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1.
It’s not that Jim is homesick, exactly. Nothing worth missing at home, not for years. But sometimes he thinks wistfully about how easy it was back in Iowa. The drinks were cheaper, the girls less discerning, and no one gave a shit about who he was. He didn’t have anywhere to be – even when he held a job, it was always the kind you could just walk off of without anyone coming after you. Didn’t have anyone to answer to, not since he’d gotten the hell out of Frank’s house at seventeen. Maybe it wasn’t the kind of life they'd tell stories about, but it was simple.
At Starfleet Academy they have this irritating habit of keeping tabs on him. If he’s late to class, his grade takes a hit even though he gets the highest score on the exam. Some of the instructors encourage passionate discussion, but Mikkelsohn in Intersystem Diplomacy scribbles a note in Jim’s file whenever he argues a point from the texts. He has words with an ensign who thinks shoving a gangly teenage cadet’s pack into a fountain is hilarious, they haul him in for yet more bullshit psych tests (though it was worth it to hear the asshole’s jaw crack like an egg). Hell, he indulges himself a little in a bar brawl off-campus and it still gets back to the brass ears.
At least this time he’s not dumb enough to show his bloodied face in the infirmary. Instead he stumbles off to Bones’ room, keying in the code without bothering to knock. Bones will bitch and moan, but he’ll patch Jim up without reporting him.
The room’s empty even though it’s two in the morning. Jim belatedly remembers that Bones has graveyard shift tonight. Fuck. His wrist is killing him and he thinks it might be sprained. Still, it’s better than going home to his roommate’s snotty disapproval. After washing his stinging face at the tiny sink, he digs through Bones’ medical shit for a strip of bandages. He’s not quite sure how to wrap it, but he can’t be too incompetent because the wrist feels a little better after he’s done.
Still fuzzy from a pitcher of the house brew, Jim leans back on the neatly made bed. He’ll just take a nap, here on top of the covers, until Bones gets back to kick him out. And it would be rude to put his boots on someone else’s bed, so he kicks them off before drawing his legs up. It’s nice. His own bed’s not nearly this soft.
The ceiling’s spinning a little, reminding him that he chased the beer with shots of some kind. He turns his head to the side to make it stop. The firm pillow beneath his cheek smells like Bones, warm and more familiar with every passing day. Jim might have expected him to carry a whiff of antiseptic but he’s fastidious about showering and changing clothes – says he never wanted to come home to his little girl smelling like a hospital and now he's too old and set in his ways to change the habit.
His eyes fall on the bed across the room, empty and stripped because the other cadet up and left last week. As sleep creeps closer he thinks maybe he’ll do the same, just march up to Captain Pike’s office tomorrow and announce that he’s done. He’s not his father’s son; everyone knows he’ll never get anywhere with this attitude; it’s not worth the effort; pick a fucking tune and blow. Not like it’ll be his first major failure in life and it damned sure won’t be the last.
In the morning he wakes to a splitting headache. He groans and covers his face, not before he spies Bones sitting on the other bed with a put-out expression and a hypospray in his hand. Jim cranes his neck for the dose, gasping as his head clears. Bones looks down at him and mutters, “Typical. Next time I find your drunk ass in my bed, you get to keep the hangover as a souvenir.”
Jim offers a wan smile. “You know, I could make it so much easier for you to keep an eye on me...”
2.
It was only a matter of time, once Jim moved in. In fact Bones is shocked that it took him a whole month. Doesn’t mean he’s entirely sanguine about the matter, considering he has a practical in the morning; it’s not unexpected, is all. If Jim had just left a sock on the door or something, he could have found a student lounge to crash in. Wouldn’t even have given him shit about it for more than a couple of days.
But Jim didn’t bother to leave a warning. Also, he’s in Bones’ fucking bed.
Bones runs through several comments in his brain, none of them particularly polite. The girl’s brown curls bounce obscenely as she writhes atop Jim. Bones glances over her shoulder and sees Jim’s face twisted up in pleasure, mouth wet and swollen, blond hair dark with sweat. And immediately wishes he hadn’t.
It doesn’t count as staring if no one catches him, right? He can just back out now, no harm done, then swoop in later to make a snide remark about Jim having had his shots.
Just then Jim’s eyes snap open. His pupils are dilated, blue swallowed up in black, and he’s looking right at Bones. Who’s still standing in the doorway like a complete fuckwit.
Jim sucks in a breath, then says hoarsely, “Hey, Bones.”
The girl looks back over her shoulder and scrambles for the sheet, sliding sideways off Jim’s hips. Bones remembers seeing her in a Xenobiology seminar, noting at the time that she was exactly Jim’s type. Which isn’t saying much since “breathing” seems to be synonymous with Jim’s type, but still, she’s very pretty and on some level he can appreciate the fact that he’s ruining her evening.
On another level, his eyes are still locked on Jim’s. It keeps his gaze from wandering downward to the tangle of sheets and long, tanned legs. Jim makes no move to cover himself, but then Bones has never met a person more comfortable with his body so that's hardly a surprise. He starts stroking his companion’s arm and she doesn’t seem so interested in escape anymore.
“Goddammit, Jim,” says Bones in a remarkably calm voice, around the tightness in his chest. “Something wrong with your bed?”
Jim shrugs, a corner of his mouth twitching. “Sorry. Yours is closer to the door.” The girl – Anna, he thinks – stretches out next to him, palm on his ribcage. She looks back and forth between them, her thin sharp face calculating.
“Why don’t you join us, handsome?” she purrs, watching Bones like a predator while she closes her teeth on Jim’s earlobe.
Okay, maybe that’s why she’s Jim’s type.
Jim doesn’t join in on the offer, nor does he contradict her. He’s not moving at all, not giving an inch, so it’s going to have to be Bones. He jerks his chin up and finally breaks his gaze, backing through the open door. He marches, stiff-legged, down the hall to the public restroom where he locks himself in a stall and unzips his jeans. Jim’s fever-bright eyes flash behind his lids as he comes hard into his hand.
He spends the rest of the night in a deserted reading room of the library, waking around dawn to a throbbing back and shoulders. Angrily telling himself that he’s not going to let a horny manchild chase him out of his own room, he steels his nerves as he walks down the dorm corridor.
The room is empty. At some point while Bones was drooling on a padd, Jim changed the sheets and made Bones’ bed up to military standards. It doesn’t look like anyone’s slept there in days. Bones can’t bring himself to muss the crisp construction, so he strips off his wrinkled clothes and steps into the shower. He stands under the hot water for what feels like an hour, letting it wash away the ache of disappointment and shame.
3.
Jim’s a considerate roommate. He has been for months now, ever since that night they don’t talk about with the girl whose name he can’t remember and Bones looking at him like – right. Never happened.
So he’s quiet when he comes in tonight; he could see through the window outside that Bones turned all the lights off. It’s still early but the med cadets’ days are usually longer than his own. He slips in the door before it’s fully open, trying to minimize the glare from the hall. In that half a second he can see Bones sprawled on the bed, apparently having fallen asleep in the middle of undressing because he’s still got his pants and socks on. Jim congratulates himself since Bones doesn’t stir.
At least not until Jim rams into the desk chair he left pushed out into the middle of the floor.
“Fuck!”
“Whozat? Lights, twenty-five percent.” Bones rolls over to blink at him, already more awake than Jim would be after ten minutes of a blaring alarm.
Jim rubs his knee and grimaces. “Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“S’okay,” says Bones with a yawn. Jim looks down at his feet instead of at his best friend’s bare chest. He’s not drunk tonight and therefore has no excuse for forgetting to not remember. “It’s Saturday night, aren’t you goin’ out?” His drawl is always more pronounced when he’s tired.
“Don’t feel like it.” Jim slings his bag onto the offending chair and pushes it back into the well of the desk.
Bones cocks a sardonic eyebrow. “Should I get my tricorder?”
“Fuck you,” says Jim with a sniff of mock offense, causing Bones’ eyes to crinkle in amusement. It’s a simple pleasure, making Bones smile, but Jim never gets tired of it. “Not like it’ll shrivel up and fall off if I don’t use it for a few days.”
“How can you be sure it won’t?” Bones retorts, hoisting himself up on an elbow. “God knows you’ve never tested the theory.”
Well, Jim can’t take that kind of insult lying down, can he? He launches himself at the bed, grabbing Bones’ wrist to try and force his arm behind his back. After one surprised curse Bones starts to laugh, struggling and shoving Jim’s face away. They wrestle for a couple of minutes and end up with Jim on his back, panting. Bones hovers over him, propped on hands and knees. The grin slowly drops off his face.
“I give,” he says in a low voice, sitting back on his heels.
Suddenly Jim’s tired of pretending. He’s not used to this, to wanting someone he can’t have – won’t have. He might not be willing to jeopardize their friendship by forcing the issue, but neither does he feel like letting Bones off the hook that easy.
“I accept your surrender.” Jim wriggles under the covers, ignoring Bones’ flabbergasted expression.
“Get your disease-ridden ass out of my bed!”
“Nope,” Jim mumbles, not looking at him. “I won so I don’t have to move.” His face is hot and the pillow feels cool against his skin. If Bones would just take the bait –
The mattress dips as Bones pushes himself up, grumbling. Jim does some grumbling of his own, just not out loud. Okay, so the chances of luring Bones into bed with him simply by refusing to get up were pretty slim. He tells himself he’s relieved. At least it saves them the trouble of having to figure out, later, what the hell they were thinking. He’s lucky that Bones has more self-control, or else that he doesn’t really want to fuck Jim all that badly. The thought is sobering enough to silence his hormones.
In the morning he wakes up with a hard-on, considers taking care of it here while he listens to Bones breathing evenly a few feet away. But he gets up to jerk off in the shower instead, imagining Bones doing the same in his bed, wrapped in Jim’s sheets and his scent.
4.
It was innocent, Bones knows – at least as innocent as Jim Kirk ever gets. They had a few drinks at the bar and then a few more at home. Bones got all maudlin over missing Joanna’s first day of school. He fell into bed and Jim fell down beside him, murmuring that he was sorry and that she’d forgive him. His body was warm and his touch light on Bones’ wrist, and Bones was too sore at the world to kick him out.
That was all well and good; no ulterior motives on anyone’s part.
Waking up pressed against Jim’s back? Not so much.
For long breathless moments Bones lies quiet, afraid to wake him. They’re perfectly aligned at shoulders and hips and thighs, his left arm draped over Jim’s waist. Bones can feel the heat Jim gives off – it’s no wonder he always sleeps in briefs and ends up kicking his blankets off during the night. He’s sweating now, fully dressed with Bones wrapped around him. Bones could press his lips to the back of Jim’s neck and taste the salt there…
Before he even finishes the thought he’s done it. Jim makes a small sound, not quite a whimper, and curls his toes against Bones’ feet.
The thing is, Bones isn’t even aroused. Oh, he could get there very quickly, especially if Jim keeps making noises like that. But it’s not the blind instincts of his body keeping him from letting go. It’s Jim, slack-mouthed and loose-limbed beside him. Jim who never stays the night with any of his conquests; Jim who comes sneaking in at two in the morning and has no idea how often Bones has lain awake in the dark, waiting for the drone of snoring so he can touch himself.
Shit, he’s got to get out of this bed.
It’s tricky, rolling Jim off of his numb arm without waking him. There’s a moment when Jim's lips purse in a pout and he says “Nnguh?” Bones shushes him and he sinks back into sleep with a sigh. Bones backs against the wall and rubs his arm until it stops tingling. Jim’s chest rises and falls, steady as a bellows.
He could retreat to the other bed, catch a few more winks since Jim is bound to be out for awhile. He might not even remember how they fell asleep last night.
Bones hopes not; but he’ll never know, because he grabs a jacket and goes for a walk in the early morning fog.
5.
It starts with a headache. By noon his head feels like it’s stuck in a vise with some sadist tightening the screws a half-turn every half-hour. He makes his way back across campus to his room, swallows a couple of pills and collapses on the bed. It’s such a blessed relief to close his eyes in darkness that he doesn’t even realize it's the wrong bed. He wakes sweating and shivering, the bedclothes rumpled around him. It seems as though he’s only slept a few minutes though the chrono claims that afternoon is running on toward evening.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he rasps, reaching out to drag the blanket off his own bed. He hasn’t been sick in years. No, fuck it – he’s not sick now, he just needs to sleep a little more. There’s probably something in Bones’ stuff to bring a fever down, but Jim doesn’t have the energy to search for it. And anyway he doesn’t need it, just maybe some orange juice and soup or whatever. He mutters, “Bones, I need –” but drifts off before completing the sentence.
Next thing he’s conscious of is light flooding the room like a fucking solar flare.
“Jim?” Bones is worried, that’s his worried voice and he’s probably got that little line between his brows but Jim can’t see because of the light. He moans a protest and hopes the computer understands.
It doesn’t, but Bones takes care of it. He touches Jim’s face with his nimble doctor’s fingers. “Jesus, Jim, you’re burning up.” Now Jim can see the frown lines and he smiles, dry lips cracking painfully. Bones grabs something out of his bag and sticks it in Jim’s mouth until it beeps. He reads the little display screen, then swears violently. “Can you walk? We’ve gotta get you to the infirmary.”
“No,” Jim croaks, grabbing his forearm. “No, I can’t, they won’t let me take the test tomorrow.” It took him ages to set up a second run; he has no reason to believe they’ll reschedule when half the class hasn’t even taken it once.
“Fuck the Kobayashi Maru! I’m not going to leave you here with a fever this high.”
“So don’t, then.” Jim falls back against the pillow, exhausted by the effort. His whole body aches beneath the burn. “Stay with me?”
Bones wavers, his mouth set in a thin line. Finally he shakes his head with a familiar Jim you fucking idiot expression, though for once it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Okay, but I’m dosing you and I will take you in if it doesn’t help – throw you over my shoulder if I have to.” Any other day Jim would leer and say he’s welcome; now he just holds onto one hand as Bones jabs him in the neck with the other. “I've got no idea how long it’ll take to kick in, given your freakish immune system.”
Jim doesn’t care. Bones is with him – he’s still shaking, still weak, but Bones is here. Which is funny because he always wanted to be left alone when he was sick as a kid, even if his mother was home. It's because Bones is a doctor, he decides.
“I’m gonna beat it this time,” he insists even as his eyelids flutter closed again. Must be some kind of sedative worked into the cocktail. “Got it all worked out. You’ll be there, right, to celebrate?”
Bones strokes his thumb over Jim’s knuckles, little swirling eddies of cool relief against fevered skin. His voice is almost too quiet to hear. “Yeah, Jim, I’ll be there.”
1.
Pale morning light wakes him in stages, as neither he nor the sun is in any particular hurry. When he finally opens his eyes he can see the ocean through a picture window.
Bones freezes. Where the fuck is he?
There’s a scrap of crimson fabric hanging from the bedpost. That was it – commencement, then commendation. Jim standing straight-backed before the admirals and all his peers. They clapped, they cheered, they nibbled expensive hors d’oeuvre at the reception. Everyone kept toasting to the Enterprise, Scotty then Chekov then Pike – so many times Bones lost count. At least it was only champagne and not anything more dangerous.
A gull cries somewhere outside and he draws in a sharp breath.
Champagne is dangerous.
It’s what he tasted like – champagne and strawberries. Jim kissed him for the first time at the foot of the stairs, under a balcony where no one could see them. Then they kissed beneath an oak tree, on an empty path, on the airlift up to the officers’ quarters. Jim laughed breathlessly and pressed him up against the door when he couldn’t remember the code to his new room.
Bones raises a hand to his neck, fingering the marks Jim’s mouth sucked into his skin.
“Stop it.”
Jim throws an arm and a leg over him. He kisses Bones on the temple, sloppily and sleepily. “C’n hear you.”
Bones shifts under his weight. “Your blood turn green without my noticing? One touch-telepath’s more than enough for me, thanks.”
Sliding a hand through his hair, Jim gently tugs his head down. His eyes are too earnest and too blue for this time of day. “Don’t go thinking everything’s different. Nothing has changed because of what happened last night; we just got a little less stupid, that’s all.” Jim smiles and stretches, knee inching between Bones’ legs. “It was always supposed to be like this.”
Something hard and knotty uncurls in the pit of his stomach. “Is that so.”
“Mmhmm,” Jim murmurs, rolling over until he’s straddling Bones. “It all works out, see?” Bones is only half listening because Jim is rocking his hips in a slow, lazy, maddening rhythm, kneading his fingertips in the muscles of Bones’ shoulders. “Enterprise has the crew she deserves, I’ve got you in my bed –”
“My bed, actually.” Bones catches his wrists and pushes up, not to dislodge him but to get closer, hotter, more.
Jim bends down to lick a stripe from one nipple to the other, then sits back to admire his success in the form of a long, deep groan. “Details.”
Bones yanks him down to kiss the smirk off his face. The room is freshly painted, the sheets new and luxuriantly soft, the view of the bay gorgeous - and he knows he won't miss it one bit, because he gets to take this to every corner of the galaxy.