Sorry for my absence, college takes up more time than you think it does, and then suddenly, you haven't updated in almost three months. Anyway, this one is a bit shorter, but I now have an excessive amount of free time and unlimited access to the new movie, so, expect more soon!
Also, I just want to thank my slightly unofficial, but totally wonderful, Beta. I don't know her username, but she's pretty much the most awesome person ever. She has sat through at least three drafts of this chapter, and long analytical discussions of the characters/plot movements/random tangents that aren't exactly related to this story. THANK YOU!!!!
o
Jim brought Bones to a random bar in the hopes that it would distract him from thinking too much about the date. Jim apparently misses something during his trip to the bathroom because when he returns, he finds Bones surrounded by a bunch of idiots. When he sees one of the large men lean in towards Bones, Jim doesn't think; he simply reacts. When he takes the punch that was meant for Bones, he knows that he's gotten in way too deep. He hasn't taken a beating for anyone since his cousins died.
But seeing the look of annoyance on Bones's face (which really translates to concern) he realizes that it was the best thing he could have done for Bones. If he's worried about patching up Jim, he won't remember that his little girl is turning four without her daddy there.
o
After days that have been particularly hard, Jim wakes up from nightmares of scorched flesh and food falling through his fingers like sand. He breathes hard, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Every time, he is positive that the small gasping noises he makes will wake up Bones, but the older man never seems to stir.
Every two and a half weeks, when Jim wakes up, gasping for air, from another nightmare, Bones holds himself very still, waiting to see if Jim will call out to him. Jim never does. Bones never goes back to sleep until he hears Jim's breath become quiet and even once more.
o
Sitting in the simulator room, looking at the anger and terror that vied for room on Jim's face, Bones cursed the idiots who not only conceived the Kobayashi Maru test, but who also thought, somewhere in their obviously tiny skulls, that it would be a clever idea to have made the test available to Jim Kirk.
Two months later, when Jim announces that he's taking the test again, Bones is tempted to lock Jim in their room until he regains his mind. The second time is only slightly better than the first. At least this time, Jim expects the rise of bile in his throat, and Bones knows to have the toilet clean and bottles of good Southern Bourbon waiting back at the room.
o
Jim Kirk meets Gaila on a Thursday. He bashes into her with a large stack of paper books precariously balanced in his arms. She and the male cadet holding her hand fall into a large tangle with Jim. His stomach tightens when she laughs brightly, saying, "Well, I guess it's lucky I finished my coffee a minute ago." The fading sunlight reflects off her dark red hair. Jim smiles as she helps him pick up his books. The cadet she had been walking with was forgotten when Jim replied, "Not that lucky." Looking up at her through his eyelashes, he continues, "If you'd dropped it, I would have had to buy you another one."
Her smile is wide as she grabs half of his books out of his arms. "Well, in that case, I think I might need some more caffeine to finish my studying tonight."
Later, drinking her, now cold, coffee, Gaila leans against Jim's headboard, tangled in his sheets. Jim watches avidly as she explains the engineering research she's conducting. Her hands fly as she tries to demonstrate her ideas for the new engines being developed.
They casually meet up on most Thursdays for coffee and sex. He gives her a comfortable place to talk and she gives him the opportunity to be silent.
o
The call came when Jim was least expecting it.
"He's going fast. It won't be long now. He's asking for you James."
Jim swallowed thickly before he could speak, " How fast can you get me there?"
"Go to the Academy's transportation center. We can arrange to have a single-person beam ready when you get there." The aging doctor sighed and took off his glasses. "Don't expect a huge amount of cognitive recognition when you get here. He's fading fast." Jim nodded and cut off the vid-screen. He had never been more grateful to fall asleep in his clothes. He swung his feet out of the small dorm bed, and shoved them into the closest pair of shoes he found in the dark.
Jim sprinted out of the building and across the campus. The trees threw barely discernable shadows on the grassy lawns. Light flooded from the glass entrance hall of the Walker P.W. Center of Transportation. A single figure stood at the entrance, waiting for him. The worn-looking technician was almost bowled over as Jim sprinted into the building. "Which way is the pad?"
The technician turned and walked through a series of identical hallways, Jim stalking nervously behind him. When the technician stopped and opened a pair of large doors, Jim almost tripped over him. He stepped through the doors, ignoring every part of the room except the transport pad. "Ready?" the technician asked.
Jim nodded and closed his eyes as the white beams of light surrounded him. When he opened them, the sight of the familiar bulkheads of his old home almost had him wanting to close them again. A small hand slipped into his, and the end of a long red braid bumped against his shoulder.
"Come on, Jim. The others are waiting."
Jim squeezed Amy's hand and walked from the room with her, nodding a polite greeting to the woman operating the pad. After a minute of walking in silence, Jim said, "How bad is it?"
Amy sighed. "It's pretty bad, Jim. Major vitals started fluxing about 30 hours ago, but they kept him stable. It was only about an hour ago that he really started to crash." She stopped walking. The white hallway extended in both directions, guards stationed every 30 feet. "He's been screaming about what happened, Jim. I think you should know that before you walk into the room. It's not the kind of thing that they would think to tell you," she said it quietly.
Jim nodded and braced his shoulders. "Alright. Is he still in the same room?" At Amy's nod of confirmation, Jim started down the hallway. After a complex set of turns and innumerable hallways, the screaming became audible. There was a flurry of activity outside one of the rooms. They pushed through the nurses and doctors around the doorway. The young man on the bed was much too small for his age; shudders racked his small frame.
"No, NO!! Get away from me," his hands grasped the lab coat of the nurse checking the closest machine. "Get him away from me, please," his voice broke on the last word. Jim released Amy's hand and crossed the room to the bed.
"Come on, bud, let go of her," Jim gently pried the hands off of the nurse.
"Jim? Jim? He won't let me go, help me. He won't – "
"He's gone, Alex. Remember? He burned with the rest of them. None of them got out. You're safe here. Remember?" Jim held the boy's hand like it was made of glass.
"Who's gone?" Alex said, eyes even glassier than they had been a moment ago. "Daddy? I know he's gone. He leaves for work every morning at seven thirty. Mommy's making pie. It's my birthday. I'm going to be eight. Mommy's using blueberries for the pie. I like raspberries better, but those bushes died and nothing we did could – STOP!" His head snapped around and his vitals spiked. "Don't touch me!" he started seizing and the doctors pushed Jim away from the bed. Jim pushed back through as Alex stopped seizing. He laid quietly, limbs sprawled. "Jim?"
"Yeah, Alex?" Jim took his hand again. Alex's eyes focused on Jim.
"Is he gone?"
"Yeah, he's gone."
"Really gone?"
"Yeah."
Alex sighed. "Really gone," he said quietly. All of the machines went crazy, protesting the reality of what had just happened in the bed. As the doctors rushed back to resuscitate him, Jim blocked them.
"Let him go," he said, voice low and heavy.
"We have to help him!" one of the nurses shouted.
"Bringing him back wouldn't help him. You'd be condemning him to a life spent reliving his worst nightmares. Let him be," Jim ground out.
The attending medical staff took a step back. Amy came forward and put a hand on Jim's back. "Come on, Jim. They won't touch him." She looked towards the three people standing in the corner. "Tom," she said quietly, "can you please turn off these machines?" Tom, the burned side of his face uncovered for once, moved between the doctors and started shutting down the equipment. Once all of the machines were silent, Jim smoothed the dark, sweaty hair away from the seventeen-year-old's forehead. "Be seeing you buddy."
Amy took Jim's hand and pulled him away from the bed. Tom and the other two followed. As a cohesive unit they walked through the halls to the closest room – Camille's. Despite it being her living space for six years, Camille's room was as spartan as it had been the day she moved into it. Jim sat on the bed with Amy and Tom, while Kevin sat in the room's only chair. Camille went to the cabinet at the far side of the room and retrieved five glasses and a murky bottle filled halfway with a clear liquid. She splashed a bit of the liquid into each glass and gave one to each of them. They drank silently. They ignored the tears shining in Jim's eyes, and the fact that Camille's face was swollen from her own tears.
"I'm joining Starfleet," Kevin announced. The other four looked at him, not a one of them surprised.
"Don't expect me to help you with your homework," Jim choked out.
"I'm applying for a spot in the school of engineering, so I don't know how much of it you'd've been able to help me with anyway," Kevin said. Jim snorted into his glass.
"I know a thing or two that would surprise you Mr. Riley." Jim sighed, sniffed back his encroaching tears, and rubbed a hand across the back of his neck. "I'm gonna need to get back to the Academy. I have an exam in," he checked the clock on the wall, "three hours."
Camille nodded and pressed the comm button by the door. After a minute of nothing but the quiet murmur of her conversation, she said, "They'll have the pad ready for you whenever you show up, Jim."
Jim nodded, "I'm going to head out then."
They put down their glasses and, again as a unit, walked to the transporter room. Jim closed his eyes against the white light, the sight of the four of them standing there burned into his memory. He opened them to the sterile Starfleet facility, the same tired-looking technician standing by the controls. He followed the man out of the building. The cold night air forced the air out of his lungs. Jim nodded his thanks and began the trek back to his dorm. The night was still dark, the only illumination coming from the lights interspersed along the paths that led from one building to another. By the time Jim reached his building, he couldn't feel his arms, and the tears streaking down his face froze almost as fast as they fell.
His fingers shook as they punched in the code, and when he entered the heat of the building, his arms started tingling unpleasantly. He trudged up the stairs to his room. He entered it silently, collapsed onto his bed, and fell asleep.
When he woke up two hours later, it was to Bones telling him, "I'm hoping there was a damn good reason you wore my shoes to sleep."
Jim couldn't even summon the energy to respond, so he just shook his head, got out of bed, and began to prepare for his exam.
o
In the early spring of their third year at the Academy, Jim declares, "Bones, how do you feel about living off campus for the summer quarter? I though it was a good idea. I went ahead and signed a lease through the housing department. You can cook, right?"
Bones sighs, and doesn't have the heart to tell Jim, that no, he can't cook. He doesn't think it would matter anyway; the kid looks too excited to not have freshman neighbors that come home too drunk to make it into their rooms.
Bones spends all of his non-existent free time for the rest of the quarter figuring out the basic of cooking so that they don't starve.
Halfway through July, he returns to the apartment after a 20-hour shift at the hospital. He is greeted by dissipating clouds of smoke and the scent of charred meat. He enters the kitchen to find Jim in front of the stove, staring at a pan with fierce determination and a spatula. A plate of mostly-burnt pancake-like objects rests on the counter beside him.
"Jim, what on earth did you do?"
"Oh, hey, Bones." Glancing at the mess on the counter, Jim continued, "Well, you always make dinner, but you have twenty hour shifts every other week, and you normally fall asleep while you cook after that, so I thought that I'd give it a try." He frowns, "The chicken burned and I couldn't get the pasta out of the pot, so I tried to make pancakes, because, who can screw up pancakes, right?" Bones nods, barely restraining a smile. "Well, apparently, I can screw up pancakes." Jim smiles ruefully.
"Shove over kid, I'll do it. You start cleaning up this mess." Bones takes the pan over to the sink and washes it out. He rubs butter over the pan and pours a cup full of batter into it. As he waits for the small bubbles of air to form, he glances over to see Jim shoving open the window. "Jim," Bones asks, "how exactly did you manage to get pancake batter all over your back?"
o
Her leg slid over his; a maddeningly slow slide. He gasped as he felt her against his leg. She melted down towards him, and he reached up to slip his hands around her waist and –
"Bones! Get up! You're teaching that class in thirty minutes."
Bones groaned and pulled his pillow over his head. "Bones, come on, you asked me to wake you up. I'm up, you need to be. Come on." Despite the muffling effect of the pillow, Bones could hear Jim shuffling around in their bathroom as he got ready to take a shower. He took a deep breath and began listing the affects of Tiburonian influenza upon the human body. His pulse slowed as he reached swelling of the nail beds. He levered himself off of his elbows and swung his legs off the bed. He stood and stretched his arms above his head. He needed to stop dreaming about that Xenomorphic Biology major down the hall.
o
The last thing Jim expects when he walks into the room he shares with Bones is the presence of a stranger; but there she is, sprawled out on Bones's bed, wearing the tiniest pieces of lingerie Jim has ever seen.
Upon seeing that it is Jim, and not Bones coming around the opaque barrier between the door and the room, she squeaks. She scrambles for the sheets and pulls them around her while Jim stands there, mouth open in shock.
When Bones comes into the room a minute later, the three of them look at each other for a minute before Jim grins. "So, I guess the room's busy right now." He claps Bones on the shoulder; "Have fun," he mutters. At a normal volume, he continues, "I'm gonna go study at the library for an undisclosed amount of time. Don't wait up." He doesn't realize until he's outside the building that the girl was the science major who lived a couple doors down.
oo
Plus a random Spock one that popped into my brain.
An hour after he's born and hasn't stopped crying, Amanda is too exhausted to analyze what it means. Three days later, when Sarek hides in his study to avoid the noise, she clutches Spock to her and silently weeps. As he continues to wail, Amanda thanks whatever gods might exist that her human DNA managed to overwrite some of the normally dominant Vulcan traits.
