Work Text:
As a Vulcan, Spock does not sleep overly much, by human standards; by comparison, Jim is practically slothlike, spending a good quarter of each day asleep, dead to the world and cranky if he gets less than he feels he requires. So it is a surprise to find that Jim seems always to be awake when Spock awakes, his head pressed to the taut skin of Spock’s belly and softly crooning to the small life inside it, as though it can hear him, understand him, through the flesh that separates them. Perhaps it can; perhaps their child feels Jim’s slow caresses as Spock does, hand moving slowly across the swell of his pregnancy, back and forth, the calluses on Jim’s palms from honest hard work catching slightly every so often, but not unpleasant.
“Jim, I must get up if I am to be ready in time to begin my shift,” Spock says, and is thoroughly ignored. “Jim. JIM.”
The human looks up finally to meet his gaze, blue eyes puckish and stubborn at the same time. “I’m the Captain. I can order you to stay here all day, on your back in bed, and you have to do it because I’m the Captain.”
“While a life of indolence may have an attraction for some, it does not for me,” Spock says, and levers himself up on his elbows, easing the crick in his back as he swings his legs over the side of the bed, twisting his belly away from his t’hy’la so that Jim’s hands slip away, soon missed but necessary. “Would you not prefer to, as you would put it, ‘keep an eye on me’? Since you are being very illogical today.”
“Fine, whatever,” Jim says, but the pout of his lips says he is sulking.
All day Spock works as though nothing is different, and if the rest of the bridge crew is unusually and unnecessarily gentle, that he has learned over the past few months to tolerate with good humour; Jim, on the other hand, seems to take every excuse to brush past Spock, hands outstretched for ‘balance’ or simply leaning over the back of his chair with his chin resting upon the crown of Spock’s head. It is very distracting, and while some more human part of Spock finds it endearing a larger part of him is beginning to be irritated.
“Later would be more appropriate,” he says after Jim has attempted to have an entire conversation with his first officer whilst his hands cup Spock’s stomach, resting against the last place that the baby has kicked.
Jim does not seem at all abashed by this small reproach, and instead smiles, the bright gleam of it turned inwards, as though he has thought of something good. “Later,” he agrees, and backs off a little, enough to let Spock do his work, at least.