Author's Note: Written for VampirePaladin as part of the Space Swap exchange. It was a pretty interesting challenge, since I've loved TOS since forever but never really gotten into the fic-writing side of things!
Down Time
Jim Kirk walked into his quarters with his back straight and head high, waited for the door to slide shut behind him, then groaned and let himself limp to his bed so he could finally collapse.
Some away missions went off without a hitch: the teams came home with new information, samples for scientific study, and completely unharmed, unless someone's allergies started acting up. Some away missions ran into minor snags: sudden equipment malfunctions, accidents, bad weather, or in certain circumstances little failures of diplomacy.
And on some away missions, you got bitten in the leg by a giant scaly bear-dog with a venom that had an effect like concentrated caffeine and spent thirty-five straight hours awake while stranded by an unexpected ion storm on a tropical planet with an average temperature of 40 degrees Celsius and a humidity level you could practically swim in.
Bones had already taken care of the venom's aftereffects and the bleeding from the actual bite; he'd wanted Jim to go to sickbay for a more thorough check-up once the ion storm finally lifted and they could return to the Enterprise, but Jim had managed to slither out with a promise he would report first thing in the morning. He felt fine - well, mostly fine - and what he wanted more than anything at the moment was to sleep until his eyes didn't feel like sandy marbles. He wouldn't trade his job for any other career in the galaxy, but it had its downsides once in a while.
And so did venomous bear-dog bites. His bed was as comfortable as ever, but after spending all that time sweating in Alaria II's sweltering humidity, his room felt a little on the cold and dry side. The lingering ache in his leg from the bite constantly nagged at the back of his mind no matter what position he was lying in, and every time he tried to shift around, a momentary flash of sharper pain would stab through his leg and up along the rest of his body.
Exhaustion or no exhaustion, he clearly wasn't going to get any sleep just by wishing for it. He levered himself off the bed with another involuntary groan and hobbled over to the shelf where he kept his store of paper books. He did plenty of his reading on screens - you could pack a lot of variety into a few discs - but print was easier on his eyes when he was tired. He was all caught up on his usual technical and scientific material, anyway, unless someone had broken the warp barrier or invented a cloaking device in the last two days. No - he was in the mood for one of the classics.
Jim ran a finger along the gently worn spines. Shakespeare - no, Christie - no, Euripides - no, Austen - no... He just needed something quiet, something he knew well enough that it wouldn't matter if his eyes skipped a sentence or three.
His hand stopped on a fat volume with a plain, slightly frayed green cloth binding. Well, it wasn't one of the books he'd had in mind when he started looking, but it ought to do nicely, and he pulled it off the shelf carefully and carried it back to the bed. He got as comfortable as he could get, rested the book on his chest, and thumbed through the soft-edged pages until he found one of his favorite sections.
03.10.2132: Well, today ended up being a lot more exciting than I expected! It's been such a slow week now that harvest's over - nothing but checking to make sure all the bales are the same weight and labeled right and etc., etc., etc. - so I figured today was just going to be more of the same. Well, joke's on me - I was trying to get a couple more minutes of sleep before breakfast and Tokiko hauled me out of bed. She was talking a light-year a minute, I couldn't understand a word until she said something about suiting up.
"What do I need to suit up for?" I said - checking bale weights on a load of cabbage is bad enough in zero-G without adding a big clumsy suit into it - but she wouldn't say why. She just grabbed my helmet and threw it at me and told me to get a move on before I got left behind. So I ended up putting my suit on over my pajamas and shoving one measly algae ball into my mouth for breakfast, and then Tokiko dragged me out to the hangar bay...
Spock considered the door to Captain Kirk's quarters. Dr. McCoy had asked him to check on the captain before he retired, citing some concern about the possible side effects of the captain's injury. Spock was well aware of Jim's tendencies to disregard his personal safety, sometimes to an illogical extreme, but reading the away team's report had made it quite obvious that the best cure for the captain's condition was likely simple rest. He had agreed to McCoy's request nonetheless, and while he might doubt its necessity, he would prefer to err on the side of caution in this case.
He pushed the door chime, and Jim's sleepy voice rose from the other side. "Who is it?"
"Spock, Captain. Dr. McCoy requested that I visit you."
"Of course he did... All right, come in."
Spock entered and saw the captain sitting up in bed with an open printed book in his hands. "My apologies if I've woken you, Captain," he said. "Dr. McCoy was most insistent, however."
Jim waved the apology away. "No, no, I was just reading - trying to get myself to relax. Have you ever been so tired you couldn't sleep?"
Spock quirked an eyebrow. "That would appear to be a contradictory state of being."
"You'd think," Jim said, with a slight smile, "but it happens. At least to some of us."
"If I may ask, what are you reading?"
"Ah, yes..." Jim closed the book, keeping his place marked with one thumb and wearing an expression that Spock would classify as mildly embarrassed. "It's the diary of Susannah Taki, one of the early colonists of the twenty-second century. Not the most action-packed story - she was an agricultural specialist - but it's an old favorite of mine."
"I would not have thought that colonial agriculture might be an interest of yours."
"Like I said, it's an old favorite. The first time I read it I was a kid - have a seat, would you? I'm going to sprain my neck looking up at you."
"As you wish," Spock said. There was a chair at the nearby desk; he sat in it.
"So there I was," Jim said, leaning back against the bulkhead, "eight years old and reading anything I could get my hands on, whether it was appropriate or not, and my father handed me this book hoping it might slow me down. It turned out to have the opposite effect - I couldn't get enough." He looked back to the book and flipped through a few pages. "There was just something about the way she talked about her work, her life on a space station and then as part of the colony... It helped me realize it's not all adventures out here, and appreciate how important even the smallest, most mundane details could be."
"I see."
"And - that's about it," Jim said. He yawned widely, covering his mouth a moment too late. "After the day I've had, it feels nice to remember that sometimes the universe runs more smoothly than it seems to around here."
"I can see the logic of that," Spock said.
"Good, good. Now - go tell Bones to quit poking at me vicariously so I can get some sleep."
"Understood, Captain." Spock paused, then said, "Sleep well."
"Good night, Spock."