Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jim Kirk woke up in an overnight holding cell on Heigar II. Nice planet, all things considered. The market patrol hadn’t actually beat him up this time, they hadn’t been the ones to give him the split lip and the bruise over his kidneys and what had definitely turned into a black eye overnight. All of that happened before they brought him in, when Jim was more or less off-duty and having a couple drinks and just by complete serendipity locked eyes with the piece of shit who had cheated him out of over 400 credits three runs ago. And that wasn’t even a bad fight. The other guy was way worse. It was just that Jim--well--he’d noticed over the years that he sort of had a vibe. No matter what the actual nature was, of the fights he’d get into, he was always the one who got thrown in the drunk tank afterwards. Never the other guy. 

He pushed himself up from the worn-out cot (see, this holding cell had cots, it really wasn’t a bad planet) and his head started pounding hard enough that he almost considered laying down again. Except the doors were open and there was an officer at the door. A different one than the two that’d thrown him in here last night, and yet, unfortunately, the two of them were already acquainted. 

“Back again already, Lieutenant?” she asked. 

“Don’t fucking call me that.”

Jim pushed himself to his feet and stumbled out of the cell, grabbed his shit from the officer behind the desk who looked way too entertained by his hangover and his fucked up face and his inability to walk straight, and got the fuck out of there. 

The journey all the way back to his ship was hell. Seeing his ship again, as tiny and pathetic and half-broken as it was, parked at the other end of a shipyard which was approximately a thousand billion degrees in direct sunlight, was salvation. Jim dropped his bag off of his shoulder and hugged it, right around the hull. 

Most of the ships this size still flying around in space were stolen and renovated Federation shuttles, Jim’s included. So they didn’t come with names etched onto the hull like the big ones did. Jim’s company had gone to the trouble of naming all of them, for their records, and someone had probably been drunk on something and all of the names were dumb, like an inside joke, or an extra fuck you to the UFP. 

“Oh, Baby,” Jim muttered, in the heat and his hangover and with his voice muffled from his split lip. “Baby Baby Baby.”

The ship’s name was actually Babydoll, but after ten months she’d become Baby. Jim pressed a kiss to the sun-warmed metal. He heard the door of the ship crack open. 

“Hey, weirdo, get in here.”

“I’m having a moment.”

“I made you a hangover breakfast.”

“Moment over,” he said, and stumbled through the last legs of his journey home, through the sand and into his tiny little ship. It was dark inside, and there was never enough space. Every available surface had to be cleared when the need arose, which meant all of their furniture was the kind that folded up into the walls. They slept in hammocks suspended above the cockpit. And this morning, Gaila had gone to the trouble of unfolding their pathetic little table and putting food on it, when they usually just ate right at the console. 

“Oh, honey, you shouldn’t have.”

“You look like absolute shit, you know that.”

“You really shouldn’t have.”

They were at the end of their replicator credits for the month, which meant Gaila must have either gone out and replicated this whole spread somewhere, or bought it from an actual food vendor. The table was full of bread and sausages and vegetables which decidedly were not from Earth, or anywhere near it, but Jim could deal. They pulled the chairs out from the underside of the table and unfolded them, and sat down to eat in their dark and cramped and--at least this morning--perfect little home. 

“You didn’t get robbed, did you,” Gaila asked with her mouth full. She was Orion, and also Jim’s only friend in the galaxy at this point. She ate hunched over and urgently, like she’d spent her childhood going hungry and having food stolen off her plate. Jim knew that look too well. He still had it himself, sometimes. 

“No, I just thought I’d take advantage of some Heigarian hospitality.”

“You’re gonna get us in trouble, one of these days.”

-

They set off about an hour later, after breakfast and after Jim took a fifteen minute nap that somehow made him feel worse , and he cursed the fucking replicator credit limit and just wanted coffee and slipped into his seat at the console anyway. They lifted up into the air, clouds of dust all around them, carrying a nine month supply of antibiotic hyposprays packed into boxes and crammed into the back of the ship. 

“Where do you think these are going, anyway?” Gaila asked. 

Jim watched the sky, felt his whole body rattle along with their little ship while they broke away from the planet’s gravity. 

“Just try and think of the worst possible use of antibiotics,” he said to the stars, “and that’s what they’ll do with them.”

“They might as well flush them, the way they treat us.”

Jim glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. She was wearing his clothes, although she usually did. When they’d met she’d been wearing someone else’s too. He didn’t mind it, considering she washed them more often than he did. She had a commitment to wearing clothes that weren’t her size, that hung off of her small frame and made her look as unapproachable as possible, which was difficult when she still had those inquisitive eyes and the arch in her eyebrow and--although maybe she only looked at Jim like this--this expression on her face like whoever she was talking to was the only person she tolerated. 

Yeah, maybe that look was just for Jim. 

“You’re not thinking of leaving me, Gaila.”

Gaila sighed.

“Gaila, tell me no,” Jim insisted. 

“No, okay, no. It’s not like I have anywhere else to go.”

“Now that’s what I like to hear.”

They had to focus, then, on piloting. Small ships took a lot more work and finesse and maybe occasionally a prayer, particularly when Baby’s back right thruster was acting up. Jim couldn’t believe he used to be impressed by the pilots on those big ships. The big ones that could practically run on autopilot through half the galaxy. He used to stand in awe on the bridge, watching the crew, until he was ushered away and back to work. Now he just laughed, to think about it. Because laughter didn’t taste bitter in his mouth. 

Once they were en route to run the hyposprays back Jim brought it up again. Carefully, because it seemed like Gaila was in a worse mood than he was, even though he was the one with a pounding headache and a black eye (he’d checked, it was pretty bad) and a split lip and a bruise on his lower back that made it hard to sit up straight. All things considered Jim was actually doing pretty great. He spoke quietly to Gaila, above the hum of the engine. 

“We’ll get a bigger ship, you’ll see. And we can go farther out, and I’ll take you somewhere.”

“Like where.”

“Somewhere nice.”

“Somewhere where we can pick up something nice, you mean.”

“Gaila, what the hell do you want me to say,” Jim asked. He looked to his right and she was glaring out in front of them, her eyebrows drawn together. She sighed and let her eyes fall closed. 

“Just stop talking, I’ll get over it.”

“Alright.”

Jim spaced out, from behind the console, while they piloted the ship back. He dreamed about replicator credits and a bed with a mattress and a bigger ship that might have both. 

-

Gaila came with him this time, to make the drop. Jim usually went by himself, but she was under the impression that looking like he got the shit beat out of him was going to harm their credibility. Jim knew it wouldn’t. They got to Galileo’s office--such a stupid fucking name that he had to have given himself, by the way--late at night, as soon as they arrived in the yard. They had to walk all the way through the marketplace pushing everything on a cart, which was exactly how Galileo intended for his smugglers to arrive. It made Jim feel cheap. They’d just been in the black for four days, to get this shit back, and landing Baby had been more of a task than usual, and by the time they got to Galileo’s office he revisited an age-old fantasy of spitting in the bastard’s face. 

Sometimes, when he spit in his face, his features looked a little different. But today it was the man himself, a former Federation Governor who used to run the colony here on Istaar and, as soon as the war ended, immediately turned it into a black market. Like he’d been planning it all along. He had this permanently smug look on his face, written into the lines around his eyes and the corners of his mouth, and barely-there eyebrows, and everyone on this side of the Sigma Quadrant agreed that he was a tool. A tool in charge of Jim’s ship and his replicator. So when they were face to face with the man, where he was sitting behind his giant desk, Jim smiled, no teeth. 

“Special delivery.”

“Aha,” Galileo said. He didn’t get up from his desk. Jim and Gaila pushed the cart to the side of the room, next to piles and piles of more crates from his other employees . Probably enough supplies for everyone in the quadrant to be healthy and safe and well-fed. All of this would be sold at the highest price-point his vendors could manage--they got bonuses, the more they earned in the market, in the form of replicator credits and energy allowances for the air conditioners in their homes. 

“Wait, let me take a look at these.”

Jim resisted the urge to groan as he hoisted a box of antibiotics onto his hip and carried it over to the desk, so Galileo could open it and inspect the hyposprays as if he even knew what a fake one would look like. 

“They’re all there.”

“Perfect.”

When Jim and Gaila were empty handed, standing side by side in front of the desk, she nudged him. She apparently wasn’t going to open her mouth, even though she insisted on coming with him. She was too busy glaring. Jim took a deep breath.

“It’s our ship,” he said, “her engine’s not great. And we’ve had problems with the thrusters for months.”

“And your engineer’s out of ideas already?” Galileo asked, like there wasn’t even a part of him that believed Gaila was an engineer. Like her skills weren’t listed in the same contract she’d signed away her soul under. 

Jim glanced over at her and she somehow managed to glare harder, eyes widening, and she tilted her chin up. Jim turned back to Galileo. 

“We can’t do repairs without supplies.” Jim cleared his throat, then. All of a sudden he did wish his face wasn’t covered in bruises. It probably wasn’t helping his case tonight. He swallowed whatever pride he had left and brought his voice up to a register he hadn’t used in years. “With respect, sir, Babydoll is your ship, and if we can’t afford to take care of her, she’ll have to be retired soon.”

Galileo watched the both of them, eyes darting back and forth, with so little respect that Jim thought about spitting again. Finally he did something that almost looked like an eyeroll. He reached into his desk drawer and tossed a small pouch down on the table. 

“Get what you need from the market, and you’ll be making your next run in the morning.”

It took all Jim had to look even a little bit grateful, taking the money. More than anything he felt cheap and stupid, like he did every time he did this, and now he wanted to shout about the fact that one night wasn’t long enough to repair the ship, that they’d have to stay up the entire night and then they’d still be late, but wanting to yell made him feel even more stupid. He pocketed the money. It didn’t even feel like enough in his hands, but maybe no amount would ever feel like enough. 

-

Two things kept Leonard McCoy from throwing himself out of the airlock: the almost twice-weekly arrival of a new patient to the starbase he lived on, and the (if he was lucky) monthly arrival of another transmission from his daughter back on Earth. Transmissions which were probably written a month or more before they even made it to him. The Federation used to bounce signals like that from ship to ship, and Leonard used to get them in a week, tops. Not anymore. He was lucky there were enough still-operating starbases between him and Earth. Otherwise they wouldn’t get to him at all. He was probably one shut down starbase from being cut off from the rest of the galaxy.

The only ships that flew around at this point could belong to anyone, no matter what they said on the hull. One thing was for certain--everyone in this star system knew he was here, and the reason he hadn’t been killed yet was because he was sitting on one of the galaxy’s best stocks of medical supplies. That and he’d sold every attempted thief off to the next planet over, where the Federation mines were under new management. 

Maybe that last part was against his hippocratic oath, because he’d only heard bad things about those mines, but it sure as hell wasn’t against his agreement to practice medicine with the Fleet, because there was no fucking Fleet . Really it was the only thing keeping Leonard alive, alone on an abandoned UFP starbase in the middle of goddamn nowhere between hell and oblivion, probably in the running for the single most vulnerable person in the galaxy. Turning people in to the mines and shooting any ship that didn’t identify itself within 1 minute of opening channels was just what he had to do. 

He wasn’t completely alone, of course. Along with the steady trickle of patients coming in, usually refugees on a long journey home, the starbase was graciously equipped with a handful of holographic crewmembers, which he could turn on and off at will. He was satisfied with that, at the beginning of all this. After moving from crowded ship to crowded ship, always in the mouth of disaster, where he felt like he couldn’t speak without yelling, and after being dropped on this starbase to recover from an injury and subsequently never picked up again when the war ended, being around holograms was a dream come true. At first. 

Two years later, he kept most of them disabled. He had a doctor’s assistant in the medbay and a skeleton of a crew that handled engineering maintenance so he didn’t have to touch it. But most of the time he was alone, guarding a treasure he hadn’t signed up to guard, reading and rereading his daughters months-late messages, and steadily working through his collection of alcohol which increased, often enough, with new patients--the only benefit of the former medical structure collapsing. People paid him however they could and he drank his way through the entire galaxy. He was as stranded as a person could be. A year ago he’d stopped trying to reach the UFP or Starfleet altogether, after his daily SOS messages went unanswered and they ended up containing so many curses that it started to look like a lost cause. 

And still-- still --people showed up to his starbase, lucky number 787, and told him that they needed help and heard from the Fleet helpline that he was practicing medicine. So they fucking knew he was there. They knew. 

Leonard tried not to think too hard about it. As long as people kept showing up, he’d keep working. He’d keep the airlock shut and his little hologram engineers enabled. 

He had two patients today, an Andorian father and son who both had the same skin infection, probably picked up from whatever hellhole they’d been living in before they made it onto a ship. Their ship was docked on the starbase, waiting, a fancy Federation one with the barcode shaved off and only a few replaced parts that stood out from their mismatched material. Leonard gave them both hypos and started running them over with the dermal regen. Universal translators were few and far between, and they sold now for a metric fuck ton of money, but Leonard could do without them. The holograms were fluent in all Federation languages. It took him two seconds to give his patients a doctor they could speak to while he grumbled in the background and treated their wounds. 

“Doctor,” the thing piped up. Well, maybe that was inconsiderate, to call the hologram a thing . It looked and spoke like a Human man, even if nobody had given it a name. Leonard thought about naming him, while the dermal regen hummed, and then realized he was being ridiculous. And also that his hologram might have just asked him something. 

“What,” he grumbled. 

“Our patients want me to ask you if you know how long the journey will be from here to the Andorian Quadrant.”

“Tell our patients to ask their Captain if they’re so inclined.”

He glanced up and the hologram was staring, while something processed inside the program. Leonard was starting to suspect that they had special speech programming to prevent hostile interactions. 

“I will tell them that you do not know.”

“I’m not a damn encyclopedia,” Leonard muttered under his breath, to the sound of his words being mistranslated into Andorian. “I’m just the unluckiest doctor in the galaxy.”

He went to bed that night on the couch in his quarters, long after his patients had gone back onto their ship which was stuffed to the brim with passengers, all of them probably refugees trying to get home. Leonard wondered if he fell under that category, considering all he thought about was getting home, but he was pretty sure he’d have to find someone to take him off the damn starbase first. The Captain of this ship didn’t offer to take him on, said there wasn’t enough space, gave him the standard lines--his role in this part of the galaxy was too valuable, and maybe if she was back this way and Leonard had found a replacement she’d take him. It was a promise that had been made to Leonard more times than he could count. She paid him instead in refill cartridges for his replicator and two bottles of Romulan ale. 

Leonard fell asleep on the couch with one of the bottles cradled into his arm like a baby. He didn’t have another patient for ten days. 

-

Leonard slept in blocks of time, during the night. A couple hours, and then he got up and checked all of the starbase systems and went up to the control room to make sure nobody was approaching on the radar, and then back to sleep. Two or three rounds of that made up one night, depending on whether or not anyone showed up. Sometimes nobody came to his starbase for days, for a week or more, and Leonard spent more time in bed than he’d care to admit. 

Tonight it was his fault for drinking too much. He slept through the first check, and then when he woke up to the security alarm and went to turn it off, he saw that it’d been going off for twenty minutes. 

Jesus fucking christ. 

It wasn’t even that Leonard was afraid he was about to get murdered, honestly. He’d passed dead inside a long, long time ago. It was just that an alarm meant someone showed up without hailing, and without answering the standard hail message one of the holograms would have sent out, and the fact that Leonard wasn’t dead yet meant they were here to rob him blind--and being stuck on this godforsaken starbase without food or medicine was as good as dead, maybe worse. 

He pulled on his uniform as fast as he could, and his shirt may have been inside out, and he shoved his bare feet into his boots and ran down to the medbay. Well, the best he could do, having just woken up and being halfway between drunk and sober, was a moderately paced walk. By the time he got there he was panting. 

All of the holograms had apparently been disabled. The whole place was empty and quiet, too quiet, after Leonard woke up to that alarm. He overrode the lock on the medbay doors and, when the main room turned out to be empty, picked up the heaviest object he could find. Finally he made his way to the storeroom with a metal stool in one hand. 

“What the fuck are you doing,” he demanded, as soon as he overrode the storeroom doors too, only to find whichever motherfucker had managed to not only dock into the base without suspicion but disable all of the holograms. It was probably breaking into the medbay which set off the alarm. All Leonard saw was the back of his head, while he rifled through boxes of medicine and hypospray refills. 

“This is a Federation medical bay,” Leonard said, louder. It was unfortunately all he could think of. 

“There is no Federation.”

He speaks, Leonard thought. His palm was sweating around the leg of the stool. 

“I still practice medicine here. You wanna find out how fast I can put you in a coma?”

“All due respect,” he said then, and stood up and turned around. He was taller than Leonard had anticipated, and his clothes were old and worn and he had a fading bruise around his eye and a scar on his lip. He was a smuggler, that much was clear. A good one, but not that good. If he’d done a better job with the medbay doors Leonard wouldn’t have woken up at all. He continued,

“There’s not a single way you could threaten me that would work. Don’t bother. My scanners said you’re alone out here.”

Fear shot through Leonard then, just a tiny bit. He wondered, with something like awe, if maybe he did value his life. He tried to imagine himself actually fighting this man, and couldn’t think of even his first move. Swinging the stool at him, of course, but then what?

“So you’re gonna take all my shit and leave me and everyone else in this star system for dead.”

He shrugged. “Federation left you for dead. I’m just doing my job.”

“ Your job. Fuck you.”

“Do you wanna fight?” There was something in the way the man glanced down at the stool in his hand, and the way his expression changed when he looked back up at Leonard’s face, almost like he was amused . “We can fight if you want, but I’m kind of on a schedule.”

Leonard’s instincts, at that look on his face, the tone of his voice, were what made him swing the stool. Because if he’d thought about it, about the idea of starting a fight with this man who still had bruises from his last fight, who’d flat out told him he wasn’t afraid of anything Leonard could threaten him with, he wouldn’t have swung the stool at him. 

It had been years since Leonard’s two-week combat training with Starfleet, and even then he’d never been particularly good at it. He had a bad leg, he’d only just started to wake up by the time he got to the storeroom. It took maybe 45 seconds before he realized he was ridiculously unmatched. 

Something clicked inside him, though, as soon as he was grappling with a total stranger against the storeroom floor. His brain woke up the rest of the way, maybe, and he realized what it would mean if he lost this fight. He’d probably be shoved to the corner of the room to watch as everything in the medbay was taken from him, and then he’d be left on this starbase with nothing, nothing to treat the next patients who arrived, nothing to treat himself. Just a dwindling supply of replicator credits until he inevitably starved to death, typing out another useless emergency message to the UFP.  

Leonard didn’t have a lot of skill, but he knew things. He knew how to snap someone’s wrist with one hand and just the right amount of leverage. 

“ Fucking hell! ”

“Get off me.”

“What the fuck did you just do? Did you fucking break my wrist?”

“Get. Off.”

The man didn’t get off, actually he spat in Leonard’s face , but he was weaker, with his right wrist broken. His body was starting to register the extent of the pain, Leonard watched it in real time. He lost his balance on his left. So Leonard pulled up the knee of his good leg and slammed it right into his stomach. 

By the time Leonard got up, he was toppled over in a pile on the floor, cradling his arm to his chest. Leonard watched him writhe for a second and then limped to the other end of the room and started to put everything away again. 

Boxes and cabinets were open but nothing was missing yet. Apparently he hadn’t walked in on the man stealing so much as he was probably just trying to get an idea of what Leonard had. His mistake. A smarter thief would have just taken it all and run. 

“Fuck you,” he finally moaned from the other end of the room. Leonard didn’t look up. 

“You were the one who said we could fight.”

“Well I didn’t think you’d break my fucking bones .”

“I’m a doctor, that means I know bones.”

Leonard finally turned away from the shelves and crossed his arms over his chest and looked down at him in the corner of the room. The starbase had a brig, he could sweat it out a couple of days in there. Assuming there wasn’t anyone else on his ship waiting for him. He could have a freighter from the mining colony over in 30 minutes, and those people had handcuffs and all that, but if the man had a broken wrist they might not take him. Or they’d do something with him that Leonard didn’t want to think about. 

Leonard sighed, and mentally kicked himself and more than anything just wished this night was a bad dream he was about to wake up from. He pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut and finally forced himself to say, 

“Get yourself out on a biobed, and I’ll fix it.”

The man did it with no further insults or fuck you s. Leonard just watched while he scrambled to his feet, holding his right arm tightly to his chest, and when the doors slid open he followed him out into the medbay. Leonard grabbed the hand-held ossioregen unit and came to stand by his biobed. He was sitting with his legs over the edge and his head down, glaring out at some random spot in front of him. After a few seconds Leonard realized he was glaring at the Starfleet insignia on his uniform. 

Finally he held out his arm. Leonard grabbed it, further down from the spot where he’d broken it, but it was still a little rough. On purpose.

“ Ow .”

“You realize I’m fixing this on the condition that you get off my starbase and never come back.”

“Just fix it. ”

“I wanna hear you say the words.”

“I’ll leave. Fuck. Okay?”

Leonard turned his arm over in his hand, then, and pulled the sleeve of his jacket up and went about fixing the bone back together. 

“They’re gonna fire me, you know,” he muttered. He hadn’t looked in Leonard’s eyes since they first met in the storeroom. Even now, he kept his head down. 

“Oh, so you’re employed.”

“They’ll take my ship, I’ll have nothing.”

“So you think I should agree to have nothing, instead.”

He hissed out a breath through his teeth, as the regen worked on his bones.

“This starbase is equipped for a crew to survive for years. Even if you can’t treat patients, if it’s just you, you’ll survive. You can send an SOS until they come get you.”

Leonard laughed, once, and it came out louder than he meant it to. He shook his head.  

“I’ve been sending those for nearly two years. They’re not coming to get me.”

“You want out of here?”

“No one in their right mind will give me a lift, not as long as I’m out here practicing medicine.”

It felt like the conversation ended there, like Leonard had revealed enough shitty details of his shitty life, but it turned out the man was just thinking. Because the next thing that came out of his mouth, the same mouth he’d used to spit in Leonard’s face ten minutes ago, was a proposition. 

“So,” he said, “what if I took you and the medical supplies.”

“Now why would I ever agree to get on your ship.”

“You don’t have to stay on the ship for long. I have to report back to Istaar. I can drop you off and you can find a lift to wherever you want to go. To Earth, I guess.”

“No.”

“Doctors are the most valuable kind of passenger, you know. You can ride for free anywhere.”

Leonard grunted, at that. He didn’t know how much of this he should believe. This man was just trying to talk his way into stealing Leonard’s shit, making it all sound easy. 

“It’ll be easier for you than it is for the rest of us.”

“The rest of us,” Leonard muttered, “what does that even mean.”

“Ex-Fleet.”

He was looking up, when Leonard glanced at him next. They caught eyes. This time Leonard wasn’t distracted by the deep purple bruise around his left eye, and noticed how bright his eyes were. He had light, optimistic sort of eyes, which ran against everything else Leonard knew about him at this point. A smuggler in former Federation space who was knowingly trying to steal medical supplies that people needed to survive.

“You rehearse this on the way here?”

“You can probably still look at my file. Lieutenant James T. Kirk of the Farragut.”

“Farragut blew up,” Leonard said. And just because it was bothering him, now, he swapped regen units for a dermal. He held it over the black eye and adjusted the settings. “Hold still.”

“Well I wasn’t on it when it blew up, clearly.”

“Uh huh.”

“I was piloting a shuttle of civilian passengers planetside, to a neutral zone. Minas cluster. The next missile after the one that blew up the Farragut went straight for the colony. I had to camp with them in the ruins for months before another ship came, and by that point the war was over.”

Leonard watched the skin around his eye heal and morph back to its normal coloring. He did the split lip next. He tried to imagine if the man, Lieutenant Kirk, apparently, was still lying, if this was something he could have even come up with. Watching a ship and a colony explode in quick succession. Camping for two months in the ruins. They probably went short on food, in that time, and who knows what else. Assuming any of this actually happened. 

“Who’s to say you’re telling the truth on all this.”

He laughed, then, and smiled in a tired sort of way. Leonard moved back from his face, now healed. 

“Trust me,” he said, looking straight up at Leonard again, “if I was making up a story, I wouldn’t make myself a part of Starfleet .”

Leonard put his tools away. He considered the best thing to say, now, in order to get this man off his starbase without any more trouble. 

“You want to come, I think.”

“I don’t.”

“You just healed my face instead of kicking me out. I didn’t even ask you to do that. And right now you’re stalling. It’s because you want to say yes and you’re telling yourself to say no.”

“Give it a rest.”

“You can go pack your things, I won’t cause any trouble. And our data actually had a lower supply reading than I found in there, so we can leave some stuff for whoever comes along next.”

Leonard blinked at him. At this man who came here to steal shit, who fought on the floor with him until he snapped his wrist, and then ever-so-politely sat on a biobed to have it healed. Whether or not he was telling the truth about himself, about being ex-Fleet, he might still be the only person in the galaxy willing to give Leonard a ride away from here. But it was that last thing he said, about leaving extra supplies behind. He had to be the only smuggler in the galaxy these days who didn’t act like fucking Machiavelli. Like every person place and thing he came across was just another source of income on their way to more income.  

And if he was lying, Leonard could always break his wrists again. 

“You know what,” Leonard said. They locked eyes for a moment longer. He couldn’t believe he was about to say this, but nobody had offered him a lift in the two years he’d been stranded. Waiting for his next chance could mean another two years. 

“Let’s shut this place down and take it all.”

“Holy shit.”

Chapter Text

“You gonna do something about him?”

“He’s fine,” Jim said, although he wasn’t actually sure, to be honest. 

“He’s been in the bathroom since we left, do you think he’s dead.”

Jim snorted. “He’s not dead . Did you see his face? He’s afraid of flying.”

“Well you should go check on him.”

“I will in a second.”

Gaila had been wary, at first, when Doctor McCoy boarded the ship. They didn’t have room for him, especially not when they loaded on the entire starbase’s medical supply, and McCoy’s suspiciously heavy personal luggage. And anyway, she always got that way around strangers. 

Except McCoy was surprisingly polite when he met her. All yes ma’am and thank you very much in his southern accent. Jim was waiting for the moment when he’d tell Gaila about the man breaking his wrist. For now she was too distracted about the fact that this extra passenger not only healed Jim’s fucked-up face for him, but brought more supplies than they’d bargained for, and, at the last minute, more than enough replicator refills to get them to the end of the month. The two of them were at the console with enough coffee to keep them awake the rest of the way to Istaar, and fuller stomachs than they’d had in days. 

Jim couldn’t say the same about his new friend. He’d watched all of the blood drain from McCoy’s face as soon as Baby took off, with her standard shake and rattle, and then he promptly locked himself in the ship’s tiny bathroom stall and had not come out in more than six hours. 

“How’d you get him to agree to this, anyway?”

“I can be very convincing, you know.”

Gaila narrowed her eyes at him. “What, did you sleep with him?”

“No, holy shit Gaila, I don’t do that anymore.”

She shrugged. After McCoy went to hide in the bathroom, she’d immediately rifled through his bags and took out a Starfleet-issue away mission jacket with about a hundred pockets on it and a Starfleet insignia patch which, thankfully, came off easily when Jim pulled at it. 

“He’s been waiting for someone to get him off that starbase for two years, it didn’t take that much convincing.”

“Two years and they never came to get him?”

“Honestly I’m not even surprised.”

“So did you give him your big I hate Starfleet speech.”

“Didn’t even have to give him all of it.”

“Go check on him? I like him.”

“You already stole his shit.”

“Please?”

Jim sighed and stood up from behind the console, letting Gaila take the controls. He had to negotiate his way through their tiny ship, between the crates they’d taken from the medbay storeroom that were crammed into stacks. Finally he tiptoed over the pile in the back and knocked on the bathroom door. 

“You good in there?”

“ Fuck off. ”

“Alright.”

And he went all the way back to the console, sat down and turned to Gaila and said, “he’s good.”

-

They were halfway there when they got a transmission from Galileo. Jim had Gaila read it. If he read the words himself he’d start to hear that man’s voice in his head, too, and maybe even see his face, and he was having such a good day today. He focused on piloting the ship while Gaila glared down at the message. 

“He’s adding an extra stop,” she finally said, “Greater Tseron, we have to pick up a crate of universal translators he ordered.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Nope.”

Jim slammed his hand against the only spot on the console that was safe for slamming his hand against, that didn’t actually change the ship’s course. It was worn there now. Jim was pretty sure he was leaving a dent. 

“Fucking hell. I’m in hell!”

“How much trouble is it going to be to pick up a crate of universal translators when our ship’s already carrying valuables. It’s like he knows we might get shot.”

“He’s sending us to the Tseron cluster in our piece of shit ship with crates of Federation medical supplies to pick up something even more expensive. I think he wants us to get shot,” Jim said, and then looked up at the ceiling and whispered, “sorry Baby.”

“How much is this going to put us off course?”

Jim looked at the map in the center of the console, turned the dial so it zoomed out. 

“It’ll add three days probably.”

Gaila groaned. 

“Why don’t you go replicate something? We might as well.”

Her eyes widened in interest, and she was almost smiling. “Be right back.”

She shuffled through the ship back to the replicator. Jim heard her tapping on the bathroom door again, not to ask if McCoy was okay, because they were well past that, but to offer him something to eat. Jim couldn’t even discern what his muffled voice said from the other side of the door. He shook his head and focused back on the controls. Baby wasn’t even flying that bad, at this point, not after Jim figured out how to account for the extra cargo. If McCoy was capable of listening to Jim long enough he would have explained that the ship actually shook the most in the back next to the thrusters, where the bathroom was and where he’d decided to spend the entire journey. 

Gaila settled back into her seat at the console with a container of food on her lap. She shared with Jim even though she didn’t have to. 

“Here’s the plan,” she said. 

“Tell me the plan.”

“We’re gonna park Baby somewhere remote. Tseron has a lot of forest, I think we need to find as much cover as possible. Then we’ll send you out to get the translators while the Doctor and I stand guard.”

Jim raised an eyebrow at her.

“What?”

“Do you like him?”

“No. He’s staying back because I know he wouldn’t let anyone steal it.”

Jim laughed. “Based on how he looked when we saw him this morning, I think he might be driven to murder.”

“Exactly. And you can get the translators without me.”

“And then drag the crate back into the forest?”

“Oh,” Gaila said. “Hm.”

Jim tried to think of a better plan. They’d done runs to and from Tseron before. It wasn’t a good place to carry valuables. A crate full of universal translators. Galileo really was trying even harder to get him killed than Jim was, and that was saying something. 

“You think he’s got a communicator?”

“Who?”

Gaila gestured her head towards the back of the ship. 

“Oh. I don’t know.”

“I’m gonna check.”

Gaila spent the rest of the ride trying to program McCoy’s communicator to operate on a closed channel with Baby. Jim wondered if the man was even going to be conscious enough, when they landed, to realize his bags had been raided twice since he boarded their ship. And, selfishly, he wondered if there was any chance of McCoy sharing that liquor stash of his before they parted ways. 

-

Jim’s mouth was full of that coppery taste of blood. He tried not to shake, while he stood and waited for Gaila to pick him up, but he was getting close. The longer he waited the more his fingernails dug into his palms. Fuck this run. He tried to tell himself that he’d never be back, but it just reminded him that it was out of his control. He didn’t get to choose where he went. He never would. And then he started shaking anyway, because he was just so angry, standing there with a crate of Federation tech that he’d almost died to get and would have to pass off to one of the worst people in the galaxy. 

He spit on the ground in front of him, mixed with the blood dripping from his broken nose. A tear almost rolled onto his cheek when he saw Baby coming down from the sky. The wind picked up and it blew dust all around him, and when it settled and Baby was right there and the door was opening he almost managed to smile. 

“Hey handsome,” Gaila said.

“What the hell happened to you?”

McCoy was out of the bathroom, apparently, looking more or less alive and way more concerned than he had to be at the state of Jim’s face. He got off the ship with Gaila, but instead of helping her move the crate, he stood and stared at Jim, calculating the extent of the damage, it looked like. 

“Not here,” Gaila said, “we need to move.”

The three of them pulled the crate in, somehow managing to find a spot on the floor for it, and the next thing Jim knew they were lifting off again. Away from this piece of shit planet. 

Instead of locking himself in the bathroom, this time, McCoy sat on a crate behind Jim’s chair at the console and started rifling through his bag. He pulled out a tricorder. Or some sort of scanner. Jim wasn’t sure, he was too focused on getting Baby into space. Apparently not focused enough to deter McCoy from trying to diagnose him with something. 

“Get that thing off my face.”

“You were only gone for five hours,” he said, and it almost sounded like some sort of accusation.

“It actually takes less than five hours to break a nose. I assumed you’d know that, Mr. I know bones .”

“You’re gonna have to get used to this, Doctor. I don’t think we’ve had a single run where he came back unharmed.”

“Hey, fuck off, we have .”

“What, did you have to fight them for the translators?”

“Can you at least wait until I’ve gotten us out of the atmosphere to poke me with your medkit and your questions.”

McCoy sighed and rolled his eyes and leaned back. In his peripheral vision Jim could see him holding onto the back of his chair for dear life, while Baby rattled up into space. It was a little bit satisfying, if he was being honest. 

“You a bad flyer, Doctor?” Gaila asked, and Jim snorted. 

“I’m not built for space.”

That made Jim actually laugh. “Did you at any point consider that before joining Starfleet?”

“Fuck off,” he said, and hunched over with his face pressed against the back of Jim’s chair until they finally leveled out in the black. Once they were basically cruising Jim turned to look over his shoulder, at the top of McCoy’s head and his hands white-knuckling the sides of his chair. 

“We’ve now reached our cruising altitude for the remainder of the flight,” he said in the best pilot voice he could do.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your pilot speaking,” Gaila parroted. “Thank you for joining us on our full-service flight to the armpit of the galaxy.”

“ We know you have many choices when you fly, so thank you for choosing Babydoll airlines. ”

“Ha!” Gaila said, “Babydoll airlines.”

“Why Babydoll?” McCoy asked, after he’d finally decided to relax his vice grip on Jim’s chair and lift his head. Jim couldn’t believe this was the same man who snapped his wrist in two a couple days ago. He was pretty sure he’d never find this man threatening again, after witnessing him curl into himself like a pill bug as soon as the ship took off. 

“That’s the name of our ship,” Gaila said. 

“Baby for short.”

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Yeah it is, isn’t it,” Jim said, but he had trouble making it sound anything but affectionate. 

The affection in his body was lost when a tricorder showed up in his face again. 

“I thought I told you to get that out of my face.”

“You know you’ve got a deviated septum,” McCoy grumbled. 

“Maybe I wanna keep it that way.”

“What the hell happened,” he asked again.

“Ugh.” Jim glared out in front of him while he and Gaila piloted their ship as far away from the Tseron group as possible, and it was hard to focus when the tricorder was replaced with a regen unit that buzzed right in his ear and gave his nose that awful achy healing sensation. It was almost worse than the dull throb of pain he’d had for the past few hours. “I didn’t fight anyone when I picked them up, okay, I got jumped on the way back.”

“Oh, Jimmy,” Gaila said, and her face was full of worry when she glanced over at him and he remembered why he usually avoided telling her where he picked up his scrapes and bruises.

“You should see the other guy.”

McCoy scoffed. He had to get up on his feet and bend over kinda awkwardly to get to the other side of Jim’s nose. He smelled like Starfleet standard-issue soap and somehow Jim didn’t mind it as much as he would’ve thought. 

“What are you,” McCoy asked, “some kinda trouble magnet?”

Jim stared straight ahead while the pain in his nose started to fade and McCoy moved the tricorder across his face to a scrape on his cheekbone. “You don’t know what it’s like out there, do you. You’ve been in that starbase the whole time.”

“What what’s like.”

“I’m actually very good at my job,” Jim said, “because I’m not dead yet.”

“Smugglers don’t usually make it long before they get fired or killed,” Gaila added. “It’s true.”

“Yall talk about this like it’s a real job.”

“It is.” Jim shoved McCoy’s hand away once it seemed like they’d reached a stopping point. His pain was low enough that he honestly didn’t care if his face still looked rough. “We have a boss, he tells us what to do, he pays us if we do it.”

Gaila cut in, “and it’s not always stealing, some pickups are pre-arranged.”

“A boss,” McCoy said, “who the hell would end up doing that for a living.”

“Whatever you’re imagining, that’s exactly what he’s like,” Gaila said. 

McCoy left the console after that. Jim heard him rifling through his bags for a little while, and then when they hit a rough patch and Baby shook a little, he heard the bathroom door slide open and shut again. Only then did he finally take a deep breath and relax his hands around the controls. 

McCoy made him tense; he made him have to explain all this shit that he didn’t want to hear himself say out loud, made him stop and think about how his life ended up where it did, made him sit still while he felt his injuries heal in real time. Jim was already thinking about the best place in Istaar to drop him off.

-

“ What? ”

“The translators were a consolation prize.” Galileo bared his teeth--he was probably convinced that whatever that was passed for smiling to his exploited workers. “Well, something like a consolation prize. A chance to let you keep your job.”

“Keep my job,” Jim repeated.

“I’ve sent, what, twenty different smugglers to try and raid that starbase? Twenty five?” He looked to the side of the room for confirmation, where one of his assistants, a Betazoid with bruises peeking out around a metal collar, was cataloguing the medical supplies on her PADD. She glanced up at him. 

“Twenty two.”

“And how many of them came back?”

“One.”

Jim had no clue what sort of point he was trying to make. And he was too tired, after flying all night to try and make it back in time, to bother being assertive. He wouldn’t have stayed to talk at all after dropping everything off if Galileo hadn’t just said that. 

“What are you talking about.”

“The doctor on that starbase,” he said, “has a deal with the neighboring mining colony. Every time he thinks he’s getting robbed, he turns them over to the mines.” He laughed. Like it was funny. Like he wished he’d thought of it himself. 

“He must know he’s signing their death warrants when he does that. I wonder what he must be like with patients.”

Something dark and clawing grew in Jim’s stomach and he had to push past it. Galileo could be lying through his teeth. Or McCoy could be guilty of more than just breaking Jim’s wrist and making him uncomfortable. Those mines. After the war ended and the Federation fell apart, any and all regulations for labor or mining or worker rights disappeared overnight. Jim had never even met someone who had worked in a mine and managed to get out. People were lucky to last a year. 

For McCoy to have sent people there, as a Starfleet officer --

No, Jim snapped out of it. He had to remember where he was, who he was talking to. Galileo sent him to that starbase when he was all but certain Jim and Gaila would end up in the mines--end up dead . He was ready to take that loss. They were nothing to him. And he’d just come back with all those crates of medical supplies that would be sold to the highest bidder, when McCoy had been treating people with it for free. 

He realized he was being spoken to again. 

“Don’t give me that face. I sent you there because I knew you could do it, or at least that you’d come back alive. When your ship left the base so many hours later I assumed you must have... convinced the doctor to let you live. One way or another.”

That stupid grin again. Jim hated the way his face heated up so easily at that comment, at that smile. Hated that he knew he was turning red and couldn’t stop it. 

“You seemed to be lagging behind schedule. I added the extra run in case that meant you hadn’t managed to get the supplies and were afraid to come back and see me.”

Jim couldn’t even respond to that. He was afraid of what would happen if he opened his mouth.

“But look at you, you completed both runs without so much as a scratch on your face.”

Remembering why he didn’t have any scratches on his face only made everything worse. Because it made him think about McCoy again. Who he really was, what he could have done, whether or not giving him a ride made Jim a part of it in some way. 

“Which is why I’m upgrading you ahead of schedule.”

“What?”

“Don’t look so disappointed. I know I had you on track to get a bigger ship after your 200th run, but you’ve proven to be more valuable than the people ahead of you in line.”

The whole system was designed to make any reward feel life-changing, whether it was a ship upgrade or an extra day of replicator credits. All of the smugglers made such tiny profits from each run, barely enough to break even, and as soon as their savings reached a level that could potentially buy them their independence, cover a passage fee back to their home planet or at least to a place with better employment, Galileo would offer up a cash-in for a new ship which always seemed like a better option. And now this. He knew this was coming. But how the fuck was he supposed to say no. 

What other choice did he have? Continue flying Baby until she broke down in the vacuum of space and he and Gaila died out there?

“What ship do I get.”

“Impatient, are we?”

Jim fantasized about spitting in his face again. 

“I’ll send a notice to Baby’s network once I’ve sorted it out. Why don’t you go find your engineer and celebrate. And Jim?”

Galileo had stopped him right as he was about to leave, right as the motion sensor had opened up the doors for him. Jim grunted. 

“Good work,” he said, and Jim wanted to throw up. 

Instead he waited until the doors closed behind him, until he was halfway through the market next to a stall selling engine parts and air conditioner units, and he kicked over a table that must have been twice his weight from the inventory. Maybe to get back at Galileo in some way. Or maybe because the salespeople at the stall dragged him outside and beat him to the ground for breaking their merchandise, and left him with a bruise on his forehead and blood dripping down his eyebrow along the side of his face. A bruise and a cut and trails of blood that he got to keep this time. 

-

It was Gaila who told Jim where McCoy had ended up after they dropped him off at the passenger docks and he struck out finding a ship. But she wasn’t the one who suggested Jim go find him. He did that on his own, after he’d had enough to drink and spent a little too long trying to figure out how the fuck McCoy had spent an entire day out in the docks and didn’t find a ship that would take him. So he went to the lodge, found him at the bar, took a shot of something cheap and awful and instead of asking him what the hell happened, accidentally asked McCoy if he needed a ride from them again. 

McCoy looked about as confused as Jim felt, when that question came out. 

“You want me to do what?”

“I didn’t say I want you to do it, I said I’m offering.”

If McCoy was in rough shape when Jim invaded his starbase in the middle of the night--his clean, well-kept starbase--he looked like a nightmare now. Four days in the black, another day standing under the sun surrounded by dust and people and pollution. He looked like he hadn’t slept once since then, let alone taken a shower. Which was about how people tended to look on Istaar. 

But it was his face, too. Jim was pretty sure he saw regret in there. 

“Uh huh.”

“Our new ship’s gonna travel better, which means we’ll be able to drop you off at a bigger port. Somewhere not so…” Jim looked around, aware he was including himself in this assessment, “seedy.”

McCoy just watched him. His eyes narrowed.

“You can find a big ship with a good captain. Someone who won’t double cross you or, I don’t know, sell you off to a mining colony.”

Jim downed his second shot a beat later to avoid having to look McCoy in the eyes and watch him realize why Jim just said what he said. 

“You heard about that.”

“You’ve got a reputation apparently. My boss didn’t think to warn me.”

“You were the one who said he’s trying to get you killed.”

“And that makes you the conduit for the killing, you realize.”

“Look I--” McCoy lowered his voice. Like he was afraid of people overhearing what he’s done. In this shithole. “It was either strike up that deal or get myself and every sick or injured passenger in the star system killed. It was the devil or the deep blue sea. I’m not proud of myself, if that’s what you think.”

“I’m trying not to think about it.”

“Oh because you’re such an upstanding citizen, Lieutenant Kirk,” McCoy spat out, and then, for some reason, offered Jim his flask when he realized he was out. Jim couldn’t resist, even though the sound of McCoy calling him Lieutenant Kirk made his hands tingle, like they were aching to knock the asshole to the ground. He overrode that urge and grabbed the flask instead, took a sip, and had to pause for a moment at the best liquor he’d tasted in years. Fucking hell. 

“I guess I’m just confused,” he finally said, voice lower and a little bit rough from the alcohol. 

“About how a doctor could do what I did?”

“Confused about why you didn’t send me there, too. You could’ve, you know. You earned my trust. You could’ve called a freighter over when you went to your quarters to pack. I wouldn’t have seen it coming.”

McCoy was watching him again, less defensive this time. Just thinking.

“Maybe I wanted to do the right thing for once.”

Jim knew it wasn’t the truth, but it was enough to make him feel better about everything. A little better, at least. He stood up.

“We’ve got one more night with Baby, you wanna sleep in the bathroom again?”

McCoy breathed out a laugh through his nose, his flask pressed up to his bottom lip.

“I already rented a room upstairs.”

“Make sure to lock the deadbolt.”

“Will do.”

“If you decide to come with us, just meet us in the shipyard in the morning. You know where we parked, we’re still in the same spot. We’ll probably be up and packing at sunrise.”

McCoy just nodded. Jim didn’t actually know if he wanted the man to come with him. He hadn’t really been planning on making that offer when he came in here. 

Maybe he was trying to do the right thing for once, too. 

Chapter Text

Sweeper was the name of their new ship. Jim and Gaila woke up in their hammocks over Baby’s control panel to see a comm that just said SWEEPER, NORTH LOT P137 . He tried not to get sentimental while they packed up everything they owned. It didn’t take long, anyway, so he was only thinking in circles for an hour or so. Babydoll was a ticking time bomb, a perpetually broken ship with a bad thruster and a completely non-functioning shield system. He buried down every nostalgic thought that came up and tried to imagine that the next ship would be better. The next ship had to be better. Or he’d march back into Galileo’s office and--

Okay, he had no idea what he’d do. Probably nothing, that was his whole intention. But fucking hell. Jim hoisted one bag over his shoulder and carried the other, all of his possessions since the Farragut rustling against one another in his hands, and walked away from Baby and didn’t let himself turn around. 

“Sweeper, that’s not bad, right? I don’t mind it.”

“I do,” Jim muttered to Gaila. Everything she owned could be carried in just her hands, or her oversized shirt pulled up like a kangaroo pocket. Instead she’d filled a duffel bag with stolen tech from Baby, the rest of the replicator cartridges, a spare tricorder McCoy let them keep. Neither of them really knew how to use it, but it had seemed like an appropriate parting gift. 

Not that it mattered, when they reached the end of the south lot and saw Dr. McCoy standing there, covered in dust from the morning wind and already scowling under the harsh light, like he hadn’t shown up voluntarily. 

“You’re coming with us!” Gaila cheered. Jim just caught his eye and nodded. He hadn’t told Gaila what he’d learned yesterday. Based on the look in McCoy’s eyes, the careful way he nodded back, he knew Jim hadn’t told her. 

“Better the devil you know,” he finally said. Jim looked him over now that they were standing closer to one another. He was still in one of his Starfleet uniforms, probably because he didn’t own anything else. At the very least he’d stopped doing the whole clean-shaven-hair-gelled-back goody-two-shoes shit. And at the very least he was here. He was smart enough to take up Jim’s offer, but apparently not smart enough to get rid of all his very obviously Fleet-issue gear. 

“You get mugged yet?” Jim asked, tilting his chin down at the shiny metal insignia on his jacket. 

Gaila actually stepped forward and tapped her fingernail against it. It probably still worked, too. McCoy could’ve hocked it for a good deal of money. “You should take that off.”

McCoy just grunted and fell into step behind Jim. Gaila slowed down to walk next to him, which was borderline offensive. 

“I thought that was just his, you know, personal thing ,” Jim heard McCoy ask.

“Well, it does kinda put a target on your forehead. Starfleet apologists don’t exactly get positive attention.”

“What she’s trying to say is that it makes you look like a sucker,” Jim said. They wove through the lot, moving into single file as the ships got bigger. Gaila didn’t wait for McCoy to respond to that. Although Jim would’ve loved to hear what he had to say. 

“Our new ship’s name is Sweeper you know,” she said.

“Huh. That’s almost a real ship name.”

Jim scoffed.

He and Gaila never went to the north lot. It was reserved for bigger ships, and it was far as fuck from the market anyway. They walked through the aisles past ships at every stage of repair and people he’d never seen before. But they all had the same look on their faces. The look that everyone in this line of work had. That life was fucking shit. Even up here where the ships were big and shiny. If Jim was in a better emotional state maybe he’d be able to laugh about it. He did, at some point, look over his shoulder at Gaila, who quirked her eyebrows up. She was looking forward to this, which helped. They kept on walking.

“Who is that,” McCoy piped up from the back of their little group, as soon as the three of them found the right aisle. 

He was probably referring to the teenager standing in front of their new ship, in place 137, and squinting in the morning light. He didn’t just look out of place, he looked like he’d been dropped there by a transporter five seconds ago. He was virtually untouched by the dirt and grime around them, wearing a clean and pressed uniform that wasn’t Starfleet but was close enough--probably some UFP member fleet or one of those fancy private schools--with pale skin and wild curly hair. He shielded his eyes with one hand and stared at them while they approached from across the aisle. 

Jim just shrugged. “One of Galileo’s assistants maybe. Who knows where he gets them.”

“No, he looks way too young,” Gaila whispered. It wasn’t an argument.  

“I know.”

The teenager introduced himself as Pavel Chekov, sir , in a high, energetic sort of voice that sounded like he was definitely too young. But his age had nothing to do with the fact that apparently his uncle was friends with Galileo and called in a favor to get him posted on one of the smuggler ships so he could spend time out in space. All Jim was thinking about through his explanation was the idea that Galileo had friends. Apparently that wasn’t where Gaila or McCoy’s mind went. McCoy was actually the first to cut in. 

“Wait a minute, kid,” he asked, holding his hand out like he was some sort of nightclub bouncer. “How old are you?”

He smiled. “Seventeen, sir.”

“Oh, good, he’s seventeen .” McCoy turned to glare at Jim. Like his age was somehow Jim’s fault. “There’s a seventeen-year-old who wants to commit crimes with you.”

“Why are you looking at me like I had something to do with it?”

“Mr. Kirk, I promise you won’t be bothered by me. I know navigation, piloting, and engine repair. I’ll work for nothing.”

Jim thought about it. He looked at McCoy’s very determined expression, and then he looked to Gaila, who clearly wanted Chekov as far away from this place as possible, based on the way she’d already walked over to stand next to him. Looked down at the kid where he was nearly bouncing up and down on his heels in anticipation.  

“Don’t call me Mr. Kirk,” he finally said, “and don’t go around telling people you’ll work for nothing. If you can really do all that, you’ll get a cut of the profits. Now get in, I wanna see how this thing flies.”

“Oh it flies great, sir, it’s one of the newest ships in rotation, refurbished after only a year in the Fleet.”

“You’ve already flown this thing?”

“I watched the testing, sir.”

“Don’t call me sir, either. You know anything about the engine?”

Chekov grinned and led them inside. 

Sweeper was big enough that it actually had rooms. An engine room, a handful of coffin-sized bunks in the wall of one corridor with skinny little standard-issue beds, a mess hall with a round table. A bridge. An honest-to-god bridge. Sure, the bridge was small, smaller than any of the ships Jim had worked in during the war, but it was more than just the control panel at the front end of the ship. It had a door . 

McCoy stuck around for the whole tour and then muttered something about finding a bunk and nobody bother me until we’re on solid ground again . Jim told him sweet dreams. 

“Alright.” He cleared his throat, shifted in his chair, positioned and repositioned his hands over the controls. The bridge’s actual Captain’s chair was empty. It hadn’t felt right, but the control panel was going to take some adjustment too. Things were automated in Sweeper that were manual in Baby. And vice versa. And Jim didn’t know what he was supposed to do with all the extra room. Leg room. Elbow room. Breathing room. It started to feel like too much, like something he didn’t deserve. He cleared his throat again. Focused just on getting off the ground, first. 

“Alright, where are we going.”

Getting up into space in this ship was so painless that Gaila had started multitasking, especially with the extra help they had now. The kid, Chekov, moved from panel to panel on the back wall of the bridge, doing the work of two officers. Gaila was playing with the ship’s settings and stabilizing it all at once. With the rest of her attention she answered, 

“We’ve got a storage facility to raid and also a weapons deal on Drema.”

“Selcundi Drema?”

“That’s the one. I think it’s the only Drema.”

“There are actually five!” Chekov called out, which made Gaila smile in the way that wrinkled her nose. 

“That’s two quadrants over. How long is that going to take?”

“If we keep an average speed of warp 2 and spend no longer than 24 hours planetside,” Chekov piped up again from behind them, “ and route the ship through the corner of the Mira quadrant to avoid hitting the particle field around the Argolis cluster--”

Jim gave Gaila a look over his shoulder, whispered how does he know all this?

“--and if we route the ship around Solais instead of piloting through, we should be able to complete the run to and from Drema one day faster than our allotted five days.”

Finally Jim turned around all the way in his chair, and saw Chekov standing at the navigation screen, hands flying while he charted the route for them. Chekov glanced up at him. 

“That’s pretty impressive.”

“Thank you s--”

Jim raised his eyebrows. 

“Uh. Thank you.”

“Is there a major port we can add to our route? Maybe a market, or something.” He caught Gaila’s confused look. “Somewhere the Doctor can hitch a ride back.”

“I’ll find one!”

The three of them settled back into flying the ship for the next few hours. Jim tried to find a rhythm with the new controls. He wondered what McCoy was doing, wherever he was. Closed up in his bunk until the ship stopped moving, maybe. Drinking whatever he had in that flask last night.

“I thought he was staying with us,” Gaila said after a while. She’d finished reprogramming the door signals from that standard whistle sound to a foghorn, and changed the settings for the lights and made two trips back and forth to the engine room before settling down to pilot the ship with Jim. 

“I told him the bigger ship meant we could take him to a better port than Istaar. He’s trying to get back to Earth, not join our crew,” Jim said, “and besides, we can’t afford another person.”

“Do you think he’d stay with us if we asked? It could be good to have a doctor on board.”

“I don’t know, Gaila.” Jim shifted the position of his hands again. He just couldn’t seem to get comfortable. Hopefully it would click soon enough, but he kept thinking about the fact that this control panel didn’t have any empty spaces, anywhere he could slam his hand against when he wanted to yell the word fuck. “I’m surprised he even showed up this morning to board our ship again.”

“Maybe he’ll start to like it here. This ship is way better than Baby.”

Jim stopped himself from letting out a sigh. He knew Gaila was right, but he wondered if maybe she was also wrong. If maybe he just wanted her to be wrong. 

-

“I told you it would be good to have a doctor on board,” Gaila mumbled. She was smiling, and her head was heavy. Jim sat next to her makeshift biobed and his leg shook up and down, energy coursing through his entire body as if this hadn’t been the longest day ever.

It wasn’t just the biobed that they’d come up with at the last minute. The mess hall, at the bottom level of the ship, was effectively their medbay now. Ever since they’d carried Gaila back to the ship five hours ago, her leg destroyed from five separate phaser hits, the skin broken and trailing blood across the floors. For all the chaos that had gone down when their pickup site got raided, Gaila screamed even louder when McCoy tried to remove her pants in order to treat the wound. Jim felt nauseous having to restrain her, having to shout at Chekov to keep holding her still while McCoy at least cut off one of the pant legs. She finally passed out from blood loss and Jim hid in the bathroom, holding himself together with his arms around his chest while he forced himself to breathe. His face was red in the mirror, around his eyes and down his neck. It took so long for him to calm down that he didn’t realize Chekov had taken their ship back up into space. 

He listened to the hum of the engine while he sat next to Gaila, her leg healed and elevated while she lay on an already-stained mattress on top of the table. McCoy only nodded at Jim when he’d finally come out of the bathroom, and then left. Jim reached for Gaila’s hand. He was glad they were alone when he heard the sound of his own voice, high and shaking. 

“I am so, so sorry.”

Gaila closed her eyes and shook her head. “You didn’t do anything.”

“I should have done something. When the raid started I should’ve--”

“Jim.” Gaila opened her eyes again. “It’s okay. It’s already over.”

Jim wished he could have apologized for the other thing, for what happened when they brought her back to the ship, for what happened before then, before Jim knew her. All he could do was hold onto her hand, over the blanket. It was a Fleet-issue medbay blanket, probably from McCoy’s things. The soft blue fabric brought back memories of its own. Jim smoothed his free hand over it. 

“You’re shaking, you know.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“And you’re covered in blood and--you know, you look like shit.”

“You’re the one on the hospital bed.”

“What are you trying to say?” She asked, and she had that look again, it was back, the same one Jim saw from across the control panel so many times. That little spark in her eye and quirk of her eyebrows.

Jim smiled. “Nothing,” he said, “you look beautiful.”

Gaila’s eyes fell closed, in a way that looked more sincere than before. She took a deep breath. 

“Beauty needs sleep. And you need a shower.”

Jim smoothed her hair back from her face, the strands that had stuck to her forehead when she was in pain and sweating and screaming at him. He brushed the line of her nose with one finger and she sighed again, nearing sleep. 

“Do you want me to stay here?”

“No,” she slurred, “I’m safe. You’ll be up at the helm like my protector.”

“I will be.” He trailed his fingertip back up and tapped the center of her forehead, a single invisible dot on her skin, and she wrinkled her nose before her face went slack. Jim stood above her bed until he was sure she was asleep. 

-

There was a knock on the door of Jim’s bunk later that night. Well, his bed. It was less of a room and more of a glorified casket built into the wall, but he could sit up and, most importantly, he could sleep. If he felt good enough, at least. Regardless of how he felt, though, he’d been ordered to go to bed. Chekov was at the helm, and Gaila had insisted on being moved up there with him so she didn’t get bored. Jim and McCoy set her up in the Captain’s chair and then she further insisted that both of them get some sleep. Jim slid into his bunk, and felt wide awake for an eternity. 

And then the knock. He slid the door open and the first thing he saw was a bottle. He slid it open the rest of the way. 

“Out of your uniform Dr. McCoy?”

“It’s covered in blood,” he said, “for the first time in a long time.”

McCoy apparently took Jim’s sitting up as an invitation to crawl in on the opposite end of the bed. He passed Jim one of the small aluminum drinking cups from down in the mess. 

“So uh.” Jim was still trying to figure out what was happening. McCoy didn’t exactly like him, and Jim was still processing the whole mining-colony-thing and the part where the same man who now insisted on healing his and Gaila’s every injury also broke his wrist without breaking a sweat. After that night in the bar and the last three days on Sweeper together they were at least on speaking terms, but nothing near slumber party terms. 

McCoy rolled up the sleeves of his flannel before he poured their drinks. Jim saw the scratch marks on his wrist, from Gaila’s nails. 

“So what.”

“Are we celebrating something?” Jim asked.

“Celebrating? No. I think this is more along the lines of drinking to forget.”

Jim would’ve snorted, if it had been a bad day for any other reason. If it had been five phaser hits to his leg instead. He held up his cup a little as some poor excuse for cheers and took a sip. 

“This is good.” And different from the last thing McCoy had handed him. How many different bottles of booze did this man have?

“It’s Cardassian.”

They sat in silence for a while, Jim’s bunk opened up to the dark hallway, McCoy in his jeans and socks sitting cross-legged at the foot of his bed. Jim felt cold out of nowhere, so he drank a little faster. At some point he realized McCoy was waiting for him to finish. A few seconds after that the two of them finally caught eyes. 

“Are you okay,” McCoy asked him then, with a deliberate sort of tone to his voice, although it wasn’t particularly earnest. Jim knew that he already knew the answer. 

The alcohol, whatever it was--Cardassian something--made Jim’s cheeks hot and all of a sudden he could smile, so he did. He smiled and he narrowed his eyes at McCoy. 

“Did you forget we’re not friends?”

McCoy breathed out a laugh through his teeth. He poured them both a little bit more. “You still mad I broke your wrist?”

Jim didn’t answer that. “I think you already know how I’m doing. You were there.”

“I was.”

“And I don’t need to talk about it. Or want to.”

McCoy raised his eyebrows, raised his drink to his lips, mumbled not sayin you have to . Jim couldn’t help smiling at that too. He cleared his throat at the end. 

“So,” McCoy tried next, “how long have you two known each other?”

Jim thought about what he was willing to share about his and Gaila’s past. About the two or so years they’d spent together at that point which already felt like a lifetime. The things Jim had to do before he found her, before they met in the luckiest coincidence of his life. The way they pulled one another out of their old lives, pushed through all of the pain and the shame and ended up the closet either of them had ever gotten to being in control. All of it made his chest feel tight again, when he remembered what happened to Gaila--what he’d let happen. So he gave some noncommittal answer about them teaming up to start smuggling because they didn’t have anyone else. And then he tried to change the subject to something easier. 

“You know she tried to kill me, too, when we first met.”

“I never tried to kill you --”

“She had a knife to my throat before I even realized she was there. I was raiding some storage unit somewhere, thought I was alone. Took forever to convince her that I wasn’t going to hurt her, I was as desperate and washed up as she was.” He started laughing. “You know what we stole that night?”

“What.”

“Holodeck program cartridges. Like six crates of them. I can’t believe we thought they were worth anything. We almost had to pay someone to take them.”

“Who the hell uses holodecks anymore?”

“Nobody. Nobody uses holodecks. We were in a fucking war.”

McCoy finished his drink and leaned back against the wall of Jim’s bunk. “Did you fight?”

Jim knew he wasn’t asking about Gaila anymore. He looked down at his hands, watched the liquid in his cup as it just barely moved with the hum of the engine. Compared to Baby, Sweeper moved so subtly that they may as well have been parked back in the lot on Istaar. 

“Yeah,” he finally said.

“Planetside?”

“I did everything. I was a kid when I first shipped out, I hadn’t even graduated. 22 years old.”

“Shit.”

“I was their perfect soldier, if you can believe it.”

McCoy barked out a laugh. “I don’t think their perfect soldier would’ve turned into someone who smuggles Federation supplies in the black market.”

“Yeah yeah, pour me another and get out, I’ve told you too much already.”

He did just that, except he stopped right outside of Jim’s bunk, leaning his hip against the wall. Jim wondered how much he’d had to drink before he showed up. He looked relaxed in a way Jim hadn’t seen him before, like the stress of the day had finally forced that hard line out of his posture. 

“I was on the frontlines too, you know,” he said.

Jim didn’t know what to say to that. He figured his confusion probably showed on his face well enough. 

“I volunteered,” McCoy went on, “Starfleet needed doctors out there and they were promising a shit ton of money, enough to take care of my family for years. So I went straight into the thick of it. I wasn’t supposed to see combat, but our ship nearly got blown up and I was hurt bad enough to be transferred out to that starbase. Problem was when nobody came out to find me after.”

Jim felt something dark start to pool in his stomach as he processed McCoy’s words. “You’ve got a family?”

“My daughter and her mother. My ex. They’re still on Earth.”

“We’ll get you back there,” he said, maybe a little too fast, and McCoy just nodded and headed up to his own bunk, the one on top of Jim’s. Jim slid the door shut again and finished his drink and pulled the sheets up over his chest. He thought about the war, until he reached those places inside his mind that were locked, hidden behind walls and chains and alarm systems. He thought about Gaila and the look on McCoy’s face today, in the mess when Jim stepped out of the bathroom and they locked eyes. His face when he talked about the war. It was almost the same both times. 

He laid back down, pressed his hands to the warmth of his cheeks and waited until he fell asleep. 

-

Jim forgot that they were supposed to drop McCoy off somewhere when they were racing to make up for lost time, and then they were approaching Istaar and he remembered. 

He found him down in the mess, which in the last two days had been transformed even further from haphazard medbay to a medbay with a tiny section left for eating, although the two things didn’t exactly work together in the same space. He was running a tricorder over Gaila’s leg. She didn’t even have a scar. And the two of them were mid-conversation. Jim leaned against the doorway. 

“Where’d you get hurt, anyway?”

“On my leg. Way worse than yours.”

“What happened,” she asked. She spotted Jim over McCoy’s shoulder and winked at him, but McCoy didn’t notice. He was busy testing the mobility in her knee, with one hand on her calf. 

“My medbay blew up. I was standing next to the decontamination chamber and when the panels shattered it sent a shard of insulated glass straight through my thigh.”

“Holy shit,” Jim heard himself say. McCoy didn’t even flinch when he realized Jim was in the room. Maybe he’d known he was there the whole time. 

“You don’t wanna know.”

“How are you even walking?”

“Modern medicine.” He turned around, apparently satisfied with his handiwork. “What are you doing down here?”

“I remembered we were supposed to make a stop for you to get off, and we didn’t do that. Thought I’d come ask if you want to try and find a ride on Istaar this time.”

“After the sparkling recommendation you gave that place?” He started putting his tools away. Like away away. In cabinets.  “I wouldn’t have left anyway, not until I saw her recovery through. You’re good to go back to normal life by the way, darlin.”

Gaila hopped off of the biobed and pulled her boots back on. Jim stood there and wondered how the two of them had ended up in darlin’ territory. 

“I’ll just stay on here until we end up somewhere reputable. I trust y’all enough at this point.”

Jim breathed out a laugh at the way McCoy didn’t even bother making that sound like a question, that he’d be on board for a while longer. And McCoy raised an eyebrow at him, like he dared him to challenge it. Jim held up his hands. 

“Alright, fine by me. Gaila, are you gonna be good to make the drop with me?”

Gaila was about to say something, and then McCoy gave both of them a deliberate look, one after another. But he said to Jim only, “don’t do anything stupid.”

“He’s like our CMO,” Gaila whispered while they walked back to the bridge.

“Shut up.”

-

Jim went straight to the engine room when they got back from the market that night. It was where Chekov had said he would be when they invited him to make the drop with them. He’d said it in a hasty, awkward sort of way that Jim didn’t think twice about until they actually set foot in the market to deliver the stuff from Drema. 

“Hey, uh, Chekov,” he said when he walked in. He couldn’t figure out a good way to start this conversation, so he went straight to the point. “Why is your face all over the market hall with a ten thousand credit reward for finding you.”

Chekov didn’t turn around, but Jim could see the way his shoulders tensed up, could see that he’d stopped moving his hands. Finally he said, quietly,

“Because I ran away.”

“I thought you said your uncle cashed in a favor with Galileo and assigned you to Sweeper.”

“It was a good story, then, if you didn’t question it. When has Galileo done anyone a favor?”

When Jim walked up closer behind him he finally saw the way Chekov’s hands were shaking. Seventeen years old, and he’d lied to get himself on a ship, and whatever he was running away from was worth ten thousand credits. That was more than Jim made in a year. Jim tried not to let anything show on his face when he sat down next to Chekov and effectively made him flinch, and then turn away. 

“I’m not going to turn you in.”

“It’s a lot of credits,” Chekov whispered. “Aren’t you wondering what makes me so valuable?”

He asked it like he thought his life had no value at all. Jim recognized that tone of voice. It took him back to the quarters of the Farragut where they’d packed six officers into every room. Young people who were technically still cadets, who were transferred from department to department and ship to ship so often they all started to look the same to each other. Jim remembered the sounds of all of their voices, his own as well, at night when they talked in the dark. 

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. But nobody has to know you’re here. I’ll make sure you never set foot on Istaar again. You just say the word.”

“You would do that?”

“I would do that.”

Jim didn’t have time to gauge Chekov’s reaction, or even see the look on his face, because from one second to the next there was a shaking teenager in his arms, pressing his face into Jim’s chest and getting engine grease on the back of his shirt. He didn’t know what to do when he realized the kid was crying, so he just let him. He sat there until Chekov took a deep breath for once. 

“Thank you, Captain,” he muttered, and the assertion to not call me Captain either was on the tip of Jim’s tongue but he held it back. 

-

In the end it was Chekov’s idea to tell the rest of them. Jim would’ve been fine explaining the situation to Gaila and maybe passing it on to McCoy (even though he definitely had no say in the matter regardless of how he acted all the time), but Chekov insisted. They sat around the empty table in the mess. 

“You should all know,” he said. His face flushed again as soon as he started speaking.

“Know what,” McCoy asked.

“Know why they’re looking for me. You should know the truth before you decide to let me stay with you.”

“Chekov--” Jim started, but Gaila shot him a look. 

“What happened to you?” She asked softly, and Chekov shook his head. 

“It’s not what happened to me, it’s what I did. My uncle does know Galileo. They used to run Istaar together. After my parents died, during the war he moved me here with him because he thought it’d be safer than my school on Yorktown. I was one of the only children in the colony and when they opened the market they started...training us.”

“Training you to do what.”

“To do what they do. To manage the colony and control the market. At first I was in charge of keeping the books, counting the money, everything like that. Galileo always said I was smarter than the other kids. He had me working with the computers instead. I wrote--I wrote the performance evaluation program for the smugglers and the merchants. The one that determines their pay. How little they can get paid, really that’s what it’s for. I programmed the surveillance systems in the colony. And then he put me in charge of personnel files. He taught me what to look for to see if someone was hoarding credits or planning to leave, and then I would use the surveillance on Istaar to catch them breaking some sort of rule that was enough to get their ship or their replicator credits taken away.”

“I was…” Chekov swallowed hard. “That was my job. All of the horrible things he does, the way it seems like nobody on Istaar can ever be free--it was because of me. That time you got caught buying non-approved hardware for Babydoll and Galileo cut your replicator credits for the last four days of that month, I was the one that caught you on surveillance. I was the one that told him.”

The next moments felt suspended in time. Chekov lifted his head to find everyone staring at him. Even McCoy, who probably didn’t know half of what he was describing. Jim couldn’t even think about what his next words were supposed to be. He looked to Gaila and saw the way her face had paled, eyes widened in shock or maybe even horror. 

“So if you don’t want me on your ship, I will find somewhere else to go. But you should know the truth before you decide.”

“I doubt they’re offering ten thousand credits because they want him back at work again,” McCoy spat out. He looked over at Jim like it was the obvious answer to let the kid stay on board. 

“I don’t know what they would do with me. I’m sure right now you’re hoping he will kill me.”

All Jim could say to that was what the fuck under his breath.

Gaila cut in. “Pavel, we don’t want you dead.” She paused. “At least, I don’t want you dead.”

“Hold on, neither do I,” McCoy cut in.

Jim finally found a whole sentence worth of words to say, “my promise to you still stands. Nobody has to know.”

“But I--” his eyes started to water, and finally he looked back down at his hands in his lap, like he was giving up. 

“It’s not your fault,” Gaila said.

“ I could have killed people, ” he whispered, and Jim looked at the top of his head, where his hair curled, at the smooth skin of his face that he could still see. The pink tips of his ears. Pavel, not Chekov. He wasn’t any sort of officer. He was so young. So, so young and still the undercurrent of evil that spread across the galaxy had sunk its nails into him too. Had made him to be a part of it--made him feel like he was a part of it. Jim felt his chest tighten. He remembered holding the kid while he cried back in the engine room, back when the source of his fear could have been anything. 

It wasn’t fear, he realized, so much as it was guilt. The kind of guilt that took over someone’s entire life. Made them think they were better off dead to the people around them. Jim was pretty sure everyone around the table knew what that felt like.

“It’s not your fault,” Jim repeated. “You were just a kid. You still are. Nobody ever should have made you do something like that.”

“They didn’t make me.”

“So you could’ve quit? If you wanted?” McCoy demanded, and Pavel went still. He continued, even though Jim didn’t think it was a particularly good idea, especially not in that tone of voice. “You could have told him you didn’t want to work surveillance and sort through personnel files and he would have let you off the hook? Put you back in the accounting department ?”

Pavel finally shook his head. “It’s not like I tried to leave as soon as it was bad.”

Jim could see Gaila leaning over the table out of the corner of his eye, getting as close as she could without actually touching him. They’d been so busy over the past few days that Jim never had the time to ask her what she really thought about having him on board. He could tell now that there was no way she was letting him off, especially not here. 

McCoy was tense, on the other side of Jim. His hands must have been clenched into fists underneath the table. Jim didn’t really get it, but he was a doctor, and a Fleet doctor at that, and apparently a parent, so that was probably enough of a moral compass to explain the bitterness in his voice. 

Jim was pulled back out of his thoughts when Pavel spoke again, even quieter than before. 

“When I moved to Istaar, I was told I would live with my uncle, but not at the beginning. I had to live with the rest of the children in another building. Whenever I asked to leave--if someone heard me crying in the night--”

He didn’t finish his sentence. 

“They abused you,” Gaila said.

“They never hit me.”

“That doesn’t matter. You did what you had to do to survive, and then you made it out. We want you to stay with us now.”

That, apparently, was the right thing to say. Pavel’s shoulders slumped on an exhale, and then he crossed his arms over the table and leaned forward to rest his head between them. Jim guessed he must have been afraid of being found out the entire week they’d been on Sweeper together. Afraid of where this very conversation could have landed him. 

They all just sat there, for a while. Jim, Gaila, and McCoy all exchanged looks. Jim felt some of the tension starting to leave his own body, too. 

“So why did you finally leave,” he asked. 

Chekov turned his head to one side, resting his cheek against the surface of the table so he could speak. 

“Galileo told me to cut the staff. Cutting staff means locking people out of their ships, usually with all of their things still in them. Or transferring the inventory of one market stall to another. I spent an entire day watching people on surveillance and thinking that I was the one to take away everything they had. So I ran away.”

“To our ship.”

“I saw that you were getting upgraded to Sweeper. I had been paying attention to you for a while.”

He answered the next question Jim had before he’d figured out how to word it. 

“I’ve seen all of the information there is on how this system works. On how long people last and why and how they lose everything. By every quantifiable metric you two will leave Istaar one day. I just hoped it would happen for us before I got caught.”

“Well, you haven’t been caught.”

“Is that why the bounty is so high? Because of what you know?”

“I think so. I think they know that if everyone found out how the market works, there would be hell to pay.”

“Hell is worth ten thousand credits,” McCoy said, “y’all heard it here first.”

Gaila snorted. Jim caught him smiling at her. 

-

Leonard and Jim ended up alone in the mess by the end of the night. Probably because Jim didn’t look motivated to stand up and leave. Leonard had gotten up from the table after the Russian kid’s big confessional to put the medbay half of the room back in order. He didn’t know what the hell was going to happen to either Jim or Gaila or both on their next run, so he did a sort of inventory while he cleaned and organized everything. He wondered if it was worth trying to get them a real biobed, if he’d be sticking around for a while. 

Then again, Leonard didn’t know exactly when they’d find somewhere better for him to go. It could be tomorrow. Or it could be in a month. 

He started to think about how much a biobed would sell for, what he might have to trade. And then he thought about the starbase he’d abandoned two weeks ago with nothing but empty biobeds and disabled holograms. Someone had probably raided it again already, maybe even started squatting there. He hoped whoever it was was having a better go at it than he did. 

Leonard nearly jumped when he turned and saw that Jim was still sitting there at the table on the other side of the room. 

“You still down here?”

“Yeah,” Jim said. He was staring at the wall in front of him, maybe had been ever since everyone else got up from the table. There had been something weird in the air during their little meeting, Leonard could sense it coming off of Jim. Something personal maybe. But he started to suspect that, one layer past Jim’s reckless, devil-may-care attitude, he sort of took everything personally. Finally Jim’s eyes let go of that spot on the wall and he rubbed his face with his hands. 

In an equally worn-out voice he asked, “do we need to establish ground rules, or something, if we’re going to work together for the foreseeable future?”

Leonard huffed out a laugh. “Foreseeable future, what is that, a proposal?”

Jim looked up at him. There was definitely something going on in his head today. It made Leonard feel like he should probably back off a little. 

“Just to make sure we don’t end up fighting on a closet floor again.”. 

“I don’t have any plans to pick a fight with you.”

“Me neither.”

Leonard leaned against the side of the table, the one they’d shoved a mattress on and turned into something that barely passed for a biobed. For a split second he wondered who’d be on it next. He sighed. 

“I don’t think we need rules.”

Jim dropped his hands into his lap. 

“Anything I should know, then, at least.”

“Just that...” Leonard sighed again, dragged a hand down his face. He hadn’t shaved since the morning he woke up in that motel room above the bar, since Jim told him to stop wearing Starfleet insignias. Since he realized his life didn’t have rules anymore. “As soon as I find a way back to Earth I’m taking it. So don’t take it personally.”

“Understood.”

Jim looked like he was already taking it personally, but Leonard figured the man was just having a shit day. Or a shit few years, at least. He really didn’t know how his and Gaila’s job worked, only what he’d seen and overheard for the last two runs. Some of the things he’d heard tonight had actually been terrifying. Especially when he realized that the same people he’d assumed were pieces of shit coming to steal his medicine were actually underfed workers who really didn’t have a choice. Who might’ve tried to leave for a different life and never could manage it. 

But Leonard could tell that Jim had had enough deep conversations for the day. So he took his guilt up to bed with him. 

“I’ll see you in the morning,” he said on his way out. He heard a noise from Jim in response that was probably some tired form of yeah . 

It actually took Leonard a long time to fall asleep that night. And he realized, when he woke up to the subtle vibrations of the ship taking off, that it was because he didn’t drink anything before bed. The engine hummed loud in his ears and he rolled over in his dark little bunk and went back to sleep.

Chapter Text

Jim had spent so much time on Istaar sweating his ass off and choking on dust that he forgot other planets could be different. Maybe even nice. When they arrived on Lagu a day ahead of schedule for their latest run (thanks to Pavel, again) and looked around and saw nothing but green leaves and blue skies and felt a soft breeze against their skin that smelled so clean it reminded Jim of the laundry room at the Academy where he always used to camp out to study, he didn’t even have to suggest that they stay that extra day and just take a break. Everyone seemed to be on the same page about that one. Better to take advantage of the extra day when everything was still going right instead of waiting until the end of the run, when something was bound to go wrong. They parked Sweeper somewhere remote and left the loading bay doors open and Jim spent half the day lying on his back in the grass. 

The sky above Lagu was such a deep blue that it made his Earth-trained senses think it was almost nighttime. The sweet air surrounded him and the grass and the leaves rustled in the wind and Gaila carried food out from the replicator so they could have a picnic. 

“This is good, isn’t it?” he asked, and he’d meant it to be a rhetorical question but the look on Gaila’s face made him doubt himself. Finally she shrugged. 

“It’s nice,” she offered. 

“It is,” Jim said, but he knew the difference between saying that the moment they were in was nice, and saying that things, in general, were good. 

Gaila would be okay, he knew that. He knew they’d been through worse, on a worse ship with worse people to turn to for help. And he knew that it was rare for Gaila to even let this side of her personality show, to let someone see her all quiet and pensive. So Jim reached over and stole her bread crusts off of her plate just to make her huff and swat him away. 

Pavel came out next and smiled at them, only to pass on their offer to join their scrappy little picnic and keep walking until he left the clearing and entered into the woods in front of them. 

“I’ll be back,” was all he said by way of explanation.

“Don’t get lost!” Jim called after him. 

“At this point I think he’d have to put in real effort to ever get lost somewhere,” Gaila said. 

The two of them spent the rest of the afternoon without talking much at all. Jim probably spent a good ten minutes just trying to focus on what it felt like to breathe, to not be doing something with urgency. If he was being honest, it didn’t feel that great. It made his chest burn to breathe that deep, his shoulders tense even as he lay spread out on his back. 

So he gave up and let his thoughts flood back in. Imagined and prepared himself for what could go wrong tomorrow morning when they needed to get back to work and raid a supposedly shut-down weapons factory on the other side of the planet. He went through every possible scenario in his head, what they would do if it wasn’t actually shut down, if they found squatters there, if someone else was planning on breaking in–or worse, already had. He traveled down each possibility to the end of the line, and then started from zero and went on to the next one. Only when he’d thought through every one of them, was that burning in his chest finally gone. It was the closest to relaxed he ever seemed to get, when there were no more worst-case scenarios left to unpack. 

He opened his eyes to a slightly darker, hazier sky above them and looked over at Gaila, who was also stretched out in the grass. Her eyes were closed. Someone who didn’t know her, and therefore wouldn’t notice the tension around her mouth, would think she was sleeping. But Jim knew her. He knew that this was the closest she ever got to relaxed, too. He wondered if the worst-case scenarios she was playing out in her mind were the same as his own. 

-

Instead of spending the afternoon outside, McCoy had apparently taken the extra time to once again rearrange the mess–or, the half of the mess that was their medbay. It was passable, but it would never look like more than a thrown-together attempt at the real thing. Jim didn’t know why he was so ornery about it. He hadn’t had to treat anyone for anything since Drema. And still he spent a good portion of every day sorting and resorting his medical supplies and testing out different setups for their single bed and sometimes straight up moving furniture across the room. 

“You’re getting a little obsessive, you know that?” Jim was on the bottom step, leaning against the doorframe. One of these days he would succeed in sneaking up on McCoy, but the man hadn’t flinched at all. Or even moved to acknowledge that he heard Jim enter. 

“It’s called a coping mechanism. You might benefit from one.”

Jim cocked his head to the side. “You seem to have a knack for getting in the way of mine, actually.”

McCoy scoffed. He rearranged his already rearranged shelf of medicines. Probably trying to make up for the fact that the only shelf he could use was right above the replicator and required him to stand on a chair to get to it.

“The kid come back?”

“Not that I’ve seen.”

“Hm.”

Jim could tell that he didn’t want to admit he was worried about him. Now that they lived on the same ship McCoy was becoming increasingly easy to read. He wore his worry and his frustration and his anger all on his face, sometimes all at once. Jim couldn’t see beneath those more obvious things, not yet, but he felt pretty certain that they were just a smokescreen for something else. The stuff McCoy probably didn’t intend to deal with anytime soon. Kept wrapped up tight, deep inside his chest. The stuff that made him drink.

In the last few years, he’d learned that everyone had something they were keeping down at all times. Some just hid it better. 

McCoy, on the other hand, was now scrubbing at the bloodstains on their biobed mattress. Again. Jim bit back a comment–one that he had made before–about how those stains weren’t going anywhere.

“He’ll come back,” he said instead, and McCoy only grunted in response. So he pushed off of the wall and went to sit in the engine room for a while. With nothing left to think about, or, more accurately, nothing left to think about that didn’t end in a dark place, all he wanted was to let the hum of the engine surround his body and take up all the empty space in his mind. He laid down on the floor and felt that gentle hum take over, soaking his spine and echoing through his heart and lungs. At some point his eyes closed, and then he must have fallen into something like sleep.

-

Sweeper had a lack of mechanical and technical issues that somehow frustrated them. Jim and Gaila had grown so used to the constant upkeep that Baby required, something he’d referred to as a vicious cycle multiple times, switching to terms like death trap and sick joke when he was pissed off, and even “sisyphean” (to make spiteful use of all those stupid culture classes he’d had to take at the Academy) on the days he was feeling particularly dramatic. He didn’t know what to do with himself if he wasn’t putting out fires every time the ship was parked planetside. Especially with Pavel onboard, who Jim suspected was fixing things without even bringing them to his attention. 

He knew the kid only meant to be as helpful to them as possible to stay on everyone’s good side. He just hadn’t expected that he would miss having something to fix.

The weapons factory was shut down, empty of squatters or other smugglers, but built in a nonsensical layout and locked up tighter than any other place they’d broken into before. But that was fine. Jim had already mentally prepared himself for all that yesterday–for getting lost in the dark in an abandoned factory, being unable to read any of the signs or labels on things, and having to spend the entire time unsure if he and Gaila were about to get jumped.

“I’m starting to wonder if anyone would’ve noticed if we nicked one of those translators,” he said. Mostly just to say something. Even walking light on the balls of their feet, their footsteps echoed in multiples that made his hair stand on end. He kept looking back over his shoulder and finding only darkness.

“Maybe. Some of those crates have those sensors that track when they’re opened or closed.”

“I know about the sensors, Gaila, I just want to fantasize for a second.”

Both of them had flashlights in one hand and heavy pipes in the other. Two years of smuggling and neither of them had managed to possess a single phaser, even an old one. Phasers were on that list of Fleet-issue deadstock, like universal translators, an item which only got more valuable day by day. They’d been fucked over too many times by carrying knives. Jim saw the pipes when they first broke into the basement of the factory and figured they’d at least be better than fists, in all this dark.

“Okay, okay.” 

They were speaking at a low whisper, quieter than the sounds of water dripping from the corners of the ceiling and their footsteps wading through puddles.

“Even an older model would be able to scan these signs,” he grumbled.

“You know Pavel offered to take my place down here?”

“I’m sure he did.”

“Seventeen years old…” 

Gaila didn’t have to finish her sentence. Seventeen years old and already involved in smuggling runs–now volunteering to do the actual dirty work. Jim was sure there were already kids younger than Pavel doing this. If he met one he knew he’d find it just as upsetting as the thought of Pavel doing what Jim had to do every day. He tried to ignore the thought that he’d likely already met one.

She stopped short, flashed the light across a door to their left.

“Maybe this is it.”

“It’s locked up. That’s a good sign.”

They picked locks the same way they did everything–quickly and with the wrong equipment. When Jim finally shimmied the heavy door open and shined his flashlight onto a stockroom of vials and vials of rellium, which almost glowed in the dark on its own, he felt equal parts relief and excitement rush through him. He hated that there were moments when he forgot everything he was supposed to remember, and instead enjoyed this job.

Getting back up to the spot where they’d broken in was harder with cargo. They had to make multiple trips there and back to get everything out, which of course included losing their way again and hearing phantom footsteps that sounded more convincing each time, as they got closer and closer to finishing the job. 

When they were done jumping down into the factory basement and done carrying highly breakable (and toxic) rellium vials onboard and done on Lagu altogether, it was as dark outside as it had been in the halls of the factory. Jim was starving and his arms trembled. He felt satisfied, and then he remembered how much he was supposed to hate his job, and he spoiled it for himself all over again.

Pavel and McCoy had both learned not to ask questions about each run outside of the necessary ones about logistics or injuries. They sat around the table in the mess before taking off from Lagu and Gaila kept the conversation moving and unrelated to the present day, while Jim ate silently and let his ugly cocktail of feelings continue to stew and fester inside of him. A third layer showed up in the aftermath. 

First he felt good, on instinct, because he’d done what he was supposed to do. Then he felt like shit about the fact that his entire life was just about stealing things and putting them in the hands of the worst people in the galaxy. Then in the mess of his big, functioning ship, with enough food to go to sleep full and with everyone uninjured today, he felt bad again that he couldn’t just enjoy it when things went well.

He took the first shift at the helm to get his mind off of it. 

Even when he couldn’t feel right about his life or what had become of it, flying up into space always did the job. It quieted down the thoughts that ran through his head all day. It was like having the hum of the engine running through him, but better, because he became a part of the ship, too. Sometimes it even gave him a few precious moments where he forgot where he was, who he was, and the only thing that mattered was his hands at the helm and his eyes taking in the expanse of space. 

He must have been in a noticeably better mood when Gaila came to join him after sleeping for a few hours in her bunk. Her eyes were puffy and she was moving a little slower. She probably slept deeper now than Jim had ever known her to. He could only remember her waking up with wide, already discerning eyes, jumping out of her hammock and sliding into her seat like she’d never been asleep at all.

She settled into the seat next to him at the control panel and when Jim caught her smiling to herself, said,

“Glad to see you’re feeling better.”

“Thanks, Gaila,” he deadpanned.

“You always get cranky when things go well, you know.”

“Whatever. I thought you didn’t think things were good.”

The two sides of the control panel hadn’t been designed to operate the same functions of the ship, but Gaila reprogrammed them early on so that, on nights like this, one person could do everything and the other could either sleep or lean back in their chair and do nothing. Jim took his turn to lean back and do nothing and watched her hands skate across the panel. Her fingers looked comically small coming out of the oversized jacket that McCoy gave up on getting back from her. Soon her eyes lost that heavy, sleep-like quality and turned clear and sharp. 

“I don’t think either of us could appreciate a good life,” she said later, after enough time passed that Jim nearly forgot the conversation they’d been having. “If we ever found ourselves in one I think we’d run back to Istaar kicking and screaming.”

“Speak for yourself. I’d be great at it.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I’d be in an apron cooking dinners from scratch and writing a little list on the fridge of stuff for you to fix around the house.”

“Meanwhile I’d be so full of existential dread I’d ruin family dinner every night.”

Jim laughed. He settled back even further in his chair and crossed his arms, propped one foot up on the edge of the panel where it wouldn’t mess with anything.

“Pavel, honey,” he said in a sing-songy kind of voice, “can you carry your mother up to bed tonight? It looks like her inner demons won again.”

“And I’m just catatonic at the table,” she added, “our poor adopted son waiting for me to acknowledge him.”

“How dare you ignore our adopted teenage son at the dinner table. You’re sleeping on the couch tonight.”

Gaila was close to laughter herself. She was smiling towards the stars in the viewfinder. “Where would the Doctor fit into this one?”

“He’d be our cranky neighbor or something. Always getting mad at us for how early you go out to mow the lawn.”

“Oh, we’ve got a lawn?”

“Of course we’ve got a lawn. Where else are we going to keep the birdbath.”

Jim waited that night for Gaila to kick him off the bridge and send him to sleep a few hours in his bunk, but she never did. Every once in a while they added to their extremely bogus nuclear-family thought experiment. At some point they had a dog that kept pissing on McCoy’s lawn until he chased it back to Jim and Gaila’s doorstep (their front door was painted cherry red, by the way), and they debated the specificities of their approach to Pavel starting to date in secondary school. At another point Jim laughed until his face felt weird. 

Finally Pavel joined them, and they let it go, discarded it in the pile of all the other stupid stories they’d come up with together as they flew through space. Pavel wouldn’t have found it funny anyway. 

-

“Doctor! Does anyone know a doctor!”

The voice was echoing through the entire market. She must have been shouting. Jim was mid-negotiation. His plan had been to finish trading extra replicator credits for the engine supplies they needed to get back off the ground and then look over and ask McCoy if he’d had enough time on solid ground yet. McCoy was gone when he turned his head.

They’d had two more uncomfortably smooth runs with Sweeper until they came across an engine problem that Pavel couldn’t fix in secret. He came to Jim to report it and they calculated that they might be able to make one more run before takeoff would start to be an issue, or they could shoot for halfway to their destination where there was a bigger marketplace to haggle at. A marketplace where people wouldn’t know Jim, which could either be a good thing or a bad thing.

It launched an extended discussion between the two of them before they agreed on the half-measure. Pavel shook Jim’s hand once they did. Jim laughed harder at that than he had in days, maybe weeks. They’d made the right choice when, upon landing Sweeper a mile out from the market at the former Quriq research station, the entire control panel started blinking and sounding an engine failure alarm. Pavel and Gaila stayed back. McCoy insisted on coming with, and made some attempt to insinuate that it was for Jim’s own protection. As if Jim couldn’t see the look on his face after their shaky landing had been paired with an alarm that sounded through the whole ship even with the bridge doors closed. It took the entire walk to the market for the color to come back into his cheeks and eyes, and then he transitioned right into looking bored. 

A few minutes after that, they all heard that woman calling for a doctor.

And now he was wondering if McCoy had some sort of innate, anticipatory sense for when people around him were going to need medical attention. He always managed to put himself in a position to help right before that help became needed. He’d followed Jim out to the market, made no effort to involve himself in what they were actually at Quriq to do, and all of a sudden some woman was crying out for a doctor within earshot. 

Jim had a hunch. His hunch was right when he made it back to Sweeper and found McCoy with two women in tow, an older woman struggling to walk with his arm around her waist and a younger one following behind, with a colored scarf tied around her head and what looked like enough luggage for all three of them–big, mismatched bags that she managed to carry without looking weighed down at all. 

“Uh, hi,” Jim said as he caught up with them. He’d started jogging a little in order to circumvent McCoy’s little party before they boarded Sweeper, the bag of engine parts in his hand clinking almost like a bunch of heavy bottles. McCoy ignored him as he guided the older woman forward, so he went for the one carrying the bags. 

Her eyes cut through him right away, and kind of sliced at his heart, if he was being honest. He was so used to the ugliness all around him that he had forgotten what it felt like to encounter beauty. It was like she was above that level of existence the rest of them lived in, free from the thin layer of grime and desperation that they all wore on their skin and had permanently packed underneath their nails. If transporters weren’t all but extinct he would have assumed she’d just beamed down to Quriq from a luxury liner. 

Of course, luxury liners went out of circulation long before transporters did. Jim smiled at her, for some reason. Maybe he just couldn’t help it. 

This mystery woman smiled back. Her caution was barely noticeable. Most of all she projected trust, which was impressive considering Jim did not look trustworthy whatsoever. He looked like what he was: an unshaven, unshowered, unregulated stranger. 

“Hello,” she said. She set her bags down and somehow managed to stand up even straighter. It weakened his already weak sense of how to proceed. He wanted to be generous. Hospitable. In response to her rare friendliness it took effort not to be. But experience had taught him to always and only be suspicious of people. Using an elderly traveler with an injury as a ruse to hijack an entire ship wasn’t unheard of. He had to make a decision about these two, and fast.

He was supposed to be the one who decided who could board Sweeper. He hadn’t denied the only two people in history who’d ever been interested in boarding his ship, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that both times he had been the one allowing it. That authority had slipped and now resided somewhere between Doctor McCoy and this woman, or maybe it was currently floating away in the air. 

Jim stepped in front of the open loading bay. 

“This is my ship, right here. I’m Jim Kirk. Who are you?” 

“Nyota Uhura,” she offered back. She shook his hand. “This is Ambassador Loven. Thank you so much for just considering letting us onboard. You have a great-looking ship.”

His mind still needed to make the transition from thinking of Baby to thinking of Sweeper, whenever someone referred to his ship. He nearly scoffed and then caught himself, and then when he tried to come up with a response all he could say was, “thanks.”

“I’m escorting the Ambassador to Starbase 81. We’ve been denied passage because she has an infection from an injury that was treated poorly.”

Jim glanced between the two of them. Ambassador Loven had an echo of the grace and power that her escort did. She looked like she was on her way to some interplanetary conference, in perfectly-pressed clothes that also carried no traces of dirt on them. The two could pass for relatives, if he squinted. 

The Ambassador herself had yet to speak. She was clinging onto McCoy’s arm and sweating from the pain in her leg. The pant leg on her weakened side was dark and damp. 

“None of the ships departing from here have a fully-trained doctor. I’m sure it doesn’t surprise you–we’re being denied because they don’t want to deal with the possibility of a corpse onboard.”

That sentence would have been nastier coming from anybody else, but the way she said it made it sound simple and appropriately urgent. 

Jim knew how these things worked. Medicine was a scarce resource, medical practitioners even scarcer. Care was the hardest, of all three, to come by. Countless passenger ships were flying through former Federation space, but a good portion of them had no medical staff onboard at all. He’d heard of ones where every room except for the bridge got renovated into quarters in order to fit as many paying customers as possible. People were out there staying in former medbays, sleeping on biobeds on their way home, and yet if they got sick they would be kicked off at the next stop. 

She held his gaze as he thought about it. Her voice was as clear and elegant as she was, standing in her headscarf with a pile of baggage at her feet. It wasn’t her beauty, though, but her friendliness that made him want to help her. Jim squinted and recognized a Starfleet-issue tunic underneath her jacket, a faded and yet unmistakable shade of red. That fabric. Its sturdy, tireless texture. He still wore it in his dreams sometimes. 

“Hey. Any other questions, Captain?” McCoy snapped at him. He was still holding himself back from just pushing past Jim onto the ship, but his patience had pretty much run out. “Or am I permitted to save this woman’s life now?”

Jim felt himself bristling. The reality was that, since the second this Nyota Uhura had yelled for a doctor and McCoy had heard it, he’d never had a choice in the matter of who boarded his ship. All he could do now was hope that it wasn’t so obvious to the others as it was to him.

“Go ahead. We’ll talk later,” was all he could come up with, and before he even finished saying it McCoy was helping Ambassador Loven onboard. 

“Yeah,” he said over his shoulder.

Jim turned back to Nyota, who he found he already preferred talking to. “Put your things wherever you can find space, I guess. We’ve got some repairs to do on the engine and then we’ll be getting out of here. I’ll talk to the others and see how close we can get you to 81.”

He sure as hell didn’t sound like he was in charge at all, during this conversation. The reality of that stung, as did the reason behind it, which Jim realized a beat later. He’d never had to sound like an authority on his own ship before–because he’d never been one. Even without these extra people on board, he’d never been in charge, not really. He could lose this ship and everything on it in a second if Galileo felt like it. 

“Thank you, Jim,” Nyota told him with a real smile. She stepped around him and followed after them. 

Jim waited until he was sure he was alone out there to kick the dirt up into a little cloud. It made him miss the endless sand of Istaar, where every step filled the air with a dust that never seemed to land, where one frustrated kick could obstruct his entire field of vision and let him be alone with the fact that he was no captain at all. That even though he never wanted to be someone who got called Captain, the way that word had slipped out of McCoy’s mouth had made him want to push him down into the ground like he had that night they met and demand he say it again, and again, until it came out in a tone that carried respect instead of dismissal. 

Finally he sighed and let his head fall back, wished for all of two seconds that it was still just him and Gaila and Baby, and then pushed it down and went to the engine room with his bag of parts.

-

Jim gave up his bunk to Ambassador Loven, since it was a bottom one. He’d decided on playing nice once he was done being petulant about how McCoy had walked all over him and realized that this was a chance for him to do something good for once. It was true that injured or sick people seeking passage across the galaxy were often denied until they died waiting, and by a very fortunate accident these two had drawn the attention of Doctor McCoy, and Sweeper just happened to have enough extra space inside to fit two more, and Pavel had scoffed when Jim asked if they could get to Starbase 81 without missing their pickup. So not only was it a chance to do something good, but by some miracle they had the right resources to actually help a person in need. It would have weighed on Jim if he’d said no.

McCoy gave him a satisfied look when he came down to the medbay to offer both of them a bunk and passage all the way to 81. Ambassador Loven had come back to life since Jim had first seen her, bouncing up and down on both legs like she was testing them out in a store. Her leg was healed, infection and all. The engine was up and running. Pavel only needed a few minutes to chart their course in order to fit in the extra stop. 

Nyota took one of the empty bunks, and instead of moving to the remaining one, the top bunk above Gaila’s, Jim decided to leave the corridor altogether for the night. He set up his old hammock in the engine room when his shift to sleep came and closed his eyes next to the noise. He liked it down here, maybe a little too much. There was something about an engine room. An engine big enough to have its own room. And the nights when he got tired and it made his mind run just wild enough to feel like it actually belonged to him. Like he had control over where he went, what he did, who he let onboard.

McCoy knocked on the side of the wall with his knuckles when he came in, even though the sound of the doors swishing open and shut and his heavy footsteps down the stairs were enough. Jim stuck his head out of his hammock and they locked eyes. 

McCoy’s presence still made him angry, he decided. He laid back down.

“Look, I know I pissed you off back there.”

“Sure,” Jim said to the ceiling.

“I wasn’t going to stand there and ask for permission to save a woman from losing her leg. Or worse. You understand.”

The last part sounded less like a question to Jim, or even a confirmation. It was closer to sounding like an order. Jim was fucking sick of taking orders. 

“Yeah, I understand. Maybe just give me a heads-up, anytime you plan on putting yourself in charge of the ship that’s letting you ride for free.”

Something shifted in the edge of his vision so that when he let his eyes fall back down from the ceiling, McCoy was standing right next to his hammock, glaring at him. 

Gaila would understand that part of this, probably a good amount of it, was just Jim being in a shitty mood. Shitty moods happen regularly as part of a shitty life. She’d clocked it as soon as he walked into the engine room earlier that evening and kept the conversation focused on the task at hand. She’d even seen Jim headed back to the engine room with his hammock tossed over his shoulder and simply said goodnight. That was why he loved her. She knew he’d be fine in the morning, that a night of sleep would help him bottle it all up so he could come back up and be nice to everyone afterwards. 

And then McCoy came in after him just so he could make everything worse. 

“You’re acting like a child, you know that right.”

“Oh, fuck you.”

“She needed my help. It was lucky I was there.”

“We turned out to be the lucky ones,” Jim deadpanned, and he put as much condescension and venom into his next words as he could, just to see them cut through that stern, almost paternal look on McCoy’s face. “You brought two strangers right to the door of my ship without checking their bags and without running that decision by either of the people on this ship who know how to spot a ruse.”

Watching the damage hadn’t been nearly as gratifying as Jim had hoped. The rest of his lecture was weaker when it came out.

“What you did, if you do that again, is going to get us killed. That’s not an if, that’s a when.”

McCoy held his eyes for what felt like an eternity, his mouth set in a hard line, his arms crossed over his chest.

“You’re not mad that I took a risk. You’re mad that it wasn’t your decision.”

“No, both of those things pissed me off.”

“Next time, you want me to just let someone die? For your ego?”

McCoy was being a bitch, but there was also something genuine in the question. It wasn’t the way Jim would have wanted to have this conversation–he would’ve wanted McCoy to ask for directions and permission in a voice that wasn’t seething, but the question still stood. 

“Next time you bring them to me, not to the ship.”

“Fine.”

“Fine,” Jim repeated. He regretted that one. It made him sound like the child McCoy had just accused him of being. 

He left then, which was what Jim had been waiting for ever since he walked in. Still Jim was up half the night with the desire to chase him out the door and resume that disaster of a conversation, beat it with his fists into something easier for the two of them to hold in the space between them, maybe something that wasn’t edged with hurt. Just like that sarcastic way McCoy’d called him Captain, there was this unique cocktail of disrespect and recognition that he always managed to mix together and throw in Jim’s face. If it was just the disrespect, Jim could throw him off the ship at the next marketplace and be done with it. If it was the recognition alone, that Jim was in charge, that he knew how the world worked around here better than McCoy did, that he had saved his life by getting him off that starbase…

Well, it wouldn’t make Jim want to kick him to the curb like he did every other time they talked, but it probably would make McCoy a lot less interesting. It’d make him the kind of suck-up that should’ve gone extinct when Starfleet did.

-

Nyota shocked all of them by seeing Ambassador Loven to her new quarters on Starbase 81 and then swiftly returning to the hangar where Sweeper was still docked and asking to stay onboard. 

She had asked Jim directly. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t appreciate that. And she hadn’t called him Captain at any point. And Gaila looked like she’d just won the Istaar market lottery for a year’s worth of replicator credits when Nyota came back into the hangar and might as well have started jumping up and down when Nyota followed it up by asking to stay. 

Jim would also be lying if he said Gaila’s reaction hadn’t been a major deciding factor. During the entire ride to 81, when Nyota wasn’t speaking in pleasant, reassuring tones to the Ambassador, she’d been laughing with Gaila, her words coming out in a speed and a register that must have been her normal voice that she didn’t put on for clients. Hearing and seeing the real Nyota in those moments, the one who made all these exaggerated facial expressions and clutched the center of her chest when she laughed too hard, only made her easier to like.

Around the table in the mess that night he learned that Nyota was fluent in 37 languages, including the most common ones Jim and Gaila kept having problems with. Gaila nudged him with her elbow when she told them that. He knew that some sort of universal translator comment would be coming the next time they were alone on the bridge together. 

Jim noticed her sticking around with McCoy after the rest of them finished up. He could only imagine the long-winded Starfleet backstories the two of them were trading down there. He was sure that the reason Nyota had yet to mention she was ex-Fleet, and the reason he hadn’t seen any more flashes of that red tunic since she first came on board, had something to do with the conversations she’d had with either Gaila or McCoy or both, in that time. He found he didn’t mind. She was a fast learner and the most well-socialized person he’d ever met, and her commitment to not stepping on anyone’s toes managed to come off as kind instead of superficial. He now had three people (four if McCoy had a sudden change of heart) who knew how not to piss him off and how to make sure anyone else who came onboard wouldn’t piss him off. 

And that would come in handy, considering he could already tell that Nyota was another person incapable of looking the other way when someone needed help. At some point, when he figured out a way to sound level-headed and generous and in charge about the whole thing, he would set down some ground rules with the two of them. Luckily that conversation could wait a few days while they hauled Sweeper back to Istaar, stowaways and all. 

-

In the end, they didn’t make it a week, or even off of Istaar, before Nyota brought three Bajorans on board. To her credit she had made the explanation that they needed safe passage to Bajor sound like a question. They were even offering to leave behind their remaining replicator credits once they got home, a modest compromise when it came to payment for this sort of thing, but something valuable nonetheless. Unfortunately, this conversation happened after all of them were already crowded onto the bridge. He’d forgotten to tell Nyota his issues with that, and once they were in front of him, forcing them back outside while he made his decision was out of the question. Two were children. Jim rubbed the stubble on his cheek with his palm. 

He looked at Pavel, first.

“Bajor?” he asked. Galileo was sending them out for another raid of a shut-down factory. Supposedly abandoned, in the upper Gamma quadrant. Nowhere close to Bajor.

Pavel’s eyes darted to the children, and then to the screen in front of him as his fingers passed over it rapidly. They all waited. Jim watched the kids fidget in the corner of his eye. Finally Pavel looked up. 

“It’s tight, but possible.”

McCoy looked like he had something to say. His mouth had been just slightly open, waiting for Jim to look at him so he could chime in. As new as he was to this, he was familiar with the risks three additional passengers, with a very far destination to reach in a very short amount of time, posed to their safety. One wrong move, one day late returning to Istaar, and everything they had would be gone. Still, he would want to help them. Of course he would. Jim even caught him smiling, in a way he’d never ever seen before, when he caught eyes with one of the kids. A smile that made his cheeks rise up to his squinted eyes. It was a little creepy if he was being honest.

In a few minutes he’d probably be giving them all wellness checks, testing their reflexes with that little hammer or whatever doctors did with kids these days. 

Jim wanted to ignore him, was planning on ignoring him, showing him what it felt like to not have a say. Maybe McCoy had even been expecting that from him. That would explain why, when Jim did look to him for confirmation, raised his eyebrows to actually encourage him to speak, he stayed silent and just nodded instead. Jim hoped that nobody else in the room had felt the weight carried in that wordless, seconds-long exchange. 

“Gaila?”

“If Pavel says we can do it, we can do it.”

So Jim turned back to Nyota, and said, 

“Okay.”

And signed up Sweeper, and what was now its crew, for its second (and very, very illegal) job. Nyota translated everything seamlessly, which made even the children relax, and she smiled at him over her shoulder as she led their new passengers off of the bridge. Gaila waved at them. McCoy grumbled something about how they better not be carrying germs before he saw himself out, but Jim knew he was going to find some way to insinuate himself into the whole thing. He knew McCoy got bored during runs.  

When it was just the three of them left on the bridge, Pavel reassigned himself to the helm, released the break, and simply said, “I was trying to make it sound nice in front of them. We need to haul ass.”

Jim laughed through their entire ascent into space. He shifted easily out of the role of making decisions for an entire ship and into the chaos of another impossible deadline. 

-

Gaila told Nyota basically everything about herself in record time. Like, within weeks. It was hard not to. She always smiled in this certain type of way when Gaila talked to her, like that exact conversation was the only place in the universe she wanted to be. Like Gaila was somebody special. Like she had interesting things to say, even when she just talked about herself. Even when she talked only about the bad stuff and had to stop mid-sentence sometimes. Nyota always looked at her like that and so Gaila always kept telling her things. 

Things she hadn’t told anyone else, would never tell Jim because of the way it’d make him act differently around her and because, just like Gaila, he wasn’t great at having intense conversations without retreating into some inside joke until the subject changed. Instead Nyota just took it all in stride, like nothing Gaila could say was going to push her away. Sometimes she even asked Gaila if she could give her a hug. After the first few nights they spent talking quietly at the bridge or in the empty mess, Gaila said yes to one of the offers. Her first hug in a very long time. Nyota’s hands around her were barely-there, her chin tucked over Gaila’s shoulder just for a second, and then she pulled away. And then she thanked Gaila for the hug, as if it had been some sort of gift. The whole thing was weird. Gaila didn’t say yes to hugs very often after that, only when she was especially tired. 

Maybe it was some part of Nyota’s training, all the social work she did. The cultural sensitivity training from when she worked with Starfleet that she’d since used with all of her clients, that gave her this sense of how each person she met wanted to be spoken to and treated. Or maybe she was just completely kind, in every part of her that had the option to be kind, and that’s why she treated Gaila like she was just a normal person. Like they were just normal friends, and Gaila wasn’t some damaged, half-good engineer, working as a smuggler in borrowed clothes. 

Nyota was running through the cramped halls of the ship one night while they were blowing through their regular schedule, traveling as close to warp speed as a warp-incapable ship could travel, all to get this man and his nephews to safety. It shocked Gaila every time she saw those kids coming around a corner or seated at the round table in the mess. They were so, so small. Too small to exist in times like these.

Nyota took on the role of entertaining them, keeping them out of the way and distracted from any bumpy patches of space or any conversations they weren’t supposed to hear, either from the rest of the crew or from their uncle (who McCoy had been treating for chronic dehydration and malnutrition, although both of the children were fine). Gaila left the bridge to find them chasing each other through the corridors and back around again, practically piling against the wall every time they hit a dead end before setting off in the other direction. Her boots squeaked on the floor and her hair flew behind her and Gaila couldn’t help but smile while she watched them running and laughing like they were anywhere else, like they were safe at home on Bajor and not stranded on the other side of the star system. 

She didn’t notice when Nyota almost collided with her, only when her hands came to the sides of her torso and squeezed and forced a startled laugh out of Gaila’s throat. Both kids sped by them and Gaila turned around to see the blood drain from Nyota’s face, eyes wide in horror. But Gaila felt fine. For once in her life, she considered the simple feeling of Nyota’s hands on her body and she felt fine. She maybe even felt good. 

“I’m sorry,” she blurted out, and she looked so worried Gaila wondered if she was insane for finding it a little charming. Gaila just smiled, in the end. 

“Sorry you can’t catch me,” she said, and turned on her heel and bolted down the corridor. The kids were only excited to have another person join the game. Gaila ran with them through the ship and felt her lungs burn and her skin prickle with sweat and realized she’d never tried running without being in danger, at least for as long as she could remember. They ended up in a heap down in the mess-medbay and Nyota caught up with them, her boots clicking on the stairs, put her hands on her hips and smiled. Gaila smiled back from where she lay tangled with laughing children for the first time since she had been a child herself, a long long time ago. 

And she hadn’t taken care of children either since she was a child, on a planet destroyed by war not long after she was born. She watched those two for the rest of the day and wondered what memories they already had, what they would think of this time in their lives, if things became peaceful enough to let them look back on it. And when they all sat in a circle on the floor while Nyota sang songs in all these different languages, she wondered if her own life would ever become peaceful enough for her to remember the past. She wondered if there was anything good in her childhood that had been buried deep by the bad. Memories that might come back to her, perfect and golden, untouched by what happened next. When she heard Nyota sing she started to feel like there had to be. 

They were still playing musical chairs with the bunks. Gaila and Pavel started taking turns with the same one after they looked at how far they had to travel to drop off their Bajoran passengers without anyone knowing. Jim snuck off to the engine room to sleep every night now, which Gaila was pretty sure he thought nobody knew about. McCoy begrudgingly moved to an upper bunk. Chekov looked half asleep already when it came time to decide who would stay at the helm for the night, so Gaila took over and sent him to bed. 

She sat up on the bridge by herself, with the lights low for the night shift, and kept them on course for Bajor. The route was smooth enough that Gaila almost started drifting off to sleep, with her chin resting on her hand. 

“Are you sure you want to work the night shift?”

Gaila flinched and woke up, and then looked to her left and Nyota was sitting in the chair where Jim usually sat at the controls. She was in loose pajama pants and a sweater and her hair was completely down, strands of it framing the sides of her face.

“What are you doing up?”

Nyota trailed her fingertip over the edge of the control panel. Gaila could see that the look on her face wasn’t fascination, but nostalgia. It made her wonder about the ship Nyota must have served on, the control panel she must have been seated at, all the things she’d witnessed from that seat. 

“I laid in bed for a while and couldn’t fall asleep. Thought I’d keep you company.”

Gaila was about to explain herself and say something about the route to Bajor being so safe it was boring, but what she said instead was, 

“Your singing was really nice, earlier.”

Nyota smiled, and her eyes were bright when she looked back up. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want me to sing for you now? Maybe it’ll keep you from falling asleep at the helm.”

“No, no, that’s okay.” Gaila laughed, trying to dispel the tension in her stomach. She wanted desperately to say yes, but it was already hard not to blush from the mere idea of Nyota sitting there and singing only to her. “That’s okay, you don’t have to.”

Nyota just nodded, but she stayed at the console for a while, anyway. And after a few minutes of flying through space in silence, she started humming. The tune was disjointed and mindless; she probably didn’t even know she was doing it. That thing in Gaila’s stomach that had tightened itself into a knot slowly started to unravel. 

“What do you think will happen to those kids?” she asked Nyota.

“You’re worried about them?”

“Of course I am.”

“Don’t be. Really. Their uncle is taking them to live with the rest of his family. They have cousins around their age. The house is on the water. They’ll all go back to school soon. It’s practically all they can talk about in between asking if we can play tag again.”

“Doesn’t even sound like they’ll be living during a war.”

Nyota was silent for a moment, and Gaila felt the moment stretch.

“None of us are living during a war,” she said carefully. “Not anymore.”

“I know,” Gaila said, so quick that it gave her away. “I...I know. I just meant--”

“It’s okay, I know what you meant.” Nyota pulled her socked feet up onto the chair with her, so that she could rest her arms over her knees. She watched the Gamma quadrant pass by. Gaila watched the nostalgia seep back into her eyes and make them shine. She had been meaning to ask why Nyota insisted on staying in a ship full of strangers, two of which were contracted for pretty morally gray work. Maybe she’d wait until tomorrow night for that one. The look on her face as she watched the stars from the bridge was enough of an answer for now. 

“I think they’ll be happy,” she finally said. “I know they’ll be happy.”

“I hope so.”

“You’ll be happy too.”

Gaila bit at the inside of her cheek to keep herself from protesting. Or maybe to keep herself from feeling embarrassed again, like she had when Nyota offered to sing to her. Or to keep herself from admitting that what she was feeling right now might actually be the desire for another hug. 

-

“Okay, so.” Jim placed his hands on the table in the mess. If it was already hard for him to put this little staff meeting together, which required tracking everyone down throughout the different rooms of the ship and trying to make the phrase crew meeting in the mess in five minutes not sound like he was playing a part, saying the actual reason they were here was close to impossible.

“Spit it out,” McCoy grunted. So Jim did.

“Right. Here’s the thing: we’re bleeding money right now. As in, if we keep this up we’re going to have to ration our replicator credits by half in order to keep everyone we’ve been loading onto this ship alive. And that’s alive, not fed.”

The hard part about having grown up in what was essentially a post-currency world–due to the UBI being high enough that nobody ever really worried about currency until after the war got bad–was that now Jim’s brain didn’t know how to keep a running tally of his resources unless those resources were literally about to disappear and introduce hunger into his daily life. It meant that he hadn’t thought about things like replicator credits and whether their thin as fuck profit margin was going to be able to handle their normal amount of repair and maintenance costs in addition to three additional (and illegal) crewmembers and a rotating cast of up to three (extremely illegal) passengers at any given time. It meant that they were about to be very, very hungry–very very soon.

“I don’t want to stop doing what we’re doing. What we’re doing is good. The problem is we can’t sustain it.”

Everyone watched him at first, and Jim realized, with two parts confusion and one part horror, that they were waiting for him to present the solution. They all thought he already had one. 

“I’m gonna be honest, guys. I have no fucking clue what to do. That’s why I wanted everyone down here. We’re gonna figure this out together. So, brainstorming first. No stupid ideas.”

“Unlike the stupid idea of you trying to have a full ship on the earnings of two people?”

“Leonard,” Nyota said, and Jim never liked her more than he did in that moment. “You’re not helping.”

Jim pointed at her as soon as she said it, and McCoy rolled his eyes and backed off. He leaned back in his seat like he was sulking about something. He was always sulking about something these days. Even on a ship that was leagues above Baby, space travel seemed to just disagree with his physiology.

“We could start charging people,” Nyota suggested. “I mean, I don’t charge as much as I could since I’ve been onboard. Ship passage fees used to be the main reason I charged people at all.”

Jim nodded.

“Okay, that’s one idea.”

Except Gaila was shaking her head. “If we start charging, it’ll be harder to keep what we’re doing a secret. People are paying us with discretion right now. If we want them to pay us with money then they’ll end up talking about us like we’re running a transport ship. Comparing our rates to the actual, not-illegal transport ships. Word will get out fast.”

“Damn,” Nyota said softly. The word surprised Jim, coming out of her mouth, and he realized he had never heard her curse before tonight.

“Not that it’s a bad idea,” Gaila told her, “I just think it might end up biting us in the ass.”

“No, no, don’t worry. You made a good point.”

Nyota and Gaila were smiling at each other now, in the way they thought didn’t distract everyone every time they did this little routine. Jim was so going to make fun of Gaila for this later. He cleared his throat.

“Gaila, tell me what you got.”

She pushed out her next breath. “I don’t know, Jim. Nothing good.”

“Give me something bad.”

“We start skimming from our runs. Sell the extras far away from Istaar. Hope Galileo doesn’t notice.”

“Give me something else bad.”

“We kill Galileo.”

“I love you, but no.”

“I know.”

McCoy tried again, with a serious idea this time. “If you give me a little more time whenever we stop somewhere, I could charge for medical care.”

“Okay, that one’s not terrible.”

“Only problem is my supply is limited. At some point we’d have to restock what I have, which means I’d have to make enough for everyone to eat and for us to keep buying some of the

 most sought after resources in the galaxy.”

Jim rubbed his eyes. This was not going well. 

“Okay. Okay,” he said. He was waiting to actually think of something himself, but he kept coming up empty. As soon as he’d realized how close they were to being flat broke, which happened sometime last night while he was trying to sleep, he’d stopped eating. Which was a stupid idea but it meant they had two extra replicator credits in an otherwise rapidly dwindling stash. “Okay, well. Pavel?”

He didn’t expect Pavel to have anything. Honestly, he’d only included Pavel in this meeting out of respect for him, not because he wanted the burden of solving their financial crisis to fall on the shoulders of a teenager. 

Pavel sat up straighter once everyone’s eyes were on him.

“I have a thought.”

“Tell us your thought.”

He turned to look at Gaila and asked, “How much could you amplify the comms system in Sweeper in order to pick up on low frequency channels?”

Nyota’s eyes widened in interest. Jim wondered if she’d done comms, when she was in the Fleet. 

Gaila shrugged before she answered, “Sweeper’s got better comms than any other ship I’ve worked on. I’ll try whatever you want me to try.”

“What do frequencies have to do with this,” McCoy asked. 

Pavel looked at Jim next. 

“It’s how Galileo’s organization communicates across star systems,” he explained. “An extremely low frequency emission that bounces between all of his ships without his smugglers knowing they are transmitting it. Even if they did pick up on it, everything is in code. They wouldn’t know what it is, they would just think it’s some weak emission from a machine far away.”

“What do you mean by everything,” Jim asked, “what are they encoding.”

“I mean, the information of what can be stolen and what needs to be picked up and everything. And the response, from Istaar, of who is going to come for it and when. It is all happening within this frequency in a numerical code.”

Jim took a deep breath. The kind that made him have to close his eyes for a few seconds in the process. 

“If you’re about to tell me you know the code, Pavel, I am going to be indebted to you for the rest of my life.”

“We would have to get open access to the frequency to begin with–and then disguise Sweeper’s comm system so that we can respond and our messages will look like they came from Istaar. But if it works–”

“We can intercept runs before anyone on Istaar knows about them,” Gaila said. Her voice and her expression both contained just pure wonder, as she watched Pavel speak. “Pavel, you’re a certified genius. And a lifesaver. And maybe the most amazing man I’ve ever met.”

“Hey,” Jim protested, but it was a weak protest. Because Pavel was blushing in his seat and shrinking into his shoulders under all of the praise which he very rightly deserved.

“Gaila, can you figure out the comms? I’m not taking no for an answer.”

“Who do you think you’re talking to? Come on, Pavel.”

Gaila practically jumped out of her seat, then, and took Pavel’s hand in her own and together they bounded up the stairs from the mess and towards the bridge. Jim sat down and closed his eyes and let the non-stop anxiety of the last 20 hours finally start to roll off of him. He felt his body relax and listened to the sounds of Nyota and McCoy getting up and moving around the room behind him. The ambient noise of sharing a ship with multiple people. It’d become the soundtrack to his daily life without him noticing. 

He might’ve fallen asleep, or been pretty close, when a clanging sound made his head snap up from where it had been resting in his hand, elbow propped up on the surface of the table. And then he smelled it. Meat and potatoes on one of the aluminum replicator trays. Right there under his nose on the table in front of him. 

McCoy set a fork down, next. 

“Eat something,” he said. “If you stop functioning, we’re all doomed.”

Chapter Text

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” Jim chanted. Except they were all laughing on the bridge. This run had become such an epic disaster that laughter was the only response any of them could have. Pavel kept wiping tears out of his eyes with the backs of his hands and yet he was smiling bigger than Jim had ever seen from him. A terrified, nihilistic sort of smile that only a teenager could produce.

“We have never made a stupider decision,” Gaila deadpanned, which only made Jim wheeze even harder. And it was true. The actual job they were sent out to do was a break-in at a medical facility in the Xeras cluster–an inhabited medical facility, by the way, which should have been enough of a challenge to make them keep things simple. Only Nyota came back to Sweeper that same evening (in their secluded intermediary pickup spot because Jim didn’t want anyone to notice Nyota walking passengers back and forth through the north lot anymore) with a woman and her child who needed to get to starbase 951 after getting stranded on Istaar for not being able to pay their full passage. Starbase 951 was nowhere close. The obvious choice would have been to keep these people on board for an extended period of time except that Pavel found out there was active conflict happening in the Xeras cluster. The next choice would have been to come back for their passengers after this stupidly dangerous job–except the final bit of information they learned was that this woman had been separated from her youngest child who was being sheltered on 951. 

So they came up with this impossible plan to get to 951 and pass through the Xeras cluster on the way back–a place which was by no stretch of anyone’s imagination “on the way back” to Istaar. They made it there by the skin of their teeth, or more accurately by the skin of the inside of Jim’s cheek which he had all but chewed to oblivion from stress until it became a constant heat and throbbing sensation underneath the pitiful action of the next three days which should have killed them all. 

“How is this worse than when we were being shot at?” Pavel asked in between shallow breaths. 

Technically Sweeper had a two-pilot design, but Jim and Gaila still needed Pavel there because he was fucking around with the internal systems as the two of them did some of the worst piloting of their lives. If they didn’t have Pavel at the life support controls in the back making rapid cabin adjustments in response to every ill-timed maneuver that Jim hoped was getting them to Istaar faster, McCoy would have already crawled his way up to the bridge in inconsistent gravity and cabin pressure in order to kill Jim or throw up on him or both. 

The being shot at part wasn’t too bad because, unlike Baby, their current ship had functioning shields. The breaking-into-a-not-at-all-empty-medical-facility-to-steal part had been far worse, to the point where Jim repressed half of it upon making it back to Sweeper with vials and vials of painkillers taken from a room that was central enough in the building that he’d had to listen to the low groaning of the very patients who needed that medicine as they struggled to sleep. On the way out of Xeras they used up the last of their limited ammunition, expertly timed by Gaila to be more of a deterrent than an actual attack on anyone. 

And now–now things were so out of hand they passed the point of being stressed, flew straight through scared and didn’t even touch on contempt, and the three of them were incapable of viewing their current circumstances as anything but comedic. Sweeper was spiraling through space to make the deadline they were bound to miss. Jim couldn’t stop imagining how insanely illegal their behavior would be if Federation Space was still Federation Space. They deserved to be in handcuffs for the number of ships whose paths had to derail at a moment’s notice because of them.

But none of them could say that they regretted it. Jim wasn’t even thinking about the possibility of regret. Not after the way that child had run into his mother’s arms on 951. Not after seeing a family reunited like that, when days before things must have felt so dire in the sands of Istaar, when Jim overheard as he passed by the mess on his way to the engine room that this woman hadn’t been able to contact her younger son in months and hadn’t seen him in years, since he was brought there by one of those big sanctuary ships Starfleet used to fill with children to get them away from conflict. That she’d had to come to terms with the idea that he may not even be there. 

That moment made everything that came after, and maybe everything that came before–even the things that happened a long long time ago–feel worth it. Maybe that was why Jim needed to laugh instead of get mad. 

The fear and contempt arrived late, just like Sweeper did into the north lot on Istaar. They landed underneath the black night sky and Jim realized, accompanied with a sinking feeling in his stomach that made it impossible for him to eat anything, that he and Gaila had never made a late delivery to Galileo before. 

Clout didn’t exist in a place like this. There was no street cred, there was no benefit of the doubt. There was certainly no fucking mercy. Showing up to Galileo’s office a day late, even with the exact delivery they were sent for, was not something he would let slide. 

There would be punishment in some form. Jim just didn’t know what to expect because they’d never fucked up this bad before. Galileo had said himself that he and Gaila were two of his most successful smugglers and their track record was impressive, but Jim knew how this place worked. He didn’t need the nervous fidgeting of Pavel from across the table in the mess to tell him this would be a problem. So after a meal where he picked at the edges of Gaila’s replicator tray rather than waste a whole credit on his nonexistent appetite, and McCoy and Nyota and Pavel all watched awkwardly as Jim and Gaila took their stress out on each other by more or less having a fight about making the drop in the morning a full day late, he knew what he needed to do.

Gaila outright refused to let Jim make the drop alone. Jim refused her refusal. They reached no compromise whatsoever. Nyota tried multiple times to mediate and gave up. McCoy just left the mess altogether. And then Jim waited for everyone to go to sleep, hoisted the crate of painkillers onto one shoulder, and walked through the lots in the middle of the night. He sat on the crate outside of the empty market for hours until the sun came up and the heat made him sweat. 

Then the market opened, he swallowed hard, and he carried the crate to Galileo’s office. 

He tried to keep that memory from 951 in the front of his mind, to visualize again and again this family he’d been able to reunite, the happy tears of this mother and the laughter of her two sons as their hug turned into wrestling on the floor of the hangar bay. He tried to remember them as he walked through the market into the office, as he caught eyes with members of Galileo’s staff who knew he was late, whose wide eyes only confirmed what Jim already expected to happen on the other side of that door.

“An entire day late,” Galileo said. His fingertips were pressed together over his desk, thumbs and  index fingers making a diamond shape. He probably thought that made him look intelligent, and not like an actor in a cheap spy holo. 

There was no point in making any sort of defense. Not only had Jim done something indefensible that he couldn’t even hint towards having done, but even if he used a valid reason for being late–something like, oh, you sent me into an field of bullets or it’s not fucking easy breaking into a hospital with people inside–it would just make things worse. So Jim said,

“Everything’s there. Count it.”

“Oh, we will.”

Galileo’s typical assistant wasn’t there, the Betazoid one who looked too young and wore that collar that Jim guessed was meant to stop them from being able to use their telepathy. Instead there was a different man standing in the corner with his arms crossed. Jim recognized him. He recognized most ex-Fleet people just from a general aura, either one of bleeding heart altruism or a clear disappointment that the war had ended before they were finished having fun. 

This guy’s energy very much aligned with the latter. 

If he and Galileo exchanged any further words before his goon in the corner slammed the side of Jim’s face against the top of Galileo’s desk, they weren’t important enough for Jim to remember. Not over the replay of the hangar bay on 951, a memory he stopped being able to access once the skin over his cheekbone split open against the cool metal surface of the desk. 

“I’ll take responsibility for this one,” Galileo said, his voice dripping with how pleased he was at his own irony. Jim’s arm was being twisted so hard behind his back that it took everything he had not to make a sound. He kept his eyes open, refusing to wince or even to let them close against the pain. He stared at the corner of the desk. At least he didn’t have to look at Galileo’s gross fucking snake-like eyes while this happened.

“Really, I think I promoted you too early. Not everyone can be trusted with a better ship. I was distracted by your work clearing out starbase 787 and forgot to consider that you don’t have the maturity for a ship like Sweeper. And now you show up late with a very important delivery after your ship’s signature has been picked up on three separate occasions doing what my contacts could only describe as joy-riding through star systems I never sent you to.”

Well, that was good news. The whole joy-riding accusation. Because it meant that they were covering their tracks well and hiding what they were actually doing. 

His arm got pulled on even more. Galileo probably noticed Jim getting comfortable and made some sort of signal to his bodyguard that Jim hadn’t seen. Not that he felt comfortable. He didn’t feel anything–he was a little busy keeping his vision clear and his face neutral. He was running out of energy for either of those tasks. 

“I would send you back to Babydoll except that I already reassigned her. So unfortunately I have to let you off with a warning. And then I was planning to send someone out there to remove your replicator until you finish your next run on time, but that just didn’t seem fitting. Hunger’s not going to help mitigate stupidity. Trust me, I’ve tried that.”

Jim pulled his bottom lip into his mouth so he could bite down on it. It seemed like a better idea than biting his tongue to keep him from groaning at what he knew was coming. This exact injury had been inflicted on him before, just not in this context. Not with this audience. 

“And then I thought–seeing as you can’t seem to take your assignments seriously, I might want to help illustrate why you wouldn’t want to be late delivering something as valuable as pain medication.”

If Galileo’s stupid ex-soldier hadn’t chimed in, Jim could have kept his mouth shut until this whole embarrassment was over. But he did, and what he said was,

“It’s just too bad you didn’t bring that little green thing with you, or she might’ve been able to distract me,”

to which Jim was unable to stop himself from replying,

“Fuck you, asshole,”

before his shoulder was pulled out of its socket and he saw stars. 

The worst part wasn’t even the pain. It was that, even though he knew he was about to have a dislocated shoulder and a spiral fracture in his arm and he knew what both of those things felt like, the moment still shocked him enough that he cried out in response to the pain. Galileo’s laughter echoed in his ears during his entire pitiful walk back to the ship. 

-

Leonard was stumped by Jim Kirk. The man confused him, at first, and then as soon as he thought he had him figured out–had pegged him as just a bitter ex-Fleet kid who took on a life of crime out of spite and always needed a system to blame–he experienced some other side to him that made him have to rewrite his opinion. Like his ability to be protective, not just of Gaila who he’d known for years, but even someone like Pavel, who walked into their lives and openly admitted to having worked against the two of them. The respect he was able to give to Nyota and, in a less direct way, to Leonard himself–two people who had come from Starfleet and sure acted like it. The help he so quickly extended to people in need when helping them meant making his own life situation worse. The way he acted with the kids they took on board, the careful language he used and the rapid tone and demeanor changes so that none of them ever knew things around them were dangerous. Just about the third or fourth time he got surprised by something he gave up trying to categorize Jim and just settled for witnessing whatever was bound to come next.

This morning was no different. After the two of them had established this routine where Jim begrudgingly allowed Leonard to heal all his stupid injuries from this stupid and reckless job he did, the kid showed up to the ship with his face bleeding and his shoulder clearly dislocated from the way his arm hung down by his side. And instead of waiting for Leonard to insist on it, he walked right up to him and said,

“My shoulder’s dislocated.”

There was something in his eyes Leonard hadn’t seen there before. Disillusionment, maybe? But that didn’t seem right. This whole damn galaxy was disillusioned. They were well past that by now.

“I see that,” Leonard said, although at this point he couldn’t look away from Jim’s face, from the set of his jaw and the dried blood that trailed all the way down his neck from his split cheekbone. From that emptiness in his eyes–eyes that had always contained something, even if it was anger and that anger was directed towards Leonard.

And then he asked something that really sounded out of character.

“Can you fix it?”

“Yeah,” Leonard said. “Come on.”

As soon as he had Jim on the mattress in the mess, the rest of their little makeshift crew all marched down to either check on him or, in Gaila’s case, chew him out.

“I told you not to go by yourself, dumbass.”

Jim smiled at her, his eyes narrow, which made the whole thing look sarcastic. There was none of the intensity that had been there last night, when the two of them were almost at each other’s throats at the table, both riled up from fear over whatever it was Jim just lived through and walked away from. Now they were being bitchy to each other in a way that struck Leonard as routine, more than anything. 

“And I told you I would do it anyway.”

“I could have helped.”

“You being there wouldn’t have divided the treatment by two,” Jim said. He turned his head to the side, baring the length of his neck towards Leonard. Leonard had treated the skin over his cheekbone, first, at Jim’s request. He’d already run it over with the dermal regen and now was wiping the blood off. This wasn’t anywhere near the first time he’d wiped blood from Jim’s skin, but it felt different all of a sudden. Because Jim wasn’t waiting to be told to tilt his head. He hadn’t waited to be told to sit down while Leonard tended to his injuries. In fact, he’d outright asked for it. Leonard wondered if that was somehow enough to make their entire dynamic feel new. 

“It would have multiplied it by two, you know that right. If not more.”

Gaila sighed. 

“I’m not going to apologize for leaving you out of it.”

“I don’t need protecting, Jim.”

Leonard finished cleaning the base of Jim’s neck where it met his now-stained t-shirt. Well, more-stained. The gray, ratty shirt had no doubt been white once upon a time. The blood was just the newest addition to the collection of stains Jim had on it. When he pulled his hand away Jim tilted his head back and looked at her again. 

“I know you’re not actually mad at me.” His voice got quieter at the end of that sentence, and Leonard wasn’t dumb. He pretended he had to fetch something from that high shelf where he kept the rest of his meds so that Jim and Gaila could have whatever low-tones conversation they needed to have that he didn’t know either of them well enough to hear. Only the rare sounds of their words, a couple vowels and consonants, made it to his ears in the corner of the room. When he walked back over Gaila was holding Jim’s hand on his good side, the one that wasn’t hanging listlessly from his dislocated arm. They were smiling at each other in a real way. He thought he heard Gaila say something like whatever before she went back up the stairs of the mess. 

Jim’s expression looked much more content at that point, although his energy was still lower than usual. Leonard walked over to his fucked-up arm. 

“I wanted you to do my face first so she wouldn’t walk in on the shoulder.”

Leonard had guessed as much.

“I’m surprised you didn’t just pop it back in yourself, since you seem so experienced with getting your ass kicked.”

That earned him a tiny little huff of laughter. Jim repositioned himself on the mattress, bringing one leg up and facing the side so Leonard could get a better hold on his arm and his upper back. So he wasn’t looking at Leonard when he said, “I wanted you to do it.”

That sentence was the one that really floored him, because it managed to make him feel something he hadn’t felt before–maybe something he had assumed at this point that his brain could no longer access. Jim made him feel needed when he said that. Not in the way any patient who ended up underneath his tools made him feel needed–needed because they were the patient and he was the doctor and that was the deal–but in the way his family had, back on Earth. The type of need that comes with want. Jim wanted him around, now. That was what that meant.

“Just don’t make fun of whatever sound comes out of my mouth.”

“I’ll try.”

-

Nyota had etched out a decent life for herself after Starfleet ceased to exist and she ceased to be Ensign Uhura of the USS Gallant and, within mere hours, became just another person stranded out in space. The crew of the Gallant had survived the war, of course. She was still on the ship in her uniform for months after all of the titles and all of the objects that made up the Fleet lost their significance. She continued following orders for as long as she could tolerate them.

The Gallant followed the path that many of the larger, well-maintained former Fleet vessels did in the aftermath of the war. They continued to travel through space, taking on passengers who needed to find their way home. The crew thinned out naturally, as the work became more people-centered than exploratory. They doubled up, and then tripled up, in the junior officer’s quarters in order to accommodate more passengers at a time. Unnecessary departments were transformed into more accommodations. The ship was at capacity and then it was beyond capacity. Nyota watched as things got tighter and then heard, in all these different languages, as the prices their passengers reported having paid the Captain got higher and higher. Then one day she looked around and it felt like she had opened her eyes for the first time in a long time, and she saw a system that was no longer helping people, but taking advantage of them. 

She packed a bag and got off at the next stop, beamed down with the others who made it to the end of their journey. She felt herself sigh in relief the same way they all did, seeing their home again, except she was staring at an entirely foreign landscape with no plan on where she would go next or how she would get there. Her relief was that she would never have to take orders from someone again if she didn’t want to, and she could make sure, from now on, that she never participated in a system that hurt people. She had nobody to report to and nobody to which she owed anything. She was 25 years old and was so far from her home that the lack of familiarity didn’t even bother her anymore. She was more free than she had ever been in her life.

A role for her in the strangeness of those first, shaky post-war years emerged naturally. Nyota spoke 37 languages at that point and it was rare for her to encounter someone with whom she didn’t share at least one. Any planet or starbase that people were headed to also contained people trying to get a ride somewhere else. An accidental day spent standing in the city center translating for strangers ended with an elderly member of the former UFP offering to pay her to accompany him and his partner all the way home. Once she knew what to offer, finding clients after that was easy.

She wasn’t the only one doing this job. After a while she found others. Not all of them had the same set of skills, but the idea was the same–they helped people get where they needed to go. Not by flying a ship or by sneaking them into a cargo hold, but by keeping them company, navigating crowds, negotiating with ship captains, anything they needed down to just being there to hold a person’s hand if they were afraid they wouldn’t make it home or afraid of what they would find waiting for them when they did. It was a job that had a lot of different names, the simplest of which was passage companion, the most pretentious being concierge, the most excessive being guardian angel. 

Nyota called herself a passage companion, when she offered her services. And her services were good. As a communications ensign on the Gallant she’d gotten to know the entire infrastructure of Federation Space, information which still came in handy even as that infrastructure crumbled down to its bones. She spoke an uncommon number of languages and could work with Humans and non Humans alike. Her upbringing with her extended family and a village of people coming in and out had instilled in her a fierce set of soft skills and a social etiquette that caught a lot of folks off guard at first and then reminded them that those things still mattered, even in times like these. She did well. She spent days, weeks, in a few cases even months at a time with her clients and found herself thinking about many of them long after they’d said goodbye. She could tell herself every night before bed and every morning that she was doing good work that wasn’t hurting or taking advantage of anyone, that she was part of the process of rebuilding, not just another vulture picking off the scraps of broken societies. 

She never expected that she was going to find herself voluntarily joining another crew. Being a passage companion was a fine way to live, even if it meant she lacked support. In many ways it beat out being tied to a ship. So the fact that the crew that drew her in was a group of four perfect strangers on a smuggling ship connected to the infamous and objectively evil network operating out of port Istaar–she was about as surprised, on the inside, as the man she’d identified as the leader of that little crew looked on the outside, when she asked if she could stay on with them. 

All she could say weeks later–when Gaila asked her about it during one of their long nights spent talking while Gaila flew the ship–was that she had found a group of people who were trying to do the right thing, and she knew that if she stayed with them for at least a little while she could take the good work she already did and with the four of them she could multiply it. Because by all other metrics Sweeper should have been another ship full of criminals, and instead it wasn’t. 

The Gallant had been a ship with all of the right ingredients to change thousands of lives in a calendar year and instead it stripped the walls bare and extracted all forms of payment it could from the most vulnerable people in the galaxy. 

And Jim and Gaila and Leonard and Pavel had agreed to take Ambassador Loven home, for free, risking their own lives in the process.

Joining them didn’t feel that much like joining a crew anyway, not really. Nyota still did the work of finding clients by herself, and she still kept her clients company during the journey while the rest of them stayed pretty hands-off. She was able to lower her rates now that her and her clients no longer needed to pay for passage, and it also afforded her the opportunity to help people who had nothing they could pay her with at all. That was probably the biggest benefit of staying onboard Sweeper. 

In between clients it was hard not to get to know the four people she shared such close quarters with, and then going back out on her own became less and less appealing. The four of them fascinated her in how different they were, how severe and contrasting their experiences of the war had been, and how they all came out the other end and agreed to do better, seemingly without having an actual spoken conversation about it beforehand.

In addition to spoken languages Nyota was also fluent in the unspoken ones–body language, self-expression, use of personal time. And she had met just about every possible type of person that could exist in the universe. So she knew things about people, the major things, without needing to ask. She didn’t need to ask if Jim Kirk, the captain who refused to consider himself a captain and yet clung to every chance he had to be in charge, had been put into some sort of no-win scenario by Starfleet during the war which now wracked him with a guilt that hung in the bags under his eyes and made him overcommit himself. She didn’t need to ask whether or not Gaila had been trafficked when she was too young and let down by every person who should have been there to help her. She didn’t need to ask if Leonard was always drinking in his bunk at night because it helped him forget who he had left behind on Earth and the time he had lost with them since his departure. All of those things were as clear in their facial expressions and their gestures and the way they carried themselves as if they’d said them out loud to her.

It was Pavel that she couldn’t seem to read. She’d missed his backstory, some of which Gaila summarized to her. But the backstory and the behavior didn’t match up. Without fail she saw him acting like a normal, nerdy teenager. The smartest 17 year old boy she’d ever met, that was for sure, but she knew that intelligence like that didn’t always come cheap. She knew that on the other side of his energy and his passion and his boyishness he was hurting. She hoped, for a while, that the private sort of looks they sometimes gave each other on the bridge or over dinner in the mess meant he talked about that hurt with Jim. Only Jim, she also had learned early on, was balancing too much on his plate.

She decided to give it a shot after that disastrous trip back from Xeras, while Leonard was down in the mess putting Jim back together and Gaila was brooding in the engine room over Jim having snuck out to spare her the abuse and the reality that she had woken up to his empty hammock in the morning and felt relieved, at first, that he’d done it (all of which Nyota picked up on from the way she’d acted over breakfast). Sweeper was still parked in the lot in an afternoon dust storm that trapped them all inside. Nyota found Pavel laying in his bunk with the door open and one of his lanky, teenage-boy legs hanging off. His socked foot rested on the floor of the ship’s hallway. Of the five of them, he was by far the most comfortable with their living situation.

“Hey Pavel.”

“Oh,” Pavel said, instead of any version of hi. 

Nyota sat down on the floor next to his bunk, folding her arms over her knees. He stared at her. 

“I don’t think you and I have talked to each other one-on-one yet.”

“That’s okay,” was his response, as if what she’d said had been an apology. 

He was a teenager, alright. Brilliant mind but as awkward with conversations and eye contact as it could get. 

“Since we’re stuck in here today I thought we could get to know each other better. I’d love to learn more about you. All I know about you right now is that you keep saving the day again and again.”

Pavel’s cheeks turned pink and he stared at the inside of his bunk.

“It’s nothing. I just happen to know a lot of things that come in handy.”

“What were you studying in school before?”

“School?” he asked, the word coming out in a ridiculous tone of voice. “I haven’t been to school since I was ten years old.”

“Wow,” Nyota laughed in the way she knew would break the tension, “I never would have guessed. You could have told me you graduated from some big science academy and I would’ve believed you.”

“I was at a primary school on Yorktown, my parents lived there and did ship maintenance. After they died in an accidental explosion I came here.”

“Did you always live on Yorktown?”

These questions were softballs, but that was the point. And it had probably been so long since an adult had shown this kind of interest in Pavel’s life unrelated to his time on Istaar that he wouldn’t notice she was trying to get him to open up just that first little bit, to trust her, to remember that she cared after this conversation was over.

“As long as I can remember. I know I was born on Earth but I have no memories of it.”

“I heard your family’s from Russia.”

“Maybe they are,” he said, “and maybe I still have some of their accent, but I’m not from there. I’m not from anywhere.”

Nyota propped her chin up on her hand. She kept her body language and her tone of voice neutral, relaxed, casual. She hid the fact that Pavel’s words made her heart sting and twist into a knot. “That’s kinda trippy, huh, to not have a place you can tell people you’re from.”

Pavel grunted.

“I grew up in this little village in Kenya. It never felt small until I came out here. Now every time I see the surface of another planet from space all I can think about is how tiny that place really was. You’d never know it was there if you looked at it from the windows of a ship, but it was big enough to be my entire world for a long time.”

“I think about that a lot,” Pavel said.

“Think about what?”

“Like what you said–when I see a planet, I can just imagine how many people are there living their lives contained in some small area of space that I can’t even see from the outside.”

Nyota smiled. She tried out a little flash of eye contact, dropped it into the middle of her next sentence.

“I always like to look out and imagine someone is down there is looking up at the sky, and that that person looking up at us is wondering if anyone is inside the ship wondering about them down on the surface.”

Pavel shook his head. “Me too, I can’t help it.”

“Where would you go, if you could go anywhere?” Nyota asked without letting the silence linger too long.

He shrugged. The action made his foot slide a little back and forth against the floor. “I don’t know. Not to Earth. Somewhere cool, maybe. Somewhere as far as possible from this place. I hate coming back here even though I know Jim would not let something happen.”

“I’m glad you found him.”

“I knew who he was already. I’m just lucky he didn’t kick me off of his ship.”

“Are you kidding? He’d be lost without you.”

Pavel watched her carefully as she stood up. She had to lean over to see his face again when he finally asked, 

“Are you trying to bond with me?”

“Maybe. Is it working?”

She didn’t expect a response from Pavel, either positive or negative. So she didn’t stay for one. But she did sneak a glance over her shoulder before she climbed up into her bunk on the other side of the hall and saw him sliding his foot back and forth now, and smiling to himself just a little.

-

“Alright. We’re getting sent on another suicide mission that makes me want to claw my eyes out. Who has something nice to say,” Jim asked. 

Their crew meetings had become routine enough that Jim no longer needed to announce them. It was just what they did, every night before they left Istaar for their next run. They all sat back down after the replicator trays were cleared and they planned everything out like they were in the war room.

“There’s an abandoned starbase on our way that’s been scheduled for a raid. Scanners picked up medical, maybe weapons equipment still inside. We already intercepted the message.”

Jim placed his hands on either side of Pavel’s head and pulled him forward so he could plant a loud, exaggerated kiss on the top, where his curly hair had started to grow a little wild. It made Pavel, Gaila, and Nyota all laugh. McCoy was probably rolling his eyes. Which was a poor lead-in to his inevitable question of whether he’d be allowed first pick of the medical supplies before they sold it. 

At some point he’d stop bothering to ask–Jim was pretty sure he only did now because Nyota had talked him into being a little nicer over the last few weeks. He had no confirmation for that, of course, but some such conversation must have taken place because suddenly McCoy asked for things without that tone of voice like he was about to spit on the ground in front of Jim’s feet, and Jim couldn’t think of anyone else around the table that was persuasive enough to accomplish that change in behavior.

Speaking of Nyota, Jim turned to her next.

“Our extra bunk will be empty on the way there,” she said, “I think I need to dial back my visits to Istaar.”

“Someone followed her across the market and halfway through the north lot,” Gaila added, which made Jim shake his head. It wasn’t that he was itching for more work to pile onto their plates, and he should have been excited about the simplicity of just doing one extra stop this week, but he couldn’t help feeling let down in just a tiny, microscopic way.

That fucking memory of watching those brothers reunite was still on a loop in his head. His body probably just wanted more like it was some sort of drug.

“Okay,” he finally said, “so our goals for right now: get to that starbase as fast as possible, find somewhere to hock what we get off of it, and not get killed on our trip through our third conflict zone of the month to pick up Galileo’s shit. Is that everything?”

“Not just a conflict zone, this one’s got meteors too.”

“This meeting was for nice things to say, Gaila.”

She held up her hands in surrender, followed it up with, “that blood on your shirt really brings out your eyes.”

Nyota nodded in thoughtful agreement, and held her composure for all of three seconds before dissolving into easy laughter with Gaila. Pavel was in on it too–he was quick to join in anytime someone had actual fun onboard the ship, with a minor level of detachment as if he were an anthropologist studying some foreign culture’s social norms and trying to blend in. So the one person Jim could commiserate with turned out to be McCoy, whose annoyance with the peanut gallery on the other end of the table felt soothing, when the two of them caught eyes under the low lighting of the mess. 

-

Dislocated shoulders and death threats aside, flying Sweeper with their ridiculous, accidental five-person crew made for some of the best weeks of Jim’s life. Genuinely. Even years later, he would still hold onto something like nostalgia for the almost three months they all spent onboard that modest little ship together. 

Of course, like all good things in Jim’s life, as the grand finale to any moment in which he allowed himself to believe that things were getting better and he was gaining some tiny piece of control over all of it–the ending was abrupt and accidental and irreversible. Pavel made an impossible miscalculation when they were already running behind trying to get back to Istaar after fitting an ambitious passenger trip in before their last pickup. Or maybe he just hadn’t known everything there was to know about this star system. About the atmosphere of the planet they were only supposed to pass by. The one that interfered with Sweeper’s shields and navigation system, that made the planet look farther than it actually was, because of some element in the outer layer that played tricks with their sensors. 

Jim didn’t remember what he was thinking about when things went wrong. Something completely unrelated to the task at hand. He had no doubt at all that his mind had been wandering that whole day, letting the actual flying the ship part of his work fade into the background and happen from muscle memory. He’d probably been thinking about something stupid like what to eat, or counting down the minutes until he could go to bed. And then the ship tipped so violently off course that he fell sideways out of his chair. All he heard from that moment on were sirens, as he tried and tried to yell at Pavel and listen in between each rhythmic blaring sound for Pavel to shout back that he was okay. The sirens drowned both of their voices out. 

After the sirens came the shaking. Tumbling, almost. And then plummeting. Unmistakable. Jim failed every time he got close to crawling his way back to the controls. He fell back down in every possible direction and hit every one of his available body parts against what felt like all corners and surfaces of the bridge, all except for the fucking control panel he was trying to reach. 

After the shaking and tumbling and after the ship started to free fall, as the sirens blared so loud he didn’t know if Pavel was even still conscious, came the spinning. Sweeper reeled. Jim slid across the floor of the bridge again, towards another wall to slam his shoulder against. Except this time he was able to see Pavel, again. Pavel had made it to one of the control panels and was clinging onto it. And yelling words that Jim couldn’t make out. And trying to do something that made a difference instead of making Sweeper’s movements even worse, which from the look on Pavel’s face had been the results of his first attempt.

The spinning turned into a torturous series of jumps and dips. Swaying back and forth. Close enough to flying, he decided.

Jim was on his feet as soon as he could manage, even with how much everything hurt from being hurled back and forth across the bridge. He wasn’t thinking, not really. He was following his deepest instincts in the face of his possible death from a crash land in a ship this size. 

He stumbled through the doors of the bridge and clawed his way down into the engine room to find Gaila. 

The movements of the ship got worse, not long after they got better. Because they started to hit things. Big things on the planet’s surface that made the entire ship jolt to one side. Jim kept fucking up every time he reached out for balance, and his hands managed to find every surface and pipe in that engine room that was hot enough to burn his skin. He must have been screaming, amidst the noise and the chaos. Screaming out for Gaila to answer him, to let him know where she was. 

For months after those ten minutes they spent falling from space, Jim would hear replays in his head of those sirens and the rattling of the entire ship and his own high and desperate voice when he screamed, because it was the chorus of the last minutes of his life that made any sense. Because that chorus ended with a noise so loud that Jim’s body didn’t even register the thing as a noise–it was the sound that accompanied his ship colliding with the planet’s surface.

Chapter Text

As soon as that rattling started, as soon as the ship was shaking so bad that everything flew off of the shelves in the mess and Leonard’s vision went double, he grabbed Nyota by the wrist and ran. Nyota’s hand found Gaila’s, as she climbed up out of the engine room on all fours. The three of them made it halfway up the ship towards the bridge tethered together like that, working to stabilize one another through divergent pulls of their interlocked arms as the ship lost control. 

Funny enough, this exact maneuver had actually been in the curriculum of the Starfleet survival course. Leonard used to have to do it as a part of his required flight simulation hours. Those memories flashed across his mind even in the midst of disaster, infused with irony, because back when he’d had to do survival tactics in a simulator in the middle of the day he remembered thinking that if he was ever in a real ship that was falling from space, he’d simply shoot himself between the eyes instead. 

And here he was clawing his way to the bridge, his free hand scrambling for purchase. His other hand, around Nyota’s wrist, was probably leaving bruises. Every time he slipped she steadied him again, and he kept going. His eyes were burning as he tried to focus his vision on the door at the far end of the ship’s corridor, the one that looked like it was shaking and getting smaller, that would lead them up to the bridge where they’d have a better chance of survival. 

That fucking door just kept getting further and further away from him. His feet couldn’t take him anywhere. His hand reaching out in front of him was becoming useless. 

When the ship started to outright fall, he lost sight of the door altogether. He pressed himself against the side of the corridor to avoid falling flat on his face instead. The g force made his body shrink into something microscopic. Into a speck that was bound to disappear in the next few seconds. There was no way he would live through this.

“The bunks!” Nyota yelled. Her teeth were chattering so bad from the force of the free fall that she couldn’t have gotten out another full sentence. But she hadn’t needed to. They all knew what she meant; they were closer to the bunks than they were to the bridge. Leonard was right in front of one. Nyota and Gaila pulled his arm back to steady him so he could yank open the door to the closest bunk. Once it was open they stopped pulling, and he combined the release with enough force on Nyota’s arm to land all three of them inside. He slammed the back of his shoulder against the button he knew was there, the one that would close and open the doors from inside the bunk. With no room to move and barely enough to breathe, the three of them held on to each other for dear life. 

Someone was hyperventilating. Someone else’s nails were digging into Leonard’s skin through his shirt, hard enough to make him bleed. Leonard squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath. The part of him that wondered if he was going to die in the next few minutes or not was somehow more powerful than the much bigger part of him that already knew death was a guarantee in a situation like this. It was powerful enough that all his mind could do was hope that he lived. Hope that this would just be a story that he could tell Joanna someday. That he’d even see Joanna again.

Each one of them had a hand around the back of another person’s neck, protecting their spinal cords for impact–the impact that none of them would see coming until it was too late to react. That they wouldn’t be able to prepare for any better than this, than with maneuvers from a survival course taught by professors who’d never lived through anything like this. 

Leonard held on. He waited. He tried to breathe and then he gave up on breathing. Let his body hold his next breath as if that would make any difference once they hit the ground. And maybe he went out like that–maybe he never took another breath before the crash killed them all. Maybe he suffocated unintentionally before he made it there. 

The force that moved through their bodies felt more or less convincing–that the ship had finally hit the surface. But it was possible that Leonard had just experienced some unexpected neurophysiological signal that accompanied his body’s passage from alive to dead. Maybe that was what that transition felt like in the body. The stillness afterwards only served to confuse him more. He couldn’t figure out whether that stillness, the shocking lack of movement and noise that felt too much like peace after what he’d just experienced, meant his suspicion was right. He was dead.

Until,

“Sound off,” Nyota said. Her voice was scratchy and dry. She might have been the one hyperventilating before. Leonard’s mind was ripped out of its delusions of afterlife and back into the uncanny truth that he was alive, seconds after a disaster that should have killed him.

He took a shaking, comically loud breath in.

“Not dead,” Gaila said. Leonard felt a hand around his neck loosen, the hand with nails that had been clawing into his back loosen, too. His brain found the connection again to his body and he let go of whichever one of them he’d been holding onto himself, and at once every one of his muscles, down to his fingers and the ones behind his eyes, were screaming with fatigue.

“Not dead,” he gritted out. He could barely speak. But he had enough to add, “will throw up.”

When the door to the bunk opened again it wasn’t all the way. The wall and part of the frame of the bunk had bent at one end. The first person had to shimmy out backwards and pull on the next one, before the third–which of course had been Leonard after he had been the first to fall backwards in there to begin with–could finally crawl out. 

Leonard didn’t throw up, but he did lie in a heap on the floor next to the bunk for as long as he could, before the both of them started trying to pull him up.

“We need to go, Leonard. There could be a fire.”

“Jim and Pavel,” Gaila added, and that made Leonard’s body remember how to move. 

When they forced the side door open and stumbled out into the light, and found the gaping hole where the engine room used to be, and Leonard spotted among the dirt and the wreckage the unmistakable human body lying on the ground–his own body forgot that it was hurt or nauseous at all. 

He ran. He skidded onto his knees next to his head, covered in dirt and smoke and grease but unmistakable. Leonard pulled Jim’s upper body off  the ground and into his lap with arms that shouldn’t have been strong enough after what he’d just been through. He started mapping out the damage with shaking hands, searching through all the rips in his burned clothing for whatever injuries accompanied them. 

The burns were everywhere. Leonard’s own hands looked white like fresh snow compared to him. And Jim wasn’t moving. Somewhere within his injuries there was one so bad that now he wasn’t moving. Leonard was going to find it. He was going to find it and he was going to fix it and Jim was going to find some ridiculous solution to the disaster they’d gotten themselves into and everything would work out. They weren’t going to be trapped here on a planet that Leonard didn’t even know the name of because he hadn’t paid any attention. Jim wasn’t going to be dead.

He was the one who sounded like he was hyperventilating, now. 

Seconds or minutes or hours could have passed before Jim’s eyes opened, and Leonard’s breath halted again. His hands shot upwards off of Jim’s body. He held his breath. He waited. 

At first Jim could only stare up at the sky, bleary-eyed, as he tried to push himself up. Tried and failed. It only made him wince and groan every time he made another attempt to move. Leonard’s instincts caught up with him and he realized he needed to intervene before he hurt himself. Jim was no longer floating in the unknown space between casualty and patient. He was his patient. Leonard was taking care of him now. He clamped his hands down on him and held him in place by the sides of his neck. 

“Don’t move. Don’t fucking move. Talk to me, Jim. Can you talk to me? Tell me what’s hurt.”

He’d positioned himself right above him, his face clearly visible in Jim’s line of sight. He didn’t want him looking anywhere else, least of all at his own body. Not until the shock wore off.

“You’re in shock,” he said slowly, “You’re alive. You can talk, you don’t need to move yet.”

Jim watched his mouth move, still with that far-away look in his eyes but Leonard knew he would catch on so long as he kept trying.

“Talk to me, Jim. You’re okay.”

“Bones,” Jim rasped. He cleared his throat and talked louder. “Bones. Bones.”

“Bones? What’s broken?”

He must have really been in shock. Like, to the point of confusion. He might have hit his head or something. He didn’t seem to understand what Leonard was saying to him. 

“Here,” he gritted out.

“Where? Where is it? I’m gonna take care of you, I promise, just tell me where.”

“Can’t,” Jim said, and then, “here.”

“Can’t what?” Leonard asked, and talking wasn’t working. Jim had a concussion, or worse. He was having some sort of stroke. Leonard didn’t know if that even made medical sense. His own reaction to everything so far hadn’t made much sense. He’d walked out of that crash on two feet.

Jim opened his mouth again and Leonard cradled the sides of his head. “Stop. Stop. It’s okay,” he said. “I’m gonna take care of you.”

Leonard just held Jim’s head in his hands like that, looked into his eyes as he started to focus more and more and the shock died down. Waves of pain still washed over his face. The firm grip of Leonard’s palms on either side of his head seemed to help. Leonard focused on his own breath for a while. He couldn’t get so worked up. He had to be steady once Jim was ready to be moved. He had to be level-headed so he could take care of him. So he breathed and he watched. Watched the subtle changes in Jim’s expression as he held his head between his hands. 

Little by little, Jim became lucid. Leonard forced himself into reckless optimism. He was just beat up, was all. He’d been beat up plenty of times before. None of his limbs were at weird angles and Leonard could see his legs starting to shift and move. Jim’s eyes were clear now and his pulse was slowing down, Leonard could feel it against the heel of his hands where each one pressed against the sides of his jaw, underneath his ears. They were okay. They’d made it. Jim would be fine. Leonard didn’t need to worry about him as much as he did–and he had never known he was capable of worrying about Jim so much until that moment, when he saw him lying there in the dirt and managed to break out into a sprint after he’d just been seconds from death. But it was over. He could relax. 

Except that he pulled his hands away from the sides of Jim’s head and they were warm and dripping wet with blood.

-

The engine room got the worst of it. It was blown open on one end and buried into the dirt. Light flooded into the dented corners of the rest of the ship. Into the mess next to the engine room, where flying, on-fire debris from the explosion blew a hole through the wall between them. And up into the hall where their bunks were, where Leonard found out later that the three of them had used Pavel’s bunk to survive the crash. 

Pavel had been on the bridge when they hit the surface, hanging onto the controls until his hands bled from the friction. Multiple pieces of the control panel had broken off in his hands, that was how hard he’d tried to get the ship flying again. At the moment of impact he’d jerked backwards and hit the captain’s chair. It was cushioned well enough that he fractured a few ribs, but otherwise made it through the crash with only bruises.

And trauma. None of Leonard’s equipment could do anything about the trauma part.

Jim’s burns took hours, but nobody could motivate Leonard to take a break even as the hand-held dermal regen he had to use went into overdrive. He didn’t stop until it was done, until Jim looked impossibly healthy. Or until the outside of him did. Leonard hadn’t needed any special equipment to tell him what Jim himself already said, hours before when he was lying in the dirt. Can’t hear.

So he, Gaila, and Pavel stayed awake for as long as it took to strip the ship of any functioning pieces of tech, the smallest they could find, and tear through Leonard’s remaining medical supplies and read every reference material he had on the topic saved in his beat-up padd from the old Fleet database, in order to come up with something that would work even halfway as a hearing aid.

Halfway had been a fair goal. They were able to make one that worked. 

Jim, after four full days spent alternating between sleeping on the bloodstained mattress in the mess and touching his fingertips to the front of Nyota’s neck to feel her vocal chords while she sang to him (to all of them, really–it was the only thing that kept them all sane), chose his left ear. 

-

“How’s that.”

“Fine,” Jim said. It wasn’t like his voice was too loud or too quiet–it just wasn’t the register that Leonard was used to. It was slightly off. It made Jim sound like he wasn’t telling the truth. 

“If we were at a hospital they’d have the tech to restore your hearing completely.”

Jim smiled as if he didn’t care at all. That Sweeper was destroyed beyond repair. That they were stranded out here. That he was definitely out of work now, even if by some miracle he did manage to make it back to Istaar. That the explosion from the engine room had all but taken out his hearing. “I hate hospitals.”

Leonard did one final check of the stupid, ugly thing they’d come up with. It was huge. Jim had hissed through his teeth when Leonard had to insert part of it into his ear canal. They’d made a decidedly silly-looking thin metal headband that held the rest of it in place. 

He’d insisted he didn’t need anything for the pain, shook his head again and again at the hypos Leonard offered–the most valuable ones that he had the fewest of and had kept hidden under lock and key until that point. That capacity to worry about Jim, the one that Leonard apparently had in excess, almost made his hands tremble as he worked. 

Maybe he didn’t need to keep checking on it after Jim said it was fine. To keep adjusting that headband over the top of his head in a way that wouldn’t put such a severe dent in his hair. To fiddle with the internal section of the hearing aid in hopes that he could take some of the pressure off it he repositioned it just a little more to the side, to make it hurt less. He did anyway. Like it would get rid of the memory of when he’d put his hands in the same place and found blood. And in that first fraction of a second when he’d seen the blood, before he connected it to the explosion, it felt like he might have done something to put it there. 

Jim raised his eyebrow at him, when Leonard finally pulled away. 

“What?”

“You’re being weird,” Jim said, and then frowned at his own voice. He stared off at some point behind Leonard’s shoulder until his eyes stopped focusing. “Weird.”

“I’ve had a fucking weird few days, if you can believe it.”

“I broke my promise,” Jim said next. 

Well Leonard knew what that cryptic-as-fuck sentence was referring to. He had no intention to go down that particular road. All five of them were finally out of the woods. Jim was more or less in one piece and Leonard was going to be able to sleep tonight for the first time since the crash. He didn’t want to face the next monumental obstacle in front of them. The one that he couldn’t fix. Not now. 

He changed the subject.

“You know you kept shouting the word Bones at me when I first found you.”

“I thought I broke them,” Jim took a pause. Leonard could tell how much the lack of audio input in one ear, and the mediocre attempt at restoring his hearing in the other, made his own words sound strange when he said them. Made it hard for him to form the kind of sentences he usually did when he spoke. “On the bridge.”

“Pavel was pretty beat up, but it was mostly bruises.”

That made Jim huff out a laugh which was over quick. The new sound of his own laughter probably made him forget what was funny. 

“‘Bones bones bones’. Those were your first words to me after I thought you were dead.”

“Maybe I was afraid,” Jim said, “that you would break mine again.”

“Very funny.”

“Like I died and you were the first person to meet me in hell.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Can I lie down now?” Jim asked, and Leonard realized he still had his hand on Jim’s shoulder underneath his teched-up ear. He pulled his it away and nodded. 

“You should too,” Jim added. He settled back against the mattress, and since he could only rest his head on one side now, didn’t have the option to turn away from Leonard. He didn’t even look that comfortable. His eyes stayed open. 

“You look like shit.”

“Thanks Jim. What a nice thing to say after I saved your life.”

“My ear hurts. You can go.”

Leonard’s eyes burned and his legs felt weak and his body begged for rest. He’d just been going so long that he couldn’t remember how to turn off the part of his brain that kept watching for something bad to happen next. For something he might have missed. So Jim half-glared at him from the mattress and Leonard tried to command his body to start moving and finally Nyota, who must have been listening through the holes in the busted-up walls of the ship, had to come down and drag him out. 

“You’ve done everything,” she said as she pushed him all the way up the stairs and towards his bunk. “There’s nothing left to do for him right now, you need to sleep.”

She started to close him in there before his last foot had even made it inside. 

-

The night sky was beautiful. Cold in an almost biting sort of way on Jim’s cheeks and nose and hands, but absolutely gorgeous. Deep purple-blue and full of stars. The kind of sky that made someone dream about space travel–the noble, scientific sort of space travel that maybe didn’t exist anymore. Jim shoved his hands in his pockets and just looked up at it for a while, watched the soft clouds of his breath in front of his face. 

He didn’t know what he was going to do. At all. They hadn’t even been able to broach that topic as a group. They’d been in survival mode this entire time, which created some twisted level of domesticity. Ever since McCoy shoved this piece of metal in his ear and clamped it over his head his days had been defined by nothing but chores. Wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, count the supplies, assess the damage, stretch his sore and aching muscles, have the most superficial conversations possible with the people around him because they refuse to address the truth. Repeat.

It was eerily identical to those first days on Minas. He heard himself thinking the exact same thoughts as if it hadn’t happened over two years ago, feeling the same panicky sort of fear that faded in and out in random intervals all day and all night, which in its absence was replaced by a dull ache of just wanting to lie down and give up and hope tomorrow never came. But tomorrow was coming, he knew that now. And the next day, and the next. 

They’d never make it back to Istaar. The way things looked at the moment, they might never make it into space again.

Jim couldn’t even think about that stuff during the day, though, with how busy they were just trying to get through it. So he settled for standing out in the cold in the middle of the night until the quiet gave him no choice but to face his panic head-on. He’d spend a couple hours alone testing everything out in his head, running through every option they still had left. By the morning he would know what to say to everyone. He would have something he could say that proved that he wasn’t going to let them die out here. 

Except one person on the ship seemed to be coping with their current situation by surveilling Jim’s condition at all times. It was his own fault for having taken most of the damage. If he’d stayed on the bridge instead of running to find Gaila in the engine room–as if she wouldn’t know what to do in an emergency–Pavel and his fractured ribs could have been McCoy’s target. Jim would have preferred it that way. He didn’t like being followed around. Especially when he came outside at this hour so he could be alone.

“Bones bones bones,” he repeated. He’d found it funny, in a weird way, that those had been his first words to McCoy after his latest near-death experience. And he liked the way it made McCoy somewhat uncomfortable every time he heard Jim repeat it. 

“Quit that, will you,” McCoy asked, even as he came up to stand next to Jim where he was looking up at the night sky. Jim’s breath formed more little wispy clouds around his face. 

McCoy was standing on his good side, the side with his homemade hearing aid that barely allowed him to hear things over the constant painful throbbing of its existence. But at least McCoy knew to accommodate it, to stand on his good side, to speak a little louder. It made the conversations they had feel normal–the half of them that came from McCoy. Unfortunately the other half required Jim to speak, an action which continued to catch him off guard with how strange it was right now. He found himself wanting to shake water out of his ears. He settled for making his sentences as simple as possible, so that he didn’t have to hear so many words in this altered form of his voice, with an overwhelming sensation of the physical act of talking that he never had to notice before. He couldn’t get used to how much his throat vibrated. 

“I think it’s funny,” Jim said.

“Well it reminds me of those few minutes I thought you were dead.”

Jim glanced at him out of the corner of his eye, but McCoy was staring up into the night, hands shoved into his pockets and shoulders hiked up to his ears against the cold. Ever since the crash McCoy had been off. It wouldn’t have shocked Jim if McCoy blamed him, if he took all of his bad moods out on him from now on. He just didn’t know what to do about the fact that whatever coping mechanism he was onto now made him want to talk to Jim all the time. 

“You’re in a mood,” Jim said next. He watched McCoy shrug his shoulders.

“How am I supposed to act after literally being shipwrecked?”

Jim laughed. Laughing felt like the wrong term, now. But the emotion was still there and it did make McCoy smile a little so that the skin around his eyes wrinkled. The light pouring out of the side of the ship behind them cast deeper shadows into the lines of his face than were normally there.

“You’re right. You should be in a worse mood.”

“I guess this hasn’t happened to you before, either. We’re finally having a shared experience.”

That made Jim look back up at the sky, away from McCoy’s face. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jacket–which was nowhere near warm enough after so much time spent in climates like Istaar. He pushed out his next breath in a puff of vapor. He could shut down this topic. He could lie. For some reason, and it probably had something to do with the fact that it felt like his words were coming out in someone else’s voice right now, he didn’t do either of those things. 

“In fact,” he said, “it has happened.”

“Really,” McCoy asked.

“I told you this. When the Farragut blew up. I was in a shuttle with all these civilians. The colony on Minas V was bombed before we landed.”

“Oh.”

“We camped in the ruins for months. 26 people who all thought I knew what I was doing because I flew the shuttle. Three died after one week.”

Talking this much made him breathless now. 

“Shit,” McCoy said.

“It was the week of my birthday.”

“How old?”

“Twenty five.”

Jim could just barely hear McCoy’s reaction to that, which was a low, exhaled sort of fuck sound.

“Minas is a desert like Istaar,” Jim said. “Like Tarsus. I fucking hate sand.”

“Tarsus,” McCoy repeated. Jim could tell the moment it clicked in his mind, even with limited input. “You--”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck,” he said louder.

“Yeah.”

McCoy was quiet for a minute, to the extent that it made Jim look over at him again just to check on him. He looked like he was calculating it. Thinking back to where he had been and what year it was when he’d heard about the vile shit that went down on Tarsus. Fed Space had been so deep into the war by that point that hardly anyone alive remembered when it had started and nobody at the time could imagine it ending. If someone had told Jim back then that the war would be over in about a decade, he wouldn’t have been able to believe it. Or even conceptualize it–he’d been born into that war. Literally. On a starship in the middle of a conflict zone. Tarsus was just one of the many places he’d been dropped throughout his life since his disastrous first breath of air.

“You must have been, what, thirteen years old?”

“Yeah. I think so. Maybe fourteen.” Jim honestly couldn’t remember. Like, he didn’t have very many memories of that time at all that his brain would let him access. “I don’t know. Old enough.”

“But still too young.”

“Yeah.”

McCoy turned his head just enough so that they were looking at each other. It was strange. Until Jim realized that it was because this was the first time McCoy’s eyes on him didn’t carry anything like anger, frustration, annoyance, hatred, contempt, sarcasm, or disbelief. It transformed his face, that his expression was just open in the absence of its usual negativity. It made him look like someone Jim could get along with. 

“I really had a bad impression of you when we first met,” he said then.

“Oh I know,” Jim said.

“I didn’t approve of you.”

“Is this a confession?”

McCoy rolled his eyes and looked away again. They both went back to watching the stars. “I just mean,” he said, “I pegged you for a delinquent, and now I know that’s not true. You’re a better person than I thought you were and you’ve been through more than I gave you credit for. It’s not a confession, it’s just me admitting I was wrong.”

“Alright.”

“You can reciprocate.”

Jim laughed out loud. Loud enough that he heard it more than he felt it for once. He worried it might’ve woken someone up.

“I think my impression of you was fair.”

“Oh really.”

“You did things that were fucked up. But you’re stubborn about doing good. You don’t lie.”

“Whatever. You’ve been in a mood, too, you know.”

“I’ve been thinking.”

“About what?”

“Sweeper had to crash like this. If I wanted to get out. I never would have bought our freedom. That was the whole point. I was in it for the rest of my life. Any run could have killed me.”

“It’s a miracle you lived this long.”

Jim smiled at the sky above them, at the stars that, by all accounts, were now impossible for them to reach. He still had no fucking clue how they were going to get back up there. But he at least had something that counted as the beginning of a plan. 

-

“We need it to look like we died,” Jim said to the table the next morning.

“What?” Pavel piped up, although he surely knew that the engine was beyond repair, and even if it wasn’t, half of the ship was wide open. They were feeling the breeze all the way into the mess, for fuck’s sake. They’d had to start layering up on their clothes.

Gaila only nodded. Like she’d read Jim’s mind she added, 

“Sweeper can still be tracked.”

“So how have we gotten away with all these extra stops we’ve been doing,” McCoy asked. 

“Dumb luck,” Gaila replied. “They can’t find us directly from Istaar. Another one of his smugglers would have to come looking for our ship’s signature on purpose. But once we miss our drop, they’ll start looking.”

“And it’s either death or jail.” Jim crossed his arms over his chest. He shrugged one shoulder. “Or worse.”

Nyota was frowning. She didn’t do it very often, Jim had noticed. It didn’t match the rest of her features. “You’re saying their response to one of their employees surviving a ship crash is imprisonment?”

Gaila laughed. More than likely at her use of the word employees. 

“The ship is more valuable of a resource than the smuggler who flies it,” Pavel said flatly. “Lose a smuggler, there are a thousand more desperate people willing to work. Lose a federation-grade ship, that’s one less  of a limited number in the galaxy. Nobody is making them anymore.”

Nyota’s hands tightened in their grip around each other. A heavy sort of silence started to press down on all of them where they sat around the table. Finally Jim stood up from his chair and rested his hands on the table. His body was almost buzzing with an energy he hadn’t felt in a long time. He looked forward to destroying this ship they had all called home for the last few months, the one that had actually been good for them, where things had started to feel something close to easy for the first time since the war started. But there it was–Sweeper had to turn to dust. 

The ship meant nothing anyway. Being put in charge of this ship was about as significant as the time Starfleet had decided to put the word Lieutenant before his name. It meant nothing. Jim had earned it with nothing. It was just a thing that had been given because Jim had managed not to die before his inevitable chance to be in the right place at the right time to receive it. 

“So,” he said again, “we need to make this crash look like it killed us.”

“Only the two of us,” Gaila added. 

Soon everyone’s attention had turned towards McCoy at the far end. 

“Why are y’all looking at me now. I agree with the plan.”

He caught on a second later. 

“No, no, no. Fuck no.” He stood up from his seat on the bench to punctuate it. On his way out of the mess and out of the ship altogether, through the gaping hole in the side of it that led into the light of their eighth day of the afterlife, he added, “Do not ask me to come up with fucking corpses of the two of you.”

-

The next morning they removed all evidence of their extra passengers, leaving the traces of their own lives untouched. Not that they owned much. Chances were low that anyone would bother coming all the way to the surface, but Jim wanted to do this right. 

Bones–the nickname stuck–had to explain until his face turned a little bit red that even with an industrial-sized multimineral replicator, creating a fake human body was so far beyond the violations of his oath that he wouldn’t have done it under any possible circumstances. They settled on a half-measure. The crash would look like it killed them. The remains of the ship couldn’t suggest anything to the contrary.

They made it so that nothing looked like it had been out of the ordinary on the day they crashed. Gaila’s bunk unmade. The rest of the bunks unused. Jim left the ropes of his burned-up hammock hanging in the burned-up engine room. Gaila left all of her tools she’d been collecting over the years scattered around, all of her engineering experiments and the pieces of tech she’d brought back to life. Most of them would have gotten her in trouble. Watching her leave them behind made Jim more sad than he felt about abandoning any of his own things. 

They cleared out the medbay, packed what they could into Nyota’s luggage, evenly dividing the available space, and burned the rest. They set a series of fires around the crash site, not just to destroy evidence but to worsen the damage. Gaila and Pavel, who had spent upwards of an hour whispering about something while the fires burned, finally came to some sort of agreement, told Jim, Bones, and Nyota to keep their distance, and went to work causing a secondary explosion that detonated on the bridge. If they were lucky it would damage Sweeper’s comm system so that future ships couldn’t find it. If they were unlucky, the fake-their-deaths plan was still in action.

The smoldering wreckage glowed through most of the night, reaching the patch of ground underneath the trees where they all laid down to sleep. Jim stayed awake and watched it. He felt like he couldn’t open his eyes wide enough to take it all in. 

In the light of the next morning, sweeping away their footprints from behind them with tree branches, Jim felt himself laughing with a strange sort of lightness. Like she’d read his mind, Gaila said,

“I think I like being dead.”

“Me too.”

“I knew we’d get to die together in the end.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Bones asked, and Jim didn’t feel like explaining the origin of their inside joke, which had been a throughline of multiple separate fantasy scenarios, discussed in detail across the hours and hours and hours they’d spent flying together, in which the two of them were in any number of universes. Pirates. Cowboys. Military deserters. But always together in the face of some enemy. They used to argue the finer points of which one of them was meant to die first, for the narrative. For the drama.  

“She’s being sentimental,” Jim said instead. 

The whole group of them were diligent in covering their tracks as they left the wreckage behind, which slowed them down. They carried Nyota’s decidedly-not-ergonomic bags in their hands and over their shoulders, changing their holds constantly as their arms tired out. That slowed them down, too. But they put one foot in front of the other and didn’t stop moving. Jim entered some sort of trance, he was pretty sure.

Wherever they’d landed was unlike any planet Jim had ever seen. The cold crawled underneath the fabric of his clothes and refused to let go of his skin, and yet they were surrounded by life everywhere they looked. Trees shooting upwards with branches that grew so thick they could block out the daylight. Endless patches of delicate ferns and vines that both climbed up the trees and spread out and tangled across the ground and forced them to slow down even more so they wouldn’t trip. Moss that covered everything, that bloomed so green it glowed in Jim’s eyes. They could feel underneath their feet and inside of their throats as the air turned more and more humid, until everywhere they looked they saw beads of moisture clinging to every surface, every leaf and tree trunk and root that stuck out of the ground and the contours of each blooming cluster of moss. Nobody spoke. They were all just taking in their surroundings, probably trying to keep their own personal supply of hope from dying out as the fatigue set in. Every night felt colder than the last, especially once their clothes grew damp. The days never seemed to dry them out enough, the closest star was too far to provide anything more than a pale, mild daylight. 

Jim could feel the way everyone’s energy levels increased when they found running water. When that running water led them to a wide river. The noise of it surrounded them on all sides as they followed the river wherever it went. Joined by Nyota humming bits and pieces of the songs in her repertoire.

Their first blessed sign of civilization, which made Jim have to drop his bags for a second just to let his shoulders sink down from his ears and breathe long and loud in relief, was a huge stone reservoir that collected water from a spot at the edge of the river, where it curved, and a waterfall rushed down the rocky cliffside. Someone had to build that. At the far end the water lapped at the dam and sometimes splashed over it. The rush of the waterfall fogged up the air around them as they climbed down the cliffside, sinking into the mud or sliding against the perpetually-wet rocks. They all took turns being the person who slipped and needed to be steadied by the others. They stayed single file at Bones’ repeated insistence, and as soon as they stepped onto the stone edge of the dam, they saw more. A collection of small buildings emerged from the fog of the waterfall, all covered in that combination of moss and vines he’d seen the whole way over. When Jim squinted and realized he saw people, he broke out into a smile so wide it made his cheek on his hearing-aid-side hurt. 

It wasn’t a market or a mine or a starbase. It wasn’t an abandoned factory. Based on the size and construction of the complex it may have been a research station, but from the look of the people walking around without hurry or fear, without their clothes hanging from their bodies or collars around their necks and cuffs around their wrists, this place hadn’t been bastardized into a new, post-war vision of hell yet. After a few minutes of standing on that dam, surrounded by that rushing water and the damp cloud it sent into the air, frozen by the realization that by some miracle they’d walked in the right direction–Jim hadn’t failed–someone down there stopped in their tracks. They were too far and the air was too fogged up, but it was clear after enough time that this person had spotted the five of them clustered together on the edge of the dam. Jim held his breath. Someone’s hand was around his wrist, maybe Nyota’s. It wasn’t like he thought they were about to get shot between the eyes by this seemingly unarmed stranger, it was just that–well, he didn’t know what was about to happen.

Somehow he was unprepared and therefore surprised by what did happen next.

The person waved. Their hand moving back and forth at first, and then forward and back, beckoning them down. They pointed to the side and Jim followed the direction of their hand and spotted a long zig-zagging set of steps. Steps they could have taken in the first place, instead of sliding down the mud like they did.

“A town under the shadow of a dam,” Bones said as they made the trek down the narrow steps. He was right behind Jim now so Jim could hear him if he tilted his head just right. “Just a stack of rocks keeping the water from razing it all to the ground. What could ever go wrong.”

Condensation and the rhythmic splashing of water from the reservoir ran down the height of the dam and as a result the entire frontside of it that faced the settlement was painted in deep, blue-green moss. Darker than what Jim had seen on this planet so far. Towards the ground the ecosystem only expanded into ferns and vines and even some flowers. The water soaked into the ground and made it soft underneath their feet. They quickly learned why this place had stone-paved pathways running through it and got out of the mud. Not that it did much to help the quantity of mud that had already crept up their pant legs to their knees.

Whoever waved them down was gone by the time they made it, and the spaces between the buildings were quiet. Jim wasn’t sure if this place was developed enough for him to call those spaces streets. There were fewer than ten buildings here in total. Most of them only two stories. Aside from one very big and out-of-place structure, everything else was built low with curved rooftops, and every one of those rooftops had been reclaimed by the planet and bloomed with growth that overflowed down the walls. Some vines clung to the buildings and some of them were just hanging down, their leaves weighted by moisture as they reached for that heady, fertile-smelling ground.

The next person whose path they crossed was wearing that unmistakable Starfleet officer shade of blue. At once a relief and a disappointment that Jim didn’t feel like putting words to. Nyota took it upon herself to approach them and he just felt grateful that he didn’t have to do it.

Under these circumstances, he told himself–bitterly and in his own head–that he wasn’t allowed to openly hate on Starfleet. If it weren’t for Starfleet and the UFP, this place wouldn’t have existed at all and the five of them would still be walking through the middle of nowhere on empty stomachs.

“She said we should head over there.” Nyota pointed to a small building squeezed between two others. “She called it a tavern. I’m not sure how we ended up getting dinner recommendations, but I told her we need help after our ship crashed and she insisted we go there first.”

“Well, if there’s dinner,” Bones started.

Nyota held him back with a hand on his wrist. “Wait. We should have a plan.”

“She’s right,” Jim said. “We can’t just show up. We need something to bargain with.”

“Oh, please. This place has former Fleet all over it.”

Jim gave him a look. 

“As wholesome as it looks. We’ve been here five minutes.”

“Listen to Jim,” Nyota added. God, he loved having her around. 

They took a detour and crowded into a dark little alleyway, shaded from the already fading daylight above them. It was even colder down here. The mist from the waterfall held in the air without enough airflow to dispel it. The damn, and the cliffsides above it, blocked the wind and most of the light and gave Jim the distinct impression that he was deep inside of a cave right now. His nose and the tips of his fingers were turning numb.

“I don’t like having to say this, but Leonard is the most valuable person here,” Nyota said.

“Cool. Agreed,” Jim deadpanned

“He’s a doctor. Whatever this place is, they’re going to want him. It’s just the truth.”

“You’re the most valuable person to me, Jimmy,” Gaila said, leaning close to his left ear so she could say it in a quiet, overly sweet tone of voice. He shrugged her off and she stuck her tongue out at him. 

Nyota and Bones started speaking in hushed tones to one another and then all of a sudden they were rifling through one of the bags, squatting over it on the ground. Pavel was standing watch at the edge of the alley where it fed back into the rest of the campus. He may not even have been doing that to protect them. Jim guessed it was more out of curiosity for where they were than anything else. He was watching to see who else came outside. And anyway he’d been quieter lately. Quieter than Jim had ever known him to be. Maybe out of courtesy so that Jim wouldn’t have to ask him to repeat himself all the time.

Jim turned back towards Nyota and Bones, and crouched closer so that he could hear them.

“Do you have anything else you can wear? Anything official looking? Maybe your old uniform?” She was asking him, and Bones sighed. 

“I burned it. You were there when I burned it.”

Jim smiled to himself at the memory. He’d been smiling to himself when it happened, too.

“Fine. Anything clean? Cleaner than–this–at least?”

She moved like she meant to feel the material of Bones’ ratty flannel shirt between her fingertips and quickly decided against it, instead waving her hand at the outfit itself. It didn’t make the best impression–or maybe it wouldn’t for someone who didn’t know Bones already. Or for someone with higher standards. Jim had met Bones in his own medbay, and his blue uniform tunic had been both inside out and backwards at the time, and Jim had been able to smell alcohol on his breath when they were fighting, and in all fairness that hadn’t stopped him from agreeing to get on a biobed. But the people here weren’t going to be as desperate for medical care as he’d been at the time. If Bones looked too gross they might not even believe his qualifications. They’d think all five of them–save for maybe Nyota who wore her newfound layer of grime very well–were smugglers. 

Not that Jim had ever been very clean, but Sweeper had a sonic unit on it that they could actually put their clothes and sheets in instead of what they’d done on Baby–which was wear them into the sonic shower when they got too disgusting. The past three days, of hiking through unknown wilderness and wearing everything they had at once to keep warm through the night, had set a record for their newer crewmembers. Everybody was now more aware than ever that Pavel was a teenage boy.

“Here. This sweater smells even worse, but it’s dark enough that you can’t see the stains.”

“Let’s do that, then.”

Bones grumbled. He pulled all of his layers off and unceremoniously dropped them to the ground as he did, until he was kneeling in the alley in just his boots and his muddy slacks. Jim was struck by the strange intimacy of him changing in front of everyone, even though it was in the dark and even though the five of them had been living together now for months. Nyota handed him the sweater they’d decided on and he looked grateful for it, after having felt the cold evening air against his bare chest and arms for only a few seconds.

Once it was over his head, Nyota’s hands were smoothing back his hair. At one point she spat on them. Jim tried so, so hard not to audibly react as he watched Bones squirm underneath her hands and be groomed against his will, this man who was easily two heads taller than Nyota when they stood and could push her away from him with little to no effort on his part. 

“That’ll do,” Nyota said. She stood up and smoothed her own clothing with her hands. She’d come out of the woods looking more presentable than the rest of them, although still more rugged than Jim could have imagined her on the day they met. Other than a few grass stains and the mud caked on her boots, she didn’t look too bad.

Bones shoved his old clothes back into the bag they’d been sorting through and stood up and swung it back over his shoulder. “Can we go now.”

“We’re going to tell them our ship crashed and caught fire. We have nowhere to go.”

“Too desperate,” Jim told her, “the ‘nowhere to go’ part.”

“Well it happens to be true,” Bones argued.

“Doesn’t mean we lead with that.” He shook his head. “Our ship crashed. We need supplies.”

“That implies the ship is fine,” Gaila said.

“It implies that we’re fine. Desperate means vulnerable.”

“We are desperate and vulnerable,” Bones said, and Jim really didn’t understand why he insisted on this argument. He didn’t understand why this man had to be so fucking difficult all the time.

“You wanna go in alone? Go. I can keep walking.” Jim missed when talking felt easy and he used to be able to bitch at Bones in complex sentences. If it didn’t feel so complicated to do so he would have added on something like go ahead and walk in there and say you have no ship and no money and see if they can’t find something to steal from you anyway.

“Okay, enough,” Nyota said. “I want to trust this place too, but Jim is still right to be cautious. At least for tonight. We’ll be vague about our situation. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Jim said. Bones said nothing, but at least he was done arguing.

“All we need is a temporary place to stay. And we’ll offer Leonard’s medical services in the meantime.”

“How the hell did she become my pimp?”

Jim slapped him on the back as they filed out of the alley. 

In the end their entrance into the so-called tavern was anticlimactic. The dining room inside was warm and dimly-lit. Mismatched tables and chairs crowded the floor. Some of them were made of that shiny, synthetic form of aluminum-steel that used to populate Fleet laboratories. The rest were wooden and looked handmade. A bar with uneven barstools lined the long side of the room and had cluttered shelves of mugs and jars and hanging bunches of herbs behind it. The whole place had a smoky, savory sort of smell to it, edged with something sour and fruity that tapped into old, scattered memories Jim had of twisting open a wine bottle and sniffing the bottom of the cork. Boring, wholesome, domestic Earth memories that felt like they must have happened to someone else.

Nobody really even raised their heads to look at them when they walked in. The ambient sound of all of the different conversations happening sounded to Jim, on his hearing side, almost like the hum of insects after dark. Interrupted every so often with laughter, jokes told at a higher volume than the rest of the conversation, clinking and rattling of glasses and silverware and food trays. The smell of the food and the warmth of the room and the lack of stares or even questioning glances made it hard for Jim to keep his guard up. He nodded his head to an empty table, a big circle made of unfinished wood, pushed into the far corner and lit up with a low, hanging light fixture in the shape of a cone. Nyota nodded. 

They dropped their bags in a pile and collapsed into the strange combination of chairs around the table.

Jim spotted a woman navigating through the dining room with a tray balanced in her hands, all the way above her head, talking with people as she went. He imagined how it was going to go once she made it around to them. Felt sick to his stomach and impossibly hungry as the reality set in that they had nothing. The clothes on the backs and the contents of Nyota’s bags, but otherwise not a single credit of any currency of any kind to their name, not without Sweeper. Nothing they could exchange in order to eat tonight, unless this woman was in desperate need of one of Bones’ hyposprays. All the “money” that they’d “earned” and “been saving” was a number on a ledger in a database in another star system. If they were pronounced dead, which of course was their goal, the number would simply be changed to 0. It would cease to exist. It had never really existed in the first place.

Two years of backbreaking fucking work, putting their lives in danger, for a job that left them with nothing.

He was glaring down at the surface of the table when that woman came around.

“We haven’t had newcomers in three years, I had to do a double take,” was the first thing she said. Jim was sitting at kind of a bad spot around the table to hear her. He had to focus on her face in order to match his audio input to the shapes she was making with her mouth. He understood everything with a slight delay, after putting all those clues together in his head.

“Unless you’ve been hiding from us this whole time,” she added, but she didn’t seem to regard them with any sort of suspicion. Jim’s focus shifted from her mouth to her eyes. They were wide and dark, almost black, gently set into the rounded shapes of her face. Her cheeks turned them into half-moons when she smiled as she talked. Dark curls of hair framed her forehead and disappeared into a knot at the back of her neck. The line of her neck was smooth and almost elegant. Her skin looked clean above the neckline of her sweater. He was getting distracted.

Jim went back to her eyes. There was something about them. Something deep. Then she looked directly at him as he regarded her and he realized what it was. Betazoid. At least half. 

He wondered how much she’d already been able to read off of them. How much they needed to even say. If their chances might be ruined of fitting in here long enough to get some rest.

“Our ship crashed,” Nyota said, and Jim lost the eye contact he’d nearly forgotten himself inside of. The woman’s attention was pulled away. She looked at all of them with such an open curiosity, her face poised to react with interest or with a smile at any possible moment. It was hard to feel like an intruder in front of her.

“Bummer. I hope it doesn’t make you feel worse if I tell you that’s not a surprise. The upper atmosphere here is kind of bizarre. It used to make transportation complicated.” She nodded her head to the side with a sarcastic sort of smile. “Back when they used to actually come and check on us out here.”

Jim wanted to be involved in this conversation. He really did, and he knew he should have tried, but it would have required switching seats with someone and leaning his ear halfway up to her in order to understand what she said without any delay, and be able to actually respond in appropriate time. He glanced at Nyota instead and she caught him looking, gave him a quick nod, and took over.

“So what is this place?”

“You’re all sitting in the former Presidio Research Campus. Technically the old storage facility of the research campus which explains the lack of windows. Welcome to the Tavern. Speaking of which, does anyone have any allergies? Tell me now.”

“Gluten,” Bones said, actually loud enough for Jim to hear over the noise without having watched his lips form around the word, and Jim’s head shot up because he hadn’t known that about him, only to realize Bones had been talking about Jim when he’d said that and was in fact pointing at him right now. “And probably anything that resembles soy.”

Jim gave her a thumbs-up in confirmation. Her gaze lingered on him this time, compared to that first few seconds when she’d noticed him. She must have finally seen the contraption on his head. She blinked a few times, dismissing the sad sort of recognition that crossed her features for just a moment. 

Yeah, Jim had probably never looked worse. He was filthy. He hadn’t shaved in over a week. Hadn’t had Gaila cut his hair since Baby. He had a piece of metal shoved into his ear and his clothes smelled bad enough that he’d been noticing it on and off all day. Since Bones gifted him with the aforementioned piece of metal in his ear he’d barely slept and it no doubt showed in his face, in dark circles under his eyes and an emptiness in his skin. It was possibly the least physically appealing he’d been in his life. And he’d nearly starved to death before making it off of Minas.

“Be right back,” she told him, her mouth shaping the words with a noticeable added emphasis. Jim understood what she’d said in half the time. 

A few minutes later, minutes during which Jim had to fight from falling asleep in his chair with his forehead on Pavel’s very bony shoulder, she came back, another woman right behind her, and suddenly there were trays and trays of food in front of them. Steam rose up to their faces. Jim nearly went into shock.

She didn’t sit down and finish her introduction until they had inhaled all of it. She pulled up another chair and squeezed in between Jim and Gaila while they were stacking the empty trays. 

“So,” she said, and her voice was clearer now, in Jim’s ear. As clear as he could experience under the current circumstances. Even somewhat obscured she had a deep, rhythmic sort of cadence when she spoke that his body really enjoyed listening to. To the point where he forgot for a few minutes how much his left ear hurt. How much it had been hurting, non stop, for days now. “I’ll give you the full story now. And no, you don’t have to pay for the food.”

She said the second part directly to Jim, which made him wonder if that concern had been central enough to his mind for her to catch it. He quickly buried the rest of his thoughts down, pushed them through the escape hatch in the back of his mind. Especially any thoughts about the pleasant tone of her voice and her eyes and her neck and the shape of her bottom lip. 

“This was a Starfleet science outpost. Soria–the planet we’re on right now–has a pretty unique ecosystem and we got a grant to do research into how its plant life persists and keeps blooming through low temperatures. Anyway, not important, that was years ago.

“So about three years ago another ship crashed, maybe for the same reason as yours. The atmosphere interfered with its external stabilizers and they lost control of the engines and couldn’t regain it in time.”

“That’s exactly what happened,” Pavel said, “I couldn’t believe it.”

She nodded. “If you want to know the actual science, almost everyone else who lives here was on the ship when it happened. There were only twelve of us at Presidio, and then suddenly three hundred Starfleet officers just showed up at our door.”

“Wow.”

“So we dropped the research and this became…this. Just a place where we all live. We decided early on that maintaining a credit system wouldn’t help anyone. So you make yourself useful, you eat as much as you need, and we all help each other through the winter. Those are the rules.”

“Is there any need for medical practitioners here?” Nyota asked. Jim knew that was coming. He wanted to roll his eyes. The woman at their table didn’t react right away, probably because it felt off-topic when she’d said it, and Nyota elaborated.

“Leonard’s a doctor,” she said, gestured towards Bones where he sat next to her. “He used to be a CMO.”

Maybe they were being too transactional, for this place’s very anti-business business model. The woman still took a while to respond, but she was smiling when she said,

“Well, I guess we could never have too many. Although his main job might just be keeping Doctor M’Benga company. I think he gets more bothered by loneliness than workload.”

“Wait.” Bones held up his hand. Narrowed his eyes. “When who hears about this? Did you just say M’Benga? As in Joseph M’Benga?”

She opened her mouth to respond, when the doors to the Tavern opened again. Bones whipped his head around, on high alert now to see who it was, and so of course the one person they were all talking about walked through the doors.

“Joe?” Bones called out over the noise of the dining room. A man in a neat, if somewhat faded, Starfleet medical uniform, with a knit beanie on and an open overcoat thrown over his shoulders, spotted their table and got this look on his face like he’d just seen a ghost come back to life. He pushed through the crowded room, nodding a couple greetings to people as he passed but otherwise got to them in a hurry, beaming at them and almost yelling because he decided it couldn’t wait.

“Cadet Doctor Leonard McCoy, as I live and breathe.”

He pulled Bones up out of his chair. Bones was smiling. Flustered from the coincidence. He shook his head and said, “I mean, this is insane. How the hell are you here?”

“How the hell are you here?”

“Oh, trust me.” He was still speaking louder than usual. He glanced at Jim out of the corner of his eye. “You don’t wanna know.”

-

“Your good fortune amazes me.”

Bones just gave him a flat look, as if he believed it wasn’t true. As if the five of them weren’t freshly showered in clean, brand-new clothes, with actual beds they were allowed to sleep in tonight. Just tonight, though, because they were the beds of the long-term ward in Presidio’s medical clinic and they had to be extra quiet because one of them was already occupied by someone fighting off a case of pneumonia.

Joseph M’Benga had worked with Bones at the Academy clinic. They’d both enlisted for their Starfleet training at the same time and shipped out on the same shuttle, ultimately for separate postings. But still, the cosmic alignment that needed to happen for two people to find each other out in space now that the Federation’s infrastructure and communication networks were crumbling to nothing and Starfleet was long past dead was blowing his mind. Joseph had been the CMO of the crew that got stranded here three years ago. The crew of the goddamn Enterprise. Starfleet’s crown fucking jewel. Three years, and no one had come to get them. Even though it was before the war ended. Jim couldn’t believe that. 

And then he remembered who the captain of the Enterprise had been, a man who was coincidentally absent from this post-shipwreck community, and it made a little more sense.

Jim only found out that it had been the Enterprise that crashed because he’d inserted that little detail, offhand, in the middle of a sentence as they passed around their final anecdotes in the clinic waiting room before going into the ward to sleep. He’d said, “there’s something weird about this planet’s atmosphere, I tell you. I’m not at all surprised that your ship got pulled in. If the Enterprise crashed after we got a little too close, a small ship like you had doesn’t stand a chance.”

He said it so casually, as if they all knew the fate of the various ships within the Fleet. As if Jim, who three years ago had been on the front lines and living in a suffocating and constant sense of danger, had had time back then to check up on the latest Fleetwide news.

“The Enterprise crashed. Here.”

“Sure did. Two hour hike that way. Basically everyone here is former Enterprise.”

He’d pointed towards a far corner of the room when he said that way and everyone followed with their gaze, maybe expecting to see, through the window and off in the distance, the lights still on in the wreckage of one of the Federation’s biggest starships.

Jim didn’t look. He didn’t say anything, because he didn’t know what he wanted to say. His mind was a stark contrast between something like good riddance I hope it gets pulled into a sinkhole and a morbid desire to actually go see the thing, find a way inside, walk the corridors again and feel the last few years of his life condense. Find closure on the stupid dreams of grandeur he’d still had when he enlisted. Dreams planted into his head by the man who first convinced him it was a good idea, who dared him to do better. 

“So,” Joseph said, slapping his palms against his thighs and pulling Jim’s attention back into the waiting room, into the sleepy faces of his friends, half-reclining in the circle of chairs and slowly inching towards sleep with each passing moment. Pavel may have already been there, unless he was listening with his eyes closed and his long legs propped up on the empty chair next to him. 

“You all sleep in the ward tonight. Leo starts here in the morning. First patient on my agenda is this one–” he pointed to Jim. “--and while that’s happening I recommend the rest of you find a place for yourselves. There’s some people-centered work going on at the Presidio cooperative, which is the big ugly building we had to make after we got here. Or you can help out with food supply, which we also had to come up with after the replicators ran out. There’s a less-ugly set of greenhouses fifteen minutes south down the wooden walking path. A resourceful group like this should have no trouble finding work to do.” 

He said it like it really was that simple. 

The five of them slept in a line of beds in the long-term ward, which was homey and had probably been one of the bunk rooms for the original scientists, where the quiet beeping of the one patient’s medical monitor was quickly drowned out by Bones’ snoring. The pillows and blankets felt like luxuries. The air itself felt uncommonly comfortable to breathe in and out. The fact that they didn’t have to sleep in shifts made reality itself feel like it had been upended. 

Jim thought about this random place they’d found, on this random planet they didn’t mean to end up on, where tomorrow morning they’d all have to find something to do. The part where finding something to do also meant indefinitely had been unspoken all night and yet it demanded attention in his thoughts from the first time it was mentioned. That there was no alternative, no ship to board, nobody to call. No way out. It all felt too permanent, too fast. Even though it was far better than the life they’d left behind. It was a place where people wanted to help each other, where they could get their needs met simply by being helpful, too. It was a place where the sun didn’t burn and the dirt didn’t coat the inside of everyone’s lungs. Where life actually grew so well they’d sent a dozen scientists out here to study it. A place with no inescapable market, no manufactured scarcity, no desperate smugglers, and no Galileo. 

And still, Jim felt his airways constricting and his heartbeat stuttering and the overwhelming urge to kick his way up and out. 

He fought it for a while, the same way he fought sleep, and then he gave in and guiltily let his mind wander to the fact that the Starship Enterprise was on this planet too. 

Crashed, reportedly.

Unable to ever fly again. Supposedly.

Chapter Text

“Oh my god,” Jim said, and his voice was ringing in both ears now. Almost too loud–just the ambient sounds within the small exam room saturated his body. The sensation of it sent a chill down his spine. The absence of pain made him feel like he was floating. It was a better high than most of the actual drugs Jim had taken. 

“Fuck, man, you’re a miracle worker.”

Joseph chuckled. The sound bounced around inside of Jim’s brain, back and forth between both ears. He nearly shivered at it. “No miracles,” he said, “just medical technology. If I’d gotten to you right after the crash, I might have been able to do more. Instead you get a new accessory.”

“That’s fine.”

He’d been upgraded from one implant to two, set behind each ear with just the tiniest, barely-there wires that connected to a node smaller than a fingertip that Joseph had installed deeper inside of each ear canal, where the explosion of Sweeper’s engine had, in the Doctor’s own words, burst your eardrums beyond redemption. Whereas Bones and Gaila’s homemade version had intended to continue to push sound through the damaged tissue, the set Joseph installed relied more on bone conduction. Even though he was pretty sure everything sounded the same to him as if it had come through a working set of eardrums–apparently soundwaves were now being reverberated through his actual skull. 

Jim checked them in the reflection of the silver-colored tray where Joseph had set his tools down when he was done. The bar was on the floor, of course, but he thought they looked pretty good. Sleek.

“Your crew did some nice work on this for you. Considering.” Joseph held up the piece of ship-grade metal that had been a part of his head for the past week. “I should have known what Leo was capable of with his cowboy methods. I’m going to save this so I can bother him with it. The headband is a nice touch. Very retro.”

“That thing hurt like a bitch,” Jim said, because it was the first thing he thought of while the rest of his brain was grappling with how Joseph had just used the words your crew. Had Jim ever referred to them as his crew? Had somebody else?

“Oh, I could tell. I had to regen the hell out of your ear canal after I took it out. I’m impressed at your pain tolerance.”

That made Jim smile at a joke he didn’t plan on telling which wouldn’t have been very funny anyway. This guy had no idea. “I think after another week of wearing it I would’ve snapped. Ripped it out and had Nyota teach me Signs. She offered.”

“You should still take her up on that.” Joseph turned around from tidying up so he could point at Jim for emphasis. “You never know.”

Jim pushed himself off of the biobed–the only one they had since this place was never meant to house more than ten or twenty people at a time. Apparently the current clinic building had been the original housing on campus, which meant it had the best interior climate control system to fight off the humidity outside, among other things. Walls painted in soothing colors and low, ambient lighting in the bunkroom-turned-ward that was set on a timer each morning. And a one-bed medical bay that hadn’t been changed at all. It still had a roster on one wall with pictures of the twelve scientists. Jim only recognized one so far. 

He stood and waited for Joseph to finish putting his tools away so he could shake his hand.

“Thanks. I don’t think I said that yet.”

“Anytime,” Joseph replied, and the way he projected so much genuine kindness kept catching Jim off guard. He’d just met Jim last night. Either Bones was the most uniquely damaged doctor Jim could have dug up out on the edge of space, or this man in front of him was the rarity and had somehow made it through the war without the goodness having been beaten out of him. He seemed so content to live in an accidental settlement with fewer than 400 people and no contact with the outside. More than that, he seemed to really like it here.

“Ready to join Presidio society?” he asked.

“I guess.”

“I would start by just walking around. Talk to people. You’ll find a place.”

Again, as if that was so easy. As if this entire place was a kindergarten classroom.

But this wasn’t Bones he was talking to, so he pushed away his instincts to reply to that with some sort of sarcastic joke and just nodded at the advice on his way out. 

-

It wasn’t that Jim struck out. It was more so that he couldn’t bring himself to try in the first place, which technically meant he hadn’t even had the chance to strike out. He spent most of the day covering the entire Presidio campus on foot, including going all the way out to their farm with its army of greenhouses. He stood outside the thing, on the edge of the wooden plank walkway that kept him out of the mud, with his hands in his pockets. All he could think was that he would rather continue to listen to the sound of his own footsteps on the wood than knock on the door of the main farmhouse and talk to the people inside. It was the same with that big cooperative building, where people were supposedly keeping busy with all the random boring tasks that kept the campus organized. With tech experiments that weren’t going to do much to change things unless they managed to build another ship.

He knew that if he went in there he would have found the rest of the crew, would get to hear their actual voices again for the first time since the crash and not just an approximation of what they sounded like. Except the quantity of Fleet uniforms going in and out of that building made him pause. 

And then there was the likelihood that those uniformed people would want to talk to him. That they would ask him questions in order to figure out how he could be useful around here. An entrance exam he would probably fail. He didn’t even know what to call himself if they asked what he’d been before he crashed, other than a person who had survived this long. There was no chance he was going to walk around telling everyone he had been one of the galaxy’s most prolific smugglers for the past two years. 

He kept walking. Stood under the shadow of the dam for a while and listened to the gentle sounds of the water that ran down the stone in drips and trickles. Enjoyed it like it was music. And when he got too cold he found himself back at the Tavern, lured by the memories of last night, of the warmth, the noise, the foreign food they served him that he couldn’t name or place.

Jim sat at the bar this time. The last thing he was going to be capable of today, now that he’d lost his ship and his crew in rapid succession–he’d lost his crew before he’d ever gotten to think of them as his crew, in fact–was subtlety. 

“You’re back,” she said, and this time Jim really did shiver. There was an undercurrent of warmth to her voice that he hadn’t caught last night. Now he wanted to submerge his entire body in it. 

He didn’t even know her name yet. He smiled at her.

“And I can hear you, now,” he replied. “My name is Jim, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you again. I’m Tamara.” She set a mug down in front of him, full of liquid in a deep red that sent curls of steam into the air. This must have been what he was smelling last night. 

“This is pretty much the only drink we serve other than water. We’re working on a coffee but our plants keep dying out in the greenhouse. Try it.”

Jim stared down into the wine she’d brought him. He could just barely see a piece of his own reflection mirrored back at him. He didn’t look great. 

It had been a long, long time since he’d been this concerned about what he looked like. He knew what that meant. 

He took a sip.

“It’s good,” he offered, and it was, it was warm and spiced and a little bit sweet, but Jim was the furthest thing from picky. He would have said the same thing if she’d given him a mug of lighter fluid. She smiled at him in a knowing sort of way.

Shit, Jim forgot she could read his thoughts.

“I haven’t seen your friends today. But I heard two of them joined the co-op.”

Jim shrugged. He drank some more. It wasn’t that strong, only a little bit beyond the midpoint between juice and wine. He started to enjoy it.

“You didn’t want to bunk with them?”

“No,” he answered right away, which came out a little too forceful. He backtracked. “It’s not that I’m against what you guys are doing here. I would have thought this was satire. A research campus turned self-sufficient village where everyone gets along. You know how insane that sounds.”

Tamara blinked at him. Those big eyes. Jim imagined seeing his reflection in them, next. If he looked long enough. Then she nodded her head a little which made a coil of her hair fall out across her forehead. He watched her tuck it back into place with her hand, watched the elegant lines of her fingers and the curve of her wrist.

“We’ve been lucky,” she said.

“Anyway. I don’t have a lot of skills that translate to planet life. I’m better in space.”

“You don’t think you could help out in a place like this?”

“Not really.”

“Alright,” she said, crossing her arms over the surface of the bar between them. “So if I were to tell you that, for example, there used to be four of us who worked here, before someone fell in love with an Enterprise officer and moved out, what would be your argument for why I shouldn’t offer you her old room?”

Jim laughed once. Except she was serious.

“I am,” she added. “And yes, this a job interview.”

Her undivided attention was magnetic. It made him want to answer her. To please her in some way. 

“Okay. Well, for starters, I’m a college dropout.”

She nodded.

“I only enlisted in Starfleet because it was the one thing more dangerous than becoming a criminal. Which I was. I still am, in fact, depending on your definition of crime now that no one’s enforcing any laws out here.”

As if he were in a trance, under her gaze, he kept going. One after the other.

“And I’m still a cadet, actually. Never even graduated. The Fleet passed me straight from cadet to Lieutenant and shipped me out because they figured it’d make me even more excited to die for the cause.

“My only work experience is following orders and I was never good at it. I don’t like authority and I suck with people. I’m starting to think it’s something like bad karma keeping me alive instead of any presence of actual talent. By all accounts I should be long dead.”

By the time he was done Tamara was smiling at him. He’d just spilled his guts out onto the surface of the bar between them, and what he’d had to say didn’t look good now that it was all lined up, but at least he’d pleased her.

“Is that everything?”

“The major points, yeah. I don’t give away the full tragic backstory until around the third or fourth date.”

She held out her hand, waited for Jim to hesitate and finally reach over the bar to shake it, and then said, “you’re hired.”

When their hands touched Jim could feel the satisfaction she got from her own punchline. Her sense of humor hit him like a shot of liquor, the way it warmed up his body from the inside out. He smiled back at her. He couldn’t help it.

“You’ll regret this.”

“You had me at ‘my only work experience is following orders’.”

“Did you miss the part where I said I was bad at it?”

She kept him busy the rest of that day, put him to work cleaning up after people and carrying trays of food out from the kitchen. There were two women working in the back, Anusha and Jia. When Tamara introduced them she said that all three of them, along with a woman named Ari who really had left the Tavern and moved in with some science officer at the co-op, had been some of the original scientists before they’d transformed the campus to house the Enterprise crew. 

The idea of an additional, unnecessary place to eat–when the cooperative and the greenhouse complex both had open mess halls and anyone was free to eat anywhere because this place had no currency–seemed silly to Jim, but Tamara and Anusha and Jia explained it in a way that made sense. The three of them came up with it before the co-op and the farm existed, when three-hundred-something crew members wandered off the wreckage of the Enterprise and found their research campus. They dropped their experiments and got to work stretching out their replicator credits as best as they could, taking care of everyone with what little resources they had. It held everything together as the co-op was being built and the crew was figuring out food production on a new planet. And even though it became redundant, technically, after the campus had transformed into a place that could handle its population, everyone kept coming. They liked having somewhere to go. They liked the women that ran the place. They liked the food which had long stopped coming from the replicators and turned into a cuisine all of its own. Everything, down to the seasonings that they dried and ground themselves, grew in the greenhouses just a short walk away. They’d invented their own food culture. It was one of those things that was no doubt happening everywhere, with so many people stranded in unfamiliar places and strapped for resources, but Jim had never thought about it before. Had never thought about how much work this sort of thing took until the whole story was laid out in front of him. Food had always just been something a machine spat out at him. It had never felt central to his existence, and yet it always had been.

Out of habit, maybe, he still made some sort of remark, about how it must have been a bummer to go out into space to be scientists and end up working in food service, and that made one of the scientists-turned-cooks, Anusha, throw her head back and laugh.

“Wine, dinner, dessert,” Anusha told him, “that’s all science too. Feeding people is applied science. Except instead of getting some esoteric seal of recognition from an elite academic society, people say thank you to your face whenever you do good work.”

The heat of the stovetops made Jia’s copper-brown hair stick to her forehead in strands. She pushed it away with the backs of her wrists. Even with such limited daylight her skin was mapped with freckles, in the same color as her hair, all the way from her hairline to her arms and the backs of her hands. “I still can’t believe,” she said, and Anusha was already laughing again so this must have been a common complaint from her, “that the Fed really thought it was a good idea for everyone to rely on a machine that only works if you also have a supply of patented input chips which need to be produced in special factories and delivered to you in crates every year.”

“Replicator credits,” Tamara added, for Jim’s own comprehension, but he’d been nodding through the second half of Jia’s sentence already.

“No, I know,” he said. “It’s supervillain shit. Literally manufactured scarcity. Their heads were just so far up their own asses they thought nobody would take advantage of it.”

“Exactly!” Jia replied. She pointed a wooden spoon in his direction. “I like him.”

“You’ve been approved by our supreme overlord,” Anusha deadpanned. “You’ve officially earned your apron. Welcome to the Tavern.”

Above the dining room, up a skinny spiral staircase that Tamara said they had to build because the lift felt like a waste of space, were the bunks she’d mentioned earlier. The second floor was just a hallway with storage closets lining both sides, closets which had been transformed into rooms that could each fit a bed and almost nothing else. Jim took in the sight of his new bunk. The ceiling was slanted on one side. He had a small, dusty window. There was more space on the bed than there was around it. It used to be someone else’s room entirely. It was the kind of place that he could convince himself was just a temporary solution without much difficulty. 

It was perfect.

-

The next night, everyone came back for dinner. Jim didn’t remember whether they had planned it or not, but they must have. Maybe when he was on a biobed in the exam room that first morning. Because suddenly the doors to the Tavern opened and Nyota walked in with the other three in tow. And one more. Joseph was thriving at the fact that one of his old friends just showed up at his doorstep all the way out here. To the point where it even put Bones in a good mood, all smiley and talkative and shit. The strangeness of seeing Bones like that twice in a row was overshadowed pretty quick by how relieved Jim realized he was to see them at all. It had only been a day and a half since they’d parted ways–and yet the sight of Nyota and Gaila’s smiling faces had him speechless. 

“There he is,” was Gaila’s greeting, before she reached up to mess up the hair on the top of his head. Jim swatted her hand away. He fought the urge to pick her up and spin her around and redirected it to Nyota instead, who gladly accepted both a hug and a kiss on the cheek. He hugged Pavel too, who looked like he was in some sort of mood. By the time he looked up, before he’d managed to figure out how he was supposed to greet Bones after all this, he saw that Bones had already sat down at their table from before. Deep in some conversation with Joseph. Jim took a second to eavesdrop–because he could eavesdrop again, finally–and realized he was talking about 787 and somehow…laughing about it?

Nobody made any outright comments about the sight of Jim waiting and bussing tables for another half hour or so, about how he ended up serving all of them their drinks and trays, or about the apron tied around his waist. The closest any of them came was when Jim finally sat down to eat with them and Nyota wrapped her arms around him and Pavel where they were seated on either side of her and said, 

“Look at us contributing to civilian life.” 

“Oh god,” Jim said. He was making a face, he knew that. Enough of a face to pull Joseph out of his conversation with Bones and make him laugh out loud. 

“You’ll get used to it, I promise,” he said, “once you’ve had some time to release your mind from space.”

“I don’t know.” Bones picked up his mug and raised it to his mouth, stopping at the appropriate level for his joke delivery. “I think this one is genetically predisposed to being on a ship. His body might reject this planet.”

“My body is rejecting this food,” Pavel said, and Jim jerked his head towards the sound. He hadn’t heard Pavel’s voice once yet. He couldn’t tell how much of a joke that was. Pavel wasn’t really smiling.

Joseph just laughed again. “You’ll get used to that too, young man.”

Having Joseph there kept the conversation moving at a pace that allowed all of them to avoid the elephant in the room. To avoid the dumb how was everyone’s day sort of questions that they would have been left with if they had to try and distract themselves on their own. He and Nyota were a good match, especially sitting across from one another like they were. They bounced off of each other at some olympic level of conversational sport. It made the evening feel normal, like this was something they did all the time. Up to the point where Tamara whistled in an almost-birdcall to get Jim’s attention and jerked her head in the direction of the kitchen, and he stood up from the table to get back to work. 

It became something of a nightly occurrence, at least in the first week or two, for everyone to come back for dinner. They claimed that table in the back for good. Joseph tagged along. They’d part ways an hour or two later, leaving Jim behind at the bar. As the novelty of Joseph and Bones’ reunion faded, somewhere towards the end of their second week in Presidio, Bones started staying late. He’d leave the big table and sit at the end of the bar for a while. The two of them didn’t talk, but Jim could tell that he was listening to him interact with all the other people coming in and out, and it kind of felt like they talked. 

Jim wasn’t sure what they would talk about, even if they were completely alone. Maybe the fact that, as soon as everyone started going through the motions of the random-ass jobs they found on this planet, nobody bothered to mention the idea of leaving. That Jim had started to feel like it was his fault nobody brought it up, because in the days between walking away from Sweeper and walking onto the edge of that dam, he’d assumed they were all on the same page that whatever they did next, they did together, and so he hadn’t done anything to confirm that plan out loud. And he didn’t know if he blamed any of them for the way they fell into the rhythm of the kind of simple life none of them thought they’d ever have again. He didn’t blame them if they didn’t want to go back out into space, and into danger, when there were enough beds and meals and work for everyone who had ended up out here, and the air was clean and everyone spoke in the same peaceful, friendly tone of voice. 

Yeah, that was probably what he needed to talk to Bones about. Instead, as Bones also began to claim a spot for himself at that second-to-last barstool night after night, they started trading the same boring sentences about working at a bar and working at a clinic, as if their days could have been happening anywhere in the universe. Customer and patient interactions. Benign observations.

“Same shit, different day,” was Bones’ current favorite line, although it was decidedly not the same shit. Not when he used to be treating Jim and Gaila’s fucked-up injuries from their old fucked-up jobs, and now he was treating head colds and migraines and–jesus christ–someone here was pregnant. And happy about it. That last one Jim had heard not from Bones’ recollection of working at the clinic, but from the ever-present stream of gossip that flowed through the bar. When he’d brought it up for confirmation Bones got all quiet and weird about it. So Jim dropped it.

“I hear you,” he’d say instead. 

Tonight was another night like that. They said the same things and decided it still counted as a new conversation. 

Jim lifted up Bones’ mug to wipe the counter underneath it and replaced it with a noticeably fuller one. Sleight of hand. Something he learned in a different life, when he used to have an older brother and a home and a few years of boring domesticity in that home where his older brother slept above him in the top bunk and taught him things like magic tricks. He only got back into it now because it was the one thing that managed to dumbfound Tamara–a literal telepath–and also for the private little smile it would sometimes get out of Bones whenever he sat at the bar like this. 

“Okay, I’ve gotta ask. This has been killing me.”

“Shoot,” Jim said.

“Aren’t you bored as fuck in here? I know those co-op people have a stick up their collective ass and everyone on the farm acts like they’re on shrooms, but there had to be something better suited for your skill set.”

It was the first time Bones had said anything about Jim having skills. It almost landed as a compliment.

Jim shrugged. 

“I wanted something that felt temporary, I guess.”

Bones chuckled into his next sip, and then paused afterwards at the sweetness of the aftertaste. “I can’t remember the last time anything felt permanent. Except when that piece of the Exeter’s medbay went through my thigh.”

“That’s the spirit, Bones.”

-

When Tamara had talked about the winter during that first conversation she’d had with all of them, Jim should have paid more attention. And extrapolated that when she talked about winter, she hadn’t been talking about the current temperature that had already made Jim’s ears hurt and his fingers get stiff if he stood outside for too long. She meant the temperature that hadn’t arrived yet, the cold that only started to make itself known after a few weeks. That made it hard to be outside at all. 

That was what she meant, when she mentioned all that stuff about the winter and unique climate and plant life on Soria. Because the cold turned brutal and the plants bloomed bluish-green and the moss continued to spread over everything and the water that ran down the front of the dam never froze. Jim finally caved and went to the co-op at everyone’s insistence in order to get some extra clothes. Out of courtesy he waited until he was back at the Tavern to try and rip the Starfleet insignia patches off of his new all-weather jacket. Jia laughed out loud when she saw him doing that behind the bar, and then disappeared into the kitchen and came back out with a knife. Together they sliced through the stitches and extracted the patches and then huddled over the stove to set them on fire. The resulting fumes made Anusha cough and glare at them and leave the Tavern altogether. So Jia made him her assistant leading up to the dinner hour that night. 

Jim was surprised by how much he didn’t mind being bossed around, in this context. He even found himself asking questions so these women could teach him even more about what they did. It was the first time in his life that the kitchen was a real place to him, where things happened, rather than just a room in a house where appliances lived. In the Tavern’s kitchen he stepped into another world. A world with its own rules and logic and considerations. Its own definitions of things like success and failure. A clock that reset at the start of each new day. 

He spent more time in there than he would have expected, and sometimes more time than he needed to. He thought about his mother, a person who wouldn’t have been able to teach him anything about food preparation even if she had been planetside while Jim was growing up. But for some reason the kitchen made him think about her. Those thoughts tended to show up as his cue to go back out into the dining room and needlessly wipe down every already-wiped down surface. 

It was weird, when he became a fixture. When everyone who came in started looking at him with full recognition in their eyes. When they would greet him by name. It made him feel like he’d tricked them without meaning to, because none of them actually knew who he was or what he’d done before he just showed up one day and started serving them dinner. He fought against the illusion that they liked him, even if they did use kind, polite words and asked him things like how he was settling in and what he thought about Presidio. These people couldn’t like him because they didn’t know him–and if they knew him, they would hate him. 

Nyota, Gaila, Pavel–even Bones walking into the Tavern started to bring him relief. He could breathe easier when one or more of them showed up. That was how he justified the fact that he now looked forward to the evenings, as the dinner hour approached, when he knew Bones would be walking in any minute. 

-

“Bones bones bones.”

Bones grunted in response.

“What exciting news do you bring us from the clinic today,” Jim asked. He was met with no response, at first. He watched as Bones sat heavily into his usual barstool and began the process of removing all of his cold-weather layers. Hat, scarf, coat. Then he was back to his normal shape, down to a set of scrubs with that fraying blue sweater he’d worn their first night here. His cheeks and the base of his neck were red. He rubbed his eyes.

“Presidio’s first baby,” he finally answered. Something clattered. The stack of trays in Tamara’s hands which she slammed onto the nearest empty table as soon as she heard the news. 

“Ari had the baby?” 

Bones didn’t look up from where he’d started to balance his chin over one hand, elbow resting on the dinged-up bar. He just nodded.

“Oh my god. Jim.” Her excitement was contagious, as were most of her emotions. Jim was almost laughing as he watched her scramble around the tables. She kept talking. “Jim, I have no idea when I’ll be back. Maybe not until after dinner.” She sped towards the doors with her apron still on and without even grabbing her coat from its hook on the wall. 

“Oh my god!” They heard her say again, and then she was gone.

As soon as the doors slid closed behind her and the air settled, Jim looked back at Bones. 

“You delivered the baby?”

“Yeah. Haven’t done that in years,” he said to the bar. Jim set a mug of wine over the spot he’d been staring at. 

He leaned his hip against the counter. The Tavern was quiet, tonight. There was some special dinner going on at the co-op. It might have been a community holiday, Jim wasn’t sure. And the air outside was the sort of cold that bit and made it hard to move after a few minutes. He was grateful for it, for the lack of people around. It meant he could stand there and wait for Bones to say the rest of what he clearly needed to say.

“I tried to be happy for them, but I think they could tell. I think they thought it meant I don’t approve.”

“You don’t think it’s insane to have a baby in a place like this?”

He waved his hand dismissively. At the same time he seemed annoyed with the entire conversation and haunted by it and desperate to have it. “It’s insane to have a baby anyplace,” he said, and then after a pause that almost made Jim give up and let Bones spend the rest of the evening in his quiet contemplation, he continued. 

“Like, to create this little person that’s going to be more important than anything else in your life could ever be. That makes you feel like every decision you make from that moment on is wrong in some way. You wouldn’t believe how much that fucks you up.”

He rubbed his face with his hands. He had that kind of discomfort in his expression like whatever was on his mind made him want to crawl out of his skin. Jim had noticed that look on Bones’ face more often since they got here. Now he knew why. 

“And I was looking at these people, the way they stared at this baby, they couldn’t let her out of their sight for even a second. I remember that.” He paused, let his hand slide from his face and drop to the bar. “How the hell I got from feeling that way to feeling like leaving the planet was the best thing I could do to take care of my own daughter, it makes no fucking sense to me now. It just blows my mind.”

His voice was so edged with hurt it was hard to stand there, or it was hard because Jim didn’t have anything decent to say. So he let Bones sit there without talking for a little while. He went into the kitchen and found leftovers from the lunch hour and heated them up. Bones grunted in acknowledgement when the tray was set down before him.

“Tell me about her.”

“The baby?”

“Your baby.”

“Joanna.” He huffed out the saddest, single laugh Jim had ever heard from him. “She ain’t a baby. She’s almost fifteen years old now.”

Jim waited for Bones to keep going. He didn’t. Not this time. He took a deep, audible sort of breath and finally the line of his shoulders softened and his face started to look relaxed. The anguish he’d come into the Tavern with was sliding off of him. He noticed for the first time that Jim had brought him wine. 

“We can talk about her, if you want. I wouldn’t be weird about it.”

“Oh, well if you wouldn’t be weird about it,” Bones said, pausing with his mug halfway to his lips. He took a sip. Swallowed. “I don’t want to talk about her.”

“Okay.”

“What I do want to talk about,” he continued, and set his mug down, “is that they named the baby fucking Deedee.”

“No they didn’t.”

“I swear to god.”

“Is that, like, a family name, or something? Somebody’s great-great-grandmother?”

Bones was pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers, like it would stop him from finding it funny, from sitting here and talking shit about this newborn baby’s name. Like he hadn’t also been on the verge of a breakdown a minute or two ago.

“Are you sure you didn’t just walk in on them after they were already in the nickname stage? She could be Deirdre.”

“I swear on my life that Deedee is this child’s full name.”

Bones was watching him as he said it, and it was a clear test. Whether or not the two of them were going to be gossip partners–now that they lived a stable enough life to even have opportunities for gossip. 

“It’s the first baby here, too,” Jim said. 

“I bet they’re gonna name shit after her.” 

“Soon enough you’re gonna be walking down Deedee Street to come to happy hour over here at Deedee’s Tavern after your shift at Deedee’s Medical Clinic.”

“Good god.”

“Maybe her birthday will become a public holiday. We’ll call it Deedee Day.”

That made Bones finally lose his grip and laugh out loud. To the point where Jim wondered if it was the first time he’d heard it. He knew he must have seen him laugh before, out of pure probability if nothing else, they’d spent months living together. But he would have remembered this. In contrast to his often-surly demeanor and his deep voice and, well, everything about him, Bones had a high-pitched sort of laugh that fought tirelessly against any effort he made to contain it in his throat and as a result came out in short little bursts. In other words, he giggled. 

The sound alone was funnier to Jim than anything either of them had said.

“They wanted–” he stopped himself to breathe, actually wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand. “Jesus christ. They wanted to name her after Presidio.”

“And Deedee was the one, huh.”

“I tried my best. I gave them all these ideas.”

“Presley?” Jim asked.

“Presley, obviously. And Sidney. At the end of my rope I tried to sell them on Dido. The entire time they looked at me like I was the crazy one.”

Jim wiped down the bar while Bones talked, clearing out some dishes from another patron who’d just left. He threw the rag back over his shoulder and leaned his hip against the counter. “Do you believe in nominative determinism?”

“Are you asking me what kind of a person I think Deedee is going to be?”

“Solely based on the name.”

“Well if she grows up in this hippie commune we’re all living in, I think she just might fit in.”

“You know my parents almost named me Tiberius.”

“Shut up.”

“It’s true. At the last second they made it my middle name instead. That’s the T in James T. Kirk.”

Bones flicked his eyes up from his plate. 

“See, if your name was Tiberius, I don’t think you’d be here right now.”

“No?”

“Tiberius Kirk? I’m pretty sure you’d be back on Earth doing porn.”

Jim pulled the rag off his shoulder and threw it at him. It hit Bones’ face, first, and then fell to reveal him dissolving into laughter again, so hard he had to steady himself against the bar. Jim just watched him in wonder. He had been so distracted with his existential dread and the incessant memories cropping up from his years on Earth–sometimes interrupted during the day when Tamara was around and her presence made him stupider–that he hadn’t noticed yet that this was their life now. This wasn’t some bizarre dream he was going to wake up from. He wasn’t experiencing this in his subconscious from his hammock above the control panel, while he was sleep-deprived and exploited and hanging by a thread. This was it. Potentially forever.

So when Tamara came back and they closed up the Tavern for the night, working side by side in the comfortable silence they’d developed over the last few weeks, Jim decided there was no point in waiting around when he might be waiting around for years or even the rest of his life out here. He paused before they went up the stairs to their bunks, before they turned off the last light switch that was keeping them from the total darkness of nighttime at Presidio, thanks to that dam that towered above them and blocked out the starlight. He didn’t know what to say, so he just looked into her eyes, for a second, and then down at the shape of her mouth, and then gave in to his instincts and let his body start to lean forward.

“Finally,” was all she said before she wrapped her hand around the back of his neck, pulled him forward the rest of the way, and kissed him.

-

Nyota had referred to it as family dinner when she showed up to the clinic with a noticeably grumpy Pavel in tow and intended for the three of them to make the short walk across Presidio to the Tavern together. Leonard wanted to respond by calling the whole thing a waste of my time–because he’d already made evening plans with himself to watch something from Joe’s holovid collection and ration a tiny bit of his final bottle of liquor as he did–except bitching at Nyota wasn’t fun at all. She always shut him down with such an earnestness and a palpable emotional intelligence that the whole interaction ended with Leonard feeling like an asshole for being snarky to begin with. 

So he followed her out to the Tavern, the cold-as-shit night air seeping through his clothes in record time. Pavel was quiet. Leonard was quiet. Nyota held her head up high and looked so determined not to give up on this whole social hour that it was right at the border of annoyance. 

All that melted away once the doors to the Tavern closed behind them and they were blanketed in the warm low lights of the dining room and Gaila stood up and waved from that same circle-shaped table in the corner they’d made a habit of sitting at. They wove through the crowded tables to the back. Nyota hugged Gaila, and then Jim, and then pushed Pavel forward to sit next to Jim, and by the time Leonard made it there was only one seat left, all the way in the back so that he had to all but climb over the back of Nyota’s chair. Jim caught Leonard’s eye as he collapsed into his seat and they nodded to each other. 

In truth, Nyota was right for this. The five of them had been through a lot as a group, and now they were facing the possibility of this being their home forever and they’d had to split up almost as soon as they arrived. They needed to talk to each other. In fact Leonard found that talking to Jim had brought him the closest to normal he’d ever felt since 787, maybe even since Earth. But socializing as a group was a thing he’d started to avoid, maybe on purpose. There was just something that happened in his brain when Leonard had to look at all four of them in front of him, when he couldn’t be distracted by working in the clinic all day, by sitting at the bar, by the placelessness of those two activities that he bounced between. And what happened was reality showing up in his conscious mind again. They were stranded here. Here was a planet that was inconceivably far from Earth, that no longer had any consistent contact with the rest of the star system let alone passing ships. Here was a place nobody would ever find them. 

The best Leonard could do in response to Nyota’s tireless championing of their five-person clique–which he approved of in theory but secretly dreaded–was show up when she asked him to. He sat in his chair and caught the mug of wine Jim slid across the table towards him and listened as she dominated the conversation with every possible Presidio anecdote. At some point they started to blend with observations about other planets. Earth came up multiple times. Leonard wasn’t paying much attention. He never did these days.

Jim got up and Leonard watched him disappear into the kitchen. He still couldn’t wrap his head around why Jim was doing this, why he hadn’t gone to the co-op with his technical skills, why he seemed oddly comfortable to spend his day working his ass off in the Tavern and flirting with that girl Tamara. Jim had blown him off when he asked that question (without the flirting accusation, obviously) as if he didn’t think he was even capable of doing more. He’d settled into the background like a shapeshifter. People talked about him around Presidio like he’d been there with him the whole time. And yet in every sentence that included his name, it was clear they knew nothing about him. 

He came back with trays of food balanced on his forearms and everyone relaxed as soon as the pressure was off to keep talking. The food here wasn’t bad. Nothing looked or tasted familiar, but the fact that it was homemade instead of replicated eventually won Leonard over and he grew a taste for it. He wondered which of the women working in the back was the one who always came up with the recipes that were spiced enough to make him have to wipe the sweat from his forehead.

Tamara stopped by a few times. More often than was necessary, and always to stand next to Jim’s chair even if she meant to clear someone else’s tray or pour wine into someone else’s mug. Leonard couldn’t stop himself from analyzing the dynamic between those two, like a part of his brain was making him do it against his will. She’d rest her hand at the base of his neck, low enough that she could have been slipping her fingertips underneath the neckline of his shirt. And then at some point he saw her run her fingers through his hair in a certain way and saw an expression on Jim’s face that he’d never seen before. Something uncharacteristically gentle and almost too private, which made her smile down at him. That cleared it up, alright. The two of them were sleeping together. 

Then Jim used some of his brand new, rudimentary Signs on her–Leonard was pretty sure it was just thank you after she topped him off–and she laughed and started talking to Nyota about it. Jim’s language lessons. She didn’t sit down at their table with them but she sure came close. 

Leonard went to bed early that night. Well, he left the Tavern early. He stayed up as late as he would have if he’d stuck around to talk shit with Jim at the bar, only he did it by himself with a double-ration of liquor instead. Sitting in the waiting room because Joe was already asleep in their shared quarters that used to be some sort of private office and was still lined with shelves and shelves of physical data hard drives. He looked out the windows, into the indigo darkness, and waited until the point when the liquor hit his bloodstream just right and he could remember that life here was good.

-

Gaila wasn’t sleeping. Not during the night, at least, when everyone laid down in their bunks in the long shared bedroom of the main farmhouse after dinner. She stared at the ceiling, at the phantom shapes that her eyes created in the darkness, and listened to the mismatched rhythm of everyone’s snoring and sniffing and sleep breathing, and found herself unable to even close her burning, tired eyes without spiraling into panic the second she did. The room was too crowded with people and yet it was also too big, the ceiling was too far away, there were no walls on either side of her bunk that she could press herself against. She would have taken her old hammock over the soft mattress they provided for her, with its real pillow and two blankets. She would have taken anything as long as it wasn’t in this room. She’d started taking note of the different rooms and corners around the complex, in the residential house and even in the greenhouses where they grew and cleaned the produce. Sometimes during the day she snuck away in these darkened corners and closed her eyes and managed to fit in fifteen minutes or so of light sleep.

She didn’t know what was wrong with her, that the safest place she had ever lived made her feel so scared of the dark. 

Well, Gaila knew what was wrong, but it all traced back to the things that had happened to her which were out of her control and so long ago that she was powerless to change the way those things had taken hold in who she became. And how those things came back, in this new environment, after almost two years of getting to pretend they’d gone away. On a tiny ship with Jim always by her side she’d enjoyed a pretend-life, countless pretend-lives actually, and she’d felt protected by it in some way and she’d been able to be someone who could sleep and who could enjoy things and invite people into her life on her terms. The rest of the Sweeper crew had all got to meet that version of Gaila. It was only a matter of time before they learned the disappointing truth.

Because now, removed from the circumstances that allowed her to be their friend, she was back to being this person she didn’t like–a person she knew, objectively, was unreasonable and closed off and bitter and required the people around her to work so much harder to earn her trust. When she and Nyota and Pavel had gone to the cooperative building their first morning in Presidio to see how they could be useful she’d found herself bristling as soon as she walked in, and angrier by the minute. It was something about the way they all spoke to each other, the uniforms so many of them still wore, their values of optimism and collectivism that they kept going on about. Nyota and Pavel were eating it up and it was all Gaila could do not to spit on the ground at her feet. 

She knew these weren’t the same sanctimonious Starfleet officers who had beamed down to Orion with all their bleeding heart intentions of breaking down the systems of bondage and abuse that were rampant all over the planet when Gaila was young. It just so happened that their arrival coincided with a need by the UFP for more people to fight in their war. Maybe if things were different those officers would have done a better job, wouldn’t have been so clumsy with how they handled everything, would have taken their time to realize that what they believed to be a culture of barbaric values was actually a culture pretty close to their own where the bad people just stood out more than the rest. Where the solution wasn’t to impose a bunch of foreigner’s etiquette, happily recruit those who wanted to get off planet at any cost, and leave unsupervised all of the people who had no intention of acting according to Federation principles and instead used them as an excuse to make life worse for everyone. 

Gaila had been too young to leave on a starship. She had so few memories from her childhood but she did remember a door opening and blinding her with light in the room she lived in that was always dark, that she only got to leave at night when someone who she was never strong enough to fight off yanked her body out of the crowded mattress she slept on. Figures bathed in light, in clean and pressed uniforms, spoke to her through their translators about how things were going to be different now. They used the word different like they were so sure it could only ever mean better, like maybe where they came from those two words were synonyms. And then they were gone.

She tried so hard at the co-op that day to believe that these were different people. She could hear Nyota and Pavel making agreements, speaking in the future tense, getting excited already about the opportunity to get to work. She didn’t want to be separated from them, but she found it impossible to be nice. Even a few seconds of forcing herself into open-mindedness in the company of all these brightly colored Starfleet uniforms made her feel sick. 

Whatever she’d said to her actual friends, about why she was going to keep looking for work somewhere else, had probably been mean. That was just who she was–who she really was–she was mean, even though she’d never wanted them to know. She never wanted any of this, she realized. The chaos of her life when it was just her and Jim against the universe may have been the only life that made her feel okay and now that life was gone. What was left was the shell of a person that her childhood forced her to become. Someone who walked out on the people who mattered to her and chose to surround herself with strangers, just because they wore different clothes and sank their hands into the dirt instead of using big words around a conference table, and even there she couldn’t smile, she couldn’t laugh, and she couldn’t sleep.

It took about three weeks before Gaila snapped. She snuck out of the bunkroom, easily, because she always got into her bunk with her boots and multiple layers of clothes on anyway and just pretended it didn’t make people stare. She walked over the wooden pathways all the way across Presidio. Her pace uneven and quick and matching every rapid change in her heartbeat. 

Nyota wouldn’t get it. Well, she would get it, like, in theory–and then it would make her look at Gaila in the way nobody ever looked at Gaila because nobody in her life cared about her enough to experience sympathy for her. She’d ask if Gaila needed a hug or if she wanted to talk some more or if she wanted Nyota to sing to help her fall asleep. She would maybe even offer to share her bed. All things that Gaila knew, logically, would help. In reality, though, she would reject them, and then it would only become clearer to Nyota that Gaila was a bad person underneath it all, no matter how the people around her tried. 

No, Nyota was too kind to Gaila, she would try too hard. She would only feel more worried about her when Gaila resisted the kindness that they both knew she needed to let herself accept. She would never be able to understand why Gaila always pushed back against what she needed again and again. 

Jim, on the other hand, was considerably more fucked up and therefore the only person Gaila could wake up in the middle of the night. It wouldn’t be a first for them. They both used to take turns being ripped out of sleep by nightmares. When it used to happen to Gaila, in her hammock over the control panel, Jim would reach over and gently push her hammock back and forth. A joke, at first, and then a legitimate form of comfort. They never talked about it, and they wouldn’t have to talk about it tonight either. He wouldn’t ask follow-up questions about the fact that she hadn’t been sleeping for weeks in her safe, comfortable bed surrounded by nice caring people. Jim knew enough about her history that he was more likely to see her breaking into his room and without a word offer her his bed and fall back asleep on the floor. And like that Gaila would sleep the sleep she’d been fantasizing about, the deep, black, dreamless sleep she craved. She’d close her eyes without fear, surrounded by the familiar smell of the only person who loved her for who she was, with that same person blocking the path between her body and the door.

Gaila already knew which tiny air-vent-turned-window was his. She climbed up the side of the building, finding footholds underneath the vines that covered the outside. The people here had long stopped fighting the plant life that threatened to pull their research campus back into the ground. The entire place looked green and furry from a distance, like a collection of little hills.

She’d had the window open and her head poked inside Jim’s closet of a bedroom before she realized she should have looked, first, for at least another few seconds. It wouldn’t have taken long for her to see that there was already someone else in Jim’s bed with him. The woman she saw every time she came to the tavern whose name she still hadn’t learned. Before Gaila could take her head back out of the window and shove the pane back into place and scramble down the building again, the woman’s eyes opened and stared straight at her. 

“Gaila?” She asked, sitting up. “Is that you?”

When she sat up and the blanket fell around her waist and Gaila saw that she was naked, she froze. The opportunity for her to escape disappeared. She held her breath. She missed the part where this person–this person who knew Gaila’s name even though Gaila didn’t know hers–gently woke Jim up where he lay curled up beside her, speaking to him all low and intimate as he regained consciousness. She knew she was making everything worse by staring but she couldn’t take her eyes off of her body, so shamelessly bare, the way the moonlight from the window illuminated her skin, cast shadows underneath every line and curve. She made no effort to cover herself underneath Gaila’s attention, but there was no way she didn’t notice. Gaila was practically making eye contact with her breasts, a weirdo in the night with her head sticking through a second-story window and her boots tangled in the vines outside. 

Only Jim’s voice could bring her back to reality. By the time she heard him, though, he was standing right below the window and looking up at her. He was clothed, but he hadn’t been when Gaila had first seen him laying in his bed asleep. And once Jim had finally maneuvered her inside through the small window, letting her step on his shoulders with her mud-caked boots and guiding her down so gently that she hardly felt any pressure from his hands at all–the woman was gone. 

Gaila hadn’t even heard the door close. She noticed the blanket was still on the bed. She wondered if that woman had walked out of the room and back to her own wearing absolutely nothing, baring herself to the night like that. She couldn’t stop thinking about it, actually, to the point that Jim stopped trying to talk to her for a few minutes and just waited, both of them sitting on opposite ends of his mattress. 

“What’s up?” he finally asked at the right time. 

Gaila came here to tell Jim about the fact that she couldn’t sleep. She came here to sleep in his bed and feel better so that she could make it another week or two before needing another favor. She came here because he would get it, because he understood her in ways that no other person in existence did, because he would pretend that her asking to sleep in his bed while he slept on the floor was a completely normal occurrence. And yet as she looked at him in the moonlight, at the streak of dirt on his cheek and all down the front of his shirt from how she’d climbed on top of him to get inside, with the memory of that woman’s body burned into her mind, she wondered if the life she and Jim had shared was gone in more ways than she’d thought. If they could only be what they were for each other when they were desperate smugglers in constant danger. If this Jim, who never got hurt anymore and whose laughter she heard all the time and who had some woman in his bed, would still understand her. 

She decided the answer had to be no. Because it was easier to decide it was no than to be told it was no. And if the answer was no, then she only had one option–to once again be that person she didn’t like. The person Jim wouldn’t like either.

“Why aren’t you doing anything to get us out of here?” she demanded. 

Jim blinked at her. 

“This couldn’t wait until morning? You had to break into my room for this?”

She hated herself for what she was doing. She really did.

“It’s already been too long, Jim. We can’t stay here. We need to keep moving.”

Jim ran a hand through his hair. Someone had been cutting his hair since he got here, someone who actually knew how and wasn’t just Gaila taking a blade to it every so often. It was shorter and spiked up at the top, buzzed down on the sides and at the back. It made his hearing implants stand out more. Her mind made up some scene, like a holovid, of that woman from Jim’s bed cutting his hair for him in the pale morning light. They smiled and laughed while she did it. She was naked in Gaila’s imagination, too.

He crossed his arms over his chest. The two of them did this. They got snappy and frustrated with each other all the time. They fought like family, where the love was always there even when they couldn’t bear to look at one another for a whole day. At least, that was her understanding of what it was like to fight with family–if she’d ever been in that situation, she couldn’t remember it anymore. And Gaila definitely couldn’t feel that love tonight. She couldn’t stand the reality that crept in, that she had lost Jim in such little time, when she hadn’t been looking. 

“If you want to come up with a way to get us on a ship that’s capable of breaching an atmosphere that made the fucking Enterprise lose control, Gaila, be my guest. I don’t know why I have to be the one handling that.”

“So, what, you want to stay here forever? Pretend you’re some good guy in front of all these people? That we weren’t making a living as the most hated people in the galaxy?”

Jim scoffed at that.

“You wanna make babies with her?”

Gaila knew that question would destroy the rest of this interaction. It wasn’t that she couldn’t stop herself from asking it–she knew it wasn’t supportive. Jim finally had a healthy relationship with someone and she had to ruin it. Like she was always meant to. And that question very much destroyed their conversation. Cracked it open and let all the mess slide out. Jim squinted at her. He never looked at her like this.

“Tamara and I are just having fun, it’s not serious.”

“It looked serious just now.”

“Okay. What is this puritanical bullshit? Did you forget I was still having sex for money when we met? Inside our ship while you waited outside?”

“Whatever.”

Gaila stood up. Even though she had no idea if she was supposed to be leaving through the door or if it somehow made more sense for her to try and exit through the window. Jim broke her train of thought when he stood up too.

“Look, stop. I’m not mad at you. I don’t want to stay here forever either. I just can’t come up with a single idea of how to get us out and if I don’t find something else to do with my time it’s going to drive me insane.”

“Fine.”

“Did you really just come here to talk about that?” he asked, then, and that was Gaila’s second chance to tell the truth. Jim had sounded honest when he said he wasn’t mad, he’d sounded like he always used to sound when they had to stop themselves from a full-on fight with one another. 

The truth held itself back from being told. It clung onto her vocal chords and wouldn’t let go in order to become air. She shrugged.

“I’m just sick of this place. I don’t wanna be here.”

She knew as soon as Jim opened his mouth that he was about to say something along the lines of it’s not that bad, because of course he would think that, here where he had his own little room and got to do whatever he wanted and got to have some beautiful woman naked in his bed at night. Her proactive anger must have shown in her eyes because he didn’t say anything at all, just closed his mouth again and nodded towards the door. 

Neither of them said another word but still Jim walked her all the way back to the farmhouse, the building that looked so ominous to her, now, when it was cast in darkness. She waited at the door until he was out of sight and then went around the back, to one of the greenhouses, where she knew she could sleep in the small bit of space between two of the planters. She breathed in the rich dampness of the soil. She took off the jacket she’d stolen from Doctor McCoy months ago and folded it up underneath her head as a pillow. And before she fell into the deep relief of actual sleep, she cried, out loud, alone in the greenhouse, for the first time in a long, long time. 

-

The people she worked and ate alongside at the farm, even though she didn’t speak to them much outside of what was necessary, already knew she was weird. Gaila found she felt comfortable just being weird to everyone, not talking, sneaking out to sleep in the greenhouse. She had already ruined any chance she had of making a different impression and so she embraced it. She was pretty certain that nobody would say anything to her about it, as long as she continued to be cold in her interactions and never slept long enough for anyone to catch her walking out of the greenhouse in the morning. 

And then one night she walked through the dark to her planters where she slept and on the floor of the greenhouse was a sleeping bag and a pillow. Whoever put them there had even pushed one of the planters aside so that she would be able to extend her legs. She slept deeper than she had since they left Sweeper behind. In the morning she rolled everything up and shoved it in the corner behind one of the planters, moved them back to the way that they were. 

Then that following night she went back to the greenhouse and found the sleeping bag set up for her once again. 

It went like that for a full week until one night she went to the spot between the planters, fully expecting her bed to be set up for her at that point by whatever bizarre stranger at the complex had been observing her without her noticing them, only to find it wasn’t there. She was about to give up and sleep on the bare ground again except that the planters had been moved even more than usual, and once her eyes adjusted to the dark even more she saw a lean-to in the far corner of the greenhouse, planks of wood nailed together to create a little crawl space. When she peered inside, there was the sleeping bag. Surrounded by walls, this time, and a slanted ceiling. She looked closer and saw that whoever built it had included a tiny door that would allow her to lock it from the inside.

That night, she may have had the best sleep of her life. Ever.

-

“I was starting to think you froze to death out there. I was about to assemble a search party.”

Tamara was talking to a man who just walked in, bringing a rush of cold air into the Tavern with him. Jim pushed the kitchen door open with his hip and spotted him, standing at the bar now, taking off layer after layer of clothing and dropping each piece into a pile on the barstool next to him. His smile got wider as he went. He had mud-caked boots and two worn-out duffel bags at his feet. 

Jim wished he could turn up the audio input on his hearing aids at times like these. Because he had two arms full of trays to deliver and was expected back in the kitchen as soon as he was done to bring out more. The Tavern was packed for the lunch hour and the voices and conversations from every corner of the dining room fought for Jim’s attention. 

In the end he had to wait until the small talk was already over and Tamara was refilling the steaming cup of wine the stranger had his hands wrapped around. He came around to the other side of the bar, up to her side and asked,

“Who’s this?”

“Jim, Scotty, Scotty, Jim,” she said without looking up from wiping down the counters. “You two are a match made in heaven. It’s just that he’s a hermit who lives in the Enterprise wreckage, so he only comes around when he wants something from us.”

“Just when I run out of food and start missing these ladies too much,” Scotty added. 

Jim reached across the bar to shake his hand. 

“You’ve been living at the Enterprise?”

“Living and working. Trying to get the thing running again.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Don’t get excited, it’s a lost cause if I’ve ever seen one. Sadly I made a bet with the good doctor that I could do it and it turns out I’m too much of a gambler to give up.”

“What’d you wager?”

“If I can get the Enterprise back into space, he gives me a computronic in my right hand that increases dexterity and pain tolerance in my fingers. If I give up, and we have to live out the rest of our lives here, I have to become his teaching dummy for the new doctors he wants to train.”

“So how much of a lost cause is it,” Jim asked.

Scotty drank down what looked like half of the wine in his cup. 

“Well, the ship is in one piece, which is good. The inside is a disaster since the gravity shut off. But here’s the kicker: on our way down here I panicked and maxed out the thrusters, which did nothing but burn them out, and even though we’ve still got excess fuel collecting dust my repairs are a constant battle against the moss that wants to grow over everything. Docked in a starbase, these engines could be fixed by a team of engineers in a week. As it is, just me and my ropes, I’m in for the long haul.”

“Ropes?”

“Right. I guess there’s another kicker: the stardrive is sticking up twenty stories high because the saucer is halfway buried in the dirt, which means I have to belay up there with ropes in order to get any work done. I always forget about that part.”

Tamara paused on her way towards the kitchen so she could chime in with, “well now I’m worried you’ll fall to your death instead of just freezing to death,” and Scotty winked at her. 

Jim couldn’t stop himself. He blamed it on morbid curiosity and didn’t let his mind go down any other possible explanations for what he asked next, which was,

“Need any help?”

Scotty’s face lit up like a solar flare.

“Like you wouldn’t believe.”

Chapter Text

“Hey,” Jim said, brushing his shoulder against Gaila’s while they walked through the woods. It was the closest he could get. What he wanted to do was pick her up off her feet and hold her in his arms like it could transmit how important she was to him and how badly he needed her. He’d wanted to do that ever since she’d agreed to come out to see the Enterprise with him during the first conversation they’d had in over a week.

But they didn’t do that. It wasn’t their relationship. That was why words always ended up being so important with them. That was why both of them trailed behind Scotty as he followed the trail of cairns he’d left for himself to mark the way to the wreckage. Either he detected the tension and decided to give the two of them some privacy or he was just that excited to get back.

“I’m sorry about the other night.”

Gaila sighed. Bumped her shoulder against Jim’s in response. “No, Jim, that was all me. I shouldn’t have just shown up like that. I was weird about Tamara. I took my shit out on you.”

“Are you okay? With the Tamara thing?”

“Of course I am. I want you to be happy. I guess I just forgot that I wasn’t going to be the only person in the universe who makes you happy.”

Jim felt his chest get tight. He’d wanted that, a long time ago. About a year into them living and working together. He’d wanted them to be like that, he’d called them soulmates. He’d told her he would be patient, as patient as she needed, that they could figure out her boundaries together. 

He’d gotten over it. 

“Maybe not,” he replied, “but you were the first person who ever did. That’s something.”

“Yeah. You too.”

“Have you been sleeping?”

“Lately, yeah. It’s been getting better.”

“You wanted to sleep at my place that night, didn’t you.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Really, don’t worry about it. A lot of stuff just came up at once. I kind of panicked that we were stuck here.”

“I panic about that all the time.”

“Does Tamara know?”

“You know she’s a telepath, right?” Jim’s hand grazed across the sides of the trees as they walked, brushed over the leaves. “She knows I still want to leave. She doesn’t have expectations.”

This patch of woods was different than the one they’d crossed through after leaving Sweeper behind. The elevation decreased as they walked and it got colder and darker between the trees, almost creating the illusion that they were traveling into the underground. The mud didn’t help. Jim noticed up ahead that Scotty had started walking on top of the roots, practically hopping between them with the ease of practice. Jim tried to follow suit. He steadied himself against the trees. 

“I think she’s good for you,” Gaila said.

“Really?”

“I mean, I don’t know. Something here is good for you. You look like you’re weirdly thriving.”

Jim huffed out a laugh. “I’m not sure what I’m doing. Maybe I’m just playing a part.”

For some reason Jim had imagined that approaching the Enterprise would be some sort of epic reveal. That they’d step out of the woods and into this huge clearing where the ship would be there waiting for them, shining in the daylight. He had no desire to analyze why he’d created that particular fantasy. 

In reality, the Enterprise crashed in the woods, wiped out countless acres of forest in the process, and was, as Scotty had initially described, buried in the dirt at a weird angle and covered in three years’ worth of moss. His brain didn’t even recognize it as a ship at first, because the trees and the wreckage of the trees blocked any possibility of seeing the entire ship at once. From far away it looked like some sort of rock formation tucked into the woods that had been there the entire time. It wasn’t until he spotted the serial number, obscured by moss and dirt, that he realized what he was looking at. 

Piles of fallen trees and branches were scattered around the ship. The closer they got the more they had to navigate through the destruction of the forest, climbing over tree trunks, some of which were so big and so slippery from the humid air that they had to lay on their stomachs and slide sideways over them. Scotty called out warnings over his shoulder but otherwise slipped through without any difficulty. Jim and Gaila lagged behind. 

“Here she is,” Scotty said, a little breathless, once they were standing together again on a cleared-out patch of ground and staring up at the butt end of the stardrive. Jim’s eyes traveled upwards and he could see where Scotty had installed all these different hooks for his ropes, hand holds for him to climb up to the thrusters. He could see the sections that had been worked on, where the moss was cleared off and the exterior of the ship looked shiny and cold. 

Jim put his hands on his hips. “This landing must’ve sucked.”

“We stayed on the ship for two days after hitting the ground, actually. We were trying to ready for a surface launch. Until the power systems started to fail and along with it, the internal gravity.”

“Oh god,” Gaila said. 

“That’s why I can’t live on the ship while I’m out here, even though my quarters are just as I left them. I’d be sleeping on the walls.” He pointed behind him, at a pile of fallen trees that Jim had, at first glance, assumed was just a pile of fallen trees. When he looked closer he saw that Scotty must have put them there on purpose, and shoved mud and leaves in between the cracks until it finally held. Dark, heavy curtains hung down in the middle. The doors, he assumed.

No wonder Tamara joked about him freezing to death.

“Well,” Gaila said, rubbing her hands together for warmth. “You’ve got us out here, put us to work.”

“Those may be the finest words ever spoken. I’ll get the ropes. You good with engine work?”

“Small engines.”

“She’s being modest. She can figure out whatever you put her in front of.”

“Well once you get to know the Enterprise, you’ll be ruined for any others.”

-

“We’re wasting our time on the exterior of the stardrive right now, I think,” Gaila said later, and blew on her can of food that they’d just reheated. It was dark outside, darker still in Scotty’s beaver dam of a cabin. The only light came from his fire pit in the middle of the room, which in fact was a repurposed piece of shuttle engine that Jim would never have agreed to sleep next to if Scotty himself wasn’t living proof that the thing was safe to be in a room with. They’d heated up their dinner on top of it, three aluminum cans out of the stash Jia had packed for them. The closest way Jim could describe its contents was rice and beans, although the greenhouses grew neither rice nor beans. After spending all day either climbing up the back end of the ship or pulling on Scotty and Gaila’s ropes to keep them steady, he finished his own can in record time.

The glow from the fire pit painted their faces in orange. Scotty laughed at Gaila’s assessment, spoon in his mouth. When he took it out he said, before he even swallowed,

“And you waited to tell me that until I had you work on it all day?”

“I needed to think about it.”

“I told you she’s good at this stuff,” Jim said. He was spread out on the dirt floor, trying to turn the sleeping bags he and Gaila had carried with them into hammocks, which meant a lot of ripping and knot-tying. Whatever it would take for them not to have to sleep on the ground and let the damp soak into their bodies all night. “She knows her shit.”

“The moss is superficial. You’re just attached to how the ship used to look. It’ll burn off in seconds. We should be focused on the power grid. If we can get the gravity back on, the engines will take half as much time from the inside. Then maybe we get some shovels, dig around the saucer, right the ship, and get ready to set a forest fire in order to pull off the surface launch you want to do.”

“We’re still talking in terms of months, here.”

“Maybe,” Gaila said, “maybe sooner. Depends on what we find in the engine room. How good we are at digging.”

“Were you in the Fleet?”

“Every ship has unique parts, but the concept is always the same.”

“That’s a no, by the way,” Jim answered for her.

“How’d you come to know your way around a ship like you do?”

“Survival. I hotwired my first shuttle when I was fifteen to run away from the brothel I lived in.”

Jim looked up from his hammock project in time to see the shock on Scotty’s face. His sheer inability to come up with a response to that. It was what Jim probably looked like the first time he learned things about Gaila’s life. Shocked and somewhat stupid. He wasn’t sure at what point they reached the level of friendship that allowed him to make jokes.

“That one always kills the mood.”

“And what a mood we were enjoying before,” Gaila deadpanned, “sitting here eating beans in the dark.”

“Alright, lady. How do you suppose we’re gonna get the power back on with the ship nearly upside down?”

“We climbed all over the outside, how’s the inside any different? We’ll just bring the ropes with us.”

“She’s got a point,” Jim said. “And the inside will be warmer.”

“I can’t believe it took me this long to bring grunts out here with me,” Scotty said, shoving his spoon back into his can. Jim had been wondering that himself. Wondering how the hell he hadn’t given up yet. How he kept himself entertained when it got too dark to keep working.

“I’m surprised nobody’s offered. Have you been out here the whole time?”

Scotty shrugged. “I lived at the campus with them all for a while. Just couldn’t find anything I cared about doing. Was always thinking about the ship. And then I didn’t try to bring anyone back out with me because food was such a priority back then, to the point where fixing the ship was kind of frivolous of me to want to do. Things onboard hadn’t been great anyway before the crash. If you can believe it, the general feeling about the Enterprise was good riddance.”

Jim’s hands stilled, on the final knot of Gaila’s hammock. “Okay. I don’t believe that.”

“I’m not kidding. I’ve never seen morale as low as it was, back then. The crew was more than cut in half by that point. And the Captain, well…” Scotty trailed off. “I don’t like to speak ill of–”

“Please do,” Jim cut in.

“Captains are meant to go down with the ship, in my view. That’s the only judgement I’ll pass. The bridge crew took their escape pods with the promise that they’d go out and find help. And maybe they really were aiming to do that and just didn’t make it, but I don’t know. I think it would have been different if he’d been with us during the crash. I think people wouldn’t have been so quick to let this thing rot in the ground. I don’t have the kind of charisma that he did, to get people excited about thankless work like this.”

“Well there you go,” Gaila said. “That’s something Jim can actually help you with other than scraping off moss with a stick.”

Jim shook his head. 

“Yeah. Very funny.”

“She might have a point, Jim. You offered me one set of hands and then it was doubled by the next morning. I can only wonder who you’ll bring along next time.”

Gaila winked at him from across the fire. He had no idea where her assertion came from, that he was going to somehow supply the charisma that the Enterprise’s former captain had taken with him when he left the bridge in an escape pod. Jim wasn’t charismatic. He wasn’t good with people. 

He was barely any good at tying knots. 

-

Two days later Jim and Gaila hiked back to Presidio alone, following the cairns in the fading light of the afternoon. They should have left earlier. It was almost too dark to see through the trees by the time they made it to the edge of the woods and could just start to make out the lights on in the windows at Presidio. They spent most of the hike talking about the ship. Jim liked the way that topic made his brain feel like it was vibrating a little. He hadn’t felt excited like this, about anything, in such a long time. He wasn’t sure if he’d be able to sleep tonight. Or at all, until the next time he went out to see the Enterprise again. 

But the warm little glowing windows of Presidio drew him in. The sight of that cluster of buildings calmed his nerves. He was breathing normally by the time they made it onto the campus. He’d stopped rambling to Gaila. The two of them walked side by side down the stone pathway towards the promise of dinner at the Tavern. They could talk more once they were inside, and the surreal two days of touching his actual hands to the surfaces of an actual starship might start to make sense to him in context. Or he would at least tell Gaila that this was his goal, to make sense of all of it, and she would tell him he was being too poetic now that he was getting laid. 

A few meters away from the Tavern they both stopped in their tracks, and then their eyes adjusted to the darkness underneath the dam and they hurried towards the figure standing in the middle of their path.

Jim had no idea how long Nyota must have been waiting for them there. She didn’t exactly look comfortable. Her hands were shoved in her pockets. She didn’t smile when they recognized her or even when the both of them greeted her. It made Jim pause, let go of his initial plan to hug her on his way into the Tavern. 

Was she…upset with them?

She had to be. She skipped all of the pleasantries that her side of the conversation tended to include, and so when she finally said something it felt like it had been cut out of the middle of a topic, like Jim had missed the five or ten minutes of crucial details that should have come before it.

“Have either of you seen Pavel lately?” she asked.

“Uh…” Jim rubbed the back of his neck. Cold neck, colder hand. He hadn’t been this cold during the hike. “Not really,” he admitted. “I’ve been waiting for him to come around.”

“And how was he doing the last time you saw him?”

Okay, Jim knew where this was going. Shit.

“Not great. He still blames himself, doesn’t he.”

“He does,” Nyota replied, so quickly after Jim finished talking that it sounded like she’d interrupted him. Seeing her mad was uncanny. She hadn’t smiled once. Her eyes didn’t widen with excitement or interest in the way they usually did throughout a conversation with her. It was like her body was possessed by another life form, one that was able to inject all this frustration into her voice and yet didn’t know how to create facial expressions. “He refuses to talk to me about it and keeps telling me he’s fine, but he’s showing symptoms of depression. Leonard agreed with me even after Pavel lied through his check-up. He thinks Pavel must have been fawning when you first met him, and he’s moved on to some other trauma response now.”

She looked back and forth between the two of them. She sounded out every word of her next sentence until it was downright painful to listen to:

“Let me make this clear: he is not doing well.”

Gaila was bending under the tension. She’d crossed her arms tight over her chest. Her shoulders were hiked up towards her ears. Now that they were so close to the warmth of the Tavern it really felt like the temperature outside had started dropping by the second. It didn’t take long before Gaila caved.

“If he would just come and talk to us he’d see that nobody blames him and we’re all doing fine,” she blurted out. 

Jim held his hand up. As emotionally unintelligent as he was, even he knew that Gaila had missed the point. And he was going to try to prove that he was aware of how he’d dropped the ball with Pavel. He had every intention to take accountability except that Nyota’s voice, cold as ice, beat him to it.

“And do you think it’s possible,” she asked, “that those two things are related in any way? Do you think this seventeen year old boy choosing to isolate himself from everyone might–I don’t know–have something to do with the fact that he feels responsible for crashing Sweeper?”

Jim’s hand was still floating in front of him, index finger pointed to the sky. At this point it just made him look like an idiot.

“I fucked up,” he said.

“Yeah you did.”

“We’ll go get him right now.”

“Good.” She pushed out her next breath, shook her head, let her eyes fall closed. When she looked up at them again the alien life form of angry Nyota was gone. She was back to being regular Nyota. Her relieved, easy smile came back. The rapid demeanor shift only contributed to how scary her lecture had been.

“Wow,” she said, “I don’t like being in that position.”

“For what it’s worth, you really nailed that lecture.”

“Yeah, I’ve never been chewed out by someone so level-headed,” Gaila added, “I’m ashamed but not demeaned. It’s kinda terrifying.”

“Alright. Go. Both of you.” A little bit of that authority in her voice was still there, not front-and-center like before but tucked away now, behind her words. She smiled even as she pointed her finger towards the cooperative building. 

As exhausted as they were after the two hours it took to get back from the Enterprise, as close as they had been to the warmth and the food and the wine behind the doors of the Tavern, they obeyed. Turned on their heels and went straight for the co-op to find Pavel. Jim had no plan beyond forcing him out of his bunk and taking him to eat dinner with them. He hoped that by the time he accomplished those two things he’d have figured out what to do about the rest. 

-

Truth be told, Pavel hadn’t been the same kid Jim first met for a while. Ever since he’d settled onboard Sweeper with them, the longer they got away with hiding him in the ship and he no doubt started to feel something akin to safe with them, he’d been changing. Jim just hadn’t paid enough attention, hadn’t connected the dots like he could have months ago. The exaggerated emotions of their first interactions, their first week or two of knowing each other, he wondered now if it had been some sort of survival instinct. Literal and figurative cries for help that the three of them answered by rushing to protect him. After that, as he stayed on board, the real Pavel must have started to take over.

He got quieter. His jokes got darker. He still wanted to be around them, that much was clear, but the desperate sort of reverence he had for Jim when they first met was gone and was replaced with his attempts to seem older than he was, to find equal footing. At the time Jim dismissed each one as an isolated incident, holding the memory of his excited bouncing between Sweeper’s controls as the true Pavel, and not as a kid weaponizing his youth and his vulnerability in order to survive. In retrospect it had been a steady progression into the sullen teenager that hiked alongside him through the woods to the Enterprise and replied to any question or conversation topic with one-word answers or short sentences dripping with sarcasm. 

Now, thanks to Nyota pulling his head out of his own ass so forcefully that he still felt dizzy, Jim realized where he’d gone wrong. Most notably in relying too much on Pavel the entire time they were flying Sweeper to the point where Pavel felt responsible for them ending up out here, but also for letting himself pretend that Pavel wasn’t as young as he was and therefore letting himself believe the kid could handle this kind of life on his own. Not that he had any idea how to deal with the emotions of a teenager when he barely remembered his own teenage years. But he knew something was going on with Pavel and could, at the very least, make sure he kept an eye on him. After all, he still pictured Pavel on the bridge with them if they ever made it out of here. He had no intention of leaving him behind in Presidio. Not just because the kid was talented, but because when Jim thought of–and the words always came out in Doctor M’Benga’s voice–his crew, Pavel was on it. Pavel might have been the first person to ever treat Jim like he was in charge of a ship. The first person who believed in him like that. That mattered. That made Jim want to give Pavel the life he deserved and the life he wanted. 

And based on how he spoke about living at the cooperative, Presidio wasn’t it. 

“I’m dreading the moment when they force us to all hold hands before dinner time and pray to some sort of spirit of the universe.”

“Come on, it can’t be that bad.”

“Every single morning at least ten different people ask me how I slept and if I had any dreams.”

“I think that’s just what they’re gonna be like if you’re the youngest one living there.”

“I am not the youngest anymore,” Pavel argued. “There’s Deedee.”

“Well Deedee’s a baby.”

“They treat me like a baby. They assigned me a tutor.”

“No they didn’t,” Jim said.

“When I got here and told them my work experience they said I could help them with resource management and planet mapping and even the project they have of getting a working comms out to space.” Pavel broke off twigs from branches as he passed by, intent on destroying something, it looked like. “And then they learned that I am seventeen and insist on my education.”

“I guess they think you can do more, I don’t know.”

“You sound like Nyota.”

Jim resisted the urge to throw his hands up in mock surrender. He felt like he was playing some sick video game where he managed to choose the wrong dialogue option every single time.

“Alright, well. Our job for the next few days is just to do whatever Scotty tells us. Feel free to turn your brain off.”

Pavel laughed sarcastically at that, and replied, “I wish I could.”

Jesus fucking christ.

He tried to imagine what Sam would do. 

Jim had been thinking about his brother a lot lately, ever since he got to Presidio. Maybe because he saw so many people walking around with their Fleet uniforms on. Because there was one guy who wore science blues and had the same mustache that Sam did the last time they saw each other and Jim still did a double take every single time he walked into the Tavern. And maybe because, once upon a time, Sam had literally been an officer on the Enterprise. His first ever ship posting. He was nearing dangerous territory, in his thoughts about him. A sector of his mind titled is my brother still alive, maybe which he’d closed off, years ago, with chains and padlocks.

Sam would know what to do with Pavel. He always knew what to do with Jim, that handful of years they overlapped at Frank’s house in Riverside before he got early acceptance to the Academy and before Jim got shipped off-planet at twelve years old for being too much of a pain in the ass. Jim spent most of their hike trying to remember what Sam used to do. The things he used to say. Why his memories of when they lived together were all positive. All he could come up with–before he approached the black hole of his subconscious that was Tarsus–was that Sam made him do stuff. Gave him tasks. Trusted him with things that nobody else in Jim’s life would have trusted him with. Let him help when he worked on his motorcycle. Let him drive the car even though he was too young. Sent him into town on his bike to run errands, without bothering to check on him once through his comm to make sure he remembered what he was supposed to do. Jim always remembered. He used to worship Sam so hard that it was physically impossible for him to let him down. 

Yeah, something like that might work.

So Jim told Pavel to hold his ropes from the ground while he scaled up the side of the Enterprise that day to open up a piece of the hull and replace some burned-out wiring. He put his life in a brooding seventeen year old’s hands. He’d made far stupider choices. 

“I can’t believe you trust me to do this,” Pavel called up to him. “I could kill you.”

Jim shook his head, reaching up for the next hold Scotty had installed. He was grateful that his altitude required him to shout anyway so that if his frustration slipped out he’d have an excuse.

“Pavel, you haven’t let me down once. And yes that includes when we–we!–crashed Sweeper.”

Pavel’s response to that was just audible.

“Whatever.”

Things went off without a hitch. Jim had about a twenty minute climb to get to the panel he needed to open. He felt steady the entire time. He knew that Pavel had the sort of laser-focus that far surpassed the job he’d assigned to him. He was able to let his trust run in the background and get lost in the tiny movements of his fingers and the little beam of light emitted by the heat gun he used to seal everything back up. 

Even though he must have been making some teenager-face about it the whole time, Pavel was careful with his ropes from start to finish. Well, from start to almost-finish, because Jim got close to the bottom he heard Gaila calling Pavel’s name and asking him to come look at something and he wanted to avoid any possible reason for another eyeroll or complaint and told the kid to go see what she wanted.

“Okay, I can make it down from here, you’re good.”

Of course in his metatextual psychoanalysis of every second spent with a moody seventeen-year-old, his brain hadn’t been thinking about all of the other variables of this climb. Like the fact that the cold, humid air left a layer of moisture on the already slick exterior of the ship. That putting his weight on the ball of one foot of one leg without Pavel keeping him steady with the ropes might, potentially, have the outcome of him slipping off and falling the rest of the way down to the ground.

And because all of Jim’s stupid mistakes tended to favor poetic irony, he caught himself–tried to catch himself–on one very poorly positioned hand.

“Oh, fucking hell,” he muttered.

-

“Well this feels awfully familiar.”

“Yeah yeah.” Jim held his arm out, lifted it even higher in the air between them until his bruised and very-likely-broken wrist was in Bones’ face. “Fix it.”

“Now that’s funny, I haven’t heard a single ‘please’.”

“Fuck you.”

Bones shook his head and took a hold of Jim’s forearm, which sent an ache through the rest of his arm all the way down to his swollen wrist. Jim shivered. It was amazing how, with enough time off from smuggling, an injury like this could hurt so much more than it used to. That time Bones had snapped his wrist with his bare hands, sure it fucking hurt, but Jim would have gone right back to raiding the medbay if he’d needed to. This time, as soon as he got up off of the ground, Jim had left Gaila in charge of Pavel and marched right back to Presidio with nothing else on his mind but the throbbing of his wrist. Meditated on the pain the entire way there. Which no doubt contributed to the nonexistent patience he had in response to Bones trying to make his little jokes. 

He sighed once the regen switched on and he felt it putting him back together with its fancy vibrations. The sound made Bones glance back up at him for a moment, before returning his attention to Jim’s wrist, one hand holding the regen unit and the other cradling Jim’s elbow to keep his arm in place.

“So how the hell did you manage to fracture your wrist as a bartender?”

“I was out at the Enterprise.”

“Oh yeah? Vandalizing the wreckage?”

“I met the old Chief Engineer. Scotty. He’s trying to get the ship to fly again.”

Bones didn’t say anything to that, at first. He thought it over while he continued to run the regen over Jim’s wrist. There was a clear pattern, to how he did it. A route he took. The total steadiness of his hold on the regen unit looked supernatural now that Jim was paying attention. His hands were impossibly stable even though the one holding his elbow had barely any pressure to its grip. Bones had always just been a doctor. Jim hadn’t considered until today that he was, like, excellent at what he did. He’d been too busy following that weird urge he had to avoid medical care even if it was unlimited and free the way it had been ever since he’d picked Bones up on 787. 

“You think it’ll work?” Bones asked.

Jim shrugged the shoulder of his free arm.

“No clue. But I’m gonna do what I can to help.”

“Huh,” he grunted. He turned Jim’s wrist over, to expose the softer skin on the inside. It wasn’t healed all the way yet but he managed to touch and move his hand in a way where it didn’t hurt at all.

“I told you I’d get you back to Earth,” Jim said. “Back to Joanna. I still plan on doing that.”

Bones glanced at him again, held his gaze for a few seconds during which Jim couldn’t figure out if he’d managed to upset him, and then turned to put away his tools. Something about that last sentence or two had turned Bones quiet. And even though Jim had long ago decided to stop wasting his energy on trying to figure out exactly the ways he pissed Bones off, he decided to make an exception. Because he felt like he was saying things that were going to make him happy for once.

“I gave you my word,” he added.

“I know you did.”

“I just want you to know I haven’t given up on it.”

“I know,” Bones said again, and Jim didn’t know how he ended up splitting his time today between the two moodiest, hardest-to-read people in Presidio. He gave up. Pushed himself off of the biobed. 

Bones turned around from the cabinets before he made it to the door. He still had that look on his face, like Jim had said something that hurt his feelings. At the very least, there was some sort of feeling happening in the very-likely-cluttered mess of that man’s brain that he wasn’t sharing. 

“Thanks, by the way,” Jim said, and held up his now-perfect wrist. “For this.”

“Yeah,” he replied, so quiet Jim almost didn’t hear it. 

Jim headed to the Tavern ready to finally seek some relief in the company of someone who didn’t hold back every one of their goddamn thoughts and speak in stunted riddles instead. 

-

“So what’s up with the Doctor?”

“Oh. Ignore him. He lived by himself on a starbase for two years, he doesn’t really know how to socialize.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Tamara said.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” Jim said, and then climbed back on top of her and leaned down to graze the bottom of her earlobe with his teeth until she laughed. He liked it when she laughed while they were touching because of the way it echoed through his own body. Kind of like butterflies in his stomach, but all over. “What did you mean?”

“I meant what’s up between you and the Doctor.”

Jim propped himself up on one elbow. Close enough that he could brush their noses together now, and feel another little spark. “I don’t know. He and I are kind of friends and we kind of hate each other. Even though I probably saved his life by getting him off that starbase. He always finds something to complain about. Even today he was acting weird when I told him about the Enterprise.”

She thought about that for a second while Jim tilted his head down to kiss the line of her jaw. 

“You know he’s into you,” she finally said. Which made Jim have to whip his head back up like he was coming out of water. 

“What?”

“Okay, you can’t be that shocked. He comes here to see you almost every night.”

“He comes here to drink. I give him the drinks.”

“And he doesn’t talk to anyone else and he doesn’t sit anywhere but that one corner of the bar.”

“I told you, he doesn’t know how to socialize.”

“Are you really arguing with a Betazoid about this?”

“You guys can’t always be right, can you? There’s gotta be times when you’re wrong.”

She pinched him on the side of his torso and he yelped at first, and then laughed. 

“Unless that man is sitting at the end of the bar and staring you down all night and pining over you as some sort of personal thought experiment, I’m right.”

“Pining over me?”

“I’m just reporting the facts.”

“I don’t think you could have told me a weirder fact if you’d tried.”

“You wanna bet?” Tamara grinned. 

Jim loved having someone smiling underneath him, wrapping their arms around him, laughing with him late into the night. Someone who genuinely liked him and wasn’t just using him, or paying for a service, or tricking him just so they could steal everything he had as soon as he fell asleep. He hadn’t had anyone like this in his life in years, not since they’d put him on the Farragut. Maybe even earlier. He’d dated at the Academy, but things were different back then. Sex and dating always carried a particular undertone of intensity if both people believed the world was ending. 

What he had with Tamara wasn’t intense like that. It was just easy and light and good. He surprised himself by how gentle he still knew how to be. By how content he was to just lay next to her in one of their tiny beds and press all these little kisses into her skin, by how well he slept in her arms, by how domestic he felt when he woke up next to her. He got to be someone else. Someone who could make a person like Tamara laugh and maybe deserved to take up her free time. But he also had the benefit of not worrying that she thought this lover character was the real Jim. He figured she’d seen him at a pretty decent rock bottom–and he did end up giving her the broad strokes of the remainder of his tragic backstory–so she could handle his thoughts being trained on the Enterprise throughout most of the day from now on. Occasionally interrupted by the desire to pull her up that spiral staircase by the wrist and into one of their little closet bedrooms. She seemed satisfied with the arrangement. He’d be able to feel it if she wasn’t. 

-

Jim didn’t know that more than half of the challenge of this whole ‘fixing the Enterprise’ pipe dream would just turn out to be physical exercise. To the point where he wondered why hiking and climbing had been entirely absent from his Academy training. In the end their ability to get work done hinged on whether or not they could continue to hold their own bodyweight with their grip strength while they did it. The hiking started to feel like a relief from everything else. Laying down to sleep felt like ascending into the heavens. Honestly Jim liked the work. He liked the way it wore him down until there was nothing left, just an empty shell of a person heading back to the Tavern to recuperate for a few days and then start all over again at the crack of dawn. 

Their progress on the power systems wasn’t exactly linear. Part of it was due to athleticism alone. The rest was because it took so fucking long to get to the bridge and test whether or not what they did worked that they put it off until they felt as confident as possible that they’d get to the control panels and not have to scramble all the way back up to the engine room and start over. Again.

Outside of the engine room, they didn’t bother with ropes as they climbed through the Enterprise. It only would have slowed them down. And making their way to the bridge from the engine room, in the dark, without being able to use the turbolift, took a colossal amount of time. An entire day basically. They’d done it three separate times now. At this point Jim’s hope had diminished–his determination hadn’t, but his hope had. He’d stopped talking to Tamara about it during the days he spent back at the Tavern. She’d stopped asking questions. He liked dating a telepath.

“Why did they ever need to build a ship this big,” Gaila grumbled. They took turns sliding down one of the corridors. It was at a steep enough angle that it saved them time, they just had to be careful not to slam into anything on the way down to the next hatch that connected the decks. Not to slam into each other, either. They’d come up with a signal to alert each other that they’d made it to the end and out of the path of the next person. It was one of the birdcalls Tamara used around the Tavern. Jim waved off Gaila’s comment and waited to hear Pavel imitate the chirp. 

“Okay, you’re up,” he said once he heard it. Gaila sat down and pushed herself forward. She picked up speed with a very sarcastic weeeeeeeee until Jim couldn’t see or hear her anymore. He held on to the side of the wall–they were sliding down the ceiling of the corridor right now–and waited for the next signal. 

The upper decks got easier. Once they passed the widest deck within the saucer they gradually became smaller and the corridors became simpler in layout to make up for the different rooms and quarters they held. They grabbed onto the support beams and the emergency handles and climbed down the walls because the combination of the two almost made a ladder. They went down towards the bridge single-file. Jim was in between Pavel and Gaila this time. So he heard when Pavel decided to take his turn complaining today.

“This had better work,” he said. “I need to give my tutor a good excuse this time for missing another two days of lessons.”

“You didn’t tell him what you were up to before you left yesterday?” Jim asked.

“I didn’t tell him I was leaving.”

“Pavel, that’s fucked up.”

“Forcing me to study the history of an organization that does not exist is fucked up.”

“People are gonna blame me for your teenage rebellion, you know. They’re gonna think I’m a bad influence.”

“You are a bad influence, Jimmy.”

“Can it, Gaila.” Jim moved like he intended to swat her with his hand, and then regretted it when it nearly made him slip off of the wall and crash into Pavel below him. He gripped onto the nearest support beam until his fingers hurt a little. Recentered himself.

Gaila just laughed at his near-miss. Asked, “did you hear Pavel dropping any f-bombs when he first came on board? Now I hear like, ten of them from his mouth per day.”

“Fuck fuck fuck,” Pavel chanted. “There, you have three more.”

“Bring back, 

bring back,”

Scotty sang to himself. To the ship, really. The man sang almost as much as Nyota did. It was so frequent, and the songs were so simple, and he was so confidently off-key that it wore the rest of them down in record time until they all sang along without thinking. Making it to the bridge put everyone in a good enough mood for that.

Scotty scaled down to the control panel, sitting on the back of the chair as if it were the seat and clinging onto one end with his hand so he could start flipping switches, and when he sang the next line, “bring back my Bonnie to me,”

Jim, Gaila, and Pavel, in unison from around the tilted bridge, all called out, “to me!”, and Scotty whooped.

“That’s what I’m talking about.”

“If this works, everyone better be holding onto something,” Gaila said. In the background Scotty was still humming, half-forming some of the words of the rest of his folk song collection. Jim watched as he kept flicking switches upwards. They’d already done all of this before, multiple times. Scotty tended to try different things when it didn’t work, though, to the point that Jim wasn’t sure when he was supposed to be able to tell if today turned out to be a bust. So he just watched. He held on. His fingers ached again. But he prepared, more than anything, for the inevitable disappointment and even longer upwards climb in defeat.

What happened next scared the shit out of him. Everything, at once, which targeted every one of his senses. Even the weird internal ones located in his brain–the ones Bones always would complain about when piloting Baby got particularly choppy. The lights blinded him and the g-force stole his next breath out of his lungs as he nearly fell off of the chair he clung to. He forgot where his body was and how to move it, how to react to what was happening. The noise was unbearable at first. Every panel screamed at them with some sort of systems warning. The red alert was on and blaring, the corresponding lights flashing in their eyes. It wasn’t until Scotty and Gaila got the alarms and the warnings all under control, and Jim stopped squinting and could take in his surroundings and was able to stand up on the actual floor of the bridge, that he realized this was what they were hoping for. This was what they’d spent weeks on. They hadn’t failed. 

It sent a rush of energy through his entire body, to the tips of his toes and up to his ears. All of a sudden he couldn’t get enough of what he was seeing, of the bridge of the Enterprise with its power back on. The control panels exactly as they’d been left years before, untouched by the crash. Ready to be used again. 

“No fucking way.”

Pavel let out a sound that Jim didn’t even know the kid was capable of. Somewhere between a yell and a groan and the word yeah. He jumped into the air and pumped his fists. It somehow became a dance. Nobody made any comment about it–they were all in agreement to just let the kid do his little dance and for once express a positive emotion. In fact Jim was tempted to join him. 

This was it. The starship Enterprise underneath his feet. The future in his hands again. Jim got so overwhelmed that he had to sit down. He realized too late that where he’d sat down was in the Captain’s chair. He flinched. Stood back up. Had some weird insecure thought about whether or not any of the three of them had seen him sit there and assumed he’d done it on purpose because he certainly hadn’t.

-

When Joseph invited all of them over to the clinic during Jim’s next set of Presidio days for a surprise, Jim was closer on the spectrum to disinterested than intrigued. He would have rather gotten laid instead. But Joseph was grinning about it when he’d invited him that morning and in truth Jim hadn’t experienced a surprise in a non-deadly context in years so he showed up. Along with Pavel and Nyota. Bones was already there. Gaila apparently declined the offer because she had already agreed to some social invitation from a group of people back at the farm. That detail in itself was enough of a surprise to call it a night, in Jim’s opinion. 

In the end the surprise was served to them in mugs. Before anyone took a sip, Joseph held his hand up. He’d prepared a speech. And a disclaimer.

“Now, this will not be an exact replica. But I did inherit a real cacao tree from the Presidio staff which I have been taking care of in the decontamination chamber in the basement for the past three years.”

“Is that what you do down there?” Bones asked, and Joseph shushed him. 

“Yes, it’s my secret lab. So it’s real cacao, but the fermentation, drying, and roasting processes had to be adjusted because the temperatures here are so low.”

“Yeah, well, you’ve been trying to grow a tropical plant in the basement of all places–”

“I’m going to take your chocolate away, Leo, is that what you want?”

Bones rolled his eyes. 

“Without further introduction–since Leo is struggling with patience–here is my first successful prototype,” he held up his own mug with two hands, like it was a precious relic. “The solution to Human homesickness: hot chocolate.”

“Cheers!” Nyota called out, holding her mug out into the center of the waiting room. Everyone joined her, clinked their mugs together and took the first sip. Joseph waited in suspense for their verdict. 

Again, Jim was the last person to be picky about food. He hadn’t been any sort of chocolate fanatic at any point in his life before this, no more than anyone else. But he would be lying if he didn’t say that the taste of it tickled something in his brain. Awakened a long line of disconnected memories. Maybe it wasn’t exactly how it would taste back on Earth, it probably wasn’t as sweet, but it was close enough that he wouldn’t have called the drink anything else. 

Everyone was quiet for a minute. The good kind of quiet. 

“Joe, you nailed it,” Nyota finally said. “I mean, wow.”

He was beaming. Jim wondered how many bad batches he’d been through in order to get to this point. There must have been a lot of them. Enough that he hadn’t clued anyone else in on this little pet project. 

“Leo?” Joseph asked, because Bones was drinking his down in record time. He lowered his mug back down and said,

“It’s chocolate and it’s hot.”

“I’m not inviting you to the next one of these.”

“I’ll drink the rest of his,” Pavel piped up, but when Joseph went to take the mug out of Bones’ hands he held it to his chest, turned his body away and out of reach. 

“So does this solve your homesickness?” Jim asked him. “Like, you feel like the only thing missing from Presidio this whole time was just chocolate?”

“I don’t know,” Joseph answered. He took a longer, more thoughtful sip out of his own mug. “Maybe. I’m willing to believe that this is just a coping mechanism for me.”

“A fun one,” Nyota added. 

Joseph had never mentioned anything like homesickness or missing Earth before. He’d always seemed content to be where he was. Jim suspected now that it was just the lack of choice. The absence of any means to make it back home. Anyone who would tend to a plant for years, one that was never meant to grow here, just to have a cup of hot chocolate at the end of all that, probably wanted to go home.

“You know, our goal is still to make it back to Earth. That’s where Bones is headed. I know that means this place would be losing two doctors, but still. If you want to go home…”

“Nah.” Joseph shook his head. “Honestly, life here is not so bad. It feels good to be building something. After the missile strikes, maybe this is selfish, but I think I’d rather stay here than go back. My family is gone. If my hometown is even above water I’m sure it’s hardly habitable.”

“Wait,” Jim said, at the same time Bones said,

“What?” at the same time Pavel said,

“Missile strikes?” closely followed by Jim adding on,

“What the fuck?”

Joseph blinked at them for a few seconds, and then his eyes got extremely sad. 

“Oh,” he said. “Maybe you wouldn’t have heard. It happened after the Federation collapsed but right before the war ended. Maybe it had something to do with how the war ended, I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t remember the first weeks after I heard the news.”

None of them even tried to come up with a response to that. They all just stared at Joseph where he stood in the middle of their circle of chairs. They waited for an explanation that didn’t come. Like Joseph was refusing to elaborate unless they asked, unless they really wanted to know. So Jim had to force the question out of his body. 

“What happened?”

Joseph set his mug down on a side table. Returned to the center. 

“Klingon missiles fired into Earth’s oceans,” he explained, “and the earthquakes on the first day broke any existing scales that have been used before to measure earthquakes. After that the whole planet experienced months of natural disasters from the aftershocks. Tsunamis, eruptions. Cities along the coastlines sank underwater, some permanently. Neighborhoods collapsed. Power systems went down. That was the last any of us heard before the comms went dark in this star system. We can’t get anything now.”

As he spoke Jim could see, behind the veil of his expression and his tone of voice and the careful use of certain details, that he had been trained in medical school in the art of delivering bad news. It was something about his pacing. He wasn’t holding for suspense but he wasn’t rushing through it either. Like he knew exactly how many seconds everyone needed in order to accept each new horrifying fact. By the end of it Bones had set his own mug between his feet and dropped his head into his hands. He wasn’t moving. Nyota was covering her mouth with her palm and her cheeks were already wet. Pavel looked just looked frozen. Confused. 

And Jim–Jim had no idea how the fuck to feel. It may have been too late for him at that point, he may have been through too much fucking tragedy in 28 fucking years to feel anything at all anymore. His body may have outright refused to let this news mean anything to him.

“I’m sorry,” Joseph said next. “I’m sorry you didn’t know. It’s still hard for all of us to think about. There’s a support group that meets sometimes at the main farmhouse, even though we aren’t getting any new information. We mostly just share stories.”

“That’s what they meant when they called it the Remembering Earth meeting?” Nyota asked.

“Yes.”

Bones stood up from his chair, then, so fast that it toppled over and hit the floor and echoed in the pin-drop silence of the waiting room. He spilled his hot chocolate too. The puddle of it leaked across the floor. Jim knew it didn’t matter at all–and he would have gotten punched for saying this–but the first and only emotion he was able to even sense in himself right now was disappointment that Joseph’s time and labor-intensive chocolate experiment was going to waste on the floor like that. 

“Bones,” Jim said, because he had to say something. The look in his eyes was terrifying. Jim felt another emotion. A clawing fear in his stomach about whatever Bones was about to do next. So at least he could feel something, two things, even both of them were more than a few steps removed from the actual tragedy he was supposed to be coming to terms with right now. 

Bones didn’t reply. He didn’t look at any of them. He ran out the door like his life depended on it. 

Jim stared at the space he had left behind. He could hear, vaguely, like it was happening on the other side of a sheet of glass, Nyota and Joseph speaking in low tones. She’d stood up from her chair and walked over to him. He heard the pleasant timbre of Joseph’s voice as he delivered what was bound to be more bad news. The bizarre sound of one of the strongest, most put-together people he knew crying into his chest. 

He didn’t know where Pavel was. Somewhere behind him, maybe. Next to him. Where had he been sitting? Wherever he was Jim knew he was on the side of confusion rather than grief. About this place he’d never been to in his conscious memory. This place he supposedly came from. If Jim knew how to navigate his own feelings he’d be helping Pavel right now because they were sort of in the same boat. Maybe Nyota would chew him out later, for not rushing to Pavel’s side first instead of chasing after Bones. He didn’t care. 

He found Bones outside, around the corner, one of his hands pressed against the wall of the clinic while he threw up. It sounded like a stranger. The high, desperate, anxious way he breathed in between the involuntary convulsions of his body. It reminded Jim of the war. 

He placed his hand on Bones’ upper back, between his shoulder blades, was thinking maybe he’d rub circles like he saw other people do for their sick friends, except that once Bones noticed the touch he flinched and skidded away from him. His eyes were wild and angry in the few seconds before he realized it had been Jim touching him in the dark. 

“Sorry. I should’ve said something. I didn’t know what to do.”

Bones dragged his sleeve across his mouth. He stared down at the corner of the building while he talked, at the mess he’d left there that Jim was now standing right next to. 

“It’s fine.”

And Jim was at a total loss for what to say next. Asking if Bones was okay would be a joke. Of course he wasn’t fucking okay. Telling him that everything would be fine would be another joke. Not a single potential question or sentence offered itself up that wasn’t twisted and wrong for him to say right now, while the air between them was still thick with the news that their home planet, the one they’d both imagined just as they’d left it this entire time, was now in ruins. Missiles in the fucking ocean. Entire cities underwater. How the hell was someone as damaged as Jim supposed to say the right thing? To a person who had so, so much more to lose? So much more that he maybe had already lost?

“You heard from her, right.” It was the wrong thing, but at least it wasn’t a lie or a stupid question. It was just a dumb question instead of a stupid one. “You said she was sending you comms while you were on 787. That was after the war ended.”

“She didn’t say anything about a missile strike. Her messages sounded fine. They were always late and they got to me out of order, they had to travel so far. Maybe–” he paused, swallowed hard. “Maybe they were just later than I thought.”

“Or maybe she’s okay.”

“Or maybe she’s not,” Bones snapped, and then when he looked at Jim again, he was glaring. His eyes were shining in the semi darkness. “I don’t know. I’m not on 787 anymore. I can’t get comms if nobody knows where I am.”

“Shit.”

“Forgot to factor that into your brilliant plan, I guess.”

“Look, I’m the one who’s trying to help you. I got you off that starbase so we could get you home.”

“And how’d you do, Jim?” His voice was loud, now. Loud enough that anyone with their windows cracked tonight were going to hear the exact contents of this fight. Bones raised his hands, gestured to where they were standing in the makeshift street of this makeshift village. “Did you get me home?”

“Bones–”

“Does this look like home? This shithole where ships can only land if they crash? Where the only hope we have in getting into space again is if you get found out and they take us all back to Istaar in handcuffs?”

Jim tried to shush him, on instinct, because he didn’t want to fight. He didn’t want to make noise. And, honestly, the sound of Bones raising his voice was making him sweat and the hair on the back of his neck was standing up and it had been a long time since he’d had a panic attack but he’d had enough of them to know that those first signs were there. 

“At least on 787 everyone knew where I was. I could have waited it out until a real captain with a real ship came to get me. Instead I made the stupidest fucking decision of my life and trusted you.”

“Or you could have died there,” Jim spat at him. He couldn’t help it. He was on the edge right now. And as much as he didn’t want to, his body tended to choose fight, first, over flight. But flight was coming up next, and fast. 

“Hey, at least I did something. I got you moving.”

“And now we haven’t moved at all. Not since you started playing house with the first person you could find.”

“Did you forget the part where I’ve been working my ass off out at the wreckage? Day after day? Are you telling me I don’t get to take a break ever? You, of all people?”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Are you the only one who’s allowed to be distracted? Are the rest of us supposed to be slaving away for a solution while you drink yourself to sleep every night?”

“You’re not distracted–you’re delusional is what you are.”

Bones was in his face now. Holding the front of Jim’s shirt all balled up in his fist, crowding him back onto his heels so that, if he let go, Jim would fall onto the ground. The first signs of the panic attack Jim was having were now gone, replaced by the panic attack itself. The feeling that he couldn’t breathe. The explosion of stress hormones in his brain and his body so that it hardly even felt like he had a body at all anymore, just a spinal cord on fire. The loss of sensation everywhere else. The only reason Jim didn’t collapse was because he’d had so much extensive training in his life on how to compartmentalize this and continue to appear human. The panic attack got to claim about 75% of his body, that was the agreement. The other 25% had the job of making it seem to everyone else that he was normal. So to Bones, who was currently screaming in his face to the point that his neck must have been bright red but it was too dark to tell, he probably just looked annoyed. Which no doubt made things worse.

“You’re just about the last person who’s allowed to have one fucking thing to say to me. I’ve been doing my job this entire time, even after I stopped getting paid and after I stopped getting anything out of it. My real job that actually helps people. What have you been doing since the war ended?”

Jim stared at him. At his belligerent face. He wanted to insult him right back but he was past the point of talking. He was past the point of even thinking in the form of words. There was one abstract thought in his brain right now, not even the word but just the sense of it, and that was escape. 

“You ruined my life. You promised to get me home and you’ve done the opposite. And you had the nerve to give me fucking hope. I may as well be dead right now. You put yourself in charge of us and you ruined everything!”

Oh, this was just great. The yelling, the physical intimidation, and now the exact words in the order that Jim’s own mind liked to play for him when he was in the darkest possible mindset. The kind that made him look too long at the things in the engine room that he wasn’t supposed to touch. 

Bones could never say they weren’t close. Close enough that he had just flown through all of Jim’s emotional triggers in rapid succession. Totally and completely aced that test. Extra credit, in fact. 

Jim wasn’t proud of what he did next. 

He bit the hand that was right under his chin, clutching at his shirt, hard enough to make Bones pull it away and let Jim fall backwards into the dirt. And then he scrambled to his feet and ran. 

-

Tamara held him in her arms for hours after that. She sat up against the wall at the head of her bed and made Jim take his shirt off and lie back against her chest so that she could touch as much of their skin together as possible and he could feel her pushing this deep sense of calm from her body into his own. It took a whole fifteen minutes, at first, of her doing that, before he could take a normal breath. And then he was crying for another thirty, tears running down his face against his will. Neither of them talked for a long time. When Jim finally did open his mouth he realized how tight Tamara’s grip on him was. It was hard to move at all, even to speak.

“You know what’s fucked up?” he asked. He cleared his throat. 

“Other than everything Doctor McCoy said to you?”

“He and I have fought before. I would’ve said worse shit to him if I hadn’t frozen up like I did. I can already think of like, ten different insults.” He traced his fingertips across the soft skin of Tamara’s arm, the one which had a vice grip around his chest. Her other arm had moved and her hand was now stroking his forehead and smoothing his hair back. “What’s fucked up is that I only cried tonight because of my stupid PTSD. That’s it. I feel nothing about the fact that Earth got pounded with missiles. Nothing.”

“You feel nothing, or you feel none of what you think you’re supposed to feel?”

He smiled. “Alright. The second one. I do keep thinking about the likelihood that Starfleet Academy is underwater right now.”

“Maybe it belongs to the fish. They’re in there holding seminars about inter-ocean diplomacy.”

“If there are any fish.”

Tamara kissed the side of his forehead and he let his hand stop moving, and just held her wrist. 

“You’re so morbid,” she said. He wanted to laugh, but the feeling was too far away right now.

“I don’t think I can find the line anymore that separates morbid from realistic.”

She kissed his forehead again, and then his cheek, and then she loosened her grip on him so he could turn his head and find her mouth with his own. 

-

When Bones came into the Tavern two days later, Jim was wiping down tables. It was early and the place was empty except for two people from the co-op. The last thing they saw before they were being rushed outside by Tamara was Jim and Bones in some sort of old-west style stand off with the light pouring in from the open doors and casting Bones’ face in shadow. 

Jim slung the towel he’d been using over his shoulder and crossed his arms. He stared at Bones. 

To his credit Bones looked more than sorry enough, once the doors closed and Jim could make out the features on his face. He looked like he’d made himself sick from grief and remorse and tragedy. The dark circles under his eyes, his messy hair, his hands shoved in his pockets to the point that it made his shoulders slouch forward. He took a deep breath that sounded like a sigh on the exhale. 

After about a minute of soaking up how miserable he looked, Jim sat down at the table he’d just cleaned and gestured to the chair across from him. 

“I fucked up,” Bones said once they sat down. Jim would have thought he’d have trouble even looking at Bones for a while, but he found he was actually fascinated by the sight of him apologizing. He realized, in a way that made him tilt his head to the side in wonder, that this may have been the first legitimate apology anyone had directed at him in years. “That was really fucked up.”

“Yeah, it was.”

“Sorry’s not even good enough of a word, I know, but that’s the only word there is. And I’m sorry I said all that to you.”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not. It’s not fine. You were out there to try to comfort me and I was an ass. I threw your own trauma in your face. Who the fuck does that?”

“Well, you did that. But you weren’t exactly in your right mind.”

“That’s not an excuse.” Bones glared at him. Eyebrows drawn together so that he got that wrinkle between them. Getting mad in the middle of his apology. Which actually made Jim want to laugh out loud. “Why are you defending me?”

“I don’t know, because it’s really not that big of a deal. I’ve been hurt worse by people who don’t actually care about me.”

The look on Bones’ face was a pretty clear indication that he didn’t believe him. But Jim could also see him actively trying not to get riled up again and argue when his tendency to cope with things through anger was the exact reason he’d had to come groveling in the first place. Jim ran a hand through his hair, realizing too late that it was still damp with cleaning solution. 

“Look, just–next time you misdirect your anger at me, can you just break another one of my bones? And then fix me back up once you’re not mad anymore? Can that be the deal?”

“You’re a masochist.”

“What would that make you in this scenario?”

Bones shook his head. 

“I’m sure you don’t want to talk about it right now, but I don’t think I would hold anything you could do to me against you if it’s a reaction to learning that Joanna might be–”

“She’s not dead,” Bones cut in. Jim just blinked at him.

“I have to believe she’s not dead,” he explained. He spoke to the surface of the table. “If I give up on her, I’ve failed her. She’s still alive and I’m still going back there to get her.”

“And I’m going to make sure you do,” Jim said. “I promise.”

As much as Jim intended to forgive him he still felt like he was on shaky ground, so he took that as his cue to keep moving. He stood up from his chair. When he saw Bones start to get up to, whether to follow him or to escape he wasn’t sure, he held out his hand to stop him. 

“Stay. I’ll heat something up for you, we’ve got leftovers from last night.”

-

Jim couldn’t believe he had to start the first meeting like this. He couldn’t believe he’d assembled an honest-to-god meeting to begin with. He’d posted flyers. 

The flyers, hand-written because the research station never had a system of comms screens when it was first built, said this:

WE’RE TRYING TO FIX THE ENTERPRISE

HELP NEEDED

WE’LL TAKE ANYONE WHO WANTS TO GO BACK OUT TO SPACE

MEETINGS TO TALK ABOUT ALL THIS SUNDAYS AT THE TAVERN AT 20:00

He expected nothing. He had to in order to keep himself sane. What he hoped for was a small turnout, maybe ten people or less, so that if he was convincing enough, word-of-mouth would do the rest over the next few weeks (or months) while they got the ship in order. So when he looked through the window of the kitchen door at five minutes to 2000 hours and saw that every chair in the Tavern was already filled, he had no idea what the fuck he was going to do. 

“Just be honest,” Tamara said from behind his shoulder. He hadn’t known she was even in the kitchen and he jumped when he heard her voice. 

“See, I’m starting to wonder if this is actually a bad idea.”

“No, I don’t think you are.”

“What if the ship won’t actually be able to fly?”

“Nope. Try again.”

“Okay, fine. These people have no reason to trust me and I have no authority whatsoever to make decisions about their old ship. I’m a total stranger.”

“That’s better.” She kissed him on the back of his neck, right where the line of his shirt ended, so that he could feel her little static shock of encouragement she transmitted into his skin. “I would start with that.”

She pushed him through the door and into the dining room of the Tavern, winked through the  window when he looked back at her in betrayal.

Everyone was staring at him. It wasn’t that they knew that he was the one who’d put up the flyers and would be running this meeting, it was just that his entrance into the room was dramatic enough for them to all turn their heads. Gaila grinned at him from a cramped table and gave him an exaggerated thumbs-up.

Jim scanned their heads for another few seconds. His heart was pounding. He spotted Bones and felt confused, at first. And then remembered that Bones probably would come to this sort of thing considering he had every intention of resuming his journey back to Earth. Whether or not things between them were weird right now. The two of them locked eyes and he gave Jim his own equivalent of reassurance, which was a simple nod.

And then, bastard that he was, Bones cupped his hands around his mouth and said, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear, “Are you gonna say something?”

Jim wanted to glare at him for that, except now everyone was really staring. So he sucked it up and stood on one of the last empty chairs in the Tavern. 

“Hey,” he said once he was up there.

“I can’t hear shit!”

“Shut up, Bones,” he said louder, and everyone laughed, which meant he probably needed to maintain that volume for the rest of this thing.

“Hey, so. Thanks for showing up. My name’s Jim Kirk.”

He’d decided in advance how much personal information he was going to share. Didn’t make it any easier for the next few sentences to be his first impression to all of them.

“I was a Lieutenant on the USS Farragut. The one that blew up. I only survived because I was piloting an escape shuttle at the time. I spent the last few months of the war stranded in the desert.”

There was a low, ambient sort of murmur that moved through the crowd. As if this wasn’t the tamest version of his backstory that he’d been able to come up with.

“Between then and now I’ve had to do some pretty fucked up shit, but before I crashed here I started to turn it around. The five of us were running a passenger ship. A small one. I know you guys have been stuck here since before the war ended, but it’s bad out there. People are being left for dead because they can’t afford the trip home. Prices are going up. There’s like a thousand different currencies in circulation now and they’re all inflated to hell. If we can get the Enterprise back into space, we could actually do good with it. It wouldn’t have to be a warship anymore.”

Someone whooped. It flooded Jim’s entire body with relief. Even though there was a very good chance that that someone had been Gaila. He’d kind of had to let his eyes blur in order to keep himself from getting too nervous.

“So, Scotty’s out at the ship right now. We got the power systems back up. He thinks we can get it to fly again, but we need more hands working on it. And if we do fly again, we’ll take anyone who wants to go home. And anyone who would want to work on the Enterprise if it becomes a passenger ship. All departments.”

He couldn’t figure out if he’d said enough yet. He felt like he’d know, when he made his point. He hastily added, 

“Basically, we’ll take anyone. That’s all.”

He started to step down from the chair and then froze, remembered the literal call to action he’d had in his outline–the one which had been the whole point of this meeting–and stood back up.

“Oh, so, if you’re willing to do manual labor or if you used to work in Engineering or both, please stick around. Everyone else can just come back next week and maybe we’ll talk about something else. Okay, that’s all.”

If Jim still wasn’t sure, the rest of the room, at least, decided that he was done. Scattered applause broke out, which quickly went overshadowed by the sounds of chair legs scraping against the floor as everyone got up–half of them to leave and the rest to consolidate towards where Jim was standing at the back of the room. They pushed all these tables together and sat down again along the odd edges of their creation, moving in and out of each other’s personal space with familiarity. Three guys came back from the bar with trays full of mugs and started distributing them. Someone set a mug of wine in front of Jim. The noise overlapped and rose to the point that he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to make another announcement to this group of people again. 

These were the engineers, he figured.

-

“You really roused the troops back there,” Gaila told him later. Jim was walking her back to the weird little greenhouse where she slept now. They went slow, on purpose, so that they lagged far behind the others who’d been in the Tavern tonight. They talked in the dark, their footsteps sounding off of the wooden pathway.

“Whatever,” Jim said. “I’m not good at that shit.”

“You know you’re gonna need to get good at that shit.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, if the Enterprise really does make it up into space like you’re planning?”

She was quiet for too long. He was supposed to have said something by now, some intelligent response that proved he knew what she was talking about. Jim felt the distinct emptiness of the moment when she clocked that he was missing the point. 

“Jim,” she said, “you’re the one who took the initiative to put all of this together. People are following your lead now. You put yourself in charge. You do know that if we pull this off, you’re going to be the one running the Enterprise?”

The point arrived. 

“Oh.”

“You did think about that, didn’t you? That you’d be in charge of at least a hundred people on a ship that size? Potentially hundreds?”

By some supernatural error, Jim hadn’t thought about that once.

“Whether or not you ‘let’ people use the term, you’d be captain of the ship. Is that what you want?”

Silence crept in between them. Jim scraped the bottom of his boot back and forth against one of the wood planks below his feet. A faraway voice delivered the tail end of a joke, he could tell by the murmur of laughter that followed behind it. Gaila reached out and held one of his wrists in her hand.

“I’ll go wherever you go, Jim. I mean it. But we don’t have to go on the Enterprise if that’s not the kind of life you want.”

Jim took a deep breath. This felt harder than public speaking. It felt like the hardest part of the whole Enterprise project so far. Because he knew he only had one response to that.

“What if it is?”

Gaila’s grip around his wrist tightened for a second, and then she let go of his hand and let it fall back to his side again.

“Then you might be the luckiest dumbass in the entire galaxy,” she said. “You dropped out of the sky and fell into a hot girl’s lap who just so happened to have an empty starship in her backyard.”

Jim burst out laughing. He covered his eyes with his hand, even though they were already out in the middle of nowhere with barely any light coming through from the stars. “This is fucking crazy, isn’t it? This kind of shit doesn’t happen. It doesn’t. Not to me.”

Chapter Text

After enough of his encounters with Jim since they’d gotten to Presidio had left him with a new and very blatant form of discomfort, Leonard had no choice but to accept that he had legitimate feelings for him. Not just admiration for his character. Not just gratitude for his having passed him the reins of his own life again. It wasn’t just that he cared whether or not the man died or that he got weird phantom pains in his own body when he saw him get seriously hurt. He also just felt attracted to his person. Who he was and–this was the most annoying one to have to reconcile–what he looked like.

It just felt stupid and unimportant, after the magnitude of everything Leonard had seen and experienced since he’d gone out into space, sweeping warfare and tragedy and absolute devastation and the evilness that had emerged in its aftermath, to still, like, have a thing for blondes. That seemed like something he would have gotten over.

Pushing 40, shipwrecked on a planet he’d never even heard of before this, three years of practicing medicine on the front lines, two years of solitude on 787, a couple months of insanity and chaos on a ship full of random strangers, and still after all that Leonard’s brain was capable of developing a crush on someone. As much as he tried to shut it down his body all but forced him to look at Jim whenever they were in the same room, to let his gaze linger on him, to stick around longer than he needed to at the Tavern just in case Jim finished closing up and offered to walk with him back to the clinic. Like he was a fucking teenager, he did this shit. 

He couldn’t get himself to stop. To stop thinking about him or to stop looking at him. Because he had too much damn time on his hands. And Jim looked good. 

Sure he’d had a certain charm about him when they first knew each other. A grittiness that he wore better than other people would. He’d been dirty and reckless and rough, betrayed only in certain moments by the earnestness in his eyes. Leonard had seen the appeal, objectively. Had been able to wrap his head around how Jim sometimes flirted his way through things and it sometimes worked, even if he hadn’t shaved or washed his clothes in days. 

But the way Jim had cleaned up since they’d gotten to Presidio…civilian life agreed with him. The harsh lines of his face from years of food insecurity softened, enough nights of good sleep brought color to his cheeks and a lightness into his eyes. Someone was cutting his hair now. He was always clean. He wore clean clothes that fit him better, had humbled himself enough to accept a set of surplus Fleet-issue clothing and wore one of those fitted black undershirts every day with the long sleeves and high neckline and the barely-there Starfleet insignia. He pushed the sleeves up to his elbows when he was at work and tied that stupid apron around his waist and somehow that combination made Leonard have to stare at him every single time he went in there. 

And Leonard would spot him sometimes when he was on his way out to the Enterprise, with a bag of supplies hoisted over one shoulder and his coat and hat on and his nose pink from the cold. And just watch for a second while he passed by. He’d be laughing with the old crewmembers he recruited, or speaking to Pavel in a way that made the kid finally look interested in something, or standing and giving directions for their upcoming trip because he was in charge, and he was actually really good at being in charge. 

It took time, there were a few more awkward and poorly-run Sunday night meetings at the Tavern and–according to the gossip that spread through Presidio quicker than the flu–he had a couple mis-steps when it came to his word choice. Leonard never would have expected Jim to be capable of compromising on his vehement anti-Starfleet rhetoric. It was possible he had taken the route of just shutting up about it rather than actually changing his mind, but still. It surprised him when he finally sat in the Tavern on a Sunday night and saw that Jim had won them over. Jim, of all people, this scrappy former criminal who’d been such a unique flavor of fucked-up when Leonard met him that he’d assumed it was a permanent state of being. Now he sat wrong-ways on a wooden chair with his arms folded over the back, in his tight black shirt with his nice-boy haircut and his fully-open eyes, and managed to hold a conversation with 20, 30, sometimes 40 or more people at a time. The kind of conversation that gradually raised the energy in the room every week until they all left in groups, laughing and talking at even higher volumes about how excited they were to get back out into space. Jim had done that. Had given them their excitement, their hope. Leonard was pretty sure he didn’t even know all that he was accomplishing with his little meetings, with his coordinated camping trips out to the Enterprise that had him up at the crack of dawn to assemble everybody, that required him to raise his voice when he spoke until he almost sounded like a different person.

Leonard wasn’t as effective at lying to himself as he used to be. A high-stress lifestyle typically helped; those two things went hand-in-hand, in his experience. His and Jocelyn’s relationship taking a turn for the worse had so perfectly coincided with both of them starting their residencies after med school that he’d been able to put everything on the back burner and even add in a few extra back burners in his subconscious as more piled up. And then he blinked and he was sitting in a delivery room with a ring on his finger.

But Presidio was just so slow and wholesome, to a cloying degree on some days, and Leonard had the kind of space and free time that gave him no choice but to be honest with himself. He wasn’t just watching what Jim did, watching his transformation from angry smuggler into–jesus christ–potential captain of the fucking Enterprise–because it was fascinating. It was fascinating, but if Leonard wasn’t also attracted to him he wouldn’t be devoting this much of his mental energy to the man. He wouldn’t enjoy his undivided attention as much as he did, even more so now that Jim split his time between the Tavern and the Enterprise and they no longer saw each other every evening. He wouldn’t be standing motionless in the exam room at the clinic while he was supposed to be giving someone a check-up, zoned out of his mind and thinking about Jim Kirk instead and the fact that he was out there, two hours northeast, transforming a little more by the hour. 

“Doctor?”

Leonard flinched. He was holding the tricorder in his hands that he must have turned around to pull out of the cabinet at least a full three minutes before this. 

“Sorry. I don’t know where I went just now.”

He knew exactly where he went. And where he was bound to go next. The pathetic reality: wherever Jim was going.

-

It turned out to be easier to venture back inside the co-op than Gaila expected. She thought she was going to have to force herself to go in, avert her eyes from the people she saw once she was in there, maybe cover them completely with her hand and call out for Nyota until she found her friend and could make her escape. 

She was being dramatic. She knew that now. 

First of all she’d gotten to know a bunch of the co-op people because they came out to the Enterprise with her and Jim. In fact she had the privilege of bossing them around half the time in the engine room, because somehow Scotty had made it to the level of Chief Engineer on a ship as big as the Enterprise and never learned how to effectively shout loud enough to be heard. He was even worse with telling people what they were doing wrong. He’d started to call his and Gaila’s dynamic during the stardrive repair days their good-cop-bad-cop routine. Gaila didn’t like being a cop at all, honestly. She would have picked any other theoretical profession, but she did like that it made them sound like they were buddies. 

And even though she was bad cop, everyone who recognized her as she climbed through the strange floors of the co-op smiled and waved. She still hadn’t figured out what the hell they did in this building. She let that question work in the back of her mind as she scanned each room for Nyota. The mess hall, the kitchen, rooms full of bunks, storage, those things were obvious. Some sort of lounge where people were sitting around and talking. Another sort of lounge where nobody was talking and Pavel lifted his head from a table in the back where he sat with some random guy and mouthed the words help me. A room with a big table and a serious looking meeting going on around it, where everyone lifted their heads when Gaila opened the door and stuck her head into the room. She gave them a thumbs-up and went back out into the hall. Finally on the fourth floor, of course the last floor of the building and therefore the last one she checked, she found the labs, and behind the fourth door she opened she found Nyota.

Each door had been marked, just with someone’s handwriting, that specified what they were working on on the inside. Nyota hadn’t been behind the doors that said energy or supplies or mapping. Gaila found her behind the door that said comms. 

The room was crowded with tech, unlike most of Presidio which Gaila had started to think of, especially compared to the inside of the Enterprise, as hilariously analog. Along the far wall there were a couple people standing at lab tables and working on something, bits and pieces covering the surface, tools in their hands. The kind of work Gaila could have been doing here all along, she realized and then tried not to think about for more than a few seconds–instead of what she had chosen to do. Without meaning to she crossed the room to get a closer look. They were working on satellites, or parts of them. Small ones made from recycled pieces of equipment. If she had to guess–pieces of Presidio’s old surface rover she’d heard stories about but had never caught a glimpse of. 

“Oh, hey Gaila,” one of the people at the table said, when they caught her peeking over their shoulder. Gaila was pretty sure their name was Mac, or something like that. She might have been standing too close.

“Satellites?” she asked.

“Yep.”

“They look like they’re gonna be small.”

“Eh. Big satellites. Who needs ‘em?”

She stepped away and resumed her mission, the whole reason she came here. Nyota was sitting at a table in the corner, which was also the corner of the building itself, lined with some of the only windows Gaila had seen in here. And she’d been so absorbed in what she was doing in that corner that she hadn’t noticed yet that Gaila was in the room, even with Mac saying her name out loud.

Gaila pulled up a chair next to her. In front of Nyota was a whole lineup of comms tech, haphazardly stacked on its improper table. She had an audio unit in one ear. An older model than the ones Gaila had come across (read: stolen on Galileo’s behalf). She looked like she knew exactly what she was doing as she adjusted the dials and flipped switches. The sight fascinated her, at first. Seeing Nyota in a completely different context, doing something that Gaila hadn’t known she could do. But then Gaila remembered that she knew almost nothing about her. If she’d been a better friend to Nyota maybe the sight of her in the comms lab flipping switches wouldn’t have been a surprise at all. 

That was the whole point she’d come into the co-op, actually.

When Nyota realized who’d just sat down she let her hands fall to the surface of the table. Her smile was bright.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. Not because she didn’t want Gaila to be right there sitting next to her, but because she no doubt recognized that this was the second time Gaila had set foot in here since they came to Presidio. Nyota had been living here for months, had been in and out of every corner of the campus. Had come out to the farm to see Gaila and even spent time working with them in the greenhouses every once in a while. Gaila had never returned the favor.  

“I just came to hang out,” Gaila answered, and it made Nyota smile even wider. So it felt bad when she followed it up with her reasoning, even though she’d decided on the long walk back to Presidio that she needed to say this, that someone needed to say these things to Nyota. 

“I’ve been kind of a bad friend, I think.”

Nyota didn’t argue. Her smile faded. She was listening closely, her face open and understanding in a way that made it easier for Gaila to keep talking from there. Nyota had always been good at that sort of thing.

“You’ve been doing so much to keep us in each other’s lives since we got here, and I don’t think anyone has said anything to you about it, but I know we’d be upset if you weren’t doing it. If it was up to the four of us we would probably just let ourselves drift apart.”

“That’s true,” Nyota said.

“But even before that, I…” Gaila rubbed her palms together in her lap. They were sweating. Had she ever had a conversation like this before? With someone other than Jim, someone she couldn’t just treat poorly whenever she was in a bad mood and know that they’d keep coming back? Was everyone else in this room listening and thinking about how bad she was at this? She was bad at this. She had to close her eyes to get the rest of her point out.

“I don’t know anything about you. I’ve been letting you do everything and feeling like we’re such good friends, but good friends both put effort in. I’ve put no effort in. That’s on me.”

It was almost an apology. Pretty much as close as she ever got to one. She didn’t say the word sorry a lot, even to Jim. But Nyota was smiling and her eyes had softened and she kind of was looking at Gaila like she’d just heard something she had been waiting to hear. She reached over and wrapped one arm around her, pulled her closer in a sort of side-hug that probably looked awkward to everyone else in the room, but to Gaila felt distinctly like she was being forgiven, like her apology hadn’t been too much of a disaster. 

Gaila took a deep breath after she was released. She had to think of something to say next, before Nyota took over with her effortless conversation style and this turned into yet another interview of how things were going back at the Enterprise. Things were the same, anyway: in progress. Gaila could rattle off benign details about what they’d been able to get done over the last few days but none of that really mattered. 

When she did come up with a question to ask Nyota it came out so fast that it sounded weirdly urgent. 

“So what are you doing?”

“Right now, trying to find the ship,” Nyota explained. One of her hands went back to the frequency dials. “Jim is over there doing the same thing. Our ultimate goal is to get Presidio back online in general, so that they can communicate with any passing ships and maybe modernize this place a little.”

“That’s what the satellites are for,” Gaila said to herself.

“Exactly. If we get even a couple of small ones in orbit, at most parts of the day they should be able to bounce the frequencies from the co-op and send them through the upper atmosphere.”

“I guess eventually in the future there could be passing ships that aren’t just smugglers.”

Nyota stared at her. Her eyes were wide like something Gaila said had fascinated her. 

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said. Now she looked almost amused. “Just–optimism is a good look on you.”

“Oh, barf.”

“I’m just saying.”

Gaila shook her head, hoping the movement might help her change the subject. She thought back to her goal of getting to know Nyota, being a real friend. 

“You were doing comms before, right?”

“Oh yeah. Just as an Ensign on the Gallant, but I think the kind of ship we were running I ended up doing more than my job title was supposed to entail.”

“I think that’s true on every ship.”

Nyota laughed. “You’re probably right.” Her hands were still working as she talked, like they were processing and responding to information without needing any help from her conscious mind. Then they paused. “Wait, I’m getting something.”

She leaned back in her chair. “Guys, I’m getting something!”

The handful of other people in the room all crowded around the table. Gaila leaned close to Nyota’s ear, the side with the earpiece in, even though within the next few seconds Nyota changed the output settings and the fuzz of the comms channel played out loud for everyone to hear.

She turned the dial a little more. In and out. The fuzz fluctuated like a wave. And then–an unmistakable voice came through.

“Presidio–you–me–Anyone–?”

Nyota made some more adjustments.

“Presidio, can you hear me? Anyone out there?”

“Yuri, can you make a note of those frequency settings?” Nyota asked the man standing behind her, and then she pressed a button on the side of her earpiece and said, “We hear you loud and clear, Jim.”

“Hell yeah. How do I sound?”

“You sound great.”

“Let me do a test for file transfer.”

“Standing by.”

Over the next few minutes everyone turned from the table in the corner and watched the comms screen on the wall next to them, waiting for the files to show up. At first all they could see were the frequency readings, which Yuri had saved in the system and titled Enterprise. 

Finally a file set showed up. Somebody in the room whooped.

“What is this?”

“Some folder Joseph told me to track down. A bunch of different logs about the same incident on the Enterprise involving a tribble problem and a hallucinogenic viral infection in the same week. You’ll have fun with this.”

Nyota watched as Yuri checked the folder on the screen, waited for him to look up again and nod at her.

“Files are all intact.”

“Ready for my close-up.”

“Adding visual input to the channel,” Nyota said, “I hope.”

Everyone but Nyota left the table this time to stand in front of the screen, where they’d installed their own visual input sensors. Waited another few minutes. The display was fuzzy at first and the picture went in and out for almost a minute while Nyota kept adjusting the settings, and then they were looking at Jim’s face all the way from the bridge of the Enterprise.

This time, everyone cheered. Even Gaila. 

Jim was smiling at them, his arms crossed over his chest. He had a couple people on the bridge with him, seated around the edges at the different control panels. Gaila couldn’t believe how in charge he looked. How he also still looked like himself. How he’d made it to this point without doing anything that struck her as weird and out-of-character for him to do. Even now, the way he was talking to all of them in the comms room with these sentences that were half planning for the future and half encouragement, he was still Jim. And when he realized Gaila was in the room he winked at her, let that self-deprecating expression he always used to make cross over his face for a second, the one where he rolled his eyes up towards the ceiling and frowned a little and then smiled. 

When Gaila could finally look away from the mind-blowing sight that was captain Jim on the bridge of the Enterprise, she realized that Nyota was still sitting by herself at that table in the corner, leaning as far back as she could without leaving behind the controls. 

She could look at Jim later. She went over to the table, sat back down at the chair next to Nyota, and pulled her into another side-hug. 

“It’s all coming together,” she said, and Nyota laughed out loud.

“Oh my god, who are you?”

-

Another day of hiking out to the Enterprise, another morning where Jim woke up way too fucking early. He felt retroactive disappointment at the most recent coffee plant failure over at the greenhouse. He decided he hadn’t been upset enough about it at the time. He scrubbed his face with his hands, got dressed in a daze, and made his way downstairs and out to the street.

“Morning sunshine.”

“Holy shit.”

Jim practically jumped, was only saved from falling down the final few steps and onto his ass because the staircase was narrow enough for him to collapse against the wall. “Jia, what the fuck.”

“You said you were leaving at 0500. Here I am.”

“You want to come dig the saucer out of the ground with us?”

She was bundled up like he’d never seen her, and maybe he hadn’t. She seemed to exist at all times in the kitchen, over the stove with a watchful expression and one or more wooden utensils in her hand ready to strike. A few times the four of them sat out in the dining room together, aprons still on, usually to just talk shit and stay up too late. But, Jim realized now, he’d never seen Jia leave the building. She had a piece of fabric tied around her head like a scarf so that only her face was visible, strands of her hair peeking out across her forehead. The rest of her disappeared into one of the giant overcoats, the ones that were an unmistakable signal of the original team of Presidio scientists because they were the only people who had them. She handed Jim his breakfast. 

She made these nutrition bars. Little bricks with all kinds of ingredients mixed and pressed together. They looked dystopian as hell but they kept Jim going for hours. This batch was on the sweeter side, spotted with dried bits of the fruit they made their wine with. Jim forgot she hadn’t answered his question until they were outside and halfway across Presidio, waiting at the co-op for the rest of today’s group.

“Wait,” he said with his mouth full, and then took another full minute to finish chewing. “You didn’t answer my question. Are you really coming out to dig holes?”

She shook her head. It was still dark outside. Her face reflected the light from the upper-floor co-op windows like a little moon. “No, Jim,” she deadpanned. “I’m not going to dig your hole, give it up.”

Jia’s voice was genuine when she explained, “I’ve been going back and forth with Cruz, one of the main guys over at the greenhouses. You’ve met him. We decided it’s time to actually go and look at the situation onboard the ship. There’s a big room that he says was being used to store exotic plants, mostly for fun, but it sounds like it has potential.”

“Potential for what?”

She smiled at him. “You think I’m gonna let you go back to hunting down replicator credits once you’ve got a ship’s worth of mouths to feed? Betray our anti-replicator manifesto?”

Jim felt stupid for taking another bite while she talked, because he couldn’t respond to that for another minute. He hoped the shock on his face was appropriate in the meantime because it had faded to something like confusion once he could finally ask,

“You’d leave Presidio?”

She shrugged. Her oversized shoulders in her oversized coat. “I want to fight the good fight. You need someone onboard who can do what I learned how to do here. Food isn’t just survival, it’s community, you know. It’s how we managed to build all this.”

Jim wanted to pick her up and spin her around. He wanted to get on his knees and worship her for the decision she’d made, for what it meant for the Enterprise–for what it meant to Jim. It meant that someone believed in his insane dream enough to leave everything they knew and everything they’d worked for behind. Someone like Jia, who never imagined themselves living on a starship full time, who came out here for another reason altogether. Struck dumb by the presence of his overwhelming gratitude and then silenced by the fact that people were already starting to come out from the co-op, squinting and yawning, he settled for leaning over to kiss her cold forehead that peeked out from her scarf. She laughed. The two of them reached into one of her bags and started distributing nutrition bars as everyone assembled in the street. 

The morning light melted across the sky on their way to the farm. Jim felt that light spread into his own body all morning. The entire hike through the woods he felt like he was floating on air.

-

“Yep. It’s as I predicted.” Doctor M’Benga had been pressing the tips of his fingers along Nyota’s lymph nodes, making her wince. Finally he let go and placed one hand on her shoulder instead. “Congratulations. You’ve got Presidio Fever.”

“Congratulations?”

“Consider it a rite of passage. Although not everybody is susceptible.” 

Nyota was in a daze. She’d started to feel off last night and then tossed and turned for hours, coated in her own sweat. By the time the lights turned on in the bunk room she knew it wasn’t a coincidence. And as soon as everyone else saw her they sent her trudging over to the clinic. With every passing moment she felt weaker in every sense of the term, until she was incapable of parsing out whatever Doctor M’Benga meant and just waited for him to explain. Her eyelids were heavy. Her whole body was heavy, actually. She might fall over in a few minutes. 

“The moisture in the air allows for these tiny spores produced by the moss to travel. We are all inhaling them pretty frequently. With enough exposure it is possible to get sick, something like an allergic reaction, but your body will create a tolerance after a few days of feeling bad. Then you can breathe in as many spores as you want.”

“Lucky me.” 

He gave her a couple pats on her shoulder before he stepped away from the biobed.

“So there’s really nothing you can do?”

“Well, you’re going to stay in the ward until it passes, so that I know you’re breathing filtered air while you fight it off. I’ll give you something for the headache and get you on a fluid IV, but I no longer have the kind of supplies that would allow me to get you feeling normal right away. I have to be careful with my remaining supplies these days, I can’t dispense medicines as liberally as we all used to. You understand.”

She did. Not that it made the fever any easier to withstand.

Nyota got her pick of the beds in the empty ward. She chose one in the center, where her view on the opposite wall was a piece of artwork that they must have put up when this room was for the scientists to sleep in. A big landscape of Presidio when it was first built. No moss on the buildings or up the front of the dam. No big co-op building. The colors were richer, idyllic in a way. The waterfall above them that fed down into the reservoir wasn’t obscured by mist and fog. Her feverish eyes liked to look at it while she laid there alone with her IV drip. 

Ever since she left home for the Academy she always hated getting sick. It helped that it never lasted long, when there was a fully-stocked medbay nearby. During those years she would only feel bad for a few hours at most. Sometimes she would get through it so quick that the emotional toll didn’t even arrive. 

And then, after almost a year of being a passage companion, she caught something right as she was delivering her client to their home planet. It was nastier than this. Bad enough that she had a few dark thoughts, from the bathroom floor, that she’d caught something terminal. 

She checked herself into a private medical facility the next morning and spent all of her earnings up to that point on treatment alone. Once she was feeling better she’d had to stick around an extra two weeks and trade translation work in exchange for the debt that her room and board put her in. 

But before that, when she was lying in that hospital bed for days on a planet she’d never been to before, surrounded by strangers and referred to only by her patient intake number, that secondary part of getting sick hit her in full force. The one she always hoped to avoid. That being any kind of sick, since she left the planet where she grew up, also made her deeply, desperately homesick too. Nobody ever took care of her or even spoke to her in the right way. Even if she got better in their care it wasn’t the same, because it wasn’t coming from the hands of her mother or grandmothers or aunties or cousins or her school friends who stopped by to check on her if she missed even a day. Even if the bed was comfortable it wasn’t right, it wasn’t her parents’ bed where she got to watch holos and the sheets always got changed without her remembering anyone forcing her to get up. Nyota was far enough from her childhood to wonder if each illness she came down with would be the first one that didn’t make her ache for her family. But she was close enough to her childhood that it still hadn’t happened yet. 

She liked Doctor M’Benga. And he checked on her in between his patients for the rest of the day, and she could tell he cared about how she was feeling each time he asked, but it felt like she maybe wasn’t at the point yet where that would be enough. Her heart still felt empty as the hours went by. The bed felt wrong.

The first night alone in the ward was long. Sweat covered her body and she fought with the sheets. Her head insisted on pounding even with the medicine she’d been given. Her jaw and neck were swollen and her body felt weak and aching. All from a bunch of little microscopic spores. 

In the morning, she drifted in and out of consciousness in the daylight, having feverish dreams of her mother’s singing, her grandmother’s hands, her father sitting in bed next to her keeping her company all at once. Someone was speaking to her, maybe a cousin or something, it wasn’t a voice she remembered hearing when she was little. She followed it, meaning to figure out who it was, but her attention pulled her into wakefulness and she was back on another planet, all alone in the ward. 

Not alone, actually. She opened her eyes and saw Tamara with a chair pulled up next to her bed. 

“Hi,” Nyota said. Her voice sounded as weak as she felt. She pushed her hair away from her forehead with cold, shaking hands. 

“Presidio Fever got you, huh.”

“Doctor M’Benga said it’s my rite of passage.”

“If he’s making jokes then he must have fully repressed his memory of when half of the Enterprise crew got it over a span of like, three months. Including him.”

“Yikes.”

“But now you’ve got two doctors to watch over you,” she said, and then held up an aluminum container with two hands. “And the three of us. Anusha got to work on this as soon as we heard. You think you can sit up?”

By the time Nyota pushed herself all the way up to a seat, Tamara had already shoved extra pillows behind her back and set a tray over her lap. The container opened to reveal some kind of soup. Savory and heavily spiced. The scent made it past her congested nose and made her want to eat for the first time in two days. 

“You’ve got Presidio Fever, and this is Presidio Fever Soup. Only for special occasions.”

“It smells great.”

“It really does help. Not just because soup is nice when you’re sick, but we figured out that the spice we scrape out from the inside of the tree bark helps fight against the spores.”

Tamara sat with her while she ate, told her stories about all the weird things that came up back when the scientists were first adjusting to Presidio. Spore allergies and slipping in mud. Jumping in the reservoir because none of them thought the water could possibly be that much colder than the air. Almost going into shock from how cold the water was and needing the arms of two people just to pull one swimmer back out. Taking the surface rover–back when they still had fuel for it–to the highest elevation spot they could find nearby to see if it was possible to catch the sunrise. She spoke in a way that didn’t necessitate any responses out of Nyota other than the occasional word or two, and it made the morning pass and her headache fade from her mind. She was able to just sit and eat her soup and let her attention dive into Tamara’s descriptions of old Presidio, of the kind of work Starfleet used to promise and actually deliver on. Of the joy of exploration, of discovery. She could feel Tamara’s nostalgia creeping into the room, mixing with the comfort that Nyota knew was her own, just from having someone here at her bedside when she felt so awful. 

Nyota hadn’t spent much time with Betazoids. She’d spent no time interacting with Tamara one-on-one. When Tamara cleared the breakfast tray from her lap and hugged her goodbye and she felt that spark of energy from her touch, the genuine care she had for Nyota, she understood why the Tavern had become the center of everything. How it became the glue that held Presidio together. 

-

Leonard was her next visitor, wearing both a black Fleet undershirt layered underneath his scrubs and his old flannel layered on top. He just greeted her with the word morning and went to work checking on her vitals and replacing her IV and loading a hypospray with another set of meds for her head. Nyota wouldn’t have expected anything more than that, she’d grown familiar with his bedside manner. The lack of unnecessary comments was actually a sign of his friendship. He was more chatty with strangers because he felt like he had to be in order to put them at ease. At the very end of that spectrum was some secret routine he saved just for Jim, where he started every treatment by making fun of him, but Nyota hadn’t reached that one yet. Maybe it was for Jim and only for Jim. The dynamic between those two left her with questions sometimes. 

And then she wondered if there was a level beyond silent friendship but before teasing, one that she’d been promoted to without knowing it, because he finished doing what he had to do and stood there for a few seconds, and then said,

“You changed your hair.”

Nyota looked up at him. Her body moved slowly, wading through the water of the fever. 

“Yeah,” she said. “Tamara braided it. I was complaining about it being dirty.”

He nodded. 

“Looks good.”

“Thanks.” She took in the strange expression on Leonard’s face. The tension that had been in his voice. 

“You don’t like her, do you.”

“I have nothing against her.”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not you like her.”

“You know, you’re too smart for your own good.”

Leonard crossed to the other side of her bed and collapsed into the chair Tamara had left there. 

“It’s not that I don’t like her.”

“Okay,” Nyota said, shifting against the pillows behind her. She felt a welcome little rush of energy inside of her at the conversation topic coming up. A conversation not about her fever, for one, but one that also suggested that Leonard McCoy was about to confide in her for the first time ever. “What is it?”

He took a long time to respond. And then his response was yet another twist.

“She’s distracting him.”

“So this is about Jim?” Nyota let her eyes wander around the room, away from the uncomfortable form that was Leonard in the chair with his arms crossed tight over his chest. “Interesting.”

“I only mean that he’s got a lot on his plate right now,” he blurted out, “this whole…Enterprise thing. He’s so busy it’s like he doesn’t exist. I can’t believe he’s finding the time to even–” Leonard stopped himself, breathed out in an almost frustrated-sounding huff. And maybe because he knew Nyota was going to come up with an equally perceptive follow-up question about why he might be so concerned about what Jim does with his time and what–or who–he has on his plate, he rapidly deflected. 

“You meet anyone, here?”

Nyota laughed. She couldn’t help it. She almost wondered if this was some sort of fever dream where Leonard sat at her bedside to talk about their love lives. But even a fever couldn’t come up with something this absurd. It had to be real. 

“Just friends so far. You meet anyone?”

“I don’t date patients.”

“So you don’t date ever.”

“No, I guess not.”

“I’m dying to know your type.”

Leonard squinted at her. 

“What?” she asked. “You brought it up. This is your conversation topic.”

He opened his mouth to argue, and then gave up. Left the chair altogether. Nyota had fun watching him try to brush off how awkward he felt about the corner he’d backed himself into. It was fun to remember that behind all the layers of what the war had done to them, once those were peeled back, they were all just people doing people things. Having petty drama and getting flustered about it. The Human element had never left, it was just hidden below the needs of survival. A lot of her clients used to talk to her about their relationship drama, too.

“Holler if you need me.”

“Okay, Leonard,” she said, and when he glanced back and saw the way she was smiling at him, he grumbled a couple syllables of nonsense on his way through the door. 

Nyota couldn’t wait for their next interaction. She gladly spent the afternoon unpacking their first one to distract herself from the fever burning her inside out.

-

The next morning, Nyota woke up to the pale winter light through the windows at the far wall, and Pavel sitting in the chair next to her bed. She found herself smiling so wide at the sight of him. The fever must have been making her loopy. He was glaring down at a padd in his hands, his socked feet propped up at the edge of her bed. 

“Oh,” he said when he lifted his head next and saw that she was looking at him. “Good morning.”

“Hi, Pavel.”

“They sent me with breakfast for you. It’s cold now.”

“That porridge they make at the co-op doesn’t taste much better warm, anyway.”

He breathed out a little laugh through his nostrils at that. Nodded in agreement. When Nyota sat up he handed her the container of almost-oatmeal and then a spoon. She watched him as she ate. Hunched over in his chair, rounding his shoulders as much as he possibly could, peering down into his padd like the words he found in there bothered him. He smoothed out his expression every time he glanced up at Nyota, but he didn’t seem to mind her attention being on him. He was more fun to watch right now than that landscape across from her bed. And he was here at all. That made Nyota feel warm in a good way for the first time since her fever kicked in.

“Thanks for hanging out with me,” she said. “I’m lonely in here.”

“I’d rather be here than in that building.”

“How’s it going with Mitchell?”

Pavel sighed, leaned back in his chair. It made his body stretch back out to his full length. He had grown a little since they’d gotten here, in both length and size. Nyota had to look up at him now when they stood next to each other. 

“He’s making me study all this shit I don’t want to study.”

“What would you want to study, if it was up to you?”

“I don’t know.” He laughed once. “Maybe nothing. Without being threatened I don’t know if I have any motivation.”

Nyota had learned her lesson with Pavel more than once. Even though she wanted, desperately, to unpack that–the idea that he’d been threatened into obedience back on Istaar, that the construction of his expansive mind had been rooted in fear–he’d freeze up and retreat if she pulled on that thread. So she had to leave it hanging there. She also knew that if she went down the route of encouragement he’d only fight against it like a cat held over a bath, scramble back into the safety of his teenage angst. She responded with what she knew worked.

“What’s he got you doing now?”

“Particle physics,” Pavel answered, “specifically as it relates to transporters.”

“You don’t think that’s interesting?”

“I think it’s more information than I need to know. I already covered the basics and Scotty is going to teach me the rest once the transporter on the Enterprise is working.”

Nyota set her half-empty container down in her lap. 

“You know in my first year on the Gallant they had me do rotations. It’s how they figure out where to place junior officers. I spent like, a full month just working in the transporter room.”

Pavel grunted. He was looking at his padd again, holding it lazily in front of his face, but Nyota could see that his eyes weren’t focused. He was listening, he just didn’t want to make eye contact. 

“I mean it’s simple sometimes, but as soon as one variable is out of place it turns into this crazy problem-solving game. Trying to lock on to a moving target and energize at the exact second. Not everyone can do it. I couldn’t. I failed my proficiency test at the end of the rotation. Like, really failed. Luckily not with real people. It takes technical knowledge, but also just good reflexes. Fast calculations and risk-taking.”

“Hmm.”

“Kinda like how you used to be on Sweeper when you ran around from panel to panel to get all the settings right. I think you’d like it.”

“Maybe I would,” he conceded, and Nyota tried not to let her satisfaction look too obvious as he settled against the back of his chair, stretched his legs out even further across her mattress, and started reading again. 

When he left a few hours later, he offered to come back with her dinner. He said it like it was halfway between a statement and a question. Nyota said she’d like that. Her response hadn’t been crafted using her meticulous Pavel-speak. She really did just want him back in that chair for as long as he was willing to sit with her. 

-

On her third day of restless sleep and cold sweat, she lifted her face off of her pillow in the afternoon as she heard the unmistakable sound of the latest Enterprise group coming back to Presidio. They were laughing, yelling, joking around. The voices were muffled enough that she couldn’t single anyone out, but the chorus had become familiar over the last month or so. It gave her a swell of hope, weaker today than usual, but still there. She flipped her pillow over to the cool side and turned her head to rest the opposite cheek on it. She fell back asleep for a little while. 

She woke up to the sensation of being pushed and prodded, almost until she fell off the mattress. When she opened her eyes, Gaila was sitting next to her, her legs hanging sideways off the bed, her coat still on. She carried that rich smell from outside, the smell of the plants and the cold air that Nyota had forgotten about during her week in the ward. She was grinning. 

“Hi there.”

Nyota rubbed her eyes and pushed herself up onto her elbows. Gaila pulled her pillow up behind her to help her stay propped up.

“Nice hair.”

“Tamara did it.”

“Think she could do mine?”

“I think so. She’s got curls like you do.”

“Sorry I couldn’t come sooner.”

“You didn’t know. You guys were busy out there.”

“What have you been up to?” Gaila asked, and Nyota breathed out a laugh. Her head felt heavy and she let it fall against Gaila’s shoulder. 

The answer to that had to be obvious. She didn’t look capable of anything right now except lying in bed waiting for someone to come in and talk to her or bring her food or replace her IV. But she loved the questions Gaila asked her, even the obvious ones, because of the sentiment behind them more than anything. Each one was proof that Gaila was reaching in her direction, now, teaching herself what it meant to be a friend. 

Nyota had interacted with a lot of people like Gaila, had called those people her friends even though she’d been carrying the friend part all by herself. None of them had ever recognized what Nyota was carrying and tried to level out the playing field in response. That was what made every conversation starter Gaila used lately, no matter how awkward she acted when she did it, feel so special. Made Nyota happy to answer every question even though half of them could have been extrapolated from the evidence in the room around them. After a while, anyway, they slipped into real conversation. Nyota could see when Gaila felt that transition, when her posture relaxed and she looked like she was enjoying the company instead of studying it like a scientist attempting to communicate with another species. When they started laughing. And then she even forgot, herself, that she was sick in this bed, that they weren’t just hanging out in someone’s room. 

She only remembered that they were in the ward when Leonard walked in and immediately got worked up. 

“Are you wearing your boots on my patient’s bed?” Leonard demanded. “Are you out of your mind?”

Nyota laughed, and then laughed even harder as she watched Gaila scramble off the bed to take her boots off which only left more muddy footprints across the floor and only resulted in Leonard’s face getting more red. 

-

“Jim,” Nyota said. She was sitting up and fully awake when he walked in. The fever was starting to let go, it only seemed to linger in her head, behind her eyes. Her body felt kind of reborn. No more sweating or shaking. She’d wrapped a blanket from the bed next to her around her shoulders. 

“Hey you.”

He leaned over to kiss her cheek. He was carrying that wooden tray in his hands that Tamara always pulled out from somewhere when she stopped by with more soup.

“Anusha sent me with this. She said to tell you not to share it with me.”

“Thanks.”

“Course.”

Nyota started eating the second he set it in front of her, before his hands even let go of the tray completely. As soon as she smelled that mix of spices her instincts just took over. She realized she was hungrier than ever. She flat out ignored Jim for the next few minutes while he sat there in the designated visitor chair. Maybe once or twice she caught herself for a second and smiled at him with her mouth full. He waited for her to finish. Not that he had to wait very long at all. 

“And I–” he paused for dramatic effect once he had her attention, “brought you this.”

“From the Enterprise?”

“Yep. We’re gonna be matching. I thought you’d have fun playing around with it in the meantime.”

He pressed it into her hand. It looked exactly the same as the one she used to wear on the Gallant. The last comms earpiece model the Fleet produced before the war ended. It wasn’t just meant to connect to the comms panel on the ship’s bridge, but she could dial it in to any frequencies that were within range. Audio input and output. Recording capabilities. She loved that thing. She’d actually–and this felt very rebellious at the time–stolen her old one off the Gallant when she left, only for it to get stolen from her in turn while she was on a different passenger ship. She looked at replacements in various marketplaces but never bothered to get one. None of the older models had come close to that last one.

She reached up to her right ear and set it into place. The sense memory made her shiver. 

“You like it?”

“It’s good to be back,” she answered. Jim smiled. He smiled a lot more, now. Real smiles, not sarcastic ones. It looked really good on him.

“We’re gonna be lucky to have you,” he said. “We always have been. I still can’t believe you saw our weird little ship and actually wanted to stay.”

“I saw the potential.”

“I guess you were right in the end.”

“Not just of the four of you put together, you know. The potential in you, specifically.”

“Are you flirting with me?”

Jim was deflecting. Nyota could tell she’d hit something on the deeper side. So she held her hands up in surrender.

“I’m just saying. You’ll be a good captain.”

Doctor M’Benga came in a second later and saved Jim from finding a way to shoot that assertion down. When he saw Nyota sitting up in bed, his eyes brightened. He turned up the lights in the room. 

“Well, you’re looking healthy if I’ve ever seen it.”

“I don’t know, Doc,” Jim said. He was still looking at her, now with his chin resting on his hand over the armrest. “I think she’s still a little delirious.”

“Maybe she needs some more rest, then. Leo wants to talk to you anyway about the state of the medbay.”

Jim rolled his eyes. “I’m never going to convince him to just hike out there and look at it himself, am I.”

“You could try using the word ‘please’,” Nyota offered. She knew what else he could try. She bit at her bottom lip so she wouldn’t laugh and then have to explain what was funny.

“Oh, he would like that,” Doctor M'Benga said.

“He would, wouldn’t he,” Jim said to himself, pretending to think it over. “No, I think I’ll bitch at him some more instead. Thanks guys.”

“So,” Doctor M’Benga sat on the edge of her bed, crossing his arms over his lap. “How are you feeling today, really?”

Nyota smiled. She had her earpiece on and her hair newly braided after Tamara visited again last night. Gaila had slept in the ward with her two nights ago and they’d watched a holo on Joseph’s padd that made them laugh until they couldn’t breathe. Gaila even let her fall asleep with her head on her shoulder for a while. She’d been fed soup and oatmeal like clockwork, each time delivered into her hands or her lap before she’d even been hungry for long. She’d asked Pavel to give her a summary of what he’d learned about particle physics and he’d reluctantly complied, and then come back every day for three consecutive days to do it again with his new material. Leonard was taking the time to sit down and complain to her about Presidio unprompted every time he checked on her. The entire week had been a journey through the worst fever she’d ever had, interrupted by this revolving cast of visitors to her bedside. So she told the truth.

“I’ve never felt better.”

“Now that makes me happy.”

Chapter Text

The main thing holding Leonard back from going out and to actually see the Enterprise with his own two eyes, of course, was pride. It was a two hour hike in the freezing cold. Even on a good day Leonard knew he would still lag behind everyone else. The winter here made his leg that already tended to ache by the end of the day start aching first thing in the morning. During their days-long walk to Presidio months ago Leonard had pushed himself past his limit just to keep up with everyone else. The rest of them had all been weighed down by bags and slower from hunger and fatigue and a little bit of hopelessness so keeping up hadn’t been as much of a challenge. Also, at that time, continuing to walk meant staying alive. He’d been able to force his pain and exhaustion to the back of his mind when it meant survival, but this would be different.

These big groups of young people (well, younger than him, most of them) who marched out into the wilderness every week, laughing with each other as they went, swinging bags of food rations and carrying homemade shovels, were bound to leave him limping on his own. Not even at the back of the group. Probably hundreds of meters behind the back of the group. And if he was being honest he just didn’t care to experience that if he didn’t have to. 

The problem was that Jim was catching onto his avoidance and especially onto his lack of a decent excuse. He couldn’t claim to be busy, not when he and Joe averaged one genuine medical concern per week and spent most of their time with Joe’s trainees or doing benign, routine check-ups. The baby kept them busier, at least, but nowhere close to the kind of schedule that wouldn’t allow Leonard to leave for a day. And Leonard didn’t want to admit the real reason he’d been putting it off. And then Jim got fed up and said the words what, do you want me to beg? Do you want me to get on my knees and beg you to come? and Leonard was so scared that he would actually follow through on it that he finally conceded and then kicked Jim out of the clinic because he didn’t want to look at him again until he’d forgotten the entire interaction. 

Two days later he was up at some godforsaken hour eating some bizarre approximation of a granola bar and following the herd of coats and beanies and shovels towards that famous spot where the USS Enterprise was still buried in the dirt. 

As he expected, he got slower as the hike picked up and the morning broke across the sky. 

Except Jim walked next to him the entire time, to the point where he must have been forcing himself to dial back his pace. He paid no mind to the fact that they got closer and closer to the back of the group as they went. He kind of acted like it was on purpose, the way he’d greet everyone who passed them by throughout the morning. And watching Jim schmooze made the whole thing even weirder. He had nothing but enthusiasm and smiles for all these insignia-clad people, some of whom slapped him on the back as they passed.

Each one of them used a different name. 

“Morning Kirk!”

“What’s up, barkeep.”

“Apron boy!”

“Hey Sweeper.”

“Lieutenant.”

“Good morning Jamesy.”

“Jimbo!”

“Give it to me, JT.”

That last one was accompanied by a high five. A solid number of them included high fives or quick passing handshakes or waves or what looked like sarcastic two-finger salutes. Jim responded to everyone in kind, as if any and all of those names were the one he went by. At some point Leonard looked over at Jim, while still had a shadow of the smile he’d just given to two women who’d also called him JT, before they all but sprinted past them wielding their shovels in an absolutely unsafe manner if Leonard ever saw it. He couldn’t take it anymore.

“JT?” he asked. Some of Jim’s smile came back, then, and he shook his head. 

“Some of them were saying Captain Kirk and I told them to call me literally anything else. I might have been a little intense about it. They’re having too much fun now.”

“This whole crowd is acting like they’re at summer camp. Like y’all aren’t on your way to spend another two days digging holes.”

Jim held his hands up in surrender. “Scotty was the one that got the sea shanties thing going. Take that up with him.”

The nicknames thrown at Jim and the scattered singing only increased as everyone became more awake and the sky got brighter, but those things also coincided with Leonard trailing further behind the group, until the noise of it all became distant. All he heard was the off-beat pattern of his and Jim’s footsteps as they wove through the trees, balanced on roots, sank into mud. Leonard was just grateful he didn’t slip and fall. Because he knew that if he did Jim would have caught him. He could feel Jim’s eyes on him. His head started to tilt as the hike got steeper downhill and muddier. He was watching Leonard’s feet the entire time. 

By the time they made it to the part that Leonard knew was coming, from treating a number of twisted ankles and jammed wrists, his leg was more than bothering him. What he needed to do was just lie down for a while. He’d needed that for at least half an hour. Instead he was trying to climb over fallen tree trunks with his stiff leg in a manner that would draw as little attention as possible to his own clumsy discomfort. Jim kept insisting that he go first, and Leonard knew what he was doing. Saying you go ahead, Bones, I need a sec, I always have to push up on my elbows to get over that one. Directing him over each one as if he were the one who was struggling. Leonard wanted to be mad at him except that he knew he wouldn’t have accepted any other form of help, and the fact that Jim had caught onto that only gave him another sort of sensation that he had to shove into the darkness of his mind along with the whole get on my knees and beg bullshit. 

His final circle of hell that day was climbing the fucking rope ladder up to the closest airlock and then nearly falling on his ass as soon as one set of doors closed behind him and another set opened up and the internal gravity of the ship hit him. He was alone, by that point, which meant that after he caught himself against the wall of the corridor he slowly lowered down to the floor anyway, stretched out both legs in front of him, let his head fall back, and just breathed for a while. The temperature inside the ship was that standard starship climate-control pleasant. He didn’t have to look at his breath anymore. After a few minutes he could take his coat off and let it fall onto the floor next to him, pull of his hat and gloves and rub his face with his hands. He felt like he was breaking some sort of rule, just sitting on the floor doing nothing. He’d never been inside of a ship this size without his life being defined by constant chaos and the long list of rules meant to manage that chaos. He’d never just sat on the floor in the corridor and done nothing at all. 

It was fucking weird. 

Once he felt good again–and the warmer air actually made him feel pretty good, all things considered–he got back up to his feet and went to find one of those screens that could show him where the hell he was on the ship and how to get to the medbay. Not all of the systems were on. There was no always-listening computer to bark orders at which he could imagine used a supreme amount of power. But after walking around the corner he found what he was looking for. Then he found the lift. Then walked into the medbay he was meant to inherit during their ride back to Earth. 

The doors slid open and he found a new, bonus circle of hell: what happens to a medbay if the gravity gets shut off and then turned back on again. He turned the lights a little brighter and took in the absolute mess before him. Tried to imagine where everything was meant to go. None of his old medbays had ever been this big. Jim had said it looked ‘a little chaotic’ in here. Leonard wasn’t sure now if Jim had ever been inside this room and actually looked at it with his own two eyes. In fact, if he’d known that this was what was waiting for him at the Enterprise, he could have used it as a legitimate excuse all those times Jim asked why he didn’t want to come out here. The longer he looked around the room, feet slowly navigating through the wreckage, the worse it got. There were things that’d broken when they fell, leaving shattered pieces everywhere that he’d have to vacuum up, leaks and spills that sat in puddles on the walls for years with no internal gravity and then, from the looks of it, slid their way down to the floor once the gravity turned back on. Those spots he’d have to scrub at. And either he’d have to simultaneously start taking an inventory of the medical supplies as he cleaned them up off the floor or he would need to spend another full day on that alone. 

Leonard had no clue where to even begin to address how bad the medbay was, which starting point would be the least annoying for him to do. 

And then he found, among the piles of shit strewn about in Joe’s old office, a bunch of replicator credits, and by some miracle the replicator in there counted among the basic life support systems, and within minutes he was holding his first cup of coffee in almost half a year. 

By his final sip of it he had his sleeves pushed up to his elbows and the lights even brighter and he felt like even his eyes were capable of taking in more visual information than before. The messes started to sort themselves by priority. His heart was racing. He found himself looking forward to the prospect of scrubbing the wall with a sponge. The day started to fly past him in blissful monotony. 

“I told you once I dragged you out here you were going to have the time of your life, you control freak.”

Leonard had heard the doors open a minute or two ago. He figured it would be Jim, which was why he didn’t look up from where he’d crouched over with the hand-vac to get at the broken glass and debris caked underneath one of the biobeds. He shook his head at that comment. 

“If this is gonna be my medbay for a while it needs to be done right, is all.”

“So you think you’re gonna be able to work in here?”

“After the conditions you’ve made me work in?” He paused for a second, turned the vacuum setting higher to make sure it got everything, and then turned it off and started to stand up. 

“That’s like asking if I think I’m gonna be able to sleep in a real bed instead of outside in the dirt.”

“Hey, and I made you do that too, what a coincidence.”

Leonard’s confusion must have shown on his face in response to finally turning around and seeing Jim in a t shirt and a pair of those grey Fleet-issue sweats and just his bare feet. When they parted ways at the rope ladder this morning he’d been layered up with his all-weather and caked in mud. His current state gave off the impression that he’d been beamed onboard directly from his bunk. Jim saw the look on his face and shrugged. 

“I didn’t want to track mud through the ship. Especially not in here.”

“Well good.” Leonard had spent enough time cleaning up the tracks he left himself, and then, about halfway through his second cup of coffee, had decided to deep clean the mud off of his boots as if he wasn’t just going to wear them outside again two days from now. Jim’s method was smarter. Except the longer they stood there, something Leonard saw made him narrow his eyes. 

“Is that blood?”

“Oh,” Jim said, like he’d so easily forgotten about whatever had caused him to stain the hem of his shirt with his own blood. He held up his hands, turning them over. Leonard took a couple steps closer and saw that his palms were battered up to hell, cracked and raw all the way to the ends of his fingers. In a couple spots there were beads of fresh blood forming. 

“McKenna forgot his gloves at the co-op this morning. I gave him mine for the dig.”

“My god. Go sit down.”

“It looks worse than it is. They were too cold to actually hurt.”

Even as he insisted on spinning his this-is-nothing narrative like he always did, Jim still sat down on the edge of the nearest biobed, and held his hands out when Leonard came back with a dermal regen from the supply closet. The one he’d put in its proper place not even an hour ago, expecting that it’d live there until they made it up into space. He should have known better by now. 

He set it on a disinfect cycle first, which was the regen cycle that actually sucked. Standard dermal regen just tickled, maybe felt like pins-and-needles at its worst. But the disinfectant had a tendency to sting and, because Jim’s pain tolerance was lower now than it used to be, made him wince the entire time until Leonard honest-to-god felt guilty for doing something that hurt him. 

God. He was such a moron. 

He looked away from Jim’s face where his brows were pulled together and his eyes were closed and his expression wouldn’t look out of place in an altogether different and very much inappropriate context. Not that focusing on his hands helped Leonard stop his mind from wandering. Because his hands, callused from all of the ropes and climbing and digging, were connected to his forearms and by extension his arms, on display now that he was just wearing a t shirt in here. His arms that were bigger than they used to be. All of him was. The labor and the food had filled him out, added muscle and definition where he used to be scrawny and, at best, closer to something like wiry. Unfortunately now Leonard’s brain kept using the term sculpted. 

It really wasn’t fair that this asshole was changing so constantly and none of these physical or personality-type changes that kept cropping up had the decency to make him less attractive. Or to even be a lateral move in that sense. They all had to send Leonard further towards the edge. An edge which, if he had to give it a title, would be something along the lines of thinking about him after dark. At this point he was sticking his hand out into the space beyond it. Testing out just how bad it might be to venture out a little further. Figuratively.

Leonard was able to find his professionalism again once he could switch to the regular dermal regen cycle and Jim stopped making that face and stopped unconsciously flexing the muscles in his arms in discomfort. The tension drained out of Jim’s features and he looked tired, then. Leonard could see it around his eyes. He didn’t know how long he’d been in here. It could already be getting dark outside. 

“So y’all sleep onboard the ship now, or what?”

“Yeah,” Jim said. “You can just find an open bunk for tonight. Or feel free to take your time and claim the quarters you’ll want later. Put it in the manifest. Just nothing on the senior officers’ decks.”

Leonard glanced up at him from the regen.

“Nobody needs that much space for themselves,” he explained. “The biggest quarters are going to be for passengers only. Families and stuff.”

“Huh.”

“What.”

“Nothing, just…” he trailed off. He decided he didn’t want to say that’s actually really thoughtful because it would end up landing like an insult, like Leonard didn’t think he had it in him. So instead he just said, “you’re right.”

“I’m not saying we all have to double and triple up, there’s still a shit ton of singles, just…we don’t need private living rooms.”

“I went into the Captain’s quarters on the Atlantis once, when she called me in there for a medical emergency. She had two of those fake fireplaces. And a full size dining room.”

“Exactly my point.” Jim shook his head in disapproval of the whole thing. “Like why would I need a fireplace in my quarters. What, am I gonna shoot porn in there?”

Oh for fuck’s sake.

-

“So, here’s your problem.”

Gaila had walked Cruz all the way around to the back of the main farmhouse where the generators fanned out to feed power into the greenhouses. The whole spot hummed almost like a warp core and the air felt warmer and charged from the activity. She’d been spending her downtime in between Enterprise trips checking on all the wiring and the tech out here. Something of a parting gift. And also just something to do because she had trouble sleeping these days for wildly different reasons than she used to. Excitement, if that was even possible. She stayed up late pacing around the complex and peeking into the generators because of anticipation. Because of how bad she wanted to be out in space again with Jim. Because something good was coming in her life and she knew about it in advance. 

She stopped them in front of the wiring panel of the biggest generator right at the back of the building. It was the main indicator of post-war architecture, external generators. Buildings weren’t being assembled in a thousand sleek and perfect pieces anymore and shipped as cargo out to new settlements. People were learning just how obscured their own awareness of utilities like power and plumbing had been. Just how much space and time those things take to create. How ugly they can look and how much harder they are to fix without a built-in computer to announce what’s wrong.

The generators were good, they were just wired to each other in a way that created brownouts like clockwork over the winter. It had taken Gaila a lot of sleepless evenings spent either looking into the generators with a flashlight or lying in her lean-to and thinking through it to figure out why. The wires were ill-equipped for the voltage, for one. They were inefficiently ordered. As a result energy traveled through the whole network in inconsistent waves instead of a steady rate. 

She explained all of that to him and then, at his request, showed him step-by-step how she was fixing it in case something similar came up. She suggested a few ideas if what she was doing didn’t work in the end, half-formed explanations that other people would need to spend more time with to turn them into legitimate hypotheses. Cruz just kept asking her more questions and she just kept answering them. 

“We’re gonna miss you,” he finally said.

“Ha.” Gaila shook her head. That was how she always responded to a line like that. Or how she always used to, when the only person who ever said nice words to her used to be Jim. She realized her mistake with a surprising little pang of guilt, for shrugging Cruz off. She looked over at him, then, and the confusion on his face meant she couldn’t just drop it. Or she’d feel like an asshole. 

“Look,” she added. “I know I’m kind of an anti-social person.”

Cruz waved his hand, dismissing her not-apology. “That was never a problem. I like having people like you around.”

“People like me?”

“Sorry. Not that. I meant creative-minded sort of folks. Being quiet is part of the bargain. I know if you weren’t over in the corner lost in thought sometimes you wouldn’t be coming up with solutions so often. You’ve fixed a lot of the systems around here that just weren’t working. Look at what you’re doing now.” 

“Oh.”

Gaila didn’t know what to think about that. That she supposedly had an identity to these people who she assumed she’d been so distant from and closed off with. That they saw a trait in her other than damaged or broken. She didn’t know what she would say to Cruz even if she wanted to argue with him. And she realized she didn’t want to argue with him, not about this. So she just nodded, her head and body feeling somewhat disconnected from one another, and shifted her focus back to the generator, to the wires she’d been holding between her fingers. 

It stuck with her, though. When she got to the mess back at the main house for dinner and one of the guys waved at her as soon as she walked in, and half of the people at the table gestured for her to sit with them, her brain painted the whole scene differently than it had in the past. She considered the idea that they weren’t acting like this out of pity and obligation because they were nice former Starfleet officers who had to do the right thing all the time according to their old handbooks. That maybe, like Cruz, they also thought she had a personality. That she was a creative-minded sort of person that just got lost in thought sometimes. 

Whether or not she thought they were right, if those were their motivations for wanting her around, didn’t seem to matter that much. Not when she found herself really, really wanting to go sit down at the table where these people were smiling and waving at her and already shifting down the bench to free up enough space for her to sit. 

-

When the saucer was out of the ground and they got the ship upright again, they called it a day early and turned Presidio into a block party when they got back. The winter was on its last legs and anyway they’d grown accustomed to the cold after all this time spent outside. They pulled out tables and chairs and lights from every corner of the campus, brought it all together to make one big outdoor dining room. Someone built a fire pit in record time. It may have been Scotty. Everyone in Presidio came out that night and filled every chair and a few of them even sat on the tables or on the ground around the fire. Ari held Deedee up so that her tiny little feet bounced on the surface of the table and she got to show off her brand new baby-smile while her devoted fanbase took turns greeting her like a long line of royal subjects visiting the queen.

Jim couldn’t contain his energy so he redirected it, almost running back and forth from the Tavern and out into the street with trays and trays of food and wine. Every time he came out the crowd was a little more tipsy and they cheered as if they’d seen him for the first time. The noise level reached a new record. Especially once the singing started.

Nyota and Scotty started off the night in the middle of the chaos, huddled around the fire and trying to figure out how to harmonize with each other. The two of them had somehow never interacted before this. It only took about thirty minutes before they found their common ground and managed to teach everyone the lyrics to an old drinking song. Something about 500 miles, which felt fitting after all the distance they’d covered walking to and from the Enterprise. The chorus always ended with a wailing, nonsensical call-and-response that caught Jim off guard the first time and made him spill wine on himself. They all sang it like, ten times. Jim was humming it on and off the rest of the night. 

Anusha put a stop to the singing at one point and directed everyone to drum their hands against the tables in a specific rhythm, and once the sound became synchronized and Jim could feel the beat coursing through his body, she slowly began to dance in a way that captivated them all. The intricate movements of her hands and feet and the turning of her head as the firelight cast her in warmth. After the first round of applause half a dozen people got up so she could start to teach them to move like she did. The beat softened as conversations started up again, but there was never a point where it ended completely. Someone always kept it going until Anusha and her students made their final bows. 

Pavel was squeezed into an overcrowded table, his face flushed from what might have been his first night where people let him drink the wine. He wasn’t just observing the conversation tonight, but Jim saw him getting swept into it. Speaking without that careful expression on his face. Laughing in sync with everyone else.  

Gaila was socializing too, in a quieter spot. Near the edge where Jim passed by every time he went to and from the Tavern. Every once in a while he’d pass by and she would grab him by the elbow or the sleeve or the apron to stop him in his tracks and ask for his opinion in the middle of the conversation she was having with two other engineers. Mainly to get him to back her up on her side of a debate because she already knew all of his opinions on everything. When the singing started up again she let Nyota pull her out of her chair to join the crowd. 

Even Bones looked loose and happy. He’d been the one to push Joseph in Anusha’s direction and whistled at him as he learned how to dance like her. He saw Jim and Tamara clearing trays from the tables at one point and got up to help them, followed them into the kitchen without a word and then nodded and went back out. Which led Tamara to make a comment that it was the first time he’d willingly been in the same room as her. The next time Jim spotted him he was clinking his mug against Nyota’s and their mouths were moving, they were talking about something. It didn’t matter what it was, Jim saw that both of his friends were happy. And he scanned the heads of Presidio and found smiles showing up on the faces of Gaila and even Pavel, and Scotty wasn’t a hermit anymore and Jia was coming with them and the baby had fallen asleep amidst the noise and stayed asleep as she was passed between sets of arms. He wondered if things really could be like this. If maybe this time there wouldn’t be punishment waiting for him on the other side of his life having good in it. He wondered that a lot lately.

-

Leonard stayed late to help clean up–late enough that it qualified as early, because the morning light just started to appear as they finished carrying the last chairs back into the Tavern. He helped because he was in a good mood, because everyone was in a good mood. And a little bit because he knew that if he did, Jim would walk through the now-empty campus and back to the clinic with him. He didn’t even know if he planned on sleeping once he got back anyway. Or if he’d find himself puttering around the rooms of the clinic, psyching himself up for the impossible future ahead of them, the one where they’d board the ship and actually get out of here. 

“I can’t believe we’re actually getting out of here,” he spoke into the silence. Jim breathed out in a tired-sounding laugh. Rubbed the back of his neck as they walked, slower than they had to, to the building that was close enough that Leonard could cross the rest of the distance to the door by himself and still be able to hear Jim say goodbye from halfway down the street.

“We don’t know that for sure,” Jim said. “We still have to do a surface launch. The Enterprise wasn’t built for that.”

“Gaila talks about it like it’s gonna be easy.”

“She and I switch off on who gets to have the brain cell capable of optimism. It’s her turn right now.”

Leonard let that joke fall as flat as it deserved to. He knew what was hiding behind it. 

“You’re scared.”

“Scared of this ending in disaster? Yeah.”

“Scared of it succeeding, too, I think.”

They were standing right outside the clinic doors now in the hazy, purple dawn. Jim looked away from him. The lights in the waiting room were always on through the night and it sent a pale white glow through the windows that elevated the lines of his face. Gave him that stark contrast of light and shadow that a painting has, turned his thoughtfulness into something heart-wrenching and beautiful. There was a tightness around his eyes. Worry in his expression. Something chronic. Something that had been bothering him for a long time.

“I know you want it to be your ship.”

Leonard didn’t use the word captain. He wasn’t an idiot. But he did wonder how long it would take of Jim being a captain in all but name, once they were up in space, before he finally let that stupid word go. 

“And what does that make me,” Jim asked, “because I feel like it’s gonna make me a hypocrite. Going out to play pretend Starfleet.”

“What you’re aiming to do with it isn’t pretend Starfleet. It’s better than what Starfleet was doing. It’s real. It’s not some bullshit about exploration and expansion that got all twisted up in the war. You’re going out there to give people their lives back. Like you’ve done for all of us.”

Jim took a deep breath. There was just a moment when it looked to Leonard like his eyes caught the light more than they had before, and then he closed them and tilted his head back and let out another exhale that sent wisps of steam out into the cold air. And in that moment Leonard faced the possibility that what he’d said had actually made Jim feel something, had had an effect on him. It struck him harder than that time Jim admitted that he wanted him to heal his injuries. Took a hold of him deeper than all those stupid, surface-level thoughts about how he looked. And then Jim’s next sentence made everything that was already happening to Leonard even worse.

“Damn, it’s gonna be really hard to replace you, isn’t it.”

-

If time moved faster once they’d formed that routine of excursions out to the ship to dig up the saucer and finish the repairs on the thrusters and the engine, it disappeared in the final weeks before the launch. Gave Jim some mental equivalent of whiplash. One minute he was wandering around Presidio in the early morning hours after that post-dig party and then he blinked and he was waving goodbye to the first group of people heading out to the Enterprise for good. 

Like, this was insane.

Jim spent those last days at the Tavern, pretending to get work done around the dining room and behind the bar when really he was just there to field questions from the constant stream of people coming in and out. Whether the ship’s textile replicator had enough supply for them to leave their clothes behind so the people who stayed in Presidio could use them. If it was too late to change which quarters they slept in. If Doctor McCoy was going to let them work in the medbay even though they were just one of the former-science-officers-turned-medical-trainees. What the plan was for making it through the upper atmosphere. What the plan was once they’d made it through the upper atmosphere. What the plan was if they didn’t make it through the upper atmosphere. Where they were going first. If they’d ever be returning to Presidio just to see everyone. If there was a policy about knick-knacks. What the plan was for cleaning up the mud from the corridors as each group arrived. How long it would take to get to Earth. Where they were going in the meantime. What the work would look like once they were carrying passengers. If they were allowed to resume their old experiments in the science labs. If the Enterprise still had ammo. What the chances were of the Enterprise facing direct conflict in this quadrant. If Jim planned on keeping the old fraternization regs in place from Starfleet. If the new fraternization regs would apply to interactions between the crew and their theoretical future passengers.

“You should write an FAQ,” Anusha told him the next time he went to hide behind the kitchen door. “You’ve been repeating yourself constantly.”

“I thought I covered everything back when we had meetings.”

“You thought, huh.”

“Turns out everyone was waiting until now to ask the questions they really wanted to ask.”

“I think my favorite one so far is the one about changing quarters. Like you’re running a college dorm.”

Jim tilted his head back against the door as he laughed. And then he heard the unmistakable sound of the main doors to the dining room opening and closing again and ventured back out. 

A part of him wished it had made sense for him to go out to the ship with the first group. He’d waved goodbye to Bones and Nyota already (well, a temporary goodbye) and was preparing to do the same in the morning to Pavel and Gaila. One more group after that, and then at the end of the week he’d be leading out the last of them. Spreading it out just felt like the right thing to do, to give people space to change their mind, to prepare the ones staying behind for what it would feel like once they were all gone. 

He’d be leaving Presidio with a crew of 163. Cutting the population here in half. It felt a little cruel. He would have happily taken everyone if only they’d all wanted to go. But it would have been idiotic to try and convince people to stay just to make himself feel like less of a terrible person. He needed all 163 people. On a ship this big that barely qualified as a skeleton crew. If they ran into any real conflict out there they’d all have to be working around the clock. He was already crossing his fingers hoping that Bones had been right when he told Jim he had ‘an incurable tendency for picking up strays’. That once they got out there he’d find a way to flesh out his crew just so everyone could work in shifts and get enough sleep and not come to regret following Jim out into the black.

Group two all gathered at the Tavern for dinner that night. Jim sat with them and dropped his head onto Pavel’s shoulder and told everyone that Gaila was his proxy for logistical questions. It took about ten minutes of Gaila either refusing to answer someone’s question because it was too trivial or answering in a way that was flat-out wrong and required Jim to lift his head to correct her before everyone gave up and dissolved into their own conversations instead. Gaila winked at him. He’d been thinking lately about how irreplaceable she was and the thought came back in full force, made it hard the next morning when he watched her disappear into the crowd and then into the trees. 

-

Nyota had really grown on Leonard. During the last few months in Presidio he’d been able to make the transition from appreciating her in a detached, anti-social sort of way to actually enjoying her presence. It happened after enough times when he witnessed her calling other people on their bullshit instead of just him. And after she spent that week in the ward and proved to be the least-annoying patient he’d ever treated. Not a single complaint. Complete trust. No stupid questions or countless requests, as if Leonard was holding back some better, more effective treatment that he wouldn’t administer until the patient demanded it enough times. 

So he didn’t mind when she showed up in the Enterprise’s medbay for no reason. It wasn’t like she interrupted anything important, he’d just been mindlessly reorganizing stuff and checking that the biobeds were working for the hundredth time. He may not have needed to move onto the ship early, with the first group. That might have been jumping the gun. He was bored. 

“Hey,” he said when she walked in. 

“I’m bored,” Nyota told him. 

“Join the club.”

He gestured with his head in the direction of his office and her eyes widened in interest. She hurried after him. 

“Don’t tell anyone about this,” he said when he handed her a cup of coffee from the replicator. All of the mugs on the ship had the Starfleet insignia on them. Come to think of it, every item had the insignia slapped on it in some form. He was excited to witness Jim inside this ship on a day-to-day basis. May or may not have pictured him in a gold uniform and wondered if he’d ever get to see that in real life.

Nyota took the mug with both hands like it was a sacred offering, looked so happy that she may as well have been bouncing up and down, and took her first sip.

“I’ll take this to my grave,” she assured him, and it removed any trace of doubt that he’d made the right call, letting her in on his little replicator secret.

“Why did we come out here so early?”

“Missing Presidio already?” she asked. “I didn’t see that coming.”

“I think I just didn’t realize coming over in the first group meant I’d have nothing to do.”

“That’s why I’m here. I’ve got gossip for you.”

“Oh, lord.”

“You’ll like this.” She took another slow sip. Scanned the CMO’s office with her eyes and then decided to go and sit on the couch. Leonard had been CMO on his last three ships. He always used the couch in the office as the primary bed he slept on. Hopefully the Enterprise wouldn’t require that of him. When he looked at the size of the couch and the height of the armrests he felt phantom pains in his neck.

“Alright,” he conceded, and sat back against the surface of his desk. Held his mug up to his face so he could smell the steam from the coffee rising up to meet him. “What petty co-op drama do I just need to hear about now. Who changed their mind for the fifteenth time about coming onboard.”

“It’s not about who’s coming onboard,” Nyota said. Her delivery was casual but there was a sort of twinkle in her eye now. Maybe it was just the stimulant she was drinking. “It’s about who’s not coming onboard.”

She paused for effect. Or for suspense. Leonard didn’t know which one. He didn’t know why she assumed he’d want to play any sort of guessing game about the exact makeup of the new Enterprise crew. He was only going to be on the ship until they made it to Earth, anyway. This would feel even more temporary than Presidio had turned out to be.

“Okay, you got me. I have no idea who we’re supposed to be talking about.”

She smiled at him. A slow, knowing sort of smile. She was more capable of mischief than most people thought. 

“Maybe a certain half-Human half-Betazoid former botanist?”

Leonard wasn’t able to curb his initial reaction to that little revelation. Relief and some sick, immature sort of satisfaction flooded his body and it must have shown on his face or his neck or something. Must have turned him red. Otherwise Nyota wouldn’t look like she was having such a blast, watching him from the couch above the rim of her coffee mug.

Nyota saved him from having to explain himself. She elaborated. He appreciated that. And he hated how much he enjoyed every additional detail. It made him feel like he was about thirteen years old.

“Her Human side is from Cyprus, you know. So she doesn’t want to go back. She told me she’d rather be part of a new village than have to witness the loss of her old one. Apparently Deedee is a big reason for her to stay, too.”

“Makes sense.”

“Yeah, I bet it does. And he was there when we were talking about it. Neither of them looked that upset.”

“Hmm.”

“They looked like they’d already broken up. No PDA for once.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“You know why.”

Leonard stared at her. He didn’t know where to start. Had no clue how he even ended up in this position, how he managed to give Nyota just enough fragments of a suggestion of a possibility that he had certain feelings about Tamara for a certain unspeakable reason. He’d certainly never said the whole truth out loud which meant he didn’t know how he was supposed to acknowledge its existence now that Nyota figured it all out with her frankly threatening social intelligence. 

He made some sloppy attempt at a threat that he knew he’d be incapable of following through on because she was way too nice. “You realize that if you ever–”

“Oh, I won’t,” she cut in. “That’s your journey.”

He took a deep breath. A very large sip of his coffee. By the end of both of those things he considered his composure regained.

“So,” he said next. “You seeing anyone?”

They both laughed more than they needed to, high on the caffeine. 

-

“Going dark.”

Jim forced himself to stay seated. He didn’t know why he felt like this would be easier if he stood up from the helm, but the urge kept coming back. Had been ever since they launched off the surface, paused to drop a sheet of water on the burning forest as a half-assed countermeasure, and proceeded to take the slowest ascent in space travel history. The ship was literally creeping upwards, buoyed by occasional jolts from the thrusters that were timed to repeat just as the ship started to stall and succumb to gravity again. They were going slower than a helium balloon set loose in the air. 

This was phase three. Going dark. A gamble if Jim ever heard one, but the best idea any of them could come up with. They sent whatever thrown-together little scouting bots they could up into the atmosphere and found that the only one that didn’t start to plummet was the one that, almost as a joke from Scotty, just had all of its sensors turned off. 

It was the equivalent of obstacles disappearing from a night road solely because they turned off the headlights on the car. They were banking on the theory that the problem with the upper atmosphere wasn’t that it misdirected the ship, but just that it confused the sensors and therefore caused a chain reaction where the ship’s automated attempts to compensate snowballed until they lost total control. He didn’t have a clear memory of that day when Sweeper crashed, only fragments, but it sounded plausible enough to him. 

With all the sensors manually disabled, they continued their rhythmic activation of the thrusters and their agonizing upwards pace. The tension on the bridge was suffocating. Jim was gripping the bottom edge of the control panel, the only part he could really touch because he wasn’t needed at the helm with both Pavel and McKenna there to steer and pilot the ship. Pavel’s tutor back at Presidio had convinced him to read an extremely detailed set of files on how to operate every single control panel on the bridge of the Enterprise and Pavel had actually followed through. The sight of his hands skating over the controls at a helm he’d sat at for the first time one hour ago was trippy. It reminded Jim of when Pavel first boarded Sweeper and just knew what to do right away. It was the first time those two very different Pavels resembled each other. 

“So far so good,” Jim said. Not that he knew that for sure, but someone had to say something before they all went insane up here. 

McKenna turned to look at him. 

“Look, Mr. Kirk, I mean no disrespect here,” he said. Aside from Pavel he was the youngest person on the ship. It was funny that both of them ended up at the helm. His hands were floating above the pilot’s controls. He hadn’t needed to do anything since the initial launch. Had been suspending his hands like that the entire time so that now they shook from fatigue. “But the helm is too crowded. I’m not gonna be able to work like this. Can’t you just sit up there?”

At the end of his question he’d pointed over his shoulder at the empty captain’s chair in the middle of the bridge. Jim didn’t want to sit there, but he also did want to be difficult. He stood up.

“It’s the best seat in the house,” Gaila chimed in from the far wall. The panel in front of her was dark and silent, unable to report on the fuel and engine status because those were among the sensors they’d turned off for this. 

Again, Jim didn’t want to be difficult. So he didn’t sass her back for that either. 

Obviously it was the best seat in the house. The captain’s chair was an ergonomic marvel. It propped him up to see the entire viewscreen, oscillated so that he could turn to talk to anyone on the bridge with no effort at all. It was too nice, maybe that was the problem. 

He watched both Pavel and McKenna’s posture relax once they were alone at the helm. And then, along with everyone else on the bridge and probably on the entire ship, he continued to hold his breath as the ship rose higher and higher towards the moment that would test their theory. If they passed, they were on their way. If they didn’t–well. 

Jim had been in that scenario before and lived through it. He’d most likely survive it again.

When Pavel said, “we’re clear, Jim,” everyone took in a deep, audible breath in unison. A breath that ended with cheers and applause and some of the crew standing up from their stations to hug each other. Jim felt the endorphins flooding his entire body. He felt thankful he’d been sitting down after all. Someone messed up his hair on their way back to their station and he dissolved into burnt-out, relieved, easy laughter, covering his eyes with his hands. The bridge came to life as the sensors booted up again. The viewscreen showed them the place they’d just left. Technically it wasn’t, but Jim considered this to be his first time he saw what Soria looked like from space. Those deep shades of blue and green obscured by the long strips of clouds. They couldn’t see Presidio, but they could see, after a few minutes of just letting it all sink in, one of their new satellites coming into view.

“Should we test the comms?” Jim asked.

“Way ahead of you,” Nyota said. She’d fit so perfectly into that comms station this morning, with her earpiece on and her eyes bright. She looked like she’d missed this the entire time. Even now her hands moved with their own intelligence, without her needing to look directly at what she was doing. “Channel open.”

“Presidio, are you there?”

The few seconds of waiting in between Jim’s question and the response from the fourth floor of the co-op felt exaggerated and long. Then another round of cheers almost drowned out the words that came through.

“This is Presidio! We hear you, Enterprise!”

There was another pause. A bizarre one where a suspicion started to creep into the back of Jim’s mind, one he’d never felt in any social situation before in his life. That everyone was waiting for him to say something. Jim remembered what Gaila had told him about how if he wanted to do this, that meant being able to talk to big groups of people. Saying the kind of things that would make them content with their decision to trust him. That would motivate them. He cleared his throat.

“Nyota, is this ship-wide?”

“It is now. Go for it.”

“Hey Presidio. On behalf of all of us I guess I just want to say we’ll never forget this place. I don’t think there’s a better community anywhere in the galaxy than what you created here. We’ll make good on our promise to come back whenever we’re in the system and see how things are going and if we can help out in any way.”

He didn’t know where this was coming from. Maybe the same strange corner of his subconscious that had even detected the opportunity for a fucking speech in the first place. And it didn’t stop there. The words kept coming out of him.

“Just for myself I wanted to say–and this goes for everyone who’s staying in Presidio and everyone on the ship with me right now–that this insane dream would never have made it this far if it weren’t for all of you taking a chance on a stranger. You’ve taught me that good people still exist. And that I can be one of them. So thank you. Really.”

It was more personal than he’d planned on being. In the corner of his eye he could see that Nyota was turned around all the way in her chair, her hands stacked on top of one another over her heart. He cleared his throat again.

“Okay. Well. I guess we’d better get going. Enterprise out.”

“We’re wishing you love and luck up there, Enterprise. Just know that all of you will always have a home with us. Presidio out.”

The rest of the bridge crew applauded at the end of the message. It was likely the entire ship was doing it. Jim felt like they’d been blessed. Like someone just broke the champagne bottle over the Enterprise’s hull. He took one last look at Soria through the viewscreen, at its little satellite beeping in its orbit. He reminded himself that this wasn’t a dream. He shifted his gaze when he noticed that both Pavel and McKenna had turned around in their chairs and were staring at him now. Waiting for him to say something. For him to tell them–tell everyone–what to do next. 

So Jim did. 

“Alright,” he said, the tone of his voice downright foreign, at this point, to his own ears. “Let’s go.”

Chapter Text

Jim lasted one day sitting in the captain’s chair before he started to feel like it was going to make him break out in hives. He just felt useless in there, an idiot watching everyone else do actual work. It didn’t help that their first day flying away from Soria and starting their long route back to Earth was unremarkable. 

Not that Jim would have wanted something to go wrong–it was for the best that they all had time to readjust to working on a starship without any distractions, could focus on making sure every system and process was in order. Jim spent their second day in space making rounds on the bridge that became unnecessary after the first hour. After that he took turns observing what happened at every station, asking questions about how all of the different parts of the different control panels worked, until Gaila told him to stop breathing down her neck and go sit in his chair. Technically what she’d said was go sit in your big boy chair, but Jim repressed that sentence within seconds. 

She knew he was being weird about the chair. Well, everyone knew, but Gaila was the one person on the bridge who felt entitled to bring it up. She turned all the way around in her own chair and stared at him, eyebrows raised, until he conceded and stuck his tongue out at her and went back to the center of the bridge. He felt antsy. Maybe it wasn’t the chair. Maybe it was something else.

He came around behind it, leaned against the back, and watched the viewscreen. Tried not to tap his foot up and down in an audible way. He waited for something to happen. Wondered if this was what all those old Fleet captains with their extra-striped cuffs and their little decorative medals used to do all day. This really didn’t feel like much, especially compared to how busy he’d been from the moment he met Scotty in the Tavern until yesterday morning when they launched the ship up into space. He’d inserted himself into every part of the process out of a determination to make sure they were successful, or at the very least to be the first to know if something went wrong and if they were going to fail. He’d been out there in the pit digging up the saucer, he’d been in the engine room watching Scotty and Gaila work, he’d covered every corner of the inside of the ship on foot, he’d spent hours and hours in the fourth floor of the co-op talking to the old crew about tech solutions to the comms or the upper atmosphere experiments or even just administrative shit. People came and talked to him about the running projects surrounding the Enterprise while he was working at the Tavern, and if they didn’t he let his mind work through every part of the plan in the background. All of that had taken up so much of his brainpower, his physical energy, had made him feel like he was doing something. And now he was just supposed to sit in a chair and wait for someone to ask him a question? 

That was messed up.

So he stood behind the chair all day to make himself feel better. It kind of worked.

When it stopped working he went to Nyota’s station, because he knew she wouldn’t kick him to the curb like Gaila would. He sat on the edge of that raised platform where the captain’s chair was and watched her work, scanning around them for any comms signals. So far the whole star system had been dark. Another one of the hundreds of systems that lost its lines of communications after the war. Unless they passed another ship they wouldn’t hear anything. 

Jim wasn’t worried. He knew nothing would get past Nyota. Even if she was maybe half as good at this job as she was at everything else.

She must have sensed him sitting on the floor behind her, because her first signal to him wasn’t a word but just her hand lifting up from the panel, index finger pointed to the ceiling. Jim perked up.

“Wait,” she said, as if Jim hadn’t been waiting all day for something to happen to allow him to use all of the unused energy rattling around in his brain. “Hold on. I’m getting something.”

“Keep us on course, but slow down a little,” Jim called over his shoulder to the helm. He didn’t know if that was the right way to say it. He knew there was ship lingo that he wasn’t fluent in because he never worked on the bridge of the Farragut. It kind of looked like McKenna was laughing at what he’d said but he couldn’t see his face. He turned back to Nyota.

“Another ship?”

Nyota shook her head. Her hands skated across the controls, trying to grab onto the signal as they crept closer to the nearest planet. “I think it’s being transmitted planetside. It’s close.”

Everyone waited while Nyota’s eyebrows knit together in concentration. And then they shot halfway up her forehead, and she turned to look at Jim. 

“It’s a distress signal.”

The handful of quiet seconds after she said that were heavy. Time kind of slowed down and Jim could feel that however they reacted to this–how he reacted to this–was going to set the tone for the entire ship. For the lives of so many people on and off this ship. This was the whole point. Helping people, answering calls that nobody else would answer, going where nobody else would go. Even though now that the opportunity was in front of them he realized the risks for the first time of answering some unknown call in times like these. In a universe where everyone was desperate and vulnerable and had to work whatever angles they had. A distress signal could be a ruse. Anything could be a ruse. But he didn’t entertain that thought for very long. He knew what he wanted his future to look like. He knew what he had to do to stay headed in that direction. 

“Cool,” he said. He pushed himself up to his feet and back to the center of the bridge, rested his elbows on the back of the captain’s chair again. “Let’s go pick them up.”

“Aye Captain,” McKenna said, and Pavel hit the back of his hand against his shoulder for that. McKenna raised both hands off the helm in frustration. 

“What,” he demanded at an almost-whisper, “what the hell else am I supposed to say? He’s giving me orders.”

-

The ship had both a conference room and a captain’s office at their disposal, and both were in pristine condition. Jim still preferred to have his post fuck-up debrief with Nyota in the mess. At a table in the back next to the windows where he had something to look at before finally giving in to his embarrassment and dropping his forehead into his hands. Jia was still prepping for dinner in the kitchen they’d hastily built to take up the corner that used to just have replicators. The walls were thin and the smell traveled out across the entire mess hall. It comforted Jim. Somewhat. 

“Well. That was a disaster,” he said to the surface of the table.

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“Come on. You were there.”

“Okay. It was pretty bad.”

Jim sighed, rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t even had to ask Nyota to come up here with him, after they escorted their first set of passengers from the transporter room to their temporary quarters. She’d just linked their elbows together and they both walked here as if they’d agreed upon it beforehand. Maybe it was because a few minutes before they were talking about the dinner hour to the people Jim had supremely pissed off in his efforts to answer their distress signal with free passage away from the planet they’d been stranded on for almost a year. 

Now Nyota sat and watched him stew in his mistakes. Their first time doing this and he was already fucking up. 

“Maybe next time,” she started, her voice agonizingly gentle, “we could just phrase things a little differently. Something like ‘for everyone’s safety, we have security measures that involve checking any luggage or cargo for items that could be dangerous to the crew and to other passengers’.”

“I recognize that you’re better at talking to people than I am, but I’m having trouble hearing how that’s that far off than what I said.”

What Jim had said was we need to search your bags.

“Well. You also said what you said before you introduced yourself. Or even before the word ‘hi’. You see how that approach might have come off as a little aggressive, right.”

Jim dropped his head into his hands again. The embarrassment of the afternoon had taken up permanent residence in his stomach, it felt like. He didn’t know if he was going to be able to even eat dinner. Nyota reached across the table and patted him on the shoulder in a way that somehow managed to not feel condescending. From anyone else it would have been. 

“Look, they’re still on board, we smoothed it over, they’re gonna be grateful when we get them over to the next system. They’re still getting to ride for free. We might be the only ship in former Fed Space that’s letting people ride for free.”

“Why did I think this would be easy?”

“You thought this would be easy?”

“Okay, no I didn’t. But I thought I’d be good at it.”

Her hand went from patting his shoulder to squeezing it. 

“You will be good at it. You just need to fuck up a couple times first.”

Jim’s head shot up from his hands, out of the self-pity he’d been wallowing in, so he could stare at her.

“Did you just say fuck?”

Nyota’s eyes were wide, almost like she’d managed to scandalize herself, too.

“I thought it might cheer you up?” she offered.

“You know it did, a little.”

Jim was able to eat dinner after all. Even though the ten stranded former UFP researchers they’d taken on board still gave him weird looks as they filed into the mess. He powered through. By the morning he almost felt normal again–almost, because he still had this cocktail of voices getting stirred around in his head, that he should be doing more somehow, that things were bound to go wrong, that something was going to happen that none of them had thought to prepare for yet and it would be his fault. The screw-up with their passengers only mixed in with all that. He tried to find a way to satisfy his desire to pace back and forth on the bridge without it coming off as neurotic. It worked, at least on that day, and most likely just because Gaila wasn’t there to call him out on it.

-

Things built slowly, with short trips between spots in the same star system and frequent breaks where they had no passengers at all. It was better that way because of how many weird little things came up that Jim didn’t anticipate. Stuff like making schedules for the crew, figuring out what to call the different departments and the different shifts and whether it was a waste of energy to rename every single term that Starfleet used or if phrases like beta shift would just stop bothering him if he let it go and waited it out. Sending shipwide memos not to smother the passengers who were often so outnumbered by the crew that Jim saw them sneaking around sometimes so that they wouldn’t run into any crewmembers and be accosted with well-meaning small talk. 

It was hard to feel like they were making much of an impact. For those first few weeks Jim felt like he was just running a glorified taxi service. He felt like he had to beg people to come onboard at all. He worried that somehow in the months he lived in Presidio, things had actually gotten a lot better out here and this whole mission he’d envisioned for the Enterprise wasn’t that revolutionary after all. 

It wasn’t that it was boring. It was still a hell of a lot better than digging holes all day and freezing his ass off hiking through the woods. And it was laughably better, by every conceivable metric, than a life spent smuggling. It just wasn’t much at first. Which was why he jumped at the opportunity, when they were headed towards another weak distress signal, to pick up the pace a little bit. Because that distress signal led them to pick up a group of stranded Vulcans from two planets over whose ship hadn’t been able to take off again after an ion storm. And on the way to drop them back at their starbase Nyota, out of curiosity more than anything, had pinpointed the old Istaar frequency they used to intercept all the time and told Jim that there was a pickup being scheduled in that same star system and asked if he wanted to do a little petty crime again for old time’s sake.

It wasn’t a responsible solution to Jim’s pathetic insecurities about being useless, to beam down and steal from his old piece-of-shit boss. Bones would probably call it an unhealthy coping mechanism. But it helped Jim mentally and it helped the ship financially, so he decided he didn’t need to know what Bones would call it if he knew that they’d resumed this little side hustle. More than anything Jim was just happy to feel useful again. His mind got a little more tame during the hours and hours spent on the bridge. 

-

The Soltis colony was overcrowded and dark, the surface of the planet where it’d been established hidden under layers and layers of smog. The Fed had probably enforced a bunch of regulations on Soltis in order to curb the pollution issue way back when. But now, breathing the air inside its cramped streets and alleyways, while possible, felt undeniably toxic. Even when it was masked by the smells of the shops and food stalls that made up its bustling and noisy marketplace. Jim had one of Nyota’s scarves tied over his mouth and nose. A sunny yellow one that had maintained its color against all odds. When he breathed in, shallow in the first place, at least the first thing that hit him was the clean fragrance from the sonic machines back on the Enterprise. And then the noxious fumes of Soltis.

He peered out across one alleyway of the market, looking for Nyota, for the flash of red and orange florals around her own nose that he knew would help him spot her. 

He had three people following behind him. They were young, probably not much older than Pavel. He’d broken up what was almost a bar fight and when these kids were the last ones lying on the disgusting floor he knew what their answers would be before he even asked if they had somewhere they could go. Of course they didn’t. They were stupid enough to try to steal food from a stranger’s table in a place like this and nearly get their asses handed to them first thing in the morning. And they came from a rare demographic that Jim had only encountered once before, on a transfer shuttle bound for the Farragut. Former Starfleet cadets who’d bypassed the Academy altogether and been sent to undergo their training on a ship from day one. 

Jim felt like a mother goose as they trailed behind him. Exhausted and hungry and staring at Jim through heavy-lidded eyes like they weren’t quite sure if he was real. Finally he spotted Nyota’s colorful head and let out a sigh of relief. He waved his hand over his head until he caught her attention.

She waved back. With how packed the market was at this time of day they could only see each other’s heads. Jim kept his hand in the air. 

Three, he signed to her.

Nyota nodded. She signed back. Jim squinted at her two hands making shapes above her head. His Signs still had a long way to go.

Family — five — two children — six — ship.

He had no idea. Only guesses. Nyota could have any number of new passengers assembled at this point. He signed back,

Meeting place

She signed something he didn’t recognize.

What? He signed.

Hour, she signed, and he nodded. She pointed at her wrist for emphasis and he decided he was going to make himself study more vocabulary in the ship’s database this evening. This was embarrassing.

Meeting place, one hour.

Well that was almost a sentence, and Jim understood all of it. Not too bad after all. Jim turned to look over his shoulder at his little trio of washed-up cadets. They looked close to passing out where they stood. He’d promised they’d go straight to the mess once they got to the ship. He’d said nothing about trudging around the market for another hour. He set his hand down on the shoulder of the guy nearest to him, which made him flinch back into full consciousness.

“Come on,” he said out loud. “You guys have been here for too long.”

It nearly took the full hour for Jim to get them beamed up and into the mess and for him to find someone to make sure they went straight to the medbay afterwards to get looked at by Bones. One of the cadets, Joey, seemed like he maybe had a broken arm that he was trying to pretend didn’t hurt every time he moved. By the time Jim got back down to the surface it was too late to look for anyone else in need. But that didn’t matter once he spotted Nyota approaching their meeting point. With more than twenty people in tow.

He made a note to look up how to say overachiever in Signs. He had a feeling he’d get a lot of use out of that one.

-

In retrospect, Jim should have considered finding a better room to have their conversations about how each new passenger would be factored into their route navigation. A place more private and legitimate than just the bridge during the middle of the day. Like maybe the perfectly good conference room one deck below. But he didn’t, and so the conversation happened in front of everyone, and that conversation included the person they’d put in charge of navigation. Who happened to be seventeen years old and was going through a phase where one bad mood–from, like, the seam of his sock being in the wrong place–could change his entire personality. 

Jim didn’t know what caused it today, but Pavel was just pissed off for some reason. And Nyota standing near the bottom of the bridge with a padd in her hand and listing off the new stops that needed to be worked into their route turned him from pissed off to livid. Finally he threw his hands up in the air at the last location on her list.

“That is literally where we just came from,” he protested. 

Nyota was unfazed by his mood. Jim figured she’d been dealing with this for much longer than anyone else, since the time they were both living at the co-op back in Presidio. Jim realized, with equal parts gratitude and guilt, that up until now he’d always gotten to be the person who improved Pavel’s mood by talking to him and therefore never had to deal with whatever the fuck this was.

“I know, but we already brought them onboard. We have to take them where they need to go.”

Pavel was gesturing his hands in the air in front of him in a way that didn’t make sense. Grasping for whatever it was that he wanted. “But it isn’t–can’t we just drop them off somewhere on our route where they can go the rest of the way with someone else?”

“Someone else?” Jim asked. “Like who?”

Pavel exhaled loudly in his frustration, all ten fingers spread out from his hands. His eyes were trained on Nyota. Jim started to wonder if this was getting out of hand. He wished he knew what to look for to know if Pavel’s complaining was about to go too far. Not to mention what the fuck to do about it.

“Maybe you don’t know this,” he said next, and the tone of his voice was so annoyed that Jim couldn’t believe Nyota’s composure. Had he talked to her like this before? Was she used to this? 

“It took all day yesterday to figure out the best route for our current passengers so that we don’t waste any time. Now that it’s done you want me to throw it away and go back to where we started?”

“We want to help these people,” Nyota explained. “Pavel, we can’t go back on our commitment to taking them home.”

“Then maybe you can make a commitment to stop taking people onto the ship without thinking. At this rate we will never leave the quadrant. I mean,” he laughed in a way that did not sound entertained at all. And kind of scared Jim to witness, if he was being honest. “We’re about to finally leave this system behind and you bring people who want to go back into the middle of everything. Are you stupid?”

The entire bridge went silent before Pavel even finished pronouncing the word stupid. Jim felt like he’d just been slapped. He could only imagine how Nyota felt. 

Worse, was the answer to that. He turned his head and he’d never seen that expression on her face before. Genuine hurt across her features. Within seconds her expression and her posture went stiff, clearing out her initial reaction and retreating into something more cold. That scared Jim. More so as soon as she opened her mouth to speak. 

He’d heard his fair share of Nyota lectures and call-outs. But he’d never had to see her defend herself from being insulted. He had no idea what that was going to entail. So Jim held his hand up, made his way over from the platform of the bridge towards the helm, and when he passed by Nyota he signed the words I’ll do it. He knew that she was more equipped to deal with this than he was, that she would come up with some measured and intelligent response to Pavel’s outburst and it would fix things faster than Jim could. But he decided he didn’t want her to have to do that. To deal with all this shit herself while he watched from the sidelines like an idiot. Like he’d been doing this entire time.

He’d been the one to bring Pavel into this whole life from the beginning. He’d been letting Nyota clean up the messes they made and now she’d been rewarded for all of that by being insulted to her face for doing her job and asking Pavel to do his. Maybe Jim’s response wouldn’t be as good as hers, but that wasn’t the point. 

He stood in front of the helm, in a way that kind of blocked off Pavel’s view of Nyota. Set one hand at the top of the control panel. Pavel was glaring up at him, daring him to say something. But his composure was starting to shake on the edges. If Jim had to guess, the anger and frustration he’d had a few seconds ago was being replaced by panic. He hadn’t been thinking when he said what he did, that much was obvious. But whatever he’d said hadn’t come from nowhere. 

Jim didn’t direct his response to the Pavel in front of him, the one who looked like he might combust in the next thirty seconds, but to whatever misguided belief within him which had sent that thought out into the open. That how sophisticated their route turned out to be mattered more than the people the route was fucking for. He tried to hold onto how much he disagreed with that pretentious-ass-Starfleet-Academy-top-of-the-class assumption so he could make it through his embarrassing attempt to reprimand this kid that he didn’t want to ever have to be mean to. 

“Look,” he said, shocked by the severity of his own voice. Apparently someone calling Nyota stupid was enough to bring that side of him out. “This is the work. We’re not picking people up because it’s convenient, we’re doing it because nobody else will. And you don’t have to do any of this. There are multiple people on this ship who can do what you do. I don’t care if they’re not as good at it.”

Pavel said nothing. The set of his face was still angry but his eyes looked scared. Jim didn’t know why he was putting up a fight. Why he couldn’t just apologize in the silence that followed and let them all move on. But he wouldn’t. He said nothing at all. So Jim said,

“Take a break. Leave the bridge.”

As soon as Pavel finished storming off and the doors of the turbolift closed behind him, Jim fell into the empty seat at the helm next to an extremely uncomfortable McKenna and scrubbed his face with his hands.

“God,” he said, to nobody in particular. “What the fuck was that?”

-

“He’s a teenager,” Bones told him later, when the ship was on course and Jim came down to the medbay just to complain. Again, he could have complained to Nyota who had actually been there when it happened, but it felt like a dick move to make her put up with anymore of Pavel’s angst than she already had. She’d gone quiet after the whole thing, gone back to work at the comms panel with an impressive poker face that kind of made Jim feel even worse. 

His hope was that bitching about it to Bones would make him feel better. And it did. At least once he’d relayed the entire story he felt like it weighed on him less. Now he was just concerned about whatever the hell he was supposed to do next so that their ticking time bomb of a navigator didn’t continue to ruin the mood on the bridge whenever he felt like being difficult.

Bones was leaning against the wall behind the biobed Jim had decided to claim when he came in. It kept reporting that his heart rate and his blood pressure were slightly elevated until Bones finally just turned the notifications off on the screen. Added, “I think being an asshole is normal at that age. My kid’s probably out there being an asshole right now.”

He said that last part with a sort of wistfulness. He was almost smiling about it, no doubt imagining Joanna slamming her bedroom door or telling her mom to fuck off or whatever. Jim pulled them back to the topic at hand, the one he’d come here to complain about.

“But for him to say that to Nyota?”

“Yeah, that tracks. She’s probably the one person in his life that he knows wouldn’t give up on him.”

“You think he’s got, like, abandonment issues?”

“The kid who lost his parents and then got shipped out from his home at ten years old?”

Jim sighed. He laid back on the biobed and rubbed at his temples with his hands. How this became the conflict he dealt with, he had no fucking clue. He used to be a criminal who faced the prospect of death–death by literal murder–all the time. Sometimes for multiple consecutive days at a time. Now he was talking about the behavior of a teenager like it was equally, if not more, important than that.

“I just wish he was taking all his shit out on me instead,” he said to the ceiling. “That would be fine. Then I wouldn’t care that I don’t know how to deal with it. He could insult me all he wants.”

“Is it fun for you to be a Human punching bag? Is that why you always jump at the first opportunity?”

“Whatever,” he said to that. He added Human punching bag to the laundry list of whimsical descriptors Bones had given him by this point. Trouble magnet, delinquent, so experienced with getting your ass kicked, incurable tendency for picking up strays. The man was a poet. 

He was also nudging Jim on the shoulder now, trying to kick him out of the biobed as if there were any sort of shortage of available biobeds in his empty medbay. So far Bones hadn’t had to do much more than preliminary check-ups and the occasional treatment of a new passenger. He had even more downtime these days than he did back in Presidio. The handful of staff members he had were just on call at this point and filling in across other departments. No wonder he was humoring Jim by pretending to be his counselor. 

“I know he reminds you of yourself,” he said. Jim pushed back up to a seat so he could swing his legs over the edge of the bed. He rubbed his eyes again. He didn’t know why he felt so tired when he also felt like he did nothing all day on the bridge. “Just try to think back to when you were his age. What would get teenage asshole Jim to stop being an asshole.”

“Teenage asshole Jim didn’t have a ship full of adults trying to make him happy. And if he did it probably would have pissed him off even more.”

“Well there you go.”

Jim dropped his hands from his face and looked up at Bones, expecting him to explain whatever the fuck he meant. He looked satisfied with his own non-advice, like he’d just solved Jim’s problem for him. He had his arms crossed over his chest. 

“That doesn’t make sense. You’re just making a face like it does. Why did I come to you for advice?”

Bones shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. Why did you?”

“I’ll see you later. I’m gonna go eat my feelings.”

“Maybe take a tray down to the kid when you’re done,” he called out after Jim across the empty medbay. “There’s my parenting advice. I’m sure he’s locked himself in his quarters.”

-

Jim was about as afraid to have a follow-up conversation with Pavel as Pavel looked when he opened the door to his quarters and saw Jim standing there in the corridor. He tried not to flinch at the overwhelming boy smell that hit his senses as soon as the doors were open, which corresponded nicely with the absolute mess that was Pavel and McKenna’s shared quarters. He tried not to stay long, either. Set the dinner tray down on the small side table next to what he assumed was Pavel’s bed.

“I don’t want to talk about this for longer than I have to and neither do you,” he said to the tray, because he’d hit his quota today of serious conversations he could have while maintaining eye contact. “I’m bad at this shit. But if you talk to Nyota like that again I will probably just kick your ass for it instead of talking at all.”

“Sorry,” Pavel finally forced out. When Jim glanced over at him he was staring at the floor. “I wasn’t–”

“I know you weren’t. You’re not supposed to apologize to me anyway.”

Jim felt certain that if he stayed here for even three more minutes his imposter syndrome was going to take him out right where he stood. He took a deep breath so he could conjure up one more sentence that might prevent him from ever having to do something like this again.

“I get that you want to impress everyone,” he started, and found where he was going with it along the way, thank god. “But I don’t think that matters anymore now that it’s not just the five of us stealing shit all the time. You don’t really get to be efficient when you’re doing good because you have to think about people’s feelings. That makes things inefficient. If you want your whole life to be about optimization then you gotta give up your ability to help people. If that makes sense.”

Jim hoped it made sense. Because he wasn’t sure where his little speech came from if he was being honest. Once it was all out though he had to stand by it. He knew Pavel was smart, smarter than he’d been at seventeen and potentially smarter than he was right now. That was why he’d blown his lid in the first place this afternoon–because their passengers got in the way of how smart he could be. 

Pavel didn’t say anything so Jim just nodded to himself and turned around and left. 

He missed the Presidio wine, even though the mood this whole thing put him in would have required him to drink at least five mugs of it before his mind could start to detach from reality. He missed Tamara. He missed having something to distract him from how inescapably in charge he was right now. The best he could come up with was going up to the observation deck and staring out at space for a few hours until his vision blurred. And even then he was still too on-edge to fall asleep until around 0300 the next morning.

Pavel came up to Jim and Nyota’s table at breakfast and the sight of him not-angry and very likely there to apologize made Jim so relieved he could have gone back to sleep right there. Real sleep, not the restless misery he’d spent half the night in. Breakfast helped, but Pavel getting his act together helped a hell of a lot more. 

“I figured it out,” he said to them. “We will only lose four days and it may even be beneficial because it will allow us to pass by the largest post-war colony in the system on the way back. You would probably want to go there to look for more people.”

Nyota smiled at him, but it was reserved. Not the full smile she tended to give everyone. She paused with her fork in the air and said, “That’s great Pavel.”

Jim let out a very exaggerated cough until Pavel looked at him. He raised his eyebrows, jerked his head to the side in Nyota’s direction. She was probably watching all of this too, he wasn’t being subtle, but he didn’t care.

Pavel got tense. He looked like he was biting at the inside of his cheek. Finally he turned his attention away from Jim, looked directly at Nyota for the first time since the whole incident went down yesterday. 

“And I am sorry for calling you stupid.”

Even Jim felt forgiven in a weird way when Nyota beamed at him in response, held her arms open and pulled their lanky teenager into a hug that made him have to bend himself in half to reciprocate. 

-

“Wait, is that Polanis?” Janice asked from her station at the back of the bridge. 

“Yes it is,” Pavel answered from the helm, without lifting his head. 

“Fuuuck, man,” someone else said. Jim turned his head to look. It was one of the engineers Jun-seo, at the station where Gaila usually sat when she was on the bridge with them. His next words were barely audible. “What I wouldn’t give.”

“Remember that time we tried to convince Pike it has a famous wellness spa to get him to schedule a leave there?” Janice asked, and Jun-seo scoffed. 

Jim turned back to the viewscreen as they approached Polanis. There was nothing remarkable about the planet from the outside. For some reason the name sounded familiar to him, like something famous had happened on this planet that he was supposed to remember. He turned the name around in his mind for a few minutes. And then it hit him.

“Wasn’t there a club in the East Bay called Polanis?” he asked out loud.

“Where do you think they got the name from?” Janice answered. “Not the whole planet, but there’s a city down there called Tresor that’s like, mecca. For partying. Not that I’d know.”

“Oh, is that right?” Jun-seo asked.

“Pike didn’t go for it, remember? I had no choice but to be good through the whole war.”

So that was it. Polanis had stuck in Jim’s mind because he’d most likely gotten wasted in a building with that same name slapped on the outside, painted above the doors he’d had to stumble out of in the early morning hours before another day of classes. The thought made him a little nostalgic. He missed being trashy.

“I thought the Oakland Polanis was a sex club,” Jun-seo muttered, and if he was trying to only say that loud enough for Janice to hear, he failed.

“Yeah it has a dungeon, I think,” she said. 

Okay, Jim might have done more than just get wasted. At this point, what did it matter. 

The thing that did feel important as he thought about it, as they approached Polanis and Jun-seo’s yearning–for this place he kept reminiscing about until it sounded like the nightclub capital of the universe–became a physical sensation in the air, was what Janice had said earlier. About when they’d tried to get Pike to let them stop there and been denied. Starfleet had regs about leisure time. Fucking off-the-clock hours hadn’t even been safe from the endless regs. Pike wouldn’t have agreed to scheduling a leave for the Enterprise crew so that they could all get high out of their minds. He was a Starfleet captain after all. A famous one that got his ass kissed nonstop. 

But Jim…Jim was nobody. Just a random dude who by some miracle got to be in charge for the time being. And now he had the opportunity to do something that just might make this crew of people like him a little more, in this one aspect at least, than they’d liked the last person who’d sat in this chair.

“Ship’s empty right now. Should we make a pit stop?”

“You’re kidding,” Janice said.

“Hell yes we should,” Jun-seo said next. He was turned all the way around in his chair when Jim glanced at him. “Man, I will love you forever.”

Maybe Jim was being petty. Trying to out-do a man who wasn’t even around anymore and could possibly actually be deceased by letting his crew go out and get drunk and high and who knows what else. All so they’d think he was cool. 

Okay. He was being petty. There was no maybe about it. 

Nyota looked a little concerned when he asked her to open the channel ship-wide. He just shrugged at her in response, and then said:

“Hey. This is a shipwide announcement: due to perceived demand, and coincidentally since we dropped off our last passengers this morning, we’re going to stop for the night at Polanis. While I empathize with the desire to get space wasted we still need a minimum of fifty crewmembers onboard and sober for the night shift. Security reasons. You can all pull straws or something, I don’t care. And be back in the morning by 0900. Kirk out.”

Chapter Text

“Hey, Bones.”

“Hey, Jim,” he parroted. If he had anything to say about the announcement Jim made a few hours ago, he chose not to share. Jim found him in his office down in the empty medbay after spending half the day going back and forth about what he wanted to do tonight, and then going back and forth about if he should do it alone, and then psyching himself up the entire way here about how stupid his final decision might sound once he said it out loud.

“I have a favor to ask,” Jim said. “Kind of.”

“Lord help me.”

“Well it’s just that—I’m in a weird place right now.”

“Outer space?”

“Enough with the quips, let me get this out before I change my mind.”

Bones rolled his eyes. As if Jim was the one who insisted on being annoying all the time. He leaned back in his chair. Jim hadn’t figured out yet why the CMO even needed a desk. Or an office. 

“Fine. Shoot.”

“I’m happy here. It looks like everybody is happy here.”

Bones nodded. 

“Like, this is working I think. What we have is good, right?”

“Yeah, Jim, it’s good.”

“Well I think I’m just so fucked in the head that I don’t really know how to just let things be good, and I need to figure something out before I get self-destructive.”

“This sounds like you’ve become self-aware and yet I’m worried about what you’re gonna say next.”

“It’s no big deal I just–I need to let off some steam, I think. I’m not really handling all this like I should.”

“You’re running a constitution-class starship through unregulated space and you’re not even 30. I don’t know how you handle it at all.”

It always weirded Jim out when Bones said something like that. Every once in a while he’d just construct this sentence that made it clear he’d been observing Jim and drawing conclusions about him. And those conclusions sometimes had a weird energy to them, like they were compliments. Like, what Bones had just said. Was that a compliment?

Jim didn’t fucking know. He didn’t care anyway. He’d come down here for a reason.

“I think I should go down to Polanis tonight and get high.”

Bones’ expression shifted so quickly from concern to amusement that it was almost funny in its own way. 

“You asking my permission?”

“I want you to come with me.”

“You want me to go clubbing with you. Me.”

“No, more like,” Jim squirmed. Once it was time to say this out loud, the words sounded twice as ridiculous. It didn’t help that Bones looked more than ready to laugh at him. “I need someone to keep an eye on me.”

“Oh,” Bones said. And by some miracle he didn’t laugh.

“Yeah.”

“What does keeping an eye on you mean,” he asked.

“I just need to kind of–and I know this sounds bad–I need to forget who I am for a couple hours. But my life actually has a purpose now and I don’t want to ruin that. So I just need someone to make sure I don’t take things too far. And that I don’t go home with anyone.”

Bones was watching him closely. He looked like he was considering it, but the lack of an answer either way made Jim nervous. His perceived stupidity of his own request hung in the air around them. He wondered if he should have sat down on the couch for this. That might have made all of this feel more casual and less like a desperate request from Jim for a state-sanctioned bender. 

“I can’t ask Gaila. I wouldn’t make her go to a place like that. And I don’t want anyone else to see me in that state if they’re supposed to trust me to be in charge.”

“But I can?”

Jim shrugged. The reason he’d thought of Bones was two-fold. One, Bones was a doctor and would make sure Jim didn’t, like, die or whatever. Two, Bones had seen him in way, way uglier contexts than whatever might happen tonight. At worst Jim would just get sloppy and embarrass himself. That was nothing compared to how their relationship had started. He watched as Bones thought about it some more, stared down at the surface of his empty desk and rubbed his palm against the stubble on his cheek. 

“Alright, I’ll come.”

“Thanks, Bones, really. I mean it. This will be a one-time thing. Just tonight.”

Bones held his hand up. “But you need to tell me exactly what ‘taking things too far’ means.”

“I can’t take anything that makes me numb.” 

Jim didn’t want to explain it further than that if he didn’t have to. That if he got to experience what everyone described, from that certain class of recreational and medical drugs, the pain-relieving, forget-you-have-a-body, leave-reality-altogether-for-some-peaceful-white-nothingness kind, he’d never want to be sober again. He knew he was one dose of that stuff away from giving up on the person he was. And that person was finally becoming half-decent. That boundary about getting high used to be about finances. Now he could afford to throw his future away and by some miracle he didn’t want to let himself do it.

“No painkillers,” was all Bones said to that, and Jim relaxed. It wasn’t a clarification. It was the phrase Jim had said to him multiple times, every time he’d offered them in the past. That meant Bones got it.

“Yeah. I’ll tell you what I take, I just don’t want to get carried away and let someone give me something when I’m not paying attention to what it is.”

“And the ‘no going home with anyone’.”

“Mostly drug related. Plus I feel like I should be back before the others.”

“I’m gonna have to keep pretty close watch for this.”

“I know. I just need a few hours, I promise.”

Bones nodded. “So what’s your drug, then?”

The answer to that question was difficult without making Jim sound like a person who really should not be doing what he was doing tonight. But the truth was he had tried everything, multiple times, in every possible combination–most of this during the pre-Farragut years when his access to controlled substances was a hell of a lot better and he took an insane level of wealth and security and comfort for granted in his daily life on Earth. His lowest moments happened before enlisting in Starfleet, and then his two short years at the Academy contained much more lighthearted, bonding-sort of experiences with mind-altering substances on the happier end of the spectrum. Included among them was a visit to the dungeon of the Polanis club in Oakland, apparently. So his drug depended on his desired outcome. 

Tonight he wanted to let go. Unplug his mind from the socket of his life that had, without him noticing, become extremely structured and wholesome and somehow routine. Take something that would let him do that without a trace of wanting to do it again any time soon. 

And–this was just as crucial–take it as far away from the rest of the crew as possible. He waited until they had all beamed down to Tresor in groups of two and three, because they didn’t have enough functioning insignia pins left for everyone to have one of their own to send a comm up to Scotty in the morning. Then he looked at the screen in the transporter room that tracked the pin locations and figured out where they all went. And where they didn’t go. 

Bones looked surprisingly not-uncool when he showed up in the transporter room to escort Jim to the club. Like he might have messed up his hair on purpose. Pulled out the oldest, most beat-up clothes he still had, that flannel shirt on top that looked like it’d been through more than one war. He was dressed down in a way that came off as laid-back instead of lazy. Jim made a mental note, maybe to level the playing field when he woke up half-dead in the morning and needed a pep-talk and a vitamin injection, to ask him exactly how much he’d misbehaved when he was in his 20s. He’d heard things about med students. It was hard to picture now, but Bones must have, at some point, had a young-person’s zest for life and desire to experiment. 

Jim just couldn’t believe that he’d agreed to this at all, that he didn’t complain or grumble about it as they beamed down to Tresor and navigated through the crowded streets, already packed with crowds of all kinds of people who were already drunk and high and tripping out of their minds. He was kind of quiet, actually. He’d taken on his role of Jim’s bodyguard with a seriousness Jim hadn’t expected.

When they stepped into the club at the edge of town, one that didn’t even have a name Jim could see or at least that he could read, maybe those huge lit-up symbols in a vertical line on the outside of the building had been the name, they just nodded to each other and split up. Bones went to the only corner that qualified as quiet, the far end of the bar near an emergency exit where he’d no doubt have to wait an hour before the bartenders even noticed him. Jim watched him go over there and take his seat, confirm that it gave him a good view of the rest of the club, and then nod to him again in approval. 

He was going to have to do something nice for Bones sometime. If he ever figured out what sort of things would make the man happy.

He squeezed through the crowd, towards the lit-up and higher-traffic section of the bar, which he could see now went the entire length of the room. The majority of the club was the dancefloor, bleeding out into all other sections. Upstairs and on the stairs. People danced in between, and in some places on top of, the tables that must have been meant for sitting and eating and conversation once upon a time. The lights were too low for that now. Constantly shifting colors and changing shapes, tuned in to the music that spread through the room with a dynamic sort of sound that made Jim wonder if there really had been people over the last few years who’d been able to devote their time to furthering sound design technology. The clubs back in San Francisco had not sounded this good. The music hadn’t wrapped around him like this, each layer of it going in and out with a rise and fall that felt like breathing. In fact it was so fucking good he could sit in here all night without the drugs and still have a good time.

But with the drugs…

He waved the bartender over, not caring that he looked over-eager. He was ready to feel what everyone else in this room was feeling, whatever amplified the lights and the music to the point that they had these permanent smiles and recurring buoyant laughter, that they crashed their bodies together like the physical limits of where one person ended and the other person were meaningless. Like their consciousness was being passed between them each time they touched. Like no boundaries mattered or even existed. Like nothing mattered. Which was exactly what he was looking for. Just for a few hours.

“You wanting to take something?” the bartender asked him. He was shouting, even as he leaned close enough to Jim that he didn’t have to. “What do you want?”

For a second Jim forgot how to be a customer. It’d been so long.

“I don’t know, what do people usually get?”

“For what?”

“Like, the people in here. What’s everyone on?”

“Oh, I got you.” 

He pulled a case from below the counter and set it on the bar. Inside the case, hundreds of tiny envelopes were lined up in neat rows. He lifted one envelope and held it between two fingers. The light above them changed a second later, to a shimmering white-gold that passed over them like sunlight for just a few seconds before being replaced by another color sweeping through the room in another direction. But for those few seconds it showed its tiny contents. Jim was pretty sure he was looking at a very neatly packaged tab of acid. Or whatever the equivalent was these days. Maybe people had been able to devote their time to developing new drugs, too. That industry certainly hadn’t gone anywhere during the war. 

“A lot of folks come here to take 118,” he said, “My own recipe. This one is a research chemical complex. Combination of methytrilin and a synthetic non-regurgative psilocybin. It’s great for a couple hours of dancing. It’s basically as hard as you can trip without losing your fine motor skills. Sound good?”

Jim didn’t want to look like a novice, but he would have been onboard with any possible answer to that question. He’d never been picky about this sort of thing. Even if he was, the last three years would have effectively beaten it out of him.

“People like it,” he added, because he thought Jim was having trouble deciding. “The come-up is quick.”

“Yeah, I’ll do it.”

“You want one tab, or two? I’m not giving you three if it’s the first time I’ve seen you.”

“Fuck it. Two.”

He laughed, drawing out the word, “alright,” as he removed two tabs from the case and set them on a glass dish between them. Jim paid him with credits he’d found on the ship–in Pike’s old office, no less–and placed them both on his tongue at once. They tasted like sugar as they melted. No going back now.

He really hoped Bones didn’t absolutely hate him after this. 

He walked over to the farthest corner of the bar, where Bones had set up his watch. Someone must have served him a drink at some point, but he wasn’t touching it. Bones raised his eyebrows when Jim stopped in front of him.

“I just took psilocybin and something called methytrilin.”

“Okay. Methytrilin is both a stimulant and a psychedelic. It’s gonna flood you with serotonin. You’re gonna sweat, try to stay hydrated. The guy who sell it to you tell you the dosage of either of those?”

“Nope.”

“Cool. These people seem real trustworthy.”

“Once it hits I’ll be on the dancefloor if you need me.”

“Yep,” Bones said.

In the meantime, Jim navigated through the club towards the couches along the outside edges. Swathed in darkness, piled with the bodies of everyone who’d taken too much and danced too hard or were waiting for the come-up or had found someone on the dancefloor that they liked enough to pull to the side and dry-hump in the margins of the club. It was possible Jim was witnessing some actual sex, it was just too dark to know for sure. He hadn’t known the rules of this place when he picked it. 

Come to think of it, this whole planet was post-Fed. It probably had no rules.

He stepped over a bunch of feet and nudged his way onto an already-full couch, in between two people who, as expected, didn’t mind at all that a stranger was joining them. The woman next to him smiled at him, her eyes looking absolutely far away from here. She pulled him towards her with one hand on the side of his jaw and kissed his cheek, and then fell back against the couch cushions again and returned to whatever higher realm she’d been visiting before Jim made her scoot over.

Jim remembered that feeling. He’d been so busy the past few years that he’d never found the time to miss it. But watching the people around him only made him look forward to the moment when those two tabs of 118 pulled him under. It would turn out to be exactly what he needed. He could be the responsible guy who’d helped get the Enterprise back up into space, who bossed people around, who took language lessons, who worried about the social etiquette of a seventeen-year-old and had a running tally of the ship’s food supply metrics in the back of his mind at all times, tomorrow. Tonight he was going down memory lane to wonderland, to a place he used to visit all the time back when he didn’t know what the word responsible meant in practice. 

The man next to him got his attention with a hand on his thigh. When Jim turned their faces were close enough that it surprised him. His pupils were so dilated it made his eyes look completely black, almost like Tamara’s eyes. His smile was subtle, less euphoric and more fascinated as he took in the sight of Jim’s face in front of him. 

“You’re new,” he said. 

“What gave it away?”

“Almost everyone in here is always here. You’re gonna be popular tonight.”

Jim looked out across the rest of the club, the mass of bodies on the dancefloor. The far corner where Bones was still sitting. When they locked eyes, he actually did look kind of pissed now. He could be regretting his decision to help Jim out already. And Jim would worry about that except that he was feeling something start to shift inside of him. His body temperature rising. His senses getting a little stronger. The hand on his thigh felt like it was covering half of his body. Like it was transmitting an energy into him. This must be the 118. The reason everyone danced so close to one another in here.

“Ex-Fleet?” the guy asked next. 

“Happily.”

“You take anything yet? Can I buy you something?”

Jim shook his head. His head that was getting heavier. His eyes, too. Pretty soon his pupils would dilate just like this guy he was talking to. He’d look just as high as the rest of them. Maybe it would make Bones even more mad to see him like that. “I already took two tabs. He said I’m not allowed to have three.”

“First time rule. Don’t worry. You only have to be a virgin once.”

Jim rubbed his face with his hands. For a longer time than he intended to because it felt good to touch himself.

“What’d you take? 118?”

He nodded. Palms on either sides of his face. He imagined that he didn’t have a neck connecting his head to his body. What it’d be like to have to just carry his head around all the time.

Fuck, he was going to be so far gone tonight. He could tell. 

“Oh, you’re gonna have a great night.”

Cold air rushed over his lap in a way that confused him, and then Jim looked down and realized the hand on his thigh had just moved away. He felt something along the shell of his ear. Fingertips. He turned his head to the man next to him again. Did it matter that they hadn’t told one another their names yet? At this point, were they ever going to?

“Do these use conduction?” he asked.

“Yeah.” Jim had lost his ability to talk over the past few minutes. When he found it again he shivered at his own voice. 

“Let me try something. You trust me?”

He laughed out loud. The feeling of it nearly lifted him off of the couch and into the air. It made the man start laughing too. They both got lost in it, catching themselves against one another with their hands. Jim felt a heartbeat under his palm like a drum. Felt that unfamiliar heart reaching for him, communicating something. He didn’t know what. 

“Of course not,” he said once he could get out a full sentence. Added, “I don’t fucking know you,” before dissolving into laughter again. The man turned away from him, so that Jim had to extend his arm a little to keep his hand over that spot on his chest where his heart was beating. He was talking to the people on the couches around them. 

“Hey, you got a padd? Does someone have a padd on them? Or a last-gen comm? Thanks.”

When they made eye contact again he looked happier. Maybe because Jim was tripping harder by the second. He was happy to have more company in the 118 dreamscape. He had a padd in his hands. 

“You don’t have to trust me. You’re gonna like this. You’re starting to feel it, right?”

“Yeah, it’s hitting,” Jim said, and flinched when he started touching the implant behind his ear. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing back there. Pressing against it in some way he hadn’t expected. Ripping it out, who knew. And then it stopped and Jim found himself fascinated by the sight of his fingers tapping against that white-blue screen in his lap. The brightness of the screen in this dark room. The size of his hands. He caught Jim staring and paused.

“Focus on the music,” he said. 

So Jim did. He focused on that thing he’d noticed when he first walked in, the way the music seemed to breathe. Fading in and out. The music changed constantly but there was never a point where one song ended, just where different layers rose to the top over the rest. He picked out one line, a thrumming sort of beat underneath everything, and followed it with his attention as it slowly came in and out and then rose in volume, replaced the other rhythms and melodies at the top of the sound. It started building and building and building. He lost his body inside of it, like the music was being injected directly into his bloodstream now. Echoed deep inside his bones. This was new. It hadn’t sounded this good when he first walked in. Or even a minute ago. When he could finally tear his attention away from the music coursing through his body and remember that he was a Human person inside a room, he asked out loud, and could hardly hear his own voice anymore over the depth of what he felt,

“What’d you do?”

The man had to talk right next to his ear, right into the implant behind it, in order for Jim to make it out. He felt a warmth spread through his body that could have been the shift in the music or the 118 hitting another level or, possibly, another hand or more than one hand touching him again. He was too far gone to tell. And not being able to tell was thrilling. His senses were converging, layering on top of one another and taking turns at the front, just like the music. Every part of him swelled like waves of water. He still felt two different heartbeats, one in his own chest and one underneath his palm. They were both getting faster.

“You’re not gonna miss that third tab,” he heard, snuck in underneath the music, like a secret code. A whisper. “Come on, new guy.”

One set of hands pulled him off of the couch. A hundred more met him on the dancefloor.

-

For his own mental health, Leonard probably shouldn’t have agreed to that. He started to suspect this within minutes of showing up to the club and knew it for certain by the time he had to drag Jim out from under someone on one of those orgy couches in the back and take him up to the ship so he could sleep at least three hours before they left Polanis. For sure he shouldn’t have put himself in a position to have to do that. But when Jim had sent the request out into the air it hadn’t felt much like a choice. If Leonard had refused to be his trip-sitter then Jim still would have gone by himself, and the idea of being able to keep an eye on him sounded better than staying on the ship fully aware of what Jim was up to, on an unfamiliar planet with all of his defenses down from a substance he would take without knowing any details about its dosage. 

If it was just about watching Jim get blissed out from the MTN, which made his eyes dark and put a constant smile on his face and revealed the fact that this was nowhere near his first time on a dancefloor, that would be one thing. Leonard knew his crush was dumb and that he’d get over it once he got back to Earth and Jim was no longer in his line of sight all the time. Any jealousy he could feel watching Jim being passed around between all of the hands and bodies in the room like he was a celebrity would be inconsequential in his memory someday. No, the problem was that, after spending so long being the only sober person in the room that it became suspicious, he ended up in an extended conversation with one of the bartenders. He found out what was going on behind the neon-and-glitter window dressing that was the nightclub scene in Tresor. And that made him spend the rest of the night feeling sick to his stomach. 

Apparently, the controlled substance industry and famous debauchery destination made up just a tiny percentage of the planet’s activity. Because Polanis had one of the highest internal concentrations of lithium in the quadrant. And now they no longer had to answer to the UFP about how and to what extent and through what means of labor and production that lithium was extracted, refined, and exported. 

It started with an innocent question from Leonard. He just wanted to know if anyone in this city had a job. How they managed to, according to the bartender, be in here every single night and continue to afford to get high. The answer was that they weren’t paying for it, not exactly. Everyone ran out of whatever money they came to Tresor with by the end of their first month, because nobody managed to pace themselves once they started. The bartender explained all of this with indifference, his face didn’t even change to imply that anything he said could be even a little messed up.

Debt. They were all living under the shadow of their own massive, ever-growing debt. The drugs every night, their basic necessities during the day, rent wherever they crashed to sleep off the come-down. Once someone ran out of cash they entered a citywide database that kept track of everything they owed. They entered all of their biodata–retinal scans, fingerprints, DNA samples–and agreed to get a tiny trackable implant poorly inserted into their upper arm, which left a scar that once Leonard could spot he couldn’t stop looking for. All so that they could continue to get high on credit. There was no upper limit. There were no consequences, within the city itself, if the number got too high. Because half of the planet was populated by lithium mines and refineries that would just come in and wipe out the debts of however many people they needed to replace the turnover of one of the most dangerous types jobs since space travel was invented. Leonard wasn’t able to pass judgement at any point during this little storytime because he wasn’t exactly fucking innocent, when it came to this sort of thing. His lack of a reaction was probably what kept the bartender talking. 

On Tresor they used the phrase ‘getting your debts paid’. That meant that someone had come in and picked a person’s name off a list and settled all the money they owed from however long they’d been living in drugged-up abundance. It always came with a one day warning, leaving whoever it was with one last night with their vices before they got tracked down and shipped off. The bartender even pointed out a handful of different people, after he’d said that, who’d just gotten their debts paid and were on their last night. The clubs all had sensors in them and the staff got alerts when people like that came in. So they wouldn’t be surprised in the morning when a bunch of guys in steel-toed boots showed up to carry those people out. And what scared Leonard was that they looked the same as everyone else. There was nothing in their expression to indicate that their life was getting taken away in the morning for a future of unregulated indentured labor. All of them were smiling and laughing just as easily, sweating and pressing their bodies together, having the best night of their life over and over and over again. 

That was what Jim looked like, when Leonard spotted him again, sandwiched between another two people who’d fallen in love with him, grinning at the ceiling with his head tilted back, his body flowing to the music, someone kissing his neck, someone else’s hands around his hips, fingers hooked in the belt loops of his jeans. Coated in sweat that darkened his hair and made his t shirt stick to his chest and made him shine in the ever-changing light. He blended in seamlessly with this crowd of horny oblivious ecstasy. This person who had been through and accomplished so much, who was now carrying this immense level of responsibility, who had fucking things to actually live for. He looked no different than the rest of the population of this club who were all throwing their lives away for the chance to leave reality a couple hours at a time. 

They were never coming back here again. 

Jim woke up the next morning with a pitiful-sounding groan that pulled Leonard out of his almost-sleep on the couch. Jim had chosen quarters small enough that it didn’t make much sense to have a couch and a bed so close to one another, but it came in handy in the end. It was a good place to sit and keep an eye on him from. Leonard turned up the lights and it only made Jim wordlessly complain some more, squinting at the light, pressing his pale, washed-out face into the pillow for relief. 

The sight of it made Leonard feel a little better. Well, the part of him that he’d allowed to become resentful at what he’d had to sit and watch Jim do for hours. The rest of him just wanted Jim to be himself again, the person that he’d become over the last few months, the one that Leonard had done all of this to protect. So he got up from the couch with the hypo he’d prepped an hour ago while Jim was asleep and went to sit on the edge of the bed. 

“I’m dying,” Jim moaned.

“You’re fine. You just have no serotonin and you didn’t drink water like I told you.”

That was what the hypo was for. Jim was lucky that the Enterprise’s medbay had the amount of supplies it still did, that things like mood stabilizers weren’t commonly used and could still be found in vials in the supply room. Leonard pressed the hypo into his neck. He must have taken his shirt off while Leonard was out of the room, his sleep interrupted as his body tried to sweat the rest of the MTN out. Now he looked cold and dried up and he didn’t smell great, from where Leonard was sitting. He pulled his hand away and moved down to the foot of the bed, watched as the vitamins and electrolytes and stabilizers started to work. Jim let out a long exhale of relief.

“That’s better,” Leonard said. 

Jim released the tension in his body and rolled over onto his back, arms stretched out by his sides, bare chest open to the ceiling, sheets tangled up around his torso.

“Maybe you should’ve made me keep the hangover,” he said, his voice much closer to normal, which allowed Leonard to relax again. “That way I wouldn’t want to go back there again.”

Never mind, Leonard wasn’t relaxed. Not at the image of Jim becoming one of those zombies down there trading his future just to get perma-high for a few months. 

“You get what you wanted?” he asked. 

“Yeah,” Jim answered, and then lifted his head off the pillow and looked at Leonard. That emptiness had started to drain from his features. He just looked tired, now. And confused. 

“Why do you sound weird? Am I still high?”

Leonard forgot about that part. He stood up and started looking around Jim’s quarters to see if he had a padd anywhere. There wasn’t an abundance of them on the ship, at least half of them probably ended up in Presidio, but he remembered now that he’d made a mental note last night to find one in the morning and forgotten to do it while Jim was still asleep. Jim waited. Leonard felt his eyes on him.

“Hello?” he asked after a while, and finally Leonard spotted one on a shelf, next to one of those dented, scratched-up, stainless-steel mugs they all used to drink wine out of at the Tavern. Jim being sentimental, that was unexpected.

“Sit up,” Leonard said on his way back to the bed. “You’re not high, you let some guy mess with your hearing aids last night.”

Jim pushed himself up to a seat and Leonard tried to ignore the sheets sliding down to pool around his lap. He did a pretty good job, he maybe just glanced down the front of Jim’s body once and only for a second. Anyway he had things to do. Like try and figure out what the fuck that guy on the couch had been doing with Jim’s implants. Jim turned his head to the side when Leonard leaned closer to look at them. Based on what he knew about the gen that Joe had been able to give him and what he’d seen from the other end of the club, there must be a way to set up some sort of wireless connection in order to adjust the settings. He found a button on the bottom edge and pressed it, went back and forth between doing that and looking at the network settings on the padd. Finally it popped up. Maybe it was a waste of time, but Leonard renamed the device from just its serial number to Jim’s Ears. 

“Oh, of course,” he said to himself once he was able to pull up the input settings. The bass was cranked all the way up. Everything else had been set lower than the standard values. No wonder Jim had such a blast. He’d probably felt like the music was happening inside his own body. 

“What?”

“Wait a second.”

Leonard set everything back to the set of values for Human use. He could see the moment Jim felt like he was hearing things normally again. It made his eyes focus. 

“How’s that?”

“That’s good.”

“You feel okay?”

“Yeah.” Jim rubbed his face with his hands, made his hair stick up from all the dried sweat. Laughed a little bit. “Wow. I don’t remember that happening at all right now. Hopefully last night comes back to me at some point.”

Leonard shifted back to the corner of the mattress. Jim was good now, so he didn’t need to stay any longer, could just let him shower and get dressed and eat something before the rest of the crew started stumbling back onto the ship through the doors of the transporter room. But things still felt a little weird. Like last night might have changed their dynamic in some way that Leonard couldn’t place. So he stuck around to make fun of Jim instead in order to make sure things would go back to normal after this morning. At least that was what he thought he was doing.

“He did that about ten minutes before he shoved his tongue down your throat, if that helps.”

Jim shook his head, one hand still pressed against his forehead. “Don’t remember that either. And sorry you had to witness it. And whatever else I probably did.”

“You weren’t exactly being a boy scout last night.”

Jim’s hand slid down to cover his eyes. He looked entertained by that assertion. 

“Are you–” Jim rubbed his eyes. “Are you trying to slut-shame me?”

“No.”

“If you are it’s not going to work. I’ve heard it all,” he said. “And done it all.”

Yeah, Leonard had extrapolated that from last night’s evidence. From his shocking comfort with being touched by strangers. If this man had any boundaries left, none of them were physical. 

“Good for you, Jim.”

“Like, I did sex work for a while. After Minas.”

Jim had dropped his hands into his lap by the time he finished that sentence. So he was looking right at Leonard, into his eyes, while his confession blended into the air. And Leonard didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t have any words coming into his head at all, just a little regret for some of the thoughts he’d had about Jim’s behavior, for what he’d already said. Then Jim kept talking, like he needed to–like he wanted Leonard to know this about him for some reason. 

“It’s how I got out. It was the only way I could have, or at least I thought so at the time. I wasn’t really thinking straight at all. I wasn’t eating. And then there was this escape hatch in front of me–have sex with a stranger and continue to live, or stay on Minas and wait to die. I guess I still looked good enough for that guy to even offer.”

Leonard thought about what that version of Jim must have been like. Three years younger and stripped of everything Starfleet had promised him before they sent him out into space. Staring death in the eye in the Minas desert. He tried to imagine who the fuck had shown up all the way out there, had beamed down to the surface and seen the kind of suffering going on in the ruins and, of all fucking things, had picked out and propositioned a starving, traumatized man. 

Of course Jim was talking about it like it had been all him. Like the choice between living and dying could ever be a choice. Said, “I left people behind. There were other people still alive there with me. I got in bed with some stranger and I left them behind.”

So that was the actual confession. The reason Leonard had been able to detect some hidden layer underneath Jim’s initial explanation of what happened to him on Minas all those months ago. He knew something had to have happened in between Jim living with those civilians in the desert and Jim ending up on Istaar. He could have guessed that the transition between those two things was being omitted from the story for a reason, he just hadn’t thought about it since that night Jim had told him, standing outside of Sweeper’s wreckage. That first night when Leonard noticed he kept wanting to look at Jim for longer and longer stretches of time. 

This conversation was entering a territory Leonard didn’t know how to navigate. Honestly he didn’t. He’d always thought of himself as having been chewed up and spit out by the universe over the last few years, but that wasn’t true. He’d been lucky in a lot of ways that Jim hadn’t. He didn’t know what to say. So he ran for cover into his initial plan, the reason he’d stuck around on Jim’s bed in the first place after the weird fucking night they just had. Because things between them always felt better, more natural in some way, if they were making fun of each other.

His response was the question, “did that ruin it for you?”

It took Jim a couple seconds to figure out what he was actually asking. 

“It,” he repeated. “Oh, sex?” 

Jim laughed out loud. Leaned to the side and had to catch himself on one hand while he laughed. Leonard finally felt like he could breathe easy again. Because Jim wasn’t looking, he was busy covering his eyes with his hand as his laughter died out, he even allowed himself to smile a little. 

“No. I definitely still enjoy sex.”

It got quiet between them. Jim was looking at Leonard again. This was another topic where it was better if they didn’t go any further than right where they were, at the edge of some immensely personal discussion about Jim’s life. All of this had been personal on Jim’s end, ever since Jim asked him for this favor to begin with. Leonard made an exception to his typical behavior and decided to trade one confession for another. Something he knew would continue to push the mood towards the lighter side and would help Jim feel less awkward about everything. Leonard was about to make himself feel awkward on purpose. It was weird feeling this way about someone. The kind of friendship that made him choose to be uncomfortable for the other person’s sake. 

He said, “I masturbated to one of the holographic crewmembers on 787 once.”

Jim’s eyes lit up.

“Oh my god, Bones. While you were–like, in front of it?”

“Fuck no, I’m not that sick. I just spent too much damn time with it and happened to be losing my mind. The second I regained my sanity I disabled it for good.”

And Leonard got up from the bed to go find his shoes, because he thought that was that. Jim’s voice followed him as he crossed the room. He was starting to get up, too, swinging his legs over the side of the bed, sitting up to his full height. 

“That’s not that weird you know,” he said, “I mean, even if you had been in the room with the hologram. People do that kind of thing all the time.”

That made Leonard shake his head. He sat down on the couch to put his boots on, focused on the laces because Jim was walking around half naked now. “Well it was my personal rock bottom.”

“What was this hologram like,” Jim asked, “I have to know.”

“Their personalities are all identical unless you program them.”

“Well did you? Program it?”

“Jesus christ.” He stood up from the couch. It was time to go. Jim had grabbed onto the thread of this conversation and was now yanking at it with his entire bodyweight. This must have been the first time Leonard had opened up to him like this and he wasn’t going to let it go. Leonard probably should have seen that coming. “I’m not having this conversation.”

“What is your type, anyway? What kind of a hologram could get you so hot you still remember it?”

“I remember it,” Leonard explained to the door, “because it’s a source of shame which I now absolutely regret telling you about. Thanks.”

“Man? Woman? Neither? Did you give it a name?”

“I didn’t give it anything.”

“So it was purely looks, then.”

Leonard sighed. He’d backed himself into a corner. He thought only Nyota was the one capable of tricking him into something like this with her follow-up questions and her open acceptance. “I’m done talking to you, you’ve officially passed your post-trip physical. Take a shower. You stink.”

“Boo,” Jim said, and when Leonard turned to look at him over his shoulder he was sitting on the armrest of the couch. Wide awake now. Having way too much fun. “I give you another crucial piece of my tragic backstory and this is what I get.”

“This is what you get,” Leonard said. He turned back to the door, hit the button to open it up to the corridor outside. More light flooded in. And Leonard blamed the stupidity of his next three words on the fact that, unlike Jim, he’d actually gotten no sleep at all last night. That must have been why–before he walked out into the corridor and down to the medbay to make another forbidden cup of coffee–some part of his brain capable of controlling his speech without conscious approval made him say the words, “he was blond.”

-

“Just a head’s up, Jim,” Nyota said later, after they’d been on the move for about an hour. An hour that Jim had spent somewhat paying attention to where they were going but mostly piecing together his fragmented memories of last night in an order that made sense. He’d finally formed the image of that guy from the couch. Hearing aid guy. His mouth had tasted like coffee on the dancefloor. So far that was it. 

He turned away from his thoughts to look at her. 

“Leonard is about to make an announcement ship-wide. I can see him setting up the audio channel from the medbay.”

“He can do that?”

“Yeah, the ship has the infrastructure for it.”

In truth Jim’s question had been more about Bones’ ability to use advanced technology and less about whether or not announcements could theoretically be made from the medbay, but he didn’t bother pushing his joke any further. It would have been more fun to make that point in front of Bones, anyway. 

“Oh, this is gonna be good.”

“He’s going to yell at us for something,” Pavel said.

“He totally is.”

The volume of the announcement, when it did come through, was deafening. Either Bones had maxed out the settings or was shouting into the receiver.

“Hey, here’s another shipwide announcement: I don’t want to see any more of y’all coming down to my medbay asking for hypos for y’alls hangovers out of my extremely limited supply. The medicine is for medical conditions only. Maybe consider that next time y’all get permission from the captain to be stupid on purpose. Until then enjoy a free and unlimited non-medical treatment which I like to call the consequences of your actions. Bye.”

Jim tried to imagine how many members of the crew had bothered him already this morning with that exact request before he snapped. He smiled to himself. And then he remembered the injection Bones had so casually given him when he’d woken up this morning. Maybe Bones wasn’t as pissed at him as he thought, after last night. Hadn’t seen Jim in that state and decided to write him off completely as an indecent, horned-up idiot. Which was kind of what the look on his face suggested in every memory Jim had recovered of making eye contact with Bones from across the club last night. Somehow Jim had maintained his position on the man’s good side. He was grateful for that. 

And, by god, he was ready to get back to work. Even though half of the bridge was sitting in quiet, hungover misery behind him. The break was over. Jim got to disconnect like he’d wanted and now he was ready to kick back into gear. 

He also got a little point beside his name that Captain Pike never got and now he could move on and pretend that he didn’t care about that sort of thing at all. Because he didn’t, at least not today. Today they had work to do. 

Chapter Text

“Hey Jim? You should come take a look at this.”

Jim nodded to Pavel before he got up from the helm and walked over to Nyota’s station. They’d been flying smooth all day, ever since they picked up a handful of people last night off of a starbase that was weeks away from its life support running out. Smooth enough, in fact, that McKenna had agreed to give Jim some flying practice and then spent the last hour staring holes into the back of his head from the captain’s chair. The second Jim was up and walking across the bridge McKenna took his spot back. 

Nyota watched him closely as he figured out what he was looking at. The comms station on the Enterprise was way easier to use than the tiny-ass screen they’d had on Baby. He felt like he was getting the hand of it already. He glanced over at Nyota. Her eyes looked worried–a little too worried for the situation, in Jim’s opinion.

“So it’s a smuggler from Istaar,” he concluded. “They look tiny.”

And whoever it was had no reason to approach the Enterprise. Even if they did have some batshit plan to take control of a gigantic starship, Jim could take them. He would love an excuse to get his hands dirty again. He almost started fantasizing about it right then and there. 

“Their ship is bouncing two frequencies. One of them isn’t obscured. Listen to this.”

She had memorized the set of steps it took to get the computer to interpret those messages about pickups and break-ins that bounced between all of Istaar’s smuggling ships. The rest of them had memorized the deep, slow voice the computer dictated them with. They were still poaching Galileo’s runs every once in a while, only when the pickup locations were convenient. Having a working transporter made everything too easy, and Jim would be tempted to do more if it didn’t make him feel guilty that all of his passengers had to wait to get home while they stopped in random places just to steal shit. 

But this second transmission wasn’t about a pickup. Everyone on the bridge sat and listened to the tail end of the broadcast before it repeated itself from the beginning. As soon as Jim heard the word dead he knew exactly what the message was going to be when it restarted.

“Reward for the return of 17097 and 17236 to Istaar. Jim Kirk, Human male, blond hair, blue eyes. Gaila, Orion female, red hair, blue eyes. 20,000 credits and ship upgrade eligibility for both returned alive. 10,000 for one alive. 5,000 for one dead.”

Nyota turned it off before it repeated again and they all sat in suffocating silence for a couple seconds. Jim stared at the radar screen at Nyota’s station, at the tiny little dot where the transmission was coming from, a ship which no doubt contained someone who would do anything for 20,000 credits. If it was a year ago and Jim and Gaila were still on their perpetually-broken ship and they got that transmission they probably would have given it a shot, hunting those people down. And Jim would have justified it to himself that whoever Galileo was looking for had committed some crime that made it okay. Whether or not he’d change his mind in the face of these theoretical other smugglers, he didn’t know. 

He’d protected Pavel, hadn’t he? Turned down an easy 10,000 credit reward? Maybe that meant he would have protected someone else.

“Well,” he finally said, “thank god Gaila was in the engine room for this one.”

He turned away from the panel at the sound of Pavel’s voice. 

“It isn’t that easy to find someone within the entire galaxy. You would have to be sending out a transmission of your own saying my name is Jim Kirk, blond hair blue eyes, I’ve been a very bad boy, come and get me.”

His deadpan delivery made Jim laugh on his next exhale and shake his head. 

They were fine, really. This manhunt wasn’t an immediate threat, he and Gaila lived on a huge ship now that could obliterate any vessel in Galileo’s fleet in a matter of seconds. They didn’t walk around calling out their own names. So their attempt to fake their own deaths didn’t work, so what? Galileo would give up eventually.

Jim headed over to sit back down in the captain’s chair, because he knew the chances of McKenna switching places with him again were pretty low at this point.. Before he made it halfway across the bridge Nyota held up her hand.

“Captain,” she said. She was the worst offender with that term slipping out, and yet Jim forgave her for it the most. “The ship is hailing us now.”

“Why would they be hailing us.”

“I don’t know. They’re approaching, too.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Pavel said.

“Second that.” Jim sat down and watched as Pavel and McKenna got to work high-tailing it out of there. They had places to be anyway.

That turned out to be the beginning of the most low-stakes and obnoxious ship chase Jim had ever experienced which lasted through the entire star system. Every time they thought they lost that little thing, which hardly looked bigger than a shuttle, it popped up out of nowhere again, corkscrewing and rolling and whipping around and somehow always catching up with them. 

“God, I don’t want to waste a warp on this asshole,” Jim muttered, resting his chin on his hand.

“They’re still hailing us, Jim.”

He sighed and stood up again. It just felt like this was a standing-up kind of situation.

“Fuck it, open a channel. Audio only. We’ll warp out of here if we have to.”

“It’s open.”

Jim swallowed hard before he spoke, raising his voice so that it’d be clear through the comms channel. He opened with,

“Hey, this is Enterprise. What the fuck do you want?”

Nyota turned around so fast in her chair at that it almost looked like she fell sideways out of it. Jim looked over his shoulder at her to see her mouth hanging open in shock.

Relax, he signed to her, we talk like this 

OK, she signed back. But she didn’t look like she relaxed about it in the slightest.

Trust me, he signed. He looked back at the viewscreen, at this tiny ship in front of them. It couldn’t fit more than two people. There might not even be two people onboard.

They all sat in silence on the bridge with the channel open and waited to hear back. Finally a voice patched through. It was sent through some sort of vocal filter, either to hide the person’s voice or because they were speaking a different language. 

“Why the hell are you reading my transmissions?”

“Why do you care? They’re not private.”

“Are you in Galileo’s fleet?”

“Fuck no,” Jim said, and realized within seconds his mistake. He slapped his palm over his forehead. Pavel was shaking his head, back at the helm. Jim didn’t want to look at Nyota’s face right now. The rest of the bridge crew were blissfully unaware of just how bad of a fuck-up that was. Jim envied them. 

It was probably time to warp the fuck out of there and hope this person didn’t raise any flags to Galileo. Too bad Jim was on an extremely recognizable ship. If word got around…

“So you know who Galileo is, and you know how to read his transmissions, and you don’t work for him. Hey, what’s your name? You got blue eyes?”

“I could decimate your ship in two seconds. You got a will to live?”

“How’d you get on his wanted list? What’d you do, steal from him?”

“I’m telling you, you don’t want to play this game with me. Back off.”

“I’ve got a transmission drafted right now that 170-97 and 172-36 are on the old Enterprise. Even if you kill me they’re gonna find you within days. Give me a reason not to.”

Jim exhaled through his teeth. The bridge was so silent he started to hear his own heartbeat, and so tense that his heartbeat sounded way too slow. 

They were in a stand-off with a puny little space shuttle that probably didn’t even have ammunition of its own, and yet was able to threaten Jim with the one sentence that would work. It’s what Jim would have done, if the roles were reversed. He remembered being the one in the pathetic little smuggling ship. He remembered how desperate he’d always felt for a bargaining chip from the control panel of Babydoll, when shit went south.

Oh, of course. 

The rest of them weren’t going to like it, but Jim didn’t care. None of them had been where he had been, where this asshole on the other end of the comm channel was right now. And if Jim had made it out, so could anyone else.

“Okay. You want a job?”

Silence, again. Jim felt everyone’s eyes on him from around the bridge. He felt his palms start to sweat. 

“What?”

“You’re a great pilot. And you work for Galileo which means you hate your life.”

“Right on both counts.”

“We’ll bring you onboard right now. I’ll pretend you didn’t threaten me. You can finally do something that matters. This is a passenger ship. We help people.”

The silence on the bridge reached an unbearable weight. Jim covered his eyes with his palm. Stood there in the quiet dark. Contemplated his own death. If he was dead, he was still worth 5,000 credits. On Istaar, at least. They’d probably harvest his organs.

This was taking too long. He dropped his hand from his face and spoke again.

“This offer’s going to expire, by the way. And we have photon torpedoes.”

Finally they got a response. A response that made Jim let out his next breath in a sigh of relief as everyone else on the bridge around him went tense in seconds, like they were preparing for impact.

“Alright. You’re on. Give me ten minutes, I’ll pack up.”

“I’ll meet you in the hangar,” Jim said, and almost slipped and added Kirk out. Damn. He sucked at being on the run, actually. 

-

Jim walked into the hangar bay with two people from the Enterprise’s old security crew, who now spent most of their time on the greenhouse deck but switched roles when they needed to. Marta and Raul. The three of them didn’t even have one phaser they could bring in case shit hit the fan but Raul had a shovel with him, which he pointed towards the door of the ship once the airlocks had closed behind it and they were able to enter the bay. Jim and Marta just stood behind him and waited. Marta had her hands poised at her sides like she was prepared to start grappling with whoever walked off the ship, another ridiculous attempt at defense if Jim was being honest, but it wasn’t like he had a better weapon or even a better idea in his possession. He shoved his hands in his pockets and felt his body go tense as soon as he heard that first click that meant the door was about to start opening.

The door opened upwards and the light from the hangar flooded into the small ship to reveal a man in dusty, faded clothes, with a fresh bruise on his forehead and a not-so-old scar across one eye that had missed the eye itself but cut a sharp line through his eyebrow. He didn’t look like he had any weapons on him. In fact he was holding his hands out, palms open, to show that he didn’t have any weapons.

“Raul, you can chill with the shovel,” Jim said. Raul didn’t chill with the shovel but he at least stepped aside and let Jim move into the center of their little welcome party. He held his hands up in the same way the pilot was doing, to show he didn’t have anything.

“I’m Jim Kirk,” he said.

“Ha, I knew it. You suck at being on the run.”

While they were talking, the exit ramp made its slow descent from inside the ship until it hit the floor of the hangar. The pilot took a few steps forward. In the corner of Jim’s vision he saw Raul tighten his grip around the shovel. He tried not to start laughing. He knew that kind of thing would ruin their already weak security measures, but god, it took a lot of self control not to start laughing. He focused on his new pilot.

“I’m Sulu,” was what he said next. “Hikaru Sulu, formerly Lieutenant.”

“Hey, same here,” Jim said.

“Nice.”

Sulu walked all the way to the bottom of the ramp and the two of them were about to shake hands, except that once he wasn’t standing in the doorway anymore Jim could see that the inside of his ship was packed nearly floor-to-ceiling with crates. Too many crates, for someone on a typical smuggling run, even as far from Istaar as they were right now. Maybe a suspicious amount. Jim paused. 

“What you got back there?”

“Little bit of everything. I’ve been skimming.”

He wanted to believe that. He liked Sulu so far. The guy just had a vibe that told Jim he would fit in around here, and had made a clear effort so far not to come off as threatening. Well, outside of the actual threats he’d made over the comms channel, but that was before. 

He walked halfway up the ramp to get a better look at the cargo that filled every bit of space except for the control panel. If this guy was skimming, he was skimming a lot. Jim let out a low whistle. “We’d better call for backup.”

“I’ll carry it, just show me where my quarters are.”

Jim shook his head. “It’d take you like, a dozen trips. Plus, that’s not how we do things here. Personal items, fine, but valuables like that get pooled and then sold. It’s how we can let people ride for free.”

“Yeah, fine, I’ll divvy it up, just don’t worry about carrying it. I can carry it.”

He turned to look over his shoulder. Sulu was facing him now, had his back to Marta and Raul. He looked tense all of a sudden. Jim almost felt disappointed once he realized that he was probably hiding something. Whatever he was hiding, when they found it, would at the very least require them to throw him in the brig. At most, Jim was dead, and his corpse would be on its way to get its organs harvested on Istaar in exchange for 5,000 credits. 

He narrowed his eyes.

“You’re being weird. You have something you don’t want us to see. Did you bring a bomb?”

“No, I just don’t want you touching my stuff.”

“You hiding someone?”

“No.”

“Marta,” Jim said, and she read his mind. Within seconds she had the guy pinned against the floor of the hangar bay, immobilized with his arm twisted and her full weight on top of his midsection. He kicked and squirmed and got nowhere. 

“It’s not a bomb, I swear.”

“If you tricked us, dude–”

“I didn’t!” he yelled. The desperation only made Jim more suspicious. He was hiding something. At this point there was no question about that. The question was just what, exactly, he was hiding on that ship, and how much of an absolute disaster of a day Jim was going to have as a result. He watched Jim board the ship with wild eyes as Marta held him down.

“Raul, help me search the ship. And lose the shovel, jesus christ.”

Sulu had been skimming alright. Save for one beat-up duffel bag full of clothes and some stuff that clinked together when Jim shook it, every other bag and crate and barrel was full of Galileo’s top hits. Universal translators, Fleet-issue communicators and padds, hyposprays, medical equipment, pills. Three honest-to-god phasers. Three. 

Jim almost forgot what he was doing and got carried away with the haul, with how far they’d be able to stretch this stuff to keep the ship running. He forgot he was about to find a bomb or worse. It was only the repeated sounds through the still-open door of the ship, of Sulu protesting and struggling against Marta’s iron grip, that reminded him that they weren’t out of the woods yet. 

Raul spent almost ten minutes trying to wedge open a wooden crate at the very back that was seemingly reinforced with steel, the way it wouldn’t come apart. The kind of thing that would maybe contain a weapon Sulu intended to hijack their ship with. Maybe. He called out to Jim within seconds of getting just a single chunk of it pulled off. 

“Uh, JT?”

“Coming.”

“It’s not a bomb.”

Raul had only managed to pull off one piece of one plank of wood from one side of the crate. It created just a big enough hole to let the light in from outside. And only enough light came in to reflect off of a set of eyes staring back at them, and then, as Jim’s vision focused, a small face, pale in the darkness of the crate, frozen and terrified. 

“Oh my god.”

She looked like she could have been ten years old, that was how small she was. With long, tangled hair and what looked like a men’s sized coat around her shoulders. She didn’t speak, she only stared back at Jim and Raul. Backed further into the corner of the crate. Jim swallowed hard. His hands clenched into fists. He saw fucking red. 

Marta read his mind again, when she saw him storming off the ship, his feet pounding against the ramp until it shook, and moved aside just in time for Jim to tower over Sulu. He pressed his boot against the man’s throat and leaned down until their faces were at appropriate spitting-distance. 

“What the fuck is wrong with you, you sick fuck,” he gritted out. He hoped his voice was just low enough that the kid wouldn’t hear it. Hoped that Raul’s soft and friendly tone of voice and the basic questions he was asking her back there were distracting her. Although, on second thought and depending on what she’d been through, maybe hearing Jim’s words would be cathartic.

“I could fucking kill you. I’ll kill you right now for what you are.”

Sulu was shaking his head back and forth, as well as he could with Jim’s boot on his neck. He was trying to speak but Jim didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to hear the inevitable defense that he had just been taking her back to Istaar, that she was just cargo and he hadn’t done anything to her himself, as if that made any difference at all. Marta was searching his pockets, emptying them. She pulled a fourth phaser out of the waistband of his pants and tossed it across the floor until it clattered against something. 

“JT,” Raul said again. Louder now, he was probably standing in the doorway of the ship.

“Way ahead of you,” Jim replied, except, as it turned out, he wasn’t. Because as soon as he started pressing his boot into his neck a little harder and reveled in the sight of Sulu’s face turning red as he choked, there were hands pulling him back. Jim tried to shrug Raul off, elbow him away so he could get back to business. Only fought back for a second or two, though, until he heard what he said next. What he screamed, actually, into Jim’s ear.

“Kirk, stop!” he yelled. Jim wasn’t proud of the almost growl-sounding noise he made as he was ripped backwards and forced off of Sulu completely. “Stop! She’s his daughter!”

The first thing Sulu did as soon as Jim backed off, even as he gasped for air, was scramble to his feet and back onto the ship, drop to his knees in front of the crate and open it up with a key chained to his belt loop, and let his daughter out. The second thing he did, holding her hand in his own so that she followed behind him, was walk back out into the hangar and shake Jim’s hand. The third thing he did was open his mouth to say, voice all fucked-up and dry:

“No hard feelings.”

Jim stared at him. He gave what was probably the weakest handshake of his life.

“Dude, I just tried to kill you.”

Sulu was kind of smiling at that point. His eyes turned to half-moons and the scar across his face pulled at the skin over his cheek. The girl stared at him. She tilted her head and then narrowed her eyes at him and leaned into her father’s side, hiding herself from Jim a little. Supposedly Raul had gotten her to speak back there, to tell him that Sulu was her dad and not her captor, but now that she was in front of Jim she didn’t say anything. It was clear that she was his daughter, though. The connection between them was real, the way they held onto each other. Sulu leaned closer towards Jim and his next sentence was on the quieter side. 

“You were ready to choke me to death with one foot because you thought I was–” he left the word out. Paused for emphasis. Eyebrows slightly raised. And when Jim nodded at that he just said, “I’d take orders from you.”

“Fair enough.”

It may have been the most Jim had ever respected anyone upon first meeting them. 

Their dynamic snowballed from there. Marta and Raul just watched the two of them in confusion and with a pretty decent amount of concern while they made small talk and laughed as they unloaded the rest of the crates. Not only had they managed to go from assault and potential murder to mutual respect within a minute, but by the time finished unloading his tiny ship (which had been named Yankee Doodle, Jim nearly vomited) and sent it floating back out into space, and then headed back up to the bridge to watch the Enterprise’s most basic ammo blow it to pieces, they were nearing the territory of best friends. They cheered at the explosion and slapped each other on the back and shook hands like they were rooting for the same team at a sports game. 

-

One second Leonard was squinting in the sunlight on some random-ass planet, trying to figure out if the woman selling plasma was about to rip him off, and the next thing he knew he was being dragged by the back of his jacket away from the stall completely and around a corner, shoved up in an alleyway between two buildings that hardly had room for one person to stand, let alone two.

“What the hell?”

“Sorry,” Jim said. He’d pulled Leonard in after him, so now in order to peer out into the street he had to lean his body to the side and press their chests together. “I saw someone.”

“Not that guy from–”

“No, no. Not him. I mean, this guy also hates me, but for a different reason.”

They were speaking quiet enough for their voices to get drowned out by the rest of the marketplace, by the layers and layers of conversations and noise. And the only reason they could hear each other amidst all that noise was because Jim’s face was so close to Leonard’s that Leonard could feel his breath against the side of his neck and pick out the specific streaks of color in his eyes. That was too damn close.

“What’d you do?”

“I stole from him.”

“You realize that’s the same reason.”

Jim laughed, then. A little. Leonard watched the lines forming around the corners of his eyes. He’d never been able to see those before. 

“What do you think he’s gonna do to you?”

“If I had to guess, probably a repeat of what he did last time. Was my nose broken when you met me?”

“Like half of you was broken when I met you.”

That also made Jim smile, made those wrinkles around his eyes come back. Leonard didn’t feel like he was being any funnier than usual. Maybe the nerves of running into another person whose shit list he was on just made Jim find everything more entertaining. Leonard tried his best to shift out of the way, to press his own back against the wall behind him and give Jim more room to stretch his neck out into the street. It didn’t work. If anything, it made the two of them fit even tighter together. Unless it was possible that the alley itself was shrinking in size. 

“Can you clue me in on the plan here? Are we just gonna stand here like sardines in a can until midnight, or what?”

“Do you think she was selling real plasma?”

It took Leonard a second to realize what the hell Jim was talking about. 

“I don’t know,” he said, “probably. You know plasma is kind of easy to harvest.”

“Gross. Don’t use the word harvest.”

“That’s what grosses you out?”

Jim tilted his head just enough, pulled his attention away from the street and looked sideways at Leonard. 

“I’m turning civilized, aren’t I,” he asked. 

“Well you certainly smell better than you used to,” Leonard answered. He didn’t know why that was what he thought of. Of course Jim was turning civilized. This process had been underway for months now. It was not news. 

“Which is lucky if you plan on squeezing me in here with you all night.”

Jim finally got around to answer his question from a few minutes ago.

“Just until I think he’s moved on.”

“I don’t get how you’re going to be able to tell from in here. We should just beam back up if you’re so afraid of him.”

“You said you needed supplies. We’re not making any more stops for two weeks, we have to get whatever you need here.” Jim leaned forward even more. Their bodies slid past each other. Leonard tried very hard to think about plasma. “Wait, I see him.”

Leonard had seen Jim’s easy intimacy with other people. Handshakes, slapping people on the back–there were even some members of the crew that had been greeting him with hugs lately. He kissed Nyota on the cheek in the mess even though the two of them saw each other all day. He and Gaila held hands sometimes, or even just interlocked their pinky fingers together, while they talked. The first day their new pilot came onboard Jim brought him down to the medbay with his arm thrown over the guy's shoulders, showing him around like he was some long-lost childhood friend. Maybe in the face of all that, Leonard had subconsciously accepted that the two of them had started off on such god-awful terms that it prevented him from that particular side of Jim’s friendship. 

And maybe he’d been wrong, because he seemed to be the only one in the alleyway who was uncomfortable with the proximity of their bodies and their faces at all. Jim was acting like they were just having a conversation under any other circumstances. 

Leonard wondered if, somewhere in the last few weeks, he may have been promoted. He tried to let some of the tension loose out of his shoulders on his next breath. The alleyway got a little wider somehow.

Leonard watched his eyes narrow and his head lean forward even more. He chewed at his bottom lip absently, something which was hard to ignore right now with it happening so close to Leonard’s own face.

“What’s he doing?” Leonard asked.

“Shopping, I don’t know. Give me a minute, I just need to see where he goes.”

“You know he might not even recognize you anymore.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice.”

“You’ve got the implants and a real haircut and you don’t look dead inside. Unless you really made an impression on him I can’t imagine he’d see you right now and make the connection.”

That made Jim smile in that annoying little sarcastic way he did. Although Leonard had only seen that smile directed at Gaila before. Shit, he had been promoted. 

“Aw, thanks, Bones. That almost sounded like a compliment.”

“Well–”

Jim placed his hand on the front of Leonard’s shoulder, as if he didn’t already have his full attention when there was nothing else Leonard could possibly be looking at in here. His hand stayed there. “Shh, wait. He’s moving again.”

It took at least another fifteen minutes of Jim continuing to insist that this guy they were hiding from was about to be gone, and then Leonard heard just the word Okay before he was pushed out from the alleyway as abruptly as he’d been yanked into it. When they ventured back out to finish restocking the medbay, maybe Leonard’s mind was playing tricks on him, making him hyperaware of the position of their bodies the entire time. Or maybe Jim did tend to stand closer to him than he needed to these days. Close enough that he was able to get Leonard’s attention by bumping their shoulders together. And Leonard also didn’t remember when Jim started communicating to him with so much body language, tilts of his head and movements of his eyes and changes in his posture, but it must have been going on long enough that Leonard always understood what he meant. As if he’d been learning some highly individualized form of Jim Kirk sign language without knowing it. 

He got back to the ship that evening and realized that now he just had to hope that nobody needed any sort of serious medical procedure anytime soon, because he forgot the fucking anesthetics which were half of the reason they beamed down in the first place. He wanted to bitch at Jim for making him forget except technically Jim hadn’t done anything wrong. All he’d done was distract Leonard by being himself–more of himself than he’d been in the past–and treating Leonard like they were real friends now. He couldn’t bitch at him for that. 

-

Sulu wouldn’t let the girl leave his side at all during those first few weeks he was onboard. No matter how many times Bones tried to get him to leave her in the medbay so he could give her a full check-up because–and even Jim agreed with him on this–she did not look good. He wouldn’t even let Nyota take her somewhere else while they stood on the bridge and fired on his now-empty ship until it was nothing but a cloud of shards of metal floating apart through space. She stood and watched all of it and listened to every word of every conversation, pressed against her father’s side and underneath his arm. 

Demora was eleven. On the smaller side. Scrawny and pale, with dark circles under her eyes, like she hadn’t set foot outside a ship in months. And in all likelihood she hadn’t. Sulu had been able to hide her existence from Galileo the entire time. The crate was how he’d moved her whenever he changed ships. He’d been planning to hide her on the Enterprise, too, at first, until he confirmed that the ship was safe. Jim trusted this. Sulu was actually an easy guy to trust, once all their cards were on the table. He could see that all of it was for her protection, the choices of a desperate father in a desperate situation who knew what could happen to his young daughter in the circles he ran in. But still the image made him feel sick. How close she had been to all of the darkness. How much of it must have rubbed off on her anyway.

It was probably why she barely spoke. 

When Jim did get to hear her voice, he felt like he’d waited so long for it that the clarity and even tone she spoke with surprised him. There was nothing wrong with how she talked, she just did it so infrequently that Jim kind of expected that there might be more than one reason behind it. Like a speech impediment or something. For the most part she only talked to Sulu if she talked at all. She’d sit on the bridge in front of the captain’s chair, at the edge of the platform and right behind where Sulu now traded off with McKenna at the helm. Watched the viewscreen all day while they flew through space. Listened to everyone talk. And every once in a while she’d break her silence by asking her dad about something on the screen or even just saying she was hungry, and every time it felt like Jim was hearing her voice for the first time again. He’d glance over at Nyota and he could tell she was having the same reaction, except she was also carrying a desire to talk to the kid that was so strong it came off of her in waves. 

At Sulu’s insistence they all gave Demora space, and within their first week on the ship her quiet presence on the bridge became normal. Another fact of life on the Enterprise, this child who wore her dad’s clothes and for some reason never had shoes on and studied everything around her without ever deciding to share whatever conclusions she must have been drawing as she watched and noticed and observed. Sulu said she just needed some time. Not that they’d really been able to talk about it. He was very hard to talk to about anything that they didn’t want Demora to hear because she was always within earshot. 

So it took almost two weeks before they were able to convince Sulu to socialize with them in the mess after hours. After after hours, technically, because while Demora was back at the counter getting seconds from Jia, Nyota leaned over the table and said that his induction onto the ship wouldn’t be complete until he’d heard everyone’s backstory but she wasn’t sure if all of them were going to be family-friendly. His response was that if they wanted to talk to him without Demora they’d have to wait until she fell asleep. So Jim and Nyota waited at the table through the dinner hour, and Nyota grabbed Pavel by the wrist on his way out and made him stick around, too. Jim looked around the mess for Bones but figured he must have already left. Bummer. He felt like Bones had a good backstory for their roundtable. 

The only ones Sulu got to hear that night, after he came back up to the mess and found the three of them still sitting there with the night-shift lights casting them almost in the dark, were Jim’s, Nyota’s, and Pavel’s. Three major points along the spectrum, at least. 

“Alright, man, you’re up,” Jim said, once Pavel was done. Pavel’s own origins had somehow hit Sulu the hardest. His posture went a little more tense at the end of every sentence, even though the way he’d explained it had been brief and had glossed over some of the finer details of the behind-the-scenes work he did on Istaar and so Jim couldn’t imagine that Sulu was able to garner that much resentment to be staring across the table like he was. Finally he turned away from Pavel and directed the beginning of his own story to all three of them, setting his fingertips on the table as he spoke. 

“I was a pilot on the USS Excelsior.”

“Woah,” Nyota said. The name sounded familiar to Jim, although any random noun said in the right tone of voice with the term USS before it could sound like a plausible ship that had existed in the Fleet. Based on Nyota’s reaction it must have been famous or something. Almost as famous as the Enterprise.

“It was a full-time passenger ship during the war,” he explained, even though Nyota was nodding like she already knew. “The crew would go into conflict zones and sometimes they’d have to literally carry people out to safety. We went everywhere.”

There were so many details about Sulu so far which felt like coincidences. Jim wondered how the hell they crossed paths, and at the same time how the hell they hadn’t crossed paths earlier. They’d been minding their own business on their long winding route towards Earth and just so happened to find a pilot from Starfleet’s legitimate passenger ship, and that pilot just so happened to be looking for a new job–after working the same fucking job as Jim. 

It was as cool as it was bizarre.

“Not bad,” Jim said.

“What happened to it?” Pavel asked. And again Sulu looked at him with this wariness. Or maybe it was caution. Jim couldn’t figure out why the man who’d been flying his eleven-year old through space was so uncomfortable about a seventeen-year-old living on the ship with them. 

Maybe he was trying to figure out if Pavel had ever fucked him over back on Istaar. If he needed to resent him for something. The thought made the hairs on the back of Jim’s neck stand up a little. 

“It was hijacked,” Sulu finally said. He’d taken his time to decide how he was going to tell the story. So the rest of it came out well-formed.

“We kept on working after the war, never charged anyone, stayed in uniform and went right into the middle of all the worst places in the galaxy. But things were different. Being a Starfleet vessel didn’t mean anything anymore. We were still trying to help people but we no longer had the protection of the UFP, which meant we were just as vulnerable as anyone else. A lot of problems happened that way. People we let onboard took advantage of our crew, stole things, stuff like that.”

“Oh no,” Nyota said.

Jim leaned back in his chair. “I wish I could say I’m surprised.”

“We never gave up, but I guess we got a reputation. Those people who finally took the ship must have been planning it for months. We picked them up in all these different places, and then once they were all onboard they took over. Killed the Captain in the middle of the bridge. Threw a few people out of the airlocks. Threatened the rest of us. Join or die.”

Nyota was leaning over the table with her chin resting on one hand. 

“How’d you get out?” she asked.

“Demora and I crammed into a one-person escape shuttle in the lower decks. Anyone who hasn’t been on a constitution-class wouldn’t know about those. It was the last one left.”

God damn. Jim was back on the edge of his seat again. Because he couldn’t believe that–even though he knew, technically, it was possible. “You flew a one-person escape shuttle through open space?”

Sulu shrugged. “I’m good at my job. And then I ended up smuggling how most people do. I fell for the pitch. I thought it’d give me access to a ship which would give me control over my future, and then I was trapped in it for an entire year. Probably one of the stupidest decisions I could have made.”

“You and me both, man.”

Jim walked with Sulu back to the single-bed quarters he shared with Demora now. The room itself was probably as big as the space they’d had onboard their smuggling ship. 

It was obvious how grateful Sulu was to be on the Enterprise. The way he walked around like he’d already been living on the ship for years, held out his arm and let his fingertips trace the walls along the corridor. But still, Jim had sensed something earlier. Other than all the weirdness with Pavel, and a certain undercurrent of nervous energy because he’d left Demora alone in their quarters when they were both on a brand new ship. There was something about the story he told, about how they got out after the Excelsior was hijacked. Something he’d left out. Jim wasn’t able to ignore it. 

He brought it up over the sound of their footsteps and of Sulu’s hand brushing against the surface of the wall. 

“You left someone behind on the Excelsior, didn’t you.”

At first Sulu just nodded, staring straight ahead. 

“Yeah,” he said. “How’d you know?”

“I don’t know–you made a point of mentioning that the escape shuttle was just for one person. And that it was the last one. I guess I read between the lines. Someone didn’t make it out.”

“Ben,” Sulu answered. He stopped touching the wall and flashed his left hand in front of them, trying to be nonchalant about it. There was a thin silver band on his ring finger. “It was the decision we had to make, for her. We had to get her off the ship, only one of us could fit in the escape shuttle with her, and only I could’ve piloted a shuttle like that to safety. Ben stayed onboard.”

“That was the last time you saw him?”

“Fifteen months ago.”

“You think he’s still alive?”

Sulu didn’t answer right away. Maybe Jim shouldn’t have asked. 

“He’s smart,” he finally said, right as they came up on the doors of his quarters and both stopped. Sulu was still looking out at the corridor while he spoke. “And he’s a good actor. He just needs to go along with the new captain and convince them he’s loyal until he finds his own way out.”

“And then what?”

“Yorktown, where we used to live before all this. That’s where we agreed to wait for each other if we both survive.”

“Yorktown,” Jim repeated. He’d heard things about that place, over the years. It was where Pavel spent the first half of his childhood. He vaguely remembered having a transfer there once, on his way to his Farragut posting. As far as anyone knew it was still intact, people still lived there, nobody had given up when it ceased to be a colony under the official seal of Starfleet and the UFP. It was kind of the land of milk and honey. Either the things people said were true, and there really was a place where life still felt normal and two people separated by war could find each other again–or they’d come to find out it was just another name on the never-ending list of things they lost to the war. Regardless,

“We can get you there,” Jim said, and that made Sulu look at him. His expression had turned a little sad, since the last time Jim had seen his face, before they started talking about all this. But it faded quickly. 

“Yeah?”

“Sure. I don’t see why not. I think it’s on the way. Just try not to make yourself irreplaceable in the meantime. I already like you better than my other pilot.”

That made Sulu raise an eyebrow. The one that had a line of scar tissue cutting it in half. 

“No promises,” he said, and Jim just brought his hand up and hit him lightly on the shoulder before he said goodnight.