A/N: So, it looks like there's a bit of a purge going on at the moment on FanFiction. Spice isn't (currently) the most licentious of slashfics so I'm hoping it's safe for now, but, in case it suddenly disappears, you can find it on LJ and the KS Archive too - I'm eimeo on both. I'd hate to lose anyone!

-o-o-o-

Ciana returns from Luna in a dark mood that she contains for the duration of an interminable de-briefing session with her Chiefs of Staff, and it's only when she glances up as they're about to file out of her office, with a terse, "Kirk - you got a minute?" that he realizes anything is wrong.

He turns in the doorway, eyebrow raised in mild surprise. "Of course," he says, and closes the door.

Her office hugs a curving exterior wall of the complex, stretching lazily along the perimeter in a wide, windowed arc that captures a panoramic view of the Bridge and the slate-blue waters of the Pacific beyond. Three hefty floor-to-ceiling bookshelves bracket her desk where it sits along the far wall and are, as he was delighted to note during their first briefing, healthily stocked with old-fashioned, paper-and-ink books. Mostly, they are old technical manuals and collections of star charts, but he also caught a glimpse of Tacitus, Sun Tzu, Nietzsche, Caesar's Civil Wars, and, incongruously, Pride and Prejudice. He's planning to ask her about that some day, if he can ever work out how. In front of the window, a selection of potted plants drink the sharp, clear winter sunlight and lead towards the long briefing desk that takes up the bottom two thirds of the room, where Ciana sits amongst an impressive pile of PADDs.

Kirk pulls back his recently-vacated chair, but she gets to her feet as he sits, pacing abstractedly towards the window. She stops by the glass, and, without turning, she says, "Draconis is off, Kirk. I got word late last night."

The Draconis project was approved months ago, while he was still on the far side of Federation space, and is well into the final stages of planning; Kirk was about forty-eight hours away from ordering the USS Pegasus to set a course-heading for the system. Even given the necessary fluidity of day-to-day policy-making in questions of fleet deployment, this is as close as anything gets to being set in stone. He was not expecting that to change.

He folds his hands on the table in front of him. "I see," he says.

Ciana runs a hand across her eyes, takes a deep breath, releases it. "I've been in conference calls with the admiralty since 0430," she says. "It just… it can't be done."

"I understood that the admiralty were enthusiastic about the project," says Kirk. "What's changed their minds?"

Now she turns back towards the room, and he can see the fatigue in her face as she crosses to the long table. She slides back into her chair and folds her hands in front of her, mirroring his gesture. "Information received from Starbase 19," she says. "There's been…some trouble verifying it."

"In what sense?"

"In the sense that the Starbase is not currently responding to hails."

He quirks an eyebrow. "How long since they went dark?"

"Luna Command received scattered com chatter around thirty-six hours ago, nothing since. It's heavily corrupted, but it appears to be reporting a series of attacks in the sector."

"Attacks? By whom?"

"That's an excellent question. The Alliance and the Concordat have been mobilized, but it'll be at least seventy-two hours before they're in visual range. And even then…" She glances up, eyes hooded. "There's been no distress call. There's just… silence."

"Were Luna able to determine any details about the attacks from the com chatter?"

She shakes her head. "There was something about Androchus IX, a series of stardates, something that sounds like explosion or expulsion; the data's almost unreadable. They mention the Draconis system specifically, but it's impossible to make out the context. Given the circumstances, though, First Contact's off the cards for the foreseeable future."

He can't argue with that. It's actively disturbing to think about how close he came to ordering a science vessel with limited weapons capability, crewed by men and women with virtually no combat experience, into a potential warzone. This, this is the problem with being earthbound: there is, quite simply, no way to know what's going on out there. He's reliant on other people's eyes and ears; dependent on them knowing where to look.

Kirk says, "The Alliance is currently stationed at Utopia Planitia?"

Ciana nods. "She took some damage during the skirmish in the Andromache system; she was scheduled to be out of drydock tomorrow."

"I can rendezvous with her by 2200 hours if I leave right away," he says. "I'd like to join their Tactical Ops team on the mission…"

But she's already shaking her head. "No way," she says. "I can't authorize that, Kirk."

He tries again: "Xeno ought to have a presence on this mission, ma'am…"

"Why?"

It's a good question. He didn't honestly expect her not to ask. But he doesn't have an answer, beyond the fact that he needs to do something, and sitting in a series of boardrooms and talking energetically about strategy doesn't count. He says, "Ma'am, at present we have no idea what we're dealing with. This is potentially a First Contact scenario with a hostile species…"

"Exactly. A hostile species. They're not exactly going to roll out the welcome wagon, Kirk; they're going to shoot first and maybe hang around afterwards to see if there's an interesting DNA signature smeared across the debris."

"Nevertheless, Federation charters specify a clear command protocol in the event of…"

"Kirk!" she snaps, and throws her arms wide. "Believe me, if it's who I think it is, we know these guys of old." Abruptly, she pushes back her chair and paces across the room to her desk. He recognizes the gesture; it's exactly what he would have done in the circumstances. She says, "You think if I thought there was even a chance that…" A beat. "I've been doing this job a long time, Kirk. This isn't a new civilization showing us its teeth. I'd swear on my oath to Starfleet, this has Klingon stamped all over it."

Kirk feels his eyebrows graze his hairline. "If the Klingons have waged an unprovoked attack on…"

"Yeah, it's not exactly a popular theory at HQ," she says. She lowers herself onto her desk, leaning heavily on her arms, and her shoulders droop. She sighs. "But it fits."

"The Starbase is close to the Neutral Zone…"

"Not so close that you'd expect them to get territorial. Relations have been good - well, not bad. That counts as good, most days."

Kirk twists his lips wryly. "I have some experience of the subtleties of the Federation's relations with the Empire," he says.

Ciana grins, but it's flaccid with fatigue. "So I hear," she says. She lifts both hands to her face, pressing the balls into the corners of her eyes, and the trace amusement fades. "This is what I know," she says. "About six weeks ago, a party of Mallamusian traders came through the sector, docked with Starbase 19 for twenty-four hours. Commodore Hansen cleared it with HQ in advance; they came to me and wanted to know how that was likely to play on Q'onoS, given the ongoing tensions between Mallamus and the Empire. For the record, I said no, no way, not worth it. Mallamus will get over it; Q'onoS, not so much. But they were trading in high-grade iridium, there'd been a series of debris strikes on the outer hull of the Starbase, a couple of minor breaches that were going to get major in a hurry if they didn't do something fast; they needed repairs." She shrugs. "HQ made a call. I don't know, maybe I would have done the same. But it had to have got back to the High Council. There's no way they were happy about it."

"You think they're returning a political slight?"

She glances up. "You know Klingon psychology as well as anyone, Kirk. You tell me how pissed a Klingon has to get before they start shooting up all round them."

He acknowledges the truth of that with a twitch of his eyebrows and a deep breath. "Still - to risk an open breach of the Organian treaty…"

She nods. "That's what HQ are saying. I get where they're coming from. If the Klingons up and blew a Starbase out of Federation space, unprovoked - well, that's a nightmare nobody wants. It's bad; it's worse than bad. It's war, and this time we've got the Organians watching, and who even knows what happens if they decide they're getting involved again?"

"With all due respect, ma'am, if the Empire has attacked a Starfleet facility then the Organian treaty is null. We can't ignore an act of war simply because it's politically inconvenient!"

She purses her lips. "That's… more or less what I said."

He looks up. She half-smiles. He says, "More or less?"

"I may have been a little less elegant."

Another time, he might have returned her smile, but he can feel a restless energy firing his bones from the inside out and it has nowhere to go. He knows she sees it; worse, he thinks she shares it, but she's played her hand too soon, and she knows it. On the Enterprise, on the edges of charted space and sheltered by distance, there are always possibilities. But on Earth…

Kirk steeples his hands in front of him; stares at the points of his fingers. He's shackled and bound, tethered and clipped, while a political danse macabre unfolds in the skies above. He says, "The com chatter mentioned Androchus and Draconis…?"

"Yeah." She slides off the table, lifts a stylus, tosses it absently in her hands. "I don't know. Maybe… maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's corrupted, maybe it's spliced in from another transmission; it could be a goddamn stellar weather forecast for all I know. The Tajarhi was en route to a training exercise around Androchus II; there were preliminary plans to scout for a science outpost near the poles on XIV. I don't know. The only link I can make is to the Starbase." A beat. "But I really think I'm right about this, Kirk."

The thing is, he does too. And he's stuck on Earth making friendship bracelets and inspirational posters. He says, "I'd like to know what the Alliance and the Concordat report back, ma'am. If that's possible."

She raises an eyebrow. "Sure," she says. "I'll let you know as soon as I hear."

Seventy-two hours. Seventy-two hours until he finds out if he very nearly sent two hundred anthropologists, linguists and diplomats onto a battlefield by accident. "Thank you, ma'am," he says.

Ciana nods. "I have a meeting with Tactics and Deployment at 1300," she says. "I'll want you with me for that."

From nowhere, Bones' voice slices through his consciousness, heavy with Romulan Ale: Yeah, and how many meals have you skipped these past weeks, Jim? Man's skin's not s'posed to be that shade of gray… He says, "I had a lunchtime with Admiral Kurylenko. I can postpone it."

"That the Augusta project? I'll com him this afternoon." She stretches her arms behind her head, closes her eyes. He wonders when she last slept. "I guess we need to start pushing 47 Aeolus C pretty hard now that Draconis is out. You got some time to talk it through this evening? I don't know about you, but I could use a drink." One eye opens. "And I still owe you a round, Commodore."

He'd been vaguely hoping she'd forgotten about that. For a woman whose job is about eighty percent reading people, she's proving remarkably oblivious to his ambivalent attitude towards his commodore's stripes. And it's hard to remember why it's diplomatically important to establish an embassy on the southern continent of 47 Aeolus C when there's a very real possibility that an atrocity just happened, that a couple of hundred men and women just died for no good reason. There's no way to define the symbiosis that exists between all deep space travelers - it's the sense of there but for the grace of God that binds them; the fact that it's all too easy to imagine oneself in another man's shoes - but there's also no way to explain it to someone who's never lived with the knowledge that they're no more than one bad decision away from disaster. Kirk considers lying, considers prevarication, considers the possibility that either of these things will be effective. On the one hand, she is neither Spock nor Leonard McCoy, but, on the other, he's not entirely sure how far her network of spies stretches.

Carefully, he tries deflective concern: "If you're referring to my promotion, ma'am, that can wait for another time. You must be tired after your trip…"

Ciana sputters laughter. Of all her possible responses, amusement wasn't high up on his list, and he's not prepared for it.

"What are you, my mother, Kirk?" she says amiably. "If you don't want to have a drink, don't have a drink, it's fine. But I've pulled longer stretches than this before; I'm not gonna fall over in a faint."

Well, there's no way out of it now, not without admitting that, no, no, he does not want to have a drink; he does not want to have to figure out the politics of what a drink might mean, or what he wants it to mean, or why he doesn't know the answer to that. He wants to get on his damn ship and streak Warp 7 across the sector to the hole in the sky where a starbase used to be, and, if there's nothing there to save, then he wants to make sure that whoever did it isn't in any kind of position to be doing it again. But she's watching him carefully now with dancing eyes that are uncomfortably astute in their scrutiny, and in a moment the silence is going to cross the temporal line into unnatural, which gives him less than two seconds to determine his response. He's not sure if she's really good at the intricacies of manipulation or really bad at linguistic politics, but he suspects the former. Bones would adore this woman.

So he purses his lips into a smile and says, "Well, you'd have to ask my CO if I'm free, ma'am. But I dare say I could use a drink by the end of today, too."

She grins. "I hear your CO's pretty easygoing, Kirk. How's 8:30? I know a place off Divisadero that the cadets haven't found yet."

He raises an eyebrow. "I don't believe there's a bar in this city that the cadets haven't found, ma'am."

Ciana laughs again, a flash-bomb of color in the gray air. "There's three, I think. Maybe just two now," she says. "This is one of them. Flag officers gotta show up every couple of nights to scare off any of the junior ranks that get brave or stupid; it's kind of a civic duty. You don't strike me as the type to shirk your duty, Kirk."

"No, ma'am," he says.

"That's what I thought," she says cheerfully. "I'll have my Yeoman com you with the address. Meantime, we got work to do."

She smacks the desk once with the flat of her hand - a decisive, conclusive gesture - using it as leverage to get her moving as she turns and strides quickly to the other side. Her terminal is idling but springs to life at a brusque command, and her eyes scroll down the screen as she says, "Yeah… Intelligence in Sector 4412 is maybe fourteen, fifteen days old; if 19 is gone, it's a game-changer, we'll need to revisit. Let's start by mapping current colonial and planetary allegiances around Aeolus. I'll get Berniere and Travis from Astrometrics, you pull your team together and meet me back here in, say, thirty minutes?" She glances up, all business once again, but her eyes sparkle. "Some time today, Kirk? I gotta be out of here for drinks at 8:30…"

He pushes his chair back and gets to his feet. "Yes, ma'am," he says.

-o-o-o-

Across the sculpted-steel waters, the Presidio Headquarters stands as the gateway to the heavens. At this distance, the swoop and fall of airtrams above the high central complex is like the circling, billowing flight of gulls over the Bay, coasting on unpredictable winter thermals. Buried inside the tritanium-blue walls, glinting lethargically in the diffuse morning sun, the massive transporter array sucks men and women through the earth's atmosphere; if he closes his eyes, he can feel that moment of weightlessness as the center of him dissolves, that lurch and the sensation of infinite expansion, infinite possibility. Somewhere up there, above the blanket of feathery stratocumulus, a battery of starships hover in the endless night, waiting to receive their atomized Human cargo.

But not him.

Kirk turns back to the room, barking a sharp command to the window sensors, which darken submissively. A pile of unconsidered tapes rebuke him from both sides of his desk: a myriad uncharted worlds waiting for his consideration, worlds that he will never see. There are reports that need to be written and they can't be written until he's scanned every file, evaluated and cross-referenced, calculated, considered and intuited his way through the data contained within that rainbow-colored mountain, but that requires a very specific sort of focus, and his brain has gone off on a tangent from which it is stubbornly resisting all his efforts at redirection. The near-miss of the Draconis mission haunts his resolution, wraps little nagging tendrils of doubt in a chokehold around his prefrontal cortex. He's due in the Centroplex at 0900 tomorrow to meet with two Vice Admirals and another Commodore - men who think that the Luna run counts as space travel - to discuss the possibility of opening up Sector 77125-C to exploratory probes, and all he can think about is the fact that he does not, cannot, know what's out there, establish what's safe, decide what's worth the risk, from behind a desk in Horseshoe Bay.

But what's he supposed to do? He's tried; he's asked the question, he's made the request, and it's been denied. The pieces shift on an infinite chessboard while he watches through a telescope from a distant mountain top and tries to make sense of what he's seeing, but what can he do? The stars are out of bounds for now. His ship is up there, a transporter ride away, but she's hobbled like her Captain. And even if the Enterprise wasn't currently resting in fifteen separate pieces in an orbital drydock, it's not as though he could just swipe the keys and make off with her to the other side of the galaxy. He's never had cause to ponder the consequences of hijacking a starship, but he's pretty sure you don't get to keep it when you're finished. Subspace distortions hide a multitude of sins, but it's slightly harder to pull off a flexible approach to the interpretation of a direct order when it's been delivered in person, straight from the mouth of one's Commanding Officer.

There's a limit to what he's prepared to risk. There has to be.

He crosses to his desk, lifts a tape, tosses it between his hands, slides it into the reader. The terminal screen sparks to life but he turns away even before it can ask its innocuous, mundane questions about what he'd like to do next, because isn't that a good question? He'd swear sometimes that, somewhere in the bowels of the cortex, there's a tech with a keen sense of dramatic irony busily programming pathetic fallacy into the Starfleet OS.

Once upon a time, he'd have been delighted with this observation, primarily because Spock would be at his side, or at least close enough to fetch in a hurry, and it would be the perfect antidote to a moment when nothing in particular was happening, everything was functioning as it should, and there was time to remember what it felt like to catch your breath. It's exactly the sort of observation that would earn an eyebrow and a look of fabricated consternation as his First pretended not to understand that he was being baited, and the Captain pretended not to understand that he was being humored.

Now the First is a Professor and the Captain's a Commodore. The ship is in pieces and Kirk's planet-bound and feeling like he's lost his right arm. Nothing stays the same. But it can't, that's not the way the universe works: stasis is the end state, it's the ultimate by-product of entropy; life is all chaos and motion. This restless energy, this sense of powerlessness, like the world has exploded beneath his feet, this will ease in time. It's just going to take some time, that's all.

You look like you don't know whether to scratch your watch or wind your butt, Jim, says Bones' voice suddenly, struggling up from scattered memories of their abortive mid-week social effort, to worry its way into Kirk's consciousness. Echo-Bones waves a bottle of something blue in front of Kirk's mind's eye. Lucky for you, I got a prescription for that.

It's not that the evening was a failure, only that Kirk suspects it might have been a tactical error. What he needs right now is a clean break from his old life, and his friend trails far too many ghosts in his wake. Plus, the Doctor has a habit of reading between the lines, whether or not there are lines to be read between, and it was obvious before he'd even shrugged off his coat that the invitation itself had caused him to draw a few conclusions.

Seen much of the old place since you been back? he said as he crossed to the center of the living quarters, worrying at the stopper of the bottle.

Practically all the old haunts, said Kirk with a self-deprecating smile.

McCoy picked up his cue. Ha! he said. I bet. Library, simulation rooms and labs, huh?

Something like that.

Got you in a fancy office, I guess?

Fancier than Starfleet Medical Offices, put it that way.

A huffed laugh. That ain't hard. A beat. Bet this is the first time you've left it in three weeks, too.

He can imagine his friend's face if he knew about tonight's excursion, but he suspects that he won't tell Bones about his adventures in cadet-free drinking establishments, and he's not entirely sure why.

Saw Frank Abrams last week. And Kirk's back was up, because he knew, he knew where it was leading. But he raised an interrogative eyebrow just the same, tried to keep his face neutral. Fractured his collarbone in the zero-g spacewalk sim - damn fool's got no business in command track, you ask me, but, hell, no-one ever does.

He's a gifted engineer.

Don't mean he's fit to run an auxcom. Man'd fall over his own toes if there was nothin' else to walk into. A beat. And then the segue: Said to give you his regards.

That was decent of him.

Funny, huh?

With resignation: What's that?

Spend all that time with folks, feels like that's your whole world, your whole life. Gets so's you can't imagine what it'll be like when they ain't there. And then… gone. Scattered to the winds.

That's the service, Bones.

Yup. He grinned. 'Cept when a man's got a bottle of Romulan Ale in his possession. Funny how a thing like that makes an old country doctor stick out in his CO's memory.

Kirk loosed a quiet laugh. That sounds about right.

Bones raised his glass, lifted it to his lips, swallowed a gulp. A grimace carried it down his throat, and for a moment they sat in silence, staring out into the shadows on the bay. And then, softly, he said, Guess the hobgoblin's kinda short on illicit liquor, huh, Jim?

Anger flared, and Kirk felt his face tighten. I've been busy, he said, and he knew it wasn't an answer.

Yup, said the Doctor. Another beat, heavy with words unspoken.You got a talent for that.

Kirk blinks away images of an evening that was unsatisfactory on a number of levels, and, with weary resignation, turns back to his terminal. When's the last time you spoke to him? echo-Bones wants to know, and Kirk wants to say that it works both ways; that his communicator hasn't exactly been wearing out its warranty these past weeks. That he's not the only one who made a choice; that he's not precisely a difficult man to find. But it's easier, much easier, to bury it in work, to bark a command and watch through disinterested eyes as the screen scrolls rapidly through the half-dozen starcharts appended to the latest briefing from Operational Command. There's a binary system in 12139 whose primary civilization are friends of Federal friends. There are three occupied planets in a system in Lyra, two of which are warp-capable - which rather begs the question as to what's happened to the third, and why no-one from the other two has been tempted to crash the party with a keg or two, so to speak. There's a quotidian Sol-type star in the Archanis sector with one solitary planet; an ice-world in Vega with a deuterium-rich moon; an orbital colony around a gas giant in Sector F-C-31. Someone with a flare for the poetic has designated the single-planet system Eremitis, the hermit, and the name intrigues him; it's the kind of histrionics that advises against assigning first year cadets to routine starmapping. He scans the file briefly: an unremarkable world orbiting an unremarkable star, but maybe that's what the Vulcans once said about Earth. Maybe that's exactly the sort of place they should be targeting: a civilization that's ready to reach out there, made hungry by mediocrity. He files it away in his Possible folder, and then, suddenly, he realizes why it caught his eye.

You heard about the attack on Ajilon Prime last month? says Nogura's voice, beaming into his ship, eating up those final moments, when what he really wanted to do was sit in his chair and grip the arms as tightly as he could. There was another on Archanis IV two days ago…

Kirk leans forward in his seat. "Computer, call up recent files on the Archanis sector," he says.

The computer balks. "Over eighteen million entries," it says reproachfully. "Please narrow search parameters."

The data's heavily corrupted, said Ciana, but it appears to be reporting a series of attacks in the sector.

"Look for reports of attacks in the region of Archanis Prime," says Kirk. "Narrow to an eight week window, ending January 12th."

"Three entries found," says the computer.

"On screen," says Kirk.

-o-o-o-

Ciana is late arriving, but, then again, so is Kirk. Her Yeoman coms him late in the evening, startling him out of his reverie and causing him to notice, for the first time, that the sun has set long enough ago for night to have settled comfortably into his office, and it is now so dark that he can't see anything beyond the sickly white glow of his terminal screen.

"She's been delayed in DC, sir," says Martinez. "Says to pass on her apologies and tell you she'll be there by 2100 hours at the latest."

Kirk accepts the regrets with patience and understanding, then signs off smoothly and bolts for the door.

It's a small, elegant bar, most likely cadet-free by virtue of its price rather than its obscurity, but mention of Ciana's name gets him shown to a secluded table near the piano - which is, mercifully, unoccupied at present - and the obsequious attentions of a young Andorian waiter who evidently pays too much attention to the news. Kirk orders a Scotch and makes sure the table is credited to his account; it may irritate his CO and it may not, but his ego demands it. And he got here first, after all.

She arrives at 2115, unruffled but apologetic. "Damn it," she says, with a flash of that smile that lights her from the inside out, "Not much of a hostess, huh? The transporters on the Hill went offline just as I was getting ready to leave; I had to come back by airtram. Thanks for waiting."

She has swapped her uniform for a simple black dress that neither clings to her figure nor ignores it, and her hair, which she habitually wears scraped into a loose knot at the back of her head, falls freely over her shoulders. He knows from her files that she's a few years older than him, which places her in her early forties, but, relaxed and easy in herself in the soft light, smiling her thanks to the waiter as he places a drink in front of her, she looks younger.

"Scotch man, huh?" she says, raising her glass. Ice cubes clink in the amber liquid. "You have excellent taste, Kirk. Although I prefer Highland Park myself." She knocks the glass against his. "Here's to Starfleet's newest Commodore."

He tries to strip his face of expression, to fix his smile in place and return her toast. It nearly works. It would work, he's certain, with every other CO he's ever had. Bones would worship this woman.

Ciana lowers her glass and drops her eyes to the table, but he's been working with her for a number of weeks now, and he knows better than to think that he's in the clear. So he's ready for her when she glances up a moment later and fixes him with a stare that dares him to look away.

She says, "Whatever you're thinking, Kirk… It's not the end. Brass aren't stupid. They're not going to take her away from you."

The angry ache twists viciously, searing a burning pain up the back of his throat. He says, with difficulty, "I wish I had your confidence, ma'am."

"Lori," she says. He raises an eyebrow and she shakes her head. "We're off the clock. You can go back to 'ma'am' tomorrow."

Call me Jim, Spock... It doesn't exactly alleviate the pain beneath his ribs. Kirk takes a gulp from his drink, buying himself the time he needs to settle the ghosts inside.

"Lori, then," he says, and smiles.

She's nobody's fool, and her answering smile is qualified by wry amusement."You're like a tiger in a cage, Kirk," she says.

"Jim."

The smile flares brightly. "All right: Jim. I knew we'd never be able to keep you; a man like you doesn't belong behind a desk. Nogura's many things but obtuse was never one of them." She takes a sip from her drink, inclines her head. "He needs you where you are right now, for whatever reason, but you work better for him in the air. Trust me on this. Meantime, I can use you." A grin, and her eyes sparkle. "Though if you could try not to make it look so much like Purgatory, I'd appreciate it."

He laughs and she joins in easily. "I don't see it as Purgatory," he says, but she shakes her head.

"Yeah. You do," she says. She shrugs, leaning back in her chair. "It's fine. Maybe I'd be the same, in your position." Gently: "Must feel like they're shutting out the sun."

He huffs a quiet laugh, but the words settle into his soul like drifting snow. He finds that there's no answer to that, so he looks up, meets her eye, twists the corners of his lips into a rueful smile.

"You just…" she says, and hesitates. "I just feel like you could use a friend, Jim."

He opens his mouth to tell her that he has friends, but then he wonders. Where are they, exactly? All these people, surrogate family, people he thought were woven so completely into the fabric of his life, and it turns out they lift right out, like water from a jug. Bones' words echo in his head - scattered to the winds - and the angry ache twists viciously, slicing against the tender skin beneath his ribs. He covers it with a smile.

"That's command for you," he says, and, if he can't quite erase the bitterness from his tone, her soft eyes tell him that she's understood.

"That's the life we chose," she agrees.

He glances up at her, and for the first time, he understands that she's hiding a few bruises of her own. Somewhere down the line, someone's told her to make an impossible choice, too, and she's buried it with duty and kept moving on, because that's what you do. It's the life they chose.

He says, quietly, "You never wanted a deep space assignment?"

"Sure I did." She doesn't look away, not quite, but her eyes turn skittish. She purses her lips. "Didn't work out that way. There's still time, though. I won't get a ship now, but… you know." A beat. "There's still time."

"Where would you go? If they gave you your ship?"

A faint smile tugs at the edges of her mouth. "I don't know. You tell me, Jim - you're the expert. Where's good, this time of year?"

A thousand images rush him; a hundred worlds, skies in every color of the spectrum. Trees so tall they block out the sun; crystalline lakes of frozen ammonia glinting silver in the starlight; mountains that sing in the restless evening breeze. He says, "The best places are the ones we haven't found yet."

"Spoken like a true explorer." She takes a sudden, deep breath, as though she's chasing shadows from her mind. "A man like that can't be chained to the ground. Nogura knows that as well as anyone. You'll get her back, Jim." Ciana extends her arm, ice clinking softly against the glass in her hand, and she raises an eyebrow in open challenge. "So can we please, for the love of God, drink to your stripes now? Instead of the sackcloth and ashes?"

Her hair falls around her face, framing eyes soft with mischievous amusement, lips curling slowly as she waits to see how he'll respond. Kirk watches her, feeling oddly disjointed; he's never seen her out of uniform, never separated her from the job, from the duty, from the protocol. He's never noticed that her skin is so smooth that light reflects off it like moonlight on marble, or that her voice is like warm honey, or that her fingers are long and graceful, that they grip her glass with the lightest, most elegant touch. He's never noticed any of this because he's become accustomed to standing apart, at command distance; to the fact that he outranks everyone else on board his ship. There's always been a wall there, surrounding him and holding him separate. And only one person has ever breached that, and look how that turned out.

Yes. Look how that turned out.

Her hand is extended across the table, drink canted towards him, light glinting off the surface of the liquid. Maybe it's time to let go.

He raises his glass, tilts it towards hers, feels it connect. Crystal chimes gently against crystal; it feels like a betrayal.

-o-o-o-

It's after midnight when he gets back to his apartment, whisky washing a comfortable river of warmth through his veins and smoothing over the stress-fractures in his soul, and he's tired: that deep-in-the-bones fatigue that settles lead into the muscles and fog behind the eyes. The evening has been pleasant, but it has been long: a sequence of prevarications and obfuscations that have grown steadily more acrobatic as the hours ticked by, and he's no longer certain where the boundaries lie between them. Sure, she's Lori tonight, but tomorrow she's his CO again; the woman whose job it is to keep him pinned and acquiescent, and three hours in his company have certainly confirmed what she must have suspected: he's fighting a battle against himself, and she's going to have to do what she can to contain that.

You know, they told me I wouldn't be able to handle you, she said, somewhere into the third round of drinks. Neither of them was drunk; he suspects she's as careful about that as he is, and this intrigues him. But she was softened, hazy around the edges, and so was he. When I wanted you in Xeno. That's what they said.

He doesn't know how he was supposed to react to that, but he settled for giving her his best diplomat's smile, the one that uses all of the advantages bestowed upon him by nature. I think you'll find my reputation is exaggerated, he said, and she laughed.

Damn, I hope not, she said.

Was it an opening? It's hard to be certain. Take away command protocol and it's not even a question, but the service complicates things, coats the wheels of flirtation with spines and jagged edges. If anyone has cause to know this, it's him.

Kirk shucks his overcoat and lets it fall onto the squat, utilitarian chair by the door, whose sole function is to act as the receptacle for the deposit of recently-shucked overcoats; toes off his boots and kicks them out of the entryway; crosses to the window without calling for the lights. The stars glisten in the dark crystal sky, the high blue shimmer of a winter's night, punctuated by staccato comet-trails of air-traffic crossing the thermosphere, and he watches them with unseeing eyes.

Does he want it to have been an opening? He's not sure he even knows anymore.

He ought to go to bed. It's been a long day and a longer night, and tomorrow it starts all over again: endlessly rolling a boulder uphill, with nothing to show for it but a path worn gradually into the rock. He ought to go to bed, but behind the fog of whisky and tiredness, his thoughts chatter restlessly and won't be settled, and the prospect of staring at his ceiling while the sky gradually turns gray doesn't exactly fill him with enthusiasm. So he turns from the window, back to his darkened room, back to his desk and his terminal, with the idea of report-writing his brain into submission, and this is when he notices that the screen, pointed into the moonlight, is faintly lit behind the reflected sheen.

He has a message.