What Was Done in Capernaum (Kirk/f, Kirk/McCoy; ST:XI; NC-17) 1/3
“Flat is just one of many ways hair can be,” Kirk said, gesturing to the server for another round. “Open yourself to the possibilities.”
McCoy had in fact opened himself to many possibilities that evening: the possibility that a three-armed barber might be able to shave you while cutting your hair; the possibility that Kirk had dragged him to the worst bar in an already miserable spaceport; and the possibility that Kirk wasn’t going to let him leave until he at least tried to approach one of the female patrons, not all of whom appeared to be completely female.
The server returned. “Drink up,” Kirk said. “You’re falling behind.”
“You’re drinking beer.”
“I’m driving us home. I am presuming you want me sober for that.” The little spaceport, as an anti-theft measure, didn’t allow beaming. McCoy had travelled to the surface his second-least-favorite way, in the Galileo, piloted with admitted competence and care by Kirk himself. Since the whole stop was going to take fewer than 12 hours, Kirk had not ordered general shore leave. And since two of those hours had been taken up by Scotty insisting loudly and at times almost incomprehensibly that he would chain himself to the nacelles in protest if the captain allowed the shield generator to be repaired at a commercial spaceport, that left just enough time for a long-promised (and by McCoy, much-dreaded) night out.
“Hey.” Kirk nudged his elbow. “Over there. Don’t look. Table by the mud pit.”
“What, her?” McCoy, gazing sideways, saw a round-faced blonde, alone, poking at her drink with a straw. “She looks completely miserable.”
“Exactly! So you go over to her and say, ‘Do you hate this place as much as I do? My asshole friend forced me to come here. Let’s go somewhere quiet for coffee and talk about how misunderstood we are.’ Works every time, trust me.”
“So your dating advice is that I should take advantage of lonely, desperate women?”
“’Take advantage?’ Her friends went off to dance and she’s holding their purses. It would be an act of mercy.”
McCoy took a jab at his own drink, something the bar called bourbon but that tasted more like fusel oil. “Maybe she wants to be left alone. Some people do, you know.”
“Fine,” Kirk sighed. “You can give a horse a decent haircut, but you can’t make him drink, apparently. Here,” he said, pushing his glass toward McCoy. “Hold my purse.”
Kirk stood and straightened his shirt, a pre-battle gesture that had transferred to civilian clothes, and moved toward the bar. The crowd parted for him and McCoy saw his target: a striking, dark-skinned woman in a leather jacket, sipping a blue drink.
The crowd recondensed, but McCoy didn’t need to watch to know what was happening. It was a familiar little drama, one he had seen countless times. Act 1, Kirk deploys a brain-melting smile and makes a remark witty enough to appeal to the woman’s intelligence but smutty enough to make his intentions plain. Act 2, Kirk engages her in small talk on any of the 1,000 subjects he knows at least a little about, causing her to step up her game and try a little harder than she might have otherwise. Act 3, Kirk moves as close as humanly possible without touching, triggering a well-documented physiological reaction usually expressed as “Does it seem hot in here to you?” Act 4, the niceties of getting out of the bar, including reassuring the woman’s friends that Kirk wasn’t a handsome psychopath. Here, McCoy could be of some help. He was Nature’s perfect wingman-gentlemanly, a bit older, able to hold his liquor and a conversation, and content to make his way home alone at the end of the evening. By the time they reached the final act, McCoy had long since left the stage.
While the scene was playing out in McCoy’s imagination, Kirk returned, holding the payment chip they’d need to get out the door.
“Well, that was easy. Her name’s Rayel, she’s been in town for eight days and she’s bored out of her mind. And she’s invited us back to her hotel room, so I did your job for you, you’re welcome.”
“Invited us back for what, exactly?”
“Chess. A calculus bee. I don’t think so. The lady is looking for company. Did I mention she’s extremely bored?”
“I don’t care how bored the lady is. I have no interest in doing…anything with her, especially after you- I can’t believe you’re suggesting that. If you want to- Well, fine. But I’m waiting in the shuttlecraft.” McCoy crossed his arms and tried to look resolute.
“See, that’s exactly why I keyed it to my biometrics,” Kirk said patiently. “There will be no waiting in shuttlecraft, or passive-aggressive sulking. There will be sex, and some of it will involve you, or at least occur in your general vicinity.”
“You can’t make me,” McCoy said, sounding petulant to his own ears.
“What’s that -a challenge? So be it.” Kirk drained his glass and slammed it on the table. “You are going to be in the same room with a naked woman before the night is out or my name isn’t David Santelli.”
“Who?”
“That’s the name I gave her. Easier that way.” Before McCoy could reach out to stop him, Kirk had turned on his heel and gone back to the bar, returning a few moments later with the lady in question who, it turned out, was what his mother would have described as “statuesque.”
“Bones, this is Rayel. She’s a freighter pilot, isn’t that interesting? Rayel, my friend Dr. Leonard McCoy.”
“Pleased to meet you, ma’am.” She smiled and gave him her hand; the palm was dry and slightly calloused.
“Aren’t you sweet. You boys must be from that Federation starship that just pulled in.”
“The Enterprise, yes,” Kirk said unstoppably. “Heading out in the morning.”
“Lucky you. I’m probably stuck another two weeks in this rat trap, thanks to our dickhead captain--pardon my language, doctor. Three weeks to rebuild a hull that never would have corroded in the first place if he hadn’t been such a fucking idiot.” She made a “captains, what can you do?” gesture with her well-manicured hands. “Shall we get out of here? I’d offer to show you around, but this is about as good as it gets. Have you been in that reptoid bar down the street? Hot as hell and full of lizards singing karaoke.”
They gathered their jackets and headed out into the night. At first, the cold, dry air was a relief, but that only lasted a few breaths. After the atmosphere-controlled bar, the dry, oxygen-poor atmosphere was like stepping off an elevator onto a mountain. Rayel and Kirk walked slowly, keeping up a lazy conversation, engines idling. McCoy, feeling third wheel-ish as well as lightheaded, dropped back a few paces, but Kirk waved him forward, wrapping his right arm around McCoy’s neck as he pulled him level, keeping his left around Rayel’s waist. They were not the only little cluster of beings on the wide, dusty street, which had the appearance of a very strange party breaking up.
They reached Rayel’s hotel, an ugly biostone block five stories high, and took the little lift pad at the corner to the third floor.
“It’s not going to be any better than you expect.” she said apologetically, swiping her finger over the keypad and waiting for the double doors to open.
It wasn’t any worse than McCoy expected either, a sparse little apartment furnished in the clumsily generic “Earth” style that reminded McCoy of some sort of human zoo. Rayel made polite but perfunctory noises about drinks and making themselves comfortable. Kirk had already excused himself to the bathroom, presumably to apply the dermal barrier gel McCoy knew he was carrying. McCoy also knew Kirk was on oral contraceptives, having prescribed them himself. The thought made him feel a little like a bodyguard dispatched by Starfleet to guard Kirk’s sexual health, though in fact Kirk had always been responsible on that score. The Adanian pox was one of the few things he could be certain would not kill James Kirk.
“Why don’t you lie down, honey?” Rayel said, rubbing his arm. “You look a little pale.” He nodded and sat down on the small sofa, starting to swing his legs to the right and then stopping halfway when he realized that would create a line of sight directly toward the bed.
Rayel propped a throw pillow against the arm of the sofa and patted it. “Go on, now,” she said gently. “He wants you to watch.” McCoy complied, obedient as a child. His head felt better immediately. She brought him a glass of water, and he decided on the spot to accept the version of events so clearly written on her face: she had brought home two men, decent and safe, one with an innocent kink and the other passive enough not to interfere. She didn’t need to understand more, and for the moment, neither did he. Far easier to lie back, close his eyes and wait out whatever was about to happen than to introspect the subtleties of Jim Kirk’s mind, wondering what mission objective, tomorrow or a year from now, might hinge on McCoy engaging in sex-by-proxy in this drab little room.
Kirk emerged from the bathroom, flashed McCoy a brief smile that told him nothing, and walked toward Rayel, cupping her elbows in his palms and pulling her close. The kiss that followed left McCoy with a curious dissonance; he knew what Kirk’s lips felt like, but these kisses were different, not a seduction but a prelude to something expected, necessary yet predictable as a launch procedure. They undressed each other with the same practiced efficiency, falling into sync so easily that McCoy recognized a familiar alienation that had nothing to do with sex. Here, it was not his unexamined lack of desire alone that made McCoy an outsider.
They were both naked now. Rayel was beautiful, as all women are beautiful. She was wide-shouldered, broad-hipped, and full-breasted, and Kirk spanned her waist with his pale hands, delineating the curves of her body in the dim light. They walked each over to the bed and he sat down first, pulling her into his lap so he could cup and kiss her breasts, and McCoy watched her back arch in pleasure.
He let the strange shifts in perspective play over him like firelight. When Kirk rolled onto the bed with Rayel on top of him, McCoy remembered the soft fullness of his wife’s breasts against his chest. When Kirk knelt between her legs, McCoy felt a twitch of arousal as his cock channeled the memory of Kirk’s mouth, hot and engulfing. But when he entered her with fluid, masculine grace, weight on his arms, hips dipping again and again, making the beautiful woman beneath him moan, McCoy thought, How can I not want that? He lay there, helpless, like the victim of a curse, a wounded king.
They were both quiet when they came, either by nature or from years of living in close quarters. Kirk threw his head back, eyes open and startlingly blue, mouth parted in a soundless cry, and McCoy felt a pang of something unnamable. Then he lowered himself, already regaining control, onto the woman’s body beneath him, and she wrapped her arms around his waist, willing the pleasure to continue. McCoy was half-hard by this point, cock as muddled and indecisive as his brain. How Kirk’s own had managed against the planet’s low oxygen McCoy didn’t know, except that like the man himself, it was likely used to performing under extreme conditions.
Kirk whispered something to Rayel that made her laugh, rocked his hips a few times before withdrawing, then rolled over onto his back next to her, the two barely fitting in the narrow bed. After a few minutes he rose and, without a glance at McCoy, headed for the bathroom. Rayel lay for a few moments longer with her arm draped across her eyes, then got up and wrapped herself in a thin, grey robe and padded over to McCoy.
Stopping down beside him, she said, “Are you okay, honey?”
“I’m fine, thank you.” Her eyes were bright, and she smelled of sex; he was unsure what else to say to her.
“Listen, you don’t need advice from me. You’re the one who knows him. But in my experience, it’s when he stops wanting you around that you have to worry. This? This isn’t cheating, unless you turn it into that, and I think you’re too smart. You’d have to be, to keep a man like that.”
“We’re not-“ McCoy began, and stopped.
Rayel waited patiently for a moment, and when McCoy could not find a word, stroked a hand through his hair and said, “You’re very sweet. He’s lucky to have you.” She walked back toward the bed just as Kirk exited the bathroom, unselfconsciously naked, and caught her and kissed her with an easy familiarity that was a wonder and a trouble to McCoy. She frowned a little when he began to get dressed.
“You can’t stay a little longer?”
“No. Our dickhead captain’s expecting us back.” She laughed at that and held his hand as they walked to the door. McCoy levered himself carefully off the sofa, his head staying clear of a hypoxic rush, and grabbed his jacket. He carefully avoided Kirk’s eyes, a hard thing to do in the little space, as if it were he who had something to be embarrassed about, not the man who’d just had sex with a stranger in front of his best friend.
They parted from Rayel at the door. She kissed them each on the lips, McCoy last, briefly clasping his hand and saying, “Take care of yourself.”
They were silent on the walk back to the shuttlecraft. The weather had, of course, not changed, and there was no other topic McCoy felt comfortable introducing. Kirk walked easy and loose-limbed, more physically relaxed than contemplative.
McCoy took the co-pilot’s seat and watched Kirk go through the pre-flight procedures. He was so focused on Kirk’s long fingers moving over the controls that he forgot to have his usual Pavlovian response to the whine of the anti-gravs and barely noticed when the ground dropped away as if they were on an immensely tall ferris wheel. At 3,000 meters, Kirk locked in the return course and the shuttlecraft began to move forward, the inertial dampeners as usual denying McCoy’s body any reference he could make sense of except a gradual widening of the horizon as they moved toward day.
Kirk leaned back in the pilot’s seat, put his hands behind his neck, and said, “So how mad at me are you?”
McCoy thought about that; anger hadn’t been among the responses he’d been considering. “I’m not mad, I don’t think. I just-- I don’t know what you want from me.”
“I want you to make the tiniest effort to stop wallowing in your own misery long enough to, I don’t know, enjoy something,” he said flatly.
“What do you mean, wallowing?”
“You got your heart stomped, and you joined the Foreign Legion to forget. I get it,” he said, his jaw setting into a hard line the way it did when he argued with Spock. “But you’re not forgetting. You’re turning it into some kind of fetish, like you’re so fucking enchanted with all this great drama you had in your life that an actual human being can’t possibly compete.”
“I’m sorry,” McCoy said stiffly, “but I’m not you. I was never the kind of guy who wanted anonymous sex with strangers he met in bars.”
“It was not anonymous. There were most definitely names involved.”
McCoy gave him a little twist of a smile. “Yes, mine. The point is, that’s not what I’m looking for. What I’m looking for is-“
“Don’t say ‘love.’”
“Why not? Just because you-“
“Oh, here it comes,” Kirk said, rolling his eyes. “I’ve never been in love so I couldn’t possible understand the glorious misery of blah blah blah. You know what? It’s been almost half a decade since that woman left you, and it’s like she got your heart and your balls in the divorce.”
“Some day, when you’ve been in love yourself, you’ll understand.”
“I can’t believe you just said that,” Kirk said in mock amazement. “It’s like dialogue from one of those Andorian telenovelas.”
“It’s the truth, and I do not watch those.” McCoy folded his arms across his chest, a belated defensive move. “Why do you care so much, anyway?” Kirk was silent for a few moments, checking the instruments and manually adjusting the warp as the shuttlecraft rounded the day side of the planet, heading back into night.
“Because that’s the one thing I can’t promise you. People don’t go into space to find love. There are a lot of things that get in the way, like vast distances and monsters and being in a fucking ship that travels. But there are so many other things out here that are amazing, and I’m afraid that you’re sleepwalking through the whole experience. That you’re going to miss it.”
“Miss what?”
“This.” Kirk swung the ship in a wide, ascending arc, angling down on the return so that the nose of the shuttle tilted down toward the planet. The system’s star was rising over the edge of the world, radiating knives of brilliance over the barren planet. Cloudless and featureless, lacking water to sustain more than the little spaceport, it looked untouched and primordial. Around them, however, clustered spacecraft of all shapes and sizes, some connected to the dock, others at anchor. A line of smaller craft trailed away to the planet’s surface, weaving around each other like silver fireflies. And almost at the edge of their vision, directly overhead, hung the Enterprise, gleaming white, her shape already signifying home more truly than the sphere of the alien world below.
McCoy knew what Kirk wanted him to say. He didn’t even need to say it; a few words from him would likely unleash one of Kirk’s infrequent, spooky soliloquies on the dangerous beauty of space. He didn’t say them. Instead, he asked, “Who was David Santelli?”
Kirk glanced at him sharply, then looked back at the viewscreen. “A kid I went to high school with. He died in a harvester accident senior year.”
“Friend of yours?”
“Not really. I just like the name David.”
“And using his name when you fuck strangers-that’s supposed to be what, a tribute?”
“Being captain…it’s not what I do, it’s what I am. I can’t-“ he struggled for words. “I can’t ever walk away from it. Not that I want to. But it’s not who I want to be when I’m in bed with someone.”
“Who do you want to be, then? A kid who never left Iowa?”
Kirk tensed a bit and he frowned, focus turned inward as if searching for an answer. But then his eyes drifting upward to where the Enterprise hung like a white ghost, and his lips curved into a smile as he reached for the thruster controls.
“Let’s go home.”
Part 2
McCoy had in fact opened himself to many possibilities that evening: the possibility that a three-armed barber might be able to shave you while cutting your hair; the possibility that Kirk had dragged him to the worst bar in an already miserable spaceport; and the possibility that Kirk wasn’t going to let him leave until he at least tried to approach one of the female patrons, not all of whom appeared to be completely female.
The server returned. “Drink up,” Kirk said. “You’re falling behind.”
“You’re drinking beer.”
“I’m driving us home. I am presuming you want me sober for that.” The little spaceport, as an anti-theft measure, didn’t allow beaming. McCoy had travelled to the surface his second-least-favorite way, in the Galileo, piloted with admitted competence and care by Kirk himself. Since the whole stop was going to take fewer than 12 hours, Kirk had not ordered general shore leave. And since two of those hours had been taken up by Scotty insisting loudly and at times almost incomprehensibly that he would chain himself to the nacelles in protest if the captain allowed the shield generator to be repaired at a commercial spaceport, that left just enough time for a long-promised (and by McCoy, much-dreaded) night out.
“Hey.” Kirk nudged his elbow. “Over there. Don’t look. Table by the mud pit.”
“What, her?” McCoy, gazing sideways, saw a round-faced blonde, alone, poking at her drink with a straw. “She looks completely miserable.”
“Exactly! So you go over to her and say, ‘Do you hate this place as much as I do? My asshole friend forced me to come here. Let’s go somewhere quiet for coffee and talk about how misunderstood we are.’ Works every time, trust me.”
“So your dating advice is that I should take advantage of lonely, desperate women?”
“’Take advantage?’ Her friends went off to dance and she’s holding their purses. It would be an act of mercy.”
McCoy took a jab at his own drink, something the bar called bourbon but that tasted more like fusel oil. “Maybe she wants to be left alone. Some people do, you know.”
“Fine,” Kirk sighed. “You can give a horse a decent haircut, but you can’t make him drink, apparently. Here,” he said, pushing his glass toward McCoy. “Hold my purse.”
Kirk stood and straightened his shirt, a pre-battle gesture that had transferred to civilian clothes, and moved toward the bar. The crowd parted for him and McCoy saw his target: a striking, dark-skinned woman in a leather jacket, sipping a blue drink.
The crowd recondensed, but McCoy didn’t need to watch to know what was happening. It was a familiar little drama, one he had seen countless times. Act 1, Kirk deploys a brain-melting smile and makes a remark witty enough to appeal to the woman’s intelligence but smutty enough to make his intentions plain. Act 2, Kirk engages her in small talk on any of the 1,000 subjects he knows at least a little about, causing her to step up her game and try a little harder than she might have otherwise. Act 3, Kirk moves as close as humanly possible without touching, triggering a well-documented physiological reaction usually expressed as “Does it seem hot in here to you?” Act 4, the niceties of getting out of the bar, including reassuring the woman’s friends that Kirk wasn’t a handsome psychopath. Here, McCoy could be of some help. He was Nature’s perfect wingman-gentlemanly, a bit older, able to hold his liquor and a conversation, and content to make his way home alone at the end of the evening. By the time they reached the final act, McCoy had long since left the stage.
While the scene was playing out in McCoy’s imagination, Kirk returned, holding the payment chip they’d need to get out the door.
“Well, that was easy. Her name’s Rayel, she’s been in town for eight days and she’s bored out of her mind. And she’s invited us back to her hotel room, so I did your job for you, you’re welcome.”
“Invited us back for what, exactly?”
“Chess. A calculus bee. I don’t think so. The lady is looking for company. Did I mention she’s extremely bored?”
“I don’t care how bored the lady is. I have no interest in doing…anything with her, especially after you- I can’t believe you’re suggesting that. If you want to- Well, fine. But I’m waiting in the shuttlecraft.” McCoy crossed his arms and tried to look resolute.
“See, that’s exactly why I keyed it to my biometrics,” Kirk said patiently. “There will be no waiting in shuttlecraft, or passive-aggressive sulking. There will be sex, and some of it will involve you, or at least occur in your general vicinity.”
“You can’t make me,” McCoy said, sounding petulant to his own ears.
“What’s that -a challenge? So be it.” Kirk drained his glass and slammed it on the table. “You are going to be in the same room with a naked woman before the night is out or my name isn’t David Santelli.”
“Who?”
“That’s the name I gave her. Easier that way.” Before McCoy could reach out to stop him, Kirk had turned on his heel and gone back to the bar, returning a few moments later with the lady in question who, it turned out, was what his mother would have described as “statuesque.”
“Bones, this is Rayel. She’s a freighter pilot, isn’t that interesting? Rayel, my friend Dr. Leonard McCoy.”
“Pleased to meet you, ma’am.” She smiled and gave him her hand; the palm was dry and slightly calloused.
“Aren’t you sweet. You boys must be from that Federation starship that just pulled in.”
“The Enterprise, yes,” Kirk said unstoppably. “Heading out in the morning.”
“Lucky you. I’m probably stuck another two weeks in this rat trap, thanks to our dickhead captain--pardon my language, doctor. Three weeks to rebuild a hull that never would have corroded in the first place if he hadn’t been such a fucking idiot.” She made a “captains, what can you do?” gesture with her well-manicured hands. “Shall we get out of here? I’d offer to show you around, but this is about as good as it gets. Have you been in that reptoid bar down the street? Hot as hell and full of lizards singing karaoke.”
They gathered their jackets and headed out into the night. At first, the cold, dry air was a relief, but that only lasted a few breaths. After the atmosphere-controlled bar, the dry, oxygen-poor atmosphere was like stepping off an elevator onto a mountain. Rayel and Kirk walked slowly, keeping up a lazy conversation, engines idling. McCoy, feeling third wheel-ish as well as lightheaded, dropped back a few paces, but Kirk waved him forward, wrapping his right arm around McCoy’s neck as he pulled him level, keeping his left around Rayel’s waist. They were not the only little cluster of beings on the wide, dusty street, which had the appearance of a very strange party breaking up.
They reached Rayel’s hotel, an ugly biostone block five stories high, and took the little lift pad at the corner to the third floor.
“It’s not going to be any better than you expect.” she said apologetically, swiping her finger over the keypad and waiting for the double doors to open.
It wasn’t any worse than McCoy expected either, a sparse little apartment furnished in the clumsily generic “Earth” style that reminded McCoy of some sort of human zoo. Rayel made polite but perfunctory noises about drinks and making themselves comfortable. Kirk had already excused himself to the bathroom, presumably to apply the dermal barrier gel McCoy knew he was carrying. McCoy also knew Kirk was on oral contraceptives, having prescribed them himself. The thought made him feel a little like a bodyguard dispatched by Starfleet to guard Kirk’s sexual health, though in fact Kirk had always been responsible on that score. The Adanian pox was one of the few things he could be certain would not kill James Kirk.
“Why don’t you lie down, honey?” Rayel said, rubbing his arm. “You look a little pale.” He nodded and sat down on the small sofa, starting to swing his legs to the right and then stopping halfway when he realized that would create a line of sight directly toward the bed.
Rayel propped a throw pillow against the arm of the sofa and patted it. “Go on, now,” she said gently. “He wants you to watch.” McCoy complied, obedient as a child. His head felt better immediately. She brought him a glass of water, and he decided on the spot to accept the version of events so clearly written on her face: she had brought home two men, decent and safe, one with an innocent kink and the other passive enough not to interfere. She didn’t need to understand more, and for the moment, neither did he. Far easier to lie back, close his eyes and wait out whatever was about to happen than to introspect the subtleties of Jim Kirk’s mind, wondering what mission objective, tomorrow or a year from now, might hinge on McCoy engaging in sex-by-proxy in this drab little room.
Kirk emerged from the bathroom, flashed McCoy a brief smile that told him nothing, and walked toward Rayel, cupping her elbows in his palms and pulling her close. The kiss that followed left McCoy with a curious dissonance; he knew what Kirk’s lips felt like, but these kisses were different, not a seduction but a prelude to something expected, necessary yet predictable as a launch procedure. They undressed each other with the same practiced efficiency, falling into sync so easily that McCoy recognized a familiar alienation that had nothing to do with sex. Here, it was not his unexamined lack of desire alone that made McCoy an outsider.
They were both naked now. Rayel was beautiful, as all women are beautiful. She was wide-shouldered, broad-hipped, and full-breasted, and Kirk spanned her waist with his pale hands, delineating the curves of her body in the dim light. They walked each over to the bed and he sat down first, pulling her into his lap so he could cup and kiss her breasts, and McCoy watched her back arch in pleasure.
He let the strange shifts in perspective play over him like firelight. When Kirk rolled onto the bed with Rayel on top of him, McCoy remembered the soft fullness of his wife’s breasts against his chest. When Kirk knelt between her legs, McCoy felt a twitch of arousal as his cock channeled the memory of Kirk’s mouth, hot and engulfing. But when he entered her with fluid, masculine grace, weight on his arms, hips dipping again and again, making the beautiful woman beneath him moan, McCoy thought, How can I not want that? He lay there, helpless, like the victim of a curse, a wounded king.
They were both quiet when they came, either by nature or from years of living in close quarters. Kirk threw his head back, eyes open and startlingly blue, mouth parted in a soundless cry, and McCoy felt a pang of something unnamable. Then he lowered himself, already regaining control, onto the woman’s body beneath him, and she wrapped her arms around his waist, willing the pleasure to continue. McCoy was half-hard by this point, cock as muddled and indecisive as his brain. How Kirk’s own had managed against the planet’s low oxygen McCoy didn’t know, except that like the man himself, it was likely used to performing under extreme conditions.
Kirk whispered something to Rayel that made her laugh, rocked his hips a few times before withdrawing, then rolled over onto his back next to her, the two barely fitting in the narrow bed. After a few minutes he rose and, without a glance at McCoy, headed for the bathroom. Rayel lay for a few moments longer with her arm draped across her eyes, then got up and wrapped herself in a thin, grey robe and padded over to McCoy.
Stopping down beside him, she said, “Are you okay, honey?”
“I’m fine, thank you.” Her eyes were bright, and she smelled of sex; he was unsure what else to say to her.
“Listen, you don’t need advice from me. You’re the one who knows him. But in my experience, it’s when he stops wanting you around that you have to worry. This? This isn’t cheating, unless you turn it into that, and I think you’re too smart. You’d have to be, to keep a man like that.”
“We’re not-“ McCoy began, and stopped.
Rayel waited patiently for a moment, and when McCoy could not find a word, stroked a hand through his hair and said, “You’re very sweet. He’s lucky to have you.” She walked back toward the bed just as Kirk exited the bathroom, unselfconsciously naked, and caught her and kissed her with an easy familiarity that was a wonder and a trouble to McCoy. She frowned a little when he began to get dressed.
“You can’t stay a little longer?”
“No. Our dickhead captain’s expecting us back.” She laughed at that and held his hand as they walked to the door. McCoy levered himself carefully off the sofa, his head staying clear of a hypoxic rush, and grabbed his jacket. He carefully avoided Kirk’s eyes, a hard thing to do in the little space, as if it were he who had something to be embarrassed about, not the man who’d just had sex with a stranger in front of his best friend.
They parted from Rayel at the door. She kissed them each on the lips, McCoy last, briefly clasping his hand and saying, “Take care of yourself.”
They were silent on the walk back to the shuttlecraft. The weather had, of course, not changed, and there was no other topic McCoy felt comfortable introducing. Kirk walked easy and loose-limbed, more physically relaxed than contemplative.
McCoy took the co-pilot’s seat and watched Kirk go through the pre-flight procedures. He was so focused on Kirk’s long fingers moving over the controls that he forgot to have his usual Pavlovian response to the whine of the anti-gravs and barely noticed when the ground dropped away as if they were on an immensely tall ferris wheel. At 3,000 meters, Kirk locked in the return course and the shuttlecraft began to move forward, the inertial dampeners as usual denying McCoy’s body any reference he could make sense of except a gradual widening of the horizon as they moved toward day.
Kirk leaned back in the pilot’s seat, put his hands behind his neck, and said, “So how mad at me are you?”
McCoy thought about that; anger hadn’t been among the responses he’d been considering. “I’m not mad, I don’t think. I just-- I don’t know what you want from me.”
“I want you to make the tiniest effort to stop wallowing in your own misery long enough to, I don’t know, enjoy something,” he said flatly.
“What do you mean, wallowing?”
“You got your heart stomped, and you joined the Foreign Legion to forget. I get it,” he said, his jaw setting into a hard line the way it did when he argued with Spock. “But you’re not forgetting. You’re turning it into some kind of fetish, like you’re so fucking enchanted with all this great drama you had in your life that an actual human being can’t possibly compete.”
“I’m sorry,” McCoy said stiffly, “but I’m not you. I was never the kind of guy who wanted anonymous sex with strangers he met in bars.”
“It was not anonymous. There were most definitely names involved.”
McCoy gave him a little twist of a smile. “Yes, mine. The point is, that’s not what I’m looking for. What I’m looking for is-“
“Don’t say ‘love.’”
“Why not? Just because you-“
“Oh, here it comes,” Kirk said, rolling his eyes. “I’ve never been in love so I couldn’t possible understand the glorious misery of blah blah blah. You know what? It’s been almost half a decade since that woman left you, and it’s like she got your heart and your balls in the divorce.”
“Some day, when you’ve been in love yourself, you’ll understand.”
“I can’t believe you just said that,” Kirk said in mock amazement. “It’s like dialogue from one of those Andorian telenovelas.”
“It’s the truth, and I do not watch those.” McCoy folded his arms across his chest, a belated defensive move. “Why do you care so much, anyway?” Kirk was silent for a few moments, checking the instruments and manually adjusting the warp as the shuttlecraft rounded the day side of the planet, heading back into night.
“Because that’s the one thing I can’t promise you. People don’t go into space to find love. There are a lot of things that get in the way, like vast distances and monsters and being in a fucking ship that travels. But there are so many other things out here that are amazing, and I’m afraid that you’re sleepwalking through the whole experience. That you’re going to miss it.”
“Miss what?”
“This.” Kirk swung the ship in a wide, ascending arc, angling down on the return so that the nose of the shuttle tilted down toward the planet. The system’s star was rising over the edge of the world, radiating knives of brilliance over the barren planet. Cloudless and featureless, lacking water to sustain more than the little spaceport, it looked untouched and primordial. Around them, however, clustered spacecraft of all shapes and sizes, some connected to the dock, others at anchor. A line of smaller craft trailed away to the planet’s surface, weaving around each other like silver fireflies. And almost at the edge of their vision, directly overhead, hung the Enterprise, gleaming white, her shape already signifying home more truly than the sphere of the alien world below.
McCoy knew what Kirk wanted him to say. He didn’t even need to say it; a few words from him would likely unleash one of Kirk’s infrequent, spooky soliloquies on the dangerous beauty of space. He didn’t say them. Instead, he asked, “Who was David Santelli?”
Kirk glanced at him sharply, then looked back at the viewscreen. “A kid I went to high school with. He died in a harvester accident senior year.”
“Friend of yours?”
“Not really. I just like the name David.”
“And using his name when you fuck strangers-that’s supposed to be what, a tribute?”
“Being captain…it’s not what I do, it’s what I am. I can’t-“ he struggled for words. “I can’t ever walk away from it. Not that I want to. But it’s not who I want to be when I’m in bed with someone.”
“Who do you want to be, then? A kid who never left Iowa?”
Kirk tensed a bit and he frowned, focus turned inward as if searching for an answer. But then his eyes drifting upward to where the Enterprise hung like a white ghost, and his lips curved into a smile as he reached for the thruster controls.
“Let’s go home.”
Part 2