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"This still feels weird," says Jim, pen tapping anxiously against his papers spread out on the kitchen table. He's put his foot down on not reading into actual medical files, but even just making a list of potentials seems kind of skeezy.

"It feels like we're reducing them to their working body parts," he sighs, eyeballs aching as he scrubs a hand over the stubble on his cheeks. "All these women." Jim looks across the table at Bones. "How the hell are we gonna go around asking, hey, do you feel like getting knocked up?"

If Jim were thinking clearly, he'd be worried about his state of mind. He'd stepped into the mist near dino territory and into something like a dream, but it had always been like a dream. He's twenty five and the youngest Captain Starfleet has ever seen - and maybe he's done his best to earn it, but that's never going to sound like anything other than a spectacular dream any time Jim says it aloud.

And now it's happening again.

Jim stands in the middle of his old quarters, the floor a bit smoother for the passage of his boots as he paces. He'd been so happy, at first, to be home. He' Captain again, of a ship, a real ship, one that didn't exist solely in memory but in the deepest reaches of space. Hell, Jim had been so happy when he'd first seen Spock that he'd kissed him, narrowly avoiding another embarrassing pinch.

But now...now Jim is wondering where Bones is. Or rather, Jim is wondering how Bones is. He knows they'll be nothing less than best friends, now that Jim's wandered back into his first, best destiny, but Jim wants more. He thinks he probably always did, and now that he's had it on the island, he's not ready to give it up.

Jim can't help but notice, though, looking down at his hands for the twentieth time - there's no ring on his finger.

Drawing a breath, Jim walks to the comm and smacks it to life. "Bones," he barks down a private channel. "My quarters, now."

He follows along, his whole face a flush of red by now. He's a damn mess and he knows it, but hell, he doesn't even give a damn anymore. Not with Jim leading him out of the party looking as absolutely fine and put together as he does. "Where're you taking me, peaches?" he asks, faintly bemused.

*

"The nearest vaguely horizontal surface with a door that locks?" Jim calls over his shoulder, managing to haul Bones up the Compound steps and down the hall. He pauses as the stairs, briefly considering just throwing Bones over his shoulder, but his head isn't where he wants Bones' blood rushing to right now, so Jim settles for keeping an eye on him as they traverse lower.

"Here will do," he announces, finding an empty room with a door and a blessed lock. "Come on, Bones." Jim pulls his belt from its loops in one long, elegant tug. "Pants are now officially optional."

Please sign Jim Kirk's bid for Council!

It's later in the morning than Jim usually prepares breakfast, and today he prepares it with extra care. The reasons for this are twofold - for one, it's Bones' birthday. Which means he'll want to sleep in so as to be properly rested later to bemoan his age. The least Jim can do to prepare him is to keep him fed on all his favorite foods. And for two, Jim's decided to prepare it wearing an apron and <i>only</i> that, and it takes a deft hand to keep the hot grease popping from the pan away from his unmentionables.

But he's careful, and he manages, and by the time the coffee's hot and ready, the pancakes are piled high on the plate with peach preserves to slather on top, the bacon's crispy, and the eggs are <i>just</i> runny enough. Jim beams and sets them all carefully on a tray, backing through the door to their room to awake the bear.

"Bones!" he calls cheerfully, holding the tray close where the bacon will fully permeate his senses. "Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey."

It’s not that Jim doesn’t have socks. He has plenty. They just...don’t match, not even here in New York, where he can go out and buy some, rather than beg the clothesbox for something not in neon plaid.

But there’s no time. He’s only half-dressed, shirt untucked and tie loose, his jacket hanging over the chair, his shoes...somewhere. He’ll worry about those when he finds some socks, and it really should have occurred to him to raid Bones’ sock drawer earlier.

Jim yanks open the topmost dresser drawer with gusto, worried that Bones will return soon that yell at him for not being ready yet, which usually Jim enjoys, but he actually wants to party tonight. If what everyone says is to be believed, they won’t be in the city much longer, and Jim means to enjoy the combustion engine cars while he can.

He’s digging past a row of neatly folded socks (in black descending to shades of gray, navy, and blue, obviously) when he fingers hit something solid.

Something solid and box-shaped.

Curious, Jim pulls the lump past the socks and stares at it, uncomprehending. The box is red velvet, small enough to fit in his palm, with a shiny metal hinge. Distracted by his still bare feet, Jim opens it just enough to see what’s inside, and even after a full minute of staring at the two gold rings, he’s not quite ready to believe what he’s seeing.

He’s just about to pull the more adorned ring out when he hears the front door slam. Jim does the only thing he can think of - he grabs wildly for a pair of socks, throws the box onto the bed and sits on top of it, somehow managing to look innocent when Bones enters the bedroom.

“Almost ready, babe.”

Bones is getting better. He's nowhere near as well as he insists he is, but Jim will concede that the man is stronger than he was even days ago, the lingering fatigue from his pneumonia at last beginning to abate. Still, he's in no shape to walk all the way from the Compound to home, and certainly not to any of the more distant clinics.

Bones should be grateful Jim stopped short of carrying him on his own back. Instead, he's fashioned what can only be described as a tricked-out wheelbarrow, complete with padding on the inside, and shocks to absorb the more unforgiving portions of island terrain. Jim's pleased enough with it that he almost looks forward to doing something stupid enough to land his own ass in it, but for now, he's ready and waiting at the Compound door.

After a few false starts, Jim at last sees Bones make his attempt at escape. "Bones!" Jim barks at him cheerfully, leaning forward with his hands braced against the bamboo handles. "Your chariot."

Jim wakes in twisted sheets, flat on his back but breathing hard, a look of dazed frustration crumpling his features as he blinks up at the ceiling. Chronologically speaking, he's too old to be a virgin, even if he can't recall a single instance of sex.

So when he closes his eyes to revisit the sordid events of his dreams, he can't say with any certainty whether they're memory or fantasy. But he can still feel the scrape of Bones' stubble across his thighs, phantom fingers around his cock, he can still taste Bones' tongue sweeping over his own, and Jesus, he's so hard he's aching.

Reaching for himself, Jim only makes it past his belly button when he hears Bones in the kitchen, and he freezes with a groan. He holds his breath, praying to whatever god he might believe in that Bones will go back into his own room, and when he exhales, there's silence.

Jim slides gingerly out of bed, tiptoeing to the door to check. He opens it just a crack and sees Bones bent over, boxers stretched tight over a backside Jim's been imagining all night. "Shit."

Jim sprawls back against the sheets, boneless as a jellyfish but for his mouth, which is stretched in a wide, exhausted grin. Bones is alive, sex is still awesome, and though neither of them has slept properly in days, Jim's confident he can go another round. Just as soon as he catches his breath, which should happen any time now.

"Let's fight more," he says, turning his sweaty head against the one pillow still miraculously clinging to the bed. "It sucked at the time, but this part, this part's worth it. You know..."

Smile fading only a fraction, Jim looks up at the ceiling, trying to remember what they'd been fighting about. "I can't even remember why I was mad."

It's an hour or so before sunset when Jim calls a halt to their little procession. He makes a show of examining the clearing and the little stream that runs by, checks the ground for rocks and determines the distance to dinosaur territory. It's all a ruse, of course - he'd scouted this clearing and the surrounding area a week earlier. Remote, but not too remote, secluded but within shouting distance of the nearest path, it's the best place he could find to take Max camping.

"Looks good," he calls, striding back to Bones and Max with Lesovik bounding at his heels. He looks calm enough, but anyone who knows him as well as Bones could tell Jim's all but bursting at the seams for Max's approval. "What say we get the tent up, then you and I, little man," he says, pointing at Max, "can start the camp fire."

Safely tucked between his blankets, Jim comes to with a jerk.

It's still dark outside - Bones can't have administered the sedative more than a few hours ago, but Jim's been fighting for consciousness every step of the way, mind wheeling while his body knits and heals. Blinking into the darkness, Jim makes an experimental stretch, wriggling fingers and toes, spreading hands over ribs that no longer ache, touching a pair of lips that he can most certainly feel.

"Yes!" Jim whispers triumphantly at the ceiling, launching out of bed. He smacks promptly into a wall, the medicine no longer enough to keep him out, but enough to keep him clumsy, but he's grinning as he pushes away from it. Tugging his shirt over his shoulders, Jim throws it on his bad and marches out the door, crossing the darkness of the kitchen to Bones' room in miraculous silence.

Opening the door, he peers inside, just able to make out Bones' sleeping form in the moonlight. "Bones?" he whispers, coming forward when there's no response. Setting his knees to the bed, Jim begins climbing over the sheets. "Hey, Bones?"

[follows this]

He tried whistling, but his lip is too swollen, so Jim settles for a contented hum as he ambles towards home, body beaten eight ways from Sunday and a spring in his step.

Dragging his tongue over his fat lip, Jim smacks away the last of the beers he'd had after he and Tommy did their best to spar each other into the ground. "Man does not hold back," Jim murmurs to himself, grinning until it hurts too much. "God love'em."

His sides ache from hip to armpit, but it's a good hurt. It's a hurt Jim knows what to do with, where it came from, how long it's gonna last. It's a hurt that makes sense, clarity in the shape of purple knuckles along his ribs, the cut above his eyebrow and the blooming colors beneath his eye.

"Simple!" Jim announces as he rounds the corner to home. It's only when he sees Bones seated on the porch in the moonlight that he wonders if things will stay that way.

Please sign Jim Kirk's bid for Council.

And don't call him Tiberius.

Jim wakes up slowly, fighting it every step of the way.

He feels awful, far worse than is warranted by the minimal whiskey he'd had the night before - his head pounding, mouth cottonball dry, hell, even his chest feels like one of the horses outside sat on it.

"Nngh," he groans, determined to keep his eyes shut until all the awful goes away, but there's bright light in his eyes, a sun shining through the window that's far too high for morning, and all at once, Jim feels the early hours coming back to him.

He'd woken up, pulled on a henley over the goofy onesie pajamas, yanked his door open in search of breakfast and then bam, Bones in a bank robber bandana and a spray of something somehow both cold and hot in his face, followed by the sudden slam of his own shoulders as they restruck the bed. And then nothing.

"Dghed muh," Jim mutters in outrage as he tries and fails to sit up. That grumpy, sadistic fucker, he, "Dosed me," says Jim with more success this time. He turns his head and glares at the whirling gadget by his head, presumably the steampunked Old West version of a heart monitor.

"You suck," he tells it as hatefully as he can. "Hate you. Hate Bones."

It shouldn't matter.

He's seen the holo a thousand times, maybe even tens of thousands. It's burned into his brain - he could close his eyes and see each individual lock of hair, each dimple in their happy faces. He knows exactly what it looks like without looking at it at all, but it's not here, and Jim's punched a jagged hole in his bedroom door before he even realizes that he's angry.

He leaves the house with an aching hand and a crunch of boots over dry, red earth, fingers clutched tight around a single faded photograph. He has one holo, one, of he and Sam and their mother. One holo of them smiling like a family, Jim's face small and round with youth and no trace of George but for his eyes, Winona Kirk's arms around him and a smile like he can't remember seeing anywhere but this holo, and now it's...

Looking down at it, Jim fights the urge to spit into the dirt. Now that holo has been ripped from his PADD, replaced instead by a wrinkled piece of paper, the colors about as vibrant as a piss stain, and their clothes - even their clothes have been altered from army brat red to gingham and leather, and Jim's had enough.

This place has taken his ship, his friend Ishiah, and now his fucking family photo, and he is done with sobriety for a while. Pushing through the doors of the closest saloon, he figures he might just be done with consciousness, too.

[ooc: one of those public privates? if your pup feels up to dealing with an angry captain in a dangerous mood, feel free!]

"It's not so bad," says Jim, sitting sprawled with his back against a tree trunk and a glass of something clear on his knee. Addressing his other knee, or rather, the orange tabby sitting there, he grins. "I mean, Bones has got a pretty sweet place as huts go. I wouldn't mind if it reminded me less of an Iowan farmhouse, but it makes him happy."

Plum's tail swishes once, which is more than enough for Jim to assume the animal agrees with him. "Right? So I've got Spock's old room, which is weird." More than weird, in fact. Sleeping in Spock's bed is uncomfortable in a way Jim's chosen not to examine too carefully, but he leaves the sheets in a mess every morning, and it makes him feel a little better. "If you're keeping score, that's one BFF, one bed, and one roof over my head. And I've got this."

He shakes his glass. Privately, Jim feels that Bones drinks too much, but damn if he isn't generous about it. "He's got a whole still to himself. And he totally doesn't bother locking it up. How great is that?"