title: Inertia or Law(s) of Motion 2
series: ST Fanfic Masterlist
fandom: Star Trek Reboot
pairing/characters: Bones/Jocelyn, Kirk/people-that-don’t-matter, Kirk/Bones
rating/warning: R for language and sex
prompt/summary: it’s not like Romeo and Juliet because nobody dies and it’s not like a romance novel because nobody’s hair is flying in the wind but somehow or another, Bones and Kirk figure out that they’re in love anyway.
disclaimer: not mine, don’t profit, mean no offense to the profiting owners.

a/n: 1. Set in the same world created in Orbit although reading it isn’t exactly necessary.


02.
side a: a still (verdictless) life
At first, there was always hot coffee or hot tea with fresh baked breakfast in the morning. There were long kisses (oh I missed you) and desperate hugs in the afternoons or late-late at night when he finally dragged himself home. In the short hours between this class and that one there were steaming bubble baths and Jocelyn’s voice telling him all about the things she seen or read or done that day.

Her dreams were little things about flowers in the park or a nice lady she met at the market. Leonard would tip his head back—soaked in heat and love and the certainty that everything was fine-just-fine—and close his eyes. He followed her out on her aimless path while she talked. He stroked her belly and her ribs below her breasts and he thought that life was never-ever going to get better than this.

Maybe he always loved her best in those moments between.

--

The first time he got asked (want to get a drink) he said he couldn’t because he had a girl waiting for him back at home and she got lonely. Only he didn’t say (she got lonely) and they didn’t mock him for being (whipped) a family man. Maybe there was something envious in their lonely freshman eyes about how he had brought his very own true love with him and they were running bar-to-bar trying to find theirs.

Leonard felt lucky.

When he got home, Jocelyn was curled up on her side with her long-beautiful-sweet-smelling blonde hair fanned across her pillow. He kissed her cheek and told her how much he loved her until she was half awake and half-smiling and half-kissing him back.

--

“I think,” Jocelyn said with her fingers tangling into the short hair at the nape of his neck and her half-bare skin against his arm while they took up space on the ratty-second-hand couch in their teeny-tiny living room, “I want to take a class or something.”

“Maybe you should,” he agreed and turned another page on the PADD. His eyes were tired and his brain was too full to wrap it around anything else. There was a test day after tomorrow and two papers he still hadn’t written. (He wasn’t a God-damn English major.) Someone wanted to know his thoughts on modern philanthropy (he had no such opinion) and someone else wanted an in-depth look at the endocrine system of Andorians.

Her fingers tickled, her breath sighed, her body was warm where it touched him and cool everywhere else. “Leonard,” was a distracting whisper, “are you even listening to me?”

“Of course I am, sweetheart,” he agreed, “you’re going to take a class.”

Hell, she could have one of his.

--

Leonard was tripping over pottery before he realized that the class Jocelyn decided to take was some kind of thing offered out of the local art gallery. It met on Wednesdays which was alright because that was the day he was late for class in the morning and late getting home in the evening. He didn’t see Jocelyn until Thursday mornings when she woke him up with a smack on his shoulder and a:

Get out of this bed or you’re going to be late.

He stood in the shower blinking blurrily at the fancy rose-scented soap thinking that he should make time to go by some that didn’t leave him smelling like his girlfriend. Then he figured it didn’t matter because he loved his girlfriend and there were worse things to smell like.

--

The second time they said (hey, man, we’re going to get something to drink), Leonard told them he didn’t have the money to go because he didn’t. There was no damn money for anything but food and he had to find a way to reapply for the scholarship while he worked in all the homework and maybe search around for a job that he could do at night.

Jocelyn was on the couch at home, legs folded under her, talking sweet and pretty to a bunch of women that Leonard couldn’t remember meeting or being told about. All he wanted was to fall into her arms and complain about things neither of them could change and all he got was wide-eyed-owl-blinks from a crowd of women.

“This is Leonard,” Jocelyn said.

Hi, he might have said. He knew better than to stay where they could try to pester him so he grabbed his books and a beer and went to take up space in his bedroom. He fell asleep snuggling an empty brown bottle and a textbook.

--

Her nose twitched at the edges like a bunny rabbit and he was trying to listen but she just kept doing it down there at the end of the couch. Every little twitch changed the lilt of her voice while she read the stupid passage to him so he could (hear it and see it and remember it) rub her feet. She had gorgeous little pink toes.

Why are you doing that? he asked when he couldn’t contain the stupid laugh that was bubbling in his throat.

“What?” she asked. But he was already halfway across the couch, crawling on his hands and knees either side of her body to pluck that PADD out of his way and kiss her cheeks and nose and lips. Maybe he said twitching your nose like a bunny-rabbit and maybe he forgot to answer her question. He made damn sure to remember to take all her clothes off.

She was smelling his hair saying: are you using my shampoo when he decided that was really going to love her forever. Even if she was going to laugh at him like that—maybe especially if she was.

--

The thing was, Leonard didn’t think it was too damn much to ask that there be something worth eating in the evenings. He had maybe an hour and a half to get from his last class to his job and no time at all to stand around trying to figure out what fucking knob did what on the ancient oven. Maybe it was all because he’d been raised up with the notion that food was always ready on time or maybe it was fucking unrealistic of him—but damn it all, it wasn’t too much to ask.

“I was busy,” Jocelyn said after the second week of no dinner.

“Doing what?” Leonard demanded half out of his school clothes and half into his uniform. The job wasn’t that classy or that great—he spent most of the night staring at his books wishing he could fall asleep and the other half mopping blood stains off the floor of the ER. It was one of those jobs that was supposed to give him experience and all he really learned was that mopping made his back hurt and there was no way to wash the smell of blood out of his nose.

“Things,” Jocelyn said back, one hand on her hip, “things you would know about if you were around.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do, Jocelyn? I’ve got to go to school! I’ve got to work or we won’t have any food—God damn it,” he shouted and threw the shirt he couldn’t get his arms into. It landed with no violence against a chair back. “You,” he said to her, “make me crazy.”

“You piss me off,” she snapped back.

“I piss you off?” he repeated.

“Yeah!” she shouted and then it was nothing but the taste of her mouth and the smell of her soap as their skin rubbed together. She was angry and lonely and so full of need he couldn’t possibly fill. Her legs around his waist and he laid her across their bed and did all that he could because she needed it.

He needed it too—but he still went to work with no food in his belly.

--

There was no third time; least he didn’t remember them asking him (get a drink?) a third time. He just remembered watching them go, the crowd of carefree boys without girls waiting at home and no midnight jobs mopping up blood. They were off (to get a drink) and he was off to find something in a silver package to stuff in his mouth before he went to some job he didn’t care much about.

It paid the bills.

--

There was no summer vacation for doctors-to-be because there was too too much to learn. Jocelyn didn’t ask and didn’t say but somewhere between those two things with her hands around his neck and her body wrapped (tight, wet) around him she might have whimper-panted something about how she was leaving for a month or so.

Her kisses were like a drug—part of him remember long ago days of smoking and climbing trees. He must have whimpered something back to her (like talking to caterpillars man, because they always understood) about how she should go.

He knew. Years later, when it wasn’t going to be worth shit to admit, he’d finally say it out-loud.

He always knew she wasn’t happy.

--

The fourth time they shouted—(McCoy, drinks, no excuses)—he said, why the fuck not because there was nobody waiting for him at home. They went some place that was loud-loud-bright-blue-and hot. He swallowed shot after shot while the round table of sophomore boys went a little red under the collar and pink in the cheeks.

They choked and sputtered and he slurped their low-class whiskey with a grin.

“The secret, boys,” he might have told them, “was learning to drink from your Granny.” Now there was a woman that could knock back a shot.

If they laughed it was only because they didn’t know.

--

Jocelyn came back at the end of the summer all golden-brown and smelling like Georgia. She brought him a peach and he stripped her naked and kept her in bed with him for hours.

--

It was no particular day, for no particular reason other than the light slanting in through the window of some burger-place caught Jocelyn’s eyes and made them so pretty. He had his mouth half-full of French fries and a mind three-quarters bogged down by another pointless list of facts he wasn’t ever going to remember after tomorrow when he took a long drink of cold tea.

He offered out: “I think you should marry me,” like he was saying they ought to get dessert.

Jocelyn had mustard-ketchup mixed up all orange at the corner of her mouth and a cheeseburger perched between her thumbs and two fingers. Her eyes were all wide then all bright and her smile was all distorted because she was still chewing. “Yeah?”

“I love you like crazy,” he said.

He was only twenty and nobody would have blamed him for being a fool.

--

There about, for a while, it was a beautiful thing. There was a ring on her finger that bought him hot dinner every night and her, his forever-and-ever-and-after-that-too devotion. He tried to tell her (like his father had) how much he loved her every day and she always smiled when he did.

He remembered, late into the mornings, early in the afternoon, if he forgot to tell her (I love you) that morning. If he had a little extra change to spare he’d buy her a flower or something and she would call him a fool if she was all alone that night and smirk big at all the unlucky women that weren’t married to him if she had her crowd.

--

“Where the hell have you been?”

That must have been after the tenth-thirteenth-twenty-sixth time someone asked him to go for drinks. He remembered how loose his arms felt, how crooked his clothes must have been. He was fucking drenched in it up to his eyeballs and rolling a smile around his mouth until he could sink his teeth into it and keep it still.

Oh she was white-hot-furious.

That must have been the first night he snuggled up with couch cushions instead of his wife.

--

The next summer came and she went. There was a week of her nagging at him as she folded her tank-tops and short-shorts into a little bag. She wanted him to go, she said he could manage it, she said that the other students did it all the time.

He told her that he wasn’t as smart as the other students and he couldn’t make up what he’d missed by reading a book. He needed to see it and hear it and touch it and smell it if he was going to learn it.

So she put a hand on her hip and rolled her eyes and told him that she’d be sure to tell his Granny that he missed her real bad and maybe she’d tell Devon congratulations on getting married too.

Leonard hated her when she was like that.

--

Shots turned into talking and talking turned into ideas and long before Leonard even knew how it happened he found himself burying the head of a statue with three drunken boys giggling like schoolgirls over their own damn genius.

He showed them how to do the job so you couldn’t tell the earth had been disturbed and they bought him another round at the only open-all-night bar in the area that would serve four already drunk idiots with dirt up to their necks.

--

It turned out that he woke up face first into an unfamiliar toilet blinking hard and trying to remember where he was and where he’d been. There was a guy he half knew kicking him out of the way and he was rolling onto his side facing a wall ignoring the sound of someone taking a piss while his stomach rolled and his brain throbbed.

Sooner or later the man that pissed far too much was done—flushing—gone and another came stumbling in with his fingers tangled in his hair and his face split between agony and half-drunk giggles. “Shouldn’t you be gone? Don’t you got to go get your wife?”

Leonard thought (yeah, maybe?) and then he was grabbing the toilet and puking until his insides felt like outsides.

--

Oh, Daddy loved Mommy without reserve or reason and forever past death and whatever came later. Daddy loved Mommy early in the morning with sunlight in her eyes and last night’s snores on her breath. He loved her in the afternoon with flour on her hands and a wooden spoon across his knuckles because she’d already told him (twice) that the pie was for later. Daddy loved her on holidays and weekdays and every day plus all the minutes in between.

When Leonard thought about it (when he had time, when he had the space in his head to think anything) while he watched Jocelyn doing nothing special at all, he couldn’t make sense of it. Leonard loved Jocelyn every minute of every day and it exhausted him until he wanted nothing more than to walk up behind her (like this) and put his arms around her (like this) and he could kiss her cheek and her jaw and behind her ear where her pretty honey-blond hair curled against his nose.

Her shoulders loosened and her hands went lax and her breath was soft over her smile as she leaned her head back. For a minute (just a minute) he thought (this, oh hell yes this forever) and forget everything else.

Then she would go stiff and touching her was like hugging nails and screws and he should have let go but he always held on until she pushed him away.

--

“Leonard,” Jocelyn said with her fingers tangled into the short hairs on the nape of his neck and her sweater rubbing against the back of his arm. He was half asleep and wishing he was all asleep but there were things to learn still and no time at all to learn them in. “I think I should get a job. What do you think?”

“Mm,” he agreed, “sounds good, darling.” His head bobbed forward and he drew in a breath like the sheer force of it could keep him awake. Her fingers were like music stroking his neck and he’d always loved her lullabies.

--

For a while their life broke down like this:

Dinner came from bags or silver wrappers, spread across a table that was never dirty but always stacked with books.

He said: I’ve got to observe a surgery tomorrow, I won’t be home until late.

She said: My boss is having a party at his place, I was thinking we should go.

He said: I’ve got to study, there’s a test.

She said: And there’s this thing (always a thing) next month at the new development. I was thinking about going. We’re going to build houses.

He’d think: like anyone needed to build houses when there was a god-damn machine for everything nowadays. That was just because he felt like that sometimes. So he’d say: Why’d they teach me all of this shit if there’s a tricorder that does it all. I don’t even need a brain.

She’d sigh and say: well you’ve got one..

--

Their second anniversary he bought her a necklace—it took months to scrounge together spare change. No drinking, no pranks, nothing but work-study-work. He hid it in the closet on the top shelf because she was too short to find it and she never bothered his stuff anyway.

So, when she woke up looking pretty and sweet, he had the little box all ready—on his belly, half across their bed and watching her sleep over the edge of rumpled blankets. She blinked at him and smiled with her hair in tangles. He held the little open box for her and she peered at it.

She said what’s this for? like she didn’t know. (Because she didn’t.)

She said: it was just so early and I wasn’t awake yet and Leonard decided believing her was easier to dealing with the alternative.

--

Sooner or later, he graduated. Then it was internship and real patients and what little time he thought he had as a student became negative time he knew he didn’t have as a new doctor. He found himself twenty-something (twenty six? Maybe twenty five? Maybe he really didn’t fucking know anymore) with a brain full of things that seemed just about pointless.

Jocelyn pulled his arm and pointed them back toward Georgia but he already had a place right here in old Mississippi so he said (maybe we should stay just until I finish this).

He thought (her boss must love her) because she took every summer off and went right on back to Mommy-Daddy’s house and played like a teenager all damn summer. It wasn’t like Leonard was angry at her because he wasn’t (oh-yes-he-was) it was that she just hadn’t ever grown up.

--

Years later, he wouldn’t even remember the first time he forgot that he’d forgotten to tell Jocelyn that he loved her. He would remember in perfectly clarity, the kind that was vivid clear and that meant it was half-fiction and all emotion that time she smiled at him across a picnic table surrounded by her work-friends.

“Leonard tells me he loves me every day,” she said to her friends like she’d never been more proud of being married to him, “and he doesn’t even always remember to put underwear on.”

Everyone laughed and Leonard protested with a “that was once!” and they laughed again. He thought—well, if he had to be the butt of her joke to see her sparkling smile that was alright too. (Except, when he looked on the horizon no damn sun was rising with the curl of her lips.)

--

“Leonard,” she said with her fingers tickling the nape of his neck. She was crawling across him—naked in the morning—and he was groaning because there was so little time to sleep and less time to sleep well. “I think we should have a baby.”

“Right now?” he mumbled back at her.

Oh but eight-nine years later and she still knew exactly how to work him over. Her hand was warm and close and her body was right there behind it. The weight of the implication left him with a head spinning around trying to figure out the last time they’d gotten this close to fucking. Must have been a few weeks—oh hell, he couldn’t remember— “Yeah,” she breathed against his lips.

“What for?” he asked her. “Can’t we get a dog?”

“You are not serious,” Jocelyn said like teeth against his lip. Her hand was all stiff and every dreamy little sex thought he’d had a second ago was replaced with the cold slap of certainty that he wasn’t getting any any time soon. “Did you just say that?”

“I’m not even awake, why are you asking me about babies now?” he pushed her back because she wanted to go anyway.

So she went—off the bed and out of the room and banging around making breakfast until his ears were ringing with the curses she couldn’t bring herself to yell at him.

--

All of Jocelyn’s dreams ended in Georgia. It was in all the things she didn’t say and all those things she did. It was in the hours she spent talking to Devon about the new baby and the old house and how the peaches were doing and if the air was still warm and—

Leonard packed her up that summer and kissed her cheek and hoped (only a little and only for a second) that maybe she just wouldn’t come back. That girl he’d met on a baseball field would have stuck her feet in the ground and said:

Boy, if you don’t get your ass back here, I ain’t never going to let you have me again.

It was just that she wasn’t that girl (and he didn’t know when that happened or whose fault it was but he thought it might-have-been his).

--

So in the end, all at once, and out of nowhere at-all-precisely, (no, it wasn’t that, it was that he just never saw it coming), it was over. Not just one thing, but everything at once was just over and it felt like somewhere, something—someone—was having themselves a hearty laugh at him the way you laugh at someone that went off and fell backward down a staircase.

Fuck it all—he just wasn’t looking behind him when he was trying to go forward.

--

She (because he couldn’t say her name, he couldn’t even think it because that name belonged to a woman he loved) said: “Leonard, I’ve been sleeping with Tim,” one day after dinner. Her hair was straight without waves, she was half-in and half-out her real-estate-assistant clothes.

He remembered, she pushed her hands against her pinstriped skirt and pushed it flat against her thighs and she didn’t look at him until she did and he couldn’t even breathe much less look at her.

--

What she never said was (I’m sorry) but they took up the same space for a few hours like one or the other of them was just building up to it. Mostly, he spent time in the bedroom sitting on the left corner of the bed staring at his hands asking himself:

How?

But not:

Why?

When she came to the doorway to ask him if he had anything to say he couldn’t look at her—so he didn’t—he just got up, palms itchy and hurting as he scraped them against his pants and he caught the edge of the door blind—because he wasn’t (was not) looking at her—and pushed it shut.

--

The screaming came later. She told him it was his fault, she told him that he was never there, she pointed her finger until she was red in the face with tears down her cheeks and watery snot on her lips and she demanded to know when the last time he’d even wanted to touch her was.

He should have said that he wanted her every day and he shouted back at her that if she wanted-it-that-badly the least she could have done was make a few extra credits getting it.

So she smacked him and she clawed at him and he took it because he deserved it and because it felt like anything but hollow. She was in his face—twisted and garish and monstrous as she screamed until her body shook:

“I hate you!” again and again so he wouldn’t ever forget it.

--

When he brought the second foot up to plant right against his Granny’s old-fashion-hand-built wood porch, he had a bag on his shoulder and one hanging off his hand. He was a real-life doctor and a twenty-seven-year-old failure.

Devon pushed open the screen door with a fat-baby on her hip and she took in a breath as she pressed her lips together. “I made you some fresh biscuits,” she said.

--

Leonard climbed trees some. He got drunk a lot.

Oh, he got drunk all the damn time—out on the lake in a rowboat with a glass bottle hugged against his ribs, cradled close in the crook of his arm. He talked to the moon because it didn’t much care what he had to say. He thought about what forever must mean and what a promise was worth to (some people) anyone anymore.

He had hard thoughts about tipping that boat over and floating along until he was floating nowhere at all.

Then again, he knew what he’d look like when they got his dead-bloated-body out of the water. He remembered what Devon looked like all bones-over-skin and screaming when their Daddy died. He thought (well that’s just selfish) so he thought about drowning the wedding ring but he always just ended up drowning himself in whiskey instead.

--

His Granny gave him a look across a spill of flour on the counter when he managed to get over the steps and the threshold and all the way against the counter while he was so drunk he was about three-quarters blind. He must have smelled like the floor of a bar but she didn’t do nothing but lift one of her little old eyebrows at him.

There was biscuit dough in the bowl on the counter.

“Boy, you’re just like your Daddy—you get it so bad.” She said it like she was sorry and proud and just awed by it.

“Bunch of fucking fools, aren’t we?” he said with that loose-rolling-grin of his. He had a bottle in his hand still but he wasn’t sure what was in it. He tipped it up and spilled it down his throat. She hummed for him until he was flat on his ass with his back against the cabinet with his head back and his mouth open-dry-drunk.

--

She showed up on his front porch like she had any fucking right to show up anywhere at all. It was two months after she just couldn’t keep her thighs (or her mouth) shut and she looked at him like she’d cried the whole way here and might just cry the whole way back.

“Leonard,” she said while he looked out at the trees trying to find somewhere that didn’t remind him of her, “I’m sorry. It was over long before—” She sounded defeated and beaten. “You don’t get to blame me for this.”

Fuck if he didn’t. “I didn’t fuck someone else,” he said to the screen and not to her.

Her sigh was guilt and regret and anger. She slapped the divorce papers on a table with a fiery fury he always loved best about her. “I was fucking him for months before I told you. Did you notice? No. Maybe I wanted you to but you didn’t. Fuck you,” she snapped at him. Then she was gone (again) and all that was left of her was a blinking light on a PADD asking for his signature.

The marriage was over—her terms were set—all he had to do was agree.

--

So he took a week.

He started with a bottle of Mr. Daniels best brew and he ended with a clear-glass-jar of something made from pure moonshine all silver and deadly. He drank it like poison until he didn’t remember anything. He didn’t remember moving—riding—walking—but he woke up in a hotel room in South Carolina wearing someone else’s shirt, no shoes and carrying a reminder that told him to report to bumfuck-nowhere Iowa to catch his ride to the Academy.

It took a few minutes to unglue his dirty eyes and wrap his drunken brain around the idea.

About the time he thought he remembered acting sober long enough to sign himself up for intergalactic slavery he discovered the tattoo on his left hip that was still raw-red and stinging. He had a God-damn butterfly fluttering above his ass and that was just about perfect.

--

Leonard caught a ride back to Georgia, stripped himself naked of the week he lost, signed the damn divorce papers—considered getting the tattoo removed and decided to leave it—packed up what he would need and kissed his family good-bye.

side b:
The last thing Kirk realized—almost too late for it to matter, with blood in his nose and the taste of violence and beer on his skin—was that he was lost.

--

When he was young, real young but not young-young, Grandma Laura would say: the boy needs direction and Grandpa Tiberius would sit out on the porch with his huge-ancient hands across his wife’s dainty long fingers. Grandpa Tiberius would sigh and he’d look at the stars like he was so sorry about something that he couldn’t never apologize enough for—he’d say: I just don’t know, Laura, I just don’t know. I’ve done everything I know how.

To Kirk (who was still Jim back then) it sounded like his Grandpa was beat up and abused and giving up. It left his belly wriggling in funny ways as he crawled back upstairs and into Sam’s bed. Sam would hug him like a teddy bear and Kirk could sleep there (just for tonight).

--

Kirk took up running when he was eighteen-fresh-out-of-school with no other direction to go in. The counselors at school cried wasted potential into their hot-hot-coffee until they were red in the eyes and belly-sick. They must have tried calling his mother all the way in space after they gave up trying to communicate to Grandpa Tiberius (who did everything he can) because Winona sent him a message telling him (don’t give up).

The thing was, as Kirk ran this way or that down the highway until his back was soaked in sweat and his hair was swing-swing-beating against his temples, there was an unpronounced yet on the end of (don’t give up) that seemed to suggest that his life was going to get better. He didn’t think too much while he ran because it was all about the shift-shiver-sway of his body in motion but if he did think he might have thought there wasn’t much of a way to get worse.

Then and again, he thought about running until he couldn’t stand to move anymore and never coming back and the idea was so sweet on his lips that he wanted to drink it down until it filled him up and he overflowed. He kept it like a secret in his chest that weighed him into place. When he started fights he thought (hit me, fuck you, hit me as hard as you can) and (I could fly) and (I hate you) and he beat his body against theirs until they were straight through the skin to blood and there were no secrets.

He screamed in his head until he felt like his body was rattling left and right when it was perfectly still. But out in that cold air, under the blinking white stars, he only thought (I could leave, I could leave, I could just leave.)

--

There was a man in the back of the bar that stared at Kirk’s shoulders like he could rip his clothes off with just his thoughts (maybe he could). They did a little dance the whole evening, Kirk throwing himself with shameless ferocity at pretty women who rolled their eyes at his antics because this-was-Thursday-dear and not Saturday. He smiled and they wavered but they always left and that was plenty fine with him.

The man would buy him drinks and wink his left eye and sip his own glass with a smirk every time Kirk struck out.

When the night was morning and the girls were just about all gone or all taken, that man was against Kirk’s back with his arm across his chest—groping his shirt to find tits that Kirk just didn’t have and his tongue was alcohol-wet in his ear. He didn’t say much with words but he said everything with a rock of his hips and his hard dick against Kirk’s ass.

I-want-you in every touch and every breath. So Kirk tipped his head back instead of forward, arm up, hand cupping the back of the man’s neck and he whispered—like a soft grunt-laced-with-moan: “No.”

The nameless man with the hard-on said: sure? like maybe Kirk just didn’t understand what no meant and he clearly never would have turned this dick down—not if he knew what sort of ride he could be getting. Hot palm going down his belly, fingers spread as his ass was pulled back and his shoulders pushed forward. There he was half-bent-over a table and his head was spin-spin-spinning with infinite possibility.

He could fucking fly because he’d done it before. All the seconds of the world in the thump-thud-hard pound of a little boy’s heart as the car went one way and his body went the other. Fear choking down his throat and the ridiculous, reckless feeling of being alive because if this went sour he was going to be dead.

Kirk’s hands were across a dirty table and there was a bartender and two bored patrons looking at him with curious raised eyebrows thinking fucking kids these days or maybe he’ll take it—take it up the ass because that’s what he does.

Everything went a little white around the edges, blood-warm and it smelled like sweat-skin-beer before it was just lost and he thought he might have kicked the table and shoved the man. He thought he could see that crazed-fucking-look on Winona’s face when she thought (I’ll kill you, Frank, I’ll fucking kill you) because Kirk wanted to break (someone) something and it never worked.

“Fuck you,” he said to the man with his fists curled and his body so tight with tension his teeth were turning to powder right there in his mouth.

What he meant was: I’m not that. I’m not. I’ll never be that.

Whatever that was.

--

The other thing was that he’d never been in love.

--

There he was at twenty, buck naked in his shower with nothing on his mind and nowhere to go. The water was running tepid because he’d pushed his forehead against the tile and left it there something like thirty-minutes-ago.

Every breath was a wet breath and every exhale tingled on his lips were the fat drops were wiggling like falling leaves. His fingers were curled, palms pushed to the wall and he wanted—(anything, oh fuck, anything)—to break something so bad his shoulders were knotted and his knuckles hurt.

But there was a pink stain to the water from yesterday’s fight, a soon-to-be scar going across his hipbone where some lucky bastard that had too much to drink and not nearly enough of a conscience got a hold of a broken bottle.

--

Libraries were leftover from yesteryear when books were made of paper and not of metal-over-circuits with a faded-old-scratched screen. But paper depleted the environment and everyone had gotten real smart about conservation after they damn near died.

Sometimes (occasionally) he wished that man hadn’t ever gotten smart enough to start caring because sometimes when he was holding a chunk of metal he daydreamed about books made of paper. (Books like Grandpa Tiberius kept in his bedroom that little boys weren’t allowed to touch because they were very old and yes older than me, Jim.)

The librarian was one of those women that had decided when she was twelve or thirteen that trying was giving into some invisible double standard of behavior and she didn’t care what her damn eyebrows looked like. Make up was nothing but conforming and she would be damned if she wanted to be a sex symbol. Physically speaking—she was nothing that Kirk wanted to get his hands on because she wore brown when she would have looked better in blue and she had frizzy hair that she let hang sometimes limp and sometimes wiry around her ears.

Then again, behind all that, she was a brilliant woman. He leaned across the desk and smiled at her because she could rattle off titles like she really knew them and he wanted to lick the words right out of her mouth every time she started talking about the nineteen fifties. (Because she got it, because she understood that man was smarter and dumber and lost-found-confused all at once.)

“You’ve read every book in the library,” she told him one Saturday looking-up-at-him instead of down. “Except the romance section.”

He leaned on his elbows (because that’s what he did) across the counter in front of her desk and smiled. “Do you read romance?”

Her blush was pink-hot-embarrassed and she glanced down at her hands and her screen before she looked back up at him. She was nothing he wanted but she’d point her little finger across the way and say: “the section right over there,” like she thought he cared.

Kirk drummed his fingers and fists against the counter as he nodded—grinned—and went right over to find something to read for a while.

--

His mother’s visit (he called it an inspection) came on a Friday when he was scratching his new scar and balancing a bowl of steaming instant oatmeal in one hand as he shuffled from the kitchen to his mattress. Like it always went she set her hard-cased bag down on the floor and shook the strap off her arm.

“How’s Sam?” he asked around a hot-hot-burning mouthful.

“Last time I heard from your brother he was fine,” Winona told him. She didn’t look old and that was always strange to him. If he was almost twenty she had to be almost fifty and she shouldn’t have looked like she did. Space and time should have shriveled her into the ugly dried thing that she had to be under her skin. “Glass?” she asked with a nod toward the pink scar his blunt nails were pulling at.

“Beer bottle,” he agreed.

Winona nodded.

He pointed his spoon at the couch under the books stacked on it. “It’s comfortable.” Then he went on his way because there was breakfast to eat and nothing at all to do after that.

--

When they were little—little, little—Sam would have nightmares. The way Kirk had (over)heard it, their father had looked his boy in the face and promised (we’ll be back soon, champ) and poor-little-Sam’s poor-little-broken-heart must have remembered that. Sam had nightmares (about their mother dying) about death that left him shaking and sobbing.

--

It was still night-but-morning-like-3AM when he crawled out of his bed on his tiptoes and found himself standing in the doorway between his room and the living room. There was the litter of broken things he kept on the floor (he liked possibilities) and a cast of light from the kitchen that brushed across his mother on the couch. He thought, for a moment, that she must have been sleeping but her elbow moved and he saw her blue-blue-damn blue eyes catching the yellow gleam of the light.

Her stare was twice what his could have been and all his questions seemed silly and confused in the face of hers. “Couldn’t sleep?” was what she asked him.

“Usually don’t,” was a child’s attempt at vindictiveness that left him feeling strange stupid and hollow. What he wanted to do was shout at her for being on his couch when she wasn’t staying because she’d never stayed and call her all the names that banged around the inside of his skull like (bitch) and (whore) and scream until he couldn’t breathe and he’d say (was he a good fuck, was he? Was Frank so good you couldn’t stand it?) or maybe just—maybe—(you left me).

If not that, he might have asked: (did you know).

--

Kirk never-ever-not once brought them home. Fucks were those things that happened against walls or in hotel beds with big pillows and magic fingers that had the bed vibrating. His brain rattling in time with her breath and it was all over in a little burst of light-sound-sensation and a curious rush of fluid that left him breathless.

Then it was over and it didn’t matter.

When he (got fucked) fucked men in was hurry-push-shove-bite in the back of a car or bent across something with a fist in his shirt and the grunt-hiss-beat of breath and skin and bone against him and inside him. He ached and burned and clawed and bit his lips until they were blood-red and tasted just like the nothing of his whole fucking life.

Wasted potential was slip-stumble-falling into his very own apartment he didn’t fucking pay for, with a bottle in his fist that he didn’t fucking pay for (least not with money) and wet-bites on his neck. The phantom feel of being crushed under another body and fucked until he was blind and finding his mother on her knees, in her pajamas, with her delicate fingers piecing together broken things.

He stopped—sloppy-fucking-sideways grin etched across his giggling face. The bottle tipped, the liquid poured like a God-damned river through his teeth and over his tongue and down his throat-neck-chest-belly. Winona looked up at him with her soft-brown eyebrows lost under a fringe of fake-blonde hair. He giggled as he kicked her precious little whatever-the-fuck and stomped on it until his pants were slipping off one bruised hip. He ground the heel of his boot against broken pieces until they were just fucking ruined while she sat back and watched.

Everything tipped right and then left—sloshy-sloshy-slosh—as he pointed his finger around the tall neck of the bottle at her. He said: “oops.”

But he wanted her to cry and she only stared.

--

It happened like this—(no it didn’t, maybe backward-sideways-upside-down-ways):

His hand stinging because he’d never hit anyone like that—no, never, not him, (you just shut your mouth Jimmee) until suddenly he did. The whole of his palm and fuck his fingers, straight across her face and the sound of it was echoing against the walls so loud he couldn’t stop the ragged suck of his own breath.

(No, not that.)

The bottle of booze hit the floor with a thump but not a crash and a gulp but not a slop. His feet were twisting over broken things while she was standing up and her eyes were just blank and angry but what the fuck ever happened that she earned the right to talk to him like that.

(Wait, first wasn’t it—)

So you can break things… she said like she could just fucking dismiss him like he didn’t fucking matter.

(And then.)

Winona wasn’t his mother because she hadn’t ever held him when he fell, she hadn’t wiped his nose when it ran, and she hadn’t read him long stories late at night when he couldn’t sleep. She didn’t hear him when he didn’t cry and know when he wanted cookies and hot chocolate because he felt awful. She wasn’t his mother because she had walked out on him—because his father had died—because she wasn’t anyone’s mother and she never-ever-once had been. He hated her for all the things she wasn’t and couldn’t ever be.

--

I won’t cry for you was defiance that burned on his tongue and she didn’t seem to give a damn with her face brilliant red and raised edges all on one side, her socks in spilt booze and her hands on her hips. She was saying do it again and he was the one with tears in his eyes until the world blurred all around him.

He sucked liquid snot back through his nose, back of his hand across his upper-lip-under-his-nose like a three year old and her head tipped just a little but he hated her so much more than he did half a second ago.

“You took the car,” Winona said like she had any idea like she knew, “I would have burned his fucking house down.”

He hit her again—slapped her like he got slapped for mouthing off and she took it like he had, head to one side, eyes down and all he saw—all he saw—was nothing and he hated her so much he thought he must have been crying.

--

Kirk woke up with a pillow and a blanket on the hard-cool floor of his living room next to a half-dried puddle and a blurry landscape of bits and pieces. Cotton in his skull and down the back of his throat kept him from thinking much but when it started coming back all he could remember was—

Salt tracks down his face but his mother never touched him. She had been there, socks beyond the edge of his vision when he had been on his knees trying not to beat his fists against the floor then it didn’t matter because he was passing out and blackness was blessed relief.

Winona wasn’t there now and that was a blessed relief too.

--

They were both occupying the same place when he heard the news—it was always on, playing over instant broadcast from the receiver set into the wall. Sometimes he cared, sometimes he didn’t (sometimes he didn’t understand why he kept it on at all) but this time it said:

House fire.

Winona was picking blackened ash out from under her fingernails wearing strange clothes that smelled flammable. She looked at him with her lip bruised all around the edge where he’d smacked her. Like she’d waited all his life to bother, she stood up and said: “I can’t save you.” She didn’t say (I never tried) but he understood that part anyway. “I couldn’t even save myself, George saved me.”

I gave up, she told him, the day you were born.

--

The other (other) thing he found out was that he wasn’t afraid—it had its uses.

--

Winona was gone and Kirk was back in his favorite bar, leaning on the counter, sipping a cold one waiting for something to happen to him. He met a woman with a cold smile that had hot skin and danced with him until he had her naked and panting against the side of the building, her nails in his arms and his tongue in her mouth.

Nothing had changed.

--

Her name was Doris and that might just have been why she didn’t care about her eyebrows. It was a family name, she told him once, from the nineteen fifties. It was better than her sister’s name (that was Ethel). She leaned on her elbows as she looked up at him and asked him how he was finding those romance novels. She meant (did you like that ridiculous drivel) but she asked him like it was a real question and her wellbeing depended on the answer.

Kirk wanted to say (fucking unrealistic shit) but he left that knocking around his head and leaned across the counter to get close enough to smile-twinkling-eyed at her just how they always seemed to do it in stupid romance novels. He said: “I’ve read worse things.”

Her laugh was startling because he had thought she’d be offended—he wanted her to be—she leaned back in her seat a little and offered out: “There’s a larger library over in Riverside that Starfleet maintains. They probably have something you’d rather be reading.”

“It’s a long walk,” was his excuse but it was only an excuse. He found himself more stupid books to read to fill the long stretches of silence that came after sundown and before sunup when he couldn’t sleep.

--


It was nothing that he exactly intended to do but the option was there and Kirk found himself sitting in on some aptitude test that would tell him what career path would be best for him. There was nothing better to fucking do with himself (and maybe maybe he wasn’t ready to give up) Still, he skimmed through the test, answered their questions and turned it in and maybe he gave them his address because maybe he was curious about what they had to say.

So a few weeks later when he was twenty one and not twenty (but wasn’t he nineteen a minute ago?) he got a message announcing that he was destined to be a starship captain. If not a captain than he’d make an excellent science officer and if that failed well, he could always settle for being an engineer (fuck that).

The point was—(if the test could be trusted) his life ended with Starfleet.

(Maybe he wasn’t ready to try yet either.)

--

He found the motorcycle by the side of the road with its engine busted open like someone had beat the fuck out of it for having the audacity to stop working. Kirk stared at it (he kind of liked it) for a while and paced back and forth deliberating about whether or not it counted as stealing or just something to do for a while and decided it was the latter not the former. He crouched in the grass picking up the little bits and pushing them into his pockets before he lifted the kick stand and pushed the damn thing miles back down the highway to where he was living.

It was a few weeks of rereading a few manuals and a matter of wasting some of his beer-drinking money for extra pieces but he had a ride at last.

--

Kirk found himself reading about Banner fucking O’Brien falling in love with some angry doctor type back before there was any kind of real technological advancement while he chewed on his toothbrush in the bathroom. It was stupid and ridiculous and he just about laughed at himself over the whole thing except for the way he was clicking next and next just to see how great this little love story worked itself out to be.

In the end, they all had babies and everyone was happy and nobody’s fucking father died. Kirk threw the book and spit out his toothbrush and wondered if these people that wrote this shit lived in the real world.

--

Doris wanted to see his bike so they stood in the parking lot outside the library with him patting the seat and her picking her fingernails. There wasn’t anything in a motorcycle that was going to impress the kind of woman that Doris was so he didn’t quite know why she was out there trying to smile anyway.

“If you had a leather jacket you could be James Dean,” she said.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

Doris lectured him about the things everyone should know until they found themselves standing outside in the evening air and she was pink from exertion and half-speechless because it had been hours and they weren’t half done talking but the library needed to be locked. (Pointless to do, really, anyone with a calculator could crack the security code.) Her embarrassment was as palpable as the smell of her wet panties.

He thought (I could have her) all he had to do was ask.

--

He suggested coffee and she’d said she had the best coffee maker in the world. Kirk looked everywhere in her bedroom but he only found her naked skin that tasted like pasted-on skin moisturizer and stale perfume at her neck. She was a beautiful woman in the dim light with her clothes off and her thighs spread around him like every red-haired-heroine so exalted in romance novels.

Her cat sat on the dresser and watched him fuck her until her nails bit into his skin and she was half-grimacing-half-frowning saying “slow down, Jim.” It wasn’t anything anyone ever asked him before but he tried it and she unfolded beneath him like a living work of art—arm over her head and body arching against him because he made her feel good.

--

When it was over and she was in the bathroom cleaning herself up proper (still talking about coffee like maybe she didn’t realize that was just a line) he was crouching full-dressed in her office. There bookshelves against every wall and a small computer lost between stacks and stacks of real live paper books. Without meaning to at all he opened one just to run his fingers down the age-rough-thin-fragile pages.

Balanced on toes he brought the open book up to his face to drag the smell of it into his lungs. Eyes closed as he tasted the dust of age and it was beautiful. Without meaning to at all, he found himself reading the printed words—one after another until he was half through the book and she was there in her bathrobe with wet hair.

“You can stay,” she whispered.

--

The first thing was he replaced solitude with isolation and wasn’t smart enough to remember it all meant that he was alone.

--

Sometimes, when Doris thought he was sleeping, she’d run her blunt-curious fingers across his scars and dream of fantastic dreams for him. Kirk thought she must have liked him laying bare there under her because he was nothing but a dream that lived-and-breathed (just asleep) and all her beautiful romantic dreams were true.

Someone found her beautiful, someone wanted her, someone had finally-finally-at-last seen her for what she was. When she was sure that he was sleeping (but he wasn’t) she’d kiss the pale scar on his shoulder and sigh like this was true love.

--

Kirk got on the motorcycle the day he turned (twenty two) and he pointed it nowhere just somewhere and he pushed it until it could go no farther. The engine was hot and overworked, panting like a laboring animal between his thighs so he dumped it nowhere in particular because it didn’t matter and found the first place that served something to numb him into nothing.

Oh the music was loud-fuck-loud and he found himself climbing onto a table, kicking over glasses while the crowd clapped and his shirt was ripped right off his body by his own hands. The music throbbed through him while he swung the shirt over his head—every person in the crowd was salivating for him, for his dick and his body, all tongues over lips-and-tongue.

He didn’t even know what fucking state he was in but he knew how to take what he wanted and oh-hell-he-wanted.

--

There were three of them. Mindy, Wendy and Evan (but those weren’t their real names). Mindy and Wendy liked to kiss and Kirk liked to fuck so he pushed him flat and fucked one—one after the other—the way he never-ever-could fuck Ms. Doris with the curious fingers. They scratched and clawed and gasped.

After when they were sweat over exhausted skin, they sat with spread thighs and pink tongues and wandering fingers jerking one another off while Evan bent him over the bed and fucked him hard-fast-cruel.

Kirk bit his own fingers until the marks were deep to the bone and he thought he’d never feel anything but the twisting confusion of pain and fury.

--

Doris didn’t understand, when he came back a few weeks later. Doris was one of those (like Grandma Laura) who just wouldn’t ever understand. It was Doris-and-him for a matter of months (maybe four, maybe six, maybe he’d read half her library and wanted to spend all his life sitting with crossed legs reading her books about nothing) but he’d been Kirk-by-himself for the twenty-one years before that. No, she was like Grandma Laura (disappointed not angry) with tears in her eyes.

He had bruises on his hips, teeth marks on his knuckles (still—</i>still</i>) and fading half-healed scratches down his back. He said: “I didn’t know we were being monogamous.” Like monogamous was a bad word (because it was, oh hell it was, because monogamy was that thing that meant all your life was in someone else and if they died well—what the fuck were you living for?)

There was no understanding her through the tears (and sobs) but her pointed finger told him to get out.

(And never come back.)

--

Kirk didn’t think while he was running. It was about the fluid shift of his body all at once—it was running away from the thoughts that kept him bound and gagged and held under. Running was about letting it go so he ran from one end of the world to the other (or it felt like it) and when he got back to where he started everything was still waiting for him.

Broken things on his floor.

--

For a long time—a long, long time—he did nothing.

--

The first time he picked up the broken bit off the floor it was nothing more than a morbid curiosity. He thought—well he could crush it the way Winona burned down some man’s house just because she could and was up-away-and-gone again in a starship doing things he had only read about in vague details. There were hammers and heels and if he wanted to he could burn it because everything burned if it got hot enough.

(He could burn.)

He put it back on the floor, he left it there—broken, abused and humiliated lying naked on the floor for anyone to see.

It was safe through his door and into the room with the mattress and his clothes in piles that looked like clean-dirty-in between. There was his blanket and pillow and the peace of blackness that came with sleep. He laid in the dark feeling (broken, abused and humiliated) like he’d failed somehow when he hadn’t ever failed at anything.

He hadn’t ever tried anything.

--

Doris looked down-not-up at him when he stopped in front of her desk. Her nose twitched like she knew him by the smell and maybe that made sense when it had been (four maybe) six months of time spent in close quarters sharing (wasting) time. “What can I do for you?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” he told her.

There was no romance in her eyes when she looked at him, just someone that was old and used and too beaten to bother trying to assure him that it wasn’t his fault. It was a strange feeling to know that she was disappointed and hurt and that it was everything that he’d done and nothing to do with (his father) anything else. “I’m sorry,” she assured him, “I thought—you’re just who you are, Jim. You’re just not who I thought.”

“What did you think I was?”

Her stare was unflinching—solid—“A good man.”

--

She was beautiful. Kirk watched her half the night because she really was beautiful and she was never going to as much as glance at him. Oh no, not some smiling hair-flipping beautiful woman with a real neat cadet uniform that was a long-fucking-way from Starfleet Academy but wore her pride like a shield and dismissed everyone around her as unworthy.

Kirk wanted to fuck her because she would never want him.

When it ended in a brawl that ended in a lecture that ended with him face-to-fucking-face with Christopher Pike Captain, thank you-very-fucking-much, he was still chugging beer to ease the burn of the thoughts he couldn’t quite shut off.

Broken things and lost things and the feeling under his skin that he wanted to leave or burn the world but (fuck anything) but what he was doing. So Captain Pike, with a tone like Grandpa Tiberius, looked him in the face and asked him flat out if he was going to be (nothing, like his mother or) half the man his father was.

I-dare-you-to-do-better was a stupid line and Kirk couldn’t get it out of his head because nobody had ever (not once) expected him to do anything and certainly never asked him to be (half as good as) his father.

--

The important thing, he found out one drunken night, was that he was going to die alone and when he told the stars they winked back at him with a real cruel-cosmic smirk and asked what else he thought he deserved.

--

The drunk doctor called him kid and he talked about nothing and a lot of it. The whiskey must have done it to him because he smelled like he’d been swimming in it for a while. When he talked about anything he talked in spurts and bursts about some woman without a name that must have been his ex-wife.

When the trip was over and Kirk was (good-bye Iowa and hello San Francisco) stepping off the shuttle, the doctor blinked at the sun like it offended him, sniffed the air like it made him want to puke and then looked over at him.

It was all that polite-southern-upbringing when McCoy stuck his hand out. “It was nice to meet you,” he said.

“Sure,” Kirk agreed.

“Glad I didn’t puke on you,” McCoy added before he was licking the last taste of whiskey out of the flask.

Kirk snorted and nodded his head. “Me too.”