Title: In the Night
Characters: Spock, Kirk
Rating: massively K
Word Count: 655
Warnings: Fluff. Like, enough to choke a horse. Also, slight silliness. So I don't feel well and wanted to cheer myself up. Shoot me. :P Spoilers for Tholian Web. Passing mention of Operation Annihilate.
Summary: For my hc_bingo card, the WILD CARD spot - Nightmares. Takes place just after The Tholian Web.

He has always loved the vast, ethereal beauty of Space, a siren song to his blood since the age of four when his preschool class took a field trip to see Saturn's rings. He had fallen in love with the brilliance of light in darkness, life in nothingness, freedom in weightlessness, and that ardor had only intensified as the years passed.

"A starship captain," he had responded promptly to a well-meaning relative one Christmas, when asked what he wanted to be 'when he grew up,' and followed it up quite seriously with "The best one in Starfleet. An' Sam's gonna be my Science Officer, an' we're gonna discover new aliens and awesomeness like that." (Thirteen-year-old George Samuel Kirk had rolled his eyes but was kind enough to agree and spend many hours embellishing the child's enthusiastic plans, which act alone gained him a small hero-worshipper until the day the older man died.)

Now, decades later, he's gained his beautiful ship, and lost his brother. Acquired the space-faring freedom his blood craved – and nearly died today, suffocating all alone in the icy embrace of what had been his first and purest love.

He wakens with a small cry, chest heaving for oxygen that his mind has not yet registered is entering his lungs in far too rapid pants, and for one fractional instant his stomach clenches at the thought that he's still floating in the void of space, running out of air, suffocating, with the Enterprise and all her crew right there before his eyes and yet so unable to rescue him, measuredly calculating his breaths to last just a few minutes longer in the faint hope that someone, somehow, can rescue him, slowly asphyxiating in utter darkness –

And then the door to the adjoining bathroom slides open and a slightly disheveled figure barrels into the room, skidding to a halt just inside. The lights brighten automatically upon entrance, sending the darkness shivering back into its corners.

He stares, terror vanishing like wraiths of autumn campfire-smoke into the wind, and finds that he can breathe again – gaining him enough oxygen to the brain to engender the impressively coherent thought what the heck, don't laugh, don't laugh…

Spock's eyebrows, after relaxing at the sight of him not dying or being sick everywhere or bawling his eyes out or something equally disturbing, almost knit themselves together.

"Captain," he is greeted solemnly, and the urge to giggle outright suddenly makes him grab the pillow and hide his mouth with it. "I had thought you might be in…distress. I see I was in error; my apologies for disturbing you."

He blinks, dumbfounded, as Spock actually yawns then, and scrubs a fist across his right eye – obviously the secondary eyelid isn't doing the job – and the sight of his impeccably elegant First Officer standing there in his pajamas and those ludicrous fuzzy green slippers (Bones's gag gift to him last Christmas), sleepily rubbing his eyes, is so ridiculously adorable that he barely manages to muffle his unmanful squeeing in the pillow.

"Just a bad dream, Spock," he finally chokes out, the terror of asphyxiation entirely forgotten. "I'm fine…sorry I woke you up." He knows Spock didn't sleep while he was trapped in interphase, and the mental and emotional drain on the Vulcan was obvious even to McCoy earlier this evening.

"Do not apologize for what you cannot control, Captain," is the sleepy admonishment, and his smile creeps into a grin as the end trails off into another enormous yawn. "If you will excuse me…?"

"Sure, sure…and thanks, Spock," he manages to say with a straight face, and the Vulcan nods solemnly before retreating through the doorway.

The door slides shut behind his amazing, loyal, brilliant, incredible, and adorably sleepy First, and he gives in to the urge to cackle hysterically into his blankets.

Who knew that a Vulcan could get a worse case of bedhead than any human he'd ever seen?