(no subject)
Well well.
Of course public radio is always at least three years late. In this case more like five. Members of X make country record. HAHAHA 1. WOT? 2. well of course.
(I realized as I was typing this that for most people reading this X is the band Viggo's ex-wife was in. Oh well, life is life.)
Terry Gross seems like she's a fan of X. This woman is very strange.
THEN I was reading a post in one of the Trek coms I'm in now and someone framed a post like this "...for all the people who have had previous Trek experience..." Um. Uh. Ok. What? This is a little for me like when Nate didn't know Superman's backstory. How is that fucking possible? How does one live in this culture at this time and have never been exposed to Star Trek? It's STAR TREK, not some obscure movie like "Night of the Lepus." <--------look that up. It's my absolute FAVORITE bad horror movie.
Idek, man. The youth today, or something. Keeping in mind I am saying this as someone who always felt like Star Trek oppressed me. (That sounds insane, but I felt like it was inescapable and I was just bored by it mostly--obvs not so inescapable as I thought--wtf!)
So I sat down to work and I thought I'd just, you know, check my fl since I've been offline for a couple days and BOOM! I land on Amber's lj and start talking about Star Trek and suddenly it's five o'clock and I haven't started dinner, haven't done SHIT, because I just wrote TWELVE PAGES of Star Trek fic. Fuck Star Trek anyway, wtf.
I have a bit of an OTP workin' in the rebootverse. It's the same one everyone else appears to have, so I'll hate it within six weeks.
Don't accept a ride from James T. Kirk. Walk. (...if it's the other kind of ride, remember your physician is going to be Dr. McCoy, just sayin'.)
San Francisco's a weird place. Mostly it's the earthquake situation, as in--why haven't they engineered a solution to that? Humans swan around in space but they can't keep their cities from falling into the ocean? Weak.
The latest "tremor" was 5.7 and Jim had the misfortune to be in the middle of a suave pick up of a Theoretical Math hottie when the quake started. He's currently sitting in Medical while a dentist clucks over him.
"Oh, this shouldn't be a problem!" Andorrans suck. Sure, it's not a problem for hir/hiz, whatever the gender-neutral pronoun is, because it's not blargiddity blar's front teeth that were broken.
"Memph," he replies through the anesthetic and indignity.
"Did you really break your teeth off on a...goddamn it, Jim, you're a walking disaster zone! I've never known someone so accident prone who actually lived to adulthood!" Over the Andorran dentist's shoulder Bones glares down at him. Jim waves and smiles as much as possible with a numb face. He tries to look pathetic.
Bones rolls his eyes. "You know three people are dead so far? And you want sympathy for your teeth? Fuck off." Bones doesn't go anywhere, though, just moves into the dentist's personal space and starts overseeing what's going down. Jim's knight in Starfleet-issued Science blue.
"Are you using Billings polymer? Why aren't you using the new Vulcan genetic bonder?" Bones tuts over the tray the Andorran has in front of him as Jim watches with wide eyes. His teeth!
"I found it unnecessary..."
"UnNESESSARY? What are you talking about, man, these are his front teeth! You'll damned well use the best and most advanced medical technology to ensure..."
Jim decides to take a little nap now that Bones is here to make sure everything goes right.
*
Jim's new teeth are exactly like his old teeth so he doesn't really think about that. His life is too action packed for him to be much better than a goldfish in the personal memory department.
"Oh, hello there." He bumps into Uhura at a Sigma Theta mixer. "Fancy meeting you here." He leans against the wall and doesn't quite have the reflexes to dodge her drink when it flies in his face. "I'll take that as a maybe."
"You are a hopeless wreck of a human being." Bones hands him a couple napkins as Jim blinks the blue liquid off his eyelashes.
Jim turns to smile up at Bones. "You don't think I really want her, do you?"
Bones inclines his head slightly, just a ten degree shift of his neck, something most people probably miss about his demeanor but that Jim knows is his "totally absorbed" body language.
"If I really wanted her, she'd be my first ex-wife by now, gimme a break!"
Jim does not get shot down when he means to pull. Uhura is a game. She's cute, funny, beautiful, but she's also a total handful. He saw that in her from their first encounter. She's got the kind of baggage he doesn't mess with--daddy issues maybe, something to prove. Jim doesn't have the patience to get involved with people who haven't figured themselves out yet. Sure, he'll hit that if it's late and he's alone, but he won't give his number, and he sure as shit won't get theirs. Best not to get into a difficult situation with someone he might have to work with eventually, like Uhura. He's actually kind of surprised she's not on to him by now, maybe she is.
"Leave her alone, then," Bones advises. "God only knows, the last thing you need is a sexual harassment addendum on your goddamned personnel file. I'm sure the thing already reads like the Highlights of a Misspent Youth."
Bones is drinking bourbon, neat. He's distracted, eyes roaming around the room in the way he has when he's got something on his mind. He's clean shaven, his hair recently cut, sharp line of black against his fair skin. He hasn't been outdoors enough this spring to get any color. Overworked.
"Bones," Jim pushes away from the wall and rests a hand on Bones' bicep. He gets a shaded glance in return, a brush of Bones' eyelashes against his cheek as he blinks slowly, warily. He drops his voice and steps even closer, his chest pressing into Bones' side. "You're doing field trials, right? On call 24/7?"
"Oh, you finally clued in to that, did you? Fucking self absorbed bastard." He doesn't pull away, because he never pulls away. Jim learned a long time ago that Southerners are the best people for him--they have a deep need for personal contact, for hugs and arms wrapping around shoulders and hands on hands. Bones is an excellent specimen--the first to insult you, but also the first to gather you up and kiss the tears away.
"Look," Jim pulls Bones' drink out of his hand. Bones freely allows this, doesn't clutch at the glass or snatch it back. He frowns in the comical way he always does when Jim does something annoying, but he only sighs when Jim polishes off the sharp bite of the bourbon. "Do you really want to be here?"
"No. I never want to be here. I was happily sprawled on the couch basking in the silence of my apartment when you showed up on my doorstep demanding we haul our sorry asses over here." He rolls his neck and sighs. When his head is back, his throat exposed, Jim touches the cool glass to the blue of the vein so visible below the skin. Bones reaches out and circles Jim's other wrist, just holding him in place, no force behind it. When Jim drops his hand and sits the glass on the table by his elbow, Bones meets his eyes.
"I wish you'd just jumped me earlier so I didn't have to get dressed."
Jim laughs loud enough to turn heads.
It's their third year in the Academy, and anyone who Jim startles with his laughter is a first year, because everyone else knows him, knows his laughter is the least startling and dangerous thing about him.
"You're an asshole," Bones grumbles. He's still holding Jim's wrist.
*
But there was a whole other life, before. When Jim was still angry, still raging against nothing in particular and anything that came into his field of vision. The time when Jim still didn't believe that love and compassion and belief were things he deserved. You hear how worthless you are long enough, it takes a whole helluva lot more than sad, loving glances and "buck up, kid"s to fix you.
There was a time when Jim really didn't believe he was good enough for the Academy, when he kept waiting for the other shoes to drop and the expulsion to come down on his head.
He thinks about his first year in San Francisco frequently. He thinks he needs to, to remember, so he's never that person again, so it doesn't take anything for granted.
Bones is asleep, because he's exhausted. Bone tired, haha. Jim's sitting in Bones' kitchen half watching the city out of the window. Starfleet personnel on furlough and normal college kids stumble down the sidewalk hammered out of their minds. Jim can see at least two who are puking in the literal gutter. He laughs, sips his NeuLaudanum, the taste of violets and hibiscus comforting in the same way that Bones's apartment is.
Yeah, there was a time when Jim was fresh out of Iowa and angry with the world, always up on disciplinary charges, always one strike from being punted back to the Heartland. And it wasn't Captain Pike who changed that. Fuck no, challenging authority figures can double dog dare you when you're drunk off your ass and your guard's down, but that's not what makes a person stick with something. Pike was the stick, Jim had a totally different carrot.
"You know," Bones said. "I can keep patchin' you up in my bathroom, topical antibiotic to compensate for the lack of sterile protocol, OR..." He paused dramatically and ducked down to get in Jim's face. "I can give you a lecture. I think I'm gonna go with the goddamned lecture now."
That was the first night--when Jim had taken a bottle to the face and shown up on Bones's doorstep at asso'clock in the morning, so drunk he still has no idea how he got there.
Of course, Jim's too stubborn to just hear good advice and go "OH YEAH, YOU'RE TOTALLY RIGHT!" Oh no. That's not James Tiberius Kirk.
"Sorry to interrupt your dramatic, moody brooding, but are you coming to bed? The dog's keeping me awake pacing back and forth between us. Dammit Jim, I'm beat, haul your sorry ass to bed."
Jim polishes off his thimbleful of narcotic and surveys Bones in the ambient light from the street--his hair's still nearly perfect, his eyebrows up-swept almost to the point of Vulcan beauty, shirtless in a pair of 'Fleet-issued pajama pants, eyelids dropped half closed in sleepiness.
"What did I do to deserve you?" Jim says, because it's edging towards dawn, and he's hopped up on opium, and honestly he just doesn't know.
"Oh good lord, here we go. Don't cry on my good sheets, Nancy," Bones turns in the doorway and flaps his hand at Jim.
Jim feels...full. Maybe this is contentment. He's not sure.
*
The klaxons go off at 3:14 on the afternoon of the 14th of April. When Jim sees the time on his datapad, he knows it's a simulation. The programmers have tells like this--matching time/dates, an inclination to run sims in the worst weather, a tendency to be too clever.
Jim ignores the simulation and keeps on with the program he's coding.
Uhura screams through the doorway "WHAT ARE YOU DOING YOU IDIOT, WE'RE UNDER ATTACK, BATTLE STATIONS!"
Kirk shrugs and makes a rude gesture at her. Keep running, sweetheart, when everyone else loses a half day to another planet-wide Klingon attack Jim will be able to leap ahead, having finished this latest lame loop he's got to jump through. This isn't even a flaming loop, just the standard regular kind--how can anyone think that third years need more telemetry training? He feels like a ratty poodle in a top hat.
He's a little surprised when the console he's working on inexplicably blows the hell up.
Jim wakes up in Medical, his old stomping grounds.
"...the hell," he moans. His face is numb but he can feel the uncomfortable pull of the medicine healing him.
A VERY stacked nurse slides cool fingers over his wrist to take his pulse. He wonders if they really have to do that anymore or if it's vestige, maybe the nursing staff lays hands on the patients not because they have to but because it soothes.
"So," Bones has his arms crossed over his chest. Not a good sign. "You thought what exactly? You'd just ignore the simulation?"
Jim grunts an affirmative.
"And you didn't think there was a protocol for that? That maybe you weren't the first goddamned bastard to cook up that plan?" Bones' eyebrows come together, uh oh, and he leans down into Jim's face. His familiar smell makes Jim want to reach out and touch while all of his animal instincts warn him that he's imminently in danger of a beat down. "Look, Ensign Kirk, I get that you've got to prove to anyone who crosses your path that you've got the biggest cock on the block, but I have about had it with your willful disregard for your own safety. Has it occurred to your lizard-sized brain that maybe if you died you'd be blissfully unaware of the situation as you'd be dead but that other people might be in a slightly less blissful state?"
Bones has a birthmark in the iris of his left eye. Adjacent to the pupil is a speck of bright green in the blue, no matter how the blue tends to grey or to Starfleet blue, the green speck is always the same size and green.
"I will grant you that perhaps I didn't think that out all the way," Jim manages to say around the pain and the anesthetic.
Bones stays in his face for a couple of seconds, his face growing increasingly red. Finally he pulls away with precise, efficient motions. He doesn't say anything else, which is how Jim knows he's seriously in the dog house.
The nurse returns. She's gorgeous, vaguely Asian with caramel skin and hair so black it's like dark matter. "You do know that he's on the war path, right?" She hits buttons on her data pad.
Jim laughs a little. Oh boy does he know. "I've known him a while, yeah, he's pissed."
The nurse's eyes come up to meet his. She holds his gaze for a span of time that probably seems longer to Jim because of the drugs. Finally, she reaches out to touch the edges of the wound on his face.
"It's funny that we can go to space, meet whole new sentient species, and form a interstellar coalition of peace, but men never change." Her fingers are cool against his skin. He realizes the skin is more abraded than he'd thought and that his thoughts are fuzzier than he'd realized at first.
"What?" He asks. Her insignia informs him she's a full lieutenant.
"You think he's just a little mad because he was scared and it's going to blow over and then you'll make up and it will be all kisses and blue skies in, like, two days or something, right?" She does the pulse taking rigmarole.
"Yeah?" It's Bones, when is he not pissed off about something?
She meets his eyes again. "Sweetheart, he just broke up with you. You just don't know it yet."
Are they dating?
*
Jim's berthed across the Bay in the Starfleet ghetto like 70% of Academy students and personnel. He likes the uniformity of 'Fleet Town, the sleek, Vulcan designed towers that always seem to shine brightly even in the weather--hell, now that he thinks about it, maybe they're engineered to do that. He likes the architecture all the same. Sometimes living in a cloistered atmosphere leads to..."special" ways of living and thinking among Academy students, but Jim figures that kind of blindness is probably universal to closed communities. He thinks it's good practice for living in close quarters on a ship with the same faces for years at a time--and he knows that's the point of sticking everyone on top of each other in the first place.
He gets released from Medical just late enough to miss the last mess sitting, so the only people he's talked to all day have been Professor Jerkoff--aka, Jerkul--Bones, and Nurse Hyun Ki--who, as it turns out, is not a nurse at all but a burn specialist. Jim touches his healing cheek and toes off his boots.
"Fuck it," he tells the still air. He's not sure what he even means.
He has five messages. His mom's face pops up first.
"Jim..." She looks pissed. "I'm not nagging you, I just don't like getting these messages from the Academy, you know? I worry about you. Sometimes you're just too much like your father..."
He deletes that before she can follow that train of thought any further.
The next message is, of course, Pike. "Well, what do you know, I think we need to create a whole new award for the cadet who hits the most failure milestones. We can call it the James T. Kirk Prize in Fucking Your Career Up..."
Jim laughs. Pike's a gas. But he deletes that one, too, before Pike can get rolling about honor and shit like that.
Sadly, the next message is some girl he gave his real code to. Fuck. DELETE DELETE.
Next is Uhura. At first she just sits there staring. After a while she finally says. "I want to apologize for not hauling you away from the computer console. I had no idea the consoles were wired to blow up if someone didn't obey the klaxon call. That was a failure of leadership on my part. I just wanted to apologize directly for failing in my duty to both Starfleet and a fellow cadet." She pushes a piece of hair behind her ear. "Also, you're a total disaster."
The screen goes dead. He saves that one.
Next, of course, is Commander Lubbock. "Ensign Kirk, I'm unsure if you're the best student I have or the worst. You're certainly the one who thinks outside the normal patterns the most. Personally, I think you should get a commendation for knowing it was a simulation, but, meh, who listens to me? I only spent twenty five years in space, who am I?"
Starfleet's a riot. Kirk deletes the message and heads to the console to grab a drink.
No message from Bones. None on his personal communicator either. Dude's pissed, that's for sure. Oh well, he'll get over it.
*
Several hours later, Jim's bombed out on mead and pain killer laying in bed watching vids on the ceiling. He knows he should probably eat something, but he doesn't have the energy to order anything. He thinks about calling Bones to grab something and bring it over but realizes that would be an asshole move since Bones would probably do it even though he's angry. Not because Bones wants to hang but because he doesn't know how to say no when someone's in need.
The edge of self pity creeps up on him when suddenly he starts hallucinating--
"Wow, you know, after you pulled that stunt with The Warbler Maneuver, I thought you'd hit rock bottom on the screwing up. I mean, you're not really that guy, are you?" Gaila is standing over him in civvies, a revealing purple dress that compliments her skin tone just the right way.
"What guy?" Jim asks. He looks down at the pill bottle in his hand and shakes it to make sure he didn't take them all.
"The guy who flunks out of school and goes home to be the bitter drunk guy who hates everyone and tells the same three stories over and over."
"Hey, I have way more than three stories!" He sits up on his elbows when Gaila settles on the edge of his bed. Above them images of dinosaurs romp over the ceiling, the light casting flickering shadows around the room. Jim clears his throat. "Hey, are you really here or is this a hallucination?"
Gaila blinks and takes the pills out of his hand. "Look, I don't believe in interventions and junk like that. Live your life like you want to live it, right? That's how my people see things. The human concepts of self-indulgence and overkill don't exist. Humans are so funny--everything in moderation! What does that even mean? Who decides what moderate is! Silly people. Anyway, my point is that there are rules and even if they were invented by lameass Vulcans who wouldn't know how to enjoy their lives if the were put in an orgy sim, doesn't mean you don't have to obey them."
"What are you talking about?" Jim's trying to follow along here, but Gaila's thinking isn't exactly human, and she doesn't try to conform to human standards all that much.
Gaila starts to laugh, and of course he's suddenly ragingly horny because that's the biological response to Orion laughter, but he knows he's too stoned to perform and Gaila has a LIST of shitty lays and he doesn't want to land on it. "Oh god, please stop laughing!"
That makes her laugh harder. She crawls over him and balances on her hands and knees to look down into his face. "It's not fair, right?" Her smile sends sharp spikes from his navel to his spine. "Being human must be awful. But on the bright side now you know I'm really here, right? No pheromones from a hallucination, huh?" She licks the undamaged side of his face and growls low in the back of her throat. "You, though," she blows over the place she just licked. "You, I could eat right up."
He's right on the edge of desire where his ability to string one thought into the next snaps off and all he is is tongue and teeth and hyper-aware skin.
"Maybe I will." She pulls away and takes his pants with her.
Okay, the blowjob really improves his evening he has to admit.
*
The next day is a Rotation Day where Jim's in an Emergency Engineering Seminar. This is completely pointless, because let's face it, if Jim's forced to repair electrical paneling in the Med Bay, everyone's fucked. He looks at the motherboard in his hand and tries to remember the wire color scheme. He hasn't had to fool with this shit since first year.
He thinks the yellow wires go to the power supply and the blue wires go to the cooling unit, but he learned that material to ace the tests and has since covered over it with important information like the star chart of Vector Seven in Klingon space. This is utter...
"Bullshit!"
Jim wheels around to see Bones shaking a pair of pliers in Commander Vaughn's face. "Do you really expect me to like playing along with this charade? I'll do it, I'll fiddle around with these wires and fuses or whatever the hell these are, but I won't do it with a sanguine attitude. I have a hard time believing that having a bad attitude about this particular simulation is going to lead me down the wicked road to ruin and dishonorable discharge. You do realize that if the equipment in Sick Bay is this badly damaged that I'm probably going to be busy triaging causalities and holding people's intestines inside their abdominal cavities?"
Jim laughs and Bones notices him for the first time. "Oh great!" Bones says and throws his hands in the air. "Of course you're here because this day couldn't get any better!"
Bones turns back to Vaughn and demands to move on to the next section. Jim watches Bones' back. His stomach falls. Never, not one single solitary time, since they've known each other has Bones turned his back to Jim in a hostile way. Sure, sometimes he hides his emotions by keeping his face averted, but he's never shut Jim down. Since they first passed the flask between them it's been all camaraderie and shared understanding. Jim watches Bones stomp out of the mock Sick Bay and into the mock burning corridor filled with bleeding holopeople without a backwards glance.
"Jim," Gaila whispers at his shoulder. "What just happened? Is this a human mating ritual?"
"Yeah," Jim answers and turns back to the blown motherboard. "Something like that."
"Humans are so stupid. The no sex during work hours rule, for example, is just lame."
*
Jim is not someone who takes rejection, admonition, humiliation, or intimidation laying down. Too bad he has the code to get into Bones's apartment, and too bad Bones's temper eclipses everything else on his mind to the point where he forgets things like changing his locks to bar people he's angry at.
"JIM!" Bones screams when he walks into the living room to find Jim sitting on the couch with a drink in his hand. "My god, man, you just took ten years off my already shortened life. Life expectancy down to seventy for sure now." His face, about to turn up into a good-humored smile, suddenly blanks and blackens. "Get out." He indicates the door with a thumb over his shoulder.
He stomps into the kitchen and slams cabinet doors meaningfully. Jim follows him, leans against the doorjamb with his arms crossed loosely over his chest. "Look, I know I messed up. But I also know that you're overreacting."
Bones wheels around, hands flying to his hair like he's going to pull at it. His face is bright red. "OVERREACTING?" He stabs a finger towards Jim. "You, you cocksure bastard, do not get to tell me what overreacting is. Have you ever seen someone with a C-2 spinal fracture? Have you ever seen someone with a severed limb? Have you ever seen a mother weeping over a dead child?" He pauses, opens a bottle of bourbon and pours himself three fingers which he slings back. Jim opens his mouth to speak, but Bones slams the glass down on the counter. "No, you zip it. You know why I got divorced, poor me with the crazyass wife and boohoo. But I did it to myself." His eyes flicker over to Jim, and he's wearing the weary, wounded physician's face now, the one that comes from looking death in the face on a daily basis and taunting it, pulling lives back from the Grim Reaper one deft snatch at a time.
"Bones..." Jim begins.
Bones shakes his head. "I've seen boys like you before. Many times. I've held their mothers', siblings', and significant others' hands as those boys lay cooling in a hospital bed after that one last dive or race." He holds up a hand and shakes his head again. "You are you who are, Jim, I accept that and wouldn't change you, but I can't carry your ashes around in a canister for the rest of my life when you finally manage to blow yourself up."
Jim laughs. He doesn't mean to, but the laughter just burbles out. He slaps a hand against his mouth and opens his eyes wide in apology.
"Goddamn it, did you just laugh in my face after I gave a moving speech where I compared you to my ex-wife?" Bones bangs his glass on the counter again. He turns his face up at the ceiling, and Jim can see he's fighting his own smile.
"Busted!' Jim shouts. "You are so busted, you overdramatic asshole." Jim barrels the rest of the way into the room and grabs Bones by the upper arms and tries to swing him around so he has to look Jim in the face. "How long were you going to make me suffer?"
Bones's laughter is special, a kind of rumbled HAHAHA that never, ever gets old. "Frankly, I was going to call you later since I have to go to that Vega party tonight..." he gasps around his laughter.
"You shit!" Jim shouts. He lets go of Bones's arms to grab his head to tilt it down so they're looking each other in the eye. "You total shit!"
Bones's pale face is flushed with bourbon and laughter. He smells like antisceptic, ozone from the anti-germ machines, booze, and the mint candies he keeps in his pocket.
"Kiss and make up?" Jim asks, stepping closer, they bump together from chest to knee, Jim's elbows pressing into Bones' chest since he's still holding him in place.
"Oh, I suppose if I have to..." Bones reconfigures his face into the bitchy work expression that indicates he thinks he's above just about anything other people occupy themselves with.
Jim brings his face close enough to breathe into Bones's slightly parted mouth. He pauses. Then he pushes away and twirls around. "No, we totally don't have to," he waves and bounces out of the kitchen.
"Jim, you insufferable bastard, there better be make up sex in the next short span or I really am done with you!"
*
Jim is reckless, yes. He's focused and doesn't let anything--rules, his own good sense, fear of death--get in his way. This is the life he's got, and he's damned well going to use it up, wring it out, and die in a blaze of glory (or at least a blaze of some sort).
He makes slightly better choices now than he did fresh off the transport ship, bitter, hurt, disaffected. Mostly, he makes better choices because he's figured out that the Starfleet gig isn't just about him. He can fling his own life down the garbage chute--but everyone else's lives? Those are on his head, too, and sometimes he needs to live to keep other people alive. Some people in particular. Bones might bitch up a storm about how reckless Jim is with his own skin, but Jim's seen Bones run into a crumbling building in a sim, he's seen him give his own respirator to a victim, he's seen him give the last ampule of antidote to a patient. Jim knows when it comes down to it, he's going to have to live to make sure Bones doesn't fling himself into that good night because some baby needs saving. Please, Jim doesn't even like children.
Jim's sitting on a cot in Medical with a Lulian Barb sticking out of his chest. Bones has his back to him tapping on some medical contraption. His shoulders are hunched over.
"You do realize that that weapon only missed hitting your heart by two millimeters?"
"Yeah, damned lucky," Jim's magnanimous, seriously doped up, his shoulder and left arm immobilized by a drug the corpsman shot him up with.
"You know that even you can't live without a functioning heart, right?" Bones keeps tapping.
Jim laughs. "Don't they make replacements? I know they make replacements..."
Bones is suddenly in his face. "Yes, Jim, they make replacements, but it doesn't matter if you bleed out on the floor of the gym before a triage team can get to you. It doesn't matter WHAT MEDICAL SCIENCE CAN DO IF YOU DIE BEFORE WE CAN GET TO YOU!"
Bones yells a lot, that's not much of a surprise, what is is the hand against Jim's cheek and the pleading look in Bones's eyes. "Please, Jim, please don't die before we can get to you, that's all I ask."
Jim doesn't really know what to say to that. He can't move the entire left side of his body from the neck down, so he reaches out with his right and pulls Bones down by the back of his neck. "Okay," Jim says. He means it. He won't die before Bones can get there.
The kiss, yeah, it's the first, but it's a whole lot less first-kissy as it is sealing a promise. At least to Jim. He was pretty high at the time.
"Jim?"
Third Year and Jim can taste the rest of his life on the wind. He looks at Bones, whose chest is bruised from a crash landing simulation that left him not only banged up physically but psychologically. Shirtless, in his pajama pants, he looks younger than he is. Younger than Jim maybe. Jim tries to imagine Bones in space without him. His stomach drops out.
"What will you do if we get posted to different ships?" Jim's been tossing that around for a while, one of those "what if" scenarios that humans torment themselves with ahead of time for no reason other than the fact that they need to prove Buddha right.
Bones runs a hand through his hair and sighs. "Jim, it's one in the damned morning, I lived through a fucking shuttle crash today--and may I add they could make that sim a little less real for all I care--and you're angsting over..."
"I'm asking seriously." Jim pins him in place with his eyes.
Bones stares right back. "Goddamn it, Jim, in what world does what I'll do matter? We both know you'll find a way to fix it with a candy wrapper, a hose, and a datapad, so come to bed so the dog will go to sleep."
"When you put it that way, why would I turn down such an attractive offer?" He follows behind, catches up, and wraps an arm around Bones, touches the bruises over his heart. "You're right, I'll always fix it." He whispers.
Bones snorts out a dark laugh. "That's good since you probably broke it in the first place."
*
No, my journal was not jacked. I really wrote that. Holy cats is all I can say. (Besides now that I've framed this, I can write the pornographic bits in between.)
BLAME AMBER who will not stop proclaiming how in love they are. Normally my response would be "PUKE, stfu!" but, alas, I watched the movie, and she's totally correct.
Now with pt 2.
I just realized I never tagged this. haha what a douche.
Of course public radio is always at least three years late. In this case more like five. Members of X make country record. HAHAHA 1. WOT? 2. well of course.
(I realized as I was typing this that for most people reading this X is the band Viggo's ex-wife was in. Oh well, life is life.)
Terry Gross seems like she's a fan of X. This woman is very strange.
THEN I was reading a post in one of the Trek coms I'm in now and someone framed a post like this "...for all the people who have had previous Trek experience..." Um. Uh. Ok. What? This is a little for me like when Nate didn't know Superman's backstory. How is that fucking possible? How does one live in this culture at this time and have never been exposed to Star Trek? It's STAR TREK, not some obscure movie like "Night of the Lepus." <--------look that up. It's my absolute FAVORITE bad horror movie.
Idek, man. The youth today, or something. Keeping in mind I am saying this as someone who always felt like Star Trek oppressed me. (That sounds insane, but I felt like it was inescapable and I was just bored by it mostly--obvs not so inescapable as I thought--wtf!)
So I sat down to work and I thought I'd just, you know, check my fl since I've been offline for a couple days and BOOM! I land on Amber's lj and start talking about Star Trek and suddenly it's five o'clock and I haven't started dinner, haven't done SHIT, because I just wrote TWELVE PAGES of Star Trek fic. Fuck Star Trek anyway, wtf.
I have a bit of an OTP workin' in the rebootverse. It's the same one everyone else appears to have, so I'll hate it within six weeks.
Don't accept a ride from James T. Kirk. Walk. (...if it's the other kind of ride, remember your physician is going to be Dr. McCoy, just sayin'.)
San Francisco's a weird place. Mostly it's the earthquake situation, as in--why haven't they engineered a solution to that? Humans swan around in space but they can't keep their cities from falling into the ocean? Weak.
The latest "tremor" was 5.7 and Jim had the misfortune to be in the middle of a suave pick up of a Theoretical Math hottie when the quake started. He's currently sitting in Medical while a dentist clucks over him.
"Oh, this shouldn't be a problem!" Andorrans suck. Sure, it's not a problem for hir/hiz, whatever the gender-neutral pronoun is, because it's not blargiddity blar's front teeth that were broken.
"Memph," he replies through the anesthetic and indignity.
"Did you really break your teeth off on a...goddamn it, Jim, you're a walking disaster zone! I've never known someone so accident prone who actually lived to adulthood!" Over the Andorran dentist's shoulder Bones glares down at him. Jim waves and smiles as much as possible with a numb face. He tries to look pathetic.
Bones rolls his eyes. "You know three people are dead so far? And you want sympathy for your teeth? Fuck off." Bones doesn't go anywhere, though, just moves into the dentist's personal space and starts overseeing what's going down. Jim's knight in Starfleet-issued Science blue.
"Are you using Billings polymer? Why aren't you using the new Vulcan genetic bonder?" Bones tuts over the tray the Andorran has in front of him as Jim watches with wide eyes. His teeth!
"I found it unnecessary..."
"UnNESESSARY? What are you talking about, man, these are his front teeth! You'll damned well use the best and most advanced medical technology to ensure..."
Jim decides to take a little nap now that Bones is here to make sure everything goes right.
*
Jim's new teeth are exactly like his old teeth so he doesn't really think about that. His life is too action packed for him to be much better than a goldfish in the personal memory department.
"Oh, hello there." He bumps into Uhura at a Sigma Theta mixer. "Fancy meeting you here." He leans against the wall and doesn't quite have the reflexes to dodge her drink when it flies in his face. "I'll take that as a maybe."
"You are a hopeless wreck of a human being." Bones hands him a couple napkins as Jim blinks the blue liquid off his eyelashes.
Jim turns to smile up at Bones. "You don't think I really want her, do you?"
Bones inclines his head slightly, just a ten degree shift of his neck, something most people probably miss about his demeanor but that Jim knows is his "totally absorbed" body language.
"If I really wanted her, she'd be my first ex-wife by now, gimme a break!"
Jim does not get shot down when he means to pull. Uhura is a game. She's cute, funny, beautiful, but she's also a total handful. He saw that in her from their first encounter. She's got the kind of baggage he doesn't mess with--daddy issues maybe, something to prove. Jim doesn't have the patience to get involved with people who haven't figured themselves out yet. Sure, he'll hit that if it's late and he's alone, but he won't give his number, and he sure as shit won't get theirs. Best not to get into a difficult situation with someone he might have to work with eventually, like Uhura. He's actually kind of surprised she's not on to him by now, maybe she is.
"Leave her alone, then," Bones advises. "God only knows, the last thing you need is a sexual harassment addendum on your goddamned personnel file. I'm sure the thing already reads like the Highlights of a Misspent Youth."
Bones is drinking bourbon, neat. He's distracted, eyes roaming around the room in the way he has when he's got something on his mind. He's clean shaven, his hair recently cut, sharp line of black against his fair skin. He hasn't been outdoors enough this spring to get any color. Overworked.
"Bones," Jim pushes away from the wall and rests a hand on Bones' bicep. He gets a shaded glance in return, a brush of Bones' eyelashes against his cheek as he blinks slowly, warily. He drops his voice and steps even closer, his chest pressing into Bones' side. "You're doing field trials, right? On call 24/7?"
"Oh, you finally clued in to that, did you? Fucking self absorbed bastard." He doesn't pull away, because he never pulls away. Jim learned a long time ago that Southerners are the best people for him--they have a deep need for personal contact, for hugs and arms wrapping around shoulders and hands on hands. Bones is an excellent specimen--the first to insult you, but also the first to gather you up and kiss the tears away.
"Look," Jim pulls Bones' drink out of his hand. Bones freely allows this, doesn't clutch at the glass or snatch it back. He frowns in the comical way he always does when Jim does something annoying, but he only sighs when Jim polishes off the sharp bite of the bourbon. "Do you really want to be here?"
"No. I never want to be here. I was happily sprawled on the couch basking in the silence of my apartment when you showed up on my doorstep demanding we haul our sorry asses over here." He rolls his neck and sighs. When his head is back, his throat exposed, Jim touches the cool glass to the blue of the vein so visible below the skin. Bones reaches out and circles Jim's other wrist, just holding him in place, no force behind it. When Jim drops his hand and sits the glass on the table by his elbow, Bones meets his eyes.
"I wish you'd just jumped me earlier so I didn't have to get dressed."
Jim laughs loud enough to turn heads.
It's their third year in the Academy, and anyone who Jim startles with his laughter is a first year, because everyone else knows him, knows his laughter is the least startling and dangerous thing about him.
"You're an asshole," Bones grumbles. He's still holding Jim's wrist.
*
But there was a whole other life, before. When Jim was still angry, still raging against nothing in particular and anything that came into his field of vision. The time when Jim still didn't believe that love and compassion and belief were things he deserved. You hear how worthless you are long enough, it takes a whole helluva lot more than sad, loving glances and "buck up, kid"s to fix you.
There was a time when Jim really didn't believe he was good enough for the Academy, when he kept waiting for the other shoes to drop and the expulsion to come down on his head.
He thinks about his first year in San Francisco frequently. He thinks he needs to, to remember, so he's never that person again, so it doesn't take anything for granted.
Bones is asleep, because he's exhausted. Bone tired, haha. Jim's sitting in Bones' kitchen half watching the city out of the window. Starfleet personnel on furlough and normal college kids stumble down the sidewalk hammered out of their minds. Jim can see at least two who are puking in the literal gutter. He laughs, sips his NeuLaudanum, the taste of violets and hibiscus comforting in the same way that Bones's apartment is.
Yeah, there was a time when Jim was fresh out of Iowa and angry with the world, always up on disciplinary charges, always one strike from being punted back to the Heartland. And it wasn't Captain Pike who changed that. Fuck no, challenging authority figures can double dog dare you when you're drunk off your ass and your guard's down, but that's not what makes a person stick with something. Pike was the stick, Jim had a totally different carrot.
"You know," Bones said. "I can keep patchin' you up in my bathroom, topical antibiotic to compensate for the lack of sterile protocol, OR..." He paused dramatically and ducked down to get in Jim's face. "I can give you a lecture. I think I'm gonna go with the goddamned lecture now."
That was the first night--when Jim had taken a bottle to the face and shown up on Bones's doorstep at asso'clock in the morning, so drunk he still has no idea how he got there.
Of course, Jim's too stubborn to just hear good advice and go "OH YEAH, YOU'RE TOTALLY RIGHT!" Oh no. That's not James Tiberius Kirk.
"Sorry to interrupt your dramatic, moody brooding, but are you coming to bed? The dog's keeping me awake pacing back and forth between us. Dammit Jim, I'm beat, haul your sorry ass to bed."
Jim polishes off his thimbleful of narcotic and surveys Bones in the ambient light from the street--his hair's still nearly perfect, his eyebrows up-swept almost to the point of Vulcan beauty, shirtless in a pair of 'Fleet-issued pajama pants, eyelids dropped half closed in sleepiness.
"What did I do to deserve you?" Jim says, because it's edging towards dawn, and he's hopped up on opium, and honestly he just doesn't know.
"Oh good lord, here we go. Don't cry on my good sheets, Nancy," Bones turns in the doorway and flaps his hand at Jim.
Jim feels...full. Maybe this is contentment. He's not sure.
*
The klaxons go off at 3:14 on the afternoon of the 14th of April. When Jim sees the time on his datapad, he knows it's a simulation. The programmers have tells like this--matching time/dates, an inclination to run sims in the worst weather, a tendency to be too clever.
Jim ignores the simulation and keeps on with the program he's coding.
Uhura screams through the doorway "WHAT ARE YOU DOING YOU IDIOT, WE'RE UNDER ATTACK, BATTLE STATIONS!"
Kirk shrugs and makes a rude gesture at her. Keep running, sweetheart, when everyone else loses a half day to another planet-wide Klingon attack Jim will be able to leap ahead, having finished this latest lame loop he's got to jump through. This isn't even a flaming loop, just the standard regular kind--how can anyone think that third years need more telemetry training? He feels like a ratty poodle in a top hat.
He's a little surprised when the console he's working on inexplicably blows the hell up.
Jim wakes up in Medical, his old stomping grounds.
"...the hell," he moans. His face is numb but he can feel the uncomfortable pull of the medicine healing him.
A VERY stacked nurse slides cool fingers over his wrist to take his pulse. He wonders if they really have to do that anymore or if it's vestige, maybe the nursing staff lays hands on the patients not because they have to but because it soothes.
"So," Bones has his arms crossed over his chest. Not a good sign. "You thought what exactly? You'd just ignore the simulation?"
Jim grunts an affirmative.
"And you didn't think there was a protocol for that? That maybe you weren't the first goddamned bastard to cook up that plan?" Bones' eyebrows come together, uh oh, and he leans down into Jim's face. His familiar smell makes Jim want to reach out and touch while all of his animal instincts warn him that he's imminently in danger of a beat down. "Look, Ensign Kirk, I get that you've got to prove to anyone who crosses your path that you've got the biggest cock on the block, but I have about had it with your willful disregard for your own safety. Has it occurred to your lizard-sized brain that maybe if you died you'd be blissfully unaware of the situation as you'd be dead but that other people might be in a slightly less blissful state?"
Bones has a birthmark in the iris of his left eye. Adjacent to the pupil is a speck of bright green in the blue, no matter how the blue tends to grey or to Starfleet blue, the green speck is always the same size and green.
"I will grant you that perhaps I didn't think that out all the way," Jim manages to say around the pain and the anesthetic.
Bones stays in his face for a couple of seconds, his face growing increasingly red. Finally he pulls away with precise, efficient motions. He doesn't say anything else, which is how Jim knows he's seriously in the dog house.
The nurse returns. She's gorgeous, vaguely Asian with caramel skin and hair so black it's like dark matter. "You do know that he's on the war path, right?" She hits buttons on her data pad.
Jim laughs a little. Oh boy does he know. "I've known him a while, yeah, he's pissed."
The nurse's eyes come up to meet his. She holds his gaze for a span of time that probably seems longer to Jim because of the drugs. Finally, she reaches out to touch the edges of the wound on his face.
"It's funny that we can go to space, meet whole new sentient species, and form a interstellar coalition of peace, but men never change." Her fingers are cool against his skin. He realizes the skin is more abraded than he'd thought and that his thoughts are fuzzier than he'd realized at first.
"What?" He asks. Her insignia informs him she's a full lieutenant.
"You think he's just a little mad because he was scared and it's going to blow over and then you'll make up and it will be all kisses and blue skies in, like, two days or something, right?" She does the pulse taking rigmarole.
"Yeah?" It's Bones, when is he not pissed off about something?
She meets his eyes again. "Sweetheart, he just broke up with you. You just don't know it yet."
Are they dating?
*
Jim's berthed across the Bay in the Starfleet ghetto like 70% of Academy students and personnel. He likes the uniformity of 'Fleet Town, the sleek, Vulcan designed towers that always seem to shine brightly even in the weather--hell, now that he thinks about it, maybe they're engineered to do that. He likes the architecture all the same. Sometimes living in a cloistered atmosphere leads to..."special" ways of living and thinking among Academy students, but Jim figures that kind of blindness is probably universal to closed communities. He thinks it's good practice for living in close quarters on a ship with the same faces for years at a time--and he knows that's the point of sticking everyone on top of each other in the first place.
He gets released from Medical just late enough to miss the last mess sitting, so the only people he's talked to all day have been Professor Jerkoff--aka, Jerkul--Bones, and Nurse Hyun Ki--who, as it turns out, is not a nurse at all but a burn specialist. Jim touches his healing cheek and toes off his boots.
"Fuck it," he tells the still air. He's not sure what he even means.
He has five messages. His mom's face pops up first.
"Jim..." She looks pissed. "I'm not nagging you, I just don't like getting these messages from the Academy, you know? I worry about you. Sometimes you're just too much like your father..."
He deletes that before she can follow that train of thought any further.
The next message is, of course, Pike. "Well, what do you know, I think we need to create a whole new award for the cadet who hits the most failure milestones. We can call it the James T. Kirk Prize in Fucking Your Career Up..."
Jim laughs. Pike's a gas. But he deletes that one, too, before Pike can get rolling about honor and shit like that.
Sadly, the next message is some girl he gave his real code to. Fuck. DELETE DELETE.
Next is Uhura. At first she just sits there staring. After a while she finally says. "I want to apologize for not hauling you away from the computer console. I had no idea the consoles were wired to blow up if someone didn't obey the klaxon call. That was a failure of leadership on my part. I just wanted to apologize directly for failing in my duty to both Starfleet and a fellow cadet." She pushes a piece of hair behind her ear. "Also, you're a total disaster."
The screen goes dead. He saves that one.
Next, of course, is Commander Lubbock. "Ensign Kirk, I'm unsure if you're the best student I have or the worst. You're certainly the one who thinks outside the normal patterns the most. Personally, I think you should get a commendation for knowing it was a simulation, but, meh, who listens to me? I only spent twenty five years in space, who am I?"
Starfleet's a riot. Kirk deletes the message and heads to the console to grab a drink.
No message from Bones. None on his personal communicator either. Dude's pissed, that's for sure. Oh well, he'll get over it.
*
Several hours later, Jim's bombed out on mead and pain killer laying in bed watching vids on the ceiling. He knows he should probably eat something, but he doesn't have the energy to order anything. He thinks about calling Bones to grab something and bring it over but realizes that would be an asshole move since Bones would probably do it even though he's angry. Not because Bones wants to hang but because he doesn't know how to say no when someone's in need.
The edge of self pity creeps up on him when suddenly he starts hallucinating--
"Wow, you know, after you pulled that stunt with The Warbler Maneuver, I thought you'd hit rock bottom on the screwing up. I mean, you're not really that guy, are you?" Gaila is standing over him in civvies, a revealing purple dress that compliments her skin tone just the right way.
"What guy?" Jim asks. He looks down at the pill bottle in his hand and shakes it to make sure he didn't take them all.
"The guy who flunks out of school and goes home to be the bitter drunk guy who hates everyone and tells the same three stories over and over."
"Hey, I have way more than three stories!" He sits up on his elbows when Gaila settles on the edge of his bed. Above them images of dinosaurs romp over the ceiling, the light casting flickering shadows around the room. Jim clears his throat. "Hey, are you really here or is this a hallucination?"
Gaila blinks and takes the pills out of his hand. "Look, I don't believe in interventions and junk like that. Live your life like you want to live it, right? That's how my people see things. The human concepts of self-indulgence and overkill don't exist. Humans are so funny--everything in moderation! What does that even mean? Who decides what moderate is! Silly people. Anyway, my point is that there are rules and even if they were invented by lameass Vulcans who wouldn't know how to enjoy their lives if the were put in an orgy sim, doesn't mean you don't have to obey them."
"What are you talking about?" Jim's trying to follow along here, but Gaila's thinking isn't exactly human, and she doesn't try to conform to human standards all that much.
Gaila starts to laugh, and of course he's suddenly ragingly horny because that's the biological response to Orion laughter, but he knows he's too stoned to perform and Gaila has a LIST of shitty lays and he doesn't want to land on it. "Oh god, please stop laughing!"
That makes her laugh harder. She crawls over him and balances on her hands and knees to look down into his face. "It's not fair, right?" Her smile sends sharp spikes from his navel to his spine. "Being human must be awful. But on the bright side now you know I'm really here, right? No pheromones from a hallucination, huh?" She licks the undamaged side of his face and growls low in the back of her throat. "You, though," she blows over the place she just licked. "You, I could eat right up."
He's right on the edge of desire where his ability to string one thought into the next snaps off and all he is is tongue and teeth and hyper-aware skin.
"Maybe I will." She pulls away and takes his pants with her.
Okay, the blowjob really improves his evening he has to admit.
*
The next day is a Rotation Day where Jim's in an Emergency Engineering Seminar. This is completely pointless, because let's face it, if Jim's forced to repair electrical paneling in the Med Bay, everyone's fucked. He looks at the motherboard in his hand and tries to remember the wire color scheme. He hasn't had to fool with this shit since first year.
He thinks the yellow wires go to the power supply and the blue wires go to the cooling unit, but he learned that material to ace the tests and has since covered over it with important information like the star chart of Vector Seven in Klingon space. This is utter...
"Bullshit!"
Jim wheels around to see Bones shaking a pair of pliers in Commander Vaughn's face. "Do you really expect me to like playing along with this charade? I'll do it, I'll fiddle around with these wires and fuses or whatever the hell these are, but I won't do it with a sanguine attitude. I have a hard time believing that having a bad attitude about this particular simulation is going to lead me down the wicked road to ruin and dishonorable discharge. You do realize that if the equipment in Sick Bay is this badly damaged that I'm probably going to be busy triaging causalities and holding people's intestines inside their abdominal cavities?"
Jim laughs and Bones notices him for the first time. "Oh great!" Bones says and throws his hands in the air. "Of course you're here because this day couldn't get any better!"
Bones turns back to Vaughn and demands to move on to the next section. Jim watches Bones' back. His stomach falls. Never, not one single solitary time, since they've known each other has Bones turned his back to Jim in a hostile way. Sure, sometimes he hides his emotions by keeping his face averted, but he's never shut Jim down. Since they first passed the flask between them it's been all camaraderie and shared understanding. Jim watches Bones stomp out of the mock Sick Bay and into the mock burning corridor filled with bleeding holopeople without a backwards glance.
"Jim," Gaila whispers at his shoulder. "What just happened? Is this a human mating ritual?"
"Yeah," Jim answers and turns back to the blown motherboard. "Something like that."
"Humans are so stupid. The no sex during work hours rule, for example, is just lame."
*
Jim is not someone who takes rejection, admonition, humiliation, or intimidation laying down. Too bad he has the code to get into Bones's apartment, and too bad Bones's temper eclipses everything else on his mind to the point where he forgets things like changing his locks to bar people he's angry at.
"JIM!" Bones screams when he walks into the living room to find Jim sitting on the couch with a drink in his hand. "My god, man, you just took ten years off my already shortened life. Life expectancy down to seventy for sure now." His face, about to turn up into a good-humored smile, suddenly blanks and blackens. "Get out." He indicates the door with a thumb over his shoulder.
He stomps into the kitchen and slams cabinet doors meaningfully. Jim follows him, leans against the doorjamb with his arms crossed loosely over his chest. "Look, I know I messed up. But I also know that you're overreacting."
Bones wheels around, hands flying to his hair like he's going to pull at it. His face is bright red. "OVERREACTING?" He stabs a finger towards Jim. "You, you cocksure bastard, do not get to tell me what overreacting is. Have you ever seen someone with a C-2 spinal fracture? Have you ever seen someone with a severed limb? Have you ever seen a mother weeping over a dead child?" He pauses, opens a bottle of bourbon and pours himself three fingers which he slings back. Jim opens his mouth to speak, but Bones slams the glass down on the counter. "No, you zip it. You know why I got divorced, poor me with the crazyass wife and boohoo. But I did it to myself." His eyes flicker over to Jim, and he's wearing the weary, wounded physician's face now, the one that comes from looking death in the face on a daily basis and taunting it, pulling lives back from the Grim Reaper one deft snatch at a time.
"Bones..." Jim begins.
Bones shakes his head. "I've seen boys like you before. Many times. I've held their mothers', siblings', and significant others' hands as those boys lay cooling in a hospital bed after that one last dive or race." He holds up a hand and shakes his head again. "You are you who are, Jim, I accept that and wouldn't change you, but I can't carry your ashes around in a canister for the rest of my life when you finally manage to blow yourself up."
Jim laughs. He doesn't mean to, but the laughter just burbles out. He slaps a hand against his mouth and opens his eyes wide in apology.
"Goddamn it, did you just laugh in my face after I gave a moving speech where I compared you to my ex-wife?" Bones bangs his glass on the counter again. He turns his face up at the ceiling, and Jim can see he's fighting his own smile.
"Busted!' Jim shouts. "You are so busted, you overdramatic asshole." Jim barrels the rest of the way into the room and grabs Bones by the upper arms and tries to swing him around so he has to look Jim in the face. "How long were you going to make me suffer?"
Bones's laughter is special, a kind of rumbled HAHAHA that never, ever gets old. "Frankly, I was going to call you later since I have to go to that Vega party tonight..." he gasps around his laughter.
"You shit!" Jim shouts. He lets go of Bones's arms to grab his head to tilt it down so they're looking each other in the eye. "You total shit!"
Bones's pale face is flushed with bourbon and laughter. He smells like antisceptic, ozone from the anti-germ machines, booze, and the mint candies he keeps in his pocket.
"Kiss and make up?" Jim asks, stepping closer, they bump together from chest to knee, Jim's elbows pressing into Bones' chest since he's still holding him in place.
"Oh, I suppose if I have to..." Bones reconfigures his face into the bitchy work expression that indicates he thinks he's above just about anything other people occupy themselves with.
Jim brings his face close enough to breathe into Bones's slightly parted mouth. He pauses. Then he pushes away and twirls around. "No, we totally don't have to," he waves and bounces out of the kitchen.
"Jim, you insufferable bastard, there better be make up sex in the next short span or I really am done with you!"
*
Jim is reckless, yes. He's focused and doesn't let anything--rules, his own good sense, fear of death--get in his way. This is the life he's got, and he's damned well going to use it up, wring it out, and die in a blaze of glory (or at least a blaze of some sort).
He makes slightly better choices now than he did fresh off the transport ship, bitter, hurt, disaffected. Mostly, he makes better choices because he's figured out that the Starfleet gig isn't just about him. He can fling his own life down the garbage chute--but everyone else's lives? Those are on his head, too, and sometimes he needs to live to keep other people alive. Some people in particular. Bones might bitch up a storm about how reckless Jim is with his own skin, but Jim's seen Bones run into a crumbling building in a sim, he's seen him give his own respirator to a victim, he's seen him give the last ampule of antidote to a patient. Jim knows when it comes down to it, he's going to have to live to make sure Bones doesn't fling himself into that good night because some baby needs saving. Please, Jim doesn't even like children.
Jim's sitting on a cot in Medical with a Lulian Barb sticking out of his chest. Bones has his back to him tapping on some medical contraption. His shoulders are hunched over.
"You do realize that that weapon only missed hitting your heart by two millimeters?"
"Yeah, damned lucky," Jim's magnanimous, seriously doped up, his shoulder and left arm immobilized by a drug the corpsman shot him up with.
"You know that even you can't live without a functioning heart, right?" Bones keeps tapping.
Jim laughs. "Don't they make replacements? I know they make replacements..."
Bones is suddenly in his face. "Yes, Jim, they make replacements, but it doesn't matter if you bleed out on the floor of the gym before a triage team can get to you. It doesn't matter WHAT MEDICAL SCIENCE CAN DO IF YOU DIE BEFORE WE CAN GET TO YOU!"
Bones yells a lot, that's not much of a surprise, what is is the hand against Jim's cheek and the pleading look in Bones's eyes. "Please, Jim, please don't die before we can get to you, that's all I ask."
Jim doesn't really know what to say to that. He can't move the entire left side of his body from the neck down, so he reaches out with his right and pulls Bones down by the back of his neck. "Okay," Jim says. He means it. He won't die before Bones can get there.
The kiss, yeah, it's the first, but it's a whole lot less first-kissy as it is sealing a promise. At least to Jim. He was pretty high at the time.
"Jim?"
Third Year and Jim can taste the rest of his life on the wind. He looks at Bones, whose chest is bruised from a crash landing simulation that left him not only banged up physically but psychologically. Shirtless, in his pajama pants, he looks younger than he is. Younger than Jim maybe. Jim tries to imagine Bones in space without him. His stomach drops out.
"What will you do if we get posted to different ships?" Jim's been tossing that around for a while, one of those "what if" scenarios that humans torment themselves with ahead of time for no reason other than the fact that they need to prove Buddha right.
Bones runs a hand through his hair and sighs. "Jim, it's one in the damned morning, I lived through a fucking shuttle crash today--and may I add they could make that sim a little less real for all I care--and you're angsting over..."
"I'm asking seriously." Jim pins him in place with his eyes.
Bones stares right back. "Goddamn it, Jim, in what world does what I'll do matter? We both know you'll find a way to fix it with a candy wrapper, a hose, and a datapad, so come to bed so the dog will go to sleep."
"When you put it that way, why would I turn down such an attractive offer?" He follows behind, catches up, and wraps an arm around Bones, touches the bruises over his heart. "You're right, I'll always fix it." He whispers.
Bones snorts out a dark laugh. "That's good since you probably broke it in the first place."
*
No, my journal was not jacked. I really wrote that. Holy cats is all I can say. (Besides now that I've framed this, I can write the pornographic bits in between.)
BLAME AMBER who will not stop proclaiming how in love they are. Normally my response would be "PUKE, stfu!" but, alas, I watched the movie, and she's totally correct.
Now with pt 2.
I just realized I never tagged this. haha what a douche.