Entry tags:

fic, star trek

Fic archive: Star Trek TOS - "At My Most Beautiful" 1/1

Summary: Kirk is haunted by Gary Mitchell's death and has a strange encounter with his first officer. Takes place some months after "Where No Man Has Gone Before."

Copyright disclaimer: I dreamed that it was mine, but I woke, and it wasn't. So I hung down my head and I cried. (All things Trek continue to belong to Paramount/Viacom. Please don't sue.)

Sex disclaimer: There be suggestions of m/m relationships herein. I refuse to apologize for them.

Notes:
Title respectfully snitched from REM. I love those guys.

I'm playing in waters I don't fully understand (ie, early canon for TOS), so I've probably made some errors in timeline and whatnot. 

And finally, apologies to Mary Ellen for yet another (small) installment of Inscrutable!Spock.
 

He wondered if places always looked like this in the aftermath of wars.

The centre of the capital city on Epsilon Theta V had a kind of manic energy. They -- this person, that person, whatever person -- were rebuilding on the wreckage of the recently-ended civil war. Buildings emerged from bio-construct foundations and grew themselves up in a matter of days, almost alive. They were, in their own way, very pretty. Shelling had virtually levelled the ugly colonial buildings at the city's core, leaving plenty of room to reconstruct. This way would be better. The provisional government was already hard at work in its silicon chambers, grown with the new crystalline nanotechnology that was brilliantly distinct from the bio-structures that made up the rest of the rebuilt areas. Peace had broken out, declared by Starfleet.

Three hundred fifty kilometres above the planet's sea level, the USS Enterprise lay slung in a low geosynchronous orbit. For three months now the ship had represented Starfleet's will to keep the peace, by force if necessary. At night, from the surface, it glittered. In the city, they were calling it the Death Star.

In the suburbs, James Kirk drank coffee and sank deeper into his restaurant seat. He waited for it to get dark.

He liked this place. This restaurant. Its interior lights were too bright, the colours too vivid. It was painful and synthetic and it kept him awake. These miles of concrete and prefabricated buildings hadn't taken so much damage in the war; they could almost have been the commercial wasteland of a Terran city. Some of the old cinder block buildings were two hundred years old, from the original colony.

Gary, I . . .

Four months since Gary's death. Four months since he'd crushed his friend with a rock. Kirk had, as of tonight, been Captain of the Enterprise for one standard year. He was alone, drinking black coffee on a planet whose peace was as tentative as his own mood. He missed his friend. The coffee burned his tongue.

He'd spent the day in government buildings, representing Federation interests and otherwise intimidating the locals. He didn't like it, but he couldn't see another solution to the place's problems. Gods, so many people had died, some of them so horribly . . .

Outside, the fog was rolling in off the flood plains east of the city. There was some trace chemical in the atmosphere that turned the moisture a sulphurous yellow. Kirk knew it was a natural phenomenon, but the sight was unhealthy. He was going to have to walk through that mess. He paid for the coffee in cash, a ten-credit coin from his pocket, to avoid showing his iridescent military funds-card. He didn't need that kind of attention tonight. He left.

The fog smelled like cigarette smoke, a smell he just barely remembered from the stolen, illegal drags he'd taken as a cadet. The air was wet and made his uniform top cling to his skin. The humidity got in under his civilian jacket through the gap between his collar and his neck. Cold. He walked.

With the Enterprise's shields up, the three or four dozen personnel planetside couldn't practically beam back up at night. The crewmen were lodged in barracks near the city's centre. Officers were billeted around the metropolitan area in twos and threes. To reduce the potential damage of a terrorist strike, officials said. Kirk remembered himself as a seventeen-year-old midshipman, in the months before he first knew Gary. If he still were one, he could sleep tonight in a space with other people, hearing soft or sharp breathing, smelling warm bodies. If he were still enlisted, he could die with everyone else if lonely fanatics decided to take all of them out at night. But maybe officer's lives were worth more, and had to be protected more intensely.

If he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine that this was San Francisco. The fog was right, at least. The coat was close, too, to the one he'd worn at the Academy. It hadn't been that long, really. Twelve years? Long enough ago that he hadn't been able to imagine his life at thirty-one, or even at twenty-five.

If this was San Fran, he'd walk across the Academy campus without even glancing at the landmarks. He'd take the stairs rather than the lift to the third floor of the John Glenn residence, where Gary's room was. What time was it? 2300 hours? Gary would still be awake. They'd sit together for an hour, and maybe they'd talk, and maybe they wouldn't. Gary would provide for him the presence of another human being. By the time Kirk went to bed, he wouldn't be lonely anymore.

miss you

He missed the young Gary. The man who'd joined him for a few weeks on the Enterprise had been almost a stranger. He could almost understand how the older Gary could have become something so alien, a god who killed without remorse.

The commercial streets melted into residential ones. Street lamps were placed farther apart; it was a little darker.

If Gary had been just a warm body for him, Kirk was even more of a son of a bitch than he thought.

But it wasn't that, entirely. Gary had known him for so much of his life, he understood things instinctively. Kirk didn't have a friend anymore who could offer him that. He wondered what Gary would say about a Jim Kirk who would rather have an embrace than a fuck.

The house Kirk was staying in was old and set back from the street behind a thin hedge. The owners having vanished in the war, the place currently belonged to Starfleet. Kirk had been sharing it with Kevin Gardner, his chief of security, but Kevin had been rotated back to the Enterprise that morning. Whoever he was living with now, he hadn't met them yet.

Inside, it almost wasn't a house at all. Warring factions had stripped away everything remotely valuable or useful; this was just an empty space. White walls, big, old windows, strange, polished wood floors. The rooms looked vaguely European-Terran.

The furnishing had been done by a year's worth of Starfleet officers who spent precious little time there. The kitchen had a simple food synthesizer and mismatched dishes. Coffee mugs, but no glasses. Various equipments for use elsewhere filled the largest part of the main floor. Upstairs, Kirk knew, there were two bedrooms and a small bathroom with a running-water shower. If no one had disturbed it since he'd left that morning, the towels probably still lay in the messy little puddles on the floor. The soap would be dissolving in the bottom of the tub.

I . . .
I want you to be here with me

Gary would have made the house into a college spring break fantasy. A couple posters, a little music, some friendly strangers he'd have found in a bar. By this time, they'd have converted that mass of technology in the living room into furniture. There'd be something weird, like a twentieth-century espresso machine in the corner. There'd be take-out food cartons piled by the door. There'd be a scavenged fridge with beer in it.

Kirk was too tired to even consider such mad ventures in great detail. He found his bedroom at the top of the stairs and stripped in the dark. He found a t-shirt under the pillow on his bed to wear with his boxers.

The bedroom, like everything else in the house, was ramshackle. But, with a chair, a bag of clean clothes, and a slab of temperfoam on the floor, what he had was better than what most rooms in the city featured. And he had a couple of pillows and some miscellaneous bedding that he hadn't really sorted, just thrown onto the temperfoam and settled into as a kind of nest after the last laundry shift. If he'd been angling for a clubhouse, it would have been fantastic. Maybe in another life. He lay breathing in the dark and waited to sleep.

how dare you leave me alone, Gary

The house made the small sounds of a primitive dwelling. Very distantly, there was traffic. In the other bedroom, someone shifted, eliciting whispers of protest from the aging wood floor. Kirk's bedroom door made a sharp click; he felt the circulating air as it opened.

"Captain?" It was a whiskey and cigarettes voice, cultured almost beyond belief. His first officer, the Vulcan, Spock.

"Yes?"

"Captain, are you well?"

"Of course, Commander." Puzzled.

"Very well." Kirk heard more than saw Spock turn. In the thin particles of light that slipped through the blinds, Kirk could just see that his first officer's chest was bare.

what the hell was that?

He could hear Spock's feet press softly against the hallway flooring. The door was swinging shut.

"Commander?" Kirk was shocked to hear his own voice. Spock's movements paused. He didn't respond. "Spock."

"Yes, Captain."

Oh gods, what? "Were you asleep? Did I wake you coming in?"

"You did not disturb me."

"I --"

"I was reading, Captain. I was not intending to retire for some time."

He didn't know what to say to that. He wished this man -- alien? man? (alien?) -- would explain why he'd asked, and not stand there like he pull Kirk's grief out of the air and hold it out as a solid thing.

Gently, Spock said, "You are broadcasting distress."

"Broadcasting?"

"Telepathically. My psi-abilities are not remarkable, so I was concerned that I could hear you so clearly."

Oh, strange, that there should be something almost like compassion in the unemotional voice. He still didn't know what to make of his second-in-command, even after a year of their partnership. It was too easy for him to dismiss the Vulcan flatness as an absence of personality. Only at odd moments did he get to look into that hard shell and wonder what the other man thought of him in return. Where this kindness had come from.

Spock turned in the dark, and the flash of a street halogen-light caught his profile. There was something there, just for a split-second.

//interest concern protectiveness pity for the young one hurting need to peel away that suffering how can a man of thirty look so young?//

He realized that Spock was older than he looked, his Vulcan blood having slowed his aging process to a crawl. He had to be at least half again as old as Kirk. He might look the same when Kirk was an old man.

He said, "I'm alright, I promise. Just a bad night. I'll try to think more quietly." He would have said lonely if it wouldn't have sounded so much like begging.

The dark shape in front of him bowed a little and turned back towards the other bedroom. He'd been right; Spock's torso was bare, dark-hair layered over the pale skin. A body that would be so hot if he reached out and stroked it. Luminous beautiful.

"Spock?"

? 
No words, just the understanding that the other man was listening.

"Thanks."

"You are welcome, Captain. Sleep well."

"You too."

He hadn't turned on a light, had to pick his way back across the room to bed. He curled inside his nest and remembered the feeling of a young Gary wrapped around him in a narrow dorm bed. Those fingers rubbing between his legs, gently, and his friend's breath on the back of his neck. Gary kissing him gently when he was still an almost-virgin boy. The imagined embrace soothed him enough that he could rest and not wonder at the Spock-feeling that protected the edges of his sleep like psychic armour.