Celandine's Chronicle (celandineb) wrote in cels_fic_haven, @ 2009-06-04 08:46:00 |
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Entry tags: | star trek fic hotm, star trek fic kirk/mccoy |
Star Trek fic: Contents under Pressure [Kirk/McCoy, general]
Title: Contents under Pressure
Author: celandineb
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy (preslash), Kirk/OFC implied
Rating: general
Length: 1990 words
Warnings: language, implied sex
Summary: Kirk wants to know why McCoy ran out last night.
Note: For inell, who writes such wonderful Kirk POV fic. Second in the "Heart of the Matter" series.
From the bar, Kirk saw McCoy leave. Not surprising, if a little disappointing. He really had hoped that McCoy would let himself relax tonight, but the man was drawn tighter than a Vulcan's arse. Too bad. A nice, no-strings-attached fuck would do McCoy good, Kirk was sure.
He returned his attention to the blonde woman beside him – Alana? Alara? Adara, that was it – who had never even noticed his distraction.
"Shall we go to your place?" he asked.
Later, after Kirk was dressing to leave her room and return to his own, his thoughts returned to McCoy once again, and he frowned. Adara thought the scowl was directed at her and it took more sweet talk than Kirk would have liked to soothe her. It wasn't as though he planned to see her again – he could count the number of women of whom that was true on one hand – but he preferred to leave his bedmates happy. A good reputation was almost as important as a good line in scoring someone new.
Back in his own room, however, and trying to ignore the snoring of his roommate, Kirk continued to ponder McCoy's unsocial behavior. It wasn't that his friend didn't like to drink; hell, McCoy had shared his hooch not five minutes after they'd met on the recruit shuttle. All the cadets they'd been sitting with were friends, and McCoy wasn't one to quarrel at random while drunk, unlike Kirk himself, he admitted. So why had McCoy stalked out with a face like thunder?
Fuck it. He'd ask McCoy next time he saw him, push the man until he answered.
With that settled, Kirk punched his pillow into a more comfortable shape and fell asleep.
Saturday was his day to catch up on sleep and on studying. Kirk never set an alarm for Saturday morning; he normally slept until he woke, for once in the week, and then spent the remaining daylight hours working. Saturday night was another matter. Kirk knew a number of bars and clubs where he could almost always find a woman to go home with – occasionally even more than one.
Tonight he had planned to go to J.C.'s, which was his current favorite, but his curiosity about McCoy's behavior got the better of him. A little before seven he found himself in the medical clinic, waiting for McCoy to come off-shift.
"What the hell are you doing here?" was McCoy's ungracious greeting when he saw Kirk.
"Waiting for you." Kirk bestowed his most charming smile on McCoy, hoping it would work. "Since we didn't really get to drink together last night, I came to make sure we did tonight."
"And whose fault was that? I'm not the one who went and draped himself all over some random blonde two minutes after we got to the bar. No thanks, Jim. I'm not interested in watching you flirt again." A muscle jumped in McCoy's cheek. "I'm going to go home, have a couple of drinks all by myself, and go to sleep. It's been a shitty day."
Interesting that McCoy remembered she was blonde. "No, you're not," he said firmly. "It's a bad idea to drink alone, and I'm buying." He looked at McCoy, still in his scrubs. "You should change first, though. You look like hell."
"Gee, thanks." The sarcasm practically dripped from McCoy's tongue. "I suppose you're not going to give up until I say yes."
"Nope."
McCoy shook his head. "Fine. But on one condition."
"What?" Kirk nudged McCoy out the clinic door and headed them towards McCoy's room.
"No flirting. Not even that much," he added as Kirk's head swivelled to look at a passing cadet whose hair gleamed like copper in the light of the sunset. "You say you want to drink with me, you drink with me."
"Fair enough," Kirk agreed. He could manage to keep his hands and eyes to himself for an evening, he supposed. After all the point of this was to figure out what was bothering McCoy, and Adara last night had been quite energetic.
For some reason McCoy changed into standard uniform in the bathroom, tiny though it was, leaving Kirk to tap his fingers in the other room.
"We could just stay here and drink," he suggested when McCoy emerged.
McCoy's expression went flat, but he said only, "Now that you've made me change, I'd as soon go out."
Instead of J.C.'s, Kirk chose Lelio's, which had a few booths and was not usually too crowded. They still had to wait for a while until a booth was vacated, standing at the bar in the meantime.
As he'd promised, Kirk paid for both their drinks, and by the time he was on his third bourbon and they had secured a booth – it was quiet, well, relatively quiet there – McCoy seemed somewhat less irritable than he had done earlier.
"I suppose we really should eat something," Kirk said. "I seem to recall you lecturing me more than once about drinking on an empty stomach."
"That's true. Is the food here any good?"
"Pretty basic menu," Kirk said, "although their sweet potato fries are fantastic."
"I'll have a grilled chicken sandwich and sweet potato fries, then. You order if the waitress shows before I'm back," said McCoy, and disappeared in the direction of the men's room.
Kirk placed the order, getting a burger for himself, and quelled the desire to wink broadly at an exceptionally good-looking woman who walked past. He had promised McCoy not to flirt, even if the bastard was taking forever to get back. And he knew that if he did, McCoy would return at exactly the wrong moment.
It took so long, however, that he was beginning to think that McCoy had actually left without a word when he slid back into the booth.
"Sorry," McCoy said, not really sounding sorry at all. "Did you order?"
"Yeah, I ordered. The food ought to be here any minute, in fact." Kirk cocked his head. "Did you fall in, or what?"
"If I'd fallen in, I'd be all wet, wouldn't I?" asked McCoy evenly. "Do you really want to hear the details, Jim?"
No, Kirk didn't. He'd have thought a doctor would know how to avoid constipation, or whatever it was though.
Perhaps luckily, just then the waitress brought their meals.
"You're right, these are good," McCoy said, munching on a piece of crisp-edged sweet potato.
"I have excellent taste," Kirk told him with a grin.
"For some things, I'd agree."
"What would you say I have poor taste about?" Kirk felt only slightly indignant, three drinks and a decent hamburger having put him in a mellow mood.
"Oh, well..."
McCoy looked away. Kirk turned to see what he was looking at – the woman that Kirk had refrained from flirting with earlier. Hm.
"You're not saying that I have poor taste in women, are you?" Kirk demanded. That cut a little too close to home.
That elicited a snort. "You judge women very well in at least in two senses. You pick the most attractive ones, and you seem invariably able to tell who's going to be willing to sleep with you."
"So I'm a poor judge of men, then?"
"I wouldn't say that, exactly. Just that, as with women, you focus on what you see as useful to you. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, I suppose." McCoy sounded pensive. He pushed his empty plate away and signaled the waitress to bring them another round of drinks.
Kirk thought about it. McCoy probably had something there. When the fresh drinks arrived, he picked his up and clinked glasses with McCoy.
"Bottoms up. I hope you don't mind so much now that I dragged you here?"
McCoy shook his head and took a long swallow.
"Good. I wanted to ask why you looked so angry last night, and why you left early," Kirk said.
McCoy choked on his drink, coughing and spraying half the table. "For god's sake, man. Warn me when you're going to say something like that."
"What, asking how you were requires advance notice?"
"Well, yes. Jim Kirk, in my experience, doesn't do a lot of worrying over other people – not after the fact, anyhow."
"Hey," said Kirk, hurt. "You're my friend. Probably my best friend. Isn't it reasonable that I should be concerned if you seem upset?"
"Reasonable, just not likely, based on past behavior." McCoy shrugged. "Don't worry about it. I don't expect anything else from you."
Kirk studied McCoy as he took another drink, this one more successfully. Usually being baited like this would set Kirk off, but something about it struck him as odd. McCoy had managed to shift the focus of the conversation to Kirk's behavior, rather than his own, instead of simply answering the question. Which meant that there was something McCoy didn't want to tell him.
Time to push, then.
"Now that we've settled that this isn't my usual mode, can we return to the question at hand?"
"What question?" McCoy's expression strove for guilelessness, but Kirk wasn't fooled.
"Why you were upset last night. I dragged you along because I thought you could use a little distraction – specifically, sex – but I didn't actually make you do anything to find a girl, when it came down to it. I decided you'd appreciate being left to your bourbon instead. So why'd you leave so soon?" Kirk spelled it all out, since that was clearly the only way McCoy wasn't going to try to wriggle out of answering again.
"I don't think it's a good idea to discuss my reasons. Besides, it's none of your business."
"It is, too. I invited you, you came along, it was rude of you to leave without at least saying goodbye. Not to mention that if we're friends, and I've offended you somehow, you should tell me so that I don't do it again." This time it was Kirk who waved for more drinks.
McCoy heaved a gusty sigh. "You're not going to give up, are you? You never give up."
"Not when it's something I want." Kirk saw McCoy flinch. "So, spill."
"You might say..." said McCoy slowly, and paused as a fresh glass of bourbon was set down before him. "You might say that I walked out last night because I don't go after what I want the way that you do, and so was angry with myself when I saw you doing so."
Puzzled, Kirk said, "Okay, fine, but what was it you wanted and didn't go after? There were a lot of pretty women there, and I'd bet most of them would have been happy to go home with you, or take you home with them. All you needed to do was get up off your ass and talk to one of them."
"Jim..." McCoy rolled the glass against his forehead. "All right. I give up. I didn't want a woman, can you get that?"
"You what?" Kirk stared for a moment, then pulled himself together. "Bones, you were married."
"So?"
"So..." Kirk floundered. "You mean, you're attracted to both women and men?"
It shouldn't have surprised him so much – after all, Starfleet Academy was in San Francisco, and Kirk had seen first-hand why the city had had a certain reputation for more than three centuries – but somehow he'd never thought of McCoy as anything but straight, if basically celibate. McCoy had always seemed more interested in booze than in sex.
"You could say that." McCoy looked away. "More that I'm attracted to specific people, regardless of their sex."
"Oh." Kirk was rapidly reassessing everything he had thought he knew about McCoy. "Gonna tell me who the 'specific people' are? I could help, maybe."
"No, Jim. I don't think you can."
And McCoy stubbornly refused to say another word on the subject that night, no matter how drunk he got or how hard Kirk tried to persuade him.
#1: Bullshit, Medically Speaking | #3: Resolved on Silence