Fic: Confined Love
May. 30th, 2009 07:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fringedwellerficTitle: Confined Love
Author:fringedwellerfic
Rating: A bit of swearing, so I'm not sure. No sex yet. Call it PG-13, and complain if I'm wrong.
Pairing: Eventual Kirk/McCoy
Warnings: First of a short series.
Author's Notes: Based on Confined Love by John Donne, this is the first of a short series looking at the progression of Kirk and McCoy's relationship through the poetry of Donne.
With apologies to John Donne, the most physical of the metaphysicals.
Some man unworthy to be possessor
Of old or new love, himself being false or weak,
Thought his pain and shame would be lesser,
If on womankind he might his anger wreak.
And thence a law did grow
One should but one man know;
But are other creatures so?
McCoy was just putting on his jacket over his non-regulation civilian clothes when Jim Kirk stomped noisily back into the dorm room, dropping data pads and clothes as he hustled his way into the unit’s tiny bathroom.
“Bones!” he called joyfully over the noise of the shower, “Bones! Get dressed up, we’re going out!”
McCoy rolled his eyes. “I’m already out!” he yelled gruffly, and made his exit from the room. He had made it as far as the outside of the dorm building before noticing the whistles, hoots and cat-calls that seemed to be following him. No, not him. Only one person on campus could be the cause of so much attention and yes, on turning, there was Jim Kirk jogging unconcernedly through the public walkways of the Starfleet Academy dorm units, dripping water and wearing nothing but a hand towel and a shit-eating grin.
McCoy turned, and kept walking, averting his eyes from the miles of tanned, smooth golden skin and hard, toned muscles. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t seen before; Kirk seemed to have absolutely no shame, and had taken to parading around the dorm room naked as a baby as soon as they stepped off Pike’s recruitment shuttle. McCoy had just learned to accept his friend was an incorrigible flirt, and ignore any tiny sparks of desire Jim’s gorgeous body lit in him. McCoy knew only too well how that played out, which is why he was determined to drink the rest of the day away alone.
Kirk soon caught up with him though. Before he could speak, McCoy raised a hand and said grimly, “It’s not a good day, Jim. I’m going out to get as drunk as I can as soon as I can.”
Kirk grinned again, and kept pace with McCoy’s lengthening strides.
“Just my plan, Bones! Just let me get some clothes on, and round up some of the guys and...”
He was interrupted by McCoy, who had picked up his speed further.
“No! Damnit Jim, today of all days, I just want to be alone! Back off, kid. “
Jim stopped dead, confused. Bones was his best friend, his buddy, his wingman. He never said no to Jim, and never drank in bars alone. Jim couldn’t remember the last time that Bones had refused to go with him out on the town. Sure, he bitched and complained a bit, but Jim always won him over. It had been ages since he’d seen Bones in this bad a mood. In fact, it had to be a whole year since...
McCoy strode off, not seeing the look of hurt that flashed across Jim’s handsome features, or the narrowing of his deep blue eyes that always preceded one of his genius ideas.
As McCoy disappeared around the corner leading out of campus and to the public ground transportation stations, Jim started jogging back to his room, banging on doors on the way.
“Bar crawl people! One night, all the bars San Francisco has to offer! Who’s with me?”
Hoots and cheers followed him back to the dorm room where he quickly dried off and changed.
“I just want to be alone, huh Bones? Sorry, not going to happen. Stupid divorces, and stupid doctors, not seeing what’s underneath their own noses,” he muttered, dressing, grabbing his credit chips and banging on a few more doors. When he had raised a suitable army of eager, party-driven cadets they moved off in search of alcohol, a good time, and a grumpy, divorced doctor who thought he knew better than James T Kirk.
The bar was a dive, which was exactly why he had picked it. It was far from the main drag of noisy, brightly lit places that catered for Starfleet cadets eager to spend their credit allowance. The bar sat on the corner of a dark side road that led to an even darker side road, out past the industrial area of San Francisco. The interior of the bar was dank, the clientele moody and disreputable and the only noise came from the muttered conversation between the waitress and the bartender. The jukebox sat unused and dusty in the corner of the bar, and there was a distinct smoky stickiness that left a patina on every surface. Just the sort of place the ex would have hated, McCoy thought, signalling the waitress to bring yet another glass of bourbon to his booth. He had slid into the darkest corner of the bar he could find, hiding away from people, and women, and memories.
Today was his anniversary. It was ironic, the way dates fell; twelve years ago today he was nervously standing in front of a minister and the majority of his family and friends, promising to love and cherish one woman for the rest of his life. Eight years ago, he was sitting in one of the University of Mississippi Medical Centre’s delivery rooms, holding the tiny spark of life he hoped would rekindle his marriage, trying not to notice the way his wife was smiling at the handsome physician taking her vital signs. Two years ago today he was sitting in a lawyer’s office, signing over his house, his bank account and half of any future earnings to his wife, until Joanna’s eighteenth birthday.
Today was not a good day. Today, in fact, sucked royally.
So, the bar. Yesterday he was up to his elbows in simulated blood and guts in an eighteen hour set of disaster drills. Tomorrow he was scheduled for the virology labs, painstakingly picking apart a virus from Demaria in an attempt to create an antidote for the plague that was causing havoc there. Today though, was all about sitting quietly in this shithole of a bar, getting very drunk and cursing womankind with a vengeance. Apart from the waitress, McCoy decided generously. She was allowed to be uncursed, as long as she kept the bourbon coming and didn’t speak.
Are sun, moon or stars by law forbidden,
To smile where they list, or lend away their light?
Are birds divorced, or are they chidden
If they leave their mate, or lie abroad a-night?
Beasts do not their jointures lose
Though they new lovers choose,
But we are made worse than those.
Four drinks later, McCoy was roused from his detailed analysis of why his life was shit and how he was trapped in a hell of his own making by a crash of colour and light piercing the gloomy interior of the bar. Cadets from the Academy in their bright scarlet poured in the door, packing the small bar. Tables and chairs were noisily dragged across the sticky floor, the long-dead jukebox was resuscitated and the bartender snapped out of his stupor to start providing drinks for the credit-rich horde. The waitress was pressed into service behind the bar, and McCoy swore loudly. There went his bourbon supply. Damn the waitress, she could be cursed with the rest of them too.
McCoy could see Jim in the centre of the chaos, swinging a pretty Orion girl around to the beat of the music from the jukebox, sucking on the neck of a bottle. McCoy hunched back in his booth as Jim looked around suddenly, eyes tracking around the bar, looking for something. He didn’t think he’d been seen. If he could just sit here quietly for a bit, the novelty of the scummy bar would wear off for the drunken kids and he could continue his misery in peace.
A while later he heard footsteps approach the table, and a green-skinned hand pushed a glass of bourbon towards him. It was the Orion girl from the Xenobiology seminars, the one that was dancing with Jim earlier.
“It’s a gift from Jim Kirk. He said to tell you, bottoms up?” Her pretty face wrinkled with confusion. “Is that a sexual reference? Earth idioms are strange. Does he intend to get you drunk so that you will assume the submissive position?”
McCoy choked on his drink, and the girl, ‘Gaila,’ his few remaining brain cells supplied, ‘Her name is Gaila,’ leaned over to rub his back. McCoy got a whiff of her heady perfume, laced with the Orion female pheromones that played merry hell with the male synapses. Those few remaining brain cells decided to call it a night, and collapsed.
“No," he managed to choke out. “No, he doesn’t mean that.”
“Ah,” Gaila sat back in her seat, nodding smugly. “I thought as much. Why would he need to get you drunk to do that? Sex with Jim is better sober, don’t you think?”
She sipped her Samarian Sunset demurely, with an inquiring look on her face. McCoy attempted to claw back control of the conversation.
“Bottoms up is a...” he wheezed, “Jim and I aren’t...”
At Gaila’s blank look, he blurted out “There is no sex!”
Gaila cocked her head, puzzled. “Why not? He’s very good at it.” She considered. “For a human.”
‘Alcohol,’ McCoy thought grimly as he drained his glass. ‘Only alcohol will save me now.‘
“We don’t have that sort of relationship,“ he managed, although the thoughts rocketing through his head now of Jim’s blue eyes and golden skin would have argued with it. He didn’t mean to add, “I was married,” but he did anyway. “To a woman.” he clarified.
Gaila scooted closer, intrigued.
“Marriage? That’s when you only have sex with one person? Forever?” she breathed, intrigued.
“There’s a bit more to it than that, “ McCoy began weakly, but Gaila shushed him with a wave of her hand. “Yes,“ he finished. “You promise to love that one person forever and only have sex with them.”
Gaila hooted with laughter, and smacked the table with her hand.
“You humans! Every time I think I understand you, you surprise me!”
McCoy knew he should be insulted, but the alcohol, or the pheromones, or both had finally caught up with him.
“What’s so goddamn funny?”
Gaila wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and McCoy found himself reaching into his jacket pocket for a clean handkerchief without thinking. Gaila accepted it with a warm smile, and McCoy could feel a strange glow start to emanate through his gut.
“Oh you and your strange ideas about love, and sex. You think that you can only love one person in one way? Ridiculous! The whole universe knows that’s not true!”
McCoy smiled despite himself, the glow in his gut warming him somehow.
“That’s not true, huh?”
“No, silly! We love many times in our lives. Sometimes that love is slow, and can burn for years, sometimes it’s a quick love, only for a night. There are different types of love. You can’t lock yourself up in a contract and say ‘I only promise to love one person in one way’. It isn’t being truthful. To deny or repress love is one of the worst crimes you can commit against yourself. It makes you sad, and bitter.”
Gaila finished and looked deep into McCoy’s eyes.
“It makes other people sad too. People who would love you, in their way. If I thought you’d say yes I’d offer to show you some of that one night love, because I like you, and I think that someone made you sad, and I want you to be happy. But I think if I did that, Jim wouldn’t like it, and that would make him unhappy. So I’d better leave it to him, and you can be happy together.“
At Jim’s name, McCoy’s gaze sought him out from the crowd of cadets. He was leaning against the bar, talking to a group of hopeful female admirers, but his eyes were firmly on Gaila and McCoy. McCoy had played poker with Jim long enough to know his tells, and the slight furrow to his brow and the whitened knuckles clutching his bottle told him that Jim was tense and unhappy. He met Jim’s eyes, and that slow glow in his gut sparked suddenly, rose up and consumed him.
Gaila smiled at him, stood, and leaned over to kiss him on the cheek.
“Be happy,” she murmured in his ear, then she left, her perfume trailing after her as she rejoined the crowd of cadets at the other side of the bar.
Who e’er rigged fair ship to lie in harbours
And not to seek new lands, or not to deal withal?
Or built fair houses, set trees, and arbours,
Only to lock up, or else to let them fall?
Good is not good, unless
A thousand it possess
But doth waste with greediness.
Gaila sashayed away, and McCoy was left alone to process that particular photon torpedo. When he had entered the bar that night he was a grumpy, bitter man mourning the loss of a love that he meant to shape his life around. Now he was sitting here, bathed in Orion pheromones, looking at his best friend in a way that would be uncomfortable if it wasn’t for the fact that his best friend was looking back in exactly the same way. Jim made his excuses at the bar, and made his way over to the booth. He dropped into Gaila’s vacated chair, and grinned.
“Did my evil plan work, Bones? Did Gaila convince you to drop your mourning and go home with her? Do I need to bring her back?”
He turned as if to signal Gaila, and McCoy laughed and tugged Jim’s arm down, pulled him closer towards where McCoy was sitting.
“No more Gaila, not tonight. I don’t think my body could take another round of those pheromones.”
Jim was brave, McCoy knew that, but what he said next was bravery on a scale McCoy couldn’t quite comprehend.
“Want to go home with me, Bones?” Jim’s voice was light and playful, but his eyes told a different story. Those eyes were full of longing, and hope, and some barrier in McCoy just broke under the weight of Jim’s stare.
“Idiot,” McCoy said gruffly. “You are home.”
It wasn’t a resounding declaration of love, but it seemed to be enough for Jim, whose smile shone so brightly that you could have used it to light a space dock. Something in McCoy’s scarred soul prompted him to say,
“You think you can only love one person in one way, Jim?”
“I didn’t think I could love anybody,” Jim admitted, peeling the label from his bottle, looking anywhere but at his friend. But then he looked up, and the naked truth sitting in front of him rocked McCoy to his core. “But I might be wrong about that.”
They sat in silence for a moment, then stood together and made their way to the door walking so closely their arms and fingers brushed against each other with every step. With the luck of the devil that seemed to follow Kirk everywhere, a cab was sitting outside the bar, its sign indicating it was available. They piled into the back of it, and Kirk told the driver “Starfleet Academy, dorm entrance.” As they pulled away, Kirk grabbed McCoy’s hand and held it firmly in his. “Home,” he said, with a fierce determination.
“Home,” McCoy repeated, squeezing Kirk’s hand back. They remained silent for the journey back, but it was a good silence, the sort of silence that promised good things for the near future. As they paid the cab and walked back to their dorm room, still holding the other in a firm grip, the big digital readout in the corridor clicked over to midnight, and a new day.
“Yesterday was a bad day,” McCoy said as they stopped outside their room. Jim keyed in the security code and the doors glided open.
“Yeah,“ Jim replied, “Yesterday was shit. Today, though. Today is going to be amazing.”
McCoy looked at his friend, and thought of the different ways he already loved him, and smiled. He didn’t know if this was alcohol, or pheromones or just plain dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks stupidity, but today he was going to love Jim in a new way.
“Amazing,” he echoed as he tugged Jim into the dark, silent room and let the doors fall shut behind them.
Author:
fringedwellerficRating: A bit of swearing, so I'm not sure. No sex yet. Call it PG-13, and complain if I'm wrong.
Pairing: Eventual Kirk/McCoy
Warnings: First of a short series.
Author's Notes: Based on Confined Love by John Donne, this is the first of a short series looking at the progression of Kirk and McCoy's relationship through the poetry of Donne.
With apologies to John Donne, the most physical of the metaphysicals.
Some man unworthy to be possessor
Of old or new love, himself being false or weak,
Thought his pain and shame would be lesser,
If on womankind he might his anger wreak.
And thence a law did grow
One should but one man know;
But are other creatures so?
McCoy was just putting on his jacket over his non-regulation civilian clothes when Jim Kirk stomped noisily back into the dorm room, dropping data pads and clothes as he hustled his way into the unit’s tiny bathroom.
“Bones!” he called joyfully over the noise of the shower, “Bones! Get dressed up, we’re going out!”
McCoy rolled his eyes. “I’m already out!” he yelled gruffly, and made his exit from the room. He had made it as far as the outside of the dorm building before noticing the whistles, hoots and cat-calls that seemed to be following him. No, not him. Only one person on campus could be the cause of so much attention and yes, on turning, there was Jim Kirk jogging unconcernedly through the public walkways of the Starfleet Academy dorm units, dripping water and wearing nothing but a hand towel and a shit-eating grin.
McCoy turned, and kept walking, averting his eyes from the miles of tanned, smooth golden skin and hard, toned muscles. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t seen before; Kirk seemed to have absolutely no shame, and had taken to parading around the dorm room naked as a baby as soon as they stepped off Pike’s recruitment shuttle. McCoy had just learned to accept his friend was an incorrigible flirt, and ignore any tiny sparks of desire Jim’s gorgeous body lit in him. McCoy knew only too well how that played out, which is why he was determined to drink the rest of the day away alone.
Kirk soon caught up with him though. Before he could speak, McCoy raised a hand and said grimly, “It’s not a good day, Jim. I’m going out to get as drunk as I can as soon as I can.”
Kirk grinned again, and kept pace with McCoy’s lengthening strides.
“Just my plan, Bones! Just let me get some clothes on, and round up some of the guys and...”
He was interrupted by McCoy, who had picked up his speed further.
“No! Damnit Jim, today of all days, I just want to be alone! Back off, kid. “
Jim stopped dead, confused. Bones was his best friend, his buddy, his wingman. He never said no to Jim, and never drank in bars alone. Jim couldn’t remember the last time that Bones had refused to go with him out on the town. Sure, he bitched and complained a bit, but Jim always won him over. It had been ages since he’d seen Bones in this bad a mood. In fact, it had to be a whole year since...
McCoy strode off, not seeing the look of hurt that flashed across Jim’s handsome features, or the narrowing of his deep blue eyes that always preceded one of his genius ideas.
As McCoy disappeared around the corner leading out of campus and to the public ground transportation stations, Jim started jogging back to his room, banging on doors on the way.
“Bar crawl people! One night, all the bars San Francisco has to offer! Who’s with me?”
Hoots and cheers followed him back to the dorm room where he quickly dried off and changed.
“I just want to be alone, huh Bones? Sorry, not going to happen. Stupid divorces, and stupid doctors, not seeing what’s underneath their own noses,” he muttered, dressing, grabbing his credit chips and banging on a few more doors. When he had raised a suitable army of eager, party-driven cadets they moved off in search of alcohol, a good time, and a grumpy, divorced doctor who thought he knew better than James T Kirk.
The bar was a dive, which was exactly why he had picked it. It was far from the main drag of noisy, brightly lit places that catered for Starfleet cadets eager to spend their credit allowance. The bar sat on the corner of a dark side road that led to an even darker side road, out past the industrial area of San Francisco. The interior of the bar was dank, the clientele moody and disreputable and the only noise came from the muttered conversation between the waitress and the bartender. The jukebox sat unused and dusty in the corner of the bar, and there was a distinct smoky stickiness that left a patina on every surface. Just the sort of place the ex would have hated, McCoy thought, signalling the waitress to bring yet another glass of bourbon to his booth. He had slid into the darkest corner of the bar he could find, hiding away from people, and women, and memories.
Today was his anniversary. It was ironic, the way dates fell; twelve years ago today he was nervously standing in front of a minister and the majority of his family and friends, promising to love and cherish one woman for the rest of his life. Eight years ago, he was sitting in one of the University of Mississippi Medical Centre’s delivery rooms, holding the tiny spark of life he hoped would rekindle his marriage, trying not to notice the way his wife was smiling at the handsome physician taking her vital signs. Two years ago today he was sitting in a lawyer’s office, signing over his house, his bank account and half of any future earnings to his wife, until Joanna’s eighteenth birthday.
Today was not a good day. Today, in fact, sucked royally.
So, the bar. Yesterday he was up to his elbows in simulated blood and guts in an eighteen hour set of disaster drills. Tomorrow he was scheduled for the virology labs, painstakingly picking apart a virus from Demaria in an attempt to create an antidote for the plague that was causing havoc there. Today though, was all about sitting quietly in this shithole of a bar, getting very drunk and cursing womankind with a vengeance. Apart from the waitress, McCoy decided generously. She was allowed to be uncursed, as long as she kept the bourbon coming and didn’t speak.
Are sun, moon or stars by law forbidden,
To smile where they list, or lend away their light?
Are birds divorced, or are they chidden
If they leave their mate, or lie abroad a-night?
Beasts do not their jointures lose
Though they new lovers choose,
But we are made worse than those.
Four drinks later, McCoy was roused from his detailed analysis of why his life was shit and how he was trapped in a hell of his own making by a crash of colour and light piercing the gloomy interior of the bar. Cadets from the Academy in their bright scarlet poured in the door, packing the small bar. Tables and chairs were noisily dragged across the sticky floor, the long-dead jukebox was resuscitated and the bartender snapped out of his stupor to start providing drinks for the credit-rich horde. The waitress was pressed into service behind the bar, and McCoy swore loudly. There went his bourbon supply. Damn the waitress, she could be cursed with the rest of them too.
McCoy could see Jim in the centre of the chaos, swinging a pretty Orion girl around to the beat of the music from the jukebox, sucking on the neck of a bottle. McCoy hunched back in his booth as Jim looked around suddenly, eyes tracking around the bar, looking for something. He didn’t think he’d been seen. If he could just sit here quietly for a bit, the novelty of the scummy bar would wear off for the drunken kids and he could continue his misery in peace.
A while later he heard footsteps approach the table, and a green-skinned hand pushed a glass of bourbon towards him. It was the Orion girl from the Xenobiology seminars, the one that was dancing with Jim earlier.
“It’s a gift from Jim Kirk. He said to tell you, bottoms up?” Her pretty face wrinkled with confusion. “Is that a sexual reference? Earth idioms are strange. Does he intend to get you drunk so that you will assume the submissive position?”
McCoy choked on his drink, and the girl, ‘Gaila,’ his few remaining brain cells supplied, ‘Her name is Gaila,’ leaned over to rub his back. McCoy got a whiff of her heady perfume, laced with the Orion female pheromones that played merry hell with the male synapses. Those few remaining brain cells decided to call it a night, and collapsed.
“No," he managed to choke out. “No, he doesn’t mean that.”
“Ah,” Gaila sat back in her seat, nodding smugly. “I thought as much. Why would he need to get you drunk to do that? Sex with Jim is better sober, don’t you think?”
She sipped her Samarian Sunset demurely, with an inquiring look on her face. McCoy attempted to claw back control of the conversation.
“Bottoms up is a...” he wheezed, “Jim and I aren’t...”
At Gaila’s blank look, he blurted out “There is no sex!”
Gaila cocked her head, puzzled. “Why not? He’s very good at it.” She considered. “For a human.”
‘Alcohol,’ McCoy thought grimly as he drained his glass. ‘Only alcohol will save me now.‘
“We don’t have that sort of relationship,“ he managed, although the thoughts rocketing through his head now of Jim’s blue eyes and golden skin would have argued with it. He didn’t mean to add, “I was married,” but he did anyway. “To a woman.” he clarified.
Gaila scooted closer, intrigued.
“Marriage? That’s when you only have sex with one person? Forever?” she breathed, intrigued.
“There’s a bit more to it than that, “ McCoy began weakly, but Gaila shushed him with a wave of her hand. “Yes,“ he finished. “You promise to love that one person forever and only have sex with them.”
Gaila hooted with laughter, and smacked the table with her hand.
“You humans! Every time I think I understand you, you surprise me!”
McCoy knew he should be insulted, but the alcohol, or the pheromones, or both had finally caught up with him.
“What’s so goddamn funny?”
Gaila wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and McCoy found himself reaching into his jacket pocket for a clean handkerchief without thinking. Gaila accepted it with a warm smile, and McCoy could feel a strange glow start to emanate through his gut.
“Oh you and your strange ideas about love, and sex. You think that you can only love one person in one way? Ridiculous! The whole universe knows that’s not true!”
McCoy smiled despite himself, the glow in his gut warming him somehow.
“That’s not true, huh?”
“No, silly! We love many times in our lives. Sometimes that love is slow, and can burn for years, sometimes it’s a quick love, only for a night. There are different types of love. You can’t lock yourself up in a contract and say ‘I only promise to love one person in one way’. It isn’t being truthful. To deny or repress love is one of the worst crimes you can commit against yourself. It makes you sad, and bitter.”
Gaila finished and looked deep into McCoy’s eyes.
“It makes other people sad too. People who would love you, in their way. If I thought you’d say yes I’d offer to show you some of that one night love, because I like you, and I think that someone made you sad, and I want you to be happy. But I think if I did that, Jim wouldn’t like it, and that would make him unhappy. So I’d better leave it to him, and you can be happy together.“
At Jim’s name, McCoy’s gaze sought him out from the crowd of cadets. He was leaning against the bar, talking to a group of hopeful female admirers, but his eyes were firmly on Gaila and McCoy. McCoy had played poker with Jim long enough to know his tells, and the slight furrow to his brow and the whitened knuckles clutching his bottle told him that Jim was tense and unhappy. He met Jim’s eyes, and that slow glow in his gut sparked suddenly, rose up and consumed him.
Gaila smiled at him, stood, and leaned over to kiss him on the cheek.
“Be happy,” she murmured in his ear, then she left, her perfume trailing after her as she rejoined the crowd of cadets at the other side of the bar.
Who e’er rigged fair ship to lie in harbours
And not to seek new lands, or not to deal withal?
Or built fair houses, set trees, and arbours,
Only to lock up, or else to let them fall?
Good is not good, unless
A thousand it possess
But doth waste with greediness.
Gaila sashayed away, and McCoy was left alone to process that particular photon torpedo. When he had entered the bar that night he was a grumpy, bitter man mourning the loss of a love that he meant to shape his life around. Now he was sitting here, bathed in Orion pheromones, looking at his best friend in a way that would be uncomfortable if it wasn’t for the fact that his best friend was looking back in exactly the same way. Jim made his excuses at the bar, and made his way over to the booth. He dropped into Gaila’s vacated chair, and grinned.
“Did my evil plan work, Bones? Did Gaila convince you to drop your mourning and go home with her? Do I need to bring her back?”
He turned as if to signal Gaila, and McCoy laughed and tugged Jim’s arm down, pulled him closer towards where McCoy was sitting.
“No more Gaila, not tonight. I don’t think my body could take another round of those pheromones.”
Jim was brave, McCoy knew that, but what he said next was bravery on a scale McCoy couldn’t quite comprehend.
“Want to go home with me, Bones?” Jim’s voice was light and playful, but his eyes told a different story. Those eyes were full of longing, and hope, and some barrier in McCoy just broke under the weight of Jim’s stare.
“Idiot,” McCoy said gruffly. “You are home.”
It wasn’t a resounding declaration of love, but it seemed to be enough for Jim, whose smile shone so brightly that you could have used it to light a space dock. Something in McCoy’s scarred soul prompted him to say,
“You think you can only love one person in one way, Jim?”
“I didn’t think I could love anybody,” Jim admitted, peeling the label from his bottle, looking anywhere but at his friend. But then he looked up, and the naked truth sitting in front of him rocked McCoy to his core. “But I might be wrong about that.”
They sat in silence for a moment, then stood together and made their way to the door walking so closely their arms and fingers brushed against each other with every step. With the luck of the devil that seemed to follow Kirk everywhere, a cab was sitting outside the bar, its sign indicating it was available. They piled into the back of it, and Kirk told the driver “Starfleet Academy, dorm entrance.” As they pulled away, Kirk grabbed McCoy’s hand and held it firmly in his. “Home,” he said, with a fierce determination.
“Home,” McCoy repeated, squeezing Kirk’s hand back. They remained silent for the journey back, but it was a good silence, the sort of silence that promised good things for the near future. As they paid the cab and walked back to their dorm room, still holding the other in a firm grip, the big digital readout in the corridor clicked over to midnight, and a new day.
“Yesterday was a bad day,” McCoy said as they stopped outside their room. Jim keyed in the security code and the doors glided open.
“Yeah,“ Jim replied, “Yesterday was shit. Today, though. Today is going to be amazing.”
McCoy looked at his friend, and thought of the different ways he already loved him, and smiled. He didn’t know if this was alcohol, or pheromones or just plain dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks stupidity, but today he was going to love Jim in a new way.
“Amazing,” he echoed as he tugged Jim into the dark, silent room and let the doors fall shut behind them.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-05-31 09:24 pm (UTC)