Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

On the more rural outskirts of Riverside, Iowa, there sat a house. Not a small house, exactly, but one that had definitely seen better days. One of its three bedrooms had been filled with boxes and broken furniture and clutter that didn’t have anywhere else to go, and another was slowly collecting dust. In the third, Jim Kirk had abruptly woken up from dead sleep.

His heart hammered against his chest, and he blinked at his ceiling, trying to get his bearings. What woke him up? Had the front door opened? No--even if he held his breath to listen, he couldn’t hear any of the floorboards creaking, and his stepdad wasn’t known for being light of foot. And if it was anyone else...what the fuck were they doing all the way out there?

“If you’re a robber, I’m really not in the mood,” he called vaguely towards his door, voice rough. What time was it, anyways? He reached blindly towards his nightstand, fumbling around until he grabbed his phone and squinted at the screen to check. He finally was able to read a blurry 3:46. “God dammit,” he mumbled. Did he have work in the morning? No, he didn’t think he did.

Wait, did he even have a job anymore? No. He got fired weeks ago. Or, you know, left under exigent circumstances. Whatever. His brain really needed to work on keeping him up to speed with these things.

He sat up and rubbed his eyes. He wasn’t going to get back to sleep again with his heart hammering like this. He was thoroughly freaked out, having trouble catching his breath. He remembered something loud, and startling, but was it just a dream?

He looked around his room, and something seemed...off. The lighting, maybe. Everything was a little bit more orange than he felt it should be.

His shadow was flickering dimly in front of him.

He turned around, and looked out his window.

“Oh, fuck,” he realized. Something was on fire. He couldn’t tell how big the fire was, but he was pretty sure it was in the middle of a cornfield, and even if it had been raining lately, cornfields were not a good place for fire to be.

He leapt out of bed, suddenly very awake, and shoved his bare feet into a pair of boots, grabbing a jacket and a flashlight from his closet before running downstairs to his kitchen and getting the fire extinguisher out from under the sink. Did he need--whatever, no time to think about it. He grabbed the keys off the stand near their front door and went to their shitty truck, tossing his things into the passenger seat and turning the ignition a few times, jaw set in frustration. “Come on...come on,” he urged it, slamming a hand against the dashboard before it finally roared to life and he turned the thing around, heading off towards the field as fast as the uneven ground would let him.

As he got closer, it became obvious that the fire wasn’t massive yet, but it wasn’t something to sneeze at either. He couldn’t imagine what had started it--he’d think lightning, but it was a clear night outside, the full moon shining bright. Though he wasn’t entirely focused on considering the possibilities.

He pulled up to the edge of the field and stopped, grabbing his stuff and jumping out, heading into the wall of cornstalks. It wasn’t exactly their field, but he was no stranger to hiding out in it, and made quick progress towards the slowly blooming column of smoke.

And then, abruptly, the corn stopped. Or, rather, he stopped, because he’d emerged into a clearing where the stalks had been run over and were lying flat, all facing the same direction.

He looked opposite to where the fire was, and saw a valley leading all the way out of the field. He looked towards the fire, and saw...

Oh, hell no.

He ran over to it, approaching a...well, a...a twisted, mangled hunk of metal and possibly glass, broken off parts trailing behind it, this thing that was...definitely, in no way, a spaceship.

Jim swallowed thickly, equal parts compelled by curiosity and repelled by fear. Either way, there was still a fire to put out, so he focused on that, taking one step at a time towards it and pulling the pin on the extinguisher, pointing it at biggest offenders, which seemed to be spreading slowly, in any case.

He carefully circled the...thing, while he completed his task, making sure to crush any embers under his boot, and telling himself that whatever it was that was inside that thing was probably dead at this point anyways. If there was ever anything inside of it. Maybe it was just a weather balloon.

Minus a balloon of any sort.

Once the area stopped flickering orange, now only lit by the white moonlight, Jim’s flashlight sitting forgotten in his pocket, he finally stilled, and looked at the strange object. Unidentified object, if you will. But definitely not flying. Anymore, at least.

He attached the hose back to its extinguisher and shifted his grip to hold it, instead, like a bludgeoning weapon, creeping a little closer, shuffling through the discarded fragments of the not-a-spaceship, hoping none of them would be sharp enough to puncture his boots.

“Heh--” he started, before clearing his throat and trying to steady his voice, “Uh--hello?”

He stood there, petrified, and when nothing moved, he stepped closer. And then immediately stumbled backwards when a hand extended out of a hole in the wreckage. A hole that looked, now that his entire attention was focused on it, like it would be big enough to fit a person though.

Not that the thing in there was a person. Or...not that...it wasn’t a person. The hand looked person enough, at least, but that wasn’t really helping to calm Jim down any.

He braced himself, ready to attack if need be, but it became apparent that an attack would have been overkill. The creature emerging from the wreckage was moving very slowly. The first hand extended out and grasped at the edge, trying to find somewhere to hold on, a second one appearing soon after. Thankfully, no more hands followed the second.

The creature lifted itself out carefully and haltingly, its torso appearing as it used its hands as leverage to lift itself up. Jim watched, unmoving, not really sure that he could move if he tried. It was almost human. If this were any other situation, he would have assumed that it was human. It had the same amount of limbs, was about the same size, but everything was just slightly wrong. It was just a little too long and a little too thin, and moved in a way that was just unfamiliar enough to be unnerving.

It was also glistening, kind of. Jim realized suddenly that that was probably because it had a head wound and was bleeding everywhere.

“Oh, shit,” he said, something of an automatic reaction.

The creature froze, and met eyes with him.

Every hair on Jim’s body stood up, despite the warmth of the summer night.

“Hi?” he tried, voice an octave higher than usual.

The thing paused, its head tilting slowly and carefully, expression revealing none of the pain it must have been in. Assuming that it felt pain. Jim thought that was probably a safe assumption. Maybe.

It spoke. Probably. Its mouth moved, and sounds came out of it that could have been a language, but it didn’t have a cadence of anything that Jim had heard in his life. It did, however, sound strained. No kidding, Jim probably would have been shaken too if whatever had happened to this thing had happened to him.

“I--I don’t know what you’re saying,” he said, belatedly realizing that his explanation was basically useless. It obviously didn’t know English, or else it would have spoken it to him. Fuck, how was he supposed to communicate with an alien? Especially one that was hurt. Wounded animals weren’t exactly the most understanding of creatures.

The thing, alien, whatever, slumped over against the side of the exit, apparently struggling to remove itself.

It needed help.

Well, what could possibly go wrong?

Jim slowly set down the fire extinguisher, keeping his eyes carefully on the creature, and then stood up with his palms open. The thing looked up at him, then at his hands, its expression betraying absolutely nothing. Jim walked over slowly, carefully, trying his best not to startle it, and then paused only a couple feet away.

“I’m going to try and help,” he said, probably uselessly, but it felt wrong to go in without at least trying to warn the thing. “It’s probably going to hurt like a motherfucker, so sorry about that.”

He stepped over, within arm’s reach of it. It continued looking at him, but didn’t make a move to either grab him or get away, so he reached down to wrap his arms around its torso and pulled.

It grabbed at him this time, but so would a human, so that was fine, probably. Even if its grip was a little strong and was probably going to bruise, it didn’t seem like it was purposely trying to hurt him.

It was goddamn heavy though. Jim thought, maybe, that it was caught on something and that’s why it was so difficult to pull it out, but after a little bit of huffing and puffing they got the alien upright, one foot on the ground and the other one gingerly hovering above it. If Jim had to guess, he’d say something was broken. The thing was leaning on him and struggling for breath, and Jim didn’t think he was going to be able to hold it up for very long.

“Okay, let’s get you to the truck,” he grunted, pulling one of its arms over his shoulder and wrapping his free arm around its waist, guiding the creature towards the truck, it limping along on its working leg. He decided to take the path the spaceship--the fucking spaceship--had mowed in the field, even if it was a little bit longer than the one directly to his truck, not wanting to drag both himself and an injured...alien, through the cornstalks.

He’d come back and get his fire extinguisher later.

And the spaceship.

“God, what do they feed you up there?” he said, gasping for breath and trying not to think about the blood seeping into his jacket, onto his otherwise bare chest. “Where are you from, anyways? I mean, I don’t want to assume, but you don’t really look like you’re from Iowa.”

Now that he was closer, he noticed the things’ pointy ears. The part of Jim’s brain that insisted on not panicking in this situation thought they were kind of cute.

In response to his personal inquiry, the alien lost consciousness. Jim barely managed to not drop it, keeling over with the loss of the extra leg of support. “Come on, my jokes aren’t that bad,” he breathed more than said as he maneuvered the thing into a fireman carry, settling it on his shoulders. He wasn’t sure whether what he was soaking in was mostly sweat or mostly blood, but either way, he was really going to need a shower after all this.

He managed to shamble to his truck out of sheer force of will and deposit the alien’s limp body onto the passenger seat before leaning against the side of the car and catching his breath, leaving a bloodied handprint on the paint. Great, he was going to have to wash this entire thing, too, if he didn’t want people asking questions about it. Questions about blood-covered vehicles were things he tried to avoid, in general.

He buckled the thing in, pulling the seatbelt all the way out so it locked it in place before going over to the driver’s side and starting the car again, frustrated with the slower pace he took going back to the house but not wanting to do any more damage to his extraterrestrial passenger than already had been done.

He gripped the steering wheel in his hands, knuckles turning white. This was fucked. An alien crash-landed in his backyard and now he was going to, what, patch it up? He didn’t even know if it had all its organs in the same places, Jim might just make it worse by trying to poke around, but...what was he supposed to do, just leave it there? Call a hospital? No, Jim had been down that route before, and he didn’t think that they’d just let this guy go after a couple of weeks, either. So he wasn’t going to turn the alien in to the local authorities.

Unless it tried to kill him once it woke up. Then Jim would consider it.

Though, in that case, he’d probably be dead, if the things’ weight was any indicator of its strength.

He pulled the truck up as close as he could to the front door and carried the alien into his house, setting it down as gently as he could manage in the tub of their first-floor bathroom, not even trying to carrying it up to his own. He hoped to anything that would listen that his step-dad wouldn’t decide to come home today, of all days, because this would take a hell of a lot of explaining, and Frank wasn’t exactly the patient and understanding type.

Jim decided to ignore that possibility, instead focusing on the task at hand. He got out a washcloth and tried to clean the blood off of the thing’s face and figure out just how bad the head wound was.

The green blood.

Jim wasn’t squeamish by any definition of the word, but seeing something green oozing out of something’s skin was enough to make even him a little woozy.

It looked, to him, like it was one of those fake-out head wounds that bled a lot but weren’t really that serious as long as you stopped the bleeding. The alien had likely just cut its forehead on an edge of the wreckage during the crash. The problem was, Jim really had no way of knowing how long it had been laying there bleeding. Or how much blood the thing could lose before it died. Or anything at all about it, really, but what he had was peroxide and bandages, so that’s what he was going to work with.

He made quick work of cleaning out the wound and patching it up, the alien not even twitching in reaction to the application of disinfectant. In fact, it seemed kind of dead.

Jim frowned. If it was dead, he was going to be pissed. He did the only thing he could think of, and pressed two fingers to the thing’s neck, searching for a pulse. Its brain had to get blood somehow, right? Or, well, even if it didn’t have a brain, for some reason, there sure was a hell of a lot of blood coming out of its forehead, so Jim assumed there was some sort of system in place to get it there.

He did find a pulse, and was immediately relieved, even if the beat of it was fast and shallow. A pulse meant for sure that the thing was still alive, at least in some capacity.

Comforted by this fact, he moved on to assess the rest of the damage. The head wound was where most of the blood was coming from, but there was still a pretty garish-looking gash on its chest that was just inviting an infection if it wasn’t cleaned out soon. Then there was the issue with broken bones. It was pretty obvious its leg was fucked up, but there could have been damage elsewhere, as well. And as far as internal damage...

Well. He was just going to have to cross his fingers.

***

The sun was lightening the sky by the time Jim had finished with the first aid. He decided to leave it in the bathtub, since he was about through with carrying it around, and if it started bleeding again, it would be way easier to clean it off porcelain than bed sheets.

He did, at least, bundle up a towel and place it under the alien’s head after moving it into a position that looked semi-comfortable.

Jim sighed, looking out the window and watching the ever lightening blue of the sky.

There was no way in hell he was going back to sleep after all of this.

***

The first thing he did was clean everything. He threw his clothes into the washer drowned in stain remover to get the blood off them, and then jumped in the shower to get the blood off himself, scrubbing his skin almost raw. He was used to being covered in his own blood, but seeing the water run green was just...weird. It smelled strange, too, in a way he couldn’t entirely place, and he tried his best to not think about it.

Then he moved on to the truck, spraying off the outside and taking a bottle of stain remover to the passenger’s seat, letting that set while he went back to the house and scrubbed at the floors, erasing the bloody trail from the back door to the bathroom. The physical labor of the previous night and all the cleaning he was doing didn’t let him ignore his stomach, so he ate at some point, but mostly he scrubbed like someone had lit a fire under his ass. He had never been that motivated to clean in his entire life. Actually, it was kind of cathartic. It had all of the physical exhaustion and mental focus of getting into a fight, with none of the nasty consequences.

In fact, the consequences were quite nice. The floors hadn’t looked that shiny in all of his recent memory.

Once his house and possessions were all relatively blood-free, he checked on the alien once more. It was still sleeping peacefully in the bathtub. It hadn't moved at all.

Good. Maybe. Actually, now he was just going to be paranoid that it was going to come awake and suck his brains out in his sleep, but that was just life, he supposed.

He went back upstairs and collapsed in his desk chair, all of his muscles feeling pleasantly sore.

So, he’d cleaned. What was he going to do about the alien?

The easy option was that it was going to wake up and kill him. Worrying, sure, but that didn’t require any action on his part. Then there was the possibility that it wasn’t ever going to wake up, and he was going to have to deal with this semi-dead body and keep it hidden from his step-dad until he figured out what to do with it.

Ideally, but also most concerning, was the idea that it was going to wake up and need to return home somehow, which meant communication. It obviously didn’t know his language, and body language probably wasn’t going to work, because the chances of an alien culture developing the same non-verbal symbols was probably about the same chance as...well, it developing to look exactly like humans, except for a few small differences. That was pretty weird.

He ran his hands through his blessedly blood-free hair, and then decided to take the most logical course of action.

He opened up his piece of junk of a laptop and googled “what to do if you meet an alien.”

Thankfully, there was an infographic someone had created specifically for this purpose.

“Thank you, Internet,” he said to himself as he read it over. It was simple enough, and he could discard a huge chunk of it because it seemed like whatever species he’d encountered was pretty human-like, and Jim wasn’t planning on introducing him to the rest of the human race just yet, so that only left a small section about communication.

Math. He had to communicate through math.

“Oh, fuck yes.” Contrary to what the teachers at his high school thought, math was his shit. He just wasn’t very good at sitting down and filling out worksheets about it.

He was so ready to rock this extraterrestrial contact thing.

***

He finally went back outside to get his fire extinguisher when the sun was sinking towards the horizon, belatedly remembering that he’d wanted to get a good look at the spaceship while the sun was up.

It was...small.

Maybe it was just in the moment the night before that it seemed larger than it really was, but it looked less like a ship and more like a one-person escape pod. He leaned over carefully to peer into the inside, seeing still flickering display screens with odd, scribbles of symbols that he guessed were writing.

“Huh,” he went, and grabbed his fire extinguisher. He’d have to take care of the escape pod at some point, but he had walked out there instead of taking the truck--and he’d probably have to rig some kind of system to get it attached to the car anyways, which would take two people, and he’d need to figure out where to stash it…

Yeah, he’d deal with that later.

***

He visited the alien one last time that night. He stood with his arms crossed, leaning over the bathtub and looking for any sign of movement. If he looked really, really closely, he could see the rise and fall of its chest as it breathed.

Or he could have just been imagining it.

He crouched down next to the tub and put his hand on the alien’s neck, searching for a pulse, and then up to its face. It felt cold. Not dead cold, but definitely not healthy human temperature, either.

Jim opened one of its eyes. It was unresponsive for a long moment, but then the eye turned towards him, and it startled Jim enough that he fell backwards with a yelp, wincing as his ass collided with the unforgiving tile floor.

His heart pounded against his chest, but he quickly calmed when it seemed the alien wasn’t going to pursue him.

Jim got up, slowly, and looked over the edge of the bathtub again, to find it once again laying there motionless.

Okay. Maybe it was just...asleep.

Fine.

***

It took him hours to fall asleep that night.

His mind was racing with a million different things.

Aliens were real, and on Earth, and didn’t automatically just blow up the entire planet. And Jim, as far as he knew, was making first contact with one. And he had to learn how to communicate with it. How did one translate “we come in peace” into alien-speak?

Also, was it going to kill him? It hadn’t so far, but also, it was injured, but also, it wasn’t injured badly, and Jim hadn’t found anything that looked like a weapon when he was patching the thing up. But it could just strangle him in his sleep. That would be pretty effective.

It probably wasn’t, though. Maybe. It possibly wouldn’t.

Fucking...aliens.

Everything in his life seemed really unimportant by comparison. Yesterday--was it only yesterday? He was worrying about when his step-dad was coming home and how he needed to call his mom and how there was that cute girl down the road that seemed pretty into him, but now...

Aliens.

He shook his head, and covered his eyes, and told himself to shut the fuck up. He could worry about everything in the morning.

***

He woke up late the next day, as if his body had forgotten what was going on—or like he’d gotten only 4 hours of sleep in the past 24 and had done a ridiculous amount of physical labor the day before, topped off with a whole lot of emotional upset. Either way, he was drowsy, and sore, and was pretty sure he could hear someone with an uneven gait walking around downstairs.

He lay there perfectly still in order to listen. It sounded like his guest hadn’t made it very far past the bathroom it had been sleeping in.

Jim felt kind of bad about that now, actually. He could have at least set it up in their mess of a guest bedroom.

He sat up, and the ache in every single part of his body reminded him exactly why he hadn’t done that.

He got dressed, sort of, settling for his sweatpants but at least pulling on a tshirt, and a jacket, too--just so he would have somewhere to hide his knife, which he really hoped he wasn’t going to have to use.

He crept down the stairs, hugging the edge and trying to step lightly on the creakier ones, hand in his pocket gripping the handle of his knife, hopefully in a way that would look nonchalant enough to a potential attacker.

When he reached the bottom of the stairs, the alien was already standing there, staring at him, looking unsurprised.

Jim tried not to look startled by it, but somehow seeing it up and about in the full light of day made this whole thing so much weirder. A lot of the bandages he’d put on it were gone, and the wounds underneath them looked like they had already half-healed. It hadn’t removed the makeshift splint Jim had managed to rig up, but it did sound like it had been walking around on its leg pretty successfully, so its healing abilities were approximately off the charts.

Also, it had a bowl cut.

He hadn’t noticed in all of the excitement from the night before, but now that its hair had settled into less of a bloody matted mess, it was pretty obvious that it was in a bowl cut. Jim considered what kind of freak evolutionary convergence resulted in that horrible mistake, and thankfully kept hold of himself well enough to not start laughing at the sheer absurdity of it.

What would laughing look like to an alien, anyways?

“Uh, hi,” said Jim. The alien stared at him.

Jim raised a hand and waved at it, uncertainly.

The alien watched him, gaze moving from his face to his hand. Then it raised a hand back, but instead of waving it, just held it upright, spreading its middle fingers into a V shape.

Jim watched it curiously, and then tried to imitate it, with little success. He had to use his other hand to spread his fingers apart in the right way, but once he did, he held it up in a mirror image of the gesture, smiling nervously.

It dropped its hand, and then turned away, continuing to examine the space around it, and Jim let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. That was communication, right? They were communicating. This was going well.

Right?

He watched the thing wander around, keeping its hands to itself with way more self-control than Jim would have managed if he were dropped in an alien planet. Probably. He followed it into the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom again, the door to his step-dad’s room which, finding it closed, the alien just turned around and ignored it. It spared nothing but occasional glances at Jim during this process, and he kind of wondered what was going on in its head with Jim just following him around like a lost puppy. Or did he seem more like a security guard? He didn’t think he’d ever thought so much about how someone else viewed him, but this proved to be an interesting mental puzzle to try and wrap his head around.

Then, at some point, the alien stopped next to what Jim considered a pretty uninteresting wall. It placed a hand on it, right under the lightswitch, and then turned to Jim, staring at him.

Jim stared back. Neither of them moved for the moment, so he decided it was up to him to make the next move.

He took a step closer, and paused. When he received no negative reaction, he walked up to the lightswitch. The alien stepped away, but kept its hand where it was, continuing to stare at him unblinkingly.

Jim flipped the switch. The lights came on, and the alien looked up at them. It then flipped the switch again, turning them off. And then back on, and then finally off again before walking away, apparently satisfied with its discovery.

It went to a different wall, and placed its hand on it, this time with its fingers facing downwards.

There wasn’t anything on the wall. Except, when Jim looked down, there was actually an electrical socket directly under the thing’s hand.

Okay. How was he supposed to explain what that did?

He looked around, but there wasn’t anything in the vicinity he could plug into it. So he took a few steps towards the kitchen. Then he realized he had no idea how to indicate he wanted his guest to follow him.

Hm.

He turned around, met again by the alien’s unwavering attention. “Uh,” he went. “Just...come here.” He pointed at the ground, using a similar open-palmed gesture, as if he was pushing something down onto it.

The alien looked to where he was indicating, and tilted its head before looking back at Jim. Alright, he’d gotten its attention at least.

He waved his hand a little bit like he was patting a dog, and then huffed. He pointed at the alien, then pointed at the ground--and then tried again, keeping his hand open. “Come...come here.” It did feel a little bit like he was trying to train a dog, actually.

Whether it was his gestures or his insistence on standing that far away instead of coming over and explaining the strange contraption on the wall, the alien did finally walk over, though it kept its distance and spared another glance at the unremarkable patch of floor Jim had been indicating towards.

Jim grinned. “Yeah, there you go,” he said, and then moved into the kitchen doorway, pausing again--he barely had time to repeat the pointing gesture before the alien walked over. It was a quick learner, at least.

Well, it was probably about a billion times smarter than him considering it’d just traveled from, presumably, a far-off star system. Maybe it would figure out English, too, if Jim just kept babbling at it for a while.

He walked into the kitchen and looked around, his guest close on his tail. Most of the things they had plugged in weren’t exactly easy to demonstrate the function of, so...

Ah, wait. He went over to the light they had mounted underneath one of their cabinets. The alien went with him, and gave the light its attention when Jim pointed at it.

He turned it on and off a couple times. Then he grabbed the wire at the end of it, trailed his hand down it until it got to the socket, and unplugged it.

He flipped the switch a few times, demonstrating that the light no longer worked. Then he plugged it back in, and demonstrated that, wow, it worked now.

“Get it?”

It returned its attention to him. Its gaze was becoming steadily less and less unnerving as time went on. Though, it was difficult to be scared of something whose ultimate goal so far seemed to be discovering how electricity worked on this humble planet of his.

Also, this close, Jim could see that its eyes weren’t as black as he had originally thought. They were dark brown, just light enough to differentiate between the pupil and the iris. They felt familiar, where almost everything else about the creature was strange to him. There was deep intelligence and understanding in its gaze.

Jim blinked. The alien did not.

“Alright,” he said. “Let’s get this show on the road. Come on.” He started heading towards his room, and had to motion one more time with their own little version of “follow me” before his guest accompanied him, following up the stairs with some difficulty, but without assistance despite its recently broken leg. Jim led it to his room.

“This is my room,” he said, waving his hand in a wide gesture for this and putting his hand on his chest for my. His pointy-eared friend didn’t indicate its paying attention this time, instead looking around from where it was standing slightly inside the doorway. There was a lot to see--his room was way more cluttered than anything downstairs, only losing to their storage bedroom by a small margin.

He crawled onto his bed in order to pull a decently-sized whiteboard out from between it and the wall, taking it to the center of the room and putting it on the floor before getting up and grabbing his dry-erase markers. He sat down next to the board, and patted the ground for his guest to do the same.

It walked over and stood next to him.

“No,” said Jim. “Sit. Sit down.” He patted the floor a few more times, and then raised his hand to eye level and lowering it, slowly. “Sit.” Oh, god, he was training a dog.

The alien stared at him. His message didn’t seem to be getting through.

“Okay, whatever,” he said, waving a hand in dismissal and leaning over the whiteboard instead, uncapping his black marker. “I hope you like math.”

He started drawing dots. He drew one, and then wrote the numeral 1 under it. Then two of them, and the number 2, three and 3, et cetera, until he got to 12. He looked up, and was rewarded with the alien’s rapt attention, looking over the dots he’d drawn.

“Get it?” Jim asked, again. He wished he could just ask whether he was making sense, because then this whole thing would go a lot easier. Instead, he was going to have to assign math homework.

He drew thirteen dots next to his twelve, and then opened one of his markers, holding it up to the alien. It looked at him, and then at the marker.

Jim tapped the place on the board where the “13” should go, and sat back, still holding the marker up.

Miraculously, the alien took it, its fingers grasping only the very bottom of the marker as it took it from Jim’s hand before situating it in its own. Then, finally, it sat down, crossing its legs and leaning over the board to write a very neat 13. It held the marker strangely, more like someone might grasp a miniature flag if they were waving it, the marker in line with its thumb and almost horizontal as it wrote.

The 1 was an unforgivingly straight line, and the 3 was two perfect semicircles connected in the middle.

“Perfect,” said Jim. Really perfect. The thing had better handwriting than he did.

Alright, so now the other way around. He wrote the number 26 away from the rest of the numbers, and tapped the area above it where the dots should go.

His friend looked at the board, and then, instead of drawing dots, it drew a single line under 13, then 12, then 1.

Jim frowned. 13, 12, 1...

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah, that is 26, isn’t it.” He wrote “13 + 12 + 1 =” on the other side of his 26, reading out loud, “thirteen... plus twelve...plus 1...equals 26.” He pointed at the plus sign, saying “plus,” again, just to make sure, and then added a few more examples onto it. Then he ran through subtraction, multiplication, and division, and sat back on his feet, giving his guest time to absorb it all, or something like that.

It stared at the whiteboard unblinkingly for a long, stretching moment, and then leaned over and wrote 1 + 2 = 5.

Jim blinked. “No,” he said, “that’s...” but the alien ignored him, instead writing next to it 2 + 3 = 5.

“Uh...yeah. Yes,” said Jim. Then, 2 + 2 = 6, “No,” 2 + 4 = 6, “Yes.”

It then placed its fingers under one of Jim’s previous examples, and said, quite clearly, “Yes.”

Jim gaped at it. As much as he was hoping that, ideally, the whole language learning thing wasn’t going to be a huge obstacle, he wasn’t actually prepared to hear English come out of an alien’s mouth.

An alien.

It indicated a few more of Jim’s examples, saying “Yes” to each of them, and then wrote two more of its own, both incorrect. It then pointed to each, and said, “No.”

It then looked over at Jim. Jim blinked.

“Yes,” he said. “Yeah, you’re right. Jeez, you’re catching on quick. I think...I’m not really an expert on extraterrestrial contact, but you get an A-plus from me.”

The alien just stared at him, and Jim grinned uncertainly. “Sorry,” he said. “Uh...” he looked back at the board, thinking about what else might be important to inform a visiting alien about the human race. Or maybe just about him. “Yes” and “no” were pretty important, so he was glad his guest was smarter than he was and thought to figure those things out.

Before he could think of anything, the alien leaned over and began writing something of its own. They were symbols, curled and intricate, to Jim’s eyes, though his friend seemed easily able to produce them in a few simple strokes. It wrote them next to each number that Jim had written, and when it got to 10, wrote one that was longer. The top part of it looked a lot like what it had written next to 1, the second part wholly new.

“You have base 10, too?” Jim asked, mostly to himself. The alien numbers looked...beautiful, in a way. He wondered what their simple numerals looked like to outside eyes.

“So...” he copied down two of the numbers as best as he could, and used the symbols familiar to him to write a simple addition. His curly numbers didn’t look quite as good.

“Yes,” answered the alien, though it wrote something down next to Jim’s equation, fitting easily into the small column of space they had left, since it was written vertically. He watched, curious, as he got translations of all the other operations as well, written with careful attention to each stroke. Jim found himself glancing at its face, its lack of expression still conveying a sense of intensity.

Once it had finished writing, setting the marker down, Jim looked over all of the curlicues now littering his whiteboard.

He had definitely underestimated the difficulty of learning how to do math in an alien language. The thought of extracting the basic symbols from the twisted letters was daunting, no matter how excited he was about first contact.

He got up and grabbed his phone off his desk, opening up the camera and standing over the whiteboard to take a photo of it. Of course, the alien was watching him with what he assumed was curiosity, so he took pity on it and showed it the finished product--an image of the whiteboard captured on his phone. Then he wiped the board down, and sighed. “So,” he said, “what do you want to learn next?”

Chapter Text

They talked about geometry, and chemistry, astronomy...well, it was mostly Jim talking, but he learned a little bit, too. For example, apparently whatever planet his friend had come from had two suns. Jim’s simple circular solar system was pretty lame compared to the complex orbit drawn out for the other one. “Bet it’s pretty hot there, huh?”

But eventually it was just too much information, and the alien was still trying to teach him things, and Jim just shook his head, running his hands over his face. “No,” he said, “we can do this more tomorrow. My brain is fried.” As much as he thought this whole alien thing was endlessly fascinating, there was only so much he could handle trying to traverse the universe’s largest language barrier. He capped his marker and took one more picture of the whiteboard before getting up and sitting down on his bed, crossing his arms.

The alien stared at him. It put its hand down on the whiteboard, patting it a few times as Jim had done before.

“...no,” said Jim. “I’m tired.” And hungry, now that he thought about it. He hadn’t eaten since he’d woken up. Actually...”Hey, when was the last time you ate?” he asked his friend, narrowing his eyes at it. “You need to eat, right? Come on.” He jumped off his bed and went to his door, stepping out before turning around and finding the alien still sitting on the floor. “Follow me,” said Jim, making the same open-palmed-pointing-at-the-floor motion he had before. “Follow me,” he explained, again. Maybe if he actually started thinking about what he was saying, he would be able to talk to this thing.

It got up and went over to him, and Jim grinned. “Good,” he said. Well, maybe there was a better way of putting that. “Yes.” he gave it a thumbs up, automatically.

Alright, this was a little bit frustrating.

He ignored his inability to stick to easy-to-understand words and gestures, and also how ridiculous he felt talking to what was obviously a very intelligent creature like it was a dog, and walked down the stairs and back into the kitchen. “So, what do you eat?” he asked it, opening the fridge. There wasn’t a whole lot in there. He hadn’t gone on a grocery run in a while. “Do you like...ketchup?”

That probably wasn’t going to cut it.

The cabinets presented a similar problem. There was a little bit more food, but mostly canned stuff that he didn’t want to go through the trouble of opening if the alien was just going to turn its nose up at it.  “Uh,” he went. “You know what, I’ll be right back.”

***

It took some brain power to convince the alien to stay rather than try and follow him out the door (add that to the list of dog tricks that it was learning), and Jim felt bad for not being able to explain why he was leaving, but he got some sort of message across eventually, and ran out to his truck, hoping it would start for him at least one more time.

They had fairly close neighbors that grew a whole lot of different crops, mostly for personal use, and they probably wouldn’t notice if one or two peppers were missing. He’d 'borrowed' from them a few times in the past, and hardly ever got caught at it. Except that one night that he nearly got his ear shot off, but that was a different story.

He parked down the road from their land and got out, armed with a pocketknife and a backpack, bolting for the first tall patch of grass with more haste than was really necessary. It was nothing to creep from there to the edge of their little vegetable patch, and he picked off some to stash in his pack, making sure the tomatoes were nice and firm and not threatening to burst in there. There was no one outside, and he couldn’t see any movement from behind the windows, so after a while he relaxed, taking into account more of his options.

When he finally headed back to his truck, his bag was weighing heavily on his back. The theft less so. He’d made sure to leave the best pickings for them, anyways--they’d have plenty to do when they came out in the evening to gather them all.

***

He came back to find his alien friend sitting in the middle of the living room, on top of the shabby rug they’d found at a garage sale years ago. It was sitting barefoot, its legs folded underneath itself, back straight and shoulders relaxed, hands grasping each other except for each of its index fingers pointing upwards.

It was praying. Or meditating, maybe? It was either something religious or it was communicating with its homeworld. Jim hoped it was saying nice things.

“Hey,” he said, knocking on the wall, trying to announce himself politely, as much as manners translated across planetary boundaries. It ignored him. Or maybe didn’t hear--either way, there was no reaction.

Jim waked over to it, slowly, and placed a hand on its shoulder. “Hey,” he tried again.

It didn’t startle, exactly, but it did quickly lean away from his touch, giving him a look that Jim interpreted as offense, even if it was about as blank as anything else it had given him. Jim grinned. “I got you something to eat,” he said. “Come on. Uh...follow me.” He waved his hand in a come-hither gesture more familiar to him, as the alien was already standing up to follow his request.

“What were you doing?” Jim asked it, glancing back as he walked to the kitchen. “It looked like you were praying. Do you have religion on your planet? I wonder what that’s like.” He took his backpack off and carefully placed it on the island counter in the middle of the kitchen, mindful of the fragility of his loot. “I hope you like plants.”

He laid out a bed of paper towels and took out everything one by one. It was a good haul--grapes, peaches, a few different kinds of peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, and a few handfuls of pecans he’d stumbled upon.

“So, uh...” he gestured at the variety of things on the counter. “Food.” He plucked off a grape, deciding it was one of the cleanest things there, and put it in his mouth. “Eat,” he said around it, picking up the peaches and taking them to the sink to wash them off. When he came back and set them down, his alien was still standing there perfectly still, staring at him.

“...what?” he said. “Do you not eat? Do you not eat vegetables?” He gestured at the counter, and it looked back down.

It said something, short, and Jim swallowed nervously. He’d forgotten how alien the language sounded. Well, of course it sounded alien, but it was unnerving. Its curved eyebrows drew together an almost unnoticeable amount.

“Food.” It said. Jim stared at it. It stared back.

“Food,” it repeated, hovering a hand over one of the tomatoes.

“Yes,” said Jim. He pointed at a few things in turn, saying “Food” over each of them. Over the pecans, he said it, and then said, “Well, I mean...” he cracked two of the shells together and pulled the meat out of one, then held it up. “Food.”

“Yes,” said the alien. Then, “Eat.”

“Yeah,” went Jim. “Uh...food.” He pointed at the pecan again, “Eat.” And then he ate it.

“Yes,” said the alien, again. And then something in its own language, mixing in the words “food,” “eat,” and “yes” somewhere in there. Then held its hands out, and said “No.”

Jim blinked. “No?” he asked. “Why ‘no’?”

It tilted its head. God, Jim needed to stop comparing it to dogs, that was going to get him in trouble at some point, somehow.

It stared at him for a long, unnerving moment, completely still. Then it tore off an unoccupied section of paper towel and used it to pull a grape off its stem and eat it.

It set its scrap of paper towel down and chewed slowly, Jim watching its throat move as it swallowed.

It seemed to not, well...keel over immediately and die, or spit anything out, so he assumed he hadn’t made any terrible mistakes in his choice of food.

“...did you just not want to touch it?” he guessed. He turned around and opened a drawer, picking out two forks and grabbing a small knife while he was at it. He set one of the forks in front of the alien, and put the knife down. “Here,” he said, sticking one of the grapes with his fork and feeling pretty pretentious as he did so, bringing it up and eating it. The alien’s eyes widened by the smallest fraction, and it picked up its fork as well.

“Yes,” it said, situating the utensil in its hand and then spearing a banana pepper on it. Jim started slicing the cucumber into reasonably bite-sized cylinders as his guest examined the pepper critically, and then bit off half of it. Once it was in its mouth, there was no slow contemplative chewing like there was with the grape. The second half of the pepper almost immediately disappeared, and it grabbed itself another one, too.

“Oh, you like that better, huh?” Jim said, laughing a little to himself. He ate a slice of cucumber as he finished chopping it up, and then gave the larger peppers the same treatment before moving to the peaches and then reluctantly making kind of a mess out of one of the tomatoes, since apparently they were only eating with forks and he felt like there wasn't a civilized way to do that with a whole tomato.

He watched as the alien made its way through what seemed to be pretty near half of the food, not counting the peaches, grapes, and pecans--it didn’t touch the grapes after its first venture with them and similarly tried the peaches once and abandoned them. The pecans were completely untouched, but then again, they weren’t exactly easy to eat with a fork.

It stopped, eventually. It looked over what was left, fork poised, and then suddenly set it down, hands falling to its sides.

“You done?” Jim asked, looking over what remained. It seemed weird to him that it hadn’t finished off the banana peppers first--it was pretty taken with them, but had moved on after eating two of the four...

“Wait, are you just leaving them for me?” he asked, frowning. He picked up what the alien hadn’t touched and moved them closer to himself, and then used the knife to scoot the rest of it near the other side of the counter. “Feel free,” he said, picking up one of the peach slices. “You’re the one missing out, these peaches are great.”

It watched him for a while as he ate, and then slowly impaled another pepper, bringing it up to eat. It took a bite, and Jim grinned. “Yes,” he said. “Guess I’ll be buying you more peppers, huh?”

***

The next hurdle presented itself when the sun was starting to sink low on the horizon and Jim belatedly realized that it wouldn’t be very nice to have his guest sleep in a bathtub again, given that it was no longer bleeding everywhere. So he went to the guest bedroom and, after seeing the complete mess it was, sighed and at resigned himself to at least clearing off the bed.

The alien watched intently throughout this entire tedious process, which actually didn’t take Jim all that long, having decided to do a mediocre job. He stacked some boxes and threw some things on top of each other in order to make more floor space and voila, he was able to move everything off the bed.

It’s not like the alien cared about having access to the closet, anyways.

Well, probably.

He went down to the linen closet to get clean sheets and a pillow (ever constantly tailed) and then back up to make the bed, struggling over the fitted sheet and finally, finally, able to stand back and admire his work.

“Phew,” he said, placing his hands on his hips. “Alright. Do you know what this is for?” he asked, gesturing at the bed. “Sleep. Y’know, like...” he crawled on the bed, laid back and closed his eyes for a second. “Sleep,” he said, again, quietly, before getting up again. “Got it?”

“Sleep,” it repeated.

“Yeah. Yes.” He looked at the bed, then back at his alien. “So, like, you...” Wait. That was probably a good subject to cover, actually. He gestured at the alien, and said “You.” Then to himself. “Me.” He repeated it, one more time. “You...me.” He raised his eyebrows. “Alright?”

It tilted its head.

“You,” it said, mirroring his gesture, which meant it was indicating itself.

“No,” Jim started, but it corrected itself before Jim could say anything further.

“Me,” it said, instead, continuing to hold a hand against its chest. Then, “You,” pointing at Jim.

He grinned. “Yes.”

It paused, and then brought its hand back to itself. “Me,” it said, again, and then repeated the gesture, briefly lifting and then placing its hand back down again. “Spock.”

Jim stared at it. “Spock?” he repeated.

“Yes.”

It then extended a hand towards him, and waited.

“Oh!” went Jim. This was kind of exciting, actually. “Oh, okay, um.” He pointed towards...towards Spock, and said, “Spock,” then at himself. “Jim.”

“Jim,” it repeated, an odd sort of accent on the J but definitely recognizable. It then repeated the gesture it had that morning, holding its hand up in that weird V-shape, and said something in its own language, ending it with Jim’s name.

He rearranged his hand to mirror the gesture, and said, “Yeah. Right back at you, Spock.”

It seemed pleased enough.

***

Jim woke up nice and early the next morning, eagerly getting out of bed at the thought of discovering more secrets of the universe that day, or maybe just teaching his new extraterrestrial friend--Spock. Spock--more ways to communicate. It was getting pretty good at it. They might be able to move on to the whole saying-nouns-and-pointing thing soon.

He found Spock on the bed in the guest bedroom, but it was in that prayer pose again rather than sleeping. Or, hell, maybe that was just how it slept, what the fuck did Jim know. Either way, he didn’t see any need to disturb it, so he went downstairs to make himself a quick breakfast. A few eggs, a bowl of cereal, maybe a granola bar if he was still starving afterwards.

He’d really need to go grocery shopping soon. They were running out of viable food.

The commotion he made was apparently enough to attract Spock’s attention, as it came downstairs soon after, Jim in the middle of his cereal, leaning against the counter.

“Good morning,” he told it, smiling. “Are you hungry? Uh--do you want food?” he said, trying to enunciate more clearly than he usually did.

It seemed to think about it for a second, and then said “No.” This was a perfectly acceptable answer, but Jim wondered if it knew what it was saying no to.

Oh, well.

Jim ate his cereal, pretending to read the back of the same box he’d been staring at for the last few weeks. He was more interested in Spock, now, who was slowly walking around the kitchen, looking over everything with the same intent gaze. It was funny to see someone stare at a toaster like that, but Jim would probably be equally as fascinated by an alien bread-warming device.

He wondered if Spock’s planet had toast. He thought about how many words with really abstract concepts he’d have to get across in order to ask, “Do you have toast on your home planet?” and decided that the matter could rest for now. He just ate his cereal and watched the alien wander over to the other side of the kitchen, opening one of the drawers. It was the same drawer, actually, that Jim had opened yesterday. It examined the utensils for a moment, and then shut it, moving on to the drawer next to it, et cetera, apparently taking mental inventory of everything present.

A thought was trying to rise up in Jim’s mind, giving him that annoying feeling of having forgotten something really important but without actually letting him know what it was.

“Looking for something?” he asked Spock, placing his now-empty bowl in the sink. “If you want a weapon, those knives work pretty well.”

It looked at him for only a moment before returning to its examination of the contents of his cabinet.

He sighed, and turned to the sink, deciding to wash the dishes since he was there. Maybe the repetitive motion would let his mind clear enough to remember what the hell it was trying to tell him.

Bowl. Spoon. Pan. Plate. He looked out the window above his sink. Spatula, fork...

He looked up again, suddenly. The cornfield. Right--everything clicked when he remembered, abruptly, that there was still a crashed fucking spaceship in the middle of the field, the owners of which (the field, not the spaceship) were probably going to be out there later that day to check and see how everything was doing.

“Shit,” Jim said, dropping the dishes he hadn’t finished yet back into the sink and wiping his hands briefly on a rag. “Shit, shit. Spock, we gotta go.”

He ran upstairs and shoved his feet into his boots, then turned around and ran back down, resulting in him very nearly colliding with Spock at the bottom of the stairs, catching himself on the handrail. The alien looked as shocked as Jim had ever seen it, even going so far as to blink.

“Yeah, I know,” Jim said, and then held his hands up to shoo it out of the way. It probably didn’t understand the gesture, but moved backwards away from his hands anyways, so Jim slipped through to the side of it, heading through the backdoor in their kitchen and then to their shitty little rundown shed. He opened the door with some difficulty and grabbed a bundle of things that might be useful for hauling spaceships around, closing the door with his foot and heading off to the truck even as the shed door slowly fell back open with a whine. Whatever, he’d get it later.

He was immeasurably thankful his haste had attracted the curiosity of his alien friend enough for it to follow him around through this entire process, since that significantly lessened the amount of pointing and grunting he needed to do. He dropped his bundle in the bed of the truck and then walked around to the passenger side, opening the door and getting across with relative ease something akin to “get in the goddamned car.” It did, and Jim shut the door for it before going around and getting in the other side, turning the keys and gratifyingly hearing the truck sputter to life on the first try.

“Hold on to something,” he said, and sped off towards the cornfield.

***

The extraterrestrial hunk of junk metal was really fucking heavy, but once Spock finally got the idea of what was going on it was pretty useful in expediting the whole process, and they managed to situate the thing in the back of the truck with minimal ear-bleeding metal-against-metal screeches. Jim picked up some of the bigger chunks of scrap metal and threw them in with the rest of it, then kicked around cornstalks trying to cover the rest of it up.

“They’re gonna be so pissed,” he mumbled to himself, and then turned around to find Spock climbing around in the truck bed.

It stepped around the metal carefully and leaned over, reaching into the opening that it’d crawled out of only a couple days go and then tugging on something a few times. It shifted its grip, and tried again, managing to pull out...what looked like a bundle of cloth. Jim walked over when it stepped off the truck bed, landing lightly despite the significant drop.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing at the mystery object. Spock looked down at it, and then held it out, hanging awkwardly onto the sides of it. Jim looked down, and saw that there were little smaller bundles of things in there--the entire structure suddenly resolved itself in his head, and he realized he was looking at a kind of knapsack with a gash torn in the side of it. That’s why Spock was holding it so weirdly. It was threatening to spill everything on the ground.

“That’s handy,” he said, uselessly, and turned around to get back into his truck.

***

He realized in the middle of the short trip back that he had no idea where he was going to hide an alien escape pod anywhere on his property. It didn’t exactly blend in with the decor. Still, he pulled his truck into the backyard anyways, stopping it right in the middle and then turning in his seat to look around.

They couldn’t bury it. It was too big, and there was always the chance Spock would flip out at him attempting to get rid of his little spaceship. Maybe it could be salvaged and flown back to its home planet or something, who knew.

It was too big to fit in the shed...but, actually, who would question a pile of junk metal leaning against a shed in the middle of nowhere? Maybe hiding in plain site was the best idea for it.

He backed up the truck to line the bed up with the side of the shed and then jumped out. Spock followed him, leaving its bag of mysterious objects in the front seat.

It was considerably easier getting the escape pod thing out of the truck than it was getting it into it, and with only a little more huffing and puffing from the two of them (alright, mostly Jim. Spock seemed pretty unfazed), they pushed it onto the ground next to the shed, only leaving a little gash in the wall.

“Thanks,” Jim attempted to say, hands on his knees as he tried to catch his breath. He stood like that for a while, and then finally straightened up, shuffling into the shed with his sore legs to grab one of their tattered tarps and drape it over the ship. “Alright. Crisis averted,” he declared, not even having the energy to observe his handiwork. “I need a fucking shower.”

***

A shower was, in fact, exactly what he had needed, washing off all the grime he’d accumulated caring for an alien and giving him time to think about what the hell he was doing. It was simple, he’d just get Spock up to date with Earthly electronics, it would repair its ship and then everyone could be on their merry way.

Or something. Alright, he spent more time on the grime part than the planning his angle of attack thing, but it was still nice to have a moment to himself.

Just a moment, though.

Once he’d half-heartedly dried his hair and wrapped a towel around his waist, he opened the bathroom door and was met with a faceful of Spock.

It was dressed in different clothes now, not scuffed and stained from its unfortunate crash landing, which answered one question about the contents of the mystery knapsack. It was, for once, not shying away from the personal proximity, instead using its slight (slight!) advantage in height to peer around Jim and see what was going on in the room behind him.

At the moment, absolutely nothing, except for Jim noticing the alien’s distinct scent and feeling a very strange way about it.

It took a step forward, and Jim got out of its way, watching it carefully. It looked around, and then stepped over to the tub, examining it, and the dripping showerhead, and the spout.

It held a hand out towards the spout, and looked at Jim.

“Oh, yeah?” Jim questioned, vaguely. “Uh...well, that’s a bathtub, I stuck you in one your first night but people don’t usually sleep in them unless they’re really drunk. Um. See?”

He bent over and turned on the hot water, then pulled up the little knob that sent the water to the showerhead instead.

“Shower,” he said. “It makes you clean.”

Spock stared at it, and then leaned over to switch it back to the bath spout. Jim stepped away to stop crowding it. He was kind of enjoying this. It wasn’t every day you got to see someone completely enraptured by a bathtub.

It reached down towards the drain and pushed, closing it, and then immediately turned towards Jim, gaze intent.

“Uh,” went Jim. Spock stepped over to the doorway and put a hand on the doorframe.

“Jim,” he said.

Jim blinked, and stepped over to the door.

Spock pushed him out--not shoved, but definitely pushed--and then shut the door on him.

“Oh,” went Jim. “Well. Okay.”

***

Spock took hours in there. Actual hours. Jim found it hard to focus on anything because he kept expecting his alien friend to be out at any time, and didn’t want to get too involved in something he’d have to stop doing, but more and more time passed without Spock appearing outside of the bathroom, and Jim skimmed more and more pages of an old chemistry textbook he’d swiped from his high school.

Eventually, finally, after what seemed like forever and a half, Jim heard the bathroom door open, and he got up to poke his head into the hallway.

Spock was dressed again in the clothes it’d salvaged from the ship, and was looking...relaxed, is how Jim would describe it. He didn’t know why, really, because it was still standing upright with perfect posture, but now it seemed more proper than stiff. Its eyes were relaxed, and its mouth was ever so slightly curling up in the hint of a smile, face flushed green.

Jim couldn’t help but smile back, or, well--maybe just smile, no back about it, at the change in Spock’s demeanor. His stomach also fluttered in a way that he endeavored never to think about ever, ever again.

“You look happy,” he commented, pushing certain feelings very far into the back of his mind. Spock looked at him, and considered him, and then said something in its native language before turning and walking away. Jim frowned, and followed it, ending up in the kitchen again, where it had laid its ruined knapsack.

“I can get you a new one of those, if you want,” Jim said, mumbling at this point because he knew there was really no point in speaking clearly. “Unless you’re into that whole grunge look...”

Spock ignored him, which was probably smart, and dug through its bag, pulling out a small pouch of some sort.

“Food,” it said, placing it on the counter.

“Oh,” went Jim. “Uh...is it?”

Spock pulled a few more out, and then opened one, pulling off a tab that almost made it look like it was being unzipped. There was a utensil inside, kind of small and curved like the letter C, that Spock used sort of like tongs between its fingers to snap off a bit of the puck-shaped substance inside the wrapper and eat it.

It then set the utensil on top of the puck and pushed the entire thing towards Jim, looking from it to him with...well, he’d say expectancy, but its expression was as blank as ever, and it soon turned away to rummage more in its bag.

There were a few distinct possibilities Jim could anticipate here, one of which was going into anaphylactic shock from contact with a substance he was allergic to.

But it was alien food. When was the next time he was going to be able to do this?

Besides, you had to have had contact with something at least once in order to become deathly allergic to it. Maybe it’d be so alien to him that his body wouldn’t know what to do with it.

Which could also result in him dying.

He shrugged internally and picked up the utensil, mimicking what Spock had done in order to break off a chunk and eat it.

He bit into it, and didn’t immediately die, so things were looking up.

It wasn’t bad, actually, though the mix of tastes was odd. It had the texture of a granola bar, maybe, though more rice-krispy-ish, and had the aroma of a very bland muffin with hints of grassy and sour underlying tastes to it.

Odd. But palatable.

He looked up to see Spock staring at him again, apparently looking for a reaction, or maybe waiting to see if the human poison was going to take and it could finally feed off of Jim’s lymph nodes, or whatever aliens ate.

Grassy rice krispies, apparently.

Jim blinked at him.

“It’s not terrible,” he said. “I’ll take peaches over it, though.”

It tilted its head, slowly, and then abruptly picked up its bag and went back towards the stairs.

Jim watched it until it turned the corner, and then shrugged.

“Well. Alright, then.”

***

The next few days were much calmer, now that Jim was getting used to having an alien around the house and didn’t have to worry about any extraterrestrial discoveries being made by the neighbors, unless one of them decided they needed to take a real close look at his shed for some reason.

In fact, the break from the summertime monotony was nice, now that he had something to focus on besides the same books he’d read fifty times over and the ever looming possibility of his step-dad appearing at the door in the middle of the night, looking for something to get mad about.

Spock remained curious, constantly following Jim around once he’d gotten up and had his breakfast for the morning. Though it wasn’t like it had any other form of entertainment available to it, so Jim could hardly blame it. It ate sometimes, but more often chose to pass on whatever Jim offered it, probably snacking on its weird alien lembas bread whenever he was asleep.

Jim lead it around the house during the day and the backyard when it was dim enough that no one could see them clearly if they happened to be passing by, and told it about different objects, and what they did, and related stories about his family, when he had them. It was easy to talk to something who probably couldn’t understand what he was saying, and definitely wasn’t going to laugh at him when he talked about his dream Raspberry Pi scheme, if he only had an excuse to blow that much money on it--or give him that pity look when he talked about how his mom got a better paying job out of state and now only visits for holidays, leaving him with his piece of shit step-dad.

It was nice to just talk. And there may have been a small moment, though he may have just been imagining it, that a hint of emotion crept into his voice and Spock’s gaze softened, just slightly, at the sound, as if it understood the emotion if not the words.

Jim tried not to think about it. He focused on polishing up his tutoring skills instead, which mostly involved pointing at things and saying their names in a clear and yet non-condescending manner (he hoped). It was weird, pointing out such simple concepts to a being who was probably about a million times smarter than him, and especially weird that it generally didn’t find it necessary to indicate whether or not it was actually understanding what he was saying.

He also, at one point, made pancakes, and slathered them in syrup. It took a while, but he finally convinced Spock to take a bite, and was rewarded with the most sour face he had ever seen it make. The most anything face he had ever seen it make, actually, and that was counting when it was hobbling around with a broken leg.

Jim almost choked laughing.

Chapter Text

Jim sat on his bed, watching Spock as it wandered around his room much like how it had walked around the perimeter of the kitchen, scrutinizing everything and opening drawers. Except it had gotten bolder, and was now picking things up, turning them around to examine them and then placing them down exactly as it had found them, with the most steady hand imaginable. Every so often it would look over at Jim, and he would tell it the name for whatever it was holding. Bottle, pencil, Rubik’s cube, blu-ray, cards, book. Textbook, which now that Jim thought about it, was kind of a redundant name. Of course it had text in it. It was a book.

Spock seemed especially enthralled with his chemistry textbook, opening it (balancing it oddly on its arm as it did so) and clumsily turning the pages, as if it had never done so before. It shut it again, and then brought it over to Jim and held it out.

He took it, slowly. “Okay...?” he said, halfway grinning at Spock. Once Jim was holding it, Spock pointed at the cover.

“Uh,” went Jim. “Textbook?”

Spock tilted its head, and pointed again. Jim looked down and realized its fingers were right on the title.

“Chemistry,” he said, instead. He drew a line under the word with his finger, Spock immediately pulling its hand back. “Chem-is-try,” he enunciated, under each syllable. “Here...” He got up, leaving the book on the bed and went over to his whiteboard, still laying on the floor, and realized he hadn’t grabbed any markers on his way over.

“Hey, Spock,” he said, as if it wasn’t paying rapt attention to him anyways. “Could you give me a marker?” It had enough words for this one, right? He pointed at the shelf next to Spock, where a few whiteboard markers were sitting. “Give me a marker,” he said, clearly, holding his hand out.

Spock looked at the markers, and picked one up.

“Yes,” went Jim, and then wiggled the fingers on the hand he was holding out. “Give it here.”

It watched him for a moment, and then walked over, placing the marker on his hand.

“Yes,” said Jim again, grinning. “Perfect.” Wait, wasn’t that ‘fetch’? His smile faltered for a second, but he shook his head. It was fine. It was...fine. “You’re, uh...you’re getting the hang of this.” He uncapped the marker and moved to write, but Spock, for some reason, interrupted him.

“Jim,” it said. He looked up at it, attentive, and it said in Jim’s same careful enunciation, “Give me a marker.”

Jim stared at it. “Well, okay,” he said, holding the marker back out to it. It took it, and then sat down next to him, placing the marker back in front of Jim.

He slowly reached for it, and then picked it up. Then he smiled, going back to his writing. “That’s right,” he said, “I can do tricks, too.”

He wrote the alphabet across the top of the whiteboard, first all capital letters and then their lowercase counterparts underneath them, trying to keep his hand as steady as possible and not utilize his atrocious handwriting. It was harder than he thought, and his hand was sore by the end of it.

“This is the alphabet,” he said, pointing at the letters. And then, for good measure, wrote “alphabet” underneath them, reading it out and underlining each syllable. “Al-pha-bet.” Then he gave the same treatment to the sentence “Give me a marker, Spock,” because it seemed to have immediate relevance, though he had to stop and think about how he wanted to spell “Spock,” deciding to put it as plainly as possible. That did raise another question, though--how did Spock spell it, and how was Jim supposed to ask that?

“Hmm,” he went, tapping the lid of the marker on the whiteboard. He then set it down, and got up to get his phone, coming back afterwards and pulling up the picture he had taken of Spock’s alien numerals. He copied a few of them down, writing the human ones first and then a really bad imitation of Spock’s curly symbols underneath them. He thought he saw the alien frown at them, but it was going to have to deal with his shitty handwriting for the time being.

Then, next to his numbers, he wrote “Spock,” leaving a space underneath it, and set the marker down in front of his alien friend. He pointed at what he wrote, read it, and then pointed at the space under it.

Spock tilted its head, and then picked up the marker, holding it in that weird way, before drawing more curlicues and lines, writing up something that looked about three times as long as one of the numerals. Also, considerably more well-written than Jim’s sad scribbles of imitations. He wondered if he’d ever be able to learn Spock’s language. From what he’d heard of it, he didn’t think he’d be getting the pronunciation down for a long, long time.

Spock then moved its hand over to the next space and wrote something else wholly distinct, though it looked about the same length as the last thing it wrote.

“Jim,” it said, after it was done writing, marker stopping at a very deliberate point. It then set the marker down like Jim had, presenting it to him.

“Oh,” he said, and wrote Jim above the squiggles. And, since he had his phone on him anyways, he took of picture of it, grinning. “I’m gonna get this tattooed on my ankle,” he said. “I’ll be the hippest kid in the entire solar system.”

Spock just looked at him with that unimpressed stare it had, and Jim couldn’t quite muster the humility to feel ridiculous about it.

“Here,” he said, standing up and going over to his laptop instead. “I’m gonna teach you how to google image search.”

***

Jim stared into the sparse cabinets. Somehow, no matter how many times he closed them and opened them again, no more food appeared than the half-used bag of rice and suspiciously large amount of canned tomatoes.

He sighed, heavily. He didn’t want to have to spend his own money on food, since there was a perfectly serviceable card in his stepdad’s wallet that he could swipe if Frank ever saw it fit to return home, but they were getting into pretty dire straits. He would rather starve than eat another granola bar, and he had a guest in from out of town. That would be rude.

“Alright,” he said, turning around and finding Spock exactly where he expected--hanging around awkwardly a fair distance behind him. “We need to go grocery shopping. What do you want?”

He, of course, knew that Spock was in no way capable of making him a list, and would have to come with him if he was going to pick up some alien-friendly food items. Which presented something of a challenge. How did one take an extraterrestrial into a grocery store without being noticed?

Jim looked Spock up and down. Slightly green-tinted skin, stiff posture, pointed eyebrows, pointed ears...

Yeah, he could probably pass pretty unnoticed, given the area’s tendency to ignore first and ask questions never, but he’d see about covering up those ears just in case.

“Come on,” he said, heading up to his room and going to dig around in his closet. He found an old beanie embroidered with a husky logo, and shook it out a little to get the dust off of it. “Perfect,” he said, grinning already at the image of Spock in a musty old beanie. Then he sneezed as the dust finally hit him, and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand.

He turned around and walked over to Spock, holding out the beanie to cover up that bowl cut.

Spock backpedaled, eyes widening slightly.

Jim frowned. “What?” he said, stepping forward again. Spock, once again, stepped backwards. “Listen. You need to put this on if we’re going to go out, or else we’re going to start an incident.” He stepped forward, Spock stepped back. “Are you scared of it? It’s not going to bite, it’s just a hat.” After a few more steps and a half-circle around the room, Jim finally stopped, dropping his arms to his side.

“Okay,” he said. “Look. Hat,” he said, holding the beanie out. Then, “You. Put on. The hat.” He put the hat on while saying the words put on, staring pointedly at Spock.

It stared back.

Jim took off the hat and held it out with one hand, staying where he was this time. Spock took it, examined it, and then put it on, slowly, patting it afterwards and feeling the material.

Yeah, he looked about as ridiculous as Jim thought he was going to, but at least nothing overtly alien was sticking out of it. “Perfect,” he said. “You look great. Ready to go?”

***

Spock’s eyes were glued to the window the entire ride to the store. Jim felt bad for keeping it cooped up in the house all the time. Sure, that’s what Jim did all day, but that was his choice, which made a pretty significant difference. Maybe he’d take Spock around town if it got to the point where their communication involved more than gestures and hoping understanding would get across. The green skin was nothing, but not understanding English would definitely blip on people’s radar. That was just the kind of town it was. If not, he could at least take it on a walk along the river or something and show it some of Earth’s wildlife.

He wondered what Spock would think of squirrels. Wherever it was from, there were evidently human-ish creatures. Were there squirrel-ish creatures too? Did they also have slanted eyebrows and bowl cuts?

Jim grinned to himself as he pulled into the parking lot of the store, thinking about serious-faced green squirrels. That would be a sight to see.

He got out and went around to open Spock’s door, and then lead it into the store, grabbing a cart.

He tried not to grin too much at Spock’s obvious excitement. Well, it wasn’t too obvious, but its eyes were darting everywhere around the store, which thankfully meant it wasn’t staring too long at any one person. Jim made a note to keep an eye on it in case it got too excited and tried to wander off, but he doubted that would be an issue. It was doing a good job of sticking close to him so far.

Maybe he should just hold its hand to keep it close. He glanced down at its long, slender fingers, and felt his face grow warm. Right--he wasn’t thinking about...about that. About whatever that was.

He walked a little quicker, grateful when Spock continued sticking by his side, and pulled off a bag to grab some produce. He didn’t usually buy fresh stuff, but it was the only thing he knew Spock actually liked eating, so he figured he would pick some up instead of continuing to steal from his neighbors. They’d notice. Eventually.

Except, after he deliberately picked up some peppers, he realized that he had no idea how to ask Spock what it did and didn’t like to eat.

“Uh,” he went. Alright, he’d figure this out. All he needed was...syrup. Yeah, he needed syrup. “Okay, come here, I have a question,” he said, waving for Spock to follow him and heading to the right part of the store. Making sure there wasn’t anyone else in the aisle, he took a bottle of syrup off the shelf and poked a hole in the safety seal. He sniffed it, and then held it out for Spock who, after a moment, leaned over and smelled it too--and then made a face. Or, as much of a face as it ever did, drawing its eyebrows together and pursing its lips the smallest amount.

Jim grinned. “Yeah. Okay, so. Teaching moment.” He grabbed the bag of banana peppers and held them in one hand, the syrup in the other. “You like these,” he said, holding the peppers out. Then the syrup. “You do not like this. Okay?” He hoped that was clear enough, because he couldn’t think of any other way to put it. “You like these, so they go in the basket.” He put the peppers back in the basket, and then the syrup back on the shelf “You do not like that. That’s how this works. Alright? We’re gonna try this out.” He led Spock back to the produce, and resolved not to sound too ridiculous trying to explain grocery shopping to a...to an obviously-not-a-child, as there were other people milling around that section as well. He grabbed a bag and put a few peaches in it, saying, “I like these,” and putting them in the cart. Then he turned to Spock, and said, “You like...?” and gestured at the rest of the row.

Spock stared at him. Then it turned and looked at the various options available, walking slowly down the row. It finally stopped in front of the tomatoes, and looked them over, before pointing at them and saying, haltingly, “I like these.” It had finally picked up the habit of pointing with a single finger, something Jim found oddly amusing.

“Alright,” Jim said, getting another bag and putting a few tomatoes in it, Spock watching him all the while. “What else?”

***

Their trip was thankfully uneventful, except for a couple of discoveries that Jim made. One, that Spock had a really strong sense of smell. Two, that it was probably a vegetarian.

The first discovery was made by way of Spock pausing in the middle of an aisle, eyes widening in interest, and looking around. Not finding what it was looking for, it walked into the next one, Jim following hurriedly. It was a snack aisle, full of chips and cookies and things like that, except one section that had varieties of nuts. Spock examined this section with great interest.

“See something you like?” Jim asked, leaning on the cart. It seemed like it didn’t exactly know what it was smelling, but whatever it was, it was intent on finding out. It picked up a few different bags and looked over them, examining the content in the little clear windows. Finally, it brought one up and its stomach audibly growled.

Its face flushed green, and Jim laughed before he could stop himself, covering his mouth and trying to choke back his amusement at such a human response, along with the small amount of nervousness that was also motivating laughter--Spock was really, really green now, way past the point of getting dismissed as an oddly tinged skin tone.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Jim assured him, catching his breath and grinning. He took the bag Spock was holding and placed it in the cart, only barely remembering not to reach out and pat it on the shoulder comfortingly. It didn’t exactly have a history of reacting well to Jim touching it. Or...trying to touch it. Or getting anywhere close to it, really.

The second discovery tied into the first, in that Spock refused to get within fifteen feet of the deli counter, and even then it looked like it was about to barf all over the floor. Jim just smiled, nervously, hoping that was only a look and not an actual indicator of what was about to happen.

“Alright,” he said, quickly turning the cart in the opposite direction, “no steaks. Got it.”

Not that he had the money for that kind of thing, but a guy could dream.

***

The total that came up on the register meant that it was Jim’s turn to feel nauseous.

He didn’t have a lot of money saved up. The cash that his mom sent home ended up going directly into Frank’s pockets, and he tended to “borrow” a lot of money from Jim, too, so what little he had managed to save was what he could hide and insist he didn’t have when Frank came asking for it.

When he got into certain moods, sometimes it was easier to just pay him, even if Jim couldn’t spare the money.

He tried not to think about it, or anything else, focusing on grabbing the bags of groceries, giving most of them to Spock since it was so strong and all, and heading back to the car, jaw set and eyes pointed straight ahead.

They drove back in silence, and this time Spock was staring pointedly at him, rather than out the window. Jim glanced at it a few times, frowning, but couldn’t stop to think how to formulate a question when he was driving, so he let it go, even if it was a little unnerving. It was a distraction from all the thoughts trying to formulate in his head, at least, which was a comfort.

Once they’d gotten home, he put all the temperature-sensitive stuff away, and the rest of it wherever before leaning on the counter, sighing deeply and running his hands over his face. Well, they had food, so now he could go on hoping that his step-dad never, ever came back.

“Jim.”

He looked up, eyes wide as Spock stepped over to him, head tilted. It brought its hands up steadily, fingers splayed, and held them in front of Jim’s face, as if waiting for something.

He blinked. “Is this the part where you brainslug me?” he asked, not able to keep the nervous tremble from his voice. There was a lot going on, alright? And he wasn’t sure how he felt about most of it.

Spock said...something, and then finally pressed the tips of his fingers to Jim’s face. They were...cold, actually, and something about the touch sent a shiver up his spine. It stared at him, and he couldn’t help but stare back.

Then, suddenly, he felt...calm. His shoulders dropped, and Spock removed its hands, stepping away. Everything Jim had been worrying about moments ago felt almost inconsequential. There was no point in worrying, things would just work out how they worked out.

“Huh,” he went. “That’s a neat trick.” He stood up from the counter, and opened the cabinets, looking at their new bounty. “So, are you hungry?”

***

He’d gotten bacon, despite Spock’s distaste, but decided to spare it an entire household that smelled like meat and whipped up a meal without it. He’d found a recipe online that seemed alright, and all the ingredients were separate so if Spock didn’t like something it wouldn’t spoil the whole meal. Hopefully.

It was basically just scrambled eggs, beans, and tomatoes. He didn’t have any avocados to put on it, but he chopped up some peppers to give it a little bit of green.

He brought the two bowls to their little square table and set their places, utensils and napkins and all, and convinced Spock to sit down before sitting across from it.

“Alright,” he said, “Eat up.” He took as big a bite as he could balance on his spoon, and then looked up at Spock, who was examining the dish closely, hand hovering over the fork and spoon Jim had provided it with. Eventually, it picked up a fork, and speared one single bean, eating it, and then a small section of eggs. Apparently satisfied with its discovery, it began to actually eat, scooping up mouthfuls of beans and eggs. It didn’t exactly stuff its face, but Jim wouldn’t say it was taking its time, either.

Poor thing. It was probably starving.

Jim ate with only slightly less fervor, thankful to have a decent meal for once, and took their bowls to the sink once they had both completely cleaned them out. He washed them, and was struck by how content he was. He liked knowing that he’d made something for Spock that it could actually eat. He liked setting the table and cleaning up afterwards and feeling...kind of normal, even though he was cooking for an alien from a different goddamned planet. It took an alien crash landing in a cornfield to make him feel like a normal human being.

He sniffled, and wiped at his eyes with the back of his wrist, hurriedly rinsing and drying off the dishes, putting them back in the cabinet.

It was nice. But he knew it couldn’t last forever.

***

The very next evening, they were sitting in Jim’s room, huddled around a book as Jim attempted to teach Spock to read, which more or less consisted of him reading his chemistry textbook out loud, since it seemed so interested in it. Its attention span was legendary--Jim started getting fidgety and losing his place before Spock so much as moved an inch, and Jim was the one who could actually understand all of this.

And then the front door opened. There was the creak of the hinges, and the slam of the screen door being thrown back, then heavy footsteps on the wood floor.

It was Frank. He had finally come home.

“Shit,” Jim cursed, dropping the book and getting up, heart hammering in his chest. Was there any evidence downstairs that he had anyone there? No, not that he could think of, and that was going to have to be good enough.

“Hey, kid,” his step-dad yelled up the stairs.

“Yeah?” Jim called back, hurriedly gesturing for Spock to get up and hide somewhere. The closet. The closet would be good. But, convincing Spock to actually go in there was pretty difficult when he couldn’t fucking explain what was going on. “Please,” he whispered, after managing to corral Spock into it, using the things’ personal space bubble as a tactical advantage. “Please, please, just stay here and be quiet.” He swung the door almost entirely shut, leaving it slightly ajar because he knew he wouldn’t be happy about being completely shut in a closet without knowing why. Thankfully, it seemed to get the message well enough, and didn’t immediately come bursting out of it when Jim moved away.

He ran to the stairs, hoping to face off Frank and not give him any reason to come upstairs looking for him, but he wasn’t quick enough. His step-dad was already stepping onto the second floor landing, frowning and red-faced. He smelled like booze, which wasn’t that big of a surprise.

“What the hell have you been doing this past week?” he demanded, “Didn’t I tell you to get a goddamned job?”

He hadn’t, to Jim’s knowledge, ever said that, but he wasn’t about to bring that fact up now.

“I, uh, I filled out a few applications around town but they’re still getting looked over,” he lied, trying not to look nervous. Evidently, he’d failed, because Frank stepped forward and grabbed him by his collar, scowling.

“Don’t you lie to me, you little shit. Do you think I’m running a charity house here? You should be thankful I didn’t kick you out a year ago. If you think you can keep on freeloading just ‘cause you’re in highschool, I might just change my mind.”

“Okay.”

“What’s that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Damned right.”

He let Jim go--more like shoved him, and Jim stumbled backwards, trying to keep his expression blank. If he looked too angry, Frank was more than willing to start a fight with him, but he refused to look scared. His pride was the one thing he knew he could keep.

Frank, thankfully, went back down the stairs, and Jim waited for a moment before turning around and retreating back into his room, shutting the door and shoving a chair under the handle. He opened the closet door and was relieved to find Spock standing there, giving him that adorable confused dog look.

“Thanks,” said Jim, sighing. “And sorry, but I don’t really want to know what his reaction would be to me harboring an alien in our guest bedroom. You’re gonna have to stay in here for a while.”

Spock just stared at him, and Jim’s shoulders drooped.

“Alright,” he said. “Let’s figure this out.”

***

With creative uses of whiteboard drawings, photographs, and little magnets, Jim eventually pulled together a kind of explanation to say that when Frank was gone, Spock could wander the house all it wanted, but when he was here, Spock could only be upstairs. If Frank was in his room sleeping, Spock could wander upstairs all it wanted, but if Frank was wandering around, Spock needed to stay in Jim’s room.

It was pretty convoluted, and in the end Jim could only cross his fingers and hope that Spock understood was he was talking about--but it turned out that Spock’s natural propensity for following Jim around made it fairly simple. He only went downstairs when he absolutely needed to, and in those cases could easily tell Spock to stay.

They got through the next few days with no major incident, even if they had to live off of bread and snacks pilfered from the kitchen in the dead of the night. By the time Frank finally left, taking a sack of clothes with him, Jim had made decent headway in teaching Spock how to play chess.

He still crept quietly downstairs, unable to break the habit quite yet, peeking into all of the rooms just to make sure he hadn’t mistaken the sound of Frank’s car rumbling to life and turning out of their lot.

Looked like the coast was clear.

He was going to make a huge dinner.

***

Spock kept drawing things on the whiteboard, things that could have been pictures or schematics or chemical diagrams or none of the above, or maybe all of the above, and though Jim took a picture of each one he was so sad to see them go that he dug around under his bed instead, finding an old notebook and giving Spock a pencil to write with, demonstrating how to write and erase.

Spock was, as far as he could tell, immediately fascinated by this. It flipped through a few pages, and then started scribbling on the first one in what was probably handwriting, because it didn’t look like anything else, but it also didn’t look like the swirly, fancy writing that it showed him before.

“Is this how you actually write?” Jim asked, looming over it as it sat on the floor and scribbled. “Were you just showing off?” Spock ignored his babbling, as usual, and Jim grinned, leaving it alone to work.

***

Hours later, after Jim had burned some time on Netflix watching cartoons, he came back to his room and found Spock sitting in the exact same spot, now a few pages into the notebook, still scribbling with characteristic focus.

“Hey, Spock,” Jim said, sitting down in front of it and leaning forward to look over the notebook. It wasn’t writing anymore, to his surprise, instead drawing a picture of...Jim tilted his head, trying to figure out what exactly it was, but either the style was too weird or it wasn’t finished enough for Jim to make it out. Or, maybe, it was just something he had never seen before, so he didn’t have any context for it.

Spock looked up at him, and made a few more marks before flipping back to the first page of the notebook, turning it around and handing it to Jim.

“Oh,” he said. “Thanks.” He took it, and flipped through it. The first pages were just writing, he assumed, and then some of what looked like technical diagrams of some sort, though he was completely at a loss to explain what they could be depicting. He couldn’t even tell how big of a thing it was, since he didn’t recognize any of the components.

He turned past the diagrams, and then...there were pictures. Drawings across the entire page of buildings Jim never could have imagined, curved and pointed structures extending downwards from massive cliffs; plants and animals and things Jim couldn’t safely say were either; people in elaborate robes and headdresses; and a page with a bunch of scattered circles, small but some bigger than the others, connected by lines in some small sections.

Jim flipped through all of these, gaping, disappointed when he reached the end, and turned the pages back to look again. “These are incredible,” he said, quietly. He turned back to the buildings and held it up to Spock. “Is this where you’re from?”

Spock looked over it, and then reached out with its pencil and pointed to one section of it. “House,” it said. Then, gesturing at the page more generally with its hand, it said something in its own language, and then, “planet.”

Jim stared at him. “Vul...Vulcan?” he tried to repeat. “Vulcan? Is that what your planet is called?”

Spock stared at him, eyes narrowing slightly, but either didn’t want to comment or couldn’t find the words to do so, taking back the notebook and setting it down for them both to see. It turned through the pages and pointed at various things, naming them in its own language, and Jim was fascinated, but definitely couldn’t find the heart to tell it there was no way in hell he was going to remember these things after just one pass-through.

It got to the last page, and started pointing out dot clusters. Jim frowned at them, trying to figure out what they were supposed to represent.

“What are those?” he more or less wondered out loud, since he didn’t think Spock was going to get it, but it looked up at him again, head tilting. It pointed to one of the clusters again, naming it, and then turned the page. It drew out a cluster--the same one, Jim released, after it named it again and Jim recognized the word, and then started drawing dots next to the circles, and then concentric ovals around them, and they looked frustratingly familiar until Jim realized that was exactly how he’d drawn his own solar system when he was trying to convince Spock humans were a smart, space-worthy race.

“Oh!” went Jim, suddenly, and he grabbed his phone from his desk, opening a browser and doing an image search for stars. He then showed Spock the screen, and said, “Stars. They’re stars, aren’t they?”

Spock turned back to the previous page, and said, “Yes. Stars.”

Jim grinned. Then he got up and went over to his window, sliding it open and popping the screen out. He gestured for Spock to come with him as he crawled out of the window and sat down on the overhang of the roof, looking up at the night sky. It was a little cloudy, but the stars were mostly in clear view.

He turned around, and saw Spock examining the window, and then turned to Jim and looked dubious.

“Come on,” he said, patting the space next to him. Spock, after a moment, braced itself and climbed out before sitting next to Jim, looking around at the roof and the yard, and then finally up at the sky, expression changing to...Jim wasn’t entirely sure, but there was something somber about it.

He started pointing out stars that he knew--Sirius, Rigel, Pollux--and then turned to Spock and asked, “Where’s Vulcan?”

Spock looked at him, and then back up at the sky, searching. After a moment, it got up, and carefully walked around the corner, watching its feet. Jim followed close behind, a bit more sure of himself after years of roof-sitting.

It then looked up at its new view, and pointed. Jim leaned closer in order to better see where it was, and then looked back at Spock. He didn’t know how he knew, maybe it was intuition or just him projecting, but he felt like Spock was sad.

“Don’t worry,” Jim said. “You’ll get back. One day.”

He didn’t know how, or when. But he would make sure it did.

Chapter Text

The next few days, Spock spent nearly all its time sitting on Jim’s floor and drawing, even when Jim crawled into bed to sleep. Usually when he woke up, no matter when that was, Spock was still sitting there, drawing, but every so often it would retreat back into its room to sleep for a few hours.

It started asking Jim about molecular diagrams. He didn’t realize that’s what it was asking about at first, because it had to go through a few iterations before it managed to draw something Jim actually recognized as a molecular diagram, but after that Jim spent a lot of his day looking up elements for it and giving it their English names--Latin names?--whatever. From what he could tell, Spock was trying to design some sort of electronic device, but Jim had no idea how it was going to build it with their lowly Earth tech. Useful or not, he was determined to help however he could.

Then, at about mid-day, on a Friday, there was a knock at their front door.

Jim frowned. People never came out there. They weren’t exactly friendly with the neighbors, what with Jim having thieving tendencies and his step-dad being a jackass and all. Could it be the mail?

The knock came again, and Jim changed into something more presentable before going downstairs and opening the door, slowly.

It was a man in a suit. A very nondescript, but well-fitting suit.

“...can I help you?” Jim asked, trying not to let too much suspicion creep into his voice or his expression. Though, there was only so much he could do about that when he only opened the door about six inches and was hoping to god Spock wasn’t about to pop up behind him to see what was going on.

“Hello, sir,” Mr. Agent Smith said, looking down at him. “Do you have time to answer a few questions?”

“About what?”

“The recent satellite crash in the area.”

Jim schooled his expression as best as he could. Shit. “Satellite crash,” he repeated, slowly. “Oh, you mean that thing that caused the field fire a few weeks back?”

“Yes.”

Jim rubbed his nose, keeping steady eye contact. “Well, it’s not our field, so I don’t know how much I can tell you about it. I can point you towards the owners, if you’d like.”

“I appreciate it, but we are making an effort to question everyone in the area,” said Agent Mulder. “Any information could help us get a better picture of what happened.”

“Right,” Jim said. “Could you come back later? My dad’s sleeping and he'll be pissed if I wake him up.”

“Sir, this is a matter of national security. We would appreciate your cooperation.” Satellite crash. Satellite crash.

“Oh, so it was a Russian satellite,” Jim said, and the hardened expression on the guy’s face was a hint that he was pushing a little bit too hard with this. “Okay, okay,” he said, putting his hands up. “Stay right there, I’ll go get him. I’ll be right back if he doesn’t break my neck.” He shut the door before the agent could say anything else, and immediately went quickly and quietly to his room, doing his best to ignore his rising panic.

“Spock, we gotta go now,” he whispered loudly, diving into his closet and digging out his already-packed emergency bag, grabbing a few extra things from his room and shoving them in. Spock just stared at him, sitting on the floor with the notebook, and Jim made a noise that was half frustrated growl and half panicked whine. “Oh, god, we don’t have time for this,” he said, grabbing another backpack and going to the guest room. He got everything that looked like Spock’s things and packed them up, hoping to god he didn’t miss anything, and then came back, getting a few pencils and then the notebook out of Spock’s hands and packing it, too. Spock, finally, was looking pretty concerned by all this.

“Yeah,” went Jim. “Listen, there’s a fucking CIA agent outside and if we don’t leave they’re going to steal you and put you in a lab and probably dissect you or something terrible, I don’t know, but I’m not gonna let them do that so we have to leave. Okay?” He didn’t know why he was wasting his time talking but he had no idea what else to do, and there was so much he needed to get across here that he didn’t have an hour to mime out--get your stuff, sneak out, be quiet, and--fuck. The ship. What were they going to do about the spaceship? Did Spock need that? Could it go home without it, ‘cause if not, Jim didn’t know if he could let that be taken, either, but it’s not like they could just pick it up and carry it away.

He puts his face in his hands and fought back the urge to scream because this was really not how he meant to spend his day, and then Spock was suddenly close to him. It took his hands and pulled them away from his face, Jim complying mostly out of shock that Spock was actually touching him, and then it brought its hands to his temples, like it did that one other time, but this was a lot different.

Jim didn’t suddenly feel calm, he felt like he was falling, except it was his brain and not his stomach that lurched, and then Spock was there. Like, not just there, but there. Jim had suspected all along that it was massively more intelligent than he was, but this was undeniable proof. He could feel the depth of its mind and understanding nestled under layers of confusion and homesickness, but it was there nonetheless.

It asked him what was going on, and Jim tried to answer all at once, and somehow he felt that his jumbled mess of thoughts was accepted and understood, and a sense of urgency was shared between the two of them. It told him, calmly nonetheless, that it needed to salvage parts from its escape pod, and from then on it would trust Jim to take care of them both.

Then it dropped its hands, and picked up its pack, throwing it over its shoulder. Jim had a sense of calm that he distinctly felt wasn’t his, but he latched onto it anyways, steadying his breathing.

Alright. That was weird, but they had reached an understanding and he’d have plenty of time to freak out about it later. It was time to go.

He hoped they’d gotten everything they needed to and went downstairs, grabbing some nonperishables from the kitchen before leading Spock out the back door.

The shed was a little ways out from the house, but not nearly enough for tearing chunks of metal off a vehicle without being heard from the front door, so Jim really hoped Spock knew what it was doing. They went over to the ship and pulled the tarp up, and Spock leaned forward into the opening of the ship, reaching carefully to make sure it wasn’t in a position where a piece of scrap metal was going to puncture its internal organs. Or external organs, for that matter.

It dug around for what Jim felt was way too long but he tried to be as patient as possible, rocking back and forth on his heels and keeping a close eye on the perimeter in case suit guy decided to come around and figure out what was taking him so long. Eventually, it emerged with a lump of metal and a bundle of wires, and it handed it to Jim, who took it, a bit startled. Then it moved on to the other half of the escape pod, pulling (yanking) a dented panel off, and grabbing a few kind-of-egg-shaped things from inside of it. It then removed its bag and stashed them away, and held the open bag out to Jim. He put the bundle of wires in it, and Spock put the tarp back over the ship.

“Alright,” said Jim, deciding Spock was done. “Ready to go?”

***

It took some careful sneaking around to deal with the fact that there was a secret agent at the front door as well as, most likely, a bunch of secret agents swarming the corn field in more-or-less their backyard. So Jim led them a little sideways, and then back around, finally completing a wide covert loop until they were finally headed north on the road up to Iowa City, maybe picking a few things out of neighbors’ fields they passed through. Snacks for the road, and all.

He felt oddly free. Sure, he had just run from a (most likely) government agent, and even if he hadn't his step-dad was going to kill him if he realized he had just up and left like this, and he was harboring an alien and had no idea where they were going and what they were going to do once they reached the city but, hey. Flying by the seat of his pants was his natural element. Besides, he hadn’t been up north in a while. It might do a good job of getting him out of his head.

“It’s about a four hour walk, so let me know if you’re about to keel over,” he said, tossing his apple core into the field they were passing. “Though let’s be honest here, I’m probably going to get tired before you are. You’re like...a tank.”

He looked around at the surrounding houses, oddly peaceful in the face of Jim’s current conundrum. They had no idea that there were extraterrestrials among them.

Which kind of made Jim wonder how many other aliens were wandering around Earth at that current moment, and whether he’d really know or not if there were.

He turned towards Spock, and saw those ears, and realized he had committed a very, very large oversight.

“Shit,” he said, grabbing its arm and pulling it off to the side of the road into a convenient ditch. “Sorry,” he said at its obvious alarm. “You just--here.” He took his bag off, dropping it on the ground to dig around in it. Thankfully, he’d grabbed a beanie, and he handed it to Spock, who got the message and put the hat on, situating it around its ears. Jim sighed in relief.

“Thanks,” he said. “Alright, we can go now.”

***

A four hour walk was fine on his body, but not so fine on his brain. His feet were barely sore when he finally found a shitty motel on the edge of the city that didn’t care what age they were as long as they had cash to pay for the room, and he collapsed on the bed, face first, and groaned.

“God, Spock,” he said, “I never want to see another cornfield in my life.” Iowa was the worst thing to stare at for four hours, especially with no one to play road trip games with. He wished so badly that Spock was able to engage him in rousing conversation, and was genuinely curious about what it had to say, but unfortunately, language barriers were a son of a bitch.

His brain was fried from boredom. He desperately needed mental stimulation, or else he was going to die.

He took his backpack off and put it on the floor, and then took Spock’s from it and opened it, finding that notebook and pulling it out. He flipped through it until he found the latest page, which was something he felt like he could almost understand. He was almost sure that Spock had been drawing the same thing over and over, attempting to find a format that was understandable to his meager human brain, and it was almost there, with most of the parts labeled with elements Jim could recognize.

It also, all of the sudden, looked a lot more familiar.

“Wait a second,” he said, flipping the last couple of pages back and forth. “This looks like...” he went back to Spock’s bag, it watching him closely, and pulled out the pieces that it had salvaged from its little escape pod. He set them on the only table in the room, and then looked at the notebook, comparing the two.

Yeah, they were definitely similar. Though Jim obviously knew fuckall about alien tech, so maybe all of their electronics looked kind of like that. Who knew.

“So,” he said, finally looking at the lists of materials written down in the notebook with some modicum of understanding, “What do you need to repair this thing?”

***

Given their communication barrier, Jim decided that the best course of action would be to just take Spock to an electronic parts store and let it pick out what it thought it needed, and do what little he could to help. First, he actually had to figure out where to find one, since he’d left his phone and laptop at the house in both his rush and a fit of NSA-induced paranoia. It wasn’t too difficult--when the nearly deserted lobby of the motel failed him, he walked across the street to a gas station, and someone wrote him down directions. It sounded like it wasn’t too far away, so he went back to the room and grabbed Spock to head over there.

When they walked in, Spock was as thrilled as he had ever seen it. That is to say, there wasn’t much of a change in its expression, but it immediately headed to one of the shelves and started looking at the little bits and pieces sitting around in trays or plastic bags. Jim only had a vague idea of what any of them were for, but it seemed like Spock knew what it was doing. Hopefully.

He followed it around, trying to unsuspiciously put himself between Spock and any of the few people in the store, blocking their line of sight. They hadn’t had any trouble with people noticing Spock looked a little odd so far, but the lighting in the store really wasn’t doing anything for its green skin tone and Jim was starting to get worried.

It went around the store, getting a collection of parts going, and Jim tried to surreptitiously pocket the little ones whenever he could. A lot of the prices were hard to notice, but even the cheap ones were discouraging when Spock kept grabbing more of them like that. Jim was pretty sure he had enough to pay for all of them--but pay for a motel, and food, and these, and still have a bit left for whatever, just in case? Hell no. He was going to cut costs where he could.

Spock finally seemed done collecting, and Jim grabbed a few tools before taking everything up to the counter and setting it down there for the guy watching the place to ring up, which he did so slowly, turning the pieces around to look for their price tags before punching them manually in a machine.

“You okay there?” the guy asked, looking at Spock for a moment. “You’re looking a little...yellow.”

Spock just stared at him, and then looked at Jim. There were a couple different ways to handle this, and Jim picked one on the fly, barely stopping to consider. “He probably doesn’t understand you, he’s still learning English,” he explained.

“Oh, yeah? Where’s he from?”

Jim quickly suppressed his smile. “Outer space.”

That shut the cashier up real fast. He just kind of looked between them, and then at the parts they were buying, as if trying to figure out whether they were enough to build some kind of bomb. Evidently, he must have decided they weren't, because he continued and accepted Jim's money.

Jim was focusing very hard on suppressing the maniacal giggling that really wanted to come up. He was stressed out, and this was really funny, and that was a bad, bad, combination. But he managed to at least pay and take all their stuff, getting about ten feet outside the door before bursting into laughter.

“Oh, my god, Spock,” he said, tilting his head back to look at the sky, “Did you see his face?”

He took the receipt out of the bag and crumpled it up, tossing it onto the sidewalk before emptying his pockets of the few parts he’d managed to swipe, putting them in the bag as well.

He’d definitely be worrying about the cost of all of this later, but he would do everything possible to keep that thought out of his mind until then.

Spock was, after all, a pretty great thing to be thinking about.

***

Once they got back to the motel, Spock immediately sat at the table and spread out the supplies they had gotten, meticulously removing each one from their little plastic bags and setting them next to each other. It examined everything briefly, and then began its work.

Jim watched it for a while, interested in the mechanics of it all, but soon got bored with the monotony and the fact that he couldn’t ask any questions about the process and actually get them answered. So he laid on the bed, staring at the ceiling for a while until he realized that being stuck in his own thoughts wasn’t a good place to be just then. So he got out the book he knew he had stuffed into his emergency bag months ago and started reading.

He read. Spock worked.

He got bored with the book and turned on the television, keeping the volume down.

He got bored with the television and wandered around the room, seeing if there was anything gross in the nooks and crannies.

He didn’t find anything particularly alarming, so he sat back on the bed and picked up his book again.

He managed to read a couple pages, but his attention kept drifting back to Spock, so he finally let it, leaning back on the headboard and watching his alien friend work.

Jim had never really just sat and looked at it before. His staring had always been accompanied by the alien staring back, which made him uncomfortable enough to stop, but now that its attention was elsewhere...

He remembered finding the way it moved strange, when it first started wandering around his house, but he’d either gotten used to it or Spock had changed its mannerisms--maybe a little bit of both. Either way, it seemed like there was a certain grace to its motions, almost like it was floating.

Its long, green fingers held everything with such purpose, never fumbling, never making any small actions before changing its mind and doing something else. Everything seemed carefully considered and metered, despite the ease with which it switched from task to task. And its face...its expression had always seemed so severe, but once he actually made an effort to look past the eyebrows, it was anything but. Now it just looked...well, deeply concentrated.

Its gaze was as steady as its hands, eyes shaded by thick lashes, mouth parted slightly instead of pressed together with the frown it usually gave to everything around it--

Jim, suddenly, was approached by the thought of what it would be like to kiss it, and not only that, his heart leapt at the idea, and he only just suppressed an undignified squawk as his face burned in embarrassment, compounded by the shock he felt at the realization.

Spock, for some goddamned reason, chose that exact moment to finally look up at him--in fact, maybe it was his reaction that got its attention, somehow, because it looked like it was surprised by something, and was searching for an explanation--and Jim was beyond not being able to handle that. He jumped out of the bed and went outside, accidentally slamming the door behind him, and stood there, trying to catch his breath even though he wasn't sure he'd lost it in the first place.

“What the fuck,” he breathed. Was he attracted to an alien? Why was he attracted to an alien? It wasn’t even a lady alien, or at least, in all the many, many ways it looked human it was pretty distinctly masculine from what Jim could tell, and that was kind of a brand new thing for him.

Or...was it?

He sat down, slowly sliding down the door, not really sure what else to do. Maybe, you know, he wasn’t actually attracted to it at all, it’s just that his brain said weird things and it had decided to say that weird thing, which Jim refused to think about because when he did it made his heart go all fluttery and--

Oh god. Okay, this was definitely at least some stupid crush, which implied attraction, and this was all really really weird.

He put his head in his hands, and laughed because he didn’t know what else to do, and hell, having a gay crisis because of an extraterrestrial was a pretty funny situation, if he ignored the fact that he was right in the middle of it. Now that he thought about it, if he really really thought about it, there was probably some motivation other than spite involved in getting into fights with a certain few guys at his high school, and that was not the best thing to have to come face to face with, but, okay, fine. There was still a good month of summer break left before he had to see everyone again, probably, so that was a good chunk of time to come to terms with...this, and figure out what he wanted to do about it.

Except, Spock was still sitting in that room behind him, and he had absolutely no time at all to come to terms with that.

But, well, he didn’t have to, did he? Spock was going to fix that hunk of metal and then go home, and everyone was going to live happily ever after, and Jim would never have to think about it again because he’d probably never ever see it again.

His heart sank at the thought, and he felt immensely worse.

“Fuck.”

***

He went back inside, eventually, and Spock was working again and not paying him any attention, and Jim was both relieved and upset about this simultaneously, and really couldn’t believe himself at that point. He went back to attempting to waste the time away any way he could, except staring at Spock was explicitly stricken from his list of pastimes, which left staring at the TV, staring at a book, or staring at a ceiling or wall, all of which were thrilling and all, but he was very relieved when he started feeling tired and decided to just go to sleep.

When he woke up, Spock was still in the exact same spot, and Jim grabbed a granola bar from his bag, noting what little food they had left. If they were going to hang out here much longer, he was going to need to go buy something.

Actually, if they were going to hang out there much longer, he was going to have to pay for another night at the motel, and shitty as it was, it was still pretty far out of his price range.

Shit.

***

It got later, and later, and Spock still didn’t seem anywhere nearer to the end of its project, and Jim’s stomach wasn’t getting any closer to miraculously filling itself, so he finally broke and went to go buy some food, grabbing some ramen and half a dozen eggs from the gas station. A packet of noodles with an egg cracked in them made a pretty good meal in a cinch, and it could be fixed in a microwave, so he figured it would do alright. Furthermore, he already knew Spock ate eggs, and he was pretty sure noodles wouldn’t be a problem, so it was good food for the both of them. Damn, he was getting good at this.

He tried to think about that instead of the fact that he was going to have to buy another night at the motel, and spend money he didn’t have on it. He paused briefly in front of the small section of alcohol they had at the gas station, wondering what the price of drowning his sorrows was. But, no--he didn’t have any money to spare, and he’d stopped carrying his fake ID around after every single person in Riverside learned he had it. It was really hard trying to break the law in a small town, but at least everyone laughed it off afterwards.

No, he just went back to the motel and put the eggs in their mini fridge and then went back to the front desk to buy another night. His card went through, and he really didn’t want to think about what deep shit he would be in if he overdrew his balance.

But, of course, that was the one thing he could think about. He went back to the room and tried to watch television again, tried to read his book, tried to do literally anything but that persistent anxiety was still creeping up on him, inflating in his chest no matter how hard he tried to ignore it.

He shut his book, and got off the bed, sitting on the floor out of sight of Spock, pulling his knees up and wrapping his arms around them. He was fucked. Any way he cut it, he was fucked. This whole alien thing was great and all, but in the end, Spock was going to leave, and then Jim would have--what? He’d be back in his step-dad’s house, except this time with none of the money he’d saved up in order to get the hell out of there one day, with no friends, no real family, and a story about an extraterrestrial he had no one to fucking share with.

Compound that with the fact that he might now be in trouble with the CIA, or whoever, and was actually facing going home and getting captured and interrogated.

Well, Spock would be gone at that point, so he’d tell them everything they wanted to know, about how great it was and how peaceful and helpful and how the only thing it wanted to do was go back home.

He sniffled, and laid his head down, trying to keep his breathing steady to various success. This sucked. This sucked. He almost...he almost kind of wished he’d never found that crashed ship in the field in the first place.

He heard a sound next to him, and looked up to see that Spock had finally stepped away from its project. It sat down next to him, and gave him one of its blank looks, head tilted.

“Jim,” it said.

“...Spock,” he responded, after taking a moment to find his voice.

It reached over and touched his face, hands still cold, placing its fingers in what seemed like very deliberate positions around Jim’s eye. This time, he didn’t feel calm, and Spock wasn’t mind reading him (as far as he could tell), but he did feel drowsy all of the sudden.

He blinked a couple of times, his fatigue prioritizing itself over his anxiety.

“Sleep,” it said.

Jim huffed, rubbing his eyes and fighting back a yawn. “You can’t just make someone sleep every time they’re upset,” he grumbled, though he had to admit it was an effective technique, in his experience. He’d always preferred sleeping to facing reality.

He crawled into the bed behind him, settling into the layers of blankets and sheets, bundling himself up. He watched as Spock got up and went back to the table, sitting down and continuing with its project, ever vigilant.

Jim blinked, slowly. “Are we friends, Spock?” he asked it, before yawning. Spock looked up at him, staring.

“Friends,” it repeated, forming a foreign word in its mouth.

“Yeah,” said Jim, closing his eyes. “I like to think we are.”

***

He woke up in the dead of the night, wide awake. He sat up and stretched, feeling pretty refreshed, all things considered, and looked around the room, lit dimly by the glow of the yellow streetlight outside.

Something was off. Spock was still sitting at the table, but it was laying its head in its arms. Jim blinked a couple times. That was odd--he hoped it was okay.

Then he noticed that the mess of wires and electrical parts on the table was now a contiguous mess of wires and electrical parts, and there were three small lights on it that were blinking slowly in different patterns.

Jim blinked again. Then he got up, and went over to the device, looking it over in the little light available, making sure to not touch it. He didn’t want to ruin all of Spock’s hard work with his clumsy human hands.

“...hey, Spock,” he whispered, testing to see if it was awake or not. He still couldn’t really tell if it was, but it did raise its head up, looking at him. Its eyes seemed to glint in the dim light, which was slightly unnerving, but Jim was used to feeling slightly unnerved by it at this point. “Is it supposed to be doing that?”

He pointed at the machine, and Spock looked at it, and immediately its eyes grew wide, and it pulled the device towards itself, staring at the blinking lights.

It sat almost perfectly still, watching them for a long moment, before it moved, pressing some switch on the side that shut the lights off, and then working three buttons, which seemed to control the lights, as well. It looked like it was putting in a message--maybe that’s what this thing was. A kind of Morse code.

Jim sat down and watched it with interest as it put in its code, and flipped the switch again, waiting. A response came, and afterwards Spock sent just a few letters--or symbols, or whatever--back, and then took its hands off it, looking...well, not devastated, probably, but its expression was difficult to read in their lighting situation. Still, though--it seemed like things had gone well.

“So,” Jim said, grinning. “Are they coming to get you? Are you going home?”

Spock looked up at him, and Jim could see the hope in its eyes. He knew, somehow, that Spock was going to be okay.

***

Still, nothing happened for quite a while, and eventually Jim decided to go back to sleep. It was weird being awake at that time. Or, at least, weird that he had woken up that early.

He slept, and when he woke up, it was to Spock leaning over him.

“Jim,” it was saying, in the same tone it always used. This was odd, though. He couldn’t remember Spock ever waking him up on purpose, always opting to let him sleep as long as he was inclined to.

“Huh?” he went, blearily, sitting up and rubbing his eyes.

Then he noticed there was someone else in the room. Another--Spock? No, another alien, but they looked really really similar. It was obvious enough that this new one was older, but it still had that same stupid haircut (though he noticed that Spock’s had gotten a little shaggier during its time on earth, now that Jim had someone else to compare it to), and the same pointy ears, and same posture and focused alien stare.

“Oh,” he said, slowly. “Uh, hi.” He turned to Spock, frowning. “Did you let him in here?”

What he really meant is he wanted to know how in the hell another alien had appeared in their motel room and if there was a massive ship parked in the lot that was going to attract attention, but he was tired, and that was a big concept to get across to someone who didn’t understand humans.

Spock stepped back, and Jim got up, brushing his sleep-wrinkled shirt down a little. The two aliens exchanged some words about...something, their body language revealing nothing about the nature of their conversation, as far as Jim could tell. He looked between the two of them, curiously, until the one that wasn’t Spock walked out of their room, staring at the door handle blankly for a split second before turning it and letting itself out.

Jim stared at it. Aliens didn’t know how to use door handles. Huh.

He turned to Spock. “Are you...leaving?” he asked, uselessly. There were so many things he wanted to ask--was Spock ever coming back? What happened now that they had made contact? Was some kind of intergalactic alliance going to get worked out? Was this just some scouting mission to figure out how to destroy Earth?--and Spock was right there, but he still couldn’t talk to it.

Except, Spock reached out and pressed its fingers to his temple, and suddenly he could.

It was the same connection he had felt when he was freaking out about the CIA agent and Spock had done this so it could figure out what the big deal was--except there wasn’t a sense of urgency now. He felt, or maybe Spock was telling him, that they had as long to talk as they needed. Anything Jim wanted to ask, he could do so now. All in all, Spock just wanted to leave him with some understanding of what was going on, and some knowledge of what to expect in the future.

Jim swallowed nervously as he tried to wrap his head around this method of communication. But Spock suggested that, if it were easier, he could simply speak, so he chose to do that, instead.

“Are you leaving?” he asked, again. Yes--Spock was leaving. He was going back to his home planet, light-years away, a warm planet with buildings nestled in the shadows of towering cliffs.

“You were--you were homesick, weren’t you?” Jim knew this, suddenly, picked it up in the mess of emotions and thoughts that were running between them.

“Yes,” said Spock, but not in English. There were layers of emotion wrapped around that word, restrained but allowed to bleed through to further Jim’s understanding. Spock had been hurt, and scared, and longing for anything familiar, and Jim had been its one comfort, had helped it get to this point, and it was immeasurably grateful.

“‘S the least I could do,” Jim mumbled, feeling bashful under the appreciation. He pushed that aside, as best he could, to ask the question he needed the most to ask.

“Are you coming back?”

Spock tilted its head, its thoughts moving and forming into an answer slowly. It didn’t know whether it would be allowed to--it didn’t know, exactly, what its planets’ plans were for making contact, as these circumstances were certainly not a part of them. But it wanted to come back, and would inform its colleagues--no, superiors? Mentors? the idea didn't make perfect sense in Jim's brain--of that desire, and the knowledge that he had gained about humanity, and its desire to learn more. Its confidence that humanity had more to offer than many of its species had assumed.

“I’ll be here,” Jim said, meaning so much more than that.

They stood there, examining each other’s thoughts, reactions forming before they fully consciously understood, and what could have been a tense silence passed in mutual understanding--but still with a note of reluctance.

Neither of them wanted, wholly, to leave, even though they both knew they had to.

And in the midst of all of this, part of Jim’s mind wandered, unbeknownst to him, considering the simple comfort that was Spock’s touch, the gentleness of his hands, and suddenly, the memory of his thought two days ago, which he didn’t realize he was recalling until he noticed Spock’s curious reaction, wondering what it meant when two humans pressed their lips together.

Jim flushed, and pushed the thought away hurriedly, imploring for Spock not to follow it, and it accepted this, despite its curiosity.

It took its hand away, and the connection was broken.

Jim sighed, missing their understanding already.

“So, I guess this is goodbye, huh,” he said, drearily. Spock lifted its hand, making the same V-shape that it had when it had first woken up, what seemed like forever ago.

It said something, and Jim was illogically let down when he couldn’t understand what it was, but he nodded anyways.

“Yeah,” he said.

Spock let its hand down, and stood there for a moment, staring at Jim, its head tilted the slightest amount.

Then it stepped forward, placed a hand on his face, and kissed him.

It was only the briefest of contact--he didn’t even really have time to react before Spock stepped away, and followed its companion out the door of the motel room.

Jim stood there, rooted to the spot, goose bumps rising on his arms. The alien kissed him. The alien kissed him, and besides the shock of it all, it had felt pretty great.

Even if, of course, Spock had no idea what kissing meant. No idea what it meant to Jim, who was kind of trying to figure that out himself, too.

He finally got his wits about him and went to the door, opening it to find a parking lot void of extraterrestrials. He stepped out and looked around, spirits sinking with each sweep of his eyes.

“Spock?” he called, into the early morning air. He wasn’t sure what response he was expecting, but what he got was the still silence of the parking lot.

That was it, then. Spock was gone.

***

Jim gathered up what was left in the motel room, which turned out to be only his things. They had taken all evidence of alien life that had been lying around there; the bag with Spock’s stuff in it, the notebook, the communicator thing Spock had been working on, of course. That, at least, meant Jim had less to carry back.

The walk back home went about as well as the walk there had. He was actually alone this time, no one to talk to and now not even anyone to keep him company. He survived, though. There were plenty of things he needed to think about, like what the hell he was going to do now, and sorting out his weird attraction to this...thing.

There wasn’t any swarm of CIA agents waiting for him when he got back to his house, though he kind of wish there had been, at that point. It would give him something to do other than sit in his room and be miserable.

He laid on his bed and sighed, staring up at the ceiling.

Well, his adventure was over, and he had nothing but an empty bank account to show for it.

He supposed he would go into town tomorrow and beg someone who wasn’t completely sick of him to re-hire him until school started, and maybe into the school year, if he felt like it.

He’d save up again. He’d get through school, and he’d get out of here.

Life would go on.

Chapter Text

Four years later.

***

Somewhere about forty minutes outside of Paris, France, a student was working late in the lab, staring at her computer screen as she attempted to debug what, by all accounts, should have been a working program. What was she missing? Did she need to increment the variable again, or was her condition off by one?

She sighed, and took off her headphones, putting her face in her hands to rest her eyes for a moment. It was probably something really obvious, but she didn’t have time to go to sleep and come back to it in the morning. If only she hadn’t put it off until then...

There was a certain mechanical hum of background noise to a room full of computers that she had become more than adept at tuning out. But at that moment, for some reason, it seemed much more noticeable.

She lifted her head, looking around, searching for the source of the noise. Was one of the computer’s fans running too loud? It didn’t sound like a fan, but it did seem to be coming from somewhere closer to the windows at the end of the building.

She frowned, and walked towards them, looking at the computers as she passed them. The noise was steadily growing louder as she approached, ever further ahead of her. She ended up standing in front of the windows, looking out at the field below them.

Then she looked up.

She gaped at the vessel she saw, slowly descending towards the field, humming only quietly as it approached. It slowly drifted towards the ground, and then alighted softly, hardly disturbing the grass around it.

She ran back to her things, grabbing her phone before hurrying out of the building. She went out the front door and then around to the field, meeting a group of a few other students who had also come to stare at the phenomenon.

It was big, ish. About the size of a small house, and it was now sitting there, completely still.

“Qu’est-que c’est?” one of the students asked the group, in hushed tones. “Est-que c’est extraterrestre?”

“Je ne sais pas...mais ça doit être, non?”

A door slid open on the side of it, and the group held their breaths as a figure stepped out. It looked...human, especially from far away. It had a familiar number of limbs, at least, and familiar proportions. It crossed the field in long, careful strides, its robe-like clothing trailing along behind it.

It approached them, hands clasped behind its back as it stepped into the light of a streetlamp. It did look human--other than its pointed ears, sticking up to the side of its short hair.

It raised a hand, palm outwards, and fingers split into a V-shape.

“Peace and long life,” it said, in American-accented English. She gaped at it. Aliens visited France, and they spoke English? She found it in herself to be offended beneath all of the abject shock.

It let its hand down, returning it behind its back. “I am looking for James T. Kirk,” it continued. “Do any of you know where I might find him?”

***

Jim hoisted his backpack over his shoulder and picked up his exam paper, going and placing it on his professor’s desk. “Thank you,” she said, and he nodded and walked out of the classroom.

He looked around and spotted Uhura, waiting around at the end of the hallway. “Hey!” he called, waving and walking over. “How’d you do? I bet you killed it, right?”

“Naturally,” she responded, smiling. “How about you? Did you remember soi and lui?”

“Uh,” Jim went, frowning. “I thought I did, right until you said that.” He shrugged, pulling on the other strap of his backpack. “Still, I think I did okay. Only blanked out a little.”

She sighed, albeit fondly. “I guess that’s all we can hope for. Dinner tonight?”

“Sure. Or, well...” he squinted, staring at a wall and attempting to recall his schedule. “I’ll get back to you?”

“Alright. See you whenever.”

“Yep.” They split, Uhura heading for her next class and Jim to his apartment, pulling his phone out to see if anything interesting happened in the last half hour.

He had one missed call from Bones. Huh, that was weird. Maybe he’d buttdailed him, since he hadn’t left a message. He stuck his phone back in his pocket and went to his apartment on the edge of campus, walking up the stairs and pulling his key out to unlock the door.

He paused when he heard voices behind it. One was definitely Bones’, no one else had that cadence and ability to inject that much vitriol into their speech without even being clear enough to hear. The others...there were at least two. Deep, succinct, and steady. That didn’t match anyone who Jim thought had a likely chance of being in his apartment.

He tried the door, carefully and quietly, and found it unlocked. So he opened it, just enough to peek through.

Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for him to be spotted. He met eyes with a man in a suit the moment he looked into the front room, so he grinned sheepishly and stepped inside.

“Hey,” he said to the two strangers. “What’s the occasion?”

Bones turned around and leveled him with a glare. “What the hell did you do this time?”

He put his hands up in placation. “I didn’t do anything, I swear!” Well, maybe a few things that might get him in trouble with the local enforcement, but no creepy-government-agents-in-a-suit type things. Definitely not in a good long while.

“Are you James T. Kirk?” one of them asked.

Jim put his hands on the straps of his backpack, looking their guests over. Yeah, there was enough space between them he could get away if he needed to. “Depends who’s asking,” he said, because he considered it his sacred duty to frustrate all law enforcement.

“The United Nations,” was the answer.

Bones gave him a look, and Jim gave him a wide-eyed shrug back. I have no fucking idea, dude. There may have been a few things that the city of San Francisco had beef with, or even the state of California, but not the country and definitely not anything on a global scale.

Except. Well, there was one thing he could think of that might concern the entire world.

“Does this have anything to do with aliens?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Jim.”

“What?” he insisted, raising his eyebrows. “That really happened! Shut up!”

Mr. and Mr. Smith watched them both, waiting for them to finish. “I don’t have complete knowledge of the situation,” one of them said, “but we’re not here to detain you. Merely ask for your cooperation.”

“It’s totally aliens,” Jim said to Bones, before turning to the agent. “Okay. What kind of cooperation?”

“We’d like you to come with us. It will be a long trip.”

“Oh yeah?” Jim asked. “A trip to where?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you yet. We’ll explain more in the car.”

Jim watched them for a moment, considering. If he was really in trouble, they would have knocked him out and thrown him in a trunk already, so he probably wasn’t in any danger. But he kind of had other responsibilities--school, a part-time job--he couldn’t just run off with two mystery men on some sort of trip into the great unknown.

Except he totally fucking could, and was definitely going to do that.

“Alright. Give me a few minutes.”

He went into his room, and Bones followed close behind, frowning.

“What’s this about?” he insisted, as Jim dumped all of his school things out of his backpack onto his bed and started stuffing clothes into it instead.

“Well, if I’m right, it’s aliens, and I’m psyched,” he answered. “If I’m wrong, I’m getting sucked into some huge international government conspiracy, which is still pretty cool.”

“Or they could kill you,” Bones said.

“Always harshing my groove, man,” Jim said, melodramatically. “Listen, if they wanted to kill me, I’d probably already be dead. You, too.” He zipped up his backpack, and looked around to see if he wanted to grab anything else. “Speaking of, probably keep the door locked and the blinds closed for the next few weeks. They might change their mind about that.”

“Oh, ha ha, you’re hilarious.”

“I know.” He winked, and headed back out, pulling his backpack over his shoulders and looking between the two suited men.

“So,” he said, “Where’re we off to?”

***

They led him out to a governmental-looking black car that they’d parked around the other side of the apartment, and one of them opened the back door for him. He slid in, and looked around at the perfectly clean interior and dark-tinted windows. “Is this where all my tax money is going?” he asked, as the two agents got in the front seat. Alright, the humor might have been a cover for his slowly heightening anxiety, now that he was in a closed space with two people who probably had guns, but he was going to have fun with this. Sure as hell beat worrying about his French exam.

“Read this,” the guy on the passenger side said, handing him a folder. He took it and opened it, looking through the contents. It was an itinerary, kind of, with the more specific details blacked out, but there was enough there for him to figure out they were flying out to France.

“France, huh,” he said to himself, checking through the rest of the papers, most of which were completely meaningless to him at a quick glance. “What’s in France that’s so important?”

“You’ll find out.”

“Yeah, in fourteen hours,” he grumbled, sitting back in his seat. He wondered what they were going to feed him. They weren’t just going to expect him to not eat for that long, right?

Oh, that reminded him--

“You know I’m allergic to basically everything, right?”

***

They drove him to an airport, at which point he was led out into a plane, guarded by more people in suits. He felt kind of like the president, if the president had no idea what was happening.

He almost forgot to care, though, because the inside of the plane was swanky. “Holy shit,” he said, looking around. “Is this where my tax dollars are going?”

He could have sworn one of the agents smiled at this. “Don’t worry,” they said, “a third party graciously loaned this to us.”

“Yeah? For what in return?”

They didn’t answer him that time, instead asking him to sit down and prepare for takeoff. He did, amazed at how comfortable the seat was, and soon they were in the air.

***

They woke him up right before they were preparing to land, and he cracked a window open, immediately affronted by how bright the sun was and the fact that his internal clock was telling him it was supposed to be the middle of the night. “Oh, god,” he groaned, rubbing his eyes and sitting up. He let his eyes adjust to the ambient light a bit, brighter now with the window open, before trying to look out of it again, still having to squint a little.

There, hidden underneath spotty cloud cover, was Europe.

His eyes were glued to the window as they landed, unfamiliar styles of buildings and city layouts coming into view as they got closer and closer. He’d never thought he’d get to visit Europe, but suddenly here he was. Really suddenly. Why was he here, again? Well, he’d probably find out soon. Hopefully.

He was lead out of the plane, drowsy, into another car, which took him on a drive that seemed short after his imprisonment on that airplane, along with all of the scenery to look at. Eventually--very eventually, he was starting to regret this whole running-off-with-government-agents thing, if his payout was just going to be getting carted around the rest of his life--they pulled up to a house nestled in a forest-y area, in contrast to the flat fields they had been driving past for the last hour. They had to go through two different security gates to get in there, but they were finally at the front door, and Jim looked around curiously as he was let out of the car.

The place looked...normal, and somehow exactly like Jim thought a French house should look like, except the security crawling around everywhere. He was escorted in, and through the front hallway, into a living area, where there were four Vulcans. Just standing there, speaking to each other in quiet steady tones in a language that was barely familiar. They were green and pointy and two of them had that stupid bowl cut while two other ones had longer hair, braided and held up with shining pins, all dressed in layers of thin robes, drifting and swaying along with every miniscule movement.

And one of them looked really, really familiar.

“Spock?” Jim said, mostly out of shock.

One of them turned around to face him, and his--its? No, his--eyes softened into that not-a-smile that now felt so nostalgic.

“Jim,” Spock responded, tone only a note lighter than stoic.

Jim trotted over, arms held out, and stopped just short of hugging him, instead placing his hands on Spock’s arms, looking him over. “Spock,” he said again, grinning, “You...you got a lot taller.” If Jim was remembering correctly, they had been about the same height the first time they’d met, but now Spock had a good few inches on him, despite Jim’s pretty significant growth spurt. It was obvious, being that close.

Spock inclined his head slightly, brown eyes looking Jim over with similar scrutiny. “As did you,” he said, and Jim’s grin widened into a delighted, open-mouthed smile.

“You learned English?” he asked.

Spock nodded, briefly. “I have spent much of my time since we met dedicated to the study of your planet.”

“Oh, yeah?” Jim responded, a bit distracted. It was his first time really hearing Spock speak and his voice was...well, it was doing things to him. It was soft and steady and definitely deeper now, too, which he was a big fan of. He’d had a good few years in San Francisco to get over all of the shock and most of the shame at being attracted to a more masculine run of people, so now he could fully appreciate exactly how attractive this alien was, even if it left him more than a little concerned about the biological logistics of it all. Was it evolutionarily sound for humans to be attracted to another species entirely?

Oh, well. Spock was cute.

He let go of him, hands hanging awkwardly at his side. “I have...so many questions for you,” he said, before glancing back at all the suited guards hanging out around them.

“And I, you,” Spock agreed. “However, I believe our hosts have a more urgent agenda. Perhaps we will speak privately at a later time.”

“I don’t know...maybe,” Jim said, frowning. There was also a chance that they were going to be tailed by these secret service people for the rest of their natural lives, which didn’t bode well for Jim resolving these whole the-alien-is-hot feelings he had.

One of the suits stepped over, still keeping a certain distance between them. “Mr. Kirk,” it said. “If you would come with us for a moment, we need to debrief you about the particulars of your stay here.”

He looked at them carefully, trying not to frown too much. He considered dropping the line, “Please, call me Jim, Mr. Kirk is dead,” but that usually didn’t go very far in making him friends, so he decided to cooperate. “Sure,” he said, instead, and turned back to Spock to give him a smile. “We’ll talk soon. I hope.”

Spock nodded at him, and then Jim was led away into another room, instructed to hand his belongings over to be searched. He wasn’t too thrilled about that, but let them anyways. They told him all about what had happened with the whole “aliens making contact” thing so far, which turned out to be surprisingly little. A few days ago, a ship landed in the middle of a field off to the side of a University, a bunch of aliens stepped out, and the first thing one of them did after delivering a peaceful greeting was requesting James T. Kirk, by name.

“How strange,” Jim had responded, with a purposefully over-the-top and unconvincing bewildered look. He didn’t get a response out of that, which was upsetting.

He was then informed that this whole thing was going to be top-secret and nothing could leave this building for at least the next week before they figured out an official press release, blah blah blah, they were trying to get the news out as fast as possible but also as correctly as possible so there wouldn’t be global uproar or anything like that, and how they would appreciate Jim’s cooperation in staying in the building and not engaging in any outside communication for the time being.

Not that he even could. He hadn’t exactly had time to purchase an international plan for his phone, so he was off the grid for the time being.

“Yeah, sure,” he answered, nodding. “You won’t get any trouble from me.”

***

“Hey, Spock, do you want to sneak out?”

Spock turned to look at him, a subtle frown creeping onto his features. It was finally dark outside, and Jim was halfway between bone tired and hyped as hell, which meant he was giddy and not entirely firing on all cylinders. They’d finally been left sort-of alone after Jim had been informed of everything and had related, more or less, the tale of how Spock and him met, thus solving the mystery of why the first thing an alien asked for when landing on a foreign planet was a 20-something English major nobody from the middle of nowhere, Iowa.

He was shown a room that he had been graciously assigned (it was pretty damned nice, actually, he could get used to this if it wasn’t for the whole quasi-imprisonment thing), and almost immediately went and found Spock’s instead, and in lieu of a greeting, asked if he wanted to make a break for it. And now you’re all caught up.

Spock stared at him from his place sitting cross-legged on the bed, and Jim could almost see the gears spinning in his head. “Sneak out?” he repeated. “I believe we were specifically requested to stay here, for the benefit of your planetary society.”

“Ah, they won’t notice,” Jim said, waving his hand. “See, look.” He stuck his hand in his jacket pocket, and pulled out his old beanie. “Your favorite.”

Spock raised an eyebrow at him, slowly, and Jim was delighted at that little bit of human expression.

“I believe there are other things that mark me as non-human besides the shape of my ears.”

“Yeah, but no one’s going to see someone walking down the street and think ‘oh my god, that’s an extraterrestrial!’ They’re just going to think you’re going to a costume party. The beanie is more of a red herring than anything. Y’know, there’s a chance an alien might be walking around, but an alien in a beanie is just too weird to believe.”

He walked over and put the hat on Spock, situating it carefully and grinning at the fact that he’d actually been allowed to do it. “So? What do you say?”

Spock tilted his head. “What do I say?”

“Yeah.” Apparently his study of Earth didn’t extend to idioms. Well, that was probably fair--they were hard enough for non-native speakers, let alone things from an entirely different planet. “You know, what’s your answer? Do you want to sneak out or not?”

Spock turned and looked out one of the windows, trees starting to blend into each other in the fading light. Jim wondered if his alien eyes saw anything different.

“...I do admit to some curiosity regarding the surrounding area,” is what he said.

Jim grinned. “Alright. Let’s go.”

***

Jim had been sneaking out of places all his life. His house, his school, other people’s houses, other people’s schools...but he had to admit, dealing with actual trained security agents was a bit more of a hassle. It did help, though, that he wasn’t actually being detained there, more like politely asked to stay, which meant if he was caught trying to leave he would, at most, be politely escorted back in, and maybe politely assigned more guards and politely locked in his room.

There wasn’t going to be any bodily harm involved, was the point, so he wasn’t too worried about it.

He spent the next hour exploring the house with Spock, testing the limits of their not-imprisonment under the guise of just looking around, which seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do after being swept off to a strange country. Turned out the security was pretty solid, but it also turned out Spock’s escape artist potential was even higher than his was.

“I believe the weakest part of their security is on the east side of the building,” he said, after only their brief intelligence-gathering stroll around the house. “Though there are a similar number of guards, the architecture blocks a certain area from view. If only one guard were to be distracted, it would be possible to escape into the foliage.”

Jim turned and looked at him, eyebrows raised. “Shit, Spock,” he said. “You’re good at this.”

Spock frowned at him, and then opened his mouth to say something--but Jim cut him off, hurriedly, not wanting to get anywhere near that discussion.

“It’s an expression of surprise,” he said. “Come on, let’s go.”

***

Their plan worked out great. Spock distracted a guard, not having to do anything but stand next to them, and Jim ran out into the trees. Then it was his turn to find a rock and toss it somewhere distracting so Spock could follow him--and the dude moved like a goddamned cat. Jim was expecting him to be there and that didn’t stop him from jumping a little when he appeared, completely fucking silent, at his side.

“Good job,” Jim whispered to him, patting him on his back and grinning wildly. He was sneaking out of a government facility, with an alien who he couldn’t help but get starry-eyed around. This was the best teen movie ever. He may also have been really in need of some sleep, but he’d take care of that later.

He had a pretty good sense of direction so he was able to lead them through the forested area and downhill to the road he’d been driven up on--or at least, he was pretty sure it was the same road. In any case, it was a road, and that was all that mattered. He crouched down to check for any guards first, and then jumped down onto the pavement, waving for Spock to follow him.

“It’s getting pretty dark,” Jim commented, starting their journey towards wherever that particular road led. “I probably should’ve brought a flashlight.”

“I can see sufficiently well,” Spock informed him.

“Oh, yeah? Do you see any lights on the horizon we should head towards?”

Spock looked around, briefly. “There is no horizon to see, currently.”

“Right. Alright, let’s get out of these trees.”

***

It didn’t take long for the road to emerge out of the edge of the forest, and then there was plenty to see around the horizon--Jim just assumed every single glow was Paris, because why not. It could have been. Rather than head towards them, though, he spotted a street sign and decided to follow that.

Spock walked quietly along beside him, looking around and taking everything in. Jim remembered how Spock felt the last time he was on Earth. The homesickness and helplessness. He hoped Spock didn’t feel that way now, but it seemed like a bit much to just jump in and ask him about deep, personal feelings first thing. Though it wasn’t like aliens had the same idea about social niceties that humans did. Probably.

Holy shit, Jim could just ask him whether they did. Where did he even start?

“So, uh,” he said, before actually thinking it through. Spock looked over at him, attentive. “Uh...shit, I have so much I want to ask you. I guess, first of all...why did you want me to come here? I mean, I was the first thing you asked for when you all landed, right?”

Spock nodded. “Yes.” He looked away and walked for a moment in silence before continuing. “We have attempted contact with other planetary civilizations before. It is difficult to reach an understanding when our customs vary so widely. Even with years of careful study, misunderstandings still arise, and can often be deadly. You presented an opportunity to have a...” his mouth hung open slightly for a moment, and then he shut it, frowning. “I do not know how to express the concept in your language,” he said, eventually. “It is similar to a translator, or ambassador, though I am aware you do not have any expertise on our culture. Your function will be merely to recognize that there is a disconnect, and attempt to respond to our actions in consideration of that. I am able to perform a similar task for my species, though we had the luxury of sending only representatives who have been trained in interspecies communication. Your planet has not yet faced that difficulty.”

Jim nodded, slowly. “My ‘function,’ huh?” he repeated, not able to keep his heart from sinking a little at the idea that he was invited to the party only because they didn’t have anyone else to help them. “So I’m here in more of an official capacity.”

Spock turned and gave him a look that he couldn’t quite read. “You are here in all capacities,” he said. “As am I. Is there another aspect of your role that you would rather discuss?”

“Well. Uh...” he rubbed the back of his neck, trying to think of how to explain what was wrong without sounding pitiful. There was the chance that Spock straight up wouldn’t know what to do with all of his mushy human feelings, too, which made it doubly scary to open up, but he wasn’t going to just let this go unresolved. “I was, um...pretty happy to see you, Spock, is all,” he admitted, face flushing at how ridiculous he felt even so. Aliens. Aliens. “In a pretty...personal capacity. So if you only want me here as some kind of...representative of my race...I mean, I’ll do it if I’m the only guy for the job, but it kind of makes me feel like...a tool, you know? Uh.” He glanced up at him, wincing. “Does that make any sense at all?”

Spock considered him. “No,” he said. “Your speech seems mostly nonsensical. I do understand, however, that the idea of serving mainly an official function is upsetting to you, perhaps due to the fact that you felt a personal reaction to my presence. I will remind you again, then, that we are both here in all capacities. Official roles do not exclude the possibility of other interactions. For example, I did not ‘sneak out’ with you with the intent of achieving a diplomatic goal; rather, I am curious about this planet and indeed you, specifically, Jim. I am gratified that my grasp of your language allows us to communicate more freely than in the past. Does that ease your worry?”

Jim’s mouth quirked up in a smile, even if he didn’t feel entirely better yet. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I’ll be okay.”

***

It didn’t take them more than an hour to reach a little town, or whatever, houses and buildings finally appearing with more frequency on the side of the road until they were surrounded by them, alleyways branching off into dark corners. Jim wandered around mindlessly, happy to take in whatever he could see, marveling at the styles of buildings he had only ever seen in pictures before, and Spock seemed to be of a similar mindset, following his lead silently. That is, until a group of people walked by, conversing loudly, drunken rambling easy recognizable no matter what the language, and he watched them carefully, before turning to Jim.

“They were speaking in a separate language,” he stated.

“Well, yeah. We’re in France,” Jim said, before laughing slightly. “Sorry, I know that doesn’t mean anything to you. But, yeah. This country is France, and people speak French here. Though, I mean, they’d call it le français, if you asked them. I mean...” he frowned. “Is that weird?”

They walked for a moment in silence, the question hanging in the air, before Spock said, “Perhaps not. Yours is the first planet we have made contact with that has not yet established an interplanetary presence. Therefore, it is illogical to assume it would have gone through the same pattern of cultural shifts.”

Jim perked up at this statement, curiosity snagged. “Cultural shifts?” he repeated. “Like what?”

Spock folded his hands behind his back. “The establishment or construction of a global language generally follows the realization that a planetary culture exists as a complete entity rather than only its various subdivisions. I know of many planets whose residents still speak regional languages, but it is rarely that they will have more than one that they utilize for interplanetary communication. My planet’s regional languages are no longer used for anything but specific ritual purposes, so it is strange to me to hear multiple languages being used casually.” He turned to Jim, head tilted. “How many languages are widely used on this planet?”

“Oh, boy,” Jim said, raising his eyebrows. “Depends on how you define ‘widely used.’ I’d say hundreds, if not thousands. I mean, just this continent we’re on has like...” He started counting on his fingers, and got to about seven before he realized the futility of his task. “A lot. But lots of people get taught English in school anyways even if it’s not their native language, so you’ll be pretty okay with it for now.”

“Then why not simply establish English as a global language?”

Jim’s eyebrows went up even further. “That’s...a really complicated question. You’ll probably have to spend a little more time here before we can crack that one open.”

Spock nodded. “Very well. I will attempt to learn more about your planet and then pose this question later.”

Jim didn’t know if he wanted to be dragged into that conversation later, either, but he also wasn't sure he'd have any other option.

***

They stayed out for a while, but Jim started feeling like he really did need to get some sleep, so they headed back, returning to their little compound right through the front gate. He got a lot of meaningful stares, but no one was willing to tell him off with one of their future alien overlords following him around, so they were let in through a tense silence, which Jim was more than happy to accept.

“See you in the morning, Spock,” he said through a yawn, and then retreated to his room to turn in for the night.

He didn’t bother changing into pajamas, opting instead to plant himself facedown on the bed and drift quickly into dead sleep.

This was going to be an adventure.

***

The first thing he did when he got up in the morning, or afternoon or whatever, was grab a pen and some paper and write out a message, which he then passed to one of his suited shadows, asking them to send out an email for him, since he couldn’t exactly contact the outside world and this seemed like a good compromise between keeping security protocol and letting his friends know he wasn’t dead in a ditch.

It said this:

Hey Bones,

I can’t tell you exactly what’s going on because there’s a security lockdown or whatever, but I asked someone to type this email up for me and send you a message so you knew I was okay. So guess what: I’m okay, and I should be able to explain all this to you soon. Like, a week or so soon. Until then: You owe me like, 5 million dollars.

Love,

Jim.

It seemed innocuous enough, but it was enough of a hint for Bones to pick up on the fact that there were actually aliens, which Jim wanted to communicate less for the sake of getting the word out and more for the sake of rubbing it in Bones’ face that he was right all these years, and also fuck off.

You know, the important things.

Chapter Text

On the fourth day of Jim's quasi-imprisonment the secret agents finally dug up a bulky, ugly laptop that they let him plug into the Ethernet. That is, the single Ethernet jack in one particular room so they could sit there watching what he did. That was fine, since he mostly wanted to browse news sites and see if anyone had word of this whole alien thing yet. And yeah, he also snuck in buying an international service plan for his phone, because not being able to talk to his friends and rub everything in their faces without going through five layers of the secret service sucked.

Turns out fairly little of the ‘alien’ news had leaked by that point. Most of the English searches pulled up what were very obviously fringe sights with no credibility, and while he was having trouble figuring out how to best search ‘alien spacecraft sightings’ in French, he didn’t think much was showing up there, either. So, turned out the government was pretty good at keeping these things hush-hush after all. What a surprise.

It also turned out that the reason they let Jim have a computer on the fourth day was that the fifth day was going to be their big press release, which they apparently thought was unimportant for him to know. He only discovered this because Spock came searching for him, looking as nervous as he ever did, talking about how he was supposed to address the planet the next day and had no idea what it would be appropriate to say.

“Oh. Well...” Jim shut his laptop, and turned in his chair to face Spock. “I mean, the truth, I guess. You came here to learn about humanity and usher us into the galactic community, or whatever. The most important thing for people to know is that you’re here to make friends, not take us over. Except don’t literally say ‘we’re not looking to take you over’ because that’s a surefire way to sound suspicious.”

Spock tilted his head at him, frowning.

“...yeah,” went Jim. “Okay, it’s complicated. Sit down.” He nudged the chair next to him with his foot, and Spock pulled it out and sat down, graceful as ever in his shimmering alien robes. Jim watched him maybe a little too carefully before continuing. “Do you need to write this down? It’s a lot.”

“I will remember it,” Spock assured him.

“Well, okay.” Jim leaned his chair back, thinking over what he was supposed to say. He didn’t want to make Spock look like an idiot in front of...well, the entire world, and he definitely didn’t want to incite riot.

Though, riots were probably going to be incited anyways. This was kind of a big thing.

He set his chair back down, and looked over at Spock. “You’re probably going to want to introduce yourself first, really briefly. Like I’d say, ‘Hi everyone, I’m Jim Kirk, a starving college student from Iowa,’ but that’s way too flippant and that’s why they don’t let me address the globe on international television. Then maybe talk a little bit about your home planet and its history leading up to this point, like specifically why you all apparently formed a planetary visitation coalition to come and talk to everyone. Though if there’s any war-mongering you should probably leave that part out.”

“We have been a peaceful people for generations,” Spock informed him. Jim nodded.

“Good,” he said. “Perfect. Definitely mention that. Then, uh...so, introduction, history, and then that will lead into why you’re here. Explain that and then close with something like...looking into the future. Like, ‘I look forward to learning about your people and your many cultures’ or something. I’d say your entire speech should fit into about, ehh, two to six minutes, though I don’t really know the rules about contact with intelligent life...you might be able to sit up there for three hours and people would just be fascinated by the fact that you’re green and speaking English.”

Spock stared at him for a moment, and then asked, “How long is a minute?”

“Oh,” went Jim. He looked around, twisting in his seat to see if there was a clock in the room. He didn’t want to have to sit there and count sixty-Mississippi. Not seeing one, he opened up the laptop again and clicked on the clock, pointing to the seconds counter that popped up above the calendar. “This one’s counting seconds,” he explained, pointing to it. “And this one minutes, and this one hours. There are sixty seconds in one minute. Does that give you some idea?”

Spock sat there staring at the clock as the seconds counted upwards. 15. 16. 17. 18. “Yes,” he said. “I believe I understand. I will attempt to keep my speech brief.”

“Perfect,” said Jim. “Let me know if you need any more help.”

***

The next day consisted of reporters slowly filtering into the house and Jim trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. They weren’t allowed upstairs, thankfully--though he definitely caught one sneaking up as he was walking down, but he gave them a look that sent them scurrying back away--but that meant that when he walked down, he was suddenly the center of attention. He just ignored everyone--or, rather, didn’t respond, nevertheless listening to their questions closely to figure out just what they knew. A lot of them were asking what exactly was going on, so that meant they’d just been called there with the promise of a big scoop without getting told what it was.

He shoved his way to the kitchen to forage for food and then went back upstairs without saying a word to anyone, heading straight for Spock’s room. Yeah, there were a few things he needed to explain, like what counting down from five meant when he was in front of a camera, and how they were definitely going to field questions later and it was going to be complete chaos, and if anyone said anything about “E.T. phone home” to him then they were just being idiots and he should feel justified in ignoring them.

Spock listened, carefully, but he couldn’t hide the steadily rising alarm growing on his expression, no matter how subtle it was.

“Don’t worry,” Jim said, despite not being sure of it himself, “You’re going to be fine.”

***

A few hours later was the big announcement. They’d rearranged a living room, or whatever, upstairs, and allowed people to set up their cameras in small groups, under very careful watch. Jim hung around the periphery of all of this, disappearing into Spock’s room again every once in a while to inform him about what was going on. He thought about telling the other aliens, too, but the thought of approaching them was not a great one, so he left it up to Spock to decide if he was going to explain anything. It seemed like he was the main focus of attention, anyways. Jim kind of was on the human side of things, too, now that he thought about it. Spock was the only one he was talking to, and he was the only one Spock was talking to.

Weird.

In any case, they finally herded everyone into the room, and Jim slipped in the door to hang out in the back, trying to not draw anyone’s attention lest he break the tense, expectant silence that had now settled over the gathering.

A man came out of one of the doors on the other side and walked to the front. He was dressed in an expensive suit and his posture radiated confidence.

He explained, in French-accented English, why they had gathered everyone there today--because they had been visited by extraterrestrial life.

The crowd suddenly shifted, murmurs breaking out in a way that an uproar might have in a crowd that wasn’t trying to get television footage.

Jim got out his phone as the representative continued to talk, explaining the brief timeline of events that had led up to that moment.

He sent a group text to his university posse with the message, “hey guys, remember that alien i met in highschool”

Bones’ reply was almost immediate. “Youve got to be kidding me”

Jim grinned. “Turn on the news.”

Then, Uhura; “What news? You can’t just say ‘the news.’”

He looked up at the logos on all of the cameras sitting in front of him. “Pick one.”

Sulu finally chimed in with “the alien you said turned you gay?”

Jim flushed. Oh boy, he didn’t remember revealing that bit of information. He had been pretty wasted at the time, though, so that wasn’t entirely surprising. “listen youll understand once you see him.”

“See him???”

He slid his phone back into his pocket as Mr. Suitguy finished up his speech, leading into what everyone understood at that point was the introduction of the actual, real-life aliens. The suspense in the air was palpable.

One of the doors opened, revealing three intimidating-looking guards, followed by Spock and his three alien friends. Every device in the room was now pointed at them, everyone paying rapt attention.

Spock stepped out to the front, two guards standing far enough on either side of him to be out of the shot, but definitely discouraging any of the reporters there from trying anything risky. He looked around the room, and then at Jim, who smiled and gave him a thumbs up. Not that he knew, probably, what a thumbs up meant, but maybe his meaning would get across.

Spock started giving his speech, and Jim briefly slid his phone out of his pocket. 15 notifications. He bit back a laugh as he put his phone back away, listening to Spock instead.

The speech followed his suggested outline almost exactly. Other than that, there were a few things that sounded like they might have been strongly suggested by some government representatives, but thankfully he didn’t say anything that could be misinterpreted and cause mass chaos. Well, probably. They’d have to see how everything was translated by the news anchors. Who knows what kind of a mess that would cause.

Spock was swiftly stashed away again after the speech, and then the room was opened to questions, which was Jim’s cue to leave. He slipped out the back door and headed towards Spock’s room, flopping down on the bed there and pulling out his phone to answer the increasing number of notifications from his friends exclaiming in disbelief and two of them admitting that, yes, the alien was pretty cute, after all.

“You’re never living this down. Ever.” he messaged everyone. “Except you, Scotty. You got my back.”

Out of Bones, Uhura, Scotty, Sulu, and Chekov, Scotty had been the only one to outright believe him right off the bat. Then again, he’d been about as drunk as Jim had been at the time, but he went on defending him and speculating with him afterwards, so he was strongly in the “believer” column. Chekov believed him more than he didn’t, but still kept up a healthy amount of speculative doubt. Sulu and Uhura were doubters, and Bones just wasn’t shy about telling him to stop making up stories, even as much as Jim insisted it was true. He didn’t really blame him, though--he'd tried to convince Bones of some really stupid shit before, so it was kind of a boy-who-cried-wolf thing.

Boy who cried alien. Whatever.

Spock was soon smuggled back into his room, and he looked relieved to see Jim there.

Jim sat up, grinning. “Good job,” he said, patting the bed next to him. “How do you feel?”

Spock sat down, if tentatively. “I feel...” he frowned, as if the question was foreign to him. “Speaking on behalf of an entire planet is a stressful experience.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” Jim agreed. “You’ve never done this before, then?”

“I have not. I am...young.” He looked down at the bed. “This venture happened largely by accident. Were contact with your planet planned, I would not have been the one who was sent to initiate it.”

“Oh, yeah?” Jim prodded. “I mean...what was the plan, then? Why’d you end up here?”

Spock glanced over at the door, and Jim scooted closer to him, grinning. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone."

Spock looked at him again, and Jim was struck by the sudden closeness of their faces, and the way Spock’s pupils dilated the slightest amount when their eyes met.

His smile faltered somewhat before he leaned back on the headboard, crossing his arms and raising his eyebrows expectantly.

“...our initial contact was unplanned, as I believe is evident by the circumstances under which it occurred.” Spock started, his gaze still fixed on Jim. “I had been sent to observe your planet from a distance as a training exercise. We had already determined your species unfit for interplanetary communication. Our previous observations showed that you are barbaric and warlike, and your technology still has far to go before you are capable of travel even within your own solar system.”

“Jeez, Spock, tell me how you really feel,” Jim muttered, but Spock wisely chose to ignore him, only raising an eyebrow slightly before continuing.

“However, there was a malfunction in my craft. I was forced to make an emergency landing, which...did not go well. If it were not for you, I likely would have died.”

Jim shrugged, rubbing the back of his neck. He was just a shitty teenager with nothing better to do, but he supposed he did kind of save Spock's life, even if it was by sheer dumb luck.

“It seemed to me that our observations were in error. Once I returned to my planet, I requested further observation, focused on broader sections of your society. That and, perhaps, my insistence on your behalf, eventually convinced our elders to make an exception for this planet and initialize what we deem premature contact.”

“So we’re your guinea pigs,” Jim said. Then, at Spock’s blank look; “Lab rats. Or, I mean...y’know, test subjects.”

“Yes,” agreed Spock, finally. “In a way. Though I believe it is more accurate to say that we are their test subjects. I am a part of this experiment as well.”

“Hm,” went Jim, turning and looking up at the ceiling. Then he sat up, and put a hand on Spock’s shoulder, patting him comfortingly. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m sure you’ll do fine.”

Humanity, however, might have been a different story.

***

He ended up sleeping in Spock’s room, because he was already there and it wasn't like Spock slept a whole lot anyways, so someone might as well make use of the bed. When he woke up, he ate breakfast as usual, and then wandered around the house, wondering where all of his pointy-eared friends had gone. He hadn’t seen them all day.

Well, he’d investigate it later. It was still early, maybe they were out in the yard doing space-yoga or something.

He went to the room they were graciously allowing him to access the Internet in and checked out how the alien news was going. A lot of it was surprisingly level-headed, simply reporting on the facts so far with minimal speculation about what was going to happen next. Then there were the Internet polls ranking the aliens by level of attractiveness, which Jim, of course, voted on. Spock was by far the cutest, it wasn’t even a contest. He was kind of offended the rankings were so close, actually.

It wasn’t long before someone came in looking for him, and fetched him into their little unofficial meeting room. Or maybe their official meeting room. A lot of people had suits, after all. But this time it wasn’t full of reporters and guards, instead only containing a few people and also, Spock.

“Am I in trouble?” Jim asked, lightly, sitting down across from them. “I swear it was only a few people. Promise.”

The suit people gave him an unimpressed look, and he shrugged. “Tough crowd. Alright, what’s up?”

“We were discussing your future involvement in...this,” they said, making a wide gesture, indicating what they were talking about. “Many world leaders have requested meetings with our visitors, and we feel it is in everyone’s best interests to allow that. Mr. Spock and his friends have indicated that their purpose was to make contact with our entire planet, not simply our small corner of it.”

“Mr. Spock,” Jim repeated, amused. That just sounded strange. “Alright. So what do you need from me?”

“We will be flying them to different countries for official meetings with other governments for an indeterminable time. We understand that you have a life outside of these proceedings; however, Spock has specifically requested your company on these trips. So we'd like you to decide whether or not you want to continue with us.”

“Yes,” said Jim. The suit blinked.

“You don't need to decide immediately, if you'd like time to think over it.”

“Well, I don’t. My answer’s yes.” He turned to Spock, and smiled. “I'll be here as long as you need me, alright?"

Spock nodded. “Thank you, Jim. I am glad to have you.”

***

The next month was filled with more planes than Jim could handle. When this all first started, he probably would have decked anyone who felt like a private jet was mundane, but he was starting to get fidgety just stepping into one, because it meant another few--if he was lucky, only a few--hours in an enclosed space with nothing to do. At least he could pace on these things since he had room to walk around, unlike the sardine-packed life of economy class, but he still wasn’t a fan.

And, at least, he had Spock to talk to, even if their conversation was somewhat limited by the fact it was being overheard by guards, so there were certain things he didn’t want to talk about. But there were still plenty of subjects--mostly Spock’s home planet, and his family and cultural differences. It was safe enough.

Jim wasn’t allowed to go talk to any of the government officials, though, no matter how many times Spock repeated that it was Jim’s entire purpose to be a mediator in discussions--he was still too much of a security risk, which Jim understood as, “no way in hell we’re letting this guy be a global ambassador.” So he spent a whole lot of time hanging around in hotel rooms, which were usually booked with Spock and him together, since neither of them minded. Or, since Jim always seemed to wander over to Spock’s room anyways, so they probably decided it wasn’t worth the extra room.

Jim wondered what else they thought about this insistent co-residence, but he could definitely live without knowing.

Thankfully, they didn’t make him stay in the hotel the whole time, or else he might have really gone crazy, getting flown to huge capital cities in other countries and not being allowed to wander around. Instead, he was appointed a chauffeur and a couple of guards and was allowed to go wherever he wanted under close supervision, and could even ask to be taken places. It was pretty awesome, especially after they finally allowed him to post pictures from his trip, as long as it had been a week since he’d taken them--barring the possibility that they were still in the same place after a week, which didn’t happen often. In that case, he had to keep quiet, but it was a sacrifice he was willing to make.

His friends could hardly believe what was happening. Honestly, he had a little bit of a hard time believing it himself.

***

One of their trips was to Tokyo, where they were met with, if the news was any indication, a pretty vigorous arts and crafts section. That was pretty standard on their visits, but the crowds in Japan were considerably more invested. Or maybe it was just that they’d had marginally more time to prepare. Who knew.

In any case, they didn’t get to see a whole lot of it themselves, since they were snuck through all the back alleys possible and kept incognito all the way to their hotel, sending a decoy car out to plow its way through the main roads and receive all of the adoration.

And the danger, of course. As much as Jim tried not to think about it, there were people who weren’t very happy with the fact that there were aliens being toted around by the government. Some people thought it was a hoax--some people thought they were false prophets sent by Satan, or even that they were actually angels and were supposed to be worshipped, which of course pissed off more than a few religious leaders, which fed back into the whole Satan thing.

He dropped his luggage on his bed once they reached the hotel, yawning and stretching out. He’d spent so much time sitting on planes and cars, he was feeling antsy--but that didn’t change the fact that he hadn’t gotten a decent night’s sleep in god knew how long. Days were basically meaningless to him at that point. He was changing time zones so quickly, was allowed to nap whenever he wanted, and Spock didn’t have a 24-hour sleep cycle, so what was the point of sticking to it?

He kicked off his shoes and collapsed on the bed, which took up about 80% of the floor space in there. It was a tiny room, and since the hotel only had single ones, it was the first time in a while he wasn’t holed up with Spock.

He didn’t mind it, particularly. It’s not like he couldn’t spend a few days without the guy, but it did feel a little strange.

He closed his eyes for a while, drifting halfway between consciousness and unconsciousness until he felt rested enough and got up to peek through the window.

It was covered with an opaque plastic film.

“...alright." Time to go out and explore.

***

The ward they were in was remarkably difficult to get lost in, despite the winding streets and underground walkways and alleyways leading to wherever they lead to. There was a map of the area on almost every street corner, as if so many people used to get lost that they tried to make it impossible.

So when one of his suited shadows got a message on their phone and suggested that they head back to the hotel, it was easy enough to find his way there and up the one working elevator.

His alien friends weren’t home yet, so he slipped into his bathroom and took a shower under the showerhead that was way too low for it to be comfortable, but at least it was clean and the water was warm.

Then he was warm and the robe the hotel had provided was cozy so he bundled up on the bed and pulled out one of his books, happy to be alone in his own head for once.

It was getting dark. He wasn’t really sure whether he was tired or not, or what time zone his brain was in, but things were winding down, and he wasn’t feeling antsy anymore so he wrapped himself up in a blanket, closing his eyes and seeing if he would fall asleep.

He didn't know how long he'd laid there, or whether he'd dozed off or not, but at some point, his brain roused him back into consciousness because someone was knocking on his door.

He groaned, and got up, situating his robe back around himself and shuffling over to the door, bleary-eyed.

He opened it, and there was Spock, looking almost ethereal in his alien robes, standing in the low, purple hallway.

“Oh,” said Jim. “Hi.”

“Hello,” responded Spock. “May I come in?”

“Yeah. Sure.” Jim stepped aside, perplexed, as Spock drifted into the room, looking around. Jim shut the door.

“These rooms are much smaller than any other we have been placed in,” Spock noted, looking around. “And the baths much more suitable for use.”

“Oh, yeah?” Jim said, a little uselessly. He did notice, then, that Spock’s hair was damp. It was hard to tell when it was so dark and always lying flat on his head anyways. “Right, you like baths, don’t you.”

Spock nodded. “They are a luxury one cannot often afford on my home planet. It is gratifying to be more able to...indulge, occasionally.”

“Hm,” went Jim, shuffling back over to the bed and crawling into the spot he’d vacated before, shifting over to allow room for Spock, if he wanted it. “So you’re a fan of indulging, huh?”

“I do not believe it would be considered indulging if I were not a fan of it.”

Jim grinned, and then yawned, stretching languidly. “That’s a good point.”

Spock watched him with interest. “You are tired,” he said. “I apologize. I did not mean to interrupt your rest.”

“No, it’s alright,” Jim said, propping his head up on an elbow, and then fluttering his eyelashes at him. “I always have time for you, Spock.”

Spock stared at him, and then tilted his head. He didn’t question Jim’s behavior, though, simply saying, “It is important that you rest. You have not been getting the recommended amount of sleep for a human.”

Jim wondered if there was a good way to subtly come on to an alien, or if he was going to have to actually bite the bullet and spell it out if this was going to go anywhere. Not that he needed badly for that to happen, or anything, but he felt silly testing the waters if it was all going to go right over Spock’s head anyways.

He shrugged. “I’m a college student. I’m used to it.”

“You should sleep,” insisted Spock, nevertheless. “However, I do have one request of you before you do.”

“Which is?”

“I would like to stay here tonight,” Spock said, grasping his hands at his abdomen rather than his back. “I have grown used to your company. So if you would not mind...”

“Of course I don’t mind, Spock,” Jim reassured him, grinning. “I like having you around, too. Why do you think I snuck into your room so many times?” He patted the empty half of the bed, scooting over just a few inches more for emphasis. “If you want to sleep, I put that weird pillow up in the closet.”

Spock nodded, and went to get it, before placing it on the bed and laying down, settling on his back.

Jim watched him for a few moments, before rolling over and pulling the blanket up, determined to go to sleep before he said anything too stupid.

He couldn’t make an idiot out of himself while he was unconscious.

Probably.

***

Spock was still there when he woke up, lying on his back with his hands folded over his stomach. Jim let his mind slowly catch up with where he was as he blinked blearily at Spock’s profile, not resisting the idle thoughts of running his fingertips along Spock’s jaw, along his bottom lip, parted just slightly from the top one, relaxed, for once, rather than pursed in irritation or confusion.

Spock’s eyes fluttered open, and he looked at Jim, whose heart leapt. He felt caught red-handed, and his face turned a similar color, even though Spock had no way of knowing what he was thinking about.

Well. As far as Jim knew. He'd definitely shown more than a little bit of psychic ability in the past.

“...humans feel very loudly,” Spock said, voice soft.

“Huh?” That sentence wasn't making sense to him, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t because he had just woken up.

Spock said something, a word that was definitely not in English, and then explained, “It is when a child of my species has not yet gone through the proper training to mentally shield their emotions, so they are open for all to see, and often forced to our attention against our will. I was not sure how to translate the concept into your language. You have very few words for this kind of perception.”

Jim blinked at him a few times. “See, here, babies just cry,” he said, and then sat up, stretching. “You’re what we call telepathic, I guess. Humans can’t do that.” He made a big show of pausing to stretch his back, his shoulders, his neck, and then, as purposefully nonchalant as he could manage, he turned to Spock, eyebrows slightly raised. “So, you...can tell what I’m feeling?”

Spock sat up, as graceful as if he hadn’t been sleeping at all. Then again, maybe he hadn’t been. Jim wasn’t entirely sure he’d ever seen Spock sleep, except that one time when he had just bled out all over his bathroom, but that was an extenuating circumstance. “At times,” he said. “I try to give you the courtesy of mental privacy, but they are difficult to ignore when they are either very strong or directed towards me.”

“Oh,” said Jim. “Well, uh...sorry.” He really wanted to know if Spock had picked up on the very large crush Jim had been harboring for him, but there was no way to ask that without spilling the beans. He also wasn’t sure he wanted to know. If Spock didn’t know, then he didn’t know--if Spock did know, then he wasn’t bringing it up, which meant he probably wanted nothing to do with it.

Probably. He was an alien, after all. Maybe they had different courting rituals.

Maybe Jim needed to ask him about their courting rituals.

“There is no need to apologize,” Spock said. “You have not been trained in mental shielding.”

“Yeah,” said Jim, fiddling with the edge of the blanket. Then, since his stomach seemed to be making a particular request of him, “Hey, are you hungry?”

***

He threw on some actual clothes in the privacy of his bathroom before the two of them went to breakfast, one of the guards following them onto the elevator.

“Can’t we get any time alone?” Jim protested, half-heartedly. At that point, he would have sent a guard with him, too. He’d already run off with Spock once, they probably didn’t want him to do it now that the world knew all about their alien visitors and would probably recognize Spock if they saw him, which could go a couple different ways, most of them very bad.

As it was, they just went to the top floor and down a few hallways to find the restaurant the hotel had stashed up there, with a breakfast buffet full of western-style foods. Jim loaded a plate up and Spock followed his lead, grabbing significantly less food and joining Jim at a table next to a window. A small window, but still enough to afford a decent view of the city skyline. Their bodyguard was polite enough to stay a few tables away, so they did, in fact, get a little privacy, though Jim was sure the suit could still hear their conversation if they listened hard enough.

Whatever. Bodyguards dealt with weird things, that was their job.

“Y’know, this time last year, I would never even imagined going to Japan,” he said, in between mouthfuls. Spock’s gaze returned to him, from staring out the window. “I mean, not that I’m not having a fun time,” he continued. “It’s just...life is weird, y’know?”

Spock’s eyebrow quirked up the smallest amount. “I would be surprised to learn you had anticipated any of this,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Jim. He idly poked at his food in the resulting silence, and then finally put his fork down. “Hey, I have a question.”

“I am listening.”

“Right,” went Jim. “Uh, well...”

He looked out the window, trying to figure out how he wanted to phrase all of this. “Do you know about human courting rituals? You know, trying to choose the right partner, dating, all of that.”

Spock frowned. “I know very little,” he said. “I admit I have avoided the subject, to some extent. They are complex, and I did not find them relevant to my purpose here.”

“Right,” said Jim, again, frowning. There was that ‘purpose’ word again. “Yeah, that’s understandable. I was just kind of wondering if there’s a similar process for your species.”

Spock tilted his head, and paused in his movements, as if he was giving it heavy thought. “Yes,” he said, after a moment. “In a way. However, we do not generally speak about it to those outside our species.”

“Oh,” went Jim. He suddenly realized that there may be a significant taboo against inter-species...whatever, where Spock was from. He wondered if there was one on Earth. They had plenty of media about sexy aliens, but it’s not like anyone had the chance to actually meet one, before.

Well, whatever. Spock was already not a woman, so Jim was socially fucked either way.

“Well, you don’t have to tell me,” he said, going back to poking at his food. He ate a grape, just to keep himself occupied.

“If you are curious, then I do not mind,” Spock said. “It is simply difficult to explain, especially in your language.”

Jim raised his eyebrows, and smiled a little. “Take your time,” he said.

Spock nodded, folding his hands on the table. “It is necessary for us to be bonded to a partner as we reach adulthood,” he said. “To that end, we are paired as children. There is...a link, between us. However, we are free to form social bonds as we wish with those around us. Our predetermined bond is merely a point of reassurance, though there are rituals that remain from our early days as a civilization that are tied to it.” He looked up at Jim, eyes questioning. “Does that answer suffice?”

“Uh,” went Jim. He wasn’t entirely sure what he had just been told. “When you say ‘social bonds’...what does that mean?”

Spock’s head tilted at a much more obvious angle than usual. “I do not know what other words I could use to describe them.”

“Right,” went Jim, sighing. This was obviously a futile exercise. He didn’t know why he expected an alien to have a clear concept of ‘friend’ and ‘boyfriend’ when a lot of humans probably couldn’t even point out a clear, universal difference between the two.

He’d just have to let things work out how they worked out. Which probably meant Spock never knowing about all this, which was...fine.

Jim would keep telling himself that it was fine.

Chapter Text

They finally left Japan, like they were always going to, and their next stop was Russia, where their hotel room was a hell of a lot bigger. They ran through the usual schedule, with the aliens getting dragged around government buildings and refusing to shake hands with people while Jim lazed around the general area of the hotel, sampling local delicacies and giving his bodyguards heart attacks. He got bored, okay?

Spock came back one evening while Jim was scrolling through alien-related news articles, which was always an interesting pastime if not guaranteed to be a happy one. He sat down on his bed across the room as Jim read over one whose author claimed to have irrefutable proof that he, Jim, and the alien, Spock, were gay together, and he was trying and failing to keep himself from giggling over it, halfway because it was just funny, but partly because he was a little nervous about the implications.

Spock stared at him, no doubt wondering what that weird noise was that the human was making.

“Jim,” he said, after a moment, and Jim calmed himself down in order to actually talk to him, instead of just sitting there laughing like an asshole.

“Spock,” he said, still grinning. “Some of these article writers have really interesting opinions.”

“It was suggested to me to avoid reading articles that were published on the Internet.”

“Yeah?” Jim said, scrolling through the article further and examining the badly photoshopped pictures of them together. At least the low resolution lent to the believability, if nothing else did. “That’s pretty good advice. I don’t know how I would even begin explaining clickbait to you.”

“What is it that you currently find so amusing?” Spock asked, apparently not yet satisfied with Jim’s answer.

“Oh. Well...uh...” He didn’t know how he would even begin to explain this to Spock, either, and he definitely wasn’t going to talk about why he found it equally terrifying as well. Especially as he’d made the novice mistake of checking the comments section, and it wasn't exactly a bastion of support for this fake relationship that had more basis in reality than the article writer knew. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to touch the anal probing jokes, because for one, pop culture, and for two, if Spock didn’t know, then Spock didn’t know.

He drummed his fingers against the side of the laptop, thinking about how he was going to phrase this. “This article writer seems convinced--or at least is pretending to be convinced--that you and I are in a romantic relationship. Well, they’re probably focused more on the sexual aspect of it, honestly, and is talking about how you and your alien friends have come down to Earth in order to turn the entire population gay and eradicate our species. Which is a pretty inefficient way of doing things. I mean, If you have intragalactic space travel you probably have better ways of eradicating us then the gays.”

He looked up at Spock, who was staring at him, blankly.

“For what purpose would someone write such an article?” he asked, after taking time to process. “As it is incorrect, they cannot have any evidence to support such an argument.”

“Well, it’s either clickbait, fear mongering, or someone who has a very warped view of how the world works,” Jim said, shutting his laptop. That was enough of that. “In other words, someone’s just trying to make money off of people coming to their site to look at the article, or someone really hates gay people and is trying to make people freak out about it, or...well, the third one is anyone’s guess. I don’t know what to say about that.”

Spock nodded, slowly, looking away in order to, presumably, think over what Jim just said. When he looked back, it was to say, “I do not know what the meaning of the word ‘gay’ is.”

“Oh,” went Jim. “Well, it’s like...if someone’s...okay, how most people use it is if someone’s attracted solely to people of their own gender, then they’re gay. Like, romantically or sexually attracted.”

Spock continued staring at him. “I am not clear on the definition of ‘gender,’ either.”

“It’s just...” He held his mouth open for a moment, and then shut it. “Uh. This was a lot easier question for me back when we first met."

Spock’s head tilted, and Jim sighed.

“Basically,” he said, “human society is really complicated, and a lot of people would probably disagree with me on this explanation, but the way I see it is: some people have internal genitals, and some people have external genitals, and some people are somewhere in between, but there’s a large swath of the population that likes to ignore that people don’t fit easily into these two categories, so they label the first category women, and the second, men. So, men and women can be in relationships, but sometimes a man likes to be with a man or a woman likes to be with a woman, and that community of people, or at least part of it, has decided to call themselves gay. Alright? Now, when people look at me, I have a lot of characteristics they associate with men, so they assume I’m a man, which I happen to be--and when they look at you, they see those same characteristics, so they assume you’re a man, even though you’re an alien and evidently don't have the same concept of these things that we do.” He paused, taking a deep breath and putting his hands together. “So. If we were in a close, intimate relationship, as this article suggests we are, people would label that gay. Does that make...any sense at all?”

The cogs in Spock’s head continued turning, and he finally said, “Are these relationships meant solely to induce procreation?”

“Nope,” said Jim. “There’s a lot of social benefits, as well. And if people did want a child and couldn’t make one themselves, there’s a lot of kids without families that they could take in as their own and provide care for it.”

“What reasons, then, do humans have for opposing these relationships?”

“A whole lot, making varying degrees of sense. That’s a whole other conversation, though.” He tossed the laptop onto the bed, and sat up, mirroring Spock’s pose, sitting on the edge of his own bed. “Now I’m curious what it’s like on your planet. Any social expectations based on genitals or hormonal balances?”

“No,” said Spock. “I do not believe so, except in circumstances related to childbearing.”

“So if you were to cozy up with someone who looked kind of like...me, for example,” Jim said, inching beyond the barrier of subtlety, “there’s no kind of social stigma against that?”

“No,” said Spock, again. “And as it is a private matter, it is not for the society to pass judgment on.”

“Hm,” went Jim, lying on the bed again, propping his head up on his hand. “Interesting.”

***

Jim didn’t generally see the other aliens around while they were all on the ground, so he understood not talking to them much in that case--but they were all regularly holed up for hours on end on a private airplane, which could definitely be more cramped, but his point still stood. They never talked to him. He had been waiting for one of them to break the ice, since from what he knew about Spock, they were a pretty private people, but none of them ever did. So eventually, he decided to take things into his own hands.

They were on another long flight, Spock was meditating and Jim was bored as shit, so he finally got up and meandered up towards the front of the airplane where the other three were sitting, conversing with each other in quiet tones, which stopped abruptly when Jim approached them. Not that he could understand what they were saying in the first place.

“Hey everyone,” he said, brightly, treading the line between friendly and irritating. He could easily be either one, depending on how they decided to react. “I’m Jim.” He resisted the urge to hold his hand out for them to shake--this species didn’t touch hands, he’d come to learn--and instead held it up in what Spock told him was the ta’al. “I don’t think we’ve spoken before.”

“We have not,” the one closest to him said. Its voice was deeper than Spock’s, and harsher. “There is no reason for us to converse.”

Jim raised his eyebrows. “I mean, there is a little. Cultural exchange, and all that.”

“You are not a designated cultural expert,” the alien said, voice completely toneless. “Any knowledge we gained from you would be flawed. We are concerned with the leaders of your society.”

Jim gaped at them. The two sitting further away stared at him with the same disaffected look that the closer one was, as if that one was speaking for all of them. “Don’t you want a variety of views?”

“We have observed you closely, and have learned all we require.”

“Well. Okay. Nice to meet you, too." He turned tail and sat down next to Spock, crossing his arms and slouching.

“They’re friendly,” he grumbled. Spock glanced at him, quirking an eyebrow.

“Do you recall our conversation about your role as cultural liaison?”

“That’s a fancy word,” Jim said, bad mood definitely rubbing off on his other interactions. Spock, however, just stared at him, until he sighed, uncrossing his arms and sitting up. “Alright,” he said. “What cultural context am I missing for them being...” he searched his mind for a word that wasn’t ‘assholes,’ which was what he really wanted to say at that point, but he was at least trying to be understanding about it. “…you know. So direct.”

“That is how we are,” Spock said. “I have noticed that humans spend a great deal of time attempting to talk around a point, but we would rather use only what words are necessary. I have noticed that this has been interpreted as impolite by many of the people we have met with.”

“Well, yeah. You can’t just go around saying things with no regard for what other people feel. That’s like...yeah, it’s really impolite, and also kind of mean.” He felt like a little kid explaining how it’s ‘mean’ to talk to people a certain way, but then again, considering the conversation topic, maybe grade school rhetoric was fitting here. Share your things. Don’t be rude. Say please and thank you. “You’re meeting with government officials like this?”

Spock nodded, and then spared the barest glance at his fellow extraterrestrials before saying, “It is the general belief of my society that emotions do not play an important part in many aspects of life. Conversing is one of them. It is thought solely to be a conduit for information.”

“But god forbid it be emotional information.”

Spock inclined his head slightly, and Jim considered that answer. “ ‘It is thought,’ huh?” he repeated, smirking. Apparently they did their fair share of talking about the point, too, but it was obvious that Spock didn’t feel this was the best place to discuss the topic.

He sat back again, crossing his arms. So Spock wasn’t exactly a pinnacle of his society. That kind of sucked, because he really liked Spock, so it was a shame there weren’t more people like him.

Jim would have to make due with just one.

***

It was winter by the time they came back around to the States. There were a ton of people who wanted to visit with the aliens in D.C., and Jim had a feeling someone was stretching out the scheduling as much as possible, because Spock ended up with a lot of downtime. Maybe they were trying to keep them on the ground for more than a week and give everyone a chance to settle their internal clock, or maybe bureaucracy was just having trouble settling itself to allow extraterrestrial visits. Either way, Jim found himself thankful for the lull. He never thought he’d see the day when he grew tired of excitement and change, but plane rides were starting to wear on him.

Besides, the Smithsonian. Of course there were plenty of cool cultural things to do in other countries, but Jim knew fuckall about most of them and they weren't always within a reasonable distance. But here was a museum you could take whole days to get through right on the government’s doorstep. He sure as hell wasn’t passing up that opportunity.

It was day three of their museum hopping, and Spock had accumulated more and more of Jim’s winter clothing as the days had gone by. He’d heard enough about Spock’s home planet to know it was a desert, and hot, and as much as Spock protested that he was "sufficiently able to regulate his internal temperature," Jim still caught him shivering when they spent too long outside. So he made sure to wrap him up real good this time--they even stopped by a clothing store and shelled out some good government coin for a jacket and a scarf.

They stood inside the lobby of the Air and Space museum--it was the end of their second day visiting that one, because Spock was so fascinated by the exhibits they’d barely gotten through any of them. Not that Jim minded. That was the point, and as far as he could tell, they weren't in any hurry.

“Your species has been advancing at a greater rate than our models predicted,” Spock was saying as they bundled him up to venture back outside. The sun was dipping below the horizon, and as much as Jim would have loved to stay later, he didn’t want to subject Spock to the temperature drop. “I believe we would have made contact with you sooner than we had planned even if my ship had not malfunctioned. Though likely not in my lifetime, and almost certainly not in yours.”

“Oh, yeah?” Jim said, wrapping the scarf around Spock and making sure it was snug, but didn’t have a stranglehold on him. “How long do you guys live, then?”

“It seems that we age at a rate that is approximately half of yours. Barring disastrous circumstances, a well-lived life may be two hundred of your Earth years. Perhaps more.”

Jim raised his eyebrows. “That’s pretty long. The way I’m going, I’ll be happy to push seventy.” He grinned. Spock, pointedly, did not, instead drawing his eyebrows together in sudden aloofness. “...hey,” went Jim, tugging on the scarf. “I’m joking. I’ll be around for a while.”

Spock nodded, and then turned to the door. Jim followed him out, their ever-present security suits shadowing them. Jim watched Spock carefully when he wasn’t trying to dodge out of the way of the weekend crowd. He didn’t think any of his jokes had ever made Spock upset before. Or was he just getting better at reading him?

Spock was on a shoulder-collision course with someone who didn’t seem to be veering out of the way, so Jim grabbed his arm to pull him away--

But the person turned deliberately towards them, running into Spock, and in a split second Spock’s hand was on their throat, pinching the area where the neck turned into the shoulder. Everything seemed to pause for a moment, and then the person collapsed, something clattering out of their hand onto the ground.

Jim looked down.

It was a knife.

A knife that was covered in green blood.

“Spock?” he said, flatly, his brain going blank in shock. He looked over, and Spock was in a similar state, looking down at his torso and holding his hand against a slowly growing pool of blood. There was commotion around them, but it all faded into the background--their guards repelling the crowd and pulling their phones out, probably calling an ambulance. That’s what Jim would do. Did government officials have special ambulances?

“They seem to have missed any particularly vital organs,” Spock said, his voice surprisingly calm.

“Particularly?” Jim repeated. His voice didn’t sound like it belonged to him, a little too strained and a little too high pitched.

“I am going into a trance now. Please catch me.”

With that brief warning, Spock passed out, and Jim scrambled to catch him, having some alarming flashbacks to their first meeting. “Spock?” he said, lowering him down onto the ground. “You’re gonna be okay, right?”

He knew there wasn’t much point in asking, but he couldn’t just sit there holding a bleeding body and not do something. He was vaguely aware of one of the guards saying something to him, and he responded, “He’s okay. I mean, he’s...he said he was going in a trance, he’s done this before. Uh, I think.” Right. When he’d pulled Spock out of that spacecraft, he’d recovered from a broken leg in a matter of days. If the knife hadn’t punctured any particularly vital organs, he should be fine, right?

Right?

***

They did end up in an ambulance, and Spock was taken in for emergency surgery, except it was more like doing whatever they could to keep him stable before they could get one of the other aliens in there to explain what the hell was up with their anatomy. In the end, it turned out drastic measures weren’t necessary, at least according to their few local experts. One of them agreed to provide blood for a transfusion, and Spock ended up in a hospital bed, hooked up to all their monitors, and for all accounts seeming like he was sleeping peacefully.

Jim sat next to the bed, staring at Spock, the shock finally wearing off after the long hours and leaving behind a healthy dose of fear. The assailant had confessed everything after the incident and wasn’t shy about explaining his motivations. Apparently the aliens were pointed green devils that Satan had sent to trick humanity into--something. So far their only activities had been going around talking to people, but then again, the contents of those conversations weren’t always public. They could have been raising Satan’s army, for all anyone knew, and the media wasn’t helping clear any of that up.

Spock was in danger. All of them were, but Spock especially, because Jim kept being stupid and sneaking him out and not telling the guards where they were going and--he was such an idiot. There was a reason those securities were in place, but of course, he just thought they were another objective to get around so they could get out and have fun.

He sighed, and reached out, putting his hand on Spock’s arm. It was cold, and once again Jim’s only reminder that Spock was still alive was the heart monitor beeping steadily at his side.

He rubbed at Spock’s arm, trying to warm it up if even just a little.

The door to the room opened, and he looked up, watching one of the aliens walk in, their footsteps light against the tile floor. They walked over and placed their fingers on Spock’s temple, closing their eyes and standing there silently for a stretching moment.

Jim sat back, taking his hands off Spock. He felt like he wasn’t supposed to be touching Spock, somehow, even though Spock himself hadn’t protested since he’d returned to Earth.

The other one straightened up, taking their hand off Spock, and then finally looked at Jim, their gaze pointed.

“Spock is recovering swiftly,” they said. “There is no need for you to stay here.”

“Well, I want to be here when he wakes up,” Jim said, frowning. He wasn’t really in the mood for cultural sensitivity, especially when it came to offering a half-dead friend some basic human comfort. Or...whatever the galactic equivalent of human comfort was.

They stared at him for a long moment, unblinking, before finally turning around and walking out the door, probably to go tattle on Jim to all of their friends.

He put his hand back on Spock’s. He could give Jim a long lecture on the merits of cultural exchange when he woke up, but right now, Jim just needed to be close to him.

***

He wasn’t there the entire time Spock was in the hospital, because stab wound or not, eight hours was just about his limit of sitting in a quiet room and staring at a television screen. But even when he left, he wasn’t allowed to do much more than that--he was on heavy security lockdown after the incident, and was escorted under close watch between the hospital and his hotel room, which, at the very least, had a slightly bigger television screen.

He at least could get the guards to bring him books, and he could talk to his friends on his government-security approved laptop, as long as he didn’t reveal any information about where they were, or what happened, or...anything, really, so he was left trying to come up with something to talk about that wasn’t their world tour, which he had already exhausted the subject of with how often he was sitting alone in a hotel room with no one but Skype to keep him company.

He must have sounded really destitute, because Bones wouldn’t even make fun of him when they were messaging back and forth, instead offering awkward reassurances that he didn’t know how to phrase because this just wasn’t how they talked to each other, but what else were you supposed to do when something like this happened?

He slowly migrated back to the hospital room over the course of the next couple of days, bringing his books and taking naps in the chairs and waking up with horrid neck cramps but whatever. He could hardly sleep in the hotel because he was worried something would happen to Spock, despite the guards that were posted outside of the door 24/7 and the improbability of someone climbing up a third-floor window to try and assassinate him.

Except someone had already tried to assassinate him, so maybe that wasn’t quite so improbable anymore.

A week or so into this routine, he was woken up from one of his fitful chair naps by an incessant beeping, which was difficult to identify in his half-conscious state. He sat up, blinking and trying to get his eyes to focus in the harsh hospital light.

“Spock?” he grumbled, squinting at him. It didn’t look like anything had changed over there, but that beeping was definitely the sound of the heart monitor going nuts. Or, not exactly nuts, since it was a steady rhythm, but it was way faster than any heart should ever go.

A human heart, at least.

He got up when a nurse entered the room, looking flustered. They looked at the heart monitor, and then at Spock, and then at Jim.

He shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he said.

“Oh, good,” went the nurse, and then exited the room in the hurry, no doubt going to find someone who had a little bit more expertise in the extraterrestrial area of medical science.

Jim went over to Spock, who hadn't moved. He reached over and tried to check Spock’s pulse, but couldn’t find anything, and resorted to putting a hand on his face and saying, “Spock? Hey, Spock, are you in there?”

His eyes opened.

Jim blinked.

“Spock?” he said.

“Jim,” responded Spock.

Jim didn’t know what he was feeling at that point--his brain seemed to be trying to reconcile panic with overwhelming relief. “Spock,” he said, again. “You’re okay. I--are you okay? How are you feeling?”

“...sore,” answered Spock. He tilted his head into Jim’s hand the slightest amount. “But I do believe I have recovered.”

Jim sighed, relief finally winning out. “Good,” he said. “Good. So...that’s supposed to be doing that?”

He pointed at the heart monitor, which was still steadily beeping at its rapid pace.

Spock turned and stared at it, and then slowly lifted a hand to feel at his chest, then his side, noting the wires attached to him. “Is it monitoring my cardiac activity?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Then, yes. It is functioning appropriately.”

“Oh,” went Jim, and then the nurse came back, a few other people following behind them. Jim reflexively pulled his hand back from Spock, and was quickly shooed away so the medical professionals could fuss over their patient. Jim sat down across the room as Spock tolerated this, though he spent most of the time reassuring them that yes, the readings the instruments were picking up were perfectly healthy, and if they would please refrain from touching him as much as possible. It took them a while to be convinced of this, but in the end, Spock was up and about, so there wasn’t a whole lot they could argue. They finally filtered out, one of them staying behind to explain how they’d still have to run a few tests before feeling comfortable releasing him from the hospital, and Spock nodded, consenting to this--though Jim had a feeling he was only doing so in order to placate them.

When they were finally all gone, Jim returned to Spock’s bedside, pulling a chair over. They just stared at each other for a long while, Jim glad to see Spock looking back, before he tentatively reached over and hovered a hand over Spock’s, asking, “Can I...?”

Spock reached up and took his hand. Jim probably would have found a way to be flustered if he wasn’t so distracted by how ice-cold Spock was.

“Jesus,” he exclaimed, quickly reaching up with his other hand to envelop Spock’s in his, “You’re freezing. Do you need another blanket? I could go pester someone until they got you one.”

“That is unnecessary. I will begin to generate more heat soon,” Spock reassured him.

“I could crawl under there with you until then. I’ve been told I’m pretty hot.” Jim laughed at his own joke, mostly because that was the worst line he had ever used, so he was pretty sure he was losing it at this point. Then Spock just raised that one eyebrow at him, and that set him off even more, until his eyes were watering and he brought a hand up to cover his face, trying to catch his breath. It wasn’t even that funny, but he was so relieved to have everything over, and still conflicted about a lot of Spock things, but here he was, holding his hand after he woke up from a stabbing-induced coma, so they were practically married now, right?

Spock watched this all with what Jim guessed was mostly curiosity, one part amusement.

“Sorry,” Jim said, once he’d finally calmed down, other than the grin on his face. “That was a bad joke.”

“I will take your word for it,” Spock said, slowly. He moved the hand that Jim was holding, flexing his fingers, and Jim let go of him a little in order to let him do it.

“Do you want me to stop?” he asked.

Spock’s answer was an almost immediate “No.” He settled his hand back down, wrapping it around Jim’s. “It...is nice to warm up.”

“Yeah,” said Jim. All of the fear began to slowly fade away, and then the relief, until he was left with an underlying current of sadness that had been creeping up on him the past few weeks. Because if he was honest with himself, he’d been sneaking in doing couple things with Spock, because he could, and who would know, and if Spock didn’t mind then that was all that mattered, but now he really really wanted Spock to know why he was holding his hand right now, and had no idea how to even begin explaining it. And generally he wasn’t a whole big believer in the “romantic feelings ruin friendships” thing, a lot of his friends were really hot and he was at peace with that, but he wasn’t sure how to handle that when aliens were involved. Spock might legitimately never want to talk to him again, and he wasn’t sure if he could live with that.

“Jim,” said Spock.

He jumped a little, and then tried to pretend he hadn’t. “Uh--yeah?”

“There is something about our species I feel I should inform you of.”

“Oh,” went Jim, feeling a little thrown off. At least it would distract him from wanting to crawl in a hole and die instead of make difficult romantic decisions. “Okay, what is it?”

“We have discussed before what you have called ‘telepathy.’ I feel it is necessary to inform you that this sense is greatly magnified by being in physical contact with another being.”

Jim swallowed, thickly, his face going cold. “Oh,” he said, again. Time to go back to considering that hole to die in. “So you, uh...you can tell what I’m thinking?”

“Not in its entirety.”

“I’m gonna need a more specific answer than that.”

Spock stared at him for a moment. “I...can see your emotions, in a way,” he explained, haltingly. “But I cannot identify all of them, nor figure out the reason for many of them. However, you seem frightened by something that involves me. Is that correct?”

“Sort of,” said Jim. “I mean, I’m not scared of you. I guess. I’m a little scared for you after the whole stabbing thing, but this is more about. Uh...” he shifted his grip on Spock’s hand, face finally heating up. “I’m...trying to figure some stuff out. That’s all.”

Spock considered this, face as blank as ever. “Uncertainty can be frightening,” he stated. “May I be of any assistance?”

“Not yet,” said Jim. “But I’ll let you know.”

***

Spock was released the next day after the doctors tried and failed to find any reason to keep him there. The wound had nearly healed up, the other aliens said that Spock had been fine to leave from the moment he woke up, and their local secret service was putting heavy pressure on the hospital to let them take Spock to a more secure facility, so he was finally released under the caveat that he be under careful watch in case his condition worsened.

Jim wasn’t there when he was officially released, though, because he had already been smuggled off to a safe house in the wilds of Virginia. Apparently the United States government took threats to the safety of extraterrestrials very seriously. Who knew?

Spock showed up soon enough, though, and they were both informed that they were being kept on the premises for an indeterminate amount of time, in order to assure their safety as an investigation was launched into the source of the assassination attempt.

Jim pointed out that the source was a single dude who they already had in custody, and was met with the predictable answer of silence before the suit person continued their debriefing, or whatever it was.

Once they were sufficiently debriefed and were left alone on the couch, Jim laid back, crossing his legs over Spock’s lap. “Just like old times, huh, Spock?” he said towards the ceiling. “Just you, me, an empty house, and fuckall to do.” He didn’t have to look up to know what look Spock was giving him.

Jim thought about the correlation between bored young adults and pregnancy rates, and then tried not to think about that.

Instead, he sat up, and grinned even though he didn’t really feel like grinning. “I’m going to go harass someone until they go buy us some decent groceries. Want anything?”

Chapter Text

Jim took to messing with the security protocols on his government-issued laptop as a not-quite-last resort at relieving his boredom. As in, a couple days in he decided it would be fun, so him and Spock sat around in his bedroom tinkering with it--Jim teaching him the basic ideas of how things worked, and Spock coming up with some truly ingenious ideas of how to put them to use. After a day or so of working with the motivation of having absolutely nothing else to do, they got it to where Jim could install Skype and message everyone. This resulted in Bones insisting on doing a video call after his class to make sure everything was actually okay.

To Jim’s absolute lack of surprise, all of his other friends somehow got the memo and insisted on jumping in on the call, too, so when he finally got the video to connect, there were five people on the other end, all gathered around Bones’ desk chair, where he was looking mildly irritated--which was almost a smile, on him.

Spock observed the screen curiously, and Jim shifted closer to him on the bed so that they were both framed better. Everyone on the other end was pretty pointedly staring at Spock.

“Hey guys,” Jim greeted. “How’re finals going?”

They all looked back at him, and Bones rolled his eyes. “We’re not talking about finals, Jim. Tell us what’s going on.”

“Hey, I’m just trying to be polite.” He held out a hand in the direction of Spock, and said, “Spock, these are my friends from university.” He pointed out each on them on the screen as he listed off their names, “Uhura, Sulu, Chekov, Scotty, and my roommate Bones. He’s kind of a mother hen, which means he’s grumpy all the time and treats us like his kids.”

Spock nodded, frowning slightly. Whatever--he’d find out soon enough.

“Everyone, this is Spock.”

Most of them waved, with a chorus of “Hi, Spock.” Spock imitated their wave, which Jim found kind of adorable.

“It is good to meet you,” Spock responded, to everyone’s readily apparent delight. Barring Bones, of course, whose delight was never apparent, as he had lost the ability to feel happiness when he was five years old.

“Alright, pick your jaw off the floor,” Jim told them. “So, here’s what’s happened so far...”

***

From what little he could gather, everyone got along with Spock pretty well. Jim gave them a brief summary of events, which turned out to be a lot easier than he thought since much of it could be summed up with “and then we went to a bunch of countries and I sat in a hotel while Spock and his friends went to make peace with foreign governments,” and then everyone, predictably, started asking questions, mostly all at once, and mostly to Spock, so he finally got to speak, Bones being the only one who dared interrupt him when his explanations ran a little long.

Unfortunately, their call ended abruptly when Jim’s connection suddenly gave out. They tried for a few minutes to figure out what had gone wrong, but eventually Jim just texted Bones and told him what happened, and promised that he hadn’t been assassinated yet.

Bones didn’t think that was very funny.

***

A few nights later, Jim was lying face-down in a pillow trying to convince himself to sleep--it was difficult, when sleep was the majority of what he did those days--when his door opened, squeaking quietly. He frowned, rolling around to face the noise, and the small spike of fear he felt resided when he recognized a familiar bowl cut.

“Spock?” he said, frowning. “Do you need something?”

“Jim,” Spock responded, as he tended to do. “May I come in?”

“Yeah, go ahead.” He pat the area vaguely next to him. “Make sure to shut the door.”

Spock did as he asked, and then walked over silently, sitting next to Jim on the bed. Jim rolled closer as the bed depressed under his weight.

“I apologize for interrupting your sleep once again.”

“No, it’s cool,” Jim said, rubbing his eyes. “I can’t sleep, anyways. What’s up?”

Spock tilted his head, watching him carefully.

“I have a question I would like to ask of you.”

Jim raised his eyebrows, wondering what kind of question couldn’t wait until the morning. Spock knew he would wander into the kitchen to make food--it’s what he’d done every day so far, and they could have talked about it then.

“Alright. Go ahead.”

“There is...a certain human gesture that I have observed, but I do not yet know the meaning of it. I would be grateful if you would enlighten me.”

“...what gesture?” Jim prodded, wondering why he needed to ask so many leading questions. Spock usually just jumped right into these things.

In the middle of Jim wondering this, Spock leaned down and kissed him.

His heart nearly beat a hole in his chest by the time he realized what was actually going on--right, Spock was just asking him what that meant, he wasn’t actually--uh--well, he was actually kissing him, but not...intentionally, for what it mattered. Jim was still bright red when Spock sat up again. He didn’t even sit all the way up, choosing to continue looming over Jim, which really wasn’t helping any.

“Well, that, uh,” he started, stopping to clear his throat and make his voice less...quivery. “It means...well, it means a whole lot of things to different people, it depends on who you ask about it.”

“I am asking you,” Spock said, and Jim must have been imagining the amused twinkle in his eye--right? “As you are the one who first introduced me to it, I am curious as to what significance it has to you, in particular.”

Jim was putting a whole lot of effort into resisting the urge to hide himself under the covers for all eternity. “Right,” he said. “That. Uh. I was a pretty lonely kid, you know, so I got really easily attached to people, especially if they weren’t completely horrible to me, so...”

Spock’s eyebrows went up the slightest amount, producing a very workable look of disbelief. “Then you do not feel a similar way currently?”

Jim swallowed. His voice came out strained when he spoke. “You’re sorta’ backing me into a corner, here, Spock.”

At this, Spock finally sat up, ceasing his looming over Jim ominously. Jim sat up, too, hoping to level the playing field a little. He wasn’t entirely sure it worked.

“So,” Jim started again, changing the subject as far away from his own feelings as he could muster, given the nature of the question. “It means, well, for one, kissing an attractive person is nice just in itself, it feels good to do it. But if I...really, really want to kiss someone it probably means I...like how they look and who they are, in a pretty particular way. I’m not entirely sure how to explain it, actually...” It was difficult when his usual definition for romantic feelings was ‘I really really want to kiss a person.’

Spock nodded, and then held out his hand towards Jim’s face, first three fingers extended in a familiar gesture.

“May I?” he asked, hand hovering inches away.

Jim stared at it warily. He knew what that meant, by now--Spock was going to dig into his brain and learn all of his deepest, darkest secrets--which at this point, Spock already knew, except for the massive crush Jim had been harboring for the past four years.

Except Spock kind of did know about that, didn’t he. Every time Spock brought up emotional transference it was when Jim was being really, really mushy, and Spock was trying to tell him how obvious he was being because, yeah, that was probably super embarrassing.

He sighed. “Alright,” he said. “Go on.”

Spock pressed his fingers to Jim’s temple, and under his eye, and a connection grew between them, slowly, as if Spock was testing how much he could pry before--no. It was how little. He was trying to find what he needed and not anything more than that.

Jim felt embarrassed about what Spock might find, about what he already knew, and kind of ridiculous for feeling embarrassed, and Spock quietly observed these emotions before softly interjecting the idea that there was nothing to be embarrassed by, and let Jim wrestle with that for a good long while before finally feeling the slightest bit better about it, and sighing.

He looked at Spock, into those deep, brown eyes, and let himself feel adoration, and sadness at the distance between them, the smallest amount weighed under the fear of vulnerability. He hadn’t been this open and this sober with anyone in a long, long time. Maybe ever.

Maybe it was only ever Spock.

And then Spock reached out, physically, with his free hand, and took one of Jim’s, entwining their fingers together and mirroring Jim’s emotions, sending them back amplified and deeper, like they were being felt with every inch of his being--

Every inch of Spock’s being. Spock felt the same way.

Jim’s jaw dropped as a million things rushed through his head--surprise, relief, confusion, and a mixed, insincere, amused betrayal at being tricked into this, as he realized--or Spock informed him?--that he had only done this to experience Jim’s reaction when he realized his feelings were reciprocated.

“You piece of shit,” Jim said, affectionately, marveling at the amusement bubbling up in Spock’s mind that would have been laughter to anyone else, and nothing in the galaxy could have stopped him from leaping forward and kissing Spock at that moment, very, very intentionally.

Spock resisted getting knocked backwards onto the bed, which Jim would have felt disappointed by if he currently had the capacity to feel disappointment. Instead, Spock wrapped his arms around Jim’s waist and reciprocated the kiss to the best of his abilities. He was obviously a newcomer to this sort of thing, but Jim was perfectly fine with that. They had plenty of time together in a secluded government safe house to learn all kinds of things.

Jim finally leaned back, and it was only just then that he realized they were two separate people again, the kiss apparently being too distracting for Spock to keep the connection up.

“Wow,” went Jim.

“Indeed.”

“Why...why didn’t you tell me?”

Spock raised an eyebrow, which was absolutely fascinating to see up this close.

“Why did you not tell me?” he responded.

Jim found that the answer to that was I didn’t know how, which, he supposed, was a perfectly reasonable sentiment for Spock to share, as well.

“Yeah, alright,” said Jim. “So, I have a whole lot of questions.”

“I will answer them, if I can.”

“Alright,” said Jim, again. “Uh. Should I get off your lap?”

“Do you want to?”

“Not really.”

“Then do not.”

“Yeah, sounds good.” He settled in, finding it a little hard to focus on the million things swirling around in his head when Spock was sitting right there, looking wonderful and not at all opposed to Jim pressing up against him and feeling firsthand all that foreign musculature. But, anyways.

“So,” went Jim, simply falling back on the easiest question in the box, “What...are we, now?”

Spock tilted his head, arms finding a more comfortable position around Jim’s waist. “I am not sure what you mean.”

“I mean...to each other. We were strangers when we first met, right, and then we...kind of became friends, and now we’re...well, I’m in your lap.”

“Is that significant?”

“It can be.”

Spock frowned, and Jim sighed. “I don’t really know how to explain this, either,” he said. “I guess...this isn’t casual for you, is it? How long do you want to keep me around?”

“I believe I want something that cannot be realistically expected.”

“That’s okay,” Jim said, smile tugging at his face. “I do that a lot. You can tell me.”

Spock glanced away for a moment, his face flushing darker. “If it were possible, I would like for you to stay with me forever. But as it is not, I will be happy for each day.”

Jim fought back the instinctive bristle he felt at the idea of “forever.” Forever was scary, even with Spock.

But day by day. That he could do.

“Alright,” he said, taking Spock’s face in his hands and kissing him, briefly. “I’m happy, too.”

***

He woke up that morning to Spock sitting in his bed, leaning on the headboard and flipping through one of the books he must have picked up off the shelf. Jim was struck with the urge to wiggle over and wrap his arm around Spock’s waist, and then realized that he totally could, so he did just that, Spock looking away from his book to observe Jim’s sleepy embrace, finding a place to rest his head on Spock’s thigh.

“Hi,” said Jim, smiling.

“Good morning,” responded Spock, and Jim went ahead and interpreted the tone of his voice as affectionate.

He searched out the hem of Spock’s shirt and slid his fingers up his back, tracing the base of his spine, before frowning, and removing his hand.

“You’re gonna have to tell me what you like and don’t like,” he said. But, that was true for any relationship, and he felt like this warranted a little bit more of a disclaimer. “I mean, I’ve never exactly dated an alien before, so I might do a lot of stuff acting like you’re human and you might decide you’re not okay with that. So just tell me, alright? I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

“I am thankful for your concern,” Spock said. “I extend the same assurance to you.”

Jim rolled over onto his back to better look at Spock, who looked down at him, expression unreadable.

“I enjoyed the sensation of your hand at my back,” he said, eventually. “You may continue, if you wish.”

Jim grinned, a little lopsidedly, and found the hem of Spock’s shirt again, more easily pressing his palm against Spock’s back at this angle, taking in the sensation of his cool, dry skin.

“See,” he said, mostly to himself. “We’re off to a great start.”

***

The next day was wonderful, the day after that bearably boring, then the one after that, Jim started getting antsy again. He was unbelievably happy to have Spock, but no amount of floating around in a honeymoon phase haze could keep him from being dead bored with being locked up in a house all day. And he kept thinking about how great it would be for Spock to finally meet all of his friends, and being able to show Spock around his university, and that he actually had a life now, instead of spending all of his time hiding in his bedroom and being terrified of his stepdad.

He was laying on one of the floors with a fancy rug as he thought about this, staring up at the ceiling. Spock came into his view and looked down at him, somewhat confused about his placement on the floor.

“Hey, Spock,” he greeted, reaching out and patting his knee. “We need to get out of here before I go insane.”

“That would indeed be unfortunate,” Spock agreed. “Do you have a plan to aid in our escape?”

“I dunno,” Jim said. “I might.”

***

It took him a solid week to convince the security people to let the two of them go outside. That is, the people watching over them were probably tired of his whining after a couple of days, but they had to be tired enough to convince their higher ups that it was necessary, which meant Jim had to be really, really annoying. Luckily, that was his specialty, and after a long, tedious battle, they got permission to go to the closest grocery store and pick out food instead of sending someone else to do it.

That, of course, suited them perfectly fine, and they made sure to bundle up enough that they would be unrecognizable unless someone put them under close inspection. That wasn’t hard for Spock, since it had only gotten colder outside, so he was more than happy to have the majority of himself covered in multiple layers of clothing.

Their two appointed bodyguards made an attempt at being incognito as well, ditching their suits for the time being. That also meant that they wouldn’t be keeping an especially close eye on the two of them, which also suited Jim perfectly fine.

He spent the entire ride to the store telling Spock about how they should pick up some movies if there were any there, because he had hundreds of years of pop culture to get caught up on. It wasn’t even entirely a lie. Sure, it was a good cover to make their guards think they had plans for when they got back to the safe house--as if that was the plan, in the first place, but one of the first things Jim was going to do when they got some time to themselves was explain to him the phenomenon of Harry Potter. It was a cultural artifact, it was important.

He picked up a basket when they got there, and they went slowly through the first two aisles, closely examining the food offerings which were pretty pithy, actually, now that Jim had spent so much time in other countries.

“Did you ever figure out what it was about certain food here that you couldn’t stand?” Jim asked Spock as they were browsing through varieties of packaged cheese. He took comfort in standing just a little bit closer than casual acquaintances would which, for Spock, was practically like hanging off his arm.

“Yes,” he said. “My species cannot digest sucrose, and therefore find its taste repulsive.”

“Jeez, that sucks,” Jim said, wrinkling his nose. “Everything has sugar in it, here.”

“I have not found it to be a great obstacle.”

They rounded the corner of the aisle to go into the next one, and Jim counted the seconds before their guards appeared in view. It was just about four. Plenty of time to make a break for it.

They went up that aisle, slowly, dragging it out as long as they could, and then once they were near the front of the store again, Jim made a show of looking up at the signs denoting the aisles, walking by a few and looking down them. He found what he was looking for, and then backtracked to the previous aisle, pausing at the head of it to give the guards time to catch up.

He tried his best to prolong his browsing here, as well, though the suspense was eating away at him. Spock’s natural calm helped a lot, and he tried to let that mellow him out as they inched their way slowly down the aisle.

Finally, they were at the end, and Jim looked past the aisle, and then grabbed Spock’s arm, saying, “Spock, check this out.”

The second they were out of view, they bolted towards the employees-only door, slipping past a startled worker.

Jim paused for a second to drop their empty basket and glance around the room. He’d worked at a place like this, he knew the general layout of the place, so he ran towards where he thought was most likely to be an exit, Spock following quietly afterwards. His speculation was rewarded, and they burst out into the cold winter air. Jim looked right, then left, and, with relief, spotted the old, beat-up blue minivan he’d come to know and love. As they ran toward it, the side door slid open, and Jim ushered Spock in to the empty floor where a back seat would be before crawling in himself, and saying, “We’re in, go, go, go--!”

“I heard you the first time,” came Bones’ disgruntled voice from the driver’s seat as the van pulled out at, admittedly, a fast speed for a minivan.

Jim laughed breathlessly, and pat Spock’s back, saying, “Holy shit, I think we did it.”

He then turned to the three pairs of eyes staring at them from the seat in front of them. Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov in the middle.

“Hey, guys,” he said. “You all came? Is Scotty here?”

“Present and accounted for!” he said from the front seat, sticking his hand out.

Jim grinned. “God, am I glad to see you all. I was about to go nuts in that safe house.” Then, turning to Spock, “You remember everyone, right?”

“Yes,” he said. “This is Uhura, Chekov, and Sulu, and I presume it is Bones that is driving us.”

“Yep,” said Jim.

“Good to finally meet you,” Sulu said.

“Yeah, we’ve heard a whole lot about you,” added Uhura, and Jim just grinned.

“See, Spock,” he said, throwing an arm around his shoulders, “Her saying that implies that I never stopped talking about you because I thought you were cute and wanted to kiss you, which I would have been mortified by her saying if you understood human implications, and didn’t already know.”

“I see,” said Spock. “It is fortunate, then, that we have reached an understanding.”

“Very fortunate.” Jim pressed a kiss to the side of his face and delighted in the slight green tint that spread across it.

Chekov’s eyes went wide. “You told him?”

“Yep, and turns out he felt pretty much the same way. So congratulations, you now have three dads.”

“Well...four.”

“What? Who’s the fourth?”

“My actual father.”

“Eh,” went Jim, waving a hand in dismissal, and then met Spock’s confused look. “It’s a joke. He’s way younger than all of us so I started calling him my kid, which resulted in Bones being the presumed other parent because everyone pretends like we’re married. But now that I’m actually dating someone, you’re automatically one of the parents.”

Spock did not look any more comforted by this explanation. If anything, he was even more confused now.

“Hey, Bones,” Jim called up to the front seat.

“I’m driving.”

“This is just like E.T., except we’re in a minivan!”

“Shut up, Jim!”

He just laughed, and then rested his head on Spock’s shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “He loves me.”

***

Once they’d gotten a few hours out from the safe house, they had a short discussion about where the least likely place for fugitives from the world government to have lunch would be, and finally decided that there were eyes everywhere and they might as well lean into the whole “road trip” thing and stop at a Waffle House.

The seven of them piled into two booths at the edge of the restaurant and they all almost tangibly attempted not to discuss the green, pointy-eared elephant in the room as Jim worked with him to figure out what the best meal for a vegetarian who didn’t eat sugar would be at a Waffle House, and thankfully the conversation drifted into most of them noting that they’d never been to this part of the country before and discussing how slightly terrifying it was.

Once they had finally gotten their food and were pretty sure they were free from at least closely prying ears, their attentions slowly shifted to Jim.

“So, what’s the plan?” Scotty asked him.

“Well,” went Jim, putting down his utensils. “It’s pretty funny that you think I have one.”

Bones glared at him, and Jim laughed. “What?” he said. “We get back home, bunker down, and see what happens then. I can’t predict...y’know...them.” He resorted to being overly vague in order to not attract attention for talking about being a runaway from whatever the hell kind of operation they had been a part of. “It’s not like we’re detainees, I’m sure it won’t be that big a deal.”

Except that the government could decide how big of a deal it was completely independently of any reason, but Jim tried not to think about that too hard.

“So this one’ll be staying with us?” Bones said, nodding his head towards Spock.

“Yep,” said Jim. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep him occupied.” He winked, and Bones rolled his eyes.

“I can’t believe you,” he muttered into his coffee.

“Really? Because I feel like you should expect this kind of thing by now.”

“Y’know what, yeah.” Bones put the mug down on the table. “This is completely unsurprising, and that’s the sad part.”

“That’s better.”

***

They had forty hours of road ahead of them and only four people with a driver’s license who could afford getting pulled over by the police--Jim not included in that count because then the government had a pretty solid lead on him, Chekov not included because he couldn’t drive, and Spock not included for obvious reasons. Since they wanted to avoid civilization as much as possible, they decided to take the trip as straight as possible, with people rotating out who got to drive and who got to nap in the passenger seat.

Jim wasn’t usually a huge fan of long car rides, what with the whole there being nothing to do and being stuck in an enclosed space aspect of them, but between the seven of them, there was plenty to talk about--Spock’s stories, despite his somewhat monotone inflection, were particularly captivating, since he got to tell them about a planet far, far away.

And there was something incredibly satisfying about laying in Spock’s arms, the car dark and quiet with everyone asleep, watching the stars from the back window.

“Hey,” he whispered, turning to look at Spock, whose eyes gleamed back at him in the low light. “You’re going back some day, aren’t you?”

Spock nodded, and Jim’s heart felt sore. He didn’t know if he could let go of Spock now that he had him, especially with no promise he would ever be back.

“Do you have interest in returning with me?”

Jim gaped at him. “Back to your home planet?”

“Yes. It would be beneficial to our cultural exchange to have members of your species visit our planet, as well.”

“I...”

He didn’t know if he would ever forgive himself if he said no. A chance to travel into outer space and explore an alien civilization--maybe the first human to ever do that. But he still had people here he couldn’t leave behind. The five people who agreed to come kidnap him from government custody, for one. He couldn’t ditch them after all they’d been through.

“I’ll...think about it,” he decided. There was no point in making any more hasty decisions than they already had so far, and Spock’s eyes reflecting the starlight were a little bit hypnotizing. He didn’t think he was in any state to answer.

Spock muttered something in his native language, and then took Jim’s hand, brushing their fingers together.

It would be hard to give this up.

Chapter Text

Early the next morning, Jim started spotting “Iowa City” signs on the side of the highway, and argued for the benefits of stopping to show Spock around Riverside again. Bones steadfastly refused, but it was his job to argue against anything Jim said, so he didn’t take it to heart. Sure, it was the one place everyone would be expecting him to go when he ran off, but he wouldn’t be going to his house or anything, and a sighting or two in the town might throw them off the scent once they started off towards San Francisco again.

Eventually, the claustrophobia of sitting in a car for more than ten hours straight won out, and everyone agreed that a short stroll around Riverside wouldn’t hurt anything as long as Jim and Spock kept a low profile.

“Hey, don’t worry, I’m the best at keeping a low profile,” Jim said as they took the turn off the interstate to head for the state highway. Unfortunately, the backseat rotation at the time was Bones, Uhura, and Sulu, which means he got the most disbelieving look imaginable from all three of them.

“Lay back down, Jim,” Bones said, pushing on the top of his head. “You’re gonna get us pulled over.”

Jim made a face at him but laid down anyways, snuggling up to Spock, who looked a little concerned.

“...what?” said Jim. “Don’t tell me you actually agree with them.”

“I admit to having some doubts about the merits of this plan. I am...recognizable.”

“Don’t worry, people don’t pay attention near as much as they should.” He ran a hand through Spock’s hair, pushing it up off his forehead. “...Hey, is there a reason you wear your hair like this?”

***

Bundling everyone’s resources together, they managed to come up with some hair gel, earmuffs, and thick-rimmed glasses, and these three things combined made Spock nigh unrecognizable. There was an itching sense of familiarity in the look, but after a few minutes everyone gave up trying to place it, and Jim went back to bundling Spock up in preparation to venture out into the cold and sparse lands of Riverside.

Except it wasn’t sparse. The closer they got to the city, the more it became obvious that something was...well, not wrong, but definitely off. There were more cars leading into Riverside than Jim ever remembered seeing--it wasn’t a town people passed through on their way to other places, so that meant most of them were actually heading for the city. When they crossed the border into the place--because it was the kind of city you were really either in or out of--and started seeing buildings, there were alien stickers and signs on and in front of stores. Most of them were the little-green-man variety, but a few attempted at least a passing resemblance to their actual visitors. Riverside wasn’t exactly known for its artistic community, though, so Jim kind of wished they’d left well enough alone.

“Oh, this is just weird,” Sulu muttered as they passed what anyone would have assumed was someone preaching on the streets, except for his tin-foil hat with antennae sticking out of it. He’d even gathered a small crowd.

They pulled over into a lot at the back of a building once they realized that traffic seemed to be getting worse as they went. Traffic, in Riverside. It was like Jim had entered a parallel dimension.

They all piled out of the car, resolution to not travel in a pack broken now that they were all thoroughly confused as to where all these cars thought they were going. There were weirder things happening than a group of college kids with an oddly green friend.

Jim took Spock’s hand, after checking in to make sure he didn’t mind, and they followed the stream of cars, heading towards what passed for a city hall in that kind of place, noting discarded signs on the edge of some buildings, messages ranging from “the end is near” to “aliens welcome!” to one, perhaps most bizarre, that said, “E.T., need a used car?” and listed the phone number of what Jim could only assume was a car lot.

“Hey, Spock, need a used car?” Sulu goaded, beating Jim to the punch. Spock just looked confused, and Jim gave him a comforting pat on the shoulder.

“Don’t worry, we’re just about as confused as you are.” He wished he could say that humans didn’t usually act like this, but he didn’t entirely know if that was true. Historically, humans did some pretty weird shit, though he liked to think that was simply an unavoidable consequence of having so many sentient creatures on one planet. Statistically, at least some of them would get up to some pretty strange things.

When they got to the city center, or as close as they were going to get, there was a crowd of a few hundred people waiting for them, which was a pretty significant gathering in such a dingy town. Some people’s cars were parked right in the middle of it and looked like they were staying for a while, some people looked just as confused as they were, but most were gathered around listening to speakers standing up on boxes or stools or whatever, waving their arms and trying to talk over everyone else, each trying to preach their own message of what aliens visiting humanity really meant. One, insisting there was a cosmic reason they first visited Riverside, in particular, despite the fully truthful official story that Spock had crash-landed there on accident.

Then again, Jim probably wouldn’t trust the government’s version of things, either, if he weren’t caught up in the middle of it all. There was probably a whole lot they weren’t sharing with the public about...well, Spock and Jim escaping, for one.

“What is the purpose of this gathering?” Spock asked him, looking around curiously.

“Hell if I know,” said Jim. “Everyone’s just trying to make sense of this, I guess. Y’know, a lot of people didn’t think there was intelligent life in the galaxy other than us before now, so your visit is kind of shaking up their worldview.”

Spock nodded, examining the crowd--and then a camera flashed in their faces. Jim winced, and tried to look for the source of the light while his eyes cleared. There was someone pointing one of those fancy long-lensed paparazzi cameras at them, and half their group hurriedly stepped between Spock and the lens.

The photographer was very excited by their find.

“It’s the alien!” they yelled. “It’s the alien! It’s here, it’s here!”

Thankfully, most of the crowd was distracted by all the other people screaming about aliens, but the ones in the immediate vicinity did look over, and Jim tried his best not to panic, knowing how fast news could spread through a crowd.

But then Scotty was laughing, loud and boisterous right next to them. “See?” he said, clapping a hand onto Spock’s back, who visibly stiffened at the contact. “I told you that was the right shade.” Then, to the photographer, “He was arguing all night about how ‘no, they’re more yellow than that,’ but I’d say he looks pretty convincing.”

Spock’s confused frown passed well enough for irritation, especially with the unwanted hand on his shoulder.

The photographer did not seem entirely convinced, at all, but they did at least pause long enough to think about it for the group to gather themselves up and meander off to another area, feigning casualness with great vigor. They meandered their way away from the crowd and out of sight of most of it, and at that point very purposely headed back to the car.

Jim felt Bones thinking up a retort once they were most likely back to safety, and he waved a hand in front of him, stopping it before it even started. “I know, I know,” he said. “How was I supposed to know this place was going to turn into the new Roswell over night?”

“They did announce your story all over national news,” Uhura reminded him. “That might have given you a hint.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Jim said, glad to finally see the minivan again. “None of you stopped me, did you?”

***

The next time they stopped at a gas station for snacks and...well, gas, with Jim and Spock not allowed to leave the back seat, as usual, Bones came back with one of the checkout-line magazines and pelted Jim with it, hitting him right in the eye.

“Ow, fuck,” Jim cursed, picking up the magazine and rubbing at his eye. “What was that for?”

“You made the front page,” Bones explained, sitting in the driver’s seat and instructing everyone to buckle up. Jim actually looked at the magazine, and saw a low-res picture of him and Spock holding hands on the cover, with the caption “The rumors are true!”

Jim whistled lowly, flipping to the actual article in the magazine, not actually sure if they’d written anything. He didn’t usually read this kind of thing.

“Well, that’s one way to come out to my parents, I guess,” he said, skimming the article. As usual, there was no solid evidence that the figures pictured were actually him and Spock, and it was filled with the usual garbage about space marriages and kidnapping him and inseminating him with alien eggs or whatever, so it wasn’t a whole lot different from the usual bullshit they published.

“Well, on the bright side, no one’s going to believe that’s a real picture of us now,” he said, handing the magazine off to the row in front of him. Anyone but Spock. He didn’t need to know about this particular side of humanity.

***

They inched ever closer to the west coast as the Sun went down, the days short in the cold winter month. The floor Spock and Jim were occupying was slowly turning into a nest of their discarded winter clothes and the emergency blanket and pillows that Bones kept in his car, because he was the definition of disaster preparedness, whether that disaster be global or on a more personal scale. It was getting pretty cozy.

The car was quiet as a storm gathered in the distance, but it was the attentive quiet of people who were thinking, not sleeping. Chekov was sitting in the middle seat and staring out the front window, and had barely moved for the past half hour.

He slowly turned around to look over the seat. Jim looked at him, but he seemed to be staring steadfastly at Spock.

“Eh...Mr. Spock,” he said, timidly, and the entire car’s focus seemed to turn to him. “Can I ask you a question?”

Spock sat up from his position on the floor. “Yes,” he said.

Chekov nodded, and glanced around for a moment while he found the words he needed. “It’s just...I’ve been studying aerospace engineering, and astrophysics, too, for quite a while now, and it seems to me that your visit here is going to change those fields very much. So I wonder if you are planning to let us figure it out on our own or...give us a nudge in the correct direction, somehow. Because it seems to me that if you do, much of my work will have been useless.”

Spock stared at him, head tilting slightly.

“We have not yet considered that question,” he said. “We have never made contact with a planet whose technology is so...” He stopped, and seemed to reconsider his words, which Jim found immensely amusing. “Whose technology had not yet progressed to the point of space-warping capability. It may be beneficial to your species to introduce certain concepts into your scientific models and provide an explanation of their mechanics. However, it is possible that such an explanation would be detrimental to our galaxy. Every planet we have visited has so vastly disparate methods of discovery that their technology is wholly unique, and I believe your planet is no exception to this. To prevent your discoveries from taking place on their own...I do not know if we are willing to make that sacrifice.”

Chekov laid his head on the back of the seat, and gave Spock’s words careful consideration.

“Yes,” he said, eventually. “Yes, I think I like that.”

***

They finally rolled back onto campus during the dead hours of the morning, and Jim was never happier to see his shitty university apartment than in that very moment. They all piled out of the van, gathering their things (and the trash, to Bones’ repeated insistence) and pairing up to return back to their various places of residency, bleary-eyed and no doubt all glad to be able to sleep in their own beds after their round trip. Jim lead Spock after Bones and they all returned to their apartment, Bones giving him a very pointed I’m planning on getting sleep tonight, and if I don’t, I will kill you look before shutting his door.

Jim yawned, widely, before looking at Spock.

“So,” he said. “Do you want to sleep with me, or on the couch?”

Spock looked at the couch, and then back at him. “Which one would you prefer?”

“With me,” Jim answered, immediately, leaving off the I’ve gotten used to sleeping with you and now that I know what that’s like I never want to have to go without that ever again, because he wasn’t that tired. Yet.

“That is fortunate.”

Jim grinned, and led him into his room, untouched since the day he left. It was weird, like his life there had been put in stasis. He brushed dust off the top of his desk, and then shook his head to get himself out of his thoughts.

“Do you want something to sleep in? I have a couple of old t-shirts that are really comfortable.”

Spock clasped his hands behind his back, head tilted with that questioning look. “Are the clothes I choose to sleep in significant?”

“Well, no,” Jim said, toeing his shoes off and shedding his layers, dropping his jacket on the floor. “I don’t really care, as long as you’re comfortable.”

“Then I will sleep in this.”

“Alright.”

Jim turned the light off, his room still lit by the streetlamp outside, and crawled into bed, burying his face in his familiar pillows. Fancy hotel beds were vastly overrated. He would take his lumpy pillow any day.

Spock took a moment before joining him, his every move as measured as ever.

Jim grinned, dopily, unable to be embarrassed because he was tired, and it was dark, and that was a surefire recipe to turn him into a huge doofus around people he had a crush on.

“Hey,” he whispered. “Can I give you a kiss goodnight?”

“I would like that,” Spock responded, and then met him halfway for a kiss that turned long and languid, that he kept meaning to draw away from but couldn’t help but return for one more, one more.

He finally managed to pull away, smiling contentedly. “Goodnight, Spock,” he said. “I have so much to show you in the morning.”

“Goodnight, Jim.”

***

Jim woke up to his face against Spock’s back, nuzzling between his shoulder blades. He laid there in a pleasant haze for a few minutes, trying to decide whether or not to go back to sleep.

“Hey, Spock,” he mumbled, testing to see if he was awake, as he almost always was.

“Yes, Jim?”

He smiled, and slid his fingers up the front of Spock’s shirt, tracing the sparse line of hair he found.

“I think I’ve been in love with you since the day we first met.”

Maybe he was imagining it, but he thought he could feel the fondness and amusement coming off Spock, even if he couldn’t see his face.

“That is highly unlikely.”

“Mph,” grumbled Jim into his back. “Spoilsport.”

Spock didn’t respond, and Jim quickly drifted back to sleep.

***

When he woke up again, Spock was gone. The area on the bed next to him was still radiating warmth, however, so he couldn’t have been too far out. Jim reluctantly crawled out into the cold room and shuffled into the outer world, immediately spotting Spock and Bones having what actually seemed to be a civil conversation in the kitchen.

How horrifying.

He walked over, grinning brightly. “What’re you two gossiping about?”

“You,” said Bones. “The government’s put on a manhunt for you and pointy-ears over here. They haven’t quite put out ‘wanted dead or alive’ posters yet, but that might be the next step.”

Jim frowned, rubbing at one of his eyes. “What’re you talking about?”

“I got a call this morning asking if I’d seen any sign of you recently. Of course, I haven’t, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s going to answer that way. I’d keep my head down, if I were you.”

“Ugh,” went Jim. “What, I escaped a safe house in DC only to get holed up here?”

“Hey, I’m not gonna keep you here. What you decide is up to you and Spock. I’m just giving you fair warning.”

“Yeah, okay.” He looked at Spock, grinning. “So, want to go look around campus, or camp out here?”

Luckily, Spock was just about as tired of being holed up as he was.

***

They had three days of almost domestic bliss after that, where Jim delighted in dragging Spock to the grocery store and showing him around campus and buying him some better-fitting human clothes with the money he hadn’t needed to spend being carted around by the world government the past couple of months. They worked their way slowly through Jim’s movie collection and got some pretty high-quality cuddling in until, one day, in the middle of a movie, Spock sat up and pulled something out of his pocket.

Jim paused the movie, watching him curiously. The thing he had was small and oval-ish shaped, and fit in Spock’s hand perfectly.

Spock spoke to it, in that language that Jim couldn’t understand, and the device spoke back.

Jim stared as Spock engaged in what ended up being a very short conversation. A phone call, probably--the voice on the other end sounded pretty familiar, but then again, he wasn’t sure he had enough experience with all the other aliens to tell their voices apart from each other.

Afterwards, Spock set the device down, and looked over at Jim.

“We are planning on returning to our planet soon in order to share our findings,” he explained.

Jim gaped at him. “You had that thing on you the whole time?” he said. “They could have found us!”

Spock tilted his head slightly. “Yes,” he said. “But I do not believe they cared. They are able to perform their task well enough without me.”

“Yeah, but...” he frowned, but decided to let the matter drop in order to move onto more pressing issues. “Well...how soon is ‘soon’?”

“That is up for me to decide,” said Spock. “We will prepare to return as soon as I am ready.”

“Oh,” went Jim. His heart sank as he remembered the choice that had been posed to him. Either stay here with his friends, or stay with Spock. He was enjoying life pretty well pretending like he could have both, in this stasis where he didn’t have to worry about school or work or anything like that, either, and just spend time with the people he loved, but now...

“So...I guess you kind of want to get back, huh,” he said, looking down at the floor.

Spock reached over, and placed a hand at his back. “I will find it difficult to leave you, if that is the choice you make,” he said. “But I cannot stay here much longer.”

“Alright,” said Jim. “Just...give me a couple more days to talk over it with everyone, okay?”

Spock nodded, and leaned over, pressing a kiss to his temple. “Anything you need.”

***

Jim invited everyone over to their cramped apartment for dinner, Bones graciously helping make food after having a long conversation with Spock about his dietary restrictions and trying to figure out what he could make that wouldn’t also kill Jim, as well. They figured out a happy middle ground, though, and soon all of their friends were gathered around the dining table they’d dragged out into the living room and Spock was trying his best to help with the food making, though he was a little perturbed that Jim kept touching things with his hands.

“I washed them, it’s fine,” he insisted, though he couldn’t help but laughing at Spock’s face every time he caught that sour expression.

They set out the food, and everyone took a few bites before Uhura looked up and said, “So? What’s the occasion?”

“Well, I figured making dinner was the only way to get all of you here in one place,” Jim said.

“Yeah, other than getting kidnapped,” Bones grumbled. Jim elbowed him.

“I wanted to talk to you guys about something.” He looked at Spock, and sighed. “Spock’s going home soon,” he said. “And he asked if I wanted to come with him. But…I don’t know. I want to go, and I want to be with Spock, but I don’t think I could leave you guys. So I don’t really…know what to do.”

“Go,” said Scotty, immediately. Jim blinked at him, wide-eyed. “What? We can live a bit without you around, believe it or not. I don’t think it’s worth giving up a chance to explore an alien planet. To be the first human to go to another solar system! I’d go in an instant, if I could.”

Chekov nodded. “Me, too.”

Jim laughed. “It’s good to know you all would ditch me so quickly.”

“Hey,” said Scotty, putting his hands up, “you’re great, but not alien planet great. It’s not like it’s forever.”

“Do you truly want to accompany us?” Spock interjected.

Everyone looked at him, and he tilted his head. “I believe that would ease Jim’s worry. There is plenty of room on our ship for all of you.”

“What?” went Uhura.

Spock nodded. “Any of you are welcome, as well.”

“What are the terms of our stay?” Sulu asked. “I mean, how long would we be there? What would we be doing?”

“There are not any specific terms, as of yet,” Spock said. “You would be there under my invitation. I would arrange housing for you. The main purpose of your stay would be to examine our culture first-hand, and develop an understanding of it. Some will want to speak to you about humans, as well, but your opinion will be one of many, so there is no need to worry about being a single representative. The length of the stay…it may be as long as you wish. We will likely be sending ships here at a regular interval, at least twice in one of your years. If you decide you do not wish to stay, you would be able to return on one of these ships.”

“Well,” went Bones. “Shit. That almost sounds too good to be true. There’s one problem, though. I got a kid here and I don’t feel too good about leaving her in the dark, even if it’s only six months.”

Spock tilted his head, and Jim translated; “He wants to know if there’s a way he’d be able to contact his family.”

“Ah,” went Spock. “We can provide them with communication devices that are capable of reaching our planet, if you wish.”

Bones crossed his arms, and the room fell silent with heavy contemplation.

Jim waved a hand. “Just eat,” he told everyone. “Think about it tonight. If you’re here in the morning I’ll know you want to go.”

***

Jim could barely sleep that night. Spock had decided not to join him, instead staying in the living room and discussing plans and transport with his alien friends, so Jim tossed and turned and tried not to think about everything, to little avail.

If no one else wanted to go, would he still be able to make himself leave? He wanted to, but the group he had here was the closest thing to family he’d ever had. Scratch that—they were his family, and he didn’t know if he could make himself leave them behind.

He managed to sleep eventually, and woke up when the sun was already high in the sky.

He rolled out of bed, groggy, and started shoving things into the suitcase he had tucked away in his closet. What would he need on an alien planet? Clothes, basically. Probably not even those—he was sure he could pick up some of those shimmery robes Spock always wore.

Still, he packed clothes and some pencils and notebooks, because it would be nice to have something familiar, and paused in the middle of zipping up the suitcase when he heard the murmur of conversation coming from the living room.

He walked out, and went down the hallway, and saw…Spock. Bones, Uhura, Sulu, Scotty, Chekov, sitting around with bags of their things.

They all turned towards him, and Sulu grinned.

“Well?” he said. “Ready to go?”