Pairing: Kirk/Spock

Ratings: from K to M, it depends on the drabble/story

Genres: AU/AR, romance, sci-fi, drama, humour, family, friendship, hurt/comfort, angst

Notes: This is a collection of drabbles/short stories with the main focus on K/S. I will be experimenting with genderbending, using always a girl!Kirk and possibly always a girl!Spock, or a actual genderbending; male-gone-female. It's different from story to story.

A general warning for the whole story is that English is not my first language, so there will be typos and grammar errors. I apologize. Also, I don't own Star Trek, nor do I make any profit off of this. It's all for fun and creativity.

Warnings on this chapter: Vague, might be a bit confusing; allusions to teenage intimate sexy times but nothing graphic.

A/N: Inspired by the song "Kom igen Lena" by Håkan Hellström :) A few lines has been borrowed and tweaked in the story. Completely AU, and can be seen as TOS too, I suppose; it's all pretty vague :P

Enjoy!

Closing the Gaps

Jim was no stranger to dreams, to ambition and an imagination running wild. He faced impossible every day, around every turn, and he spat it in its face with glee as he ran past and let the red sand create a dust trail after his light footsteps. No, he wasn't a stranger at all. He dreamt of the stars, from where he'd come, those many years ago. He dreamt of sneaking behind those ridiculous walls, straight into the heart of knowledge, and stealing some for his own.

And he pulled through, that once, because they were fools and they needed to learn how to dream properly. There was a distinction between dreams and delusions; their naïve philosophy of complete logic wherever they turned in their private little bubbles allowed him to hack those shiny little things, allowed him to return, because even if he'd left behind any sign they wouldn't see it because they weren't looking.

Stop dreaming of the lovely, tranquil life; you're never going to have it, Jim tells the boy who invades the alley he's hiding in then. Same age, maybe older, or younger; hard to tell.

The boy looks confused, and maybe because Jim is human, he says; "I am sorry?"

"Don't apologize for things you never did," Jim replies instead of clarifying himself, maybe because he enjoys the warm brown eyes, and the confused frown of slanted eyebrows. Maybe.

The boy's name is Spock, and he's not-hiding from his father's aids. Jim takes him to a better place and shows him how to run and leave a proper cloud of dust behind. When reality catches up with them, as they knew it would, Jim is looking up into stern faces and smiling, just because he can.

"What was your purpose in taking my son away?"

It doesn't help to stand on his tip-toes; the man is still impossibly tall and Jim knows who he is but respect is earned, according to Jim, and so far, this one isn't doing all that bad. Not that Jim would let him know just yet.

"He was standing next to me," he says, seeing the same confusion in another pair of eyes, "but he seemed really far away. I was trying to close the gap."

They never manage to get his name because he knows these streets well and the buildings are old, from a time when logic was a little babe and the mother a warrior wary of the changing world's fickleness, and so there are tunnels and complex corridors and he's gone by the time they've taken the wrong turn in an alley.

They couldn't dream of the possibility he climbed through that window, invaded someone's home, and that was where the failed.

It hurts, he realizes, looking out of his window to see red sands and clear skies. He was standing next to me, but he seemed really far away. I was trying to close the gap. So close, he knew; the same city, the same streets. But so far away; only stolen moments in shadows from then on and always looking over their shoulders, but still kicking up dust, still reaching out, but never quite touching.

So Spock showed his mother a picture one day, of a man clad in leather swinging a girl with a flowery skirt around in a movement unfamiliar to him. Dancing, she said, was not the same on Earth. Jim was quite eager to learn, that was the only reason he held his mother's hand and waist, while her free one was resting gently on his shoulder, swaying to an unfamiliar tune.

It would feel different with Jim, he knew. He could…imagine it. With the first touch of impossibly soft lips in this dry air, to music he was sure he knew the composer of moments before, he was not disappointed. Sore toes, reality with its broken bridges and stubborn distances, the deception of fake illusions of calm and serenity in life; they all mattered so little now. Swaying to the music, kissing a boy shy of fifteen.

Fantasies, spinning inside his mind, where he suspected they would always be.

"C'mon Spock." Whispers; moist breath against harsher, dryer lips. "What else could we do?"

They get sand in their hair, but his mother doesn't tell, and so he likes to think – to hope, dream, imagine – the gap is closing.

"Don't cry. Please, don't cry."

"I am not crying."

"I can see it in your eyes. You don't need tears to cry, Spock."

"Illogical."

"Truth. Reality. What is."

He's leaving but he doesn't want to go. No, Jim wants to stay. But he's only sixteen and his mother suddenly remembered him and so they're moving again, and he's not legal, and he already tried hiding but it took them a week and they found him in a cave. He said he must've been sleepwalking, because recently, he's dreamed of staying. For once, mum, can't we stay? What's so important over there anyway?

"I cannot catch you Jim."

They'd played tag, surrounded by sun-warmed sand and wiping it out of their eyes when they fell together. Spock is a comforting weight on his chest; warmer still than the ground beneath him.

"I can't catch you either," he begins, but is interrupted by a kiss. Because I know you are wanted, needed, elsewhere, he wanted to add, but he never did.

"C'mon, James," Spock sighs against his lips, "what else should we do?"

And they don't bother caring about the sand at all this time, because they rolled around a lot and they were partly-naked through most of it, and it was awesome (like a dream but it was real) and there weren't any gaps to bridge because they were one, and together; my mind, to your mind.

Spock is in Starfleet, has been for a little while; he's getting settled. Fieldtrip, he's majoring in science, but the ship had a problem with an old circuit and docked to be repaired. He hears jazz, a familiar tune now, and lets his shoulders relax as he imagines himself on that dancefloor, with Jim pressing soft lips against his and whispering of dreams and stars and gaps closing.

And there, terran sand, and familiar lips around a straw.

"Jim."

They're playing jazz, and Jim wants to join and try out the piano, because he learned how to play it a few years ago and hasn't been able to stop toying with the keys and imagining the sound of strings sighing in his ears (Lyre, Spock had called it); Vulcan music would clash so horribly with it so he clings to this with all his might because it's funny, and he thinks he'd enjoy it.

The floors are muted with a dull carpet and the walls are tranquil; they are lies and they encase him and the cluster of aliens spread out among the tables. His mother is an Engineer and she's assigned here for the time being, and he refused to be left behind, because he dreamt of stars and here they were all around him; a small Starbase, with a room at the higher deck made almost entirely of see-though force-fields and glass. He'd intended to spend his 18th birthday locked away there; computer system hacked and properly taken care of.

After this rum and coke, of course, and maybe mum would even buy him a proper beer instead if he swallowed and smiled and got it out of the way.

"Jim."

And reality can go fuck itself because dreams are so much better they even replace it, sometimes.

A/N: Please review! :D