Chapter Text
Jim groans as the auxiliary wire he had been working on comes out in his hand. “It’s miracle we get anywhere in this pile of junk!”
Bones rolls out from under the Enterprise’s engine far enough for Jim to see his raised eyebrows. “You nearly bit Spock’s head off for saying the same thing.”
“Yeah, well, I’m allowed to insult her all I want.” He smacks the console, partly to drive the point home and partly to get the circuit running again. “C’mon…. c’mon….”
“You’re in a sudden rush to leave,” says Bones slowly, rolling out even further, probably to make a disturbing amount of eye contact. “How did the resignation go?”
“It was fine,” says Jim, focusing on his repairs. “Pike wasn’t happy, but he understood. He wished us luck.”
“And Uhura?”
He tightens his jaw. “It doesn’t matter, Bones.”
“’Course it doesn’t matter, that’s why you’re sulking.”
“I am not sulking.”
“What’re you doing to that dilithium reattributor?”
Jim looks down at the wire in his hands. Or, more specifically, the tangled knot of frayed metal he’d been worrying in his hands.
He throws it to the side; it’s useless now anyway. “Fine. It’s just—she was yelling at me for leaving. Like it was my fault! Like I was just sauntering out of the rebellion for no reason, like she’s not…” He trails off.
“Your crush’s crush?” Bones suggests.
“You could put it that way,” Jim mutters.
“Well, you can’t blame her for not understanding,” says Bones, pulling off the panel underneath the engine so he can take a better look at the reactors. “You never told her about…you know.”
“Of course I didn’t!” says Jim, jabbing the wrench in his direction. “He wants her, and she wants him, and I have nothing to do with it. I’m not enough of a jerk to get in the way of that.”
Bones glances at him, then back to his work, his mouth flattening into a line. “And Spock? Did you tell him?”
“No! He’s the last one I would tell, aren’t you listening??”
“Did you tell him that we’re leaving?” the doctor clarifies.
Oh.
Uh.
“Um,” says Jim.
McCoy gives him a Look.
“We were too busy doing patrol!”
“Uh-huh,” says Bones.
“And then he went out to take a look at that meteorite! There just wasn’t a good time!”
“Uh-huh,” says Bones, again.
“Do I really need to tell him?” Jim whines, his shoulders slumping.
“That we’re leaving?” Bones demands incredulously. “Yes! Comm him right now!”
“No!” says Jim, crossing his arms. “I’m an adult and I can make my own stupid decisions. So there,” he adds, sticking out his tongue.
“You can’t keep running away from this!”
“Um, yes, I can,” says Jim.
“Actually,” says Bones, “you can’t, because the central lifters are nonfunctional.”
The captain turns, only to see his First Mate’s hands full of what used to be the lifter core.
“Really?” Jim yells. “You decide now is the time to pull both of these energy transmitters? I'm trying to get us out of here and you’re pulling random pieces off our ship!”
“Because they’re broken, you halfwit!”
“We’ve flown with worse equipment before!”
“Excuse me, Keptin!” a new voice chimes in.
“And in this piece of crap, we could still die even with better equipment!”
“Don’t you dare call her that, you—”
“You’re a damn hypocrite, you know that?”
“Keptin… Might I heff a word wizh you, please?”
“What do you want?” Jim snaps, turning on him.
“Iz Princess Uhura, Keptin!” says Chekov. “She haz been trying to get you on ze communicator.”
“I turned it off,” says Jim shortly. “I don't want to talk to her.”
Chekov looks crestfallen, like he’s watching his parents fight or something. “Oh,” he says softly. “Well, ze Princess iz wondering about Commander Spock. He hazn't come back yet. She doezn't know where he is.”
Looking for her boyfriend, huh? Jim scowls and turns back to his repairs. “Well, I don't know where he is,” he snaps. It’s not like he knows anything about Spock that Uhura doesn’t.
“No,” says Chekov. “Nobody does.”
Jim’s head jerks up. He stares at the other pilot, something cold and sick settling in his stomach. “What do you mean, ‘nobody knows’?”
He looks up at the fading light at the entrance of the ice cave as night slowly begins to fall on Hoth. It’s dangerous enough for a desert-dweller to be out there during the day; during the night without supplies… unable to comm back to the base for reasons that Jim doesn’t want to consider…
“Well, uh, you see—” Chekov stammers.
Despite the fact that Jim is clearly ignoring him and jumping down off the lift, Chekov follows him. “Deck Officer,” Jim shouts. He catches sight of Stevenson on the other side of the hangar. “Hey! Deck Officer!”
“Excuse me! Keptin, might I inqu—”
Jim slaps his hand over Chekov’s mouth, cutting him off as the central deck officer approaches. “Yes, sir?”
“Do you know where Commander Spock is?” he bites out.
The officer hesitates, looking uneasy. “I haven't seen him. But it's possible he came in through the south entrance…”
“It's possible?” Jim repeats, practically snarling now. “Well why don't you go find out!? It's getting dark out there!”
“Yes, sir!” the officer squeaks, and practically runs in the opposite direction. Jim takes his hand off Chekov’s mouth.
“Keptin, may I ask what iz going on?”
“You can definitely ask,” Jim mutters, and stalks away toward the entrance Spock would have used. He grabs an emergency overnight pak for extreme temperatures on the way – a heated shelter tent, a set of stim-shots, temperature-controlled sleeping bags. Even with all the provisions the rebellion has to offer, going out into the snow at night is potentially fatal.
Without any of the provisions, Spock’s chances are… not good. To say the least.
Jim forces that thought aside and heads to the south entrance check-in crew, darkly satisfied by the way the deck hand looks wide-eyed and terrified by whatever he sees on his face.
“Sir, Commander Spock hasn't come in through the south entrance. He might have forgotten to check in?” he suggests, his tone almost pleading. Jim has no idea what kind of look is on his face, but he can’t imagine it’s in any way friendly.
Spock, forgetting to check in? Right. “Are the speeders ready?”
“Not yet,” says the deck officer, glancing to the side, where the other deck hands are studiously avoiding his gaze. “We're having s-some, um, trouble a-adapting them to the cold.”
Of course. Of course Jim finally manages to get his act together enough to leave only for Spock to end up incommunicado and vanished somewhere in the middle of some frozen wasteland. Of course there’s yet another reason he has to stay.
Or at least another reason he can’t leave.
“Then we'll have to go out on sehlats,” says Jim.
The deck officer squirms. “Sir…the temperature's dropping too rapidly.”
“That's right,” Jim mutters through gritted teeth. “And my friend’s out in it.”
The guy starts stammering something in response, but Jim is already turning and striding away across the hangar, the deck officer running to catch up behind him. He’s distantly aware that the poor guy is trying to tell him something, but Jim is beyond caring, is already pushing his way through the troops to the patrol equipment and swinging himself up onto one of the sehlats. The wind is almost a physical force outside the steel doors, but it doesn’t matter. None of it matters, if Spock is out there…
“Your sehlat will freeze before you reach the first marker!” the deck officer yells.
“Then I'll see you in hell!" Jim shouts back. He snaps the sehlat’s reins and they take off into the brutal cold.
---
It takes about thirty seconds for the awesomeness of his exit to wear off and for Jim to start regretting this entire journey, blinking back the flurry of snowflakes pelting him, already starting to lose feeling in his toes in the oppressive cold. The oppressive, endless cold.
He’s riding in a random route at this point, surrounded by endless nothing, nothing, nothing and white, white, white. The only thing he knows for sure is that he’s lost sight of the rebel base long ago, so he couldn’t go back even if he wanted to.
Not that he wants to—his chest is still tight with the panic of Spock being out here, alone, freezing, possibly de—
No, he can’t think about that. He has to focus.
He could have been riding for hours, or minutes, he honestly has no idea, and for all he knows he’s out of range, but he pulls out his comm despite it, despite the fact that he knows the deck officers had been trying to contact the Vulcan for hours without success.
“Spock,” he calls. “You there? Please, if you can hear me, say something. Anything. Please….”
The other end of the line stays silent and dead. The only sound for miles is the roaring storm around him and the quiet protests of his sehlat. Jim takes a shaky breath and closes his eyes and tries his very last resort.
“Hey, God,” he murmurs. “Or, the Force. Or whatever you are. If you are. I’ll admit, I’m skeptical about this whole thing. The whole…overarching energy that connects us and binds us and whatever. I think Selek was kind of nuts himself, and he’s passed his nuttiness on to his next of kin. But hey, I don’t believe in anything anymore, not even the basic goodness of humanity, so I’m probably a bad person to ask.” He stops, the snow burning his face, his teeth chattering. “But… Spock… he really, really believes in this stuff. He’d die for this stuff. He depends on it to get through the crap you’ve given him, and by the way, you’ve given him a lot of crap. As if growing up without his parents wasn’t enough, you had to kill his aunt and uncle too, and—” He stops himself short. “Look, the point is, I’m jaded, and bitter, and I automatically think the worst of people. But Spock’s not like that. He’s… he’s the best kind of person. And he’s going to do amazing things. You just have to let him.”
And with that last, pointless prayer into the void, Jim opens his eyes.
He opens his eyes and sees a dark, humanoid blob in front of him, struggling through the storm. It falls to its knees and collapses and—
And Jim is off his sehlat and running as fast as he possibly can in the snow, and yelling, “Spock! Spock, it’s me!”
Over the wind he hears what might be Spock’s voice (he found him he found him he found him) groaning, “Selek… Selek…”
He’s feverish and hallucinating and seeing people who are no longer of the living. But he’s alive.
He drops down next to his friend, but Spock is already unconscious. He cradles him in his arms, turns him over.
There’s a horrible, bloody slash across his face and his skin is almost blue and his eyes won’t open and oh God, no no no… Dimly Jim is aware of his sehlat making a low, pitiful bellow behind him, but it doesn’t matter when Spock is silent and bleeding. He shakes the Vulcan as hard as he can. “Spock!”
No response.
“Spock!”
No response.
Jim’s breath catches in his throat, his voice wobbling despite his best efforts. “Don't do this, Spock. Don’t do this to me. C’mon, give me a sign here…”
Still no response.
Jim pulls one glove off with his teeth and feels his friend’s face. It’s ice-cold. Unresponsive. He’s even stopped shivering, stopped trying to so much as resist the hypothermia. Jim takes a quivering breath and begins frantically rubbing Spock’s face, trying to put some heat into them, but it’s no use. He has to get him into the emergency tent or whatever good he can do will be outweighed by the cold outside.
He scoops down and pulls Spock into his arms (breath on his cheek, he’s breathing, thank God, he’s breathing), hoping to lift him onto the sehlat and get to a cave or even just a flatter, less exposed area to set up camp, when he hears a rasping sound behind him.
Jim turns just in time to see his sehlat stagger, cough, and fall over into the snow. With one last groan, the Tauntaun goes completely limp.
Great.
Jim grits his teeth. “Don’t have much time…. You might hate me for this, but your life’s more important.”
He puts the unconscious Vulcan down next to the sehlat’s body and pauses, panting. Which is when he hears—
“V’Ger….” Spock mumbles, and Jim’s head shoots up, his heart leaping. He’s still alive and functioning. It’s nonsense, as far as Jim can tell, but nonsense that means he’s not dead, and the tiniest flicker of desperate hope surges inside him.
“Hang on, Spock,” Jim says quietly, unhooking his friend’s lightsaber. At least one of them knows how and when to use this thing.
“Gol...” Spock says, and isn’t that place on Vulcan? Maybe not complete nonsense after all.
Still, it’s not anything that’s going to save his life, so Jim straightens up and ignites the saber, surprised by the sheer amount of effort it takes to keep the sword steady, and looks at the dead beast.
All at once he remembers tucking in for their first proper dinner at the rebel base after blowing up the Death Star, remembers how Spock’s eyes had flickered from his plate to his face and away, all within a moment.
“What?” he’d asked defensively.
Spock had shaken his head. “It is wrong to project my own convictions upon you.”
Jim had looked down at his meal. “You don’t like hamburgers?”
“You are eating the flesh of another living being,” Spock had explained. “A living being with a consciousness about which we continue to discover more with each passing year. According to Jedi teaching, animals have souls just the same as the intelligibly communicable races.”
“Not sure I believe in the soul at all, myself,” Jim had remarked, and Spock had just looked at him like he was pretty much hopeless. He added hastily, “I get what you’re saying, though. We have no idea how much animals understand, and on the chance that they are aware of—well, anything—it’d be almost cannibalism to eat them.”
“Precisely,” said Spock, his tone surprised? or pleased? or maybe neither?
“But, uh,” said Jim, breaking whatever moment they were having (hell if he could figure it out). “Can I still eat it? I, um. Really love burgers.”
Spock’s expression had been bemused, maybe, or chagrined. Or maybe nothing at all. “You may, Jim.”
It was that same empathy and unguarded marvel of life that had gotten them repeatedly into trouble over the years. Probably the same curiosity that had gotten them into trouble this time. And it was arguably the most irritating, most inconvenient, most wonderful, most loveable part of him.
Spock had been uncomfortable so much as eating at the same table with someone eating an animal. If he knew Jim had stuffed him inside the belly of one, even for his own self-preservation…
“Gol…“ Spock mumbles again, flinching away from something, as if in a nightmare.
If it really came to a conflict between Spock’s kindness and his life, of course Jim would first sacrifice his kindness. He’d sacrifice anything. But if he set up tent immediately and administered the stim-shots and… damn him to the seven hells but it might just be possible to save Spock’s life without debasing any corpses.
“Kolinahr…” Spock moans, and Jim blows out a hard breath and sheathes the lightsaber’s blade back into its hilt.
“Jesus, Spock,” he huffs, dropping to his knees to start setting up the emergency tent, squinting through the bitter storm. “You’re gonna be the death of me, you know that?”
Spock doesn’t reply, of course, and Jim mutters, “If you don’t kill yourself first.”
---
It takes the emergency tent, the extra space heater, the temperature-controlled sleeping bag, and three stim-shots before Spock says anything resembling Standard, and when he does, it’s a weak, bleary-eyed, “Jim?”
Jim sits back on his heels, flooded with the relief of Spock finally talking, finally recognizing him, after hours of careful supervision and keeping his fingers on his pulse and worrying, while the wind howling outside the tent.
“Yeah!” he says, far too excited, and immediately lowers his voice to something more soothing. “Yeah, it’s me, buddy. How’re you feeling?”
“C-cold,” Spock manages, and a pang of worry sparks up in Jim’s chest. Whoever thought it was a good idea for a native desert-dweller to follow the rebels to the coldest planet in the system…
Oh yeah. That had been Spock.
“Yup, that’s pretty much the tagline of this new base location,” says Jim, forcing cheer into his voice. “But luckily we’re inside now. All we gotta do is relax, and keep talking. Can you do that?”
“C-cold,” Spock whispers again, which might be a response, or he might not be hearing Jim at all. “You are so cold. Frozen.”
The Jedi-in-training reaches one hand out of the sleeping bag, reaching for Jim, or maybe for something else entirely, and Jim catches it, entwines their fingers. His skin is so cold it’s almost painful.
“’Fraid you’ve got that backwards,” says Jim tightly, trying not to panic. “You’re the frozen one. You’re doing such a great impression of an ice cube right now, even Uhura will be impressed at our next team charades game. You want to impress Uhura, right?” He can’t help the note of desperation that creeps into his voice on the last word.
Spock’s eyelids flutter shut, his eyebrows furrowing as if in pain. “Late,” he mutters. “I am too late… You are frozen in… in carbon…”
The hell? Carbon? “Hey… hey, I’m right here, nobody’s frozen in carbon, all right?”
“I am so sorry, Jim,” comes the faint reply, and there is true anguish in his voice. “I must—kolinahr—”
No… no, this shouldn’t be happening, he’s slipped back into the nonsense far too fast. Jim searches frantically through his emergency pak for something else to use, but all he finds is food and water and more stim shots. And he’s already pushed the limit on those, barely avoiding sending Spock’s heart into overdrive and killing him without the snow’s help.
“Stay with me,” Jim finds himself pleading, brushing a stray hair out of his friend’s face. Somehow it feels wrong to let his usually-immaculate haircut fall into disarray. “Come on, Spock, stay with me, don’t go…”
The Vulcan’s eyes flutter open for a moment. “Do not worry, Jim. I am not in danger. I am warm.”
It is words that send a jolt of icy fear through Jim’s veins, knocking the air out of him as he remembers the first aid lessons Bones had insisted on giving him. As remembers Bones telling him that in the last moments of hypothermia, the body gives off an impression of warmth, gives the person the illusion of a painless, peaceful death even as their heart slowly stops beating and their lungs gradually shut down.
And Jim’s vision is swimming, his heart pounding a panicked rhythm in his chest, and he can’t let this happen, he can’t, he’ll give anything to make Spock live, give his own life, his own— his own warmth.
Of course. Of course. Why didn’t he think of it before?
Jim quickly takes off shirt, ignoring the way the cold bites at him, even inside the tent, and climbs into the sleeping bag behind Spock, wrapping his arms around his stomach until they’re right up against each other. If Jim had full command of mental faculties he might laugh at the irony of this being the way he and Spock finally end up cuddling, after Jim imagining it for so long, or maybe he’d just panic some more. But Spock’s skin is so cold it’s almost burning, and the bag is so, so warm, and he’s so, so tired…
Jim’s eyes shoot open just in time, the realization hitting him all at once that he’d almost fallen asleep. He could still fall asleep, if he’s not careful. He could fall asleep and wake to a silent tent and a cold, lifeless body next to him—
No. He has to stay awake and wait for the rescue team to arrive and give Spock another stim-shot in four hours. He’ll sleep when they’re found and safe and back at the base.
Spock makes a muffled, unintelligible sound in his sleep and shifts closer, pressing himself flush against Jim’s body, and the captain freezes, torn between moving away and holding Spock tighter to give him the warmth he obviously needs.
In the end he stays still and a moment later Spock rolls away, and Jim breathes a sigh of relief. Until, that is, a moment later, when he rolls closer again, right up against his body, and then shifts away, then closer, then away, almost like—
Oh. Oh hell.
And that’s all it takes, Jim’s completely hard, and Spock is still completely unconscious, still moving against him. Maybe even in the middle of a wet dream…?
Or more likely desperately needing your body warmth to survive but it hurts his frozen skin too much to do it all at once, you pervert, says an internal voice that sounds remarkably similar to Uhura.
Still, logic doesn’t make it feel like any less of a wet dream.
Especially with Spock moving like that, back and forth against him, his breaths heavy, his fingers tightening on Jim’s arm in his sleep. All Jim can do is close his eyes and try not to move, almost whimpering with the exertion of staying still, cursing himself for being so damn horny all the damn time, even when Spock’s life is in danger.
Finally, finally Spock stops, falls quiet, his breaths even and his skin slightly warmer, and Jim is left biting his tongue and thinking about the least sexy things he can possibly imagine and harder than he’s ever been in his entire life.
At least there’s no way he’ll fall asleep now.
Jim lets out a long, shaky breath, closes his eyes, and braces himself for the long wait till morning.