FIC: 'Every Mountain and Hill Shall be Made Low' by Thalia (1/3) (NC-17)
Title: Every Mountain and Hill Shall be Made Low (Or: How Jim Kirk Moved a Mountain Without Even Trying)
Author: Thalia (thalialunacy)
Fandom: Star Trek reboot (w/ a few tiny TOS references)
Pairing: Jim Kirk/Leonard McCoy (theirloveissoallergyprone), secondary Sulu/Chekov & Spock/Uhura
Rating: NC-17, yar.
Summary: Bones is given a surprise gift by a space anomaly. And in German, ‘gift’ means ‘poison’.
Teaser: Oh sweet heavens to Betsy, he has not just been hypothesizing the extent of his captain’s flexibility.
Length: 22K
Warnings: Author’s first Trek fic. It turned out kind of like a Srsness Sandwich-drama smooshed between two thick slices of CRACK. I’m pants at science & medicine, and most likely pants at this canon, as all I’ve got is the reboot and a vague memory of TNG. O AND IT’S A WHOLE PILE O’ DIRTY POP SLASH, NGL. Like, Severe Porn Warning must be heeded. Including some het, but only a little. Also, I used anachronisms flagrantly, and severely abused the word ‘damn’ and all its variants.
Prompt: Really, I didn’t write this. It was all in an EPIC prompt at st_xi_kink. Related Note: If the plot sounds familiar, it’s because the prompt has already been filled once, and wonderfully so. No disrespect is meant towards that effort; my slut of a muse just went a little crazy when shown such a smexy plot. I tried to steer as clear as possible of echoing the first story, beyond the inevitable.
Disclaimer: Obvious lack of ownership is obvious.
Dedication: TO CFINE WILL U PLZ MARRY ME OKTHX For abigail89, my beloved internet!Mom, who doesn’t put up with my bullshit.
---
Day One
“The hell?”
McCoy’s mama raised him not to swear in front of children-and he doesn’t care that Chekov’s nearly twenty, he’s still so damned bright-eyed that it amounts to the same thing-but there the word goes anyway, swooshing through the air of Sick Bay, free as a bird. And there’s not even a life-threatening situation he can use as an excuse for his bad manners, either.
‘Make sure you eat a lot of protein in the next few days,’ is all he’d said. Then he’d gotten a distinct sense that he’d made Chekov homesick with this suggestion, as if the only thing Chekov knows that would fit the bill is some mighty Russian roast beast.
That’s not the weird part, though. He’s used to being able to- well- feel things from people. To be a doctor, to be a damned good doctor like he’s worked hard to become, you have to have a certain amount of ability when it comes to guessing what people are going through. You’ve got to be able to tell when they’re lying about how much pain they’re in, or how they actually got that rash. It’s empathy, he guesses, or something that amounts to it, but he hates that creepy Betazoid bullshit so he just calls it being good at what he does, please and thank you.
Point is, he isn’t unused to being annoyed by little titters of emotions from the people around him, especially people he’s treating.
But usually it doesn’t involve smells.
And McCoy can sure as shit right now smell something suspiciously like stroganoff. Strongly, too, as if it’s right in front of him. As if Chekov’s hiding it behind his back. He has to keep himself from peering over the patient’s shoulder towards the other side of the bed.
“Doctor?”
He shifts his attention back to his patient. “Yeah?”
“Am I going to be… all right?”
“Of course, Ensign,” he says, trying to keep the worst of the gruff out of his voice. He’s like a baby chick, this Chekov. All peepy and fluffy and if you let him get rained on, he’ll get sickly and die on you. McCoy claps him on the back once, not too hard. “You’ll be fine. Just remember what I said.”
And the stroganoff smell comes back so strongly his mouth almost starts to water. It’s just so damn real that his brain automatically slips into down-and-dirty problem-solving mode and tries to deduce a cause. He searches his memory quickly, flipping through his mental catalog of the past few days. But no, he himself hasn’t come into contact with anything he hasn’t touched a thousand times before on this voyage. So it’s got to be something else. “Ensign, I have a question before you go.”
The pale kid goes paler, if that’s possible. “Yes, Doctor?”
“We haven’t taken on any classified passengers in the past few days, have we? I mean, if so, the captain’s broken about fifty rules, but that only makes the occurrence more likely, now, doesn’t it?”
“No, Doctor, I’ve heard of no such things happening.”
“All right.” He chews on the inside of his cheek. “Two questions, then: Did she-the ship-pass through or by any sort of… field, or planetary ring, or something of that nature, in the last, oh, thirty-six hours? Something considered innocuous by Starfleet classifications?”
Chekov’s eyes light up and McCoy sees him fight the urge to raise his hand. “Oh, yes! Yes, sir! Just forty minutes ago, there was a magnetic wave we identified as-“
“Save it. It’s too early in the day for physics. Thank you, Ensign. You’re free to go.”
Chekov scrambles down from the bed. Gotta love this place, McCoy thinks as he watches the kid walk out the door, taking the noodley smell with him. Every day’s like Halloween.
He’s standing there, one arm crossed in front of him and one hand absently at his mouth, a million questions running through his head, when he hears the hiss of the door again. He looks up to see none other than Jim Kirk hopping up on one of the beds and pulling off his shirt.
“Nice,” he says shortly a few minutes later, after Jim’s presented the wounds and the pretty damn unlikely story. “Very nice, Jim.”
Kirk shrugs, then winces at the sting. “Believe me or don’t believe me, but it’s the truth, Bones.”
“You got five feet worth of scratches on your back from a dirty, distressed, orphaned baby koala. While you were on a secret away mission. In the middle of the night.” It’s almost too ridiculous to bother being sarcastic about. Almost. “And that’s the truth.”
“Yup.”
He rolls his eyes towards the heavens briefly, then leans in to smear an antiseptic on Jim’s clearly not koala-related wounds.
…and is nearly knocked over by the smell.
“Goddammit!” he says hoarsely, holding the back of his wrist up to his nose to block the stench. It smells like absolute shit. Literally. Manure, horse stalls, flowerbeds, diapers, and a bunch of other images McCoy hasn’t thought about in a long, long time flash before his eyes, brought back by the once-familiar olfactory stimulation. “What the hell, Jim?”
“What?” the captain answers a bit warily, peering at McCoy’s hands and pockets as if a hypospray lurks just within.
McCoy’s brain scrambles around for a second, then draws the unexpected but correct conclusion. “Son of a bitch, you’re telling the truth.”
Jim straightens up indignantly. “I told you! Why don’t you ever believe me?” Then he shoots McCoy a look that’s part curiosity, part suspicion, part ‘I’m a bastard’ smirk. “Wait. Why do you believe me now?”
“Uh….” McCoy can’t quite answer that, not yet. “Just a hunch.”
Jim clearly ain’t buying it, though. “A hunch.”
“That’s right.”
“Uh-huh. Bones, you’re a doctor, not a psychic.”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Yes, well, you can stop saying and just trust me, alright? I’m your goddamn doctor.”
Jim looks at him for a second more, then shrugs-which causes another wince as it pulls at his wounds again. “Bones,” he says through his teeth, clearly trying not to whine, “fix it.”
McCoy isn’t sure he can handle the godawful smell long enough to do so. He thinks fast, accepting the improbable even as he can’t quite believe it. “Uh… Sure, if you’ll… think about something else.”
“What?” Jim’s thoroughly confused now, and that’s no good, because he can get to be like a toddler if he’s feeling stubborn, asking ‘Why?’ and not taking ‘no reason’ or ‘because’ for an answer.
“Please, for the love of my mother’s apple pie, just think of something else.” He hesitates for a split second, then goes for the easy answer. All he wants is a quiet bay so he can figure out what the hell’s going on with his nose, and the scratches on Jim’s back are an angry red and he’s tired of looking at them. “Think of sex.”
Jim guffaws, once, but clearly the suggestion worked because when McCoy’s fingers come into contact with the torn skin, his nose fills with a haze of post-coital stink. He tries not to let his fingers twitch, but goddamn, it’s got to be an animal instinct, to be turned on at least a little by that smell. That smell of sweat, and dry mouths, and semen, and spit, and… and more semen.
Bemused, McCoy lifts his hands away from Kirk’s back casually, just a couple inches. The smell recedes to vague sweaty bodies. Then he smoothes an ointment-anointed finger along the next section of cut skin, and the sweat smell oozes into sharper tangs, which he can mostly discern from one another. Gym socks, other dirty laundry. Male ejaculate, that one’s easy to pick out. And beer, plenty of beer. Linens. Bedsheets, assumedly. Cologne.
A furrow develops between McCoy’s brows. There’s no flowery perfume, no baby powder bathwash, no vaginal secretions even, not that he can tell. Not exactly what he was expecting, that’s for damn sure. “You thinking about sex you’ve had, Jim? Or sex somebody else has had?”
He knows Jim’s smirking even though he can’t see the bastard’s face. “Why would I need to think about sex somebody else has had? Of course it’s sex I’ve had.”
McCoy has to admit there’s logic in that, which leaves him with only one conclusion to draw. A sour taste forms in the back of his mouth. “Alright, fine. Think about something else, then.”
“Like what?”
“Like…” Except that Jim already has, because yes, there it is, that ticklingly pungent, salty-sweet scent of an aroused woman. “Ah,” McCoy says swiftly. “Never mind, it’s fine.”
Jim swivels his neck around as far as he can, trying to get a good look at the doctor. He’s definitely suspicious now, and McCoy can practically hear that infamous brain tick-tick-ticking away. “What’s fine?”
McCoy clears his throat and finishes up the wound-cleaning. “This. Your back is fine. Or will be, very soon.” He turns away to retrieve the dermal regenerator, then passes it slowly over the affected area. The sex smell is nearly gone, thank Christ, but Kirk is still eyeing him. “Quit squirming and turn around. You’re worse than a kindergartner.”
After a moment, Jim grins and faces forward. “Geez, Bones, you tell me to think about sex, then you yell at me for squirming?”
“Poor baby. There, done.”
“I tend to think so.” He stands and stretches gingerly, testing the new bits. “So am I free to go?”
“Yes,” McCoy says, not giving a damn about how gruff he sounds now. “And when you do something stupid again tonight that reopens those wounds,” he warns as Jim dons the gold shirt again, “don’t come crying to me.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Jim grins and pops a mocking salute at him before sauntering out the door.
---
Much to his chagrin, the fruits of the next few hours find him swearing in front of his Senior Medical Staff, Nurse Chapel, and the few patients that happen to be around.
He’d handed the sick bay over to his staff and ducked into his office-the one he’d finally decorated, sort of; there’s a picture of him and Jim from the Academy, a picture of Joanna that was out of date the day after it was taken, and a picture of his first prize-winning stallion-to do some research into whatever the hell was going on with his olfactory system doing overtime.
He hadn’t wanted Chekov to give him the details because he didn’t want to scare the kid unnecessarily, and it was all in the ship’s logs, anyway, but now he kinda wishes the kid was around, because he has all sorts of questions.
Questions the kid probably can’t answer, though, McCoy has to admit. According to the logs, nothing was amiss when it happened, and nothing was amiss after it happened. The ship just pushed through a field that the computer identified as an Alfvén wave. She was in it for less than thirty seconds, and all reports afterwards were clear. Kirk was thorough, too; he’d heard about this happening before, and he’d wanted everything checked and double-checked.
Plus, well, impenetrable starship? Hello? They haven’t had new air in heaven knows how long, for love or money; how the hell could something as seemingly innocent as a magnetic wave fiddle so lovingly with his head?
And, come to think of it, why only his? He’d’ve thought other people would’ve come running in here by now.
Then he remembers the chip and curses aloud again, realizing only after the fact that it’d been a particularly vitriolic one he’d learned at Ole Miss. (And these walls? Not so thick, as the CMO needs to be able to come running for, well, just about anything.)
He’d known getting that thing was a bad idea. And now he was paying for it. Perfectly safe, his ass. Then why did they only ‘offer’ it to CMOs?
Starfleet can kiss his ‘perfectly safe’ ass, he thinks to himself as he drums his fingers on the desk. Once he figures out how to get rid of this new-and goddamn annoying-sixth sense, at least.
---
“The hell?”
McCoy’s momma really had taught him not to swear when there are ladies present, for the sweet Lord’s sake, but here he is, on the bridge, watching everyone’s eyebrows go up simultaneously like a goddamn circus troop at the words that just came out of his mouth.
But they don’t have to deal with this shit, do they? No. They haven’t been smelling sex and lotion and alcohol and gym shirts and other people’s mama’s cooking all damn day.
And they most certainly didn’t just get attacked by three dozen different streams of language (all categorized and easily referenced, of course) while trying to hold a normal conversation with one Lieutenant Uhura.
Said Uhura is now looking at him like he’s going to get detention after school. “Pardon,” he mutters. “Will you excuse me for a moment?” She nods, and he pivots and walks away from her station. He pauses, per usual, next to Jim’s chair. “Can I have a word, Captain?” The last word is sort of ground through his teeth.
Jim quirks an eyebrow at him. “Uh, sure. Spock, you alright? I know this is strenuous flying, three hours in a straight line in warp, but-“
“Captain.” Spock and Kirk share a look. Bones scowls.
“Right.” Jim nods and turns to McCoy. “Shall we?”
Once the captain’s ready room door closes behind them, McCoy keeps as far from Kirk as possible. “Just-don’t come any closer.”
Jim is clearly amused. “Dare I ask why?”
“No.”
“Why?”
McCoy rolls his eyes.
“Fine. What’d you need to see me for?”
McCoy chews on his cheek for a moment. “Has anybody on the crew reported… anything unusual since we passed through that Alfvén wave during alpha shift?”
Kirk makes a mildly surprised face. “Wouldn’t they come to you with something like that?”
“Yeah. But you of all people know that sometimes the doctor is the last person to be informed.” He realizes after a second that he’s not getting anything… extra from Jim. Just a vague sort of hum. And suddenly he’s tempted to give a little test run of this newfound ability of his. He already knows what’s going on in Jim’s head, anyway, it being Jim, so what the hell?
He scootches forward.
He’s at least a little prepared this time. And he’s not surprised that what he gets from Jim is a cacophony, a zoo of words and images and goddammit, there’s that sex smell again…
And in its wake zooms the ludicrous image of a mostly clothed Jim, half-perched on the desk in that very room, receiving what, if the look on his face is any indication, must be some of the best fellatio he’s had in his life. And the person giving it-well, McCoy can only guess it to be Yeoman Rand, by the looks of the gravity-defying blonde coiffure.
“Jesus, Jim.” He steps back and the image fades. He breathes a little easier.
“…yes?”
“Well.” He shifts his weight. “Nothing. I’ve… got to get back to sickbay.”
Jim eyes him for a moment. “Fine. You’ll report if anyone in the crew does complain of anything relating to the anomaly?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Okay.”
And he swears the smell of sex follows him down the hallway.
---
He notices in the mess a little later something he missed while he was having the minor meltdown on the bridge-- Sulu’s got a problem. The kid can’t sit down or stand up without pulling a face, and he might think no one notices the surreptitious rub he gives the small of his back, but McCoy’s trained to see those kinds of things. And he can’t not ask. It’s his damn job, isn’t it?
“Sulu.” The pilot looks up from his food, clearly schooling his expression to seem neutral and pain-free. “What the devil is wrong with your back?”
“My back, sir?” His eyes drop back to his fork. “My back is fine, sir.”
“Uh-huh. Tell me another one.”
Sulu’s eyes flash, but he clenches his jaw and stays silent. McCoy raises an eyebrow, then he decides hell, if he has these special powers, he might as well use them for good. He picks up his tray, moseys over to sit himself down right beside the now very twitchy pilot, and waits.
It’s almost instant this time. Good God, more sex? The smell is there again, only this time it’s… sweet. Not literally, thank Christ, but McCoy suddenly has the impression this isn’t a Jim-style fuck-and-run, but actual love-making, in a monogamous sort of fashion. Which makes him feel better, because it means Sulu is unlikely to be visiting his sick bay for embarrassing diagnoses anytime soon.
Not that Kirk’s ever embarrassed. But he damn well ought to be.
McCoy’s thinking this over to himself, proud of the pilot for manning up and flying straight, when the image behind the smell floats into his vision.
Chekov.
It’s Chekov Sulu’s banging. Well, making love to, if his instinct about the smell is at all on target. Which he’d be willing to bet money it is.
Except in this vision, their… copulation is a damn sight closer to the first expression, to be perfectly honest. McCoy can see very clearly now exactly how Sulu threw out his back, and it’s quite a feat, actually. For a second, he gets stuck on how that position is actually physically possible to maintain for any humanoid, let alone a star ship officer. Well, Jim could probably manage it, he reasons, but he’s really very-
“Sir?”
Oh sweet heavens to Betsy, he has not just been hypothesizing the extent of his captain’s flexibility. He pinches the bridge of his nose and tries to ignore the rise in body temperature he’s just brought upon himself.
When he looks up, Sulu’s narrowing his eyes at him-When did this whole damn crew get so intuitive? -so he barks out instructions immediately. “Sulu. Listen to me- I don’t care how it happened. I’m a doctor, I’m here to fix these things. Come to the bay directly before your next shift so I can get it taken care of. That’s an order, dammit.”
Sulu grimaces, but McCoy thinks he looks secretly thankful anyway. Back problems are hell, no two ways around it. “Thank you, Doctor.”
McCoy nods, and a mildly uncomfortable silence falls as they go back to the business of eating. The mental stream is still coming, of course. McCoy grimaces, then sets about trying to block it out. Success comes in fits and starts, but a number of thoughts jump into his head no matter how hard he tries.
Much to his relief, they’re not all about the pilot’s proclivity for a certain young navigator. In fact, his general stream of thought is rather boring, at least to McCoy- It’s a whole lot of stars, planets, and more stars, and a lot of pilot-babble that he can’t understand, let alone bring himself to care about. The kid is a pilot down to his very marrow, it seems. Considering he pretty much holds their lives in his hands, McCoy’s okay with it. But it doesn’t make it any more exciting to be listening in on.
The bits about Chekov are far from boring, of course, but he does his best to ignore them even as they’re right in front of him. No need to go rubbernecking about other people’s private affairs, he maintains. No need at all. Especially when it’s so clear that two people are so totally ridiculous for each other.
And if someone were to suggest that, as he runs his tricorder over Sulu’s back a while later, he can’t help but wallow a little in a memory of waking up surrounded by a beloved, warm body, he’d deny it. But they’d be right.
---
McCoy thought he’d hated meetings before.
Hoo-boy, had he been wrong.
Meetings before have been a walk in the park. A day of leisure. When compared to the torture he’s currently undergoing, meetings used to be a damn pleasure cruise.
Over the course of the day, through some miracle McCoy hates with every fiber of his being, his newfound talent-‘The Damn Curse’, as he’s started referring to it in his head-has grown, and is anxious to prove its worth even at further and further physical distances.
His first clue of this had been like a hit from a two-by-four shortly after his arrival at sickbay for the beginning of the beta shift. Nurse Chapel had nodded to him, per usual, and had given him her normal report on patient status before going off-shift. He’d totally had it under control, put in the effort to block whatever he could out of his head while she was within what seemed to be normal range.
Then she’d walked out the door, and he’d let down his guard- but heard it anyway. She was ten, fifteen feet away from him, and still, clear as the sun, he’d heard, ‘And maybe tomorrow, I’ll tell him I’m pregnant.’
He’d stared after her, too stunned to pretend to be busy, or, hell, to call her back or something. The ‘him’ intended clearly isn’t McCoy-he likes to think he maintains a work ethic, thank you very much, so he’s always put her firmly off-limits-but all the same, she’s one of his people, and she needs medical attention he knows for a fact she isn’t getting.
He’d spent the next ten minutes holed up in his office, writing and deleting messages to her on the subject, but eventually been defeated by his own old-fashioned sensibilities. He’d thrown the PADD down in order to go find something he could actually help with.
Only, he’d never really found anything-sometimes his bay ran far too efficiently for him to be useful-and one incredibly boring shift later, he’s stuck in this goddamn meeting, wishing he could be back in that awkward moment, for the love of God. Wishing to be anywhere but here.
Six people in such close quarters means the whole thing is more insistent. There are only the six people in the room, yet in his head it sounds like six thousand. In countless damn languages and thinking an endless array of things. He’d probably find their mental tangents comforting, considering he usually feels bad for letting his mind wander during meetings, except that apparently everyone on this damned crew is having far, far more sex than he’s having.
And that’s just aggravating.
He spends the first few endless minutes trying to identify and separate the streams. There’s Uhura, pondering a new Klingon dialect she’s ferreting out of various transmissions from a period in history so boring nobody’s ever bothered before; nobody else would be thinking about that, for sure. There’s someone thinking about-Oh for the love of all that is holy, that must be Spock, and McCoy’s not even going to try to understand what’s going on in that bastard’s mind. There’s gobbledeegook physics theorems punctuated by excited Russian, that’s nobody but Chekov. There’s katanas and really cheesy movie music, that’s Sulu. There’s Chekov and Sulu naked on a couch, that’s…
McCoy scowls.
“Bones?”
Oh, Christ. “Yes, Jim?” As he meets Jim’s eyes, the expected mental stream jumps out to dominate, and McCoy has to suppress the urge to put his head in his hands and moan. It’s like being inside a goddamn video game, and piss if he’s any good at those. Jim is all fast shiny vehicles and fast dangerous missions and fast hard sex, and it makes McCoy a bit dizzy.
Dizzier when he realizes the person Jim’s thinking about having sex with right now is Uhura. It’s disgusting. The kid is a pig. Uhura is permanently bonded with Spock, and will twist your nuts off in a second if you suggest otherwise, and the kid’s getting offers of sex every time he goes around a corner, but he somehow still can’t keep his mental dick in his imaginary pants.
“Are we boring you?” Jim has the biggest of smartass smirks on his face, and McCoy has the urge to hit him. Or stab him with an inoculate-filled hypospray.
“No.”
“No?” He looks at McCoy expectantly.
Oh, if that urge didn’t just get ten times stronger… “No, Captain.” He knows Jim knows he’s lying, but he doesn’t particularly care at the moment. He’s got too much else on his mind. So to speak.
“Glad to hear it.”
So the meeting continues. And McCoy spends the next forty minutes trying not to notice exactly which position Uhura likes the best (from behind, of all things, which surprises him, coming from such an elegant woman, even though it shouldn’t, because women are strange creatures and he knows it well), or the fact that Spock has done quite thorough research into the art of pleasuring a woman orally (Flutter tongue? The hell?), or any of the disturbing things Scotty is thinking. (Hamsters? Really? It isn’t strictly legal to beam living creatures without their permission unless it’s for their health, and definitely isn’t legal to beam them there… Although, actually, that might be fun for a little blackmail later, McCoy muses, so he tucks it away in his memory.)
He wants to put his hands over his ears and tell everyone to shut the hell up. But he can’t do that, now, can he? So he grits his teeth and does the best he can to get his brain to get them to shut the hell up instead. He tries thinking of it like a picture, like phaser beams or spiderwebs or-or neural ganglia. Yes. That’ll do nicely. He lines them up in his head and one by one tries to break the chains. It works, way better than the clumsy attempts with Sulu and Chapel, and he’s thrilled as the noise in his head begins to dim.
The only catch is that he can’t seem to drown out Jim. That chain clings together tenaciously, no matter how hard he tries. And oh Lordy, how he tries.
…and before he knows it, Kirk is nodding at them in dismissal. “We’re done here, ladies and gentlemen.” McCoy tries not to look too surprised that the meeting’s over already, but knows he’s probably failing. Apparently time passes quickly when you’re going quietly mad. “Bones, I know you weren’t listening to any of that, so you can stay after and I’ll run a recap.”
Goddamn son of a bitch is totally enjoying himself, but McCoy knows he’s licked. “Fine.” He sullenly watches Jim watch the others leave, and probably shouldn’t be stunned, but is anyway, when the image of Sulu and Chekov in a passionate embrace pops into his mind as they exit.
What the hell.
He’d known Jim was, well, a bit of a Lazy Susan, but he’d not known the man dipped into so many pools of applicants for his mental aerobics. So to speak.
How many damned surprises is a man supposed to endure in a day, for pity’s sake?
“Jim, can we get this over with, please?” he grumps, trying to spit the image from his mind. And when Jim turns to him, it’s appears he’s succeeded, and Jim is thinking of duty rosters, supply requisitions, and other ship’s things, the things he’s relaying to McCoy. He has a feeling Jim’s going into more detail with him than he did in the general meeting, which almost makes him forgive the little shit.
…then Jim’s brain wanders, and McCoy’s head is filled with an incredibly detailed, incredibly dirty image. Of course, he thinks, anything Jim does, he does with aplomb, so why should this be different?
His brain takes a second to process the picture fully, and when he does, that sour taste is back in his mouth. It’s Jim, clearly, naked as a jaybird… and being fucked-there’s no other word for it, McCoy realizes with a grimace-into the mattress by a man with dark hair. McCoy can’t see the mystery man’s face, but Kirk’s wearing such a distinct expression of pure animal joy, his mouth in a perfect rictus of pleasure and his hands gripping the man’s shoulders like he never wants to let go, that he kind of forgets to wonder.
For a second.
“Damn it, Jim,” he growls before he can stop himself. “Do you always think about sex?”
Jim blinks, but doesn’t ask where this line of questioning came from. Thank God. “Well… sort of, yeah, at least in the back of my mind. Unless we’re, like, under direct attack. Or I’m with Spock.” A corner of his mouth turns up, then he gives the doctor a curious look and McCoy tries not to flinch at what he knows is coming. “Dare I inquire as to why you’re asking? I mean- doesn’t everybody? Don’t you?”
“Please.” McCoy hears that he’s inflected that one word exactly like his hillbilly cousins used to say ‘pshaw,’ and it makes him even grumpier.
Too bad Jim’s got a wicked glint in his eye. “Is it because of your advanced age? Can’t get it up anymore, grandpa?”
And suddenly the image flashes, changes, and McCoy nearly chokes- For now the picture is Jim kneeling in front of the same dark-headed man, his hand expertly coaxing a half-soft cock to utter alertness while his mouth alternates between taking a lick here and there and uttering words that, by the looks on both of their faces, are utter filth.
And McCoy has no trouble seeing exactly who the other man is. As much as he tries not to look in the mirror most days, he knows his own face far too well.
The fuck.
The sour taste becomes nausea, and he feels his body temperature spike and his skin become clammy as he oozes slowly to his feet. He has to… get… somewhere. “Are we finished here, Jim?”
Jim looks up at him, a little concerned. “Yeah. You alright?”
“Fine.” He forces himself to look Jim in eye and speak smoothly, damn it, despite the stench of sweat and his own semen in his nostrils. “I don’t appreciate the joke about my working parts,” he manages in a tone resembling his normal gruffness, “but seeing as I am a grown-up, and secure in what I do, I’ll just ignore it, and see you and your immature ass tomorrow.”
Jim shrugs and waves him off with a typical Jim grin. “Sure. The excitement of a totally non-dangerous away mission awaits. See you then.”
There’s a drink waiting for McCoy in his quarters, and he’s damn well going to have it. Good sleep and a stiff drink, that’s all he needs, right?
And then tomorrow, with the mission and them being so far away from the anomaly, everything will be fine.
Well, the thought is enough to let him get a few hours’ sleep, at least.
---
Day Two
Diplomacy is sometimes exactly what it’s cracked up to be, McCoy had thought after he had shaken his head free of post-beaming fuzz and looked out from the beam-down point.
The planet they’re visiting has some of the most beautiful rolling hills he’s ever seen, and the thriving metropolis that’s grown, where once just an outpost lay, is really quite impressive. It’s to be a day full of history lessons, tours of medical labs, and meals with heads of state, and he’s had worse places to be.
…or so he had thought. Then, first of all, it had taken him a good hour of conversation before he could buckle down and dim out all the streams of thought scampering into his mind from their hosts.
Second of all, once that’s accomplished, which isn’t, by the way, until halfway through their first meeting-turned-impromptu-history-lecture, one thing becomes disgustingly clear:
Jim Kirk’s mind tends to wander unless something’s in danger of blowing up. And when it wanders, it usually wanders to sex. And when it wanders to sex, it’s usually sex with the person in closest proximity.
Or at least, that’s McCoy’s educated guess, because today, while they’re the only two crew members on the ground, it would appear Jim Kirk is planning to spend a lot of the day thinking about having sex with one Leonard McCoy.
First, when they’re in the preliminary meeting and he finally separates and nails down the strains of thought, it’s just a hum on Jim’s part. Just a keyed-up, sexed-up undercurrent to the other shit-the actual important captain-y shit-rifling through his brain.
Then they go on the walking tour.
McCoy notices Jim looking almost wistfully down a long road that winds out into the countryside, and assumes Jim’s wishing for his motorbike. He walks up and claps him on the shoulder, prepared for the mental bombardment this time. He’s getting good at this, if he does say so himself. “Miss her?”
Jim shoots him a half-smile, but doesn’t really look away from the road. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
And McCoy can see that yes, the bike is what Kirk’s thinking of. The smell of leather and diesel teases his nostrils as his mind’s eye sees Jim running his hands over the seat, the handles, the shiny metal, then straddling her and revving her up, the expression on his face clearly showing it to be an act of love.
A very real, very plaintive, very honest love.
Suddenly McCoy’s mouth is somehow dry, and he finds himself unable to move, the hand on Jim’s shoulder proving to be a direct conduit for love and lust and a lot of other things he’d never thought a man would feel for a motorbike… Emotions wash through him, only to go back to Jim and lap upon themselves, churning and peaking with the throb of the engine until he’s chagrined to realize he’s out of breath.
And then, somehow, assumedly because it happens to be McCoy’s hand on him and not someone else’s, McCoy has joined Kirk on his mental motorcycle, straddling the warm leather cushion behind the captain. One hand burrows up under Jim’s shirt in search of warm skin while the other is fisted around the captain’s cock, and the look on his face is… is like it’s the only place he’d like to be.
McCoy feels it like an electrocution. He freezes for a split-second, then steps back as quickly as he can without arousing suspicion. He scuffs the ground with his toe, something he’s never done before in his damn life, but he’s so discomfited and they’re supposed to be acting like diplomats, for Christ’s sake, not adolescents, and if Jim could just keep his mind out of his-his!-pants for twelve blessed hours, then-
“Shall we move on?”
McCoy’s brain snaps to attention, and the picture vanishes. Thank Christ. He knows redness is creeping up his neck, but no one seems to notice anything out of the ordinary. Jim throws him a grin, and McCoy narrows his eyes at the captain. But there’s no way Jim can know what just happened, is there? No. There’s no way.
He smothers a grimace and follows the group to their next destination.
---
Three hours later that grimace has turned into a full-blown scowl, accompanied by, if he’s being honest, a little bit of a tic above his left eyebrow. Jim has scampered off with some nubile colonist and left McCoy to deal with their hosts, again, which isn’t exactly his strong suit, thanks very much. He’s a doctor, not a diplomat. And even though he grits his teeth and does his best, it’s a pretty sad attempt. The colonists take pity on him at some point and drop the subject of intergalactic politics, so the conversation turns from complicated and aggravating to boring and aggravating.
Needless to say, when Jim shows up just in time to beam back aboard the ship, McCoy is in no mood to hear about his antics. But Jim shares them anyway. “She was a natural redhead, Bones, I mean, ev-“
“Shut up, Jim.”
“You don’t want to hear about it?” He’s got that fool grin on, and McCoy just doesn’t think he can get more annoyed.
“Not unless you want to hear about my dinner with the Counselor General and his four wives, no, I don’t wanna hear a goddamn thing outta your mouth.” He’s stuck seeing it in stereo in his head, anyway. Not that Jim would know this.
Jim loses the smile briefly. “Anything I need to know about? You know, politically?”
“No.” He reaches for his communicator. “Scotty, please beam us the hell up.”
As they wait, McCoy tries to ignore what’s coming from the captain’s head, even though he knows it won’t work. Jim might’ve switched conversational tactics, but he’s still thinking about the red-headed chit, and McCoy finds it exceedingly difficult to tune out the incredibly raunchy picture of Jim piled on top of some girl on one of those hillsides he remembers waxing poetically about mere hours ago.
After a couple more moments of mental struggle, he gives up trying to block it-he’s too damn tired and Jim’s thoughts are too damn obnoxious-and lets it come through loud and clear. And only then does he see that while Kirk enjoyed the moves he very thoroughly executed with the sweet young thing, he was not thinking of her while executing them.
No, it appears that while buried deep inside her, Kirk was imagining being buried deep inside McCoy. So says the picture that now fills McCoy’s head to the clanging, banging brim.
Jim has a hell of a thorough imagination, too. McCoy can smell the grass on the hillside, feel the small green blades bunching up between his fingers, and see the sweaty sheen they’re both sporting, the looks of absolute pleasure on their faces, hear the way he keeps growling Jim’s name while Jim just-Jim just watches him, as if his main focus is McCoy’s enjoyment, not his own.
And if that’s not a sign it’s all a bullshit daydream, he doesn’t know what would be.
Oh, he has no doubt Jim’s a dynamite lay, what with having the energy of a bunny and the experience of a brothel’s worth of painted ladies, but come on. It’s Jim. To give more of a damn about your partner than yourself in bed means you have to give more than a damn about your partner, period.
And then he feels the familiar sickeningly sparkly feeling of the transporter, and he can’t think about it anymore.
---
“Bones, I was wondering if you’d thought about-“ Jim doesn’t look up from his PADD until he’s halfway into McCoy’s quarters. “Oh. You about to go to bed?”
“What does it look like?” McCoy replies testily. He’s just finished his nightcap and has already slipped on his most beloved pjs, determined to actually get some sleep tonight. He’s thinking of having another drink, even, because he’s unwilling to admit there’s no way a hundred drinks’ll do nearly enough to bring true rest within his reach.
“It looks like you need new pajamas,” Jim replies. He’s close to chuckling, and it’s just the last thing on a long list of things that have tried McCoy’s patience today.
“As my daughter would so eloquently say, bite me.”
Now Jim actually does snicker, but as he watches Bones sit down tiredly onto the bed, he sobers. “Hey, listen. I should apologize for ditching you today, shouldn’t I?”
“What kind of question is that? Either apologize or don’t, jackass.”
The stream he’s getting from the kid’s brain is a half-assed apology, regret that McCoy had a rough time of it but indignant certainty that he had every right to do what he did anyway. Just another to add to a long list of reasons James T Kirk will always seem like a jackass, regardless of how many times he saves the world or how good he may or may not be in bed.
So when the captain opens his mouth, McCoy cuts him off. “Look, Jim, it’s been a long day,” -a long couple of nights, too, dammit- “and I’d just like to go to sleep, if that’s alright with you.”
Jim regards him for a second, then shrugs. “Sure.”
“Thank you,” he says dryly, his actual meaning-‘Go away.’-perfectly clear. He waits for the kid to leave, but Jim is hesitating. And suddenly the stream of images is changing from thoughts on the day to thoughts on the right now, featuring Kirk watching him get ready for bed, and McCoy does not want to see where it will lead. “Goodnight, Jim.”
“Yeah.” After an unbearably long second, Jim slowly turns and strolls towards the door, taking his sweet time, and it’s not quick enough to stop the movie playing in his head-well, in their heads, which is a thought he turns aside quickly-from becoming intimate, just as he feared.
But it’s a weird, fuzzy sort of intimate. It’s Kirk slowly divesting him of his admittedly tatty sleep shirt while raining soft kisses along his cheeks and throat, then gently pushing him down onto the bed so he can tease off the well-worn pants as well. It’s Kirk soothing every inch of skin he uncovers with slow touches of calloused hands. It’s Kirk coming up to kiss him gently, almost sweetly, in an utterly non-demanding, purely giving way, before kissing a path down the left side of his body and taking McCoy’s mostly soft cock into his mouth. It’s Kirk not thinking twice about it taking longer, because Bones is so damn tired, instead just being more patient and gentle than McCoy’s ever thought possible. It’s Kirk watching McCoy rise, climax, and fall with a look on Jim’s face that McCoy’s not ready to deal with in any way, shape or form. It’s Kirk hushing McCoy’s feeble attempts to reciprocate, instead shucking his own clothes and tucking the blankets around them both before brushing the mussed hair back from McCoy’s exhausted eyes and telling him to go to sleep.
It’s Jim Kirk apologizing.
“Goodnight, Bones.”
Jim’s voice, his actual voice, shakes McCoy loose from the fantasy, and he looks up, his eyes sticky with something, just in time to see the door slide shut.
He manages to reach the bathroom before retching up a sinkful of bourbon and stomach acid.
Tomorrow, he swears to himself as he crawls into bed, interested in nothing but sleep and forgetting. Tomorrow, everything will be fine.
That’s not enough for sleep, though, this time.
( Part Two)
Author: Thalia (thalialunacy)
Fandom: Star Trek reboot (w/ a few tiny TOS references)
Pairing: Jim Kirk/Leonard McCoy (theirloveissoallergyprone), secondary Sulu/Chekov & Spock/Uhura
Rating: NC-17, yar.
Summary: Bones is given a surprise gift by a space anomaly. And in German, ‘gift’ means ‘poison’.
Teaser: Oh sweet heavens to Betsy, he has not just been hypothesizing the extent of his captain’s flexibility.
Length: 22K
Warnings: Author’s first Trek fic. It turned out kind of like a Srsness Sandwich-drama smooshed between two thick slices of CRACK. I’m pants at science & medicine, and most likely pants at this canon, as all I’ve got is the reboot and a vague memory of TNG. O AND IT’S A WHOLE PILE O’ DIRTY POP SLASH, NGL. Like, Severe Porn Warning must be heeded. Including some het, but only a little. Also, I used anachronisms flagrantly, and severely abused the word ‘damn’ and all its variants.
Prompt: Really, I didn’t write this. It was all in an EPIC prompt at st_xi_kink. Related Note: If the plot sounds familiar, it’s because the prompt has already been filled once, and wonderfully so. No disrespect is meant towards that effort; my slut of a muse just went a little crazy when shown such a smexy plot. I tried to steer as clear as possible of echoing the first story, beyond the inevitable.
Disclaimer: Obvious lack of ownership is obvious.
Dedication: TO CFINE WILL U PLZ MARRY ME OKTHX For abigail89, my beloved internet!Mom, who doesn’t put up with my bullshit.
---
Day One
“The hell?”
McCoy’s mama raised him not to swear in front of children-and he doesn’t care that Chekov’s nearly twenty, he’s still so damned bright-eyed that it amounts to the same thing-but there the word goes anyway, swooshing through the air of Sick Bay, free as a bird. And there’s not even a life-threatening situation he can use as an excuse for his bad manners, either.
‘Make sure you eat a lot of protein in the next few days,’ is all he’d said. Then he’d gotten a distinct sense that he’d made Chekov homesick with this suggestion, as if the only thing Chekov knows that would fit the bill is some mighty Russian roast beast.
That’s not the weird part, though. He’s used to being able to- well- feel things from people. To be a doctor, to be a damned good doctor like he’s worked hard to become, you have to have a certain amount of ability when it comes to guessing what people are going through. You’ve got to be able to tell when they’re lying about how much pain they’re in, or how they actually got that rash. It’s empathy, he guesses, or something that amounts to it, but he hates that creepy Betazoid bullshit so he just calls it being good at what he does, please and thank you.
Point is, he isn’t unused to being annoyed by little titters of emotions from the people around him, especially people he’s treating.
But usually it doesn’t involve smells.
And McCoy can sure as shit right now smell something suspiciously like stroganoff. Strongly, too, as if it’s right in front of him. As if Chekov’s hiding it behind his back. He has to keep himself from peering over the patient’s shoulder towards the other side of the bed.
“Doctor?”
He shifts his attention back to his patient. “Yeah?”
“Am I going to be… all right?”
“Of course, Ensign,” he says, trying to keep the worst of the gruff out of his voice. He’s like a baby chick, this Chekov. All peepy and fluffy and if you let him get rained on, he’ll get sickly and die on you. McCoy claps him on the back once, not too hard. “You’ll be fine. Just remember what I said.”
And the stroganoff smell comes back so strongly his mouth almost starts to water. It’s just so damn real that his brain automatically slips into down-and-dirty problem-solving mode and tries to deduce a cause. He searches his memory quickly, flipping through his mental catalog of the past few days. But no, he himself hasn’t come into contact with anything he hasn’t touched a thousand times before on this voyage. So it’s got to be something else. “Ensign, I have a question before you go.”
The pale kid goes paler, if that’s possible. “Yes, Doctor?”
“We haven’t taken on any classified passengers in the past few days, have we? I mean, if so, the captain’s broken about fifty rules, but that only makes the occurrence more likely, now, doesn’t it?”
“No, Doctor, I’ve heard of no such things happening.”
“All right.” He chews on the inside of his cheek. “Two questions, then: Did she-the ship-pass through or by any sort of… field, or planetary ring, or something of that nature, in the last, oh, thirty-six hours? Something considered innocuous by Starfleet classifications?”
Chekov’s eyes light up and McCoy sees him fight the urge to raise his hand. “Oh, yes! Yes, sir! Just forty minutes ago, there was a magnetic wave we identified as-“
“Save it. It’s too early in the day for physics. Thank you, Ensign. You’re free to go.”
Chekov scrambles down from the bed. Gotta love this place, McCoy thinks as he watches the kid walk out the door, taking the noodley smell with him. Every day’s like Halloween.
He’s standing there, one arm crossed in front of him and one hand absently at his mouth, a million questions running through his head, when he hears the hiss of the door again. He looks up to see none other than Jim Kirk hopping up on one of the beds and pulling off his shirt.
“Nice,” he says shortly a few minutes later, after Jim’s presented the wounds and the pretty damn unlikely story. “Very nice, Jim.”
Kirk shrugs, then winces at the sting. “Believe me or don’t believe me, but it’s the truth, Bones.”
“You got five feet worth of scratches on your back from a dirty, distressed, orphaned baby koala. While you were on a secret away mission. In the middle of the night.” It’s almost too ridiculous to bother being sarcastic about. Almost. “And that’s the truth.”
“Yup.”
He rolls his eyes towards the heavens briefly, then leans in to smear an antiseptic on Jim’s clearly not koala-related wounds.
…and is nearly knocked over by the smell.
“Goddammit!” he says hoarsely, holding the back of his wrist up to his nose to block the stench. It smells like absolute shit. Literally. Manure, horse stalls, flowerbeds, diapers, and a bunch of other images McCoy hasn’t thought about in a long, long time flash before his eyes, brought back by the once-familiar olfactory stimulation. “What the hell, Jim?”
“What?” the captain answers a bit warily, peering at McCoy’s hands and pockets as if a hypospray lurks just within.
McCoy’s brain scrambles around for a second, then draws the unexpected but correct conclusion. “Son of a bitch, you’re telling the truth.”
Jim straightens up indignantly. “I told you! Why don’t you ever believe me?” Then he shoots McCoy a look that’s part curiosity, part suspicion, part ‘I’m a bastard’ smirk. “Wait. Why do you believe me now?”
“Uh….” McCoy can’t quite answer that, not yet. “Just a hunch.”
Jim clearly ain’t buying it, though. “A hunch.”
“That’s right.”
“Uh-huh. Bones, you’re a doctor, not a psychic.”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Yes, well, you can stop saying and just trust me, alright? I’m your goddamn doctor.”
Jim looks at him for a second more, then shrugs-which causes another wince as it pulls at his wounds again. “Bones,” he says through his teeth, clearly trying not to whine, “fix it.”
McCoy isn’t sure he can handle the godawful smell long enough to do so. He thinks fast, accepting the improbable even as he can’t quite believe it. “Uh… Sure, if you’ll… think about something else.”
“What?” Jim’s thoroughly confused now, and that’s no good, because he can get to be like a toddler if he’s feeling stubborn, asking ‘Why?’ and not taking ‘no reason’ or ‘because’ for an answer.
“Please, for the love of my mother’s apple pie, just think of something else.” He hesitates for a split second, then goes for the easy answer. All he wants is a quiet bay so he can figure out what the hell’s going on with his nose, and the scratches on Jim’s back are an angry red and he’s tired of looking at them. “Think of sex.”
Jim guffaws, once, but clearly the suggestion worked because when McCoy’s fingers come into contact with the torn skin, his nose fills with a haze of post-coital stink. He tries not to let his fingers twitch, but goddamn, it’s got to be an animal instinct, to be turned on at least a little by that smell. That smell of sweat, and dry mouths, and semen, and spit, and… and more semen.
Bemused, McCoy lifts his hands away from Kirk’s back casually, just a couple inches. The smell recedes to vague sweaty bodies. Then he smoothes an ointment-anointed finger along the next section of cut skin, and the sweat smell oozes into sharper tangs, which he can mostly discern from one another. Gym socks, other dirty laundry. Male ejaculate, that one’s easy to pick out. And beer, plenty of beer. Linens. Bedsheets, assumedly. Cologne.
A furrow develops between McCoy’s brows. There’s no flowery perfume, no baby powder bathwash, no vaginal secretions even, not that he can tell. Not exactly what he was expecting, that’s for damn sure. “You thinking about sex you’ve had, Jim? Or sex somebody else has had?”
He knows Jim’s smirking even though he can’t see the bastard’s face. “Why would I need to think about sex somebody else has had? Of course it’s sex I’ve had.”
McCoy has to admit there’s logic in that, which leaves him with only one conclusion to draw. A sour taste forms in the back of his mouth. “Alright, fine. Think about something else, then.”
“Like what?”
“Like…” Except that Jim already has, because yes, there it is, that ticklingly pungent, salty-sweet scent of an aroused woman. “Ah,” McCoy says swiftly. “Never mind, it’s fine.”
Jim swivels his neck around as far as he can, trying to get a good look at the doctor. He’s definitely suspicious now, and McCoy can practically hear that infamous brain tick-tick-ticking away. “What’s fine?”
McCoy clears his throat and finishes up the wound-cleaning. “This. Your back is fine. Or will be, very soon.” He turns away to retrieve the dermal regenerator, then passes it slowly over the affected area. The sex smell is nearly gone, thank Christ, but Kirk is still eyeing him. “Quit squirming and turn around. You’re worse than a kindergartner.”
After a moment, Jim grins and faces forward. “Geez, Bones, you tell me to think about sex, then you yell at me for squirming?”
“Poor baby. There, done.”
“I tend to think so.” He stands and stretches gingerly, testing the new bits. “So am I free to go?”
“Yes,” McCoy says, not giving a damn about how gruff he sounds now. “And when you do something stupid again tonight that reopens those wounds,” he warns as Jim dons the gold shirt again, “don’t come crying to me.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Jim grins and pops a mocking salute at him before sauntering out the door.
---
Much to his chagrin, the fruits of the next few hours find him swearing in front of his Senior Medical Staff, Nurse Chapel, and the few patients that happen to be around.
He’d handed the sick bay over to his staff and ducked into his office-the one he’d finally decorated, sort of; there’s a picture of him and Jim from the Academy, a picture of Joanna that was out of date the day after it was taken, and a picture of his first prize-winning stallion-to do some research into whatever the hell was going on with his olfactory system doing overtime.
He hadn’t wanted Chekov to give him the details because he didn’t want to scare the kid unnecessarily, and it was all in the ship’s logs, anyway, but now he kinda wishes the kid was around, because he has all sorts of questions.
Questions the kid probably can’t answer, though, McCoy has to admit. According to the logs, nothing was amiss when it happened, and nothing was amiss after it happened. The ship just pushed through a field that the computer identified as an Alfvén wave. She was in it for less than thirty seconds, and all reports afterwards were clear. Kirk was thorough, too; he’d heard about this happening before, and he’d wanted everything checked and double-checked.
Plus, well, impenetrable starship? Hello? They haven’t had new air in heaven knows how long, for love or money; how the hell could something as seemingly innocent as a magnetic wave fiddle so lovingly with his head?
And, come to think of it, why only his? He’d’ve thought other people would’ve come running in here by now.
Then he remembers the chip and curses aloud again, realizing only after the fact that it’d been a particularly vitriolic one he’d learned at Ole Miss. (And these walls? Not so thick, as the CMO needs to be able to come running for, well, just about anything.)
He’d known getting that thing was a bad idea. And now he was paying for it. Perfectly safe, his ass. Then why did they only ‘offer’ it to CMOs?
Starfleet can kiss his ‘perfectly safe’ ass, he thinks to himself as he drums his fingers on the desk. Once he figures out how to get rid of this new-and goddamn annoying-sixth sense, at least.
---
“The hell?”
McCoy’s momma really had taught him not to swear when there are ladies present, for the sweet Lord’s sake, but here he is, on the bridge, watching everyone’s eyebrows go up simultaneously like a goddamn circus troop at the words that just came out of his mouth.
But they don’t have to deal with this shit, do they? No. They haven’t been smelling sex and lotion and alcohol and gym shirts and other people’s mama’s cooking all damn day.
And they most certainly didn’t just get attacked by three dozen different streams of language (all categorized and easily referenced, of course) while trying to hold a normal conversation with one Lieutenant Uhura.
Said Uhura is now looking at him like he’s going to get detention after school. “Pardon,” he mutters. “Will you excuse me for a moment?” She nods, and he pivots and walks away from her station. He pauses, per usual, next to Jim’s chair. “Can I have a word, Captain?” The last word is sort of ground through his teeth.
Jim quirks an eyebrow at him. “Uh, sure. Spock, you alright? I know this is strenuous flying, three hours in a straight line in warp, but-“
“Captain.” Spock and Kirk share a look. Bones scowls.
“Right.” Jim nods and turns to McCoy. “Shall we?”
Once the captain’s ready room door closes behind them, McCoy keeps as far from Kirk as possible. “Just-don’t come any closer.”
Jim is clearly amused. “Dare I ask why?”
“No.”
“Why?”
McCoy rolls his eyes.
“Fine. What’d you need to see me for?”
McCoy chews on his cheek for a moment. “Has anybody on the crew reported… anything unusual since we passed through that Alfvén wave during alpha shift?”
Kirk makes a mildly surprised face. “Wouldn’t they come to you with something like that?”
“Yeah. But you of all people know that sometimes the doctor is the last person to be informed.” He realizes after a second that he’s not getting anything… extra from Jim. Just a vague sort of hum. And suddenly he’s tempted to give a little test run of this newfound ability of his. He already knows what’s going on in Jim’s head, anyway, it being Jim, so what the hell?
He scootches forward.
He’s at least a little prepared this time. And he’s not surprised that what he gets from Jim is a cacophony, a zoo of words and images and goddammit, there’s that sex smell again…
And in its wake zooms the ludicrous image of a mostly clothed Jim, half-perched on the desk in that very room, receiving what, if the look on his face is any indication, must be some of the best fellatio he’s had in his life. And the person giving it-well, McCoy can only guess it to be Yeoman Rand, by the looks of the gravity-defying blonde coiffure.
“Jesus, Jim.” He steps back and the image fades. He breathes a little easier.
“…yes?”
“Well.” He shifts his weight. “Nothing. I’ve… got to get back to sickbay.”
Jim eyes him for a moment. “Fine. You’ll report if anyone in the crew does complain of anything relating to the anomaly?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Okay.”
And he swears the smell of sex follows him down the hallway.
---
He notices in the mess a little later something he missed while he was having the minor meltdown on the bridge-- Sulu’s got a problem. The kid can’t sit down or stand up without pulling a face, and he might think no one notices the surreptitious rub he gives the small of his back, but McCoy’s trained to see those kinds of things. And he can’t not ask. It’s his damn job, isn’t it?
“Sulu.” The pilot looks up from his food, clearly schooling his expression to seem neutral and pain-free. “What the devil is wrong with your back?”
“My back, sir?” His eyes drop back to his fork. “My back is fine, sir.”
“Uh-huh. Tell me another one.”
Sulu’s eyes flash, but he clenches his jaw and stays silent. McCoy raises an eyebrow, then he decides hell, if he has these special powers, he might as well use them for good. He picks up his tray, moseys over to sit himself down right beside the now very twitchy pilot, and waits.
It’s almost instant this time. Good God, more sex? The smell is there again, only this time it’s… sweet. Not literally, thank Christ, but McCoy suddenly has the impression this isn’t a Jim-style fuck-and-run, but actual love-making, in a monogamous sort of fashion. Which makes him feel better, because it means Sulu is unlikely to be visiting his sick bay for embarrassing diagnoses anytime soon.
Not that Kirk’s ever embarrassed. But he damn well ought to be.
McCoy’s thinking this over to himself, proud of the pilot for manning up and flying straight, when the image behind the smell floats into his vision.
Chekov.
It’s Chekov Sulu’s banging. Well, making love to, if his instinct about the smell is at all on target. Which he’d be willing to bet money it is.
Except in this vision, their… copulation is a damn sight closer to the first expression, to be perfectly honest. McCoy can see very clearly now exactly how Sulu threw out his back, and it’s quite a feat, actually. For a second, he gets stuck on how that position is actually physically possible to maintain for any humanoid, let alone a star ship officer. Well, Jim could probably manage it, he reasons, but he’s really very-
“Sir?”
Oh sweet heavens to Betsy, he has not just been hypothesizing the extent of his captain’s flexibility. He pinches the bridge of his nose and tries to ignore the rise in body temperature he’s just brought upon himself.
When he looks up, Sulu’s narrowing his eyes at him-When did this whole damn crew get so intuitive? -so he barks out instructions immediately. “Sulu. Listen to me- I don’t care how it happened. I’m a doctor, I’m here to fix these things. Come to the bay directly before your next shift so I can get it taken care of. That’s an order, dammit.”
Sulu grimaces, but McCoy thinks he looks secretly thankful anyway. Back problems are hell, no two ways around it. “Thank you, Doctor.”
McCoy nods, and a mildly uncomfortable silence falls as they go back to the business of eating. The mental stream is still coming, of course. McCoy grimaces, then sets about trying to block it out. Success comes in fits and starts, but a number of thoughts jump into his head no matter how hard he tries.
Much to his relief, they’re not all about the pilot’s proclivity for a certain young navigator. In fact, his general stream of thought is rather boring, at least to McCoy- It’s a whole lot of stars, planets, and more stars, and a lot of pilot-babble that he can’t understand, let alone bring himself to care about. The kid is a pilot down to his very marrow, it seems. Considering he pretty much holds their lives in his hands, McCoy’s okay with it. But it doesn’t make it any more exciting to be listening in on.
The bits about Chekov are far from boring, of course, but he does his best to ignore them even as they’re right in front of him. No need to go rubbernecking about other people’s private affairs, he maintains. No need at all. Especially when it’s so clear that two people are so totally ridiculous for each other.
And if someone were to suggest that, as he runs his tricorder over Sulu’s back a while later, he can’t help but wallow a little in a memory of waking up surrounded by a beloved, warm body, he’d deny it. But they’d be right.
---
McCoy thought he’d hated meetings before.
Hoo-boy, had he been wrong.
Meetings before have been a walk in the park. A day of leisure. When compared to the torture he’s currently undergoing, meetings used to be a damn pleasure cruise.
Over the course of the day, through some miracle McCoy hates with every fiber of his being, his newfound talent-‘The Damn Curse’, as he’s started referring to it in his head-has grown, and is anxious to prove its worth even at further and further physical distances.
His first clue of this had been like a hit from a two-by-four shortly after his arrival at sickbay for the beginning of the beta shift. Nurse Chapel had nodded to him, per usual, and had given him her normal report on patient status before going off-shift. He’d totally had it under control, put in the effort to block whatever he could out of his head while she was within what seemed to be normal range.
Then she’d walked out the door, and he’d let down his guard- but heard it anyway. She was ten, fifteen feet away from him, and still, clear as the sun, he’d heard, ‘And maybe tomorrow, I’ll tell him I’m pregnant.’
He’d stared after her, too stunned to pretend to be busy, or, hell, to call her back or something. The ‘him’ intended clearly isn’t McCoy-he likes to think he maintains a work ethic, thank you very much, so he’s always put her firmly off-limits-but all the same, she’s one of his people, and she needs medical attention he knows for a fact she isn’t getting.
He’d spent the next ten minutes holed up in his office, writing and deleting messages to her on the subject, but eventually been defeated by his own old-fashioned sensibilities. He’d thrown the PADD down in order to go find something he could actually help with.
Only, he’d never really found anything-sometimes his bay ran far too efficiently for him to be useful-and one incredibly boring shift later, he’s stuck in this goddamn meeting, wishing he could be back in that awkward moment, for the love of God. Wishing to be anywhere but here.
Six people in such close quarters means the whole thing is more insistent. There are only the six people in the room, yet in his head it sounds like six thousand. In countless damn languages and thinking an endless array of things. He’d probably find their mental tangents comforting, considering he usually feels bad for letting his mind wander during meetings, except that apparently everyone on this damned crew is having far, far more sex than he’s having.
And that’s just aggravating.
He spends the first few endless minutes trying to identify and separate the streams. There’s Uhura, pondering a new Klingon dialect she’s ferreting out of various transmissions from a period in history so boring nobody’s ever bothered before; nobody else would be thinking about that, for sure. There’s someone thinking about-Oh for the love of all that is holy, that must be Spock, and McCoy’s not even going to try to understand what’s going on in that bastard’s mind. There’s gobbledeegook physics theorems punctuated by excited Russian, that’s nobody but Chekov. There’s katanas and really cheesy movie music, that’s Sulu. There’s Chekov and Sulu naked on a couch, that’s…
McCoy scowls.
“Bones?”
Oh, Christ. “Yes, Jim?” As he meets Jim’s eyes, the expected mental stream jumps out to dominate, and McCoy has to suppress the urge to put his head in his hands and moan. It’s like being inside a goddamn video game, and piss if he’s any good at those. Jim is all fast shiny vehicles and fast dangerous missions and fast hard sex, and it makes McCoy a bit dizzy.
Dizzier when he realizes the person Jim’s thinking about having sex with right now is Uhura. It’s disgusting. The kid is a pig. Uhura is permanently bonded with Spock, and will twist your nuts off in a second if you suggest otherwise, and the kid’s getting offers of sex every time he goes around a corner, but he somehow still can’t keep his mental dick in his imaginary pants.
“Are we boring you?” Jim has the biggest of smartass smirks on his face, and McCoy has the urge to hit him. Or stab him with an inoculate-filled hypospray.
“No.”
“No?” He looks at McCoy expectantly.
Oh, if that urge didn’t just get ten times stronger… “No, Captain.” He knows Jim knows he’s lying, but he doesn’t particularly care at the moment. He’s got too much else on his mind. So to speak.
“Glad to hear it.”
So the meeting continues. And McCoy spends the next forty minutes trying not to notice exactly which position Uhura likes the best (from behind, of all things, which surprises him, coming from such an elegant woman, even though it shouldn’t, because women are strange creatures and he knows it well), or the fact that Spock has done quite thorough research into the art of pleasuring a woman orally (Flutter tongue? The hell?), or any of the disturbing things Scotty is thinking. (Hamsters? Really? It isn’t strictly legal to beam living creatures without their permission unless it’s for their health, and definitely isn’t legal to beam them there… Although, actually, that might be fun for a little blackmail later, McCoy muses, so he tucks it away in his memory.)
He wants to put his hands over his ears and tell everyone to shut the hell up. But he can’t do that, now, can he? So he grits his teeth and does the best he can to get his brain to get them to shut the hell up instead. He tries thinking of it like a picture, like phaser beams or spiderwebs or-or neural ganglia. Yes. That’ll do nicely. He lines them up in his head and one by one tries to break the chains. It works, way better than the clumsy attempts with Sulu and Chapel, and he’s thrilled as the noise in his head begins to dim.
The only catch is that he can’t seem to drown out Jim. That chain clings together tenaciously, no matter how hard he tries. And oh Lordy, how he tries.
…and before he knows it, Kirk is nodding at them in dismissal. “We’re done here, ladies and gentlemen.” McCoy tries not to look too surprised that the meeting’s over already, but knows he’s probably failing. Apparently time passes quickly when you’re going quietly mad. “Bones, I know you weren’t listening to any of that, so you can stay after and I’ll run a recap.”
Goddamn son of a bitch is totally enjoying himself, but McCoy knows he’s licked. “Fine.” He sullenly watches Jim watch the others leave, and probably shouldn’t be stunned, but is anyway, when the image of Sulu and Chekov in a passionate embrace pops into his mind as they exit.
What the hell.
He’d known Jim was, well, a bit of a Lazy Susan, but he’d not known the man dipped into so many pools of applicants for his mental aerobics. So to speak.
How many damned surprises is a man supposed to endure in a day, for pity’s sake?
“Jim, can we get this over with, please?” he grumps, trying to spit the image from his mind. And when Jim turns to him, it’s appears he’s succeeded, and Jim is thinking of duty rosters, supply requisitions, and other ship’s things, the things he’s relaying to McCoy. He has a feeling Jim’s going into more detail with him than he did in the general meeting, which almost makes him forgive the little shit.
…then Jim’s brain wanders, and McCoy’s head is filled with an incredibly detailed, incredibly dirty image. Of course, he thinks, anything Jim does, he does with aplomb, so why should this be different?
His brain takes a second to process the picture fully, and when he does, that sour taste is back in his mouth. It’s Jim, clearly, naked as a jaybird… and being fucked-there’s no other word for it, McCoy realizes with a grimace-into the mattress by a man with dark hair. McCoy can’t see the mystery man’s face, but Kirk’s wearing such a distinct expression of pure animal joy, his mouth in a perfect rictus of pleasure and his hands gripping the man’s shoulders like he never wants to let go, that he kind of forgets to wonder.
For a second.
“Damn it, Jim,” he growls before he can stop himself. “Do you always think about sex?”
Jim blinks, but doesn’t ask where this line of questioning came from. Thank God. “Well… sort of, yeah, at least in the back of my mind. Unless we’re, like, under direct attack. Or I’m with Spock.” A corner of his mouth turns up, then he gives the doctor a curious look and McCoy tries not to flinch at what he knows is coming. “Dare I inquire as to why you’re asking? I mean- doesn’t everybody? Don’t you?”
“Please.” McCoy hears that he’s inflected that one word exactly like his hillbilly cousins used to say ‘pshaw,’ and it makes him even grumpier.
Too bad Jim’s got a wicked glint in his eye. “Is it because of your advanced age? Can’t get it up anymore, grandpa?”
And suddenly the image flashes, changes, and McCoy nearly chokes- For now the picture is Jim kneeling in front of the same dark-headed man, his hand expertly coaxing a half-soft cock to utter alertness while his mouth alternates between taking a lick here and there and uttering words that, by the looks on both of their faces, are utter filth.
And McCoy has no trouble seeing exactly who the other man is. As much as he tries not to look in the mirror most days, he knows his own face far too well.
The fuck.
The sour taste becomes nausea, and he feels his body temperature spike and his skin become clammy as he oozes slowly to his feet. He has to… get… somewhere. “Are we finished here, Jim?”
Jim looks up at him, a little concerned. “Yeah. You alright?”
“Fine.” He forces himself to look Jim in eye and speak smoothly, damn it, despite the stench of sweat and his own semen in his nostrils. “I don’t appreciate the joke about my working parts,” he manages in a tone resembling his normal gruffness, “but seeing as I am a grown-up, and secure in what I do, I’ll just ignore it, and see you and your immature ass tomorrow.”
Jim shrugs and waves him off with a typical Jim grin. “Sure. The excitement of a totally non-dangerous away mission awaits. See you then.”
There’s a drink waiting for McCoy in his quarters, and he’s damn well going to have it. Good sleep and a stiff drink, that’s all he needs, right?
And then tomorrow, with the mission and them being so far away from the anomaly, everything will be fine.
Well, the thought is enough to let him get a few hours’ sleep, at least.
---
Day Two
Diplomacy is sometimes exactly what it’s cracked up to be, McCoy had thought after he had shaken his head free of post-beaming fuzz and looked out from the beam-down point.
The planet they’re visiting has some of the most beautiful rolling hills he’s ever seen, and the thriving metropolis that’s grown, where once just an outpost lay, is really quite impressive. It’s to be a day full of history lessons, tours of medical labs, and meals with heads of state, and he’s had worse places to be.
…or so he had thought. Then, first of all, it had taken him a good hour of conversation before he could buckle down and dim out all the streams of thought scampering into his mind from their hosts.
Second of all, once that’s accomplished, which isn’t, by the way, until halfway through their first meeting-turned-impromptu-history-lecture, one thing becomes disgustingly clear:
Jim Kirk’s mind tends to wander unless something’s in danger of blowing up. And when it wanders, it usually wanders to sex. And when it wanders to sex, it’s usually sex with the person in closest proximity.
Or at least, that’s McCoy’s educated guess, because today, while they’re the only two crew members on the ground, it would appear Jim Kirk is planning to spend a lot of the day thinking about having sex with one Leonard McCoy.
First, when they’re in the preliminary meeting and he finally separates and nails down the strains of thought, it’s just a hum on Jim’s part. Just a keyed-up, sexed-up undercurrent to the other shit-the actual important captain-y shit-rifling through his brain.
Then they go on the walking tour.
McCoy notices Jim looking almost wistfully down a long road that winds out into the countryside, and assumes Jim’s wishing for his motorbike. He walks up and claps him on the shoulder, prepared for the mental bombardment this time. He’s getting good at this, if he does say so himself. “Miss her?”
Jim shoots him a half-smile, but doesn’t really look away from the road. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
And McCoy can see that yes, the bike is what Kirk’s thinking of. The smell of leather and diesel teases his nostrils as his mind’s eye sees Jim running his hands over the seat, the handles, the shiny metal, then straddling her and revving her up, the expression on his face clearly showing it to be an act of love.
A very real, very plaintive, very honest love.
Suddenly McCoy’s mouth is somehow dry, and he finds himself unable to move, the hand on Jim’s shoulder proving to be a direct conduit for love and lust and a lot of other things he’d never thought a man would feel for a motorbike… Emotions wash through him, only to go back to Jim and lap upon themselves, churning and peaking with the throb of the engine until he’s chagrined to realize he’s out of breath.
And then, somehow, assumedly because it happens to be McCoy’s hand on him and not someone else’s, McCoy has joined Kirk on his mental motorcycle, straddling the warm leather cushion behind the captain. One hand burrows up under Jim’s shirt in search of warm skin while the other is fisted around the captain’s cock, and the look on his face is… is like it’s the only place he’d like to be.
McCoy feels it like an electrocution. He freezes for a split-second, then steps back as quickly as he can without arousing suspicion. He scuffs the ground with his toe, something he’s never done before in his damn life, but he’s so discomfited and they’re supposed to be acting like diplomats, for Christ’s sake, not adolescents, and if Jim could just keep his mind out of his-his!-pants for twelve blessed hours, then-
“Shall we move on?”
McCoy’s brain snaps to attention, and the picture vanishes. Thank Christ. He knows redness is creeping up his neck, but no one seems to notice anything out of the ordinary. Jim throws him a grin, and McCoy narrows his eyes at the captain. But there’s no way Jim can know what just happened, is there? No. There’s no way.
He smothers a grimace and follows the group to their next destination.
---
Three hours later that grimace has turned into a full-blown scowl, accompanied by, if he’s being honest, a little bit of a tic above his left eyebrow. Jim has scampered off with some nubile colonist and left McCoy to deal with their hosts, again, which isn’t exactly his strong suit, thanks very much. He’s a doctor, not a diplomat. And even though he grits his teeth and does his best, it’s a pretty sad attempt. The colonists take pity on him at some point and drop the subject of intergalactic politics, so the conversation turns from complicated and aggravating to boring and aggravating.
Needless to say, when Jim shows up just in time to beam back aboard the ship, McCoy is in no mood to hear about his antics. But Jim shares them anyway. “She was a natural redhead, Bones, I mean, ev-“
“Shut up, Jim.”
“You don’t want to hear about it?” He’s got that fool grin on, and McCoy just doesn’t think he can get more annoyed.
“Not unless you want to hear about my dinner with the Counselor General and his four wives, no, I don’t wanna hear a goddamn thing outta your mouth.” He’s stuck seeing it in stereo in his head, anyway. Not that Jim would know this.
Jim loses the smile briefly. “Anything I need to know about? You know, politically?”
“No.” He reaches for his communicator. “Scotty, please beam us the hell up.”
As they wait, McCoy tries to ignore what’s coming from the captain’s head, even though he knows it won’t work. Jim might’ve switched conversational tactics, but he’s still thinking about the red-headed chit, and McCoy finds it exceedingly difficult to tune out the incredibly raunchy picture of Jim piled on top of some girl on one of those hillsides he remembers waxing poetically about mere hours ago.
After a couple more moments of mental struggle, he gives up trying to block it-he’s too damn tired and Jim’s thoughts are too damn obnoxious-and lets it come through loud and clear. And only then does he see that while Kirk enjoyed the moves he very thoroughly executed with the sweet young thing, he was not thinking of her while executing them.
No, it appears that while buried deep inside her, Kirk was imagining being buried deep inside McCoy. So says the picture that now fills McCoy’s head to the clanging, banging brim.
Jim has a hell of a thorough imagination, too. McCoy can smell the grass on the hillside, feel the small green blades bunching up between his fingers, and see the sweaty sheen they’re both sporting, the looks of absolute pleasure on their faces, hear the way he keeps growling Jim’s name while Jim just-Jim just watches him, as if his main focus is McCoy’s enjoyment, not his own.
And if that’s not a sign it’s all a bullshit daydream, he doesn’t know what would be.
Oh, he has no doubt Jim’s a dynamite lay, what with having the energy of a bunny and the experience of a brothel’s worth of painted ladies, but come on. It’s Jim. To give more of a damn about your partner than yourself in bed means you have to give more than a damn about your partner, period.
And then he feels the familiar sickeningly sparkly feeling of the transporter, and he can’t think about it anymore.
---
“Bones, I was wondering if you’d thought about-“ Jim doesn’t look up from his PADD until he’s halfway into McCoy’s quarters. “Oh. You about to go to bed?”
“What does it look like?” McCoy replies testily. He’s just finished his nightcap and has already slipped on his most beloved pjs, determined to actually get some sleep tonight. He’s thinking of having another drink, even, because he’s unwilling to admit there’s no way a hundred drinks’ll do nearly enough to bring true rest within his reach.
“It looks like you need new pajamas,” Jim replies. He’s close to chuckling, and it’s just the last thing on a long list of things that have tried McCoy’s patience today.
“As my daughter would so eloquently say, bite me.”
Now Jim actually does snicker, but as he watches Bones sit down tiredly onto the bed, he sobers. “Hey, listen. I should apologize for ditching you today, shouldn’t I?”
“What kind of question is that? Either apologize or don’t, jackass.”
The stream he’s getting from the kid’s brain is a half-assed apology, regret that McCoy had a rough time of it but indignant certainty that he had every right to do what he did anyway. Just another to add to a long list of reasons James T Kirk will always seem like a jackass, regardless of how many times he saves the world or how good he may or may not be in bed.
So when the captain opens his mouth, McCoy cuts him off. “Look, Jim, it’s been a long day,” -a long couple of nights, too, dammit- “and I’d just like to go to sleep, if that’s alright with you.”
Jim regards him for a second, then shrugs. “Sure.”
“Thank you,” he says dryly, his actual meaning-‘Go away.’-perfectly clear. He waits for the kid to leave, but Jim is hesitating. And suddenly the stream of images is changing from thoughts on the day to thoughts on the right now, featuring Kirk watching him get ready for bed, and McCoy does not want to see where it will lead. “Goodnight, Jim.”
“Yeah.” After an unbearably long second, Jim slowly turns and strolls towards the door, taking his sweet time, and it’s not quick enough to stop the movie playing in his head-well, in their heads, which is a thought he turns aside quickly-from becoming intimate, just as he feared.
But it’s a weird, fuzzy sort of intimate. It’s Kirk slowly divesting him of his admittedly tatty sleep shirt while raining soft kisses along his cheeks and throat, then gently pushing him down onto the bed so he can tease off the well-worn pants as well. It’s Kirk soothing every inch of skin he uncovers with slow touches of calloused hands. It’s Kirk coming up to kiss him gently, almost sweetly, in an utterly non-demanding, purely giving way, before kissing a path down the left side of his body and taking McCoy’s mostly soft cock into his mouth. It’s Kirk not thinking twice about it taking longer, because Bones is so damn tired, instead just being more patient and gentle than McCoy’s ever thought possible. It’s Kirk watching McCoy rise, climax, and fall with a look on Jim’s face that McCoy’s not ready to deal with in any way, shape or form. It’s Kirk hushing McCoy’s feeble attempts to reciprocate, instead shucking his own clothes and tucking the blankets around them both before brushing the mussed hair back from McCoy’s exhausted eyes and telling him to go to sleep.
It’s Jim Kirk apologizing.
“Goodnight, Bones.”
Jim’s voice, his actual voice, shakes McCoy loose from the fantasy, and he looks up, his eyes sticky with something, just in time to see the door slide shut.
He manages to reach the bathroom before retching up a sinkful of bourbon and stomach acid.
Tomorrow, he swears to himself as he crawls into bed, interested in nothing but sleep and forgetting. Tomorrow, everything will be fine.
That’s not enough for sleep, though, this time.
( Part Two)