Astral Bodies Part II
Part I
Spock was jostled awake in the darkness of the first officer’s quarters by a cool, lissome, naked body sliding into his bed. He went rigid at the intrusion, at the chill press of human skin and - desire destruction need shame admiration - emotion against the entire length of him.
“Jim,” he hissed, the short syllable swallowed as if it never was when Jim sealed his pliant mouth over Spock’s and forced his tongue past Spock’s teeth. “Mmmph,” Spock grunted, moving to sit up. Jim was a limpet clasping Spock’s body in a trap of spindly limbs. Spock wrenched his mouth away and heaved in the breath stolen from him, holding Jim’s bony shoulders steady.
“Come on, Spock,” Jim whispered, his voice hoarse. His lips were parted for quick breaths, his eyes large and intense and expectant in the dark, his hand flexing in the hair at the back of Spock’s head, urging him forward. “I can make you feel good. Please, Spock.” Thwarted by Spock’s unyielding hold on his shoulders, Jim gave an experimental roll of his hips.
“No,” Spock said in his firmest voice, even as his body betrayed him. This was his bondmate so wantonly straddled atop him, wanting him, and his blood did not deliberate on Jim’s regressed physical state. Jim ground with more confidence into Spock’s traitorous lap.
“I know you want it, Spock. I can feel it.” Jim’s hand was on his erection, squeezing with a loose, inexpert grip. He tried leaning close to Spock’s ear. “Know you want it, come on.”
With a snarl, Spock pitched Jim to the ground. He realized abruptly that he was on his feet looking down at the transformed body and anguished eyes of his bondmate. Remorse bloomed hot and bitter at the base of his spine before he could exert control over it, and he kneeled to reach Jim, sprawled and shaking on the floor. Jim scrambled to get to his feet, skin ablaze in the human physiological reaction to humiliation, and he shoved Spock’s hands away. “Jim, allow me to -”
“Fuck you, Spock! Jesus, fuck, stop looking at me, stop looking at me! Don’t you look at me, you fuck!” A fist collided with Spock’s ear, and then Jim was gone, darting through the shared bathroom into the captain’s quarters.
Spock stood naked in the barren bedroom of the first officer’s quarters for a moment and felt quite keenly the absence of Jim as he knew him: four inches taller and sixty pounds heavier, reconciled with the darkness inside himself instead of drowning in it, stubble on his jaw when he kissed him with so much tenderness. He had tamped down on the sensation of desolate solitude earlier as he sat in the captain’s chair on the bridge, when he answered Jim’s familiar chess moves, when he’d dipped the bed with his lone weight in this stark room when he required rest and could not bear to test his own hypothesis regarding Jim’s dilemma. He had pushed it down deep with the ease of a half Vulcan outcast terribly accustomed to loneliness, but now he allowed himself a single moment of illogic to miss his captain, his lover, his bondmate, before donning a robe and following the boy his bondmate had become into the captain’s quarters.
He found Jim crouched next to the bed shivering, a sheet wrapped around him despite the temperature controls still being set to the compromise between Vulcan-normal and Earth-normal.
“Go away,” Jim muttered into his arms, head tucked low.
“I apologize for …shoving you, Jim. I did not intend to cause you harm,” Spock said, seating himself cross-legged in front of Jim, who still did not look up.
“Please leave,” came the reply.
“I must explain myself. If, after you have listened to me, you would still prefer that I leave, I will of course vacate your quarters.”
Jim was silent, his harsh breath echoing off the bulkheads.
“I confess that you were correct in my assumption that I desire you.” Here Jim lifted his head slightly and cracked one eye to peer at him. “I find you a compelling, dynamic individual regardless of your incarnation. There is even reason to believe that…intimate contact between us could possibly return you to your proper state -” Both eyes now peeked from above arms crossed over knees. “ -but I am unable to justify perpetrating an act of molestation against you, despite the logic which dictates that I must.”
“How is it molestation if I sit on your penis begging for it?” Jim mumbled into his arms, eyes scowling and face flushing.
“You are below the age of consent.”
“You’re my husband.”
“Do you believe that my status as your spouse implies that I have open rights to your body at any time, regardless of your mental state or desires?”
“Yeah. Well, I mean, no, but -”
“It is my duty as your bondmate to keep you from harm, Jim. Even from yourself, or myself.”
“I just, I just want to keep you,” Jim said it a rush. “I just want you, Spock, what’s wrong with that?”
“Jim, you desire not only sexual gratification from me, but castigation for imagined transgressions in the form of rough, demeaning intercourse. I will not become party to injuries both emotional and physical to your person.”
Jim’s head shot up. “What? How did you --- What the hell are you - I never ---”
“Jim,” Spock said, laying light fingertips on Jim’s sheet-covered knee and ducking down to meet Jim’s eyes. “I know you. I know all of you.”
Jim’s face transformed into a caricature of itself, contorting in horror and panic. He began to hyperventilate, bunching the sheet in his fists as he shook his head side to side. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no -”
“Jim, listen to me. Inhale slowly through your nose, exhale slowly through your mouth. Be still. Be still, ashayam.” Spock had come around and lain a hot hand on Jim’s back through the sheet, maintaining an eighteen-centimeter distance between their bodies. Jim moaned through the restoration of his own very human controls, and then he was silent with his head in his arms and his breathing steady.
They remained huddled between the bed and the bulkheads for nineteen minutes and forty-three seconds. At last Jim shifted to look at Spock and said, “Stay with me? Don’t leave. Don’t leave.”
Spock inclined his head in acquiescence. Jim rose and clambered without pretense of grace into the bed, still wrapped in the sheet. Spock slid in behind him, their bodies molding together chest to back, hips cradled in hips, knees into knees. After arranging the covers, Spock slung an arm around the diminished body of his bondmate, who closed his eyes and slept without dreaming.
*
When Jim woke, Spock was propped against the bulkhead beside him, robe lashed to his body preserving all modesty, padd and stylus in hand. Jim recalled the events of the night before with sudden clarity and groaned, setting a hand to his eyes as if to block out his mortification. But Spock was still there, reading reports and writing up memos in bed, as if Jim really were his husband, nothing left to hide between them. Spock had implied that he was aware of all of Jim’s most jealously kept secrets, his burning shame and the leprous stains devouring his spirit. All this, and still Spock had stated outright that he wanted Jim. Something nagged at the edges of Jim’s memory, tantalizing him with its significance. Then, like the sun emerging from behind clouds to illuminate the sleep-dazed corners of his mind, he knew.
“Did you say we had to have sex to get me back to normal?” he blurted. He seemed to have startled Spock, who whipped his head to one side to look at him. He still lay prone, swaddled in the sheet, just the top half of his head exposed.
“That is my hypothesis, yes,” Spock answered with some reluctance.
“How’s that work, then? You got magic Vulcan sperm or something? Come one, come all, heal all your ills?”
Spock set his padd flat in his lap and regarded him with what Jim detected as fond vexation.
“No, Jim. Vulcan ejaculate is analogous to human ejaculate and has no supernatural properties, as I am sure you are aware.”
“Then what’s the deal?”
Spock inched his backside backward to sit up straighter against the bulkhead, hands pressed into the bed.
“It is not logical, per se,” he equivocated.
“Bring on the illogic then,” Jim pressed him. “I’d love to hear this.” He saw Spock take a moment to formulate his reply.
“I believe the catalyst for the transformative events of two nights ago was your expression of a wish to …give your virginity to me, though it was impossible. It was not, I believe, a romanticized notion of giving yourself to me born of antiquated Terran ideals conflating worth with sexual purity, rather, it was a gesture of entrusting me with your security. Your early sexual encounters were not…pleasant, Jim.”
Jim watched Spock fold his long-fingered hands over the pad in his lap. Spock did not shy from his gaze, though Jim felt himself shrinking inwardly at the thought of the things he must have done with Hank, the Coach, Mark, innumerable other rough and tumble men. The things he’d must have allowed them to do. Begged them to do. He shut his eyes against Spock’s easy acceptance of him, against the promise and weight of Spock’s unconditional devotion, tucking his nose into the sheet to burrow deeper.
“I still don’t get how it would fix me,” he whispered.
“It was my impression that wishes upon stars required no scientific explanation.”
Jim barked out a humorless guffaw, still not opening his eyes. “Funny, from you.”
“Indeed, that is essentially what the doctor implied as well.” There was a pause. “He also implied that I would - what is the phrase? ‘Grasp at hay’ to find a resolution.”
Jim felt a heaviness settle over him. It was the first time he’d truly considered Spock’s perspective: he’d lost a captain and a partner, and despite his impassive demeanor, he missed the man whose place Jim had taken. He would go to any lengths to get that man back, even eschewing logic when logic provided no viable answers. He dislodged his head from his cocoon and looked at Spock, heart aching. He realized that Spock’s fealty was not his to snatch up and hoard like so much non-perishable food. Spock was for his future.
“I hypothesize,” Spock continued, “that if we engage in sexual relations as per the terms of your wish, thereby fulfilling it, the regression process would reverse itself and you would once again be an adult and the captain of this starship.”
“And your husband.”
“And my husband.”
Jim wriggled, encased yet in the sheet, toward Spock until he lay against Spock’s side. Spock poured out heat like a star going supernova. After a moment, one of those fevered arms settled over Jim, soothing, not restraining.
“So we have to. Even if you don’t want to, you know, take advantage. I promise not to ask for anything bad.” He craned a bit to get a look at Spock’s face. Jim thought he could see skepticism there before he settled back with his face mashed against Spock’s hip.
“We will not reach Zenzobar of the Third Outer Ring for approximately two days. I believe it would be beneficial for us to spend time in each other’s presence and communicate frequently so as to avoid more… misunderstandings.”
“So you wanna hang out and talk?”
“Essentially, yes. If the efforts of the science and medical teams in regards to your case prove futile, and we must …copulate, I will strive for a wholly positive experience. Providing such will require trust and mutual understanding, which we do not yet have between us.”
Translation, Jim thought: you don’t want some damaged kid throwing himself at you and then freaking out again. Out loud, he said, “Heh, I think you just promised me the lay of my life, Spock.”
Warm fingers threaded gently into his hair. Jim’s heart skipped a beat at the contact.
“So it seems, Jim.”
*
“Drink up,” McCoy grunted as he set a tall glass of milk in front of Jim in the mess before alpha shift. His tray clattered as he slid in next to Spock, staring at Jim and his glass of milk with an expectant expression. “Well?”
“I don’t like milk too much.”
“That’s not just any milk, Jimboy. That milk’s gonna turn you into a man.” McCoy leaned back, crossing his arms and giving Spock a smug smirk.
Jim frowned.
“But I thought -”
“Christ, did this hobgoblin tell you he needed to deflower you?”
“Doctor, I am reasonably certain-”
“Betcha just ate that right up, too, huh Jim?”
“Hey! Shut up!” Jim stood, scowling at McCoy, a hot blush crawling up his neck, tinting his ears, flooding his face. The mess hall went quiet and McCoy looked contrite.
“Sorry, Jim. Just forgetting you’re not - you, sometimes.”
Jim sank back into his seat, burning with embarrassment. Spock leveled a derisive eyebrow at McCoy, setting down his utensils.
“Doctor, I assume you have data to support your milk hypothesis. Please elaborate.”
Looking rather pinched, McCoy pushed his tray to the side and leaned forward.
“Me and Christine’ve been reading up on those Devarsian goat myths, and in every single one, youths and maidens and old men are healed by the power of goats’ milk. And Spock, remember how I about died when I saw some for sale at that farmers’ market? This is my last container of it, still good and everything.”
“That is illogical. There is no evidence that what has befallen Jim originated from Devar XI. Our presence on the planet was minimal and occurred over four weeks prior to Jim’s regression.”
“And what makes this less logical than your gonzo ‘wish upon a star’ statutory rape theory?” McCoy barked, eyebrows arching wildly, a finger thrust into Spock’s personal space. “I thought as long as we were trying out flights of fancy on this tin can that drinking a tall glass of alien goats’ milk was as likely to cure him as drinking a tall glass of fully grown Vulcan male!”
“Doctor, the expression of the wish and the timing of the regression suggest that-”
“Know what Spock? I think you want it to be some kinda crazy wish Jim made in bed with you. This is your fantasy come true, you’d love to fix up your broken boy with the power of your big, Vulcan---”
“Ears!” Jim hollered, getting to his feet again. The mess hall was vacant now, the exodus unnoticed amid the fracas of such lively discussion. McCoy’s jaws snapped shut as Jim chugged the Devarsian goats’ milk and flung the glass behind his shoulder, careless of the shattering. Then he threw his arms out and snarled, “Well? Come on, McCoy, where’s my big boy body now? Huh?”
He stood panting in the empty mess, McCoy gawping at him, Spock’s fixed gaze as intense as ever.
“Jesus,” McCoy breathed. “Jesus, I’m sorry, Jim. I swear I’m not trying to be a jackass about this, I just. I want you to be well, and whole, and innocent, I guess.”
Jim snorted, lips twisting in a sneer. “You’re a long time too late for that shit, doctor.”
“Aw, Jim, it’s not like that.”
“Yeah? What the hell’s it like then?”
“It’s like all this shit that happened to you is just that: shit that happened to you, outta your control, and you did your best under the circumstances. It doesn’t make you bad, Jim. I wish you could see that.”
“You have no idea about anything, and you’re trying to keep the only one who does away from me. Why are you doing this? Why are you punishing me?”
McCoy rounded the table and grabbed Jim by the shoulders in a harsh grip. “No, Jim. No.” He shook him. Spock was on his feet in an instant, prying McCoy off of Jim.
“Doctor, unhand him. I apologize, Jim. The doctor is incapable of restraining himself. He is often guilty of letting his emotions rule him.”
“Don’t you even start, Spock, I swear to God.” McCoy backed off. “A body might think you were on the verge of an emotion. I’m sorry again, Jim. You need to know I never meant you harm.”
Jim wrapped his arms around himself in a defensive position, hunching his shoulders. McCoy shot him a penitent look.
“I gotta get to sickbay. You just… well. You just hang in there.”
When McCoy was gone, Jim sat again, bowing his head over his breakfast. He forked some of the pancakes and rubbery, reconstituted sausage into his mouth, chewing slowly. Spock remained upright and rigid, staring at Jim’s back, appetite gone.
“He’s gone, you know. You can sit down.”
“I am aware, Jim.”
“Then come here and sit down and stop staring at me.”
Spock sat, but kept his eyes on Jim’s downturned face.
“You feel shame though it was McCoy who disgraced himself, not you.”
“No one said humans are logical, Spock.” The pancakes and sausage were steadily disappearing. Relaxing his spine almost imperceptibly, Spock picked up his spoon to stir his porridge.
“Dr. McCoy has a forceful personality, but he is your closest friend, Jim. You knew and held him in high esteem long before we met. He was truthful when he stated that he meant you no harm. He and I share a contentious relationship, but after a fashion, we are also friends.”
“I can’t see how.”
“You must trust the man you became.”
When Jim’s plate was clean, Spock stood.
“Perhaps you would derive pleasure from visiting the bridge today, Jim. You are technically still Starfleet personnel.”
Jim brightened, slung the trays into the receptacles, and matched Spock stride for stride on the way to the bridge.
*
When the doors to the bridge opened, Spock glided in with purpose, but Jim hung back in the doorway, awestruck. Every surface shone as if waxed daily, every piece of equipment was sleeker, smaller, and probably faster than he’d ever seen, not to mention that technology he’d never even bothered imagining, and the viewscreen… The viewscreen comprised the entirety of the far wall, stars and planets and assorted masses studded in the blanket of space, the Enterprise’s protective shroud. Jim realized he was gaping when he saw a pretty communications officer looking and him and suppressing a smile without success as if familiar with his brand of enthusiasm. He shot her back a shrug and a sheepish smile, fully entering the bridge.
With an upturned palm and sparing gestures, Spock began indicating the bridge crew and introducing them. “Helmsman and chief navigator, Lieutenant Sulu and Ensign Chekov. Chief communications officer Lieutenant Uhura. Systems analyst Lieutenant Xingtao, tactical officer Lieutenant Commander Ahrens.”
Jim nodded at each of them, feeling small in the face of their smiles and shared looks and warm welcomes. He swallowed, suddenly dizzy.
“You may sit at the science station, Mr. Kirk,” Spock told him, directing him to a data console next to the chief communications officer as he sat in the command chair. Jim turned his attention to the science station, taking measured breaths and ignoring the cold lick of discontent at Spock’s brusque professional manner. Nothing personal, he reminded himself as Spock and the navigator discussed route mapping, Spock’s eyes never alighting on Jim. Jim straightened his spine and tried to act like an officer who deserved to be on this magnificent bridge. Scrolling through the data, Jim skimmed a lot of dry analyses of the compositions of nearby gaseous bodies and their positions in space until, not three minutes after he had sat down, he was sure he was done with the science station.
“How you doing?” came a low query from the chief communications officer. Uhuru? He turned to face her.
“Okay,” he said. She cocked her head.
“You don’t sound so sure.”
He shrugged, looking back down into the data console. “I’m just causing problems for people. It would be better if I changed back.”
“They’re working on it in the science labs,” she said. Then she gave a soft laugh. “Not sure what medical’s doing, though.”
“You heard about that?”
“Honey, everybody heard about that. How’s the goats’ milk settling in?”
Jim couldn’t help breaking into a smile. “Kinda sloshy,” he whispered.
“You’ll be okay, Jim. And if we have to send you into negotiations as is, I’ll make sure you’re totally prepped.”
“What’s with that anyway? I mean, why can’t that princess deal with someone else? Spock’s gotta be a way better choice than me right now. Or, you know, anyone.”
Uhura barked out a short laugh, then looked around to make sure no one heard her. She leaned back in when no one gave her the stink eye and said, “Your totally fabricated reputation precedes you, Kirk.”
Jim’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“The outer ringers’ only desirable resources are precious gems and dilithium. They’ve had to scrap for pretty much everything else, and part of that means building themselves up, dressing themselves up. If you’re rich, you drip with jewels, you can afford the right clothes, the right lifestyle, the right social circle, whatever. What is beautiful is what is valuable, and that includes life forms. Some of them, like Supreme Empress H’Lopia, throw their power around and demand to deal only with beings of, quote, ‘exceptional physical beauty.’ And by deal with, I mean sleep with. She heard wildly exaggerated stories about you all across Federation space and decided you were her next target.”
Jim stared. “Huh. I didn’t know news of my total hotness had reached all over the galaxy like that.”
Uhura laughed again, adjusting her personal comm device. “Well,” she said in a teasing tone, “there’s no accounting for taste.”
“She just hasn’t seen the rest of you yet. She’ll be throwing me over for that super buff helmsman as soon as we reach orbit.” Jim thrust a thumb over his shoulder in the general direction of the helm.
“We’ll see. She’s pretty insistent, and, ah, shrill, and I hear Komack owes her a favor for the crazy rock he’s got on his wife’s hand right now.”
“Starfleet Command can force me to sleep with someone even though I’m Vulcan married?”
“Well, no, but you always manage to let ’em down easy. I don’t know how you do it, Kirk, but I’ve seen you turn the most aggressive suitors into harmless kittens who thank you when all’s said and done and they haven’t gotten you in the sack. Sometimes I still can’t believe it when it happens.”
Jim glanced at Spock in the periphery of his vision. “Obviously I’m just that smooth, Lieutenant.” Uhura laughed again, swinging her seat back to face her console.
Alpha shift passed slowly, peppered with conversation with Uhura. At lunch, alternates relieved the bridge crew so they could eat in the mess. He was spared McCoy’s fussing, but not Chekov and Sulu’s bickering. Spock and Uhura shared a quiet discussion about the fascinating language of Samargol V’s native fleabats, and Jim sat silently spooning soggy replicated pasta into his mouth until it was time to go back to the bridge and the hard ergonomic seat at the science station.
After interminable stretches of time during which Jim counted his arm hairs, mooned over Spock, tried to eavesdrop on Sulu and Chekov’s conversation and let himself be mesmerized by Uhura’s sparkling earrings, something worthwhile finally happened. Lieutenant Sulu steered them through an unanticipated asteroid belt with the ease and agility of a bird soaring free on the wind. Jim leaned back in the seat, captivated by the images on the expansive viewscreen, the starship tilting into curves, sailing over and under and around the debris with staggering grace. The bridge crew had ceased all conversation, all extraneous noise-making, to allow Sulu full concentration on his task. When they reached the end of the string of space debris, Jim couldn’t help letting out an exhilarated whoop and clapping his hands together once. Sulu took a deep breath and let his shoulders slump a little in relief. Chekov chattered at him and patted his shoulder, grinning. The bridge hummed with the crew’s collective satisfaction.
The jovial mood was short lived, broken when Spock sprang to his feet and moved toward the viewscreen.
“Magnify unidentified object,” he said. There, a speck on the edge of the viewscreen expanded, and the crew beheld a clunky, outdated vessel drifting without power. “Hail at all frequencies, Lieutenant Uhura.”
“Nothing, Captain. Communications are completely down. They’re broadcasting a general distress signal, but no recorded SOS and no answers to our hails.”
“Sir, life support systems reporting significant damage, defaulted to minimum use mode,” Xingtao said. “It looks like a private science vessel, Earth-manufacture. I’m unable to determine what happened to it without more data.”
“Mr. Ahrens, report to security and ready an away team with environmental suits.”
Ahrens stood at attention. “Sir, will you be beaming over with us?”
Spock’s eyes flickered almost imperceptibly toward Jim. “Negative, Tactical Officer. In addition to security personnel, bring Lieutenant Murphy-Stone from sciences and have her fitted with a camera for a vid-feed to be broadcasted directly to the bridge viewscreen. Dismissed.”
Spock was at the science station in two long steps, clasping his hands together behind his back.
“It would be best if you returned to your quarters or visited the observation deck, Mr. Kirk.”
“I’d rather stay. I mean, I’ll be thinking about what could be happening no matter where I am on the ship, anyway.”
“Certain things cannot be unseen, Mr. Kirk.”
Jim clenched his jaw and glowered at Spock. “And I think I know that better than anyone, Mr. Spock.” He saw resignation pass over Spock’s eyes, the moment Spock gave in, but Jim saw no fondness qualify the concession and so felt no satisfaction, only resentment at being made to feel like a child and a burden. He dug his heels into the floor on either side of his seat at the science station, crossing his arms over his body, tucking his fists into his armpits.
“Very well, Mr. Kirk. You will remain silent and stationary for the duration.” Spock went back to the command chair without sparing Jim another glance, and Jim swallowed back a hot rage bubbling up in his throat. Uhura leaned over and touched his arm, sympathy coloring her expression. He closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see her seeing him.
Tense minutes passed until the viewscreen flickered and flared into an image of the landing party’s position on the unidentified vessel. They had beamed into the corresponding transporter room, a gray, empty place with dim lighting.
“Can you hear me, Captain Spock? Come in, Captain Spock,” came a female voice through the bridge-wide comm speakers. On the viewscreen, crew members flanked her and fanned out as they stepped into the corridor. The viewscreen went black, and the bridge heard only breathing and shuffling. One by one the landing party turned on their flashlights.
“Affirmative, Lieutenant. Have you scanned for life signs?”
“Yes, sir. Nothing alive within range. Oxygen levels low, but able to support life. I’m trying to get a read on why this ship is dead in space, but so far there’s no relevant data.”
The landing party moved through the corridors, shining their lights through open doors, exposing vacant, stagnating rooms. Sometimes, spatters of blood, much of it brown with age, appeared on walls where the light fell on them.
“Lieutenant Murphy-Stone, have you encountered any casualties?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“Exercise caution, Lieutenant. Attempt to reach the bridge.”
“Yes, sir.”
The security personnel moved quickly and silently, flashlights scanning the premises, phasers set to stun. Murphy-Stone brought up the rear, the buzzing of the tricorder and the rubbing of the environmental suit against itself as she walked the only sounds on the bridge of the Enterprise. The barren starship’s lights sputtered now and again, exposing in flashes a sturdy, utilitarian vessel with equipment destroyed and strewn along its floors, all of it smeared with iron-based blood. And there were the bones.
“Oh hell,” Murphy-Stone whispered, the sensitive microphone of the camera picking it up and delivering the soft curse onto the bridge of the Enterprise. When the away team came across bones picked clean, they averted their lights. They made their way to the bridge, stepping over broken, blood-stained bulkheads, tendon-lashed human bones and crushed science gear, pointing phasers round every corner.
As the away team approached the bridge, a sense of foreboding flooded Jim’s core. Dread began to flatten his lungs and he gripped the seat of his chair in an effort to steady himself. He felt sweat prickle along his hairline and down his back. On the viewscreen, Murphy-Stone and Ahrens stood back as the three men from security forced the bridge door’s wide and filed in. No bloody tableau confronted them, no sickening horrors awaited them there. Jim let out a shaking breath.
“There’s a text document on screen at the helm, sir,” Murphy-Stone reported. “It looks like… it looks like an account of what happened here.”
“The main points, Lieutenant.”
“There was a calculation error, or maybe intentional sabotage. They ran out of fuel and their warp drives powered down, as well as their sublight engines. They went as far as they could on fumes under impulse power, not even a parsec. An unknown computer virus jammed all communications, destroyed 70% of the life support generators and forced the food replicators offline. There was… there was only a limited store of nonperishable food items.”
The roaring in Jim’s ears wasn’t interference from the comm devices, but the rush of his own frenzied blood, his jackrabbit heart railing against the cage of his ribs. That which he couldn’t unsee was upon him again. Paralyzed, Jim could not tear his gaze from the viewscreen, could not even think to regret defying Spock’s earlier suggestion to leave the bridge.
“The crew lasted four months and then….” Murphy-Stone seemed unwilling to say it.
“That’s enough, Lieutenant,” Spock said, sparing her the task. “Return to the transporter room and beam back immediately. We must warp out of this area of space as soon as your party returns to the Enterprise.”
The away team made haste away from the bridge, the camera mounted on Murphy-Stone’s shoulder jostling with her efforts. Suddenly, the image pitched and Murphy-Stone was on the ground, her flashlight skittering away from her, a shriek piercing the air.
“Lieutenant!” It was Ahrens, back in an instant, flashlight thwarting the camera. The Enterprise bridge crew could only listen as a flurry of shouts and curses accompanied the thuds of bodies colliding with bulkheads, the floor, other bodies, and finally, finally, the dull blast of a phaser set to stun.
“Mr. Ahrens, report. Report, Mr. Ahrens,” Jim heard Spock demand distantly. The sound of harsh breathing filled the bridge. The camera had not restored visual. “Mr. Ahrens, that’s an order.”
“We’re fine, sir. Shaken, but all fine,” Murphy-Stone panted.
“Murphy-Stone is unharmed, Captain,” came Ahrens’ voice. “She was attacked by a survivor and there was a scuffle. I killed him. I killed him, sir. It was set to stun but I killed him.”
A wave of nausea sent Jim’s vision swimming. He lurched up and stumbled out of the bridge, heedless of Spock calling his name after him.
*
McCoy was lurking near the bridge bathroom, contemplating entering the bridge to try to apologize to Jim again, when a tornado of limbs slammed into him with the force of all Jim’s torment behind it. The pair of them toppled to the ground, McCoy’s head smacking against the floor tile. He groaned. Jim slid off him and lay facedown on the floor, no strength left in his quaking body, gagging through tearless, wracking sobs. McCoy propped himself up by his elbows, watching his captain, reduced in more ways than the obvious, break down under the enormous weight of his own guilt. McCoy shifted to a sitting position and carefully laid a hand between Jim’s prominent shoulder blades. Suddenly Jim reeled, eyes wide, and he scrambled toward a toilet where he heaved his lunch, his breakfast, and all his sour bile. Through it all McCoy rubbed warm circles on his back.
“Easy now. There you go, darlin’, let it out. There you go.” He murmured comforting nonsense now and then, his gruff voice reverberating between the bathroom bulkheads. Jim hugged the cool toilet in the aftermath, sweaty and quivering and unable to summon the strength to move or tell McCoy to fuck off. McCoy pressed the flusher for him.
“It’s all right now, Jim. You’re all right now.”
“Never be all right.
“Yeah? Well there’s a starship you captain says otherwise. They don’t just give starships to anyone off the street, you know.”
“They ate each other on that other one.”
“What?”
“There was a ship, and a distress signal. He sent a rescue party with no one to rescue; they all ate each other. And then they killed him.”
McCoy was silent, piecing together a story to go with Jim’s disjointed narrative. It was a familiar story, dressed up nice and new with different players and costumes, but it was still the same old horror show. McCoy didn’t need to hear the gritty details to know them and ache in response.
“I know, Jim. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t know. You don’t know.”
“Tell me, darlin’. Tell me how it is.”
Jim pulled away from the toilet and McCoy’s soothing hand on his back to glare at McCoy with accusing blue eyes.
“It’s like there was no food left and they kept waiting for someone to come save them and no one came, no matter how many waves they sent, or how many people died and then some of them got so hungry they turned on you like dogs. They turned on you when the food was gone and the police patrolled for race betrayers and all you could do was hide and try to keep the little ones alive and still they’d find you, they’d find you, understand?” Jim rubbed his face with his hands, pressing his fingers to his eyes as if to block out what he’d been living with for so long.
“No,” McCoy said. Jim looked at him. “No, I’ll never understand. No one can, not without living through it. But you did Jim. You lived through it and you’re here and you’re strong and you’re breakin’ hearts all over the galaxy.” Jim was shaking his head, not hearing McCoy’s attempt to lighten the mood, maybe not hearing McCoy at all.
“You don’t know what I did. You don’t know what I did.”
“All right. How ’bout I tell you what I did, then?”
“You’re a doctor. You save people, boo hoo.”
McCoy snorted. “You think you got the market cornered on pain and guilt and bad deeds done, boy? Are you so far gone that you think you’re the only one who feels as deep as you do?” Jim’s eyes were two blazing points in that thundercloud face.
McCoy sighed and stretched his legs out in front of him, back against a bulkhead. He wished, not for the first time, that Starfleet uniforms weren’t so closely tailored to the body so he had room for a discreet flask. That lack, more than anything, proved that stars didn’t just bestow wishes on the needy. He was needy, goddamnit, and he still had to hide his liquor away in his desk’s false bottom.
“You ever heard of pyrrhoneuritis? Well, it’s a wasting disease. Disgusting thing, eats away at you, breaks you down, leaves you in agony. There was no cure. My dad got it, and there was nothing I could do. Sat by his bed listening to him moaning while I pored over the medical texts again and again. Thought I could buy time injecting him with painkillers and tri-ox compound and total bullshit that never did a goddamned thing. He eventually used all the breath he had left to beg me to let him die. Not just let him die, but make it happen. My father lay there in his bed asking me to kill him, Jim.”
Jim mouth hung open, his face bloodless, attention rapt. McCoy forced himself to go on.
“So what could I do? What could I do Jim? A few weeks later, a goddamn handful of days, really, someone on the Trebalum colonies found a cure. For pyrrhoneuritis! Hundreds of years of fatal affliction and bam! They cleared that shit right up just weeks too late to save my dad. I went over and over it: if I’d just waited, if I’d found it faster myself. I sent myself straight into hell, couldn’t think of anything but his wasted body disintegrating while I watched. I destroyed my marriage, I lost my little girl. I killed my father Jim. I killed him.”
“I killed him,” Jim echoed in a hollow voice.
McCoy nodded.
“I killed him,” Jim said again. “He found us and grabbed Kevin but I was quicker. I was quicker.”
“And you saved Kevin, and yourself, and all those other kids, kept them safe until the shuttles came. You know what he would have done if you hadn’t killed him, Jim. It’s no shame. You’ve got to stop torturing yourself.”
“Have you?”
McCoy’s answering smile was wry. “Touché.”
“Maybe…” Jim hesitated. “Maybe people like you and me, no matter what our reasons were to do it, maybe we don’t get to be happy. You know?”
McCoy swore he felt his hair going gray. “Aw, hell, kid. You are happy. On this boat, with that pointy-eared bastard, doing what you were born to do. And you deserve that happiness. You know that, don’t you?”
Jim looked bleak. “I don’t see how. I don’t see how anyone can stand to look at me.”
Without thought McCoy leaned over and gathered Jim to his chest in a crushing embrace. He heard Jim’s bones rub together, and Jim let out a strained gurgle before McCoy abruptly freed him, awkwardness pervading the moment.
“Oh,” Jim said.
“Sorry,” McCoy muttered. “Just- just don’t talk like that, would you?”
Spock arrived with his characteristic silence, hovering in the entryway with badly concealed concern. Jim looked up at him with naked hope on his face, but then he seemed to wilt and looked back at the ground. The heavy ball of conflict McCoy had been dragging around about where his diaphragm usually was for the past two days felt lighter as he watched Spock and Jim each trying to hide what they meant to each other, both failing rather spectacularly. This is how it had been for them, in the beginning, while everyone around them waited, biting their nails in anticipation of the inevitable. Over the course of the mission, McCoy had watched these two men become the best possible versions of themselves as they strove to be worthy of each other, whole and healed. Jim was still a hopeless flirt occasionally crippled by self-doubt, but he had found an abiding peace at Spock’s side, in his role as captain, by his own measure of judgment. And where once he was a raw, unVulcan nerve of barely contained anger and vulnerability, Spock was calmer and more self-possessed too, eternally working to reconcile emotion with logic, human with Vulcan, passion with temperance. Not that he wasn’t still an uptight, condescending bastard who claimed to have no feelings most of the time, but McCoy could admit, in the private recesses of his mind, that Spock was not just tolerable but admirable. He was tilting at windmills keeping them apart, and he knew with the steadfast certainty of a zealot that Spock would never hurt Jim, would lay down his life before letting Jim come to harm. He had done so countless times in the line of duty, as Jim had for him, the pair of them causing their kindly family doctor to develop ulcers and high blood pressure he was unable hide from Chapel’s eagle eyes. McCoy, with great effort and a deep breath, took his own advice and let it go.
Standing up, he met Spock’s eyes. McCoy marveled at the thought that he’d once found them inscrutable and impossibly alien. “You taking care of this ship, Acting Captain?”
“I endeavor to perform to the highest standards of duty and keep her in good repair until such time as her rightful captain is restored, doctor.”
“Glad to hear it, Spock. Glad to hear it.”
At the edges of McCoy’s line of vision, he saw Spock kneel down in front of Jim before he took the scenic route back to sickbay.
Part III
Spock was jostled awake in the darkness of the first officer’s quarters by a cool, lissome, naked body sliding into his bed. He went rigid at the intrusion, at the chill press of human skin and - desire destruction need shame admiration - emotion against the entire length of him.
“Jim,” he hissed, the short syllable swallowed as if it never was when Jim sealed his pliant mouth over Spock’s and forced his tongue past Spock’s teeth. “Mmmph,” Spock grunted, moving to sit up. Jim was a limpet clasping Spock’s body in a trap of spindly limbs. Spock wrenched his mouth away and heaved in the breath stolen from him, holding Jim’s bony shoulders steady.
“Come on, Spock,” Jim whispered, his voice hoarse. His lips were parted for quick breaths, his eyes large and intense and expectant in the dark, his hand flexing in the hair at the back of Spock’s head, urging him forward. “I can make you feel good. Please, Spock.” Thwarted by Spock’s unyielding hold on his shoulders, Jim gave an experimental roll of his hips.
“No,” Spock said in his firmest voice, even as his body betrayed him. This was his bondmate so wantonly straddled atop him, wanting him, and his blood did not deliberate on Jim’s regressed physical state. Jim ground with more confidence into Spock’s traitorous lap.
“I know you want it, Spock. I can feel it.” Jim’s hand was on his erection, squeezing with a loose, inexpert grip. He tried leaning close to Spock’s ear. “Know you want it, come on.”
With a snarl, Spock pitched Jim to the ground. He realized abruptly that he was on his feet looking down at the transformed body and anguished eyes of his bondmate. Remorse bloomed hot and bitter at the base of his spine before he could exert control over it, and he kneeled to reach Jim, sprawled and shaking on the floor. Jim scrambled to get to his feet, skin ablaze in the human physiological reaction to humiliation, and he shoved Spock’s hands away. “Jim, allow me to -”
“Fuck you, Spock! Jesus, fuck, stop looking at me, stop looking at me! Don’t you look at me, you fuck!” A fist collided with Spock’s ear, and then Jim was gone, darting through the shared bathroom into the captain’s quarters.
Spock stood naked in the barren bedroom of the first officer’s quarters for a moment and felt quite keenly the absence of Jim as he knew him: four inches taller and sixty pounds heavier, reconciled with the darkness inside himself instead of drowning in it, stubble on his jaw when he kissed him with so much tenderness. He had tamped down on the sensation of desolate solitude earlier as he sat in the captain’s chair on the bridge, when he answered Jim’s familiar chess moves, when he’d dipped the bed with his lone weight in this stark room when he required rest and could not bear to test his own hypothesis regarding Jim’s dilemma. He had pushed it down deep with the ease of a half Vulcan outcast terribly accustomed to loneliness, but now he allowed himself a single moment of illogic to miss his captain, his lover, his bondmate, before donning a robe and following the boy his bondmate had become into the captain’s quarters.
He found Jim crouched next to the bed shivering, a sheet wrapped around him despite the temperature controls still being set to the compromise between Vulcan-normal and Earth-normal.
“Go away,” Jim muttered into his arms, head tucked low.
“I apologize for …shoving you, Jim. I did not intend to cause you harm,” Spock said, seating himself cross-legged in front of Jim, who still did not look up.
“Please leave,” came the reply.
“I must explain myself. If, after you have listened to me, you would still prefer that I leave, I will of course vacate your quarters.”
Jim was silent, his harsh breath echoing off the bulkheads.
“I confess that you were correct in my assumption that I desire you.” Here Jim lifted his head slightly and cracked one eye to peer at him. “I find you a compelling, dynamic individual regardless of your incarnation. There is even reason to believe that…intimate contact between us could possibly return you to your proper state -” Both eyes now peeked from above arms crossed over knees. “ -but I am unable to justify perpetrating an act of molestation against you, despite the logic which dictates that I must.”
“How is it molestation if I sit on your penis begging for it?” Jim mumbled into his arms, eyes scowling and face flushing.
“You are below the age of consent.”
“You’re my husband.”
“Do you believe that my status as your spouse implies that I have open rights to your body at any time, regardless of your mental state or desires?”
“Yeah. Well, I mean, no, but -”
“It is my duty as your bondmate to keep you from harm, Jim. Even from yourself, or myself.”
“I just, I just want to keep you,” Jim said it a rush. “I just want you, Spock, what’s wrong with that?”
“Jim, you desire not only sexual gratification from me, but castigation for imagined transgressions in the form of rough, demeaning intercourse. I will not become party to injuries both emotional and physical to your person.”
Jim’s head shot up. “What? How did you --- What the hell are you - I never ---”
“Jim,” Spock said, laying light fingertips on Jim’s sheet-covered knee and ducking down to meet Jim’s eyes. “I know you. I know all of you.”
Jim’s face transformed into a caricature of itself, contorting in horror and panic. He began to hyperventilate, bunching the sheet in his fists as he shook his head side to side. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no -”
“Jim, listen to me. Inhale slowly through your nose, exhale slowly through your mouth. Be still. Be still, ashayam.” Spock had come around and lain a hot hand on Jim’s back through the sheet, maintaining an eighteen-centimeter distance between their bodies. Jim moaned through the restoration of his own very human controls, and then he was silent with his head in his arms and his breathing steady.
They remained huddled between the bed and the bulkheads for nineteen minutes and forty-three seconds. At last Jim shifted to look at Spock and said, “Stay with me? Don’t leave. Don’t leave.”
Spock inclined his head in acquiescence. Jim rose and clambered without pretense of grace into the bed, still wrapped in the sheet. Spock slid in behind him, their bodies molding together chest to back, hips cradled in hips, knees into knees. After arranging the covers, Spock slung an arm around the diminished body of his bondmate, who closed his eyes and slept without dreaming.
*
When Jim woke, Spock was propped against the bulkhead beside him, robe lashed to his body preserving all modesty, padd and stylus in hand. Jim recalled the events of the night before with sudden clarity and groaned, setting a hand to his eyes as if to block out his mortification. But Spock was still there, reading reports and writing up memos in bed, as if Jim really were his husband, nothing left to hide between them. Spock had implied that he was aware of all of Jim’s most jealously kept secrets, his burning shame and the leprous stains devouring his spirit. All this, and still Spock had stated outright that he wanted Jim. Something nagged at the edges of Jim’s memory, tantalizing him with its significance. Then, like the sun emerging from behind clouds to illuminate the sleep-dazed corners of his mind, he knew.
“Did you say we had to have sex to get me back to normal?” he blurted. He seemed to have startled Spock, who whipped his head to one side to look at him. He still lay prone, swaddled in the sheet, just the top half of his head exposed.
“That is my hypothesis, yes,” Spock answered with some reluctance.
“How’s that work, then? You got magic Vulcan sperm or something? Come one, come all, heal all your ills?”
Spock set his padd flat in his lap and regarded him with what Jim detected as fond vexation.
“No, Jim. Vulcan ejaculate is analogous to human ejaculate and has no supernatural properties, as I am sure you are aware.”
“Then what’s the deal?”
Spock inched his backside backward to sit up straighter against the bulkhead, hands pressed into the bed.
“It is not logical, per se,” he equivocated.
“Bring on the illogic then,” Jim pressed him. “I’d love to hear this.” He saw Spock take a moment to formulate his reply.
“I believe the catalyst for the transformative events of two nights ago was your expression of a wish to …give your virginity to me, though it was impossible. It was not, I believe, a romanticized notion of giving yourself to me born of antiquated Terran ideals conflating worth with sexual purity, rather, it was a gesture of entrusting me with your security. Your early sexual encounters were not…pleasant, Jim.”
Jim watched Spock fold his long-fingered hands over the pad in his lap. Spock did not shy from his gaze, though Jim felt himself shrinking inwardly at the thought of the things he must have done with Hank, the Coach, Mark, innumerable other rough and tumble men. The things he’d must have allowed them to do. Begged them to do. He shut his eyes against Spock’s easy acceptance of him, against the promise and weight of Spock’s unconditional devotion, tucking his nose into the sheet to burrow deeper.
“I still don’t get how it would fix me,” he whispered.
“It was my impression that wishes upon stars required no scientific explanation.”
Jim barked out a humorless guffaw, still not opening his eyes. “Funny, from you.”
“Indeed, that is essentially what the doctor implied as well.” There was a pause. “He also implied that I would - what is the phrase? ‘Grasp at hay’ to find a resolution.”
Jim felt a heaviness settle over him. It was the first time he’d truly considered Spock’s perspective: he’d lost a captain and a partner, and despite his impassive demeanor, he missed the man whose place Jim had taken. He would go to any lengths to get that man back, even eschewing logic when logic provided no viable answers. He dislodged his head from his cocoon and looked at Spock, heart aching. He realized that Spock’s fealty was not his to snatch up and hoard like so much non-perishable food. Spock was for his future.
“I hypothesize,” Spock continued, “that if we engage in sexual relations as per the terms of your wish, thereby fulfilling it, the regression process would reverse itself and you would once again be an adult and the captain of this starship.”
“And your husband.”
“And my husband.”
Jim wriggled, encased yet in the sheet, toward Spock until he lay against Spock’s side. Spock poured out heat like a star going supernova. After a moment, one of those fevered arms settled over Jim, soothing, not restraining.
“So we have to. Even if you don’t want to, you know, take advantage. I promise not to ask for anything bad.” He craned a bit to get a look at Spock’s face. Jim thought he could see skepticism there before he settled back with his face mashed against Spock’s hip.
“We will not reach Zenzobar of the Third Outer Ring for approximately two days. I believe it would be beneficial for us to spend time in each other’s presence and communicate frequently so as to avoid more… misunderstandings.”
“So you wanna hang out and talk?”
“Essentially, yes. If the efforts of the science and medical teams in regards to your case prove futile, and we must …copulate, I will strive for a wholly positive experience. Providing such will require trust and mutual understanding, which we do not yet have between us.”
Translation, Jim thought: you don’t want some damaged kid throwing himself at you and then freaking out again. Out loud, he said, “Heh, I think you just promised me the lay of my life, Spock.”
Warm fingers threaded gently into his hair. Jim’s heart skipped a beat at the contact.
“So it seems, Jim.”
*
“Drink up,” McCoy grunted as he set a tall glass of milk in front of Jim in the mess before alpha shift. His tray clattered as he slid in next to Spock, staring at Jim and his glass of milk with an expectant expression. “Well?”
“I don’t like milk too much.”
“That’s not just any milk, Jimboy. That milk’s gonna turn you into a man.” McCoy leaned back, crossing his arms and giving Spock a smug smirk.
Jim frowned.
“But I thought -”
“Christ, did this hobgoblin tell you he needed to deflower you?”
“Doctor, I am reasonably certain-”
“Betcha just ate that right up, too, huh Jim?”
“Hey! Shut up!” Jim stood, scowling at McCoy, a hot blush crawling up his neck, tinting his ears, flooding his face. The mess hall went quiet and McCoy looked contrite.
“Sorry, Jim. Just forgetting you’re not - you, sometimes.”
Jim sank back into his seat, burning with embarrassment. Spock leveled a derisive eyebrow at McCoy, setting down his utensils.
“Doctor, I assume you have data to support your milk hypothesis. Please elaborate.”
Looking rather pinched, McCoy pushed his tray to the side and leaned forward.
“Me and Christine’ve been reading up on those Devarsian goat myths, and in every single one, youths and maidens and old men are healed by the power of goats’ milk. And Spock, remember how I about died when I saw some for sale at that farmers’ market? This is my last container of it, still good and everything.”
“That is illogical. There is no evidence that what has befallen Jim originated from Devar XI. Our presence on the planet was minimal and occurred over four weeks prior to Jim’s regression.”
“And what makes this less logical than your gonzo ‘wish upon a star’ statutory rape theory?” McCoy barked, eyebrows arching wildly, a finger thrust into Spock’s personal space. “I thought as long as we were trying out flights of fancy on this tin can that drinking a tall glass of alien goats’ milk was as likely to cure him as drinking a tall glass of fully grown Vulcan male!”
“Doctor, the expression of the wish and the timing of the regression suggest that-”
“Know what Spock? I think you want it to be some kinda crazy wish Jim made in bed with you. This is your fantasy come true, you’d love to fix up your broken boy with the power of your big, Vulcan---”
“Ears!” Jim hollered, getting to his feet again. The mess hall was vacant now, the exodus unnoticed amid the fracas of such lively discussion. McCoy’s jaws snapped shut as Jim chugged the Devarsian goats’ milk and flung the glass behind his shoulder, careless of the shattering. Then he threw his arms out and snarled, “Well? Come on, McCoy, where’s my big boy body now? Huh?”
He stood panting in the empty mess, McCoy gawping at him, Spock’s fixed gaze as intense as ever.
“Jesus,” McCoy breathed. “Jesus, I’m sorry, Jim. I swear I’m not trying to be a jackass about this, I just. I want you to be well, and whole, and innocent, I guess.”
Jim snorted, lips twisting in a sneer. “You’re a long time too late for that shit, doctor.”
“Aw, Jim, it’s not like that.”
“Yeah? What the hell’s it like then?”
“It’s like all this shit that happened to you is just that: shit that happened to you, outta your control, and you did your best under the circumstances. It doesn’t make you bad, Jim. I wish you could see that.”
“You have no idea about anything, and you’re trying to keep the only one who does away from me. Why are you doing this? Why are you punishing me?”
McCoy rounded the table and grabbed Jim by the shoulders in a harsh grip. “No, Jim. No.” He shook him. Spock was on his feet in an instant, prying McCoy off of Jim.
“Doctor, unhand him. I apologize, Jim. The doctor is incapable of restraining himself. He is often guilty of letting his emotions rule him.”
“Don’t you even start, Spock, I swear to God.” McCoy backed off. “A body might think you were on the verge of an emotion. I’m sorry again, Jim. You need to know I never meant you harm.”
Jim wrapped his arms around himself in a defensive position, hunching his shoulders. McCoy shot him a penitent look.
“I gotta get to sickbay. You just… well. You just hang in there.”
When McCoy was gone, Jim sat again, bowing his head over his breakfast. He forked some of the pancakes and rubbery, reconstituted sausage into his mouth, chewing slowly. Spock remained upright and rigid, staring at Jim’s back, appetite gone.
“He’s gone, you know. You can sit down.”
“I am aware, Jim.”
“Then come here and sit down and stop staring at me.”
Spock sat, but kept his eyes on Jim’s downturned face.
“You feel shame though it was McCoy who disgraced himself, not you.”
“No one said humans are logical, Spock.” The pancakes and sausage were steadily disappearing. Relaxing his spine almost imperceptibly, Spock picked up his spoon to stir his porridge.
“Dr. McCoy has a forceful personality, but he is your closest friend, Jim. You knew and held him in high esteem long before we met. He was truthful when he stated that he meant you no harm. He and I share a contentious relationship, but after a fashion, we are also friends.”
“I can’t see how.”
“You must trust the man you became.”
When Jim’s plate was clean, Spock stood.
“Perhaps you would derive pleasure from visiting the bridge today, Jim. You are technically still Starfleet personnel.”
Jim brightened, slung the trays into the receptacles, and matched Spock stride for stride on the way to the bridge.
*
When the doors to the bridge opened, Spock glided in with purpose, but Jim hung back in the doorway, awestruck. Every surface shone as if waxed daily, every piece of equipment was sleeker, smaller, and probably faster than he’d ever seen, not to mention that technology he’d never even bothered imagining, and the viewscreen… The viewscreen comprised the entirety of the far wall, stars and planets and assorted masses studded in the blanket of space, the Enterprise’s protective shroud. Jim realized he was gaping when he saw a pretty communications officer looking and him and suppressing a smile without success as if familiar with his brand of enthusiasm. He shot her back a shrug and a sheepish smile, fully entering the bridge.
With an upturned palm and sparing gestures, Spock began indicating the bridge crew and introducing them. “Helmsman and chief navigator, Lieutenant Sulu and Ensign Chekov. Chief communications officer Lieutenant Uhura. Systems analyst Lieutenant Xingtao, tactical officer Lieutenant Commander Ahrens.”
Jim nodded at each of them, feeling small in the face of their smiles and shared looks and warm welcomes. He swallowed, suddenly dizzy.
“You may sit at the science station, Mr. Kirk,” Spock told him, directing him to a data console next to the chief communications officer as he sat in the command chair. Jim turned his attention to the science station, taking measured breaths and ignoring the cold lick of discontent at Spock’s brusque professional manner. Nothing personal, he reminded himself as Spock and the navigator discussed route mapping, Spock’s eyes never alighting on Jim. Jim straightened his spine and tried to act like an officer who deserved to be on this magnificent bridge. Scrolling through the data, Jim skimmed a lot of dry analyses of the compositions of nearby gaseous bodies and their positions in space until, not three minutes after he had sat down, he was sure he was done with the science station.
“How you doing?” came a low query from the chief communications officer. Uhuru? He turned to face her.
“Okay,” he said. She cocked her head.
“You don’t sound so sure.”
He shrugged, looking back down into the data console. “I’m just causing problems for people. It would be better if I changed back.”
“They’re working on it in the science labs,” she said. Then she gave a soft laugh. “Not sure what medical’s doing, though.”
“You heard about that?”
“Honey, everybody heard about that. How’s the goats’ milk settling in?”
Jim couldn’t help breaking into a smile. “Kinda sloshy,” he whispered.
“You’ll be okay, Jim. And if we have to send you into negotiations as is, I’ll make sure you’re totally prepped.”
“What’s with that anyway? I mean, why can’t that princess deal with someone else? Spock’s gotta be a way better choice than me right now. Or, you know, anyone.”
Uhura barked out a short laugh, then looked around to make sure no one heard her. She leaned back in when no one gave her the stink eye and said, “Your totally fabricated reputation precedes you, Kirk.”
Jim’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“The outer ringers’ only desirable resources are precious gems and dilithium. They’ve had to scrap for pretty much everything else, and part of that means building themselves up, dressing themselves up. If you’re rich, you drip with jewels, you can afford the right clothes, the right lifestyle, the right social circle, whatever. What is beautiful is what is valuable, and that includes life forms. Some of them, like Supreme Empress H’Lopia, throw their power around and demand to deal only with beings of, quote, ‘exceptional physical beauty.’ And by deal with, I mean sleep with. She heard wildly exaggerated stories about you all across Federation space and decided you were her next target.”
Jim stared. “Huh. I didn’t know news of my total hotness had reached all over the galaxy like that.”
Uhura laughed again, adjusting her personal comm device. “Well,” she said in a teasing tone, “there’s no accounting for taste.”
“She just hasn’t seen the rest of you yet. She’ll be throwing me over for that super buff helmsman as soon as we reach orbit.” Jim thrust a thumb over his shoulder in the general direction of the helm.
“We’ll see. She’s pretty insistent, and, ah, shrill, and I hear Komack owes her a favor for the crazy rock he’s got on his wife’s hand right now.”
“Starfleet Command can force me to sleep with someone even though I’m Vulcan married?”
“Well, no, but you always manage to let ’em down easy. I don’t know how you do it, Kirk, but I’ve seen you turn the most aggressive suitors into harmless kittens who thank you when all’s said and done and they haven’t gotten you in the sack. Sometimes I still can’t believe it when it happens.”
Jim glanced at Spock in the periphery of his vision. “Obviously I’m just that smooth, Lieutenant.” Uhura laughed again, swinging her seat back to face her console.
Alpha shift passed slowly, peppered with conversation with Uhura. At lunch, alternates relieved the bridge crew so they could eat in the mess. He was spared McCoy’s fussing, but not Chekov and Sulu’s bickering. Spock and Uhura shared a quiet discussion about the fascinating language of Samargol V’s native fleabats, and Jim sat silently spooning soggy replicated pasta into his mouth until it was time to go back to the bridge and the hard ergonomic seat at the science station.
After interminable stretches of time during which Jim counted his arm hairs, mooned over Spock, tried to eavesdrop on Sulu and Chekov’s conversation and let himself be mesmerized by Uhura’s sparkling earrings, something worthwhile finally happened. Lieutenant Sulu steered them through an unanticipated asteroid belt with the ease and agility of a bird soaring free on the wind. Jim leaned back in the seat, captivated by the images on the expansive viewscreen, the starship tilting into curves, sailing over and under and around the debris with staggering grace. The bridge crew had ceased all conversation, all extraneous noise-making, to allow Sulu full concentration on his task. When they reached the end of the string of space debris, Jim couldn’t help letting out an exhilarated whoop and clapping his hands together once. Sulu took a deep breath and let his shoulders slump a little in relief. Chekov chattered at him and patted his shoulder, grinning. The bridge hummed with the crew’s collective satisfaction.
The jovial mood was short lived, broken when Spock sprang to his feet and moved toward the viewscreen.
“Magnify unidentified object,” he said. There, a speck on the edge of the viewscreen expanded, and the crew beheld a clunky, outdated vessel drifting without power. “Hail at all frequencies, Lieutenant Uhura.”
“Nothing, Captain. Communications are completely down. They’re broadcasting a general distress signal, but no recorded SOS and no answers to our hails.”
“Sir, life support systems reporting significant damage, defaulted to minimum use mode,” Xingtao said. “It looks like a private science vessel, Earth-manufacture. I’m unable to determine what happened to it without more data.”
“Mr. Ahrens, report to security and ready an away team with environmental suits.”
Ahrens stood at attention. “Sir, will you be beaming over with us?”
Spock’s eyes flickered almost imperceptibly toward Jim. “Negative, Tactical Officer. In addition to security personnel, bring Lieutenant Murphy-Stone from sciences and have her fitted with a camera for a vid-feed to be broadcasted directly to the bridge viewscreen. Dismissed.”
Spock was at the science station in two long steps, clasping his hands together behind his back.
“It would be best if you returned to your quarters or visited the observation deck, Mr. Kirk.”
“I’d rather stay. I mean, I’ll be thinking about what could be happening no matter where I am on the ship, anyway.”
“Certain things cannot be unseen, Mr. Kirk.”
Jim clenched his jaw and glowered at Spock. “And I think I know that better than anyone, Mr. Spock.” He saw resignation pass over Spock’s eyes, the moment Spock gave in, but Jim saw no fondness qualify the concession and so felt no satisfaction, only resentment at being made to feel like a child and a burden. He dug his heels into the floor on either side of his seat at the science station, crossing his arms over his body, tucking his fists into his armpits.
“Very well, Mr. Kirk. You will remain silent and stationary for the duration.” Spock went back to the command chair without sparing Jim another glance, and Jim swallowed back a hot rage bubbling up in his throat. Uhura leaned over and touched his arm, sympathy coloring her expression. He closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see her seeing him.
Tense minutes passed until the viewscreen flickered and flared into an image of the landing party’s position on the unidentified vessel. They had beamed into the corresponding transporter room, a gray, empty place with dim lighting.
“Can you hear me, Captain Spock? Come in, Captain Spock,” came a female voice through the bridge-wide comm speakers. On the viewscreen, crew members flanked her and fanned out as they stepped into the corridor. The viewscreen went black, and the bridge heard only breathing and shuffling. One by one the landing party turned on their flashlights.
“Affirmative, Lieutenant. Have you scanned for life signs?”
“Yes, sir. Nothing alive within range. Oxygen levels low, but able to support life. I’m trying to get a read on why this ship is dead in space, but so far there’s no relevant data.”
The landing party moved through the corridors, shining their lights through open doors, exposing vacant, stagnating rooms. Sometimes, spatters of blood, much of it brown with age, appeared on walls where the light fell on them.
“Lieutenant Murphy-Stone, have you encountered any casualties?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“Exercise caution, Lieutenant. Attempt to reach the bridge.”
“Yes, sir.”
The security personnel moved quickly and silently, flashlights scanning the premises, phasers set to stun. Murphy-Stone brought up the rear, the buzzing of the tricorder and the rubbing of the environmental suit against itself as she walked the only sounds on the bridge of the Enterprise. The barren starship’s lights sputtered now and again, exposing in flashes a sturdy, utilitarian vessel with equipment destroyed and strewn along its floors, all of it smeared with iron-based blood. And there were the bones.
“Oh hell,” Murphy-Stone whispered, the sensitive microphone of the camera picking it up and delivering the soft curse onto the bridge of the Enterprise. When the away team came across bones picked clean, they averted their lights. They made their way to the bridge, stepping over broken, blood-stained bulkheads, tendon-lashed human bones and crushed science gear, pointing phasers round every corner.
As the away team approached the bridge, a sense of foreboding flooded Jim’s core. Dread began to flatten his lungs and he gripped the seat of his chair in an effort to steady himself. He felt sweat prickle along his hairline and down his back. On the viewscreen, Murphy-Stone and Ahrens stood back as the three men from security forced the bridge door’s wide and filed in. No bloody tableau confronted them, no sickening horrors awaited them there. Jim let out a shaking breath.
“There’s a text document on screen at the helm, sir,” Murphy-Stone reported. “It looks like… it looks like an account of what happened here.”
“The main points, Lieutenant.”
“There was a calculation error, or maybe intentional sabotage. They ran out of fuel and their warp drives powered down, as well as their sublight engines. They went as far as they could on fumes under impulse power, not even a parsec. An unknown computer virus jammed all communications, destroyed 70% of the life support generators and forced the food replicators offline. There was… there was only a limited store of nonperishable food items.”
The roaring in Jim’s ears wasn’t interference from the comm devices, but the rush of his own frenzied blood, his jackrabbit heart railing against the cage of his ribs. That which he couldn’t unsee was upon him again. Paralyzed, Jim could not tear his gaze from the viewscreen, could not even think to regret defying Spock’s earlier suggestion to leave the bridge.
“The crew lasted four months and then….” Murphy-Stone seemed unwilling to say it.
“That’s enough, Lieutenant,” Spock said, sparing her the task. “Return to the transporter room and beam back immediately. We must warp out of this area of space as soon as your party returns to the Enterprise.”
The away team made haste away from the bridge, the camera mounted on Murphy-Stone’s shoulder jostling with her efforts. Suddenly, the image pitched and Murphy-Stone was on the ground, her flashlight skittering away from her, a shriek piercing the air.
“Lieutenant!” It was Ahrens, back in an instant, flashlight thwarting the camera. The Enterprise bridge crew could only listen as a flurry of shouts and curses accompanied the thuds of bodies colliding with bulkheads, the floor, other bodies, and finally, finally, the dull blast of a phaser set to stun.
“Mr. Ahrens, report. Report, Mr. Ahrens,” Jim heard Spock demand distantly. The sound of harsh breathing filled the bridge. The camera had not restored visual. “Mr. Ahrens, that’s an order.”
“We’re fine, sir. Shaken, but all fine,” Murphy-Stone panted.
“Murphy-Stone is unharmed, Captain,” came Ahrens’ voice. “She was attacked by a survivor and there was a scuffle. I killed him. I killed him, sir. It was set to stun but I killed him.”
A wave of nausea sent Jim’s vision swimming. He lurched up and stumbled out of the bridge, heedless of Spock calling his name after him.
*
McCoy was lurking near the bridge bathroom, contemplating entering the bridge to try to apologize to Jim again, when a tornado of limbs slammed into him with the force of all Jim’s torment behind it. The pair of them toppled to the ground, McCoy’s head smacking against the floor tile. He groaned. Jim slid off him and lay facedown on the floor, no strength left in his quaking body, gagging through tearless, wracking sobs. McCoy propped himself up by his elbows, watching his captain, reduced in more ways than the obvious, break down under the enormous weight of his own guilt. McCoy shifted to a sitting position and carefully laid a hand between Jim’s prominent shoulder blades. Suddenly Jim reeled, eyes wide, and he scrambled toward a toilet where he heaved his lunch, his breakfast, and all his sour bile. Through it all McCoy rubbed warm circles on his back.
“Easy now. There you go, darlin’, let it out. There you go.” He murmured comforting nonsense now and then, his gruff voice reverberating between the bathroom bulkheads. Jim hugged the cool toilet in the aftermath, sweaty and quivering and unable to summon the strength to move or tell McCoy to fuck off. McCoy pressed the flusher for him.
“It’s all right now, Jim. You’re all right now.”
“Never be all right.
“Yeah? Well there’s a starship you captain says otherwise. They don’t just give starships to anyone off the street, you know.”
“They ate each other on that other one.”
“What?”
“There was a ship, and a distress signal. He sent a rescue party with no one to rescue; they all ate each other. And then they killed him.”
McCoy was silent, piecing together a story to go with Jim’s disjointed narrative. It was a familiar story, dressed up nice and new with different players and costumes, but it was still the same old horror show. McCoy didn’t need to hear the gritty details to know them and ache in response.
“I know, Jim. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t know. You don’t know.”
“Tell me, darlin’. Tell me how it is.”
Jim pulled away from the toilet and McCoy’s soothing hand on his back to glare at McCoy with accusing blue eyes.
“It’s like there was no food left and they kept waiting for someone to come save them and no one came, no matter how many waves they sent, or how many people died and then some of them got so hungry they turned on you like dogs. They turned on you when the food was gone and the police patrolled for race betrayers and all you could do was hide and try to keep the little ones alive and still they’d find you, they’d find you, understand?” Jim rubbed his face with his hands, pressing his fingers to his eyes as if to block out what he’d been living with for so long.
“No,” McCoy said. Jim looked at him. “No, I’ll never understand. No one can, not without living through it. But you did Jim. You lived through it and you’re here and you’re strong and you’re breakin’ hearts all over the galaxy.” Jim was shaking his head, not hearing McCoy’s attempt to lighten the mood, maybe not hearing McCoy at all.
“You don’t know what I did. You don’t know what I did.”
“All right. How ’bout I tell you what I did, then?”
“You’re a doctor. You save people, boo hoo.”
McCoy snorted. “You think you got the market cornered on pain and guilt and bad deeds done, boy? Are you so far gone that you think you’re the only one who feels as deep as you do?” Jim’s eyes were two blazing points in that thundercloud face.
McCoy sighed and stretched his legs out in front of him, back against a bulkhead. He wished, not for the first time, that Starfleet uniforms weren’t so closely tailored to the body so he had room for a discreet flask. That lack, more than anything, proved that stars didn’t just bestow wishes on the needy. He was needy, goddamnit, and he still had to hide his liquor away in his desk’s false bottom.
“You ever heard of pyrrhoneuritis? Well, it’s a wasting disease. Disgusting thing, eats away at you, breaks you down, leaves you in agony. There was no cure. My dad got it, and there was nothing I could do. Sat by his bed listening to him moaning while I pored over the medical texts again and again. Thought I could buy time injecting him with painkillers and tri-ox compound and total bullshit that never did a goddamned thing. He eventually used all the breath he had left to beg me to let him die. Not just let him die, but make it happen. My father lay there in his bed asking me to kill him, Jim.”
Jim mouth hung open, his face bloodless, attention rapt. McCoy forced himself to go on.
“So what could I do? What could I do Jim? A few weeks later, a goddamn handful of days, really, someone on the Trebalum colonies found a cure. For pyrrhoneuritis! Hundreds of years of fatal affliction and bam! They cleared that shit right up just weeks too late to save my dad. I went over and over it: if I’d just waited, if I’d found it faster myself. I sent myself straight into hell, couldn’t think of anything but his wasted body disintegrating while I watched. I destroyed my marriage, I lost my little girl. I killed my father Jim. I killed him.”
“I killed him,” Jim echoed in a hollow voice.
McCoy nodded.
“I killed him,” Jim said again. “He found us and grabbed Kevin but I was quicker. I was quicker.”
“And you saved Kevin, and yourself, and all those other kids, kept them safe until the shuttles came. You know what he would have done if you hadn’t killed him, Jim. It’s no shame. You’ve got to stop torturing yourself.”
“Have you?”
McCoy’s answering smile was wry. “Touché.”
“Maybe…” Jim hesitated. “Maybe people like you and me, no matter what our reasons were to do it, maybe we don’t get to be happy. You know?”
McCoy swore he felt his hair going gray. “Aw, hell, kid. You are happy. On this boat, with that pointy-eared bastard, doing what you were born to do. And you deserve that happiness. You know that, don’t you?”
Jim looked bleak. “I don’t see how. I don’t see how anyone can stand to look at me.”
Without thought McCoy leaned over and gathered Jim to his chest in a crushing embrace. He heard Jim’s bones rub together, and Jim let out a strained gurgle before McCoy abruptly freed him, awkwardness pervading the moment.
“Oh,” Jim said.
“Sorry,” McCoy muttered. “Just- just don’t talk like that, would you?”
Spock arrived with his characteristic silence, hovering in the entryway with badly concealed concern. Jim looked up at him with naked hope on his face, but then he seemed to wilt and looked back at the ground. The heavy ball of conflict McCoy had been dragging around about where his diaphragm usually was for the past two days felt lighter as he watched Spock and Jim each trying to hide what they meant to each other, both failing rather spectacularly. This is how it had been for them, in the beginning, while everyone around them waited, biting their nails in anticipation of the inevitable. Over the course of the mission, McCoy had watched these two men become the best possible versions of themselves as they strove to be worthy of each other, whole and healed. Jim was still a hopeless flirt occasionally crippled by self-doubt, but he had found an abiding peace at Spock’s side, in his role as captain, by his own measure of judgment. And where once he was a raw, unVulcan nerve of barely contained anger and vulnerability, Spock was calmer and more self-possessed too, eternally working to reconcile emotion with logic, human with Vulcan, passion with temperance. Not that he wasn’t still an uptight, condescending bastard who claimed to have no feelings most of the time, but McCoy could admit, in the private recesses of his mind, that Spock was not just tolerable but admirable. He was tilting at windmills keeping them apart, and he knew with the steadfast certainty of a zealot that Spock would never hurt Jim, would lay down his life before letting Jim come to harm. He had done so countless times in the line of duty, as Jim had for him, the pair of them causing their kindly family doctor to develop ulcers and high blood pressure he was unable hide from Chapel’s eagle eyes. McCoy, with great effort and a deep breath, took his own advice and let it go.
Standing up, he met Spock’s eyes. McCoy marveled at the thought that he’d once found them inscrutable and impossibly alien. “You taking care of this ship, Acting Captain?”
“I endeavor to perform to the highest standards of duty and keep her in good repair until such time as her rightful captain is restored, doctor.”
“Glad to hear it, Spock. Glad to hear it.”
At the edges of McCoy’s line of vision, he saw Spock kneel down in front of Jim before he took the scenic route back to sickbay.
Part III