Work Text:
The thing is – giving Jim Kirk a dare will never ever work.
Her knuckles are bruised and her face beaten and bloodied. She drains her beer, condensation cool under her fingers, and she holds Christopher Pike’s eyes over the brim of her glass, and she salutes him when he looks disappointed in her. He’s not the first person she’s disappointed, he sure as hell won’t be the last, and no one tells Jim Kirk to do better, no one tells her how to live her life, least of all some Starfleet uniform with illusions of grandeur that doesn’t belong to her.
“Enlist,” she repeats to herself as Pike’s back disappears out the door. She snorts. It’s one of those things that just keep getting funnier.
*
She takes the call in her ready room, and it’s good to know that at least one of the Spocks is always glad to see her. Her own Spock stands on the bridge, tight-lipped as he always is when she converses with his older counterpart. She doesn’t actually know why, but quite frankly she doesn’t give a fuck, because both Spocks fucked with her head and let her believe that the world would go boom if they knew of each other.
“Jim,” Spock says warmly and Jim wonders if her own Spock will ever sound this pleased to be in her company. She somehow highly doubts it. “You look fatigued.”
“Humans generally prefer compliments,” she says drily.
Spock’s lips twitch. “You are aesthetically pleasing as always,” he says. “However, you still look fatigued. Is captaincy disrupting your rest?”
She laughs, she can’t help it, and Spock looks pleased to have made her laugh. “A little insomnia never killed anyone, Mr. Spock. How’s the colony?”
He looks at her as if he knows exactly what she’s doing and he’s only letting her get away with it because she is who she is. She is pretty okay with that, actually, everything considered. She sees in him the search for someone who looks like her and embodies her but isn’t her, and if she can give him just a little bit of that, she’ll give everything, and she thinks he knows that.
*
Fooling around with Gaila was probably one of the best non-decisions Jim had made in her entire life. To be entirely clear about it: Jim loves sex and she doesn’t discriminate. Gaila however was soft and stunning and had the best grin and didn’t mind it when Jim pounced on her. Also, Gaila’s face when Jim started making corrections to her assignments was the next best thing.
Gaila was also one of the only people who understood that trying to talk Jim into doing something else than what she was already doing was the best way to get Jim to do the exact opposite. So she didn’t say anything when Jim corrected the third set of calculations and then rewarded her for a job well done.
Jim thought she’d earned it.
Later, she thinks back on this and wishes that she’d done something more, but retrospect is a bitch and Gaila kicked ass right up until she didn’t anymore, and Jim thinks that maybe that’s legacy enough for her.
*
To be fair, the entire fight started because Starfleet fucks think too highly of themselves and thought that no doesn’t mean no if the chick is a dumb farm hick, and well. Jim has never been known to back down from a fight. When the stupid fuck had the gall to hold back because I don’t hit girls, Jim kneed him in the balls and fought back harder.
She met Uhura outside the bar when Jim finally left (when she thought Christopher Pike, that sly fuck, had left and wasn’t lurking anymore to try making her enlist again), and Uhura said quite vehemently, “those guys are suck jerks,” and “are you really alright?”
Jim had never been good at resisting a pretty girl and Jim didn’t know any African to save her life, but she was pretty sure Uhura is another word for danger, abort mission! and I will fuck you up if you even try. It was also why Jim wiped her nose with her sleeve again and said, “fuck ‘em, I’ve had worse,” which was and is the truth and probably not what Uhura wanted to hear.
It was pretty obvious then that Uhura knew exactly who she was, but it turned out Jim’s hunch about her being a smart girl was right, because she didn’t mention it at all. Instead, she said, “if you ever come to San Francisco, hit me up, okay?”
And what do you know, Jim was curious and she did just that.
*
“It’s an honor,” the ambassador says and is having a noticeably difficult time looking away from Jim’s boobs. She wants to roll her eyes so badly, but she doesn’t and hopes Spock knows how difficult it is for her to go against her instincts. “Captain Kirk, your reputation precedes you.”
“Only good things, I hope, Ambassador,” she greets. Spock stands behind her, silent and presumably twelve kinds of constipated, and probably waiting to avert an interplanetary disaster if (when) she says something stupid. It’s handy, having a Spock for that purpose. “Thank you for having us.”
And the negotiations go – smoothly. Jim is pretty smug about that, especially because if Spock was capable of surprise she’s pretty sure he would be dropping his jaw right about now. Jim can do diplomatic very well when she wants to and it’s always fun proving people wrong (she aced all her courses, she knows Spock knows this, so why the surprise, actually?)
When they bid the ambassadorial delegation goodbye, she very pointedly doesn’t roll her eyes when the ambassador still can’t stop looking at her boobs. Seriously.
“See, I didn’t make the planet explode by just being there,” she says when they’re on the way back to the bridge.
“Indeed,” Spock returns. “Though I am sure that if anyone were to be in possession of that ability, it would be you, Captain.”
She laughs and nothing can convince her he’s not smiling.
*
It’s always hunger, gnawing and raw and the thinness of the dying bodies, the skulls that moan at her and the carcasses around her, and it’s the orders and a bastard of too many faces.
“Run,” she whispers and she pleads and demands and screams and bodies not listening, of faces twisting, and she’s so hungry. She eats and doesn’t taste, she eats and it’s ash, falling in her mouth and clogging her throat and she’s coughing and coughing and coughing and she can’t stop, it hurts, but it’s the hunger that kills her over and over again.
And she wakes with her lips still the shape of the screams she never let go of and she breathes and tries to remember how Bones curled around her sweating body in the dorms, how he seemed to want to fold her in and never let go.
But it’s Spock that comes to her on the ship, it’s Spock that stands in the doorway of their shared bathroom and looks out of place and stiff and having no idea but trying so hard to be what Jim needs from him.
“It was a nightmare,” he says and she would sob if she were alone, but she nods and takes the water he offers her, and she knows he knows it’s not what she needs, but he doesn’t know and how do you tell your first officer you’re fucked up beyond relief?
“Thanks, Spock,” she says with her torn throat and she manages a smile though she knows he’d prefer if she didn’t, the way her face is a bruise of exhaustion. “I’m fine, go back to sleep.”
She really must be looking like hell fell on her face when Spock doesn’t bother correcting her that he was meditating and not asleep, but he nods his farewell and is gone, and she lies back down and lies very still until she’s sure she’s not going to cry.
*
Meeting Bones changed her life, and not just because she would possibly, quite probably, be dead by now if not for his hypos and checkups and obsession with keeping her allergy lists up to date, but because he’s actually the only one who lets her get fantastically drunk when she needs it. He lets her smash things when she needs it, lets her vent when she’s too angry to contain it all and gives her hell when she deserves it. He rolls his eyes when she hates her hair and when her uniform sucks and when she needs to tell the world that getting your bra off after a long day is the best feeling in the entire galaxy. And probably in all galaxies as well.
He will not tiptoe around her and won’t treat her like she’s made of glass. He will endure her rightful anger and storm away when she’s a bitch and PMS-ing all over the place like a boss. He will buy her birthday presents even when she doesn’t want them and he’ll yell at her and nag her like a mom, and he’ll cockblock her like a brother would because he can and tease her because she can take it.
He hugs her when she deserves it the least and that is when she needs it the most.
Bones is, for all his gruff and attitude, quite possibly the best man in the entire world and all the galaxies and whoever ends up landing him? She will scratch their eyes out if they don’t treat him well.
He knows this and keeps her alive when she can’t breathe.
*
She wipes the floor with Sulu and he laughs through a wince when she helps him up.
“Sorry,” she says.
He rolls his eyes. “I’m sure it’s not a shame to be schooled by the Captain,” he laughs and stretches. “But damn, go easy next time?”
A lot of them thought at first that because she’s a girl, she can’t handle it. She is confident that she can take almost anyone on this ship, except maybe Spock, in a fight (not a fair fight, because Jim never fights fair,) and she’s also pretty sure everyone knows it. What can she say, she doesn’t pull her punches. Which probably explains why so few are actually willing to go up against her now, the damn wimps.
Spock won’t fight her because he’s actually three times stronger than a human and because Spock is afraid he’ll hurt her and Spock can beat her by raising his eyebrow. She’s not telling him that. Bones is not the brawling kind of guy and anyway she kinds of relies on him to patch her up, so. She fights Lieutenant Giotto on most days because she suspects he’ll never forgive her for calling him Cupcake and for kneeing him in the balls.
But Sulu is done and she’s still angry because seriously, fuck Admiral Archer into the next fucking millennium and she’s done thinking about that, nope, not thinking about it anymore, not thinking about it anymore, not thinking about it anymore.
“Captain,” Spock says when he finds her on the observation deck. “Can I be of assistance to you?”
Jim wants to either punch something into oblivion or fuck someone through a mattress (or a wall, she’s not picky), and since she’s pretty sure Spock isn’t offering either (unfortunately), she shakes her head and plasters on a smile that even feels painful. She seems to do that a lot around him. “I’m fine, Mr. Spock.”
He looks like he wants to say to her that fine has variable definitions, like he’s told her a million times already since they set out from Earth, but he doesn’t. “You appear troubled, Captain.”
She almost laughs. A Vulcan is telling her about emotions, god, what is her life actually? But sometimes his eyes are very, very human, and sometimes she sees what he could be in many years. Spock Prime did something to her brain, riddled it with double-images and impressions and things she can’t possibly or logically know but does anyhow. Sometimes when she steps on the bridge she steps onto another bridge staffed by the same people but not. It hasn’t become easier with time, but she’s getting better at knowing that they’re always her crew.
Spock walks over to her and actually sits down on the floor next to her, as graceful as he always is and he also makes it look comfortable, which it profoundly isn’t, her sleeping ass can attest to that. “I wish to make it clear to you that I am available if you should need assistance.”
“Catering to my illogical, emotional needs, Mr. Spock?”
He doesn’t rise to it because he’s learning her, too, a learning curve with ups and downs. “As emotions are vital for Terrans, it is not illogical to ensure your emotional well-being, Captain.”
She smiles but doesn’t feel it. “You do your job well, Spock, but this isn’t exactly a part of it.”
He looks away from her for a moment. “Jim,” he says and that is what makes her listen. “I am told you play chess.”
Sometimes she really doesn’t know what to do with him.
*
She fixed Spock’s car long before she stopped laughing every time someone mentioned her and Starfleet in the same sentence.
He came to the shop and looked so out of place that she spent the next fifteen minutes snickering before she came out to the front of the shop and asked what was wrong with the car. He told her quite stiffly that it did not function within the given parameters. Which she took to mean that it sounded funny. If he’d been surprised to see a girl with motor oil all over her face and drying her hands with a rag dirtier than her fingers, he didn’t show it.
She fixed it within the hour and took care of the engine in the process (she almost cried, it looked like it’d been through hell without proper maintenance).
“Good as new,” she announced and leaned on the car as she tossed the keys back to him. She was pretty sure he was itching to tell her that she was a highly illogical being, but he didn’t, just settled the bill and left again.
The next time she saw him, she was meeting Uhura and Gaila after their classes and she could tell that he was thoroughly confused to see her there.
She really didn’t give a damn.
*
She wakes in med bay and that is never a good thing. Taking stock of her body, she tries to figure out how deeply she can breathe – ow. Conclusion: not very. Ribs, then. She groans, fuck, she really hates bruising and breaking ribs, damn it. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
She’s also alone, she manages to determine that through her slit eyes, the med bay is silent and the lights darkened (which she’s absurdly grateful for, her head is already pounding like no one’s business), and she remembers phasers and god, spears? What the hell.
She takes a moment to be grateful for being alive.
“Jim,” Bones says above her and she blinks, confused, because she must’ve fallen back asleep. She blinks some more at him. “My god, woman, stop turning my hair grey.”
“How bad?” She rasps and realizes that that’s actually her voice, that weird brand of rough.
Bones ignores her and stabs her with a hypo in a particularly vicious way, then he glares at her like she ruined something. “I know you’re not exactly fond of our next mission, god knows why, but deciding to commit suicide before we even get to it in the name of defending your, by the way, more than capable, First Officer from phasers and a spear through a lung is not the smartest thing you’ve ever done. Idiot.”
“Your bedside manner may leave something to be desired, doctor,” Spock interrupts from the doorway. “Even if I agree with the basic sentiment.”
“Please don’t agree with me, Spock, you make me very uncomfortable,” Bones says and looks faintly ill. “And what would you know about bedside manners anyway?”
Jim thinks she might laugh if she actually felt capable of it. The thought of it makes her ribs hurt and she coughs, which, ow. A machine beeps insistently next to her and Bones reaches for it.
“Calm down,” he orders soothingly, then looks away from her and really, it’s getting hard to keep track of him, the way her eyes are shutting and are hazy. She watches Bones’ mouth move but doesn’t hear anything, she watches his eyes go wide and his fingers on her face and it’s so hard to breathe.
When she manages to blink her eyes open again there’s a mask over her mouth and she breathes. She seems to recall that that was difficult, but it isn’t now.
“Captain?”
She blinks, slow, slow, slow, and her head is hurting, but she tries to turn it anyway.
“Captain, Jim,” and it’s Spock who sits by her. He seems to evaluate her mental facilities, and she wants to assure him that it wasn’t her brain that got hit, but it seems incredibly exhausting right now. She settles for nodding slightly. “The medication Doctor McCoy administered to you caused a severe allergic reaction.”
Jim wants to say she’s surprised, but really, she’s Jim Kirk. If it exists, she’s allergic. She’s allergic to the entire fucking universe.
“Captain,” Spock then says. “I realize this is likely a futile endeavor, but I must implore you not to continue risking your life in favor of mine. It is illogical for a higher standing officer, let alone the captain, to risk their life for a subordinate. You must cease this.”
Yeah, like that’s going to happen. She wants to tell him to take a hike. It’s made somewhat difficult by the mask on her face and the fact that her muscles, all of them, even ones she didn’t even know she had, feel like jelly. She settles for glaring blearily at him and hopes that the message is getting through. They’re almost seven months into their five year mission, and before that Jim has been irradiated to death and been resurrected and really, this is one of those battles Spock should really know by now that he’s just not going to win. Khan was right in that regard, there really is nothing she won’t do for her family.
Spock sighs like she’s being a highly illogical human, even for her, and his eyebrows pinch like they do when he seems to resign himself to never ever making sense of anything Jim is and chooses to be. “Captain.”
She glares extra hard at him.
“Jim,” he amends. “You seem to be operating under the assumption that you can simply be replaced on this ship. You are mistaken, I must assure you of this.”
She wants to tell him that he seems to be operating under the assumption that he’ll actually win this argument, and she also wants to tell him that he’s mistaken. He has, fortunately, learned that her silences aren’t her conceding to his (most often, stunningly logical) arguments, so he stands instead though she suspects he’d rather stay and make her promise in twelve different languages that she’ll stay behind on any and all future away missions. “I shall alert Doctor McCoy to the improvement in your condition. As in, you are lucid. Mostly.”
In seven months, Spock has learned a respectful amount of sass. If she wasn’t so annoyed, she would be proud.
Oh, who is she even trying to fool, she is very proud.
*
Her boss was an ass, but he paid her well, partly because the customers liked to ogle her boobs and ass when she bent over to look under the hood of the cars, and partly because she did her job really fucking well. Machines were something she’d always understood instinctively, much better than people, because people were by and large assholes in the grand scheme of things, and machines didn’t talk trash about her the moment she turned around. She wasn’t a disappointment to them and if they ever ended up disappointing her; it was because of her not doing her job well enough, so there was that.
She was picking Bones up when his classes ended, and she was leaning against her motorbike when a couple of guys walked up to her and she really didn’t like how they leered at her. It wasn’t the first time and no way in hell would be the last, but fuck it, it annoyed her how those people always saw her long, blonde ponytail and her boobs and then thought she’d bend over for every single one of them.
“Piss off,” she said with a sigh and was halfway through a silent apology to Bones for being late and possibly instigating a fight on campus when Bones himself actually showed up.
“Guys, piss off,” Bones groused, “or you better hope we won’t be stationed on the same fucking ship, I hear Andorian flu is very uncomfortable.”
“My knight in shining armor,” Jim batted her eyes when they left and Bones glared at her. “No, seriously, I love it when you defend my non-existing virtue, baby.”
Bones’ glare really was something else. He hated petnames with a fiery passion, almost as much as he hated his ex-wife and that was half the appeal for Jim to keep doing it. That was probably the motivation for most things Jim did, actually.
“See if I’ll ever defend you again,” Bones bit out even though they both knew he would, every single time she needed it (and all the times she didn’t need it, but Bones did.)
She didn’t comment, because she actually valued her life, contrary to the general and pretty popular belief of Riverside’s shitty, mouthy inhabitants. Instead, she offered Bones a helmet and gestured at the seat. “Get on, smartass, I’m going to rock your world.”
“Jim,” Bones rolled his eyes like he did when she was especially trying and detrimental to his health. “I’m not going on that flimsy thing, you know this, and second, what the actual fuck?”
She patted his cheek and then got on the bike. “Good boy, now get on.”
He did, because that was apparently a recurring theme in their lives now. Jim wasn’t complaining. And if she wasn’t ignoring how his arms around her felt safe, then that was her own damn business.
*
Mission parameters: Picking up two prisoners on a penal colony and escort said prisoners to another penal colony.
“I don’t want to see either of them,” Jim says and knows that she sounds irrational and possibly childish, and also not giving a fuck.
Spock raises an eyebrow at her. “Captain, it is standard procedure that –”
“No.”
“– the highest commanding officer –”
“No.”
“– oversees the prisoners beam safely – ”
“No.”
“– onboard the ship.” He raises his other eyebrow at her. “Captain, you are being needlessly contrary.” He doesn’t need to add even for you, but just because he doesn’t necessarily say it doesn’t mean he’s not implying it and it also doesn’t mean she doesn’t hear it. Funny what seven months in space do to a work relationship.
She knows this. She leans forward and rests both hands on the table between them. “Mr. Spock, you will oversee the prisoners beaming safely onboard the ship, and I will not see them, hear them or even hear about them. And that’s an order, Commander.”
Both his eyebrows rise further, disappearing up under his infuriatingly straight bangs. She knows what he’s reacting to, because it’s very rare that she has to make it an order when she asks him for something, but this, fuck it, she’s not ready, not prepared and definitely not wanting to compromise on this. Illogical human being or not.
“Captain,” he acknowledges and he’s clearly itching to shake an explanation out of her, but he doesn’t touch her unless necessary and this hardly qualifies. She watches him go and knows she should tell him, but she can’t.
She needs Bones and a drink so stiff she won’t be dreaming.
*
Jim was on the good list.
*
“Jim,” Bones is saying into her hair when she jolts awake and she realizes that she’s sobbing and breathing hard, and Bones is hard-edges around her, arms holding her tight. “Jimmy, you’re alright, shhh darlin’, you’ll be just fine – ”
Bones’ tired and thick southern drawl is somehow more home to her than Iowa has ever been. He’s safe.
“Doctor,” Spock’s voice says from the doorway. “Can I offer my assistance in any capacity?”
“Yeah, in the capacity of getting your Vulcan ass the fuck out of here,” Bones hisses, voice low and gruff above her head, “can’t you see it’s difficult enough as it is?”
And she tries to not sob all over Bones’ shirt, she really does, but her tear ducts and nose have obviously decided to stage a rebellion against her. She turns her head away from Bones’ soggy t-shirt and Spock looks awkward and vaguely uncomfortable, in a very stiff, Vulcan way, in the doorway, undone somehow, and she doesn’t know exactly what she wants, she just doesn’t want to be alone. She doesn’t deserve the comfort, but she craves it.
“Don’t coddle me just because I’m a girl,” she hisses at Bones and tries to back up a bit, but Bones’ arms definitely aren’t allowing that. She sometimes forgets that Bones has a daughter back on Earth and that he’s held crying girls in his arms before her, but she feels it when he holds her and he’s been a better brother and protector to her than Sam ever was, a truer friend than any she’s ever deserved.
She can hear Bones rolling his eyes at her. He lets her lean away a bit and he checks her eyes, checks her pulse, and dithers because he knows she needs the time. Spock stands in the doorway, awkward as fuck and trying not to look it, hands resting on his back, and he hasn’t moved away despite the abundance of illogical human emotion going on in the room.
“Jimmy,” Bones says and her heart aches a bit because he only calls her that when she looks like death warmed up. It does warm her heart, really. “What do you need?”
Bones could easily sedate her and drug her up to her gills, but that’s not always what she needs. When she looks up at Spock she thinks she’s seen this situation before – not her sobbing her heart out and snotting all over Bones, but this constellation of the three of them, and she has to blink because it’s disconcerting.
“With your permission, Captain,” Spock starts and takes a single step closer, “a highly superficial meld could settle your errant thoughts.”
The thought alone is terrifying, because the last time someone rummaged around in her head, she ended up carrying memories that definitely aren’t hers. She doesn’t think Spock knows this and damn it all, she’d rather undergo a cesarean without anesthetics than tell Spock. And she doesn’t know if Spock performing a mind meld on her would make him aware of what her nightmares and memories consist of, and she’s very happy with no one knowing about that, thank you very much.
“No,” she says and pushes off Bones’ poor ruined shirt, and this time, he lets her get back. She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “Thank you,” she manages. “But no, I don’t want that. God, I’m a mess. Guys, go to bed, I’m sorry for waking the entire ship. God.”
It’s so embarrassing, even if at one point in her life she’d have sworn she had no shame left.
Bones looks like he very much wants to hypo her to sleep and glares at her, but she glares right back and he seems to realize that she won’t back down on this. He looks at her while he says to Spock, “You alert me if needed, okay?”
Spock inclines his head, and sometimes Jim really, really dislikes the person that thought that adjourning quarters between Captain and First Officer was a good idea. She really could’ve lived a full life without this ever happening. The embarrassment, seriously. Bones looks distantly unhappy, but he at least knows her well enough to know that it’s not getting any better with an audience, so he leaves with one last pointed glare at both her and Spock, which she personally feels might be a bit unwarranted.
“I’m sorry I woke you up,” she settles for to fill the silence Bones left in his wake, and she finds a very fascinating spot on the floor next to Spock’s feet to look at.
“I was not asleep,” he assures her, voice cool, as if he still has no idea what to do with her and her feelings and her very obvious humanness. He most probably doesn’t, but hey, she counts it actual personal growth for him to not having fled the room yet. He takes a cautious step closer and then another, and then he crouches in front of her, and really, he will forever be doing things that surprise her. “Captain –”
“Jim,” she corrects.
“Jim,” he amends, as always, and then visibly hesitates. “I wish to ease your distress.”
Coming from Spock, that is probably the most emotional she’ll ever hear him or see him, not counting how he cried when she died. Uhura totally told her, but they don’t talk about that ever. Ever.
“I’m not sure anyone can,” she admits. “And it’s not your job in any capacity to deal with my feelings.”
“I would like to consider myself your friend,” he says, a gentle rebuke and this is just about an exact replica of a conversation they had not even two weeks ago. “Contrary to what you might believe, I do not find it a chore to ‘deal’ with your emotions, as you so phrase it. It is distressing to me to find you continuously in a state of unrest, particularly so if both myself and Doctor McCoy can do nothing to help you carry these burdens you isolate yourself with.”
Spock had better stop saying things like these or she will cry again, she really will. Sometimes, they’ll argue so fiercely on the bridge that the rest of the crew runs for cover, and sometimes she genuinely believes that they will never ever agree on anything ever again, but then Spock will do something like this and… when he says or does something like this, she really thinks she can buy into the whole epic friendship thing the elder Spock keeps telling her and what she keeps seeing in her head. Sometimes the overlap is frightening and awe-inspiring and wonderful in all the right ways. Maybe all of them at the same time.
She doesn’t know what she wants.
She very carefully touches his clothed arm, because please, she has actually learned a thing or two about Vulcans, and even though she’s still feeling raw with everything, she manages a smile that doesn’t feel like an open, festering wound. “Spock,” she says. “These burdens aren’t yours to carry, but thank you. I mean it. Thank you.”
She expects him to tell her gratitude is illogical and unnecessary, but all he says is, “Can I trust you to let your crew know if there is anything to be done?”
They both know she won’t, but she nods anyway, and illogical or not, she’s so intensely grateful that he doesn’t call her out on it. He just looks at her for a moment before standing in a smooth move and he squeezes her shoulder briefly.
“We would all appreciate it if you could manage some rest,” he says as he makes for the doorway to their shared bathroom.
She manages a grin. “Are you insinuating I’m cranky in the mornings, Mr. Spock?”
“I may occasionally do more than insinuate,” he returns readily. “Sleep well, Captain.”
*
At age nine, Jim thought she’d probably set the house on fire sooner rather than later, because sober Frank was kind of an asshole, manageable but an asshole, but drunk, he turned into a freaking raging psychopath, and okay, Jim herself was probably not the most well-balanced child in the world and was angry enough at the world in general on her own, but mixing the two of them?
Disaster. Utter disaster of the apocalyptic kind. Sam was long gone at this point and Jim sometimes felt so angry that she didn’t feel like all of the world was big enough to contain it.
She couldn’t be bothered doing her homework, school bored her to tears and everyone else was shit anyway. Everyone in school thought she was weird and crazy and too much of a loose cannon already, and Winona stayed in touch twice a year, maybe, and said that school would get better and please don’t drive Frank to homicide. Jim very honestly said she couldn’t guarantee anything. She wasn’t entirely sure Winona knew she was serious.
Aged almost thirteen, she drove the car off a cliff, her hair flying in the wind and she honestly didn’t know if she’d jump until the second she had to, and Frank yelled and yelled and she learned never to turn her back on him. She begged Winona to let her go away, somewhere else, anywhere but Iowa with Frank, because even if she didn’t drive Frank to murder, she might be on trial for it.
And Jim nearly cried with relief when the shuttle came to bring her to Tarsus and she saw Earth get smaller beneath her through the glass panes.
*
“It is extraordinary to hear from you again so soon, my old friend,” Spock says and his expression is pleased and the transmission is clearer than it was last time. Jim still can’t help how loosely her smile falls from her lips. “I trust everything is in order?”
Except for the fact that Jim is a highly emotional human, by everyone’s standards, yes. “Yeah,” she says on an exhale. She knows he’ll notice and maybe that’s why she does it, but she isn’t entirely clear on her own feelings at lot of the time, so who knows. “The crew is great, and the Enterprise is still fantastic.”
He looks at her, that way he has that tells her he knows her very well, and he says, not unkindly, “And what about her Captain? Forgive me for saying so, but while you are as visually pleasing as ever, Jim, I must reiterate that you still look unwell.”
He clearly learnt his lesson from last time they talked and she would laugh, but god, she’s so tired. “We have Governor Kodos and his daughter on board,” she says instead and watches as his face turns a shade of sympathy that doesn’t feel stifling, and she wonders if that is something his Jim had taught him through trial and error, the various colors of sympathy, which ones she (he) would accept and which ones would invoke anger. “We’re transporting them to another penal colony.”
“I see,” he says carefully. “I assume you wish to ascertain whether that particular event happened in my time as well.” When she nods, he looks at her for a time before saying, “In my time, I came to know Governor Kodos as Anton Karidian. He was a travelling Shakespearean actor.”
She blinks. “That is so weird.”
“Indeed,” he agrees and says no more, because technically, he has answered her question. He also seems to be waiting for her lead.
“I guess,” she starts, “I guess I’m just wondering if I, if he, ever told anyone about it.”
Spock leans forward on the screen and then says, somewhat urgently, “Jim, admitting to the suffering you never should have faced will not make you less of a competent captain, quite on the contrary. You have survived these events and they shape you, but Jim, they are not all you are, your past is not everything, and even if it were so, your crew would not care.”
She wonders if what he’s actually saying is that her Spock wouldn’t care at all. “I don’t want them on board,” she whispers and she wonders if he realizes what it costs her to say it.
“I wish to ease your distress,” he says and she has to close her eyes against the knowledge that she knows that cadence of his voice because he’s already said that to her in her own time. For once, her Spock was first. “It is displeasing that I cannot. Jim, you are more than the horrors in your past, the sum of your parts are infinitely more than the ways it could burden you. Your kindness is universal, a constant in all timelines we may encounter, I believe, and I find solace in that. Turn not from your family in your time of need, and perhaps you will find comfort in the constants of your own time.”
It’s not like he says anything she doesn’t actually know, it’s just that she’d prefer not thinking about it and not make anyone else think about it either. The thought of them knowing makes her stomach turn, the worst thing in all the universes and parallel timelines is pity, and she just doesn’t fucking want it, any of it.
“Thank you,” she says sincerely, because he’s honest with her when it feels like no one else is.
He inclines his head slightly. “My Jim struggled with the survival itself, but you are different from him, your life experiences are so vastly different that I cannot begin to fathom it all. I know regret is illogical yet I find I do regret.”
She knows he’s sorry, she knows that he’d go back, go back, go back if it meant her having her father, having a normal childhood, stable frames, no rocking ground beneath her feet, but he can’t. “What is, is,” she says.
His mouth quirks, just that slight tilt that would be a laugh on anyone else. “Your rise to captaincy was unprecedented but not undeserved. Have faith in your present self and you will rise above it all.”
She has a feeling he knows what he’s talking about it.
*
She met Leonard McCoy the first winter she spent in San Francisco. She was drunk, actually completely shit-faced and about half a bottle of beer from complete oblivion when he sagged down into the seat next to her and grunted eloquently enough at the bartender to communicate he needed a scotch.
He earned her respect right there and then, that was skill. He then proceeded to down it and ask for one more, still in that language made up entirely of grunts and scowls, and only by the third scotch did he look at her, and he did a double-take (he’ll deny it later, but she knows what she saw and hell yeah, he totally checked her out.)
She knew what she looked like then, completely wrecked, and she also knew that she didn’t give a shit.
“I’d ask what a girl like you were doing in a place like this, but it does look pretty obvious to me,” he said and raised his glass to her. “Boy troubles?”
She laughed. And laughed. And then laughed some more. And almost choked on a cough and he pounded her back until she could breathe again, and she said, “Happy birthday to me.”
And he said, “Next round’s on me, birthday girl,” and when she woke up, she was still in her dress from yesterday, on a Starfleet bed, curled up under Starfleet issued sheets in a Starfleet dorm with a Starfleet cadet unconscious on the floor. She thought it on par for the course that it managed to be the best birthday she’d had yet, which she didn’t tell Leonard McCoy until he became Bones to her and he scowled and said, “Fucking sawbones,” and she laughed and kissed his cheek and never avoids him on her birthdays after that, because not all forced company is miserable on a shitty day.
*
She parries Sulu’s jabs, ducks and swipes at him, and she probably should feel bad about the beating she’s giving him.
“Fucking ow,” he says and wipes at his lip. She’s sensing a pattern here in which she beats up her crew.
She can’t remember the last time she was this angry, maybe it was right after Tarsus, maybe it was the time Frank broke three of her fingers for saying he could keep his eyes to himself. The bastard. She’d thought that speaking to Spock Prime would help with her temper, and to be fair, it had helped for a time, but this anger is coiling in her, simmering beneath her skin and she really just wants to badly mess someone up. She’s very aware of the fact that she’s genuinely not a good person, but she hardly cares at this point.
Sulu’s fist connects sharply with her jaw and then – there are eyes on her and shots and phasers, so much screaming and running feet, panic and so much fear, and she kicks and fights until her body can’t anymore, she’s all adrenaline and reduced to instinct and rage – and she doesn’t realize she’s reacted until she has him on his stomach, her knee pressed sharply into his back and his arm twisted tightly. She breathes hard – it would probably be easier dislodging his shoulder at this point than anything else, and she can feel his accelerating breathing under her.
“Captain,” he says, calm but urgent. “Captain. Jim.”
The haze clears and it’s Sulu, fuck. She blinks and she lets go, horrified with herself. “Oh god, I’m sorry,” she gasps and scrambles away. “Fuck, I’m sorry, I’m so so sorry.”
“Hey, hey, no problem,” Sulu says as he sits up, gingerly holding his shoulder, and he clearly makes a point of looking at her, catching her eyes, very obviously telling her no hard feelings, but. Jim is not that person. Not anymore, at least. She’s a Starfleet captain, she has responsibility for these people, she can’t use any of them as outlet for her unjustified and irrational anger. Fuck, why is she such a mess?
She flees.
And Spock finds her in her quarters, uses his override code as casually as if he does it every day, and she doesn’t want to look at him, because if he’s here now on his own volition, that means he’s heard about Sulu, and above all, she doesn’t want to disappoint him, she doesn’t want to be the disappointment she’s all too aware of the ease of being. And the thing is – she knows it. She knows she’s angsting like a teenager, she knows that, but it’s real. It’s not something she can hide from forever even if she wants to, she can’t pretend it didn’t happen, and she’d thought this was something she had control over, that it was over and done with. It seems like no matter where she goes, her failures will always, always find her.
“Spock, I’m,” she says tightly when Spock very obviously doesn’t, “I’m emotionally compromised.”
The mattress dips behind her under his weight and his hand comes to rest on her upper arm, his touch carefully restricted to her uniform sleeves. “Jim, Lieutenant Sulu appears to be under the impression he has taken actions against you that qualify him to a longer stay in the brig.”
“What?” That doesn’t make any sense at all. Sulu? “Why? I was the one that beat him up.”
There’s the sound of an inhalation, the short one just before a sentence is spoken, but Spock doesn’t say anything for a long moment. “I must admit I am struggling to find the reason as to why you are continually rejecting any offers of comfort when it is clear to me you are in need of it.”
“Fuck you, Spock,” she hisses, anger suddenly having a target, and she rolls to a sitting position on the bed, all coiled and ready, his hand sliding off her arm. “I don’t – ”
“Jim,” he placates, hands coming up to disarm her ire, and fuck if it’s working. “I only mean to say that it is strange to me that humans are so full of emotion yet perceive them as weaknesses. I assure you, Jim, that having emotions will not make you less to your crew. They will not make you any less to me.”
That thing both Spocks do, to basically say the exact same thing just with different words, is pretty eerie. Awesome, but eerie, holy shit.
And seeing that he can obviously talk to her without her going completely psychotic on him, he actually scoots up the bed, and this time, he hesitates only slightly before taking her hand, closed into a tight fist, and he gently pries her fingers loose. Oh god, what a mess he’ll be sensing right now, she is in no condition to even try to keep a semblance of control on her feelings and thoughts. Her brain is a mess on a good day, so what is this kind of disaster doing to his shields?
He doesn’t even so much as flinch and she loves him fiercely in that mome- oh.
Well, fuck. That does explain rather a lot.
She remembers a mission about a month ago where she woke up in med bay (fucking surprise) to Bones scowling and saying they’d barely managed to keep Spock from firing torpedoes at the planet and that he’d looked like he was ready to level the entire place with his own damn hands. She remembers – several instances when she sat in her chair and looked over at Spock, he’d already be looking at her and he didn’t look away when she caught his eye. He stands close to her when they plot in new coordinates, always and always a lingering presence by her shoulder, warm and dependable, even when they fight and Spock disarms her with logic and she retorts with iron will.
She remembers – looking at him on the other side of the glass, just looking at him and knowing she was dying and really just wanting him to understand how she’d never had a friend like him, knowing she’d never deserved a friend like him, such a different friend from Bones, not better, just different and wholly good to her; she remembers feeling happy despite being really fucking scared, and then she woke up and he was still somehow there with her, unmoving and silent, sentinel in all hours.
And she remembers Uhura, beautiful and shaken, telling her how Spock had lost all his metaphorical marbles and beaten a superhuman halfway to death – would’ve killed him if she’d gotten there mere seconds later.
“Spock,” and maybe it’s time now, time to admit the things she’s never wanted to revisit but does every time she dreams. It’s time. She breathes. “I was on Tarsus.”
Spock folds his fingers around hers, not gentle because she’s a girl but because it’s her. It’s a stunning difference it makes, and how she knows that, she has no idea, but it’s somehow just how it is. She could say more, and she probably should say more, but this in itself is so much more than she ever expected to say voluntarily. It tastes like vindication.
“I grieve with thee,” he says simply. And – he doesn’t see her as a victim, he still looks at her as if she perplexes him utterly and that he’s not going to stop trying to puzzle her out. And she knows she can show him Tarsus and Frank and the Corvette, and she can show him sexual harassment and she knows, she knows he won’t look at her any differently.
She’s not a fucking victim and Spock won’t see her as one because he doesn’t think of her as one.
He holds her hand and presses his lips to her knuckles. “Jim,” he says and this time, she hears it for what it actually is. He welcomes her and folds her in and lets her bury her face in his neck. She does know which sorts of things he’s gleaning from her right now because she is, as he’s told her several times, both of him, an emotional human being and she can’t stop thinking. She doubts he even needs to perform a meld to know what’s going on in her brain.
And somehow, that’s okay, too.
*
“Spock thinks you should enlist,” Gaila said when Jim was on her bed, mostly asleep because her own place was a dump, truly. Even a Starfleet issued bed was better than her own.
Jim opened an eye, bleary. “Who?”
“Spock. My Vulcan professor.”
Jim knew who it was, of course she did. “Uh huh, and why does he care whether or not I enlist? Does he even know who I am?”
Gaila rolled her eyes. “Of course he does.”
“He didn’t say it, did he?”
“Maybe not in so many words, but he totally wants you to enlist, I swear.”
Jim narrowed her eyes. “What did you tell him?”
Gaila didn’t even bother looking apologetic, rather, she looked playful and smug, and she said, “That last essay I had, the one you edited the fuck out of? I submitted it under your name, and he was very impressed, it was totally worth it and he even let me submit my own, too. Do you know how difficult it is to impress a Vulcan? Let me give you a clue: very.”
First instinct – get angry as hell. Jim had spent more than half her life, probably more like two thirds of it, angry at everyone and everything and the entire world at large, growing up and being angry before she was even consciously aware of it, and she’d hoarded it and nursed it and defended it and tapped into it when she wanted to, feeling that self-righteous anger at her disposal, and she was more than used to people being disappointed in her not doing anything with her life than living from day to day.
Being used to it didn’t make it less annoying, though – that everyone felt justified in passing judgment on her life and how she lived it, that it was for everyone but her to decide how she was going to shape it.
At one point, she could admit to being contrary just because she could – whatever she could do to piss people off, she would do that, the more the better.
Second instinct – shrug it off. “Who cares?”
“Jim, I care,” Gaila said and flopped down next to her. “I think he might be in love with your brain.”
“Everyone’s in love with my brain, just saying,” Jim returned without even looking at her.
“Mostly,” Gaila said carefully, “I think he’s wondering if you’d be able to perform like this all the time or if you just got lucky.”
Jim knew that Gaila was very well aware of what she was saying – and what she very carefully wasn’t saying, and Jim knew better than rising to the bait but. It wasn’t a dare, not really, because Spock hadn’t phrased a challenge. The only thing he’d done was formulated doubt, and Jim very much liked proving people wrong, to be contrary when it suited her. If she could show him that fuck you, no, her brain really was that awesome, she’d do it.
That bastard.
(But really, being with Gaila really was one of the best things she’d ever done. She owes her so much.)
*
Spock oversees the transfer of the prisoners.
So does Jim. She stands and looks squarely at both Kodos and his daughter, and she feels nothing but faint discomfort, because she is not defined by this man, she is more than what he tried to reduce her to, and even if she’d not wanted to be here, there’s Spock to account for, curled protectively around her thoughts at the back of her head. He’s also next to her, not even a half-step behind her shoulder-line, a steady presence and she’s not embarrassed, she refuses to feel anything but strong about this.
Bones is also better than any guard dog she could ever wish for (or grumpier, in any case: Bones’ scowl is truly impressive, and it’s also pretty much permanent), and he’s on her other side, silent and daring Kodos to even as much as consider breathing wrongly in Jim’s direction.
She doesn’t need the protection, but she’s learning how it’s alright to accept it when it’s freely given.
On the way back to the bridge, she knocks Spock’s shoulder with her own and grins when he frowns at her. Sometimes it’s too easy. She could curl her hand around his elbow and he’d let her – the knowledge is enough.
“Where to now, Mr. Spock?”
He’s still frowning at her, possibly because where is the logic in knocking into his shoulder? She loves him unbearably much. “Anywhere you would like to go, I imagine, Captain.”
She looks at him and sees just him and no one else, not interferences and extra layers. “How does New Vulcan sound to you?”
He doesn’t stiffen the way she’d expected him to – she always imagined he didn’t like her talking to his older counterpart because of, well, she’s not sure why, actually, but she knows that now, he doesn’t mind. It’s him that reaches for her fingers, briefly, just a brief touch.
“We are several weeks out from New Vulcan,” he says and it’s not a rebuff. “If you can refrain from engaging Lieutenant Sulu in fights in that interim, I do not foresee any complications in our destination.”
“Several weeks?” She can’t help but grin. “That’s very inaccurate by your standards. And you know, if you were willing to actually spar with me, I wouldn’t need to bully anyone else into it.”
In the turbolift, she does curl around his arm and she was totally right, he lets her.
“Experience dictates that you would not appreciate an accurate answer,” he returns evenly, “in that you will most likely inquire to the remaining distance several times regardless of my accuracy.”
“Careful, your sass is showing,” she says, but it’s not like she minds, in fact, it’s the exact opposite. “New Vulcan it is, then. We have an old friend to thank.”
Spock very carefully touches his fingers to her cheekbone, as if he just can’t quite help it, and she can’t help her eyes falling closed.
She breathes out just as door opens and, god, she loves this ship.
“Captain on the bridge!”
It’s good to be home.
*