100 More One Shots ✔️

Of the Expanse of Outer Space >> Jim Kirk X Reader

-

After helping pick up your files, he'd apologised, and gone off back to his running games with his pals. But after it, you couldn't help but see him places, like it was Where's Wally but with Captain Pike's protégé recruit everywhere. The bars. The library. Your dorm-room block. Your roommate Tonita thought he was some kind of stalker. You shook your head, and said it was a coincidence. Starfleet Academy, however prestigious, was still large to its own limits. It wasn't that you didn't like running into him. He looked like there was something more to him than the famed womaniser who dreamed of captaining a starship.

But it's three weeks later and he's not on your mind when you look up halfway through your shift. Working at the medical clinic with McCoy is just to earn money, and keep up your accreditation of medical practice (who didn't like a nurse-slash-studier of alien cultures?). But looking up, you see him. Jim is standing in the entrance, his hand wrapped up in a dish cloth. You also notice that his nose is coloured-in with bruising pigment, eyes watery. There's a small cut under his eye, too.

If you were attending to a patient, you wouldn't drop everything and walk over to see the guy, what, you barely knew him. But you're sorting out bandages for Leonard, who's too lazy to sort them out himself, and gesture for Jim to sit in the triage seat.

"Looks like a barfight, Cadet Kirk." You raise an eyebrow, taking the dishtowel hand in yours, inspecting it. "Doesn't look as bad as it could be."

He snorted, and then winced. "You should see the other guy."

You shook your head. "No thank you. Not a fan of conflict." You sigh, and motion to the empty Medbay beds, "You've got glass in your hands. I can take it out, or I can have the doctor look at it."

"I do not want the doctor." Jim shakes his head. "Bones'll only laugh at me."

-

In his sleep, he mutters something, that sounds like punch it! or something. The pair of you were yet to go to space, but you knew inside you that he'd make a great part of a team when on board a space ship. And not just because of his genetics. At this, Jim turns, his head turning toward you, burying his fair face and hair into the space between shoulder and neck. He smells faintly of peppermint and motor oil, and your shampoo he borrows when staying in your dorm room.

It's been ages since he's been in his room, for a proper sleep. Always your bed, always your space. You wondered if he had a thing for not wanting to be alone. You didn't mind. The evidence was nuzzling you, coming up through the layers of sleep. You wondered if his dreams were of the expanse of outer space, or perhaps of his own memories. People say that sometimes your dreams are from your past, but it wasn't true for you. Your dreams were a vivid kaleidoscope of warmth, a jumble of faces you'd never seen before, events never to occur.

"________," Jim breathes, his lips warm upon your skin.

-

It's raining when he finds you. It has been eight months after you patched him up, and with only a year to go until graduation, you are sitting on a pile of good marks and barely any sleep. You heard a day too late that he had run away into outer space. In fact, all but your roommate's best friend had been taken away to space to fight against the rouge Romulan Nero, leaving you planet-bound and mopey.