Author's Note: I took some requests on LJ for a quick one-shot, and people wanted ridiculously sappy Greg/Pavel fluff. And that is what this is. It is ridiculously, irredeemably sappy fluff. This is your first and last warning: ain't nothing deep here.
Living on a starship, especially serving such a long tour of duty so far from home, is a strange way to serve in a uniform.
It can't just be a job, because it's life. It's what a person wakes up to and goes to sleep around. There isn't a person in sight who isn't a fellow officer. Not a place to eat that isn't a mess hall. There's no commute home at the end of the day. No friend or family to go hang out with. No chance to switch the job off.
There's only this, the contained universe of the starship. A person has to create a family from the closest of the people they have chosen as their friends. Five years with the same people, living a job, with only rare and brief chances to escape, means that if a person can't find a family around them, they'll go pretty frigging crazy.
Which, Jim Kirk can't help but think, doesn't excuse the conversation he's in the middle of. But it does explain it.
Because when a bunch of idiots in uniform are the only ones each other has to talk to, sometimes they have to talk about the stuff big tough guys aren't supposed to talk about.
Sometimes it's even kind of fun.
"So what do ye think, Spock?"
Jim focuses in on the conversation fast when his first officer gets called out. He exchanges a quick grin with Hikaru before leaning back in his chair and gesturing to Spock grandly. "Yes, by all means. Tell us what you think."
Spock, of course, doesn't rise to the bait. He sits as straight-spined as ever, holding whatever probably-nonalcoholic thing he's drinking in a tight grasp.
He looks at Scotty, who first asked him the question, before raising an eyebrow at Jim and Hikaru. "You're asking my opinion about...?"
"Love, man!" Jim smacks the table between he and Spock with a sound rap. He can barely contain his glee, ignoring his beer to watch the ever-fascinating play of Spock's eyebrows. "Poetry and flowers and passion, Spock. Surely you've got some kind of opinion on the matter?"
Spock sighs, small and contained. "Every time your plans for an evening off involve alcohol, I tell myself not to bother coming. And yet here I am, time and again, suffering the same sort of drivel over and over."
"Illogical bastard," Jim agrees cheerfully. "But that's no answer."
"I have no opinion about the concept of love, captain."
Jim shoots him a stern look.
Spock's eyebrow twitches. "Jim."
Jim grins.
"You think if we asked Nyota she'd tell us otherwise?" Hikaru asks at Jim's side.
Jim perks up and looks around the mess instantly, but of course she isn't around. Most of the time Nyota excuses herself from the not-quite-weekly gab sessions. She claims that these sorts of beer-and-talk gatherings are meant to be shared among men. (Besides, she and Gaila and Rand and their little gal pals all do the same thing, somewhere on the ship that Jim hasn't managed to find and plant listening devices in yet.)
Pavel rarely comes to these sorts of evenings, and Bones usually doesn't force himself out of sickbay in time, so they're rarely a full group as it is.
"Nyota," Spock replies in that bland none-of-your-business voice he's so good at, "wouldn't tell you a thing."
Which is true, and frustrating to many a crewmember who want first-hand gossip about the habits of amorous Vulcans.
Hikaru smiles back innocently, as if he knows something Spock doesn't.
The door slides open behind Jim's back and heavy footsteps thump in.
Jim leans back and twists to see the intruder – Len trudges pretty hard sometimes at the end of a shift. But it isn't Len.
"Hey! Cupcake!" Jim grins over his disappointment and lofts his beer in greeting.
Greg Harris stops halfway through the doorway, looking surprised. He can be way too serious sometimes, especially about the whole stand-at-attention-and-salute-the-captain part of his job. But Jim flinging around a beer bottle must be enough to keep him contained, because he doesn't snap to attention.
He just flashes a small smile at the group of them. "Sorry, didn't think anybody'd be in here this late. Just came by for some..." He gestures vaguely towards the replimat in the corner.
"What, you've got somewhere to rush off to?" Jim grins. "Oh, no, unlike most of us pathetic bastards you've got someone."
Greg shrugs and moves around the table. "Pasha's doing some kinda research, some entropy black-hole something or other. I dunno, but he's been at it for days and I don't figure he's gonna slow down anytime soon."
"So you can hang out!"
Greg shoots him a faintly baffled look and moves to the replimat. "Nah, he forgets to eat when he gets all research-guy like this. I'm gonna grab him some food and-"
"Cupcake." Jim sets his beer on the table and pushes up from the bench, moving around to the replimat.
"We're off duty right now, so I don't want you to think of this as an order." He moves up to Greg, slinging an arm up and around that broad, hard shoulder, and reaches out to cancel the order he'd been typing in.
He reqs a couple more bottles of beer instead, grinning up at his massive security officer. "But you're gonna sit down with the guys over here and take ten minutes to chill out away from the...er...significant other. Because we're guys, and that's what we do."
Greg blinks down at him, but there's a glint of amusement in his eyes.
Jim beams and grabs the bottles, slapping one into Greg's hand.
He and Greg have was can only be called a colorful history. They tried to beat the shit out of each other when they first met – though in hindsight Jim can admit that nowadays if some drunk idiot was going after Nyota in a bar he'd be right there with Greg ready to throw the first punch.
Jim tried to have Greg kicked out of Starfleet under the mistaken belief that the oversized lunkhead was terrorizing their youngest cadet. Greg helped Spock throw him off the ship and onto an oversized snowball, and dragged him around with a phaser pointed at him once he got back on board.
Jim got his revenge by all but making 'Cupcake' the guy's official name once Jim found himself captain and could get away with shit like that. But then Greg came around and saved their asses while Chekov bled nearly to death in a Klingon cell.
Jim threatened him when he found out that Greg and aforementioned Youngest Cadet were actually fucking and happy about it. But Greg proved himself, in school and on the ship, as never having a single bad intention towards Pavel.
A hell of a roller-coaster ride of a history, really, but it all came together hard when Jim and Greg used each other to get revenge on an untouchable pack of alien shitheads who had found it funny to corner and kick the ass of said Youngest Officer on Jim's ship.
No one fucks with Jim's crew, especially not his main crew. Especially not the baby, who Jim has come to really like. And no one fucks around with Greg Harris's man, apparently. So they managed to work together to get their revenge, with Starfleet never the wiser.
Jim has accepted that Greg is absolutely devoted to his little Pasha, and Greg has come to trust his captain to fight like a mama bear to protect his crew.
These days, though they don't socialize much and have next to nothing in common, Jim regards Greg as a friend. One of the few off-bridge crew that he greets by first name and allows himself some informality with.
Greg is still a little shoulders-back-eyes-forward with Jim, still working on separating Jim from The Captain, but it's getting better.
That shows now in the way he accepts the beer Jim smacks into his palm. He looks down at Jim with some bemusement and tosses off a casual salute.
"Yes, sir, Captain Kirk, sir."
Jim grins and pushes against his massive back, nudging him towards the table.
Hikaru smiles and lifts his mostly-empty bottle in greeting. Spock nods to acknowledge the man, and Scotty flashes a grin and echoes Hikaru's bottle-salute.
Jim pushes Greg – at least Greg lets himself get pushed – down on the long bench and returns to his own seat.
"Okay, boys. Now we've got someone who actually has some current experience with the topic of choice. One who'll actually talk about it, anyway," he adds with a mock-glower Spock's way.
Spock gazes back, expressionless, one eyebrow just the slightest bit tilted.
Jim grins.
"Er, what's the topic of choice?"
"Love," Hikaru answers Greg, drawing the word out with a flourish of a sigh at the end, barely containing his smirk.
Greg blinks. "You're shitting me."
"Nope." Jim nudges his arm. "We're not all as lucky as you and your genius little boyfriend, pal. Some of us have to swallow our pride every now and then and turn into women and talk this shit out."
"Some of 'us'?" Greg answers with a look back at Jim.
Jim waves his hand, but doesn't answer. He and Bones and their...thing...it goes back to the Academy. It's no secret, though it's nothing they really talk about openly.
And it's good. It really is.
Len is his best friend, a better friend than a cocky, antisocial shit like Jim ever figured he'd have. He's sexy as all hell when he wants to be, he's the funniest guy Jim knows when he breaks out of his bitter-divorcee moods, and he's fucking brilliant at what he does.
But, and here's where the whole conversation tonight started, he isn't sure it's love, with a capital L and a heart for the o. He knows it's great, and it's hot, and he'd feel like shit if anything ever broke it up, but he doesn't know it's the ultimate Thing.
How the hell is he supposed to know? How does anyone?
It's questions like that – asked hypothetically because Jim likes to imagine a few people on his crew don't already know who he's fucking – that got them going tonight.
Spock is probably in love with Nyota, but he won't talk about it. The only other couple Jim knows on the ship who have lasted longer than a month are Greg and Pavel.
So.
He looks back at Greg with a grand gesture, and speaks more cavalierly than he feels. "The floor is yours, Cupcake. Teach us miserable bastards about love."
Greg turns a light shade of red. "Come on, sir, you're not..." He looks around, from Hikaru's wicked grin to Scotty's distant interest and Spock's complete neutrality. "The hell do you want me to say? I don't know nothing more than anybody else."
"Don't be modest, Greg." Hikaru waves his bottle in a vague gesture towards the door. "You've got the smartest kid in the universe mooning after you like a puppy, right? Gotta be doing something right."
"Oh yeah?" Greg's eyes go to Hikaru as if there's some escape there. "Pasha told me the other day that you were ragging on him about us. Said we were ridiculous or something."
Hikaru shrugs, looking sheepish. "You've got to understand, it's really, really fun to give him crap."
Jim nods his agreement.
Greg just stares at Hikaru. "I wasn't gonna say nothing, since I know he doesn't listen to that kind of shit. But since you've got me here talking about it...what the fuck?"
Hikaru sets his beer down and raises his hands. "Peace, Greg. I was just giving him a hard time."
Greg keeps staring.
"Okay, put the death eyes away. Jeez. All I said was that any two normal people would have gotten sick of each other by now." He gets to his feet, moving to the replimat and grabbing another beer. "You know I'm your biggest fan, right, you two together? So you don't get to kill me for teasing him."
"Wasn't planning on it," Greg answers. "But you're his best friend and he overthinks shit too much."
Hikaru looks back in surprise. "You think he actually listened to me?"
Greg shrugs. "Not that he says anything about. But he hears everything, and he doesn't forget a damned thing, and..."
"Huh."
Jim can't help but stare at Hikaru himself.
Guys go after each other about everything. That's understood. But there's something for every guy that is off limits when it comes to callous guy-teasing.
For Jim it's his dad. For Len it's his daughter. Jim isn't sure what Sulu's or Scott's is, he's never hit that point with them. Spock he doesn't even try to reach that line with. He knows it's safe to tease him about Nyota, so he pretty much sticks with that.
He's never seen Pavel hit that line – he seems to be a pretty all-around happy kid with not too many shadows in his past. He figures if anyone is ever stupid enough to bring up the transporter accident with Spock's mom, that'd cross a line. But guys, as dumb as they usually are, aren't cruel.
Still, Jim's inclined to think that as much shit as Pavel and Greg have gone through, their relationship might be close to being off-limits. Not the day-to-day aspects – and come on, the tiny little Russian kid and Cupcake? That's too much material to go to waste – but the general feasibility of it.
The two of them fought pretty hard to be where they are, and Jim knows better than to mess with that.
He's surprised that Hikaru of all people might have crossed that line.
Hikaru catches his gaze and sighs as he sits back down. "It wasn't anything deep, Greg. It's not like I told him I thought you should have broken up by now. Just...come on, it's been years. You should at least be used to each other."
"The hell does that even mean?" Greg asks, sharp but not dangerous. Yet.
"I don't...okay, like...there's this period in a relationship where everything is hearts and flowers, right, and there's pet names and googly eyes and you make everyone around you sick." Hikaru shrugs, taking a drink. "That phase isn't supposed to last, and the fact that you two are still right there after so long is...weird. That's all."
Greg doesn't answer, shaking his head and taking a drink.
Jim and Bones never had that giggly honeymoon phase. Then again, they never really had any set starting point on their relationship. They were friends who fucked and had been that way from pretty much the start.
They never talked about the bigger picture. They both had their own quarters, even if one sat empty on almost any given night. They cared about each other, worried, took care of each other, but that felt like the friendship side of things more than the lust side.
Len would have been the first to say that the poetry-and-flowers phase was ridiculous, a youthful ideal of what a relationship should be and not a realistic view of what love actually is.
"You're supposed to settle in to each other," Hikaru goes on after a minute. For the first time he looks a little awkward. "That's what I've always thought. I mean, a million couples never make it through that first phase, and the ones who do are the only ones who really make it. You know? My folks..." He hesitates.
There's that moment, Jim sees it in Hikaru's eyes, when things go from general vague conversation to something-that's-actually-meaningful-to-me.
As guys they have two choices – wave him off and steer the conversation in another direction, or roll up their sleeves and go with it.
He exchanges a glance with Scotty, shrugs.
Scott leans over a nudges his benchmate. "What about them, then?"
Hikaru relaxes a little, but goes on. "My folks have been together as long as any couple I've ever known. They've got six kids, a whole history together. And...you know, they're so damned comfortable with each other that it's like they don't even have to acknowledge the other one's there. They're as vital and as...expected to each other as oxygen or gravity, you know?"
Jim shrugs. That's one thing he doesn't know. Not the kind of thing he witnessed as a kid.
Hikaru smiles to himself, his voice going softer. "Sometimes dad will look around and his eyes pass over mom like she's just another chair in the room. Like she's so familiar and so always-there that he just doesn't have to take much notice. But you just know that if he ever looked around and didn't see her where she should be, the whole place would crumble around him."
He looks around then, sheepish. "That's always been what I figured love would look like."
There's a beat, a silence. Scott's eyes are distant, somewhere in his own memories. Jim doesn't have his own cheerful memories to think about, but he can at least admit that it sounds nice, the way Hikaru describes it. It sounds peaceful, like something he'd want to grow old with.
And it doesn't have much in common with the sparkling new and perky relationships most people fall into at first. The kind of relationship that Hikaru thinks Greg and Pavel are stuck in.
Hikaru shrugs after a moment. "Look, I really was just teasing Pavel the other day. If you think he took me seriously at all I'll be the first one to talk some sense into him." He looks past Jim suddenly, a crooked grin touching his face. "Though I doubt I'll have to."
Jim glances back and sees none other than Pavel Chekov hovering in the doorway to the mess.
The kid looks the way he typically looks in the middle of some research bender. His curls are wild, a shade too long and disheveled. He seems pale, with shadows under his eye, and he radiates nervous energy.
He'd rather be somewhere with books and data padds in his hands, that's clear. Len gets that exact same delayed-wildness when he's forced away from researching some cure or the biology of some species he hasn't done much work with before.
Jim's only surprised that he's here at all. He's known Pavel to go hours without so much as looking up from a display, much less going out in search of someone or something.
He almost waves Pavel in, but Greg's voice sidetracks him.
Greg hasn't looked back, doesn't notice Hikaru's attention being caught by the new arrival. "You think there's some truth in it, though. What you said to him. Don't you?"
Hikaru hesitates, looking from Pavel back to Greg. "Only the truth as I just said it – that you guys don't look the way I always thought that...that love would look." His eyes flash over to Pavel, sheepish.
Jim glances back, sees a furrow of annoyance carving into Pavel's face. Like Len, Pavel gets temperamental when he's in the middle of some cram-session.
"Huh. Well, I guess you're just gonna have to learn to deal with that," Greg says, drawing a swallow from his beer bottle before pointing at Hikaru with it still tight in his hand. "If Pasha wants to be with someone who's gonna start seeing him as part of the furniture, he ain't gonna have much luck with me."
"Yeah?" Hikaru looks back at Greg. He must know that Greg is unaware of his audience, but with the slightest quirk of a smile he encourages him anyway. "Why's that?"
Greg blinks. "Why? Have you met him?"
"Pavel? I've seen him around, sure." Hikaru shrugs with a smile.
"Well..." Greg looks over at Jim. "Okay, you wanted to know my opinion about love? I couldn't tell you. I'm shit with talking about things. I don't have the kind of words someone like Hikaru's got, or someone like Pasha. But I do know that if you really think there's just one right way to love somebody, you're crazy."
Jim glances back at Pavel. He's come in a few steps, but that annoyed line in his face is still deep, and his eyes are dark on Hikaru.
Greg frowns when no one answers.
"Okay, hell. You figure me and Pasha are ridiculous because we're not sick of each other yet, is that it? Cause we're not...what'd you say? Settled in to each other, or whatever." He hesitates, tapping the bottom of the beer against the table thoughtfully. "When I go down after a shift and I walk in to my quarters and he's there...it doesn't ever get old or feel settled or anything like that because it's like something different about him hits me every damn day."
Jim bites back a smile and keeps from looking back at their annoyed spectator. He nudges Greg in encouragement. "Really? Like what?"
"Like...shit." Greg sighs, fidgeting with the bottle.
Jim has a pretty good sense that a guy like Greg Harris must have to fight a lifetime of conditioning to talk the way he's talking now. Over-sized Midwestern farmboys aren't anything new to cocky Iowa-raised Jim Kirk. He knows how tough these guys are taught to be.
Greg goes on, though. Brave in a way he doesn't have to be in his job.
"Sometimes I look at him and my brain goes...'this guy loves you.' And I don't know how the hell I'll ever get over that. Who the fuck am I, you know? This big dumb shithead who never got nothing right until just a few years ago. He loves me, and I know it, and I don't have to doubt it or worry about it going away if he meets some genius nerd guy who might fit him better. I know it isn't going anywhere, even if sometimes I don't know why. And it's fucking amazing, knowing that. I never been confident in anything in my whole dumb life the way I'm confident about him."
Greg shrugs, shooting Jim a look. "But just when I start getting used to that whole idea I'll see him again the next day and it'll be 'this guy is so fucking beautiful', and then I gotta deal with that for a while. And then it's that he's so fucking smart, or the way he talks – not his accent or anything, I mean the way he's always so at people. Like he knows they think he oughtta apologize or feel inferior because he's too young or too smart or whatever, but instead he just shows 'em up and save their asses."
Jim looks back, unable to help himself.
The furrow is out of Pavel's face by then. His eyes are on the back of Greg's head, his mouth curled up softly.
Greg's fingertips curl in absent patterns on the table. "So sometimes I'm just amazed by that, and then I'll think about how good he is, how he cares about everything so damned much, about how he shared his dad and his mom and his whole town with me just because I needed...something. Whatever. And I think about that for a while."
Pavel's smile shifts, but his eyes are still bright.
Jim looks away from him, feeling oddly like he's spying on a private moment.
Greg's throat works. "Eventually it comes right back around to me thinking how he actually loves me, on top of all that other stuff, and it all kinda starts again from square one."
He clears his throat as his voice goes a little too soft for comfort. "So, hell. If I grin a little big every time I see him, or if I get a little goofy waking up with him there, and if I still want to bring him little presents or sit there with him while he's talking Russian in some message to his dad that I don't understand a word of...or if I wanna come down here and get him some pirogies even if it means I gotta take a damn hour listening to the computer over and over again so I know how to say the word 'pirogi' right, then oh fucking well. If that's ridiculous than I guess ridiculous works pretty good for us."
He looks down at his hands, at the bottle of beer and the table. His cheeks are touched with color but he doesn't seem all that embarrassed by the whole thing.
He looks over at Hikaru after a moment. "So. You know. Maybe it's 'cause I'm not all that good at learning things, and he's got a thousand other things to focus on. But it doesn't look like either of us is gonna get used to how things are enough to take it for granted. Frankly, man, if you're gonna call us out for doing things wrong than I can't do anything to shut you up, but you're shit out of luck if you think either of us is gonna actually listen to you."
Hikaru meets his eyes for a moment across the table, and he smiles. There's a glint in his eyes, like relief, maybe.
Jim knows that as protective as he himself is about their teenage navigator, Hikaru is a hundred times worse. Maybe his remarks to Pavel that started this whole thing were his way of feeling them out, of testing how things were settling in around the two of them.
Jim knows as well as anyone that even the most intense kind of love can fizzle out fast when its left to nothing but the bland routine of day to day life.
"I suppose there's no one right way to settle down with someone," Hikaru concedes after a moment.
"Let me tell you, man. There's sure as hell a wrong way." Greg sits back, swallowing from his beer. "My folks don't even like each other, much less love. Only time they talk is to yell, and only time they touch is when they're throwing each other around. So I don't know much about the right way, but I've seen it wrong, and I don't care what you say, me and Pasha ain't there."
He grins after a moment, as if he realizes he's successfully shut them and their idiot blathering up. "Besides, Pasha is a genius. And hell, I have to have caught a little bit of second-hand genius by now, hanging around him so much, so. What's the chance the two of us'd get anything wrong?"
"My genius," Pavel says suddenly, breaking his long silence, "is not a communicable disease, Grischa."
Greg looks back, surprised and suddenly more red-faced than he was. "Christ. You gotta stop sneaking up on me like that."
Pavel moves up, coming in behind Greg and slipping his slender long-fingered hands over Greg's shoulders. He looks over Greg's head at Hikaru.
The weariness is out of his eyes. The drawn, wild look is gone, and there's nothing there but a happy sort of peace.
"I hope you're satisfied," he says to Hikaru lightly.
Hikaru grins, looking back at Greg. "Did he tell you what he said to me the day I was giving him crap about you?"
Greg leans back against Pavel, like it's instinct to want to be closer. "Nope."
"Pretty much the same thing you just said," Hikaru reports with a grin. "And I don't care. Look at you two ridiculous bastards."
Pavel laughs quietly, squeezing Greg's shoulders.
Greg sets his beer down, rolling his eyes and pushing out of his chair. "Jealous," he throws back.
Pavel beams at him. "I said that, too, actually."
"See? I caught your genius. Probably just a mild case, but..." Greg slings his arm around Pavel. "The hell are you doing down here, anyway? I know you don't want to leave your work."
"You were gone." Pavel shrugs, letting Greg lead him around to the replimat. "I noticed. You were coming to get me food?"
"Still am. And then you're only gonna read a couple more hours before I make your ass go to bed."
It's interesting to Jim that the two of them seem to have forgotten the conversation they just walked away from, and the group of people they've left behind.
It's interesting how much much bigger Greg smiled when he saw Pavel than he smiled at any of them before he arrived. How Pavel softened listening to Greg, and pushed himself through his genius-at-work haze.
How they stand there, very much a part of each other, as Greg makes Pavel laugh by deliberately mispronouncing the word 'pirogi' into the replimat control just so Pavel can give him an impromptu lesson, and Pavel does so as if it's at least as fascinating as the work he left behind.
Talking about something like love is a useless fucking thing to do. Jim can listen and nod and say 'that sounds right' or 'that feels wrong' when someone's describing their view of it, or else he can take one look at Greg's pink cheeks and unselfconscious grin, and Pavel's bright, contented eyes as he leans back against Greg and watches the replimat glow, and he can know.
Yeah. That's it.
So maybe Greg's right. Maybe there is no good way to have a conversation about something like love, because for every person around him it's going to be entirely different.
Seems like everyone gets to choose for themselves exactly what love feels like and how it shows itself. Whether it's Hikaru's parents' quiet adoration or Greg and Pavel's more blatant variety. Or Spock's silence, or Nyota's discretion.
Maybe it's in the way Jim can't help but stay up long hours into the night whenever Len is caught in his own obsessive modes. Maybe the way Len is still somehow there for Jim even though he knows every stupid, cocky, overconfident shithead move Jim has ever pulled. Maybe that Len has stuck by him longer and closer than anyone in Jim's life, and Jim lets him stick, and sticks to Len just as hard, when in every other relationship he's ever had Jim always leaves tracks on the ground getting away the moment he feels like he's in too deep.
There doesn't seem to be much use in talking about it, if that's the case. It seems like the only thing that will help Jim figure his shit out is going back to his quarters to see if Len's off shift yet. To hang around his best friend and see what exactly about Len strikes him as most remarkable today, as opposed to yesterday, or tomorrow.
Greg and Pavel have make their way out the door while Jim thinks about it, and around him the conversation switches to a new topic, something sciencey to reclaim the attention of the Vulcan and the Engineer who could give a damn for talking about love.
Jim isn't done with the subject, though. His profs always thought of him as a slacker, but he hates leaving a theory half-formed.
The only recourse for him is to push out of his chair, tell the other guys good night, and go to his quarters to do his own personal research on the whole thing.
So that's what he does.