Chapter Text
Five months in, Uhura and Spock end their relationship. They’re not showy about it—but then, they never were, and Jim doesn’t even notice it. Bones is the one to tell him. “Guess Uhura got tired of him,” Bones says, as he applies restorative skin gel to Jim’s face. Somehow Jim had thought his first burn on Enterprise would come from a daring rescue or an emergency situation, not falling asleep on the beach on a planet with high solar radiation levels. It’s a little embarrassing.
“It doesn’t matter,” Jim says automatically. He’s in a good mood right now, pleasantly tired and a little sore from a long night with the ambassador’s attaché who’d sucked at the mark and scraped it with his teeth while he fucked Jim. There’s a slight bruise there, but Jim hasn’t mentioned it to Bones because he doesn’t want it healed. “Look, I don’t want to talk about it. Everyone had a good time on the planet, okay?”
Bones looks heavenward. “I’m going to give you a few extra prophylactic hypos too, just in case.”
Jim is insulted—he’s always very careful—but it’s better not to argue with Bones when he has a hypospray in hand.
Later that day, he’s in the captain’s chair, head bent over a stack of reports about the particulars of the trade deals they nailed down yesterday. He hears Spock walk onto the bridge and approach his usual spot, standing just behind Jim. Spock has a distinctive gait, or at least Jim can always tell when he’s approaching, and Jim can also tell when Spock abruptly stops breathing for a few seconds. That’s always a very bad sign. Jim jerks in his chair, lets the padds fall to the side reflexively and braces himself for whatever’s out there, but there’s only the mesmerizing patterns of warp rushing past. He says, “What’s wrong, Spock?” at the same time that Spock asks, “Captain, may I speak with you? Privately.”
The bridge falls dead silent until Jim manages to say, “Mr. Sulu, you have the conn,” and lead Spock to his ready room. When the doors slide shut behind them, Spock actually grabs Jim by the front of his shirt and pushes him against the wall hard. The part of Jim’s brain that’s a glutton for emotional punishment says Yes, please. The part that controls his mouth says, “Spock, what are you doing?”
In a very un-Spock-like way, Spock grips Jim’s chin and turns his head to the side—to look at the bruise distorting his mark, Jim realizes, and a very particular kind of heat shoots through him. “Your behavior is highly inappropriate,” Spock says. Another wave of heat—does Spock remember saying that to him, back at the Academy? Does Spock even know that was him with Gary and Gaila, in that room?
“What, because I let someone get a little sloppy and forgot to ask Bones to fix it?” Jim eases away, out from between Spock and the wall, and puts a few feet of space between them.
“Let,” Spock begins, and then visibly restrains himself. “You have a responsibility to this crew.”
“What, to remain celibate?” He laughs. “Come on, Spock, relax. It’s a hickey. Half the crew came back from the beach messed up some kind of way, and nobody’s mad about it.”
“You should not allow someone to touch your—” Spock starts again, and then stops. “I am told that for Humans—”
Oh. That’s what this is about. Jim is suddenly angry. “I shouldn’t let someone else mess up my mark, the one that doesn’t mean much?”
“It means something to Humans!” Spock steps forward as he says it, and visibly works to calm himself.
“Yeah,” Jim says, “but not to you. So you can’t be angry about it.” He touches the back of his neck, presses the bruise and lets himself arch his back a little, the way he would if he wanted Spock to be jealous.
“I am not angry,” Spock visibly lies. “As the captain, you set the standard for the crew. It could damage crew morale to see your—flagrant disregard of Human norms regarding sexuality.”
“I thought we were talking about the soul-mark, not sex.” He thinks about Spock’s lips forming the words flagrant disregard. “I believe you’ve made your point, Mr. Spock.” When Spock starts to speak again, Kirk adds, “You know, the last person to call me a slut was my stepfather. I kind of thought I wouldn’t have to hear it again once I moved out of his house.”
Spock presses his lips together tightly. “I apologize, Captain. I did not intend to prompt painful memories. I simply—” He stops. “I apologize,” he says again, and leaves.
Well, fuck.
* * * * *
He and Spock work great together as captain and first officer—but he’s careful not to let himself touch Spock and Spock is equally careful not to touch him. They play kal-toh for three weeks straight until Spock frowns and says, “This game is less satisfying than I recalled.”
“Figured out my play style?” Jim asks. “We could play solo and race instead. Or go back to chess.” Spock has been pouting because Jim managed to beat him four times straight, never mind that Spock routinely has much longer win streaks. “Or I’ll get the computer to replicate Monopoly.” It’s his recurring threat, and like every time, it succeeds. They play speed kal-toh and Jim gets distracted watching Spock’s graceful fingers and fumbles his rods. No deeper meaning there, no sirree.
The next two months are full of planets that do not have cheery locals in revealing clothing who are warp-capable, which means he doesn’t exactly have opportunities to socialize that way. Things go badly wrong on what should’ve been an easy away mission. He and Spock go down with a couple security officers to meet the Genii delegation and then, in rapid succession, one of the security officers is gunned down, Jim gets shot in the leg with an honest-to-god metal bullet, and they’re all carted off to an underground prison facility. As they’re being tossed into the cell, one of the Genii clocks that Jim is the captain and clubs him in the head with the butt of his own phaser for good measure.
The surviving security officer, Thompson, tourniquets Jim’s leg while Spock says, “Captain, stay awake.” There’s nowhere in the cell to huddle and formulate a plan—it’s metal bars on three sides, a guard stationed outside. Anything they say will be overheard.
“’m awake,” Jim says. It’s sort of true. The world is kind of out of focus and he feels like he’s just done about ten shots and then spun in circles. “’m fine.”
The world is fading in and out a little. He feels Spock press one hand to his face, hears him say something and then swear—Vulcans have curse words, who knew—and then Spock is cupping the back of his head very carefully with one hand, the other still on his face. Spock repeats whatever he said before and presses with both hands, and—
Spock is in his mind. It’s a loud, crowded place where Jim doesn’t like to spend a lot of time, and Spock looks pained for the slightest instant before he says, Thompson managed to hide her comm badge. She will signal the ship, but we must provide a diversion.
What kind of diversion? In here, he isn’t fuzzy; everything makes sense. Are we going to pretend to fight?
Will you be able to speak?
Might not make much sense.
Does it ever? He catches a hint of amusement from Spock and then, horrifyingly, some of the feelings he keeps tamped down start to bubble up, affection beyond fondness or camaraderie, and he shoves Spock out of his mind.
“You are an ineffectual captain!” Spock shouts at him. The shouting helps wake him up a little.
“Ineffectual? What kind of pathetic Vulcan insult is that? You were a useless captain, a total failure!”
“And for that I’m sentenced to serve under you—a high-school dropout who cheated his way through the Academy on his father’s name and took advantage of circumstances to get a ship, whose only use as a diplomat is to keep everyone distracted imagining what they’ll do with you, and you think you deserve even more than that—”
That hits, in a way that Jim didn’t think they were trying to do to each other, and he’s not proud of his reaction but he punches Spock in the face. He pulls it a little at the last minute, remembers that he doesn’t want to hurt Spock—not now, anyway, and it turns theatrical, Spock reacting the right way. There’s something painful in his lungs from what Spock has said—he feels like he should be coughing up blood. “Fuck you,” is all that his brain can supply, and it grates out of his throat. “Fuck you, why are you here if you feel that way, go to New Vulcan and marry your fucking—”
The familiar light of the transporter beam surrounds him and he has only a brief moment of consciousness on the transporter pad before he hears Spock say, “The captain has a serious head injury, he needs medical attention immediately.”
“Fuck you, I don’t,” Jim tries to say, and finds that he’s unconscious.
He wakes up in sickbay and he wakes up angry. His heart rate must spike, because Bones hurries out of his office and says, “Calm down, Jim. You’re still healing.”
Jim takes a deep breath and works on tamping down the knot of rage and hurt inside himself until his heart rate has evened out. “I feel fine,” he lies. His head is pounding.
“You’re a bad liar.” Bones scans him with a medical tricorder. “I bet you’ve got a hell of a headache.”
Jim cautiously feels his head—there’s a swollen knot on one side. “Not too bad.”
Bones looks unimpressed and gives him a hypo. Coolness spreads through his head, and the relief is probably obvious on his face. “I don’t want to see you out of this bed for at least another five hours.”
“Five—!” Jim isn’t very good at sitting still, let alone lying still for hours.
“Five hours, Jim,” Bones repeats. “You had a damn brain bleed, another hour and you would’ve been dead.”
Probably from Spock shoving his way into Jim’s mind. “Fine. Get Spock down here.”
Bones is uneasy. “You’re supposed to be resting. What d’you want to talk to him for?”
“Oh, you know, thank him for the rescue,” Jim says. “Do it, Bones, or I’m walking out of here.”
“I’d like to see you try to walk,” Bones mutters. Jim eyes the medical boot on his leg and raises an eyebrow in challenge, and Bones throws up his hands and comms Spock.
It only takes Spock a minute to appear—he must’ve been doing something nearby. “Bones,” Jim says.
“He needs rest, Commander,” Bones reminds Spock, and then heads to his office in a half-assed kind of gesture toward giving them privacy.
There’s a slight green bruise on Spock’s pale skin where Jim punched him. “Captain. You appear to be recovering.”
The anger is surging back through Jim, and the damn heart monitor betrays it. “What the hell was that, Spock?”
“I will need greater specificity,” Spock says. His dark eyes are fixed on Jim.
“What you said. In the jail cell. That was—”
Spock raises an eyebrow. “We were creating a diversion.”
“Yeah, but—” Jim rubs one hand over his face and grimaces. “I didn’t realize we were going to—”
“It was my goal to make you angry,” Spock says carefully. “I believe that I succeeded. As you have done in the past.”
Jim takes a long, slow breath. “I didn’t realize you were going to go for the throat.” That idiom seems to be universal, because Spock doesn’t look confused. He knows he’s revealing too much, telling Spock that what he said hit tender places, but they have to work together after this and he can’t—“Were you being honest?” Spock hesitates for too long, and that alone is a gut punch. “Okay,” Jim says, just to say something. “Okay.”
“Captain—I do not hold you in low regard,” Spock clarifies. “It is factually accurate that you did not complete your secondary education, that you are the son of a famous Starfleet officer, that you were accused of cheating while at the Academy, and that you obtained your captaincy under extremely unusual circumstances.”
“Wow, Spock, tell me how you really feel.” It’s actually worse to hear it this time, with Spock saying it all so calmly. “And that I’ll bend over for just about anyone, huh?”
Spock looks momentarily wrong-footed. “That was—an exaggeration. I am not describing feelings, Captain, merely facts. It would not have been productive for me to state my high opinion of your performance as captain during the Narada attack, nor afterward. I do not regret serving as your first officer. To the extent that I indicated otherwise, it was hyperbole necessary to ensure the verisimilitude of the argument.” He frowns the tiniest bit. “You also made statements that denigrated my performance as captain.”
“Don’t tell me you think what I said was on the same level,” Jim says. “And that I think I deserve even more than that? What fact was that?” Now Spock looks acutely uncomfortable, and Jim realizes exactly what he meant. “You’re the one who touched my soul-mark and went into my brain,” he says, and he hates how his voice has gone raspy. “Whatever you saw—that’s your own fault.”
“I told you that I could not fulfill your—Human desires toward the mark,” Spock says. “Yet you persist in wishing to do so. And I was not the first person to have melded with you.”
Jim stares at him. “Are you fucking kidding me.” His heart rate monitor beeps alarmingly.
“All right, that’s enough!” Bones intercedes then, and Jim thinks it’s only that that keeps him from escalating things further. “Spock, get out, now.” Spock turns and nearly stomps out, and it’s the only little bit of satisfaction that Jim gets from the entire conversation, the idea that maybe he made Spock a little bit emotional. “I’m giving you a sedative,” Bones announces, as Jim hears the hiss of the hypospray. “Before you give yourself an aneurysm.”
* * * * *
When he’s finally free of Bones, he comms Uhura to his ready room. “Oh, no,” she says when she walks in and sees his face. “I am not going to be your—your relationship counselor with Spock.”
“Did he ever just—say all the worst things, the things he knew would be worst for you to hear, and then act like he was just being factual?” When Uhura just stares at him, he adds, “Bones hates him and Sulu and Chekov are afraid of him. You’re the only person I know who ever liked him.”
“…No,” she says, and for a minute he’s not sure whether she’s saying no to answering or actually answering his question. “But he and I were—different. There was no threat to—the entire way that he thinks of the world.” Uhura sighs at Jim’s expression. “He told you that Vulcans see the whole soulmates question differently than Humans. It’s something outside the realm of logic. To be guided by the soul-mark would be very Human. To continue with the Vulcan betrothal despite the mark is—well, Vulcan. You’re very Human, Captain.”
He is, isn’t he. Messy and emotional, one of the more id-based people that he knows. “Yeah, he made that pretty clear when he yelled at me in sickbay because he’d gone into my mind and saw that I still want the matching soul-marks to mean something when he told me they wouldn’t.”
Uhura looks stunned. “He shouldn’t have done that.”
“No shit.” The worst part is that Jim remembers the particular feeling of it as the meld started, the zing when Spock touched his mark to hold the connection steady. “You know what? He had the gall to be pissed that someone else had already been in my mind, too. It’s all the worst parts of being in a relationship, all the jealousy with none of the sex.” He assumes.
“No, I mean—that’s not normal,” Uhura says. “To meld with someone without express permission—something must be wrong.”
“It’s not that,” Jim says. “We had to communicate privately, I guess my brain was the only place to do it. The—other Vulcan, he did it that way too, to dump information into my brain. I’m just mad at what Spock did with it.”
Uhura is looking increasingly distressed. “Something is very wrong,” she says. She starts to leave, then turns and adds, “I don’t think you should have contact with Spock for a few days. And I think you should prepare to turn the ship around and head for New Vulcan.”
That’s the last thing in the world that Jim wants to do, but she looks so worried that he just nods.