Touch 1/2

[ceres_libera]

Title: "Touch 1/2"
Author: ceres_libera
Rating: R to NC-17
Characters: Kirk/McCoy
Canon: ST:XI/AOS-verse, but strongly influenced by all canon ST-verses.
Disclaimers: It all belongs to Paramount, JJ Abrams, and the great Roddenberry. Except for this story, which is all me.

Summary: However, as far as touch was concerned? He was a connoisseur. In fact, in some circles, Jim Kirk was considered a bit of a savant on the subject … until he met the exception. Because there's always an exception to prove the rule. Touch is a Switch-verse inverse story.

Notes: Touch is a Switch-verse story, and builds on that story, so some things may make more sense if you've read it. It takes place a few months after the Switch: Epilogue, on or about the 4th month of 2259, and is written from Jim's POV. I originally intended this story to be posted as a one-shot, but then I decided that posting a WIP would be fine, and might even help me with breaking through some writer’s block. Still, this story is likely to be only 2-3 parts, no 50 chapters plus Epilogue epics.

I think.

P.S. I'm looking for icons of Bones touching Jim. Clues?



+

Jim Kirk was a genius, which in and of itself wasn’t a particularly helpful attribute. After all, it was completely possible to be really smart about things that were essentially useless.

He knew, for example, how to calculate a degrading orbit. Awesome, but hardly a necessary skill.

Or how many pairs of binary stars there were in the known quadrants. Interesting, but again, not essential.

But Jim Kirk also had skills.

He could size up a room, or a situation and decide on a course of action – fast. He could recognize when he was being lied to, even by non-humanoid species. He had a nose for danger, and a way of getting out of it, as swiftly as he got in it in the first place.

But his intelligences weren’t all about facts, or higher math, or applied theorems.

He knew the best way to muck out a stall, and how to shuck an ear of corn, silk and all, in one twisting, efficient two-handed pull.

Of necessity, he knew – well, he’d learned -- how to feed himself for weeks on a diet of bark, bugs and dirt.

He was an adept adaptive, but that didn’t make him particularly malleable, as many had learned.

And although his genius took many forms, one of his best intelligences was intuitive. He understood movement -- intention, action and impulse -- and not just experientially from his years of fight training.

However, as far as touch was concerned? He was a connoisseur. In fact, in some circles, Jim Kirk was considered a bit of a savant on the subject.

He knew exactly what the intent behind the touch was, what was wanted, what was expected of him. He just knew -- often before someone touched him -- but always, always once they had.

He always knew … until he met the exception.

Because there's always an exception to prove the rule.

+

Jim was yawning so widely that he cracked his jaw. He pulled his shirts over his head, twisting at the last minute so that he would miss bumping into the divider separating his bedroom from the rest of his quarters.

He loved his job, he really did, but not the fact that Starfleet Command just fucking loved scheduling these useless briefings for the middle of the ship's night. And he got it, really -- they were a young crew, with Starfleet’s youngest Captain ever at the helm, and it was the flagship for fuck's sake, doing its first tour of the Neutral Zone. But Uhura had the best goddamned ears in the fleet, and everybody knew it, and she’d heard nothing alarming in any of her deep sub-space scans. And she was listening to everything, a habit that had become ingrained after what had happened before the Battle of Vulcan.

Besides, it wasn't like there was any secret intel that was being imparted to him during these briefings. Month after month, it was the same role call: the Klingons were rebuilding their shattered Armada, but had begrudgingly accepted both Federation tech and assistance, much to the relief of the UFP; the Cardassians had stepped up both their patrols and their presence near the Neutral Zone, although they'd not become more aggressive – well, not for orders of aggressive that included Cardassians.

As for the Romulans? They were still being totally secretive bastards. Surprise, surprise, the sarcastic voice in his head that sounded a lot like Bones intoned.

Jim knew that there had been negotiations that had gone on far above his head, through diplomatic channels and between the uppermost echelons of government. Uhura had heard, and long-range sensors had confirmed, that UFP science vessels had been permitted through the Neutral Zone. He assumed that this incursion into Romulan space had been allowed because the Romulus in this universe was desperate to understand if it would share the same fate as the one from which Ambassador Spock had come, but that was only his assumption -- because he wasn't goddamned being told anything, at least not in these briefings. He toed at the back of a boot in irritation, stumbling.

No, he was being treated like he was still an angry kid spoiling for a fight -- like he hadn't learned that lesson his first time out of the gate. For all that he could be a brash asshole, he wasn't going to risk his crew for some foolish reason. When it had been just his own neck, that had been one thing. But he’d learned that leadership had a price long before the Narada had upended the universe. Shit, he’d lived that lesson before his voice had stopped cracking.

If he had to wager, he’d bet that he’d seen more death in his 26 years than Carter and Olshansky and that pompous asshole Tu'kk’ai'nian had seen in their Starfleet careers combined. Sometimes he thought that was exactly the problem – that the shock of what had happened to Vulcan had made the Admiralty cautious, left them rudderless, adrift. Vulcans, for better or ill, had served as the elders for many cultures in the Federation, had set themselves up in that role, for all that they had been proved to be fallible years ago. But the loss of the planet itself, the destruction of it and its six billion souls, seemed to some a repudiation of the peaceable values that the Vulcans espoused, and to others, the most bitter irony. For them all, it had left a leadership void in the Federation -- mirrored in its own small way by the void in critical Starfleet personnel, the one that had occasioned his own precipitous rise to the Captaincy, a fact of which some of the Admirals were forever reminding him. As if he would ever forget. As if he could.

Although … they all did forget -- in small ways -- until the inevitable reminder would cause a stutter in the flow of words, a minute hesitation until reality caught up to them, even the Admirals. There had been one or two instances when the Admirals most sympathetic to Jim’s daily struggles as a new Captain had caught themselves, on the verge of referring Jim to consult with a Captain who might best advise him. There’d be a blink, and then a stammer, as they searched for words. Jim would bet a billion credits that the speaker had just recalled that the Captain in question was dead. With that feeling, that gut punch of remembering, he could at least sympathize. Bones always claimed that he was a hard-headed pragmatist, and that Jim was a starry-eyed optimist, but the truth was that Jim wasn't really that far off from him, even if he wasn't quite the cynic that Bones -- the most friendly misanthrope ever -- claimed to be. Jim knew that dead was dead and dead meant gone, and yet … a year later, he still caught himself thinking that he should check in with Subie or Irina or …

They were all suffering from various levels of PTSD, but Jim’d had years of experience in dealing with this shit, not that he’d had much of anybody left to share the experience with, after Tarsus. Nor had his familiarity made him immune to the stutter in forward momentum, the little shock that pierced the bubble of normalcy -- it just meant that he always kind of half-expected it and that he knew what to do when it happened. Like earlier in the day when Sulu had flown a particular choice maneuver around a comet, getting Spock some excellent data in the process. Spock had complimented him on his agility, and a smiling Sulu had swung around from his station and demurred credit, saying that he’d copped that move from a pilot named Hurwitz.

Spock had politely asked where Hurwitz served, and even before his lips finished forming the question Jim knew what was going to happen. He swung his chair around to face Sulu, and willed himself not to shift. He kept his legs crossed, kept his posture loose and waited, as Sulu blinked, his usually affable expression becoming crestfallen, before he quietly answered Spock.

"She served on the Wolcott, sir."

Jim had allowed the silence on the Bridge to ripen from respectful notice, but not beyond, ending it by saying, "Then we'll have today’s official report reflect your usage of the Hurwitz Maneuver, Lieutenant Sulu.” He spun in his chair, capturing the Bridge crew’s attention. “Lieutenant Uhura, please forward the report to Lieutenant Sulu so that he can document the Hurwitz Maneuver appropriately."

“With pleasure, Captain,” Uhura had answered with crisp warmth.

Jim swung the chair forward, noting that Sulu’s shoulders had straightened from their slump.

Chekov had announced an upcoming navigational adjustment as they moved into the comet’s debris field, and Sulu had turned his attention back to the helm, missing Chekov shooting Jim a smile of gratitude; Spock had merely tilted his head and looked at Jim in a way that Kirk knew meant that he approved.

So, yeah, they were young, but they weren't untested, and they knew, all of them that had served at the Battle of Vulcan, they knew exactly what was at stake, but it didn't seem to matter to certain members of the Admiralty. It didn't matter that Pike knew that Jim wasn’t going to needlessly endanger his crew, that he would do everything and anything to assure that wouldn’t happen. Instead, like clockwork, Jim had to sit there every two weeks for a ridiculous session where they told him shit he already knew and held back what he really needed to know, just to reinforce his position as their subordinate, simply because they could.

Fuckers.

But as annoying as that all was, and it was, it wasn’t the petty politics or the lack of respect that made his hands clumsy with haste as he yanked off his shirts and simultaneously toed off his boots. Nor was it the promise of an abbreviated but restful sleep after a long damned day that made him so intent on getting into bed as fast as possible. No. It was what awaited him in his bed, the prime reason that he paid very careful attention to all the intel that was available, not just what some Commodores and Admirals who were 20 years out of active duty thought was important.

Bones.

Fast asleep on his stomach, his brown hair in an unruly arc on his slightly furrowed brow, the soft light emphasizing the line of his strong shoulders above the dark blue covers of Jim's bed. As eager as he’d been to get in bed with Bones just nanoseconds before, Jim found himself arrested at the sight of him, sleeping so soundly with his arms up under the pillow. He stood there with his shirts around his elbows, smiling, as he just looked at Bones, head turned toward the empty side of the bed, like he was waiting for Jim. He had no fear that he’d wake Bones up with his scrutiny, or even by kicking his boots back toward the wall as he was currently doing. Bones had always maintained that he was a light sleeper, but Jim had known for years that the rules that applied to other people didn't apply to him, as far as Bones was concerned.

Well ... more like he figured out how to beat the system, really.

Because as long as Jim was unhurt and calm when he slipped into bed with him, Bones wouldn’t wake. It wasn't like he wouldn't stir, because that had always been the best part of getting into bed with Bones, how he'd respond, even while sound asleep. Long before Jim knew what the hell he wanted to do about Bones, he'd crept into Bones' bed to see if Bones would still make room for him. He'd done that – made room for Jim -- from the very beginning, from the first night that he offered Jim a place to sleep alongside him, just like that, not a thought involved, like Jim … belonged.

He didn't think that Bones would ever really understand what a big deal that was, the idea that Jim was always welcome. Some nights, Bones would rouse enough to sling an arm over Jim, or to kiss him, but that had been later on. In the beginning, Jim had lived for the nights when he would curl up behind Bones, and he would sigh and push back against Jim – or more rarely, when Bones would turn over and wrap his arms around Jim, pressing his face into Jim's neck.

Jim used his undershirt to wipe at his chin where he’d splashed himself while brushing his teeth, before he dropped it on the floor, shucked his pants and slid into bed naked, grinning now. All those months, years really, that he had taken a secret delight in seeing Bones in the bed he’d gotten for him? They had nothing on the feeling it gave him to come back to his quarters on Enterprise, the Captain’s quarters, to see Bones waiting for him in his bed. It was stupid and possessive and probably regressive of him, but he couldn’t fucking help it. It did something to him, and not just his libido, to see Bones sleeping there, to know that he chose to be there, waiting for Jim in his bed. Jim lay in the near dark, watching the faint frown lines that Bones always got when he was thinking too hard even out as he registered Jim’s presence. Jim watched him, blinking drowsily as the warmth emanating from Bones began to relax him better than any sleep aid ever had, while he waited for Bones to make his move. Half a minute later, a long, heavily muscled arm appeared from under Bones’ pillow and reached out for him, as he turned to face Jim fully. Jim held his breath in anticipation of the touch of Bones’ hand, the warmth and weight of it as it dropped onto his chest and slid across and over, coming to rest wrapped around his ribs. Bones’ muscles rippled as he tugged, pulling Jim closer to his warmth; when he’d settled Jim alongside him, he let out a content sigh.

“Lights off,” Jim said aloud in the room, skin still tingling from Bones’ touch, from the slide of flesh and bone and the metal of the ring he wore because Jim had given it to him. He turned onto his side, tucking an arm under his pillow as his eyes adjusted, then awarded him with the sight of Bones sleeping peacefully, lit by the faint illumination of the stars streaking by. He only got to watch Bones for a minute more before Bones' hand ran up and down his spine possessively, tucking Jim against him more tightly as a pleased rumble emanated from his chest.

Jim fell asleep pressing his smile into the warm skin of Bones’ neck.

+

It had always been like that, from the very beginning, Bones’ touch, the way his hands made Jim feel.

+

Well … that was romanticizing it in the extreme, because, you know like every other fucking thing in Jim's life, it was actually a lot more complicated than that. Really, a lot of the time it was like that old joke, the one that went ‘your mouth is saying 'no', but your eyes are saying 'yes'!’ Except Bones' eyes were also saying ‘no,’ most of the time.

And sometimes? Sometimes, they were adding, ‘And fuck off.’

His hands, though … Bones’ hands. Jim had never been indifferent to their touch, no matter what Bones’ eyes or his mouth said.

It was weird, though. Because Jim might not have scored as high on his psi test as Gary Mitchell, but he could intuit a lot from people's tells and infer what it was that they wanted from him, and yeah, how they wanted it. Of course, that didn’t mean that he didn’t get his ass handed to him now and then – he was good, not invincible – but it did explain why he could usually pick up a partner, or two or whatever, for a night’s fun with relative ease. And it wasn’t just their posture or their gestures, where their eyes lingered when they looked at him. The minute someone put their hand -- or whatever they used to touch -- on him, Jim could pretty much knew the intention behind the touch.

So, when McCoy strode across the locker room in the induction center and shoved his fingers into Jim’s fist and unknotted it, he knew what was going to happen next. It wasn’t like the assholes who were talking shit about him were saying anything he hadn’t heard hundreds of times before. And he’d heard McCoy’s intake of breath, knew that the penny had dropped and that now he was George Kirk’s son, not just some guy that he’d shared his flask with on the shuttle. So, whatever. That was that. He had other business to attend to, anyway -- although he usually wasn't about giving assholes what they wanted, even if it was a richly deserved asskicking, he was still considering giving it to them anyway. Because, seriously? He wasn't so sure that this whole Starfleet gig was going to work out.

Consequently, he was only half-listening to McCoy yammering, sure as he was of how it would evolve into either the 'don’t sully your father’s memory' speech, or the offer, ever so slightly fawning in its presentation, to join Jim in kicking some ass. No matter which variant it turned out to be, it was bound to be followed by the inevitable questions, the inevitable comparisons, the weighing and measuring that always, always found him lacking.

So, he totally didn’t expect Bones, talking to him and manhandling him into his red tunic, his hands somehow rough and gentle at the same time, their touch impossible to ignore. And he kept those hands on Jim, moving him around in a way that made it clear that he expected to be obeyed.

Jim should have protested, should have whacked those hands off him the way he normally would have, but he was only waiting for the turn in McCoy's monologue while he tracked the insults coming from behind him now, because McCoy’s insistent hands had somehow turned him around, putting his back to the idiots.

And then he realized that McCoy’s sly drawl was murmuring some nonsense about how Jim belonged here and how he was the outsider, and seriously? That was just such insane bullshit that Jim turned his head to actually look at the crazy bastard, and when he did he recognized the smoldering intelligence in those dark eyes, and well … he never could resist a challenge, could he?

So, he flirted and called McCoy ‘Bones’ to see what would happen, but Bones just shoved him and marched him out of the induction center and into the testing room, keeping himself between Jim and trouble and never taking those hands off of him.

+

And Bones never asked the inevitable questions.

Not that night when Jim took him out for a drink.

Not ever.

And whenever Leonard H. McCoy, M.D., Ph.D to the third power, said the name Kirk, it was clear that he was just talking to and about Jim, period.

+

Which … Jim didn’t really get, because in his experience, people tell you what they want with their touch, and they always wanted something, right?

+

Even Sam.

Mostly, he wanted Jim to shut up so that their mother would lose the pained expression on her face that his questions always seemed to provoke. In most of Jim's earliest memories of Sam, Sam is making the face that Jim called the 'Jesus, Jimmy' in his head, which also came with a hand reaching out to cover Jim's mouth as Sam hissed, "Jesus, Jimmy, stop talking for five whole minutes, OK?"

Sometimes, he wanted Jim to shut up because he was drawing too much attention from one of their mother’s husbands – not that it mattered which one, because they were all pretty much bastards. The first one had come and gone before Jim was five, which meant they’d spent a lot of time together, him and Sam. He’d always enjoyed it, even if Sam was perpetually exasperated with Jim’s constant queries – “I don’t know, Jimmy, just look it up!” -- about how gravity worked or how far was a light year, really?

The thing was, Sam did know, but it was like someone had made up the rules and they all followed them faithfully, without ever having had them explained: Sam was the bad boy, and Jim was the good one. Sam was the tough one, and Jim was the smart one.

He understood now, in a way he hadn't then, exactly what Sam was always trying to protect him from. It wasn't until Sam was dead and gone that Jim had realized how much of a shield he'd been, how much he'd used the unspoken rules about who occupied which role in their family to draw the attention away from Jim, to protect him. But that had been much later, after Jim had stolen the car, after they’d been sent to Tarsus, after he’d learned firsthand that touch was a spectrum sense, and that there were beings who actually liked to inflict pain.

But then, then … before he knew all that and was still ‘Jimmy’ and spoke in a high, rushed voice, looking up at everything and everyone around him with curiosity, the only person who never got sad or exasperated by him and all his questions was Grandpa Tiberius. Instead, he listened carefully, and then would answer him by asking more questions, trying to tease the solution out of Jim in a chain of logic, showing him the way to higher reasoning and understanding.

There wasn't much from his early life that Jim had kept, but there were a couple of things that were precious to him.

One lived on Bones' hand.

Another was a heavily encrypted datachip, with a scrambled back-up on a cloud account owned by a pseudonym, under cover so deep that it would never be hacked. On it were some holos and some vids, but none more precious than the one that his Uncle Brian had taken in early 2233, when Jim had come home to Iowa, after the Kelvin. He was still pretty tiny – on the vid, he’s mostly a round pink head wrapped in a blue blanket -- only a little bit bigger than a typical newborn, although he was already a month old. His mother is wan and obviously depressed, blinking tearfully at the noise and clamor of Grandma MacAllister’s kitchen. She surrenders him easily to his Aunt Marinell and clings briefly to his brother Sam before letting him go so that he can clamber up onto Marinell’s lap as she and Grandma Mac peel back Jim’s blankets. Sam is mostly quiet while Marinell and Grandma MacAllister size Jim up, enthusiastically assigning his nose to this cousin, the set of his eyes to another, his feet, his hands and on and on.

Even when she’s not in view of the camera, which is most of the time, Grandma Kirk’s soft crying is audible. When baby Jim gets handed to her, it's clear to Jim that what she sees is her dead boy, re-born. Or maybe Jim just sees that because of how he felt sometimes when she looked right through him and into her own past.

Through all the hubbub in the room, Tiberius is silent. When the camera finds him, he’s always tracking Jim, being passed hand-to-hand as he's weighed and measured by his relatives. Although he was already old in 2233, Tiberius’ back was not stooped like Granddad Jim’s. Instead, Tiberius is a striking figure, tall, like all the Kirk men, but bigger than Jim through the chest, broad-shouldered and strong. His eyes are a blinding shade of blue, his hair and eyebrows totally white with no hint of grey. When baby Jim is finally given to him, he rests Jim’s body on his forearm and raises him up to see him better, gently cupping Jim's head in his big hand. For the first time during the vid Tiberius smiles, right down at Jim's baby self, at the hands Jim is rubbing in front of his face restlessly, maybe trying to get his thumb into his mouth.

"Who do you think he looks like, Pa?" Sam asks in a childish voice, having abandoned Marinell to follow Jim as he traveled around the kitchen.

"He looks just like himself," Tiberius says on the vid, still smiling, his hand almost dwarfing Jim's head. He bends forward while Sam clambers up onto a chair so that he can stare at Jim, too.

Jim's eyes startle open at the sound of Tiberius' deep, gruff voice, and there's an instant where he looks like he might cry, but Tiberius rubs his rough thumb over Jim’s cheek and makes a soothing noise, and Jim stills instead as he looks up and sees his grandfather, his blue eyes mirroring Tiberius' in the sunlit kitchen.

"Hello, Jimmy," Tiberius says.

There is only happiness in the smile he directs at Jim.

+

Jim has another memory, not preserved anywhere on vid, of waking in a hospital to the feeling of strong arms wrapping around his back, lifting him away from the bed. The hold on him had been so strong, so grasping, that he'd struggled against it, still primed for a fight, even though they'd told him repeatedly that he was safe. But he knew, he knew that it didn’t matter what they said because there was no such thing, there never had been, especially not while he still saw Sam crumpling brokenly onto the hard, dusty, useless soil of Tarsus every time he closed his eyes. He clawed at the body over his until he recognized Tiberius' voice and the fight went out of him.

Tiberius relaxed his grip and Jim, so weak and tired, couldn't help but fall back toward the bed. He braced himself for the impact, but Tiberius caught him -- cupping the back of Jim's head in his big hand, his tears falling like rain on Jim's face, on his soul, withered and dry as the hard ground of the blighted planet that had almost claimed him.

"Oh, my Jim." Tiberius' fingers still dwarfed Jim's face as he wiped the tears that he'd cried off Jim's cheeks, where they stood in for the tears that Jim was incapable of crying for himself, for Sam and Aurelan, for Marinell and Brian, for Bobby and Baby Emme, for Hoshi-baasan. He blinked against warm brine of the tears and squinted up at Tiberius, unsure if he was really here or there -- or still dreaming -- and Tiberius nodded like he knew what Jim was thinking.

"You're home, Jim," he said to him with assurance, even though his voice was cracking with strain. “I promise you. You’re home.”

+

Tiberius only lived for eighteen months after Jim came back from Tarsus.

+

After Tiberius, until Bones, he's never just Jim, without the weight of expectation and the face of a ghost, again.

+



Hoshi-baasan is the correct way to say Granny in Japanese, according to ya_books. Thanks to folks who weighed in!

Touch 2/2

Comments

[shighola.livejournal.com]

omg more Switch verse. You have made my day!!!!!!

He turned onto his side, tucking an arm under his pillow as his eyes adjusted, then awarded him with the sight of Bones sleeping peacefully, lit by the faint illumination of the stars streaking by. He only got to watch Bones for a minute more before Bones' hand ran up and down his spine possessively, tucking Jim against him more tightly as a pleased rumble emanated from his chest.

Jim fell asleep pressing his smile into the warm skin of Bones’ neck.
*sighs*

[ceres-libera.livejournal.com]

Thanks!