Repeat Offender by Seperis (NC-17)

[aprilleigh24.livejournal.com]

Fandom: STAR TREK:REBOOT 
Pairing: Jim Kirk, Spock, Kirk/Spock
Length: ~6000
Author on LJ: seperis 
Author Website: Author page at AO3

Why this must be read:

After a bar, in Iowa. Both Kirk and Spock in the reboot universe were ‘delinquents’ in their youth. This fiction explores this commonality with a deft touch that still kicks you in the gut.

"As a child," Spock says, and that's enough to make Jim open his eyes, turning his head to look in the general direction of Spock's matter-of-fact voice, "I was often accused of reacting too strongly to emotional stimulus."

Jim blinks; he can count on one finger the number of times Spock's indulged in something as potentially illogical as personal anecdotes, and none of those times have ever been with him. Sorting through the sentence, Jim pulls up his Spock to Standard dictionary and hazards a translation. "They caught you smiling at a puppy."

So it's not a good translation.

"Other students would make a habit of trying to incite negative emotional reactions by denigrating my heritage," Spock answers with the faint impression that perhaps the injury to Jim's head had left him somewhat wanting for rational thought. "Sometimes, they would succeed."

Jim rolls onto his side; there's just enough ambient light he can make out the Spock-shaped mound less than two feet away. "Vulcan kids do that?"

It seems kind of obvious, but imagining the tall, sober Spock as a kid is next to impossible; tiny and infinitely more fragile, and half-human in a society that wasn't thrilled with full humans, in a Federation that was only forty years past dissolving the nightmare of legal and social controls that had long made interspecies marriage difficult at best, and risking death at worst.

It wouldn't have been too long after that, Jim thinks hazily, that a very young woman would walk past the cameras of a thousand worlds and the protestors of a thousand cultures, would board a ship, contract a marriage, and bear a child in the face of the xenophobia of two species, a child that would revolutionize genetic engineering, maroon Jim on an ice planet in a fit of temper, and save the Federation.

Jim wishes he could have met Amanda Grayson. She must have been something else.

"So did they get a reaction?" Jim asks; a tiny Spock-like figure forms in his head, small and solemn and Vulcan down to his logical toes, surrounded by everything the Federation was meant to oppose.

"There were occasions," Spock answers reluctantly, "when I allowed my emotional response to supersede logical thought and would face reprimand for my uncontrolled--reaction."

Translation's strangely easy; his Spock to Standard's getting better every day. "You beat them up."

There's a faint sense of embarrassed silence from the other side of the bed. Jim feels himself grin, lip stinging at the stretch of broken skin. 

"How many occasions are we talking about?"

Jim can almost see Spock close his eyes, the Vulcan equivalent of utter embarrassment. 

"So you're like, a Vulcan juvenile delinquent." It's like the world just shifted. Jim turns his face into the pillow, swallowing the bubbling laughter. "Oh man. That's--"

"I would prefer this information--"

"Never tell a soul." No one would believe him.

Repeat Offender