A/N: I love writing AUs, and I especially love writing Spock in a surprising! (but still totally fitting) occupation… like bank robber, as in this instance. I'm not sure why I chose to set this in Seattle rather than San Francisco except that I've been to both (relatively) recently and I've already written a lot about SF. Bonus mystery puzzle: if you can figure out who the FBI agent and Officer O'Hara are based on (before I spoil it for you at the end of the next chapter), uh… brownie points or something! (Two different fandoms, btw; one is Star Trek; the other is… something I am deeply ashamed of.)
This fic will have two chapters.
x
The Thief
x
Part One
x
Kirk is not generally a total wimp who requires caffeinated drinks to keep from expiring, but desperate times, et cetera. Sure, he's the man who made it through basic and officer candidates school without shedding a single tear, but he's also the man who drinks mint chip mocha frappes (extra whip) in the summer and didn't give up his baby blankets until well into his MBA program. He's good with contradictions.
"And as if the merger isn't complicated enough, then Komack comes out and tells us that we have to have all of the accounts done by Friday!" Kirk wails. It's the middle of the day in rainy Seattle and he's holed up in a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf with a large chai tea (two soy creams, three organic sugars), a lukewarm vegan panini, and his best friend, who is trying desperately to ignore him.
"Your first world problems're really tragic," Bones grunts, stirring his coffee (black) for no actual reason other than to distract himself from the human train wreck that is James Tiberius Kirk. "How long are you goin' to moan about accounts for?"
Kirk looks at his sixty year-old Patek Philippe. "My lunch isn't over for another forty minutes," he sniffs.
"Jesus Christ," Bones mutters. He pushes his coffee aside and grabs Kirk by the shoulders. "Pull yourself together, Jim. I know you're a drama queen, but just because you haven't slept in sixty-five hours and Pike is probably gonna to fire you—" Kirk moans. "—doesn't mean you need to irritate me about it! Listen, you can't let a hardass McCombs ex-Vanderbilt CEO piss on your possible awesome."
"That was really inspiring," says Kirk, finally going for his panini. "Did Roland Emmerich write that for you?"
"I hope you die," says Bones, letting go of Kirk disgustedly. "I hope Pike takes a TI-89 to your skull."
Kirk makes a kissy face at him. "I love you too, Bonesy."
Back at work, there's screaming. One of the techs has accidentally crashed the CCO's server bank. Kirk sticks his head into her office on the 79th floor just as she has finished describing how exactly she is going to take his life with an Ethernet cord. "Good day, Nyota?"
"The best," Uhura smiles, her left eye twitching. Kirk backs away.
Kirk's staff has been working through lunch to get the accounts done for the third-quarter earnings report. Kirk sets a crate of chicken teriyaki from Osaka down on the break room table and is positively swamped with gratitude. "It's the least I can do!" he protests as Noel tries to hug him while balancing a foot-tall stack of receipts. Rand sweeps him into his office and shows him the gratifyingly small pile of accounts that Kirk needs to do himself. Kirk only handles the stuff that's confidential or too difficult for his staff to do in thirty minutes. Generally, he does it in five.
That's why Kirk is the CFO of Enterprise Industries. He's kind of a financial genius. He had read Mill and Keynes by middle school and was being harassed by MBA programs by the age of sixteen. It helped that his great-grandfather was J. P. Morgan's best friend, and his great-grandmother was Susan B. Anthony's, that his father made Citibank what it is today and that his mother co-founded the IMF. Kirk is working his way through a massive account like it's butter and he's a hot knife when Gaila, the IT manager, sticks her head around the doorjamb.
"Karu told me that he has a seriously massive favor to ask of you," she says. "Are you going to be at Romulus Bank anytime soon? That is, can you go to Romulus Bank for him?"
"What?" says Kirk. "Why?"
"He has some acquisition papers that he wants you to look over, before he signs them," she says. "He loves you very much."
"As long as he loves me to the tune of an '89 Cristal," says Kirk. "When does Hikaru need them looked at by?"
"The sooner the better," says Gaila. "Or, you know, within the hour."
x
Romulus Bank in Seattle's downtown was the first, constructed in 1892 and redesigned in 1913, 1955, 1987, and 2012, and it serves as the now multinational bank's headquarters. Romulus Tower looms over half of the business district. Kirk doesn't much like RB, or that Enterprise Industries deals so much with them. All of their finances are above-board, but there have been a few high-profile fraud cases to go to court, and their board of directors is notorious.
Kirk steps inside the lobby, adjusting his lapels. The lobby is wide and low, done up in industrial ironworks and tiled with white Merced granite, etched at the edges and sewn through with reedy steel designs. Cold white lights with silver fixtures hang in front of mirrors. The wooden teller counters and windows are mahogany, finely dove-tailed and elegantly worn. There are no windows, but the wide bank of sliding doors at the entrance is entirely glass.
Kirk is in the middle of the lobby, removing his Enterprise Industries ID from his wallet, when the first shot rings out.
x
"Get down!"
Kirk drops. His right hand goes to his hip, scrabbling for a gun that isn't there. Bank patrons are screaming. Ten black-suited robbers have appeared out of nowhere.
One rushes by Kirk, and without thinking, Kirk lashes out, hooking their ankle with his kick. The robber tumbles and lets out a shout. Kirk scrambles forward and disarms them, shoving a knee into the robber's neck and raising the gun he's grabbed from the floor.
He's just got the sights focused on the brigands approaching the tellers when a fist hits him squarely in the jaw. He drops the gun immediately and his attacker kicks it away. The robber he's felled rushes to their feet and snatches up their lost gun. Kirk finds himself staring cross-eyed into the barrel of somebody else's firearm.
"No heroics, please," says a smooth male voice from behind a featureless mask. The black clothes the thief is wearing are thin and tight: Kirk can see the man's biceps, flexing around a red band that undoubtedly marks him as the leader. "Number Four, as you were."
The robber Kirk had disarmed nods and hurries off. Kirk swallows. His heart rate is up because of the adrenaline. He's not afraid at all, he realizes, looking away from the gun and into the thief's mask. It's good to know.
"Please, do not move," says the thief. The eyeholes in the mask are small, and the man's eyes are shadowed, but Kirk can tell that they are a dark, dark brown.
"You say please a lot for a bank robber," says Kirk, breathing heavily. They must make a picture. He is on his knees in the middle of the lobby, elbows at acute angles and fingers crossed on top of his head. The thief is leaning down to aim his gun at Kirk's head, nothing but focus apparent in the line of his body.
"Manners are appropriate in every situation," says the thief. "What are you? Undercover police? Military off-rotation?"
"National Guard," says Kirk. "What are you? The scum of the Earth?"
"By your definition, undoubtedly," says the thief. Without looking away from Kirk he calls, "Number Eight! I will need someone to cover this Guardsman."
"You're needed elsewhere?" says Kirk, wondering if he can disarm this guy without getting his brains blown out.
"Always," says the thief. He lowers his gun before Number Eight arrives, which surprises Kirk so much that he doesn't try to disarm anybody even though he has the chance to.
While Number Eight levels their gun at Kirk's nose, Kirk looks around the bank. A few security guards are being closely observed, and some belligerent hostages, but Kirk is the only one receiving special treatment. He hasn't been watching, but he thinks his guard is present because he was the only successful opposition.
It's been ten minutes since the thief and his team stormed the bank. Already there are FBI agents, uniformed police, and reporters at the doors, gesticulating wildly and pulling out tools. Kirk winces a little when he realizes that, by virtue of his location in the middle of the lobby, he's probably the one getting photographed by the slavering media.
After another ten minutes of the bank robbers thoroughly ignoring the media, police, SWAT, and FBI presence right outside, the man with the red band comes over to Kirk and Number Eight, bringing most of his crew with him. They confer in whispers. Kirk has been watching them directing the tellers to load mounds of cash and bonds into bags and boxes. Now, Kirk strains his ears, trying to listen to what the thief is saying to his crew, but Number Eight whistles a lond and tuneless song, and when Kirk glares at him, Number Eight winks.
The circle breaks, and the thief, the only one not hefting massive bags of cash, makes a sharp gesture. "Go," he says. Number Eight breaks away and the thief levels his gun at Kirk's head. The other robbers lift millions of dollars of crates and sacks and jog out a back entrance, leaving the thief alone in the lobby.
Kirk starts to say, "This doesn't seem wise," but before he can get the sentence out, the police are breaking down the doors. The thief grabs Kirk by the neck and drags him towards a different exit, pressing the barrel of the gun hard to Kirk's temple. Kirk staggers hugely, trying to throw the thief off balance so he can get a good grasp of the man's arm or torso, but it's nothing doing: the thief has impeccable balance and incredible strength, and Kirk can only limp along, trying and failing to find purchase.
The thief drags Kirk into the bowels of the bank, down deserted office corridors and through back electrical rooms. Lights are flashing, alarms are hissing: the building has been evacuated. The sounds of their pursuers are constant, and Kirk has hope that a policeperson will leap around a corner and shoot the thief in the arm, but it never happens; always, the law is a half a step behind.
Finally, after two corridors of grime and rust and a few back staircases that Kirk needs a tetanus shot just from looking at, the thief bursts into a wide, tall room filled with flashing lights and humming machines. It's well kept, not to mention well equipped: before Kirk can recover a modicum of balance, the thief has tied his hands tightly to an aluminum railing with a long stretch of yellow extension cable. As Kirk watches, the thief jogs to each door—there are three—and shoves storage lockers and banks of flickering equipment in front of them.
"I'm not following your plan," Kirk calls, yanking at the cords around his hands as he gauges the strength of his bonds. "Is it just me, or have you painted yourself into a corner here?"
The thief doesn't bother to reply. When Kirk looks up, he's surprised to see the thief standing in the clear center of the room, looking straight up. Kirk follows his gaze to a skylight.
"That's at least fifty feet up," says Kirk slowly.
"Sixty-two, to be precise," says the thief, turning to Kirk. He's still holding a gun. And then Kirk realizes that he—the thief—is bleeding.
"Your arm," says Kirk, automatic. The thief glances at the alarming gash in his left shoulder.
"I do have time to tend to it," the thief says, almost philosophical. He sits down, cross-legged, about ten meters from Kirk, and extracts a large bandage and some spray antiseptic from somewhere on his uniform. "Do you know when it happened? I was not paying attention, I must admit. I must have been clumsy somewhere along the way."
Kirk can't imagine any part of this man being clumsy. He says, "No, I didn't notice until—"
He stops. The thief has just removed his mask.
Kirk's not sure what he expected, but it wasn't this. The thief has thin, angular features, all geometric planes and harsh line segments, but his eyes are round. He has dark, thick eyebrows and straight black hair that falls in a perfect line across his forehead. When he turns his head to look at his wound, the tendons in his neck lift up and stretch between his chin and shoulder like suspension cords on a bridge.
In a million years, Kirk is not going to admit to being distracted, to being intrigued, to being just a little bit turned on. But, as he sits awkwardly in his now very crumpled suit, tugging uselessly at the binding on his wrists, and watches the thief carefully strip off his torn black shirt, he has to bite his lip. To keep from what, he doesn't know, but the thief's collarbones are curved unlike the rest of him, glistening with sweat, round like a bruise or a red, glossed lip.
The thief glances up, and Kirk isn't prepared at all for the man to smile. It's a quick thing, just a quirk of the lip, and not at all sincere, but Kirk swallows. The thief holds eye contact with Kirk for a moment longer than is—appropriate? expected? platonic? He says, "What is your name, sir?"
"Jim Kirk," Kirk says. "What's yours?"
"My name is Spock," he says. "I am very sorry to have inconvenienced you, Mr. Kirk."
"Oh, it's no bother," says Kirk, trying to be light around the lump in his throat. "I was having a boring day anyway."
"I am sure it was not," says Spock. He has daubed blood off of his biceps and is now applying antiseptic to the wound. "What do you do, Mr. Kirk?"
"I'm the CFO for Enterprise Industries," says Kirk. "What do you do, Mr. Spock?"
Spock tilts his head, gazing at the wound from a few angles before replying, "Why, Mr. Kirk—I rob banks. Is that not apparent?"
"That's it?" says Kirk. "That's how you make your living? That's all you do?"
"Before I robbed banks, I robbed businesses. Before that, I robbed individuals. Before that, I was a soldier. And before that, I was student."
"Of what?"
"Physics and mathematics," says Spock, "at MIT. That is something the FBI does not know. You can tell them. Maybe then they will figure out who I am and why I am doing what I am doing." He finishes tying the bandage around his arm and stands up, flexing his muscles against the fabric. "Mr. Kirk, it was very nice to make your acquaintance. I hope I have not ruined your day."
"Of course not," Kirk demurs. Spock stands and pulls his shirt over his head, leaving his mask on the floor. He looks up, towards the skylight. "Mr. Spock," Kirk says.
"Yes?" says Spock, bringing the full glare of his gaze to rest on Kirk.
Kirk blinks. A light passes across his face, and he says, "Nothing."
"I see," says Spock. "My best, Mr. Kirk."
On cue, there is a huge noise of glass shattering, and an iron bar attached to a thick length of knotted rope falls sixty feet through the broken skylight. In a smooth movement, Spock leaps on the bar and tugs the rope, balancing perfectly on his thin perch. Then he goes up, and through the roof; the helicopter wheels away, and Spock is gone.
The police bust down the doors almost a minute later. Kirk realizes only then that they've been trying to break through the whole time, but his ears have been forgetting to tell him. As a paramedic cuts through the cord around his wrists, and as the police shout questions at him, Kirk looks at the mask abandoned on the floor, and can't look away.
x
Kirk's lawyer extracts him from the SPD debriefing labyrinth at one in the morning. Bones, Pike, and the rest of the executive board, including Sulu, are waiting for him at his apartment.
"I am so, so sorry," moans Sulu, thrusting two bottles of Cristal into Kirk's hands as soon as he walks through the door. "This is all my fault."
"It's more the fault of the bank robbers, don't you think?" says Kirk, bemused. Sulu hugs him hugely. Kirk's lawyer, Areel Shaw, rolls her eyes and goes over to flop on a couch next to Pike, who smiles at her.
"We were all pretty worried, Uhura says. "Dr. McCoy nearly threw a first aid kit through the window, he was that worried about your face."
"I did not," Bones protested, blushing and trying to hide behind his bourbon.
"Let me guess," Kirk says, clapping Bones on the shoulder and nearly spilling his drink. "You don't give a damn about me?"
"No damns," Bones affirmed. "Not a single damn was given."
"Good to know," laughs Kirk.
Kirk serenades them with the story, which he doesn't exaggerate too much of, until two, at which point Bones gets his doctorly side back and throws everybody out, yelling that Kirk needs to sleep so that he'll be less insufferable the next day. Pike tells Kirk to take a day off on his way out the door, at which Kirk protests strongly until Pike silences him with one of the firmest looks Kirk has ever seen.
x
The next day, Kirk is awoken by the scent of cooking eggs.
Hazy, he doesn't bother to put on anything but an undershirt before venturing into the kitchen, wearing that and boxers. An impeccably dressed man in a black collared shirt and slacks is pouring orange juice into two glasses. He is in profile, and Kirk does not recognize him at first. When he turns to hand one of the glasses to Kirk, Kirk nearly screams. He takes two steps backward, but Spock persists, pressing the glass carefully into Kirk's hand.
"Good morning, Mr. Kirk," says Spock, turning around to fetch the eggs. Kirk, the glass trembling in his hand, notes the gun shoved into the back of Spock's pants. "Excuse the intrusion. I trust you slept well?"
"Yes, very well," Kirk whispers, reaching for the phone on the wall.
Spock divides the eggs into two masses and deposits them onto plates. "I have cut your telephone line, by the way," he says, as Kirk listens to the absolute silence coming from the phone instead of a dial tone. "Additionally, I have disconnected your Internet and hidden your cellular phone."
Kirk places the phone slowly back in its cradle. "What—what are you doing here?"
"In truth," says Spock, setting the plates down at the table—which is set—and motioning for Kirk to join him, "I am rather bored. I thought I would come see you."
Kirk sits down slowly in front of his plate. Spock is consuming his scrambled eggs with some enthusiasm. "You're bored," he repeats.
"Well," says Spock, "more along the lines of curious. My full name did not appear in the papers today, as I had suspected it would. This surprises me. Had the police known my surname and former education, they would have been able to put two and two together and come up with my identity. But they still do not know who I am, which implies that you—" He aims his eggy fork at Kirk, who blinks. "—did not tell them. And the question is, why?"
"I didn't want to," says Kirk. Spock keeps staring, and Kirk babbles on. "You didn't hurt anybody. Actually, you were really nice to the hostages. I was watching."
"You did not want me to be caught," Spock tries to clarify.
"Ye-es," says Kirk, hoping Spock won't notice the hesitation. He does, of course.
"What is the real reason?" Spock says.
Kirk snaps, "I don't know!" He stands up, beginning to push back on the balls of his feet so that he can leap towards Spock, but Spock is aiming a gun at him again.
"What is the real reason?" Spock repeats. "Who are you working for?" He is steel again, nothing like the playful cat burglar cooking scrambled eggs of a minute ago.
"Enterprise Industries," Kirk says, clenching his fists. "I'm not a damn undercover operative. You can search my apartment."
Spock raises an eyebrow. "Mr. Kirk, that is a very good idea."
x
"I haven't been tied up this regularly since college," Kirk tries to joke, yanking on the silk tie wrapped thoroughly around his wrists and also around the chair he is sitting in.
"Fascinating," says Spock, going through Kirk's bookshelves. "What did you do in college that involved so much knot-tying?"
"You're kidding, right?" says Kirk, glaring at the knot, which is some sort of horrible binding knot that Houdini probably couldn't get out of.
"I never 'kid'," says Spock, and Kirk can hear the quotation marks. Spock runs a hand underneath Kirk's shelves, probably searching for hidden compartments. Kirk sighs and watches Spock work for a while. Having completed the bookshelves, Spock turns to Kirk. "Well?" he says, absolutely no trace of sarcasm in his voice. "What did you do in college that involved so much knot-tying?"
Kirk can't figure out if Spock is joking or not. He closes his eyes. "I had a lot of kinky sex, alright?"
Much to Kirk's surprise, Spock doesn't reply immediately. When Kirk opens his eyes, he sees that Spock actually looks kind of uncomfortable. It hits Kirk that he hasn't seen Spock expressing emotion before this—other than a rather irritating smugness—and so Kirk bares his teeth in a smile.
"What, you didn't?"
Spock turns to Kirk's television and begins to inspect it and its hutch. "No, Mr. Kirk, I cannot say that I did."
"That's really surprising, considering your physique and obvious sociopathy," Kirk snaps.
"I assure you, Mr. Kirk, I do not have antisocial personality disorder," says Spock. "You said yourself that my team and I treated the hostages well. You will find, in an analysis of my background and modus operandi, that I have never injured or killed."
"You said you were a soldier," says Kirk.
"Membership and/or employment in a military force does not imply the inclination to or endorsement of homicide," says Spock. "Are you a murderer, Mr. Kirk? You are a Captain. You fought in Iraq."
"I don't know where you heard that," said Kirk. "I served in Afghanistan. Do better research, Mr. Spock."
"Are you a murderer?"
"I have killed people, if that's what you're asking."
Spock's eyes go dark. "There is no difference between murder in civilian life and murder in war."
"I beg to differ," says Kirk. "Listen to me, debating morality with a criminal."
Spock is silent for a long time. It takes him nearly an hour to search Kirk's living room, dining room, and kitchen.
When Spock finally speaks, emerging from the kitchen to stare at Kirk, it is to say, "Your apartment is very clean."
"Thanks," says Kirk, whose throat hurts a little from not speaking, and whose wrists are killing him—he's been picking at this knot for what feels like a year and all he's got is soreness. "I really love Swiffering."
"Do you," says Spock, glancing into Kirk's broom cupboard. "This Swiffer is still encased in plastic wrap."
"Well, I wear them out. That's a new one," Kirk explains patiently. Apparently Spock has three flaws, from Kirk's point of view: kleptomania, asexuality, and a total lack of a sense of humor. He watches Spock close the broom closet and, noticing the jitter in Spock's arm, asks, "How's the wound?"
"Healing," says Spock, and goes off to ransack Kirk's apartment some more.
Spock finishes searching the bedroom and the bathroom within another half hour. Kirk kind of doesn't want to know what Spock has found out about him. He watched a show with his brother last year about people who can go into a stranger's office and then answer embarrassingly specific questions about them, and Spock definitely strikes Kirk as one of those people. He knows for sure that Spock has found his porn stash, his sex toy stash, thumbed through his photo albums, flipped through probably all of the files, images, emails, and videos on his laptop and phone, and discovered his deeply embarrassing shoebox full of blue marshmallow Peeps.
But there's nothing indicating that Kirk is a secret agent of some kind, which is somehow even worse than Spock knowing about Kirk's weird obsession with Peeps, because Kirk will then actually have to explain to Spock why he didn't tell the FBI about Spock's revelations.
Spock comes pacing out of Kirk's bedroom, hands behind his back. He looks suddenly menacing. Kirk wasn't afraid when Spock was leveling a gun at him, but now, a shiver of trepidation goes rolling down his spine.
Kirk has been at the table this whole time, and now Spock sits across from him, at the other end of the table. He clasps his fingers together in what would be a melodramatic fashion if his eyes weren't so seriously alarming.
"You did indeed serve in Afghanistan," says Spock. "You have a brother named George, who has, with his wife Aurelan, three children. You received your MBA from Stanford eight years ago and worked your way with almost indecent haste up the corporate ladder. Your family is sickeningly well-connected, yet you have not profited, recently, from their diamond-studded net of connections, and indeed, are not in contact with your extended family."
"Three guesses," mutters Kirk, twisting in his seat. "And the first two don't count."
"I wondered briefly why this was, but your stash of sexually explicit materials illuminated the issue for me," says Spock. "I assume they disapprove of your homosexuality?"
"No, please, don't mind about my feelings, put it bluntly," says Kirk. "Yeah, Spock. Cocksucking is not an acceptable lifestyle for a member of the great Kirk family."
Spock is apparently zero percent surprised. "An obstacle I, too, have encountered," he says, and Kirk seriously thinks that he might be having a seizure for a minute, because oh my god, what? By the time he's recovered, Spock has moved on to less mind-blowing topics. "I have found no evidence that you are working undercover for Interpol, the FBI, the CIA, MI6, or any other national or international anti-crime, anti-terror, or counterintelligence agency. Therefore, I would like to pose again my initial question to you: why did you not tell the FBI about my education and name?"
Kirk has formulated a reply. "Because I thought you'd try to seek revenge on me for giving out that information."
"Even though you noted that I was nonviolent towards yesterday's hostages?" says Spock.
"Okay, but also, you've aimed a gun at my head, what, three times now? Four?"
"Point taken," says Spock. "But you are, as I have detailed and as you of course know, a powerful, rich, and high-ranking member of Seattle society. Why would you have reason to fear me? Furthermore, I essentially gave you permission to reveal this information to the authorities."
"Just now, you broke into my apartment, threatened to kill me—" Spock began to object. "—again with the aiming guns at my head, it's totally a nonverbal threat—and have had me tied up for a really long time now and my shoulders hurt a lot."
"I feel deeply for your pain," says Spock dryly. "But I do not believe your claims."
"Then—I just don't know what you want from me," says Kirk. "That's my reasoning, and that's all I've got." He feels a flicker of panic in his stomach and starts jerking his wrists against his bindings. Something resembling concern, or maybe confusion, goes across Spock's face. He stands, drawing the gun again, and Kirk's head starts to hurt.
"Why can't you believe that I'm afraid of you?" Kirk bites out. "What makes you think that I wasn't saving my own skin yesterday?"
"Honest citizens hide nothing from the law," says Spock, approaching, his finger wrapped coolly around the trigger of the gun. "You must be dishonest. What are you dishonest about?"
Kirk has no idea. He genuinely has no idea why he didn't tell the police and the FBI and any of the tens of officers and agents that debriefed him yesterday about Spock. He told them about the injury and the escape, and he insisted that the thief had said nothing. He hadn't thought about it, hadn't reasoned why he was acting to strangely. He had simply withheld the information without any conscious reason for doing so.
See, Kirk has never done something like this before. It's in his nature to be honest, often times painfully so. His parents had warned him that telling his extended family about his sexuality would not go well but he had told them anyway; his early professors had told him that nobody appreciated a smartass but he couldn't help but know the right answer; he had always informed his sexual partners of exactly what he wanted and in no uncertain terms.
"Yesterday, at the bank, you looked at me without fear," says Spock. "But you are afraid now. What has changed? What do you have to lose?"
Kirk has absolutely no idea.
And then, because apparently there is a God, Kirk's doorbell rings.
x
Spock reacts like lightning. He tucks the gun into his pocket, tugs his gloves up his wrists, and without saying another word, sprints into Kirk's bedroom. Kirk starts yelling. The doorbell goes silent, and whoever-it-is knocks. "I'm tied up!" Kirk shrieks at the door. "Get the police!"
By the time the police (along with a sleepy-looking FBI agent Kirk recognizes from yesterday) arrive, Spock is very long gone. Kirk isn't sure how he managed to escape from the bedroom window, which is forty floors above ground level, but he's not really surprised. It turns out that Bones was at the door. "Why did you knock?" Kirk grouses at him. "How did that make sense?"
"What'd you expect me to do, call 911 when I heard yellin'?" snaps Bones, checking Kirk's wrists for contusions. "I was your roommate in college. I've heard worse."
"He got away," Kirk pouts. "You rang the doorbell and he threw himself out of the window. It's all your fault."
"Hey, I rescued you," says Bones. "You're the one who got yourself taken hostage."
"Not technically a hostage situation," says the FBI agent, who is ignoring the small army of police combing the apartment with microscopes and tweezers to drink a cup of Kirk's very expensive Iranian coffee. "No third-party involvement."
"Until now," says Kirk, finally shoving Bones away.
"And the other requirement is that the aggressor has to demand something from the third party, which didn't happen," the agent goes on. "Do you have any bagels? I'm kinda hungry."
"No bagels, but I've got a box of vegan croissants," says Kirk. "Top cabinet over the mixer. Aren't you supposed to be helping the police?"
"Probably," shrugs the agent, and goes for the croissants.
"I like him," says Kirk to Bones. Bones hits him on the arm. "Ow! What!"
"Why'd you let a felon into your apartment? How does that make sense?"
"I did not let him in, he broke in. He's a felon. He does that kind of thing professionally."
"Don't you do that smart thing professionally? How's that going?"
Thankfully a policewoman comes over, preventing them from coming to blows. "Mr. Kirk," says Officer O'Hara. "Want to tell us the tale?"
"Not really," sighs Kirk.
"I understand," says O'Hara, sitting down across from Kirk and stealing the FBI agent's coffee. "However, we need to know all the details."
x
Kirk ends up telling them Spock's name, which he really can't believe they didn't know. "Apparently," he b. to O'Hara, "he let it drop during the escape and thought I heard, but I didn't, so when you guys didn't come after him, he came after me, because he is apparently crazy."
O'Hara crosses her legs carefully and sits back in the chair. Bones is reading Kirk's Entertainment Weekly and sharing more of Kirk's expensive Iranian coffee with the FBI agent, who is at this point blatantly ignoring everything that's happening around him. "Regardless of Spock's potential psychological issues, we need to develop a better understanding of his patterns. None of us predicted that the Romulus Bank would be Spock's next target, although the institution was on the list."
"And now it's personal, right?" says the FBI agent.
Kirk raises his eyebrows. "Meaning?"
"She's a Romulan," the FBI agent says, nodding at O'Hara, who merely stares at him with lidded eyes.
"Meaning that Romulus Bank is one of the most secure financial institutions in the world," says O'Hara. "If Spock can disable Romulus's security and make off with millions of their dollars, then he is clearly capable of breaking any bank, anywhere. So it is personal in the sense that Spock has proven himself to be a supremely worthy opponent."
"We should trap him," says the FBI agent.
O'Hara stares at him. "Excuse me?"
"Presumably," says the agent, sitting up and pulling at his shirt collar, "Spock is paranoid about his identity. Reasonable. Which is why he went after Kirk. So, we put Kirk in a safe place, and keep not running checks on his identity."
"First," says O'Hara, eyes narrowed, "what makes you think that Spock will come back for Kirk, especially since we will have hidden Kirk in a secure location? Second, I've already ordered checks on Spock's identity."
"Oh, I cancelled those," says the agent, grinning slowly. "Came up with this idea a while back."
O'Hara gives him this look that Kirk has no interest on being the receiving end of, ever. "Excuse me," she says again, but very slowly.
"I think," says the agent, "that we should move Kirk to your house for, oh, a week or so, to see if Spock bites."
x
It's a miracle that O'Hara doesn't kill the FBI agent. Pike is phoned and basically court-ordered to give Kirk a week off. Bones, much too amused by this whole situation, asks if he can come along to keep Kirk company and generally annoy everybody, which the FBI agent acquiesces to. O'Hara steams. Kirk half really wants to go back to work and forget about all of this. Not only does he have a ton of stuff to do, like seriously a ton, but the bit with armed criminals and dishonesty and (for once) the really wrong kind of sexual attraction is freaking him out. But at the same time, the other half of him really wants to continue with this… whatever it is. Charade? Flirtation? Adventure? Bildungsroman? He can see a lot of paths for this whatever-it-is to take. The more romantic, dreamy ones end in stunningly non-bloody shoot-outs, country-fleeing, and a lot more tropical-island-sex than Kirk would care to admit. The realistic fantasies also end in shoot-outs, but they're mainly stunning for their graphic violence. Real life isn't PG-13.
O'Hara, who is a senior officer on the Seattle Police Force and apparently dirty rich, has an incredible house on Mercer Island. Walking into the mansion, Kirk recognizes some of the same style of carvings from Romulus Bank. O'Hara calms down a little when the FBI agent, who has brought an honest-to-god red cooler of full of Rainier Beer, offers her one. "I know you prefer Romulan Ale, but this is a lot less potent," he says, popping the tab. "Shouldn't get too sloshed on duty."
She glares at him and knocks back the can.
Kirk is being housed on the bottom floor. His guest room is more of a suite. There's an Andrew Wyeth in the study. (Bones confides to Kirk that his room has a Cassat, "Hah!") O'Hara gets him to sign a ton of four-point font forms that essentially allow the SPD to place video cameras around every inch of his environment and person, wire him, control his movement, and probably lay claim to his firstborn. Areel Shaw looks them over and says that they hold the SPD responsible for any harm ("Physical or psychological, that's important," she says) he experiences, so really it's all good. "Unless you want personal freedom or the right to privacy."
"Oh, how important are those?" says Kirk, and signs.
The strategy is pretty simple. O'Hara and the agent establish a perimeter around the house, all plainclothes cops and badly disguised shrubbery. They cover every inch of the house and the grounds with cameras and microphones. They don't do any traceable digging into Spock's name and background. They don't release Kirk's whereabouts, but they do let his location become a badly kept secret.
Kirk isn't sure if Spock is going to bite. He can see Spock getting intensely curious about why they've suddenly put him under serious wraps. But he can also see Spock realizing it's a trap and staying far away. "Either way, I'm bored," he says to the FBI agent, who's watching the Steelers beat up the Packers and (as is apparently normal for him) drinking another beer on-duty, "so can you at least get my boss to send over some work?"
A crate of files arrives later that day. Kirk lays claim to a desk in the main room and rips through two hundreds accounts before dinner. Bones, who actually took a week off of work to observe this nonsense, is doing paperwork. O'Hara is swishing around, out of uniform and in a really amazing evening dress, getting the house ready for the dinner party that will be held the next night. "You can't have this shindig later?" the FBI agent says, flipping the channel to basketball. "We gotta do ID checks and everything."
"I cannot postpone this, particularly in light of recent events," O'Hara says irritably, arranging a vase of magenta flowers for the dinner table. "My family needs to discuss business. I have already run everyone's IDs."
"I should make you recuse yourself," the FBI agent says.
"You should help me with the candles," O'Hara says.
The FBI agent spends the rest of the evening organizing O'Hara's shockingly large collection of candles by scent and color. O'Hara actually smiles at one point.
"Really, though," says the FBI agent the next morning as they're all eating breakfast. "You couldn't have had this thing somewhere else, at least?"
"You chose my house for this operation," says O'Hara. She snaps her fingers for another mimosa, which her mouse of a servant dashes over with. "You deal with the consequences."
"Fair enough," the agent shrugs.
Kirk shovels more of his surprisingly good tofu French toast into his mouth. This whole thing is like a big grown-up sleepover. He and Bones stayed up really late the previous night watching all four Die Hard movies. O'Hara had occasionally walked on and commented on how stupid they ("they" apparently applying to Kirk and Bones half the time, the movies the other half) were, although she was more amused than really necessary by the part in the fourth movie when McClane took out a helicopter with a car. The FBI agent had started walking around in fluffy pink slippers and a tartan robe, and Kirk caught him clipping his moustache in the kitchen sink that morning. "O'Hara's going to kill you," Kirk had noted, pouring himself some coffee.
"Woman needs to take it down a few notches," the agent muttered, wiggling his lip. "I recommend more beer, fewer Romulans."
"Good formula," said Kirk.
O'Hara forces them to help her finish setting up for the party. Kirk is put on napkin duty. By the time dinner rolls around, all Kirk can think about is napkin patterns. His hands won't tie his tie. "Bones," he yells. It's six o'clock and O'Hara has been in her room for an hour. Thirty minutes ago she dragged the FBI agent into her room because she needed help picking out an outfit.
"What," yells Bones back.
"Come help me with my tie," Kirk yells.
"I'll have you arrested for indecent exposure and sexual assualt," Bones yells.
"My fucking neck tie, Bones," Kirk yells. "My hands don't work anymore."
Bones comes huffing into the room and ties Kirk's tie for him. "Do you think the FBI agent is still alive?" he says while apparently trying to strangle Kirk with a Windsor knot.
"Oh my god, I need to breathe," says Kirk, beating Bones away. "And probably not; I think I heard O'Hara asking him about eyeshadow earlier."
"Christ protect his soul," says Bones sorrowfully.
After Bones leaves, Kirk takes a second to survey himself in a mirror. He dresses in a suit and tie every day, but this is a really nice suit. The suit is gray pinstripe, perfectly tailored. He bought in the United Arab Emirates last year during a business trip to Abu Dhabi. He turns around a little in the mirror. He hasn't told anybody this, but his favorite part about the suit is how great the pants make his butt look.
When the guests start arriving, O'Hara introduces Kirk as a fellow attendee and Bones (much to Bones's indignation) as his date. This concerns Kirk at first because from what he knows about the Romulus family, they're just as conservative as the Kirks, but nobody bats an eyelid, which makes sense when the current Romulan patriarch, a skinny bald man what Kirk cannot help but think of as a cocksucker mouth, shows up in this shiny black leather suit.
"Apparently," the FBI agent says, wandering up behind Kirk and Bones, "he's adopted. Explains a lot."
"You survived," Kirk notes.
"I escaped when she accidentally poked herself in the eye with her mascara brush," says the agent, a distant horror glossing his eyes. "But I did pick out that dress."
They all look over at O'Hara, who is smiling narrowly at some auditors. The dress is white, floor-length, and patterned with black abstract shapes. It shows off her collarbones, which are kind of amazing.
"Good choice," says Bones, a bit hoarsely.
Kirk wanders over to the bar for a drink. He ends up watching the security procedure. At O'Hara's front door, a man and a woman that look like hired security are wanding people and checking their IDs and invites to a laptop, presumably with a list of invited guests up. Kirk knows that the computer is actually hooked up to the FBI's warrant database and that the doorframe has a hastily installed metal detector in it, which is explaining why a few random people are getting escorted into a coatroom for pat-downs. He's just finished his first rum and coke when the FBI agent comes over for a beer.
"Do you expect Spock to go for me here?" Kirk asks, folding his napkin into his highball glass. "It seems more likely that he'd try a sneak attack at night or something."
"Here's good because he can get close to the house, but the final distance is a lot harder than it would be without a party in full swing," says the agent. "Which is why you're going to stay in view of guests at all times. If you gotta take a piss, let us know."
"That's alarming," says Kirk.
"That's real hostage situations," says the agent.
What Kirk does like about the party is that the guests are all talking about money. Kirk has a funny attitude about money. It's not that he likes money that much. Since his family is stupid rich he's never worried about it or thought about it. But he likes economics, financing, and banking. The industry is completely fascinating to him and always has been, even though the people are pretty much universally a bunch of privileged assholes. (He sort of is too, so that's okay.) He makes the rounds. There are a few people there he knows, mainly insurance adjusters and personal financiers. He's just finished having a friendly takedown of Thatcherite monetary policy with a woman from Deltan Bank when he realizes that they've ended up in a side room, almost blocked from everyone's view.
"I should go," he says, starting to move towards the main room again. The woman, who he's known for a few years, gets a sad expression in her eyes.
"You may not know this, but I'm from Vulca," she says. "I'm really sorry."
In a fast, fluid move, she reaches out and grabs his shoulder. His hands come up to disarm her, but it's too late. Her grip tightens, and everything goes black.
x
You know what? For once in my life, I am going to write a chaptered one-shot. The next chapter will finish this story. Please review!