Disclaimer: Geen.

Warnings: Slash, innuendo, profanity.

Broaden

Jim makes him try new things, and at various points in his life Bones has found himself eating chocolate-covered grasshoppers, grilled Chalxi salamanders, deep-fried Diruvian monkey toes, and the bluish liver of some strange animal he never got the name of.

It's because of Jim that Bones has been sky-diving, ridden through narrow city streets on the back of a motorcycle at eighty miles per hour, spent an entire month living in a city underwater, and rode a thrashing, hump-backed bull with steam billowing out of its nostrils.

And it's definitely Jim's fault that he's slept with a four-armed Kallian, an Elysion with rose-coloured irises and curling white hair, a forked-tongued Elapidi, and an insatiable starship captain.

Bones is proud of the fact that he's rather resistant to change, however, and he is fairly sure he's managed to keep any of Jim's attempts to broaden his horizons from improving him, or any of that nonsense.

Until, of course, he finds himself encouraging Joanna to just try the calamari, she might find that she likes it, and he realizes with annoyance that Jim has gone ahead and turned him into someone open-minded and adventurous and willing to try new things.

He's grouchy and bothered for the rest of the day, his mood barely salvaged by his daughter's presence and then gone straight to hell as soon as she's gone.

Of course, when Jim's tongue is doing that thing that Bones has never been able to figure out, and his fingers are curling in the bed sheets, and there's a golden-skinned blue-eyed starship captain smiling at him like he's just saved the entire fucking universe, he figures it's okay to broaden his horizons. Sometimes.

Flash

"What?" Jim demands. "Have you never seen a starship captain naked before?"

The bridge crew is staring at him. Or, well, not staring at him.

Uhura runs her eyes over him once, up and down, like she's watching a yo-yo, then meets his gaze with a grin and a slightly glassy look. Chekov is staring into his control panel like he's suddenly realized all he's needed to prove Goldbach's Conjecture has been hidden there all along. Sulu finds the whole thing rather hilarious, and has his fist stuffed halfway in his mouth and is shaking with muffled, hysterical laughter.

(Jim isn't sure whether or not to be insulted by that, but figures the pilot's really laughing at everyone else and not him, and that's okay.)

Most of the crew-members Kirk isn't as good of friends with seemed to have designated the spot about six inches off from his left ear to be the only appropriate place to look. Of course, a few of them are just standing, flabbergasted, with their jaws on the floor.

Kirk makes a mental note to do some shuffling of positions, he can't afford to have people who freeze up in hard situations on his bridge.

Spock, naturally, remains completely unflustered, and only dryly remarks. "Captain, Starfleet has rather explicit requirements for proper uniforms, and this hardly follows the standardized dress code."

"Starfleet also says that it's a good idea for the Captain to get the bridge as quickly as possible when his whole ship is in danger of being blown up, Commander," Kirk snaps back.

Kirk immediately sets upon fixing the whole "ship being blown up" problem, and there are no more interruptions until Scotty comes in, an armful of hand-drawn plans flapping in the air as he runs.

He skids to a stop a few feet from the captain, mouth gaping, blueprints dashing to the ground.

"Holy shit, Captain!" He exclaims, and his eyebrows start to waggle.

An hour later, the crisis is adverted, and the bridge crew has mostly gotten used to the fact that the captain is naked.

Chekov still can't manage to speak anything but Russian or lift his eyes more than a foot from the floor, and a few of the ensigns had to be quietly removed (and Scotty, not so quietly), but otherwise, all is well.

Then McCoy stomps onto the deck, yanking a grinning Jim from his Captain's chair.

"Come on, Captain, you're needed below deck. And stop grinning like an idiot, it's nothing I haven't seen before," He rolls his eyes.

Jim follows the doctor out willingly, and a few dozen pairs of eyes watch him go. The doors slam shut behind them, and there is a collective sigh. Quite a few crewmen sink bonelessly into their seats.

"So, anyone want to tell me what just happened?" Sulu finally manages to stop his hysteria long enough to ask.

"As the captain explained," Spock answer smoothly. "Starfleet protocol dictates that the captain of the ship should make his way to the bridge with all haste when faced with conflict, especially when the circumstances are as potentially disastrous as the ones which we have just averted."

"Right, Commander." Sulu says.

"But why was he naked in the first place?"

Graze

"It's only a graze," Jim says cheerfully, clamping his hand down over the wound. Dark blood floods slowly over his fingers, like oil in the ocean, unnatural and dangerous.

Spock nods dubiously. Jim crouches and moves away from him, crossing the ground like a predator, low and swift and deadly.

He makes it a half-dozen yards before he collapses.

From here Spock can barely make out the spreading puddle of dark blood, surrounding Jim like a halo.

There's a spurt of phaser-fire that is swallowed up by the distended flames of an explosion, and Spock's not sure if it's statistically feasible for him to make it to Jim.

He does the calculations in an instant, thinks them over carefully, and finds the most logical answer. Then he throws it, as Jim would say, out the window.

The odds of him making it to Jim's fallen form are infinitesimally low.

He's going to do it anyway.

Review. All the cool kids are doing it.