Author's Note: Two chapters in two days. Feel loved. Feel verrrry loved. :)
Music: Wire to Wire by Razorlight
The Shoes: Part Two
"How do you love on a night without feelings?/
She says "Love? I hear sound, I see fury."
-Wire To Wire
They are an ordinary pair of shoes. Nothing about them hints of their true importance. They are Starfleet dress shoes- not the work boots he normally wears- those boots are lying by his dresser in a pile where he threw them after work. These are black, old-fashioned, highly-shined, lace-up shoes. The ones he wore to the negotiations and was still wearing on the bridge last night.
Jim stares at them, memorizing every last detail of their appearance. Like a painter studying a face, trying to capture the person's exact expression and the feelings that have prompted it, he looks at them. There is a slight scuff near the heel of the right; the right one is slightly shinier than the left; the laces are thin and black and droop over each side of the shoes, but beyond the second row of holes, they are still laced up.
Beyond these observations, there is nothing detectably different about them. It is how he feels about them that changes things.
Jim Kirk has never been a careful man, in all senses of the word. His room back when he lived with Winona and Frank (his room, not his home. His home was never there) was always a pit. He isn't the sort of person that really adheres to niceties. If it's clean, that's good enough for him. And that's why, as he gets out of bed, cusses out Bones to himself without any real anger (it feels so good to have slept), and makes his way blearily to the shower, his eyes fall on something so strange, so unexpected, that he stops dead.
His dress shoes are sitting neatly at the foot of his bed, laces loose, and his socks are folded neatly beside them. He pauses. He takes a breath. He stares.
It isn't anything big. It's nothing that anyone else but him would consider significant, but, inexplicably, his throat tightens.
Jim Kirk raised himself. Winona was always off-planet. For a long time, he thought it was his fault- the reason that she never seemed pleased to see her son. That maybe he hadn't been good enough. That it was become of him that she sighed and wept, that her visits eventually became shorter and further apart.
It was at the last Christmas that he'd known. They'd exchanged gifts. His was clumsily wrapped, and she'd opened it slowly, pulling off the paper in meticulous pieces to avoid ripping it, breaking the tape.
She couldn't meet his eyes, and left right after dinner.
He remembers sitting at the table after Frank had gone, looking at the remnants of the wrapping paper still lying upright at her place setting. He laid his head down on the tablecloth. By the light of the candles, from there, the paper she had so carefully opened still looked whole, like a candy wrapper hollowed out to look as if there was still a sweet inside. The shadows flickered over it, and the broken paper box seemed to shrink, and then to swell, and to shrink again in the shifting light.
He could almost imagine the present was inside it, waiting to be opened. But it was only an illusion; the inside was empty. Hollow.
It was at that instant that Jim Kirk understood his mother.
He blew out the candles one by one and left the table. He knew, this time, that his mother was never coming back.
There was never anyone who made Jim's lunches, or picked pebbles out his knees when he fell and washed the cuts with soap and hissed out of sympathy for the pain. There was never anyone like that. No one bothered. The only ones who cared were his teachers, and so he did his best to make them proud of him. To deserve their praise.
His grades were perfect.
His home life was not.
And so he stares at the shoes, with their shiny black laces and the scuffed up bottoms, and he swallows. He can't explain it, not even to himself, but the closest approximation of what he feels right now is…wanted. He feels, for perhaps only the second or third time in his life, like someone actually cares about him.
And he doesn't remember much of last night but he doesn't need to. Alone in his quarters, Jim Kirk smiles.
No one else but Spock would ever fold socks quite so rigidly.
Author's Note: I am considering writing the scene where Spock takes off Kirk's shoes from Spock's POV, because in my head, it is too cute for words. Is that something you lot would be interested in reading? Also, I would love to hear what YOU want to see in a slash fic. (But not too much naughtiness, thanks. This fic will not exceed a T.)
Reviews to writers are like food to Tribbles. If given reviews, this fic may take over the Enterprise! Moooahahaha! Errr, not really.
But seriously. Review.