Chapter 34
Lori toes off her dress uniform boots by the bedroom chair and crosses to the bathroom, unwinding her hair from its complicated knot as she moves.
"Can we not do this tonight?" she says, without looking at him. "I'm too damn tired."
Alone in the center of the room, Kirk purses his lips to bite back his instinctive rejoinder. There is literally nothing he can say right now that won't pour oil on the smoldering embers of this evening's argument, though the fact that he's obliged to concede a point by virtue of the fact that she's already called time-out and anything he says now that's not yes, dear automatically makes him the bad guy, rankles enough that he's almost tempted to just do it anyway. But he's too damn tired himself for the inevitable round of recriminations that follow any attempt to plead that case, so he satisfies himself with stalking to the closet and kicking his boots into its depths with a satisfying thump.
From the bathroom comes the sound of water spattering on tile and the door slides shut. Another night, he might shuck his uniform into the cycler and slip in after her, wrap his arms around her in the heat and steam of the shower and nuzzle an apology into the tense line of her neck as she struggles valiantly to stay mad at him, but he's 100% certain that's not a good idea this evening, not for either of them. He's pissed, she's pissed; they'll count it as a win that they manage to share a bed like grown ups, and if it gets talked out - if - it won't be until after work tomorrow.
A full length mirror stretches from floor to ceiling on the closet's far wall, nestled between a sparsely populated railing of Kirk's clothes and a scarcely better filled rail of Lori's. He peers at his reflection now, swaddled in unfamiliar grays and whites, starched and constricted and dark-eyed with residual anger. The new uniforms were not Kirk's idea, but they are practical and comfortable, they allow the female members of the corps to move at speeds above a rapid stroll without risking arrest under local bodily indecency ordinances, and his support of the original proposal has earned him several brownie points with his wife, who does, he will admit, wear them particularly well. But he's just not sure what was wrong with the old color scheme, in the final analysis, and, moreover, he doesn't understand why the dress uniforms still have to be so damned uncomfortable.
Nor is he particularly delighted to be wearing one for the third goddamn night in a row, while he and the rest of Starfleet Senior Command argue their way through plans for a venture that has much the same prospects for success as a Candygram peace envoy to Q'onoS.
It's not Lori's fault. He's prepared to admit that, even if he's not prepared to cede the moral high ground: Ilion is personal, it's the one that went bad that he couldn't make good, and he hasn't made any secret of the fact that he thinks everything about the way Starfleet handled it stinks. She was almost certainly right to pull rank in order to shut him up after Admiral Mortimer's poorly judged remark about the need to avoid Veleth Hai-ing their nascent diplomatic contact with the ruling Skhar of Antioch V, because even Kirk knows when he's about to push things a little further than they can safely go without risk of snapping, and he could feel the warning signs before he'd spoken the first word. If Lori hadn't done it somebody else might have, with less delicacy and understanding, and the whole thing could have ended much less civilly than it did.
It doesn't change the fact that it's the one that went bad that he couldn't make good, and his colleagues in the Admiralty are now using it as a transitive verb. It doesn't change the fact that he was the most junior officer in the room and already at a disadvantage, and his wife just handed valuable maneuvering points to Komack, Balkhi and Morgenstern that Kirk will now have to spend months recouping. And it doesn't change the fact that she did this less than seven days after their last row about Kirk doing exactly the same thing to her.
There's an abrupt silence from the bathroom as the shower shuts off, and he can hear the sounds of exaggerated movement on the other side of the door, as of a woman whose activity is still governed by a fiery wash of irritation. Kirk decides that the best thing he can do for both of them right now is take his mood elsewhere, so he strips off his dress jacket with its starched, high-necked collar and its ridiculous complement of medals and stows it on a hanger, seeks out his discarded boots and sets them back on the rack where they belong, and slips out of the bedroom and into the gloomy corridor beyond before the bathroom door opens.
The study is dark, lit only by the soft glow of two idling terminal screens on either side of the room. It made sense for him to move into Lori's place when they married; she was hardly likely to give up her home of six years for a billet in the Residences, and it wasn't as though they gave themselves much time to go house-hunting after the decision was made. It's still supposed to be a temporary measure, but they're eleven months into a twelve-month marital contract now and he guesses that they'll wait to see if they renew next month before they start looking for anywhere permanent to live. So it is that it doesn't feel as though there's a square inch of the galaxy, on- or offworld, that he can call his own, and the study is not much of a refuge for a man nursing a powerful resentment against a sense of having been managed, handled, stripped of his agency.
He grabs a bottle from the shelf behind his desk and lowers himself into his chair, with a soft command to the computer that fires it to life in a blast of white light. As he pours, he calls up his messages, but immediately thinks better of it and powers down before the screen has a chance to load. He's read the messages he wants to read; he doesn't need to deal with the content of the three dozen fresh missives that will have arrived during his hours at HQ until tomorrow morning, and he definitely doesn't need to go searching self-consciously for correspondence that absolutely, categorically will not be there. It's been eighteen goddamn months. He cannot keep doing this to himself.
Kirk takes a gulp of whisky, leaning back in his chair and cradling the glass against his chest. He doesn't know how long it's going to take for his wife to fall asleep - she's good at angry insomnia; they both are - but he's damn sure he's not going back into the bedroom while she's still awake, for the sake of everyone's peace of mind. There are books stacked high on the shelves around him, floor-to-ceiling walls of the written word, and he could get up, lift one at random and open it wherever it happens to fall, let it drift his mind back from the red shores of anger until his eyelids droop and his spine sags and he wakes up, three hours later, with an almighty crick in his neck and the dregs of a glass of bourbon staining the front of his undershirt. But he's not ready just yet to let go of the fires of righteous indignation - more than that, he's not ready to cast this evening's argument into their shared history, move on and forget about it, not yet. This didn't use to be them. They didn't use to have to tiptoe around each other, like they were walking on broken glass and white-hot metal, each waiting for the spike of irritation that would set the other off.
Kirk tries to remember the last time they were easy with each other, content in each other's company. It's not a total surprise when he comes up short.
-o-o-o-
She leaves it more than two weeks after his move to Operations before she comes to him - sixteen days in which he's barely left his office for eight hours at a time, and this has numbed his brain back into that focused exhaustion that lets him channel huge quantities of information without stopping to think about anything else. It's a good thing he has a Yeoman who knows what she's doing, he reflects from time to time, or else he'd never eat, never step away from his terminal or his communicator, never rest until his brain gave up and shut down in silent protest. But this is a good thing. He's thinking of putting in a request for a change of billet so that he never has to go back to that goddamn apartment again, but, in the meantime, it will suffice to have his attention occupied exclusively by nothing but endless, demanding, interminable work.
Her arrival problematizes this plan, of course. It works best without external input.
She buzzes for entry late one Wednesday evening as the sun is sinking behind the Headlands in fiery reds and coppers, and he's too distracted by six years of biannual weapons discharge reports to consider an appropriate exit strategy until she's already in the doorway, medals glinting on the breast of her dress uniform, right eyebrow raised.
"Admiral Ciana," says Kirk. It's no more than a fraction of a second before his brain kicks back in and gets him to his feet, but he knows it's long enough to register. "I wasn't expecting you, ma'am."
But there's no sign of misplaced protocol on her face. "Jesus, Jim," she says, as her eyes take in the discarded coffee cup, cooling on the desk beside his terminal, a half-eaten grilled cheese sandwich that he forgot about some time after lunch, the shades that he hasn't remembered to drop. "When was the last time you slept?"
He lets that one pass with a twitch of his eyebrows, turns his eyes downwards to buy him the moment he needs to settle the rising tide of irritation. "Is there something I can do for you, ma'am?"
She sucks in a breath, and, when he looks up, her expression is blank. "You could say that," she says. "I was over this way for a meeting with OpTacs, thought I'd stop by, straighten things out between us. I can't do my job without Fleet Ops on my side, Jim. So - go ahead. Say what you need to say to me and let's put this thing to bed."
He huffs a tight little laugh. "I don't think that's appropriate, ma'am."
"I'm not your CO anymore, Admiral Kirk," she says, and if there's a faint emphasis on the Admiral, he refuses to acknowledge it.
"No," he says, "but you're still my superior officer, ma'am. And I resent the implication that I'd allow my personal feelings to cloud my professional judgment."
"I don't believe that's what I said," she counters icily. "But I don't like being held responsible for something I didn't do. You know, you're the first person below the rank of full admiral ever to sit in this seat, Kirk; what, you think I get to tell Nogura how to run his fleet? He wanted you, Admiral, and when he wants something, he makes damn sure nothing gets in his way."
"You let me walk into that ceremony…"
"Oh, please!" She tosses her head, lips pulled tight into a smile that's completely stripped of humor. "You're pissed because you thought I knew? I lost my goddamn deputy, I lost three month's work in the space of ten seconds, and I had to plaster this big stupid goddamn smile across my face and clap and cheer with everyone else like it was the best thing that could have happened to Xeno, and you think I knew? You're not the only person who got screwed in this deal, you know."
"I guess," he says acidly, "there are gradations of 'screwed'."
She shakes her head with a bitter twist of her lips. "Oh, poor little golden boy," she says. "You got boosted from a standing start into the top thirty most influential people in this goddamn organization in one single move, so forgive me if I'm not queuing up to join in your pity party, Jim."
Kirk's hands close into fists, and the rush of anger alarms him. He tucks them safely behind his back, though he knows she's seen the tension, the whitening of his knuckles, the tremble in his wrists. He says, "For a woman whose job requires her to look between the lines, you seem to miss a hell of a lot, ma'am."
They're ugly words, designed to wound, and he sees them flare brightly behind her eyes: damage done. But he knows her better than to think she'll go down under the weight of casual cruelties. It takes her less than three seconds to come back fighting, and the fact that her answer, when it comes, is level, clear, stripped of emotion, only serves to fuel his anger.
"You know what?" she says, and her smile is like acid. "I can see how it looks like I deserve that. Truth is, I never thought he'd pull this. I thought I knew where he wanted you, and, boy, did I ever call that one wrong. But I'm not going to apologise for a bad call, no matter how much you want to make all of this my fault. Because this isn't about me, and I know you know that. And I guess I know another couple things about you too right now, which is why I'm going to let that last comment slide, and we're both going to blow right through it like it never happened. But if you ever question my professional competence like that again, Admiral Kirk, you better make damn sure you have five PADDs worth of evidence to back you up or I'll see that you live to regret it. Are we clear?"
He purses his lips. "Crystal," he says, and allows just enough time to pass before he adds, "ma'am."
"Good," she says. An eyebrow arches, but the eyes beneath it are as dark as he's ever seen them. "Maybe you did get screwed, Jim, but it wasn't by me. Maybe it's about time you start asking yourself who you're really angry with."
-o-o-o-
This is his wife's gift, and it's not one that always serves her well: the ability to cut right through the bullshit and the defensive bluster to whatever's bleeding out beneath. It's her job, but it's also who she is, and she does it sometimes without even realizing, and sometimes he just wants to slam the door behind him and get on the first transport to wherever, disappear for an hour, a day, a week, to somewhere he can walk in a crowd and just be unseen, unknown. She walked out of his office that May evening surrounded by ice and bristles, and he sat in front of his terminal and fumed, glaring at the screen through a haze of cold fury that saw him through to the small hours. He woke in his chair at 0430 as dawn was just beginning to shift the light outside his uncurtained windows from black to navy blue, head pounding and neck aching, and he told himself that he'd managed her, managed himself, and that it was over at least. Whatever had been between them, he thought, it was gone now, and he was glad of that, because he remembered her face, that distant morning in her bedroom, and he remembered her words - Like nothing's ever been so beautiful - and they were in her eyes as she stood by his office door. Whatever she thought she knew, he thought, whatever she thought she saw in him, it was over now.
But what are you supposed to do? Time moves forward like floodwater and it sweeps away everything behind it. A week becomes two, becomes a month, and the hollowness closes over, little by little, as the days stitch together the jagged edges of what's left behind. He remembers sitting, boneless, on the floor of his apartment a week after Cochrane Day, head pressed against the window as the sun climbed down the sky and the stars spiked the growing shadows, letting the hours wash over him for lack of any other way to fill them, and he remembers feeling as though inertia had finally claimed him and that he would spend the rest of his life being spun and buffeted by invisible tides that he no longer had the will to fight. But time moves forward, and there's work to do, and every day is a step further away from that sucking blackness; every day is a step back towards the light, and, little by little, things begin to settle. The next time he saw Lori, in a meeting room on Luna, surrounded by representatives of fifteen different worlds, she caught his eye and nodded, and it took him a moment - long enough that he was angry at himself, because he's never been an ill-mannered man - but he nodded back. The time after that, she smiled.
Little by little. It took a long time to mend what had broken so easily, and the first time they tried out the limits of each other's company over coffee in the officers' mess, they were all boundary walls and barb wire and long, uncomfortable silences. But there were ambassadors to host and delegations to impress and receptions to attend, and proximity chipped away at the barricades, little by little, until the evening she sidled up to him as a party was breaking up and nodded at the plate in his hand and said, Jim Kirk, get your coat, because it turns out I can't rest easy this week until I see you eat something that's not made out of plastic and saturated fat. Cafe Aziz. I'm buying.
And he protested, of course, that he had work to do, and she shrugged it off with a casual comment about how he wasn't the only one, and at least his office was fully staffed. But she said it with a grin, the old grin that they used to share when things were less complicated, that told him that something had shifted, something important, and that they were back on the road to being okay.
I don't want to be your mom or your confessor or your friend, Jim, she told him. I just want to make sure the Chief of Fleet Ops doesn't quit or die before he signs off on Xeno's fleet deployments for the next six months. And maybe there was a comeback to that and maybe there wasn't, and maybe it was just that it turned out that the quality of Starfleet brandy got better when a person achieved flag rank, good enough that it took the sting out of something that, not so long ago, would have opened up a whole world of glacial acrimony.
Maybe it was just that he was so damn tired of eating alone.
It doesn't take a woman of Lori's gifts to see that she's been a lifeboat, a refuge from a storm that was taking its time blowing itself out. He wonders why she allowed him to come over that first night, mid-September: too late for a social call; she had to have known what was on his mind. He made the decision and she made the decision and he wonders if either of them had the first clue what it was they were deciding to do, or if it was just a kind of default reaction to a situation that had been sliding down a very particular path since the day they met. They both needed an anchor, he thinks; a safe harbor, a friend. Is that grounds for a marriage? He doesn't even know anymore.
Enough. He's tired, and the bourbon is coating the edges of his irritation, damping down the fire and flame of indignation. Lori may be asleep and she may not, but Kirk doesn't feel like spending another night in his office chair, and, while sharing a bed with his wife may not solve anything, distance certainly won't. He drains his glass and sets it on the desk, dials down the lights, gets slowly to his feet on tired, thick-muscled legs, stretching his arms over his head as he stands, working out the knots in his spine. Enough. It's time for sleep.
But he calls up his messages before he leaves the room, just in case.