Secrets Were Invented In Russia (Sulu/Chekov--PG-13)
Title: Secrets Were Invented In Russia
Authors: sororexitium and nenya24
Pairing: Sulu/Chekov
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: We're just two little girls floating through someone else's dreams. We own nothing.
Summary: There are some things about Pavel that Hikaru and Hikaru alone knows.
Notes: This is part of the Butterfly Series. You don't have to read any of the other stories to get this, but if you want something to kill some of your day with...it's always there. Unfortunately I had to drop this down from 50 to 30 secrets, because I suck...and not even in the fun way. Nenya and I had fifty ideas, but after a week of staring at them...I threw in the towel. Please, feel free to stone me...just spare Nenya. Also...we were kinda way in over our head with this pairing. It's our first attempt at this pairing...and well, I understand if I didn't pull it off properly. Please feel free to critique and as always requests for a longer version of any secret are welcome. Hope you enjoy!
One:
Pavel used to get up hours before registration for each term, so that he would get into the classes he wanted. He was terrified that if he didn’t get up at four o’clock in the morning on the first day of registration and go rushing to the console to click on all the classes he needed, he would somehow be passed over for them. Completely ridiculous, seeing as how with his aptitude levels he probably could have taught the classes he had been so worried about enrolling in.
Two:
His favorite story is Alice in Wonderland. He has a copy on almost all of his padd’s, each at various levels of being read and read and read over again. He says that he enjoy the simplicity of Alice’s mind. The innocent way she follows after animals as if she were no more than the animal itself. Hikaru asks him if that’s why he likes him so much, but Pavel just smiles, rubbing his thumb over his black eyebrow (‘You are much less innocent than Alice. You are more to me the Mad Hatter.’)
Three:
He’s afraid of butterflies. Really, butterflies. He can match wits with Vulcans, outshoot Klingons, navigate through unchartered space with hardly a sweat broken, yet the most harmless, delicate creature possibly found in the universe and Pavel scrambles away from them like they are spawned directly from some mythical devil. Hikaru tries not to find pleasure in the way pointing out a butterfly will make Pavel holler in Russian for ten minutes while punching at him with more strength than his slim form belies.
Four:
His mother was a ballet dancer and so taught him the forms. Moving from position one to five, even now, when Hikaru meets Mrs. Chekov, they stay in the kitchen, possibly a little more than drunk, and stumble through the forms, both as agile and lithe as they are goofy and wavering. Hikaru can’t stop smiling, though he can’t understand half of what Mrs. Chekov says as she ‘corrects’ her son’s form in a combination of Russian and Standard.
Five:
Of course, when Hikaru met Pavel, the youngest navigator in Starfleet was only seventeen. The attraction was instant, almost as instant as their ability to work together in perfect tandem, but Hikaru had had reserves. Waited three months until Pavel was both more familiar to and with him and, more importantly, eighteen. Even then he was hesitant, until Pavel, with a frustrated groan, grabbed him by the front of his shirt and crashed their lips together, muttering between kisses in Russian. Hikaru’s almost positive he was called every derogatory name in the book while they kissed inside the botany lab.
Six:
Pavel keeps an assortment of candy hidden around his favorite hang outs. He has a bowl of some sort of licorice that Doctor McCoy sneaks when the Captain isn’t around to bitch about it. He has some chocolate candies in ‘his’ corner of Rec Room 5, where he, Hikaru, and Uhura relax. He even has some hidden in the little console of his seat. It’s really quirky, but Hikaru likes the sneak kisses that taste mostly of sugar.
Seven:
He once dyed his hair blue after a fight with his parents. He thought it would help to show that he was capable of making his own decisions without their input. It only served to make his father laugh until he cried, while his mother continuously made still frames over the transmission they were on. Pavel is still trying to locate where his mother hid the pictures.
Eight:
Pavel speaks French fluently. His mother taught it to him when he was a little boy. As a ballet dancer she often did many shows in the different states of the world, and a few off planet, but her favorite place to work in was always France. Pavel doesn’t speak in it often, but there are a few ensigns in the science department that are French and Hikaru’s shown up to a few of their conversations. It’s almost ridiculous how hot French is when spoken with a Russian accent.
Nine:
His father owned a computer repair buisness, still does. When Pavel was a boy, when his mother wasn’t whisking him off with her to different parts of Earth, he would spend his days with his father, learning to pull apart and put together computers. Mr. Chekov taught his boy everything their was to know about computers, and by the time Pavel was nine, he could fix computers almost faster than his father could.
Ten:
Gaila was his first friend at Starfleet Academy. Apparently, it is very possible to hate an adorable, fourteen year old genius for simply because he’s lightyears ahead of almost everyone else. But Gaila, green, and sweet, and somewhat an outcast herself despite her many friends, had taken to him like dragon to gold. Pavel has said it often himself, in varying degrees of happiness and sadness, ‘she hoarded me like I was precious dance to her. Always, she made me feel welcome and normal.’ Both Pavel and Hikaru make sure to have flowers sent to her (very empty) grave for her birthday.
Eleven:
Pavel has the strangest tendency to completely mother-hen Doctor McCoy. It is quite possibly the funniest thing to watch the youngest crewmember on the ship boss around the only man on the ship that can boss around the Captain. And he’s sneaky about how he does it, too. He’ll be talking with the doctor calm as can be, and all of a sudden, he just says, ‘Doctor McCoy, I think it is time for you to eat. You are gripy and unpleasant and I know for fact you haven’t eaten since morning. Food will help.’ And impossibly, McCoy grumbles under his breath and heads towards the mess. Kirk says, while giving Pavel a teasing glance, it’s because he needs to set a good example for the children aboard the ship. Hikaru kind of hates Kirk in those moments because they only serve to remind Hikaru how young their navigator is.
Twelve:
He has a weird fascination with his weight. Not as in he doesn’t want to gain any weight, or the fact that he is trying to gain weight. It’s more to do with the fact that he weighed the same since he was sixteen and randomly he has to know if this has changed. Hikaru has become accustomed to Pavel’s random proclamations of, ‘I have to go check my weight!’ just before he runs off to the nearest scale.
Thirteen:
Pavel had a younger brother by the name of Poitr. He was seven years younger than Pavel, and, sadly, died suddenly when he was only three months old. Pavel recalls one night while they’re talking about siblings and how completely terrible growing up with five older sisters was for Hikaru that having a younger brother would have been welcome, but he was glad for his status as a single child. It meant that he never had to wear make-up as Hikaru did. On the other hand, ‘I would have traded the world to never hear that cry come from my mama.’
Fourteen:
Hikaru assumes that it is because Pavel’s parents lost an infant, but really they could have been like this their entire parenting lives. They are ridiculously protective of their boy. It’s really kinda sweet, because they’re always sending Pavel care packages and once, they sent him an aloe vera plant to make sure his cuts were properly cared for, which Pavel settles gently next to Gertrude after they move in together on the Enterprise.
Fifteen:
He has math competitions with Kirk once a month. They will enlist a completely random crewmember to find them a complicated math question which neither of them are allowed to see until the date they have decided to have the competition on. Then they will meet in the recreational room with a small, but growing every month, crowd circling around them. Hikaru usually stands next to McCoy and he listens to him grumble about how inane this is, while quietly willing Pavel the speed to win these stupid competition. At current standing, it’s usually a draw who will win a match and Pavel only has one win against Kirk.
Sixteen:
He has random bouts of insomnia caused by his too active brain that doesn’t ever seem to rest. There are several nights where Hikaru has heard of Pavel just wandering the Enterprise halls with wide, glossy eyes that seem to see nothing but the numbers that rule his world. He’s seen it himself a few times, when he’s restless as well after a mission that seemed to consist of nothing but blood and hate, where Pavel will sit in his chair and stare into the abyss that captures their room, and his stormy eyes turn gray like the room around them. Hikaru has never been more taken away by the melancholy color of gray than on those nights.
Seventeen:
His favorite animal is… hippos. Yeah, Hikaru wants to know the intrigue as well.
Eighteen:
The frist time they see Earth from space, still whole and only suffering atmospheric disturbances that would likely effect something…something (Pavel had gone on this entire speil about what could be wrong…and turned out to be ninety-eight percent accurate), there were tears glittering in his eyes. Hikaru doesn’t bring it up, now. At that point in time, they barely knew each other. But he saw Pavel’s eyes-gray like the raging sea-and his heart fluttered. In the midst of losing a planet, an entire class, shooting away an entire ship into a black hole they were nearly dragged into…Pavel just looked so happy to find ‘home’ was still there, steady as time.
Nineteen:
His mother often took him to France for a week or two when school let out. His father had his computer business, so didn’t often attend with them. So, it would just be the two of them, traveling throughout a city his mother adored and eating at all of her favorite bakeries, and taking a sip of her wine in their hotel room. Pavel regales him of stories of gondolas and sweets and all the plays that were from the old, old days before holoscreens. Hikaru loves those moments, lounging on the beds they had pushed together when they moved in, and staring up at wild hand gestures and smiling features.
Twenty:
Pavel is a frivolous knot-maker. Give him anything-wire, ribbon, string-and he will sit there and turn it into a bundle of knots. Sad thing is…given enough time, Spock has come to see a mathematical pattern in the way he knots. Of course Pavel would tie strings to the Fibinacci sequence.
Twenty-one:
He sends Scotty sandwiches after they’ve had a ‘fight’-a constant source of joy for Hikaru. Pavel always pretends like he has no idea what Hikaru is talking about, or Scotty, or Uhura, hell, even Kirk knows by now. He says ‘people like Scotty. Anyone would send him sandwich.’ Unfortunately, he’s terrible at lying about anything that isn’t poker.
Twenty-two:
Pavel has…a ridiculously short temper. Not many would guess it by his sweet demeanor and his contagious laugh that is never too far away from him. However, after a year of dating him, Hikaru has been subject to just how short his temper can be and how well he can hold a grudge. Sad thing is, it’s really almost beautiful when Pavel is worked into a rage over the rumpled bedspread that ‘I just fix this, dammit!’ It’s so worth the glares Hikaru gets to mess up Pavel’s careful organizing.
Twenty-three:
Pavel and Uhura have a strange fascination with pastries. Doughnuts, turnovers, eclairs, it doesn’t matter. Before shift, sometimes after depending on the day, or some strange combination thereof, the two of them can be found at the replicator ordering different baked sweets and groaning about how it just isn’t as good as the homemade stuff that they’re accustomed to from home. They no longer ask Hikaru for his opinion, because no one in the Sulu family can cook (according to them) if he thinks that the Turkish Delight that the Enterprise spits out is ‘good stuff.’
Twenty-four:
Pavel has to actively not count cards at the ‘Not-Poker’ parties held in the captain’s quarters. Hikaru swears some days that he can see sweat forming on his brow in an effort to stop doing what is almost second nature to him.
Twenty-five:
Pavel will make his accent thicker when speaking to certain higher ups that absolutely piss him off. He’s found that it makes them dismiss him faster, than if he explains everything, because that always runs the risk of more questions. He’s learned that if he answers immediate questions in a tone so thick even Uhura sits there with furrowing brows they just want to get away from him. Let it never be said that Pavel isn’t a sneaky, little devil.
Twenty-six:
For being the one most often associated with innocence aboard the Enterprise, Pavel is the kinkiest person Hikaru has ever dated. Ever! Handcuffs, spanking, toys, you name it, Pavel is into it. Hikaru would never label himself as boring in the bed, but, hell, compared to Pavel…Hikaru would easily say that he’s the happiest man on the Enterprise.
Twenty-seven:
Pavel had never driven a car before he met Hikaru. Having grown up in St. Petersburg, he says, ‘Everything was easy to walk to. Papa didn’t drive. Mama didn’t drive. I don’t drive.’ The first time their on shore leave home on Earth, Hikaru tries to teach Pavel, but the young Russian stares at his sister’s car with an air of contempt and firmly says, ‘We can walk to store. It won’t kill us.’ Hikaru seriously had to resist the urge to pout when they were carrying what felt like fifty pounds of groceries back to his house.
Twenty-eight:
Despite being a kinky, anger-prone, young man, Pavel is easily the most romantic person in the universe. It no longer shocks Hikaru to wake up to slim fingers running over his face, to gray-blue eyes staring down at him with reverence and love, or to a slow, happy smile that graces pale lips. It doesn’t shock him when Pavel shuffles closer to him at the ‘Not Poker’ parties, pressing their chairs close enough that Hikaru can feel the Russian’s thigh pressed firmly to his. It doesn’t even surprise him when Pavel laces their fingers together in the rec room. It does kind of astound Hikaru that Pavel is still so taken with him, despite all of their glaring disimilarities. It’s mind-blowing.
Twenty-nine:
His favorite thing to do with Hikaru is simply…taking a shower together. They don’t have a shower on the Enterprise, so it’s always a rare thing, but you get Pavel down on a shore leave planet that has a good shower, and Hikaru swears they both come back as prunes. Pavel says, ‘You look good in water,’ in that very decisive tone he has, and Hikaru is ready to drown for the rest of eternity just for him.
Thirty:
Pavel likes to say that Hikaru tricked him into loving him. He had no intention doing anything so unscientific; it was all an elaborate scheme. That soft smile will appear and he’ll run his hand through Hikaru’s hair and say, ‘I really don’t mind so much as I should.’
Authors: sororexitium and nenya24
Pairing: Sulu/Chekov
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: We're just two little girls floating through someone else's dreams. We own nothing.
Summary: There are some things about Pavel that Hikaru and Hikaru alone knows.
Notes: This is part of the Butterfly Series. You don't have to read any of the other stories to get this, but if you want something to kill some of your day with...it's always there. Unfortunately I had to drop this down from 50 to 30 secrets, because I suck...and not even in the fun way. Nenya and I had fifty ideas, but after a week of staring at them...I threw in the towel. Please, feel free to stone me...just spare Nenya. Also...we were kinda way in over our head with this pairing. It's our first attempt at this pairing...and well, I understand if I didn't pull it off properly. Please feel free to critique and as always requests for a longer version of any secret are welcome. Hope you enjoy!
One:
Pavel used to get up hours before registration for each term, so that he would get into the classes he wanted. He was terrified that if he didn’t get up at four o’clock in the morning on the first day of registration and go rushing to the console to click on all the classes he needed, he would somehow be passed over for them. Completely ridiculous, seeing as how with his aptitude levels he probably could have taught the classes he had been so worried about enrolling in.
Two:
His favorite story is Alice in Wonderland. He has a copy on almost all of his padd’s, each at various levels of being read and read and read over again. He says that he enjoy the simplicity of Alice’s mind. The innocent way she follows after animals as if she were no more than the animal itself. Hikaru asks him if that’s why he likes him so much, but Pavel just smiles, rubbing his thumb over his black eyebrow (‘You are much less innocent than Alice. You are more to me the Mad Hatter.’)
Three:
He’s afraid of butterflies. Really, butterflies. He can match wits with Vulcans, outshoot Klingons, navigate through unchartered space with hardly a sweat broken, yet the most harmless, delicate creature possibly found in the universe and Pavel scrambles away from them like they are spawned directly from some mythical devil. Hikaru tries not to find pleasure in the way pointing out a butterfly will make Pavel holler in Russian for ten minutes while punching at him with more strength than his slim form belies.
Four:
His mother was a ballet dancer and so taught him the forms. Moving from position one to five, even now, when Hikaru meets Mrs. Chekov, they stay in the kitchen, possibly a little more than drunk, and stumble through the forms, both as agile and lithe as they are goofy and wavering. Hikaru can’t stop smiling, though he can’t understand half of what Mrs. Chekov says as she ‘corrects’ her son’s form in a combination of Russian and Standard.
Five:
Of course, when Hikaru met Pavel, the youngest navigator in Starfleet was only seventeen. The attraction was instant, almost as instant as their ability to work together in perfect tandem, but Hikaru had had reserves. Waited three months until Pavel was both more familiar to and with him and, more importantly, eighteen. Even then he was hesitant, until Pavel, with a frustrated groan, grabbed him by the front of his shirt and crashed their lips together, muttering between kisses in Russian. Hikaru’s almost positive he was called every derogatory name in the book while they kissed inside the botany lab.
Six:
Pavel keeps an assortment of candy hidden around his favorite hang outs. He has a bowl of some sort of licorice that Doctor McCoy sneaks when the Captain isn’t around to bitch about it. He has some chocolate candies in ‘his’ corner of Rec Room 5, where he, Hikaru, and Uhura relax. He even has some hidden in the little console of his seat. It’s really quirky, but Hikaru likes the sneak kisses that taste mostly of sugar.
Seven:
He once dyed his hair blue after a fight with his parents. He thought it would help to show that he was capable of making his own decisions without their input. It only served to make his father laugh until he cried, while his mother continuously made still frames over the transmission they were on. Pavel is still trying to locate where his mother hid the pictures.
Eight:
Pavel speaks French fluently. His mother taught it to him when he was a little boy. As a ballet dancer she often did many shows in the different states of the world, and a few off planet, but her favorite place to work in was always France. Pavel doesn’t speak in it often, but there are a few ensigns in the science department that are French and Hikaru’s shown up to a few of their conversations. It’s almost ridiculous how hot French is when spoken with a Russian accent.
Nine:
His father owned a computer repair buisness, still does. When Pavel was a boy, when his mother wasn’t whisking him off with her to different parts of Earth, he would spend his days with his father, learning to pull apart and put together computers. Mr. Chekov taught his boy everything their was to know about computers, and by the time Pavel was nine, he could fix computers almost faster than his father could.
Ten:
Gaila was his first friend at Starfleet Academy. Apparently, it is very possible to hate an adorable, fourteen year old genius for simply because he’s lightyears ahead of almost everyone else. But Gaila, green, and sweet, and somewhat an outcast herself despite her many friends, had taken to him like dragon to gold. Pavel has said it often himself, in varying degrees of happiness and sadness, ‘she hoarded me like I was precious dance to her. Always, she made me feel welcome and normal.’ Both Pavel and Hikaru make sure to have flowers sent to her (very empty) grave for her birthday.
Eleven:
Pavel has the strangest tendency to completely mother-hen Doctor McCoy. It is quite possibly the funniest thing to watch the youngest crewmember on the ship boss around the only man on the ship that can boss around the Captain. And he’s sneaky about how he does it, too. He’ll be talking with the doctor calm as can be, and all of a sudden, he just says, ‘Doctor McCoy, I think it is time for you to eat. You are gripy and unpleasant and I know for fact you haven’t eaten since morning. Food will help.’ And impossibly, McCoy grumbles under his breath and heads towards the mess. Kirk says, while giving Pavel a teasing glance, it’s because he needs to set a good example for the children aboard the ship. Hikaru kind of hates Kirk in those moments because they only serve to remind Hikaru how young their navigator is.
Twelve:
He has a weird fascination with his weight. Not as in he doesn’t want to gain any weight, or the fact that he is trying to gain weight. It’s more to do with the fact that he weighed the same since he was sixteen and randomly he has to know if this has changed. Hikaru has become accustomed to Pavel’s random proclamations of, ‘I have to go check my weight!’ just before he runs off to the nearest scale.
Thirteen:
Pavel had a younger brother by the name of Poitr. He was seven years younger than Pavel, and, sadly, died suddenly when he was only three months old. Pavel recalls one night while they’re talking about siblings and how completely terrible growing up with five older sisters was for Hikaru that having a younger brother would have been welcome, but he was glad for his status as a single child. It meant that he never had to wear make-up as Hikaru did. On the other hand, ‘I would have traded the world to never hear that cry come from my mama.’
Fourteen:
Hikaru assumes that it is because Pavel’s parents lost an infant, but really they could have been like this their entire parenting lives. They are ridiculously protective of their boy. It’s really kinda sweet, because they’re always sending Pavel care packages and once, they sent him an aloe vera plant to make sure his cuts were properly cared for, which Pavel settles gently next to Gertrude after they move in together on the Enterprise.
Fifteen:
He has math competitions with Kirk once a month. They will enlist a completely random crewmember to find them a complicated math question which neither of them are allowed to see until the date they have decided to have the competition on. Then they will meet in the recreational room with a small, but growing every month, crowd circling around them. Hikaru usually stands next to McCoy and he listens to him grumble about how inane this is, while quietly willing Pavel the speed to win these stupid competition. At current standing, it’s usually a draw who will win a match and Pavel only has one win against Kirk.
Sixteen:
He has random bouts of insomnia caused by his too active brain that doesn’t ever seem to rest. There are several nights where Hikaru has heard of Pavel just wandering the Enterprise halls with wide, glossy eyes that seem to see nothing but the numbers that rule his world. He’s seen it himself a few times, when he’s restless as well after a mission that seemed to consist of nothing but blood and hate, where Pavel will sit in his chair and stare into the abyss that captures their room, and his stormy eyes turn gray like the room around them. Hikaru has never been more taken away by the melancholy color of gray than on those nights.
Seventeen:
His favorite animal is… hippos. Yeah, Hikaru wants to know the intrigue as well.
Eighteen:
The frist time they see Earth from space, still whole and only suffering atmospheric disturbances that would likely effect something…something (Pavel had gone on this entire speil about what could be wrong…and turned out to be ninety-eight percent accurate), there were tears glittering in his eyes. Hikaru doesn’t bring it up, now. At that point in time, they barely knew each other. But he saw Pavel’s eyes-gray like the raging sea-and his heart fluttered. In the midst of losing a planet, an entire class, shooting away an entire ship into a black hole they were nearly dragged into…Pavel just looked so happy to find ‘home’ was still there, steady as time.
Nineteen:
His mother often took him to France for a week or two when school let out. His father had his computer business, so didn’t often attend with them. So, it would just be the two of them, traveling throughout a city his mother adored and eating at all of her favorite bakeries, and taking a sip of her wine in their hotel room. Pavel regales him of stories of gondolas and sweets and all the plays that were from the old, old days before holoscreens. Hikaru loves those moments, lounging on the beds they had pushed together when they moved in, and staring up at wild hand gestures and smiling features.
Twenty:
Pavel is a frivolous knot-maker. Give him anything-wire, ribbon, string-and he will sit there and turn it into a bundle of knots. Sad thing is…given enough time, Spock has come to see a mathematical pattern in the way he knots. Of course Pavel would tie strings to the Fibinacci sequence.
Twenty-one:
He sends Scotty sandwiches after they’ve had a ‘fight’-a constant source of joy for Hikaru. Pavel always pretends like he has no idea what Hikaru is talking about, or Scotty, or Uhura, hell, even Kirk knows by now. He says ‘people like Scotty. Anyone would send him sandwich.’ Unfortunately, he’s terrible at lying about anything that isn’t poker.
Twenty-two:
Pavel has…a ridiculously short temper. Not many would guess it by his sweet demeanor and his contagious laugh that is never too far away from him. However, after a year of dating him, Hikaru has been subject to just how short his temper can be and how well he can hold a grudge. Sad thing is, it’s really almost beautiful when Pavel is worked into a rage over the rumpled bedspread that ‘I just fix this, dammit!’ It’s so worth the glares Hikaru gets to mess up Pavel’s careful organizing.
Twenty-three:
Pavel and Uhura have a strange fascination with pastries. Doughnuts, turnovers, eclairs, it doesn’t matter. Before shift, sometimes after depending on the day, or some strange combination thereof, the two of them can be found at the replicator ordering different baked sweets and groaning about how it just isn’t as good as the homemade stuff that they’re accustomed to from home. They no longer ask Hikaru for his opinion, because no one in the Sulu family can cook (according to them) if he thinks that the Turkish Delight that the Enterprise spits out is ‘good stuff.’
Twenty-four:
Pavel has to actively not count cards at the ‘Not-Poker’ parties held in the captain’s quarters. Hikaru swears some days that he can see sweat forming on his brow in an effort to stop doing what is almost second nature to him.
Twenty-five:
Pavel will make his accent thicker when speaking to certain higher ups that absolutely piss him off. He’s found that it makes them dismiss him faster, than if he explains everything, because that always runs the risk of more questions. He’s learned that if he answers immediate questions in a tone so thick even Uhura sits there with furrowing brows they just want to get away from him. Let it never be said that Pavel isn’t a sneaky, little devil.
Twenty-six:
For being the one most often associated with innocence aboard the Enterprise, Pavel is the kinkiest person Hikaru has ever dated. Ever! Handcuffs, spanking, toys, you name it, Pavel is into it. Hikaru would never label himself as boring in the bed, but, hell, compared to Pavel…Hikaru would easily say that he’s the happiest man on the Enterprise.
Twenty-seven:
Pavel had never driven a car before he met Hikaru. Having grown up in St. Petersburg, he says, ‘Everything was easy to walk to. Papa didn’t drive. Mama didn’t drive. I don’t drive.’ The first time their on shore leave home on Earth, Hikaru tries to teach Pavel, but the young Russian stares at his sister’s car with an air of contempt and firmly says, ‘We can walk to store. It won’t kill us.’ Hikaru seriously had to resist the urge to pout when they were carrying what felt like fifty pounds of groceries back to his house.
Twenty-eight:
Despite being a kinky, anger-prone, young man, Pavel is easily the most romantic person in the universe. It no longer shocks Hikaru to wake up to slim fingers running over his face, to gray-blue eyes staring down at him with reverence and love, or to a slow, happy smile that graces pale lips. It doesn’t shock him when Pavel shuffles closer to him at the ‘Not Poker’ parties, pressing their chairs close enough that Hikaru can feel the Russian’s thigh pressed firmly to his. It doesn’t even surprise him when Pavel laces their fingers together in the rec room. It does kind of astound Hikaru that Pavel is still so taken with him, despite all of their glaring disimilarities. It’s mind-blowing.
Twenty-nine:
His favorite thing to do with Hikaru is simply…taking a shower together. They don’t have a shower on the Enterprise, so it’s always a rare thing, but you get Pavel down on a shore leave planet that has a good shower, and Hikaru swears they both come back as prunes. Pavel says, ‘You look good in water,’ in that very decisive tone he has, and Hikaru is ready to drown for the rest of eternity just for him.
Thirty:
Pavel likes to say that Hikaru tricked him into loving him. He had no intention doing anything so unscientific; it was all an elaborate scheme. That soft smile will appear and he’ll run his hand through Hikaru’s hair and say, ‘I really don’t mind so much as I should.’