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“I can’t believe it Spock! Time after time we’ve tried to get Bones to join us and he just turns us down!” Jim whined as he practically threw himself into their joined cabin and flopped face first onto the couch. Spock gracefully followed behind him as he set himself in a chair and stared back at the door they had just entered from. For some reason the mechanics of the door had failed and it was swishing back and forth silently as it went from open to halfway closed, back and forth.
“Captain, I-”
“Spoooock!!! How many times do I have to say it!? Call me Jim!” Spock did not roll his eyes at Jim’s whining.
“Very well, Jim , I believe the door is broken.” he explained casually as he continued to stare at the sliding door. It presented him with an interesting view of the hallway as people managed to walk past.
Jim barely raised his head from the couch to glance behind him at the continuously sliding door. Glaring at the door, he willed it to stop with no luck. Sighing in defeat Jim turned back to the conversation at hand by shoving his face back into the couch cushion.
“I’ll fix it later, I’m really trying to figure out how to win over Bones and you're not helping me!”
“That is because, time after time, you have turned down all of my ideas.”
“What ideas? We’ve been going along with my plans for almost a year now and I’m the one who comes up with all the plans!”
“That is because you are the one who insists on these plans. My plan was to simply tell Dr. McCoy how we felt. He-”
“Bones deserves better than that! Especially from us!”
“Jim, waiting for him to decipher your convoluted schemes will take longer than either of us shall live, and I am part Vulcan.”
“Hey! My plans aren’t convoluted!”
“So far every single one has ended with one of us being injured.”
“Not intentionally!” Spock could only give Jim his signature brow, “Ok, I didn’t intentionally plan to get hurt in all of them, but you have to admit the fainting plan was a good idea until those Ferenge got involved.”
“Jim, you faked fainting into Dr. McCoy’s arms and only succeeded in knocking him unconscious when you accidentally backhanded him into the wall. When he failed to catch your fall you knocked yourself unconscious. The only reason the Ferenge even got involved is because they found your unconscious bodies on the ground and decided to pickpocket you both. What about that was a good idea?” Spock asked, honestly concerned for his T'hy'la’s mental health at the moment.
“My timing was off! Fine, what about the hallucination plant idea that one was so close!”
“Remind me again how that day went Jim, for some reason, my memory of the events are incomplete.” Spock said in a tone that clearly screamed sarcasm even if his face didn’t show it. Turning away from the still swishing door Spock faced Jim as he retold the story with a smile that you could only see in his eyes. Jim completely missed it as he stared off into space, retelling the details of that particular adventure.
“Well we found that flower on Rigel 7, it was a bright blue color and admitted pheromones in the air. It acted as somewhat of a drunken truth serum, which we only figured out after Chekov started drunkenly crying about how he knew that everything wasn’t really invented in Russia. Couple days later Bones had been running some tests and figured out how to isolate the pheromones and basically make them into a serum of his own.” Jim paused for a moment thinking about what happened next.
“I went down to check on you in the Medbay after that fiasco with the planet of Valkyries, Bones was saying something about how he was giving you something to help you sleep and I walked up and grabbed the blue serum out of his hands. Bones-”
“Jim if that whole plan was a spur of the moment accident, how can it qualify as a real plan?”
“Because it popped into my head as it was happening! It was so brilliant I didn’t even have to think about it! Anyway, as I was saying, Bones started to yell at me for taking the serum and when I asked him what it was the vial cracked open in my hand. Since I was standing right next to your bunk it kind of splashed on you. I remember Bones saying ‘ Dammit Jim! ’ and then I was all warm and fuzzy and you were purring! I dragged Bones down onto the bed to cuddle with us, he said something about touchy feely Captains and cat like hobgoblins. After that I fell asleep and when I woke up I was still holding you but Bones was standing over us. He mumbled something like, ‘ Well that’s one way to find out he’s allergic to everything!’ I think I fell back asleep after that because the next thing I remember is you shaking me awake and asking why I was in the medical bed with you.” Jim trailed off sounding almost sad.
“Jim, I do not see why you feel it is such a bad idea to just confront Dr. McCoy and tell him about our feelings.” Jim laughed but it was a hollow sound.
“Did you just admit to having feelings Spock? Bones should hear this!” Spock smirked in a way only he could, but yet again Jim wasn’t the one looking at him.
“Dr. McCoy knows very well that I have feelings, I just fail to express them in a way that he deems fit. Besides, if the door remains broken for much longer he will hear us anyway.” Jim seemed a bit brighter as he gave a soft chuckle and flipped over onto his back placing his arm over his eyes.
“Dr. McCoy also probably needs the reassurance that we would not leave him or use him as a one nightstand. There is also the issue of rank, what the crew and admiralty would think and our own personal insecurities.” Spock seemed to be listing everything that could possibly go wrong today and Jim wasn’t really sure why.
“We’ve talked about all of that before Spock. At any given point the three of us can outrank each other depending on the circumstances so that’s not actually an issue. Half the crew already knows about us anyways so that’s not an issue either. Admiralty can kiss my ass if they have something to say. I already achieved my goal of becoming Captain, we can buy a ship and explore on our own if they think they can make me change my mind about loving you two.” Jim could suddenly feel Spock smiling through their ever growing bond in the back of his mind which only managed to confuse him.
“I can feel you smiling through our bond Spock, why are you asking all of this when you already know the answer?”
“No particular reason Jim, you wanted to go over everything so I am bringing up every possible point for you to consider, even if we have already done so many times before.” Jim sighed at the half answer.
“Fine, be weird.” Jim groaned as he adjusted his head onto a pillow but left his arm over his eyes.
“Being afraid I’d leave is probably the biggest issue. I know it’s my own fault, he saw how I was at the Academy, I lost track of how many times he walked in on me and my fling of the week. I don’t know how to convince him that if he joined us I would never leave him. I guess that’s why I come up with all of these plans hoping he can just fall in love with us and forget about the zero percent chance that I would ever hurt him that way.”
“I know Jim, but I believe you are only proving that you are incredibly accident prone. If anything Dr. McCoy believes you are incredibly clumsy or have a death wish, both of which I recall him having shouted at you in the past few months.”
“Yeah, he has.” Jim smiled at the memory as he switched the arm that was covering his eyes.
“You know Old Spock told me that in his timeline he was the one that was hard to convince. He said that his Jim and Bones already had a sort of fling going on and that they each had separate relationships with him, but it wasn’t until after they were all admirals that the three of them actually got together. Old Spock said it wasn’t that they didn’t try, it was just never the right time, something always came up. I don’t want that to be us. I don’t wanna look back fifty years from now and regret all the time we wasted… I just don’t know how to tell Bones that I love him.”
“Well flat out saying it like that is probably your best bet there Jim.”
Jim shot off the couch as if someone had doused him with ice water to stare at the two men in front of him. Jim glanced back and forth and suddenly realized why Spock had been smiling through their bond this whole time.
“How long have you been standing there?” Jim asked somewhere between angry and elated. Bones’ face turned bright red as the brunette glanced at Spock.
“Dr. McCoy walked into the room when I mentioned I had feelings, no doubt in an attempt to give a witty comeback, but he has been standing in the open doorway since we started this conversation twenty three minutes ago. I told you someone would be listening.”
Jim’s jaw hit the floor as he stared at his smirking Vulcan and his blushing best friend.
“What! Why didn’t you say anything?!”
“Because time after time, my best laid plans always work out in the end.”