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I've Had A Few, 1/1
Title: I've Had A Few
Author:
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vlbuehle Fandom: Star Trek Reboot
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy
Word Count: ~2,300
Disclaimer: Sadly, not mine.
Summary: Jim gets an unexpected message.
A/N: Because my lovely readers requested a sequel to Regrets, and then the ideas started popping. There will be a third with the actual conversation, but Jim wanted his say first. And Bones wanted to grump. Who was I to say no?
It had been a long goddamn few days, Jim decided wearily as he slipped quietly into the apartment he shared with Bones. First there had been the glorious fun of limping home in his battered lady, doing what he could to hold his crew and ship together long enough to get back to Earth. Even when they’d finally made it home, he hadn’t had time to relax; there had been injured to transfer down, reports to file and flesh out, hurried commendations for everyone while he still had Acting Captain before his name, and a final round of personal thanks for his bridge crew, who’d set aside their doubts to obey his crazy-assed scheme.
Then he’d finally gotten on the shuttle taking them to the Academy and the real fun had started. He’d spent hours on his feet and more hours sitting in front of tribunals and committees, defending every decision he’d ever made. Spock had dropped his complaint for the Kobayashi debacle, but that didn’t mean shit in the face of every rule and regulation he’d broken, which was just about every one in the damn playbook. His own determination to cover Bones’ ass hadn’t exactly helped, but he was pretty sure Bones wasn’t going to get more than a slap on the wrist, considering Earth would be very dead right now if not for him, and even Spock had admitted as much.
The Admiralty had let his crew go long before Jim himself had been dismissed, and he’d flatly forbidden Bones to wait for him. If the darkness of the apartment was any indication, his lover had crashed once he’d gotten home, not that Jim grudged him the rest; they were all running on empty right now. He wasn’t the exception to the rule, but he’d spent the better part of sixteen hours defending himself and his people, and the adrenaline was too high right now for sleep. He needed to calm down, needed to let himself settle before he joined Bones, or he’d be begging for nightmares and he didn’t feel like dealing with a parade of his personal horrors all night. Not tonight.
Jim sank down on the couch and leaned back, scrubbing his hands over his face and contemplating the merits of some decent booze. He should probably feel more nervous than he did; the Admiralty had remained impressively blank-faced throughout his entire debriefing without giving him a hint of what they thought about his actions. That probably wasn’t a good sign, but he couldn’t bring himself to give a shit right now. Tomorrow would be soon enough for the worries and the grief; Vulcan was a huge loss, yes, almost too big to conceive of, but it was his classmates that hurt the most because he’d known most of the people who’d died in the skies above Vulcan. But tonight—tonight wasn’t for worries or mourning. He’d gotten his crew home again, and because of their hard work there’d been a home to come back to. For now, that was enough.
He glanced over at the table and winced at the blinking comm signaling messages. It was tempting to put it off for the morning, but he wasn’t ready to drop just yet, and besides, that was his official Fleet comm. Any reporters that made it through to this number damn well deserved a personal brush-off, and maybe a discussion about their hacking techniques.
Blowing out a breath, Jim leaned over and snagged his comm, dragging it onto the couch with him. He pulled up the messages and frowned a little; more than he’d hoped for, less by far than he’d feared. Looked like the Fleet firewall had beaten the hackers yet again.
He thumbed through quickly: notice of suspension, orders to report to the Academy to fill in for a handful of instructors gone with the fleet to Vulcan, a handful of demands as to his whereabouts which he deleted with thoroughly unrepentant glee, and then a gag order from the Fleet public relations office. Big surprise there, but a damn good excuse to keep his mouth shut when the reporters came calling, so he’d take it. A series of worried queries from the bridge crew, sent as the hours dragged on and there had been no word of him; he composed a generic reassurance and sent it out. Notifications of memorials, and several requests for speeches; he ignored the ones clearly intended to puff up Starfleet’s image, but sent agreement to the ones intended for the traumatized cadets still alive. A series of alerts on Pike, as per his request, keeping him updated on the captain’s condition; he forwarded those to Bones, relieved to note it looked good. Not good enough for a Captain, but then they’d be promoting him anyway to fill the gaps in the Admiralty, and the tentative prognosis suggested he’d be back on his feet within a year. Jim lowered his head for a moment of shameless relief, but he and Chris Pike were far closer than most people had ever realized. Pike had recruited him, but more importantly, Pike had seen something in him that made him worth fighting for when everyone else had written Jim off for good. Jim wouldn’t ever forget being called to Pike’s office the day after he’d enlisted to find the man grim-faced and coldly furious as he’d gently explained he’d alerted Winona that Jim had enlisted, as per protocol. And Jim hadn’t needed it said to know it hadn’t gone well; Winona had washed her hands of him long ago and she’d never regretted it since.
The real shock had been Pike steering him to the couch and dropping down next to him, a casual arm going over his shoulder as he was firmly informed that being the case, he was Chris Pike’s now and that was the end of it. He was to sign the PADD making Pike his emergency contact and next of kin, which he’d obediently done, and then Pike had given him a wicked grin, welcomed him to the family, and informed him to show up for dinner on Saturday no later than 5pm. Jim hadn’t believed it at first; it had been so damn long since someone had wanted him, but Chris Pike was a determined man, and he wasn’t joking. He’d mentored and shepherded and reamed Jim out all the way through the Academy. Which was probably why it had meant so much to have Pike give him a tired smile when Bones finally let Jim into Sickbay, and to see the delight in the older man’s eyes as he addressed Acting Captain Kirk.
One message left and he frowned as he realized he didn’t recognize the number, then shrugged and opened it. A woman’s face popped up, and he froze, staring at his mother. She was older than he remembered, with threads of gray streaking her hair, but she was still beautiful. Still Mom.
The real question was what the hell did she want?
“Hello, Jim,” she said quietly, and his hands clenched around his comm at the sound of her soft voice. “I pulled some strings, called in a few old favors to get your number. I—” her voice trailed off for a second as he frowned down at her face; why had she bothered? She hadn’t been interested before. “I have no right to ask this, but I’d like to speak to you. Please call me back.” Her breath hitched, but her eyes stayed steady. “Please, Jim.”
Jim didn’t know how long he sat on the couch, gaze locked on the darkened screen, before a warm body settled next to him. A blanket was tossed over his shoulders before an arm pulled him against Bones’ solid frame.
“Bad news?” his lover asked mildly, and Jim blinked out of his daze.
“What time is it?”
“Late. Doesn’t matter, we’re all off for the next couple of days. Medical orders.” Bones paused for a second to pry the comm from Jim’s hands, then rubbed the cramps out. “Talk to me, Jim.”
“My mom called.”
Bones went ominously still, but then he’d been the one to pull Jim out of the brawls and the drinking binges when his personal demons were too strong for sex to beat back, and he’d suffered through the nightmares about Frank and Tarsus and all the other shit tucked neatly away in Jim’s psyche.
“And what does she want?” he asked, drawl thickening in warning. Jim blew out a shaken breath.
“To talk, she said.”
“Hmm.” Bones didn’t say anything for a few long minutes, just rubbed slow circles on Jim’s back. He was shaking, he realized in some surprise—when had he started shaking? “Are you going to call back?”
He didn’t want to. A very large part of him didn’t want to. Yeah, he hadn’t been the easiest of kids growing up—genius level repeat offender pretty much covered it—but he couldn’t remember a time when Winona hadn’t looked at him with cool distance in her eyes that thawed whenever her gaze found Sam. Couldn’t remember finding actual approval in her face rather than indifference. She’d almost never touched him, even when he’d tried to provoke her into a spanking because at least then she’d have to touch him. She hadn’t given a shit when he’d been good, and she’d acted like it was no surprise when he finally exploded, because at least when she was yelling she was seeing him, not the dead father he’d never seen. She’d ignored him when he’d tried to tell her about Frank, snapping that he couldn’t be that bad given that Sam never had any troubles with the man.
And once he had started acting up in ways even she couldn’t ignore, it hadn’t taken her long to ship him halfway across the galaxy to her sister rather than deal with him herself. Tarsus had shaped him, had turned him from a frustrated child into a hardened survivor with as little respect for his mother as she’d had for him, because she’d sent him to that hell without even bothering to check. He’d checked, after he was back on Earth; yeah, things hadn’t been bad yet, but there had been hints that maybe, just maybe, something was off on Tarsus IV.
Winona had never even apologized.
After he’d come back, he’d been through. Fuck her and her disdain; if she didn’t want him, fuck her very much. He’d watched his aunt and uncle die, had seen his younger cousins butchered, and he’d listened as Hoshi Sato died cursing Kodos with her final breath. Jim had been Kodos’ prize, the genius son of one of the Federation’s greatest martyrs, and he’d used that ruthlessly to protect the few he could, later escaping and hiding with his small band of survivors, doing whatever it took to keep them alive. His mother hating him wasn’t that big a deal, not after dealing with Kodos’ madness for weeks on end.
But he’d still hoped, a small part of him. Until her rants had turned to his future, or lack thereof. The day she’d flatly told him he didn’t have the brains to get into a decent college, he’d nearly laughed in her face, because his record hadn’t slowed any college from coming after him; he had acceptances from every single one he’d applied to, a Who’s Who list of the finest colleges in the world.
That had also been the end of it for him. She’d been getting aptitude results and correspondence from teachers raving about his brains for years and obviously hadn’t bothered to read any of it. Nor had she ever bothered to understand what it had taken to survive Tarsus.
Fuck it. He’d been done, and he’d walked out the day he’d graduated to her poorly hidden relief and started doing his considerable best to destroy himself with a series of dead-end jobs and fights afterwards.
Then Chris Pike had come along, thrown a challenge in his face with steady eyes, and knocked some sense into him. He might have started out because Jim was the son of his dead friend, but he’d made it very clear he respected Jim for himself, not George’s son. At the Academy he’d actually nearly been challenged intellectually, and he’d found a mentor and father figure in Christopher Pike, a best friend and then lover in Bones.
He’d been happy. And right now, he felt like that bewildered, hurt child again whose mother hated the very sight of him.
But she was still his mother. And looking back, he hadn’t exactly made things easy. She’d fucked up first and worst by far, but…
“I’ll hear her out,” he decided, and Bones’ arms tightened briefly. He’d regret it if he didn’t, even if it was only that small bit of him that was still a child craving his mother’s love. “One more chance, and that’s the end of it.”
“All right,” Bones said quietly. He wasn’t happy, but this was Jim’s call and he’d made it. “Together, then.”
Jim’s lips twitched; if Winona said something Bones didn’t like, his overly possessive lover would probably cut her off, ream her out like he’d been itching to do for ages, and make sure she never got near Jim again. He could live with that; it was nice to have someone so fiercely protective of him. “Yes, Bones.”
“In the morning,” his lover added in a tone that brooked no argument. “Bedtime now, and don’t argue with me, kid, or I’ll sedate your ass so fast you won’t know what hit you.”
Jim was laughing even as he was hauled up and towed into the bedroom. “Whatever you say, dear.”
“Shut up. Brat.”
He was still grinning as he followed his grumbling lover into the bedroom, shoving all thoughts of Winona and tomorrow out of his head. Tonight, he’d savor his victory. Tomorrow would come soon enough.
FINIS
Followed by Conversations.
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Eagerly awaiting the confrontation,
~Jay
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