Fic: This is Home - Part One (ST: XI, R)
Title: This Is Home: Part One
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy(UST), multiple
Rating: R
Betas: near_family, and leftarrow, who have harassed, hand-held and nursed my procrastination-tastic ass through pretty much every fic I've written. They were invaluable for this one. Thanks to pororoca who helped me finally get this thing done.
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters nor do I court any profits with this fanwork.
oOo
This Is Home
Part One: A Hot Mess
oOo
Stardate: 2245
Kodos chooses them because they are special.
That is what he says when Jim survives another simulation, when Carol vomits blood and Thomas starts seeing things, when Gary screams as his eyes turn silver and Kevin assembles a sub-space communicator with two broken fingers - when Lenore poisons the guard in their fifth attempt at escape.
Through the guilt, hunger, and needles, Kodos tells them they are the future.
oOo
Stardate: 2260
Time: 0445
Truly, Captain Jim Kirk thinks as he is ushered through the police station to the holding cells truly, this is the best of all possible fucking worlds.
His uniformed escort, a young Andorian officer with an obvious limp and a warp drive equation scribbled in bright pink across his face, abandons Jim half way down the hall. Jim would like to think that's because he's imposing and scary and the police officer just doesn't want to witness the captain-y wrath that surely awaits the occupants of cell 208. But it's probably just the growing stench. Stale beer, wet gutter, and the sour tinge of sweat - the offensive, universally recognized stink of those who were up to no good and too stupid not to get caught doing it.
Jim breathes through his mouth and takes stock of the carnage.
Slumped like road kill and rapidly grossifying in their own funk, are his senior bridge crew in various states of unconsciousness and undress. Chekov is slumped against Sulu in nothing but his Starfleet regulation underwear, a pink felt tip pen tucked jauntily behind his ear and a smile that is frankly, unnerving. The entire left side of Sulu's face is caked in a blue smear of suspicious origin. Scotty is sprawled face down on the floor, knees in and ass up. It's vaguely obscene. Uhura is on Spock's lap, face plastered to his neck, snoring wetly. Her boots are gone along with five inches of hair. Spock, of course, is pristine which does absolutely nothing to offset the horrifying reality of his quiet singing as he gently pets Uhura's back, totally oblivious to the eight kinds of ick on her uniform.
And then there's Bones. Shit-faced and drooling, Bones is ridiculously fuckable, and Jim makes a firm, captain-y decision not to notice that.
Moving on.
“Good morning, assholes!” Jim's singsong greeting is met with moans, and whimpering - a general cacophony of despair. This is right and proper.
Bones' gravely voice surfaces amongst the groans of blossoming hangovers.“Oh, fuck. Jim, use your inside voice.”
Spock and Chekov are the only ones able to bring themselves to stand at attention. Jim appreciates the gesture, even if the effect is dampened somewhat by Chekov's lack of pants and Spock still holding Uhura, who has yet to grace him with her consciousness. Sulu just stares at Chekov, obviously befuddled by the no pants situation.
Scotty grunts, roles over, and scratches himself.
“You all suck,” Jim announces. “I want you to know that. I fought tooth and nail to get every one of you on my awesome ship. I bribed, flirted and maybe groped a couple people I'm not proud of -”
“Classy, Jim.”
“And this is the thanks I get? You get arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct - on Risa? How is that even possible?”
Bones slides his forearms through the bars and leans his forehead against the iron, hair mussed, crooked smile full of dirty possibilities. “Aw, pookey, could just say ya missed us.”
“That's Captain Pookey, and fuck you, I could be sleeping right now. Someone explain to me why I am not sleeping right now.”
Silence. Unless he counts Uhura, who mumbles something impressively filthy in Klingon.
“Erm.”
“What's that, Lieutenant Sulu? I couldn't hear you over the epic fail.”
Sulu blanches and makes an obvious attempt to man up. “It was...” He pauses, face contorting into lines that signify anxiety, which is interesting because Sulu doesn't generally register feelings that fall on the bitch end of the emotional spectrum. “It was the crew of the Valiant. Sir”
And just like that his tongue-tied crew erupts into noise. It's like being yelled at by a drunk, six-headed toddler.
The USS Valiant is crewed by dicks and its captain is their one true prophet. Jim hates that guy like he hates Andorian porn and phasers aimed at his crotch. Four months into their commission Starfleet sent the Enterprise on a cooperative mission with the Valiant to Ferenginar. Pike had neatly summed up the eight-page mission statement by telling Jim that there came a time in every star ship captain's life when he had to shake his ass for a mutually beneficial trade agreement. At the time Jim had truly believed a week of negotiation with the galaxy's best hustlers was totally worth hearing Pike talk about Jim's ass.
It wasn't.
They arrived in the middle of a women's suffrage movement. And plague. It was an infectious disaster wrapped in feminist rage and Captain Esteban was a tool who called Jim “son” and commed Starfleet Command for clearance every five minutes. Just in case his balls started getting any funny ideas about initiative. Sulu called Captain Esteban the Anti-Kirk.
Jim called him an asshole.
The highlight of the clusterfuck had been watching Bones drop trou right there on the bridge and instruct the Valiant's CMO to kiss his goddamn ass, please and thank you. Captain Esteban had demanded that Jim throw Bones in the brig for insubordination, to be followed swiftly by a court martial.
In retrospect, “Blow me,” probably hadn't been the most diplomatic response.
Shit had deteriorated from there. Between the two crews, they had racked up forty-nine reprimands and filed sixty individual complaints against one another. Somewhere around having to pry Scotty off of the Valiant's Chief Engineer and cock blocking the Prime Directive for the sake of Ferengi gender equality, Pike had more or less pissed himself laughing and stopped answering Jim's calls.
“- beam something right up his arse.”
Jim startles and points at Scotty. “No.” This is his serious voice. “No ass beaming, Scotty. We've talked about this.”
“Their behavior is unbecoming of Starfleet officers.”
Bones snorts. “Not that I'm disagree'n here, slim, but you're in a jail cell with a naked Russian.”
“You shut up. And you”, Jim turns his attention to his first officer, funneling as much seething accusation as possible into his index finger,“What the fuck are you doing here? I seem to recall leaving you on the bridge.”
It strikes Jim as unfair that even while holding his unconscious girlfriend, surrounded by filth and debased drunks, Spock can assume a posture of dignified disdain. “Lieutenant Uhura commed at 2100 requesting the presence of a senior officer to ensure that matters did not escalate beyond the parameters of acceptable behavior.”
There is a pause, right before Spock's face projects the kind of emphatic blankness that sets off all of Jim's internal bullshit alarms. “I was also informed that Commander Simon van Gelder was present.”
The Valiant's first officer is a squirrelly, beady-eyed fucking lunatic laboring under the delusion that Spock is secretly a Romulan. Jim's pretty sure that every time Spock tells him to “Live long and prosper”, what he actually means is “Go die in a fire,” which is kind of awesome.
Scotty fixes Jim with a grave stare. “Don'nae be cross, Capt'n. Daffy bastard had it comin'.”
“He had what coming?”
Bones looks way too smug for someone who smells that much like dumpsters and shame. “A dress, some rope and a little public humiliation.”
Yeah, okay. Jim turns to Chekov, who has started doing math on Sulu's shoulder, not at all concerned with the rampant nudity. It's cute and all kinds of disturbing.
Jim knows this question is ridiculous before he even asks it. “Where are your clothes?”
Chekov smiles somewhat dreamily at him.
Sulu perks up. “He gave them to a stripper.”
There is a moment of profound silence while Jim's brain flatly refuses to process that bit of information.
“I am very disappointed in all of you. ”
Sulu grins, blue goo flaking at the edge of his upturned mouth. “We TP'd their shuttle.”
Jim is slightly less disappointed in them.
oOo
Herding the bridge crew out of jail and back to the shuttle is a very special adventure. It's like trying to get drunk cats to walk in a straight line. Bones and Scotty start singing almost immediately and make several abortive attempts to walk and waltz at the same time. Chekov keeps wandering away to do ridiculously complex math with his pink felt tip pen. Even on Risa, it's weird when a mostly naked Russian genius starts drawing algorithms on people's foreheads so Jim orders Sulu to carry him. He does. Piggyback style.
Jim doesn't trust any of them not to set fire to themselves or something expensive, so he sets the auto control on the shuttle craft and sits with them for the trek back up to the Enterprise. He gets there in time to catch Chekov peering speculatively at the blue glob on Sulu's face.
“Do not lick him. You don't know where he's been.”
Scotty laughs so hard he starts snorting uncontrollably. Matters escalate when he snatches Chekov's pen and Sulu attempts to retrieve it. There's cursing and an inspired use of a roll of toilet paper that Jim didn't even know they had. He refuses to speculate on where they were hiding it.
Spock is no goddamn help at all. He just cradles Uhura who wakes up as they break atmosphere. Her smile is sweet and triumphant and a little bit drunk. Spock stares at her like she's the most fascinating thing in the known universe.
Some time after the problem children start to doze off, Bones sighs and rolls his head onto Jim's shoulder, too drunk or too tired to care that he's in a tin-can death trap with a bunch of infants in the cold, merciless vacuum of space and therefore obligated to get his grump on. Instead he uses the fabric of Jim's jacket to absently scratch the side of his nose. He reeks and his hair is gross, but Jim doesn't push him off, just slips his arm around Bones' vaguely sticky shoulders and breathes.
The best of all possible worlds, Jim thinks.
oOo
Time: 0515
Janice Rand is waiting for them in the docking bay wearing her Long-Suffering Yeoman Expression Number Three: A Beat Down Is Seriously Fucking Nigh, James T. Kirk.
Jim may or may not have super glued the door to her quarters shut in order to sneak off ship and retrieve his bridge crew from jail.
“Yeoman Rand! What a pleasant surprise. Did you crawl through the ventilation ducts or did you just glare at the door until it gave up?”
She doesn't even roll her eyes at him. As usual she is completely unmoved and totally fucking cool in the face of Jim's smoldering cheer, from the shiny tips of her regulation boots to the tippy-top of her of no-nonsense hair bun. She tasered him once, when a transporter malfunction gave him a serious case of Rapist and Jim loves her kind of a lot.
There's an eruption of cursing to Jim's right that signifies Christine Chapel has taken charge and is ushering Jim's special, little snowflakes towards Sick-Bay with a judicious application of hypos and medical malpractice, if Bones' pained bitching is anything to go by. Sulu tries to make a run for it, bounding over cargo like a blue smeared half-man, half-deer, all-drunk, freak of athleticism.
Rand catches him by the collar and punts him back towards Chapel without looking up from her PADD.
Once Jim's sure medical has the bridge crew in hand and all attempts at escape have been neatly thwarted, he turns his attention back to Rand. “So, what's the message?”
“No new messages, Captain.” She eyes him in that special way she has that signals she finds Jim in fundamental error, and pulls a hair comb out of seemingly nowhere. Jim doesn't even try to duck it, just holds still and lets her get the whole primate maintenance behavior thing out of her system.
“Really? No messages at all?” It's probably not smart to question her freakishly efficient secretarial skills when she's got a sharp object so close to his eyeballs, but what's life without a little risk?
“No Starfleet memo? Hate mail? Credit-card application? Another requisition for a pony from Engineering?” Jim pauses, considering. “A holo of someone's genitals?” That one earns him a delicate snort and Jim wiggles his eyebrows solicitously.
Rand sighs and the comb vanishes to wherever it is she hides stuff like that. She pointedly checks her PADD again, oozing long-suffering patience under Jim's expectant gaze.
“No. Nothing.”
“That's so weird. I really feel like there should have been a message.”
She looks at him askance as they make their way out of the hanger. “Are you high, sir?”
“What? No. That happened one time,” one awesome time and it's really a damn shame he'll never set foot on Argo again, “can't you let it go?”
oOo
When Jim gets to his quarters he checks the comm, but the things waiting for him there are Pike's last maneuver for the game of Battle Ship they've been playing for over a month and a digital copy of the bail receipt.
He stares at the screen for a long time, strangely distracted by a vague sense of expectancy.
oOo
There's a bulletin board in the mess, a community catalog of shame, glory and assorted shenanigans. Before hitting the bridge for his shift Jim takes a detour and dives into the organized chaos masquerading as the Alpha shift breakfast rush. Jim slaps the bail receipt to the board and grins when several crewmen cheer over their coffee.
Jim surveys the mess after a moment, taking in the sights and sounds of his crew. He indulges in a little captain-y sociology, updating his internal flow chart of who's clearly shacking up with who ( Lt. Cordila Jax from Intra-ecosystems and Ensign Tsu in Xeno-Protocol) and which couples are still on the war path (Angus “Cupcake” Mathews, Tim Smith and Fran Kingsly in Security still aren't eating together and Jim makes a mental note to take Cupcake out for a drink soon).
It doesn't sit right with him all of the sudden - so much food everywhere, plates and forks and wet mouths. The scrape of replicated silverware and messy smack of idle conversation.
Jim doesn't realize he's made it to the turbolift until he's throwing up in it.
He presses his forehead to the cool metal, throat burning, head pounding in time to the frenzied beat of his heart.
“Fuck.”
oOo
Time: 1215
Bones likes to burst in on the bridge like a summer thunderstorm, all noise and rumbling menace, shaking up Jim's sunny day with his grumpy thunder.
“Are you seriously taking those lunatics planet side?”
Jim swivels in the chair and levels Bones with his most professional expression. “If you are referring to the fine people that comprise the Stellar Cartography Department,” Bones rolls his eyes, “Then yes, I am taking those lunatics planet side. They deserve it. They work hard to make sure we don't warp into a sun or something.”
Bones' mouth does that thing it does right before he relays some grim prediction of bodily harm. He does not disappoint.
“You're going to get maimed, Jim. You've got no goddamn self-control when you go out on these little 'department dates' of yours.”
Jim snickers, because he can totally hear the quotations in that sentence and Bones is the best show in town when he gets his doom on, all wild eyebrows and emphatic hand gestures.
“They're going to talk you into something stupid and you're going to get arrested.”
Bones shuts up abruptly, realizing what he just said, and manfully suppressing the grimace he so clearly wants to make at setting himself up like that.
“Speaking from personal experience, doctor?”
There's a moment of silence on the bridge and Jim just smiles, and smiles and smiles.
Finally. “Why do you have to bring up old shit?”
“It makes me feel tingly in my man bits. ”
“Unbelievable.”
oOo
The thing is, yeah - Jim is totally inviting grief and disaster to befall him in court-marshall shaped rations of shit by personally dallying in shenanigans with his crew. But the fact remains that he is physically incapable of living with eight hundred strangers for five years without learning what makes them tick. He tried, for about a week, when the newness of his captaincy was enough to blot out just about everything in his head that wasn't directly related to how not to fuck this up.
The crew roster was an uncharted territory of unknowns and he was itching, from day one, to dive into it, and see who those people were.
The thing is, Jim is greedy. So fucking greedy for this, for being surrounded by so many amazing people who have no choice but to put up with him and his curiosity because it's Jim or the cold crush of space and that's probably fucked up but he'll take what he can get.
Department Dates have been his way of getting to know them, one group at a time.
Xeno-Anthropology was first; they had soberly demanded cake. (Or death. They all laughed uproariously at that and Jim didn't get the joke, but whatever. Cake).
Jim doesn't remember a whole lot from his night out with the medical staff. Christine Chapel fellating a beer bottle is one of his less blurry and more awesome memories. He recalls having to corral one of the med techs into helping him fish M'Benga out of an orgy in the public water fountain of the city they were consequently banned from for life, (which was seventy percent awesome and thirty percent horrifying depending on who he tells that story to and how drunk he is at the time.)
Security made him take them to the ballet. (Jim refuses to discuss it.)
oOo
Time: 2245
Jim's watching the entire Stellar Cartography department drink, dance and dry-hump their way into Enterprise infamy.
They're a freakishly twitchy group of people on the best of days, all rapid talk and squirming energy. Mapping the ship's exact location in the galaxy, and everything in it, is a high stress job, what with having to do it every fifteen seconds. It makes for a very unnerving group of people with scary focus and what Jim suspects are terrifying hobbies. Jim's never managed to hold more than a two- minute conversation with any of them (they don't blink enough and it kind of makes him nauseous) and he's almost completely certain they scare the shit out of Bones. But they hold their liquor like fucking champs and get kicked out of three casinos before they throw themselves, en masse, at the loudest dance club on the strip.
Jim watches the carnage unfold from the relative safety of the bar, throwing back the occasional shot of whiskey. Ensigns Bax'ali and Dinah aren't exactly having sex on the dance floor, but it's a near thing considering where two of Bax'ali's four hands are. The Lieutenant Commander who heads Stellar Cartography begins gyrating in a way that signifies imminent nudity. There are cheers all around. Jim is impressed, and preemptively pissed about having to post bail again when it hits him. The smell of rotting vegetation. His mouth goes dry, and his vision wobbles. The shot glass slips from his fingers and hits the floor with a crack that sounds like the clean snap of bone.
His chest tightens, lungs screaming for air he can't seem to make himself take in. The lights of the club fracture, the scene in front of him tearing like wet paper and his eyes burn with the memory of yellow dirt and saffron skies, bodies spoiling under the hot press of the Tarsus sun.
His hands are shaking, and his face is wet with sweat and tears and he's so fucking terrified he can't make himself care about it, not when the awful techno of the club gives way to the harsher pop of bombs in the distance, never fucking close enough to the walls of the compound to be helpful.
Gary crying because they did something to his eyes and it fucking burns, Jimmy.
Lenore screaming daddy! as the guards drag her down the corridor, her pleas warping into animal desperate noises as Thomas beats his hands against the bars -
And it's not real, it's not real, but he can't -
Jim shoulders his way blindly through the crowd, knocking into people and half tripping over himself, the rational part of his mind noting that Captain Goddamn Kirk is having a panic attack. He can hear himself, the high whine of his strangled breathing over the roar of his heart -
Carol and Kevin huddled against the wall, and she keeps saying hush baby, hush now -
By the time he staggers into the alley he's making stuttering wet gasps for breath, every inhale a flex of razor blades in his chest. There's noise in his head and blood in his mouth and he needs to stop.
Just stop.
Jim plants his hands on the sticky dampness of the wall, finger nails scraping the gritty surface for purchase.
He vomits whiskey in the greasy shadow of the alley, the sounds of his pained retching echoing loud and obscene off the walls. When his stomach is empty he stumbles away from the stink and the mess, legs giving out half way to the other side of the alley.
Jim doesn't know how long he's there, on his knees, completely loosing his shit but when he feels the important pieces of himself slide back into place he almost laughs. Because of fucking course Bones is there, crouched in front of him, the tips of his fingers tracing soothing circles at the nape of Jim's clammy neck.
Of fucking course he is.
Jim wipes his face with a trembling hand, wrung out and strangely hollow. Bones cards his fingers through Jim's sweaty hair, and he just goes for it, tipping forward to rest his forehead against Bones' chest. Those crazy amazing hands don't stop, they just change trajectory, drifting down his shoulders and back up again, tracing warm, Bones-specific messages into Jim's skin.
“What's your name?”
“James Tiberius Kirk.”
“Where are you?”
“Risa.”
“What's the stardate?”
“2260.”
“Who am I?”
“Leonard McCoy.”
There's a pause.
“Who am I?”
“Bones.”
Gary Mitchell, Kevin Riley, Thomas Leighton, Carol Marcus, Lenore Karidian, and Jim - a fucked up incestuous knot of a family, tied up by love and fear and the memories of hunger and he has no fucking idea why he's thinking of them now.
“Jim.”
“I'm okay. Really. Let it go.”
oOo
Bones doesn't let it go.
Part Two: Crying Won't Help You, Praying Won't Do You No Good
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy(UST), multiple
Rating: R
Betas: near_family, and leftarrow, who have harassed, hand-held and nursed my procrastination-tastic ass through pretty much every fic I've written. They were invaluable for this one. Thanks to pororoca who helped me finally get this thing done.
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters nor do I court any profits with this fanwork.
oOo
This Is Home
Part One: A Hot Mess
oOo
Stardate: 2245
Kodos chooses them because they are special.
That is what he says when Jim survives another simulation, when Carol vomits blood and Thomas starts seeing things, when Gary screams as his eyes turn silver and Kevin assembles a sub-space communicator with two broken fingers - when Lenore poisons the guard in their fifth attempt at escape.
Through the guilt, hunger, and needles, Kodos tells them they are the future.
oOo
Stardate: 2260
Time: 0445
Truly, Captain Jim Kirk thinks as he is ushered through the police station to the holding cells truly, this is the best of all possible fucking worlds.
His uniformed escort, a young Andorian officer with an obvious limp and a warp drive equation scribbled in bright pink across his face, abandons Jim half way down the hall. Jim would like to think that's because he's imposing and scary and the police officer just doesn't want to witness the captain-y wrath that surely awaits the occupants of cell 208. But it's probably just the growing stench. Stale beer, wet gutter, and the sour tinge of sweat - the offensive, universally recognized stink of those who were up to no good and too stupid not to get caught doing it.
Jim breathes through his mouth and takes stock of the carnage.
Slumped like road kill and rapidly grossifying in their own funk, are his senior bridge crew in various states of unconsciousness and undress. Chekov is slumped against Sulu in nothing but his Starfleet regulation underwear, a pink felt tip pen tucked jauntily behind his ear and a smile that is frankly, unnerving. The entire left side of Sulu's face is caked in a blue smear of suspicious origin. Scotty is sprawled face down on the floor, knees in and ass up. It's vaguely obscene. Uhura is on Spock's lap, face plastered to his neck, snoring wetly. Her boots are gone along with five inches of hair. Spock, of course, is pristine which does absolutely nothing to offset the horrifying reality of his quiet singing as he gently pets Uhura's back, totally oblivious to the eight kinds of ick on her uniform.
And then there's Bones. Shit-faced and drooling, Bones is ridiculously fuckable, and Jim makes a firm, captain-y decision not to notice that.
Moving on.
“Good morning, assholes!” Jim's singsong greeting is met with moans, and whimpering - a general cacophony of despair. This is right and proper.
Bones' gravely voice surfaces amongst the groans of blossoming hangovers.“Oh, fuck. Jim, use your inside voice.”
Spock and Chekov are the only ones able to bring themselves to stand at attention. Jim appreciates the gesture, even if the effect is dampened somewhat by Chekov's lack of pants and Spock still holding Uhura, who has yet to grace him with her consciousness. Sulu just stares at Chekov, obviously befuddled by the no pants situation.
Scotty grunts, roles over, and scratches himself.
“You all suck,” Jim announces. “I want you to know that. I fought tooth and nail to get every one of you on my awesome ship. I bribed, flirted and maybe groped a couple people I'm not proud of -”
“Classy, Jim.”
“And this is the thanks I get? You get arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct - on Risa? How is that even possible?”
Bones slides his forearms through the bars and leans his forehead against the iron, hair mussed, crooked smile full of dirty possibilities. “Aw, pookey, could just say ya missed us.”
“That's Captain Pookey, and fuck you, I could be sleeping right now. Someone explain to me why I am not sleeping right now.”
Silence. Unless he counts Uhura, who mumbles something impressively filthy in Klingon.
“Erm.”
“What's that, Lieutenant Sulu? I couldn't hear you over the epic fail.”
Sulu blanches and makes an obvious attempt to man up. “It was...” He pauses, face contorting into lines that signify anxiety, which is interesting because Sulu doesn't generally register feelings that fall on the bitch end of the emotional spectrum. “It was the crew of the Valiant. Sir”
And just like that his tongue-tied crew erupts into noise. It's like being yelled at by a drunk, six-headed toddler.
The USS Valiant is crewed by dicks and its captain is their one true prophet. Jim hates that guy like he hates Andorian porn and phasers aimed at his crotch. Four months into their commission Starfleet sent the Enterprise on a cooperative mission with the Valiant to Ferenginar. Pike had neatly summed up the eight-page mission statement by telling Jim that there came a time in every star ship captain's life when he had to shake his ass for a mutually beneficial trade agreement. At the time Jim had truly believed a week of negotiation with the galaxy's best hustlers was totally worth hearing Pike talk about Jim's ass.
It wasn't.
They arrived in the middle of a women's suffrage movement. And plague. It was an infectious disaster wrapped in feminist rage and Captain Esteban was a tool who called Jim “son” and commed Starfleet Command for clearance every five minutes. Just in case his balls started getting any funny ideas about initiative. Sulu called Captain Esteban the Anti-Kirk.
Jim called him an asshole.
The highlight of the clusterfuck had been watching Bones drop trou right there on the bridge and instruct the Valiant's CMO to kiss his goddamn ass, please and thank you. Captain Esteban had demanded that Jim throw Bones in the brig for insubordination, to be followed swiftly by a court martial.
In retrospect, “Blow me,” probably hadn't been the most diplomatic response.
Shit had deteriorated from there. Between the two crews, they had racked up forty-nine reprimands and filed sixty individual complaints against one another. Somewhere around having to pry Scotty off of the Valiant's Chief Engineer and cock blocking the Prime Directive for the sake of Ferengi gender equality, Pike had more or less pissed himself laughing and stopped answering Jim's calls.
“- beam something right up his arse.”
Jim startles and points at Scotty. “No.” This is his serious voice. “No ass beaming, Scotty. We've talked about this.”
“Their behavior is unbecoming of Starfleet officers.”
Bones snorts. “Not that I'm disagree'n here, slim, but you're in a jail cell with a naked Russian.”
“You shut up. And you”, Jim turns his attention to his first officer, funneling as much seething accusation as possible into his index finger,“What the fuck are you doing here? I seem to recall leaving you on the bridge.”
It strikes Jim as unfair that even while holding his unconscious girlfriend, surrounded by filth and debased drunks, Spock can assume a posture of dignified disdain. “Lieutenant Uhura commed at 2100 requesting the presence of a senior officer to ensure that matters did not escalate beyond the parameters of acceptable behavior.”
There is a pause, right before Spock's face projects the kind of emphatic blankness that sets off all of Jim's internal bullshit alarms. “I was also informed that Commander Simon van Gelder was present.”
The Valiant's first officer is a squirrelly, beady-eyed fucking lunatic laboring under the delusion that Spock is secretly a Romulan. Jim's pretty sure that every time Spock tells him to “Live long and prosper”, what he actually means is “Go die in a fire,” which is kind of awesome.
Scotty fixes Jim with a grave stare. “Don'nae be cross, Capt'n. Daffy bastard had it comin'.”
“He had what coming?”
Bones looks way too smug for someone who smells that much like dumpsters and shame. “A dress, some rope and a little public humiliation.”
Yeah, okay. Jim turns to Chekov, who has started doing math on Sulu's shoulder, not at all concerned with the rampant nudity. It's cute and all kinds of disturbing.
Jim knows this question is ridiculous before he even asks it. “Where are your clothes?”
Chekov smiles somewhat dreamily at him.
Sulu perks up. “He gave them to a stripper.”
There is a moment of profound silence while Jim's brain flatly refuses to process that bit of information.
“I am very disappointed in all of you. ”
Sulu grins, blue goo flaking at the edge of his upturned mouth. “We TP'd their shuttle.”
Jim is slightly less disappointed in them.
oOo
Herding the bridge crew out of jail and back to the shuttle is a very special adventure. It's like trying to get drunk cats to walk in a straight line. Bones and Scotty start singing almost immediately and make several abortive attempts to walk and waltz at the same time. Chekov keeps wandering away to do ridiculously complex math with his pink felt tip pen. Even on Risa, it's weird when a mostly naked Russian genius starts drawing algorithms on people's foreheads so Jim orders Sulu to carry him. He does. Piggyback style.
Jim doesn't trust any of them not to set fire to themselves or something expensive, so he sets the auto control on the shuttle craft and sits with them for the trek back up to the Enterprise. He gets there in time to catch Chekov peering speculatively at the blue glob on Sulu's face.
“Do not lick him. You don't know where he's been.”
Scotty laughs so hard he starts snorting uncontrollably. Matters escalate when he snatches Chekov's pen and Sulu attempts to retrieve it. There's cursing and an inspired use of a roll of toilet paper that Jim didn't even know they had. He refuses to speculate on where they were hiding it.
Spock is no goddamn help at all. He just cradles Uhura who wakes up as they break atmosphere. Her smile is sweet and triumphant and a little bit drunk. Spock stares at her like she's the most fascinating thing in the known universe.
Some time after the problem children start to doze off, Bones sighs and rolls his head onto Jim's shoulder, too drunk or too tired to care that he's in a tin-can death trap with a bunch of infants in the cold, merciless vacuum of space and therefore obligated to get his grump on. Instead he uses the fabric of Jim's jacket to absently scratch the side of his nose. He reeks and his hair is gross, but Jim doesn't push him off, just slips his arm around Bones' vaguely sticky shoulders and breathes.
The best of all possible worlds, Jim thinks.
oOo
Time: 0515
Janice Rand is waiting for them in the docking bay wearing her Long-Suffering Yeoman Expression Number Three: A Beat Down Is Seriously Fucking Nigh, James T. Kirk.
Jim may or may not have super glued the door to her quarters shut in order to sneak off ship and retrieve his bridge crew from jail.
“Yeoman Rand! What a pleasant surprise. Did you crawl through the ventilation ducts or did you just glare at the door until it gave up?”
She doesn't even roll her eyes at him. As usual she is completely unmoved and totally fucking cool in the face of Jim's smoldering cheer, from the shiny tips of her regulation boots to the tippy-top of her of no-nonsense hair bun. She tasered him once, when a transporter malfunction gave him a serious case of Rapist and Jim loves her kind of a lot.
There's an eruption of cursing to Jim's right that signifies Christine Chapel has taken charge and is ushering Jim's special, little snowflakes towards Sick-Bay with a judicious application of hypos and medical malpractice, if Bones' pained bitching is anything to go by. Sulu tries to make a run for it, bounding over cargo like a blue smeared half-man, half-deer, all-drunk, freak of athleticism.
Rand catches him by the collar and punts him back towards Chapel without looking up from her PADD.
Once Jim's sure medical has the bridge crew in hand and all attempts at escape have been neatly thwarted, he turns his attention back to Rand. “So, what's the message?”
“No new messages, Captain.” She eyes him in that special way she has that signals she finds Jim in fundamental error, and pulls a hair comb out of seemingly nowhere. Jim doesn't even try to duck it, just holds still and lets her get the whole primate maintenance behavior thing out of her system.
“Really? No messages at all?” It's probably not smart to question her freakishly efficient secretarial skills when she's got a sharp object so close to his eyeballs, but what's life without a little risk?
“No Starfleet memo? Hate mail? Credit-card application? Another requisition for a pony from Engineering?” Jim pauses, considering. “A holo of someone's genitals?” That one earns him a delicate snort and Jim wiggles his eyebrows solicitously.
Rand sighs and the comb vanishes to wherever it is she hides stuff like that. She pointedly checks her PADD again, oozing long-suffering patience under Jim's expectant gaze.
“No. Nothing.”
“That's so weird. I really feel like there should have been a message.”
She looks at him askance as they make their way out of the hanger. “Are you high, sir?”
“What? No. That happened one time,” one awesome time and it's really a damn shame he'll never set foot on Argo again, “can't you let it go?”
oOo
When Jim gets to his quarters he checks the comm, but the things waiting for him there are Pike's last maneuver for the game of Battle Ship they've been playing for over a month and a digital copy of the bail receipt.
He stares at the screen for a long time, strangely distracted by a vague sense of expectancy.
oOo
There's a bulletin board in the mess, a community catalog of shame, glory and assorted shenanigans. Before hitting the bridge for his shift Jim takes a detour and dives into the organized chaos masquerading as the Alpha shift breakfast rush. Jim slaps the bail receipt to the board and grins when several crewmen cheer over their coffee.
Jim surveys the mess after a moment, taking in the sights and sounds of his crew. He indulges in a little captain-y sociology, updating his internal flow chart of who's clearly shacking up with who ( Lt. Cordila Jax from Intra-ecosystems and Ensign Tsu in Xeno-Protocol) and which couples are still on the war path (Angus “Cupcake” Mathews, Tim Smith and Fran Kingsly in Security still aren't eating together and Jim makes a mental note to take Cupcake out for a drink soon).
It doesn't sit right with him all of the sudden - so much food everywhere, plates and forks and wet mouths. The scrape of replicated silverware and messy smack of idle conversation.
Jim doesn't realize he's made it to the turbolift until he's throwing up in it.
He presses his forehead to the cool metal, throat burning, head pounding in time to the frenzied beat of his heart.
“Fuck.”
oOo
Time: 1215
Bones likes to burst in on the bridge like a summer thunderstorm, all noise and rumbling menace, shaking up Jim's sunny day with his grumpy thunder.
“Are you seriously taking those lunatics planet side?”
Jim swivels in the chair and levels Bones with his most professional expression. “If you are referring to the fine people that comprise the Stellar Cartography Department,” Bones rolls his eyes, “Then yes, I am taking those lunatics planet side. They deserve it. They work hard to make sure we don't warp into a sun or something.”
Bones' mouth does that thing it does right before he relays some grim prediction of bodily harm. He does not disappoint.
“You're going to get maimed, Jim. You've got no goddamn self-control when you go out on these little 'department dates' of yours.”
Jim snickers, because he can totally hear the quotations in that sentence and Bones is the best show in town when he gets his doom on, all wild eyebrows and emphatic hand gestures.
“They're going to talk you into something stupid and you're going to get arrested.”
Bones shuts up abruptly, realizing what he just said, and manfully suppressing the grimace he so clearly wants to make at setting himself up like that.
“Speaking from personal experience, doctor?”
There's a moment of silence on the bridge and Jim just smiles, and smiles and smiles.
Finally. “Why do you have to bring up old shit?”
“It makes me feel tingly in my man bits. ”
“Unbelievable.”
oOo
The thing is, yeah - Jim is totally inviting grief and disaster to befall him in court-marshall shaped rations of shit by personally dallying in shenanigans with his crew. But the fact remains that he is physically incapable of living with eight hundred strangers for five years without learning what makes them tick. He tried, for about a week, when the newness of his captaincy was enough to blot out just about everything in his head that wasn't directly related to how not to fuck this up.
The crew roster was an uncharted territory of unknowns and he was itching, from day one, to dive into it, and see who those people were.
The thing is, Jim is greedy. So fucking greedy for this, for being surrounded by so many amazing people who have no choice but to put up with him and his curiosity because it's Jim or the cold crush of space and that's probably fucked up but he'll take what he can get.
Department Dates have been his way of getting to know them, one group at a time.
Xeno-Anthropology was first; they had soberly demanded cake. (Or death. They all laughed uproariously at that and Jim didn't get the joke, but whatever. Cake).
Jim doesn't remember a whole lot from his night out with the medical staff. Christine Chapel fellating a beer bottle is one of his less blurry and more awesome memories. He recalls having to corral one of the med techs into helping him fish M'Benga out of an orgy in the public water fountain of the city they were consequently banned from for life, (which was seventy percent awesome and thirty percent horrifying depending on who he tells that story to and how drunk he is at the time.)
Security made him take them to the ballet. (Jim refuses to discuss it.)
oOo
Time: 2245
Jim's watching the entire Stellar Cartography department drink, dance and dry-hump their way into Enterprise infamy.
They're a freakishly twitchy group of people on the best of days, all rapid talk and squirming energy. Mapping the ship's exact location in the galaxy, and everything in it, is a high stress job, what with having to do it every fifteen seconds. It makes for a very unnerving group of people with scary focus and what Jim suspects are terrifying hobbies. Jim's never managed to hold more than a two- minute conversation with any of them (they don't blink enough and it kind of makes him nauseous) and he's almost completely certain they scare the shit out of Bones. But they hold their liquor like fucking champs and get kicked out of three casinos before they throw themselves, en masse, at the loudest dance club on the strip.
Jim watches the carnage unfold from the relative safety of the bar, throwing back the occasional shot of whiskey. Ensigns Bax'ali and Dinah aren't exactly having sex on the dance floor, but it's a near thing considering where two of Bax'ali's four hands are. The Lieutenant Commander who heads Stellar Cartography begins gyrating in a way that signifies imminent nudity. There are cheers all around. Jim is impressed, and preemptively pissed about having to post bail again when it hits him. The smell of rotting vegetation. His mouth goes dry, and his vision wobbles. The shot glass slips from his fingers and hits the floor with a crack that sounds like the clean snap of bone.
His chest tightens, lungs screaming for air he can't seem to make himself take in. The lights of the club fracture, the scene in front of him tearing like wet paper and his eyes burn with the memory of yellow dirt and saffron skies, bodies spoiling under the hot press of the Tarsus sun.
His hands are shaking, and his face is wet with sweat and tears and he's so fucking terrified he can't make himself care about it, not when the awful techno of the club gives way to the harsher pop of bombs in the distance, never fucking close enough to the walls of the compound to be helpful.
Gary crying because they did something to his eyes and it fucking burns, Jimmy.
Lenore screaming daddy! as the guards drag her down the corridor, her pleas warping into animal desperate noises as Thomas beats his hands against the bars -
And it's not real, it's not real, but he can't -
Jim shoulders his way blindly through the crowd, knocking into people and half tripping over himself, the rational part of his mind noting that Captain Goddamn Kirk is having a panic attack. He can hear himself, the high whine of his strangled breathing over the roar of his heart -
Carol and Kevin huddled against the wall, and she keeps saying hush baby, hush now -
By the time he staggers into the alley he's making stuttering wet gasps for breath, every inhale a flex of razor blades in his chest. There's noise in his head and blood in his mouth and he needs to stop.
Just stop.
Jim plants his hands on the sticky dampness of the wall, finger nails scraping the gritty surface for purchase.
He vomits whiskey in the greasy shadow of the alley, the sounds of his pained retching echoing loud and obscene off the walls. When his stomach is empty he stumbles away from the stink and the mess, legs giving out half way to the other side of the alley.
Jim doesn't know how long he's there, on his knees, completely loosing his shit but when he feels the important pieces of himself slide back into place he almost laughs. Because of fucking course Bones is there, crouched in front of him, the tips of his fingers tracing soothing circles at the nape of Jim's clammy neck.
Of fucking course he is.
Jim wipes his face with a trembling hand, wrung out and strangely hollow. Bones cards his fingers through Jim's sweaty hair, and he just goes for it, tipping forward to rest his forehead against Bones' chest. Those crazy amazing hands don't stop, they just change trajectory, drifting down his shoulders and back up again, tracing warm, Bones-specific messages into Jim's skin.
“What's your name?”
“James Tiberius Kirk.”
“Where are you?”
“Risa.”
“What's the stardate?”
“2260.”
“Who am I?”
“Leonard McCoy.”
There's a pause.
“Who am I?”
“Bones.”
Gary Mitchell, Kevin Riley, Thomas Leighton, Carol Marcus, Lenore Karidian, and Jim - a fucked up incestuous knot of a family, tied up by love and fear and the memories of hunger and he has no fucking idea why he's thinking of them now.
“Jim.”
“I'm okay. Really. Let it go.”
oOo
Bones doesn't let it go.
Part Two: Crying Won't Help You, Praying Won't Do You No Good