Fic: What Do You Want? Pike/Barnett, NC-17
Title: What Do You Want?
Fandom & Pairing: Star Trek AOS, Pike/Barnett
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: post-Narada trauma, angst, angry!sex
Word Count: Around 3000
Beta: the indispensable imachar
Summary: A dutiful Barnett is trying to do the right thing. A traumatized Pike is not making it easy.
Context: I gave Pike/Barnett to imachar as a prompt and she wrote this glorious friendly, sexy ficlet where it is all Jim's fault. Then I tried writing my own version of the pairing in a very different mood.
Author's Note: In my head canon, Barnett is a Starfleet lawyer, promoted to Admiral after successfully managing the creation and propagation of the latest version of the Prime Directive. He's never served in space. And there is an unofficial schism in Starfleet where those who have space service tend to look down on those who haven't.
"What do you want?"
Barnett, having waited a moment and realized that an invitation to enter the apartment was not going to be forthcoming, pushed past Pike into the entrance hall. "I came to see if you were settled in, if there is anything I can do to help."
Pike bristled at Barnett's tone of patient reason. "I'm fine." He was aware he was not being gracious but he'd only been released from hospital two days before. He'd been grateful to get rid of the entourage of fussing busybodies who'd accompanied him home, but now that they were gone he was acutely conscious of the echoing silence of his apartment.
Barnett offered him a thin smile that didn't reach his eyes. "I'm sure you are. But I thought there might be something I could do for you. Joining the Admiralty can be rather disorientating at first."
Pike clenched his fist around the crutch he was using to keep the weight off his weakened left side. He'd been a consummate diplomat once, capable of keeping his emotions under control in the most trying of circumstances, but now his moods swung wildly. Boyce said it was due to traces of toxins in his brain stem. Boyce said it would get better. All Pike knew was that he felt damaged and dirty and with a mind out of control in ways he'd never experienced before.
"I think I can manage Admiralty 101," he snapped. "It's not as if you lot have done much in the past."
Barnett's nostrils flared, although otherwise his face remained impassive. "You think Command is to blame for all this?"
"Oh no, I'm well aware who's to blame," spat Pike. "Every officer in Starfleet knows who gave Earth's border protection codes to the Romulans." Ever since being brought out of the medical coma following his return to Earth, he'd been having recurring nightmares, not just of the events on the Narada, but of the reactions he'd get from his fellow officers. When they'd informed him of his promotion, a small part of his mind had still been expecting a court martial.
"Don't be an ass," said Barnett, voice tight with control. "We've all had a comprehensive briefing, led by Boyce. He made very certain that everyone knew how that slug worked, what it did to you, how you had no option."
Pike felt a nauseating surge of anger swelling in his throat. So Boyce had done preemptive damage control on his behalf. Fuck, he hated being so weak, so compromised, that such things were necessary.
"I can't imagine what it must have been like for you," Barnett offered softly.
And somehow that was the last straw. Barnett here to do his duty, teeth gritted in his dislike of Pike, Pike could just about live with. Barnett pitying him? It was too much.
"No, you can't fucking imagine, can you? Because you've never served in space. All you desk-captains, busy explaining to everyone from the public to the Federation government what went down out there, you've no fucking idea and you never will."
The softness vanished from Barnett's face, the dark skin going marble smooth as he shrunk back into himself. "You're right. I don't know. All I do is sit back on Earth and pick up the pieces left behind by you heroes."
The two men stood in silence for a long moment, the air simmering with tension, neither looking at the other.
Barnett was the first one to slip back into his shell of duty. "So. As I was saying, is there anything I can do for you at this point?" He was already beginning to edge towards the door, clearly anticipating another refusal.
Pike's anger was still churning in his stomach, a nauseating acid reflux that never left him, given an extra edge by the fear of being left alone once again with only his own thoughts for company. "If you really insist on trying to be helpful, you can have sex with me."
"Excuse me?"
"I like sex. It's a good stress reliever. But I've not done it since... I'm not sure how well everything is working. If you're so determined to be useful, it would be helpful to test things out on someone..." He deliberately let the sentence trail away.
"On someone you despise," said Barnett slowly. "So it doesn't matter whether you turn out to be able to get it up or not."
Pike offered him a bland smile. He wasn't expecting to get a fuck but he was rather hoping to get a fight. He needed something to try and release the pressure of the anger boiling inside him.
Barnett stared at him silently, expression impenetrable, and then calmly lifted his hands to begin opening the buttons of his jacket. "Fine. Let's do it. You're not the only one who could do with some easy stress relief. I've spent the last two weeks contacting the families of the dead cadets. I could do with a no-strings distraction."
Pike watched disbelievingly as Barnett pulled his jacket off his broad shoulders. The man was calling his bluff, he had to be. Still, two could play that game. "Undo your flies," he said flatly. "The rest can stay where it is. This is only about one thing."
Barnett carefully, calmly, hung his jacket up by the door. Then he abruptly grabbed Pike by his upper arms, big hands digging hard into the flesh, squeezing down bruisingly onto the bone, and pushed him backwards, crowding him up against the wall. Pike's crutch clattered to the floor at his side. Barnett was only a little taller than him but he had to be half as broad again, not with fat but with sheer bulk.
A generous mouth crushed down over his, pushing his lips painfully against his teeth. Without any pause to seek permission, a tongue was forced brutally into his mouth. Pike met it with his own, without care or sympathy, giving back as good as he was getting. He reveled in the sense of contact, in the heat and life and power of the body grinding unforgivingly against his own. He was so sick of being treated like a china doll, damaged and fragile. He pushed back roughly and was contained by the mass of Barnett, surrounded and protected by the size of the man. He let all his agonizingly repetitive thoughts drain away as he immersed himself in the simplicity of tongue and teeth and rising desire, let himself fall into hot, hungry, mindless lust.
He raked his hands down Barnett's back, his nails long after his enforced rest in hospital, pushing down cruelly as he tried to dig right through the fabric of the shirt into the substantial flesh underneath. Spreading his legs, he thrust roughly against a muscular thigh, trying to rut against it, trying to focus this down to the one place that mattered.
In response, Barnett pushed his leg forward, letting more of his weight rest against Pike, using his large hands to push Pike's shoulders back against the wall. Something about the flat surface behind him and the constraint across his chest sent a spike of panic tearing through his arousal, triggering an abrupt flashback to a hard tabletop under his back, a leather strap pressing down across his chest, his throat being torn apart so that his mind could be fucked wide open, letting him spill the secrets that would condemn an entire planet to destruction... He only realized that he'd begun to hyper-ventilate when Barnett abruptly pulled back, releasing the weight that had pinned him down, pressing a concerned hand against his cheek. "Chris? Are you okay?"
An icy torrent of humiliation crashed down over his panicked fear and both washed into the churning pool of bottomless anger that he'd been nursing ever since he'd first seen Nero's face on the viewscreen of the Enterprise. He pushed furiously away from the wall, grabbed Barnett's shirt with one hand and mashed their mouths together once again, teeth knocking, lips bruised with the impact. With the other hand he began to fumble with Barnett's fly, determined to force the man to follow through. It worked for a moment until he put too much weight onto his left side and his weak leg crumbled under him, pain lancing up through his spine.
Barnett caught him, hesitated for a moment, and then clearly thought better of any lingering impulse he'd had to try and express concern. He ducked down and set his shoulder into Pike's stomach, picked the other man up roughly in a fireman's lift and strode into the bedroom with him. Dumped unceremoniously on the bed, Pike reveled in the spikes of pain and of indignation, welcoming the pure intensity of the feelings after all the helplessness and fear of the past weeks, numbed into cotton-wool haziness by the incessant doses of drugs. He grabbed Barnett's shirt, tearing it loose from the small mother-of-pearl buttons as he pulled the other man down on top of him.
He'd lost the muscle mass that might have once let him maneuver a man as heavy as Barnett. He settled for scrabbling at the other man's clothes, pushing up under the shirt to scrape his fingers across a hot flat stomach, trying to reach down into Barnett's pants.
Barnett seemed to have given up at any attempt to make this mutual. He thrust one hand roughly into Pike's hair, now longer than regulation after weeks without a cut, using a vicious grip to pull Pike's head to one side, giving him access to the taut lines of Pike's neck. He bit down hard on the pale skin and then sucked remorselessly. Pike grabbed the back of Barnett's neck, forcing the other man's face down onto his skin. He wanted the marks and the bruises. He wanted signs on his skin that he'd chosen to put there, rather than having them inflicted by his enemies or by his doctors.
Barnett was thrusting restlessly against the thigh of Pike's good leg, and Pike could feel a thick mass hardening against him. They'd both get off on this and that was enough. There was no emotion here, no reciprocity beyond the most basic. This was a hot hard body for him to rub off on, without obligation, without explanation. This was an uncontrolled explosion of self-serving lust, hungry, greedy, selfish.
He squeezed his eyes closed and forced his hands into the back of Barnett's pants, kneading at the broad ass while riding the rush of rising arousal, trying to push his erection against Barnett's. His underwear was chafing around his balls but at least his cock was finally getting with the programme, swelling to uncomfortable firmness in the constraints of his pants, apparently still in working order despite all the trauma and spinal damage.
Barnett abandoned his trail of destruction down Pike's neck and rolled them both onto their sides, doing a rather more expert job than Pike would have expected of getting their flies open and their pants down onto their thighs.
"Lube?" he demanded.
"Bedside table."
It was the last thing either of them bothered to say. A cool slippery hand engulfed his cock and pulled it tight against another hot hard prick, squeezing and tugging with a brutal unforgiving authority. This clearly was not meant to last long, which suited Pike just fine. He buried his head against Barnett's neck, writhing and bucking against the solid body at his side, concentrating on the sensations spiraling outwards from his groin, hunting down the overload that would drown out his tortured thoughts. With his eyes held tightly shut he could pretend that they were both someone else. Anyone else. He could pretend that this was nothing more than the easy release that sex had always been for him.
He let the intensity of the emotion swell up inside him, for a short time overwhelming all the horror and despair of the last few weeks, all the desolate uncertainty of the future that now lay before him. He could feel the intense pounding of Barnett's heart, and the ragged echo of his own racing pulse. He could smell the musty stink of sweat and sex rising off both of them and hear the harsh, ragged breaths panting by his ear. He rode blindly through the sudden shudders that racked the body pressed up against his own, felt the slick spill of semen lubricating his aching cock, and let his own wave crest and break over him, wiping everything else away for long delirious minutes. He slumped down gratefully into a hazy aftermath, his buzzing mind finally quieted for a while.
At last a hand stroked gently down his back. "Chris? You're alright?"
The quiet was lost. The despair abruptly welled back up, a slimy oil slick across his mind, contaminating everything he felt, everything he did. Pike felt a sudden hot prickle in his eyes as a sense of the infinite futility of all this washed over him.
"Get out."
The warm hand vanished. Barnett reordered his clothing and left without comment. Pike lay with his face pressed into the crumpled pillow, surrounded by the stink of sweat and semen, and let his festering anger turn inward on himself.
* *
Pike picked up his padd and tried to focus on the policy documents he was meant to be reading, but the words shifted and shimmered in front of his eyes and no amount of jaw-clenched determination would get them to stay still. He turned on the news feed but after a few minutes of flicking through channel after channel of talking heads debating yet again the events of the past few weeks, debating yet again who was to blame for it all and how could they have let it happen, he turned the feed off. He succumbed to his automatic impulse to pace the room, as he had always done when unhappy in the past, but the stabbing pain in his left leg as he unthinkingly rose too quickly had him crumpled back on the bed almost instantly.
He lay on his back on the bed staring at the ceiling, the scent of sex still present in the sheets, and thought about having to contact the families of each and every one of the 327 Starfleet cadets killed in the Battle of Vulcan and its aftermath. He thought of having to listen to every one of them question and rage and demand to know who was to be held responsible, and answer them each time with dignity and compassion and regret, as if you hadn't said this 326 times before. He'd not even had to do it for those lost on the Enterprise. Kirk had taken care of it while he'd been undergoing the multiple operations in hospital.
He thought about a good man doing his best in bad circumstances. He thought about trying to apologize but what exactly was he apologizing for and how far back was he supposed to go?
Finally he grabbed his comm and typed fast, without editing, without checking, hitting send before he could lose his nerve, and then throwing the unit across the room.
i wish id aksed you to stay
* *
"It is common civility to answer your doorbell."
Pike's head jerked up, he lost control of his console and the enemy hordes he'd been holding at bay swarmed over his small flotilla, taking them out in a blaze of destruction.
"Fuck you, now look what you've done." The virtual reality panorama that had been laid out in front of him crumbled in on itself, focusing down onto a blinking message hovering in the space beyond the bed. You're dead! Play again?
Barnett looked at Pike coolly from the door of bedroom. He was back in his neatly pressed uniform, leaving Pike very aware that he was in his boxers, lying on the bed tangled in semen-stained sheets and wrapped in the duvet he'd been hiding under while playing Galactic Disaster 7.
"Crap score," commented Barnett.
Pike bristled. "I've done much better than that... you know, before--" He looked down at his treacherous hands. Unlike his legs they appeared fully functional but he knew that he didn't have the fine motor control and the speed of reaction that he was used to.
Barnett dumped a large brown paper packet on the bed from which wafted the smell of rather good-quality Chinese takeaway. He waved the other hand at the giant monitor on Chris's bedroom wall, accessing his media account and pulling up a vid. "I've downloaded all five series of Deep Space Survivors," he said over the swell of the theme music as he pulled off his boots and then stripped down to his black undershirt. "I am going to eat Chinese and mainline DSS. You can do whatever the hell you want."
"I don't eat in my bed," protested Pike.
"I'm an Admiral. You're an Admiral. Between us we can find you clean linen once we're done," retorted Barnett, stealing Pike's pillows to settle himself comfortably against the headboard.
"DSS is utter shlock," objected Pike.
"I give you that it jumped the shark in series four when Commander Tretyakov found herself pregnant by that cephalopod from Bectel V, but up until then it's pretty good. And after that it's still good for a laugh. Now either sit down and shut up or bugger off."
Pike tried to dredge up the energy to protest, but the dim sum really did smell good and he was suddenly aware of how long it was since he'd last eaten. Boyce would have his head for not taking more care. On the screen young Olga Tretyakov was preparing for the disastrous attempt to run away from the family homestead that would lead to her becoming one of the deep space survivors. The series really had been quite compelling at the beginning.
Pike tried to get comfortable but it was difficult when Barnett had stolen all the pillows and most of the duvet. At last, purely motivated by a desire for revenge, he pushed the food to one side and settled for using Barnett's broad stomach as a pillow instead. An arm curled gently round his shoulders. Silently they watched the flickering screen.
THE END -
Fandom & Pairing: Star Trek AOS, Pike/Barnett
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: post-Narada trauma, angst, angry!sex
Word Count: Around 3000
Beta: the indispensable imachar
Summary: A dutiful Barnett is trying to do the right thing. A traumatized Pike is not making it easy.
Context: I gave Pike/Barnett to imachar as a prompt and she wrote this glorious friendly, sexy ficlet where it is all Jim's fault. Then I tried writing my own version of the pairing in a very different mood.
Author's Note: In my head canon, Barnett is a Starfleet lawyer, promoted to Admiral after successfully managing the creation and propagation of the latest version of the Prime Directive. He's never served in space. And there is an unofficial schism in Starfleet where those who have space service tend to look down on those who haven't.
"What do you want?"
Barnett, having waited a moment and realized that an invitation to enter the apartment was not going to be forthcoming, pushed past Pike into the entrance hall. "I came to see if you were settled in, if there is anything I can do to help."
Pike bristled at Barnett's tone of patient reason. "I'm fine." He was aware he was not being gracious but he'd only been released from hospital two days before. He'd been grateful to get rid of the entourage of fussing busybodies who'd accompanied him home, but now that they were gone he was acutely conscious of the echoing silence of his apartment.
Barnett offered him a thin smile that didn't reach his eyes. "I'm sure you are. But I thought there might be something I could do for you. Joining the Admiralty can be rather disorientating at first."
Pike clenched his fist around the crutch he was using to keep the weight off his weakened left side. He'd been a consummate diplomat once, capable of keeping his emotions under control in the most trying of circumstances, but now his moods swung wildly. Boyce said it was due to traces of toxins in his brain stem. Boyce said it would get better. All Pike knew was that he felt damaged and dirty and with a mind out of control in ways he'd never experienced before.
"I think I can manage Admiralty 101," he snapped. "It's not as if you lot have done much in the past."
Barnett's nostrils flared, although otherwise his face remained impassive. "You think Command is to blame for all this?"
"Oh no, I'm well aware who's to blame," spat Pike. "Every officer in Starfleet knows who gave Earth's border protection codes to the Romulans." Ever since being brought out of the medical coma following his return to Earth, he'd been having recurring nightmares, not just of the events on the Narada, but of the reactions he'd get from his fellow officers. When they'd informed him of his promotion, a small part of his mind had still been expecting a court martial.
"Don't be an ass," said Barnett, voice tight with control. "We've all had a comprehensive briefing, led by Boyce. He made very certain that everyone knew how that slug worked, what it did to you, how you had no option."
Pike felt a nauseating surge of anger swelling in his throat. So Boyce had done preemptive damage control on his behalf. Fuck, he hated being so weak, so compromised, that such things were necessary.
"I can't imagine what it must have been like for you," Barnett offered softly.
And somehow that was the last straw. Barnett here to do his duty, teeth gritted in his dislike of Pike, Pike could just about live with. Barnett pitying him? It was too much.
"No, you can't fucking imagine, can you? Because you've never served in space. All you desk-captains, busy explaining to everyone from the public to the Federation government what went down out there, you've no fucking idea and you never will."
The softness vanished from Barnett's face, the dark skin going marble smooth as he shrunk back into himself. "You're right. I don't know. All I do is sit back on Earth and pick up the pieces left behind by you heroes."
The two men stood in silence for a long moment, the air simmering with tension, neither looking at the other.
Barnett was the first one to slip back into his shell of duty. "So. As I was saying, is there anything I can do for you at this point?" He was already beginning to edge towards the door, clearly anticipating another refusal.
Pike's anger was still churning in his stomach, a nauseating acid reflux that never left him, given an extra edge by the fear of being left alone once again with only his own thoughts for company. "If you really insist on trying to be helpful, you can have sex with me."
"Excuse me?"
"I like sex. It's a good stress reliever. But I've not done it since... I'm not sure how well everything is working. If you're so determined to be useful, it would be helpful to test things out on someone..." He deliberately let the sentence trail away.
"On someone you despise," said Barnett slowly. "So it doesn't matter whether you turn out to be able to get it up or not."
Pike offered him a bland smile. He wasn't expecting to get a fuck but he was rather hoping to get a fight. He needed something to try and release the pressure of the anger boiling inside him.
Barnett stared at him silently, expression impenetrable, and then calmly lifted his hands to begin opening the buttons of his jacket. "Fine. Let's do it. You're not the only one who could do with some easy stress relief. I've spent the last two weeks contacting the families of the dead cadets. I could do with a no-strings distraction."
Pike watched disbelievingly as Barnett pulled his jacket off his broad shoulders. The man was calling his bluff, he had to be. Still, two could play that game. "Undo your flies," he said flatly. "The rest can stay where it is. This is only about one thing."
Barnett carefully, calmly, hung his jacket up by the door. Then he abruptly grabbed Pike by his upper arms, big hands digging hard into the flesh, squeezing down bruisingly onto the bone, and pushed him backwards, crowding him up against the wall. Pike's crutch clattered to the floor at his side. Barnett was only a little taller than him but he had to be half as broad again, not with fat but with sheer bulk.
A generous mouth crushed down over his, pushing his lips painfully against his teeth. Without any pause to seek permission, a tongue was forced brutally into his mouth. Pike met it with his own, without care or sympathy, giving back as good as he was getting. He reveled in the sense of contact, in the heat and life and power of the body grinding unforgivingly against his own. He was so sick of being treated like a china doll, damaged and fragile. He pushed back roughly and was contained by the mass of Barnett, surrounded and protected by the size of the man. He let all his agonizingly repetitive thoughts drain away as he immersed himself in the simplicity of tongue and teeth and rising desire, let himself fall into hot, hungry, mindless lust.
He raked his hands down Barnett's back, his nails long after his enforced rest in hospital, pushing down cruelly as he tried to dig right through the fabric of the shirt into the substantial flesh underneath. Spreading his legs, he thrust roughly against a muscular thigh, trying to rut against it, trying to focus this down to the one place that mattered.
In response, Barnett pushed his leg forward, letting more of his weight rest against Pike, using his large hands to push Pike's shoulders back against the wall. Something about the flat surface behind him and the constraint across his chest sent a spike of panic tearing through his arousal, triggering an abrupt flashback to a hard tabletop under his back, a leather strap pressing down across his chest, his throat being torn apart so that his mind could be fucked wide open, letting him spill the secrets that would condemn an entire planet to destruction... He only realized that he'd begun to hyper-ventilate when Barnett abruptly pulled back, releasing the weight that had pinned him down, pressing a concerned hand against his cheek. "Chris? Are you okay?"
An icy torrent of humiliation crashed down over his panicked fear and both washed into the churning pool of bottomless anger that he'd been nursing ever since he'd first seen Nero's face on the viewscreen of the Enterprise. He pushed furiously away from the wall, grabbed Barnett's shirt with one hand and mashed their mouths together once again, teeth knocking, lips bruised with the impact. With the other hand he began to fumble with Barnett's fly, determined to force the man to follow through. It worked for a moment until he put too much weight onto his left side and his weak leg crumbled under him, pain lancing up through his spine.
Barnett caught him, hesitated for a moment, and then clearly thought better of any lingering impulse he'd had to try and express concern. He ducked down and set his shoulder into Pike's stomach, picked the other man up roughly in a fireman's lift and strode into the bedroom with him. Dumped unceremoniously on the bed, Pike reveled in the spikes of pain and of indignation, welcoming the pure intensity of the feelings after all the helplessness and fear of the past weeks, numbed into cotton-wool haziness by the incessant doses of drugs. He grabbed Barnett's shirt, tearing it loose from the small mother-of-pearl buttons as he pulled the other man down on top of him.
He'd lost the muscle mass that might have once let him maneuver a man as heavy as Barnett. He settled for scrabbling at the other man's clothes, pushing up under the shirt to scrape his fingers across a hot flat stomach, trying to reach down into Barnett's pants.
Barnett seemed to have given up at any attempt to make this mutual. He thrust one hand roughly into Pike's hair, now longer than regulation after weeks without a cut, using a vicious grip to pull Pike's head to one side, giving him access to the taut lines of Pike's neck. He bit down hard on the pale skin and then sucked remorselessly. Pike grabbed the back of Barnett's neck, forcing the other man's face down onto his skin. He wanted the marks and the bruises. He wanted signs on his skin that he'd chosen to put there, rather than having them inflicted by his enemies or by his doctors.
Barnett was thrusting restlessly against the thigh of Pike's good leg, and Pike could feel a thick mass hardening against him. They'd both get off on this and that was enough. There was no emotion here, no reciprocity beyond the most basic. This was a hot hard body for him to rub off on, without obligation, without explanation. This was an uncontrolled explosion of self-serving lust, hungry, greedy, selfish.
He squeezed his eyes closed and forced his hands into the back of Barnett's pants, kneading at the broad ass while riding the rush of rising arousal, trying to push his erection against Barnett's. His underwear was chafing around his balls but at least his cock was finally getting with the programme, swelling to uncomfortable firmness in the constraints of his pants, apparently still in working order despite all the trauma and spinal damage.
Barnett abandoned his trail of destruction down Pike's neck and rolled them both onto their sides, doing a rather more expert job than Pike would have expected of getting their flies open and their pants down onto their thighs.
"Lube?" he demanded.
"Bedside table."
It was the last thing either of them bothered to say. A cool slippery hand engulfed his cock and pulled it tight against another hot hard prick, squeezing and tugging with a brutal unforgiving authority. This clearly was not meant to last long, which suited Pike just fine. He buried his head against Barnett's neck, writhing and bucking against the solid body at his side, concentrating on the sensations spiraling outwards from his groin, hunting down the overload that would drown out his tortured thoughts. With his eyes held tightly shut he could pretend that they were both someone else. Anyone else. He could pretend that this was nothing more than the easy release that sex had always been for him.
He let the intensity of the emotion swell up inside him, for a short time overwhelming all the horror and despair of the last few weeks, all the desolate uncertainty of the future that now lay before him. He could feel the intense pounding of Barnett's heart, and the ragged echo of his own racing pulse. He could smell the musty stink of sweat and sex rising off both of them and hear the harsh, ragged breaths panting by his ear. He rode blindly through the sudden shudders that racked the body pressed up against his own, felt the slick spill of semen lubricating his aching cock, and let his own wave crest and break over him, wiping everything else away for long delirious minutes. He slumped down gratefully into a hazy aftermath, his buzzing mind finally quieted for a while.
At last a hand stroked gently down his back. "Chris? You're alright?"
The quiet was lost. The despair abruptly welled back up, a slimy oil slick across his mind, contaminating everything he felt, everything he did. Pike felt a sudden hot prickle in his eyes as a sense of the infinite futility of all this washed over him.
"Get out."
The warm hand vanished. Barnett reordered his clothing and left without comment. Pike lay with his face pressed into the crumpled pillow, surrounded by the stink of sweat and semen, and let his festering anger turn inward on himself.
* *
Pike picked up his padd and tried to focus on the policy documents he was meant to be reading, but the words shifted and shimmered in front of his eyes and no amount of jaw-clenched determination would get them to stay still. He turned on the news feed but after a few minutes of flicking through channel after channel of talking heads debating yet again the events of the past few weeks, debating yet again who was to blame for it all and how could they have let it happen, he turned the feed off. He succumbed to his automatic impulse to pace the room, as he had always done when unhappy in the past, but the stabbing pain in his left leg as he unthinkingly rose too quickly had him crumpled back on the bed almost instantly.
He lay on his back on the bed staring at the ceiling, the scent of sex still present in the sheets, and thought about having to contact the families of each and every one of the 327 Starfleet cadets killed in the Battle of Vulcan and its aftermath. He thought of having to listen to every one of them question and rage and demand to know who was to be held responsible, and answer them each time with dignity and compassion and regret, as if you hadn't said this 326 times before. He'd not even had to do it for those lost on the Enterprise. Kirk had taken care of it while he'd been undergoing the multiple operations in hospital.
He thought about a good man doing his best in bad circumstances. He thought about trying to apologize but what exactly was he apologizing for and how far back was he supposed to go?
Finally he grabbed his comm and typed fast, without editing, without checking, hitting send before he could lose his nerve, and then throwing the unit across the room.
i wish id aksed you to stay
* *
"It is common civility to answer your doorbell."
Pike's head jerked up, he lost control of his console and the enemy hordes he'd been holding at bay swarmed over his small flotilla, taking them out in a blaze of destruction.
"Fuck you, now look what you've done." The virtual reality panorama that had been laid out in front of him crumbled in on itself, focusing down onto a blinking message hovering in the space beyond the bed. You're dead! Play again?
Barnett looked at Pike coolly from the door of bedroom. He was back in his neatly pressed uniform, leaving Pike very aware that he was in his boxers, lying on the bed tangled in semen-stained sheets and wrapped in the duvet he'd been hiding under while playing Galactic Disaster 7.
"Crap score," commented Barnett.
Pike bristled. "I've done much better than that... you know, before--" He looked down at his treacherous hands. Unlike his legs they appeared fully functional but he knew that he didn't have the fine motor control and the speed of reaction that he was used to.
Barnett dumped a large brown paper packet on the bed from which wafted the smell of rather good-quality Chinese takeaway. He waved the other hand at the giant monitor on Chris's bedroom wall, accessing his media account and pulling up a vid. "I've downloaded all five series of Deep Space Survivors," he said over the swell of the theme music as he pulled off his boots and then stripped down to his black undershirt. "I am going to eat Chinese and mainline DSS. You can do whatever the hell you want."
"I don't eat in my bed," protested Pike.
"I'm an Admiral. You're an Admiral. Between us we can find you clean linen once we're done," retorted Barnett, stealing Pike's pillows to settle himself comfortably against the headboard.
"DSS is utter shlock," objected Pike.
"I give you that it jumped the shark in series four when Commander Tretyakov found herself pregnant by that cephalopod from Bectel V, but up until then it's pretty good. And after that it's still good for a laugh. Now either sit down and shut up or bugger off."
Pike tried to dredge up the energy to protest, but the dim sum really did smell good and he was suddenly aware of how long it was since he'd last eaten. Boyce would have his head for not taking more care. On the screen young Olga Tretyakov was preparing for the disastrous attempt to run away from the family homestead that would lead to her becoming one of the deep space survivors. The series really had been quite compelling at the beginning.
Pike tried to get comfortable but it was difficult when Barnett had stolen all the pillows and most of the duvet. At last, purely motivated by a desire for revenge, he pushed the food to one side and settled for using Barnett's broad stomach as a pillow instead. An arm curled gently round his shoulders. Silently they watched the flickering screen.
THE END -