"heat" a Star Trek fanfiction
“heat” by ansley15
Fandom: Star Trek IX
Pairing: Kirk/Spock/Uhura
Genre: Angst, romance, pon farr
Summary: Kirk knew a storm when he saw one, and this had been brewing in quiet desperation for months. When Spock goes into pon farr while he, Kirk, and Uhura are stranded on a planet and needs both humans to save him, uncomfortable truths edge to light.
Note: Well, my attempt to write threesome smut turned into a quiet, introspective little character piece. Proof that I am truly Angstsexual...but this one has a happy ending, I promise. Feed back appreciated :)
Disclaimer: I do not own Star Trek.
As a child, I roamed the world at night. Unmuted by light pollution, the stars smeared like melted butter. Too young to gray the hairs of all the fathers in Riverside, I nestled in the cereal grass. Content to merely dream. That was the summer that the heat first took me, first fell on me in fll gravity. Like violence it enthralled me. I've never been able to shake that fire.
Now, years later, the dreams reassert themselves. She laughs as his hand snakes up my spine.
“Don't deny it, silly boy. You have too much heart for one.”
Jim Kirk knew a storm when he felt one, and this one had been brewing for months.
The only sound beneath the rain pelting the shuttle roof was the rubbery squeak of boot heels, the papery wheeze of Spock's breathing. Limp as a ragdoll, the Vulcan lay upon the only cot. Aside from eyeballs spinning in his sockets, he was unnaturally still. Slowly...tentatively...past caring that Uhura watched, Jim lay a hand on his best friend's forehead.
Spock smoldered beneath his skin.
“He's getting worse,” Jim murmured, more to himself than Uhura. Unconsciously, his fingers threaded through the sweat-slicked hair, smoothing flat bangs plastered to Spock's brow in odd flips.
He withdrew his hand on reflex when Uhura spoke.
“Shall I attempt to hail Star Fleet command again, Captain?”
“Well, if it makes you feel better, Lt. Uhura, though I doubt the Enterprise has arrived within hailing range since you tried five minutes ago,” Jim quipped in a subtle, sly joviality which felt plastic even to him. They slipped into professionalism easily as actors into scripts after their lines should have been learned. Assuredly, he rose from Spock's side to stare her right in the face when he gave a command. A Captain must inspire respect in the crew, he reminded himself. Even a crew of one.
One who saw right through him.
“If you decide to hail the Enterprise,” he told her seriously. “Wait a little longer. I don't know how much longer the shuttle power will last.”
The implication behind his forcibly light tone flashed in her eyes. She nodded.
“Aye aye, Captain.”
It was their third night canned within the shuttle on Galileo 7, stranded from civilization and their ship. Their rations whittled by the day. Spines aching from sleeping upright and brains aching from barely sleeping at all, they made perfunctory conversation now in unease. Though neither were the kind to give up hope, Jim knew no matter when Uhura hailed, it would be no use.
Before him loomed another night he'd have to tough out Uhura, with only the static squeal to drown the rasp of Spock struggling to breathe.
()()()
The first time Kirk saw Spock nearly die, he had barely breathed for a week after.
“Ambassador, I assure you the Federation has no intent of...”
“Don't work that smile of yours on me, Kirk! I shall not fall for your Federation's tricks...”
“Captain...”
“What is it, Mr. Spock?'
“Captain, I believe it pertinent to...”
“DON'T LOOK AWAY WHEN I”M TALKING TO YOU, KIRK!”
“Spock, I'm right in the middle of..”
“JIM! LOOK OUT!”
Collision. When the spinning world skidded still, steaming dark blood soaked right through his gold command shirt. Jim's own wordless face reflected back in twin charcoal ghosts in Spock's wide eyes.
“We're losing him, Dr. McCoy”
Smooth as dream the medical gurney cleaved the Enterprise hall, the universe hummed white at the edges...
“Damn it, you green-blooded hobgoblin, you're too goddam tough to go out like this! Stay with me.”
I never wanted any else one to die for me. My father was enough...
“Okay, lower him down...gently..gently...”
Don't you dare fucking die on me.
“No pulse.”
A flatline toned infinite across a blank screen.
“He's gone, Doctor.”
“Resuscitation paddles,” McCoy's voice in that kind of calm chilled Jim all through his veins. “Now.”
You can't do this to me, you son of a bitch. Don't you realize before you I could do things by myself, I could take whatever the world threw at me. And yeah maybe it wasn't great, but it was alright...and then YOU happened...you're not allowed to teach me what it feels like to be truly close to someone and then die on me...Don't. You. DARE.
“I'm getting a pulse.”
Don't leave me in this world alone.
“Stronger...he's stable, Doctor!”
“Atta boy, Spock!” Bones crowed, panting a little as his body unclenched, still bent over his patient. “I knew you were too hardheaded of a son of bitch to cop out that easily.”
He's okay. He's okay. He's okay.
“He'll be alright, Jim.” Dr. McCoy assured him later. Jim lingered until Spock stabilized, cemented to the Vulcan's bedside. Though the monitors throbbed with vital neons, Spock's skin still was drained bloodless.
My God, he was so still....
“How bad is he?” Jim asked seriously, not diverting his eyes to Bones when he spoke.
“He's going to be in a Vulcan healing trance for several days, but he's going to make it Jim. Of course I'm going to protest and make him stay longer, but I think in a week he'll be fit to go on duty.”
Pause. A comforting hand warmed Jim's forearm.
“You can stay with him for awhile, if you want.”
Jim had not even thought to ask. Being a Captain had perks worth getting used to. Almost ceremoniously, tense in dread behind his stoic face, as if approaching an open casket at a wake, Jim floated towards his fallen first...
“Where is he?” Lt. Uhura brushed by Jim without glance, replacing him at Spock's side. “Give me his condition.”
While McCoy filled her in, Jim watched her flatten Spock's hair. His stomach muscles tightened and liquified. There was something almost voyeuristic seeing her aristocratic profile catch the light like that, to see the tenderness soften her face. He felt like a splinter in the both their thumbs, a foreign object, unwelcome. The itching to leave and aching to linger magnified once McCoy left him alone with Spock and Uhura. Though she did not once raise her eyes, he felt her like a slap as he turned his back to the scene. In confident strides he plunged down the hallway, tensing to man up and run his ship. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Uhura gently kiss Spock's cheek before they faded into the shadows.
()()()
“Hey,” an unused grin cracked Jim's face when he ambled into sickbay, several days later.
“How's my favorite First Officer doing?”
Though too weak to protest when jabbed with hypo sprays without pity, Spock had strength to quirk an amused brow.
“Your statement is illogical. The quantifier “favorite” designates “the most cherished out of a group.” I am your only First Officer. Therefore, I cannot be your favorite for I am not in a group.”
“Well, you are pretty fucking cherished,” Jim said brightly, popping out a swearword rarely used since his captaincy. He could feel his usual grin not quite reach his eyes. More than he intended must have slipped through the cracks. For though Spock's face was still as a death, Jim's heart reflected in his eyes.
“Yes,” Spock managed to squeeze through his exhaustion. “I am...aware of the fact.”
()()()
When Spock first grew feverish on the shuttle, he had preferred Uhura's company to Jim's.
Neither was sure why. It had been a source of unspoken tension between them that the reverse had been true for months.
Jim had not questioned it. It was a little petty, he chided himself, caring about who Spock's favorite human was when Spock was dyin....ill. Ill. Ill, but able to recover. By the second day, by which time Spock drowned too deep in fever to care who held his hand, Jim was too wrapped in anxiety to care she was in the room. He clutched Spock's hand as often as she, quietly drinking in his pulse, his mind screaming at the thought of a funeral. But that first night he paced about the cockpit while their voices in a farther room filtered through the metal.
They went on talking together. Jim went on walking in circles alone.
Usually, Jim did not dwell much on the mind-meld with the Other Spock on Delta Vega, the fragments of another life which trickled through ancient fingertips. Jim preferred to carve his own destiny. Now, however, ghosts of the life of a full-hearted Jim Kirk often caught him unaware, surprised him with random thoughts on the bridge. It tainted his chessgames...his favorite hour of the day...by comparison. In the other life, he thought, as Spock's voice blended with Uhura's. I was closer to him than anyone else in the universe.
And he and Spock were close. But never close enough.
And maybe it was petty to lament this now...maybe this was what closeness was. Maybe all relationships edged off another like this. Jim wouldn't know. He had never really had true friends before. Even his relationship with Bones had not been one he couldn't have lived without until the beginning of the 5 year mission, when their friendship had deepened.
Maybe Jim didn't need a destined soul mate. Maybe all he needed was...just for once...to be first in another's heart.
He was jolted from half-dream by a soft touch. It was Uhura.
“But despite it all,” he thought to himself, staring up into her lithe and lovely body. “I could never hate her.”
“Captain?” she paused. “.Jim. I..I think I know what's wrong with him.”
Jim snapped up straight, fully awake.
“Really? What do you think it is? Is it curable?”
She drew a shuddering breath before answering.
“I think it is. But...”
“I think it will take both of us.”
()()()
“But it if they were acting under duress, then it wouldn't be free will. That is why most laws on most planets have a code declaring contracts under duress void...”
“Laws reflect social custom more perfectly than moral reality. And I repeat, Cadet Uhura, that a moral agent in such situation still acts under choice. “Perform an act, or die” is still a choice.”
“But is a choice unto death truly a choice?”
“Since death is a viable and in some situations an acceptable outcome of action, yes. Only if an agent's mental faculties are literally being controlled so that their locomotive functions are dictated by an outside agent is free choice truly...”
“Ah, but Commander, you were the one who once told me that often free choice in an illusion. When we believe ourselves to be free, we are only free to act within the confiding of our socio-cultural environment.”
Nyota brandishes this one out passionately, believing she has finally won one of the good natured debates she and Professor Spock wage every Tuesday afternoon inside this coffee shop. It's the fall she took his xenolinguistics class, the fall they fell in love. It's only later, after they have found themselves in a relationship and he has disclosed the nature of “pon farr” to her in full honesty of what she is getting into, that she understands what slips through him when he next speaks.
“There is always choice. Always.”
()()()
That last morning before the distress call from Galileo 7, Nyota and Spock had had the quiet luxury of breakfast together. The tea cup he had poured for her sat before her untouched, cold as insult. They sat primly across the table from one another, the brittle scrapping of spoons against their bowls interrupted occasionally by snatches of spiritless conversation. Nyota tried first.
“What are you plans for today?”
“Assuming there are no outstanding orders from Star Fleet, I imagine I shall continue to supervise the science department in their attempts to discover whether or not the flora found on Rigel III is, indeed, sentient.”
Now it was his turn. They knew the script by heart.
“And you?”
“I'll spend most of Alpha shift on the bridge.”
“Indeed.”
“Yes.”
“Right.”
()()()
She slipped behind him in the turbolift
“What do you need?”
She hugged him so tightly her breasts stung, so tightly as if to take him and his heat and his sorrow within her. In the stillborn numb she held him, the poignant grip of him, and it wrenched in her harder than anything what she would do to ease his pain. Fingers snaking into his sleek thin hair his heartbeat fluttered against her ribs and everywhere tender kisses trailed themselves across his throat his cheeks his eyelids...the curve of his pointed ear.
The bridge of his nose pressed hard into her shoulder. He clutched her with a drowning grip.
For the briefest of moments as she first throws her arm around her, as if barely daring, as if something within him crumbles to do it...he hugs her.
He hugs her.
()()()
“Do you estimate much luck with the translation of the Vigarian runes?”
He instigated the morning conversation. Well, that's a first. It means he's trying, she assured herself.
“Yes,” she answered. For once, her brilliant mind could not come up with anything else to say, so she continued eating; their silence a mockery of their once-easy closeness.
The drudgery of living will murder us yet, she thought.
()()()
“Tell me what you need.” she whispered into his throat.
Cupped by her hands, his face raised itself to her. Through a haze of misery, his eyes seem to find hers and for a long moment merely stared, drawing strength from the tenderness he saw there.
“I need all personnel,” he managed through gritted teeth. “To continue to perform admirably.”
She nodded, eyes abrim with tears and empathy. One last time she kissed him, harder, trying to conduct all her passion through that kiss. He allowed his forehead to rest against hers in a second of fragil intimacy.
They have an understanding beyond words.
()()()
The awkward silence stretched for miles.
“I am going to be in the lab for most of tonight,” Nyota tells him finally. If he understands her full meaning, he does not show it. His face is blank as an empty plate. Nyota rises proudly to her feet. She will not hunger about her own quarters, ignored, when there is work too be done. “I will probably not see you until tomorrow.”
“Indeed. I wish you luck in your endeavors.” He tells her in a simple tone which, to her mind, echoes goodbye.
“Okay, so, you and Spock are both ambitious, smart, and serious. But really, what do you have going for you? You say you understand each other, but do you really? He needed someone to hold him on the day his planet died and you were there, and he had nobody closer. But now that Vulcan isn't imploding, what are you to him? When he doesn't need you how compatible are you, really? And you know you don't need him.”
“If he had not lost his planet, would you two have ever even gotten so far?”
No. The nobler track in her mind shoots that train of thought down. She would not insult Spock and what they shared by denying what had passed between them.
He had felt real.
He had looked real.
That gravity of skin between them was the most real thing she had known.
How it happened, when it started, Nyota could not be sure. She only knew it began in cracks, and crept and broadened, until it shattered the world they had built. Day in, day out. Mornings, evenings, nights. They had fallen into a routine broken only by occasional moments of tenderness, or moments where Nyota raised her eyes and wondered why they were together. Comments he made, unoffensive at the time, magnified malignant in retrospect. His daily habits grew irritating to her. She suspected he felt the same about hers. She wished he'd have the nerve to tell her so. She dreaded one day he would. The nights they lay awake all night with nothing to say soon became every night for weeks. And maybe the hardest part was there was no one to blame, not even Jim Kirk and his chess nights and his smirk. (it was good Spock had a best friend, she decided. It was good he had a friend to tell things he did not tell her. It was good. She approved. She would not allow herself to be a woman who didn't. She really didn't have a problem...)
The hardest part was, in the end, people simply grow apart.
()()()
Spock's head snapped up in alert attention. Steeled, he strode from the turbolift without another word. In a hissing of doors, he was gone.
()()()
I'm losing him.
“And he's already lost me,” Nyota thought to herself. But, her heart declared, hot in determination. We may have fallen out of love...or decided love is not enough...but I will not let him die. I won't allow it to happen.
She didn't realize how deep her determination ran until she saw it mirrored in Jim Kirk's face.
()()()
Things fall apart
The Centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is unleashed upon the world.
()()()
Words filtered through the gray soup of Spock's mind.
He burned.
Through the inferno, ghosts of logic lingered like iron in a primordial ooze, refusing to be dissolved. The voices sounded familiar...
"Why both of us?"
"Because Vulcans are linked with their future bondmates at a very young age so that pon farr will be less dangerous for both involved. Spock's betrothed, T'Pring, broke off her engagement to him after he joined Star Fleet. Anyway, you know Vulcans are much stronger than humans and do not tire as easily. Furthermore, since Spock is unbonded, I don't think either of us alone has the physical endurance to survive a night of pon farr."
“How do you even know he swings my way? I mean, just because you two have never had sex...which I still can't believe, by the way...are you sure...”
“He told me he thought he was homosexual before he met me.”
“Well, I can see how a guy might change teams...”
“I can't believe you're joking at a time like this, Captain!”
“You really shouldn't call a man whom you are about to engage a threesome with 'Captain.' That's kinky on so many levels I don't even want to go into.”
“We're not going to touch him at once. You will have none of me, mister. We'll relay off. You first.”
“Really? Why me?”
“I think deep down inside, it's you he loves best of all.”
“I wouldn't be so sure of that.”
(And maybe (Spock allowed himself to think while dying) this is what it feels like to be human: a race which apologizes for touching ,terrified to riot at the prospect of a hug)
Nestled in in lukewarm elbow crooks, Spock elevated. His skull felt soggy as wet cardboard. He was dizzy, disoriented. Cool little kisses moved in streaks over him, icing his flushed throat, his cheekbones, his eyelids...
Limp in their arms, he sagged dead to the world.
“You first.”
She backed away.
He touched him.
He crackled alive with sudden strength.
The heat crashed within Spock like electric shocks. The man's touch claimed him effortlessly, mastering him in easy flicks. He was everywhere nipping and stroking and grinding and moving. Over Spock he bent, his mouth now licking Spock's nipples into hard nubs now biting his neck now sliding down the low.... the hours... they smeared
In a vicious roll, Spock flipped the golden youth unto his back and stared down upon him.
Universe blue eyes gaze back.
He was in love with Jim Kirk. Had been from that night on the Narada. With the love Dante felt for Beatrice. A poet's love can burn you, too.
Remembering...remembering...everything he has longed for. He enters the golden boy. Taking him in awkward and hasty touch. He is not careful. He is hungry and devours him in a mess of rough poking elbows, in wrists pinned viciously to the side of the cot. The golden boy is patient. He is skillful. Masterfully, his hands pass over the feverish chest and with sly fingertips caress the flaming skin. His touch sparks life in unknown places-bends, plateaus, wrinkles, caves. Into the core, Spock plunges and when the man (kneecaps cupping his shoulders) arches his spine he tremors like an earth quake rising. The hips quickened and slowed and steady until in a whirlwind of writhing Spock is forced to cry out. Dizzy, almost unable to bear the intensity of that rocking, he seizes and sagged limp unto the other's chest. Slimmed in perspiration he trembles, slowly riding out the pulse with stark-numb brains.
“Your turn,” a voice says weakly.
The golden boy is gone. A midnight girl stands before him
And there she is with her beautiful, nimble hands. There is no going back.
She does not judge his restraint. She respects his Vulcan heritage, does not pressure him for what he cannot yet give. Yet always the longing in her eyes, this unspoken hole between them...
The slither of her hand upon that hardness which aches for her in need and heat. Always he wants her...the humiliation of dependency, that need, desire.
I'm sorry, ashyam, for this distance that has grown between us. Believe me: I have not desired it.
The oily slick of her inside his mouth as his tongue rolls her clit to climax. Her hands clutch his hair desperately, forcing his face more tightly between her legs as her hips buck up to meet him. Eyes half closed, she shudders. She is ready for him now. Taking the heat of him on her, inside her body. The power of him inside her, his absolute strength. The force of his blows catch breathless in her throat and she cranes back her head and spasmed into his girp. He is not gentle with her; he barely touches her breasts. Another hand cools his shoulders as he ravishes this squirming girl...
“Shussh. Gentle with her, Spock. We have all night.”
As she screams and arches into him, rough lips kiss the back of Spock's neck.
“We have all night.”
()()()
Finally they take him together.
Her thighs straddle him as the golden boy takes him from behind, thrusting into him as he grinds into her. Sandwhiched between them the universe swirls with the glory of anarchy.
Two people loved and needed in two different ways. In loving both, can be loved by neither. In having one, denied the other. In lacking one, lacking everything...unto death he could not tell them, unto death he would not chose between them....
"I don't believe in no win, scenarios, Spock. There is always a third option."
His nose and hers brush daringly as Spock wriggles between them. Though he is too enraptured to read their features, much less their expressions, the understanding that seeps through their veins soaks into him...and him back to them...until a loop of acceptance swirls around like infinite reoccurence.
The girl cranes her head over Spock's shoulder. She kisses the golden boy's lips.
Spock comes with the shock of rebirth.
()()()
Spock opened his eyes to a solid world. Lukewarm skin pressed soft against his.
Nyota and Jim both lay atop him at once. All three curled beneath a single thin blanket, jammed tight upon the cot. Their hair was endearingly disheveled. Both humans sagged limp in utter exhaustion, Jim's mouth slightly agape. Their heads lolled unto Spock's chest, foreheads touching. Each had a hand flat on Spock's stomach, inches apart, as if they had fallen asleep holding them.
Spock realized with a jolt all three were naked.
Fascinating.
Memories of the night before shot through in hysteric fragments...the liquid of her clit inside his mouth...of thrusting hard into him from behind..of Jim's lips touching Nyota's over Spock's trembling shoulder...
The only time in his life he had ever felt truly cherished. The only home he had ever known.
Jim's eyes flickered open sleepily. He peered up at Spock with his most disarming grin.
“Nyota! Check it out! Looks whose up!”
Blurrily, Nyota shook herself awake and raised her head with a small, disoriented whimper. Upon seeing Spock, she bolted up gleefully, knocking off the blanket to reveal their bodies in all glorious skin.
“Spock! You're conscious!”
“Indeed,” Spock propped himself up on his elbows as both humans sat back on their knees, all three twisting awkwardly so not to smush another. “I find myself in perfect health. I am at a lost to understand it, however.”
“I think you have a pretty good idea,” Jim supplied slyly. He waggled his eyebrows at Nyota.
“So I guess we're on first name basis, now?”
She smacked him. Spock's eyes crinkled in affection. Wordlessly, both lay down, exhausted, in the crook of each of Spock's arms. Nyota and Jim entwined fingers with another as she pressed a tender kiss to Spock's pectoral.
“Missed you,” She whispered. He knew exactly what she meant.
“You know?” Jim said breathlessly. “I never thought I'd say this...but I'm kinda hoping that Sulu and the others don't find us for awhile.”
“Indeed,” Spock titled his head with a cocked eyebrow, stroking Nyota's hair with one hand even as the other pattered up Jim's spine. “I believe that considering the possible planets upon which we may be stranded are consist of 76, all within a 500 parsec distance, and we are in our 78th hour upon this particular satellite, I estimate Acting Captain Sulu's chances of discovering our location within the next 24 hours to be 234.59 to 1, and his odds of discovering our location within the next 48 hours to be 12...”
He was silenced by twin human mouths pelting his own with kisses.
Other OT3 stories/drabbles in this universe can be found in my masterpost or my AO3.
Fandom: Star Trek IX
Pairing: Kirk/Spock/Uhura
Genre: Angst, romance, pon farr
Summary: Kirk knew a storm when he saw one, and this had been brewing in quiet desperation for months. When Spock goes into pon farr while he, Kirk, and Uhura are stranded on a planet and needs both humans to save him, uncomfortable truths edge to light.
Note: Well, my attempt to write threesome smut turned into a quiet, introspective little character piece. Proof that I am truly Angstsexual...but this one has a happy ending, I promise. Feed back appreciated :)
Disclaimer: I do not own Star Trek.
As a child, I roamed the world at night. Unmuted by light pollution, the stars smeared like melted butter. Too young to gray the hairs of all the fathers in Riverside, I nestled in the cereal grass. Content to merely dream. That was the summer that the heat first took me, first fell on me in fll gravity. Like violence it enthralled me. I've never been able to shake that fire.
Now, years later, the dreams reassert themselves. She laughs as his hand snakes up my spine.
“Don't deny it, silly boy. You have too much heart for one.”
Jim Kirk knew a storm when he felt one, and this one had been brewing for months.
The only sound beneath the rain pelting the shuttle roof was the rubbery squeak of boot heels, the papery wheeze of Spock's breathing. Limp as a ragdoll, the Vulcan lay upon the only cot. Aside from eyeballs spinning in his sockets, he was unnaturally still. Slowly...tentatively...past caring that Uhura watched, Jim lay a hand on his best friend's forehead.
Spock smoldered beneath his skin.
“He's getting worse,” Jim murmured, more to himself than Uhura. Unconsciously, his fingers threaded through the sweat-slicked hair, smoothing flat bangs plastered to Spock's brow in odd flips.
He withdrew his hand on reflex when Uhura spoke.
“Shall I attempt to hail Star Fleet command again, Captain?”
“Well, if it makes you feel better, Lt. Uhura, though I doubt the Enterprise has arrived within hailing range since you tried five minutes ago,” Jim quipped in a subtle, sly joviality which felt plastic even to him. They slipped into professionalism easily as actors into scripts after their lines should have been learned. Assuredly, he rose from Spock's side to stare her right in the face when he gave a command. A Captain must inspire respect in the crew, he reminded himself. Even a crew of one.
One who saw right through him.
“If you decide to hail the Enterprise,” he told her seriously. “Wait a little longer. I don't know how much longer the shuttle power will last.”
The implication behind his forcibly light tone flashed in her eyes. She nodded.
“Aye aye, Captain.”
It was their third night canned within the shuttle on Galileo 7, stranded from civilization and their ship. Their rations whittled by the day. Spines aching from sleeping upright and brains aching from barely sleeping at all, they made perfunctory conversation now in unease. Though neither were the kind to give up hope, Jim knew no matter when Uhura hailed, it would be no use.
Before him loomed another night he'd have to tough out Uhura, with only the static squeal to drown the rasp of Spock struggling to breathe.
()()()
The first time Kirk saw Spock nearly die, he had barely breathed for a week after.
“Ambassador, I assure you the Federation has no intent of...”
“Don't work that smile of yours on me, Kirk! I shall not fall for your Federation's tricks...”
“Captain...”
“What is it, Mr. Spock?'
“Captain, I believe it pertinent to...”
“DON'T LOOK AWAY WHEN I”M TALKING TO YOU, KIRK!”
“Spock, I'm right in the middle of..”
“JIM! LOOK OUT!”
Collision. When the spinning world skidded still, steaming dark blood soaked right through his gold command shirt. Jim's own wordless face reflected back in twin charcoal ghosts in Spock's wide eyes.
“We're losing him, Dr. McCoy”
Smooth as dream the medical gurney cleaved the Enterprise hall, the universe hummed white at the edges...
“Damn it, you green-blooded hobgoblin, you're too goddam tough to go out like this! Stay with me.”
I never wanted any else one to die for me. My father was enough...
“Okay, lower him down...gently..gently...”
Don't you dare fucking die on me.
“No pulse.”
A flatline toned infinite across a blank screen.
“He's gone, Doctor.”
“Resuscitation paddles,” McCoy's voice in that kind of calm chilled Jim all through his veins. “Now.”
You can't do this to me, you son of a bitch. Don't you realize before you I could do things by myself, I could take whatever the world threw at me. And yeah maybe it wasn't great, but it was alright...and then YOU happened...you're not allowed to teach me what it feels like to be truly close to someone and then die on me...Don't. You. DARE.
“I'm getting a pulse.”
Don't leave me in this world alone.
“Stronger...he's stable, Doctor!”
“Atta boy, Spock!” Bones crowed, panting a little as his body unclenched, still bent over his patient. “I knew you were too hardheaded of a son of bitch to cop out that easily.”
He's okay. He's okay. He's okay.
“He'll be alright, Jim.” Dr. McCoy assured him later. Jim lingered until Spock stabilized, cemented to the Vulcan's bedside. Though the monitors throbbed with vital neons, Spock's skin still was drained bloodless.
My God, he was so still....
“How bad is he?” Jim asked seriously, not diverting his eyes to Bones when he spoke.
“He's going to be in a Vulcan healing trance for several days, but he's going to make it Jim. Of course I'm going to protest and make him stay longer, but I think in a week he'll be fit to go on duty.”
Pause. A comforting hand warmed Jim's forearm.
“You can stay with him for awhile, if you want.”
Jim had not even thought to ask. Being a Captain had perks worth getting used to. Almost ceremoniously, tense in dread behind his stoic face, as if approaching an open casket at a wake, Jim floated towards his fallen first...
“Where is he?” Lt. Uhura brushed by Jim without glance, replacing him at Spock's side. “Give me his condition.”
While McCoy filled her in, Jim watched her flatten Spock's hair. His stomach muscles tightened and liquified. There was something almost voyeuristic seeing her aristocratic profile catch the light like that, to see the tenderness soften her face. He felt like a splinter in the both their thumbs, a foreign object, unwelcome. The itching to leave and aching to linger magnified once McCoy left him alone with Spock and Uhura. Though she did not once raise her eyes, he felt her like a slap as he turned his back to the scene. In confident strides he plunged down the hallway, tensing to man up and run his ship. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Uhura gently kiss Spock's cheek before they faded into the shadows.
()()()
“Hey,” an unused grin cracked Jim's face when he ambled into sickbay, several days later.
“How's my favorite First Officer doing?”
Though too weak to protest when jabbed with hypo sprays without pity, Spock had strength to quirk an amused brow.
“Your statement is illogical. The quantifier “favorite” designates “the most cherished out of a group.” I am your only First Officer. Therefore, I cannot be your favorite for I am not in a group.”
“Well, you are pretty fucking cherished,” Jim said brightly, popping out a swearword rarely used since his captaincy. He could feel his usual grin not quite reach his eyes. More than he intended must have slipped through the cracks. For though Spock's face was still as a death, Jim's heart reflected in his eyes.
“Yes,” Spock managed to squeeze through his exhaustion. “I am...aware of the fact.”
()()()
When Spock first grew feverish on the shuttle, he had preferred Uhura's company to Jim's.
Neither was sure why. It had been a source of unspoken tension between them that the reverse had been true for months.
Jim had not questioned it. It was a little petty, he chided himself, caring about who Spock's favorite human was when Spock was dyin....ill. Ill. Ill, but able to recover. By the second day, by which time Spock drowned too deep in fever to care who held his hand, Jim was too wrapped in anxiety to care she was in the room. He clutched Spock's hand as often as she, quietly drinking in his pulse, his mind screaming at the thought of a funeral. But that first night he paced about the cockpit while their voices in a farther room filtered through the metal.
They went on talking together. Jim went on walking in circles alone.
Usually, Jim did not dwell much on the mind-meld with the Other Spock on Delta Vega, the fragments of another life which trickled through ancient fingertips. Jim preferred to carve his own destiny. Now, however, ghosts of the life of a full-hearted Jim Kirk often caught him unaware, surprised him with random thoughts on the bridge. It tainted his chessgames...his favorite hour of the day...by comparison. In the other life, he thought, as Spock's voice blended with Uhura's. I was closer to him than anyone else in the universe.
And he and Spock were close. But never close enough.
And maybe it was petty to lament this now...maybe this was what closeness was. Maybe all relationships edged off another like this. Jim wouldn't know. He had never really had true friends before. Even his relationship with Bones had not been one he couldn't have lived without until the beginning of the 5 year mission, when their friendship had deepened.
Maybe Jim didn't need a destined soul mate. Maybe all he needed was...just for once...to be first in another's heart.
He was jolted from half-dream by a soft touch. It was Uhura.
“But despite it all,” he thought to himself, staring up into her lithe and lovely body. “I could never hate her.”
“Captain?” she paused. “.Jim. I..I think I know what's wrong with him.”
Jim snapped up straight, fully awake.
“Really? What do you think it is? Is it curable?”
She drew a shuddering breath before answering.
“I think it is. But...”
“I think it will take both of us.”
()()()
“But it if they were acting under duress, then it wouldn't be free will. That is why most laws on most planets have a code declaring contracts under duress void...”
“Laws reflect social custom more perfectly than moral reality. And I repeat, Cadet Uhura, that a moral agent in such situation still acts under choice. “Perform an act, or die” is still a choice.”
“But is a choice unto death truly a choice?”
“Since death is a viable and in some situations an acceptable outcome of action, yes. Only if an agent's mental faculties are literally being controlled so that their locomotive functions are dictated by an outside agent is free choice truly...”
“Ah, but Commander, you were the one who once told me that often free choice in an illusion. When we believe ourselves to be free, we are only free to act within the confiding of our socio-cultural environment.”
Nyota brandishes this one out passionately, believing she has finally won one of the good natured debates she and Professor Spock wage every Tuesday afternoon inside this coffee shop. It's the fall she took his xenolinguistics class, the fall they fell in love. It's only later, after they have found themselves in a relationship and he has disclosed the nature of “pon farr” to her in full honesty of what she is getting into, that she understands what slips through him when he next speaks.
“There is always choice. Always.”
()()()
That last morning before the distress call from Galileo 7, Nyota and Spock had had the quiet luxury of breakfast together. The tea cup he had poured for her sat before her untouched, cold as insult. They sat primly across the table from one another, the brittle scrapping of spoons against their bowls interrupted occasionally by snatches of spiritless conversation. Nyota tried first.
“What are you plans for today?”
“Assuming there are no outstanding orders from Star Fleet, I imagine I shall continue to supervise the science department in their attempts to discover whether or not the flora found on Rigel III is, indeed, sentient.”
Now it was his turn. They knew the script by heart.
“And you?”
“I'll spend most of Alpha shift on the bridge.”
“Indeed.”
“Yes.”
“Right.”
()()()
She slipped behind him in the turbolift
“What do you need?”
She hugged him so tightly her breasts stung, so tightly as if to take him and his heat and his sorrow within her. In the stillborn numb she held him, the poignant grip of him, and it wrenched in her harder than anything what she would do to ease his pain. Fingers snaking into his sleek thin hair his heartbeat fluttered against her ribs and everywhere tender kisses trailed themselves across his throat his cheeks his eyelids...the curve of his pointed ear.
The bridge of his nose pressed hard into her shoulder. He clutched her with a drowning grip.
For the briefest of moments as she first throws her arm around her, as if barely daring, as if something within him crumbles to do it...he hugs her.
He hugs her.
()()()
“Do you estimate much luck with the translation of the Vigarian runes?”
He instigated the morning conversation. Well, that's a first. It means he's trying, she assured herself.
“Yes,” she answered. For once, her brilliant mind could not come up with anything else to say, so she continued eating; their silence a mockery of their once-easy closeness.
The drudgery of living will murder us yet, she thought.
()()()
“Tell me what you need.” she whispered into his throat.
Cupped by her hands, his face raised itself to her. Through a haze of misery, his eyes seem to find hers and for a long moment merely stared, drawing strength from the tenderness he saw there.
“I need all personnel,” he managed through gritted teeth. “To continue to perform admirably.”
She nodded, eyes abrim with tears and empathy. One last time she kissed him, harder, trying to conduct all her passion through that kiss. He allowed his forehead to rest against hers in a second of fragil intimacy.
They have an understanding beyond words.
()()()
The awkward silence stretched for miles.
“I am going to be in the lab for most of tonight,” Nyota tells him finally. If he understands her full meaning, he does not show it. His face is blank as an empty plate. Nyota rises proudly to her feet. She will not hunger about her own quarters, ignored, when there is work too be done. “I will probably not see you until tomorrow.”
“Indeed. I wish you luck in your endeavors.” He tells her in a simple tone which, to her mind, echoes goodbye.
“Okay, so, you and Spock are both ambitious, smart, and serious. But really, what do you have going for you? You say you understand each other, but do you really? He needed someone to hold him on the day his planet died and you were there, and he had nobody closer. But now that Vulcan isn't imploding, what are you to him? When he doesn't need you how compatible are you, really? And you know you don't need him.”
“If he had not lost his planet, would you two have ever even gotten so far?”
No. The nobler track in her mind shoots that train of thought down. She would not insult Spock and what they shared by denying what had passed between them.
He had felt real.
He had looked real.
That gravity of skin between them was the most real thing she had known.
How it happened, when it started, Nyota could not be sure. She only knew it began in cracks, and crept and broadened, until it shattered the world they had built. Day in, day out. Mornings, evenings, nights. They had fallen into a routine broken only by occasional moments of tenderness, or moments where Nyota raised her eyes and wondered why they were together. Comments he made, unoffensive at the time, magnified malignant in retrospect. His daily habits grew irritating to her. She suspected he felt the same about hers. She wished he'd have the nerve to tell her so. She dreaded one day he would. The nights they lay awake all night with nothing to say soon became every night for weeks. And maybe the hardest part was there was no one to blame, not even Jim Kirk and his chess nights and his smirk. (it was good Spock had a best friend, she decided. It was good he had a friend to tell things he did not tell her. It was good. She approved. She would not allow herself to be a woman who didn't. She really didn't have a problem...)
The hardest part was, in the end, people simply grow apart.
()()()
Spock's head snapped up in alert attention. Steeled, he strode from the turbolift without another word. In a hissing of doors, he was gone.
()()()
I'm losing him.
“And he's already lost me,” Nyota thought to herself. But, her heart declared, hot in determination. We may have fallen out of love...or decided love is not enough...but I will not let him die. I won't allow it to happen.
She didn't realize how deep her determination ran until she saw it mirrored in Jim Kirk's face.
()()()
Things fall apart
The Centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is unleashed upon the world.
()()()
Words filtered through the gray soup of Spock's mind.
He burned.
Through the inferno, ghosts of logic lingered like iron in a primordial ooze, refusing to be dissolved. The voices sounded familiar...
"Why both of us?"
"Because Vulcans are linked with their future bondmates at a very young age so that pon farr will be less dangerous for both involved. Spock's betrothed, T'Pring, broke off her engagement to him after he joined Star Fleet. Anyway, you know Vulcans are much stronger than humans and do not tire as easily. Furthermore, since Spock is unbonded, I don't think either of us alone has the physical endurance to survive a night of pon farr."
“How do you even know he swings my way? I mean, just because you two have never had sex...which I still can't believe, by the way...are you sure...”
“He told me he thought he was homosexual before he met me.”
“Well, I can see how a guy might change teams...”
“I can't believe you're joking at a time like this, Captain!”
“You really shouldn't call a man whom you are about to engage a threesome with 'Captain.' That's kinky on so many levels I don't even want to go into.”
“We're not going to touch him at once. You will have none of me, mister. We'll relay off. You first.”
“Really? Why me?”
“I think deep down inside, it's you he loves best of all.”
“I wouldn't be so sure of that.”
(And maybe (Spock allowed himself to think while dying) this is what it feels like to be human: a race which apologizes for touching ,terrified to riot at the prospect of a hug)
Nestled in in lukewarm elbow crooks, Spock elevated. His skull felt soggy as wet cardboard. He was dizzy, disoriented. Cool little kisses moved in streaks over him, icing his flushed throat, his cheekbones, his eyelids...
Limp in their arms, he sagged dead to the world.
“You first.”
She backed away.
He touched him.
He crackled alive with sudden strength.
The heat crashed within Spock like electric shocks. The man's touch claimed him effortlessly, mastering him in easy flicks. He was everywhere nipping and stroking and grinding and moving. Over Spock he bent, his mouth now licking Spock's nipples into hard nubs now biting his neck now sliding down the low.... the hours... they smeared
In a vicious roll, Spock flipped the golden youth unto his back and stared down upon him.
Universe blue eyes gaze back.
He was in love with Jim Kirk. Had been from that night on the Narada. With the love Dante felt for Beatrice. A poet's love can burn you, too.
Remembering...remembering...everything he has longed for. He enters the golden boy. Taking him in awkward and hasty touch. He is not careful. He is hungry and devours him in a mess of rough poking elbows, in wrists pinned viciously to the side of the cot. The golden boy is patient. He is skillful. Masterfully, his hands pass over the feverish chest and with sly fingertips caress the flaming skin. His touch sparks life in unknown places-bends, plateaus, wrinkles, caves. Into the core, Spock plunges and when the man (kneecaps cupping his shoulders) arches his spine he tremors like an earth quake rising. The hips quickened and slowed and steady until in a whirlwind of writhing Spock is forced to cry out. Dizzy, almost unable to bear the intensity of that rocking, he seizes and sagged limp unto the other's chest. Slimmed in perspiration he trembles, slowly riding out the pulse with stark-numb brains.
“Your turn,” a voice says weakly.
The golden boy is gone. A midnight girl stands before him
And there she is with her beautiful, nimble hands. There is no going back.
She does not judge his restraint. She respects his Vulcan heritage, does not pressure him for what he cannot yet give. Yet always the longing in her eyes, this unspoken hole between them...
The slither of her hand upon that hardness which aches for her in need and heat. Always he wants her...the humiliation of dependency, that need, desire.
I'm sorry, ashyam, for this distance that has grown between us. Believe me: I have not desired it.
The oily slick of her inside his mouth as his tongue rolls her clit to climax. Her hands clutch his hair desperately, forcing his face more tightly between her legs as her hips buck up to meet him. Eyes half closed, she shudders. She is ready for him now. Taking the heat of him on her, inside her body. The power of him inside her, his absolute strength. The force of his blows catch breathless in her throat and she cranes back her head and spasmed into his girp. He is not gentle with her; he barely touches her breasts. Another hand cools his shoulders as he ravishes this squirming girl...
“Shussh. Gentle with her, Spock. We have all night.”
As she screams and arches into him, rough lips kiss the back of Spock's neck.
“We have all night.”
()()()
Finally they take him together.
Her thighs straddle him as the golden boy takes him from behind, thrusting into him as he grinds into her. Sandwhiched between them the universe swirls with the glory of anarchy.
Two people loved and needed in two different ways. In loving both, can be loved by neither. In having one, denied the other. In lacking one, lacking everything...unto death he could not tell them, unto death he would not chose between them....
"I don't believe in no win, scenarios, Spock. There is always a third option."
His nose and hers brush daringly as Spock wriggles between them. Though he is too enraptured to read their features, much less their expressions, the understanding that seeps through their veins soaks into him...and him back to them...until a loop of acceptance swirls around like infinite reoccurence.
The girl cranes her head over Spock's shoulder. She kisses the golden boy's lips.
Spock comes with the shock of rebirth.
()()()
Spock opened his eyes to a solid world. Lukewarm skin pressed soft against his.
Nyota and Jim both lay atop him at once. All three curled beneath a single thin blanket, jammed tight upon the cot. Their hair was endearingly disheveled. Both humans sagged limp in utter exhaustion, Jim's mouth slightly agape. Their heads lolled unto Spock's chest, foreheads touching. Each had a hand flat on Spock's stomach, inches apart, as if they had fallen asleep holding them.
Spock realized with a jolt all three were naked.
Fascinating.
Memories of the night before shot through in hysteric fragments...the liquid of her clit inside his mouth...of thrusting hard into him from behind..of Jim's lips touching Nyota's over Spock's trembling shoulder...
The only time in his life he had ever felt truly cherished. The only home he had ever known.
Jim's eyes flickered open sleepily. He peered up at Spock with his most disarming grin.
“Nyota! Check it out! Looks whose up!”
Blurrily, Nyota shook herself awake and raised her head with a small, disoriented whimper. Upon seeing Spock, she bolted up gleefully, knocking off the blanket to reveal their bodies in all glorious skin.
“Spock! You're conscious!”
“Indeed,” Spock propped himself up on his elbows as both humans sat back on their knees, all three twisting awkwardly so not to smush another. “I find myself in perfect health. I am at a lost to understand it, however.”
“I think you have a pretty good idea,” Jim supplied slyly. He waggled his eyebrows at Nyota.
“So I guess we're on first name basis, now?”
She smacked him. Spock's eyes crinkled in affection. Wordlessly, both lay down, exhausted, in the crook of each of Spock's arms. Nyota and Jim entwined fingers with another as she pressed a tender kiss to Spock's pectoral.
“Missed you,” She whispered. He knew exactly what she meant.
“You know?” Jim said breathlessly. “I never thought I'd say this...but I'm kinda hoping that Sulu and the others don't find us for awhile.”
“Indeed,” Spock titled his head with a cocked eyebrow, stroking Nyota's hair with one hand even as the other pattered up Jim's spine. “I believe that considering the possible planets upon which we may be stranded are consist of 76, all within a 500 parsec distance, and we are in our 78th hour upon this particular satellite, I estimate Acting Captain Sulu's chances of discovering our location within the next 24 hours to be 234.59 to 1, and his odds of discovering our location within the next 48 hours to be 12...”
He was silenced by twin human mouths pelting his own with kisses.
Other OT3 stories/drabbles in this universe can be found in my masterpost or my AO3.