Title: Lies of Jim (The E-Type Lover)

Short Summary: This is a response to the iPod Writing Challenge in the Live Long And Prosper: The Star Trek Challenge forum. The challenge: to write a story featuring a song title, or using said song or title as inspiration. The song title was chosen by putting a magical psychic iPod on shuffle. I say "magical psychic iPod" because the song shuffled for me was "Lies of Jim (The E-Type Lover)" by Budgie. Is there ANY song title more Trek-relevant than that? I THINK NOT.

There's the tiniest hint of slash at the end, but if you blink you'll miss it.

Rating: T/PG-13 for mentions of notching bedposts and seducing women.

A/N: All women mentioned are actual women Kirk has been somehow involved with. The timeline, on the other hand, is just my best guess. The six types of love are part of a real love theory.

This fic can be read as a companion to "Take One Breath".

1. Pragma

There are six different kinds of love, and Kirk's tried them all.

Well, all except type P; and to be honest, Pragma's not much of a loss. He might give it a go someday though, if he ever wants to be bored out of his skull. The idea of picking out a lover based on cost-benefit analysis doesn't really appeal to him.

2. Ludus

Most people who have heard of Captain James T. Kirk think he favors Ludus-type love, or "playboy" love. After all, Kirk's ability to seduce anything sentient and bipedal is literally the stuff of Starfleet legend. It's hard for Kirk to argue with them when it seems like he's stringing along a new woman every month.

However, the motivation makes all the difference. Nine times out of ten, when Kirk upgrades his 60-watt grin into what Bones calls his "600-watt heartbreaker", he's not thinking about the notches on his bedpost: he's trying to charm his way out of captivity. ("Instead of outwitting the enemy, Kirk tries to outwatt the enemy." Terrible puns amuse Kirk much more than they should.)

Bad puns aside, Kelinda, Sylvia, Shahna, Deela, and a dozen others on a dozen different planets were all seduced out of necessity. Of course, that's not to say that Kirk never engages in type L behavior. He knows he's got a reputation to maintain.

3. Mania

Cool, confident, charismatic Captain Kirk doesn't have a codependant bone in his body...now. But some of his friends have heard him talk about the type M phase he went through early in his Starfleet years.

Years ago, when he was still Lieutenant Kirk, he met Lieutenant Lester. He'd been a lieutenant for two years, she for four; he was young and unsure, she was brilliant and possessive. Both of them had been terribly ambitious. Between the two of them, they managed the most obsessively Manic affair since Sytok and T'mok. Their increasingly unhealthy relationship ended rather explosively when Kirk became a Lieutenant Commander and she was, yet again, passed over for promotion in favor of a man. She quit Starfleet after that, and he had managed not to give her a single thought until the body-switching incident a month ago.

He had also felt pretty Manic about Elaan, the Dohlman. However, Kirk doesn't think it counts when he falls in love because of an alien princess's magical tears, a mad doctor's mental programming device, or a strange herb administered by a hill witch.

4. Agape

Kirk has had only one experience with Agape. Her name was Edith. He does not talk about her.

5. Eros

Eros is love for romantics, for the sentimental and idealistic. E-type lovers believe in love at first sight. Ten years after a relationship has ended, an E-type lover still knows what the weather was like on the first date.

Most of the time, Kirk is an E-type lover.

He remembers how he met Ruth perfectly. She was a wispy blonde girl, and she was the only one who came in late to their first class of their first year at Starfleet Academy. Kirk had caught the scent of her perfume as she sat down next to him, and he remembered thinking she smelled like a blackberry field. When he got his first assignment in space as an ensign, he gave her a promise ring. He got it back six months later, enclosed in a "Dear John" letter.

Then there was Areel. Being with her had been cotton candy: light, sweet, and insubstantial, just what he had needed after Janice. They had ended it on the Christmas of 2259. She had been wearing a brilliant green dress that made her look like she was floating, and Kirk thought she'd never looked more beautiful; but he had just gotten his commander's stripes and a new assignment. There had been no hard feelings on either side. Kirk still sends her a card on her birthday.

Miramanee, his wife, was a native of the planet Amerind, whose population consisted of transplanted American Indians (The Starfleet planet-naming process is not very creative). She had deep, dark hair that fell in a sheet down her back. When he kissed her for the first time, her hair ran through his fingers like water; when he kissed her for the last time, it was matted with her blood. Sometimes he wonders if his marriage even counts, as he wasn't really Kirk at the time. He never wonders long. He felt married, and that's what matters.

There have been others besides Ruth, Areel and Miramanee, since Kirk falls in love quickly and often. He can remember every single one of their names, though for some reason there's one he always has a little trouble with- Rena is close, but not quite- Rayna, that was her name, in the Omega system. He thinks, though he is not sure, that he might have loved her most of all; but when he tries to recall her face, it is as if he is looking through a rainy window. (Or would that be "looking through a Rayna window"? After a moment of contemplation, Kirk thinks that might be one of the better ones.)

6. Storge

Storgic love: the slow, reliable love that grows slowly over years and is built from bone-deep trust. Storgic lovers know each other so well that it's impossible not to be in love.

Kirk has never said anything he didn't mean to a woman he was courting. He's exaggerrated a little, and sometimes he's let them believe things that weren't entirely true; but he's never outright lied. At least, that's what he's been telling himself. There are lies, and then there are lies.

And then there are lies.

Sometimes, when watching the stars doesn't help him sleep and he's feeling particularly cynical, Kirk wonders if he's been lying every time he's kissed a woman. Maybe, every time he thinks he'll be in love forever, every time he's been in type E love, he's been lying to himself. He falls in love all the time- and what kind of love is that, which alters when it alteration finds?

Maybe the only real type of forever is the S type.

("The S type." Kirk smiles a little. Terrible puns make any situation better.)