Title: as clean and sweet a tale
Rating: R
Characters/Pairings: Jim Kirk/Christopher Pike (references to Jim/McCoy and Pike/Number One)
Warnings: Sex, angst.
Recipient: Margaret/brilligspoons
*
If this were a trashy romance novel Christopher Pike would have fallen in love with Jim Kirk the night they met. But this isn't a trashy romance novel and when he looked down at Jim's battered, punch-drunk face that night he didn't fall in love.
He didn't fall in love.
*
It's the sort of bar that has no name, and sports the kind of inadequate lighting that Chris appreciates. There's a dusty old fashioned juke box that plays the same sinister twangy blues no matter what record is playing. Chris likes the place for its constant cloud of wispy cigarette smoke, and the clean burn of good liquor he has no qualms enjoying when he's safely away from the prying eyes of impressionable young cadets.
He's waiting for Number One when he realizes that the flash of blond hair at the far edge of his vision is Jim, with McCoy at his hip.
He hasn't seen either of them since orientation.
Chris watches Jim take a shot glass from McCoy's un-protesting fingers and down it in one slick movement. There's a lazy promise in the tilt of his hips, that dangerous strip of skin bared just so by a threadbare t-shirt that rides up and a pair of battered blue jeans that hang low. Chris tracks the pale expanse of Jim's arm as he reaches behind himself to set the glass down on the table. Watches as Jim closes the space between them and lowers himself into McCoy's lap, whose hands come up to steady Jim easy as anything despite the scowl on his face.
When Jim presses his mouth to McCoy's Chris feels something low in his belly tighten. Jim didn't swallow the shot after all. It runs down his chin and neck as he opens his mouth over McCoy's in an obscene imitation of a kiss. When the whiskey's gone, Jim licks his lips (Chris thinks clearly, stupidly, of Iowa and the way Jim licked his lips then, of his pink tongue and red blood) and goes back for more. He's stalled by the doctor's hands in his hair, and when he pulls Jim goes with it, spine curving, neck bared in the soft light of the bar.
McCoy leans down, noses Jim's throat, teeth skimming his Adam's apple and Chris thinks of wild things in the dark woods of stranger planets than this one, of sharp-toothed animals and the way they touch.
Jim's head turns, and when he opens his eyes he looks right at Chris.
Chris feels his whole body open up for that look, for that spike of white hot desire and the sharp thrill of surprise in Jim's face. It's a strange alien burn, Jim's eyes on his with another man's hands on his body.
They hold it for a long hard moment while McCoy licks a path down Jim's throat and Chris thinks of absolutely nothing (I didn't fall in love).
McCoy traces Jim's slack mouth with the pad of his thumb, drawing his eyes away. McCoy must be doing something with his other hand, something Chris can't see from his vantage, because Jim suddenly hisses and jerks against him.
Number One startles him with a sure hand at the nape of his neck. He turns and it's like it always is with them when she's been gone long enough for him to forget the sharp, handsome lines of her face. Her smile is a brief flash of wicked brightness, like the dangerous flicker of a butterfly blade.
She makes of a point of finishing his forgotten drink for him, swallows it with the kind of deliberation that answers any number of embarrassing questions without him having to ask.
*
Chris fucks her against the door of the bathroom, the heels of her regulation boots digging into the small of his back as she sucks bruises into his neck, just low enough to hide beneath the grey collar of his uniform.
*
Jim Kirk is trouble. Chris knew he would be. That's not the problem. The problem is, people think they can fix Jim, that they can make him better if they just love him enough, or push him enough. There are a dozen of them, beautiful sharp-eyed girls and sly fly boys who think they'll be the one, the exception to the Jim Kirk Rule of Non-Involvement. And sooner or later they all get their hearts broken because they're too stupid or too willfully ignorant to know what Chris knows: Jim isn't going to get better.
It's easy to look at him in his cadet reds and see how brightly the potential of his reckless genius burns, easier still to be drawn into the promise of it. To see all the ways Jim could be shaped and tempered into something amazing, something worth following. And that's good. Chris sees it too, and knows with bone deep certainty that it will happen. But that's not "better". That's not fixed.
Jim will always be Jim.
He might thrive in Starfleet, but he still fights, and he still fucks. He still pisses off all the wrong people just because he can. He's arrogant and selfish. There are a lot of different kinds of selflessness and Jim's is more like a pit George Kirk carved than a proverbial heart of gold. It's a great strength and an awful weakness. One that took Jim's soul and knotted it up with ship-shaped desires until there was just no room in it to want what normal people want. The best of Jim's possible futures will never be a house on a hill and a couple of admiral's bars on his chest after a decade or two of heroing across the stars. It's never going to be a dog and family on the other side of a distinguished career for him. It'll be something fast and violent, up in the black where he was born, out in the far flung light of long dead stars.
Jim is Jim and he isn't going to get better.
It doesn't mean a thing that Chris might love him for it.
*
Christmas Break is wet and foggy. The city is gunmetal grey under a perpetually cloudy sky and Chris isn't surprised when the campus becomes a ghost town in less than forty-eight hours, students having fled the chill like migrating birds as soon as classes finished.
Leonard McCoy left on one of the first shuttles out, sober enough to stumble his way on, drunk enough not to care, which by all rights Chris shouldn't know. But he's developed a habit of keeping tabs and there are more people willing to be his eyes at the Academy than he's entirely comfortable with, but that's Starfleet and Chris is not so noble that he won't take advantage.
He's had Jim's information pulled on his computer screen for a while, eyeing the balance on the kid's food credit allocation, having a quiet argument with himself about caloric intake and how the care and proper feeding of one Jim Kirk is none of his damn business.
McCoy's been gone two and a half days and Jim's account shows inactivity since he left.
He gets in one good hour of busy work before grabbing his comm and texting Jim, 'Go eat something.'
*
Twenty minutes later the computer alerts him to a charge on Jim's account (two turkey sandwiches, an apple and milk) and Chris is absolutely certain Number One is laughing at him, wherever she is.
*
The following day Chris finds Jim in the cafeteria. More accurately, he finds a crowd in the cafeteria, cheering over the familiar sounds of 3-D Battle Ship with Jim in the middle, a duel-screen console set up in front of him and a taking-on-all-comers smile.
A jerry-rigged menu sign reads Kirk vs. Mitchel in flashing letters and a timer. They've been playing for over an hour. Chris settles in, watching the match. They play with a complimentary set of smiles aimed at each other like guns, their moves peppered with sly compliments and lazy flirtations, slipping in and out of Orion Prime as the mood takes them. When Mitchel loses it's sooner than Chris expected and with more restraint than he feels Mitchel would normally display if the faint frown on Jim's face is anything to go by.
They shake hands, Mitchel holding Jim's a beat longer than necessary, promising a rematch in a tone that manages to be both casual and vaguely threatening. Chris watches him leave as people in the crowd exchange credits with varying degrees of discretion and wonders how that little scene would have played out if he hadn't been watching.
Jim asks, "Who's next?" like it's a question even though his eyes are zeroed in on Chris when he looks back and it's clearly anything but a question. The dare hanging between them makes Chris think of bar fights and long faded bruises.
When he slides into the vacated chair Jim's audience erupts into excited murmurs and the rapid clicks of furious texting. As the game resets someone speaks into their comm, "Get down here quick, Kirk's playing motherfuking Pike."
Chris smiles.
*
They play through the afternoon, and by the evening their corner of the cafeteria is packed. Word makes it to the officer's quarters and soon Chris finds himself with half a dozen instructors at his back cheering and cursing in turn.
In terms of technical skill Chris plays more efficiently than Jim, seeking out his fleet with precision that looks even sharper in the face of Jim's seemingly random attack patterns and near incomprehensible search grid. But time and again Chris finds himself pulled into Jim's little traps, fascinated by how that mind works, curious to the detriment of his dwindling fleet to see what Jim will do next.
When dawn breaks they're alone save Admiral Novak and Captain Wesley of the USS Lexington.
Jim is sprawled in his chair, hair mussed from running the occasional hand through it, cadet's jacket long since abandoned, the sleeves of his undershirt rolled up. He looks rakish, humming with tired energy and when Chris finally takes his remaining battle cruiser he laughs, looking for all the world like a man who didn't just lose.
Captain Wesley passes Novak fifty credits and claps Jim on the shoulder before ambling away.
After a moment of silence Jim leans forward. "How'd you win?"
Chris shrugs. "Cheated."
"So did I."
In truth they started cheating outrageously around 0300. Christopher tips his head at Jim, feeling a familiar smile tug at the corners of his mouth. "I'm better at it."
Jim smiles back, lips curving with all kinds of dirty promises, and Chris thinks again of bars, bruises and the wicked flicker of Jim's pink tongue. "I bet you're better at a lot of things. Sir."
*
He's thought about it, the things that might be in his head if he and Jim ever made good on the hungry threat of sex that seems to infuse everything they do. Chris has wondered how much of himself would be helplessly wrapped up in GeorgeGeorgeGeorge while Jim panted ohohoh beneath him and whether or not he'd be a decent enough man to feel ashamed of himself.
*
Remembrance Day comes the way it always does.
There are hundreds of thousands of hours ahead of Jim, all waiting their turn to count out the sweetness and sorrows that will eventually make up the entirety of his life, but none of them will be as important as the eleven minutes that preceded his birth. It's unfairness bordering on cruelty and George Kirk is still dead and Jim is alive and Chris didn't fall in love.
Jim is wordlessly furious and bloody when he arrives at Chris's door, all fists, bright eyes and biting kisses. George is dead and Christopher is alive and when he shoves Jim against the doorway of his bedroom he's a decent enough man to know that the only reason he gets to have this is because Leonard McCoy is at the hospital, elbows deep in the chest cavity of a second year cadet who swerved left when he should have gone right. And Jim – broken, amazing Jim who fights so hard in so many directions at once Chris almost can't bear to look at him – is still Jim and he needs.
So Chris gives.
*
The second time he fails the Kobayashi Maru Jim disappears for a week. McCoy invites himself over on day three dressed in civvies and carrying a bottle of Tennessee whiskey in blatant disregard for Starfleet protocol.
They sit in front of Chris's bay windows, staring out at the tightly packed sprawl of San Fransisco, wondering which point of light in the distance is closest to Jim.
"I know you're fucking him."
Listening to McCoy speak is like watching a man set his own broken bones, sickening and fascinating all at once. But Pike asked for this, and it's nothing he doesn't deserve.
"I should care more, or at least differently than I do. But." He trails off and Chris can't help him find the end of that sentence.
Quietly. "Not enough people love that kid."
I didn't fall in love he thinks and doesn't get any further than that because McCoy reaches out one sure hand and cups the back of Chris's neck, drawing himself in like it's the most natural thing in the world.
It's not a kiss, but it's not nothing.
He breathes McCoy's breath, not quite searching for Jim's familiar taste over the bite of whiskey. Their noses brush and McCoy's cool surgeon's fingers trace that spot at the corner of his jaw that Jim likes so much and it's not nothing.
*
Down in the dark gnarled pit of the Narada Pike listens to the sound of improperly maintained moisture units and the slosh of coolant lapping against the strangely organic looking walls of the ship that killed George Kirk. He thinks about love and the best of all possible futures.
*
When he wakes up it's to the soft hisses and metal clicks of sick-bay.
There's the raw, bitter edge of panic when he can't move his legs. He feels the sheet catch on the dry skin of his right toe and the bunched sweat-damp wrinkle of the hospital gown against the strangely vulnerable patch of skin under his knee. He feels the desperate bite of his own finger nails digging into the meat of his protesting thigh, but he cannot fucking move his legs.
*
When Number One asks him why he's so ready to hand the Enterprise over Chris just says, "The kid deserves to go home."
It's not a lie, it just isn't the whole truth.
*
Maybe he didn't fall in love with Jim Kirk, and maybe he did.
In any case it's a deeply meaningless distinction considering how Jim inched his way irrevocably into Chris's life. When he finds himself back on the ship he captained for less than a day five years after the fact, once again trying to out run the death throes of yet another planet, he finds that the distinction matters even less.
George is still dead and Kahn is newly dead, the wreckage of his rage written across the stars with a vengeful hand. None of those things change depending on the direction of Christopher Pike's wayward heart.
He feels it break though, when he gets down to Engineering.
*
McCoy is in a crumpled heap on the floor and Jim is leaning against the glass on the other side of the containment chamber.
When Chris gets to the wall Jim looks up at him, face bloody and licks his lips before asking. His voice is awful.
"The ship?"
"Out of danger."
"The crew?"
Chris reaches down and brushes his fingers across McCoy's slack face, the harsh rasp of Jim's labored breathing thundering over the comm. "Safe."
"S'good," Jim slurs, shoulder sliding down the barrier separating them, eyes glassy as his legs give out, but he smiles as he goes. Chris follows, kneeling in time with Jim. They stare at each other for a long, hard moment, and it's the same moment it was back in the bar, so achingly goddamn familiar that Chris thinks maybe if they want it enough they can push back time, and make it real. Go back.
"Have to do it, Christopher." Jim raps his ruined knuckles against the glass. "Relieve me."
*
This is what he didn't tell Number One.
It wasn't a kiss but it wasn't nothing. McCoy pulled away, hand still tracing Jim-shaped secrets into Chris's skin and said, "He watched them build that ship, you know. It's not really yours. And he'll never love us the way he loves it, but it's enough that he'll let you have it for a while."
*
"I relieve you."
"I am relieved."