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Entry tags:
- comics-jason,
- comics-robins,
- comics-steph,
- numb3rs:alan,
- numb3rs:robin,
- star trek*au,
- star trek*chapel,
- star trek*chekov,
- star trek*gaila,
- star trek*gender,
- star trek*george,
- star trek*joanna,
- star trek*kirk,
- star trek*mccoy,
- star trek*mirror,
- star trek*pike,
- star trek*rand,
- star trek*spock,
- star trek*sulu,
- star trek*uhura,
- star trek*winona
A Calvacade of Story Fragments
So, at the other end of this week, I asked to be told about stories I never wrote, and wrote bits of them. Then I cringed at all the typoes, bad word choices, and so on, so here are the completed fragments (as it were), polished up a bit.
"The one where Alan meets his first grandchild."
"Alan?" Robin calls, and he dries his hands on a dishtowel as he turns to her. She has one hand laid high on her belly and one bracing her back, and for a moment with the sun behind her she reminds him of Margaret, laughing and wincing forty-five years ago.
But Robin's hair and profile and narrow proud smile are all her own, and as Alan reaches to pull out a chair for her his twinging hip reminds him how long ago that was. She settles gratefully, pushing the other chair out with her foot, so he sits facing her, and she reaches out to grasp his wrist.
He forgets sometimes how strong she is. He's reminded now as she tugs his hand over and sets it on her belly, saying, "Feel this."
A little bump rises under his hand, a squirming ridge. Alan presses down as his grandchild presses back, not realizing he's holding his breath until his chest starts to tingle, and when he looks up Robin is smiling as brightly as he's ever seen.
+*+* *+*+
"The one where Rosie Cotton saved Marigold Gamgee from an unpleasant encounter with a Ruffian only a few days before Sam got home..."
'Twas the silence that saved them.
Rosie was laughing and Mari was laughing, and laughter was all the sweeter in these dark days, but when they both paused to catch their breath in the quiet they heard a footfall amidst the garden's rustling, meant to be stealthy but thudding in their ears.
Rosie stared at Mari staring round-eyed at her, and knew they thought the same, their hearts beating panicked as rabbits' as another step thumped down, then another. But Bagshot Row's little dwellings didn't have the deep cellars of Rosie's farmhouse, the pantry would be but a trap. Where might they hide?
Rosie thought, and stood and caught Mari's hand. Quietly as they might, they dashed down the hall, Rosie leading Mari towards the lads' room, now disused. Sam's old bed stood there, almost a year empty, walled around with parcels and boxes and bags and mathoms.
Just as Rosie nudged one sack of cloaks and scarves aside, a heavy blow resounded from the door. Barely daring to breathe as a few specks of dust floated up, shaking with each bang at the door, Rosie and Mari silently tugged the bag aside, and Rosie pushed Mari before her, squirmed after and began pulling the bag back.
The Ruffian outside wasn't even calling for entrance. His only goal was to break the door and loot the house. Mari squirmed round, flat on her belly in the bed's dusty underfloor, and jerked the bag to so it fell across their hiding place, blocking all but a chink of afternoon light.
The door-latch gave, and the Man ducked in, cursing at the low lintel, stomping through the house. "Little coneys," he crooned, voice deep and growling like a beast from a tale, "Little coneys, where be you? I heard you, here's your grub you've left, now where be you?" Mari lay shaking against Rosie's side, and Rosie clutched her hand; dust tickled her nose, so she breathed soft as she could through her mouth.
The Ruffian stomped the halls, pushing doors open, treading into every room. Rosie watched through the chink as his dirty boots paced past the open doorway of the lads' room, once up the hall, once back again. Her heart bounced against her ribs with his every call, Mari shaking till Rosie feared her teeth should chatter, as they clutched hand around hand and listened to him roam the Gamgees' smial.
At length they heard him snuffling and gorging in the kitchen, smashing crocks and cursing again, and banging the door as he left. Mari made to crawl forward but Rosie held her back, thinking the slowest song she knew as she waited, lest he stood just by the door waiting for them.
After she finished it twice over, finally Rosie dared to whisper, "D'ye think he's gone?"
Mari drew breath to answer, and immediately sneezed.
+*+* *+*+
"The one where Leah McCoy and Nyota Uhura had a conversation that lasted for more than two seconds."
"Of course, CMO on the Enterprise is an extremely enviable position," Lieutenant Uhura replies, which is entirely the wrong goddamn concession; Leah nods curtly and manages to resist the irritated impulse to blurt exactly how unenviable she's found it, but she can't keep her tightly pressed lips from curling, or hide her scowl by bending a little closer over the incision on Uhura's extended forearm. The Lieutenant just smiles serenely, and Leah swallows hard over the unsettled slosh in her belly and concentrates a moment on sealing the dermal layers back together as seamlessly as possible, taking refuge in the professional pride Uhura says she so admires.
By the time there's only the epidermis left to repair, the silence has begun to congeal around them. For this ship, considering her usual aloofness, Uhura is being downright friendly, so Leah rummages for a polite lie and produces, "It's an honor. I'm just trying to do my best."
"Which we all appreciate." Leah glances up from the fading red line, and Uhura's still wearing that little Mona Lisa moue, even more fucking terrifying than her usual icy stare. "As does the Empire." A chill pours down Leah's spine but she manages not to let herself shiver, mentally reminding herself in her mother's distant voice to be polite, goddammit, when for once Uhura's actually speaking to her like a human being for the length of an entire conversation.
So Leah pulls her stiff face into an unfamiliar-feeling smile. "Thank you, Lieutenant."
Uhura inclines her head, her smile widening in return as she adds, "Even the best position can be improved, though. Lightened duties, increased security..." She modulates the last word almost like singing, letting it fade in the air between them as she slips from the biobed, graceful as a cat, and flexes her arm as she looks over the repair. "Think about it, Doctor. And, thank you."
Leah nods acknowledgement and dismissal, her belly frankly rolling with unease as she watches Uhura stride away, then turns back to her wound repair kit. Something is off, above and beyond Lieutenant Uhura having a chatty moment, and as Leah's hands move through the familiar motions of clearing and packing up the kit she tries to make herself think through the sludginess of her persistent exhaustion, through the goddamned useless adrenaline surge roaring down her veins.
Then she gets it, and the feverish unease instantly chills to outright fear, cold sweat trailing down the back of Leah's neck. Uhura was feeling her out, probing her loyalties, determining where the CMO would side if the Captain were attacked.
Or at least letting Leah think so, so she'll run right to Kirk and blab as much, playing into some further game she can't even fathom yet. Leah grips the edge of the biobed, tells herself she can't have a drink, and allows herself a moment to shake.
+*+* *+*+
"The one where Kirk, Spock, and Uhura get married in Vegas (or the equivalent)."
Nyota sits bolt upright and then wakes up. She can't remember anything from last night after the third drink, sitting wedged between Spock and Jim, the taste of fire and laughter spilling down her throat. Now the mattress gives plushly beneath her hands, softer than her Enterprise bunk or Spock's bed; a warm weight lies across her legs, a snub nose pressed to her naked hip.
Spock faces her, seated with legs crossed in a chair at the foot of the bed, immaculately dressed in that high-collared black shirt Jim goaded him into buying and his uniform trousers, the severity of his outfit lightened by the smile in his eyes and his bare foot pressed sole to sole against a pale pink one. Nyota follows that foot to its long muscled leg draped across hers, to the breathing naked man slumped against her side, Jim's arm around her waist, his sticky face jammed against her hip. He's sound asleep. He smells like smoke and alcohol and sex and chocolate.
So does Nyota. She looks up from Jim sleeping like a child, wrapped around her, to Spock again, and notices the deep green mark peeking from under his collar. She opens her mouth, and shuts it, and opens it again as Spock just watches her, the smile in his eyes getting brighter and brighter like a dawn.
Eventually Spock has mercy. "Good morning, spouse," he intones.
Nyota's mouth falls open again. Jim snuffles against her hip, his mouth open and hot and soft against her skin.
Eventually she manages to croak -- her throat hurts -- has she been screaming? -- "What?"
"Good morning," Spock repeats, counting out each word like a grain of gold. "My spouse."
"We got married?" Nyota's voice cracks like a pubertal boy's. Jim just keeps breathing distracting warmth, and she realizes that he's got her legs pinned when she can't get the leverage to kick him.
"Indeed we did." Spock leans forward onto the bed in one smooth, economical motion. "Last night you were very adamant on the subject. Jim less so, but he expressed a willingness to do, and I quote, 'anything you want, babes, long as I get my dick sucked.' "
Nyota covers her face with one hand. "What on Earth -- well, on Risa, what could I possibly have said to that charming offer?"
"I admit, my recall of last night is not the clearest." Spock sits beside her, lifting Jim's leg like a bolster across both their laps, keeping gentle hold of his ankle. He smells like he recently showered off a night's worth of sex and chocolate. "But I believe you struck him, kissed him, and asked him to marry you, in approximately that order."
"Wait a minute." Nyota peeks through her fingers at Spock. "I thought I married you."
"So you did; we all three were married. Risan marriage laws admit any number of consenting adult participants."
Nyota gapes, at this news and because Spock's smile has spread to his mouth, until Jim makes a snorting kind of moan that's somehow still as frustratingly charming as he almost always succeeds in being. He drags his hand across her lap as he shifts and stretches a little, blinking his eyes open as he peers up at her. "Morming, sunshine," Jim burbles, spreading his hand out over her belly, wiggling his toes against Spock's forearm. "Who wants to get your hubby a glass of water before we get on with the honeymoon?"
Nyota covers her face with both hands as she starts to laugh.
+*+* *+*+
"The one where Uhura showed Spock Prime just what he was missing in his universe. I especially liked how squirmy and hot that made nuSpock feel..."
Since Jim Kirk's first improbable report of him, since she first met him, Nyota has thought of the soi-distant Selek as Elder Spock, or Spock The Older, or Spock From Another Timeline, some sort of relative to her Spock, an odd amalgam of uncle and twin. As she leans back against her Spock's broad tense chest, rising and falling with his careful breathing, she looks for and finds his clean lines in the craggy cliffside of 'Selek''s weathered face, the tiny flickers of warmth grown to a radiant, affectionate kindness as Selek regards her with his infinite eyes.
Still, he doesn't look like her Spock. But when she closes her eyes and three dust-dry fingertips settle into the meld points on her face, she startles at the jarring familiarity, because he feels like her Spock, the easy slide into her mind, the banked heat of him, the fractal comprehension and straightforward strength. He feels like her Spock, but not identical, further recesses, layers, dimensions, experiences and regrets and losses.
And, she notes wistfully, she doesn't feel that deep buried fire, her first confirmation that Spock -- her Spock -- loves her.
The Elder Spock gathers his presence together, slipping from her mind as smoothly as he entered. "I see," he says softly, and she opens her eyes to find her head bowed, to see his hands folded simply in his lap. "Thank you for allowing me to."
Nyota gathers herself, too, matching her breaths to her Spock's even pace until the rolling surge inside her quiets somewhat. "I can imagine a universe where we didn't love each other. But I'm glad I don't live there." Her Spock tightens his hands fractionally on her shoulders, a thousand words in the press of his fingers.
The Elder Spock smiles at her -- smiles! -- and in that unSpocklike gesture she sees her Spock most clearly of all. "Nyota Uhura," he says, as warmly as anyone ever has repeated her name, "I do not believe any such timeline exists."
+*+* *+*+
"The one where Leah tries to make a friend..."
Leah stands up, letting Joanna lean against her for one more moment as she looks Chapel full on, sees more than planetside sunlight lighting her eyes, her lips quivering as her control strains to the limit. Kirk isn't known for his patience, so Leah just extends her hand as steadily as she can with all this excited fear swooping through her and her back prickling under his stare, and keeps her voice calm enough to do a Vulcan credit. "Christine. It has been an honor."
Christine smiles, a little stiffly as if the muscles atrophied, closing both her strong, capable hands around Leah's. "Leah," she says, and there's life there that Leah never heard in their five years together, just in the swing of her name in Christine's voice. "Leah, thank you. I'll care for your daughter as if she were mine."
"I know you will." Leah's face hurts, which is how she knows she's grinning, and Christine's eyes glimmer brightly. Kirk snorts, but instead of taking the warning, Leah recklessly lets her resentment crack its dam. He agreed to this, and he rarely lies, so she squeezes Christine's hands in both of hers, swallowing down the lump rising in her throat, and wishes she could hug her best nurse and only friend.
But Leah's courage won't carry her that far, not after these five years. Christine pulls back first, always sensible; Leah bends to hug Joanna one more time, memorizing the softness of her cheek and the smell of her hair and her lanky thin-boned frame, then pushes her arms away and sets her hand in Christine's. "Be good and learn, Joanna," she says, and now her voice does shake, now Joanna's red-rimmed eyes spill over, but Leah swallows around the lump, and Joanna nods solemnly instead of sobbing. "I'll see you soon," she promises as she lets go, and Chapel takes the cue and turns, leading Joanna away.
Kirk steps up, and Leah's shoulders stiffen; he calls, "Good luck, Cadet Jojo!" as he wraps his arm around her back, and Joanna glances back at them but Chapel steadily keeps walking so Joanna obediently follows. "Look at our little girl," Kirk murmurs, mouth brushing Leah's ear, fingers biting into her shoulder, and she lets him win a shudder from her, doesn't bother with a retort as she keeps her eyes on their retreating figures. Leah knew he'd make her pay for this goodbye, a steep price for Joanna and Christine's freedom, but he lets her watch until the big steel doors of Jellico Academy close behind them, and at least now she's the only one who'll pay.
+*+* *+*+
"The one where Leah tries to make a friend (Rand), and Kirk finds out."
Leah's first horrible thought, when she walks into Rand's quarters to find the place wrecked and Janice crumpled beside her bed, is that all that finely coiffed hair is finally down. Rand's curled up fetal on her left side, naked and bloody with her left arm splayed out, forearm bent in an obvious fracture of both bones, the edge of the proximal ulna denting out the flesh. All that damage and somehow it horrifies Leah the most that Rand's golden hair is spilled out in a messy halo, its ends stuck together in drying deep-red points.
Leah's a doctor, she doesn't gasp, she doesn't push her hand against her mouth in shock, she runs to her friend and falls to her knees beside her. Seeing that Rand's at least breathing, Leah's reaching to check for skull fractures when Rand's raccoon-bruised eyes pop open, wild bloodshot blue, and wince shut again as she hisses, "Get away from me."
"Janice. Rand--" Leah uses her most comforting voice but Janice snarls, wounded and angry, batting at Leah with her unbroken right arm. "Lie still, you've been--"
"Leah, go away, I shouldn't know your name." Janice sobs, pressing her face against the floor. "Just-- just--"
She chokes and keens, her voice raw with agony, and Leah tries again, reaching for her right shoulder. "I'm not going anywhere." Janice claws her one-handed, the other twitching on the floor, nails sharp even through Leah's sleeve but she's had worse from patients before. "We need to get you to Sickbay." Leah reaches up to the bed to grab a blanket, anything to keep Janice warm, palming her communicator with the other hand.
Janice punches her in the gut, a thudding burst of pain.
Leah wheezes, rocking back, and sits with an unbalanced thump. Janice laughs or sobs or something inbetween. "Get out of here," she rasps, voice harsh but clear.
Leah finally hears her, finally looks into her face, the tear-tracks in the blood, the fierce lucidity in her eyes. "Oh, God. Who did this?"
"Who do you think?" Janice snaps, and shuts her eyes, quivering. Leah's guts twist in aching knots, tightening into agony as she understands. "He could've Boothed me." Janice's breathing hitches, forcing her to pause every few words. "But you had to see this. I could be dead, but I'm useful."
All Leah can think of are useless apologies. "Janice --"
"Rand," the woman snaps weakly, and groans, and Leah's eyes hurt. "Rand. Just go, McCoy -- send your nurses. But just go."
Leah nods and pushes herself up on shaking legs, backs away to keep her eyes on Rand shivering on the floor, flips open her communicator and stammers a call to Medbay as she goes.
+*+* *+*+
"The one where Joanna and Leah get some quality time together."
Joanna's laughing, ponytail flying, feet off the ground as Kirk swings her around in circles over the grass. "Full impulse!" he shouts, spinning faster, and Joanna's wild giggles rise to shrieks of joy as Kirk dances her through the air.
Leah laughs too, watching her daughter flying, feet kicking and face bright with life, watching Kirk whirl her, his tawny hair catching the planetside sunshine. She feels her grin widen approvingly as Kirk squeezes Joanna to his chest with strong arms, until sudden comprehension slams into her so hard she chokes. Joanna doesn't even know her father is dead, that Kirk killed him. She doesn't even know that he could kill both of them on a whim, and here's Leah laughing cheerfully as this murderous master of hers hugs her daughter.
She flings herself forward, reaching out, and Kirk stops her with a glance over Joanna's head. He tilts his head a little as one eyebrow goes up, glances down at Joanna and smirks, and Leah's belly clenches with that familiar chill she can never get acclimated to. He kisses the top of Joanna's head as he sets her down, and Leah has to stand there clenching her empty hands and let him.
Joanna wobbles dizzily, arms extended, still laughing. Leah catches her wrist and grips her shoulders, kneeling as she urgently asks, "You okay, Jojo? You had enough?"
"Whee!" Joanna answers, rolling her head in a circle. "Whee, I want more!"
"No, baby, you've had enough," Leah tells her, and doesn't hear the sharpness of her voice until Joanna stills under her hands to stare at her, confusion darkening her eyes.
"Aw, the kid's all right," Kirk says, heavily patting Leah's shoulder; she rocks under the thwack and looks up at him, the light brilliant in his hair, his eyes glinting out of his shadowed face, and he curves his hand under her arm and hauls her to her feet. "But your Mamma's right," he tells Joanna, holding out his far hand as he wraps his near arm around Leah. "That's enough. Let's go get some ice cream."
"Ice cream!" Joanna shouts, grabbing Kirk's hand and skipping on his other side like a lamb nestling beside a lion.
Leah can't reach across and grab her back. She halfheartedly grumps, "Empty calories, nothing but sugar and fat," and Joanna just laughs at her, piping and cheerful. Kirk laughs at her too, and squeezes her bone-creakingly hard.
+*+* *+*+
"The one where the one where Leah's sick and Kirk is kind of nice to her..."
The first thing Leah hears when she claws her way to wakefulness, is, "Especially for a doctor, you can be really fucking dumb sometimes," in Kirk's 'pleasantly annoyed' tone of voice.
She takes a breath, and her chest immediately ejects it in a racking cough. She blinks open gummy eyes and finds Kirk sitting beside her biobed, legs crossed, a cup and tray on his knee. "Wha'," is all she manages before she starts coughing again, feeling like steel bands are tightening around her chest.
Kirk waits, apparently patiently, until Leah rasps to a stop. As she gasps, the tightness slowly easing, he gently -- gently, she can't believe it -- pushes her hair back from her face and cups her cheek. "Here," he says, and feeds her a piece of ice. It slips between her dry lips like a cool blessing, melting into a little puddle of peace on her sore tongue. Kirk feeds her another, and a third, and the whole time he just cradles her face, his long calloused fingers shockingly light on her skin.
Just when she thinks regretfully that she should refuse the next ice chip and give her system a few minutes to catch up, Kirk pats her cheek lightly and says, "That should hold you for now." He looks at her a moment more with enough intent to make her prickle with goosebumps, rising electricity like an approaching storm.
Then his face hardens, blue eyes going glacial, and Leah can never witness Kirk's fury without trembling, her guts knotting tensely. "The next time," he tells her, fingers curved to her cheek, thumb laid on her bottom lip, "you get so much as a sniffle, you will log your reports and remove yourself from duty. You will not continue working as your condition worsens, you will not collapse where you won't be found for over an hour, and you will not fucking nearly die." Welling with indignation, Leah can't help trying to answer that, pushing against Kirk's thumb, and he presses it down hard across both her lips, holding her mouth shut. "I do not care how many casualties there are, what staff there aren't. You don't die unless I tell you to. That's an order, Bones."
He gives her just enough space to nod, so she does. He presses down on her mouth for another long moment as he stares into her face, then eases off.
Leah takes a slow breath, her sides twinging, and another, and a third. Only then does she ask, "What do you want with me? Sir."
Kirk barks a laugh and gives her that wide bright smile of his, that looks to people who don't know him like sunniness and charm. "You're my favorite," he tells her, patting her cheek. "You don't go anywhere. Now get better already. Little Tiernan is trying her best, but she's just not you."
Leah can feel a growing tickle in the back of her throat, her eyelids getting heavier, so she just snorts and rolls her eyes. Kirk pinches her cheek as he withdraws his hand, smirks at her and stands up.
+*+* *+*+
"The one where Hikaru is helplessly proud of Pavel."
Hikaru is frankly, dazedly surprised to wake up, and he's not at all surprised that everything hurts, threads of fire twanging through his entire body as if all his nerves were incinerated inside him, his muscles crampishly sore and unstrung at the same time. Even his toes ache inside his boots, his lax fingers throb against the cool tiles beneath him. His chest aches on every shallow breath.
He's surprised, and then he's worried; his eyes won't open, all he can hear is a dull confused roar. He threw himself between Pavel and the pirate's weapon just in time to take that blast full in the chest, and all he can hope is that it was enough, that Chekov and Giotto got the captives to safety, even if he doesn't exactly like the idea of being left for dead.
Maybe that tingle means the Enterprise is trying to transport him. Or maybe it's just nerve damage. His toes twitch involuntarily, painfully; his fingers feel like they've been stuck with a hundred pins, and Hikaru thinks a thousand curses because he can't groan. The noise rises meanwhile in his ears, louder and louder, resolving into shouts and blast noises.
Hikaru's katana whistles overhead. He would know its sound anywhere. Another metallic whicker and someone screams, male and pained; a grunt, and the scream chokes off on a gurgle.
The prickling starts to fade from Hikaru's fingers. His eyelids throb like they weigh a million kilograms each, but he can shove them open. He sees bright sky and a slender black leg, just as Pavel shouts, voice more steely than Hikaru's ever heard him, "Put down your weapons and prepare to be taken into custody!"
The only answers are some snarled curses, but no more blast noises, and nothing from the captives or the rest of the away team. Did Pavel's field-rigged EMP work? Where are Giotto and the girls? Hikaru's neck tenses as if it would turn if he wanted it to, but he catches himself -- he can't help right now, he could only be distracting-- and listens to Pavel's fierce wordless shouting, Hikaru's katana singing overhead, another shriek and a heavy thump.
"Surrender or be destroyed!" Pavel actually bellows, no trace of reediness in his voice, and Hikaru's heart thumps and glows inside his chest. To think that when Pavel talked his way onto the away team Hikaru had worried about protecting him.
+*+* *+*+
"The one where Gaila had a nightmare and Jim surprised her."
Gaila jerks awake to darkness and quiet and her own soft bed. No rough floor, no jeering shouts, no bruising, pummeling hands all over her, no bright spotlight searing her eyes. It was just a memory, just a dream.
She can't breathe, but there's air to be had, and the only people she smells on it are herself and Jim. She draws a deep breath and blows it out, and only then hears another person breathing with her. Opening her eyes, she murmurs, "Computer, lights."
"Ow," says Jim.
Gaila blinks at him as her eyes adjust. He's sitting beside her, one leg folded underneath him, one off the bed, just far enough away to give her a little space without looking like he's going anywhere.
He didn't go anywhere.
"Why are you here?" Gaila sits up, too surprised to be anything but blunt, and he gives her a smile that would've earned him tips and trinkets if he'd been where she was, before.
She's not there anymore, it was just a dream, and Jim's still here. "You know you talk in your sleep, right?"
He doesn't look annoyed, but she says, "I'm sorry," anyway. "Did I wake you?"
Jim shrugs attractively, waving it off. "Nah, it doesn't matter. I just... I thought you might like some company when you woke up." He shrugs again, bouncing his foot against the floor. "But I can go if you don't."
Gaila doesn't want to be alone with only her memories, and Jim's proven to be quite good company. "Get back in bed," she tells him, and watches his smile spread up to crinkle the corners of his eyes.
+*+* *+*+
"The one where Jim brings Bones flowers."
Leonard is halfway through the discussion of colloidal gold vs. fluorescence when his attention jerks abruptly towards the fruity tones of a deliberately charming Jim Kirk. He can hear feminine giggles but not Jim's actual words, which is just as well; he really should finish this and decide on a design for the mass-produced assay before he lets himself take a dinner break. Which he told Jim. Three times.
Leonard's eyes unfocus a moment as he remembers the third time, when Jim pushed his legs apart and knelr between them like he was making a goddamn marriage proposal. "But Bo-ones," he whined like the infant he is, "I'll miss you if you don't go!" And he'd smiled, that fucking gorgeous smile, until it took all Leonard's willpower to push Jim away (from between his legs, God lend him the strength he needs to deal with the kid) and shoo him off to let Leonard finish this project.
The giggles die away, the front door opens and shuts. But something's not quite right, setting the hair to prickling on the back of Leonard's neck. He stops breathing, and hears someone else's stealthy inhale, the slight creak of a bootsole bending. "Dammit, Jim--" he shouts as he spins his chair--
-- and bites down on the rest of his tirade, as he's confronted by Jim and three bright-skinned, giggling girls with tumbling black hair and cheerful outfits constructed sparingly from wisps of cloth. The tallest leans her pastel purple cheek against Jim's shoulder, while the bright fluorescent pink and shimmeringly opalescent blue maidens advance upon Leonard and plump themselves onto his knees. "Hello-oo, Dr. McCoy," all three coo in unison, and Leonard can already feel his cheeks welling hot with blood.
"So, Bones," says Jim, insufferable as always, "Viola, Fuchsia, and Trillium here said they absolutely couldn't have dinner with even a starship captain until they'd met the physician responsible for keeping all of us intact and healthy." The girls bounce a little on Leonard's lap, and they smell floral too, sweet and so absolutely appetizing Leonard's stomach starts up a traitorous rumble. "What do you think of him, girls?"
"Oh, he's so handsome!" says the blue one, messing up his hair, running shiver-inducing fingertips along his nape.
"Such strong hands!" says the pink one, stroking the back of his hand, his fingers until they tingle.
"He absolutely must dine with us," says Jim's purple one, wiggling a little as Jim tightens his arm around her waist.
"Well, there you have it, Bones." With a ludicrous little bow, Jim holds out his free hand. "After all, you're not going to disappoint these ladies, are you?"
+*+* *+*+
"The one where Kirk and Sulu get drunk and argue about comics."
"You know who else doesn't believe in the no-win scenario?" Jim rears up out of his seat and slams his hand down on the table.
The glasses tremble. Hikaru doesn't, slumped backwards in his chair, moving nothing but his face. "Besides an idiot-savant pretty boy captain?"
"Hence the else." Jim leans over the table, trying to supplement his loom with captainly gravitas. This is important. "And you're one to talk about pretty boys, Hi-karu-karu-karu."
Hikaru rolls his eyes, swatting Jim's hand away from his hair before Jim even realizes he's reached over. "So, enlighten me about your fellow sufferer of delus-z-" He gets a little tangled up for a second, and the z-shaped 's' he stutters makes Jim giggle.
The way he crosses his eyes as if he could look at his own tongue makes Jim roar with laughter and collapse across the table. "Batman!" he gasps out, his ribs aching. "Batman, Batman doesn't believe in the no-win. Batman has a plan for everything."
"Batman nothing," Hikaru scoffs, flourishing his glass. "Superman can knock him into orbit with one punch."
A woefully thin and colorless sheen slops across the glass's bottom, so Jim manfully ignores that base and untrue statement, for the moment. "Hey, you're empty," he says, grabbing the bottle and gesturing with it. Hikaru's eyes open up wide, dark and intriguing and okay alcohol tends to make Jim kind of horny, but this is an important discussion they're having, no time for distractions. He fills Hikaru's glass, spilling only a drop or fifteen, gives himself a top-up slosh, puts the bottle down as carefully as Bones could ever wish him to, and says, "Also, you are wrong. Wrongity wrong. With wrong sauce. And a wrong cherry. A cherry so wrong it can't even be popped."
Hikaru squinches his face into a moue. "You're drunk, Captain," he informs Jim rather primly, then knocks his glassful back. No wonder it keeps being empty. His throat bobs kind of biteably, but Jim gets twin sinking feelings, that if he tried to it might be the kind of bad that'd end up with Hikaru kicking his ass or demanding a transfer or both, and that if he tries to move he'll fall off the table and maybe out the viewport.
So he just grips the table with his free hand and says, "Yeah, so? I'm still Jim and you're still wrong. Batman could take Superman any day. He could totally make Supes his bitch anytime he likes. He's got plans."
"And Superman can fly," Hikaru counters; his face smooths out as he murmurs, "fly," again, looking all dreamy and reverent, like he does sometimes at the helm. Jim wonders if he looks like that other times too, and makes a mental note to get Checkers all liquored up and ask sometime. And another not to call his wunderkind navigator 'Checkers' to the kid's face.
Hikaru's eyes refocus into a sharp glare, and Jim realizes he's been caught staring. What was the last thing he said? Flying, yeah. "So?" he counters, good and truculently. "Batman can fly, too-ooo." Hikaru narrows his eyes into sharp slivers of suspicion. "His cape can become a -- a glidey thing. I saw it once."
Hikaru actually growls, which is so hot Jim might have just moaned a little, maybe. Hikaru doesn't notice, since he's too busy lurching to his feet, swaying somewhere between a wobble and a dance. "That's not the same at all!" he cries, launching himself at Jim. The table goes over with a giant resounding crash.
By the time Chekov and Bones come running in, suspiciously soon afterwards, Jim and Hikaru have dragged each other from the wreckage and lie laughing on the floor, wrapped in each other's arms.
+*+* *+*+
"The one where Chris Pike and Winona Kirk discover they had the same dream about George"
Pike is tightning his arms around Winona's waist, sinking into the silky wetness of her mouth, when she slams her bright-hard teeth into his bottom lip and rears back on a sharp shocked noise. "Holy shit," she gasps as he struggles to make his willful fingers pry loose, "you taste the fucking same."
Pike opens his mouth, bottom lip throbbing hot against his cool indrawn breath, but it takes a moment to sift through his spinning brain for adequate words. Meanwhile he braces his hands on her supple waist -- with Winona sitting on his lap, that's all the compromise his eager fingers will grant his conscience -- and eventually produces, "I don't recall previously being so fortunate as to kiss you."
Winona laughs, bright and high and eerily familiar. "Flatterer," she snickers, her grin shining sharp above his upturned face. "No, I just had this dream once, you and me and George--"
The memory slams into him, knocking away his years and accomplishments and scars. "-- the Observation deck of the Kelvin, I was never actually aboard but the dream was absolutely real--" Her eyes widen, concentric white, ocean blue, sky black. "You were so real."
"George was so real," Winona murmurs, her lips pink and creased, her eyes still shocked as they stare at each other.
Pike knows his must be just as wide, can feel his eyebrows trying to launch; they mourned the same man in their very different ways, it's reasonable they would have had dreams on similar themes, but that doesn't explain this strange familiarity, this bizarre confidence that he could chart a quarter century of minute changes against a memory he shouldn't credit of Winona in his arms.
Winona swallows, firming her grip as she slides her hands down over his biceps, as if comparing him to her own impossible knowledge. "Nine months after?" she asks fiercely, as if they could possibly have dreamed simultaneously.
They did. Pike cannot believe it, he triple-checks his own remembered timeline of that crazy transformative year, but it adds up until he has to nod. "I was doing outlines on the dissertation."
"Jim was such a fussy little bad sleeper." Winona shakes her head, silvery-blonde hair tumbling from the bun he wrecked in his eagerness. "I -- fuck it, I'm too sober for this." She grabs for the bottle and upends it in a piratical swig that reminds Pike with helpless incongruity of her son even as her arched back pushes her bobbing breasts into his face.
It's not the first time a Kirk's brought him an impossible truth, and if Jim manages to survive these five years it's unlikely to be the last. Pike nuzzles Winona and she splutters a laugh, swinging the bottle down past his ear as she grips his head with strong fingers, and he gives in to the scho of memory as she tips his head back, licks liquid flame off her cheek and sighs when she growls as she kisses him.
+*+* *+*+
"The one where Kirk has the genderswitch trait, the ability to switch genders, something unusual but not unknown on Earth."
Leonard looks up into the mirror and drops his beard suppressor, which promptly disintegrates all over the sink. He can barely notice the spray of small electronic shards against his bare chest and abdomen, not when he's staring at the reflection of a tall blonde woman with an ear-to-ear grin of shining mischief below sparking blue eyes he'd know anywhere and above a long sleek neck and gracefully slanted collarbones.
He turns around, and his jaw falls like the shaver, because she's got breasts like ripe swells of joy and sweeping curves to kill for, hands planted on her wide hips above long sleek legs, fingers curled invitingly into the waistband of her indecently frayed boxers. She looks three-dimensional and tactile and too goddamn hot for a tired doctor to deal with on an ordinary underslept morning.
And she's Jim, Leonard knows it, even before she crosses the bathroom in two hip-swinging, breast-bouncing strides to slide one long finger under his jaw and shut his mouth. "Good morning to you too, Bones," Jim says with perfectly familiar obnoxious cheer, and smacks his shoulder as bruisingly as ever. "Guess I don't need to ask if you like it."
+*+* *+*+
"The one where George Kirk and Cadet Pike pulled that prank..."
Chris's laughter is the absolute cherry on George's sundae, his victory hymn for this mighty accomplishment. As Chris gasps and wheezes, doubling over on the float pallet until he nearly bangs his forehead, George thrusts his arms over his head, turning in a slow circle as he surveys the entirety of Tucker Hall's seating laid out in neat, precise rows on the lawn, every chair and bench its appropriate horizontal placement down to the cm. Allowing for the uncertainty of grass and the massively unwieldy lectern, that's pretty good.
George whoops into the sleeping-or-studying night air, shocking a panicky choking sound out of Chris; before Chris can start worrying again, or swallow his own tongue, George trots three steps and pats him on the shoulder. "Behold our valor, Pike! Our mighty accomplishment!" Chris merely hiccups out a doubtful noise. "We shall tell this tale in many a party and bar, from this night until the ending of the world!" Chris giggles, sharp and high and downright sweet. "Cadets and ensigns now abed will think themselves thrice-damned they were not here!" Chris falls onto his ass, howling with laughter, and this is more fun than George's had while dressed in months. "And hold their hijinks cheap while any speaks who dissasembled Tucker Hall on this completely random day!"
Rolling around, holding his belly, Chris tips his head against George's thigh. His curly-haired, solid, laughter-vibrating head. George hears himself make a little throat-closing noise of his own, and Chris looks up, along the plane of George's thigh, his laughter-crinkled eyes going wide and pale as the Moon above them.
George looks down at Chris through the sudden silence, his heart clanging like a bell. He thought he considered Chris like a kid brother, a bundle of potential fun just needing to be pried from a studious cadet-red shell. But Chris stares up at him, lips softly parted, cheek pressed against his thigh, and doesn't look anything like a little brother anymore.
A wisp of evening breeze brings them the distant sound of a security hovercar. Chris's eyes go impossibly round, white all round his shining irises, but he doesn't move. George should, and can't.
Much nearer, someone coughs, and snickers. George knows that snicker. He turns, and Winona stands at the other end of the West Aisle, clearly, clearly keeping herself from laughing. She's been teasing George about Chris's supposed crush for months, and now she's going to be absolutely, gorgeously insufferable.
"Win!" George calls, waving, as Chris scrambles back like George's leg just burned him. "Here to witness our great deed?"
"Here to save you from Security, you decorative dolt," she says, sauntering down the path, moonlight shining on her hair. George takes a breath and a moment to consider how lucky he is, then turns and grabs Chris's elbow before he can escape. Chris sets his mouth in a flat line that's going to be formidable someday, George can already see it, and George just grins at him until he, if not quite relaxes, stops tugging away.
Winona arrives, tucking herself under George's other arm. "Winona, hi," Chris says nervously, and when she smiles at him he actually does relax.
She also raps George's shoulderblade with her knuckles. "Would you move already? Or are you waiting to get caught? Because if you are I'm grabbing Pike and making a break for it."
"Not until you tell me if you really think I'm pretty," George says, because by the loudness of the engine noise and their usual velocity security's at least twenty-five seconds away.
"I think you're lucky you are," Winona says, and pinches George's ass. He yelps and jumps obligingly, and Chris shakes his head as he helplessly cracks up laughing again.
+*+* *+*+
"The one where, after Spock Prime informed Nu!Jim of his BFF... Kirk Prime, Nu!Jim, Bones, Spock and Uhura... ended up with Jim timeshared between Bones and Spock-and-Uhura."
"You," Jim says, slowly at first but speeding up like an oncoming disaster, "are, jealous, Leonard H. McCoy! Bones, you're jealous! Of Spock and Uhura!" He whoops, voice arcing high with incredulity, as Leonard glares at the padd in his hand. Maybe it'll do him the favor of exploding so they won't have to have this misbegotten conversation.
Besides... "Bones," Jim wheedles, drawling out his nickname, and Leonard scowls defeat at the resolutely intact padd. "Bones, you know I love you best, right?" He's pitched his voice to the syrupy tones one might use with a recalcitrant child.
Leonard growls, flinging the padd down to the accompaniment of Jim's bray of laughter. "It's not that, goddamit," he snaps, staring at the floor, his hands, anywhere but at Jim beside him. "It's..."
The admission sticks in his throat. Jim slides a foot forward, softly asking, "What?" his voice lowering until it eases apart a knot in Leonard's chest. "What is it?"
"Elder Sp-- Selek. The Older Spock. Whatever we call him. He --" Leonard sighs, feeling his shoulders slump. "He told you that you and Spock -- our Spock -- Uhura's, anyway, and yours I guess, that you and he were fated, or something. And I just..." Leonard trails off on a defeated shrug, all emptied out.
Jim inhales on "Ah." There's a beat, or three, during which Leonard's cheeks burn like a bonfire and he fervently wishes for the floor to open beneath him and dump him out into space. Then Jim pats his shoulder, a few levels softer than his usual slap. "Hold that thought."
Leonard looks up to see Jim diving inexplicably for the console. "Dammit, Jim, what in the Sam Hill are you doing?"
"Dropping a line to Old Spock," Jim says, typing furiously, leaned over with his pert butt raised in the air. Of course. "I need to ask him permission."
Leonard's stomach starts to fall and boil at the same time. "For what?" he asks, voice strained with dread of the answer.
Jim looks over his shoulder and his eyes go wide; he turns to face Leonard, hitting the last three keystrokes without looking, but Leonard can barely see anything besides the sweet, true smile Jim gives him, the one that convinced him to try this whole semi-committed relationship thing again after his marriage burned down like a bombed house, the one he never can help but believe. "To let you know, Bones," Jim answers, warm light in his eyes, "what he told me about you."
+*+* *+*+
But which story was it, my bright eyed lady?
***
Neal is mortally certain that is it, this is the time Peter will yank out the handcuffs, will flip out his phone and call the prison, will wash his hands of Neal once and for all.
Except that Peter just stares at him, as they both breathe, as Neal waits for Peter's eyes to thaw until he realizes they never hardened.
***
Spock catches Jim's wrist easily, grip like a manacle of sun-warmed stone. "You will not damage yourself further," he says, voice quiet and implacable. "The Enterprise needs her Captain whole." Nyota's arms slide around Jim from behind, she presses her cheek behind his heart, and he suddenly can't hold it anymore, he can't breathe, he starts to shake as Spock concludes, "As do we."
***
"Just-- just --" Steph can't even choke out 'go the fuck away', but she knows Tim can hear it in her roughened voice, the scuff of her boots as she sprints away, as she flings herself off the roof, already sobbing. She flies blindly, swinging across the tear-blurred Gotham sky by sheer luck, hits the ground and rolls and stumbles and drops to her knees.
A gentle hand lands on her shoulder, not pressing, just touching, and Steph knows it's Tim's narrow hard thigh she leans her forehead against as she cries.
***
(Tribute/sequel to this story which greatly impressed me.)
The next time Pike jerks taut on an adrenaline flare, whipping around fist-first, his hand swings eight centimeters past One's nose. She stands there, calm and collected as if he didn't just nearly fucking hit her and he's caught between punching himself and roaring at her because now she knows what he could do --
--until she arches one precise eyebrow, and reports, "Nearly a decimeter. I think you pulled that one."
***
"Jason," is all Bruce says, something naked and raw in his voice, and Jason freezes, and stops, and turns around.
"The one where Alan meets his first grandchild."
"Alan?" Robin calls, and he dries his hands on a dishtowel as he turns to her. She has one hand laid high on her belly and one bracing her back, and for a moment with the sun behind her she reminds him of Margaret, laughing and wincing forty-five years ago.
But Robin's hair and profile and narrow proud smile are all her own, and as Alan reaches to pull out a chair for her his twinging hip reminds him how long ago that was. She settles gratefully, pushing the other chair out with her foot, so he sits facing her, and she reaches out to grasp his wrist.
He forgets sometimes how strong she is. He's reminded now as she tugs his hand over and sets it on her belly, saying, "Feel this."
A little bump rises under his hand, a squirming ridge. Alan presses down as his grandchild presses back, not realizing he's holding his breath until his chest starts to tingle, and when he looks up Robin is smiling as brightly as he's ever seen.
"The one where Rosie Cotton saved Marigold Gamgee from an unpleasant encounter with a Ruffian only a few days before Sam got home..."
'Twas the silence that saved them.
Rosie was laughing and Mari was laughing, and laughter was all the sweeter in these dark days, but when they both paused to catch their breath in the quiet they heard a footfall amidst the garden's rustling, meant to be stealthy but thudding in their ears.
Rosie stared at Mari staring round-eyed at her, and knew they thought the same, their hearts beating panicked as rabbits' as another step thumped down, then another. But Bagshot Row's little dwellings didn't have the deep cellars of Rosie's farmhouse, the pantry would be but a trap. Where might they hide?
Rosie thought, and stood and caught Mari's hand. Quietly as they might, they dashed down the hall, Rosie leading Mari towards the lads' room, now disused. Sam's old bed stood there, almost a year empty, walled around with parcels and boxes and bags and mathoms.
Just as Rosie nudged one sack of cloaks and scarves aside, a heavy blow resounded from the door. Barely daring to breathe as a few specks of dust floated up, shaking with each bang at the door, Rosie and Mari silently tugged the bag aside, and Rosie pushed Mari before her, squirmed after and began pulling the bag back.
The Ruffian outside wasn't even calling for entrance. His only goal was to break the door and loot the house. Mari squirmed round, flat on her belly in the bed's dusty underfloor, and jerked the bag to so it fell across their hiding place, blocking all but a chink of afternoon light.
The door-latch gave, and the Man ducked in, cursing at the low lintel, stomping through the house. "Little coneys," he crooned, voice deep and growling like a beast from a tale, "Little coneys, where be you? I heard you, here's your grub you've left, now where be you?" Mari lay shaking against Rosie's side, and Rosie clutched her hand; dust tickled her nose, so she breathed soft as she could through her mouth.
The Ruffian stomped the halls, pushing doors open, treading into every room. Rosie watched through the chink as his dirty boots paced past the open doorway of the lads' room, once up the hall, once back again. Her heart bounced against her ribs with his every call, Mari shaking till Rosie feared her teeth should chatter, as they clutched hand around hand and listened to him roam the Gamgees' smial.
At length they heard him snuffling and gorging in the kitchen, smashing crocks and cursing again, and banging the door as he left. Mari made to crawl forward but Rosie held her back, thinking the slowest song she knew as she waited, lest he stood just by the door waiting for them.
After she finished it twice over, finally Rosie dared to whisper, "D'ye think he's gone?"
Mari drew breath to answer, and immediately sneezed.
"The one where Leah McCoy and Nyota Uhura had a conversation that lasted for more than two seconds."
"Of course, CMO on the Enterprise is an extremely enviable position," Lieutenant Uhura replies, which is entirely the wrong goddamn concession; Leah nods curtly and manages to resist the irritated impulse to blurt exactly how unenviable she's found it, but she can't keep her tightly pressed lips from curling, or hide her scowl by bending a little closer over the incision on Uhura's extended forearm. The Lieutenant just smiles serenely, and Leah swallows hard over the unsettled slosh in her belly and concentrates a moment on sealing the dermal layers back together as seamlessly as possible, taking refuge in the professional pride Uhura says she so admires.
By the time there's only the epidermis left to repair, the silence has begun to congeal around them. For this ship, considering her usual aloofness, Uhura is being downright friendly, so Leah rummages for a polite lie and produces, "It's an honor. I'm just trying to do my best."
"Which we all appreciate." Leah glances up from the fading red line, and Uhura's still wearing that little Mona Lisa moue, even more fucking terrifying than her usual icy stare. "As does the Empire." A chill pours down Leah's spine but she manages not to let herself shiver, mentally reminding herself in her mother's distant voice to be polite, goddammit, when for once Uhura's actually speaking to her like a human being for the length of an entire conversation.
So Leah pulls her stiff face into an unfamiliar-feeling smile. "Thank you, Lieutenant."
Uhura inclines her head, her smile widening in return as she adds, "Even the best position can be improved, though. Lightened duties, increased security..." She modulates the last word almost like singing, letting it fade in the air between them as she slips from the biobed, graceful as a cat, and flexes her arm as she looks over the repair. "Think about it, Doctor. And, thank you."
Leah nods acknowledgement and dismissal, her belly frankly rolling with unease as she watches Uhura stride away, then turns back to her wound repair kit. Something is off, above and beyond Lieutenant Uhura having a chatty moment, and as Leah's hands move through the familiar motions of clearing and packing up the kit she tries to make herself think through the sludginess of her persistent exhaustion, through the goddamned useless adrenaline surge roaring down her veins.
Then she gets it, and the feverish unease instantly chills to outright fear, cold sweat trailing down the back of Leah's neck. Uhura was feeling her out, probing her loyalties, determining where the CMO would side if the Captain were attacked.
Or at least letting Leah think so, so she'll run right to Kirk and blab as much, playing into some further game she can't even fathom yet. Leah grips the edge of the biobed, tells herself she can't have a drink, and allows herself a moment to shake.
"The one where Kirk, Spock, and Uhura get married in Vegas (or the equivalent)."
Nyota sits bolt upright and then wakes up. She can't remember anything from last night after the third drink, sitting wedged between Spock and Jim, the taste of fire and laughter spilling down her throat. Now the mattress gives plushly beneath her hands, softer than her Enterprise bunk or Spock's bed; a warm weight lies across her legs, a snub nose pressed to her naked hip.
Spock faces her, seated with legs crossed in a chair at the foot of the bed, immaculately dressed in that high-collared black shirt Jim goaded him into buying and his uniform trousers, the severity of his outfit lightened by the smile in his eyes and his bare foot pressed sole to sole against a pale pink one. Nyota follows that foot to its long muscled leg draped across hers, to the breathing naked man slumped against her side, Jim's arm around her waist, his sticky face jammed against her hip. He's sound asleep. He smells like smoke and alcohol and sex and chocolate.
So does Nyota. She looks up from Jim sleeping like a child, wrapped around her, to Spock again, and notices the deep green mark peeking from under his collar. She opens her mouth, and shuts it, and opens it again as Spock just watches her, the smile in his eyes getting brighter and brighter like a dawn.
Eventually Spock has mercy. "Good morning, spouse," he intones.
Nyota's mouth falls open again. Jim snuffles against her hip, his mouth open and hot and soft against her skin.
Eventually she manages to croak -- her throat hurts -- has she been screaming? -- "What?"
"Good morning," Spock repeats, counting out each word like a grain of gold. "My spouse."
"We got married?" Nyota's voice cracks like a pubertal boy's. Jim just keeps breathing distracting warmth, and she realizes that he's got her legs pinned when she can't get the leverage to kick him.
"Indeed we did." Spock leans forward onto the bed in one smooth, economical motion. "Last night you were very adamant on the subject. Jim less so, but he expressed a willingness to do, and I quote, 'anything you want, babes, long as I get my dick sucked.' "
Nyota covers her face with one hand. "What on Earth -- well, on Risa, what could I possibly have said to that charming offer?"
"I admit, my recall of last night is not the clearest." Spock sits beside her, lifting Jim's leg like a bolster across both their laps, keeping gentle hold of his ankle. He smells like he recently showered off a night's worth of sex and chocolate. "But I believe you struck him, kissed him, and asked him to marry you, in approximately that order."
"Wait a minute." Nyota peeks through her fingers at Spock. "I thought I married you."
"So you did; we all three were married. Risan marriage laws admit any number of consenting adult participants."
Nyota gapes, at this news and because Spock's smile has spread to his mouth, until Jim makes a snorting kind of moan that's somehow still as frustratingly charming as he almost always succeeds in being. He drags his hand across her lap as he shifts and stretches a little, blinking his eyes open as he peers up at her. "Morming, sunshine," Jim burbles, spreading his hand out over her belly, wiggling his toes against Spock's forearm. "Who wants to get your hubby a glass of water before we get on with the honeymoon?"
Nyota covers her face with both hands as she starts to laugh.
"The one where Uhura showed Spock Prime just what he was missing in his universe. I especially liked how squirmy and hot that made nuSpock feel..."
Since Jim Kirk's first improbable report of him, since she first met him, Nyota has thought of the soi-distant Selek as Elder Spock, or Spock The Older, or Spock From Another Timeline, some sort of relative to her Spock, an odd amalgam of uncle and twin. As she leans back against her Spock's broad tense chest, rising and falling with his careful breathing, she looks for and finds his clean lines in the craggy cliffside of 'Selek''s weathered face, the tiny flickers of warmth grown to a radiant, affectionate kindness as Selek regards her with his infinite eyes.
Still, he doesn't look like her Spock. But when she closes her eyes and three dust-dry fingertips settle into the meld points on her face, she startles at the jarring familiarity, because he feels like her Spock, the easy slide into her mind, the banked heat of him, the fractal comprehension and straightforward strength. He feels like her Spock, but not identical, further recesses, layers, dimensions, experiences and regrets and losses.
And, she notes wistfully, she doesn't feel that deep buried fire, her first confirmation that Spock -- her Spock -- loves her.
The Elder Spock gathers his presence together, slipping from her mind as smoothly as he entered. "I see," he says softly, and she opens her eyes to find her head bowed, to see his hands folded simply in his lap. "Thank you for allowing me to."
Nyota gathers herself, too, matching her breaths to her Spock's even pace until the rolling surge inside her quiets somewhat. "I can imagine a universe where we didn't love each other. But I'm glad I don't live there." Her Spock tightens his hands fractionally on her shoulders, a thousand words in the press of his fingers.
The Elder Spock smiles at her -- smiles! -- and in that unSpocklike gesture she sees her Spock most clearly of all. "Nyota Uhura," he says, as warmly as anyone ever has repeated her name, "I do not believe any such timeline exists."
"The one where Leah tries to make a friend..."
Leah stands up, letting Joanna lean against her for one more moment as she looks Chapel full on, sees more than planetside sunlight lighting her eyes, her lips quivering as her control strains to the limit. Kirk isn't known for his patience, so Leah just extends her hand as steadily as she can with all this excited fear swooping through her and her back prickling under his stare, and keeps her voice calm enough to do a Vulcan credit. "Christine. It has been an honor."
Christine smiles, a little stiffly as if the muscles atrophied, closing both her strong, capable hands around Leah's. "Leah," she says, and there's life there that Leah never heard in their five years together, just in the swing of her name in Christine's voice. "Leah, thank you. I'll care for your daughter as if she were mine."
"I know you will." Leah's face hurts, which is how she knows she's grinning, and Christine's eyes glimmer brightly. Kirk snorts, but instead of taking the warning, Leah recklessly lets her resentment crack its dam. He agreed to this, and he rarely lies, so she squeezes Christine's hands in both of hers, swallowing down the lump rising in her throat, and wishes she could hug her best nurse and only friend.
But Leah's courage won't carry her that far, not after these five years. Christine pulls back first, always sensible; Leah bends to hug Joanna one more time, memorizing the softness of her cheek and the smell of her hair and her lanky thin-boned frame, then pushes her arms away and sets her hand in Christine's. "Be good and learn, Joanna," she says, and now her voice does shake, now Joanna's red-rimmed eyes spill over, but Leah swallows around the lump, and Joanna nods solemnly instead of sobbing. "I'll see you soon," she promises as she lets go, and Chapel takes the cue and turns, leading Joanna away.
Kirk steps up, and Leah's shoulders stiffen; he calls, "Good luck, Cadet Jojo!" as he wraps his arm around her back, and Joanna glances back at them but Chapel steadily keeps walking so Joanna obediently follows. "Look at our little girl," Kirk murmurs, mouth brushing Leah's ear, fingers biting into her shoulder, and she lets him win a shudder from her, doesn't bother with a retort as she keeps her eyes on their retreating figures. Leah knew he'd make her pay for this goodbye, a steep price for Joanna and Christine's freedom, but he lets her watch until the big steel doors of Jellico Academy close behind them, and at least now she's the only one who'll pay.
"The one where Leah tries to make a friend (Rand), and Kirk finds out."
Leah's first horrible thought, when she walks into Rand's quarters to find the place wrecked and Janice crumpled beside her bed, is that all that finely coiffed hair is finally down. Rand's curled up fetal on her left side, naked and bloody with her left arm splayed out, forearm bent in an obvious fracture of both bones, the edge of the proximal ulna denting out the flesh. All that damage and somehow it horrifies Leah the most that Rand's golden hair is spilled out in a messy halo, its ends stuck together in drying deep-red points.
Leah's a doctor, she doesn't gasp, she doesn't push her hand against her mouth in shock, she runs to her friend and falls to her knees beside her. Seeing that Rand's at least breathing, Leah's reaching to check for skull fractures when Rand's raccoon-bruised eyes pop open, wild bloodshot blue, and wince shut again as she hisses, "Get away from me."
"Janice. Rand--" Leah uses her most comforting voice but Janice snarls, wounded and angry, batting at Leah with her unbroken right arm. "Lie still, you've been--"
"Leah, go away, I shouldn't know your name." Janice sobs, pressing her face against the floor. "Just-- just--"
She chokes and keens, her voice raw with agony, and Leah tries again, reaching for her right shoulder. "I'm not going anywhere." Janice claws her one-handed, the other twitching on the floor, nails sharp even through Leah's sleeve but she's had worse from patients before. "We need to get you to Sickbay." Leah reaches up to the bed to grab a blanket, anything to keep Janice warm, palming her communicator with the other hand.
Janice punches her in the gut, a thudding burst of pain.
Leah wheezes, rocking back, and sits with an unbalanced thump. Janice laughs or sobs or something inbetween. "Get out of here," she rasps, voice harsh but clear.
Leah finally hears her, finally looks into her face, the tear-tracks in the blood, the fierce lucidity in her eyes. "Oh, God. Who did this?"
"Who do you think?" Janice snaps, and shuts her eyes, quivering. Leah's guts twist in aching knots, tightening into agony as she understands. "He could've Boothed me." Janice's breathing hitches, forcing her to pause every few words. "But you had to see this. I could be dead, but I'm useful."
All Leah can think of are useless apologies. "Janice --"
"Rand," the woman snaps weakly, and groans, and Leah's eyes hurt. "Rand. Just go, McCoy -- send your nurses. But just go."
Leah nods and pushes herself up on shaking legs, backs away to keep her eyes on Rand shivering on the floor, flips open her communicator and stammers a call to Medbay as she goes.
"The one where Joanna and Leah get some quality time together."
Joanna's laughing, ponytail flying, feet off the ground as Kirk swings her around in circles over the grass. "Full impulse!" he shouts, spinning faster, and Joanna's wild giggles rise to shrieks of joy as Kirk dances her through the air.
Leah laughs too, watching her daughter flying, feet kicking and face bright with life, watching Kirk whirl her, his tawny hair catching the planetside sunshine. She feels her grin widen approvingly as Kirk squeezes Joanna to his chest with strong arms, until sudden comprehension slams into her so hard she chokes. Joanna doesn't even know her father is dead, that Kirk killed him. She doesn't even know that he could kill both of them on a whim, and here's Leah laughing cheerfully as this murderous master of hers hugs her daughter.
She flings herself forward, reaching out, and Kirk stops her with a glance over Joanna's head. He tilts his head a little as one eyebrow goes up, glances down at Joanna and smirks, and Leah's belly clenches with that familiar chill she can never get acclimated to. He kisses the top of Joanna's head as he sets her down, and Leah has to stand there clenching her empty hands and let him.
Joanna wobbles dizzily, arms extended, still laughing. Leah catches her wrist and grips her shoulders, kneeling as she urgently asks, "You okay, Jojo? You had enough?"
"Whee!" Joanna answers, rolling her head in a circle. "Whee, I want more!"
"No, baby, you've had enough," Leah tells her, and doesn't hear the sharpness of her voice until Joanna stills under her hands to stare at her, confusion darkening her eyes.
"Aw, the kid's all right," Kirk says, heavily patting Leah's shoulder; she rocks under the thwack and looks up at him, the light brilliant in his hair, his eyes glinting out of his shadowed face, and he curves his hand under her arm and hauls her to her feet. "But your Mamma's right," he tells Joanna, holding out his far hand as he wraps his near arm around Leah. "That's enough. Let's go get some ice cream."
"Ice cream!" Joanna shouts, grabbing Kirk's hand and skipping on his other side like a lamb nestling beside a lion.
Leah can't reach across and grab her back. She halfheartedly grumps, "Empty calories, nothing but sugar and fat," and Joanna just laughs at her, piping and cheerful. Kirk laughs at her too, and squeezes her bone-creakingly hard.
"The one where the one where Leah's sick and Kirk is kind of nice to her..."
The first thing Leah hears when she claws her way to wakefulness, is, "Especially for a doctor, you can be really fucking dumb sometimes," in Kirk's 'pleasantly annoyed' tone of voice.
She takes a breath, and her chest immediately ejects it in a racking cough. She blinks open gummy eyes and finds Kirk sitting beside her biobed, legs crossed, a cup and tray on his knee. "Wha'," is all she manages before she starts coughing again, feeling like steel bands are tightening around her chest.
Kirk waits, apparently patiently, until Leah rasps to a stop. As she gasps, the tightness slowly easing, he gently -- gently, she can't believe it -- pushes her hair back from her face and cups her cheek. "Here," he says, and feeds her a piece of ice. It slips between her dry lips like a cool blessing, melting into a little puddle of peace on her sore tongue. Kirk feeds her another, and a third, and the whole time he just cradles her face, his long calloused fingers shockingly light on her skin.
Just when she thinks regretfully that she should refuse the next ice chip and give her system a few minutes to catch up, Kirk pats her cheek lightly and says, "That should hold you for now." He looks at her a moment more with enough intent to make her prickle with goosebumps, rising electricity like an approaching storm.
Then his face hardens, blue eyes going glacial, and Leah can never witness Kirk's fury without trembling, her guts knotting tensely. "The next time," he tells her, fingers curved to her cheek, thumb laid on her bottom lip, "you get so much as a sniffle, you will log your reports and remove yourself from duty. You will not continue working as your condition worsens, you will not collapse where you won't be found for over an hour, and you will not fucking nearly die." Welling with indignation, Leah can't help trying to answer that, pushing against Kirk's thumb, and he presses it down hard across both her lips, holding her mouth shut. "I do not care how many casualties there are, what staff there aren't. You don't die unless I tell you to. That's an order, Bones."
He gives her just enough space to nod, so she does. He presses down on her mouth for another long moment as he stares into her face, then eases off.
Leah takes a slow breath, her sides twinging, and another, and a third. Only then does she ask, "What do you want with me? Sir."
Kirk barks a laugh and gives her that wide bright smile of his, that looks to people who don't know him like sunniness and charm. "You're my favorite," he tells her, patting her cheek. "You don't go anywhere. Now get better already. Little Tiernan is trying her best, but she's just not you."
Leah can feel a growing tickle in the back of her throat, her eyelids getting heavier, so she just snorts and rolls her eyes. Kirk pinches her cheek as he withdraws his hand, smirks at her and stands up.
"The one where Hikaru is helplessly proud of Pavel."
Hikaru is frankly, dazedly surprised to wake up, and he's not at all surprised that everything hurts, threads of fire twanging through his entire body as if all his nerves were incinerated inside him, his muscles crampishly sore and unstrung at the same time. Even his toes ache inside his boots, his lax fingers throb against the cool tiles beneath him. His chest aches on every shallow breath.
He's surprised, and then he's worried; his eyes won't open, all he can hear is a dull confused roar. He threw himself between Pavel and the pirate's weapon just in time to take that blast full in the chest, and all he can hope is that it was enough, that Chekov and Giotto got the captives to safety, even if he doesn't exactly like the idea of being left for dead.
Maybe that tingle means the Enterprise is trying to transport him. Or maybe it's just nerve damage. His toes twitch involuntarily, painfully; his fingers feel like they've been stuck with a hundred pins, and Hikaru thinks a thousand curses because he can't groan. The noise rises meanwhile in his ears, louder and louder, resolving into shouts and blast noises.
Hikaru's katana whistles overhead. He would know its sound anywhere. Another metallic whicker and someone screams, male and pained; a grunt, and the scream chokes off on a gurgle.
The prickling starts to fade from Hikaru's fingers. His eyelids throb like they weigh a million kilograms each, but he can shove them open. He sees bright sky and a slender black leg, just as Pavel shouts, voice more steely than Hikaru's ever heard him, "Put down your weapons and prepare to be taken into custody!"
The only answers are some snarled curses, but no more blast noises, and nothing from the captives or the rest of the away team. Did Pavel's field-rigged EMP work? Where are Giotto and the girls? Hikaru's neck tenses as if it would turn if he wanted it to, but he catches himself -- he can't help right now, he could only be distracting-- and listens to Pavel's fierce wordless shouting, Hikaru's katana singing overhead, another shriek and a heavy thump.
"Surrender or be destroyed!" Pavel actually bellows, no trace of reediness in his voice, and Hikaru's heart thumps and glows inside his chest. To think that when Pavel talked his way onto the away team Hikaru had worried about protecting him.
"The one where Gaila had a nightmare and Jim surprised her."
Gaila jerks awake to darkness and quiet and her own soft bed. No rough floor, no jeering shouts, no bruising, pummeling hands all over her, no bright spotlight searing her eyes. It was just a memory, just a dream.
She can't breathe, but there's air to be had, and the only people she smells on it are herself and Jim. She draws a deep breath and blows it out, and only then hears another person breathing with her. Opening her eyes, she murmurs, "Computer, lights."
"Ow," says Jim.
Gaila blinks at him as her eyes adjust. He's sitting beside her, one leg folded underneath him, one off the bed, just far enough away to give her a little space without looking like he's going anywhere.
He didn't go anywhere.
"Why are you here?" Gaila sits up, too surprised to be anything but blunt, and he gives her a smile that would've earned him tips and trinkets if he'd been where she was, before.
She's not there anymore, it was just a dream, and Jim's still here. "You know you talk in your sleep, right?"
He doesn't look annoyed, but she says, "I'm sorry," anyway. "Did I wake you?"
Jim shrugs attractively, waving it off. "Nah, it doesn't matter. I just... I thought you might like some company when you woke up." He shrugs again, bouncing his foot against the floor. "But I can go if you don't."
Gaila doesn't want to be alone with only her memories, and Jim's proven to be quite good company. "Get back in bed," she tells him, and watches his smile spread up to crinkle the corners of his eyes.
"The one where Jim brings Bones flowers."
Leonard is halfway through the discussion of colloidal gold vs. fluorescence when his attention jerks abruptly towards the fruity tones of a deliberately charming Jim Kirk. He can hear feminine giggles but not Jim's actual words, which is just as well; he really should finish this and decide on a design for the mass-produced assay before he lets himself take a dinner break. Which he told Jim. Three times.
Leonard's eyes unfocus a moment as he remembers the third time, when Jim pushed his legs apart and knelr between them like he was making a goddamn marriage proposal. "But Bo-ones," he whined like the infant he is, "I'll miss you if you don't go!" And he'd smiled, that fucking gorgeous smile, until it took all Leonard's willpower to push Jim away (from between his legs, God lend him the strength he needs to deal with the kid) and shoo him off to let Leonard finish this project.
The giggles die away, the front door opens and shuts. But something's not quite right, setting the hair to prickling on the back of Leonard's neck. He stops breathing, and hears someone else's stealthy inhale, the slight creak of a bootsole bending. "Dammit, Jim--" he shouts as he spins his chair--
-- and bites down on the rest of his tirade, as he's confronted by Jim and three bright-skinned, giggling girls with tumbling black hair and cheerful outfits constructed sparingly from wisps of cloth. The tallest leans her pastel purple cheek against Jim's shoulder, while the bright fluorescent pink and shimmeringly opalescent blue maidens advance upon Leonard and plump themselves onto his knees. "Hello-oo, Dr. McCoy," all three coo in unison, and Leonard can already feel his cheeks welling hot with blood.
"So, Bones," says Jim, insufferable as always, "Viola, Fuchsia, and Trillium here said they absolutely couldn't have dinner with even a starship captain until they'd met the physician responsible for keeping all of us intact and healthy." The girls bounce a little on Leonard's lap, and they smell floral too, sweet and so absolutely appetizing Leonard's stomach starts up a traitorous rumble. "What do you think of him, girls?"
"Oh, he's so handsome!" says the blue one, messing up his hair, running shiver-inducing fingertips along his nape.
"Such strong hands!" says the pink one, stroking the back of his hand, his fingers until they tingle.
"He absolutely must dine with us," says Jim's purple one, wiggling a little as Jim tightens his arm around her waist.
"Well, there you have it, Bones." With a ludicrous little bow, Jim holds out his free hand. "After all, you're not going to disappoint these ladies, are you?"
"The one where Kirk and Sulu get drunk and argue about comics."
"You know who else doesn't believe in the no-win scenario?" Jim rears up out of his seat and slams his hand down on the table.
The glasses tremble. Hikaru doesn't, slumped backwards in his chair, moving nothing but his face. "Besides an idiot-savant pretty boy captain?"
"Hence the else." Jim leans over the table, trying to supplement his loom with captainly gravitas. This is important. "And you're one to talk about pretty boys, Hi-karu-karu-karu."
Hikaru rolls his eyes, swatting Jim's hand away from his hair before Jim even realizes he's reached over. "So, enlighten me about your fellow sufferer of delus-z-" He gets a little tangled up for a second, and the z-shaped 's' he stutters makes Jim giggle.
The way he crosses his eyes as if he could look at his own tongue makes Jim roar with laughter and collapse across the table. "Batman!" he gasps out, his ribs aching. "Batman, Batman doesn't believe in the no-win. Batman has a plan for everything."
"Batman nothing," Hikaru scoffs, flourishing his glass. "Superman can knock him into orbit with one punch."
A woefully thin and colorless sheen slops across the glass's bottom, so Jim manfully ignores that base and untrue statement, for the moment. "Hey, you're empty," he says, grabbing the bottle and gesturing with it. Hikaru's eyes open up wide, dark and intriguing and okay alcohol tends to make Jim kind of horny, but this is an important discussion they're having, no time for distractions. He fills Hikaru's glass, spilling only a drop or fifteen, gives himself a top-up slosh, puts the bottle down as carefully as Bones could ever wish him to, and says, "Also, you are wrong. Wrongity wrong. With wrong sauce. And a wrong cherry. A cherry so wrong it can't even be popped."
Hikaru squinches his face into a moue. "You're drunk, Captain," he informs Jim rather primly, then knocks his glassful back. No wonder it keeps being empty. His throat bobs kind of biteably, but Jim gets twin sinking feelings, that if he tried to it might be the kind of bad that'd end up with Hikaru kicking his ass or demanding a transfer or both, and that if he tries to move he'll fall off the table and maybe out the viewport.
So he just grips the table with his free hand and says, "Yeah, so? I'm still Jim and you're still wrong. Batman could take Superman any day. He could totally make Supes his bitch anytime he likes. He's got plans."
"And Superman can fly," Hikaru counters; his face smooths out as he murmurs, "fly," again, looking all dreamy and reverent, like he does sometimes at the helm. Jim wonders if he looks like that other times too, and makes a mental note to get Checkers all liquored up and ask sometime. And another not to call his wunderkind navigator 'Checkers' to the kid's face.
Hikaru's eyes refocus into a sharp glare, and Jim realizes he's been caught staring. What was the last thing he said? Flying, yeah. "So?" he counters, good and truculently. "Batman can fly, too-ooo." Hikaru narrows his eyes into sharp slivers of suspicion. "His cape can become a -- a glidey thing. I saw it once."
Hikaru actually growls, which is so hot Jim might have just moaned a little, maybe. Hikaru doesn't notice, since he's too busy lurching to his feet, swaying somewhere between a wobble and a dance. "That's not the same at all!" he cries, launching himself at Jim. The table goes over with a giant resounding crash.
By the time Chekov and Bones come running in, suspiciously soon afterwards, Jim and Hikaru have dragged each other from the wreckage and lie laughing on the floor, wrapped in each other's arms.
"The one where Chris Pike and Winona Kirk discover they had the same dream about George"
Pike is tightning his arms around Winona's waist, sinking into the silky wetness of her mouth, when she slams her bright-hard teeth into his bottom lip and rears back on a sharp shocked noise. "Holy shit," she gasps as he struggles to make his willful fingers pry loose, "you taste the fucking same."
Pike opens his mouth, bottom lip throbbing hot against his cool indrawn breath, but it takes a moment to sift through his spinning brain for adequate words. Meanwhile he braces his hands on her supple waist -- with Winona sitting on his lap, that's all the compromise his eager fingers will grant his conscience -- and eventually produces, "I don't recall previously being so fortunate as to kiss you."
Winona laughs, bright and high and eerily familiar. "Flatterer," she snickers, her grin shining sharp above his upturned face. "No, I just had this dream once, you and me and George--"
The memory slams into him, knocking away his years and accomplishments and scars. "-- the Observation deck of the Kelvin, I was never actually aboard but the dream was absolutely real--" Her eyes widen, concentric white, ocean blue, sky black. "You were so real."
"George was so real," Winona murmurs, her lips pink and creased, her eyes still shocked as they stare at each other.
Pike knows his must be just as wide, can feel his eyebrows trying to launch; they mourned the same man in their very different ways, it's reasonable they would have had dreams on similar themes, but that doesn't explain this strange familiarity, this bizarre confidence that he could chart a quarter century of minute changes against a memory he shouldn't credit of Winona in his arms.
Winona swallows, firming her grip as she slides her hands down over his biceps, as if comparing him to her own impossible knowledge. "Nine months after?" she asks fiercely, as if they could possibly have dreamed simultaneously.
They did. Pike cannot believe it, he triple-checks his own remembered timeline of that crazy transformative year, but it adds up until he has to nod. "I was doing outlines on the dissertation."
"Jim was such a fussy little bad sleeper." Winona shakes her head, silvery-blonde hair tumbling from the bun he wrecked in his eagerness. "I -- fuck it, I'm too sober for this." She grabs for the bottle and upends it in a piratical swig that reminds Pike with helpless incongruity of her son even as her arched back pushes her bobbing breasts into his face.
It's not the first time a Kirk's brought him an impossible truth, and if Jim manages to survive these five years it's unlikely to be the last. Pike nuzzles Winona and she splutters a laugh, swinging the bottle down past his ear as she grips his head with strong fingers, and he gives in to the scho of memory as she tips his head back, licks liquid flame off her cheek and sighs when she growls as she kisses him.
"The one where Kirk has the genderswitch trait, the ability to switch genders, something unusual but not unknown on Earth."
Leonard looks up into the mirror and drops his beard suppressor, which promptly disintegrates all over the sink. He can barely notice the spray of small electronic shards against his bare chest and abdomen, not when he's staring at the reflection of a tall blonde woman with an ear-to-ear grin of shining mischief below sparking blue eyes he'd know anywhere and above a long sleek neck and gracefully slanted collarbones.
He turns around, and his jaw falls like the shaver, because she's got breasts like ripe swells of joy and sweeping curves to kill for, hands planted on her wide hips above long sleek legs, fingers curled invitingly into the waistband of her indecently frayed boxers. She looks three-dimensional and tactile and too goddamn hot for a tired doctor to deal with on an ordinary underslept morning.
And she's Jim, Leonard knows it, even before she crosses the bathroom in two hip-swinging, breast-bouncing strides to slide one long finger under his jaw and shut his mouth. "Good morning to you too, Bones," Jim says with perfectly familiar obnoxious cheer, and smacks his shoulder as bruisingly as ever. "Guess I don't need to ask if you like it."
"The one where George Kirk and Cadet Pike pulled that prank..."
Chris's laughter is the absolute cherry on George's sundae, his victory hymn for this mighty accomplishment. As Chris gasps and wheezes, doubling over on the float pallet until he nearly bangs his forehead, George thrusts his arms over his head, turning in a slow circle as he surveys the entirety of Tucker Hall's seating laid out in neat, precise rows on the lawn, every chair and bench its appropriate horizontal placement down to the cm. Allowing for the uncertainty of grass and the massively unwieldy lectern, that's pretty good.
George whoops into the sleeping-or-studying night air, shocking a panicky choking sound out of Chris; before Chris can start worrying again, or swallow his own tongue, George trots three steps and pats him on the shoulder. "Behold our valor, Pike! Our mighty accomplishment!" Chris merely hiccups out a doubtful noise. "We shall tell this tale in many a party and bar, from this night until the ending of the world!" Chris giggles, sharp and high and downright sweet. "Cadets and ensigns now abed will think themselves thrice-damned they were not here!" Chris falls onto his ass, howling with laughter, and this is more fun than George's had while dressed in months. "And hold their hijinks cheap while any speaks who dissasembled Tucker Hall on this completely random day!"
Rolling around, holding his belly, Chris tips his head against George's thigh. His curly-haired, solid, laughter-vibrating head. George hears himself make a little throat-closing noise of his own, and Chris looks up, along the plane of George's thigh, his laughter-crinkled eyes going wide and pale as the Moon above them.
George looks down at Chris through the sudden silence, his heart clanging like a bell. He thought he considered Chris like a kid brother, a bundle of potential fun just needing to be pried from a studious cadet-red shell. But Chris stares up at him, lips softly parted, cheek pressed against his thigh, and doesn't look anything like a little brother anymore.
A wisp of evening breeze brings them the distant sound of a security hovercar. Chris's eyes go impossibly round, white all round his shining irises, but he doesn't move. George should, and can't.
Much nearer, someone coughs, and snickers. George knows that snicker. He turns, and Winona stands at the other end of the West Aisle, clearly, clearly keeping herself from laughing. She's been teasing George about Chris's supposed crush for months, and now she's going to be absolutely, gorgeously insufferable.
"Win!" George calls, waving, as Chris scrambles back like George's leg just burned him. "Here to witness our great deed?"
"Here to save you from Security, you decorative dolt," she says, sauntering down the path, moonlight shining on her hair. George takes a breath and a moment to consider how lucky he is, then turns and grabs Chris's elbow before he can escape. Chris sets his mouth in a flat line that's going to be formidable someday, George can already see it, and George just grins at him until he, if not quite relaxes, stops tugging away.
Winona arrives, tucking herself under George's other arm. "Winona, hi," Chris says nervously, and when she smiles at him he actually does relax.
She also raps George's shoulderblade with her knuckles. "Would you move already? Or are you waiting to get caught? Because if you are I'm grabbing Pike and making a break for it."
"Not until you tell me if you really think I'm pretty," George says, because by the loudness of the engine noise and their usual velocity security's at least twenty-five seconds away.
"I think you're lucky you are," Winona says, and pinches George's ass. He yelps and jumps obligingly, and Chris shakes his head as he helplessly cracks up laughing again.
"The one where, after Spock Prime informed Nu!Jim of his BFF... Kirk Prime, Nu!Jim, Bones, Spock and Uhura... ended up with Jim timeshared between Bones and Spock-and-Uhura."
"You," Jim says, slowly at first but speeding up like an oncoming disaster, "are, jealous, Leonard H. McCoy! Bones, you're jealous! Of Spock and Uhura!" He whoops, voice arcing high with incredulity, as Leonard glares at the padd in his hand. Maybe it'll do him the favor of exploding so they won't have to have this misbegotten conversation.
Besides... "Bones," Jim wheedles, drawling out his nickname, and Leonard scowls defeat at the resolutely intact padd. "Bones, you know I love you best, right?" He's pitched his voice to the syrupy tones one might use with a recalcitrant child.
Leonard growls, flinging the padd down to the accompaniment of Jim's bray of laughter. "It's not that, goddamit," he snaps, staring at the floor, his hands, anywhere but at Jim beside him. "It's..."
The admission sticks in his throat. Jim slides a foot forward, softly asking, "What?" his voice lowering until it eases apart a knot in Leonard's chest. "What is it?"
"Elder Sp-- Selek. The Older Spock. Whatever we call him. He --" Leonard sighs, feeling his shoulders slump. "He told you that you and Spock -- our Spock -- Uhura's, anyway, and yours I guess, that you and he were fated, or something. And I just..." Leonard trails off on a defeated shrug, all emptied out.
Jim inhales on "Ah." There's a beat, or three, during which Leonard's cheeks burn like a bonfire and he fervently wishes for the floor to open beneath him and dump him out into space. Then Jim pats his shoulder, a few levels softer than his usual slap. "Hold that thought."
Leonard looks up to see Jim diving inexplicably for the console. "Dammit, Jim, what in the Sam Hill are you doing?"
"Dropping a line to Old Spock," Jim says, typing furiously, leaned over with his pert butt raised in the air. Of course. "I need to ask him permission."
Leonard's stomach starts to fall and boil at the same time. "For what?" he asks, voice strained with dread of the answer.
Jim looks over his shoulder and his eyes go wide; he turns to face Leonard, hitting the last three keystrokes without looking, but Leonard can barely see anything besides the sweet, true smile Jim gives him, the one that convinced him to try this whole semi-committed relationship thing again after his marriage burned down like a bombed house, the one he never can help but believe. "To let you know, Bones," Jim answers, warm light in his eyes, "what he told me about you."
But which story was it, my bright eyed lady?
Neal is mortally certain that is it, this is the time Peter will yank out the handcuffs, will flip out his phone and call the prison, will wash his hands of Neal once and for all.
Except that Peter just stares at him, as they both breathe, as Neal waits for Peter's eyes to thaw until he realizes they never hardened.
Spock catches Jim's wrist easily, grip like a manacle of sun-warmed stone. "You will not damage yourself further," he says, voice quiet and implacable. "The Enterprise needs her Captain whole." Nyota's arms slide around Jim from behind, she presses her cheek behind his heart, and he suddenly can't hold it anymore, he can't breathe, he starts to shake as Spock concludes, "As do we."
"Just-- just --" Steph can't even choke out 'go the fuck away', but she knows Tim can hear it in her roughened voice, the scuff of her boots as she sprints away, as she flings herself off the roof, already sobbing. She flies blindly, swinging across the tear-blurred Gotham sky by sheer luck, hits the ground and rolls and stumbles and drops to her knees.
A gentle hand lands on her shoulder, not pressing, just touching, and Steph knows it's Tim's narrow hard thigh she leans her forehead against as she cries.
(Tribute/sequel to this story which greatly impressed me.)
The next time Pike jerks taut on an adrenaline flare, whipping around fist-first, his hand swings eight centimeters past One's nose. She stands there, calm and collected as if he didn't just nearly fucking hit her and he's caught between punching himself and roaring at her because now she knows what he could do --
--until she arches one precise eyebrow, and reports, "Nearly a decimeter. I think you pulled that one."
"Jason," is all Bruce says, something naked and raw in his voice, and Jason freezes, and stops, and turns around.