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singularityTitle: Cold Comfort, Or, Three Times Kirk Apologized (And One He Didn't)
Author:possibly_thrice
Pairing(s): Pike/Kirk
Rating: NC-17, although the first two parts are both PG-13 and can be read without the third one, more or less.
Summary: Kirk is really, really bad at comforting people. It's not actually in shiny shiny three times one time format, but anyway.
Warnings: Wheelchair sex. But the wheelchair is incidental if there hadn't been a wheelchair it would have been a couch and not intended to be offensive and I'm really, really sorry oh god oh god what have I dooooone.
A/N: Because there can never be enough Pike fanfiction in the world. That said, know, oh reader, that someone else has already done this and probably done it better. I just felt like expanding. Bad characterization, it is my kink. Also: mods, please tell me if I need to filter this somehow, wasn't clear from the rules.
Pike is distracting himself from the new and exciting pains that have started up with idle speculation as to how the Enterprise is doing when, typically, a man wearing an Enterprise badge manages to burst into the unfortunately bright light pooling around him despite the fact that there are not, in fact, any doors to burst through. It's not quite as much of a surprise as it should have been that the man turns out to be a slightly panicky Kirk; he'll give the kid this much, he knows how to make an entrance.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Just following orders, sir,” says Kirk, unstrapping him, which is possibly the least helpful explanation he's ever heard from anyone, ever, although he's not actually inclined to complain, given the circumstances. In any case, he doesn't get a chance: the next thing he knows he's being hauled up and half-dragged towards in what he really, really hopes Kirk is right about being the direction of the exit.
He does get a chance to blast two Romulans on the way out, though. That's something.
And the Enterprise, as it turns out, is doing just dandily, save for a couple of minor details – doing well enough that Pike quite willingly surrenders himself to the medic soon after stumbling off the landing pad, secure in the thought that someone else will have to deal with the incipient black hole and that all he is now expected to do is to sleep while McCoy cuts out that goddamn slug.
At least, that's how he assumes it's going to work. As it turns out, shooting aliens while crazed with pain and the parasitic toxins softening up his inhibitors is the simplest part of what follows.
Because as it turns out, James Tiberius Kirk hasn't learned in somewhat less than twenty-four Terran hours of command to quit while he's ahead.
*
It's one operation, an inordinate amount of shots, approximately two drugged-enough-to-be-an-approximation-of-good nights' sleep, and a day of pretending to deal with business later when Kirk ducks in through the doorway and says, with all the eloquence of the sweet-talking prodigy he is,
“Hi.”
Kirk's not the first to come by like this, to stop and stand around looking slightly awkward and sincere and terribly young. On the contrary, several cadets Pike barely recognizes have already flooded the sickbay and gotten all weepy about everything he had theoretically taught them. The Russian kid, for instance. Forget Nero; Pike is going to have nightmares soon about the Russian kid, stammering and watering the sheets.
And a totally unfamiliar man, apparently the one who had the bright idea about driving the ship out of the wormhole that was about to swallow them all whole, shook his hand repeatedly without letting him get a word in edgewise. (This was just as well. What exactly did you say to “Centaurian slug? And you aren't gibbering yet? Brilliant!”)
Even Spock sidled in to murmur something too formal to parse in his current state, and looked disapprovingly at the evidence of injury criss-crossing his body, which Pike would have been more irritated by in memory if he hadn't a) been dosed with really excellent anesthesia b) understood the intentions and c) appreciated the restraint. Thank god for Vulcans, he decides now.
Which makes Kirk the last, in fact.
But the boy looks so uncharacteristically hesitant, uncertainty in his mouth and eyes like a bruise, that the shock of it is there regardless. Pike isn't used to being treated like an... unstable variable -- although he supposes that's what he is, at least until he finds himself a decent shrink (i.e., anyone not McCoy. Pike quite likes McCoy, because, well, it's hard not to like a man who's just extracted a carnivorous gastropod from your brainstem and dished out the key details of what's been happening in your absence, but his bedside manner could do with some work. Plus, he retired to his own quarters a little while ago and is therefore useless).
And in Kirk of all people, Kirk who is approximately one part actually warranted self-confidence and nine part sheer balls, this curious timidness is doubly unsettling.
“That bad, hmm?” he says, touching the bandages on his ribs.
Kirk blinks. “What? Yes. I mean, no! Just a bit of a shock. You know. Everything that's happened. All this.” He makes several sweeping gestures, taking in the sickbay, himself, and Pike, then catches the look Pike gives him. He stops gesturing.
“This,” Pike says, gravely.
“Yeah,” Kirk says. “Look, are you – well, that's a stupid question. I just... wanted to know if there's anything I can do.”
“Did you get a psychiatric degree during your stay on Delta Vega?”
Kirk grins a grin that is fleeting but cocksure enough to be a blessing, of a sort. “I see Bones has been filling you in, sir.”
“Colorfully,” he says. “I'll be fine, Kirk. Can't say I'm quite right in the head and everything else just yet, but I will be.”
That might or might not be true, he knows, but Kirk replies, “Yes, sir,” and Pike can see the slouch creeping up the boy's spine, the relief settling over his shoulders.
“We're... all grateful, sir,” he adds.
For getting myself put out of action so you could have your moment? Pike wonders, silently, and regrets it even as it crosses his mind. Kirk doesn't deserve that kind of question. But he's old, and tired, and in a great deal of pain, and it's difficult to smile back. It's difficult to be the man Kirk and all of them, all these brilliant children, want him to be, now that they no longer need him to.
He does it anyway. He's done it before, and he'll do it again, and that makes it easier.
“Fine. I'll expect free rides once you've gotten your own ship,” he says, smiling back. “Now go to bed. You've had a long day.”
There's a pause, and a distinct lack of Kirk, going to bed. Instead, Kirk walks over and pulls up a chair and sits down, gracelessly. It's less awkward than talking at each other across a room, but it doesn't bode well.
“Captain...”
“What is it, Kirk?”
“The Federation reached us a little while ago. Uh. You're going to be promoted to Admiral, probably. I think maybe you've been promoted to Admiral. And I – I'm going to be captaining this ship. The Enterprise, sir,” he finishes, inanely, and flushes.
Christopher Pike replays this in the privacy of his own battered skull and swears under his breath. “Ah.”
The nervousness is back in full force; Kirk's left hand flies to rub a scar Pike kind of thinks he might have gotten in that bar fight long ago, a stretch of tight, shiny skin running vertically down the side of his neck, and he mutters, “Sorry, sir.”
“Oh, don't apologize. I'm not going to throttle you for telling me I've been promoted,” he says, dryly. Kirk does not seem assured by this. “Just a bit of a shock, as you put it.”
He can hear the brittleness creeping into his voice and his bones, now.
“I really am sorry.”
He's so earnest, so plaintive, that Pike can't resist regarding him with a hint of amusement. “Are you? Really? Sorry that they gave you this ship? Because if you are, you don't deserve it. And I doubt that.” He breathes out. “I owe you my life, and you're getting the Enterprise. Let's just call it even, shall we?”
Kirk doesn't answer.
He does lean forward and kiss him.
“Oh, fuck,” Pike says, or tries to say; the shape of the word is lost in skin on skin and Kirk's open, hungry mouth, sliding wet against Pike's.
For an instant, it's as much as he can manage not to tilt his head so and so, to let himself relax into the kiss, now when his body temperature isn't going to right itself fully for another day thanks to lingering chemicals and by contrast Kirk is feverish. Warmth radiates off his face, threading his swollen lips, his tongue. One hand is supporting the back of Pike's head, the other curving around Pike's jaw, and Kirk's palms are sweaty and steady and hot. All in all, it's hardly Pike's fault that the invective turns into an inarticulate noise deep in his throat, obscene on a whole different level.
He counts down from ten in his head, concentrating on the numbers for his sanity's sake, and then shoves. Gently, but the slight pressure's enough; Kirk slumps back, breathing heavily, his eyes wild.
“That,” Pike informs him, not removing his hands, not least because he can still see tension coiled in Kirk's posture, as if he were poised to pounce, “was pretty dumb."
“Yeah,” Kirk says. He swallows. Pike stares at a scab on the boy's cheek, the better to keep from staring at his bobbing Adam's apple. “I'm not very good at comforting people.”
A rather strained silence. “I can see that,” Pike said, finally.
“Punch them or kiss them, that's how I always did it in Iowa,” Kirk continues, clearly under the impression that he'll be able to bullshit his way through. “And I kind of thought you wouldn't want a broken nose added to the list.”
“I might break your nose,” Pike says, and lets go of Kirk's shirtfront with a sigh. “Don't think I can't or won't just because my legs are a little numb," he adds, when he sees Kirk's expression. "Do I need to tell you not to do it again?”
“Can't hurt,” Kirk says, and it's then that Pike becomes aware that he's not the only one who's staring, and that this probably isn't just an Iowan tradition.
And Kirk isn't the first to do this, either: the first in a few years, but plenty of cadets confuse a natural desire for a father figure with the sort of fixation that is more visceral, more lasting. It's an easy mistake to make. He of all people would know. (Eunice never has stopped mocking him about that dissertation.)
He used to be better at handling it. But not-Captain-for-much-longer Christopher Pike is too old for this shit.
“Don't do it again.”
“Sir,” Kirk says, his tone ostentatiously subdued. Pike eyes him sideways.
“Was that a yes, sir, Kirk?”
“Of course, sir.”
“Well... good,” Pike says, warily.
Kirk salutes, casual, not quite insubordinate, although under the circumstances insubordination is probably the least of Pike's worries where James Tiberius Kirk is concerned. And he makes as if to stand and leave – except he takes Pike's hand, before actually being so kind as to get out, and grips it, hard, a grip somewhere between shaking it like a brother in arms and holding it like... well, like something else entirely.
“Kirk --”
“Sorry!”
Then he's gone.
Such respite probably won't last. Pike frowns at the empty chair for a moment, and then, with a groan, settles himself down to sleep. He'll have to deal with Kirk. But it can wait till what, on this ship that is still his damn ship for a few more precious hours, counts as morning.
But as it works out, there's simply not enough time to say anything more to Kirk, let alone rebuke him and interrogate him and possibly even thank him, before landing, given all that they both have to do. And once the crew has spilled out onto solid ground, greeted by a solid wave of cheers, Pike finds that a number of bureacrats, more than he can really wrap his head around, are anxious to negotiate the immediate future with him. Understandable, since word is spreading and the media is going into ecstasies all over the Starfleet headquarters, not an easy thing to clean up after, but it leaves him exhausted, a weariness that doesn't quell the restive fidgeting he can't seem to help yet does dry out his aching head, does make him dream of running (running, by god) away.
He has no energy to deal with Kirk. So he doesn't, until suddenly it's the day of the ceremony and Kirk is standing in front of him, looking down, his face so confident he shines.
Pike suspects that the boy's slightly drunk on the brilliant spotlights, reflected dizzyingly by polished surfaces, and the audience's layered hush, and the words someone instructed him to say. Or – no, that's not right; doubtless Kirk has known the words for years. He says them now, and blunt as the statement is it becomes all charming arrogance in Kirk's mouth.
“I am relieved,” Pike replies, warmly as he can, not least because if anyone's going to get his ship it might as well be Kirk, who is after all his father's son. Even so, Kirk's crooked grin falters a little; it doesn't fade, no, but the corner curls sardonically, deepens, and it changes subtly into an expression that is perhaps a stone's throw away from being an apology in and of itself.
They shake hands, and Kirk doesn't let go for a beat too long. Of course.
*
Half an hour after the ceremony, Kirk follows him back to his glinting new office, dressed in civvies and wearing a ridiculously oversized coat. Not unexpected, but... well. And he slouches right into the chair opposite Pike's desk.
“Do sit down,” Pike says, because some things have to be said. “And... congratulations, Captain.”
“Told you I'd do it in three. Do I get a prize?” Kirk says cheerfully, both more and less composed than in the sickbay or before the Starfleet Command. He might have started out sitting but by now he is nearly horizontal, sprawled casually over the sunned leather, although an edge of shade slants across his side, halving him neatly.
“Yes,” Pike says, “I've edited out the worst of your attempted mutiny and related misdemeanors from the official record. Mostly because Commander Spock was gracious enough to request it.”
Kirk pouts. There is no other word for it, really. “That's all?”
“I might have some spare change in my --”
“You aren't buying me a drink?” Kirk says. Or rather, whines.
“I have to tell you that watching you get into a bar fight in memory of our first meeting doesn't strike me as the best use of my evening,” Pike says.
“Why, what're you doing?”
“Work,” says Pike, turning to the paperwork. Pointedly.
“What kind of work?” Kirk rotates and leans forward and rests his elbow on the paperwork. Pointedly. Then he glances at what he's covering up so handily, and there's a wince there, all right. “The Vulcan -” he starts, and stops.
“Yes,” Pike says, “just so. Now get off my desk.”
Kirk gets off his desk. “Okay, so, you're too busy to buy me a drink. Fine, fine. Can I buy you a drink?”
“How would that waste less of my time, again? Also, what happened to the prize idea?”
“I'm not picky about who gets the prize. I just feel like there should be a prize involved. Everyone's been so heroic," he says, sing-song and high, a bitter parody of some poor cadet, no doubt. "And I could bring it to you. Like room service.” He turns so that the shade that was bleeding up across his cheek slips off like an unzipped jacket, leaving his perfect profile fully illuminated, bright and cruel.
“No. What do you want, Kirk?”
Kirk clasps his hands in his lap and makes a concentrated, if obvious, effort to school his features into giving an impression of gravity. It doesn't work. “To buy you a drink. Sir,” he adds, prudently.
“Let me rephrase that. No. Also, why?”
“Because,” he says, raising his eyes, which are very blue in the late-afternoon light, “you might be kind of a bastard, but you don't deserve this. So! Alcohol.”
“That – ” Pike begins, and pauses. “That was a nice smooth transition from insulting me to encouraging licentious behavior, captain, well done,” he says, after some consideration. The sarcasm is forced, but still easier than the alternative. If there is an alternative. He's not really sure.
“I try,” Kirk says, the picture of modesty. “Was that a yes? I could get some bootleg Romulan ale – ”
“I don't think so,” Pike says, flatly.
He can remember the smell, acrid, burning and sweet. Miners drink a lot. Genocidal unhinged bastard miners turned madmen drink even more. The Narada was all oil and metal and strange, organic odors like rotting vegetable matter, little that was recognizable or human, but they made him drink the ale, and used it, always searching for a way in, they were -- and that was worse by far than the mere alien quality of surroundings, though he'd liked Romulan ale, or pretended to, when he was a cadet.
Kirk opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “I'm an idiot.”
“You've had better moments,” Pike said, mildly. “Captain Kirk --” he watches Kirk's hand clench, and ignores it “-- if you insist we can play catch-up in a few months when matters have... calmed, somewhat. Until then, I suggest we return to our respective newfound duties."
“Bullshit,” Kirk says, and then, quiet and quick, before Pike can reply: “Believe me when I say I don't want to talk to you any more than you want to talk to me. I want to stop feeling guilty, because feeling guilty sucks Klingon donkey balls.” Pike has to turn the harsh laugh this surprises out of him into a cough. Kirk's been spending too much time around veterans, it seems. “Getting you happily and idiotically intoxicated is the fastest way.”
“Your sensitivity's touching, Kirk, but you have nothing to be guilty about and, frankly, you'd be better off getting that through your skull than trying to make amends for imaginary offenses by spiking my punch.”
“I imagined taking your ship?” Kirk says, raising his eyebrows. “And then...” he made a vague gesture that was somehow, nevertheless, quite clear, “...assaulting you?”
Pike snorted at that. “You certainly imagined taking the ship. You had nothing to do with it – that was Starfleet's decision. As for kissing me, I let it slide on the condition that you never pull it again, remember? You were having an irrational moment in the aftermath of adrenaline. There. All better.” His voice is too tight but then the memory of Nero's stinking breath is making him edgy.
“I was being an asshole, sir.”
“Language, Kirk. And harassing me when I have made my point several times is not in any way being an asshole?”
“Hypocrisy, sir?”
“They teach it in Negotiation 101. A class you skipped, I note. Answer the question.”
“Was that a yes?”
Pike covers his eyes with one unfamiliarly thin hand. “No, it wasn't. Out of my office, Kirk.”
“Sir.”
“That had better have been an implied ye --”
“It wasn't, sir.”
“I just gave you an order, Captain.”
Kirk unbuttons his coat. “Yeah, and I'd follow it right now only I actually already purchased some high-quality booze, and it'd be a shame to waste it. Bought it from your Mr. Chekov, even. Well, bought probably isn't the right word. It's not Romulan ale, I can tell you that much. Strictly Earth-made.”
“Good, you can drink it out in the hall without getting arrested. Have fun. Out.”
Kirk finishes unbuttoning his coat and produces a bottle, long-necked, square, glinting prettily, its contents prettier. Clear vodka, more crystalline than water. It casts odd, parabolic, dancing shadows on the floorboards. Kirk unscrews the top and knocks back a mouthful, wiping the wet line it leaves off his full lower lip with the back of his hand. “You're really stubborn, you know that?”
Pike debates, for a thirty seconds, between making good on his promise to break Kirk's nose and ignoring him. Or, perhaps, he can slowly talk him to death about everything Kirk did wrong during his brief but soon to be extended command of the Enterprise. On the other hand, Pike's throat is already sore.
“This is okay too, you know,” Kirk says. “If I drink enough fast enough while you... work... that means I don't have to be guilty. And that's fine. Only then I have to do it again and again and again. Your fault.”
“I'm happy for you. Do you have to be occupying my field of vision while satisfying addiction and consoling yourself?”
“Okay, okay,” Kirk says, lifting his hands, already shaking. “The hallway it is.” He rises, gathering his coat around him and slinking on his long goddamn working legs out through the still-open door, which he slams shut behind him.
Pike picks up his unfamiliar pen with his unfamiliarly thin fingers that don't have a true penpusher's calluses – yet --, and resumes as if nothing happened at all.
He spends the next three hours reading about the deaths, and the socio-economic-fucking ramifications, and all that will need to be done before the Federation can even begin to count its loss as healing. He reads and he reads and he writes, in precise script, and draws, with a draftsman's hand, where necessary, and then he reads the descriptions over and over and over until all he can think about is the cracks webbed across that red desert while he was hovering a safe distance away, coming up with plan after plan and choosing one that didn't work.
How many chains of thought does it take to spin upwards from the land and souls swallowed, upwards and outside that dying atmosphere to the dying fleet, caught like fish in a barrel?
(He can name them all, the dead of those ships that burned away like leaves, disappearing, ash on water or wind).
Three hours.
Sometimes the excuse of someone else's temptation is a godsend.
He puts the pen down, and wheels – floats, whatever – outside. Kirk is leaning against the wall just by the entrance, probably because he can't stand upright, and his curling pose, his half-lidded eyes, his trembling knees, all make him look dreamy, childish, lost to the pleasures of misery. But the grin he gives Pike is hard and dreamless.
“So is this a yes?” he says, offering what looks like his third bottle.
“Looks like,” Pike says, and takes it.
They brood – or rather sulk – side-by-side in his gloomy office and pass a glass back and forth, and blessed silence reigns until, halfway down, Kirk metamorphoses into a talkative drunk.
That's when everything that's left to go wrong goes wrong, really.
He's manic and barely distinguishable from his sober self except that his sober self is nothing like so inclined towards the rough, ludicrous gesticulations that punctuate his tripping speech. “What do I do with you?” he says, leaning dangerously far over the arm of the couch he's curled into to squint at Pike. “That's the thing. I don't know. You're the captain.”
“Was your captain,” Pike corrects, absently.
Kirk rejects this, a development that is so shockingly shocking that the shock is palpable, as is the headache that is wobbling into place. This is not going to help him relax and preferably black out, so much he can tell. “You're the captain,” he says, prodding Pike in the chest. “How do I treat you? If I liked you better, if I knew you, I could slap you on the back and shit, but we're not friends, are we, sir?”
“Stop talking, Kirk,” Pike says, with feeling. The vodka is lukewarm and bitter.
“Thought you were the one who wanted to talk.”
“When did I say that?”
“You know. In the sickbay.”
“Oh, for – can you stop bringing that up? I have enough to actively avoid remembering without adding that to the list, and there's not that much –” he tapped the side of the half full (empty? whatever) bottle “– left.”
“Should have brought me back in earlier then, shouldn't you've,” Kirk says, flopping back.
“Shouldn't've brought you in at all, Kirk,” he says, taking a black satisfaction from that knowledge, that he is being an idiot and that this is probably the healthiest thing he's done in a week, this self-destructive choice. The psychiatrist will be so pleased.
“You can't have it both ways.”
“No,” Pike agrees. “That would be your fault.”
“Everything's my fault. I don't know how to make you better, sir.”
“Losing your faith in the curative –“ he barely stumbles over the word “– powers of booze?”
“I was banking on you not being a maudlin drunk,” Kirk says. “Can't you stop thinking, sir?”
“Morose. Not maudlin.”
“Exactly.”
“And from the evidence I'd say that I haven't been thinking for some time now,” he says, as dryly as he can manage through wet teeth and wet lips that stick a little at the corners when he talks, through the seductive edge of a watery, metallic taste against his palate. “I mean, I did recommend your promotion, did I? Not thinking.”
“Yes you are. You're also way too sober.”
“You keep telling me.” Pike says, and tilts the bottle up.
So far he's restrained himself to a swallow at a time, but now he shifts the weight onto his elbow lest Kirk see his wrist tremble, the cords of muscle standing out under the skin, and he doesn't stop drinking until he thinks he might drown, too much vodka hitting the back of his throat too soon for him to force it down. He comes up for air a little too late and coughs, the sound wet and unpleasant as his insides, as the Narada in memory. He presses his mouth to his sleeve and when he lowers his arm there's a dark stain in the crook of his elbow that might be a little blood mixed in with spit and vodka.
There's, oh, call it half an inch of clouded liquid left, bright with the borrowed glow of the computer monitor he hasn't even bothered to turn off, one pale quadrangle thrown onto the floor, overlapped by slanting shadows that make a cool-toned palette melting from blue to black and back. The refraction is very soothing, viewed from a sideways angle (e.g., the one Pike's neck is bent at).
He replays that thought and considers that the alcohol is kicking in, all right.
Kirk's jaws close with a melodramatic click, bringing Pike's attention to the fact that he was gaping slightly in the first place. “Damn,” he says, after a pause. Pike is vaguely gratified to hear the unabashed fourteen-year-old-boy awe in his voice. He's less gratified by the fact that the room is starting to spin.
“Mission accomplished,” he says, slowly so's not to slur. “You should go home now, Kirk.”
“Are you going to be all right?” Kirk says, the respect draining away to be replaced by a weird anxiety that creases his high forehead and turns his skeptic's countenance into an earnest one, and fuck, but he looks like his father.
Pike blinks, pinches the bridge of his nose. “You need to learn timing. Now you ask if I'm going to be all right?”
“Well... I didn't expect it to work this quickly,” Kirk says, ruefully. He stands up, not even swaying.
“It didn't work,” Pike mutters, and goes on before Kirk can react: “I was planning to sleep at my desk anyway.”
“Right,” Kirk says, rolling his eyes. “I'm pretty sure your doctors would pitch a fit if you did. C'mon, it's not like they didn't give you an entire apartment in the building, or whatever, while you were recuperating.“
“Why are you not as drunk as me?” Pike says, ignoring the sanity because any sanity that comes from Kirk is suspect. Plus, it's a question that's been nagging him for thirty seconds now, an eternity in his brand new fucked-up perception with its languid nightmares, visible in the corner of his eye.
“Years of practice? Plus I ate something at the ceremony, and I'm going to guess you didn't.”
“The buffet was pretty awful.”
He's smiling warily now, like a man reeling in a fish, and that, too, is a look Pike's seen before.“Yeah, but there were these little balls of cheese on sticks and crackers that weren't too bad – “
“Kirk?” Pike interrupts, staring up.
(The wrong bone structure: too fine-boned, and the mouth too full, and hair too fair even with the color bleached by this artificial dusk. But the eyes, and the expression – he needs to stop thinking about this. George Kirk was nothing more than a schoolboy obsession. He is about as far from a schoolboy as it is possible to get, really. And yet he's not sure he can stop thinking about this. It's so much sweeter than thinking about what, indeed, the vodka hasn't chased away from the inside of his eyelids.)
“Yeah?”
“You should go. Now.”
“But,” Kirk begins.
“Now,” he says, desperately but also not, because there's a large part of him that no longer wants to convince Kirk to go at all.
“You're still not even kind of okay, huh,” Kirk says. He crouches forward as if trying to learn his face, once again serious and concerned, an emotion that seems grafted on, like a child imitating his parents (fuck fuck fuck fuck). And it occurs to Pike that he's never seen Kirk look this little like the delinquent genius he is.
“Not even kind of,” he echoes, and pulls Kirk towards him with two hands, and kisses Kirk. He doesn't use any of his experience, his ill-gotten skills, he just holds Kirk there, mouth pressed against his, Kirk's elbows propped on the armrests and Kirk's knees digging into his shins as he hunches inwards. He exhales through his nose, sullen breath sealing the distance, and they stare at each other over their locked-together mouths. Kirk's pupils are dilated and there is panic there, and triumph, too. The panic, at least, Pike considers to be his just deserts. The triumph is bloody annoying.
He wonders if this is what Nero felt like, and lets go, recoils from the idea of keeping Kirk still. But he also doesn't draw back. and Kirk has moved, too, not away but in, pressing the heel of his palm against the soft junction between Pike's jaw and his neck, an intimate, familiar pressure. When he does surface for air he's grinning an irritating grin. But the urge to lunge doesn't flee with the erstwhile expression.
“Guess I should have just gone with my first instinct after all, hmm?” he hums, brushing his lips up across Pike's cheekbone.
“I –“ Pike tries. Kirk slides down and licks the hollow at the base of Pike's neck, and Pike's sure he was going to say something intelligent that would put an end to this folly but it seeps through the freshly damp skin on his larynx and he... forgets.
Zippers get undone with remarkable speed. His undershirt hikes up and then there are fingertips running across his bandaged ribs, lightly, and Kirk's tongue following the line of short fine hair over his flat stomach, down down down.
“You,” he manages to say in defiance of Kirk's sticky, trailing kisses, “don't have to – I was being stupid, the vodka, oh god.”
“Is that a yes?” He doesn't hear it so much as feel it.
“Yes,” Pike says, quietly. Kirk works his close-fitting trousers down over his hips, dragging him forward in the process, and spreads his thighs in one disturbingly practiced push. Pike tucks his shoulders in until he's curved over Kirk's head, like some kind of twisted mother hen, and doesn't flinch or honestly hesitate as he threads his hands through Kirk's short, spiky hair, as Kirk hooks his chin over the edge of the seat and blows him. No frills added, haha, just his moving mouth, hot and slick and impossibly slow; that and his hands, touching the inside of his thigh, the underside of his knee, the small of his back, like muffled electricity on sensitive skin.
He comes with a choked moan, just loud enough to be embarrassing when Kirk winks and crawls over to spit into the wastebasket. Then he drinks the rest of the vodka, while Pike dresses, too warm and empty to let himself begin cataloguing the private principles fractured, the laws bent almost unrecognizably out of shape, willing to stretch and contemplate the problem of zippers, existence thereof, while the minutes swell and burst in the awkward but slightly less miserable silence.
Except then Kirk drapes himself across the back of the chair and continues kissing along the side of Pike's face, along the trace of stubble, like someone with no comprehension of the essential nature of illicit, drunken five-minute stands.
“See, it's fun for everyone,” Kirk mumbles. “How'd I do, sir?”
“You did just fine, Kirk,” Pike says, wryly, because he can afford that now. “You've done something for me, all right, thanks very much for that. I might even sleep tonight. And. I can still name every man and woman I knew who died in Vulcan's outer reaches.”
Kirk tenses against his shoulder, and it's not like he's not a queer mix of sympathetic and appreciative, but he's amused, too, and conscious that the grief is waiting, is there in the ragged edge of his voice.
“And I still did sell billions of lives for my own comfort. So where does that leave me? Where does that leave you?”
“Less guilty,” Kirk says, decisively.
Pike laughs for too long, a raw, exhausted laugh, and runs a hand through his hair. “Bully for you, then. Please tell me you're going, now.”
Kirk hauls himself off Pike's numb side and says, “Yep. But I am sorry, sir.”
“So you've said. Repeatedly.”
“And you owe me a drink, sir.”
“Kirk?”
“Yeah?”
“Out.”
“Yessir,” Kirk says, cheerfully, and he's gone.
Author:
possibly_thrice Pairing(s): Pike/Kirk
Rating: NC-17, although the first two parts are both PG-13 and can be read without the third one, more or less.
Summary: Kirk is really, really bad at comforting people. It's not actually in shiny shiny three times one time format, but anyway.
Warnings: Wheelchair sex. But the wheelchair is incidental if there hadn't been a wheelchair it would have been a couch and not intended to be offensive and I'm really, really sorry oh god oh god what have I dooooone.
A/N: Because there can never be enough Pike fanfiction in the world. That said, know, oh reader, that someone else has already done this and probably done it better. I just felt like expanding. Bad characterization, it is my kink. Also: mods, please tell me if I need to filter this somehow, wasn't clear from the rules.
Pike is distracting himself from the new and exciting pains that have started up with idle speculation as to how the Enterprise is doing when, typically, a man wearing an Enterprise badge manages to burst into the unfortunately bright light pooling around him despite the fact that there are not, in fact, any doors to burst through. It's not quite as much of a surprise as it should have been that the man turns out to be a slightly panicky Kirk; he'll give the kid this much, he knows how to make an entrance.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Just following orders, sir,” says Kirk, unstrapping him, which is possibly the least helpful explanation he's ever heard from anyone, ever, although he's not actually inclined to complain, given the circumstances. In any case, he doesn't get a chance: the next thing he knows he's being hauled up and half-dragged towards in what he really, really hopes Kirk is right about being the direction of the exit.
He does get a chance to blast two Romulans on the way out, though. That's something.
And the Enterprise, as it turns out, is doing just dandily, save for a couple of minor details – doing well enough that Pike quite willingly surrenders himself to the medic soon after stumbling off the landing pad, secure in the thought that someone else will have to deal with the incipient black hole and that all he is now expected to do is to sleep while McCoy cuts out that goddamn slug.
At least, that's how he assumes it's going to work. As it turns out, shooting aliens while crazed with pain and the parasitic toxins softening up his inhibitors is the simplest part of what follows.
Because as it turns out, James Tiberius Kirk hasn't learned in somewhat less than twenty-four Terran hours of command to quit while he's ahead.
*
It's one operation, an inordinate amount of shots, approximately two drugged-enough-to-be-an-approximation-of-good nights' sleep, and a day of pretending to deal with business later when Kirk ducks in through the doorway and says, with all the eloquence of the sweet-talking prodigy he is,
“Hi.”
Kirk's not the first to come by like this, to stop and stand around looking slightly awkward and sincere and terribly young. On the contrary, several cadets Pike barely recognizes have already flooded the sickbay and gotten all weepy about everything he had theoretically taught them. The Russian kid, for instance. Forget Nero; Pike is going to have nightmares soon about the Russian kid, stammering and watering the sheets.
And a totally unfamiliar man, apparently the one who had the bright idea about driving the ship out of the wormhole that was about to swallow them all whole, shook his hand repeatedly without letting him get a word in edgewise. (This was just as well. What exactly did you say to “Centaurian slug? And you aren't gibbering yet? Brilliant!”)
Even Spock sidled in to murmur something too formal to parse in his current state, and looked disapprovingly at the evidence of injury criss-crossing his body, which Pike would have been more irritated by in memory if he hadn't a) been dosed with really excellent anesthesia b) understood the intentions and c) appreciated the restraint. Thank god for Vulcans, he decides now.
Which makes Kirk the last, in fact.
But the boy looks so uncharacteristically hesitant, uncertainty in his mouth and eyes like a bruise, that the shock of it is there regardless. Pike isn't used to being treated like an... unstable variable -- although he supposes that's what he is, at least until he finds himself a decent shrink (i.e., anyone not McCoy. Pike quite likes McCoy, because, well, it's hard not to like a man who's just extracted a carnivorous gastropod from your brainstem and dished out the key details of what's been happening in your absence, but his bedside manner could do with some work. Plus, he retired to his own quarters a little while ago and is therefore useless).
And in Kirk of all people, Kirk who is approximately one part actually warranted self-confidence and nine part sheer balls, this curious timidness is doubly unsettling.
“That bad, hmm?” he says, touching the bandages on his ribs.
Kirk blinks. “What? Yes. I mean, no! Just a bit of a shock. You know. Everything that's happened. All this.” He makes several sweeping gestures, taking in the sickbay, himself, and Pike, then catches the look Pike gives him. He stops gesturing.
“This,” Pike says, gravely.
“Yeah,” Kirk says. “Look, are you – well, that's a stupid question. I just... wanted to know if there's anything I can do.”
“Did you get a psychiatric degree during your stay on Delta Vega?”
Kirk grins a grin that is fleeting but cocksure enough to be a blessing, of a sort. “I see Bones has been filling you in, sir.”
“Colorfully,” he says. “I'll be fine, Kirk. Can't say I'm quite right in the head and everything else just yet, but I will be.”
That might or might not be true, he knows, but Kirk replies, “Yes, sir,” and Pike can see the slouch creeping up the boy's spine, the relief settling over his shoulders.
“We're... all grateful, sir,” he adds.
For getting myself put out of action so you could have your moment? Pike wonders, silently, and regrets it even as it crosses his mind. Kirk doesn't deserve that kind of question. But he's old, and tired, and in a great deal of pain, and it's difficult to smile back. It's difficult to be the man Kirk and all of them, all these brilliant children, want him to be, now that they no longer need him to.
He does it anyway. He's done it before, and he'll do it again, and that makes it easier.
“Fine. I'll expect free rides once you've gotten your own ship,” he says, smiling back. “Now go to bed. You've had a long day.”
There's a pause, and a distinct lack of Kirk, going to bed. Instead, Kirk walks over and pulls up a chair and sits down, gracelessly. It's less awkward than talking at each other across a room, but it doesn't bode well.
“Captain...”
“What is it, Kirk?”
“The Federation reached us a little while ago. Uh. You're going to be promoted to Admiral, probably. I think maybe you've been promoted to Admiral. And I – I'm going to be captaining this ship. The Enterprise, sir,” he finishes, inanely, and flushes.
Christopher Pike replays this in the privacy of his own battered skull and swears under his breath. “Ah.”
The nervousness is back in full force; Kirk's left hand flies to rub a scar Pike kind of thinks he might have gotten in that bar fight long ago, a stretch of tight, shiny skin running vertically down the side of his neck, and he mutters, “Sorry, sir.”
“Oh, don't apologize. I'm not going to throttle you for telling me I've been promoted,” he says, dryly. Kirk does not seem assured by this. “Just a bit of a shock, as you put it.”
He can hear the brittleness creeping into his voice and his bones, now.
“I really am sorry.”
He's so earnest, so plaintive, that Pike can't resist regarding him with a hint of amusement. “Are you? Really? Sorry that they gave you this ship? Because if you are, you don't deserve it. And I doubt that.” He breathes out. “I owe you my life, and you're getting the Enterprise. Let's just call it even, shall we?”
Kirk doesn't answer.
He does lean forward and kiss him.
“Oh, fuck,” Pike says, or tries to say; the shape of the word is lost in skin on skin and Kirk's open, hungry mouth, sliding wet against Pike's.
For an instant, it's as much as he can manage not to tilt his head so and so, to let himself relax into the kiss, now when his body temperature isn't going to right itself fully for another day thanks to lingering chemicals and by contrast Kirk is feverish. Warmth radiates off his face, threading his swollen lips, his tongue. One hand is supporting the back of Pike's head, the other curving around Pike's jaw, and Kirk's palms are sweaty and steady and hot. All in all, it's hardly Pike's fault that the invective turns into an inarticulate noise deep in his throat, obscene on a whole different level.
He counts down from ten in his head, concentrating on the numbers for his sanity's sake, and then shoves. Gently, but the slight pressure's enough; Kirk slumps back, breathing heavily, his eyes wild.
“That,” Pike informs him, not removing his hands, not least because he can still see tension coiled in Kirk's posture, as if he were poised to pounce, “was pretty dumb."
“Yeah,” Kirk says. He swallows. Pike stares at a scab on the boy's cheek, the better to keep from staring at his bobbing Adam's apple. “I'm not very good at comforting people.”
A rather strained silence. “I can see that,” Pike said, finally.
“Punch them or kiss them, that's how I always did it in Iowa,” Kirk continues, clearly under the impression that he'll be able to bullshit his way through. “And I kind of thought you wouldn't want a broken nose added to the list.”
“I might break your nose,” Pike says, and lets go of Kirk's shirtfront with a sigh. “Don't think I can't or won't just because my legs are a little numb," he adds, when he sees Kirk's expression. "Do I need to tell you not to do it again?”
“Can't hurt,” Kirk says, and it's then that Pike becomes aware that he's not the only one who's staring, and that this probably isn't just an Iowan tradition.
And Kirk isn't the first to do this, either: the first in a few years, but plenty of cadets confuse a natural desire for a father figure with the sort of fixation that is more visceral, more lasting. It's an easy mistake to make. He of all people would know. (Eunice never has stopped mocking him about that dissertation.)
He used to be better at handling it. But not-Captain-for-much-longer Christopher Pike is too old for this shit.
“Don't do it again.”
“Sir,” Kirk says, his tone ostentatiously subdued. Pike eyes him sideways.
“Was that a yes, sir, Kirk?”
“Of course, sir.”
“Well... good,” Pike says, warily.
Kirk salutes, casual, not quite insubordinate, although under the circumstances insubordination is probably the least of Pike's worries where James Tiberius Kirk is concerned. And he makes as if to stand and leave – except he takes Pike's hand, before actually being so kind as to get out, and grips it, hard, a grip somewhere between shaking it like a brother in arms and holding it like... well, like something else entirely.
“Kirk --”
“Sorry!”
Then he's gone.
Such respite probably won't last. Pike frowns at the empty chair for a moment, and then, with a groan, settles himself down to sleep. He'll have to deal with Kirk. But it can wait till what, on this ship that is still his damn ship for a few more precious hours, counts as morning.
But as it works out, there's simply not enough time to say anything more to Kirk, let alone rebuke him and interrogate him and possibly even thank him, before landing, given all that they both have to do. And once the crew has spilled out onto solid ground, greeted by a solid wave of cheers, Pike finds that a number of bureacrats, more than he can really wrap his head around, are anxious to negotiate the immediate future with him. Understandable, since word is spreading and the media is going into ecstasies all over the Starfleet headquarters, not an easy thing to clean up after, but it leaves him exhausted, a weariness that doesn't quell the restive fidgeting he can't seem to help yet does dry out his aching head, does make him dream of running (running, by god) away.
He has no energy to deal with Kirk. So he doesn't, until suddenly it's the day of the ceremony and Kirk is standing in front of him, looking down, his face so confident he shines.
Pike suspects that the boy's slightly drunk on the brilliant spotlights, reflected dizzyingly by polished surfaces, and the audience's layered hush, and the words someone instructed him to say. Or – no, that's not right; doubtless Kirk has known the words for years. He says them now, and blunt as the statement is it becomes all charming arrogance in Kirk's mouth.
“I am relieved,” Pike replies, warmly as he can, not least because if anyone's going to get his ship it might as well be Kirk, who is after all his father's son. Even so, Kirk's crooked grin falters a little; it doesn't fade, no, but the corner curls sardonically, deepens, and it changes subtly into an expression that is perhaps a stone's throw away from being an apology in and of itself.
They shake hands, and Kirk doesn't let go for a beat too long. Of course.
*
Half an hour after the ceremony, Kirk follows him back to his glinting new office, dressed in civvies and wearing a ridiculously oversized coat. Not unexpected, but... well. And he slouches right into the chair opposite Pike's desk.
“Do sit down,” Pike says, because some things have to be said. “And... congratulations, Captain.”
“Told you I'd do it in three. Do I get a prize?” Kirk says cheerfully, both more and less composed than in the sickbay or before the Starfleet Command. He might have started out sitting but by now he is nearly horizontal, sprawled casually over the sunned leather, although an edge of shade slants across his side, halving him neatly.
“Yes,” Pike says, “I've edited out the worst of your attempted mutiny and related misdemeanors from the official record. Mostly because Commander Spock was gracious enough to request it.”
Kirk pouts. There is no other word for it, really. “That's all?”
“I might have some spare change in my --”
“You aren't buying me a drink?” Kirk says. Or rather, whines.
“I have to tell you that watching you get into a bar fight in memory of our first meeting doesn't strike me as the best use of my evening,” Pike says.
“Why, what're you doing?”
“Work,” says Pike, turning to the paperwork. Pointedly.
“What kind of work?” Kirk rotates and leans forward and rests his elbow on the paperwork. Pointedly. Then he glances at what he's covering up so handily, and there's a wince there, all right. “The Vulcan -” he starts, and stops.
“Yes,” Pike says, “just so. Now get off my desk.”
Kirk gets off his desk. “Okay, so, you're too busy to buy me a drink. Fine, fine. Can I buy you a drink?”
“How would that waste less of my time, again? Also, what happened to the prize idea?”
“I'm not picky about who gets the prize. I just feel like there should be a prize involved. Everyone's been so heroic," he says, sing-song and high, a bitter parody of some poor cadet, no doubt. "And I could bring it to you. Like room service.” He turns so that the shade that was bleeding up across his cheek slips off like an unzipped jacket, leaving his perfect profile fully illuminated, bright and cruel.
“No. What do you want, Kirk?”
Kirk clasps his hands in his lap and makes a concentrated, if obvious, effort to school his features into giving an impression of gravity. It doesn't work. “To buy you a drink. Sir,” he adds, prudently.
“Let me rephrase that. No. Also, why?”
“Because,” he says, raising his eyes, which are very blue in the late-afternoon light, “you might be kind of a bastard, but you don't deserve this. So! Alcohol.”
“That – ” Pike begins, and pauses. “That was a nice smooth transition from insulting me to encouraging licentious behavior, captain, well done,” he says, after some consideration. The sarcasm is forced, but still easier than the alternative. If there is an alternative. He's not really sure.
“I try,” Kirk says, the picture of modesty. “Was that a yes? I could get some bootleg Romulan ale – ”
“I don't think so,” Pike says, flatly.
He can remember the smell, acrid, burning and sweet. Miners drink a lot. Genocidal unhinged bastard miners turned madmen drink even more. The Narada was all oil and metal and strange, organic odors like rotting vegetable matter, little that was recognizable or human, but they made him drink the ale, and used it, always searching for a way in, they were -- and that was worse by far than the mere alien quality of surroundings, though he'd liked Romulan ale, or pretended to, when he was a cadet.
Kirk opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “I'm an idiot.”
“You've had better moments,” Pike said, mildly. “Captain Kirk --” he watches Kirk's hand clench, and ignores it “-- if you insist we can play catch-up in a few months when matters have... calmed, somewhat. Until then, I suggest we return to our respective newfound duties."
“Bullshit,” Kirk says, and then, quiet and quick, before Pike can reply: “Believe me when I say I don't want to talk to you any more than you want to talk to me. I want to stop feeling guilty, because feeling guilty sucks Klingon donkey balls.” Pike has to turn the harsh laugh this surprises out of him into a cough. Kirk's been spending too much time around veterans, it seems. “Getting you happily and idiotically intoxicated is the fastest way.”
“Your sensitivity's touching, Kirk, but you have nothing to be guilty about and, frankly, you'd be better off getting that through your skull than trying to make amends for imaginary offenses by spiking my punch.”
“I imagined taking your ship?” Kirk says, raising his eyebrows. “And then...” he made a vague gesture that was somehow, nevertheless, quite clear, “...assaulting you?”
Pike snorted at that. “You certainly imagined taking the ship. You had nothing to do with it – that was Starfleet's decision. As for kissing me, I let it slide on the condition that you never pull it again, remember? You were having an irrational moment in the aftermath of adrenaline. There. All better.” His voice is too tight but then the memory of Nero's stinking breath is making him edgy.
“I was being an asshole, sir.”
“Language, Kirk. And harassing me when I have made my point several times is not in any way being an asshole?”
“Hypocrisy, sir?”
“They teach it in Negotiation 101. A class you skipped, I note. Answer the question.”
“Was that a yes?”
Pike covers his eyes with one unfamiliarly thin hand. “No, it wasn't. Out of my office, Kirk.”
“Sir.”
“That had better have been an implied ye --”
“It wasn't, sir.”
“I just gave you an order, Captain.”
Kirk unbuttons his coat. “Yeah, and I'd follow it right now only I actually already purchased some high-quality booze, and it'd be a shame to waste it. Bought it from your Mr. Chekov, even. Well, bought probably isn't the right word. It's not Romulan ale, I can tell you that much. Strictly Earth-made.”
“Good, you can drink it out in the hall without getting arrested. Have fun. Out.”
Kirk finishes unbuttoning his coat and produces a bottle, long-necked, square, glinting prettily, its contents prettier. Clear vodka, more crystalline than water. It casts odd, parabolic, dancing shadows on the floorboards. Kirk unscrews the top and knocks back a mouthful, wiping the wet line it leaves off his full lower lip with the back of his hand. “You're really stubborn, you know that?”
Pike debates, for a thirty seconds, between making good on his promise to break Kirk's nose and ignoring him. Or, perhaps, he can slowly talk him to death about everything Kirk did wrong during his brief but soon to be extended command of the Enterprise. On the other hand, Pike's throat is already sore.
“This is okay too, you know,” Kirk says. “If I drink enough fast enough while you... work... that means I don't have to be guilty. And that's fine. Only then I have to do it again and again and again. Your fault.”
“I'm happy for you. Do you have to be occupying my field of vision while satisfying addiction and consoling yourself?”
“Okay, okay,” Kirk says, lifting his hands, already shaking. “The hallway it is.” He rises, gathering his coat around him and slinking on his long goddamn working legs out through the still-open door, which he slams shut behind him.
Pike picks up his unfamiliar pen with his unfamiliarly thin fingers that don't have a true penpusher's calluses – yet --, and resumes as if nothing happened at all.
He spends the next three hours reading about the deaths, and the socio-economic-fucking ramifications, and all that will need to be done before the Federation can even begin to count its loss as healing. He reads and he reads and he writes, in precise script, and draws, with a draftsman's hand, where necessary, and then he reads the descriptions over and over and over until all he can think about is the cracks webbed across that red desert while he was hovering a safe distance away, coming up with plan after plan and choosing one that didn't work.
How many chains of thought does it take to spin upwards from the land and souls swallowed, upwards and outside that dying atmosphere to the dying fleet, caught like fish in a barrel?
(He can name them all, the dead of those ships that burned away like leaves, disappearing, ash on water or wind).
Three hours.
Sometimes the excuse of someone else's temptation is a godsend.
He puts the pen down, and wheels – floats, whatever – outside. Kirk is leaning against the wall just by the entrance, probably because he can't stand upright, and his curling pose, his half-lidded eyes, his trembling knees, all make him look dreamy, childish, lost to the pleasures of misery. But the grin he gives Pike is hard and dreamless.
“So is this a yes?” he says, offering what looks like his third bottle.
“Looks like,” Pike says, and takes it.
They brood – or rather sulk – side-by-side in his gloomy office and pass a glass back and forth, and blessed silence reigns until, halfway down, Kirk metamorphoses into a talkative drunk.
That's when everything that's left to go wrong goes wrong, really.
He's manic and barely distinguishable from his sober self except that his sober self is nothing like so inclined towards the rough, ludicrous gesticulations that punctuate his tripping speech. “What do I do with you?” he says, leaning dangerously far over the arm of the couch he's curled into to squint at Pike. “That's the thing. I don't know. You're the captain.”
“Was your captain,” Pike corrects, absently.
Kirk rejects this, a development that is so shockingly shocking that the shock is palpable, as is the headache that is wobbling into place. This is not going to help him relax and preferably black out, so much he can tell. “You're the captain,” he says, prodding Pike in the chest. “How do I treat you? If I liked you better, if I knew you, I could slap you on the back and shit, but we're not friends, are we, sir?”
“Stop talking, Kirk,” Pike says, with feeling. The vodka is lukewarm and bitter.
“Thought you were the one who wanted to talk.”
“When did I say that?”
“You know. In the sickbay.”
“Oh, for – can you stop bringing that up? I have enough to actively avoid remembering without adding that to the list, and there's not that much –” he tapped the side of the half full (empty? whatever) bottle “– left.”
“Should have brought me back in earlier then, shouldn't you've,” Kirk says, flopping back.
“Shouldn't've brought you in at all, Kirk,” he says, taking a black satisfaction from that knowledge, that he is being an idiot and that this is probably the healthiest thing he's done in a week, this self-destructive choice. The psychiatrist will be so pleased.
“You can't have it both ways.”
“No,” Pike agrees. “That would be your fault.”
“Everything's my fault. I don't know how to make you better, sir.”
“Losing your faith in the curative –“ he barely stumbles over the word “– powers of booze?”
“I was banking on you not being a maudlin drunk,” Kirk says. “Can't you stop thinking, sir?”
“Morose. Not maudlin.”
“Exactly.”
“And from the evidence I'd say that I haven't been thinking for some time now,” he says, as dryly as he can manage through wet teeth and wet lips that stick a little at the corners when he talks, through the seductive edge of a watery, metallic taste against his palate. “I mean, I did recommend your promotion, did I? Not thinking.”
“Yes you are. You're also way too sober.”
“You keep telling me.” Pike says, and tilts the bottle up.
So far he's restrained himself to a swallow at a time, but now he shifts the weight onto his elbow lest Kirk see his wrist tremble, the cords of muscle standing out under the skin, and he doesn't stop drinking until he thinks he might drown, too much vodka hitting the back of his throat too soon for him to force it down. He comes up for air a little too late and coughs, the sound wet and unpleasant as his insides, as the Narada in memory. He presses his mouth to his sleeve and when he lowers his arm there's a dark stain in the crook of his elbow that might be a little blood mixed in with spit and vodka.
There's, oh, call it half an inch of clouded liquid left, bright with the borrowed glow of the computer monitor he hasn't even bothered to turn off, one pale quadrangle thrown onto the floor, overlapped by slanting shadows that make a cool-toned palette melting from blue to black and back. The refraction is very soothing, viewed from a sideways angle (e.g., the one Pike's neck is bent at).
He replays that thought and considers that the alcohol is kicking in, all right.
Kirk's jaws close with a melodramatic click, bringing Pike's attention to the fact that he was gaping slightly in the first place. “Damn,” he says, after a pause. Pike is vaguely gratified to hear the unabashed fourteen-year-old-boy awe in his voice. He's less gratified by the fact that the room is starting to spin.
“Mission accomplished,” he says, slowly so's not to slur. “You should go home now, Kirk.”
“Are you going to be all right?” Kirk says, the respect draining away to be replaced by a weird anxiety that creases his high forehead and turns his skeptic's countenance into an earnest one, and fuck, but he looks like his father.
Pike blinks, pinches the bridge of his nose. “You need to learn timing. Now you ask if I'm going to be all right?”
“Well... I didn't expect it to work this quickly,” Kirk says, ruefully. He stands up, not even swaying.
“It didn't work,” Pike mutters, and goes on before Kirk can react: “I was planning to sleep at my desk anyway.”
“Right,” Kirk says, rolling his eyes. “I'm pretty sure your doctors would pitch a fit if you did. C'mon, it's not like they didn't give you an entire apartment in the building, or whatever, while you were recuperating.“
“Why are you not as drunk as me?” Pike says, ignoring the sanity because any sanity that comes from Kirk is suspect. Plus, it's a question that's been nagging him for thirty seconds now, an eternity in his brand new fucked-up perception with its languid nightmares, visible in the corner of his eye.
“Years of practice? Plus I ate something at the ceremony, and I'm going to guess you didn't.”
“The buffet was pretty awful.”
He's smiling warily now, like a man reeling in a fish, and that, too, is a look Pike's seen before.“Yeah, but there were these little balls of cheese on sticks and crackers that weren't too bad – “
“Kirk?” Pike interrupts, staring up.
(The wrong bone structure: too fine-boned, and the mouth too full, and hair too fair even with the color bleached by this artificial dusk. But the eyes, and the expression – he needs to stop thinking about this. George Kirk was nothing more than a schoolboy obsession. He is about as far from a schoolboy as it is possible to get, really. And yet he's not sure he can stop thinking about this. It's so much sweeter than thinking about what, indeed, the vodka hasn't chased away from the inside of his eyelids.)
“Yeah?”
“You should go. Now.”
“But,” Kirk begins.
“Now,” he says, desperately but also not, because there's a large part of him that no longer wants to convince Kirk to go at all.
“You're still not even kind of okay, huh,” Kirk says. He crouches forward as if trying to learn his face, once again serious and concerned, an emotion that seems grafted on, like a child imitating his parents (fuck fuck fuck fuck). And it occurs to Pike that he's never seen Kirk look this little like the delinquent genius he is.
“Not even kind of,” he echoes, and pulls Kirk towards him with two hands, and kisses Kirk. He doesn't use any of his experience, his ill-gotten skills, he just holds Kirk there, mouth pressed against his, Kirk's elbows propped on the armrests and Kirk's knees digging into his shins as he hunches inwards. He exhales through his nose, sullen breath sealing the distance, and they stare at each other over their locked-together mouths. Kirk's pupils are dilated and there is panic there, and triumph, too. The panic, at least, Pike considers to be his just deserts. The triumph is bloody annoying.
He wonders if this is what Nero felt like, and lets go, recoils from the idea of keeping Kirk still. But he also doesn't draw back. and Kirk has moved, too, not away but in, pressing the heel of his palm against the soft junction between Pike's jaw and his neck, an intimate, familiar pressure. When he does surface for air he's grinning an irritating grin. But the urge to lunge doesn't flee with the erstwhile expression.
“Guess I should have just gone with my first instinct after all, hmm?” he hums, brushing his lips up across Pike's cheekbone.
“I –“ Pike tries. Kirk slides down and licks the hollow at the base of Pike's neck, and Pike's sure he was going to say something intelligent that would put an end to this folly but it seeps through the freshly damp skin on his larynx and he... forgets.
Zippers get undone with remarkable speed. His undershirt hikes up and then there are fingertips running across his bandaged ribs, lightly, and Kirk's tongue following the line of short fine hair over his flat stomach, down down down.
“You,” he manages to say in defiance of Kirk's sticky, trailing kisses, “don't have to – I was being stupid, the vodka, oh god.”
“Is that a yes?” He doesn't hear it so much as feel it.
“Yes,” Pike says, quietly. Kirk works his close-fitting trousers down over his hips, dragging him forward in the process, and spreads his thighs in one disturbingly practiced push. Pike tucks his shoulders in until he's curved over Kirk's head, like some kind of twisted mother hen, and doesn't flinch or honestly hesitate as he threads his hands through Kirk's short, spiky hair, as Kirk hooks his chin over the edge of the seat and blows him. No frills added, haha, just his moving mouth, hot and slick and impossibly slow; that and his hands, touching the inside of his thigh, the underside of his knee, the small of his back, like muffled electricity on sensitive skin.
He comes with a choked moan, just loud enough to be embarrassing when Kirk winks and crawls over to spit into the wastebasket. Then he drinks the rest of the vodka, while Pike dresses, too warm and empty to let himself begin cataloguing the private principles fractured, the laws bent almost unrecognizably out of shape, willing to stretch and contemplate the problem of zippers, existence thereof, while the minutes swell and burst in the awkward but slightly less miserable silence.
Except then Kirk drapes himself across the back of the chair and continues kissing along the side of Pike's face, along the trace of stubble, like someone with no comprehension of the essential nature of illicit, drunken five-minute stands.
“See, it's fun for everyone,” Kirk mumbles. “How'd I do, sir?”
“You did just fine, Kirk,” Pike says, wryly, because he can afford that now. “You've done something for me, all right, thanks very much for that. I might even sleep tonight. And. I can still name every man and woman I knew who died in Vulcan's outer reaches.”
Kirk tenses against his shoulder, and it's not like he's not a queer mix of sympathetic and appreciative, but he's amused, too, and conscious that the grief is waiting, is there in the ragged edge of his voice.
“And I still did sell billions of lives for my own comfort. So where does that leave me? Where does that leave you?”
“Less guilty,” Kirk says, decisively.
Pike laughs for too long, a raw, exhausted laugh, and runs a hand through his hair. “Bully for you, then. Please tell me you're going, now.”
Kirk hauls himself off Pike's numb side and says, “Yep. But I am sorry, sir.”
“So you've said. Repeatedly.”
“And you owe me a drink, sir.”
“Kirk?”
“Yeah?”
“Out.”
“Yessir,” Kirk says, cheerfully, and he's gone.
re: Cold Comfort
Date: 2009-06-03 09:59 pm (UTC)Re: Cold Comfort
Date: 2009-06-03 10:04 pm (UTC)(Also, if I do write a sequel to this (which is pretty, how do you say, fucking inevitable) there will be a lot riffing on the theme of broken noses. Trufax.)