Fic: The Token

[fringedwellerfic]

Title: The Token
Author: fringedwellerfic
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: Not my characters, not making any money off this.
Summary: Jim likes to give presents, but just can't find the right one for Bones.
Author's Note: Based on The Token by John Donne, this is the sixth in a series charting the progression of the Kirk/McCoy relationship through the poetry of Donne. Follows The Flea
Warnings: None, unless like me you suffer from hay fever. In which case,there is pollen.




Send me some token, that my hope may live,
Or that my easeless thoughts may sleep and rest;
Send me some honey to make sweet my hive,
That in my passions I may hope the best.
I beg no riband wrought with thine own hands,
To knit our loves in the fantastic strain
Of new-touched youth; nor ring to show the strands
Of our affection, that as that’s round and plain,
So should our loves meet in simplicity;
No, nor the corals which thy wrist enfold,
Laced up together in congruity,
To show our thoughts should rest in the same hold;
No, nor thy picture, though most gracious,
And most desired, because best like the best;
Nor witty lines, which are the most copious,
Within the writings which thou has addressed.
Send me nor this, nor that, to increase my store,
But swear thou think’st I love thee, and no more.



It’s not a fact that Jim Kirk likes to advertise, but he likes to give people presents. His psychologist at the Academy said it was driven from a childhood spent suffering from conditional love: be good, and maybe Mom will come back planet side for leave this year; be nice, maybe Ted won’t come home drunk tonight; be a big boy, maybe your brother won’t leave you alone and unprotected in a house of pain.

That’s just so much bullshit. He likes making people happy. What’s wrong with that? Lord knows, it’s easy enough. Sex was an easy way of doing it, and it’s not like he didn’t get something from it too. A quick fumble in a storeroom, a lazy afternoon stretched out on a hotel bed, it was the same end result. Smiles all round, and a bounce in his step. Despite Bones muttering under his breath about satyrism, Jim had gone through his Academy days just fine, spreading the joy in his own way.

Then came that glorious day when Bones had finally seen the light, thanks to slightly too much alcohol and an Orion philosophy lesson. The pheromone overload hadn’t hurt, either. Jim knew he wasn’t going to be stupid enough to ruin something that he’d been waiting so long for, but it seems that Bones wasn’t so sure. It had all kicked off after a “thank-the-deity-of-your-choosing-exams-are-over” party, where Jim thought in retrospect, it was possible that he was standing slightly too close to the Arensen twins, both known to be as brilliant in bed as they were in the Engineering labs. Bones had dragged him from the room, thrown him onto their bed (cobbled together from two singles, its structural integrity dubious), ripped off his clothes, pinned his arms and straddled his thighs. This was in no way a bad thing.

Bones made it crystal clear that night and long into the morning, in between sucking deep marks onto his skin, bending him into positions that even he had never tried before and riding him harder and more thoroughly than any other lover had, that Jim belonged to him. No more flirting, no more fucking with anyone other than Bones. Jim, lost in a blissful haze, agreed happily. If Bones was able to keep that level of intensity in the bedroom, then he doubted he’d be able to talk coherently again, let alone flirt.

Then the bed broke in half, Bones’ vigour finally pushing it past its limits. When the laughing had stopped, and the useless pieces fed into the recycling unit, Jim had splurged on a king sized bed. Two fully grown men could not be comfortable in a standard double, he had argued, and this way when Bones turned over and stole the covers there might actually be some left for him. Bones had rolled his eyes, but agreed. The bed had followed Kirk to his quarters on the Enterprise, where nobody asked why the captain would need such a large bed for only one person who was absolutely definitely not sleeping with anybody from his crew on a nightly basis.

Jim loves his crew. He gives them as many presents as he can, without being obvious. Scotty’s friend Keenser had found himself transferred to the Enterprise after Kirk noticed how down the normally cheerful Chief Engineer was after being recruited from Delta Vega. Somehow, Lieutenant Uhura had quarters on a deck reserved for senior officers of the ship despite being fresh out of the Academy. In fact, they were next door to those of the First Officer. Sulu and Chekov always pulled the same duty shifts, and always managed to get on the same shore leave rotation as each other.

Shore leave under Captain Kirk was always for everybody, and always on an actual planet, with weather and scenery, instead of a soulless Starbase. Granted, perhaps they should have scanned the surface of Colkbas VII a little more thoroughly that they did, and then the first landing party wouldn’t have had so many problems with the sentient fauna; and that business with the Mer-People of Aqualis wanting to kidnap Chekov and keep him as a pet was a bit unfortunate, but for the most part the crew enjoyed getting off the ship even though Chekov kept a wary distance from open bodies of water for a long time.

Kirk was able to make everybody happy, it seems, but it always bugged him that he couldn’t do anything for Bones. The most important person on his ship, in his life, and he had no way of showing him it. Whenever he tried, it just seemed to go wrong.

Take the ribbons, for instance. The Enterprise had actually lived up to its remit of discovering new worlds and new civilisations, and had come across a society that had just mastered warp technology. As emissaries from the United Federation of Planets, they had beamed down to Crohid to meet with the planet’s leaders and take part in the many and varied friendship and trust ceremonies. Now granted, he probably should have listened more carefully to his briefing from the Cultural Sciences Officer, Lieutenant Darrow. She was a fine officer, great at her job, and responsible for keeping them from making mistakes when dealing with non-Federation representatives. It’s just that Cultural Sciences had always made Jim want to pluck his nose hairs out one by one out of sheer boredom, and he had spent all his mandatory lectures boning up on the Kobayashi Maru test. So, when it came time for the briefings, Jim wasn’t always fully focused. It was a bad habit.

That’s why, on arriving at the centre of government on Crohid, he was somewhat taken aback to be handed a pile of colourful, silky ribbons by a beaming Crohid official. His first thought was that he didn’t have enough room in his quarters for more cultural crap, and his second thought was he could give them to Bones to send to Joanna, who was bound to enjoy them. Isn’t that what little girls liked? Ribbons, and hair slides, and things like that? He thanked the official profusely, and turned and put them into Bones’ unresisting hands. The look of horror on the face of Lieutenant Darrow, and the glint of fear followed by anger in Bones’ confused him. Thirteen hours later, the Crohid wedding party ended and the Enterprise officers were allowed back to their ship. The leering look the Crohid leader had given Jim as he wished him a pleasurable evening made Jim slightly queasy; Bones, wrapped in the ribbons and nothing else shot him a glare of pure ice. Jim spent a long time apologising for that one; despite regulations declaring all joining ceremonies involving Starfleet officers on non-Federation planets null and void if they were accidentally undertaken, Bones was angry about Jim’s lack of attention on the briefing notes, and his lack of clothes while undergoing the joining ceremony.

“I have no idea what part my naked ass has in establishing inter-species diplomacy,” he had yelled in the relative privacy of Jim’s quarters, “but damnit Jim, the next time you beam me down to some fucking backwater craphole, you better be damned sure you know what the fuck you’re doing!” He dressed in his spare clothes, marched out of the room and didn’t return for a week.

Jim made sure to pay very careful attention to the briefings after that.

Some months later, when things had returned to what passed for normality in their lives and people could enter sickbay without the threat of hyposprays put where they clearly were not designed to go, Jim had been searching for a birthday present for McCoy. They were docked at a Starbase that was a hub for trade among the local star systems, and he was hoping he could find something suitably special. The promenade of the station was crammed with shops and market stalls, selling everything from bolts of cloth to antique weaponry, cute little pets to aromatic spices. He browsed through an antique shop, but nothing caught his eye. There were several bottles of distinctly illegal-looking alcohol trading hands, but Bones didn’t need anything but his beloved bourbon, and even that sat undrunk for weeks on end. “I’m a doctor, not an alcoholic,” Bones had grumbled when his last birthday saw several friends go for the easy option and buy him a bottle. There were still three unopened ones stashed in his room.

It wasn’t until he had reached the far end of the promenade that he saw the jewellery shop. He almost didn’t go in; after all, Bones didn’t wear any jewellery except for his graduation ring on his little finger. Still, he was bored, and he had searched every other damn shop in the station. He went in and browsed around, and was caught by a row of chronometers. They were modern, made of a high-grade polished latinum alloy and had every possible setting a person could wish for, but they were designed to resemble old fashioned pocket watches. It seemed perfect; Bones loved old things, he collected books, real books with paper and ink, a fact that always amused Jim who saw no reason to clutter up his quarters with things that could just as easily be displayed on a PADD. He’d love the watch, a mixture of old and new. It was just as the vendor was fussily laying the watch in a box and bagging it up that Jim saw the rings laying on a display case. There were two of them, matching in size and weight. They too were in latinum, but were not carved, twisted or jewel-bedecked, as the current fashion went. They were just plain and simple circles, discreet and unpretentious. They were simple, but solid, with a pleasant weight to them. Kirk slipped one on his finger, and felt the metal expand and contract as it shifted to fit him properly. The slight weight was unfamiliar, but not threatening. It wasn’t until the vendor cleared his throat for the second time, gift bag in hand, that Jim realised that he had been standing silently staring down at his hand.

Jim left the shop with the two rings in a separate box, one that he stowed away at the back of his underwear drawer and didn’t mention to Bones. In the days leading up to Bones’ birthday he would take the box out of the drawer, stare at it unopened and put it away again.

He gave the watch to Bones for his birthday.

The next time Jim gave Bones a present, they were stoned. Not their fault, not anybody’s fault. Who knew that the pollen of the indigenous flora on the planet they were surveying for possible terraforming would have such an intoxicating effect?

Jim lead the mission, because they hadn’t done anything but fly through sterile, unoccupied space for three weeks and he was bored. Spock went because he was Science Officer and was there to oversee the teams that would do the actual work. Bones went along because he knew that Jim would probably cause some kind of havoc, and somebody had to patch up the wounded. There were twenty five other crew members from assorted science departments milling about in the corridor outside the transporter room when they arrived, so Jim had opened up the mission to anyone that wanted to come on the basis of the more the merrier, although that wasn’t his phrasing in his official report to Starfleet headquarters. Uhura, Sulu and Chekov had all jumped at the chance to do something other than stare at their consoles for a few hours. Scotty refused, on the grounds that the planet had no technology or machinery, so therefore was of no interest when there were miles of Jefferies tubes he could make Keenser crawl through.

When the trippy pollen eventually hit the Enterprise crew, there were a lot of reactions to it. Some people lay on their backs and just stared up at the clouds, fascinated by whatever they saw, their thoughts slow and jumbled. Some had laughing fits, and sat hunched over, weeping with the force of their hysteria. Some got amorous, and disappeared off in pairs and small groups. Even Spock succumbed, and was to be found plaiting some of the flowers into a giggling Uhura’s hair, who in turn was making him a coronet of the same flowers. They then skipped around the field where they beamed down, hand in hand. Later investigations into exactly who posted video of them onto the ship’s internal communication system failed to find a culprit, although footage appeared at crew parties for years afterwards. Ones that Uhura was not present for, anyway.

Jim and Bones had fallen victim to the cloud-staring lethargy. They laid side by side, fingers brushing and curling against each other for what seemed like hours to Jim’s befuddled mind, watching the slow drift of the lilac clouds across the peppermint sky. Bones was still entranced when Jim started to pull at the long, thin leaves of some of the nearby plants. Laboriously, as the pollen made his movements clumsy, he began to twist the leaves together, the red over the blue over the green. Eventually he managed to form one long strip, which he placed over McCoy’s wrist and tied off.

“There!” he said, pleased with his efforts. “S’pretty, Bones! For you!”

Bones turned to look at him, puzzled, and eventually lifted his arm so he could peer at the bracelet on his wrist. He cocked his head, and drawled,

“What is it?”

Jim shook his head in irritation. Stupid Bones. Wasn’t it obvious?

“It’s a friendship bracelet! For you! Because we’re friends!

McCoy’s face softened into a smile, and he rubbed the leaves gently. He rolled over onto Jim to give him what had to be the sloppiest kiss Jim had ever been given. They lay together, rubbing the leaves gently and trading sloppy kisses when McCoy began to look pale, and started to sweat.

“Jim,” he croaked. “I may throw up on you.” Before Jim‘s drug addled brain could react, McCoy was horribly sick, throwing up for what seemed to Jim a very long time. Then Jim passed out, and he couldn’t remember anything until he woke up in Sickbay a day later.

Jim had to rely on official reports to discover exactly what happened on the planet. He could remember beaming down, and looking at the clouds, and making the bracelet and then not much else. It turned out that the leaves he wrapped around McCoy’s wrist had an emetic effect, released through prolonged contact with the skin. As soon as he had been sick and purged the pollen, McCoy’s wits had returned and he was able to contact the Enterprise to get an isolation ward set up and medical staff to beam down supplies to help the affected away team. They had spent hours rounding up errant crew members who had wandered away, and purging their systems. The planet had a big red “danger” sign stamped on it on the Federation database by the crew of the Enterprise, and they warped away, anxious to leave the planet and all the embarrassing memories behind them.

Jim didn’t have to ask what McCoy did with his friendship bracelet. He discovered it in the recycling unit in Bones’ office after he escaped from the isolation ward he was being kept in. He handled it regretfully, thinking about how his presents to Bones always ended up being useless until he remembered too late the effects of the leaves and vomited spectacularly all over the floor. He didn’t put up a fight as an angry Bones led him back to the iso ward and knocked him out with a hypospray. He figured he kind of deserved it.

The next gift Jim gave Bones wasn’t really from him. The Enterprise had celebrated its first wedding – its first consensual wedding – and Jim had proudly completed his first marriage service. He decided it was one of the best perks of being a Starship captain, as the bride and groom looked so happy. It was a great gift to give them. At the reception afterwards, Jim and Bones sat comfortably together in a booth in the officer’s lounge away from the main crowd of people, champagne glasses and plates of half-eaten cake littering their table. Both men were in their dress uniform, although both had loosened the tight collar of their tunics. They didn’t notice the amateur photographer from Stellar Cartography that had been taking pictures of the service and the reception snap a few candid pictures of the captain and CMO laughing and sharing a few quiet moments.

A week later Jim was approached nervously by that ensign as he sat eating breakfast in the mess. He did have a private dining room, but he preferred to actually be visible to the vast majority of the crew that didn’t make it onto the bridge in the day to day completion of their duties. He was just debating whether or not asking for another order of the pancakes he had just demolished would be seen as a praise of his mess staff or just plain greedy when the ensign coughed to signal her presence.

“Excuse me, sir? Am I interrupting you?”

“No, Ensign, I was just finished,” said Jim, kissing goodbye to the pancakes. He flashed her a brilliant grin and said, “Sit down. What can I do for you?”

Grateful for the seat because her knees were starting to go weak, the ensign pulled some photographs from a pouch she was carrying.

“I was talking the pictures for the wedding last week, sir. Lieutenant Valdez wanted a hardcopy of the pictures, for an album, as well as the usual digital ones. I thought,” here she stumbled over her words and blushed slightly, “I thought you may like this. It’s a spare.” She slid a picture of Bones and himself across the table. They hadn’t even seen her, he mused, looking at the warm smile lighting up Bones’ face, the look of adoration clearly present on his own. He had some pictures of the two of them together, but none that had caught them like this, their love so open and obvious on their faces.

He looked at the woman sitting opposite him, clearly worried that she had done the wrong thing.

“Thank you, Ensign. It’s a wonderful picture,” he smiled at her again, and she smiled back in relief. “I’m going to have to ask you to photograph all the functions the Enterprise holds, if your work is as good as this.”

Her mild blush took a more pronounced turn for the tomato, and she stammered out a thank you. He dismissed her gently, and she left him alone to study the picture again. He kept it hidden in the underwear drawer, next to the unopened ring box, until he could replicate a frame for it. He presented it to Bones a few weeks later, on their anniversary. He had written a small message on the back of the paper, hidden by the frame. Bones didn’t take the frame apart like he thought he would though; simply kissed him deeply and presented him with his gift. The frame disappeared from Jim’s quarters with Bones early the next morning. Jim didn’t see it in Bones’ rooms the next time he was there. He was quietly disappointed; maybe Bones just didn’t see the picture the way he did.

It wasn’t until weeks later, after another Away Mission gone awry and Bones was patching him up yet again in the privacy of his office, that Jim caught sight of the picture. It was sitting on a shelf next to one of a little girl with familiar eyes and a crooked smile. It was discreetly positioned, and next to another group shot of cadets from the Academy, but it was there. For a man so concerned with appearances on the ship, for plausible deniability and sneaking around in the depths of delta shift, it was a shocking admission of love. Jim stared at in silence as Bones cursed at him loudly and stuck him with hypospray after hypospray.

“Are you even listening to me, you thick headed chimpanzee? Did the mountain you fell off deafen you on the way down?” Bones narrowed his eyes and ran his tricorder over the top of Kirk’s head, just to check.

“You put my picture up Bones,” Jim said dazedly, a big grin on his face. “I got you a present that you like!”

Bones’ scowl softened. “Of course I like your presents, dumb ass. I like everything you give me. Now hold still, this will sting.”

Even the dermal regenerator knitting his ripped flesh together couldn’t stop Jim from smiling.

“I love you, Bones. I really do. I’m sorry I keep hurting myself. I try not to, honestly, but even when I do, I know that you’ll put me back together again. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”

The stinging stopped as the buzz from the regenerator did. Before Jim could flex his arm to test out the new skin’s elasticity Bones had grabbed him and plundered his mouth. All Jim could do was hang on to Bones’ broad shoulders and try not to drown in the waves of lust rolling over him. Bones eventually broke the kiss, panting for air, but kept his forehead touching Jim’s. He spoke so quietly that Jim could barely hear him.

“That was the best present you could ever give me, Jim. Just keep telling me you love me, and I’ll be a happy man.”

It’s not a fact he likes to advertise, but Jim Kirk loves to give presents, and this was one he had no problem in arranging.