They had been walking in silence, too beat and maybe too angry to talk, for a couple hours now.
The planet's inhabitants—they'd hardly been welcoming enough to try to give them the name of their race—had smashed Nyota's communicator as well as their phasers and Kirk had barely stolen the chance to stow his comm under some shrub before they searched him down and hauled both of them off. They'd spent what had felt like half of the day being escorted to the distant village where they knew they'd probably be—with luck—imprisoned; after the miracle that made them able to get the jump on one of them with a very big rock and then use his crude handgun to take out the other one, they'd looked at each other's clotting wounds and dirt-dusted faces, rubbed hair and sweat out of their eyes, and began to walk back to try to retrieve Jim's comm.
It was one of those nightmare "But what if?" scenarios that used to make her academy tactics instructor mildly roll up her eyes at how far-fetched the possibility really was. Nyota had never gotten nervous about the perceived defenselessness of reconnaissance missions; the fact that the away shuttles are so small is exactly the reason other vessels tend to leave them alone and assume there's nothing on board worth trying to badger out, and in the event of any other trouble, the flagship is usually at an easy contact distance. She had specifically requested this mission because it was for the purpose of following up on some weird encoded frequencies that had been showing up on the subspace monitors, and, she reminded the captain, ciphers were part of her everyday work. He'd been hesitant but then said something neutrally standard about appreciating her initiative, and added, "Bring something to read; it'll be a long ride."
Then there had come the class M planet he'd thought was worth getting some readings on from down on the surface, and they'd split up just so that Jim could take a leak, and she'd wandered an easy yelling distance away to try to get a look at an interesting nest of animals. She remembered taking a blow to the head and waking up in something like a cave, before it was feeling the hours eat into her as they gave her no food and no water. When her comm had started blaring messages from the bridge, she realized it had been long enough for Jim to somehow get back to the Enterprise and start sending the search parties.
The inhabitants, apparently having some understanding of their technology, then forced her to communicate with the ship in order to set an away party up for an easy ambush. She'd known that if she used the code word that would tip them off to the communication being enemy-coerced, Jim would order them to come down anyway. Conveniently, since it was Spock she was directly talking to, it seemed credible enough that she would use Vulcan numerals, which gave her more leeway to simply lie.
She had no idea how it was that Jim had materialized right in front of one of the inhabitants instead of where her faulty coordinates were and where, presumably, the rest of the away team had been sent. She had not even asked him about this; they'd been too busy being scared to utter much of any words in front of the aliens, and now she felt this silence looming too heavy between them and wasn't sure she even wanted to ask. What she'd put together was that Jim had figured he hadn't had the time to argue with Spock and had therefore programmed himself a different set of beam-down coordinates without telling anyone else, and that was why the Enterprise had no idea where they were, and they needed to get Jim's communicator back if they weren't going to simply wait and hope that a search team would find them before more of the lovely locals did.
The walk took them back through that seemingly endless field of strange stone sculptures; there was something vaguely technological about the room-sized flat pods like huge tables that were laid out in an even grid of circles, the fact that every other one of them was perfectly level while the rest formed a slightly curved bowl structure, but at the same time Nyota had the undefinable impression that they had been there for thousands of years. In the daytime they'd been as beautiful as you could possibly appreciate while fearing for your life; now, with the sun almost gone, they had a sort of foreboding mystery, seeming to hum with their surfaces still holding the day's warmth as if they'd absorbed that light and exhaled the night's brisk dank air.
The bowl-shaped ones had collected a good deal of rainwater, and after some time Nyota stopped to zip off her uniform and wade into one, feeling only a little calmed by the hint of moonlight that bounced off the still warm water. Wordlessly Jim followed suit and they removed their grimy clothes, wringing them out, all the while wincing as the actions brought a new sting to their cuts and bruises. She didn't need to bother with modesty. It was nothing he hadn't seen before, even if more often than not it was an affair of lifting skirts and shirts when they were together.
Jim put on his pants and then slung the rest of his clothes in a knot over his shoulder. She was zipping back into her dress with a toss of her wet hair out of her face, and when he helped her down out of the bowl, something passed between them that made her finally speak.
"...How did you know?"
They'd begun to walk again. Jim looked at her. "What?"
"The coordinates. How did you figure them out?"
She could barely see him shrugging in the darkness, and the motion seemed a little too stiff. "I figured if there was any way to guess what your mind would jump to...that cipher was fresh in your mind, and if you had to come up with the lie on the spot..."
She gave a long sigh, some undefinable aggravation knotting through her at the fact that he could be able to even make a lucky guess. After a moment she asked, "And how'd you know I was lying?"
"I didn't know. If I'd known I wouldn't have sent everyone else to the other coordinates. But I suspected, and I figured on the off-chance that I was right I'd get the time to at least comm up to the transporter room before some bastard slugged me. But—"
"But what gave you the hunch?" she said with a rougher frustration. "How did you know?"
"...I don't know," Jim finally replied, something forced flat in his tone. "Something in your voice I heard...I just knew. I should have ordered everyone to come with me, I should have trusted that."
"No. You really shouldn't have."
"Yeah, cause you have so much goddamn business telling me how to run a crew when you're lucky I won't have it in me to report anything about this."
"Oh." She rubbed at a sore spot on her hip. "Here we go."
"Excuse me, Lieutenant," Jim said with sudden hardness, loudly adding, "You straight-up lied to a higher commanding officer today."
"Yes, allow me to get on my knees and thank you because—"
"And now you're giving me attitude?"
She gave a tired bitter laugh. "Please. This is not a reprimand. This is you having a personal outburst, because you're apparently the only one who's allowed to throw yourself in front of a bullet. I would have been completely honest if I thought you'd actually put aside your reckless crap long enough to organize hostage contingencies rather than leap down here like some dumbass cowboy and get yourself killed."
She gasped slightly as he'd pulled sternly at one of her arms to bring her face around to him, the motion taking her by surprise in the building dark. He snapped, "When we got down here, I was expecting you to be a corpse. Have you even thought about that?"
"I figured I would probably die whether I lied or not, Captain. I don't have to wonder what you look like dead. Maybe I didn't want to see that a second time."
She started walking away, and his footsteps felt close right behind her and the tone of him was now hotly mocking, "Oh, cause you were so broken up about it. The way you've been doing me ever since I woke up again. Little Miss 'Don't kiss me on the mouth.' But hey, it turns out I'm okay for a fuck so it's not—"
Almost confused out of her anger, she'd turned around to try to look at him. He stopped close in front of her and she could faintly see stern blue under the bitter slope of his eyebrows. She said, "You never talked like it bothered you before."
A long half-stunned moment slid between them; he was very close, close enough to make it the first time. She could feel his breath, could feel his head lowering into hers in a low desperate pull. At the last possible second she lost her nerve, turned her face down.
His head seemed to almost land in defeat against her neck, before he stepped back. She said, "I'm not ready."
He made an aggravated sound. "Not ready for what? I do not understand what the hell is going on, I mean, did I miss something? It's like I sleepwalked into pissing you off while I was out cold those two weeks with how you're stepping around me like we barely know each other, and then when you need a good lay you just show up and—"
"It's not like that," she protested, the sinking feeling making her have to gasp for air. "It's not...I'm not like—"
"Yeah, you're not like that, so please for the love of fuck explain to me why this is like that." All of this was spilling out of Jim in shaky tones of long-worn frustration. "When I got better, everybody and then some, everyone I consider a friend, came to see me and say something. 'Gee, Captain, you almost died, that was pretty intense.' You know, 'I'm glad you're okay.' Where were you? I thought we were friends. I thought you were with Spock. Now things are all fucked up and you won't tell me why? You've got nothing to say?"
"I just didn't..." She shook her head, her voice wavering. "I didn't think any of it needed saying, I don't know, Jim. And for God's sake, you didn't almost die, you did die, do you understand that?"
She almost struggled against him in surprise when he touched her, but he was brushing his fingers over her cheeks, incredulously demanding, "Why are you crying?"
She let out a long forced breath. "I can't do this." She pushed his hands off but now he was so close, mindlessly brushing his mouth to her forehead in little soothing mumbles.
"Do you wanna stop?" he whispered after a moment. "Do you want to stop this?"
Surely that would be the magic trick. If he didn't touch her anymore. They would beam back into the bright light of the Enterprise and it would be like months ago, the easy exchange of companionable jokes and professional nods. They would be friends; it would be like nothing had ever changed. They should stop. They would stop.
She said, "No."
Her body lit up in a whip of nerves at the firm and sudden movement: He grabbed her up and set her atop the stone edge she hadn't realized she'd been backed up against, and the simple wave of his body pressing to her and between her legs tilted her whole sense of balance. His lips and tongue were working up her neck and got to her ear.
"I'll kiss you," he whispered in rough insistence. "I'll kiss you."
One hand was already up her skirt, grappling at her panties and she was too lost in the ebb of wrapping her arms over his bare shoulders to wonder at her own hips so easily surrendering to this: the underwear came down her legs in a thinning tangle, clearing her boots instead of him waiting for her to take them off. The cold feeling of exposure as the night's air breathed up her thighs made something in her quaver. She expected the sound of his fly unzipping when he pulled down, but instead his shoulder tapped up under one knee and she gasped, letting him pull both legs up around him, letting him bow in to kiss her there.
On the fifth night of his recovery, when he was still dead, when McCoy had managed to finally send Spock away to get some sleep and she'd just gotten up from a restless night, the doctor had looked at her looking at him and said, "I'll give you a minute," and then left the room to give her an hour. She'd only had gentle things to say to Jim then, and she did not know how to tell him that, or to tell him that she had cried very hard in the clinging fear that he would never wake up, or that she had (just this thing, just this once, nobody else in the world will ever have to know about this one time) leaned over him then and kissed him on the lips.
And when he'd been okay after all, something in her had free-falled away from him and also into him, hanging on like a superstition to the fact that since the very beginning of her years of knowing James T. Kirk she'd made more than enough of the right arrangements to ensure that this would never be her feeling for him. But then having to have him closer still, closer but never kissing, never on the mouth, no matter how badly she wanted to stray there every time. It was such a small thing, she told herself, it was only this one act, this one place. And how much can you even do with a mouth, his mouth, his mouth, his mouth—
She croaked his name out in ecstatic alarm at the careful firmness, the pace of his tasting just shy of enough so that the world creaked almost to a halt to wait for her breath to steady, steady, but it wouldn't steady. He moaned a long noise, almost a pained noise, drawing even slower as her gasps and groans heightened to begging. Her fingers found his hair in a tight unconscious grip and one of his hands reached around to grasp that hand in a simple loving hold before traveling up to find a breast. Her mind poured out of lucidity and into a single obsession with wet, wet against wet and how much is a mouth, how much for a heart, how much did she want to taste that tongue that tasted her? Would it ever be enough?
"Please, oh, please," she moaned, and she knew that when he brought her over to sated, it wouldn't be the answer. It wouldn't be the end. She heard him nudging a hand into his pants now, could feel the motion of him beginning to stroke himself. He was already shuddering and close after a short moment, groaning in agreement as her hips stuttered up at him and her back fell hard against the unforgiving surface beneath her and her blood charged up in the loud, loud throw.
After, his head fell to rest on her abdomen, and she stroked his hair for a long time as they caught their breath. There was a strange noise off in the distance of the wild, like cicadas but low and lazily rhythmic. After a while he moved and she felt him carefully sliding her panties back up over her knees, and she sat up to pull them the rest of the way and heard him shifting back into his shirts. She slipped off of the hard plane and back onto the gravel, and they began to walk again.
The darkness had thickened more dangerously; after they had both tripped on something a couple times they began to hold hands. But she did not speak. She couldn't think of what to say, other than something pulled out of sequence, a number that lost its meaning in the encryption. A middle to some beginning that hadn't happened, because she couldn't think about the end.