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They strip in the cold light of Kirk's cramped dorm room amidst the dirty laundry and empty food containers. Number One's skin is a wreckage of scars, her body a patchwork of messy splays and streaks of silver that speak of acid burns and cruel knives. Tales of service and sin written in small nicks and sweeping lines down her thighs and around her back, across the sharp jut of her hips. Kirk feels young and soft, a yet unmade thing, in front of her.
"Number One serves," she says, her calloused palms laid flat over his heart.
Her kiss is cool, chaste and vaguely metallic. It buoys him up, and straightens his spine. If he can't have his first best destiny, then fuck it. He'll take this and use it to carve out a new one.
They dress each other carefully, her in command gold and him in nondescript black. When they're finished she affixes an un-inscribed Starfleet chevron to his chest and steps back, dark eyes hard and expectant.
"My name is Yorktown." she says.
Kirk smiles, bright and crooked. "I'm Number One."
*
It works for a while.
Number One has the highest rank and no rank. He has no station but everyone knows where he stands (a step behind and to the left of the captain's chair). He sleeps in Pike's bed. They share meals and bicker over who gets the shower first. They argue about away-team protocol and have a couple of not-screaming matches down in engineering that end in breathless fucks and the occasional black-eye.
Kirk is Number One and he is the first to step between Pike and the long knives, to slip between him and the fire. Number One makes quick decisions, defies death and refuses to compromise. For every order Number One follows there are three more that he breaks. For every no-win scenario bearing down on them, Number One is there with a gamble and a cheat.
He has a phaser in his hand, and a smile on his face.
Pike denies him nothing.
*
The Enterprise holds fast in the face of budding war, ion storms and alternate realities.
He and Pike hold together and they don't talk about it.
*
Sybok rips him apart on the observation deck of the Enterprise.
The watery visage of Jonathan Archer's office shifts in and out of focus around them, and Kirk screams, face twisted and red, cheeks wet with tears and sweat as he struggles against Sybok's vice-like grip. Spock is sprawled in a boneless heap across the floor and Uhura is on her knees beside him, a streak of dark green blood painted across her arms while Bones yells at Sybok's followers to just give him a goddamn tricorder you bastards and they're all waiting for a miracle as Kirk writhes and howls like an animal under the searing heat of Sybok's cruel sympathy.
"Show me your pain," he says, and Kirk convulses under the the acid-bite of his fingers.
hot razors shredding the inside of his skull
trickle of blood down the front of his face
Sybok licking his cheek and show me your
the shadows on the wall move
Admiral Archer stares at Pike like Kirk's not even there, and that's fair because Kirk doesn't feel like he's all there either. Something is breaking just beneath the surface of his skin, falling apart in his head and down in his chest and under the hickey Pike left on his hip this morning. Kirk is watching it happen with numb fascination.
"Look Christopher, I know you wanted-"
"No," Pike cuts him off. "You don't know."
Kirk feels Archer's gaze flicker over to him with the briefest flash of awkward pity.
"I will not be relieved," Pike says flatly, like saying 'I won't be thrown away' and Kirk's heart stutters, stumbles and burns in his chest because one of them has to be and he didn't think it would be him. He didn't think he'd be the one not to go back (home) to the Enterprise.
Archer sighs and Pike turns to look at him (fucking finally don't fucking look at me bastard why). Kirk looks back.
Softy. "I won't be relieved, Jim."
And he isn't sorry.
The unforgiving click-hiss of a phaser set to kill, and the deck is a riot of surprised yells and murderous light. Sybok laughs, high and delighted, his hands and face smeared with Kirk's blood, smiling like a happy child at the end of messy meal.
Pike shoots him in the head.
Kirk falls to the ground, twisted and raw, a red pulpy thing gagging-gasping on the floor and he vomits before passing out.
*
Number One hasn't been on the bridge in seven days.
Pike watches the stars slide across the forward view screen and thinks about the best of all possible futures. He wonders how far off the mark his reality is and what kind of man it makes him that the thought causes the corners of his mouth twitch up, not down.
"Mister Spock, you have the conn for the remainder of the shift."
Spock rises smoothly from his station and inclines his head in acknowledgment.
Pike doesn't stay to watch Spock lower himself -carefully- into the captain's chair.
Crewmen pause and salute as he passes them, their names and ranks ticking by in his head as he goes. He thinks of Spock's cool hospitality and Uhura's terse silence. The line of Sulu's mouth, as flat and unforgiving as the edge of his blade and the confused misery in Chekov's eyes. McCoy's clenched fists.
It's his crew, but it's Jim's family. Pike has their trust and their respect, but not their love – something he never noticed until he realized he didn't have it, and maybe never would.
Pike lets his feet carry him down into the brightly lit chaos of Engineering, picking his way through the humming jungle of maintenance systems and the complicated snarl of electrical units. He has to squeeze his way down a pipe-choked hallway and shimmy along a maintenance shaft before he finds the only place on the ship that can truly be called Jim's – an enclosed alcove tucked beneath the warp-core.
Under the ghostly blue of the illuminated panels that line the low-ceilinged walls, Jim lays on his side, head pillowed on his arm as the ship's engine whirls a steady beat around them. For a long moment Pike watches Jim. Thinks to himself with a cold kind of clarity that they could maybe save themselves, if they just hated each other a little more.
Pike knows himself. He's a brave man, and maybe even an honorable man, but he isn't perhaps, a very good one. He wanted his ship more than he wanted Jim's happiness and in truth, he doesn't regret it.
Love does many things, but it doesn't make better people.
Christopher Pike isn't kinder because he loves Jim Kirk, from his dumb jokes to his switch-blade smile. His brilliant, reckless mind.
The way his breath hitches when Pike touches him in the dark.
Pike presses into the kiss and smooths his hands down Jim's back, until his fingers slide home around his hips, the grasping, needful part of him relieved at the easiness of it. Jim tastes like apples and the faint sourness of sleep, the warm softness of his mouth sweetly pliant under Pike's, until it isn't. Giving, until it becomes a sharp, hungry demand. The wet stroke of Jim's tongue against his and the click of their teeth turning the kiss into something mean and hard.
They've never been able to do this slow, do this gently and maybe they never will. Pike's not quite sure why they should even want to, not when they can have this - hard, biting kisses and the rough scrape of calloused hands on hot skin, bruised lips and seeking fingers marking territory and rudely tugging away impeding clothes. It's beyond good. It's almost a fight and more than just a fuck, the mindless stutter of Jim's hips under Pike's sweaty palms and the quivering flex of Jim's thighs wrapped tight around his waist. The hoarse cry he makes when Pike pushes inside of him, too fast and not slick enough.
No softness here, no giving quarter – just the sticky demands of slapping flesh, loud and wonderfully obscene. Greedy bodies racing towards or fighting against something just beyond reach. ("I will not be relieved.") And Pike wants. He wants to fuck that memory away, leech it out of Jim, smooth it into nothing with his hands and his mouth and his cock and all the promises he can make about the stars.
Jim gasps and pants, rocking against him, broken voice croaking out half formed words - faster, harder, more, don't stop – whining a high, startled scream when Pike drops his head and bites his bared throat. Pike moans into the sweaty flesh of his neck, tasting salt and the coppery tang of blood as Jim jerks hard beneath him, his come slicking between them as Pike thrusts. Until his own orgasm rocks through him, bright and devastating, like the best kind of pain.
After a moment Pike falls beside him, rolling onto his nail scratched back, shaky and breathing hard as Jim's hand reaches for his.
Down in the secret depths of the Enterprise, wrapped up in the beat of her warp-core heart and the feel of Jim next to him in the dark, Pike believes in them - that they can do this together, that what they have will be enough, if never quite right.
Jim's mouth ghosts his cheek, and Pike sighs, tongue flicking out to catch a fleeting taste.
"Number One," he says.
"Captain."