singularity | fic: the other test he failed, nc-17, lady!pike/kirk

Title: The Other Test He Failed
Author:

possibly_thrice
Rating: NC-17. But not really in a fun way, because I'm lame like that.
Pairing: lady!Pike/Kirk. And Kirk/Kirk's hand. Again. D:
Summary: The bar scene, rewritten for lady!Pike's sake. Sort of answering a prompt at

st_xi_kink , which will probably be the death of me: "Kirk/lady!Pike or McCoy/lady!Pike, or, hell, Kirk/McCoy/lady!Pike (cuz you know Pike ain't no little girl - she's a ~sexy lady~.) Have Captain/Admiral Christina Pike be as much of a BAMF as the Christopher version. I imagine her looking something like Julie Christie: http://www.superiorpics.com/news/pic/julie_christie_001_050408.jpg"
A/N: Basically written because they are clearly VERY GOOD AT CASTING. Mm, yes. It was going to be a drabble-ode to her pretty but then I... felt bad and extended it into a longer ode to her pretty? IDK IDK. Questionable purpose, questionable characterization, questionably porny porn. Good times for all. Basically I'm just decompressing. Everyone does it! Right?

Jim is in pain, kind of a lot of it. But it takes him three seconds flat to observe two things about the officer who walks in on his abject humiliation, (which incidentally involves way more splinters than he would ever have expected, fucking antique fucking tables) who whistles like a knife, who apparently has a barful of cadets in a state of permanent twitchy obedience. The first one is that she's extremely good-looking. She's probably pushing forty and there are unforgiving lines etched with a fine pen into her square, beautiful face, but Christ, between the way her full creased mouth curves around two fingers and the memory of Uhura's profile, slim and straight, is enough to make him wonder whether Starfleet has aesthetic fucking standards, or something.

Then he remembers Cupcake, and decides no, probably not.

"You whistle really loud, you know that?" he says. It's not a pick-up line, because here's the other thing about her, the important second: the way she stares at him, measuring, her gray eyes bright and blank, is the scariest thing he's seen all day. And her expression -- like she bit into a lemon and broke a tooth on a gold brick lodged inside and isn't sure whether to throw a party or kidnap a dentist. Like he's a rare butterfly. It makes him want to punch her, to break her tired, fascinated face, makes his aching hands clench, which at least makes a nice change from the shaking that pervades the bruised fine bones of his wrists, the small unidentifiable muscles running up and down his forearms. Because Jim isn't stupid, and he can guess what she thinks she's found.

The woman half-grins, kindly enough, amused. Concerned for him, or for what she sees in him. She says something. It doesn't quite process, but it sounds vaguely parental. Jim tries to get up on his elbows, with half a mind to walk out, since polishing his knuckles on Starfleet brass is an even crappier idea than polishing his smile on trainee Starfleet brass turned out to be and if he stays he can't make any guarantees. It sort of works, in the sense that he leaves the table. All of him. Rather suddenly. He hits the floor still rolling.

"Fuck," he mumbles, and can't quite muster the intelligent thought necessary to be grateful when she strides forward and hauls him up, fingers long and strong and not exactly gentle on his barely located shoulders. Jim maybe blacks out a little and the next thing he knows he's slumped into a less than comfortable chair with a wad of tissue paper stuffed into his open palm, and she's talking quietly to the bartender, her voice low and rough and triumphant. He does his best to plug up his nose with the tissue, dignity aside, because seriously, no one needs that much blood dripping out of their nostrils, burning their upper lip, and he does his best not to hear. His best isn't worth shit. (“Who's he?” “Jim Kirk.” “Kirk?” “Yes.” “I see.”) The words are so clipped, so even, so military, and yet the excitement threads each syllable.

When she finishes up he orders another beer and notes that she winces, delicately, although there's not a lot delicate about her. She pulls up another chair and sits down.

“Hi,” he drawls.

“I couldn't believe it when the bartender told me who you were,” she lies, without preamble. Jim can tell that she's trying to make her body language light, jokey, informal: leaned back, legs crossed, hips slouched under an unbuttoned coat. She runs a hand through her cropped brown hair, looks down, as if she's not paying attention to everything he does, as if she's remembering less suspicious days, old friends. The thin spiking shadows of her short lashes fan out gorgeously across her cheekbones.

She's really bad at it, too.

He laughs, raw-throated. “If you say so. Who are you and what do you want?”

“Captain Christian Pike,” she says. And: “I did my dissertation on the U.S.S. Kelvin.”

He doesn't tense a muscle. Pike looks him in the eye then, switching to 'straight and honest' with a suggestive flick of her wrist.

She talks for five minutes solid about Starfleet, the Federation, his father, his potential, his test scores. Destiny. He's become a one-man peanut gallery through careful honing of a certain natural talent, but it's incredibly hard to get a word in edgewise, which is pretty frustrating given that this might as well be the scenario they coined the term 'target-rich' for. There's room for a few one-liners when she breathes between each impossibly eloquent not quite canned spiel, and that's it. The rest of the time he settles for smiling a winning smile through the drying blood and shuttering his face.

The frustration, such as it is, slides in, inevitably, and it's then, as her pitch stretches to fit the slight slow anger and the lines framing her nose deepen and her nostrils flare, he realizes that she reminds him of his mother. God, he knows he has trouble with authority, but this -- this woman acting like Winona might have, if she hadn't actually had a fucking life, unlike Captain Christian Pike --

“We done?” he says, flatly.

Pike's been calculating all this time, so blunt it's breathtaking, so she reads the look Jim gives her now and says, “I'm done.” Jim registers the lie: she stands, but continues, “Riverside shipyard. 0800 tomorrow.” And without transition: “You know, your father was captain of a starship for 12 minutes. He saved 800 lives, including your mother’s. And yours.”

He sets the cold glass aside and lays a hand on the saltshaker shaped like a starship. They gaze at each other.

“I dare you to do better,” she says.

For an instant, he wonders if he's gone blind, the fury bubbling up from under his eyelids. He gets up, moves towards her, vision crowded and shaking, streaked with pain. She looks at him hard, and when he lunges she catches his hand with hers, fingers around his forming fist. When he lunges a second time she catches his mouth with hers, lips around a slip of tongue, before curling away and stepping matter-of-factly out through the door and into the street. She's wiping her face with the back of her hand, and the surprise is writ there, but not writ large. A part of her was expecting it. Which is fair enough; a part of him was expecting it, too.

Jim follows. It's as easy as dancing to follow, down the sidewalk. And he tugs her into the alley, holding on as gingerly as possible to her shirtfront. She stumbles, glares; he doesn't. He's done this before and he'll do this again because, after all, it's not like he's going to be following Starfleet regulations any time soon, now, is it?

Although apparently Starfleet regulations are laxer than he thought, at least for senior officers, because Pike presses him up against the wall with one splayed hand against his chest, warm through the jacket, and tilts her head to one side, curiously, and he could almost imagine this is just that bizarre note of protectiveness returned in full force until she -- without concerning herself with, say, warnings – does something obscene to his set jaw, teeth skimming the stubble.

“What are you looking for, Kirk?” Pike says, eyes like ink in the shadows, and he thrills at the age and exhaustion in her voice, the ruined tough-sell. It's nice to dislike someone this way. Wrong, but simple. “A fight? A fuck? A future?” she says, caressing the tight skin across his neck, an old scar.

“Two out of three ain't bad,” he says, learned irony spilling out rough, a little cracked. (He wants to say: all of the above.)

“Cute.” She lets go, rocks back on her low heels. “I think you should go home, kid.”

In silence, he unzips his fly and shoves jeans and boxers down to his knees. She folds her hands behind her back and watches him, apparently torn between disappointment and, Jim tells himself, lust, although it's probably just -- horrified fascination, or something like that, damn her. He watches her watch him and rubs circles under the head of his cock with his thumb. The callous along the pad, from a temporary job hauling garbage, teases at soft translucent skin, snagging here and here. He's used to smoother touches -- he rarely has reason to masturbate, thanks, and the girls he picks up aren't hard workers.

Except Pike. But her mouth is a line and it's been a while since she's been a girl, she's a hard-ass officer, and he doesn't think he has, in fact, picked her up.

He comes in record time, the pleasure like the anger. Insidious. A shock. His hips arching off the plastic wall, the heat blooming in his belly.

She shakes her head, once, slowly, and in two strides vanishes into the mist rising over concrete.

He exhales and tries to remember where he parked his motorbike, tries to concentrate through the echoes of her challenge and her grip.

fic: the other test he failed, nc-17, lady!pike/kirk

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