Fic: Put these words in your mouth
Put these words in your mouth
ST:XI
Kirk/McCoy preslash
PG-13
2,500 words
Warnings for angst, poor structural integrity, language, a running joke about shooting people in the ass and the abuse of half of a mattress.
For the space_wrapped prompt: "Post-apocalyptic Christmas - keeping the festive spirit alive, even though 90% of the population isn't."
The man standing in front of Jim’s door differs from what Jim would consider a traditional Christmas Miracle in several key ways. Namely:
1) He’s naked.
2) He’s bloody.
3) He’s pissing through Jim’s letterbox.
But he’s human and alive and saying something to Jim that isn’t “get out of here before I suck your eyeballs out of your skull and feed them to the sand rats,” which makes him pretty much unique among the life forms Jim’s encountered in the last eighteen months.
“You’re gonna shoot me, I’d be grateful for some pants first,” the Miracle says. “You can have ‘em back soon as I’m cold.”
Jim realises he still has his plasma rifle raised to his shoulder. It occurs to him, dimly, that being presented with your very own Christmas Miracle only to shoot it in its bare, bony ass could probably be construed as ungrateful, and then, even more dimly, that he’s finally lost his mind.
“I’m Kirk,” he tells the Miracle. “My name’s Jim Kirk.”
“Hooray for you.” The miraculous bag of bones finishes pissing and kicks sand over the damp patch at the bottom of Jim’s door, still studiously not raising his eyes from the ground, like he thinks looking directly at Jim’s rifle will make it go off.
“I’m not gonna shoot you,” Jim tries. It comes out more like a question than he means it to. “You wanna trade something or something?”
The Miracle does look up, then. “Kid,” he says, staring at Jim like he’s grown a second head, “I got three cracked ribs, two broken fingers and a partridge in a pear tree. All of it’s yours if you want it. If you don’t, either shoot me or get out of my goddamn way.”
This is the most anyone has said to Jim without opening fire on him since the settlers on the other side of the city made it clear they didn’t want his company, maybe since the search party sent up from Farragut Camp accused him of murdering himself, stealing his own clothing and impersonating Jim Kirk for his own nefarious purposes.
The urge to pull the Miracle close and check he’s real is suddenly embarrassingly strong; Jim wants to see if he’s as much a sack of burnt up bones as he looks, see if he still smells like the antiseptic cities to the south or if he’s picked up the salt-dirt smell of the desert already. He can’t have been out here that long, Jim reasons, not if he’d been dumb enough to try and talk to the settlers. He can’t know much and he doesn’t have anything and Jim could help him, help ease those bones, maybe, a little, if he would just -
He doesn’t realise he’s moved forward until Bones steps back. “Hey, hey, no, no, it’s okay. It’s okay, I’m not, this isn’t, um. I’m on my own.” Seventy-five percent of the population of the Academy of the United Federation of Cartographers once voted Jim Best Public Speaker and Most Likely to Succeed. He’s almost glad they aren’t around to see this pathetic display of neediness and mute panic. Almost. “I’m from the Federation.”
He shrugs off his jacket and tosses it over to Bones, who has continued to edge incrementally backwards. “See that insignia? Means I’m from the Enterprise unit. We get sent out to -”
“Risk your damn fool necks is what you’re sent out to do,” Bones grouses, but he puts the jacket on, apparently convinced that Jim isn’t the kind of lunatic who’d kill a Fed and then dress up in his clothes and wander round the desert. Jim brightens a little.
“You’ve heard of us!”
“I’ve heard you’re insane.”
Jim gives his best reassuring smile. Bones shivers.
*
Jim doesn’t actually remember the attack. He used to pretend to a lot as a child, before his friends got old enough to figure out that being born in space made him too young to remember anything that happened there, but all he really knows is that aliens arrived, his dad died, half the world vanished under a blanket of white noise and then the aliens disappeared again, like they’d showed up just to fuck with his family.
(Tangentially: Jim’s pretty sure he saw an alien once, nearly two years back, when he broke protocol and headed off into the White alone to try and find Riley’s body. It flickered in and out of view on the horizon, the only dark shape in a endlessly bright, endlessly featureless landscape, and it’d taken Jim three days to remember what they told you in Basic about how seeing aliens was one of the first signs that you’d spent too long in the White and needed to rock on back to Base Camp.
Jim had dutifully attempted to rock on back but had somehow ended up here, on the south side of a city not even the settlers remember the name of, hoping the radiation doesn’t kill him before he manages to reboot his Compass and find his way back to where he’s actually meant to be.)
Leonard’s memories of that time are a little clearer, though they’re still mostly of a bright light on the horizon and a horrible noise always being in the air, like everyone was driving through a tunnel with the radio real loud, right up until his mama wrapped him up in most of the clothes he owned and bundled him out of the house and into the endless line of people trekking south, where it was supposed to be safe.
(Somewhat less tangentially: Leonard’s not from a rich family but the kind that’s valuable in a crisis, and he made it through the exodus and the aftermath well enough to wind up with a wife and a child and more than most folks, right up until his wife went a little crazy and took off with some hair-brained cult that swore blind the aliens had opened up some kind of door on Paradise right there in that burnt, bright space where the Midwest used to be and took their daughter to walk through it, at which point Leonard took off into the White after them with pretty much the clothes on his back, a fifth of strong liquor and a firm conviction that he was gonna cold clock anyone who tried to get between him and his baby girl.
He doesn’t remember where his clothes went.
He refuses to even think that he’s seen an alien.
He’s not entirely sure everyone else can still hear the terrible radio noise.)
*
Jim doesn’t use the top two floors of the house because - well, he probably started avoiding them when the settlers still looked for him most nights, but at this point it’s mostly habit. Still, the rooms he’s got set up in the basement are pretty neat, he thinks, apart from the strange green patch growing on the far wall, and he doesn’t like the way Bones is staring around him like it’s the weirdest thing he’s ever seen.
“This isn’t the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen,” Jim tells him.
“It might be.”
“Yeah right. You just walked in out of the White.”
“Is that a Christmas tree? With starships on it?”
“They’re salt cellars,” Jim explains, with pride, before realising that probably makes him sound insane. “I’m not insane. The tree was just in here, and my Mom - this one year I made her buy a whole set of starship-shaped tree ornaments because I was obsessed with the ‘fleet as a kid, and then she cried all Christmas because my dad died in the attack and after that she wouldn’t take them down, and -” It strikes Jim that this may not exactly be helping his cause. “I just don’t want you to think you’re about to take drugs off a crazy person.”
Bones gives him a long, level and surprisingly believing look. “My six-year-old hates starships,” he says, eventually.
“Smart kid.”
Bones relaxes infinitesimally at that, enough to accept Jim’s offer of pants and five minutes with a medkit, anyhow, but not enough to talk or eat or tell Jim anything about the outside world other than it’s still there and it still sucks. The conversation goes something like this:
“Where’d you come from?”
“Georgia.”
“Where’d you hit the White?”
Bones shrugs.
“How long had you been walking before you got here?”
Bones shrugs.
“My equipment’s fucked, I keep trying to fix it so I can start up or head back, but until I do I’ve got no way of knowing whether I’m going forwards or back.”
“I’m going forwards.”
“You shouldn’t.”
Bones shrugs.
“You’ll die.”
Bones shrugs.
“My partner, Gary Mitchell, he died.”
Bones looks sad.
“You can stay a couple of days at least, get rested up.”
“I’m going forwards.”
“Where did you come in from?”
“Georgia.”
“No, but where did you first hit the White?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m trying to get my equipment fixed. I’ve managed to find some parts from things left in the other houses but shit, the radiation screws with everything.”
Bones shrugs.
“My partner, Gary, I don’t even know where he died.”
Bones looks sad.
“You could stay a couple of days, if you need to rest up.”
Bones raises an eyebrow.
Jim laughs.
Bones raises the eyebrow further.
“But seriously,” Jim says, “how long were you walking before you got here? If you give me a rough idea, I can maybe figure out where we’d be on a C-23 map - ”
It goes on for longer than Jim would care to admit and is, embarrassingly, his most satisfying conversational experience in recent memory. When Bones is finally persuaded to bed down on half a mattress in the back corner of the basement, Jim heads out on night patrol almost dizzy with humiliation and glee.
*
By the time Jim gets back from night patrol, Bones is gone.
So are the pants he borrowed, and most of Jim’s emergency stash of medical supplies.
The good news is that everything’s too tidy for him to have been killed or kidnapped; the bad news is that that means that Jim’s Christmas Miracle was a lying, scheming son of a bitch and Jim should have shot him in his bare ass when the opportunity presented itself.
How the desire to retroactively shoot Bones leads to Jim frantically dry-humping the mattress he slept on isn’t something Jim can really explain. To be honest, he’s not really aware of it until he’s got one hand down his pants and his face shoved into one sleeve of the jacket Bones borrowed, grunting his way to an orgasm that leaves him feeling sticky and stupid and alone.
Bones is probably sitting up with the settlers, laughing at him.
Fuck, Bones probably is a settler. He’s probably been here longer than Jim has.
Jim lets himself waste thirty minutes of his life wondering how long he’d last if he marched into the settlers’ camp with a gun, then goes to sleep. There’ll be no-one out in the heat of the afternoon, and then he can go scavenging for something that can fix this. Maybe fix his Compass, finally. Maybe get the fuck out of here.
*
He doesn’t go scavenging, in the end. Instead, he:
• checks the security systems and the water level
• stares at a protein pack for seven minutes
• decides to forgo eating in favour of doing the horizontal tango with his half-a-mattress twice more
• eats the protein pack anyway
• adds more notes to the map he’s building of whatever city this used to be, even though at this point it’s so finely detailed he’s struggling for space
• zones out staring at his bald aluminium Christmas tree, wondering what the fuck happened to his brother and where his mom’s gone and when exactly he got so soft and useless
• has a weird moment where he thinks he can hear Pike barking instructions like he wants to nail them to the inside of Jim’s skull one word at a time before he realises
• no, that’s the sound of the alarm on Nth Street going haywire, and
• picks up his rifle, flicks off the safety and heads out to shoot Bones in the ass.
He finds Bones standing in the middle of Nth Street, holding a plate and looking for all the world like he knows he’s going to be shot in the ass and has made his peace with that. “Look, kid -”
“I’m going to shoot you in the ass,” Jim informs him.
“And that’s fair. But I really think you should come inside first.”
“Excuse me?” There is no way Bones can know about the entire shirt-mattress episode. No way at all. That cannot possibly be what he means. Jim’s cock twitches hopefully anyway, just to let him know that it still exists and approves.
“I’m a doctor, okay? I’m a doctor, and from what I’ve seen they don’t have one, and I figured I’d get more out’ve ‘em than you could.” He looks sad again, like he didn’t want to admit that to Jim’s face. “Most of your stuff’s still in here.”
He slides the remains of Jim’s medkit across to him, and yeah, fine, it’s intact, and there are ration packs in it again and some ragtag bits of circuitry that look shit but might not be, but that doesn’t mean that he isn’t shooting anyone anymore. “What you got there?”
Now it’s Bones’ turn to look embarrassed. He gestures vaguely with the plate, like that might prompt it to explain itself. “It’s a plate.”
“You traded my med supplies for a plate?”
“No, I, uh. I found this one. I was just - ” Bones glances sidelong at some squat wreck of a house at the end of the street. Jim braces himself for an ambush, but all he gets is Bones looking sheepish again and saying, “Would you have dinner with me? I’d like to have dinner with you. What with it being the holiday, and you not shooting me in the ass.”
“You’re wearing my pants,” Jim says, but he follows Bones in anyway.
Inside the house is... kind of a shambles, actually. Something black and foul-smelling squats in the middle of a table - Jim’s pretty sure it’s a mixture of protein supplement and cactus flesh, which Bones obviously hasn’t been told is fucking hideous and to be eaten only after your partner - and the table has been covered with crockery that Bones seems to have put together with spit and prayer over the course of a morning.
In front of one seat is a small stack of ammo wrapped in what Jim thinks for a split second is ribbon, before he realises that it’s actually a strip torn from the hem of the pants he strongly suspects he's never getting back. There's a string of tiny lights hooked up to a car battery and looped round nails in the walls. They’re the shape of starships, and they look like something Jim’s mom would have humoured him with when he was five.
He can’t breathe round the lump in his throat.
“I can’t stay here,” Bones is saying, and he sounds like he can’t really breathe, either. “And I don’t know if I could talk you into leaving, but I need to find my daughter, so. Thank you for not shooting me, and for letting me fix up my fingers. It was good to know you, Jim Kirk. Merry Christmas."
And then Bones smiles, kind of.
It’s terrifying.
It’s the best thing Jim’s seen in years.
ST:XI
Kirk/McCoy preslash
PG-13
2,500 words
Warnings for angst, poor structural integrity, language, a running joke about shooting people in the ass and the abuse of half of a mattress.
For the space_wrapped prompt: "Post-apocalyptic Christmas - keeping the festive spirit alive, even though 90% of the population isn't."
The man standing in front of Jim’s door differs from what Jim would consider a traditional Christmas Miracle in several key ways. Namely:
1) He’s naked.
2) He’s bloody.
3) He’s pissing through Jim’s letterbox.
But he’s human and alive and saying something to Jim that isn’t “get out of here before I suck your eyeballs out of your skull and feed them to the sand rats,” which makes him pretty much unique among the life forms Jim’s encountered in the last eighteen months.
“You’re gonna shoot me, I’d be grateful for some pants first,” the Miracle says. “You can have ‘em back soon as I’m cold.”
Jim realises he still has his plasma rifle raised to his shoulder. It occurs to him, dimly, that being presented with your very own Christmas Miracle only to shoot it in its bare, bony ass could probably be construed as ungrateful, and then, even more dimly, that he’s finally lost his mind.
“I’m Kirk,” he tells the Miracle. “My name’s Jim Kirk.”
“Hooray for you.” The miraculous bag of bones finishes pissing and kicks sand over the damp patch at the bottom of Jim’s door, still studiously not raising his eyes from the ground, like he thinks looking directly at Jim’s rifle will make it go off.
“I’m not gonna shoot you,” Jim tries. It comes out more like a question than he means it to. “You wanna trade something or something?”
The Miracle does look up, then. “Kid,” he says, staring at Jim like he’s grown a second head, “I got three cracked ribs, two broken fingers and a partridge in a pear tree. All of it’s yours if you want it. If you don’t, either shoot me or get out of my goddamn way.”
This is the most anyone has said to Jim without opening fire on him since the settlers on the other side of the city made it clear they didn’t want his company, maybe since the search party sent up from Farragut Camp accused him of murdering himself, stealing his own clothing and impersonating Jim Kirk for his own nefarious purposes.
The urge to pull the Miracle close and check he’s real is suddenly embarrassingly strong; Jim wants to see if he’s as much a sack of burnt up bones as he looks, see if he still smells like the antiseptic cities to the south or if he’s picked up the salt-dirt smell of the desert already. He can’t have been out here that long, Jim reasons, not if he’d been dumb enough to try and talk to the settlers. He can’t know much and he doesn’t have anything and Jim could help him, help ease those bones, maybe, a little, if he would just -
He doesn’t realise he’s moved forward until Bones steps back. “Hey, hey, no, no, it’s okay. It’s okay, I’m not, this isn’t, um. I’m on my own.” Seventy-five percent of the population of the Academy of the United Federation of Cartographers once voted Jim Best Public Speaker and Most Likely to Succeed. He’s almost glad they aren’t around to see this pathetic display of neediness and mute panic. Almost. “I’m from the Federation.”
He shrugs off his jacket and tosses it over to Bones, who has continued to edge incrementally backwards. “See that insignia? Means I’m from the Enterprise unit. We get sent out to -”
“Risk your damn fool necks is what you’re sent out to do,” Bones grouses, but he puts the jacket on, apparently convinced that Jim isn’t the kind of lunatic who’d kill a Fed and then dress up in his clothes and wander round the desert. Jim brightens a little.
“You’ve heard of us!”
“I’ve heard you’re insane.”
Jim gives his best reassuring smile. Bones shivers.
*
Jim doesn’t actually remember the attack. He used to pretend to a lot as a child, before his friends got old enough to figure out that being born in space made him too young to remember anything that happened there, but all he really knows is that aliens arrived, his dad died, half the world vanished under a blanket of white noise and then the aliens disappeared again, like they’d showed up just to fuck with his family.
(Tangentially: Jim’s pretty sure he saw an alien once, nearly two years back, when he broke protocol and headed off into the White alone to try and find Riley’s body. It flickered in and out of view on the horizon, the only dark shape in a endlessly bright, endlessly featureless landscape, and it’d taken Jim three days to remember what they told you in Basic about how seeing aliens was one of the first signs that you’d spent too long in the White and needed to rock on back to Base Camp.
Jim had dutifully attempted to rock on back but had somehow ended up here, on the south side of a city not even the settlers remember the name of, hoping the radiation doesn’t kill him before he manages to reboot his Compass and find his way back to where he’s actually meant to be.)
Leonard’s memories of that time are a little clearer, though they’re still mostly of a bright light on the horizon and a horrible noise always being in the air, like everyone was driving through a tunnel with the radio real loud, right up until his mama wrapped him up in most of the clothes he owned and bundled him out of the house and into the endless line of people trekking south, where it was supposed to be safe.
(Somewhat less tangentially: Leonard’s not from a rich family but the kind that’s valuable in a crisis, and he made it through the exodus and the aftermath well enough to wind up with a wife and a child and more than most folks, right up until his wife went a little crazy and took off with some hair-brained cult that swore blind the aliens had opened up some kind of door on Paradise right there in that burnt, bright space where the Midwest used to be and took their daughter to walk through it, at which point Leonard took off into the White after them with pretty much the clothes on his back, a fifth of strong liquor and a firm conviction that he was gonna cold clock anyone who tried to get between him and his baby girl.
He doesn’t remember where his clothes went.
He refuses to even think that he’s seen an alien.
He’s not entirely sure everyone else can still hear the terrible radio noise.)
*
Jim doesn’t use the top two floors of the house because - well, he probably started avoiding them when the settlers still looked for him most nights, but at this point it’s mostly habit. Still, the rooms he’s got set up in the basement are pretty neat, he thinks, apart from the strange green patch growing on the far wall, and he doesn’t like the way Bones is staring around him like it’s the weirdest thing he’s ever seen.
“This isn’t the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen,” Jim tells him.
“It might be.”
“Yeah right. You just walked in out of the White.”
“Is that a Christmas tree? With starships on it?”
“They’re salt cellars,” Jim explains, with pride, before realising that probably makes him sound insane. “I’m not insane. The tree was just in here, and my Mom - this one year I made her buy a whole set of starship-shaped tree ornaments because I was obsessed with the ‘fleet as a kid, and then she cried all Christmas because my dad died in the attack and after that she wouldn’t take them down, and -” It strikes Jim that this may not exactly be helping his cause. “I just don’t want you to think you’re about to take drugs off a crazy person.”
Bones gives him a long, level and surprisingly believing look. “My six-year-old hates starships,” he says, eventually.
“Smart kid.”
Bones relaxes infinitesimally at that, enough to accept Jim’s offer of pants and five minutes with a medkit, anyhow, but not enough to talk or eat or tell Jim anything about the outside world other than it’s still there and it still sucks. The conversation goes something like this:
“Where’d you come from?”
“Georgia.”
“Where’d you hit the White?”
Bones shrugs.
“How long had you been walking before you got here?”
Bones shrugs.
“My equipment’s fucked, I keep trying to fix it so I can start up or head back, but until I do I’ve got no way of knowing whether I’m going forwards or back.”
“I’m going forwards.”
“You shouldn’t.”
Bones shrugs.
“You’ll die.”
Bones shrugs.
“My partner, Gary Mitchell, he died.”
Bones looks sad.
“You can stay a couple of days at least, get rested up.”
“I’m going forwards.”
“Where did you come in from?”
“Georgia.”
“No, but where did you first hit the White?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m trying to get my equipment fixed. I’ve managed to find some parts from things left in the other houses but shit, the radiation screws with everything.”
Bones shrugs.
“My partner, Gary, I don’t even know where he died.”
Bones looks sad.
“You could stay a couple of days, if you need to rest up.”
Bones raises an eyebrow.
Jim laughs.
Bones raises the eyebrow further.
“But seriously,” Jim says, “how long were you walking before you got here? If you give me a rough idea, I can maybe figure out where we’d be on a C-23 map - ”
It goes on for longer than Jim would care to admit and is, embarrassingly, his most satisfying conversational experience in recent memory. When Bones is finally persuaded to bed down on half a mattress in the back corner of the basement, Jim heads out on night patrol almost dizzy with humiliation and glee.
*
By the time Jim gets back from night patrol, Bones is gone.
So are the pants he borrowed, and most of Jim’s emergency stash of medical supplies.
The good news is that everything’s too tidy for him to have been killed or kidnapped; the bad news is that that means that Jim’s Christmas Miracle was a lying, scheming son of a bitch and Jim should have shot him in his bare ass when the opportunity presented itself.
How the desire to retroactively shoot Bones leads to Jim frantically dry-humping the mattress he slept on isn’t something Jim can really explain. To be honest, he’s not really aware of it until he’s got one hand down his pants and his face shoved into one sleeve of the jacket Bones borrowed, grunting his way to an orgasm that leaves him feeling sticky and stupid and alone.
Bones is probably sitting up with the settlers, laughing at him.
Fuck, Bones probably is a settler. He’s probably been here longer than Jim has.
Jim lets himself waste thirty minutes of his life wondering how long he’d last if he marched into the settlers’ camp with a gun, then goes to sleep. There’ll be no-one out in the heat of the afternoon, and then he can go scavenging for something that can fix this. Maybe fix his Compass, finally. Maybe get the fuck out of here.
*
He doesn’t go scavenging, in the end. Instead, he:
• checks the security systems and the water level
• stares at a protein pack for seven minutes
• decides to forgo eating in favour of doing the horizontal tango with his half-a-mattress twice more
• eats the protein pack anyway
• adds more notes to the map he’s building of whatever city this used to be, even though at this point it’s so finely detailed he’s struggling for space
• zones out staring at his bald aluminium Christmas tree, wondering what the fuck happened to his brother and where his mom’s gone and when exactly he got so soft and useless
• has a weird moment where he thinks he can hear Pike barking instructions like he wants to nail them to the inside of Jim’s skull one word at a time before he realises
• no, that’s the sound of the alarm on Nth Street going haywire, and
• picks up his rifle, flicks off the safety and heads out to shoot Bones in the ass.
He finds Bones standing in the middle of Nth Street, holding a plate and looking for all the world like he knows he’s going to be shot in the ass and has made his peace with that. “Look, kid -”
“I’m going to shoot you in the ass,” Jim informs him.
“And that’s fair. But I really think you should come inside first.”
“Excuse me?” There is no way Bones can know about the entire shirt-mattress episode. No way at all. That cannot possibly be what he means. Jim’s cock twitches hopefully anyway, just to let him know that it still exists and approves.
“I’m a doctor, okay? I’m a doctor, and from what I’ve seen they don’t have one, and I figured I’d get more out’ve ‘em than you could.” He looks sad again, like he didn’t want to admit that to Jim’s face. “Most of your stuff’s still in here.”
He slides the remains of Jim’s medkit across to him, and yeah, fine, it’s intact, and there are ration packs in it again and some ragtag bits of circuitry that look shit but might not be, but that doesn’t mean that he isn’t shooting anyone anymore. “What you got there?”
Now it’s Bones’ turn to look embarrassed. He gestures vaguely with the plate, like that might prompt it to explain itself. “It’s a plate.”
“You traded my med supplies for a plate?”
“No, I, uh. I found this one. I was just - ” Bones glances sidelong at some squat wreck of a house at the end of the street. Jim braces himself for an ambush, but all he gets is Bones looking sheepish again and saying, “Would you have dinner with me? I’d like to have dinner with you. What with it being the holiday, and you not shooting me in the ass.”
“You’re wearing my pants,” Jim says, but he follows Bones in anyway.
Inside the house is... kind of a shambles, actually. Something black and foul-smelling squats in the middle of a table - Jim’s pretty sure it’s a mixture of protein supplement and cactus flesh, which Bones obviously hasn’t been told is fucking hideous and to be eaten only after your partner - and the table has been covered with crockery that Bones seems to have put together with spit and prayer over the course of a morning.
In front of one seat is a small stack of ammo wrapped in what Jim thinks for a split second is ribbon, before he realises that it’s actually a strip torn from the hem of the pants he strongly suspects he's never getting back. There's a string of tiny lights hooked up to a car battery and looped round nails in the walls. They’re the shape of starships, and they look like something Jim’s mom would have humoured him with when he was five.
He can’t breathe round the lump in his throat.
“I can’t stay here,” Bones is saying, and he sounds like he can’t really breathe, either. “And I don’t know if I could talk you into leaving, but I need to find my daughter, so. Thank you for not shooting me, and for letting me fix up my fingers. It was good to know you, Jim Kirk. Merry Christmas."
And then Bones smiles, kind of.
It’s terrifying.
It’s the best thing Jim’s seen in years.