legs apart with his sharp hipbones. Kirk made a long, bloodcurdling sound.
“Come on, Chekov,” McCoy snapped, so he could delay having to decide what to do with them, “eyes on the prize.”
“Oh, am watcheng for signiwicant rewards, Offwisir McCoy.”
“The dogfight, kid!”
“Unnecesserwy!” Chekov protested.
“Manhaaa-” Kirk tried to say. “He’s got him. Doesn’t prove anything. Mind manipulating bas-” And Spock withdrew, flipped him onto his stomach, mounted him like that. “Trying to kill morale! Degrade us! Not gonna work! Ah ye- I mean, no!”
A series of warbirds shattered under a photon blast. And then efficiently reassembled themselves in clear view and neatly picked up their flight path as though nothing had happened.
“That is impossible.”
“I can’t believe it, I mean, it can’t happen like that, something’s going on that we don’t know about.”
“Did you see that?”
Despite the panic and terror and frightening maneuvers and also all the things the warbirds were doing, Scotty was tracking ships individually and in groups with pinpoint fascination. “I don’t know, I mean the planet has raw materials, scrap, equipment and unrefined metallics in the outposts. He seems to be controlling those bugs remotely now, so he could have ... made them?” He cringed away from his own suggestion slightly, realizing that he was granting Manhattan an order of power they’d all unofficially and communally rejected for the sake of sanity. It was fine, though; Spock was too busy sucking on Kirk’s testicles to take any offense.
“Sulu, what the hell are we doing?” McCoy shouted, trying to pull his captain and first officer apart without actually touching them. “Get us away from those things before they surround us!”
“They,” Sulu said tonelessly, his gaze flashing between controls, mapping grid and viewport, “are on me. I can’t. Think. I. Get them away.”
“Don’t be so intolerant, man. Anyway they aren’t quite on you.” Which was true enough; though Spock had picked Kirk up and bent him over behind Sulu, Kirk was only really clutching the back of Sulu’s chair, panting and moaning while Spock humped him frantically, so they weren’t actually touching him at all, even if he was being forced to share part of the experience.
“Is inappropryate.” Chekov was manipulating controls flawlessly without taking his eyes from the spectacle in the ship for an instant. “Wery diffycult to fokess.”
“The crystal!”
Chekov actually yelped a bit as Uhura's sharp cry sliced through the warning bells and alarms and crackling circuitry. Dark eyes radiant, she leaped to her feet and then had to catch herself on a panel when the ship lurched under another precise splash of fire.
“The crystal, we didn’t even think of the fucking crystal! Send it to him! Scotty, run down and beam this to him now!”
Wide-eyed, Scotty snatched it from her hand and threw himself through the doors almost before they had sighed open.
Long, long minutes passed. Enterprise wove her way under and around the tightest formations, slipped through weak points, avoided traps, but there was a net with perfectly spaced threads coming down on her, and fire was catching her on all sides.
Tears were pouring down Kirk’s face. Actual tears. Spock put him over the rail, much to Sulu’s horrified relief, and was moving his hips in very slow, very controlled circles, easing in and out with tiny motions and then a few deep and apparently life-changing strokes. With Spock eating his earlobes, Kirk ejaculated onto the lower level.
“Aw, fucking ew,” said one of the redshirts from below.
In outrage, Uhura slapped the comm button at her station and said into it: “Scotty, did you send it? Send it! Now!”
The doors opened and Scotty fell through them, scrambling down the steps over to a flush of controls and readouts on the lower deck. “I did! I put it right in front of him! I - aw, what’s all this now?”
On Delta Vega, briefly visible in the corner of the viewport, a sudden, searing pulse of blue light scorched through the mealy atmospheric storm clouds. The warbirds whirling around Enterprise burned to a perfect halt, suspended in space like mock stars.
“What,” Scotty said, then spun around and ran back to the powerlift, shouting, “If they’re offline, I’m down to the engines while we’ve got breather!” Several seconds after he’d vanished again there was a faint, audible cry that sounded suspiciously like the phrase: I’m on my way, girls!
“Scan the, ah, scan the planet!” Kirk finally managed to cry. “Scan for his energy patterns!” He jerked beneath Spock, his whole body shuddered with a kind of hot, liquid finality, and his eyes rolled. “Holy shit, I, shit, that’s not, fuck.”
And then Spock was looking at him from the span of an inch. Actually looking at him, lucid. Faint lines slowly formed around his mouth and eyes, and he pulled himself out of Kirk sharply; that was when he first seemed to notice that he’d had his cock stuck in him at all, or that his uniform was completely stained with semen. He straightened himself up some, stood over his crumpled captain for a while. Just towered over him. Then he was off like a shot for the lift without a word.
There was stunned silence.
“Uh,” Sulu ventured. “Captain. Manhattan’s signature. It, uh. I mean. Yeah. It’s gone.”
Kirk squirmed. Decided it would be prudent to cover his shame, at least. “Yeah, I guess that would make sense or something.”
12:00
“Hello, Jon. I’m sure it’s been a very long time. Have you missed me, I wonder? I hope not. You were perfect as I knew you; a perfect entity and a perfect friend. Because we weren’t friends, really, certainly not at the beginning. You told me once that you were often accused of losing your humanity, of forgetting it, but you know better than I the kind of petty judgments that humans make when they encounter something - or someone - so frighteningly beyond their limited ken. I think those first few years were your personal genesis; you knew everything, but did not know how derive meaning from any it. You disappeared into knowing, into being everywhere and always seeing everything before you learned to focus yourself on individual people and tasks. You were very cold then. You were very beautiful.
“I should tell you, even if you already know, that you are perhaps the most feared and reviled figure in the world. This may sound like a hyperbole, but you know that I am not often given to those. People hate you blindly, so much that the revelation of a secret and, might I add, reasonably accurate account of what happened here - Rorschach journals, they’ve been called, which I’m inclined to consider authentic - did very little to alter the public opinion. You are a fugitive, a war criminal, and you will remain so entirely for my sake.
“The point of this message is not to thank you. I don’t think you’d approve if I did. In fact, I only want to tell you that I know what has happened. All of it. By the time you see this, I will have been dead for years, hundreds of years. Perhaps more. But I know.
“I’ll explain. As you have seen, I am not a virtuous man. I make gambles, I offer payment in flesh that is not my own to sell. Even so, I cannot abide the thought of leaving a world defenceless against its own slow corruption. Such a thing would be too cruel.
“Your private research into time and the eleventh dimension did intrigue me, but that is not why I funded it. When you told me that you had begun to see the possibility for manufactured slips through time and shadow universes, I realized something. It is very selfish of me to save the world once and count that as the end of my obligation when there is so much time stretching beyond that point. So much, so far beyond me, no less worthy of being redeemed.
“I know you completed the technology in secret, Jon; I haven’t seen it, I never will, but you are too brilliant to have left it undone. I know that you have given this technology to beings who remind you of yourself; that perhaps you truly have made some in your own image, with clockwork minds that glitter like yours and faces that betray none of the secrets in their hearts. They used it. Or misused it. And you didn’t know. The nature of your creation resists your knowledge of its application, doesn’t it? Tachyons are the most marvellous things.
“I don’t even need to be there anymore. I activated this system before you knew what it was, and it will make you the apparent architect of destruction, forever if necessary. The tachyons will keep you blind to the precise details, but I’m sure you understand by now that it will always be known as your work, ostensibly. You will be the target of every war, you will be blamed for every great conflict. Enemies will come together in pursuit of you.
“Living things must be led, Jon. I’m sorry that I keep having to make you the fox that dashes on ahead of the hounds. However, I have great confidence that you will someday find a way to write perfect harmony into life itself.
“It’s simply an unfortunate fact that today is not that day.”
... 12:01?
So, really, looking back on it, they knew what the orders meant now. On the basis of exactly no intelligence regarding where to start, go find and subdue God while your second-in-command bangs you in the ass in front of everyone. Godspeed, Captain! A big ten-four on that one. Kirk only wished that he’d figured it out earlier, so that he could have responded with a politely scathing message for all superior officers ever.
Then again, the conjured warbirds were literally falling to pieces around Enterprise, filling her viewscreens with images of steel-and-crystal supernovae - to which Scotty reacted over the comm as though he was watching some dangerous, lovely predator being eviscerated - and if wishes were orgasms, Kirk just had four. So there was less to lament than there was to celebrate. Sort of. Celebrate might have been a bit of a strong word, as Spock had just returned in a fresh set of colours and was very carefully not looking at him - the entire bridge wasn’t looking at him, but Spock was never going to look at him ever again, never - and their actual objective remained indefinitely unsecured. So. Damn. And crap. At least he was pretty sure he hadn’t just fantasized Uhura saying fuck.
Kirk put the remains of his clothes in order and cleared his throat several times, trying to think of something to say. Maybe it was for the best that he couldn’t come up with anything. His entire crew was shell-shocked; it was probably wise to leave them alone with their special feelings.
Eventually he summoned the sense to make a report. He tapped a sensor, accessed the log archives, keyed the computer to record.
“Captain’s log,” he said authoritatively. “Stardate 2258.53. Command, you asshole. Go get him yourself.”
He shut it off.
“So all of this is classified,” he said to the universe at large. “In fact, it never happened.”
“What neyer heppen, Sir?” Chekov asked, a bit shrilly, and Sulu looked over at him and said, “Yeah, I must have been asleep for the last,” and had to swallow before he could say it, “forty minutes.”
“Kirk,” Uhura said, and his name fairly seethed on her lips. “We’re going to have words.”
“Nice words?”
“Not-very-nice words.”
“Like ... dirty words?”
She flattened her lips into a thin, cutting line.
“I knew this day would come,” he said thoughtfully, almost mournfully, “but I always sort of hoped that, you know, it would not be today. And that the parties would be reversed. Like, Spock and I would be the ones having words. Like, because. You know.”
Uhura turned to Spock and gestured sharply; some signal that made the strictly, agonizingly expressionless angles of his face flicker minutely. Facing Kirk again, she pointed at the lift. Her arm was held in an almost perfect Point-in-Line; Kirk glanced at Sulu reflexively, and saw him nodding appreciatively at her form.
“Today’s the day,” Kirk sighed, and muttered at Chekov to take the bridge.
Bonus round: It is my personal belief that Uhura drags them both off for a threesome, a belief supported by the fact that miarr wrote just such a thing weeks ago in Laws of Motion, which is amazing.
Star Trek (2009)/Watchmen; Spock/Kirk, Manhattan/Veidt; slash, dub-con.
6000 words.
R for sex and some language.
Written for this anon at st_xi_kink, and it should be noted that much of this totally awesome concept was anon's invention. I worked some stuff in, but really you guys. Pilgrims from the kink meme, stay anonymous if you like; IP logging is always off!
Notes: Crossing movieverses primarily here. There are a couple of truly epic plotholes going on, b-but I can explain: time flies when you're having a good time. Also, I apologize for being such a dork.
11:55
The crew of Enterprise was granted special leave for up to a standard month if they wanted it, and they didn’t. A general consensus had been reached in the week that followed the destruction of the Narada, carefully cultivated in a number of Academy-sponsored celebratory galas and a graduation kegger (which Chekov had most certainly not attended, no, they hadn’t seen him), and it was this: they were going everywhere together anyway, and the entire Federation was understandably rattled, probably very much aware of the potential threats to intergalactic co-habitation that had been filed away in the expectation that none of them would ever grow teeth, or a revenge complex or whatever. In the week that his people been surface-bound, Kirk guessed that Starfleet Command had likely been stepping up security procedures to the point of paranoia, tearing through old emergency dispatches and reports of open hostility, looking for those that needed to be dealt with immediately. Choice assignments were going to be handed out very soon and the greeners who actually took the full vacation being dangled in front of them would be the greeners who spent the next six months patrolling the Neutral Zone, staring across a bank of stars at some very uneasy Romulans and generally getting on each other’s nerves.
As soon as Enterprise was fit to cruise, they were all on deck, demanding orders. Dispatch was unnerved by their enthusiasm and tried to recommend a little more downtime, so Kirk threw a very fancy and very professional tantrum, insisting that he had the authority to call in a personal favour from Admiral Pike. So dispatch got Pike on the holo comm.
“Oh, hi,” Kirk said, genuinely pleased by the sway he obviously held. “I want orders, is all.”
“You’re insane,” Pike said instantly. “Why did you drag the entire crew onboard? Even if I got Command to issue something to you right now, you can’t just blaze off without prep and clearance.”
“Captain needs a crew,” Kirk replied. “I’m a captain. Crew needs orders. They’re a crew.”
Everybody waved a little. Even Spock.
“I had hope for you kids once. What do you want, exactly?”
“Something awesome!” Kirk said.
“Some-” Pike started to mutter, but he was smiling a bit and trying not to let them see it. “Well, don’t get used to this because I’m not going to make a good sugardaddy; I hate the administrative channels. I’ll see if I can get you something by tomorrow, though.”
Clapping his hands together sharply, Kirk turned and flashed Spock a thumbs up. He’d turned the tide, without a doubt; who could bear to disappoint a benign, somewhat tourist-y Vulcan? All he got in return was a faint frown that may or may not have been a general reaction to the indignity of it all. “Thanks, Admiral. You’re the coolest dad.”
“If you sleep on the ship, I will know there’s something wrong with you.”
Of course Kirk had some wiseass thing to say about that, but Christopher Pike clearly did not get what he had in life by being overly polite either. He cut the feed before he could hear anything he didn’t need to envision.
11:56
For: James T. Kirk, Captain
Commanding: NCC 1701 Enterprise
Issued: Stardate 2258.53
Officer(s) as named above are ordered to locate and take into custody one altered humanoid Doctor Manhattan (born: Jon Osterman) for the purpose of interrogation by Federated officials and trial for crimes committed on Earth in the pre-warp era, including crimes against humanity (kidnapping, torture of civilians, murder of civilians, killing of intellectuals, use of chemical and biological agents), crime of genocide, destruction of state property, and conspiracy. Subject considered active. Last confirmed sighting on Earth, 1985.292. Reports of unconfirmed sightings in Vulcan system (2085 and later), Romulan Neutral Zone (2183 and later).
For the completion of these orders you are granted permission to use excessive force as outlined in official Starfleet regulations.
Receive supporting documents:
Audio/visual media
Image stills
Personal history
List of war crimes
Data crystal
Transcript/ID page corresponding to data crystal
11:57
“So I don’t know if he’s making fun of us or not.”
McCoy flicked him a practiced look of offended impatience. “Jim, your request wasn’t even remotely formal. If he’s punishing you, it’s justified. And all he said is that he’d get us something quickly, which he did. And you’re pretty ungrateful, did you know that?”
“For first offisheyl assignment, obyectif does look pretty aussome,” Chekov commented, scrolling through the supplementary data sent along with the orders file. “Ties to anshieynt Earth historwy, specificully end of Cold War between Ameryika and Rusha! Wery cool. Deh partickular entity we are charged wis finding is rejisterd as ‘altered humanoyd’ Dokter Manhyetten, mastyrmind of capityal disasters in nineteen eighty-five.”
“Right,” Kirk said miserably. “See how relevant the date is? And where did he go? The report gives us no ideas, none.”
From the other side of the bridge, Uhura called: “Maybe they’ll send us more later, Captain. In fact, this could be a small test. Give us an apparent cold case and see what we do with it. I think we were right to assume that the Federation would be spreading its hottest files around. This could be very important, so much that they can’t give us everything at once. Make it look dusty.”
“Basic subterfuge,” Spock agreed. “A precaution and a way to determine what manner of assignment we deserve in the future.”
“Optimists, everywhere I turn. What else came with this stuff?”
All eyes went to Scotty, who was snapping his fingers for attention and then just for fun. “There’s the thing they beamed us right away. The thing. I gave it to Miss Uhura because, well, I don’t know what that thing is supposed to be.”
“It’s an encrypted data crystal,” Uhura said, producing a small, opaque chip of the most hideous colour Kirk had ever seen. “At least, that’s how it’s catalogued, but I can’t open it. I can’t even hack it. And the transcription file doesn’t list its contents, just that it’s intended to be ‘given to Doctor Manhattan on contact by direct post-mortem requistion of Adrian Veidt’.”
“If there are people running around doing everything I want centuries after I’m dead, life will be good,” Kirk said.
Sulu nodded. “Over, but good.”
“Keypten, some of the addishional media looks like it wyll be wery waluable. Here: footyge ov Doktor Manhyetten, old photygraffs, dockuements from his colleborashuns with Veidt.”
Clips and still frames were tossed up onto Enterprise’s viewport screen, an array of damaged photo scans and restored film cels. Most were washed out, completely colourless; others were barely discernible, aged completely off of the medium. There were a few decent shots from an interview session, though, and they showed a perfectly structured man in a black suit gazing impassively at a crowd of reporters. He was humanoid but perfectly hairless, and his skin was electric blue.
“Oh. Hey,” Kirk said, suddenly animated and restless again. “P.S., on Delta Vega, I was almost eaten by two monsters - thanks fully, Spock - and while I was maintaining a firm grip on the situation, I saw a very blue man like him. Just for a minute. Very, very blue.”
“Well, it is pretty cold there,” McCoy said.
“Do not start telling me about what’s pretty cold. Anyway, in this case, who cares what the dispatch means if we’ve already got a lead? We could wrap this thing up in a few days. Days. ENTERPRISE, LOCATE THE FUGITIVE KNOWN AS ‘DR. MANHATTAN’ BECAUSE, HAHA, WE’VE ALREADY GOT ENOUGH ELBOW GREASE TO LAST US A WHILE. Then, before Bones can say ‘Dammit, Jim’, we’ve already tracked him down. You know how impressive that would look? Pike will be all, ‘Slow down there, kid, I’m starting to feel totally inadequate in the shadow of your heroic deeds’ and I’ll say, ‘Sir, we both know I’ll never achieve as much as you already have in your prestigious career’ even though we actually both know that I definitely will.”
“I swear, Captain,” Uhura remarked, her eyes narrowing to razors.
“Okay, okay.” Easing back in his chair, Kirk drew a short breath and held it, willing his body not to shake in a frenzy of anticipation. It couldn’t be; but what if it was? He exhaled, clearing his lungs of the sweet, recycled oxygen that made him so fond of hyperventilating on the bridge. “It’s just that I saw him. It’s unbelievable but I might know where to find him. He looked at me.”
Sulu made a bit of a face. “Could you have been hallucinating? I mean, if he was there, wouldn’t he have helped you?”
“I,” Kirk began, and then fell silent. Everyone watched him with pointed interest. “Well, I don’t know. I looked toward him in the first place because I felt like I was being watched. He was at the mouth of a cave and I started going that way; when I got there, he was gone. I got the sense that, whatever he was, that’s all he did, he just ... watches. You know?” And Kirk glanced around for support, received only a few shrugs.
“I guess it might be worth checking out,” McCoy ventured, nearly lodging the last word in his throat when Uhura rounded on him and said very quietly, “Wait a minute.”
Oh, Kirk thought, and felt like an ass. “Mr. Spock, you, uh, haven’t said anything on the matter. Your opinion is paramount in this. Do you ... want some time to consider my suggestion?”
For a while, Spock just looked at him. A perfectly serene exterior. A sign, Kirk was coming to recognize, that he was wrestling with particularly troubling thoughts.
“Is your conviction absolute?” he asked at length. “Refusing to investigate Delta Vega prevents us from obtaining a result, either positive or negative. Eliminating that location from a list of possibilities will allow us to build an unbiased case for any other leads that present themselves. Or, if he is there, I would only be delaying the successful completion of our orders. So. Are you truly confident in this hunch of yours?”
“I saw him,” Kirk said, leveling his voice and his eyes to match that clean slope of Vulcan sincerity he’d come to hate and admire so much in the last few weeks. “Or someone who looks so much like the image in the references that we should find out how they knew his aspect well enough to imitate it.”
“I understand, Captain, and I trust your judgment.”
“Thank you,” Kirk said, and managed not to add: you must be totally crazy but not as crazy as me. Please please don’t let me be wrong or I’ll look like a such a tool.
11:58
He was right. Search operations weren’t necessary; that’s how right he was. In fact they didn’t even have to enter the planet’s gravity well before he was completely and inescapably right. Normally Kirk enjoyed being so right, but he wasn’t enjoying it very much this time.
Manhattan appeared before them, a mote of blue fire that snapped impossibly to life in vacuum while they approached Delta Vega at a wary speed in realspace. Though he’d seen readouts confirming that the singularity over the space once occupied by Vulcan had evaporated, Kirk still didn’t like the idea of trying to hop another event horizon. He didn’t have his crew drag their ship out of a black hole just to trip headfirst into the one Nero had used to destroy Vulcan in the first place. Pike would kick his ass, wherever it ended up. So they had been creeping toward the planet, being crafty, when Manhattan suddenly materialized in front of the viewport.
Draped in darkness, he was a very pure, pleasant colour all over, about the shade of a summer sky on a cool morning. He suspended himself before them - and it suddenly clicked for Kirk; in airless space - looking in at them, letting them look at him, and then he sank through the viewport. Kirk recoiled without moving; all the breath in his body seemed to crawl timidly into his sinuses. Doctor Manhattan was hanging in his ship like a very expensive ornament, so ... mission accomplished?
“James Kirk.” As if out of a sense of etiquette, Manhattan lowered himself until his toes nearly touched the deck. He was still taller than most of the human officers on board, but it was thoughtful of him not to leave his crotch at eyelevel. “I see you’ve suffered no lasting harm from your previous visit to this system.”
Under his breath, Kirk said: “Bones, why does everyone know my name?”
Before McCoy could pin him with a discreet glare, Manhattan turned his head to Spock - the first physical motion beyond speaking that Kirk had seen him make, he was like a reptile - and said something unintelligible. Then: “It is very good to make your acquaintance through direct contact.”
“Sorry, what was that?” Kirk asked no one in particular.
"My name," Spock said. He didn’t blink away from Manhattan’s white-point eyes for an instant. “You are Jon Osterman of Earth?”
“I have not been called such a thing for a very long time. But I am that.”
“How have you come to be in this sector of space? What are you doing here? What connection did you have to Vulcan?” Each word lifted Spock’s voice by the faintest degree. He was not shouting, but at some point he began to demand rather than ask.
Manhattan tilted his head like a lizard. “I made Vulcan. Not the physical planet, of course. Its civilization. Your civilization. It did very well, you should be gratified by its degree of cultural maturation. I will take much of what your people taught me to the next project.”
Chairs swivled and hissed, fingers clattered on crystal casing. A note of nervous laughter rose like a bird, barely audible.
Shaking his head, rather violently for a Vulcan, Spock said: “I cannot accept that as fact. You propose that the Vulcan race, culture and history in its entirety has existed since Gregorian date 1985, a total of 273 years and 58 days from the present.”
“Yes.”
“That is impossible.”
“That is not,” Manhattan said. “The probability of it is extremely low in nature, and your generational memory perhaps competes with the validity of the idea. But I assure you that it is possible, as a result of having happened. I left Earth to better serve Adrian’s experiment and came to the planet that would eventually be called Vulcan at the date you have submitted. Its environmental conditions were ideally habitable for the type of species I wished to encourage. Upon my arrival, I formed an accelerated time field around it through a manipulation of the substance that has been referred to in your presence as Red Matter; which, I must admit, has recently been employed in ways that imply most cognizant lifeforms are still quite mentally and emotionally infantile even at a very advanced stage of development.
“In any case, time was not experienced differently by anything within the field, of course. There’s nothing to worry about. You and your people evolved at a perfectly normal rate, with minimal intervention. Millions of years for us, a span of decades for the universal community at large. After your first contact with extraplanetary species, I thought it best to permit the field to lapse permanently, and you have been in standard temporal synchronization ever since.”
Nobody spoke. For one thing, they all felt out of their depth reaching for that little gem; and for another, it was hard to think of some argument or exclamation that would really do the thing justice. The most immediate worry for Kirk, though, was Spock. Nothing about him had changed. He hadn’t moved or looked incredulous or scoffed at a single word. His face was a pale, bloodless mask, as still as Manhattan’s, while he was informed that his race had been created in a time capsule and then abandoned in front of scavengers by the figure casting frigid shadows through their starship. Not that anyone could be believing a word he said; but he believed it and there was a strangeness to him that showed Kirk exactly why the Federation found him menacing centuries after his disappearance from Federated territory.
First to gather a fistful of wits was McCoy. “You did this,” was all he said, the tactful man. He looked like a spacer who’d just had artificial gravity cut out on him; he put out a hand to steady himself on the rail and his knuckles gasped white.
“I did nothing.”
“Exactly,” Kirk said, finally beginning to feel more angry than afraid.
“Is such a thing not in theoretical correspondence with your Prime Directive?” Manhattan asked mildly.
“You will allow us to escort you back to Earth.” The room itself jumped at the sound of Spock’s voice. Only he and Manhattan did not flinch. “You will be delivered to Federation officials and interrogated in connection with disasters experienced on pre-warp Earth.”
“I will not comply, as it would bring the integrity of Adrian Veidt into question.”
“Reconsider, as a sign of respect for your lost,” the word seemed to rise in Spock’s mouth like an unpleasant flavour, “creations.”
“The most interesting evolutionary variation, the Rihannsu, departed some time ago and continue to flourish elsewhere,” Manhattan said, his eyes tracking empty spaces as if there were people flowing around him. “They have been synched to standard longer than the Vulcans. Through them, my wards do, in fact, still prosper.”
Kirk peered at him. “What departed?”
“You call them Romulans.”
“Are you crazy? I mean, are you completely offworld? It was a Romulan who destroyed it, your planet if you have to call it that. Did you even know?”
“Yes. I know everything, which is to say, I know that now. Truthfully, I would have preferred to avert the ironic catastrophe that befell the planet called Vulcan. It was an unusual and regrettable event in this continuum. But there have been so many of those, and there will be more.”
“Well, you obviously could have prevented this one if you’re telling us the truth.” His unshakeable tranquility was getting to Kirk. He’d thought Spock was bad, but this was like yelling at an asteroid and expecting it to stop. “Why didn’t you?”
“I could not anticipate the circumstances at the time. The tachyon array that follows a typical time slip or sudden formation of a singularity impedes my ability to foresee coming events. That was what made the Vulcans so fascinating; inhabiting their sense of time prevented me from knowing what they would do, who they would eventually become. I was drawn into the experience of awe and disbelief at the complexity of life, simply by observing it.”
“That’s enough,” Spock said. Something in his tone made Manhattan seem to crystallize in place; the racing, burning pulse of his presence withdrew, and the ship was suddenly very cold. “You will submit to the authority of the United Federation of Planets and surrender yourself to us now.”
White pupils in ice-nine eyes. Manhattan’s head swivled with perfect smoothness and regularity, taking them all in. He smiled vaguely, but it was the imitation of a smile rather than the expression of what a smile should mean. “It has been a long time for me. I have nearly forgotten how I ever saw pleasure in conversation with short-lived biological constructs; however, I remind myself to be patient. You are only a child, and you are - by a feasible extension of logic - my child. You answer to me. Would you like me to prove it?”
“Yes,” Spock said frigidly.
The bridge went dark. Comparatively. The lights were up and Enterprise’s panels and curves were gleaming ferociously, but Kirk aburptly had the sense that he’d been staring into the sun for hours and would never see more than shadows again. When he managed to blink most of the tears and static from his eyes, he saw that Doctor Manhattan had vanished the same way he’d entered.
“Was anyone else just looking at his dick the whole time? Because I’m not gonna lie.”
“We should destroy Delta Vega, Captain.”
Still wiping at tears, Kirk coughed and nearly poked himself in the eye. “Holy shit, Spock.”
“That does not qualify as an informed response.”
“Are you nuts? I don’t know if this is a staple of your childhood or not, but remember ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’?”
Many of Spock’s most finely nuanced emotions made it into his idle gestures. Kirk was starting to get that and even though he could only read one or two of them, he still felt pretty good about identifying them when he managed it. This one was familiar: Spock settled his expression carefully, folding his hands neatly behind his back. Meant he was getting impatient, in the order of a starvation victim who’d just been promised a proper meal. “We have encountered our target and found him to be unstable, delusional, an accessory to murder and a murderer himself. Orders grant us permission to use excessive force if necessary. We are young, after all, and accidents happen.”
“Accidents.”
Driving a hard edge into the bubble of their argument, Sulu leaned away from his station and called: “So Captain, there are ... hundreds of what the computer insists are Romulan warbirds breaking the cloud belt on that planet right now.”
Silence. “No, there aren’t.”
“Yeah. There are. No answer from them, either.” Very deep furrows drew themselves down into the smooth skin between Sulu’s eyes. “Scanner says they’re unpiloted.”
Silence. “Scanner’s wrong.”
“A.I. navigation?” Scotty wondered aloud. “That’s clumsy, though. We might have issues with the sheer number, but they’ll fart about and collide with us accidentally more often than they land a shot.”
Three pairs of fighters had already leaped the short distance from atmosphere to move within firing range of the Enterprise; early birds, after a fashion. A good way to find out what was going on, Kirk thought.
“Open fire,” he snapped, startling McCoy a step back. The crew scurried to comply and streams of photon torpedoes flared on a sharp track into the warbirds’ faces.
At once, they banked, scattered and regrouped more loosely, taking on a more complicated offensive formation all in one elegant maneuver.
McCoy shook his head. “No. Just no.”
“Oh, come on,” Uhura whispered, watching them split slightly to return fire.
A few warning shots blazed at them, and Enterprise kicked under the impact, more as if she’d been insulted rather than hurt. Everyone fell into their stations, barking damage reports. Nothing bad. The lady didn’t appreciate it, though. More ships were swirling up to feed the vanguard of six, dozens more, their sides cold and shining like calculating sneers.
“Shiyelds, Keyptain?” Chekov shouted, because Kirk hadn’t issued the order and everyone had their hands full. So did he, of course, but he was the better multitasker. “Keyptain?”
Uhura spun to see why he wasn’t answering. Uhura said, “Um,” and everyone on the bridge turned to look at her, and then everyone on the bridge followed her line of sight.
11:59
The crew of Enterprise had seen Kirk and Spock come to blows before, but the context had been different, somewhat more socially acceptable as a public event, and the ship hadn’t been under immediate attack at the time. After a short pause, everybody locked down and got to work without speaking; they found they didn’t actually need spoken orders to wind together an elegant ratio of power distribution between defense to offense, trading percentages, trusting Sulu to dodge as much of the incoming attack as possible. Meanwhile Spock had laid his captain out on the deck with just the right kind of violence, destroyed his clothes and stuck his tongue in his ear, was tracing his musculature with long, precise fingers, muttering inaudible things against his throat, splitting his legs apart with his sharp hipbones. Kirk made a long, bloodcurdling sound.
“Come on, Chekov,” McCoy snapped, so he could delay having to decide what to do with them, “eyes on the prize.”
“Oh, am watcheng for signiwicant rewards, Offwisir McCoy.”
“The dogfight, kid!”
“Unnecesserwy!” Chekov protested.
“Manhaaa-” Kirk tried to say. “He’s got him. Doesn’t prove anything. Mind manipulating bas-” And Spock withdrew, flipped him onto his stomach, mounted him like that. “Trying to kill morale! Degrade us! Not gonna work! Ah ye- I mean, no!”
A series of warbirds shattered under a photon blast. And then efficiently reassembled themselves in clear view and neatly picked up their flight path as though nothing had happened.
“That is impossible.”
“I can’t believe it, I mean, it can’t happen like that, something’s going on that we don’t know about.”
“Did you see that?”
Despite the panic and terror and frightening maneuvers and also all the things the warbirds were doing, Scotty was tracking ships individually and in groups with pinpoint fascination. “I don’t know, I mean the planet has raw materials, scrap, equipment and unrefined metallics in the outposts. He seems to be controlling those bugs remotely now, so he could have ... made them?” He cringed away from his own suggestion slightly, realizing that he was granting Manhattan an order of power they’d all unofficially and communally rejected for the sake of sanity. It was fine, though; Spock was too busy sucking on Kirk’s testicles to take any offense.
“Sulu, what the hell are we doing?” McCoy shouted, trying to pull his captain and first officer apart without actually touching them. “Get us away from those things before they surround us!”
“They,” Sulu said tonelessly, his gaze flashing between controls, mapping grid and viewport, “are on me. I can’t. Think. I. Get them away.”
“Don’t be so intolerant, man. Anyway they aren’t quite on you.” Which was true enough; though Spock had picked Kirk up and bent him over behind Sulu, Kirk was only really clutching the back of Sulu’s chair, panting and moaning while Spock humped him frantically, so they weren’t actually touching him at all, even if he was being forced to share part of the experience.
“Is inappropryate.” Chekov was manipulating controls flawlessly without taking his eyes from the spectacle in the ship for an instant. “Wery diffycult to fokess.”
“The crystal!”
Chekov actually yelped a bit as Uhura's sharp cry sliced through the warning bells and alarms and crackling circuitry. Dark eyes radiant, she leaped to her feet and then had to catch herself on a panel when the ship lurched under another precise splash of fire.
“The crystal, we didn’t even think of the fucking crystal! Send it to him! Scotty, run down and beam this to him now!”
Wide-eyed, Scotty snatched it from her hand and threw himself through the doors almost before they had sighed open.
Long, long minutes passed. Enterprise wove her way under and around the tightest formations, slipped through weak points, avoided traps, but there was a net with perfectly spaced threads coming down on her, and fire was catching her on all sides.
Tears were pouring down Kirk’s face. Actual tears. Spock put him over the rail, much to Sulu’s horrified relief, and was moving his hips in very slow, very controlled circles, easing in and out with tiny motions and then a few deep and apparently life-changing strokes. With Spock eating his earlobes, Kirk ejaculated onto the lower level.
“Aw, fucking ew,” said one of the redshirts from below.
In outrage, Uhura slapped the comm button at her station and said into it: “Scotty, did you send it? Send it! Now!”
The doors opened and Scotty fell through them, scrambling down the steps over to a flush of controls and readouts on the lower deck. “I did! I put it right in front of him! I - aw, what’s all this now?”
On Delta Vega, briefly visible in the corner of the viewport, a sudden, searing pulse of blue light scorched through the mealy atmospheric storm clouds. The warbirds whirling around Enterprise burned to a perfect halt, suspended in space like mock stars.
“What,” Scotty said, then spun around and ran back to the powerlift, shouting, “If they’re offline, I’m down to the engines while we’ve got breather!” Several seconds after he’d vanished again there was a faint, audible cry that sounded suspiciously like the phrase: I’m on my way, girls!
“Scan the, ah, scan the planet!” Kirk finally managed to cry. “Scan for his energy patterns!” He jerked beneath Spock, his whole body shuddered with a kind of hot, liquid finality, and his eyes rolled. “Holy shit, I, shit, that’s not, fuck.”
And then Spock was looking at him from the span of an inch. Actually looking at him, lucid. Faint lines slowly formed around his mouth and eyes, and he pulled himself out of Kirk sharply; that was when he first seemed to notice that he’d had his cock stuck in him at all, or that his uniform was completely stained with semen. He straightened himself up some, stood over his crumpled captain for a while. Just towered over him. Then he was off like a shot for the lift without a word.
There was stunned silence.
“Uh,” Sulu ventured. “Captain. Manhattan’s signature. It, uh. I mean. Yeah. It’s gone.”
Kirk squirmed. Decided it would be prudent to cover his shame, at least. “Yeah, I guess that would make sense or something.”
12:00
“Hello, Jon. I’m sure it’s been a very long time. Have you missed me, I wonder? I hope not. You were perfect as I knew you; a perfect entity and a perfect friend. Because we weren’t friends, really, certainly not at the beginning. You told me once that you were often accused of losing your humanity, of forgetting it, but you know better than I the kind of petty judgments that humans make when they encounter something - or someone - so frighteningly beyond their limited ken. I think those first few years were your personal genesis; you knew everything, but did not know how derive meaning from any it. You disappeared into knowing, into being everywhere and always seeing everything before you learned to focus yourself on individual people and tasks. You were very cold then. You were very beautiful.
“I should tell you, even if you already know, that you are perhaps the most feared and reviled figure in the world. This may sound like a hyperbole, but you know that I am not often given to those. People hate you blindly, so much that the revelation of a secret and, might I add, reasonably accurate account of what happened here - Rorschach journals, they’ve been called, which I’m inclined to consider authentic - did very little to alter the public opinion. You are a fugitive, a war criminal, and you will remain so entirely for my sake.
“The point of this message is not to thank you. I don’t think you’d approve if I did. In fact, I only want to tell you that I know what has happened. All of it. By the time you see this, I will have been dead for years, hundreds of years. Perhaps more. But I know.
“I’ll explain. As you have seen, I am not a virtuous man. I make gambles, I offer payment in flesh that is not my own to sell. Even so, I cannot abide the thought of leaving a world defenceless against its own slow corruption. Such a thing would be too cruel.
“Your private research into time and the eleventh dimension did intrigue me, but that is not why I funded it. When you told me that you had begun to see the possibility for manufactured slips through time and shadow universes, I realized something. It is very selfish of me to save the world once and count that as the end of my obligation when there is so much time stretching beyond that point. So much, so far beyond me, no less worthy of being redeemed.
“I know you completed the technology in secret, Jon; I haven’t seen it, I never will, but you are too brilliant to have left it undone. I know that you have given this technology to beings who remind you of yourself; that perhaps you truly have made some in your own image, with clockwork minds that glitter like yours and faces that betray none of the secrets in their hearts. They used it. Or misused it. And you didn’t know. The nature of your creation resists your knowledge of its application, doesn’t it? Tachyons are the most marvellous things.
“I don’t even need to be there anymore. I activated this system before you knew what it was, and it will make you the apparent architect of destruction, forever if necessary. The tachyons will keep you blind to the precise details, but I’m sure you understand by now that it will always be known as your work, ostensibly. You will be the target of every war, you will be blamed for every great conflict. Enemies will come together in pursuit of you.
“Living things must be led, Jon. I’m sorry that I keep having to make you the fox that dashes on ahead of the hounds. However, I have great confidence that you will someday find a way to write perfect harmony into life itself.
“It’s simply an unfortunate fact that today is not that day.”
... 12:01?
So, really, looking back on it, they knew what the orders meant now. On the basis of exactly no intelligence regarding where to start, go find and subdue God while your second-in-command bangs you in the ass in front of everyone. Godspeed, Captain! A big ten-four on that one. Kirk only wished that he’d figured it out earlier, so that he could have responded with a politely scathing message for all superior officers ever.
Then again, the conjured warbirds were literally falling to pieces around Enterprise, filling her viewscreens with images of steel-and-crystal supernovae - to which Scotty reacted over the comm as though he was watching some dangerous, lovely predator being eviscerated - and if wishes were orgasms, Kirk just had four. So there was less to lament than there was to celebrate. Sort of. Celebrate might have been a bit of a strong word, as Spock had just returned in a fresh set of colours and was very carefully not looking at him - the entire bridge wasn’t looking at him, but Spock was never going to look at him ever again, never - and their actual objective remained indefinitely unsecured. So. Damn. And crap. At least he was pretty sure he hadn’t just fantasized Uhura saying fuck.
Kirk put the remains of his clothes in order and cleared his throat several times, trying to think of something to say. Maybe it was for the best that he couldn’t come up with anything. His entire crew was shell-shocked; it was probably wise to leave them alone with their special feelings.
Eventually he summoned the sense to make a report. He tapped a sensor, accessed the log archives, keyed the computer to record.
“Captain’s log,” he said authoritatively. “Stardate 2258.53. Command, you asshole. Go get him yourself.”
He shut it off.
“So all of this is classified,” he said to the universe at large. “In fact, it never happened.”
“What neyer heppen, Sir?” Chekov asked, a bit shrilly, and Sulu looked over at him and said, “Yeah, I must have been asleep for the last,” and had to swallow before he could say it, “forty minutes.”
“Kirk,” Uhura said, and his name fairly seethed on her lips. “We’re going to have words.”
“Nice words?”
“Not-very-nice words.”
“Like ... dirty words?”
She flattened her lips into a thin, cutting line.
“I knew this day would come,” he said thoughtfully, almost mournfully, “but I always sort of hoped that, you know, it would not be today. And that the parties would be reversed. Like, Spock and I would be the ones having words. Like, because. You know.”
Uhura turned to Spock and gestured sharply; some signal that made the strictly, agonizingly expressionless angles of his face flicker minutely. Facing Kirk again, she pointed at the lift. Her arm was held in an almost perfect Point-in-Line; Kirk glanced at Sulu reflexively, and saw him nodding appreciatively at her form.
“Today’s the day,” Kirk sighed, and muttered at Chekov to take the bridge.
Bonus round: It is my personal belief that Uhura drags them both off for a threesome, a belief supported by the fact that miarr wrote just such a thing weeks ago in Laws of Motion, which is amazing.