Star Trek Big Bang: On A Day Like This [7/7]
Title: On A Day Like This
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy
Length: ~42k.
Rating: NC-17 for sex.
Master Post: Mix & Art
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six | Part Seven
At AO3
It’s intuition that tells Jim it’s ridiculously late when he wakes. It’s not like he’ll ever get woken up by sunlight again. He scours a hand across his face, kicking out of bed; a glance at the terminus tells him Bakshir’s expected message is still sitting in his inbox. He scans it quickly, and a glance at the chronometer tells him he’s half an hour late for his own tribunal.
He makes it to the conference room, decent if not formerly dressed, fourteen minutes later; he reaches up a fist to knock sharply, but the door glides open noiselessly to reveal an empty room. He interrogates the nearest terminus till it tells him where Bakshir’s accommodation is - her shuttle’s still docked, so they can’t have all left yet - and he breathlessly collapses against the ambassador suite’s doors, just about running the length of the ship in under three minutes. Part of him still has the dignity to cringe; stumbling into an Admiral’s quarters, messily-dressed, sweaty and panting is hardly the best introduction Starfleet’s ever seen.
Bakshir doesn’t seem surprised to see him. She snaps up the top of her case, tightens the strap down one side and transfers it to a trolley floating to her right before pacing smartly across the room and firmly shaking his hand. “Mr Kirk. I’m glad to see you managed to struggle out of bed at some point.” He starts to gabble off a frantic apology, but Bakshir laughs, waving a hand to cut him off. “Seriously, with all you’ve been through, I reckon you can be let off a late start.” Her mouth twitches in amusement. “As much as my colleagues disagree.” She types a quick command into the hover-trolley beside her, picks up her coat from the bed and starts toward the door.
“Wait!” Jim catches her arm just before she leaves. “What about - ”
“It was a pleasure to meet you, Mr Kirk,” Bakshir says smoothly, cutting him off. “I’d consider it an honour to work with you someday.”
Jim can do little but stare after her as she walks away.
“I guess they let me off,” he says slowly to Bones, perched on the biobed next to Pike’s. “Kinda abrupt, though, don’t you think?”
“To be honest, Jim, I don’t get what you’re complaining about. Now get your ass off that bed, I’ve got a case of Cardassian sleet-worm coming up from engineering - somebody is going to tell Scotty to damn well change those sucker-tubes, and he’d better hope it ain’t me.”
Jim presses his palms against the rail, the single glass window of the observation deck stretching out twenty foot in every direction. There’s two foot of empty space between the edge of this platform and the window; through the gap he can see the floor below, the window plummeting still downwards to finish in front of a jumble of computer monitors and haggard-looking analysts.
Unsurprisingly, there’s little use at the moment for an enterprising vehicle; the Federation’s having a hard enough time keeping control of the systems it knows of, never mind places they’ve never been before. The Klingons are starting to rear their (indisputably) ugly heads, complaining about how little they were told of Nero; the surviving Vulcans are (serenely) kicking up a fuss over Jim’s destruction of the Narada, claiming that the logical action would have been capture and interrogation for invaluable knowledge and material. Whilst the Federation does its best to turn Nero’s rampage into something positive and not start another war, the U.S.S. Enterprise has been assigned to bookkeeping jobs; police intraplanetary rows on that system, keep an eye on this singularity, check out the odd fluctuations in that asteroid field.
At the moment, it’s slowly orbiting a star in the last stages of its life, bordering on supernova, sapping some of the last solar energy and setting up some specially Scotty-tuned dilithium batteries to absorb the blast on impact. It lets off a soft, purple light, and, being the only one on the observation deck, Jim dims the lights to ten percent and revels in it. The glass, Spock once told him at length, is similar to that used in the cell doors of the brig; the exterior is fiercely strong stuff and as to not indicate to their enemies a small but admittedly weak spot in which it could be advantageous to strike, it has the false gloss of metal alloy, making it indistinguishable from the rest of the hull. On inquiry, Jim discovers that it’s a brand-new system, being launched on their ship; he can’t help but feel slightly uneasy, but stood there, watching the star revolve tragically slower and slower, trapped in its dying moments, he reckons it’s worth the risk.
There’s a shift change; he can hear it, even through the solid doors way across the deck. The analysts beneath him don’t move. The hiss of the pneumatics tells Jim he’s no longer on his own; he glances to the door and watches Lieutenant Sulu pace across the deck to lean on the rail beside him. “They reckon it’s going to go any moment,” Jim tells him quietly, gesturing towards the star.
Sulu nods. “I’ve never actually watched one die before.” Jim licks his lips. Sulu’s watching him carefully, almost mystically illuminated by another purple flash from the star. “Are you here because of the update?” He spots Jim’s blank face and laughs. “I guess not.”
“They said something bad about me, then.”
Another nod. “There’re a group of Romulans asking for a formal tribunal,” Sulu mutters, scowling slightly out of the glass. “They reckon you should actually be punished for what you did.” He snorts. “I wouldn’t worry, though; the Federation stamped down on it straight away. I don’t know who it is, but somebody up there likes you.” Spock, Jim realises, straightening slightly and smiling. Well, the elder Spock - Ambassador Spock. He said he had something to do, indeed. He’s probably standing behind all the Admirals twisting their arms and scaring them shitless about tales of universe-ending paradoxes. Jim grins and, for the first time in a while, feels safe.
Sulu leans across the rail, his fingers tripping over each other; Jim watches them. His mother used to do that. “It seems like a bit of a hollow victory, don’t you think?” he says softly, and Jim doesn’t need to ask; the thought’s so familiar, prickling and brewing in his mind for weeks. Nero blew up his planet; he blew up Nero. It didn’t bring any of it back, or stop any of it happening. Sure, he might’ve prevented universe-ending war, but the petty, human part of him was still jumping and waving and yelling so what? at the top of its voice.
What next?
“I liked the way you did it, though,” Sulu confesses, turning to face him more directly, lounging a little against the rail. “Charging in recklessly, irresponsibly - it got things done. Don’t get me wrong, Spock’s a great leader - and the Federation love him, he’s just what they need; flawlessly and consistently following the rules. But I... I don’t think there’s time for his sort of leadership anymore.”
The star goes into supernova. Bright, hot, flash; the ship judders underneath them, but stays grounded and solid beneath their feet. There’re a few heart-stopping moments of flaring fire, the reinforced glass protecting their eyes; then the viewscreen fades, the star dies, and it’s over.
“I think we need a change.”
“Jim - Jim,” Bones grunts, extracting Jim’s hands from the death grip around his upper arms and shoving him a good foot away. “At least let me take my clothes off first.”
“Mmm, I don’t know, Bones,” Jim breathes, breaking the space again and pushing him up against the wall. “Kinda kinky, don’t you think? What with you still there in your doctor’s uniform - ”
“Jesus, Jim, what’s gotten into you? You’ve not been this damn jittery since - ”
Jim cuts him off with a roll of his eyes and a kiss. And Bones says he never knows when to shut up.
Jim’s mumbling, incoherent, arching and writhing under Bones. He shimmies his hips just a little, sending him further down the mattress, curling his fingers and scraping his nails on the bottom of Bones’ spine. Bones is fucking him with a rhythm; a bit of the old in-out, in-out, he thinks lethargically, and keens, skidding his nails back along Bones’ back, clutching at his shoulders and shunting down with his hips. Bones’ eyes are clamped shut above him, the force of keeping everything moving sending spiders’-webs of wrinkles sprawling out across his face, and Jim watches the sweat slide between them, trickling past his eyebrows, beading across his eyelashes. He watches Bones’ lip, caught in his teeth, little whistles of breath slipping past as he does his best not to gasp or moan, to ride it right to the very end. He can feel the dips on either side where Bones’ hands are scrunched and firmly punching the mattress, and he shunts his hips to one of them; Bones’ eyes are open and in the same instant his hand’s on his hip, he’s shoved back along the bed and he has a second to watch Bones snap before he’s gone out of his mind with the rush of it, driven mad by all of it, coming on a wing and a prayer.
Jim rolls onto his side to watch Bones come down, sprawled on his back on the tiny bed and almost wheezing with the effort of drawing air back into his battered lungs. Jim traces his fingers in the pooled sweat around his navel and Bones moans roughly, a beg for more mixed with a plea for mercy.
Jim watches him blink. “Do you think I should enlist?”
Bones throws him the most scathing look. “We are not talking about this now,” he rasps, and falls asleep.
“Were you being serious?”
It takes Bones four days to bring it up again. Jim shrugs. “It’s not like there’s anything else to do, is there? I can’t hitch a ride on this ship forever.”
Bones nods. “The new doctor’s arriving tomorrow,” he says absently.
“Ouch,” Jim replies, grinning a little. “What, don’t you qualify anymore?”
“I never did qualify,” he mutters. “I’m still a damn cadet, in case you forgot.”
Jim throws him a lazy look. “You could always come to the Academy with me.”
Bones snorts. “Spending another three years in college is not my idea of a good time.”
Jim, sprawled across the bed, rolls onto his stomach. “So what are you going to do instead?”
“I don’t know,” he grumbles, and leaves the room.
Bones’ replacement is a woman, much to Jim’s surprise. He tries to introduce himself as the hero who saved the universe, all charm, but gets misinterpreted as a lecherous crewman and ends up wobbling off to Bones with a nosebleed, because apparently she can punch.
“Hold your hand above your head,” Bones mutters, poking around his cheeks and ignoring Jim when he yelps. “It’s not broken.”
“You’re a lifesaver, Bones,” Jim mumbles, and the bleeding eventually stops. Bones looks like he’s in two minds about something, pacing around, fidgeting with the rudimentary medkit in the bathroom, reorganising it again and again. “I spoke to Spock.”
“Hmmn?”
“I, uh.” Jim coughs. “I guess I’ve outstayed my welcome.”
Bones raises an eyebrow. “They’re chucking you out?”
Jim rolls his eyes. “It was never going to be permanent. Starfleet are redistributing personnel all over the place, and if they can’t justify you being there - ”
“Then you’re not,” Bones finishes, scowling. “I wonder where that leaves me.”
Jim slumps back on the bed, scratching his stomach and staring cross-eyed at the strip of light on the ceiling. “I’m going to Risa. They’re setting up a new Academy there, and I’m going to enlist.” Jim grins. “Hey, it’s only three years late.”
Bones freezes. “You made up your mind?”
“Talking to Spock kinda spurred it on, I guess.” He sits up, staring across the room at Bones. “They’re collecting all human survivors there too, y’know, and it’s not like you can stay here any longer. It’s a one-way ticket to Risa, enlisting or not.”
The journey itself is a pain in the ass. They have to actually make it to Risa, first, which involves a four-hour shuttle flight (piloted by some obscure Ensign of the Enterprise), and then, from the sounds of it, there’s another day’s worth of check-ins and cataloguing before they can even make it out of the airport. All in all, it sounds like hell.
Spock schedules the Ensign to take them at the third shift change, when the majority of the crewmembers will either be out of their way or hotfooting it to the canteen. Jim spends the morning awkwardly saying goodbye to Scotty, Sulu and Chekov; he even tracks down the Ensign he knocked unconscious and buys him a stiff drink to apologise.
Pike’s in the medbay, in the same bed since Jim last saw him; he looks a little better, a little fuller, and he’s flexing his ankles around and testing his weight with a long walking stick. Jim watches him exercise, methodically working out the kinks in his newly-growing muscles, and they stroll to the canteen and back to give him practice. “I heard you’re enlisting,” Pike murmurs as they turn back into the medbay; he props his stick up by the wall and climbs painfully back onto his biobed. “I have to say I’m glad. We could do with more men like you.”
Jim shrugs. “There’s nothing else to do.”
Pike smiles a little wryly. “Best of luck, Jim,” he says, and shakes his hand. “Let me know how you get on.” Jim mock-salutes him in the doorway and, with a smile, walks away.
When he catches up with Bones he finds him talking softly to Uhura in the corner, and she looks like she’s close to tears; Jim realises there can’t be many cadets around anymore, and they must’ve lost a lot of friends. The conversation ends with Uhura clasping her hand around Bones’ arm and murmuring “you keep in touch, okay?”; naturally, she barrels past Jim without a sideward glance, and he yells something gentlemanly down the corridor after her.
They walk in silence to the shuttle. “You ready for this?”
Bones picks up his small duffle. “As I’ll ever be.”
Spock courteously bids them farewell beside the shuttle, customary straight back and sharp salute; Jim pulls him into a manly hug, and laughs as he watches Spock’s eyes twitch.
Then they’re in the shuttle, and they’re gone.
Jim can see even from space why the Federation decided to select Risa as the human race’s home-from-home. Despite the initially disorientating presence of two moons and two suns, the geology’s virtually the same, if a bit more tropical; it’s notorious for being a wealthy holiday resort, and vaguely resembles something like what Hawaii would look like if it spanned a planet. Most of this, though, they don’t even find out for hours after they land; they spend at least half a day in check-in, asked a variety of stupid questions (Jim, poker-faced, says yes when asked if he’s carrying any radioactive material; cue a strip-search and an hour in high-level security as he insists it’s just a joke) and ferried from one immigration officer to the next. Naturally, when Jim drops the Starfleet bombshell, they’re not exactly treated like royalty, but they at least get to sit down when they’re being spoken to.
The first night they spend in a communal youth hostel; it reminds Jim of the bunks on Delta Vega, minus the freezing cold and the space monsters. Halfway through the night an overtired elderly kitchen lady suffers a stroke, and Bones starts a half an hour long argument with the hostel staff over giving medical attention to her, by which time the paramedic has already long been and gone and taken her with him. Neither of them sleeps well - Jim because of Bones’ shouting, and Bones because of his foul mood - but there’s something amazing in waking to find the sun on your face, and they lose pretty much all of their moodiness by the time breakfast’s over.
The second day’s pretty much on par with the first. There isn’t a four-hour trek across space, sure, but there is a four-hour trek across the planet’s surface to their new designated ‘home’; the shuttle’s hot, heady and crowded, and Bones even looks a little uncomfortable, despite having just spent at least two weeks in a giant aircraft in space. Risa’s not quite as industrialised as Earth was; it has all the commodities that Earth did, especially in terms of popular brands and the like, but there are parts of it that feel less tourist-polished and more rugged and original. Starfleet have decided to build their new headquarters in the latter, rather than the former, and the town sprawling around the new building (which hasn’t even really had its foundations dug) is small, self-maintaining and comfortable. They locate their new apartment - to stop them going through ‘town planning’ twice, they decided to share - and spend a slightly more agreeable afternoon wandering around town and buying expensive smoothies with the handful of credits the shuttle pilot handed out to them.
“Jesus,” Jim beams, turning round and grinning at Bones. “There’s a freaking beach!” He crows in delight, taking long, running leaps towards the sand and enthusiastically immersing himself in the lukewarm water. Bones, unimpressed, sits on the sand a few feet away and watches Jim make a fool of himself in the spray, some of the other personnel sprawled around on the beach finding him entertaining enough to take pictures. Eventually, he falls down on the sand beside Bones, letting the suns cake him dry. “I bet we can see this from our apartment,” he murmurs, wriggling comfortably in the scratchy sand.
“End of the goddamn world and we still want a sea view,” Bones mutters dryly, and gets a fistful of sand in the face.
Jim enlists the next morning. There’s an office in town specially designed for it, and the queue’s not long, but it’s there. He deliberates over the courses for a bit; while Starfleet obviously want to replace their lost personnel, they can’t exactly give any idiot with a shovel the rank of commander, and the minimum course is three years. The leaflet has a warning message in big red caps to remind them that it’s highly demanding, and not just any dumb hick can sign up for it; when he tries to register he’s ushered abruptly into a side room and given a short aptitude test, and by the benevolent way he’s treated once it’s over they obviously found him good enough.
He bumps into Cassie on the way home. It’s hardly the coincidence of the century; the whole town’s devoted to housing any form of surviving academic personnel, and her previous job involved a lot of communication with Starfleet. She tells him this perched in a coffee house off the main road, and they pass an hour swapping stories while Jim sweet-talks the waitress into giving him a part-time job. “We all got divided up when we got here,” she explains, chopping a thin slice of ginger cake into perfect squares and stabbing one with her fork. “Jack went through a medical, and they found she was three months gone, so she’s working in a plantation nearer the capital; Alex - the pilot - they offered him a job around here, but he turned them down.” She smiles. “Last I heard he was planting an obscure type of potato out by Suraya Bay.” Cassie shrugs. “He seemed happy.”
“And the kids?”
Cassie nods, her mouth full of cake. “Mmm - yeah. Well, Alex turned out to be some kind of freaky child super-genius, and Starfleet has them all tucked away somewhere; he might even be here, but I haven’t seen him. As for Tim, I’m pretty sure he got relocated with most of the other kids, probably in the capital. They’re all safe, I know that at least.”
Her apartment’s on the other side of town to his and Bones’, so they say goodbye outside of the shop, switching numbers to make sure they keep in touch. Bones is talking on the comms when he gets in, so he starts unloading some of the food-pack they gave him down at the centre; Bones wanders into the doorway to watch him when he’s done. “Just Jocelyn,” he explains, grabbing a wayward apple from the fruit supply. “Giving her the new number.”
“Are they okay?”
Bones nods. “I missed Joanna’s birthday while we were on Delta Vega, which is a pain in the ass, but she just seemed relieved to know I was safe.”
Jim leans back against the counter. “I spoke to someone in the office,” he murmurs, staring Bones down. “There’s a fast-track course you can go on to get your degree, same as me.” Bones hums in half-interest, moving stacked dishes from the washer to the cupboard.
When he finishes, there’s a long silence.
“Alright, goddammit, I’ll do it,” he grumbles.
Jim smiles.
At the first opportunity, Jim blows his pay on a motorbike; half because Bones tells him not to, and half because he misses his old one. The first time he takes it out is also the first time he drives Bones on it, and the resulting journey is hair-raising, painful and life-changing (or at least on Bones’ part). Jim flips off the crash controls and remembers just how much he loves driving.
If there’s anything Risa does particularly well, it’s stunning scenery; it’s part of its charm for attracting tourists. On the first day Jim discovered the beach; within the next two months they’d hiked up a mountain, been deep-sea diving, got lost in the middle of a mini desert and been bitten by a variety of nasty reptiles in an almost-tropical forest - and all within ten miles of their new town, fast jumping towards becoming a city. The majority of the epic landscape is natural, with the occasional prod or poke from the nearby tourist office, but the most impressive landscape of all lies just outside the ten-mile radius and is completely inaccessible by foot or public transport. It’s not really much more than a glorified cliff-face, but saying that scaling it is an uphill struggle is probably the understatement of the century; the Risa Tourist Board has helpfully provided a potholed and battered track that weaves up and down in every possible direction, something they annually promise to remedy and, being a tourist board, naturally never do.
It is, therefore, the perfect destination for a first-time drive.
When Jim chunters his bike to a halt in the rudimentary vehicle-park, Bones collapses off the back of the bike, looking about ready to either punch Jim in the face or throw up. Jim leaves him to it, trundling cheerfully off across the park to a kiosk on the other side renting binoculars. There is, apparently, some form of meteor shower or something happening, and they’d made sure to weave their way up there at night to watch it clearer; meteor showers are practically a weekly event in Risa, just another tourist attraction, and hardly anyone’s turned out to see it save for them and the gangly, miserable-looking kid behind the counter.
“Give me those,” Bones snaps, snatching his pair of binoculars from Jim’s hand when he arrives. He looks a little less green than before, which Jim takes to be a good sign. “I don’t know why you talked me into this, it’s fucking freezing up here and I swear I just felt rain.”
It’s never really cold on Risa; its general climate is that of a permanently sunny Mediterranean island, but in the ‘winter’ the nights are colder than the days, and despite having spent two weeks on sub-zero Delta Vega Bones and Jim have gone soft in the new climate. Ignoring escalating moans and grumbles, Jim starts up the footpath to the very highest point, rubbing his hands together to keep them warm.
“What time’s it meant to start?” Jim asks, flopping down on the damp grass and balancing the binoculars over his eyes.
“2200 hours.” Bones settles on the grass next to him, propped spread-eagled against a battered-looking and cragged rock. Jim peers through the binoculars; they turn the ground into lurid, radioactive green, but the sky is sharpened and magnified far beyond the human eye. Whenever they roam across a particularly recognisable star, it jumps into further focus, accompanied by a million little labels telling him everything from tectonic shifts to preferred sexual positions.
“Just think, Bones,” Jim sighs, a little dreamily. “We’ll see all these up close one day.”
Bones snorts. “Up close and personal, for you more like.”
Jim lolls on his stomach, looking at Bones through the binoculars. “Did you hear about the memorial they’re building on Starbase 52? They’re making a cenotaph the size of freaking Russia with everyone’s names carved on the walls. Well, everyone who’s dead.”
Bones cocks an eyebrow. “A lot of good that’ll do them.”
Jim nods, stretching out comfortably. “Bureaucracy.”
Starfleet officer in three years, he thinks, and, fuck Bones’ cynicism, he’ll be out there hopping the stars. The meteor shower bursts above them, and Jim can’t help but think it’s not as impressive as blowing up the world.
Jim grins and throws Bones a sideways look. Three years of bitching and sniping to look forward to.
Hey, it’s just what they do to get by.
end.