A Distant Horizon Part II
IV
Once upon a time, Jim might have taken this opportunity to get absolutely shit faced. He’d never liked coming face to face with his various shortcomings, and that was part of why he’d spent so much of his adolescence and early twenties obliterated - inspiring sour disappointment in everyone within a fifty-mile radius just by existing had a tendency to erode one’s self-respect. But he wasn’t a kid anymore; he was pushing thirty, a captain responsible for this starship and all the buzzing lives that played out their own private dramas inside it. He couldn’t justify pouring an entire bottle of whatever moonshine Scotty had last gifted him down his throat tonight, even if he weren’t set to be on the bridge for alpha shift in the morning.
Sometimes, being an adult sucked.
More than two hours after Spock dumped him into the corridor, Jim was still staring blankly at the document the admiral had sent him requesting drop-off in San Francisco. The pixelated letters didn’t even make words anymore. If he closed his eyes, all he saw was Spock’s face, aghast at Jim’s temerity and unable to hide it. Sleep wouldn’t come easy tonight.
San Francisco - the lines arranged themselves into a meaning, and that meaning was Bizarro Kirk off his ship, off his Spock, and off his mind, and it engendered such relief that Jim almost felt guilty. But he paused when he set stylus to screen to approve the request. Would Spock be happier if Kirk stayed on? He was certainly giving Spock something Jim couldn’t. Maybe those two crazy kids could cobble together something decent with each other once Kirk got in a few sessions with Shandhir and evened himself out. Maybe signing this meant signing away a measure of Spock’s contentment, and after all he’d done, didn’t Jim owe Spock a little bit of brightness? He’d have to lay down some ground rules: that he was in command of the Enterprise, not Kirk, and that he never wanted to see them kiss or touch or, frankly, be anywhere near each other, and actually, if Kirk could stay away from Jim altogether, it would be pretty great. He fiddled with the stylus, flipped it around his fingers, tapped it on the table, and once again lines blurred and Spock’s breath hot on his face rose up in his memory and threatened to suffocate him. He didn’t hear his doors open or the intruder’s indiscreet footsteps. He jumped in his chair and swiveled around when he heard,
“This book sucks.”
It was Kirk, and he was short, and he was brandishing Jim’s vintage paper copy of A Passage to India at him.
“Jesus!”
“I mean, Forster tries so hard, but it’s still all ‘exotic but inferior foreign people’ and ‘know your place,’ don’t you think?”
“What are you doing in my quarters?”
“Not the best material for a guy who has to make first contact. If you have some kind of burning need to read Forster, I think you should give Maurice a go, don’t you?”
Jim scowled at the sly smirk and strode over to snatch the paperback away.
Kirk’s laugh was a mean, mocking bark. “Or are you still pretending a healthy cropping of chest hair and a good pair of broad shoulders don’t give you a hard-on?”
“I’ve read Maurice!” And how absurd was that statement? It was nothing like what he’d wanted to say.
Kirk made a low sound of feigned contemplation. He turned back around to look at Jim’s bookshelf, fists anchored on hips.
“Didn’t like it enough to bring it, though?”
Jim crossed his arms, A Passage to India bending in his tight grip.
“Limited space,” he said, curt. He shoved the book back into its place. Kirk half turned toward him and leveled a wry, disturbingly flirtatious smile at him. It curdled Jim’s insides.
“And yet A Passage to India looks like it’s barely been cracked.”
“Are you here just to insult my collection? You can leave, you know. I’m pretty busy.”
“Yeah, all that wool-gathering you were doing looked really urgent.”
Jim’s lip curled in a sour grimace.
“What do you want?”
Kirk pivoted to face him full-on, and when he crossed his arms, they stood as twin images in sideshow mirrors, uncanny and just slightly off.
“I want you to stop acting like a baby,” Kirk said. “You’re, what, coming up on twenty-eight? Get your head out of your ass.”
Jim scoffed.
“You’re choosing right now to come tell me how much better you were at everything than me? Fuck off, Admiral, I’m not you, and you can kiss my ass.”
“And what a fine ass it is, Captain, but I think I’ll restrain myself. No, this is a very Marley kind of visit.” He plucked A Christmas Carol off the shelf and tossed it at Jim. He caught it on reflex and looked back up at Kirk with a frown.
“Showing me the error of your ways now, Admiral?”
Kirk rolled his eyes.
“You act like I don’t know you at all.”
“You don’t!” Jim shoved the Dickens back at him.
“I do!” Kirk snapped, and he smacked the shelf with the book, though the light smack it produced was less climactic than he’d probably hoped. “I know you think about Spock when you jerk off, and I know you pretend you didn’t the moment it’s all over.”
Jim’s eyes went wide, and he found himself crowded into a bulkhead for the second time that night, his alternate advancing on him like a predator enflamed by the scent of fear. He pushed at Kirk’s shoulders, but the admiral wouldn’t let up.
“I know you think about what everyone’s reactions to your giving in to your feelings would be except the ones who matter: yours and Spock’s.”
“Shut up.”
“I know you’ve never come so hard with a woman as you would by yourself after a workout with Spock.”
“Stop, just fucking stop-”
“I know you used to imagine Jordan Sanders sucking your cock and that you thought about sucking his more times than you could ever admit to.”
Jim’s stomach flipped. “Don’t-”
“I know you were one of the ones who watched and did absolutely nothing while that bastard Krytoph and his thugs kicked the shit out of him the last day he ever came to school.”
“Fuck you!” Jim took a swing, and it landed on Kirk’s pert nose. Blood bloomed under Jim’s fist and Kirk crumpled to the floor. He wrapped his arms around Jim as he went down, though, and Jim fell heavy on top of his alternate. They both grunted on impact, and Kirk shoved Jim off of himself and clambered on top of him, pinning him down with a knee in the stomach and his hands on his shoulders. Jim lay panting, bewildered, Kirk’s blood, his blood, dripping down onto his face and gold shirt. They stared at each other wild eyed for a long moment.
“I know what happened to Jordan Sanders.”
“What?” Jim whispered, voice breaking.
Kirk sighed and got off him, propped himself against the bulkhead. He prodded at his nose and Jim pulled himself up, leaned back on his hands.
“I don’t think you broke it, at least,” Kirk grumbled.
“Jim,” Jim prompted him. He needed to hear it. Needed to know what had become of the fey boy who’d first stirred his blood and shame. Needed to know if there was more guilt to be borne on his account.
Kirk met his eyes, and for the first time Jim saw not banked fury or despair, but a guilelessness he thought was foreign to his own nature.
“Nothing. Nothing happened to him. He moved to New York and does something with teen shelters. He’s married to some guy; they adopted a kid and a Great Dane.”
Jim sat up fully and scrubbed his hands through his hair, over his face. He wiped at the blood on his face with a sleeve.
“How’d you find out?” he asked.
“Before I finally got my act together with Spock a couple years ago, I was thinking pretty hard on what I wanted, who I wanted, and what it meant for me. I finally admitted, privately, that Spock did more for me than anyone in a miniskirt ever had. It was like all these memories were unleashed. I couldn’t get Jordan out of my head, I felt so bad about what I’d done. Or hadn’t done. I was worried something bad happened to him and somehow it would be all my fault. So I looked him up. Gave him a call. I don’t think he even remembered me, but.” Kirk shrugged. “I don’t know. Seeing him made me let go of something that had been tormenting me for almost my whole life. All my reasons for telling myself I was straight fell apart when I saw this skinny kid who’d been harassed for years grown up, happy and himself instead of hiding and worrying, like I was. It let me stop torturing myself, trying to be something I’m not.” Then Kirk scoffed. “Still waited to actually tell Spock my feelings, of course, like an ass. I thought he couldn’t possibly want me back.”
Jim watched Kirk draw up his knees and balance his elbows on them as he tipped his head back and held his sleeve to his nostrils.
“I’ll get a cloth,” Jim said, and he went into the head to get a hand towel. In the mirror he saw a man with two clear blue eyes, fresh out of excuses.
He tossed the towel at Kirk and sat back down on the floor beside him, legs outstretched. Kirk grunted and balled it up to press against his nose. Jim saw him close his eyes.
“I don’t want to be gay,” Jim told him.
Kirk heaved a congested sigh. “I know. Doesn’t make it not true.”
“I have sex with women. I like sex with women.”
“You make it work with women. You’ve never had sex with someone you honest to God, low down in your soul, wanted so bad it felt like you might die if you couldn’t have them. There’s a difference.”
“I’m attracted to women.”
Kirk cracked one golden eye at him, and one side of his mouth came up in half a smile.
“Women are good looking creatures. Even gay men and straight women and asexuals can admit to it.”
Jim rubbed his eyes, and kept his hands covering his face when he was done. He began to shake.
“Hey,” he heard Kirk say softly. “It’ll be okay, you know. I’m here, aren’t I?”
“You’re here,” Jim echoed. “Yeah, you’re here and you’re a fucking mess and you’re having some kind of ill-advised affair with my first officer that doesn’t seem to be making either of you happy. Wow, sign me up; I can’t wait.”
“No one’s saying you have to march in a pride parade next week. Hell, kid, no one’s telling you you have to call yourself anything in particular. I’m a fan of ‘Spocksexual,’ myself.”
A manic bubble of laughter burst out from Jim’s mouth and surprised him.
“So you’re cheating on Spock with Spock right now? Jesus.”
Kirk stretched his legs out alongside Jim’s.
“It’s complicated. Spock left me. I was… distraught. And then I was here, and your Spock was so… well. You know. It was a bit of comfort, and a bit of revenge, for both of us, I think. Not my wisest move, I admit. Or his.”
But Jim was stuck on one sentence. “He left you? What? Why? What did you do to him?”
Kirk sent him an irritated glower from around the bloody rag.
“What makes you think I did anything to him? Why is that what everyone assumes first?”
“Well, if you know me, I know you, and I know because I’m the king of sabotaging a relationship. Remember Ruth? Carol?”
“Both women you didn’t really want to be with because you like cock.” Kirk bumped Jim’s shoulder and Jim glared at him. “No, Spock was just - having a prolonged Vulcan freak-out precipitated by my asking him to marry me. And I only found this out by calling the other Spock on New Vulcan earlier. And I’m glad I did because I can’t really imagine going through years of… what I’ve been going through.”
Jim was stuck again though, and couldn’t give the faintest of shits where Kirk had gotten his information.
“Marry you? You asked him to marry you?”
Kirk’s small smile was a sad one, and he set his head back against the bulkhead.
“Never wanted to be apart. Starfleet has a regulation, you know, Article 78, Section 9? Couples with Vulcan marriage bonds can never be separated by assignment. I wanted to marry him like a Vulcan, like a human, like a goddamn Klingon if it meant being with him for the rest of my life. Turns out, the right relationship with the right person turns me into a saccharine romantic.”
Jim blinked at him from eyes gone huge and round.
“I didn’t know.”
Kirk patted Jim’s knee.
“He’s the real deal, Jim. You shouldn’t sit on opposite sides of this bulkhead, too busy worrying about what other people might think of you to go take what makes you happiest.”
“What if he leaves me too?” Jim tightened his arms around himself and shivered anyway.
Kirk propped up one knee and took the towel away from his face. He balanced his elbow on his raised knee and let the bloody rag dangle from his fingers like some kind of trophy from a duel. His nose had stopped bleeding.
“He’s different than my Spock,” Kirk said. “With Vulcan gone and his mother dead, I think he knows he can’t hide from his emotions, even if he doesn’t want anyone to know he has them. Plus-” Kirk flicked the slaughterhouse rag at him playfully. “-he kinda told me he’d never do to you what my Spock did to me.”
“I was an asshole tonight. A complete and utter asshole.”
“He loves you anyway.”
Jim pulled his knees up and put his head between them, suddenly breathless.
“That’s a lot to process,” Jim said.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret, Jimmy: you love him too. It’s a lot less scary than you think it is.”
Jim found that hard to believe. Love seemed to open people up to every kind of pain imaginable, like bacteria on a flayed slice of meat left out of the fridge. Love seemed like too much con and not enough pro. How many happy marriages had he ever seen? How many functional familial relationships? Look at Kirk, having a breakdown because one skinny Vulcan with a bowl cut and a penis left him. No - it must be better to go it alone.
“Jim,” Kirk said. “Tell me you’ve been happy these last few months since you and Spock… parted company. Tell me you haven’t been moping around like your dog just died and I’ll leave you alone and set Spock up with that nice Lieutenant Commander in the science department.”
Jim lifted his head and scowled.
“Dr. Nguyen? He’s totally wrong for Spock! He’s all fussy and uptight and washes his hands like thirty times a day.”
Hazel eyes lit with amusement peered at him from beneath raised brows.
“He’s brilliant, meticulous with his work, hygienic, and not bad to look at if I do say so myself.”
“You’re a dick.”
“You’re stubborn.”
“You’re deliberately harassing me.”
“You’re deliberately ignoring the truth, even though it would make you happy. Do you enjoy cutting off your nose to spite your face?”
Jim got up and yanked the rag away from his alternate. He stalked to the disposal unit and sent it away.
“Why do you want me to go sweep him off his size fourteens anyway?” he asked. “You could stay on this boat in an advisory capacity and have your Spock and eat him too. Or something.”
Kirk shook his head and staggered to his feet. He brushed past Jim and sat in his place at the worktable, smirking at Jim’s chagrined glare. His face was crusted with vivid blood.
“You look like a serial killer,” Jim said as he slid into the opposite chair with a moistened paper towel and flung it at his alternate. Kirk ignored him, but began to dab away at the mess on his face.
“Me and this Spock aren’t for each other,” Kirk said. “We’d never actually be happy. Besides, I’m meeting a certain someone when we dock.” He waggled his eyebrows, and he looked lighter.
“Seriously?”
“Sure.”
“So you’d just - drop everything. For him.”
Kirk’s smile held no shadows. “Absolutely,” he said.
Jim was silent for a while. He hit the replicator for two hot chocolates.
“So how’d you two get together anyway?” he asked. “Did someone travel back in time to plant a foot on your ass?”
Kirk wrapped his hands around his mug, warming them. He took a gulp even though it must have been too hot.
“Remember Janice Lester?” he asked, wiping his mouth with the back of a hand.
Jim didn’t bother to hide his surprise.
“Yeah, like I could forget someone that nuts. Don’t tell me she set us up or something.”
“Well. She switched our bodies. Mine and hers.”
Jim gaped. “No shit.”
“Yeah. She was trying to take over my life. It was… it was awful. But. Spock was there. And he made everything easier. He always does, but I mean… he saw me, you know? Trusted me even though he had no reason to, at first. After it was over, I was still rattled by having been in her body. I just wanted to feel stable, and safe, and like, like I was tied to something real and tangible. And I was just so tired of pretending being with Spock wasn’t something I wanted. I’d fought it for so long, came so close so many times but never, never did what I wanted. It was wearing on me. So I finally just let it go. I went to his quarters that night. And he was -” Kirk’s eyes were on a faraway plane, mesmerized. “-he was tall and strong and beautiful and awkward and warm, and I loved him so much. It was… it was like an epiphany. We were together for over two years.” He cocked his head then, snapping back to reality and meeting Jim’s eyes, his expression shuttered. “Before he left.”
Jim reached over for the pinkened paper towel that languished on the table.
“C’mere,” he murmured, and Kirk leaned over. Jim scrubbed away what Kirk had missed around the creases of his nostrils, the dip above his lip, along his jaw line and cheekbones. “You think I owe this to myself.”
“Do you want to turn around in twenty years find yourself alone, a bitter old man who can’t be close to anyone?”
“Am I as melodramatic as you?”
“Probably.”
“Jesus.”
Jim kept wiping at Kirk’s face. These lips have kissed Spock’s, he told himself. Two Spocks. An image of himself and Spock entangled, holding each other close, bare chest to bare chest, cock to cock, hooked Jim’s imagination, tugged at his heart. He pulled back abruptly when his cock firmed up in his trousers.
“Is it worth it?” he asked then, the soiled paper towel balled up in his fist. “All the pain and the bullshit? To be with him?”
Kirk looked at the far wall and tilted his head toward Spock’s quarters on the other side of the bulkheads as if sensing him.
“I know I’ve been a terror since Spock left,” he said. “Even Bones told me to shove it until I can act civilized. But I’ve never once regretted it. I’ve never once said ‘I wish I’d never been with him in the first place.’ He’s - he’s worth all of this. This is nothing in comparison.” He waved a hand in front of his face as if erasing the blood and the worry lines and the heaviness around his eyes. Jim’s heart began to beat a faster, more erratic pace, and his breath came quicker.
The truth was, Spock’s quiet offer of companionship three months ago had tempted him more than he cared to admit. He could imagine it all too readily: the hot tangle of limbs, the fathomless gaze he could lose himself in for too long, a naked vulnerability he had never allowed himself. The way his heart leapt and his blood pumped had sent a shudder down Jim’s spine; he couldn’t want this, couldn’t want Spock so much - it was dangerous. To turn him down and see the look on his face - a flash of pain, covered quickly by stony placidity - nearly tore Jim to shreds. He wanted to reach out then, to pass his fingertips over the dear sharp bones of that face, but he balled his fists and left Spock’s quarters instead. But this heat, the way everything in him cleaved toward everything in Spock, was the life in his veins, the air in his lungs, and being apart from him was a torture for which he could no longer justify being noble. It eased an unnamed pain to acknowlege finally the truth of his desires.
Jim tipped his hot chocolate back into his mouth. When he put the mug down, he fixed his eyes on Kirk’s and clenched his jaw.
“That’s that then,” he said. “There’s only one problem.”
Kirk grinned at him.
“And what’s that?”
“I don’t know anything about guy-on-guy sex.”
Kirk threw his head back and laughed, the uproar reverberating between the bulkheads. He gestured for Jim to come around to his side of the table, and Jim scooted the chair over. Kirk booted up the computer and tapped with enviable ease through a bunch of firewalls and password protected folders, and suddenly Jim realized they were looking at the contents of Sulu’s hard drive.
His very lecherous hard drive.
Jim’s mouth went dry.
“Our helmsman is a connoisseur of gay erotica from all around the galaxy,” Kirk said with a wink.
“You mean porn.”
“Don’t act like my maiden aunt.”
“We don’t have a maiden aunt.”
“What are you, Spock right now? Here.” Kirk clicked on a file named ‘Beach Bum Boys 7.’ “We’ll start off with something pretty vanilla.” Vanilla, Kirk had said, but Jim still felt overwhelmed.
“How about you just tell me what Spock likes and how to do it?”
Kirk looked at him like he just said he wanted to retire to Saskatoon to start looking for Sasquatch.
“No. First off, you’re gonna watch a bunch of Sulu’s porn and get a healthy appreciation for penis so you don’t freak out at an inopportune moment. Honestly, I can’t believe you’ve never even looked before. Secondly, figuring out what Spock likes and how to get him to make that funny noise is an adventure I won’t take from either of you.”
Jim’s cock twitched.
“What funny noise?”
Kirk beamed, clapped him on the back, and hit play.
V
Spock was already on the bridge when the captain arrived three minutes early for alpha shift. He approached the science station, and Spock detected a note of nervous energy from the way the muscles of his face tensed.
“Captain,” Spock said without inflection when Jim came to stand in front of his chair.
“Hey, Spock. Since shift hasn’t started yet, can I talk to you in the ready room for a sec?”
Spock nodded once and rose, careful not to make any superfluous movements. He followed his captain off the bridge and into a space used mostly for senior crew meetings. Spock stood tall and straight, hands behind his back. He gripped his left wrist with his right hand harder than necessary and schooled himself still. He tamed the dread that threatened to overtake him.
“At ease, Commander,” Jim said, and gestured to the seats around the table. He took one, and indicated that Spock should take the one to his immediate left. After a moment’s hesitation, Spock sat, but did not let his spine relax. Jim looked at him with regret plain on his face. “Spock. I’m not here to reprimand you. Quit looking like I’m about to swat your nose with a newspaper.”
“How would you have me look, Captain? I am as I am.”
“Spock. Don’t be like this. I brought you here to apologize for my behavior last night.”
Spock flicked his gaze to Jim’s. Blue eyes peered at him with concern, and Spock had to exert control to calm the fluttering of his heart. He dropped his eyes and looked unseeing into his own lap.
“Continue,” he said.
Jim huffed out a short laugh. “Thank you, First Officer, I will. Could you please look at me, Spock?”
Spock forced himself to comply. Jim looked contrite, but it solved none of Spock’s turmoil. He was still in love with his captain, who could not return his regard. No amount of apologizing could resolve the dilemma, and since returning to his quarters last night feeling a terrible emptiness, Spock had let the notion of transferring off the Enterprise hold court at the forefront of his mind. He had contemplated it fleetingly from time to time since Jim spurned him, but the idea reared up now, monolithic and increasingly tempting. It would not please him to depart, but perhaps it would be easier for him and the unwilling object of his affections if they were to be as strangers.
“Look,” Jim said. “What I said and did last night was out of line. Way, way, way out of line, and I’m so sorry. I never meant to get so out of control and act like such a - jerk. I have no right to dictate anything about your personal life, and I have no right to know what you do with your personal life either. I know that, and there’s no excuse. I just… I want you to know how sorry I am, and that I’ll never do it again.”
Spock’s heart, an illogical organ prone to feeling, felt brittle, ready to crumble. Jim had no intentions of insinuating himself into Spock’s “personal life,” as he termed it, even as friend, and here their desires diverged. He knew what remained of his acquaintance with Jim was over, and he had no recourse. He would leave the Enterprise.
He became aware that Jim was regarding him with an expectant expression.
“The standard social convention is that I accept your apology and forgive you, correct?” he asked, his voice hoarse and low.
Jim frowned, then gave a slow nod of affirmation.
“That’s the convention, I suppose, but you don’t have to.”
Spock stood abruptly.
“Then I do not. Alpha shift commences, Captain. We should not be late.”
He swept out of the room. For the rest of the uneventful alpha shift, he avoided the stony pallor of Jim’s face, and when his back was turned at the science station, he felt the weight of Jim’s gaze, a heavy burden.
As soon as the captain departed from the bridge at the conclusion of the shift, Spock sent his transfer request. Spock bypassed his usual stop at the science department and went straight to his quarters to begin packing. When he unearthed his duffle from the depths of his closet, his personal padd trilled.
The pixelated message that appeared on the screen when he unlocked it was from Jim.
Can I please come over to talk? it read. Spock hesitated over the virtual keyboard. If he wrote yes, Jim would be in his quarters, desperate, pleading, but offering nothing that could compel him to stay. If he wrote no, well. Jim wouldn’t be in his quarters at all.
Yes, he sent, and before even thirty seconds lapsed, Jim had let himself into Spock’s quarters, a blur of command gold and skin flushed pink. He stopped short where Spock had his duffle laid out on his bed. When he looked up at Spock’s face, the only word that could properly describe his expression was ‘desolate.’
“You’re really doing this?” Jim asked, the waver in his voice almost imperceptible. Almost.
“I regret that it has come to this, but I find that my position is untenable. I have come to believe that it would be to the benefit of this ship and its captain if I removed myself from my post.”
Jim’s frown threatened to swallow his face. It would have been comical if Spock was not at that moment learning the practical application of that once-befuddling human term ‘heartbreak.’
“Tell me what to do, Spock. Tell me what to do to make this better and I’ll do it.”
Spock turned away. In his closet were row upon row of pristine blue science shirts in a thermal fabric made just for him. They had the Enterprise insignia embroidered on the breast, and would be worse than incongruous on another ship. It would be illogical to keep them all. It would be illogical, but he began to gather and fold them nonetheless.
“There is nothing,” he said. He felt Jim move closer to him.
“What if - what if I told you I wanted to give it a go? You and me?”
Spock whirled around, a shirt clenched in his fist. He straightened his spine and stood at full height. He met Jim eye to eye.
“Do not mock me, Captain.”
“I’m not. Spock, I swear, I’m not.” Jim took a cautious step forward. “I’ve been - thinking about you. For a long time. I just couldn’t admit it to myself.”
Spock swallowed and shook his head.
“You have made it very clear -”
“Spock. I was being an ass. I spoke to the admiral-”
An involuntary scoff escaped Spock’s throat and he turned back to his packing. He shook out the shirt he’d just wrinkled and smoothed it down to fold and place on top of the neat pile.
“The admiral,” Spock interrupted Jim, “is barely capable of looking after his own emotional well-being. He should not interfere with yours.”
“I’m sorry I hurt you, Spock. And I’m sorry he has, too.”
Spock just shook his head and kept packing.
“Spock. Listen to me. Before today went down the toilet, I had this whole thing planned. I was gonna make you dinner- well, I was gonna program the replicator myself, at any rate, and I was gonna brew up a batch of that that special tea you like, because I got it for you last shore leave, but then I didn’t know how to give it to you because we were avoiding each other, and-” Jim’s mouth snapped shut. “Or have I fucked it up so badly that you’re not even listening to me right now?”
Spock couldn’t bring himself to look anywhere but at the shirts collected in his duffle bag. But softly, he said, “I’m listening.”
He heard Jim swallow, and then he was right beside him. He could feel Jim’s body heat.
“I should have said yes three months ago. It would have saved the both of us a lot of grief.”
“Jim. You cannot… force desire where there is none. I regret only that the episode cost us our friendship.”
“I’m not forcing any desires, Spock.” A careful hand came to rest on Spock’s arm. Spock heard him take a deep breath. “I’m - I’m tired of pretending I don’t want you. And I’m tired of not having you around off-duty. I’ve missed you a lot, Spock.”
Spock faced Jim, but he watched the pulse point in his neck rather than his eyes.
“I am not sure a precipitous relationship prompted by careless words from your alternate is wise.”
“It’s not him, Spock. I mean, yeah, he made me face the music, but he didn’t make me imagine this.” With that, Jim seized Spock’s right hand and pressed it to his chest, above his heart. He ducked his head and forced Spock to meet his gaze. “Hey. Can you feel me?”
Where Spock’s fingers weaved between Jim’s, Spock felt a steady thrum of hope and longing and anticipation keep time with Jim’s heartbeat. Beneath it all was a baseline of jealously guarded love. Wonder bloomed in Spock’s consciousness, and he could not tell if it was his own or Jim’s.
“Yeah?” Jim murmured. Spock’s lips parted and he drew in a quick breath. He dipped his head in a nod, and Jim broke into a wide grin. He wrapped his arms around Spock’s neck and pulled him in for a kiss. An exploratory tongue nudged his mouth with gentle insistence, and Spock allowed its entry, every nerve lighting when he swallowed Jim’s moan. Jim pressed himself closer, and they matched plane for plane, bone lashed with muscle. Jim rocked his hips experimentally, and though neither of them had yet been incited to erection, jolts of pleasure thrilled Spock’s spine.
Spock pulled away and pressed his forehead to Jim’s, cradling his face in worship.
“Jim,” he whispered. He felt the curve of Jim’s lips as he smiled.
“You’re stubbly,” he whispered back. A puff of air escaped Spock’s lungs, and through heated skin he could feel Jim’s delight at having made Spock laugh.
“I shave but once in the mornings,” Spock told him. Spock kissed him again, a soft merging, and Jim’s knees threatened to buckle.
Jim broke away from the kiss and hugged Spock harder, his face buried in Spock’s neck. His breath hitched, and Spock put his arms around him to hold him close and steady.
“Jim?” he ventured.
“I’m fine,” Jim said. He pulled away, hands on Spock’s shoulders, and just looked at him, awe in his eyes. “I’m fine, Spock,” he said, and he gave a watery kind of smile.
Spock ushered him down to sit on the bed, and he sat beside him, taking his hand. He slid their palms together, pushed his fingers between Jim’s, clasped his hand tightly and rubbed his thumb into the soft flesh at the base of Jim’s.
“I could bring you a glass of water,” Spock said. Jim covered Spock’s hand with his other one and gave a squeeze.
“I told you, I’m fine. Great, even. This is - this is exactly what I’ve needed. You’re exactly what I’ve needed, Spock.” A human kiss landed on Spock’s cheekbone, then the bridge of his nose, and then on both closed eyes. Jim stroked down the side of Spock’s face. “I’ve wanted you for so long,” he said. “I was just too much of a coward to admit it. And now it’s like a dam’s breaking inside me. Is that cheesy? That’s cheesy.”
“If the statement is apt, then its metaphorical dairy content seems irrelevant.”
Jim laughed and shuffled closer. He dislodged one of his hands from the knot they’d created and wrapped his arm around Spock’s waist.
“I want you tonight, Spock,” he said. “Is that okay? Too fast?”
Spock touched a thumb to Jim’s lips. His eyes were a clear, fathomless blue under full brows. Spock shook his head.
“I want you, also,” he said. Jim nipped at his thumb through a smile, and then they were kissing again, long hot draws of soft lips and strong tongues. Jim threw a leg over Spock’s, pushed himself closer.
“You’re gonna have to help me out though,” he said. “Never been with a guy. Or a Vulcan. Or a guy Vulcan.”
Spock pressed a hand to Jim’s chest, appreciating the hard musculature it encountered. Jim held it there, fingers tangled.
“We will do only what pleases us,” Spock said. “Without itinerary or goal.”
“Oh, I’ve got a goal.” Jim grinned. “It involves making you come so hard you make a certain sound I may or may not have heard a rumor about.”
“The admiral has been telling tales,” Spock grumbled, but nonetheless he hummed his approval into the kiss Jim pressed to his mouth.
Spock slid his hand further down Jim’s chest, his stomach. He watched Jim’s tongue flicker out to wet his lips, and he heard the wet sound of Jim’s lips parting for an intake of breath. Jim jerked his head in assent when Spock met his eyes, and then Spock lifted the hem of his gold shirt and peeled it off his body. Jim’s hands, as if unsure of their welcome, settled on Spock’s shoulders.
Jim’s hair was ruffled from his shirt, just mussed enough to be endearing. Spock smoothed his hand over the cowlick, trailed his fingertips along the line of Jim’s collarbone, ran his hands over his pecs and the pads of his thumbs over two tight nipples. Jim’s heartbeat came fast beneath his palms, but Spock had more flesh to map and memorize. He followed the fine golden line of hair, barely perceptible but wholly tantalizing, from chest to abs, down to the sweet hollow of Jim’s navel. His slipped his hands around the jut of Jim’s hip bones, which fit perfectly into the cradle of Spock’s palms. He saw Jim’s erection strain against the confines of his Starfleet issue trousers.
Spock felt Jim pulling at his shirt and he drew back to let Jim divest him of it. Jim attached himself like a limpet, fingers through chest hair, leg over hips. Electricity bolted up and down Spock’s spine when Jim straddled him and their cocks bumped through the fabric of their trousers.
“Look at you,” Jim murmured as if to himself. “Look how gorgeous you are.” He petted through Spock’s chest hair, tugging lightly along the way. “I’ve thought about this. Thought about exactly this.”
Spock wet his lips and lay back, pulling Jim to lie atop him, their bodies flush. He cupped Jim’s ass through his trousers and ground their cocks together. Jim gasped and dropped his forehead to Spock’s shoulder, muffled his grunt on the bony clavicle.
“What else?” Spock asked, voice deep and rough. “What else have you thought about?”
“Everything,” Jim moaned. He moved that seeking mouth to the pulse point in Spock’s neck, and on the other side of his head Spock felt clever fingers toy with the point of his ear. He arched into the contact.
“Tell me,” Spock whispered. He held Jim’s hips down and pushed his own against them. Jim pushed a thigh between his legs and began to rock.
“Thought about kissing you,” Jim said as he set his tongue flicking behind Spock’s ear, at the hinge of his jaw. “Thought about smelling you here,” he nuzzled into Spock’s neck, “and here,” he swept his hand over Spock’s erection and cupped it with a tentative touch. “Thought about how your cock would feel in my hand, in my mouth, in my-” He cut himself off with a moan and a shudder and thrust into Spock’s pelvis. “Thought about fucking you. God, Spock, I’ve thought about fucking you so many times.”
Spock pitched his weight in the narrow bunk and rolled them, sending his duffle and neat pile of clothes to the floor without a thought. He rose up on his knees, hands poised on the button of Jim’s trousers. The eager length of Jim’s cock strained against the zip.
“I will divest you of your remaining garments now,” he growled.
“Yeah,” Jim panted. “God, yeah.” And then his trousers and briefs were an inelegant, tangled heap on top of Spock’s forgotten duffle, and Spock was kicking off his own clothes, and they met skin against skin, cock against cock in a shock of sensation so intense that Jim cried out, clutching Spock’s biceps in a convulsive grip.
Spock seized Jim’s mouth with his own for a heated, sloppy kiss that had Jim gasping when Spock moved down to map the planes and dips of Jim’s body with his tongue. Spock reached the thickening line of bronze hair that flared out into a lush thicket around Jim’s engorged genitals and he buried his nose there to scent him deeply. Jim made a strangled sound in the back of his throat, his fingers scrabbling for purchase at the base of Spock’s skull. At the tender strip of softness where Jim’s thigh creased in connection to his body, Spock set his sucking mouth, and Jim whined out an elongated expletive that sizzled down Spock’s spine. Spock spread Jim’s legs and pushed his body between them, shoulders pushed up under knees, and then Spock slid his slavering mouth over the head of Jim’s cock.
Jim shouted out an indeterminate vowel sound and gripped Spock’s hair. Both hands came to rest on his head, where he stroked through Spock’s hair as if in apology.
“God, that’s good, Spock,” he said through labored breath. “That’s so good. Suck my cock just like that, yeah.”
One hand cradling Jim’s balls and the other holding the base of Jim’s cock steady, Spock bobbed up and down on the full shaft with eager abandon. He derived his own pleasure from this, from the weight and flavor of Jim on his tongue, from the fullness in his mouth, from fingers in his hair and the sounds his fervent sucking elicited. He pushed his own erection into the bed, unable to contain himself. Jim’s breath hitched, and he seemed to choke off impending whines, but when he spoke it was with a filthy reverence that made Spock’s cock throb.
“Look at you, sucking my cock,” he said, “fuck, you were made to do this, made to suck my cock, weren’t you Spock? You love it, love my cock. Spock, Spock, fuck, that’s so good, Spock, Spock.”
Spock rubbed the pad of his thumb lower on Jim’s perineum, and Jim gave up speaking altogether, pressing himself back into the mattress with a wail. Spock went lower still and brushed the tiny wrinkled aperture of Jim’s anus, which quivered against the touch. Jim moaned above him and his hands in Spock’s hair tightened. One drifted downward and pushed Spock closer by the shoulders. Jim’s heels drummed against Spock’s sides, and, encouraged, Spock pressed his thumb more firmly, rubbing in a gentle circle to relax the tight bud of muscle.
“Spock,” Jim gasped. “Wait.”
Spock moved away from Jim’s anus and cupped his testicles again. He lifted his head off Jim’s cock and quirked an inquisitive eyebrow.
“Don’t wanna come yet,” Jim told him. He tried to pull Spock up, but Spock was immovable when he wished it, and he wished it now.
“I desire it,” he said. “To be the instrument of your pleasure. Oblige me, Jim?”
Blue eyes went hazy, swollen mouth slack, and Jim gave a languid nod. Spock returned to his task with singular concentration. When saliva slicked the length of Jim’s cock and dribbled down over his balls, Spock drew back and pushed his hands into the backs of Jim’s knees to expose his winking pink hole. When he swiped his tongue over it, Jim gave an echoing bellow and spewed a litany of curse words. With his own hands he pulled his legs higher, crushed to his chest, and as he jerked Jim’s cock with one hand, Spock laved all around the outside of Jim’s anus, flicked each wrinkle, sucked on the sensitized rim with lusty gusto.
“Oh fuck, I had no idea,” Jim said amid his nonsensical babble. “Jesus fuck, Spock, yes.”
Spock hummed and pushed his face deeper into Jim’s perineum. This was an intimacy he had only imagined he’d be granted. Jim’s hole spasmed around Spock’s invading tongue, and Spock reveled in the dark musk of it, in the rich, heady flavor of Jim’s innermost core, in how his name spilled from Jim’s lips like a benediction.
When Spock lifted his head, Jim whimpered at the abandonment and cast a pleading look at him. Spock tilted half a smile at him.
“Do you consent to manual penetration at this time?” he asked. Jim’s eyes crossed for a moment.
“Oh God, I think I’d consent to pretty much anything right now, Spock,” he said. “Do it. Please, please, do it.”
Spock gently moved Jim’s scrotum from his path and slid his middle finger into Jim’s ass straight up to the third knuckle. Jim grunted, but Spock began to thrust it in and out, and he moved it in widening circles. With his fingertip he caressed the smooth, constricting inner walls. The tight heat wreaked havoc on his controls, and from the tip of his own penis came a dollop of lubricating fluid that slicked his shaft. Jim had begun to rock down into the point of connection.
“One more,” Spock said, and he withdrew his hand. Two fingers made a tight press, but Jim’s body accepted it readily, and he gave a low rumble of appreciation. Avidly Spock watched his fingers disappear into the pink hole, framed by saliva-slick hair, and his cock throbbed in lament of his neglect. Spock drew his fingers in and out, paying careful attention to stimulating the walls of Jim’s rectum, and finally he alighted on the small protrusion that elicited a full wail from his lover’s throat.
“Fuck!” Spock could feel Jim’s toes curling against his ribs. “Oh fuck, right there, Spock!”
Spock hummed and pressed Jim’s prostate again, then hunkered down between his thighs to take Jim’s cock down his throat. He pumped it firmly into his suckling mouth as he worked his fingers deep into Jim’s ass, and then Jim was making small, thwarted sounds in the back of his throat, his thighs clenching around Spock’s ears, hands twisting in Spock’s hair, back arching in a painful convex curve. His orgasm burst into Spock’s mouth even as his blinding ecstasy blasted through Spock’s own consciousness. Spock moaned around the load and swallowed it, but some dribbled from his mouth and when he pulled away to lap it back up, the final spurts wrung from Jim’s dick striped his cheeks, his nose, his lips.
Jim gave a weak groan and collapsed boneless onto Spock’s bed panting, his legs falling open. Spock wiped his face and chased the globs of semen with his tongue before he crawled up and fell to his side, curled against Jim’s sated body. He pressed his nose into Jim’s armpit when Jim gathered him closer, heaved in a deep dose of the pheromones there and began to jerk himself in a punishing rhythm against Jim’s hip. Jim turned and wriggled down to kiss him, hand on cheek, then he whispered, “Let me?”
The sound that escaped Spock’s throat was a sort of desperate sigh, and when Jim pushed him onto his back and set tentative lips to the crown of his cock, Spock wanted to watch. He wanted to, but the joy of Jim’s touch on his body forced his eyes shut. Jim had no suction, and his teeth mashed against Spock’s flesh, and then he choked a little when he tried to take too much too fast, but all Spock felt was Jim’s desire to make him feel as replete in bliss as Jim felt now.
“Don’t hurt yourself, Jim,” he murmured with a touch to Jim’s cheek. “Go slowly. Yes.”
Spock eyes slid shut and he gave himself up to Jim’s cautious experimentations. Eventually Jim got some semblance of a rhythm and began to apply suction, and he caught him with the sharp edges of his teeth less and less, and Spock felt the heat and pressure of orgasm build in his testicles and at the base of his spine. He had to signal Jim, had to let him know what was coming; his hand tapped an erratic warning on his shoulder and swallowed the verbal notification that had formed on his lips when his breath caught. He must have been clear enough, because Jim stilled, and the hand around his cock squeezed tighter, pumped harder into that sucking mouth, and Spock’s orgasm came as a blast of light and color behind his eyes and down his spine, rushed through the very depths of his being and burst onto Jim’s waiting tongue. Dimly Spock heard his lover cough, but pleasure had overwhelmed his senses, made limp his limbs. When he was able to crack his eyes open again, he found Jim nestled into his side, arm and leg thrown over him in a possessive tangle.
“Good?” Jim asked, his lips feather-soft on Spock’s shoulder.
“Indeed,” Spock replied. He brought a hand up to stroke down the muscular length of Jim’s arm.
“I’ll need practice,” Jim said. “Lots and lots of practice.” Spock could feel the curve of his smile on his skin. “So. You know. You can’t leave.”
Spock linked their fingers.
“I will not,” he said, and he felt a cool wash of relief and gratitude flow from Jim to himself.
Jim shimmied up to lay his head on the pillow, and Spock turned to gaze into blue eyes.
“I’m glad,” Jim said. He rubbed his thumb on Spock’s cheekbone, memorizing.
Spock hesitated. Finally, he asked, “Have you any misgivings?”
He was gratified that Jim did not answer immediately, that he lay there, touching Spock’s face, and gave the question its due contemplation.
“I’ve got all my own issues here, Spock,” he answered after a silence. “I’ve let them bog me down too long. I’m not saying they’ve magically disappeared, but I feel, I don’t know, lighter? I know I’ve still got to work through stuff. But. I feel like it’s gonna be okay, you know? It’s you and me, and we’re gonna be okay.”
A tightness that had gathered in Spock’s chest once his ardor had cooled began to ease. He nodded once.
“I have not played chess in 3.4 months,” Spock said. Jim beamed at him, but made no move to get up. He traced the bow of Spock’s lips.
“There was so much more I wanted to do with you tonight, Spock, and none of them involved capturing your queen.”
“Perhaps playing in the nude will be provocative while we pass the duration of our refractory periods.”
Jim’s face lit with amusement and he laughed, the sound a riot between the bulkheads.
“Oh my God, you’re hiding a dirty mind in that big sexy brain of yours!”
“I find myself… inspired by the view,” Spock said with a demure lilt, and cast his gaze down the impressive musculature of his lover’s bare body. Jim mock-preened, and Spock indulged in the visual feast he presented. Spock placed a hand on firm abdominal muscles, brushed upward to feel defined pectorals. Jim sighed under the attention, but abruptly Spock sat up, swung his legs over the edge of the bed, and stood to set up his dusty three-dimensional chess board.
“Hey!” When Spock looked back over his shoulder, Jim was pouting, a petulant Adonis amid the bedding. “I didn’t even get to hear your funny sound!”
Spock laid out the pieces one by one. He could feel Jim ogling him - his small buttocks, his muscular back, the breadth of his shoulders. It inspired a feeling of triumph. He made a show of setting up the board with languorous deliberation, and he sent Jim an indulgent sideways look.
“T’hy’la,” he said, “you have a lifetime to earn my ‘funny sound.’”
Spock straightened, and with a contained gesture, invited Jim to sit at the table. Jim came when beckoned, but before he sat down, he pressed a kiss to the corner of Spock’s mouth.
“And I do intend to use it, Mr. Spock,” he whispered.
VI
When Kirk caught sight of Spock at the San Francisco space port, he had to force himself to keep from visibly buzzing with anticipation. As it was, he had been so jittery and keyed up for the days leading up to dry dock that McCoy threatened to sedate him and keep him strapped to a bed until it was time to go. He refrained from shoving people out of the way, but when he was finally in front of his lover, long parted from him, he found himself stopping short, his breath caught in his throat.
“Jim,” Spock said. His voice was rougher, quieter than it used to be. His eyes were clouded, his hair grey. His hands were linked behind his back, and he cocked his head when he offered a tiny smile.
Kirk swallowed and tamped down on the trembling.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, hoarse. He grabbed Spock’s wrist and led him away from the crush of the crowd and the roving of curious eyes. “Where are you parked?”
“Jim, cease rushing.”
Outside the bustle of the port, there were fewer harried people jostling them, and no one paid any mind when a human was pulled into elderly Vulcan arms and held tightly, as if it were a punishment. Finally, the tension roiling in his gut gave way and Kirk let himself sag in Spock’s embrace, shivering.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Kirk said into the column of Spock’s throat. “I can’t believe I’m feeling you right now.” The arms locked around Spock’s neck squeezed harder, but Spock didn’t protest. He rubbed up and down Kirk’s back.
“We will go to Sarek’s condominium and I will make you a soothing beverage.”
Kirk snorted and pulled away. He put his hands on Spock’s shoulders and regarded him for a moment. The years had been kind, but they had left their mark. He was more aged than a full-Vulcan would be at a hundred and sixty years old. Kirk’s hands came up to cup his jaw. This was his Spock; he was still in there, looking at him with such naked affection. It had been so long that Kirk could barely remember what it felt like to be on the receiving end of it, and he had avoided his younger self and the Spock who loved him for the past few weeks just so the jealousy wouldn’t eat him alive. He’d occupied himself by consulting in the engineering decks, though Scotty seemed a little anxious and territorial by halfway into the first week.
“Long as it’s not that tea I can’t stand,” he said. Spock lifted an eyebrow, but took one of Kirk’s hands in one of his and led him to his aircar in short-term parking.
Once they got to the condo, though, Kirk didn’t feel up to a coffee or a hot toddy or anything. He was exhausted and wanted nothing more than to collapse in bed. He said so, and Spock only nodded. In the bedroom, they disrobed, and in Kirk’s heart he felt a heavy tenderness as Spock revealed his body. He’d always been thin, but now his muscle tone was gone, his skin sagged, and he had a tiny, soft belly on him dusted with silver hair. Kirk laid a hand on one flat pectoral.
“How long has it been?” he asked. “Since you saw me?”
Spock placed both his hands over Kirk’s on his chest, held him there.
“Much too long, Jim,” he said. “It does not bear thinking about.” He pulled Kirk down on the bed and they arranged themselves on their sides, face to face. A gnarled hand rested on Kirk’s hip. He stroked through Spock’s chest hair, like he used to do. He watched Spock deflate with an inaudible sigh, eyes sliding shut. Softly, Jim kissed him.
“It’s over,” Kirk said. “After this we’ll go back to your work at the VSA, I’ll get a little ship to call my own, and everything will be fine.”
Spock only grasped him tighter, pressed their bodies closer. Kirk’s heart swelled and he looped his arm around his lover, tucked his head under his chin, breathed in the deep warm scent of him, and listened to the steady cadence of his own heartbeat until he fell asleep. He dreamed of places he’d never been before.
When he woke, the afternoon sun was throwing long shafts of light across the bedroom floor. He was sprawled on top of Spock, who lay serenely beneath him, awake and silent.
“What are you thinking about?” Kirk asked in a croak. He cleared his throat.
“A different time,” Spock said with a finality that meant the subject was closed. Kirk lifted his head to look into Spock’s face.
“You okay?”
“You are here with me,” Spock said, and it was answer enough. Kirk kissed those thin lips, coaxed them open as he trailed a hand down Spock’s chest to rub over an olive nipple. Kirk’s tongue followed his fingers, teeth worrying the sensitized flesh until Spock hissed and held Kirk’s hips against his own. Kirk was surprised to find his own hard cock griding against Spock’s; some things apparently hadn’t been affected by age.
“Eager, Spock?” he murmured into the solid chest with a smirk.
“I have waited a very long time for this,” Spock said, and Kirk swore he could hear a pout. He grinned up at the pursed lips and furrowed brow.
“Then I won’t keep you waiting any longer,” he said, and he bent over Spock’s lap to take the needful cock into his mouth. Spock made a strangled sound and dropped his head to the pillow. Jim moaned around the throbbing length - he loved sucking Spock, loved the flavor of it and the sense of power it gave him. Loved to be the focal point of all Spock’s attention. He was leaning sideways over Spock, and it gave Spock the opportunity to fondle his ass with the hand that wasn’t occupied in his hair. He stroked Kirk’s cheeks, and Kirk was forcefully reminded of the last time they’d been together, right after he’d asked Spock to be his forever, but before the desolation of the next morning: he lay on his stomach after they’d both come, after Kirk had made declarations of his love, and Spock trailed his hands over and over the downy, near-invisible hair on Kirk’s ass. Kirk asked him what he was doing, lazy and sated but vaguely amused and a little turned on and definitely head over heels in love, and Spock had said only “committing you to memory.” The sweetness of the moment had been spoiled by all that had come after it - even the careful touches Kirk had allowed the younger Spock to bestow upon his unbending body had been bitter ashes in his mouth - but now Kirk moaned and pushed back into the contact. This Spock - this Spock wouldn’t disappear like so much vapor on the wind. This Spock would stay.
Spock’s fingers, thickened and surely arthritic, brushed over Kirk’s hole. He circled it gently, but with a firm insistence until the muscle gave way and allowed the entry of one dry fingertip. Spock retreated and advanced like this for some time, eventually slicking the way with saliva, until Jim found himself rocking back into a finger buried all the way inside him. Then Spock withdrew and patted Kirk on the swell of one asscheek. Kirk took the cue and maneuvered himself on top of Spock, knees on either side of his head, bodies together in a heated press, and planted his asshole over Spock’s mouth. Kirk gave a shout as Spock’s hands spread him wide and his tongue delved deep; he’d missed this, Spock’s specialty - single-minded attention to his greedy asshole. He was fairly sure Spock could eat his ass for hours and be perfectly content, but Kirk had yet to test that theory since it drove him out of his mind and he always ended up with his face mashed against the pillows, ass hiked in the air begging to be fucked. At the impatient bump of Spock’s dick, leaking copiously its personal lubricant, Kirk remembered himself and got back to fellating his lover with renewed zeal.
When Kirk thought he couldn’t take another lap at his asshole, he swung himself round and straddled Spock’s lap, facing him. He rose up on his knees and snugged the blunt head of Spock’s cock against his hole, but Spock staid the descent of his hips.
“Do you not require more stretching?” he asked.
Kirk pumped Spock behind himself, rubbed the convenient Vulcan lube around his hole.
“Just you,” Kirk said. “Just want your cock and nothing else.” With that, he sank down on Spock’s erection. The burn was a purifying fire, and the heavy, hot fullness was so consumptive that Kirk forgot about all the time that lay between them, forgot his misgivings and his battered heart.
He rose and fell in a measured rhythm, the thick slide of Spock’s penis inside him a dizzying sensation that lit all of Kirk’s nerves and radiated outward so he became a thing of pure pleasure. Beneath him, Spock flexed and thrust and rolled his hips to match Kirk’s movements. He batted Kirk’s hand away from his penis and seized it himself, stroking it with the firm grip and upward twist Kirk favored, a technique that spoke of years of practice - years Kirk had yet to experience. Kirk cried out and met Spock’s hooded eyes, enflamed by the slack mouth and the tiny sounds escaping with each breath. Kirk leaned down and braced his hands on Spock’s shoulders so he could thrust back on to his cock with more urgency.
“Needed this,” he panted, “needed this so bad, Spock, you don’t know.”
Spock craned his neck up to capture Kirk’s mouth. Kirk moaned and pulled away, sat up again to rock into the penetration. He grabbed Spock’s hand and shoved two of his fingers into his mouth, tongue slipping between them even as his teeth closed gently around the sensitive flesh between Spock’s knuckles. When he sucked hard, Spock jerked and arched under him, body twisting, and finally he keened out a desperate, quavering sound that sputtered and choked, and Kirk hummed out a little laugh around his mouthful.
There it is, he thought with a measure of victory, and he fucked himself down on Spock’s cock harder and faster. He bit and sucked Spock’s fingers, and he would have said a lot of things if he weren’t gagged, would have told Spock he loved him, missed him, needed him always, but then he couldn’t think anything at all because Spock’s cock was hot and hard and fucking him deep, fucking the come right out of him when orgasm bore down like thunder through his wracking body. As he spurted thick stripes of come onto Spock’s chest, Spock bellowed and lurched upward, wrenching his hand from Kirk’s mouth and wrapping his arms around him as he pushed into Kirk’s body and came, his semen hot enough that Kirk could feel it flooding him.
Afterward, they slumped together on the bed, and Kirk slid off to the side, dislodging Spock from his ass. Kirk reached a hand over Spock’s chest, and Spock met it with his own, his first two fingers clamping around Kirk’s. They were silent, and the sun’s rays made their way across the room.
Eventually they had to move again. Spock turned Kirk over and passed a clean cloth over his perineum and his raw anus. Kirk sighed as Spock cleaned him with his usual focus. When he was finished, he encouraged Kirk onto his side and spooned up beside him, arm slung over his torso, knobbly knees pushed into the backs of Kirk’s own. He felt Spock nose into the space between his neck and shoulder, felt the contented sigh as it passed over cooling sweat. He held Spock’s hand over his heart.
“How are our counterparts?” Spock asked, voice pitched low.
“Sickening,” Kirk replied. He felt Spock’s stomach quake with a silent laugh, and added, “I don’t know if anyone else has noticed yet. I mean, Bones, obviously, but I wonder if I just see because it’s really obvious to me, or if everyone can see what I can.”
“I recall that crew members were surprised, shocked, and in some cases, appalled by the our involvement, when we made it public.”
“Hm. Yeah. I just - did we look like that in the beginning? Like a pair of lovestruck idiots?”
“I am certain such a description could never have applied to me,” Spock said. “I have always conducted myself in a very dignified manner.”
Kirk snickered. “Oh, shut up.”
“What does ‘lovestruck’ look like on a stern Vulcan countenance?” Spock’s arm tightened around Kirk. Kirk closed his eyes and sent up a wish that this moment last as long as possible, that time and reality never encroach upon it.
“I could feel your eyes follow me everywhere, and they burned. Maybe your expression didn’t change, but something did. An energy, maybe. Between us. And I was probably grinning like a maniac for months. I don’t know how everyone couldn’t tell.”
“Perhaps our comportment was more discreet than our feelings.”
“Must have been.” Kirk traced the veins on Spock’s hand. The skin was thinner, and smooth as petals. Kirk’s heart ached, and he lifted Spock’s hand to press a kiss to each big knuckle. He felt Spock’s shudder, his long exhale.
“Being with you like this, Jim, is a priceless gift,” Spock said.
“Yeah,” Kirk replied. “Yeah. I’m glad, too.”
The sun poured in through the windows and warmed their skin.
Prologue Part I Part II Epilogue
Once upon a time, Jim might have taken this opportunity to get absolutely shit faced. He’d never liked coming face to face with his various shortcomings, and that was part of why he’d spent so much of his adolescence and early twenties obliterated - inspiring sour disappointment in everyone within a fifty-mile radius just by existing had a tendency to erode one’s self-respect. But he wasn’t a kid anymore; he was pushing thirty, a captain responsible for this starship and all the buzzing lives that played out their own private dramas inside it. He couldn’t justify pouring an entire bottle of whatever moonshine Scotty had last gifted him down his throat tonight, even if he weren’t set to be on the bridge for alpha shift in the morning.
Sometimes, being an adult sucked.
More than two hours after Spock dumped him into the corridor, Jim was still staring blankly at the document the admiral had sent him requesting drop-off in San Francisco. The pixelated letters didn’t even make words anymore. If he closed his eyes, all he saw was Spock’s face, aghast at Jim’s temerity and unable to hide it. Sleep wouldn’t come easy tonight.
San Francisco - the lines arranged themselves into a meaning, and that meaning was Bizarro Kirk off his ship, off his Spock, and off his mind, and it engendered such relief that Jim almost felt guilty. But he paused when he set stylus to screen to approve the request. Would Spock be happier if Kirk stayed on? He was certainly giving Spock something Jim couldn’t. Maybe those two crazy kids could cobble together something decent with each other once Kirk got in a few sessions with Shandhir and evened himself out. Maybe signing this meant signing away a measure of Spock’s contentment, and after all he’d done, didn’t Jim owe Spock a little bit of brightness? He’d have to lay down some ground rules: that he was in command of the Enterprise, not Kirk, and that he never wanted to see them kiss or touch or, frankly, be anywhere near each other, and actually, if Kirk could stay away from Jim altogether, it would be pretty great. He fiddled with the stylus, flipped it around his fingers, tapped it on the table, and once again lines blurred and Spock’s breath hot on his face rose up in his memory and threatened to suffocate him. He didn’t hear his doors open or the intruder’s indiscreet footsteps. He jumped in his chair and swiveled around when he heard,
“This book sucks.”
It was Kirk, and he was short, and he was brandishing Jim’s vintage paper copy of A Passage to India at him.
“Jesus!”
“I mean, Forster tries so hard, but it’s still all ‘exotic but inferior foreign people’ and ‘know your place,’ don’t you think?”
“What are you doing in my quarters?”
“Not the best material for a guy who has to make first contact. If you have some kind of burning need to read Forster, I think you should give Maurice a go, don’t you?”
Jim scowled at the sly smirk and strode over to snatch the paperback away.
Kirk’s laugh was a mean, mocking bark. “Or are you still pretending a healthy cropping of chest hair and a good pair of broad shoulders don’t give you a hard-on?”
“I’ve read Maurice!” And how absurd was that statement? It was nothing like what he’d wanted to say.
Kirk made a low sound of feigned contemplation. He turned back around to look at Jim’s bookshelf, fists anchored on hips.
“Didn’t like it enough to bring it, though?”
Jim crossed his arms, A Passage to India bending in his tight grip.
“Limited space,” he said, curt. He shoved the book back into its place. Kirk half turned toward him and leveled a wry, disturbingly flirtatious smile at him. It curdled Jim’s insides.
“And yet A Passage to India looks like it’s barely been cracked.”
“Are you here just to insult my collection? You can leave, you know. I’m pretty busy.”
“Yeah, all that wool-gathering you were doing looked really urgent.”
Jim’s lip curled in a sour grimace.
“What do you want?”
Kirk pivoted to face him full-on, and when he crossed his arms, they stood as twin images in sideshow mirrors, uncanny and just slightly off.
“I want you to stop acting like a baby,” Kirk said. “You’re, what, coming up on twenty-eight? Get your head out of your ass.”
Jim scoffed.
“You’re choosing right now to come tell me how much better you were at everything than me? Fuck off, Admiral, I’m not you, and you can kiss my ass.”
“And what a fine ass it is, Captain, but I think I’ll restrain myself. No, this is a very Marley kind of visit.” He plucked A Christmas Carol off the shelf and tossed it at Jim. He caught it on reflex and looked back up at Kirk with a frown.
“Showing me the error of your ways now, Admiral?”
Kirk rolled his eyes.
“You act like I don’t know you at all.”
“You don’t!” Jim shoved the Dickens back at him.
“I do!” Kirk snapped, and he smacked the shelf with the book, though the light smack it produced was less climactic than he’d probably hoped. “I know you think about Spock when you jerk off, and I know you pretend you didn’t the moment it’s all over.”
Jim’s eyes went wide, and he found himself crowded into a bulkhead for the second time that night, his alternate advancing on him like a predator enflamed by the scent of fear. He pushed at Kirk’s shoulders, but the admiral wouldn’t let up.
“I know you think about what everyone’s reactions to your giving in to your feelings would be except the ones who matter: yours and Spock’s.”
“Shut up.”
“I know you’ve never come so hard with a woman as you would by yourself after a workout with Spock.”
“Stop, just fucking stop-”
“I know you used to imagine Jordan Sanders sucking your cock and that you thought about sucking his more times than you could ever admit to.”
Jim’s stomach flipped. “Don’t-”
“I know you were one of the ones who watched and did absolutely nothing while that bastard Krytoph and his thugs kicked the shit out of him the last day he ever came to school.”
“Fuck you!” Jim took a swing, and it landed on Kirk’s pert nose. Blood bloomed under Jim’s fist and Kirk crumpled to the floor. He wrapped his arms around Jim as he went down, though, and Jim fell heavy on top of his alternate. They both grunted on impact, and Kirk shoved Jim off of himself and clambered on top of him, pinning him down with a knee in the stomach and his hands on his shoulders. Jim lay panting, bewildered, Kirk’s blood, his blood, dripping down onto his face and gold shirt. They stared at each other wild eyed for a long moment.
“I know what happened to Jordan Sanders.”
“What?” Jim whispered, voice breaking.
Kirk sighed and got off him, propped himself against the bulkhead. He prodded at his nose and Jim pulled himself up, leaned back on his hands.
“I don’t think you broke it, at least,” Kirk grumbled.
“Jim,” Jim prompted him. He needed to hear it. Needed to know what had become of the fey boy who’d first stirred his blood and shame. Needed to know if there was more guilt to be borne on his account.
Kirk met his eyes, and for the first time Jim saw not banked fury or despair, but a guilelessness he thought was foreign to his own nature.
“Nothing. Nothing happened to him. He moved to New York and does something with teen shelters. He’s married to some guy; they adopted a kid and a Great Dane.”
Jim sat up fully and scrubbed his hands through his hair, over his face. He wiped at the blood on his face with a sleeve.
“How’d you find out?” he asked.
“Before I finally got my act together with Spock a couple years ago, I was thinking pretty hard on what I wanted, who I wanted, and what it meant for me. I finally admitted, privately, that Spock did more for me than anyone in a miniskirt ever had. It was like all these memories were unleashed. I couldn’t get Jordan out of my head, I felt so bad about what I’d done. Or hadn’t done. I was worried something bad happened to him and somehow it would be all my fault. So I looked him up. Gave him a call. I don’t think he even remembered me, but.” Kirk shrugged. “I don’t know. Seeing him made me let go of something that had been tormenting me for almost my whole life. All my reasons for telling myself I was straight fell apart when I saw this skinny kid who’d been harassed for years grown up, happy and himself instead of hiding and worrying, like I was. It let me stop torturing myself, trying to be something I’m not.” Then Kirk scoffed. “Still waited to actually tell Spock my feelings, of course, like an ass. I thought he couldn’t possibly want me back.”
Jim watched Kirk draw up his knees and balance his elbows on them as he tipped his head back and held his sleeve to his nostrils.
“I’ll get a cloth,” Jim said, and he went into the head to get a hand towel. In the mirror he saw a man with two clear blue eyes, fresh out of excuses.
He tossed the towel at Kirk and sat back down on the floor beside him, legs outstretched. Kirk grunted and balled it up to press against his nose. Jim saw him close his eyes.
“I don’t want to be gay,” Jim told him.
Kirk heaved a congested sigh. “I know. Doesn’t make it not true.”
“I have sex with women. I like sex with women.”
“You make it work with women. You’ve never had sex with someone you honest to God, low down in your soul, wanted so bad it felt like you might die if you couldn’t have them. There’s a difference.”
“I’m attracted to women.”
Kirk cracked one golden eye at him, and one side of his mouth came up in half a smile.
“Women are good looking creatures. Even gay men and straight women and asexuals can admit to it.”
Jim rubbed his eyes, and kept his hands covering his face when he was done. He began to shake.
“Hey,” he heard Kirk say softly. “It’ll be okay, you know. I’m here, aren’t I?”
“You’re here,” Jim echoed. “Yeah, you’re here and you’re a fucking mess and you’re having some kind of ill-advised affair with my first officer that doesn’t seem to be making either of you happy. Wow, sign me up; I can’t wait.”
“No one’s saying you have to march in a pride parade next week. Hell, kid, no one’s telling you you have to call yourself anything in particular. I’m a fan of ‘Spocksexual,’ myself.”
A manic bubble of laughter burst out from Jim’s mouth and surprised him.
“So you’re cheating on Spock with Spock right now? Jesus.”
Kirk stretched his legs out alongside Jim’s.
“It’s complicated. Spock left me. I was… distraught. And then I was here, and your Spock was so… well. You know. It was a bit of comfort, and a bit of revenge, for both of us, I think. Not my wisest move, I admit. Or his.”
But Jim was stuck on one sentence. “He left you? What? Why? What did you do to him?”
Kirk sent him an irritated glower from around the bloody rag.
“What makes you think I did anything to him? Why is that what everyone assumes first?”
“Well, if you know me, I know you, and I know because I’m the king of sabotaging a relationship. Remember Ruth? Carol?”
“Both women you didn’t really want to be with because you like cock.” Kirk bumped Jim’s shoulder and Jim glared at him. “No, Spock was just - having a prolonged Vulcan freak-out precipitated by my asking him to marry me. And I only found this out by calling the other Spock on New Vulcan earlier. And I’m glad I did because I can’t really imagine going through years of… what I’ve been going through.”
Jim was stuck again though, and couldn’t give the faintest of shits where Kirk had gotten his information.
“Marry you? You asked him to marry you?”
Kirk’s small smile was a sad one, and he set his head back against the bulkhead.
“Never wanted to be apart. Starfleet has a regulation, you know, Article 78, Section 9? Couples with Vulcan marriage bonds can never be separated by assignment. I wanted to marry him like a Vulcan, like a human, like a goddamn Klingon if it meant being with him for the rest of my life. Turns out, the right relationship with the right person turns me into a saccharine romantic.”
Jim blinked at him from eyes gone huge and round.
“I didn’t know.”
Kirk patted Jim’s knee.
“He’s the real deal, Jim. You shouldn’t sit on opposite sides of this bulkhead, too busy worrying about what other people might think of you to go take what makes you happiest.”
“What if he leaves me too?” Jim tightened his arms around himself and shivered anyway.
Kirk propped up one knee and took the towel away from his face. He balanced his elbow on his raised knee and let the bloody rag dangle from his fingers like some kind of trophy from a duel. His nose had stopped bleeding.
“He’s different than my Spock,” Kirk said. “With Vulcan gone and his mother dead, I think he knows he can’t hide from his emotions, even if he doesn’t want anyone to know he has them. Plus-” Kirk flicked the slaughterhouse rag at him playfully. “-he kinda told me he’d never do to you what my Spock did to me.”
“I was an asshole tonight. A complete and utter asshole.”
“He loves you anyway.”
Jim pulled his knees up and put his head between them, suddenly breathless.
“That’s a lot to process,” Jim said.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret, Jimmy: you love him too. It’s a lot less scary than you think it is.”
Jim found that hard to believe. Love seemed to open people up to every kind of pain imaginable, like bacteria on a flayed slice of meat left out of the fridge. Love seemed like too much con and not enough pro. How many happy marriages had he ever seen? How many functional familial relationships? Look at Kirk, having a breakdown because one skinny Vulcan with a bowl cut and a penis left him. No - it must be better to go it alone.
“Jim,” Kirk said. “Tell me you’ve been happy these last few months since you and Spock… parted company. Tell me you haven’t been moping around like your dog just died and I’ll leave you alone and set Spock up with that nice Lieutenant Commander in the science department.”
Jim lifted his head and scowled.
“Dr. Nguyen? He’s totally wrong for Spock! He’s all fussy and uptight and washes his hands like thirty times a day.”
Hazel eyes lit with amusement peered at him from beneath raised brows.
“He’s brilliant, meticulous with his work, hygienic, and not bad to look at if I do say so myself.”
“You’re a dick.”
“You’re stubborn.”
“You’re deliberately harassing me.”
“You’re deliberately ignoring the truth, even though it would make you happy. Do you enjoy cutting off your nose to spite your face?”
Jim got up and yanked the rag away from his alternate. He stalked to the disposal unit and sent it away.
“Why do you want me to go sweep him off his size fourteens anyway?” he asked. “You could stay on this boat in an advisory capacity and have your Spock and eat him too. Or something.”
Kirk shook his head and staggered to his feet. He brushed past Jim and sat in his place at the worktable, smirking at Jim’s chagrined glare. His face was crusted with vivid blood.
“You look like a serial killer,” Jim said as he slid into the opposite chair with a moistened paper towel and flung it at his alternate. Kirk ignored him, but began to dab away at the mess on his face.
“Me and this Spock aren’t for each other,” Kirk said. “We’d never actually be happy. Besides, I’m meeting a certain someone when we dock.” He waggled his eyebrows, and he looked lighter.
“Seriously?”
“Sure.”
“So you’d just - drop everything. For him.”
Kirk’s smile held no shadows. “Absolutely,” he said.
Jim was silent for a while. He hit the replicator for two hot chocolates.
“So how’d you two get together anyway?” he asked. “Did someone travel back in time to plant a foot on your ass?”
Kirk wrapped his hands around his mug, warming them. He took a gulp even though it must have been too hot.
“Remember Janice Lester?” he asked, wiping his mouth with the back of a hand.
Jim didn’t bother to hide his surprise.
“Yeah, like I could forget someone that nuts. Don’t tell me she set us up or something.”
“Well. She switched our bodies. Mine and hers.”
Jim gaped. “No shit.”
“Yeah. She was trying to take over my life. It was… it was awful. But. Spock was there. And he made everything easier. He always does, but I mean… he saw me, you know? Trusted me even though he had no reason to, at first. After it was over, I was still rattled by having been in her body. I just wanted to feel stable, and safe, and like, like I was tied to something real and tangible. And I was just so tired of pretending being with Spock wasn’t something I wanted. I’d fought it for so long, came so close so many times but never, never did what I wanted. It was wearing on me. So I finally just let it go. I went to his quarters that night. And he was -” Kirk’s eyes were on a faraway plane, mesmerized. “-he was tall and strong and beautiful and awkward and warm, and I loved him so much. It was… it was like an epiphany. We were together for over two years.” He cocked his head then, snapping back to reality and meeting Jim’s eyes, his expression shuttered. “Before he left.”
Jim reached over for the pinkened paper towel that languished on the table.
“C’mere,” he murmured, and Kirk leaned over. Jim scrubbed away what Kirk had missed around the creases of his nostrils, the dip above his lip, along his jaw line and cheekbones. “You think I owe this to myself.”
“Do you want to turn around in twenty years find yourself alone, a bitter old man who can’t be close to anyone?”
“Am I as melodramatic as you?”
“Probably.”
“Jesus.”
Jim kept wiping at Kirk’s face. These lips have kissed Spock’s, he told himself. Two Spocks. An image of himself and Spock entangled, holding each other close, bare chest to bare chest, cock to cock, hooked Jim’s imagination, tugged at his heart. He pulled back abruptly when his cock firmed up in his trousers.
“Is it worth it?” he asked then, the soiled paper towel balled up in his fist. “All the pain and the bullshit? To be with him?”
Kirk looked at the far wall and tilted his head toward Spock’s quarters on the other side of the bulkheads as if sensing him.
“I know I’ve been a terror since Spock left,” he said. “Even Bones told me to shove it until I can act civilized. But I’ve never once regretted it. I’ve never once said ‘I wish I’d never been with him in the first place.’ He’s - he’s worth all of this. This is nothing in comparison.” He waved a hand in front of his face as if erasing the blood and the worry lines and the heaviness around his eyes. Jim’s heart began to beat a faster, more erratic pace, and his breath came quicker.
The truth was, Spock’s quiet offer of companionship three months ago had tempted him more than he cared to admit. He could imagine it all too readily: the hot tangle of limbs, the fathomless gaze he could lose himself in for too long, a naked vulnerability he had never allowed himself. The way his heart leapt and his blood pumped had sent a shudder down Jim’s spine; he couldn’t want this, couldn’t want Spock so much - it was dangerous. To turn him down and see the look on his face - a flash of pain, covered quickly by stony placidity - nearly tore Jim to shreds. He wanted to reach out then, to pass his fingertips over the dear sharp bones of that face, but he balled his fists and left Spock’s quarters instead. But this heat, the way everything in him cleaved toward everything in Spock, was the life in his veins, the air in his lungs, and being apart from him was a torture for which he could no longer justify being noble. It eased an unnamed pain to acknowlege finally the truth of his desires.
Jim tipped his hot chocolate back into his mouth. When he put the mug down, he fixed his eyes on Kirk’s and clenched his jaw.
“That’s that then,” he said. “There’s only one problem.”
Kirk grinned at him.
“And what’s that?”
“I don’t know anything about guy-on-guy sex.”
Kirk threw his head back and laughed, the uproar reverberating between the bulkheads. He gestured for Jim to come around to his side of the table, and Jim scooted the chair over. Kirk booted up the computer and tapped with enviable ease through a bunch of firewalls and password protected folders, and suddenly Jim realized they were looking at the contents of Sulu’s hard drive.
His very lecherous hard drive.
Jim’s mouth went dry.
“Our helmsman is a connoisseur of gay erotica from all around the galaxy,” Kirk said with a wink.
“You mean porn.”
“Don’t act like my maiden aunt.”
“We don’t have a maiden aunt.”
“What are you, Spock right now? Here.” Kirk clicked on a file named ‘Beach Bum Boys 7.’ “We’ll start off with something pretty vanilla.” Vanilla, Kirk had said, but Jim still felt overwhelmed.
“How about you just tell me what Spock likes and how to do it?”
Kirk looked at him like he just said he wanted to retire to Saskatoon to start looking for Sasquatch.
“No. First off, you’re gonna watch a bunch of Sulu’s porn and get a healthy appreciation for penis so you don’t freak out at an inopportune moment. Honestly, I can’t believe you’ve never even looked before. Secondly, figuring out what Spock likes and how to get him to make that funny noise is an adventure I won’t take from either of you.”
Jim’s cock twitched.
“What funny noise?”
Kirk beamed, clapped him on the back, and hit play.
V
Spock was already on the bridge when the captain arrived three minutes early for alpha shift. He approached the science station, and Spock detected a note of nervous energy from the way the muscles of his face tensed.
“Captain,” Spock said without inflection when Jim came to stand in front of his chair.
“Hey, Spock. Since shift hasn’t started yet, can I talk to you in the ready room for a sec?”
Spock nodded once and rose, careful not to make any superfluous movements. He followed his captain off the bridge and into a space used mostly for senior crew meetings. Spock stood tall and straight, hands behind his back. He gripped his left wrist with his right hand harder than necessary and schooled himself still. He tamed the dread that threatened to overtake him.
“At ease, Commander,” Jim said, and gestured to the seats around the table. He took one, and indicated that Spock should take the one to his immediate left. After a moment’s hesitation, Spock sat, but did not let his spine relax. Jim looked at him with regret plain on his face. “Spock. I’m not here to reprimand you. Quit looking like I’m about to swat your nose with a newspaper.”
“How would you have me look, Captain? I am as I am.”
“Spock. Don’t be like this. I brought you here to apologize for my behavior last night.”
Spock flicked his gaze to Jim’s. Blue eyes peered at him with concern, and Spock had to exert control to calm the fluttering of his heart. He dropped his eyes and looked unseeing into his own lap.
“Continue,” he said.
Jim huffed out a short laugh. “Thank you, First Officer, I will. Could you please look at me, Spock?”
Spock forced himself to comply. Jim looked contrite, but it solved none of Spock’s turmoil. He was still in love with his captain, who could not return his regard. No amount of apologizing could resolve the dilemma, and since returning to his quarters last night feeling a terrible emptiness, Spock had let the notion of transferring off the Enterprise hold court at the forefront of his mind. He had contemplated it fleetingly from time to time since Jim spurned him, but the idea reared up now, monolithic and increasingly tempting. It would not please him to depart, but perhaps it would be easier for him and the unwilling object of his affections if they were to be as strangers.
“Look,” Jim said. “What I said and did last night was out of line. Way, way, way out of line, and I’m so sorry. I never meant to get so out of control and act like such a - jerk. I have no right to dictate anything about your personal life, and I have no right to know what you do with your personal life either. I know that, and there’s no excuse. I just… I want you to know how sorry I am, and that I’ll never do it again.”
Spock’s heart, an illogical organ prone to feeling, felt brittle, ready to crumble. Jim had no intentions of insinuating himself into Spock’s “personal life,” as he termed it, even as friend, and here their desires diverged. He knew what remained of his acquaintance with Jim was over, and he had no recourse. He would leave the Enterprise.
He became aware that Jim was regarding him with an expectant expression.
“The standard social convention is that I accept your apology and forgive you, correct?” he asked, his voice hoarse and low.
Jim frowned, then gave a slow nod of affirmation.
“That’s the convention, I suppose, but you don’t have to.”
Spock stood abruptly.
“Then I do not. Alpha shift commences, Captain. We should not be late.”
He swept out of the room. For the rest of the uneventful alpha shift, he avoided the stony pallor of Jim’s face, and when his back was turned at the science station, he felt the weight of Jim’s gaze, a heavy burden.
As soon as the captain departed from the bridge at the conclusion of the shift, Spock sent his transfer request. Spock bypassed his usual stop at the science department and went straight to his quarters to begin packing. When he unearthed his duffle from the depths of his closet, his personal padd trilled.
The pixelated message that appeared on the screen when he unlocked it was from Jim.
Can I please come over to talk? it read. Spock hesitated over the virtual keyboard. If he wrote yes, Jim would be in his quarters, desperate, pleading, but offering nothing that could compel him to stay. If he wrote no, well. Jim wouldn’t be in his quarters at all.
Yes, he sent, and before even thirty seconds lapsed, Jim had let himself into Spock’s quarters, a blur of command gold and skin flushed pink. He stopped short where Spock had his duffle laid out on his bed. When he looked up at Spock’s face, the only word that could properly describe his expression was ‘desolate.’
“You’re really doing this?” Jim asked, the waver in his voice almost imperceptible. Almost.
“I regret that it has come to this, but I find that my position is untenable. I have come to believe that it would be to the benefit of this ship and its captain if I removed myself from my post.”
Jim’s frown threatened to swallow his face. It would have been comical if Spock was not at that moment learning the practical application of that once-befuddling human term ‘heartbreak.’
“Tell me what to do, Spock. Tell me what to do to make this better and I’ll do it.”
Spock turned away. In his closet were row upon row of pristine blue science shirts in a thermal fabric made just for him. They had the Enterprise insignia embroidered on the breast, and would be worse than incongruous on another ship. It would be illogical to keep them all. It would be illogical, but he began to gather and fold them nonetheless.
“There is nothing,” he said. He felt Jim move closer to him.
“What if - what if I told you I wanted to give it a go? You and me?”
Spock whirled around, a shirt clenched in his fist. He straightened his spine and stood at full height. He met Jim eye to eye.
“Do not mock me, Captain.”
“I’m not. Spock, I swear, I’m not.” Jim took a cautious step forward. “I’ve been - thinking about you. For a long time. I just couldn’t admit it to myself.”
Spock swallowed and shook his head.
“You have made it very clear -”
“Spock. I was being an ass. I spoke to the admiral-”
An involuntary scoff escaped Spock’s throat and he turned back to his packing. He shook out the shirt he’d just wrinkled and smoothed it down to fold and place on top of the neat pile.
“The admiral,” Spock interrupted Jim, “is barely capable of looking after his own emotional well-being. He should not interfere with yours.”
“I’m sorry I hurt you, Spock. And I’m sorry he has, too.”
Spock just shook his head and kept packing.
“Spock. Listen to me. Before today went down the toilet, I had this whole thing planned. I was gonna make you dinner- well, I was gonna program the replicator myself, at any rate, and I was gonna brew up a batch of that that special tea you like, because I got it for you last shore leave, but then I didn’t know how to give it to you because we were avoiding each other, and-” Jim’s mouth snapped shut. “Or have I fucked it up so badly that you’re not even listening to me right now?”
Spock couldn’t bring himself to look anywhere but at the shirts collected in his duffle bag. But softly, he said, “I’m listening.”
He heard Jim swallow, and then he was right beside him. He could feel Jim’s body heat.
“I should have said yes three months ago. It would have saved the both of us a lot of grief.”
“Jim. You cannot… force desire where there is none. I regret only that the episode cost us our friendship.”
“I’m not forcing any desires, Spock.” A careful hand came to rest on Spock’s arm. Spock heard him take a deep breath. “I’m - I’m tired of pretending I don’t want you. And I’m tired of not having you around off-duty. I’ve missed you a lot, Spock.”
Spock faced Jim, but he watched the pulse point in his neck rather than his eyes.
“I am not sure a precipitous relationship prompted by careless words from your alternate is wise.”
“It’s not him, Spock. I mean, yeah, he made me face the music, but he didn’t make me imagine this.” With that, Jim seized Spock’s right hand and pressed it to his chest, above his heart. He ducked his head and forced Spock to meet his gaze. “Hey. Can you feel me?”
Where Spock’s fingers weaved between Jim’s, Spock felt a steady thrum of hope and longing and anticipation keep time with Jim’s heartbeat. Beneath it all was a baseline of jealously guarded love. Wonder bloomed in Spock’s consciousness, and he could not tell if it was his own or Jim’s.
“Yeah?” Jim murmured. Spock’s lips parted and he drew in a quick breath. He dipped his head in a nod, and Jim broke into a wide grin. He wrapped his arms around Spock’s neck and pulled him in for a kiss. An exploratory tongue nudged his mouth with gentle insistence, and Spock allowed its entry, every nerve lighting when he swallowed Jim’s moan. Jim pressed himself closer, and they matched plane for plane, bone lashed with muscle. Jim rocked his hips experimentally, and though neither of them had yet been incited to erection, jolts of pleasure thrilled Spock’s spine.
Spock pulled away and pressed his forehead to Jim’s, cradling his face in worship.
“Jim,” he whispered. He felt the curve of Jim’s lips as he smiled.
“You’re stubbly,” he whispered back. A puff of air escaped Spock’s lungs, and through heated skin he could feel Jim’s delight at having made Spock laugh.
“I shave but once in the mornings,” Spock told him. Spock kissed him again, a soft merging, and Jim’s knees threatened to buckle.
Jim broke away from the kiss and hugged Spock harder, his face buried in Spock’s neck. His breath hitched, and Spock put his arms around him to hold him close and steady.
“Jim?” he ventured.
“I’m fine,” Jim said. He pulled away, hands on Spock’s shoulders, and just looked at him, awe in his eyes. “I’m fine, Spock,” he said, and he gave a watery kind of smile.
Spock ushered him down to sit on the bed, and he sat beside him, taking his hand. He slid their palms together, pushed his fingers between Jim’s, clasped his hand tightly and rubbed his thumb into the soft flesh at the base of Jim’s.
“I could bring you a glass of water,” Spock said. Jim covered Spock’s hand with his other one and gave a squeeze.
“I told you, I’m fine. Great, even. This is - this is exactly what I’ve needed. You’re exactly what I’ve needed, Spock.” A human kiss landed on Spock’s cheekbone, then the bridge of his nose, and then on both closed eyes. Jim stroked down the side of Spock’s face. “I’ve wanted you for so long,” he said. “I was just too much of a coward to admit it. And now it’s like a dam’s breaking inside me. Is that cheesy? That’s cheesy.”
“If the statement is apt, then its metaphorical dairy content seems irrelevant.”
Jim laughed and shuffled closer. He dislodged one of his hands from the knot they’d created and wrapped his arm around Spock’s waist.
“I want you tonight, Spock,” he said. “Is that okay? Too fast?”
Spock touched a thumb to Jim’s lips. His eyes were a clear, fathomless blue under full brows. Spock shook his head.
“I want you, also,” he said. Jim nipped at his thumb through a smile, and then they were kissing again, long hot draws of soft lips and strong tongues. Jim threw a leg over Spock’s, pushed himself closer.
“You’re gonna have to help me out though,” he said. “Never been with a guy. Or a Vulcan. Or a guy Vulcan.”
Spock pressed a hand to Jim’s chest, appreciating the hard musculature it encountered. Jim held it there, fingers tangled.
“We will do only what pleases us,” Spock said. “Without itinerary or goal.”
“Oh, I’ve got a goal.” Jim grinned. “It involves making you come so hard you make a certain sound I may or may not have heard a rumor about.”
“The admiral has been telling tales,” Spock grumbled, but nonetheless he hummed his approval into the kiss Jim pressed to his mouth.
Spock slid his hand further down Jim’s chest, his stomach. He watched Jim’s tongue flicker out to wet his lips, and he heard the wet sound of Jim’s lips parting for an intake of breath. Jim jerked his head in assent when Spock met his eyes, and then Spock lifted the hem of his gold shirt and peeled it off his body. Jim’s hands, as if unsure of their welcome, settled on Spock’s shoulders.
Jim’s hair was ruffled from his shirt, just mussed enough to be endearing. Spock smoothed his hand over the cowlick, trailed his fingertips along the line of Jim’s collarbone, ran his hands over his pecs and the pads of his thumbs over two tight nipples. Jim’s heartbeat came fast beneath his palms, but Spock had more flesh to map and memorize. He followed the fine golden line of hair, barely perceptible but wholly tantalizing, from chest to abs, down to the sweet hollow of Jim’s navel. His slipped his hands around the jut of Jim’s hip bones, which fit perfectly into the cradle of Spock’s palms. He saw Jim’s erection strain against the confines of his Starfleet issue trousers.
Spock felt Jim pulling at his shirt and he drew back to let Jim divest him of it. Jim attached himself like a limpet, fingers through chest hair, leg over hips. Electricity bolted up and down Spock’s spine when Jim straddled him and their cocks bumped through the fabric of their trousers.
“Look at you,” Jim murmured as if to himself. “Look how gorgeous you are.” He petted through Spock’s chest hair, tugging lightly along the way. “I’ve thought about this. Thought about exactly this.”
Spock wet his lips and lay back, pulling Jim to lie atop him, their bodies flush. He cupped Jim’s ass through his trousers and ground their cocks together. Jim gasped and dropped his forehead to Spock’s shoulder, muffled his grunt on the bony clavicle.
“What else?” Spock asked, voice deep and rough. “What else have you thought about?”
“Everything,” Jim moaned. He moved that seeking mouth to the pulse point in Spock’s neck, and on the other side of his head Spock felt clever fingers toy with the point of his ear. He arched into the contact.
“Tell me,” Spock whispered. He held Jim’s hips down and pushed his own against them. Jim pushed a thigh between his legs and began to rock.
“Thought about kissing you,” Jim said as he set his tongue flicking behind Spock’s ear, at the hinge of his jaw. “Thought about smelling you here,” he nuzzled into Spock’s neck, “and here,” he swept his hand over Spock’s erection and cupped it with a tentative touch. “Thought about how your cock would feel in my hand, in my mouth, in my-” He cut himself off with a moan and a shudder and thrust into Spock’s pelvis. “Thought about fucking you. God, Spock, I’ve thought about fucking you so many times.”
Spock pitched his weight in the narrow bunk and rolled them, sending his duffle and neat pile of clothes to the floor without a thought. He rose up on his knees, hands poised on the button of Jim’s trousers. The eager length of Jim’s cock strained against the zip.
“I will divest you of your remaining garments now,” he growled.
“Yeah,” Jim panted. “God, yeah.” And then his trousers and briefs were an inelegant, tangled heap on top of Spock’s forgotten duffle, and Spock was kicking off his own clothes, and they met skin against skin, cock against cock in a shock of sensation so intense that Jim cried out, clutching Spock’s biceps in a convulsive grip.
Spock seized Jim’s mouth with his own for a heated, sloppy kiss that had Jim gasping when Spock moved down to map the planes and dips of Jim’s body with his tongue. Spock reached the thickening line of bronze hair that flared out into a lush thicket around Jim’s engorged genitals and he buried his nose there to scent him deeply. Jim made a strangled sound in the back of his throat, his fingers scrabbling for purchase at the base of Spock’s skull. At the tender strip of softness where Jim’s thigh creased in connection to his body, Spock set his sucking mouth, and Jim whined out an elongated expletive that sizzled down Spock’s spine. Spock spread Jim’s legs and pushed his body between them, shoulders pushed up under knees, and then Spock slid his slavering mouth over the head of Jim’s cock.
Jim shouted out an indeterminate vowel sound and gripped Spock’s hair. Both hands came to rest on his head, where he stroked through Spock’s hair as if in apology.
“God, that’s good, Spock,” he said through labored breath. “That’s so good. Suck my cock just like that, yeah.”
One hand cradling Jim’s balls and the other holding the base of Jim’s cock steady, Spock bobbed up and down on the full shaft with eager abandon. He derived his own pleasure from this, from the weight and flavor of Jim on his tongue, from the fullness in his mouth, from fingers in his hair and the sounds his fervent sucking elicited. He pushed his own erection into the bed, unable to contain himself. Jim’s breath hitched, and he seemed to choke off impending whines, but when he spoke it was with a filthy reverence that made Spock’s cock throb.
“Look at you, sucking my cock,” he said, “fuck, you were made to do this, made to suck my cock, weren’t you Spock? You love it, love my cock. Spock, Spock, fuck, that’s so good, Spock, Spock.”
Spock rubbed the pad of his thumb lower on Jim’s perineum, and Jim gave up speaking altogether, pressing himself back into the mattress with a wail. Spock went lower still and brushed the tiny wrinkled aperture of Jim’s anus, which quivered against the touch. Jim moaned above him and his hands in Spock’s hair tightened. One drifted downward and pushed Spock closer by the shoulders. Jim’s heels drummed against Spock’s sides, and, encouraged, Spock pressed his thumb more firmly, rubbing in a gentle circle to relax the tight bud of muscle.
“Spock,” Jim gasped. “Wait.”
Spock moved away from Jim’s anus and cupped his testicles again. He lifted his head off Jim’s cock and quirked an inquisitive eyebrow.
“Don’t wanna come yet,” Jim told him. He tried to pull Spock up, but Spock was immovable when he wished it, and he wished it now.
“I desire it,” he said. “To be the instrument of your pleasure. Oblige me, Jim?”
Blue eyes went hazy, swollen mouth slack, and Jim gave a languid nod. Spock returned to his task with singular concentration. When saliva slicked the length of Jim’s cock and dribbled down over his balls, Spock drew back and pushed his hands into the backs of Jim’s knees to expose his winking pink hole. When he swiped his tongue over it, Jim gave an echoing bellow and spewed a litany of curse words. With his own hands he pulled his legs higher, crushed to his chest, and as he jerked Jim’s cock with one hand, Spock laved all around the outside of Jim’s anus, flicked each wrinkle, sucked on the sensitized rim with lusty gusto.
“Oh fuck, I had no idea,” Jim said amid his nonsensical babble. “Jesus fuck, Spock, yes.”
Spock hummed and pushed his face deeper into Jim’s perineum. This was an intimacy he had only imagined he’d be granted. Jim’s hole spasmed around Spock’s invading tongue, and Spock reveled in the dark musk of it, in the rich, heady flavor of Jim’s innermost core, in how his name spilled from Jim’s lips like a benediction.
When Spock lifted his head, Jim whimpered at the abandonment and cast a pleading look at him. Spock tilted half a smile at him.
“Do you consent to manual penetration at this time?” he asked. Jim’s eyes crossed for a moment.
“Oh God, I think I’d consent to pretty much anything right now, Spock,” he said. “Do it. Please, please, do it.”
Spock gently moved Jim’s scrotum from his path and slid his middle finger into Jim’s ass straight up to the third knuckle. Jim grunted, but Spock began to thrust it in and out, and he moved it in widening circles. With his fingertip he caressed the smooth, constricting inner walls. The tight heat wreaked havoc on his controls, and from the tip of his own penis came a dollop of lubricating fluid that slicked his shaft. Jim had begun to rock down into the point of connection.
“One more,” Spock said, and he withdrew his hand. Two fingers made a tight press, but Jim’s body accepted it readily, and he gave a low rumble of appreciation. Avidly Spock watched his fingers disappear into the pink hole, framed by saliva-slick hair, and his cock throbbed in lament of his neglect. Spock drew his fingers in and out, paying careful attention to stimulating the walls of Jim’s rectum, and finally he alighted on the small protrusion that elicited a full wail from his lover’s throat.
“Fuck!” Spock could feel Jim’s toes curling against his ribs. “Oh fuck, right there, Spock!”
Spock hummed and pressed Jim’s prostate again, then hunkered down between his thighs to take Jim’s cock down his throat. He pumped it firmly into his suckling mouth as he worked his fingers deep into Jim’s ass, and then Jim was making small, thwarted sounds in the back of his throat, his thighs clenching around Spock’s ears, hands twisting in Spock’s hair, back arching in a painful convex curve. His orgasm burst into Spock’s mouth even as his blinding ecstasy blasted through Spock’s own consciousness. Spock moaned around the load and swallowed it, but some dribbled from his mouth and when he pulled away to lap it back up, the final spurts wrung from Jim’s dick striped his cheeks, his nose, his lips.
Jim gave a weak groan and collapsed boneless onto Spock’s bed panting, his legs falling open. Spock wiped his face and chased the globs of semen with his tongue before he crawled up and fell to his side, curled against Jim’s sated body. He pressed his nose into Jim’s armpit when Jim gathered him closer, heaved in a deep dose of the pheromones there and began to jerk himself in a punishing rhythm against Jim’s hip. Jim turned and wriggled down to kiss him, hand on cheek, then he whispered, “Let me?”
The sound that escaped Spock’s throat was a sort of desperate sigh, and when Jim pushed him onto his back and set tentative lips to the crown of his cock, Spock wanted to watch. He wanted to, but the joy of Jim’s touch on his body forced his eyes shut. Jim had no suction, and his teeth mashed against Spock’s flesh, and then he choked a little when he tried to take too much too fast, but all Spock felt was Jim’s desire to make him feel as replete in bliss as Jim felt now.
“Don’t hurt yourself, Jim,” he murmured with a touch to Jim’s cheek. “Go slowly. Yes.”
Spock eyes slid shut and he gave himself up to Jim’s cautious experimentations. Eventually Jim got some semblance of a rhythm and began to apply suction, and he caught him with the sharp edges of his teeth less and less, and Spock felt the heat and pressure of orgasm build in his testicles and at the base of his spine. He had to signal Jim, had to let him know what was coming; his hand tapped an erratic warning on his shoulder and swallowed the verbal notification that had formed on his lips when his breath caught. He must have been clear enough, because Jim stilled, and the hand around his cock squeezed tighter, pumped harder into that sucking mouth, and Spock’s orgasm came as a blast of light and color behind his eyes and down his spine, rushed through the very depths of his being and burst onto Jim’s waiting tongue. Dimly Spock heard his lover cough, but pleasure had overwhelmed his senses, made limp his limbs. When he was able to crack his eyes open again, he found Jim nestled into his side, arm and leg thrown over him in a possessive tangle.
“Good?” Jim asked, his lips feather-soft on Spock’s shoulder.
“Indeed,” Spock replied. He brought a hand up to stroke down the muscular length of Jim’s arm.
“I’ll need practice,” Jim said. “Lots and lots of practice.” Spock could feel the curve of his smile on his skin. “So. You know. You can’t leave.”
Spock linked their fingers.
“I will not,” he said, and he felt a cool wash of relief and gratitude flow from Jim to himself.
Jim shimmied up to lay his head on the pillow, and Spock turned to gaze into blue eyes.
“I’m glad,” Jim said. He rubbed his thumb on Spock’s cheekbone, memorizing.
Spock hesitated. Finally, he asked, “Have you any misgivings?”
He was gratified that Jim did not answer immediately, that he lay there, touching Spock’s face, and gave the question its due contemplation.
“I’ve got all my own issues here, Spock,” he answered after a silence. “I’ve let them bog me down too long. I’m not saying they’ve magically disappeared, but I feel, I don’t know, lighter? I know I’ve still got to work through stuff. But. I feel like it’s gonna be okay, you know? It’s you and me, and we’re gonna be okay.”
A tightness that had gathered in Spock’s chest once his ardor had cooled began to ease. He nodded once.
“I have not played chess in 3.4 months,” Spock said. Jim beamed at him, but made no move to get up. He traced the bow of Spock’s lips.
“There was so much more I wanted to do with you tonight, Spock, and none of them involved capturing your queen.”
“Perhaps playing in the nude will be provocative while we pass the duration of our refractory periods.”
Jim’s face lit with amusement and he laughed, the sound a riot between the bulkheads.
“Oh my God, you’re hiding a dirty mind in that big sexy brain of yours!”
“I find myself… inspired by the view,” Spock said with a demure lilt, and cast his gaze down the impressive musculature of his lover’s bare body. Jim mock-preened, and Spock indulged in the visual feast he presented. Spock placed a hand on firm abdominal muscles, brushed upward to feel defined pectorals. Jim sighed under the attention, but abruptly Spock sat up, swung his legs over the edge of the bed, and stood to set up his dusty three-dimensional chess board.
“Hey!” When Spock looked back over his shoulder, Jim was pouting, a petulant Adonis amid the bedding. “I didn’t even get to hear your funny sound!”
Spock laid out the pieces one by one. He could feel Jim ogling him - his small buttocks, his muscular back, the breadth of his shoulders. It inspired a feeling of triumph. He made a show of setting up the board with languorous deliberation, and he sent Jim an indulgent sideways look.
“T’hy’la,” he said, “you have a lifetime to earn my ‘funny sound.’”
Spock straightened, and with a contained gesture, invited Jim to sit at the table. Jim came when beckoned, but before he sat down, he pressed a kiss to the corner of Spock’s mouth.
“And I do intend to use it, Mr. Spock,” he whispered.
VI
When Kirk caught sight of Spock at the San Francisco space port, he had to force himself to keep from visibly buzzing with anticipation. As it was, he had been so jittery and keyed up for the days leading up to dry dock that McCoy threatened to sedate him and keep him strapped to a bed until it was time to go. He refrained from shoving people out of the way, but when he was finally in front of his lover, long parted from him, he found himself stopping short, his breath caught in his throat.
“Jim,” Spock said. His voice was rougher, quieter than it used to be. His eyes were clouded, his hair grey. His hands were linked behind his back, and he cocked his head when he offered a tiny smile.
Kirk swallowed and tamped down on the trembling.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, hoarse. He grabbed Spock’s wrist and led him away from the crush of the crowd and the roving of curious eyes. “Where are you parked?”
“Jim, cease rushing.”
Outside the bustle of the port, there were fewer harried people jostling them, and no one paid any mind when a human was pulled into elderly Vulcan arms and held tightly, as if it were a punishment. Finally, the tension roiling in his gut gave way and Kirk let himself sag in Spock’s embrace, shivering.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Kirk said into the column of Spock’s throat. “I can’t believe I’m feeling you right now.” The arms locked around Spock’s neck squeezed harder, but Spock didn’t protest. He rubbed up and down Kirk’s back.
“We will go to Sarek’s condominium and I will make you a soothing beverage.”
Kirk snorted and pulled away. He put his hands on Spock’s shoulders and regarded him for a moment. The years had been kind, but they had left their mark. He was more aged than a full-Vulcan would be at a hundred and sixty years old. Kirk’s hands came up to cup his jaw. This was his Spock; he was still in there, looking at him with such naked affection. It had been so long that Kirk could barely remember what it felt like to be on the receiving end of it, and he had avoided his younger self and the Spock who loved him for the past few weeks just so the jealousy wouldn’t eat him alive. He’d occupied himself by consulting in the engineering decks, though Scotty seemed a little anxious and territorial by halfway into the first week.
“Long as it’s not that tea I can’t stand,” he said. Spock lifted an eyebrow, but took one of Kirk’s hands in one of his and led him to his aircar in short-term parking.
Once they got to the condo, though, Kirk didn’t feel up to a coffee or a hot toddy or anything. He was exhausted and wanted nothing more than to collapse in bed. He said so, and Spock only nodded. In the bedroom, they disrobed, and in Kirk’s heart he felt a heavy tenderness as Spock revealed his body. He’d always been thin, but now his muscle tone was gone, his skin sagged, and he had a tiny, soft belly on him dusted with silver hair. Kirk laid a hand on one flat pectoral.
“How long has it been?” he asked. “Since you saw me?”
Spock placed both his hands over Kirk’s on his chest, held him there.
“Much too long, Jim,” he said. “It does not bear thinking about.” He pulled Kirk down on the bed and they arranged themselves on their sides, face to face. A gnarled hand rested on Kirk’s hip. He stroked through Spock’s chest hair, like he used to do. He watched Spock deflate with an inaudible sigh, eyes sliding shut. Softly, Jim kissed him.
“It’s over,” Kirk said. “After this we’ll go back to your work at the VSA, I’ll get a little ship to call my own, and everything will be fine.”
Spock only grasped him tighter, pressed their bodies closer. Kirk’s heart swelled and he looped his arm around his lover, tucked his head under his chin, breathed in the deep warm scent of him, and listened to the steady cadence of his own heartbeat until he fell asleep. He dreamed of places he’d never been before.
When he woke, the afternoon sun was throwing long shafts of light across the bedroom floor. He was sprawled on top of Spock, who lay serenely beneath him, awake and silent.
“What are you thinking about?” Kirk asked in a croak. He cleared his throat.
“A different time,” Spock said with a finality that meant the subject was closed. Kirk lifted his head to look into Spock’s face.
“You okay?”
“You are here with me,” Spock said, and it was answer enough. Kirk kissed those thin lips, coaxed them open as he trailed a hand down Spock’s chest to rub over an olive nipple. Kirk’s tongue followed his fingers, teeth worrying the sensitized flesh until Spock hissed and held Kirk’s hips against his own. Kirk was surprised to find his own hard cock griding against Spock’s; some things apparently hadn’t been affected by age.
“Eager, Spock?” he murmured into the solid chest with a smirk.
“I have waited a very long time for this,” Spock said, and Kirk swore he could hear a pout. He grinned up at the pursed lips and furrowed brow.
“Then I won’t keep you waiting any longer,” he said, and he bent over Spock’s lap to take the needful cock into his mouth. Spock made a strangled sound and dropped his head to the pillow. Jim moaned around the throbbing length - he loved sucking Spock, loved the flavor of it and the sense of power it gave him. Loved to be the focal point of all Spock’s attention. He was leaning sideways over Spock, and it gave Spock the opportunity to fondle his ass with the hand that wasn’t occupied in his hair. He stroked Kirk’s cheeks, and Kirk was forcefully reminded of the last time they’d been together, right after he’d asked Spock to be his forever, but before the desolation of the next morning: he lay on his stomach after they’d both come, after Kirk had made declarations of his love, and Spock trailed his hands over and over the downy, near-invisible hair on Kirk’s ass. Kirk asked him what he was doing, lazy and sated but vaguely amused and a little turned on and definitely head over heels in love, and Spock had said only “committing you to memory.” The sweetness of the moment had been spoiled by all that had come after it - even the careful touches Kirk had allowed the younger Spock to bestow upon his unbending body had been bitter ashes in his mouth - but now Kirk moaned and pushed back into the contact. This Spock - this Spock wouldn’t disappear like so much vapor on the wind. This Spock would stay.
Spock’s fingers, thickened and surely arthritic, brushed over Kirk’s hole. He circled it gently, but with a firm insistence until the muscle gave way and allowed the entry of one dry fingertip. Spock retreated and advanced like this for some time, eventually slicking the way with saliva, until Jim found himself rocking back into a finger buried all the way inside him. Then Spock withdrew and patted Kirk on the swell of one asscheek. Kirk took the cue and maneuvered himself on top of Spock, knees on either side of his head, bodies together in a heated press, and planted his asshole over Spock’s mouth. Kirk gave a shout as Spock’s hands spread him wide and his tongue delved deep; he’d missed this, Spock’s specialty - single-minded attention to his greedy asshole. He was fairly sure Spock could eat his ass for hours and be perfectly content, but Kirk had yet to test that theory since it drove him out of his mind and he always ended up with his face mashed against the pillows, ass hiked in the air begging to be fucked. At the impatient bump of Spock’s dick, leaking copiously its personal lubricant, Kirk remembered himself and got back to fellating his lover with renewed zeal.
When Kirk thought he couldn’t take another lap at his asshole, he swung himself round and straddled Spock’s lap, facing him. He rose up on his knees and snugged the blunt head of Spock’s cock against his hole, but Spock staid the descent of his hips.
“Do you not require more stretching?” he asked.
Kirk pumped Spock behind himself, rubbed the convenient Vulcan lube around his hole.
“Just you,” Kirk said. “Just want your cock and nothing else.” With that, he sank down on Spock’s erection. The burn was a purifying fire, and the heavy, hot fullness was so consumptive that Kirk forgot about all the time that lay between them, forgot his misgivings and his battered heart.
He rose and fell in a measured rhythm, the thick slide of Spock’s penis inside him a dizzying sensation that lit all of Kirk’s nerves and radiated outward so he became a thing of pure pleasure. Beneath him, Spock flexed and thrust and rolled his hips to match Kirk’s movements. He batted Kirk’s hand away from his penis and seized it himself, stroking it with the firm grip and upward twist Kirk favored, a technique that spoke of years of practice - years Kirk had yet to experience. Kirk cried out and met Spock’s hooded eyes, enflamed by the slack mouth and the tiny sounds escaping with each breath. Kirk leaned down and braced his hands on Spock’s shoulders so he could thrust back on to his cock with more urgency.
“Needed this,” he panted, “needed this so bad, Spock, you don’t know.”
Spock craned his neck up to capture Kirk’s mouth. Kirk moaned and pulled away, sat up again to rock into the penetration. He grabbed Spock’s hand and shoved two of his fingers into his mouth, tongue slipping between them even as his teeth closed gently around the sensitive flesh between Spock’s knuckles. When he sucked hard, Spock jerked and arched under him, body twisting, and finally he keened out a desperate, quavering sound that sputtered and choked, and Kirk hummed out a little laugh around his mouthful.
There it is, he thought with a measure of victory, and he fucked himself down on Spock’s cock harder and faster. He bit and sucked Spock’s fingers, and he would have said a lot of things if he weren’t gagged, would have told Spock he loved him, missed him, needed him always, but then he couldn’t think anything at all because Spock’s cock was hot and hard and fucking him deep, fucking the come right out of him when orgasm bore down like thunder through his wracking body. As he spurted thick stripes of come onto Spock’s chest, Spock bellowed and lurched upward, wrenching his hand from Kirk’s mouth and wrapping his arms around him as he pushed into Kirk’s body and came, his semen hot enough that Kirk could feel it flooding him.
Afterward, they slumped together on the bed, and Kirk slid off to the side, dislodging Spock from his ass. Kirk reached a hand over Spock’s chest, and Spock met it with his own, his first two fingers clamping around Kirk’s. They were silent, and the sun’s rays made their way across the room.
Eventually they had to move again. Spock turned Kirk over and passed a clean cloth over his perineum and his raw anus. Kirk sighed as Spock cleaned him with his usual focus. When he was finished, he encouraged Kirk onto his side and spooned up beside him, arm slung over his torso, knobbly knees pushed into the backs of Kirk’s own. He felt Spock nose into the space between his neck and shoulder, felt the contented sigh as it passed over cooling sweat. He held Spock’s hand over his heart.
“How are our counterparts?” Spock asked, voice pitched low.
“Sickening,” Kirk replied. He felt Spock’s stomach quake with a silent laugh, and added, “I don’t know if anyone else has noticed yet. I mean, Bones, obviously, but I wonder if I just see because it’s really obvious to me, or if everyone can see what I can.”
“I recall that crew members were surprised, shocked, and in some cases, appalled by the our involvement, when we made it public.”
“Hm. Yeah. I just - did we look like that in the beginning? Like a pair of lovestruck idiots?”
“I am certain such a description could never have applied to me,” Spock said. “I have always conducted myself in a very dignified manner.”
Kirk snickered. “Oh, shut up.”
“What does ‘lovestruck’ look like on a stern Vulcan countenance?” Spock’s arm tightened around Kirk. Kirk closed his eyes and sent up a wish that this moment last as long as possible, that time and reality never encroach upon it.
“I could feel your eyes follow me everywhere, and they burned. Maybe your expression didn’t change, but something did. An energy, maybe. Between us. And I was probably grinning like a maniac for months. I don’t know how everyone couldn’t tell.”
“Perhaps our comportment was more discreet than our feelings.”
“Must have been.” Kirk traced the veins on Spock’s hand. The skin was thinner, and smooth as petals. Kirk’s heart ached, and he lifted Spock’s hand to press a kiss to each big knuckle. He felt Spock’s shudder, his long exhale.
“Being with you like this, Jim, is a priceless gift,” Spock said.
“Yeah,” Kirk replied. “Yeah. I’m glad, too.”
The sun poured in through the windows and warmed their skin.
Prologue Part I Part II Epilogue