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Apr. 20th, 2025 01:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madimpossibledreamerHappy Easter if you celebrate it and if not I hope you have a great day anyway!
Main Points:
Star Trek (the 2009!movie verse) Cambion AU (New Genesis)
Summary: It seems like Jim's efforts to make a friend might not have been wasted after all.
Word Count: 1279
Rating: Gen
After that, he has about a million things he has to do and can’t bring himself to move. He realizes he’s crying when Spock walks in and instantly freezes still. He can finally move, if only to rub his hands at his eyes. “Sorry for the emotional outburst.”
Spock’s still frowning, but if Jim’s gotten any better about reading it, that’s not the frown of ‘Kirk is a problem’. “The message you received troubled you.” He’d probably come to the conclusion already, without the evidence of Kirk’s tears, just from the fact that he hadn’t come back to the bridge. Come to that conclusion, and followed to make sure he’d be fine. Man, having friends is kinda awesome, actually. Even when they’re half-Vulcans without much experience dealing with the kind of friends who’d make a scene. Unsure of where to put his hands, Spock eventually just clasps them behind him. It’s kind of funny, actually.
“I’ll get to that in a minute.” He has to get this in motion before he breaks down again. He comms Pike. “Hey, nothing big, just call me when you’re free.” Hopefully that’s good enough of a code to read when you’re on an encrypted channel but he’s a little too frazzled to come up with anything fancy. He leaves it at that, turning back to Spock. “You keep on top of the latest science developments, right?”
Spock’s blank stare says he has no idea how that connects with anything. “Of course.”
“You’ve read about the Genesis Project, right?” He starts hacking into the network, multitasking. Again. Admiral Marcus might be a little more tempted to investigate this one, but...hmm, introducing static, corrupting the signal. That could work. At the silence he glances up to see Spock has raised an eyebrow, glancing deliberately at his hacking. “Don’t start quoting regs at me now; I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t necessary.”
“I am more concerned about what necessitated such actions,” Spock admits. “I have, of course, kept informed about the status of the research. It is not ready for testing.”
“Well, yeah, officially.” The other eyebrow joins the first. “Carol Marcus just called me. Her dad runs some kind of black ops, supposedly, and he wants to turn it into a weapon. The fact that she’s worried about this now means it’s probably close to testing. We’re gonna throw her into the spotlight, instead. They can’t disappear her or her work if she’s out in the open and if billions of people are gonna notice.” He’s probably going to make enemies (okay, firmer enemies, he’s been under no illusions that the only reason Marcus hasn’t gone after him harder is that Pike likes him and he still cares at least a little about what Pike thinks), but like hell is he going to just stand by when something’s wrong. “They could make an enemy of the Vulcans, but it’d be a thoughtless move. They’d be checkmating themselves.”
He glances back up, and Spock’s frozen again. Then, tonelessly, he concludes, “You wish to use her project to create a new planet for my people.”
It’s not disapproval. Probably. He’s probably shutting down because that’s too much emotion for him to process in the moment. So he keeps going. “It’s a great reason to make a big deal out of it right now. Push for more funding, faster work, a test. And has the added advantage of giving your people a new home, too.” Spock is still not moving. Barely breathing.
“You okay?” Maybe he moved just a little too fast. Like that’s anything new.
That’s...actually the trace of a smile. “Indeed. Jim, thank you.”
He waves that off. He should’ve been on this, like, at least last year. “Eh, I figure it’s a gift balanced by the fact that I’m probably going to make a whole lot of Vulcans have to work really hard to deal with emotions. Besides, I’m kinda being blackmailed into it. Don’t give me too much credit. I didn’t think of it on my own.”
He’s probably managed to confuse the hell out of Spock again. “As is fairly common when dealing with you, Captain, I do not understand.”
Yeah, yeah, when he’s not running around the galaxy doing massively unwise things, he’s actually slow on the uptake. Sometimes. Well, more like he gets distracted. And sure, it wouldn’t have been ready, a year ago, but still. It’s something he should’ve put in motion already. Pike’s an admiral, now. And the Vulcans have been suffering, adrift, for too long now. He’d say it’s something he doesn’t get. It’s not like he needs the Earth. The Enterprise is his home and she’s a beaut. But he can only say that because it’s still out there, not like Vulcan. Thousands of years of culture, of history, wiped out. No more visiting, nothing left, an entire sentient species the shadow of what it’d been? Never mind being able to sense the pain beneath the surface, he can imagine it only too well, and not just because Vulcan hadn’t been the only target. “We’ve been really busy and it hadn’t occurred to me before.”
Spock doesn’t acknowledge the admission of fault, which at this point probably means he doesn’t blame Kirk. Even though he should. Then again...the same thing could’ve occurred to him. He’d had the same data, and if anything even more motivation to apply the research, and he hadn’t thought of it either, so he’s probably taking the extremely logical action of not blaming his Captain or he’d have to blame himself. “I was referring to the blackmail.”
Time for the panic, apparently. “As you know, I’m kind of...really sexually active. So I try to make sure I’m responsible. It wouldn’t take too much for me to get an STI and transmit it to a whole lot of people—hell, with my weirdo constitution I might not even notice. But it only takes one mistake, and, well.” The panic is starting to creep again now, at the edges. “Spock, I have a kid I didn’t even know about.”
This is apparently bad enough that Spock stops trying to keep his distance and actually ends up putting a hand on Kirk’s shoulder. “How old?”
It’s actually kind of good to keep thinking about the logistics. It’s a little harder for numbers or facts to hurt you. “Probably three or four years ago, back in the Academy. The kid’s probably old enough to go dreamwalking, but I didn’t start needing sex until I was a teenager. And I have to warn her, because she’ll need to be prepared and the kid deserves to have a parent that actually knows what the hell is going on, but.” He sounds a little miserable. “I really don’t want to.”
“Lieutenant Uhura, please report to the second briefing room.” At a look, he explains, “Nyota is more accustomed to comforting than am I.”
Kirk finds an absurd sense of loss there. He’d actually been kind of having fun with the whole ‘guess her name’ game. Then he realizes that it doesn’t have to stop, actually. “I’ll keep the fact that you blabbed her first name a secret.”
One of these days, Spock’s eyebrow is gonna get stuck there. He holds onto that funny thought, because it’s keeping the tears at bay, right up until the point when Uhura actually appears in the doorway, and the genuine empathy she feels on seeing him looking such a mess breaks him again. At least she gives good hugs, and probably isn’t going to complain about the tears. Spock’s even thoughtful enough to grab a tissue so he’s not getting snot everywhere.
Main Points:
Star Trek (the 2009!movie verse) Cambion AU (New Genesis)
Summary: It seems like Jim's efforts to make a friend might not have been wasted after all.
Word Count: 1279
Rating: Gen
After that, he has about a million things he has to do and can’t bring himself to move. He realizes he’s crying when Spock walks in and instantly freezes still. He can finally move, if only to rub his hands at his eyes. “Sorry for the emotional outburst.”
Spock’s still frowning, but if Jim’s gotten any better about reading it, that’s not the frown of ‘Kirk is a problem’. “The message you received troubled you.” He’d probably come to the conclusion already, without the evidence of Kirk’s tears, just from the fact that he hadn’t come back to the bridge. Come to that conclusion, and followed to make sure he’d be fine. Man, having friends is kinda awesome, actually. Even when they’re half-Vulcans without much experience dealing with the kind of friends who’d make a scene. Unsure of where to put his hands, Spock eventually just clasps them behind him. It’s kind of funny, actually.
“I’ll get to that in a minute.” He has to get this in motion before he breaks down again. He comms Pike. “Hey, nothing big, just call me when you’re free.” Hopefully that’s good enough of a code to read when you’re on an encrypted channel but he’s a little too frazzled to come up with anything fancy. He leaves it at that, turning back to Spock. “You keep on top of the latest science developments, right?”
Spock’s blank stare says he has no idea how that connects with anything. “Of course.”
“You’ve read about the Genesis Project, right?” He starts hacking into the network, multitasking. Again. Admiral Marcus might be a little more tempted to investigate this one, but...hmm, introducing static, corrupting the signal. That could work. At the silence he glances up to see Spock has raised an eyebrow, glancing deliberately at his hacking. “Don’t start quoting regs at me now; I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t necessary.”
“I am more concerned about what necessitated such actions,” Spock admits. “I have, of course, kept informed about the status of the research. It is not ready for testing.”
“Well, yeah, officially.” The other eyebrow joins the first. “Carol Marcus just called me. Her dad runs some kind of black ops, supposedly, and he wants to turn it into a weapon. The fact that she’s worried about this now means it’s probably close to testing. We’re gonna throw her into the spotlight, instead. They can’t disappear her or her work if she’s out in the open and if billions of people are gonna notice.” He’s probably going to make enemies (okay, firmer enemies, he’s been under no illusions that the only reason Marcus hasn’t gone after him harder is that Pike likes him and he still cares at least a little about what Pike thinks), but like hell is he going to just stand by when something’s wrong. “They could make an enemy of the Vulcans, but it’d be a thoughtless move. They’d be checkmating themselves.”
He glances back up, and Spock’s frozen again. Then, tonelessly, he concludes, “You wish to use her project to create a new planet for my people.”
It’s not disapproval. Probably. He’s probably shutting down because that’s too much emotion for him to process in the moment. So he keeps going. “It’s a great reason to make a big deal out of it right now. Push for more funding, faster work, a test. And has the added advantage of giving your people a new home, too.” Spock is still not moving. Barely breathing.
“You okay?” Maybe he moved just a little too fast. Like that’s anything new.
That’s...actually the trace of a smile. “Indeed. Jim, thank you.”
He waves that off. He should’ve been on this, like, at least last year. “Eh, I figure it’s a gift balanced by the fact that I’m probably going to make a whole lot of Vulcans have to work really hard to deal with emotions. Besides, I’m kinda being blackmailed into it. Don’t give me too much credit. I didn’t think of it on my own.”
He’s probably managed to confuse the hell out of Spock again. “As is fairly common when dealing with you, Captain, I do not understand.”
Yeah, yeah, when he’s not running around the galaxy doing massively unwise things, he’s actually slow on the uptake. Sometimes. Well, more like he gets distracted. And sure, it wouldn’t have been ready, a year ago, but still. It’s something he should’ve put in motion already. Pike’s an admiral, now. And the Vulcans have been suffering, adrift, for too long now. He’d say it’s something he doesn’t get. It’s not like he needs the Earth. The Enterprise is his home and she’s a beaut. But he can only say that because it’s still out there, not like Vulcan. Thousands of years of culture, of history, wiped out. No more visiting, nothing left, an entire sentient species the shadow of what it’d been? Never mind being able to sense the pain beneath the surface, he can imagine it only too well, and not just because Vulcan hadn’t been the only target. “We’ve been really busy and it hadn’t occurred to me before.”
Spock doesn’t acknowledge the admission of fault, which at this point probably means he doesn’t blame Kirk. Even though he should. Then again...the same thing could’ve occurred to him. He’d had the same data, and if anything even more motivation to apply the research, and he hadn’t thought of it either, so he’s probably taking the extremely logical action of not blaming his Captain or he’d have to blame himself. “I was referring to the blackmail.”
Time for the panic, apparently. “As you know, I’m kind of...really sexually active. So I try to make sure I’m responsible. It wouldn’t take too much for me to get an STI and transmit it to a whole lot of people—hell, with my weirdo constitution I might not even notice. But it only takes one mistake, and, well.” The panic is starting to creep again now, at the edges. “Spock, I have a kid I didn’t even know about.”
This is apparently bad enough that Spock stops trying to keep his distance and actually ends up putting a hand on Kirk’s shoulder. “How old?”
It’s actually kind of good to keep thinking about the logistics. It’s a little harder for numbers or facts to hurt you. “Probably three or four years ago, back in the Academy. The kid’s probably old enough to go dreamwalking, but I didn’t start needing sex until I was a teenager. And I have to warn her, because she’ll need to be prepared and the kid deserves to have a parent that actually knows what the hell is going on, but.” He sounds a little miserable. “I really don’t want to.”
“Lieutenant Uhura, please report to the second briefing room.” At a look, he explains, “Nyota is more accustomed to comforting than am I.”
Kirk finds an absurd sense of loss there. He’d actually been kind of having fun with the whole ‘guess her name’ game. Then he realizes that it doesn’t have to stop, actually. “I’ll keep the fact that you blabbed her first name a secret.”
One of these days, Spock’s eyebrow is gonna get stuck there. He holds onto that funny thought, because it’s keeping the tears at bay, right up until the point when Uhura actually appears in the doorway, and the genuine empathy she feels on seeing him looking such a mess breaks him again. At least she gives good hugs, and probably isn’t going to complain about the tears. Spock’s even thoughtful enough to grab a tissue so he’s not getting snot everywhere.
