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akainagiTitle: Submit, Fight, Fail, Fall (or why you can't fight the blood that's in you)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
akainagi
Rating/Warnings/Spoilers: R so far / Spoilers for XI
Fandom/Pairing/Prompt: Star Trek AOS AU, Kirk/McCoy
Disclaimer: Alas, I do not own Star Trek.
Summary: Spawned by Word Wars over at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
jim_and_bones. Jim Kirk is an omega with a chip on his shoulder. He's convinced all alphas are assholes. Then he meets one that isn't.
Author's Note: This fic features the alpha/beta/omega trope. For a background on this trope check out the fanlore wiki HERE.
[CHAPTER 5]
By the time the boringly massive and massively boring orientation assembly finished, Leonard was half-comatose and in sore need of a drink. Nothing like being squashed in with a bunch of kids almost ten years his junior, and obnoxiously starry-eyed to boot.
Which led him to the fact that he was about to meet one of those kids for a drink. Not that Jim Kirk had been anything like starry-eyed, although his eyes had been a startling blue underneath that shiner. But the kid clearly had issues. Why else had he been picking a fight in a bar in Bumfuck Iowa the night before enlisting?
Probably for the same reason Leonard had signed-on drunk.
The doctor made his way across the quad towards the dorms that would be his home for the next three miserable years, itching to get out of the uniform that already felt like it was choking the life out of him. Leonard’s ex had always told him he was in love with trying to fix things. Had always gravitated towards the people and things who needed the fixing. Unfortunately such things had not included his marriage. His instinct as a doctor to help whoever was in front of him at any given time, coupled with what Jocelyn had uniquely termed ‘that alpha instinct to stifle the shit out of everything’ had spelled the end of their marriage long before the divorce had become a reality.
Leonard was a physician. He knew the standard biological imperatives of the three subtypes of the human species. Alphas were the protectors, betas were the thinkers, omegas were the nurturers. He also knew that these classifications weren’t worth the textbooks they were printed in. Jocelyn was omega – a less nurturing person you could never find on God’s green Earth. It was probably a good thing they never had kids, as much as Leonard had wanted them, or he would be going through a custody battle along with the recently completed divorce proceedings.
He reached his dorm room – a single, thank Christ – and after the second fumble, managed to key himself in. He began shedding the hated uniform as soon as the door closed, still lost in his own mental wanderings. Was this what divorce turned a person into, he wondered as he stepped under the sonic. Did it turn you into someone who questioned yourself at every turn? Did it make you question your motivations for every interaction and every relationship you embarked on, even casual friendship? Was his sense of self that rattled?
He refused to believe that. He was not that broken.
By the time he was pulling on his simple jeans and shirt, then pulling up the bar’s address, he had ruthlessly quashed his introspective angst. He was going out for a drink with a near-stranger (whose shoes he had vomited on, thank you very much) on his first week as a cog in the Federation’s military machine. This was about as socially forward as he could get.
[CHAPTER 6]
Leonard was relieved to find that the bar, an enigmatically named establishment on the edge of San Francisco proper, was not a horribly obnoxious affair. It appeared clean and sanitary, if a little crowded. And if the music was not exactly his glass of bourbon, at least it was kept down to a dull pounding in the background.
The doctor scanned the crowded room until his eyes lighted on a figure whose hand was raised in a wave. Sure enough, ensconced in a small booth in the back corner, was the Kid. As Leonard approached he noted that Kirk hadn’t bothered to have anyone look after the bruising on his face. It made his doctor’s hands itch. The rest of the younger man’s lean figure was clothed in jeans and a T-shirt that hugged his torso appealingly. The hue of the shirt brought out the startling color of his eyes, which were deep, and bright and very blue against the mottled bruising of his face.
Leonard muttered a greeting and dropped himself in the booth across from Kirk. Christ, this had been a bad idea. Here for less than five minutes and he was already waxing poetic about blue eyes.
Kirk face split into a wide smile. “What’s with the sour face, Bones?”
“Don’t call me that.” Leonard made a nominal attempt not to scowl. Then gave up. If anything, Kirk’s grin seemed to widen in inverse proportions to the doctor’s own sour expression. “I think I’ve been oriented right into a coma. Six hours of listening to morons drone on about military decorum and curfews.”
Kirk took a pull on his beer. “I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to refer to your instructors as morons,” he pointed out wryly.
“And what would you call them?”
Kirk made a show of looking thoughtful. “Self-important pricks.”
“And that’s better?” Leonard asked with a snort of amusement.
The other man shrugged, his smile endearingly lopsided. “At least I’m not insulting their intelligence.”
Leonard couldn’t stop the upward twist of his own mouth. This kid was a trip, clever with an irreverent streak a mile wide. Which begged the question: “So. Why Starfleet. You know why I’m here.” The doctor had volunteered that bit of information during the first minutes of their acquaintance, when he was half-drunk and near-paralyzed with fear. “What the hell are you doing in this army of nutjobs?”
The younger man’s smile slipped a little, reforming into one that was wider, but totally disingenuous. Kirk lifted his shoulders in a ‘whatever’ expression. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Leonard wanted to ask if that time was before, during or after he was getting his face pounded. He refrained from questioning the lackluster response. There was a limit to how much a guy could pry with only a few days of acquaintance under his belt. His curiosity was definitely piqued, though.
To say that Leonard hadn’t had much in the way of social companionship in the last year was an understatement of biblical proportions. And he had never been as adept in the social graces as his ex had wanted him to be. He observed as Kirk waved over one of the staff and ordered himself another beer, and Leonard made it two. The kid flirted skillfully with the waitress, who gave as good as she got, probably in pursuit of the almighty tip.
The woman sashayed off to fetch their drinks, as Leonard raised an amused eyebrow at his companion.
Kirk grinned in response, his sunny disposition back in full force. Normally Leonard would be annoyed by such a display. But the Kid’s obvious wit and sarcasm tempered what might have otherwise been irritating.
Kirk carried himself like an alpha. All cockiness and swagger. Although Leonard could’ve sworn, just a few days ago, that his impression had been rather the opposite. Especially when the younger man was trying to nurse him through the worst of his alcohol and shuttle induced dry-heaves. An extroverted beta, he had thought at the time. Maybe an omega, on the outside chance. But now, looking at Kirk and listening to him natter and bitch and wax enthusiastically about his class schedule (Christ, the Kid was actually enthusiastic about that), he had to remind himself that biology wasn’t everything, even to someone like himself who lived and breathed the stuff. And even Leonard’s considerable grasp on the subject of the human species didn’t tell him any more about who and what Jim Kirk was.
That was when he realized, to his surprise, that he actually wanted to find out. Not because he was interested. At least not that way. But because, for the first time in a year, he actually felt need to connect with another person on a level higher than ‘hello, how are you, now back the fuck off.’
Leonard took a swallow of his beer (horrible stuff), listening to Jim Kirk ramble and inserting his own dry commentary when the mood took him.
Well. This might just turn out to be interesting.
[CHAPTER 7]
Jim Kirk, as friends go, was both exasperating and surprisingly useful.
Useful because damned if the Kid wasn’t several kinds of fucking genius. He made a decent study partner, well versed in so many of the areas where Leonard was lacking, from xenolinguistics to the dreaded but mandatory Piloting 101. In return, Leonard found himself patching up his fellow cadet after many a bar brawl that the younger man seemed to get pulled into like a damned magnet. Leonard got and academic compatriot, Jim got patched up under the official radar of Starfleet medical. It was a surprisingly effective system of quid pro quo.
Jim Kirk, as friends go, was also a hell of a lot of work.
Perhaps it was Leonard's own proximity to his recent divorce, or merely his tendency as a doctor to detect and diagnose, but he recognized a familiar pattern in Jim Kirk. The man was alternatingly genuine and disingenuous in turns. Attempts to connect alternated with attempts to deflect, a telltale sign of the recently wounded. It resonated with the part of Leonard that was still trying to figure out where the hell everything in his marriage had gone so wrong.
Then there were times when Jim would give Leonard that blindingly honest and open smile. When he would sling an arm affectionately over the doctor’s shoulder and give him a taste of the human companionship Leonard now realized he had actually been starved for. In those moments the older man was reminded that it was all worth it. Hell, Jim could be twice the trouble he was (and wasn’t that a horrifying prospect), and it would still be worth every last second of frustration.
Of course, there was more than one kind of frustration.
[CHAPTER 8]
Leonard McCoy, as friends go, was both exasperating, and surprisingly useful.
Useful because damned if he didn’t have mad skills with a regen unit, even if his skills with a hypo were fucking terrifying. And he was a top notch diagnostician. The guy just had to look at Jim to know what was wrong with him. Half the time the tricorder was a formality. Thank god for the man, because otherwise Jim would be sunk in a sea of demerits so deep he’d never wade out from under them. Starfleet took a rather dim view on bar fights amongst its cadet body.
And in return for his medical prowess, Jim helped fill some of the gaps in his friend’s vast body of knowledge. Vast, but seriously limited to all things biological. The man was as close as you could get to a technophobe in the 24th century. Transporters and shuttles were his antichrist, and the mere thought of an exam in Piloting 101 turned Bones distinctly green.
Leonard McCoy, as friends go, was also a hell of a lot of work.
The man wore sarcasm like a suit of armor, a fresh glare always at the ready. Sometimes Jim would swear that Bones was actively cultivating their friendship, and other times he appeared to be trying to scowl it to death. It was an intricate dance of advace-and-retreat that Jim immediately recognized. Whoever his ex was, the woman had really done a number on the guy. And Jim could sure a shit relate to that particular problem, even five years later.
The man made a bitchin’ drinking buddy, though. He could toss ‘em down. Apparently one should never underestimate the constitution of a southerner, Jim found out the first time he was put under the table.
And it was … good. He supposed. To have someone to rely on. Terrifying and good. He had never trusted anyone to be there before. Not his mom, certainly not Frank. And not Gary, the bastard. And here he was, friends with an alpha. Best friends. With an alpha.
And Jim was frequently reminded that Bones was indeed an alpha.
The inhibitors suppressed his heat, by and large. However, they did absolutely nothing for his omega sensitivity to alpha pheromones. It was seductive. He found himself leaning just a little closer when he was explaining the intricacies of xenolinguistics, found himself, almost without the consent of his brain, slinging an arm over his friend’s broad shoulders on the way home from the bar. The combination of pheromones and Bones’ innate dependability and his strong, attractive build made Jim feel oddly vulnerable. So he pulled back. Until the next time he felt himself moving forward. It was seductive. And good. And terrifying.
And it was frustrating as hell.
[NEXT PART]
Author:
akainagiRating/Warnings/Spoilers: R so far / Spoilers for XI
Fandom/Pairing/Prompt: Star Trek AOS AU, Kirk/McCoy
Disclaimer: Alas, I do not own Star Trek.
Summary: Spawned by Word Wars over at
jim_and_bones. Jim Kirk is an omega with a chip on his shoulder. He's convinced all alphas are assholes. Then he meets one that isn't.Author's Note: This fic features the alpha/beta/omega trope. For a background on this trope check out the fanlore wiki HERE.
By the time the boringly massive and massively boring orientation assembly finished, Leonard was half-comatose and in sore need of a drink. Nothing like being squashed in with a bunch of kids almost ten years his junior, and obnoxiously starry-eyed to boot.
Which led him to the fact that he was about to meet one of those kids for a drink. Not that Jim Kirk had been anything like starry-eyed, although his eyes had been a startling blue underneath that shiner. But the kid clearly had issues. Why else had he been picking a fight in a bar in Bumfuck Iowa the night before enlisting?
Probably for the same reason Leonard had signed-on drunk.
The doctor made his way across the quad towards the dorms that would be his home for the next three miserable years, itching to get out of the uniform that already felt like it was choking the life out of him. Leonard’s ex had always told him he was in love with trying to fix things. Had always gravitated towards the people and things who needed the fixing. Unfortunately such things had not included his marriage. His instinct as a doctor to help whoever was in front of him at any given time, coupled with what Jocelyn had uniquely termed ‘that alpha instinct to stifle the shit out of everything’ had spelled the end of their marriage long before the divorce had become a reality.
Leonard was a physician. He knew the standard biological imperatives of the three subtypes of the human species. Alphas were the protectors, betas were the thinkers, omegas were the nurturers. He also knew that these classifications weren’t worth the textbooks they were printed in. Jocelyn was omega – a less nurturing person you could never find on God’s green Earth. It was probably a good thing they never had kids, as much as Leonard had wanted them, or he would be going through a custody battle along with the recently completed divorce proceedings.
He reached his dorm room – a single, thank Christ – and after the second fumble, managed to key himself in. He began shedding the hated uniform as soon as the door closed, still lost in his own mental wanderings. Was this what divorce turned a person into, he wondered as he stepped under the sonic. Did it turn you into someone who questioned yourself at every turn? Did it make you question your motivations for every interaction and every relationship you embarked on, even casual friendship? Was his sense of self that rattled?
He refused to believe that. He was not that broken.
By the time he was pulling on his simple jeans and shirt, then pulling up the bar’s address, he had ruthlessly quashed his introspective angst. He was going out for a drink with a near-stranger (whose shoes he had vomited on, thank you very much) on his first week as a cog in the Federation’s military machine. This was about as socially forward as he could get.
Leonard was relieved to find that the bar, an enigmatically named establishment on the edge of San Francisco proper, was not a horribly obnoxious affair. It appeared clean and sanitary, if a little crowded. And if the music was not exactly his glass of bourbon, at least it was kept down to a dull pounding in the background.
The doctor scanned the crowded room until his eyes lighted on a figure whose hand was raised in a wave. Sure enough, ensconced in a small booth in the back corner, was the Kid. As Leonard approached he noted that Kirk hadn’t bothered to have anyone look after the bruising on his face. It made his doctor’s hands itch. The rest of the younger man’s lean figure was clothed in jeans and a T-shirt that hugged his torso appealingly. The hue of the shirt brought out the startling color of his eyes, which were deep, and bright and very blue against the mottled bruising of his face.
Leonard muttered a greeting and dropped himself in the booth across from Kirk. Christ, this had been a bad idea. Here for less than five minutes and he was already waxing poetic about blue eyes.
Kirk face split into a wide smile. “What’s with the sour face, Bones?”
“Don’t call me that.” Leonard made a nominal attempt not to scowl. Then gave up. If anything, Kirk’s grin seemed to widen in inverse proportions to the doctor’s own sour expression. “I think I’ve been oriented right into a coma. Six hours of listening to morons drone on about military decorum and curfews.”
Kirk took a pull on his beer. “I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to refer to your instructors as morons,” he pointed out wryly.
“And what would you call them?”
Kirk made a show of looking thoughtful. “Self-important pricks.”
“And that’s better?” Leonard asked with a snort of amusement.
The other man shrugged, his smile endearingly lopsided. “At least I’m not insulting their intelligence.”
Leonard couldn’t stop the upward twist of his own mouth. This kid was a trip, clever with an irreverent streak a mile wide. Which begged the question: “So. Why Starfleet. You know why I’m here.” The doctor had volunteered that bit of information during the first minutes of their acquaintance, when he was half-drunk and near-paralyzed with fear. “What the hell are you doing in this army of nutjobs?”
The younger man’s smile slipped a little, reforming into one that was wider, but totally disingenuous. Kirk lifted his shoulders in a ‘whatever’ expression. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Leonard wanted to ask if that time was before, during or after he was getting his face pounded. He refrained from questioning the lackluster response. There was a limit to how much a guy could pry with only a few days of acquaintance under his belt. His curiosity was definitely piqued, though.
To say that Leonard hadn’t had much in the way of social companionship in the last year was an understatement of biblical proportions. And he had never been as adept in the social graces as his ex had wanted him to be. He observed as Kirk waved over one of the staff and ordered himself another beer, and Leonard made it two. The kid flirted skillfully with the waitress, who gave as good as she got, probably in pursuit of the almighty tip.
The woman sashayed off to fetch their drinks, as Leonard raised an amused eyebrow at his companion.
Kirk grinned in response, his sunny disposition back in full force. Normally Leonard would be annoyed by such a display. But the Kid’s obvious wit and sarcasm tempered what might have otherwise been irritating.
Kirk carried himself like an alpha. All cockiness and swagger. Although Leonard could’ve sworn, just a few days ago, that his impression had been rather the opposite. Especially when the younger man was trying to nurse him through the worst of his alcohol and shuttle induced dry-heaves. An extroverted beta, he had thought at the time. Maybe an omega, on the outside chance. But now, looking at Kirk and listening to him natter and bitch and wax enthusiastically about his class schedule (Christ, the Kid was actually enthusiastic about that), he had to remind himself that biology wasn’t everything, even to someone like himself who lived and breathed the stuff. And even Leonard’s considerable grasp on the subject of the human species didn’t tell him any more about who and what Jim Kirk was.
That was when he realized, to his surprise, that he actually wanted to find out. Not because he was interested. At least not that way. But because, for the first time in a year, he actually felt need to connect with another person on a level higher than ‘hello, how are you, now back the fuck off.’
Leonard took a swallow of his beer (horrible stuff), listening to Jim Kirk ramble and inserting his own dry commentary when the mood took him.
Well. This might just turn out to be interesting.
Jim Kirk, as friends go, was both exasperating and surprisingly useful.
Useful because damned if the Kid wasn’t several kinds of fucking genius. He made a decent study partner, well versed in so many of the areas where Leonard was lacking, from xenolinguistics to the dreaded but mandatory Piloting 101. In return, Leonard found himself patching up his fellow cadet after many a bar brawl that the younger man seemed to get pulled into like a damned magnet. Leonard got and academic compatriot, Jim got patched up under the official radar of Starfleet medical. It was a surprisingly effective system of quid pro quo.
Jim Kirk, as friends go, was also a hell of a lot of work.
Perhaps it was Leonard's own proximity to his recent divorce, or merely his tendency as a doctor to detect and diagnose, but he recognized a familiar pattern in Jim Kirk. The man was alternatingly genuine and disingenuous in turns. Attempts to connect alternated with attempts to deflect, a telltale sign of the recently wounded. It resonated with the part of Leonard that was still trying to figure out where the hell everything in his marriage had gone so wrong.
Then there were times when Jim would give Leonard that blindingly honest and open smile. When he would sling an arm affectionately over the doctor’s shoulder and give him a taste of the human companionship Leonard now realized he had actually been starved for. In those moments the older man was reminded that it was all worth it. Hell, Jim could be twice the trouble he was (and wasn’t that a horrifying prospect), and it would still be worth every last second of frustration.
Of course, there was more than one kind of frustration.
Leonard McCoy, as friends go, was both exasperating, and surprisingly useful.
Useful because damned if he didn’t have mad skills with a regen unit, even if his skills with a hypo were fucking terrifying. And he was a top notch diagnostician. The guy just had to look at Jim to know what was wrong with him. Half the time the tricorder was a formality. Thank god for the man, because otherwise Jim would be sunk in a sea of demerits so deep he’d never wade out from under them. Starfleet took a rather dim view on bar fights amongst its cadet body.
And in return for his medical prowess, Jim helped fill some of the gaps in his friend’s vast body of knowledge. Vast, but seriously limited to all things biological. The man was as close as you could get to a technophobe in the 24th century. Transporters and shuttles were his antichrist, and the mere thought of an exam in Piloting 101 turned Bones distinctly green.
Leonard McCoy, as friends go, was also a hell of a lot of work.
The man wore sarcasm like a suit of armor, a fresh glare always at the ready. Sometimes Jim would swear that Bones was actively cultivating their friendship, and other times he appeared to be trying to scowl it to death. It was an intricate dance of advace-and-retreat that Jim immediately recognized. Whoever his ex was, the woman had really done a number on the guy. And Jim could sure a shit relate to that particular problem, even five years later.
The man made a bitchin’ drinking buddy, though. He could toss ‘em down. Apparently one should never underestimate the constitution of a southerner, Jim found out the first time he was put under the table.
And it was … good. He supposed. To have someone to rely on. Terrifying and good. He had never trusted anyone to be there before. Not his mom, certainly not Frank. And not Gary, the bastard. And here he was, friends with an alpha. Best friends. With an alpha.
And Jim was frequently reminded that Bones was indeed an alpha.
The inhibitors suppressed his heat, by and large. However, they did absolutely nothing for his omega sensitivity to alpha pheromones. It was seductive. He found himself leaning just a little closer when he was explaining the intricacies of xenolinguistics, found himself, almost without the consent of his brain, slinging an arm over his friend’s broad shoulders on the way home from the bar. The combination of pheromones and Bones’ innate dependability and his strong, attractive build made Jim feel oddly vulnerable. So he pulled back. Until the next time he felt himself moving forward. It was seductive. And good. And terrifying.
And it was frustrating as hell.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-04 09:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-04 10:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-06-04 11:36 pm (UTC)That resonated deeply with me, as I'm in the midst of the same. I hope eventually that I'll be only as bitter and messed up as our favorite doctor.
I loved Bones's growing need to find out "what Jim is." That's one of the interesting things in this AU, is the idea that it may not be obvious.
I adored the parallel sections where we see each character's POV on the developing friendship.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-06-05 01:13 am (UTC)One of the things I love about these characters in AOS is that they are so damaged, and yet they gravitate towards each other and strike up this amazing relationship. I just adore exploring that dynamic in fic. I also like reading the hot porn.