Yeah, so, this is my first foray into the Spirk fandom. So. Awww yisss all the breadcrumbs all the time.

WIP with regular updates because I have a lot more written than I intend to post all at once because I am a jerk.

Warnings: none at this point with the potential of NC-17

Pairing: Spock/Kirk

Star Trek 2009-verse.

Summary of Story: Jim doesn't like Spock much. Spock is confusing and sort of a jerk. Basically, when Spock Prime did the mind-meld on Delta Vega there was some unintentional transference. This causes major issues for Jim but he has no idea what the cause actually is. He tries to figure out what is actually going on, and Spock is all like, oh, holy cow. I think I know. Oh darn. What now. Shenanigans and drama and love because that is how I roll, bro.

Chapter summary: Basically, Jim wakes up from an alarming dream and stares at himself hatefully in the mirror for awhile.

0000

Jim bolted upright and tumbled out from the comforts of his bed in a cold sweat yet again from yet another unfamiliar and unsettling episode sponsored by the Dreams from Fucking Hell.

He sighed wearily as he untangled himself from his blankets, and shaking off the sheet still wrapped around his ankle, stumbled his way into the bathroom.

Splashing cool water into his face, Jim longingly yearned for a hypo or two or three that'd make him into Sleeping Beauty for a few centuries or so.

But, then again, a visit to Bones for another hypo to ameliorate the relentless curse of disruptive dreams would be counterproductive, particularly since the Doctor was already salivating for any chance at all to toss his friend under the microscope.

Ah, Bones. Good old Bones.

Friend or not, that man held the power to strip him of command if he deemed it responsible to do so, personal sense of loyalty be damned.

Jim admittedly, had used every last excuse in the book to avoid an examination. But with good reason.

Because at best, should the Federation be clued in to his current state of crazy he'd be assigned nothing but milk runs for the indeterminate future, at worst, he'd be stripped of command and sent back to Earth and locked away til they could get his head put back on right.

As far as Jim was concerned, the Constitution class Starship was his, and he would be damned if anyone tried to take his precious, hard-earned baby, the finest lady in the fleet away from him. They'd have to pry her from his cold, dead hands.

But at the very least, he was honest with himself. He knew he was on the brink of collapse.

He was just so fucking tired all of the time and frankly, though his poker face was awesome, and while his crew outside of the Bridge seemed oblivious, there was no hiding it from within.

Every time he snapped at Sulu or Chekhov or Uhura or, dear lord, his first officer... and everyone just sort of was ignoring the problem out of respect, he imagined. Or pity. Or out of fear of being disciplined for insubordination or whatever the pet rationale of the day was to inflict punishment. No one wanted to be working in the engineering room under the charge of the chief engineer cum slave driver.

Scotty was the only one lately benefiting from any of this, actually. He gleefully reaped all the assistance he could garner from Jim's descent into unrelenting crankiness, shoving the poor victims he left in his wake down the Jefferies tubes for a good old fashioned elbow grease grunt job of routine maintenance.

There was a level of self-loathing he was becoming uncomfortably familiar with lately. He hated what he was becoming, but similarly, couldn't be bothered to give a fuck.

He caught their silent exchanges of concerned raised eyebrows. He recognized how everyone seemed to be delicately avoiding directly approaching him about the situation that was not A Situation.

Captaincy, as a whole, was, in theory, everything he had been trained for and was naturally equipped to handle. Only, going from being among peers to overseeing them had a distancing effect. And now, he was just a jerk. Kirk the Jerk.

Kirk is a Jerk. Now that was something, wasn't it? Or was it?

A flicker of deja-vu was there and then gone again before he could blink.

He shook his head to clear the passing nagging feeling of barely there recognition and dragged a hand through his sleep-mussed hair.

It was no wonder Bones was on his back like a flee on a dog, constantly hounding him to get his ass down to sickbay for an eval.

A fancy little shrink session was not on his agenda.

No one had actually uttered the word, 'unfit' with regard to his command in earshot, but he could see it in all of their well-intentioned, meaningful glances of concern.

Not that he was prone to being overly charitable toward Spock, but out of everyone, he observantly respected his recent taking-no-shit attitude and backed the fuck off for once, ceasing the incessant critique.

It was like a goddamn Christmas Miracle. With less of the old Terran Yule-tide festival and more of the holy-fuck bless this turn of events.

Previously, his First had always been the first never to dodge a chance to leap down his throat at the first given opening, the opportunist, pointy-eared prick . Whatever tentative connection they had made while working together to destroy the Narada has dwindled since they had begun their mission not 4 months ago.

Spock was always there just a breath behind him with his superior everything questioning every decision he made and otherwise undermining his authority in nearly every capacity in any given circumstance.

Always the master of wielding the blade of passive condescension, and he'd strike quick and clean.

For some absolutely out-of-left-field reason, this prompted Jim to conjure an image of a disturbingly shirtless Sulu brandishing a samurai sword with a crazed look in his eyes.

Jim shook his head to clear the ridiculousness and snorted with an ugly laugh. He really was not okay.

Upon completion of Alpha shift, Jim often found himself fleeing down to Engineering to douse his wounds in the blessed bliss of liquor. Using Captain's prerogative to nab just a bit from Scotty's conveniently immense 'secret' stash of Saurian brandy. Because Synthehol just didn't do the trick.

It was a justifiable palliative, basically, liquid suppression to resist from throttling the neck of a certain infuriating half-Vulcan.

Because, in all honesty, suppression was key. An actual physical altercation would not bode well for the human. He knew from first hand experience just how strong Spock could be if that little display on the Bridge immediately after his miraculous return from Delta Vega was anything to go by. And if Jim wasn't dead, then he'd certainly be under severe disciplinary action from Starfleet. Again, risking expulsion from his beautiful Lady was not an option just for a bit of cathartic strangling. Jim had his priorities in order.

Mostly.

If he was feeling particularly maudlin, he'd admit to himself, he did, in fact, care what Spock thought of him. He did want his approval. His respect.

Personally, he knew he was smart guy. He knew he was a tactical genius and goddamned prodigy and knew what the fuck he was doing. Yet, this irreparable professional relationship he had with his First was miserable.

He didn't believe in no-win scenarios except where he and Spock were concerned.

How could he salvage a thing that didn't even exist in the first place?

He was feeding on an illusion of hope that was proving futile when he knew better. He'd been burned before.

Avoiding waxing nostalgic about his wayward youth was no hardship.

Really though, if he had learned anything in Iowa, James Tiberius Kirk should have known better than to blindly trust anyone really, let alone some stranger from an alternate universe and time line.

Which, was basically one of the several reasons why he was avoiding transmissions from Ambassador Selek. Old friend? Debatable. He had a massive soft spot for the guy, but really? He only felt a sliver of guilt when he'd press ignore and conveniently forget to respond at a later time.

At any rate, he could get his updates on New Vulcan from the Fed message boards on the topic. As far as Jim was concerned, it was healthier not to give in to his strange desire to be overly familiar with the only version of Spock who seemed to appreciate him. It only made him resent his Spock more anyway, which only made matters worse.

Ultimately, he felt down right, straight up lied to. Other Spock had promised him some supposedly super important, life-alteringly awesome, epic friendship, if not in words exactly, then from whatever unintentional transference happened during that mind-meld on Delta Vega.

He had felt what seemed to be echoes of deep attachment to that other version of himself emanating in soul-rocking waves from the old man. He'd been wholly unprepared for the sudden barrage of familiarity, overwhelming fondness and all encompassing respect, understanding and compassion from a man whom he had barely known and had just seconds before, identified as the very same asshole who'd just dropped him on an icy death planet for supposed mutiny.

He had felt shaken afterward. So much so, that Jim had pocketed the whole thing away into his head to avoid looking at it too closely.

A very small part of him was terrified to overturn that rock.

The thing was, it seemed like every time he and this world's Spock moved one step forward they fell two steps back.

It was like, this perfect idea of what could be, had become ephemeral. Just a whisper of a promise, like a malfunctioning transporter unable to materialize the subject in transit. The subsequent feeling of absolute loss was eating away at his self-esteem. Why wasn't this version of Kirk good enough for this version of Spock?

Apparently this time line's Kirk wasn't meant to have nice things. It left a bitter taste in his mouth.

It seemed unfathomable that he should resent another version of himself, yet there it was. That man had a father. That man had a lifetime of support and love that was a foreign concept to Jim. He had nothing in common with that man. Nothing.

What sucked the most was that he had let himself grow enamored with the idea that he could have some kind of awesome connection to Spock. He could admit that the man was brilliant and amazing, and they had worked together seamlessly to defeat Nero. It literally had felt like he was fulfilling some sort of destiny when Spock had agreed to come aboard, and he was all for living out this grand cosmic plan. But then it had literally come back to bitch slap him in the face, reminding him that he was the master of his own destiny.

A one man operation of Team Free Will was a bitter pill to swallow.

It was barely feasible to work with a man who could see every kink in his armor and use it against him, let alone rue the loss of some alleged bond with him he'd never have.

He had been dealt a bad hand that had forced him to concede. It was a disillusioning betrayal that that rose-tinted time line that would never come to fruition.

But Jim needed to count his losses and move on. He was an adult. He could cope with disappointment. Hell, he'd been trained all his life to do so.

Though, he did seriously regret petitioning Pike to aide in convincing Spock to accept the position in the first place.

But, perhaps his resentment prevented him from being grateful for having the most efficient and capable Commander Starfleet had to offer.

Generally, he did wonder what was the actual selling point for Spock to accept the position under him in the first place.

If Jim was feeling particularly vicious, he imagined it was all delayed revenge for getting Spock booted as unfit, post destruction of Vulcan so he could come aboard and drive Jim to the breaking point.

And, then again, maybe his lack of sleep was creating a caustic paranoia that had somehow projected it's skewed rationale for Jim's keen sense of disappointment at a rejection he knew Spock had no way of knowing he could be responsible for, to the man himself.

It was, after all, maybe a bit unfair to expect something from someone oblivious to what they were supposed to deliver. Sometimes Jim thought he was pissed at himself more than angry at being strong-handed into aborting his unrealistic expectations. It wasn't Spock's fault. He didn't know they were destined to be epic space bros.

Jim wasn't sure what it was about that situation, but contributed his stress over it to the influx of dreams he was having. It was like, the more he was around Spock, the more he thought about the man, the more fucked up they would get, which in turn meant Jim, in spite of being painfully self aware of his own irrationality, found himself despising Spock just a little bit more every time he was within line of sight.

Perhaps he needed to stop dwelling and over self-analyzing and get some fucking sleep.

If the joke the Cosmos was playing on him would ease up and let him.

There was a shore leave coming up and he would take care of the problem then. Con Bones into more sleepy-time hypos, lock himself into his cabin and pass out for a good, solid 48 hours.

He'd be fine.

He put a damper on his wandering inward self musing and snorted in disgust as he looked at himself in the mirror; the water dripping from his chin and rolling down his chest.

Grabbing a towel he wiped himself dry and knocked his toothbrush to the floor. Grimacing, he picked it up and tossed it in the sink.

It was pathetic to feel so much self-pity. But seriously. Even his toothbrush was against him this morning.

Looking back into the mirror at his haggard expression he could clearly see the strain of sleep deprivation from the bruised rings encompassing his blood shot eyes and the lines developing around his mouth, the tell-tale signs of light stubble that he could give no shits to shave.

Any vestiges of vanity remaining had been decimated. He hadn't gotten laid in months. Not that he had much of an opportunity to do so with respect to his station's fraternization policies, but even if he'd had the chance, his very healthy, and rather notorious libido was practically nil.

At least he knew the mechanics were still operable if his sheets had anything to say about it.

Which they did.

It was strange though. He would have contributed it all to exhaustion or stress but, for some reason, he'd felt an unsettling sense of sexual lock down for months before the Narada incident had commenced.

During the downtime of the Enterprise's refit to repair the damage, he'd hit up an old reliable contact or two, and both times had been horrified by his lack of...gusto. His under performance was depressingly emasculating. He was far too young to be this dysfunctional. He would have been even more concerned, but at least a good old fashioned date with the right hand seemed to work just fine.

Only, he had a very unnerving inability to draw from any of his old tried and true spank bank files. They'd all been corrupted by this insidious, creeping, alien notion that he was supposed to be with someone specific. An unnameable, unidentifiable specific. There was something less gratifying when jacking off had become mechanical and reduced to basic tension relief.

And with the decrease in logged-in healthy sleep time, he was basically condemned to franciscan monkhood status.

It was an untenable situation. His brain was a fucking, cock-blocking asshole.

Jim blamed the dreams. They were basically wrecking havoc with every part of him lately. Crazy, inexplicable dreams like nothing he had ever experienced. And he knew all about crazy, fucked up dreams.

He'd survived Tarsus IV.

But these had a different flavor altogether. The scenarios in his dreams played out cyclically and always, Jim remained a physically dissociated viewer, imprisoned within to watch the scenes coalesce and play out, unable to interact or change them. He felt what he felt as well as whatever emotions were felt by this dream vessel.

This last one he was standing among a group of Romulans as they held a conference in which he was aware that there was no threat to his person.

It seemed he was both welcome and unwelcome. A subject of mixed suspicion and respect.

In retrospect, the content and setting, always was inconsequential in view of the fact that he would suddenly be seized by an inexplicable, undefinable, debilitating pain. A pain of dread, loss, despair. The scene would fade into another in which he stood, strangely self aware, alone in an unfamiliar cabin within an unfamiliar facility.

He could sense the individual he embodied was both familiar and yet alien. He would feel this person's utter, soul-piercing aloneness. A hideous undefinable, intense sensation of having been torn, without forewarning from something vastly important.

He would be overcome by the sense of it and collapse to the floor and shiver, crushed, aching and fragmented and so, so angry.

So angry for feeling angry. For being unable to reign in and master the anger he supposedly expected himself to be capable of managing. Even more conflicting, was this self righteous resentment at feeling as if he was supposed to be handling this anger that raged within.

Seriously, when does that make any sense?

The worst of it was the emptiness. The vacancy.

The void where something had been and was no longer.

He would whisper, 'T'hy'la', whatever the fuck that meant, in a deep, gravelly, foreign tongue and shattered tone, and suddenly be ripped from the dream to jarringly wake in his own familiar, dimmed cabin every time, confused and hurting for some phantom unknown. Keenly aware of being no longer encapsulated in another, once again within the safe familiarity of his shorter, compactor, younger but weaker self.

This was the worst one. There were others.

Unfamiliar situations just familiar enough to be processed as recognizable, but they were so far fetched that Jim begrudgingly marveled at the complexity of his brain.

And they had only been coming with increasing and troubling regularity.

He recognized the players in his dreams sometimes. But while Uhura was Uhura, or Sulu was Sulu, or Bones was Bones, they were also different and seemed to interact with him differently. He knew things about them through familiarity, things that were impossible to know. And he had to question their validity. Were these things he didn't know about these people? Or were they simply constructs invented by his very fucked up dreams?

It effected him to a degree in waking life, when he'd have to take pause and sift through what he actually knew about a person, and what strange information he had catalogued about them from his dream interactions.

For instance, he would find himself waiting for the inevitable crack Chekhov would make about his home country and when it wouldn't happen he would find himself taken aback by it's absence.

It was unsettling feeling a kinship with his crew as if he'd known them for years, when they had only just begun their mission.

The worst of it was he never felt like himself and the familiar players in his dream treated him with a certain fond distance.

It seemed always that his physical body and sense of self felt different. He felt leaner and taller and stronger and always cognizant of proximity. As if he was untouchable and cared to remain so. And Jim knew that he, personally, was a handsy, demonstrative kind of guy.

Or maybe the worst of it was actually the dreams of completeness, of belonging to someone and always being in tune with them. He'd awaken dripping with sweat and sticky release and his heart stuttering a mile a minute in his chest aware he'd just been involved in the hottest sex he could possibly imagine with some figment, intangible upon waking. And the crux of it was, instead of a happy wet-dream afterglow, he just felt utterly, painfully, unsatisfied. Bereft. Incomplete.

It was beyond frustrating.

"Computer, raise lights 30 percent," Jim voiced, dropping back onto his bed pulling his PADD off the adjacent shelf.

He logged into Starfleet intranet and browsed the Active Mission section of the Enterprise bulletin board to check for mission updates on the routine science expedition they were headed. It was boring but there would be a plethora of fauna for Sulu to gush over, so at least someone was stoked about it.

Most of the message board consisted of his Lieutenant happily answering everyone's inquiries with enthusiastically detailed descriptions of the new plant life they were about to obtain samples of and the subsequent care and handling, blah, blah, blah, boring.

However, not even that could put him back to sleep.

It was 300 and he still had 3 hours before Alpha shift, so Jim tugged on a clean regulation work-out shirt and wandered the dimmed corridor making his way to the Observation Deck as per usual.

It was conveniently vacated as it typically was at this hour, considering most of Beta shift was either socializing in the rec hall or headed to bed and Gamma would be on duty at this hour.

Jim collapsed into a seat and stared upward and outward. Nothing like a humbling dose of space-gazing at the universe to give a man perspective.

000

tbc, and comment because its cool, yo.