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I opened Word to just write a little porn thing. Like two pages of just porn. HAHAHA <---apparently I'm a genfic writer in this verse? CRAP!!!!!
This is an outtake from This fic. Which you should read first.
I guess I had to write this one to get to the actual porn outtakes? Please pity me.
Mutually Assured Destruction
Jim can't really tell what Bones' problem is. He clearly--so so clearly--has a problem, but not one Jim's familiar with.
"I know you're not asexual, so what's the damage?" Jim's tired of not asking. He sips his beer and watches Bones ignoring him. "Does the equipment not work?" He suppresses the laughter; he's just fucking with the guy now.
Bones cuts his eyes away from the Ensign doing body shots off of a Vargan. "Impugning my ability to get an erection? Isn't there someone else here you can turn your attention to?" Bones' mouth is an obscene color, the sort of color that makes a person think of other body parts engorged with blood.
Jim leans his elbow on the bar and looms in Bones' personal space. "Don't tell me you've never thought about it," he whispers right into his ear. Bones' hair comes down into a fashionable tip right next to Jim's mouth and it's an Herculean effort for Jim to lean away and not touch the tiny span of skin between his sideburn and ear.
Bones has his finest "cut the shit" look on his face when Jim meets his eyes again. "You can't really be so hard up you're looking in this direction, can you? You've actually completed the circuit and fucked the entire student body already?"
"Ouch!" Jim slaps his belly. "That went right to my soul, really." He casually scans his eyes over the crowd at the club. "No, I see four or five people here who haven't yet had the pleasure."
"Oh god, give me strength!" Bones wails.
"This is an unlikely temple, Bones, I'm not sure god listens to people who pray over their whiskey."
"I'll have you know that praying over whiskey, whether it's going down or coming back up, is an old Southern tradition."
Jim looks down at Bones' easy smile, the way his left eyebrow is raised, is holding his drink in his hand with three fingers, and he wants him. Flat out wants to toss Bones against the wall and just get really filthy, rough with fingernail gouges and hair pulling..."Huh," Jim says into his beer.
"What?" Bones asks with the tremor of feigned panic he uses as Comedy Routine #5.
"Nothing, don't worry about it." Jim flicks his eyes away from Bones and towards a gaggle of Ensigns getting rowdy about which one of them got the lowest mark in Vulcan Studies.
"I wasn't worried in the first place, now I am, dammit!" Bone's tone has the edge to it that indicates actual annoyance rather than the feigned sort of stress his tone always has. Bones swings away from the bar and steps into Jim's direct line of sight. His side presses into the bartop and he sips his drink with a casual scowl. He cracks his neck and blinks down at Jim.
"What?" Jim asks, because Bones is rolling through his I know you're hiding something routine. In the rioting bar light--blue and pink LED light striving against soft full-spectrum lamps--Bones's cheeks are flushed grey against china white.
"I know you forget, but I am a doctor, Jim. A trained physician. My job is to read bodies. Forgive me for prying, but why are you pretending what just happened didn't?"
"What just happened?" Jim's a master at confusing people into forgetting what they're even talking about. This is just the opening gambit, like chess, how Bones responds will determine Jim's next move.
Bones rolls his eyes.
Ok, fine, the eye-rolling is Bones's usual first move in this game, too, so standard opening, Jim knows how to advance this attack...
But Bones doesn't wait for Jim to make a wise crack about geezers and memory loss or some chick's tits. No.
Bones touches the back of Jim's hand. Jim's sprawled out with his elbows propped on the bar, his usual lazy stance. Bones runs two fingers over the raised veins on the back of Jim's hand.
Jim's not quick enough to cover his in-drawn breath or the way his body tenses, his eyes dilate, his face flushes.
"Do you want to discuss fear of intimacy and the ramifications of a lack of meaningful attachments in commanding officers?" Bones sips his drink and lifts an eyebrow. The bastard smirks!
"You complete bastard!" Jim stands up straight. "Excuse me if I'm erring on the side of not ratcheting up the already borderline codependent relationship I have with my only intimate friend by hopping into bed with him."
Bones tilts his head a bit and watches him for a few seconds before he starts to laugh.
"What?" Jim barks. Bones turns away so he's facing the room instead of Jim. Jim's not having any of that, he peels away from the bar and steps into Bones's face. He repeats it. "WHAT?" with a little more force. Jim's tenuous grip on his temper is slipping.
Bones scratches an eyelid with his thumb. "Even you can work out the irony of this situation. You James Tiberius Kirk, drawing the line at sexual contact."
Jim huffs. "It's not about me." Jim gets enough that he doesn't need to go there, so why do that to Bones?
"Wait, what?" Bones's easy slump unfolds into his ultra-straight suspicious posture. "Me? You think...I..."
"You were married, Bones. Who gets married?" Jim shrugs. Logic is logic, suck on that, Bones.
"What?" Bones does the bird thing with his head, rapidly tilting it back and forth in sharp little jabs. "Dammit, Jim, people get married all the time..."
"Sure. Nobody I know." Jim reconsiders. "Except you."
Bones's mouth falls open. That's always a sign that Jim has won. He can't help the triumphal little smile he feels curling his mouth. "See, not even you can deny facts."
Jim slides back into his slot on Bones's left side. He waves over the bartender. "What'd you do to McCoy?" Levi the bartender's a cute kid, all black ringlets and sharp smiles. Jim could cut himself on one of those smiles and enjoy the hell out it.
"Won another battle of wits," Jim laughs.
Looking back on this scenario later, Jim can see every one of his technical errors. It's a mark of a good commander that he learns from his strategic mistakes so he can make a whole new set next time.
*
Jim has a Governance section that regularly drives him to contemplate forestry as an alternative career option. He groans low and long, slaps his belly with the flat of his palm and looks over at Bones who is frowning down at a portable screen mumbling to himself. "I'm about ready to declare myself a partisan for a galactic empire."
Bones doesn't respond.
"Just imagine it, a glorious dictatorship with no councils, no voting tiers, no loop clauses."
"Will you shut up?" Bones doesn't even bother to look up from his work.
"It will be a benevolent dictatorship. The symbol will be a stylized phallus..." Jim's just getting warmed up, he hasn't even gotten to the mandatory dress codes yet...
Bones slaps the table and glares at him. "From what I recall, you do have your own residence. Have you seen the interior of it this cycle?"
"What crawled up your ass and died?" Jim smiles. Oh, Bones, so excitable. He needs to relax--Jim idly imagines Bones in a hammock on a beach, this turns pornographic PDQ.
"Jim, I have to finish these fake field reports," he pauses and looks at his watch. "In the next two hours. I beg you to take your traveling circus and hit the road so I can get a goddamned moment of peace."
Jim's skin's alive, Bones's bitchy attitude more of a turn on the longer they know each other. Jim's always liked real people, people who don't bullshit or fake their way through life. "Yeah, whatever, wanna grab a burger and..."
"Jim!" Bones shouts. Good, Jim has his attention finally. "I have plans. I need to finish this work before I proceed to drink myself insensate. You can stay here while I finish, but I'm not above wrestling you to the ground and giving you a sedative if you don't shut up and sit still."
This is the first inkling Jim has that perhaps his clever gambit regarding obfuscation and his relationship with Leonard McCoy, MD, was deflected by a deeper play by Bones. This is the smoke on the horizon moment where Jim sits up and sharpens his gaze.
"Ok," Jim says sliding to his feet. "I'll catch you on the flip side."
Jim's cool enough to not look over his shoulder as he leaves. He can't remember the last time he had to fight the impulse, though.
*
Jim sometimes wonders if he and Gaila are dating. They do things together that aren't sex; he talks to her about his day and she does likewise; they laugh at the same things. If this was the real world and not the Academy, he'd think they were definitely dating. But they never discuss it, and Jim doesn't feel awkward about it until...
"Oh!" Gaila's hand flies to her mouth in the middle of a detailed explanation of the warp particle sim she was in earlier in the day. "I know this is dire, but sometimes humans confuse me..."
"Shoot," Jim says. He's half distracted by the equations he's fiddling with.
"Are there, you know, topics we're not supposed to discuss?"
He looks up and she's wearing her quizzical face, mouth parted slightly and both eyebrows up.
"No?" Jim really doesn't know. Are there? "After the blow by blow recounting of your bowel seizures I didn't think anything was off the table..."
She rolls her eyes and does that head swivel gesture that always strikes him as distinctly alien. "Not bodily functions and other physiological issues, I mean social proscriptions, you know, taboos?"
Jim thinks that over for a couple of seconds. He's never really had issues like that, but he's not head over heels about talking about his parents. She's not all that gung-ho about discussing her childhood either, so he can't imagine it coming up.
"Nah," Jim says and takes a drink of his juice. "It's cool."
Suddenly she looks pissed off. "Then why didn't you tell me you had a fight with Dr. McCoy?"
Jim thinks the feeling of being struck speechless must be universally uncomfortable. "Excuse me?" he finally manages.
"If there are no taboos between us, you know, why didn't you tell me you and your primary significant other are having a period of tension? It's not really fair to me to walk into human relationship politics like that." Her frown deepens. Anger doesn't settle on her features naturally.
"Just wait a minute here," Jim sets his datapad down on the table. "First, back up, what are you talking about?"
"Yesterday I was out with my roommate and Dr McCoy was in the same eatery with a companion I do not know. Their behavior was distinctly mating ritualy."
"You mean he was on a date?" Well, ok, weird, but it happens.
"Yes." She makes a hand gesture he can't interpret. "I approached him to offer greetings and acknowledgment of our shared tribal affiliations and he was clearly uncomfortable with my presence and rude by human standards." She pauses. "He's always like that, so I wasn't offended, but he was agitated by your name and gave the impression of being deeply angry with you." She stops in the way she has where he can almost see the words NOW YOU SPEAK written over her head.
"Also, what's this primary significant other thing?" Jim says wiping a hand against his cheek to feel the nap of the beard that's coming in. "You do know what that means to us, right?" When discussing humans with someone who isn't one, Jim always says us. The Academy discourages language like that, but he feels like they can force him to conform to the grooming standard and the uniform, but they can't tell him how to think.
"Yes, of course, it is the term for someone with whom a human has a bonded relationship."
"Well, yes and no..."
"A non-kinship bonded relationship," Gaila adds.
Ok, that's strictly speaking accurate. Jim wonders if he's really up to explaining human friendship to an alien. "Uh," he begins but he's at a loss.
"I thought it was customary to discuss psychological traumas like grave rifts a human has with her primary significant other." She's not mad now, just curious.
"Bones isn't my significant other, Gaila, and we're not fighting." Jim sighs and shrugs.
Gaila watches him, the afternoon sunlight coming through the windows high over their heads picks up copper strands in her hair. "Oh." she says finally. "I know this pattern from human holovids. You are in the portion of your relationship where you have yet to come to terms with your feelings. I really hope you don't have to have a grave trauma or a short-term separation to come to terms with the realities of your situation."
Jim realizes that almost dating an alien might have been a bad move.
*
"Are you trying to make me jealous?" Jim's not going to fuck around with this shit any more. Jim doesn't do strained relationships and all that 'what do you feel?' garbage. "Because if you're going to make me jealous, you have to tell me you're dating someone."
Bones looks up from the projection of a 3D Vulcan spleen. "I suppose this is the middle of a conversation you were having with yourself about Gaila running into me the other night?"
"Exactly," Jim confirms.
"What aspect of my personality indicates to you that I'd be the making you jealous type?" Bones clicks the datapad projection off.
Now that that's brought to his attention, Jim can see the flaw in that logic. "Nothing?"
Bones rolls his eyes. "Look, Jim, against my better judgment it would appear that a good chunk of my time and energy is now devoted to making your life as pain-free and easy as I can. Just like I give you analgesic patches for your contusions, I'm not going to make you suffer emotionally. If I can help it. There may be times when I'm unable to offer succor."
Bones's kitchen is the usual white tile, white cabinet, white appliances deal. The dinette, though, is made of wood, painted a bright orangey-red. The paint's gouged and flaking. They bought the table at an open air market a couple weeks into their tenure in San Francisco. They picked it out together.
"You were just on a date because you gave up on me because of my little scene last week." He doesn't turn it into a question, and he doesn't look away from the truth now that he's seen it. The decision he thought he was putting off was actually made a long time ago, on a transport vessel over a shared flask of sourmash.
Bones leans back in his chair and crosses his arms over his chest. "So we're going do this when I have an exam tomorrow? I'd be shocked if I hadn't met you before, you complete bastard."
"Hey, I never claimed to be good at this shit!" Jim's disappointed in himself. It's fine that he's clearly deficient at something that comes naturally to other humans, but the fact that he's dragging Bones along for the ride is pretty damned shitty of him. Self-loathing is an old companion and Jim can indulge that bitch like no one else when he gets to it.
Bones is in civvies, soft grey pants and a worn t-shirt. Jim can see one of his bare feet flat against the cool tile of the floor. This is Jim's every day. Except usually they would study, eat, and Jim would fuck off to campus to pull or to work late into the night in labs he has to charm his way or break into. Tonight Jim could stay, he could wake up and share a cup of coffee in the morning while mocking Bones's snoring.
"No, you study." The scrape of the chair legs on the tile echoes through the room.
"That's strike two, you get one more."
The threat would have more effect if it came from anyone else. Jim already knows any ultimatums coming from Bones lack the weight of the carry through. As far as routing maneuvers go, that one's a dud.
*
The sirens sound for an All Hands sim. Jim knows it's a sim, but it's bound to be more interesting than the longhand calculus he's doing on vectors--seriously, if they have to do vectors by hand the situation's so fucked they might as well off themselves with their sidearms. He hits the corridor and is manning his duty station at the door to Level Three Lift A when the entire room shakes. He flattens his palm against the wall and grins wild and manic. It's on!
The lift doors open and three cadets stumble out covered in soot and propping each other up. "Damn, are they using live rounds? Awesome!" Kirk directs the cadets to the next part of the sim and hits his com. "Kirk to Commander Cho. Status report: three cadets are headed your way."
"Kirk! Shuttlebay six is on fire! The shuttle's loaded and the bay doors are jammed! Get down there now!"
Jim's smile drops off his face. He's not a huge fan of shuttlebay duty.
Much later he's bruised from head to toe and on autopilot. He doesn't really think about much of anything except the smell of burning plastic and how real the sim was until he's standing in Bones's living room and Bones is staring a him over the rim of a half-full tumbler of bourbon.
"Come on," Bones says and tilts his head towards the bathroom. Jim sits on the closed commode and takes Bones's drink when it's handed to him.
"Cut your scalp a little..." the sting of the antiseptic and topical antibiotic is comforting, familiar like the taste of the bourbon Bones favors. Bones tilts Jim's head gently and inspects a lump on his forehead. "Smacked your noggin on a crossbeam?"
Jim shrugs, he can't remember.
"Lost a patient today." Bones already has the burr to his voice he gets three drinks into an evening, his words slowing to bare feet on red clay and August haze.
"They're not real, Bones." Jim takes an extra large mouthful of booze, though.
"No, Jim, a real patient."
Jim looks up and Bones still has a hand on the back of his head, the contact less soothing now, more a heavy oppression that Jim can't ignore away or deny. "What happened?" Jim Kirk is not a coward and he doesn't leave a man alone in the cold.
Bones sighs, drops his hand and walks out of the room. Jim trails him into the kitchen and he waits out the traditional pouring out of the liquor watching the slump of Bones's shoulders.
"In the middle of the goddamned sim Ensign Perez blew an aneurysm in her spine. She was triaged as a fatality by a field medic who didn't know how to read the tricorder for simmed symptoms and also for real. By the time one of her cohort flagged me down, she'd thrown another clot in her brainstem and I was pretty much just there to hold her hand as she died." Bones sips his drink. "I guess that's the best we can do some days."
And this is the part of Bones that Jim confronts head on because when he takes it away with him to pick over in the long still silences between class and fucking, little shards of it lodge in his lungs and liver and spine and he thinks one day one might strike just right and do him in.
"And now I suppose you're going to fall into bed with me because you want to fix this." Bones flicks his eyes over Jim's face and it feels a little like what the Last Judgment must be like. "You can't fix this, Jim. One day all any of us will be is a cooling husk that used to be a person."
Bones is nothing if not a morbid fucker.
"Do you want a hug?" Jim says and he thinks his deadpan is pretty damned good, but Bones doesn't crack a smile. He scowls into his glass as Jim finishes his drink. "Look, Bones, if you had gotten there five minutes before, would Perez be dead?"
"Probably braindead."
"From what I recall those things mean the same thing."
They stand there in the dimmed light of the kitchen without speaking. Jim thinks he's made his point. As much of a point as you can ever make to Bones.
Bones finally meets his eyes. "If this is your way of saying don't blame myself, then I'm just going to show you the door and kick you in the ass as you leave."
"They put me on burning shuttlebay duty," Jim rejoins. Normally, of course, Jim wouldn't have mentioned this. But the one way to get Bones to stop feeling sorry for himself is to give him something else to worry over.
"Dammit, Jim, why didn't you say that before?" Bones, just like that, compartmentalizes and shoves away his own aching to reach out to circle Jim's wrist with his hand. His shoulders come back up into a less beaten-down posture. "I should have made you take your shirt off before. Do you have other injuries?" His hands move efficiently to press against Jim's collarbones then down to his ribs.
"I see I haven't lost my powers of seduction," Jim grabs Bones's hands, pressing them harder against the fabric of his shirt.
Bones sighs. "Will you at least let me satisfy myself that you don't have any broken ribs or a concussion before you stick you hands down my pants?"
"We haven't even slept together and you make it sound like a chore." Jim can't tell if he's actually offended because he's got several other competing thoughts in his head, like ow, my head hurts and fuck Starfleet and the swirling tension in his belly that is the awareness of Bones's hands on him.
"You started this," Jim whispers before using his weight to twist around and press Bones back into the counter, Bones's hands curling reflexively so that his nails dig in eight halfmoons of bright near-pain through Jim's shirt.
Jim has no expectation of the kiss, his deep well of experience not able to inform him about which way Bones will tilt his head or if he'll be tongue-jammy or full of teeth. He is, of course, just Bones--a hand coming off Jim's ribs to settle on the back of his neck, mouth firm pressure but not pushing anywhere, other hand sliding down the indent of Jim's spine to slide under his shirt and press on the small of his back to fit their bodies together. That is, Bones lets Jim kiss him while he moves on to the more important business of actually fucking.
Jim, of course, approves.
The soft swipe of Boness's tongue sliding between Jim's lips sets off a frenzy in Jim that he hasn't experienced since he finally landed Naomi Chung when he was nineteen. That's all it takes, a little jab of tongue, and Jim's flipping them around again to knock Boness's knee out from her him. Jim rides him to the floor, hand on the back of Bones's head to cushion the thin bone from tile. Jim's already pretty banged up and Bones's joints hit him in some spots that make him moan "oh fuck," for bad reasons.
Bones knows him well enough to recognize the tone. He tries to pry Jim off, twisting his head out of the kiss and getting a hand braced on Jim's belly to shove him off. "Dammit, Jim..."
Yeah, right, like this is going to end in any way but the one Jim intends. Bones's pants are held up by a string tie and even squirming he's no real challenge for Jim to hold down. Jim bites Bones's neck because Bones is now playing hard to get and won't kiss him.
"If you're hurt goddamn it..."
Jim huffs laughter into Bones's face. "Do I seem hurt to you?"
"You seem ridiculous to me..."
Jim gets his hand inside Bones's pants, his hand around his cock, and Bones still doesn't dial back the aggro.
"I'll let you scan me, ok?" Jim says on a down stroke. "Just," Jim presses his mouth to the corner of Bones's mouth. "Just do this first. Then I'll let you, I swear." Jim is used to making promises during sex. He actually means it this time. Bones relaxes and his eyes drop closed in what Jim assumes is permission to kiss him. Jim smiles into it.
*
It's only after they fuck the first time that Jim understands how unimportant that part of their relationship is. This is a huge mindfuck for him. He's framed his life by being the kind of person who has no sexual hang ups. Then he woke up one day and realized his entire life was actually framed by being the guy who has a huge sexual hang up. Well, damn.
Anyway, personal growth. That's what the brass claims the Academy is for--figuring yourself out before you fuck up the universe with space grudges and personal agendas. Suuuure. Jim's sure everyone comes out of the Academy totally self-aware and ready to man space ships with guns that can blow up planets.
"Goddamn it, Jim, could you be a little less explicit in your description of our sex life to Gaila? What I have to endure on a daily basis surpasses understanding..."
Jim is starting to realize that life gets lived in the frenzy and stillness where self-awareness escapes a person. You have to be ready to make the right choices in moments where right is reflexive. You can't become that kind of person on your own.
This is an outtake from This fic. Which you should read first.
I guess I had to write this one to get to the actual porn outtakes? Please pity me.
Mutually Assured Destruction
Jim can't really tell what Bones' problem is. He clearly--so so clearly--has a problem, but not one Jim's familiar with.
"I know you're not asexual, so what's the damage?" Jim's tired of not asking. He sips his beer and watches Bones ignoring him. "Does the equipment not work?" He suppresses the laughter; he's just fucking with the guy now.
Bones cuts his eyes away from the Ensign doing body shots off of a Vargan. "Impugning my ability to get an erection? Isn't there someone else here you can turn your attention to?" Bones' mouth is an obscene color, the sort of color that makes a person think of other body parts engorged with blood.
Jim leans his elbow on the bar and looms in Bones' personal space. "Don't tell me you've never thought about it," he whispers right into his ear. Bones' hair comes down into a fashionable tip right next to Jim's mouth and it's an Herculean effort for Jim to lean away and not touch the tiny span of skin between his sideburn and ear.
Bones has his finest "cut the shit" look on his face when Jim meets his eyes again. "You can't really be so hard up you're looking in this direction, can you? You've actually completed the circuit and fucked the entire student body already?"
"Ouch!" Jim slaps his belly. "That went right to my soul, really." He casually scans his eyes over the crowd at the club. "No, I see four or five people here who haven't yet had the pleasure."
"Oh god, give me strength!" Bones wails.
"This is an unlikely temple, Bones, I'm not sure god listens to people who pray over their whiskey."
"I'll have you know that praying over whiskey, whether it's going down or coming back up, is an old Southern tradition."
Jim looks down at Bones' easy smile, the way his left eyebrow is raised, is holding his drink in his hand with three fingers, and he wants him. Flat out wants to toss Bones against the wall and just get really filthy, rough with fingernail gouges and hair pulling..."Huh," Jim says into his beer.
"What?" Bones asks with the tremor of feigned panic he uses as Comedy Routine #5.
"Nothing, don't worry about it." Jim flicks his eyes away from Bones and towards a gaggle of Ensigns getting rowdy about which one of them got the lowest mark in Vulcan Studies.
"I wasn't worried in the first place, now I am, dammit!" Bone's tone has the edge to it that indicates actual annoyance rather than the feigned sort of stress his tone always has. Bones swings away from the bar and steps into Jim's direct line of sight. His side presses into the bartop and he sips his drink with a casual scowl. He cracks his neck and blinks down at Jim.
"What?" Jim asks, because Bones is rolling through his I know you're hiding something routine. In the rioting bar light--blue and pink LED light striving against soft full-spectrum lamps--Bones's cheeks are flushed grey against china white.
"I know you forget, but I am a doctor, Jim. A trained physician. My job is to read bodies. Forgive me for prying, but why are you pretending what just happened didn't?"
"What just happened?" Jim's a master at confusing people into forgetting what they're even talking about. This is just the opening gambit, like chess, how Bones responds will determine Jim's next move.
Bones rolls his eyes.
Ok, fine, the eye-rolling is Bones's usual first move in this game, too, so standard opening, Jim knows how to advance this attack...
But Bones doesn't wait for Jim to make a wise crack about geezers and memory loss or some chick's tits. No.
Bones touches the back of Jim's hand. Jim's sprawled out with his elbows propped on the bar, his usual lazy stance. Bones runs two fingers over the raised veins on the back of Jim's hand.
Jim's not quick enough to cover his in-drawn breath or the way his body tenses, his eyes dilate, his face flushes.
"Do you want to discuss fear of intimacy and the ramifications of a lack of meaningful attachments in commanding officers?" Bones sips his drink and lifts an eyebrow. The bastard smirks!
"You complete bastard!" Jim stands up straight. "Excuse me if I'm erring on the side of not ratcheting up the already borderline codependent relationship I have with my only intimate friend by hopping into bed with him."
Bones tilts his head a bit and watches him for a few seconds before he starts to laugh.
"What?" Jim barks. Bones turns away so he's facing the room instead of Jim. Jim's not having any of that, he peels away from the bar and steps into Bones's face. He repeats it. "WHAT?" with a little more force. Jim's tenuous grip on his temper is slipping.
Bones scratches an eyelid with his thumb. "Even you can work out the irony of this situation. You James Tiberius Kirk, drawing the line at sexual contact."
Jim huffs. "It's not about me." Jim gets enough that he doesn't need to go there, so why do that to Bones?
"Wait, what?" Bones's easy slump unfolds into his ultra-straight suspicious posture. "Me? You think...I..."
"You were married, Bones. Who gets married?" Jim shrugs. Logic is logic, suck on that, Bones.
"What?" Bones does the bird thing with his head, rapidly tilting it back and forth in sharp little jabs. "Dammit, Jim, people get married all the time..."
"Sure. Nobody I know." Jim reconsiders. "Except you."
Bones's mouth falls open. That's always a sign that Jim has won. He can't help the triumphal little smile he feels curling his mouth. "See, not even you can deny facts."
Jim slides back into his slot on Bones's left side. He waves over the bartender. "What'd you do to McCoy?" Levi the bartender's a cute kid, all black ringlets and sharp smiles. Jim could cut himself on one of those smiles and enjoy the hell out it.
"Won another battle of wits," Jim laughs.
Looking back on this scenario later, Jim can see every one of his technical errors. It's a mark of a good commander that he learns from his strategic mistakes so he can make a whole new set next time.
*
Jim has a Governance section that regularly drives him to contemplate forestry as an alternative career option. He groans low and long, slaps his belly with the flat of his palm and looks over at Bones who is frowning down at a portable screen mumbling to himself. "I'm about ready to declare myself a partisan for a galactic empire."
Bones doesn't respond.
"Just imagine it, a glorious dictatorship with no councils, no voting tiers, no loop clauses."
"Will you shut up?" Bones doesn't even bother to look up from his work.
"It will be a benevolent dictatorship. The symbol will be a stylized phallus..." Jim's just getting warmed up, he hasn't even gotten to the mandatory dress codes yet...
Bones slaps the table and glares at him. "From what I recall, you do have your own residence. Have you seen the interior of it this cycle?"
"What crawled up your ass and died?" Jim smiles. Oh, Bones, so excitable. He needs to relax--Jim idly imagines Bones in a hammock on a beach, this turns pornographic PDQ.
"Jim, I have to finish these fake field reports," he pauses and looks at his watch. "In the next two hours. I beg you to take your traveling circus and hit the road so I can get a goddamned moment of peace."
Jim's skin's alive, Bones's bitchy attitude more of a turn on the longer they know each other. Jim's always liked real people, people who don't bullshit or fake their way through life. "Yeah, whatever, wanna grab a burger and..."
"Jim!" Bones shouts. Good, Jim has his attention finally. "I have plans. I need to finish this work before I proceed to drink myself insensate. You can stay here while I finish, but I'm not above wrestling you to the ground and giving you a sedative if you don't shut up and sit still."
This is the first inkling Jim has that perhaps his clever gambit regarding obfuscation and his relationship with Leonard McCoy, MD, was deflected by a deeper play by Bones. This is the smoke on the horizon moment where Jim sits up and sharpens his gaze.
"Ok," Jim says sliding to his feet. "I'll catch you on the flip side."
Jim's cool enough to not look over his shoulder as he leaves. He can't remember the last time he had to fight the impulse, though.
*
Jim sometimes wonders if he and Gaila are dating. They do things together that aren't sex; he talks to her about his day and she does likewise; they laugh at the same things. If this was the real world and not the Academy, he'd think they were definitely dating. But they never discuss it, and Jim doesn't feel awkward about it until...
"Oh!" Gaila's hand flies to her mouth in the middle of a detailed explanation of the warp particle sim she was in earlier in the day. "I know this is dire, but sometimes humans confuse me..."
"Shoot," Jim says. He's half distracted by the equations he's fiddling with.
"Are there, you know, topics we're not supposed to discuss?"
He looks up and she's wearing her quizzical face, mouth parted slightly and both eyebrows up.
"No?" Jim really doesn't know. Are there? "After the blow by blow recounting of your bowel seizures I didn't think anything was off the table..."
She rolls her eyes and does that head swivel gesture that always strikes him as distinctly alien. "Not bodily functions and other physiological issues, I mean social proscriptions, you know, taboos?"
Jim thinks that over for a couple of seconds. He's never really had issues like that, but he's not head over heels about talking about his parents. She's not all that gung-ho about discussing her childhood either, so he can't imagine it coming up.
"Nah," Jim says and takes a drink of his juice. "It's cool."
Suddenly she looks pissed off. "Then why didn't you tell me you had a fight with Dr. McCoy?"
Jim thinks the feeling of being struck speechless must be universally uncomfortable. "Excuse me?" he finally manages.
"If there are no taboos between us, you know, why didn't you tell me you and your primary significant other are having a period of tension? It's not really fair to me to walk into human relationship politics like that." Her frown deepens. Anger doesn't settle on her features naturally.
"Just wait a minute here," Jim sets his datapad down on the table. "First, back up, what are you talking about?"
"Yesterday I was out with my roommate and Dr McCoy was in the same eatery with a companion I do not know. Their behavior was distinctly mating ritualy."
"You mean he was on a date?" Well, ok, weird, but it happens.
"Yes." She makes a hand gesture he can't interpret. "I approached him to offer greetings and acknowledgment of our shared tribal affiliations and he was clearly uncomfortable with my presence and rude by human standards." She pauses. "He's always like that, so I wasn't offended, but he was agitated by your name and gave the impression of being deeply angry with you." She stops in the way she has where he can almost see the words NOW YOU SPEAK written over her head.
"Also, what's this primary significant other thing?" Jim says wiping a hand against his cheek to feel the nap of the beard that's coming in. "You do know what that means to us, right?" When discussing humans with someone who isn't one, Jim always says us. The Academy discourages language like that, but he feels like they can force him to conform to the grooming standard and the uniform, but they can't tell him how to think.
"Yes, of course, it is the term for someone with whom a human has a bonded relationship."
"Well, yes and no..."
"A non-kinship bonded relationship," Gaila adds.
Ok, that's strictly speaking accurate. Jim wonders if he's really up to explaining human friendship to an alien. "Uh," he begins but he's at a loss.
"I thought it was customary to discuss psychological traumas like grave rifts a human has with her primary significant other." She's not mad now, just curious.
"Bones isn't my significant other, Gaila, and we're not fighting." Jim sighs and shrugs.
Gaila watches him, the afternoon sunlight coming through the windows high over their heads picks up copper strands in her hair. "Oh." she says finally. "I know this pattern from human holovids. You are in the portion of your relationship where you have yet to come to terms with your feelings. I really hope you don't have to have a grave trauma or a short-term separation to come to terms with the realities of your situation."
Jim realizes that almost dating an alien might have been a bad move.
*
"Are you trying to make me jealous?" Jim's not going to fuck around with this shit any more. Jim doesn't do strained relationships and all that 'what do you feel?' garbage. "Because if you're going to make me jealous, you have to tell me you're dating someone."
Bones looks up from the projection of a 3D Vulcan spleen. "I suppose this is the middle of a conversation you were having with yourself about Gaila running into me the other night?"
"Exactly," Jim confirms.
"What aspect of my personality indicates to you that I'd be the making you jealous type?" Bones clicks the datapad projection off.
Now that that's brought to his attention, Jim can see the flaw in that logic. "Nothing?"
Bones rolls his eyes. "Look, Jim, against my better judgment it would appear that a good chunk of my time and energy is now devoted to making your life as pain-free and easy as I can. Just like I give you analgesic patches for your contusions, I'm not going to make you suffer emotionally. If I can help it. There may be times when I'm unable to offer succor."
Bones's kitchen is the usual white tile, white cabinet, white appliances deal. The dinette, though, is made of wood, painted a bright orangey-red. The paint's gouged and flaking. They bought the table at an open air market a couple weeks into their tenure in San Francisco. They picked it out together.
"You were just on a date because you gave up on me because of my little scene last week." He doesn't turn it into a question, and he doesn't look away from the truth now that he's seen it. The decision he thought he was putting off was actually made a long time ago, on a transport vessel over a shared flask of sourmash.
Bones leans back in his chair and crosses his arms over his chest. "So we're going do this when I have an exam tomorrow? I'd be shocked if I hadn't met you before, you complete bastard."
"Hey, I never claimed to be good at this shit!" Jim's disappointed in himself. It's fine that he's clearly deficient at something that comes naturally to other humans, but the fact that he's dragging Bones along for the ride is pretty damned shitty of him. Self-loathing is an old companion and Jim can indulge that bitch like no one else when he gets to it.
Bones is in civvies, soft grey pants and a worn t-shirt. Jim can see one of his bare feet flat against the cool tile of the floor. This is Jim's every day. Except usually they would study, eat, and Jim would fuck off to campus to pull or to work late into the night in labs he has to charm his way or break into. Tonight Jim could stay, he could wake up and share a cup of coffee in the morning while mocking Bones's snoring.
"No, you study." The scrape of the chair legs on the tile echoes through the room.
"That's strike two, you get one more."
The threat would have more effect if it came from anyone else. Jim already knows any ultimatums coming from Bones lack the weight of the carry through. As far as routing maneuvers go, that one's a dud.
*
The sirens sound for an All Hands sim. Jim knows it's a sim, but it's bound to be more interesting than the longhand calculus he's doing on vectors--seriously, if they have to do vectors by hand the situation's so fucked they might as well off themselves with their sidearms. He hits the corridor and is manning his duty station at the door to Level Three Lift A when the entire room shakes. He flattens his palm against the wall and grins wild and manic. It's on!
The lift doors open and three cadets stumble out covered in soot and propping each other up. "Damn, are they using live rounds? Awesome!" Kirk directs the cadets to the next part of the sim and hits his com. "Kirk to Commander Cho. Status report: three cadets are headed your way."
"Kirk! Shuttlebay six is on fire! The shuttle's loaded and the bay doors are jammed! Get down there now!"
Jim's smile drops off his face. He's not a huge fan of shuttlebay duty.
Much later he's bruised from head to toe and on autopilot. He doesn't really think about much of anything except the smell of burning plastic and how real the sim was until he's standing in Bones's living room and Bones is staring a him over the rim of a half-full tumbler of bourbon.
"Come on," Bones says and tilts his head towards the bathroom. Jim sits on the closed commode and takes Bones's drink when it's handed to him.
"Cut your scalp a little..." the sting of the antiseptic and topical antibiotic is comforting, familiar like the taste of the bourbon Bones favors. Bones tilts Jim's head gently and inspects a lump on his forehead. "Smacked your noggin on a crossbeam?"
Jim shrugs, he can't remember.
"Lost a patient today." Bones already has the burr to his voice he gets three drinks into an evening, his words slowing to bare feet on red clay and August haze.
"They're not real, Bones." Jim takes an extra large mouthful of booze, though.
"No, Jim, a real patient."
Jim looks up and Bones still has a hand on the back of his head, the contact less soothing now, more a heavy oppression that Jim can't ignore away or deny. "What happened?" Jim Kirk is not a coward and he doesn't leave a man alone in the cold.
Bones sighs, drops his hand and walks out of the room. Jim trails him into the kitchen and he waits out the traditional pouring out of the liquor watching the slump of Bones's shoulders.
"In the middle of the goddamned sim Ensign Perez blew an aneurysm in her spine. She was triaged as a fatality by a field medic who didn't know how to read the tricorder for simmed symptoms and also for real. By the time one of her cohort flagged me down, she'd thrown another clot in her brainstem and I was pretty much just there to hold her hand as she died." Bones sips his drink. "I guess that's the best we can do some days."
And this is the part of Bones that Jim confronts head on because when he takes it away with him to pick over in the long still silences between class and fucking, little shards of it lodge in his lungs and liver and spine and he thinks one day one might strike just right and do him in.
"And now I suppose you're going to fall into bed with me because you want to fix this." Bones flicks his eyes over Jim's face and it feels a little like what the Last Judgment must be like. "You can't fix this, Jim. One day all any of us will be is a cooling husk that used to be a person."
Bones is nothing if not a morbid fucker.
"Do you want a hug?" Jim says and he thinks his deadpan is pretty damned good, but Bones doesn't crack a smile. He scowls into his glass as Jim finishes his drink. "Look, Bones, if you had gotten there five minutes before, would Perez be dead?"
"Probably braindead."
"From what I recall those things mean the same thing."
They stand there in the dimmed light of the kitchen without speaking. Jim thinks he's made his point. As much of a point as you can ever make to Bones.
Bones finally meets his eyes. "If this is your way of saying don't blame myself, then I'm just going to show you the door and kick you in the ass as you leave."
"They put me on burning shuttlebay duty," Jim rejoins. Normally, of course, Jim wouldn't have mentioned this. But the one way to get Bones to stop feeling sorry for himself is to give him something else to worry over.
"Dammit, Jim, why didn't you say that before?" Bones, just like that, compartmentalizes and shoves away his own aching to reach out to circle Jim's wrist with his hand. His shoulders come back up into a less beaten-down posture. "I should have made you take your shirt off before. Do you have other injuries?" His hands move efficiently to press against Jim's collarbones then down to his ribs.
"I see I haven't lost my powers of seduction," Jim grabs Bones's hands, pressing them harder against the fabric of his shirt.
Bones sighs. "Will you at least let me satisfy myself that you don't have any broken ribs or a concussion before you stick you hands down my pants?"
"We haven't even slept together and you make it sound like a chore." Jim can't tell if he's actually offended because he's got several other competing thoughts in his head, like ow, my head hurts and fuck Starfleet and the swirling tension in his belly that is the awareness of Bones's hands on him.
"You started this," Jim whispers before using his weight to twist around and press Bones back into the counter, Bones's hands curling reflexively so that his nails dig in eight halfmoons of bright near-pain through Jim's shirt.
Jim has no expectation of the kiss, his deep well of experience not able to inform him about which way Bones will tilt his head or if he'll be tongue-jammy or full of teeth. He is, of course, just Bones--a hand coming off Jim's ribs to settle on the back of his neck, mouth firm pressure but not pushing anywhere, other hand sliding down the indent of Jim's spine to slide under his shirt and press on the small of his back to fit their bodies together. That is, Bones lets Jim kiss him while he moves on to the more important business of actually fucking.
Jim, of course, approves.
The soft swipe of Boness's tongue sliding between Jim's lips sets off a frenzy in Jim that he hasn't experienced since he finally landed Naomi Chung when he was nineteen. That's all it takes, a little jab of tongue, and Jim's flipping them around again to knock Boness's knee out from her him. Jim rides him to the floor, hand on the back of Bones's head to cushion the thin bone from tile. Jim's already pretty banged up and Bones's joints hit him in some spots that make him moan "oh fuck," for bad reasons.
Bones knows him well enough to recognize the tone. He tries to pry Jim off, twisting his head out of the kiss and getting a hand braced on Jim's belly to shove him off. "Dammit, Jim..."
Yeah, right, like this is going to end in any way but the one Jim intends. Bones's pants are held up by a string tie and even squirming he's no real challenge for Jim to hold down. Jim bites Bones's neck because Bones is now playing hard to get and won't kiss him.
"If you're hurt goddamn it..."
Jim huffs laughter into Bones's face. "Do I seem hurt to you?"
"You seem ridiculous to me..."
Jim gets his hand inside Bones's pants, his hand around his cock, and Bones still doesn't dial back the aggro.
"I'll let you scan me, ok?" Jim says on a down stroke. "Just," Jim presses his mouth to the corner of Bones's mouth. "Just do this first. Then I'll let you, I swear." Jim is used to making promises during sex. He actually means it this time. Bones relaxes and his eyes drop closed in what Jim assumes is permission to kiss him. Jim smiles into it.
*
It's only after they fuck the first time that Jim understands how unimportant that part of their relationship is. This is a huge mindfuck for him. He's framed his life by being the kind of person who has no sexual hang ups. Then he woke up one day and realized his entire life was actually framed by being the guy who has a huge sexual hang up. Well, damn.
Anyway, personal growth. That's what the brass claims the Academy is for--figuring yourself out before you fuck up the universe with space grudges and personal agendas. Suuuure. Jim's sure everyone comes out of the Academy totally self-aware and ready to man space ships with guns that can blow up planets.
"Goddamn it, Jim, could you be a little less explicit in your description of our sex life to Gaila? What I have to endure on a daily basis surpasses understanding..."
Jim is starting to realize that life gets lived in the frenzy and stillness where self-awareness escapes a person. You have to be ready to make the right choices in moments where right is reflexive. You can't become that kind of person on your own.