Title: Let It All Go
Author: anonpersona
Universe/Series: Reboot, AU
Rating: PG13
Relationship Status: slowbuilding leading to slash
Accumulated Word Count: 19,412
Genre: Drama, H/C, Romance, Friendship
Tropes: academy, character study, friendship, teen, troubled_past, chess
Warnings: None as of yet, besides WIP
Additional Pairings: Background Sulu/Chekov, vague Spock/Uhura fail
Summary: Prompted on kink meme (.com/st_xi_kink_) I'd love to see an AU where Kirk is homeless, and Spock takes him in. it can be set in San Fran or wherever anon wants, i just need a Kirk who's wet and cold getting taken in for the night and being given warm, dry clothes and some food. Then more plot happens. Title from the song 'Cotton' by The Mountain Goats.
AN: This chapter dedicated to my lovely, shiny, AMAZING new beta notboldly50295 at livejournal dot com . Also, in my universe, they are one year apart, and McCoy is maybe three years older than Spock. Also, I don't believe that the future world is a perfect utopia. Please review! I love you guys and your words. 3
"Hell in a hand basket, kid! What the hell do you think you're doing, eating so fast? Didn't anyone tell you to take it slow once in a while?"
Jim only let out a choking cough in response, the meager meal of white rice looking slickly wet and inadequate as it was sprayed across the bedspread, bits clinging to Jim's face as if it were attempting to devour him instead. Spock's first instinct—to obtain something more sufficient for a starving man—was suppressed, in the need to obey the future doctor. As well as the almost heavy thought that that simple action would equate more of an emotional response than any act he had committed thus far. It was probably better to not even question it.
"Are you certain that such basic sustenance is adequate?" Spock questioned.
"I might not yet be a licensed doctor—" McCoy paused to scowl at Spock, illogically, for his earlier stated fact "—but I do know he's not going to be able to hold down anything with more substance, his stomach's been mostly empty for so long. Hell if I know how this idiot of yours has managed to survive up till now."
"I'm still in the room, you know. Right here. In front of you."
"Which is where you're staying." McCoy growled.
"With this degree of emaciation, would it not be pertinent to relocate him to a hospital or—"
"No. No hospitals." The cocky, reflexive smile fled from Jim, to be replaced with a hard, cold expression that only enhanced the cage of bones and hallow skin that was his face, pores empty hungry things across bony cheeks and a sharp, sloping jaw. He seemed as if he would be translucent in too bright a light.
"I'm fine. Really."
Spock watched as Jim picked at the small grains that had scattered around him, popping them quickly into his mouth as if sowing them as seeds beneath his lips.
McCoy lost his patience.
"You're about as fine as a three-day corpse, and with almost as much life! You can't be more than a teenager, younger than me, I'll bet."
"I'm seventeen," said Jim with a kind of whining indignation ordinarily found in a child steadfastly convinced of his own adulthood.
"Which is just about the dumbest age anyone can be! Kid, you can't just stay on the street; in the shape you're in, that storm probably would've killed you if this brat hadn't taken you in. It's not even safe for you to move at this time, much less survive on your own."
"I've survived this long on my own."
"And how long is that, exactly?"
Jim fell silent, tight lipped, unblinking. McCoy sighed. And for all his youth, for a moment, too many witnessed hardships seemed etched like lines and shadows into his face.
"Alright, fine. If you won't go find your own damn way with any sort of sense, then I guess—"
"Jim may stay here."
Jim looked at him with a blank expression, almost carefully neutral, but the words that had come unbidden from Spock's mouth received no response from McCoy except a dismissive, tired sigh.
"Students aren't allowed to keep pets, remember? I am."
"What am I, a cat?"
"I'd say you were more of a dog, if I had to choose. Not that I know you well enough to make important life and soul decisions like that. But it's probably better if you stay in my dorm. It's bigger, and it would be slightly easier to hide you, and something tells me Spock doesn't really want to have something like being in possession of a boy on his permanent record."
"It seems logical that he remain here." Spock said quickly. They both looked at him. Jim's eyes were shining with mirth, and McCoy's brows were raised incredulously, angry brown caterpillars above his vicious little eyes. "You yourself stated that it would not be wise to move him at this time as his body must recover from the ordeal. My punishment if discovered would also not be as extreme as yours, and likely lessened simply by the fact of my father's influence."
There was another silence in which both of them looked at Spock in very different ways that were similar only in that they both made him distinctly uncomfortable.
"I'd actually prefer to stay with this guy." Jim said, finally. "I mean, so long as he's cool with it. And so long as I need to. Or… so long as it's better that I do. I don't need to." He turned to Spock, and his gaze slid down and pinned him again. "I don't need to. No matter what he says."
"He's wrong. He's a liar. He needs to."
"I'm no one's burden, ok? No one's 'good deed.'" His voice was suspended in the air between them, cutting through any jovial relaxation that might have been there before. "Don't make me that."
"Keeping you here is not a 'good deed.'" Spock said crisply. Oddly enough, he felt no need to suppress any kind of humiliation at admitting his defeat to Jim and the future doctor. "In Vulcan culture, this is actually considered a failure of morality."
"A failure? So up on that boiling piece of red rock you folks call a planet, if you see some guy stuck in hard times, it's considered 'good' to just keep on walkin'?"
Spock threw McCoy a distinctly disapproving look. "It would be more correct to alert the authorities to the display of despondency, so that the individual could be moved to a less public location." He said, keeping his voice level.
"What?"
Jim was laughing. Spock was oddly light around his bones. "That's fantastic! So you're really being kind of naughty by helping me out, aren't you?" There was a pause, and then Jim said "And when I say 'naughty,' I mean it in a way that is not at all kinky or… sex."
"For the love of god." McCoy muttered, dragging a hand over his face.
"It is considered inappropriate behavior, yes." Spock said. He was having a very confusing problem, in that it seemed as if the situation warranted a certain amount of guilt, which he shouldn't be feeling as a Vulcan, yet it seemed as if, as a Vulcan, he should feel it, but he shouldn't, and he wasn't, but as he was Vulcan –
"That's fantastic. That's… I don't even know. Actually, I was kind of planning on getting out of here as soon as I could even slightly walk, regardless of what Doc here says, but now that I know that you consider this to be an 'inappropriate' thing, I think I'll stick around until I can really get a hold of things. So long as I'm a bad deed instead of a good one, so long as you want me here, I think I can live with this." His grin was wide and yellow, almost painfully honest, and his eyes were filled with a mirthful, sharp light. "It's exciting."
"Thanks, by the way, for saying all that. Now I know to lock the dorms from the inside too at night." McCoy said, smirking.
"That would be problematic. I frequently walk at night, in order to clear my mind for meditation."
"We have a curfew, you know."
"It is an illogical time to retire."
"So you just don't follow it? Why am I even surprised?"
Spock paused. He didn't feel guilty about that, either. In fact, his blood seemed to sing in his veins, and his chest was full and zinging with a heady energy. "There is no point in following illogical laws," The words held a kind of heavy, delicious potential in his mouth, each cupped like a precious stone with his tongue, his lips tingling from them.
He tried not to think about it. And he did, anyway.
McCoy drags a spare mattress into Spock's dorm, the noise of fabric rubbing over rug a rushing white noise, and it seems neither of them have thought about how many of his fellow dorm-mates would stick their heads out their doors, staring at the goings-on in the hall. McCoy swears quietly, lifting his head and scowling at them, making all of them stick their heads pointedly back inside. They don't close their doors, though. Many of them never close their doors. Spock doesn't understand how they stand it.
The only spare sheets he has are white, and in the end, the makeshift bed seems too bright in his room, which is mostly made up of grays and blacks. The dorm is small, so it's pressed up against his desk chair on one end and blocking the door from opening entirely on the other. It's inhibiting my studies. He thinks. And then, the oddest thought, There is no point to studying there. An almost angry thought. Though of course it's not. It's not.
McCoy flicks off the light before they're ready, before some level of comfort with everything here has been reached, though he wonders if they would have reached it anyway. It takes him a moment to adjust to the darkness, and he turns and sees Jim, eyes wide and staring at his ceiling, mouth partially open, frozen and expressionless in a way only people who don't expect to be visible in the dark can be.
"Goodnight." McCoy shouts gruffly behind him through the closed door. Spock hears a few returning sentiments from those in his hall, and he slowly sinks down onto the new bed. He's not tired at all.
"Listen… I don't want to take your bed from you. Come on, let's just switch." Jim shakily rises to the point of all his weight resting on a quaking arm.
"We were both told that it would be unwise to move you. It is necessary that you are given ample time to recover."
"You know that's bullshit. Well, no, I mean, it's not, but I could totally recover from that mattress. I mean, he offered me a bed in his room, and I would have had to walk there. I'd really just have to stand up and then fall down, here."
"I believe it would have been necessary for me to carry you." Spock says.
There's a pause, and then Jim says, "Really?" a clear hint of amusement carrying through.
Spock feels his brows furrow, and he relaxes the expression instantly, vigilant even in the darkness. "Affirmative. Vulcans are stronger than humans. It would be a simple task."
Another silence, and then "You could carry me to the bed on the floor, then. I mean, if you really don't want me to just flop myself over there."
"I am currently residing in this bed. I would prefer if you did not 'flop yourself over.'"
"I'd wait for you to move. Probably."
Spock shut his eyes, and then opened them again. There was something distinctly pleasing about the fact that he could see in this darkness and The Boy – Jim – could not. It seemed safe, somehow. As if it somehow kept them in different rooms, even in such close quarters. "I would be required to wash the bedding on my usual bed before sleeping on it. It is more logical that I sleep in this bed."
There was another silence. It wasn't until Jim spoke again with a changed tone that Spock realized it had been a different kind of quiet than the others. "Oh."
For half an hour, they both lay in silence. The air was charged and dark, and, as time wore slowly on, illogical thoughts began to crowd at the surface of Spock's mind. Like perhaps the air he was breathing had been breathed before, and this was bad, somehow. Like maybe if they lay still for long enough in the same place, all the automatic actions of their bodies would begin to align themselves. Their hearts might start beating the same way. Almost out of his control Spock's breathing seems to align itself with Jim's, and when, in a kind of odd stupidity, when he tried to stop it, it seemed difficult to breathe.
Without explanation he rises, grasping his key-card off the small table by the door, and he walks quickly from the room. Jim doesn't say anything.
Outside, the air is still. There isn't any wind, and the sky is clearer than he's seen it recently – three, perhaps four stars visible through the smog.
Trees lay strewn over the walkways, their bark hanging off the swollen, water-logged bodies like old leather, sticks lining the walkway like bones. Ancient relics of a long-past massacre. He steps over them easily, walking on, looking at the buildings standing silent at the edges. A few lights are on, windows gaping yellow at him, a few lives going on awake and perhaps equally charged inside.
His feet carry him down the street, where cleanup had already began, trash cans dotting the sidewalk and overflowing with the rubbish that had been brought on in waves from the storm. Briefly, for some reason, his thoughts drift to that lone motorcyclist in the storm. He wonders if the man or woman is alive.
Spock glances up at Jordan West. One of the less luxurious upperclassman dorms, suite-style, made up mainly of triples and doubles. "Come visit me any time, I'm suite 201, room B." Uhura had said. "If Gaila answers, yell for me and leave if I'm not there. Trust me. You don't want to be left alone in a room with Gaila for more than a few minutes. Or do you… do you?"she'd smirked at him. He'd stared blankly at her, wondering if the question was rhetorical. "I don't think you do." She'd said, and laughed.
Suite 201, room B. Spock recalled the blueprints he had looked over for all the dorms and school buildings before arriving here. After a few quick moments of thought, he calculated that one of the lighted windows was hers.
Come visit, any time you want.
Had it just been politeness? Was it not inappropriate to visit someone without being specifically invited? Had he been specifically invited? What would they do if he did visit? She would feel too guilty to tell him if he was not wanted. Most likely, he would stand awkwardly, an interruption to her fun and life, as she attempted in vain to make them both comfortable. Perhaps her other suite mates would be there, glancing amusedly back at them every now and then. They would probably make fun of her for the uncomfortable experience afterwards, and she would laugh along, saying something that was not blatantly mean, but which clearly carried to them her view of him as cold and generally uncomfortable.
It was just politeness.
He wondered how people reached the point where it was appropriate to visit someone at their dorm. It seemed to happen all the time, but he didn't understand it.
So he went to the park. He sat at a familiar chess table, and he stared at the swollen, dark sky and the small glinting glimmers of stars thick with other worlds, millions of light-years away. Their light was like old photographs of dead relatives lining the walls. He tried to think of that. Of everything, instead of anything that was him, only him, here in a park at night trying to want the silence.
The next morning had arrived slowly.
Spock had awoken precisely thirteen minutes before his alarm was set to go off, which was a full three minutes before he usually woke up. So he had spent those three minutes lying absolutely still, hyper-aware of the deep, slightly wheezy breaths of the form on his bed. He watched the sheets over the chest rise and fall, so very slowly, and the curl of fingers over the blanket. He also managed to shut the alarm off within the first millisecond of it emitting sound.
Regardless, Jim mumbled something and turned to his side. Spock wondered how and where he slept if he was so easily woken.
The day passed in an oddly companionable silence. Jim slept far into midday, and, when he was fully and determinedly awake, Spock walked directly across the hall to Dr. McCoy's dorm to inform him of this fact. A quick check-up was performed, and it was only now, after an hour of Spock doing homework and Jim reading one of his books (without asking, which really should have bothered him somehow, but didn't) that Spock had finally opened his mouth. He had spent the past fourteen point seven minutes considering how best to begin a conversation of sorts, and had decided that asking a direct question would be the best way to gather information. Which was what he wanted.
What he really very strongly desired in a scientific fashion.
"Why do you not wish to go to a hospital? I am not saying that it is required or that I wish it." Spock added quickly, seeing the sharpness immediately strike into the previously relaxed gaze. "I am simply… curious."
Jim shrugged. After a moment it seemed as if he did not intend to answer the question, but then he said, hesitatingly, "I've spent enough time in hospitals. In them, out of them, visiting people in them. I just… would rather not. You get sick of hospitals if you spend too much time in them. Really easily. They're not really set up for frequent visits. They're supposed to be just a stop, a short pause a few times in your life and you're done. I just don't want to be any more acquainted with them than I am."
"I see." Spock said. He thought back to being young and a miracle. To being something no one expected possible. Something everyone expected to be mutant and unhealthy and strange, two things that shouldn't come together clashing in his body. To be poked and prodded and X-rayed in the name of science, and for his own protection. So they could make sure he didn't begin spewing battery acid, or his body didn't begin rejecting the human organs it possessed. "I understand the sentiment, and how an emotional creature such as yourself would develop such a dislike of hospitals. I myself spent a great deal of time in labs and health centers as a young child, and I admit that it did indeed become… monotonous."
Jim stared at him oddly. "Were you sick a lot as a kid?" he asked, staring directly into Spock's eyes. The actual curiosity was evident in the tilt of his face, and Spock found it strange, so he looked away.
"No," he said. He realized he couldn't simply leave it at that, so he continued. "They believed there was a high probability that my body would not properly function, however. I was expected to have a very short life-span."
"Why?" Jim asked, still looking at him.
"I – " Spock started. He stared at his hands folded on his lap for a moment. "I am a hybrid. A human and Vulcan hybrid. There were no previous studies on how a hybrid between the two species would function, though it was well-known that Orion and Human hybrids tend to have a plethora of genetically based ailments and disabilities, as well as notably shorter life-spans than both Orions and humans. It was expected that a human-Vulcan hybrid would suffer these as well."
"But you didn't."
In a sudden flash, he is seven again, standing naked before one pediatrician and three astrobiologists. Two nurses are holding his arms, and they are expressionlessly examining him, commenting on how he will most likely perish in approximately fourteen years. He looks at Jim, and has the most bizarre sense that this memory is seen by him as well.
"No. I am, of course, less strong than a full-blooded Vulcan. I have been told that it is highly improbable that I will ever have acceptable control over my emotions, yet I believe that this is a mistake on the part of the many Vulcan psychiatrists who analyzed me."
Jim laughed. "You show 'em." He said.
Spock blinked at them. "Show who what?" He asked.
"Um. You know, that you're so much better than they are."
"I am hardly claiming superiority. I only intend to 'show' that my human DNA is not a disability."
"Yeah, that's what I meant! It's a blessing. You're lucky to be part human. Makes you original and pretty and all that. Haven't you ever noticed that mix-raced girls and guys are always scarily attractive? It makes sense, what with the best of both worlds coming together. And hey! You've got that literally! Best of both worlds, eh?"
Spock stared at him, taken aback. "I believe I am late for class." He said, quickly rising. His face felt oddly hot, and his ears were tingling a bit, but he didn't know why. "I will ask you to refrain from propositioning me in that manner in the future." He meant it to sound calm and composed, but it came out a little shaky. He meant it to simply clear things up. He didn't like being called pretty. He didn't like someone being in his room telling him he was better than anybody. It was distinctly uncomfortable.
It made perfect sense to him. This is why he found Jim's next reaction incredibly illogical.
"Propo – what the fuck are you talking about? And oh, 'in that way,' huh? What way do you want me to proposition you then, huh?" He sat up, and Spock could see his limbs quivering like those old, sick cats in the window at the shelter as his arms locked, supporting the rest of his body, his bony face blooming angry red patches of blush. His eyes were like sharp bits of metal, and they pinned Spock again. "If you think this is what this all is, you can get that out of your head right the fuck now. I'm not trading anything for my life. I'll die in the street before I give myself up just to be saved, just to become someone's fucking pet, and I mean that literally, you know, just to – "
"What," Spock said, swallowing the shaky words he didn't understand yet, "I am not – this is not any kind of illegal – "
Jim laughed, and it was cold. That boy – that calm, kind boy from before was gone, and this livid monster had replaced him. "I know. God, I know, you don't have the courage to try to pull that kind of shit. But do me a favor, would you? Don't consider me the poor pathetic brat from the street who just wants to marry the prince and live happily ever after, ok? I'm notpropositioning you. I'm just being friendly."
Spock watched, still pinned to the spot by those eyes, as that sudden flash of anger got weaker and weaker in the other boy's form. It sunk out of his limbs and they went boneless in the lack of it, and he crumbled back into the pillow.
For a moment, Jim lay there, staring at the ceiling. His eyes slowly calmed from angry metallic to that gentle, unmarred blue. His face turned white. Very white.
Jim's lids slid shut over his eyes – translucent, vein-riddled shades across bright windows. The room was left darker. "Aren't you going to be late for your class?" He asked quietly.
Spock left without another word.
It wasn't until he got to the building and saw the tree lying across the entrance that her remembered that sociology was canceled today.
AN: Sorry for the wait. I've been feeling a little off lately. Going to have my first pilot lesson in two days, though, so that should cheer me up. Review, please! 3