Title: Desperate Times, or the one in which I foist my own migraine off on poor Jim Kirk, stuck in the 1930s in New York before the advent of Imitrex and Vicodin
Characters: Kirk, Spock
Word Count:
Warnings/Spoilers: absolutely shameless H/C, because there's not enough headache!fic out there in the world. Nothing more to see here. Spoilers for City on the Edge of Forever.
Summary: see title; missing scene from CotEoF

It's been a long time since he really, truly, felt hatred for another human being. Pity, yes; anger, certainly – but the last time he actually and genuinely felt cold, murderous hatred for someone was many years ago, on a planet half-dead from famine and the despotism of a man who solemnly murdered four thousand people and sincerely believed himself in the right.

Since then, he's learned not to hate; a Starfleet officer can't afford to, because hatred is born of fear, and fear has no place in Starfleet exploration. He cannot be afraid of the unknown, and therefore cannot hate that which is different, simply because it is so. Even the most murderous of men, including those who have threatened the safety of his ship and his crew, he simply cannot afford to hate; because hatred makes a man careless of consequences, causes him to act irrationally due to uncontrolled emotion.

He sounds a little like Spock, he thinks with exhausted amusement, and maybe the Vulcans have just taken this excellent idea to a less logical extreme?

However, back to his original mental ramblings; it has been a very long time since he felt hatred for another person, decades at least. But now, he thinks he might just be approaching hatred for one particular person, the one who is solely responsible for his current uncomfortable surroundings, the entire lack of advanced medicine – and the migraine which is pounding against his skull, sharp and piercing under the glare of cheap electricity and murmur of grumpy tenements.

Bones is dead when they find him, if his idiot CMO didn't get himself killed already in this harsh Old World.

The wooden rreeeeeeeechhh of a creaking door being closed upstairs is an avalanche of sound in the quiet of the room, and his stomach immediately rebels. He inhales through his nose abruptly, slowly, deliberately, because in brutal honesty he simply can't afford to throw up right now; their cash on hand needs to be spent on other things than buying extra food. Spock needs gloves if he's going to be able to continue in the increasing cold, they both could use another set of clothes, and as for food and vitamins – that's next to impossible in this impoverished city. They can't take a chance on missing McCoy's arrival, just because the captain of the Enterprise's brain decided to crash and refuse to reboot under the worst headache he's had in months.

The combination of poor nutrition, twelve-hour days of manual labor, very little sleep, and intense stress have amalgamated into what seems to be a knife stabbing deep into his head, not a throbbing pain but rather a constant, burrowing pressure, like a warp coil intermix chamber set to overload. The constant strain of searching for McCoy, of trying to while still trying to work for a living; the knowledge that cordrazine overdose has been fatal and Bones could just be dead somewhere out there; the awareness that everything depends on so many variables in space and time swirling together in just the right instant.

The knowledge that if he and Spock fail, then someone else will have to come behind them and try to figure out what went wrong, his entire crew one by one becoming stranded here, perhaps without ever finding them…

The only surprise to him should be that he hasn't worried himself into a migraine before now.

The white-hot pain only increases as someone somewhere in the building starts a rickety shower, producing a knocking and banging in the walls that makes him curl half-onto his side with both arms pressed tightly against his head and ears, trying desperately to stop his stomach from churning. His breathing is shallow and rapid, almost clammy, as the nausea flares again with the addition of someone shouting at a child in the hall upstairs. A police vehicle trundles past the window, sending a stab of blinding red and blue slicing straight through his eyelids into his pain receptors, and he's a little (very little, because he's past caring by this point in the agony) ashamed of the faint whimper of pain he muffles into his elbow, as the room spins again when he tries to open his eyes in the darkness.

If he was on the Enterprise, he'd be either in Sickbay under duress or in his cabin, with the lights on three percent (just enough to let him see his way to the bathroom, a soothing bluish glow along the walls and the path to his desk) and a hypospray of Bones's most powerful blood thinner in his veins, preparing to sleep off the worst of the migraine in about ten hours of uneventful rest. He's powered through headaches before aboard ship, but on the rare occasion that one of this magnitude hits, he is of little use to anyone; and while he has, more than once, stayed on the Bridge while under the influence of the good drugs due to chaos and a battle zone, he usually is down for the count.

Unfortunately, he's stuck in New York City during early winter in the Terran 1930s, earning fifty cents a day doing manual labor for twelve to fourteen hours and consuming only the bare minimum of food in order to give Spock the funds he needs to construct whatever miracle he can to get them out of this mess.

Hence, the proud captain of the Enterprise reduced to such a pathetic state; lying on a lumpy mattress in a thin-walled tenement room, shivering under the solitary blanket and trying desperately not to vomit on that one blanket, as they have no extra money for laundering purposes and he's afraid if he moves to fling it to the side the motion will make his head fall off and go rolling on the floor in some grotesque parody of Irving's Headless Horseman.

He's somewhere past the thinking-he's-going-to-die stage and is barreling merrily toward the wanting-to-die stage, when the door to the "flop" creaks, ever-so-quietly but loud enough that a strangled curse falls unbidden from his lips, muffled into his arm as he cringes, fingers clenching in the cheap sheets. He breathes open-mouthed, almost panting with the pain, into his pillow for a moment, praying that his stomach will settle without mishap.

A gentle hand grasps his shoulder, turns him on his back, and before he can moan a blind protest an icy damp cloth is laid over his eyes, immediately shutting out the remnants of the street lights outside and the slice of garish yellow that glows from the gap under their hallway door. The pain recedes ever so slightly from behind his eyes, the knife retreating further back in his head just a fraction, and he takes a slow, measured breath in hopes that the nausea will retreat with it.

It doesn't. His fingers clench at his side in the sheet as the threat becomes very, very imminent, and how embarrassing is this going to be, succumbing to the most mortifying of uncontrollable human weaknesses right in front of a species who is known for their control? Edith must have found Spock, told him Kirk had left the mission early and why. She had given him a look of compassion, a kiss on the cheek, and a couple of white pills that were supposedly an Old Earth pain reliever called aspirin; unfortunately, none of the three had even taken the edge off the agony.

The soft creak of bed-springs is a banshee-screech, reverberating into his skull from below, but his sound of protest is somewhat distorted by the hand he has clenched over his mouth, as he fights back another hot curl of nausea, trying desperately to count a breathing exercise in his mind. Not an easy task, when he feels his mind shredding into jagged pieces under the onslaught of grinding, unending pain.

"Have I said I'm going to court-martial Bones when I see him?" he manages to grind out, between shuddering breaths.

"You have, Jim."

Spock's voice is soft, so soft he can barely hear, and almost magically free of harsh phonemes, rolling gently and without jarring to his over-sensitized hearing. That in itself makes it welcome, and when it's accompanied by cold fingers (Spock really is freezing in this weather, and he hates that he can't do anything about it) at first hesitantly, but then more firmly applying pressure to his temples, he could just about faint or cry from sheer relief.

Their personal boundaries pretty much went out the window two nights ago, when it got so cold in the drafty room that he was literally afraid Spock might become ill, even die from hypothermia, and had insisted upon sharing the single blanket along with (fully-clothed, because even he had standards of awkwardness that didn't need crossed yet) body heat. Until that frigid night, they had managed somehow to keep their dignity in the tiny room, both being very private individuals in undesirable conditions. And since then, though that barrier has disintegrated little by little, the situation is less awkward than he would expect, and he is not about to refuse the expert aid of a touch-telepath in relieving what is legitimately a crippling pain.

Spock's more sensitive fingers are evidently capable of seeking out the worst areas of constricted blood vessels, knowing just where to apply pressure and for how long, better than any acupressurist Kirk's ever known, and in his Academy days he'd been known to date a few for their professional benefits more than anything else.

"You don't have to do this," he whispers, the words hammering loudly against his constricted eardrums, even though he suspects Spock will just ignore him. It's only polite to give the poor Vulcan an out if he's uncomfortable. He's fairly certain it's not in the First Officer's job description (because that would be all kinds of awkward, now that his pain-muddled mind thinks about it) to give his commanding officer a head massage in the event that the idiot gets himself worked up into a migraine while on an away mission out of reach of civilization and its advanced painkillers.

"I have no wish to see you in pain, Captain." Cold fingers suddenly apply consistent pressure to the points at the base of his skull, and something explodes behind his eyes. Spock pauses as he inhales sharply, but continues when he relaxes back against the pillow as the tension drains slowly from the area. "And in the absence of modern technology, to alleviate pain in more archaic but no less effective methods is only logical."

Bull. Spock could have just stuffed a towel under the door and let him sleep it off; and he is aware just from the freezing fingers now drawing the tension upward along his scalp that Spock is still miserably cold; this is hardly logical.

His smile is thin and strained, but genuine, and he knows Spock will pick up on his absolutely pathetic and sappy gratitude through touch-telepathy.

"Thanks are illogical, Captain."

"Yes, well, shut up and let me think it at you anyway, Commander."

"As you wish. Sir."

The title is almost an afterthought, flippant and just ever-so-slightly teasing. He recognizes it for the distraction it's meant to be, and relaxes further into the lumpy pillow. His nausea is nearly gone now, certainly at a manageable level, and the pain has receded along with Spock's fingers into a dull ache at the base of his skull, one which is low enough that his pain threshold will allow him to sleep in relative peace.

"R'mind me to leave you a recommendation in your file for performance above the call of duty when we get back," he murmurs, drowsy with the rush of relief that seeps through every cell in lieu of the blinding agony of before.

If we get back, he does not say, but he knows Spock picks up on the barely-controlled terror that lurks deep within at the faint possibility.

He doesn't have the strength to protest when his friend pulls the single blanket back up to his shoulders. Spock turns the wet cloth over so that the cool side once more covers his eyes from the light, as his faithful First Officer turns on their single flashlight, to work across the tiny room by that dim glow until he's asleep and unable to be set off by the overhead lighting.

Their mission goes on, and he is able to sleep at last knowing that, if Spock has anything to say about it, they will succeed.

He's still going to murder Bones when he sees the man, however.

Nobody should be forced to wear this horrible atrocity of red plaid for longer than a week, thank you very much.