Current location:	a hyperactive imagination
Current mood:	awake
Current music:	I love you, you imbecile - pelle carlberg
Entry tags:	fandom: star trek xi, kink meme, prompt, ship: kirk/spock, slash

Star Trek XI: Kink Meme Response
I, er. Desperately wanted to write something. I strayed from the light, went to the kink meme. And this happened.

Fandom: NewTrek / Star Trek XI
Rating: R
Pairings: Kirk/Spock
Summary: Scotty puts the pieces together.
Contains: Tension, cuteness, kisses.
Notes: Prompt here, in the NewTrek Kink Meme: "What I’m dying to see is Kirk/Spock fic with a healthy dose of Scotty. Inadvertent or scheming matchmaking takes place. Because really, Scotty’s the only other one who saw Spock Prime! Bonus: Scotty mentions to Spock something along the lines of “They seemed awfully chummy” re: Spock Prime and Kirk."


‘Five Things that Scotty Noticed and Didn’t Mention to the General Public, And One Thing That Spread Around the Enterprise Within Five Minutes of him Seeing It’

*

one
The men had stumbled in from a snowstorm, pale flakes clinging to their coats. Keenser had wisely deferred the matter to his superior Starfleet officer, even if, at first, Scotty was a wee bit piqued that they’d interrupted his afternoon nap (because it wasn’t often he’d been able to steal one of those aboard a starship, know what he meant? Few things were worse than warping into a crisis and having to rub sleep out of your eyes in the 0.5 seconds before you answered the captain’s comm.)

It threw him a bit when the grandad Vulcan knew his name, but of course, he was infamous through Starfleet by now. That was how he’d ended up on this bloody rock, after all.

Of course, when the pretty, pretty boy with those sky-sharp eyes had tried to pun on whiskey ‘on the rock’, Scotty had channelled the urge to hit him with a spanner into glaring at the giggling Keenser instead. But what he caught was the way the grandad Vulcan had looked at the boy, and – smiled, yes, a flex of the lips, but the sadness in those eyes had been enough for Scotty to notice, and he’d never been too good at reading other species’ emotions. Enough for Scotty to swallow, turn away, pick up a cloth and unnecessarily wipe at his spanner in discomfort, as if even observing that strength of emotion was a transgression into privacy. Because what Scotty saw there was loss, and he’d had enough of that himself to want to avoid being reminded by other people, particularly ones who’d dropped in out of the chill air outside and spouted impossible nonsense about futures and warping and spacetime.

Kirk, the spitfire with ice in his eyes and something burning up from the depths of his soul in every driven word, took all of this madness in his stride. Scotty had stared at him at first, shaking his head out of sheer disorientation at the fury that seemed the focus of someone who still felt, to Scotty, precocious: gifted, perhaps a little experienced, yet still ahead of his age, still young. But the sure weight of the Vulcan’s single nod and the utter, utter lack of surprise that Kirk was taking the lead was enough for Scotty to at least follow their train of thought for a little while.


two
Holy hell. He really was from the future. That ancient-looking Vulcan with a nerve of iron had known him, known someone else who was him, somewhere else.

Scotty squeezed his eyes shut in pain at the thought. Numbers and equations flashed through his head – space moving, time, singularities, the distortion effect of collapsing matter. Scotty had to admit that it was all theoretically possible. Beaming onto a ship in warp and passing through the event horizon of a black hole weren’t too far apart, if you accepted that space and time were mutable (and you had both a spadeful of faith, and an absence of argumentative cosmologists around to dissuade you).

The equation that the old guy said was his own etched itself onto the insides of his eyelids, sinking deep into his memory and staying there. But what filtered through from the surface was the way the Vulcan handled Kirk as if he was an over-eager puppy – at arm’s length, weighing and measuring, always aware of the absence of something more.


three
(Incidentally, what Scotty had denied seeing, even to himself, was fondness and knowledge for him in the Vulcan’s face. It was bad enough trespassing on a other peoples’ privacy: when it was with someone who clearly knew you, well. Scotty was happier to curse paradoxes and remain blessedly ignorant of his own condition in that far-distant future.

Except, if he did say so himself, he’d produced a bloody brilliant equation for the manipulation of spacetime, and he almost wanted to meet that other self, shake his hand, and get him properly drunk on slowly-sipped drams of well-aged whiskey, reminiscing about poaching trout as a lad, because he had no doubt that his other self had also learned the importance of being somewhere else very fast when sprinting away from Linlithgow Loch with half of the West Lothian constabulary at his heels.

But what he didn’t mind acknowledging was that the, for want of a better word, fondness in the Vulcan’s minor variations of facial expression were entirely different when he looked at the young man he called Jim.

Scotty also didn’t see the look on Keenser’s face as the world spun and re-arranged around him. Of course he didn’t. He was a manful, manly man, after all.

But when he’d been offered a permanent position on Kirk’s crew, the first thing he did was to beam to that Godforsaken chillbox, to go back for him. And as Scotty picked him up, settled him onto the pad and snapped at him about clambering all over the transporter, he nearly wept with guilt that he couldn’t have wiped that look off the old guy’s face, as well.)


four
The tension when he and Kirk had been dragged onto the bridge and Kirk had turned the full storm of that glare, full lips pursed, up into the piercing eyes of the Vulcan officer, had had Scotty babbling about towels and desperately attempting to hide the flush creeping up his cheeks.

If anybody had looked at him like that, he’d’ve had their kilt across his head in five seconds flat, and would have expected noisy results within a minute.

It took him at least two days to comment about this to anybody on the Enterprise, and even then, he’d been innocuous at best, but the situation had entirely got out of control. He’d even waited until that hot girl, the one who was good at languages and whose eyes strayed in Spock’s direction a little too regularly, was safely absent, before he turned to the two in yellow who seemed to front the gossip operation and commented on the, ah, sparks between their two superior officers. To his surprise, the pair launched into a detailed study of how it was funny that Kirk and Spock gone from hating each other so much, to working seamlessly in a daring rescue that Scotty had personally heard Spock repeat was only 4.3% likely to have succeeded, in the space of a few hours. (And Scotty allowed himself to dwell for a moment on whether this was the surety that had had that older Spock nodding in the base on Delta Vega, before he went back to congratulating himself on his masterful performance with the teleport.)

‘Fire and ice,’ said Sulu succinctly, sipping from his straw and utterly oblivious to the flustered fidgeting of the Russian boy wonder who was trying not to watch him.

Scotty shook his head. ‘Whatever it is, I’m telling ye, they’re generating enough of a charge to regulate the warp drive, if you follow my terminology...?’

Sulu paused, flicking the tip of the straw with his finger. ‘Opposites attract?’ he suggested.

‘Explosively,’ Scotty muttered darkly. ‘You’ve never seen a reactor blow?’ Sulu shook his head. ‘Ye don’t wanna be ridin’ that one out in a tin can that can barely break atmosphere, laddie, I’m telling ye...’

‘Meester Spock, he is only half Wulcan,’ the boy, Pavel, cut in. ‘I have hyeard zat ze human side, it... takes ower with passions, sometimes.’

‘Hmm,’ Scotty considered, perhaps a bit too enthusiastically, because Pavel blushed a delicate pink, and Sulu nearly choked on his milkshake. Scotty had laughed loud enough that the doctor at the next table had glared in their direction before turning away with some quiet curse twisting his lips. Sulu and Chekov carefully avoided looking at each other, and Scotty wondered how many odd couples would end up stealing kisses in secluded corners of the Enterprise, and whether he could run a sweepstake that wouldn’t rely on hacking her security system for proof.


five
To Scotty’s surprise, the door chimed and slid open to admit the First Officer himself to Engineering. It was standard evening, and Scotty was working late, still tweaking and monitoring aspects of the ship’s systems. She hadn’t been test-run, after all, and Scotty had no intention of letting her go down on his watch because some half-arsed welder had missed a spot on the circuitboard in their rush to unveil their flagship in time for that unfortunate interruption at Old Vulcan.

(He thought of the old Spock, again, with a rush of sympathy, magnified tenfold by the blossoming strength of the man in front of him, eyes still hot with youth.) ‘How can I help you, Mr Spock?’ he asked, setting his programme to run a background scan and turning away from the console.

‘Mr Scott.’ The Vulcan paused, gaze travelling around the engine room as if he was evaluating, that gaze that the old, other Spock had turned on the Captain when Jim had blazed with fury at the man now in front of Scotty. What could he be here for? Just checking up? Kirk hadn’t sent any messages down, and it was the start of standard night, the end of the shift, besides... ‘You joined the Captain during his sojourn on Delta Vega, did you not?’

And suddenly, Scotty thought he knew where this was going. ‘Yessir,’ he replied smoothly, wondering whether Spock would notice if he pressed the brief sequence on the screen that would set the comm link to record. ‘Like a bloody freezer it was, too.’ But talkative as he was, Scotty knew one thing about people: when they found silence awkward, they would fill it with words. And Spock, he was sure, was down here for something specific. (Scotty was also quite pleased to be using the Vulcan technique back at the formidable XO, who must, he realised, be extremely agitated indeed if he didn’t notice at all.)

‘Indeed.’ Spock stopped again, before tilting his head and meeting Scotty’s eyes. ‘And you met his companion, also?’

Bingo. ‘I did, sir, and a charming gentleman he was too,’ Scotty smiled, watching the slight twitch to Spock’s eyebrow. ‘An extremely penetrative intellect.’

‘Indeed?’

Scotty had never heard a word repeated so quickly, with such a definite alteration in inflections. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said smoothly, knowing that Spock wouldn’t find his grin at all reassuring. ‘And he and Kirk were at it nineteen to the dozen, of course, chattering on about planning and possibilities and differences in spacetime. Extremely probing questions he asked, too, dragging the Captain back to the point of the adventure. Adventure for me, I should say. The old guy was terribly serious about it all, I seem to remember. I’ll tell you now, I was surprised that he didn’t mind the Captain being so, well... I don’t like to be critical, now, you know?’ Scotty waited for the quirk of Spock’s eyebrow to continue baiting his trap. ‘But the Captain is sometimes, shall we say, impetuous?’

‘It has been commented on,’ Spock conceded, pointedly missing out by whom, how often and in what tone.

‘Aye,’ Scotty nodded. ‘The old guy took it all in his stride, though. He’d known Kirk a long time, apparently. They were certainly awfully chummy, even though we were trying to beam onto the Enterprise at warp from a climbing frame on an ice cube.’

‘Did you learn the identity of that man? It would be... interesting... to talk to him.’ Scotty frowned, considering his answer, as he watched the careful blankness of Spock’s face. There was something there...

‘No,’ Scotty lied cheerfully. ‘It was all such a rush, I didn’t catch his name. Shame, really, because it would be fascinating to talk to him, to benefit from his experience. But he knew the Captain well, maybe it’d be possible to track him down.’

‘Perhaps,’ Spock nodded once, that same decisive tilt that seemed, to Scotty, to echo across reality. And suddenly, Scotty wondered what he should and shouldn’t say. The equation, his equation, his shining gift from the old man (and one that, he admitted to himself sometimes, he clung to all the more because he wasn’t sure he deserved it) that had folded itself into his brain seemed to quiver, slightly, with the weight of time. He was suddenly absurdly glad that he hadn’t managed to record this conversation for later analysis, however much fun it would have been to watch Chekov take a rumour and run with it.

‘Of course, since he and the Captain were so close, I may not have to,’ Scotty continued, idly pressing at buttons and hoping that Spock believed he was busy with something. ‘The Captain being so extremely sociable, and all.’

‘We can hope so, Mr Scott.’ Spock looked around again, nodded decisively, and left. ‘Good evening to you.’ Scotty paused as the doors closed, reflecting on the Vulcan’s reticence. Spock was not normally quite so quiet, he decided.

Really, Scotty wondered what it was that Spock had wanted to know, and whether he’d paid off a little of that debt to the old man, who had already left Delta Vega by the time he’d gone back.


...and the other one
Uhura had been grim as a thundercloud for a standard week, and Spock even tighter-mouthed than usual. The lieutenant didn’t look across at him any more, but in the spaces when she would have done, her eyes focused on nothing, and a look of intense sadness stole across her face. Unusually, though, Bones, who normally stayed the hell away from crew disputes, was flickering his eyes back and forth between the two of them, loaded with unspoken questions. And sometimes he would discreetly scan Spock with what looked to Scotty like a modified tricorder, stare at the screen, and glare at the XO, muttering about stupidity. Pavel reported new episodes excitedly at breakfast, while Sulu maintained that Spock had probably given in to his human side with some ambassador’s wife, pissing Uhura off and picking up something communicable in the process.

Scotty’s wake-up call was a trip to medbay with scorched hands – he didn’t want to risk operating the transporter’s touchscreens with desensitised fingertips, after all. (Pavel’s rose-tinted cheeks as Scotty had announced that had been entirely worth the bother of a detour to the infirmary.) As the door opened, he heard Bones snap, steamrollering over Kirk’s pleading.

‘I’m a doctor, damnit, not a counsellor! You want a psychic, go ask for a mind-meld instead of – ’

‘But Bones...’

Scotty was suddenly very aware that this was perhaps the best time to announce his presence, before he heard too much more. ‘Doctor?’

‘Thank god, a patient,’ Bones glared at the Captain. He muttered, so low that Scotty only just caught it, ‘Just go and – I don’t care, hit him, taunt him, hell, you could even try using words, but get out of my sickbay, Jim. You’re making the place look messy.’

The Captain clapped Scotty on the shoulder as he left, glancing at his hand and commiserating, before he strode on, eyes already focused on something out of the room, some other target.

Bones had dealt with Scotty in under a minute, spraying a seal on his hand that would peel off within the hour and leave fresh new skin behind, then storming off to his office, muttering about regulations and stubbornness.

It was on his way back to Engineering that Scotty wheeled round the corner to see two figures further down the corridor, on gold-shirted and tow-haired, the other almost turning his blue shirt into a bar of ice with rigidity.

Scotty backed up against the wall as he saw Kirk spring, a fist lashing out and catching Spock across his cheek. Spock’s hand flashed, catching Kirk’s other wrist mid-swing.

‘Enlighten me as to why you are striking me, Captain Kirk.’ There was steel in Spock’s voice enough to have Scotty flinching back around the bulkhead. It wasn’t quite a command, but it wasn’t a question, either.

‘Because you’re an idiot,’ Kirk replied instantly, brash and confident.

‘It defies logic that you should resort to violence rather than attempting to talk with me first. Perhaps I am inhuman in that respect. Please explain your actions.’ Spock hadn’t let go of Kirk’s wrist, and his dark eyes were locked on Kirk’s, hot and intent.

Kirk tilted his head up. ‘Emotional compromise, Spock? We’ve covered this one before, come on!’

‘My medical condition does not affect my ability to do my duty, Captain. So if you will please – ’

‘No, Spock, I won’t.’ Scotty was surprised to hear the statement of fact, quiet and controlled, belying the scorch of Kirk’s stare up into Spock’s face. He took a breath, and the chaotic bundle of emotions returned to his voice. ‘Sure, it’s not bothering you too much now, but tomorrow? Next week? I’ve seen Bones’ scans, Spock, and you can’t live in denial! You won’t live, you’ve got to do something about it, tell me how I can – what I can – I’m not going to let you die!’ he snapped suddenly, jerking backwards, against the grip Spock still had on his arm.

‘While I appreciate your concern, Captain, risking emotional compromise – ’

Kirk rolled his eyes, interrupting. ‘Oh, okay, I get it, you’re still pissed that I hit you. Well, I’m sorry, I just didn’t think I could...’

And then Scotty stared as the captain pursed those full, red lips, darted forwards, slid an arm around Spock’s neck, and kissed him.

Spock blinked in the false day of the corridor lights, and Scotty wondered if time had lapsed in that corridor, just for a moment.

Then Spock growled (there was no other word for the sound that sent dark tingles right down to the base of Scotty’s spine), wrapped his arms around the captain and pushed him up against the wall. Kirk laughed, gasped, tugged Spock’s face back to his, and they surged together, almost wrestling, lips locking, Kirk’s fingers visible in Spock’s dark, dark hair.

Really, Scotty was disappointed to be watching from the wings, but with such a restricted view of the stage.

Then he remembered the cameras.

Scotty turned on his heel, hurrying back to Engineering, thanking whatever fate had been smiling on him when she’d granted him his own private office. He picked up his comm when he reckoned he was two corridors away and hailed Hikaru and Pavel. ‘Boys? Boys. I don’t care what I’m interrupting. I think you owe me a bottle of fine whiskey, Mr Sulu. Get down to my office, now, if you want proof. I’ll collect my prize from you later.’


...SO. Anybody want to beta? It's up at the kink meme, because, let's face it, it's 4am and I just want to stop writing it (and go to sleep).

Dear self, you know you said you'd never write fic because you wanted characters to be your own?

Escapism is beautiful.

Regards,

Self.