Chapter Text
“Someone’s in a good mood this afternoon,” says Leonard as Jim stalks towards his table across the cafeteria.
Jim slams his lunch tray down and leans into his face. “Was it you?”
“Was what me?” says Leonard, all innocence.
A muscle jumps in Jim’s forehead. “Today is not the day to test my maturity, Bones. You know what I’m talking about.”
Bones sighs and tries to scrounge up some sympathy for his friend, who is clearly wound up like a pretzel over all this. “Relax, young’un,” he says. “I got better things to do than disseminate your smutty literary stylings to the entire cadet class.”
Jim glares hot death for another moment, then falls into his seat and begins shoveling chicken noodle soup into his mouth. “You look pretty smug for a guy who didn’t do any ‘disseminating’,” he accuses between bites.
“Yeah, well, just ‘cause it wasn’t me that stuck my foot out don’t meant it ain’t funny when you trip and land on your face.” Leonard beams at him. Jim's his best friend, and Leonard never wants to see him suffering, but this? This is fair game.
Jim ducks his head furtively. “People are reading it.”
“No accounting for taste.”
“Someone uploaded it to the public Academy server last night at 0001 exactly. It’s 1230 now.”
“And?”
“And the hits are over 50k.”
“Well.” Leonard dabs at his mouth with a napkin. “If they kick you out of the Academy for, I don't know, smuttiness unbecoming? then at least you’ve got a career to fall back on.”
“Goddammit!” Jim flung his spoon down with a clatter. “It was supposed to be an inside joke. Only you guys were ever supposed to see it!”
“Jim.” Leonard tries to sound patient, but he’s tickled pink and self-aware enough to know he’s bad at hiding it. “Writing ten pages of interspecies porn on a dare, now, that was an inside joke. But then you went and turned those ten pages into the first chapter of a damn romance novel.”
“To prove a point!”
Leonard’s eyebrows climb to his hairline. “Well, you proved something, all right.”
“And, it was supposed to be a secret point.”
“Then you shouldn’t have told Gary."
“You don’t really think it was him, do you?” Hot, bright spots of color glow in Jim’s cheeks.
As far as Leonard’s concerned, Gary Mitchell is ten pounds of shit crammed into a five pound bag and if anyone's stalking Jim's network activity, just waiting for a chance to cause him a little grief, that's the prick his money's on.
But he can’t just come out and say that. Being Jim Kirk’s best friend is a delicate dance sometimes.
“Jim,” Leonard says intently. “If Gary Mitchell were behind this, you’d be in a world more trouble than you actually are. Did you fail to notice that whoever uploaded your little porn novel to the student server stripped all the ident tags leading back to you? And, instead of writing JIM KIRK in 42 point font across the top, they made up a Vulcan pen name to protect your precious privacy?”
The expression of stunned disbelief on Jim’s face answers that question. “You didn’t even look, did you.”
“I panicked,” Jim admits, which is rare enough and honest enough that Leonard decides to lay off him a little, even if this is the most hilarious thing he can possibly imagine happening without one of them getting arrested.
Jim opens his PADD, eyes skimming as he swipes through files. Relief softens his expression. “Okay, you’re right. My name’s not there." A few more seconds of furious typing. "My name’s not anywhere. People are talking about the book, but no one’s talking about me.”
The big blue gaze he turns on Leonard is almost uncomfortably vulnerable. “So I’m safe, right? It’s still just between the five of us.”
Leonard would like to say yes. He’s not cruel, and this is obviously stressing Jim out to an almost irrational degree. But Jim asked for his honest opinion, and unfortunately for both of them he's a master at conjuring worst-case scenarios.
“That depends,” he shrugs. “Can anyone trace the name ‘T’Khara’ back to you?”
“Bones, I have done some shady stuff in my life, but I’ve never pretended to be a Vulcan.” Jim’s expression grows thoughtful. “Yeah, even with a wig, I don’t have the cheekbones for it.”
Leonard strangles his smile. “Then I would say you’re in the clear,” he says. “Until someone blabs, of course. And Jim…” He takes a deep breath. “Gary might not have started this, but you know how he gossips. If this thing’s gone as viral as it looks, I don’t know if he’s gonna be able to keep his mouth shut.”
Jim loses interest in his soup abruptly. The vein in his forehead jumps.
“Do you really care that much if people find out?” Leonard says, a little concerned for Jim’s blood pressure. “Hell, it’s not like you did anything against regs. If this gets back to Pike, you just tell him it was a private document that someone released to the public without your knowledge or permission.”
Jim makes a small, strangled noise, like the possibility of Pike’s finding out has only just occurred to him.
“In fact,” Leonard sips the last of his coffee thoughtfully, “if I were you, I’d get out ahead of this thing and give Pike a head’s up now. Less humiliating that way.”
Jim digests this simple logic. “You’re right,” he says at last. “It’s just, ‘author of steamy interspecies romance novels’ isn’t really in keeping with the badass future starship captain image I’m trying to build here, you know?”
Leonard knows next to nothing about non-medical computer systems, but he’s gained the impression that computers in general start purring like cats once Jim starts whispering to them. “Are you really telling me you can’t figure out who uploaded the damn thing? You?”
Jim shrugs. “Gaila’s got the infosec background to strip the file. And she’s…you know, she wouldn’t think the book was anything to be ashamed of.”
“She was a big fan, as I recall.” To Gaila, sharing Jim’s porn novel on the student server would probably be the equivalent of a doting mother sticking her first grader’s crayon scribbles on the fridge with a magnet. Len sure does like that girl a lot.
Jim sighs wearily. “It’s probably one of those cultural things we don’t get. Like how she thinks monogamy is unnatural and unhealthy.”
“That's right. It'd be downright selfish or something to not your share your steamy Vulcan fantasies with all of Starfleet.”
“Fantasies! I am gonna—” Jim’s mouth tightens, and he jabs a finger into Leonard’s face. “For the last time, Bones: Ophelia is a fictional character. She isn’t like, me in a girl suit."
“Maybe not entirely,” says Leonard, eyeing Jim shrewdly. “See, the thing about you is—”
“Fuck, Bones, spare me.”
“You don’t really like yourself all that much,” Bones plows on, ruthlessly. “Oh, you’ve got some obvious assets, you’ll admit to that, but you’ve got the worst case of imposter syndrome I’ve ever observed.”
“What kind of syndrome?”
“The girl in your story has all the parts of you that you don’t mind admitting are okay. Like your brains. And your pretty gold hair, and your sky-blue eyes.”
“Uh, she has blonde hair and blue eyes, so do 80% of all romance novel heroines in the history of Human literature.”
“Pre-First Contact, sure. Not so much these days. You may not have noticed this, growing up in Inbred, Iowa, but you're like, twelve recessive traits in a cadet uniform. People like you ought to be in a museum."
Jim’s mouth twists, because he knows Leonard is right, but the closest he'll come to admitting it is grumbling something about how he’s not the only blonde in Starfleet.
Bones informs him that this says a lot more about Starfleet than it does about human genetic diversity.
Jim scrubs a hand over his face, then backtracks shamelessly.
“So it’s got to be Gaila, right?” he says. “So I just need to talk to her. I explain my concerns, she promises never ever to spill the beans about who T’Khara really is, and my worries are over. Right?”
Leonard decides not to address the fact that Jim’s apparently decided to forget all about Gary Mitchell and his big mouth.
He leans back in his chair with his fingers laced behind his head, spine popping pleasantly. “I just had a thought.”
“Oh?” says Jim, reluctantly.
“There’s a Vulcan in Starfleet. Professor Spock, my ethics instructor? He’s managed to make at least one of his students cry every single day this semester.” Bones relates this fact in the respectful tones it deserves.
“Great, so he sounds like an asshole. What about him?”
“I don't know. I just hope he doesn’t get offended when he finds out someone tried to pass that steaming pile of dribble off as the work of a Vulcan. He might get curious.” Leonard cocks an eyebrow. “You do know what they say about curious Vulcans.”
“Nice try, Bones.” Jim gathers his tray and rises. “But I’ve already got enough on my plate without worrying about some Vulcan I’ll never meet. Also, no one says anything about ‘curious Vulcans’. There is no proverb or axiom like that in any Federation language. This has been your daily reminder that I am, actually, a genius.”
“Now, you didn’t have to get all ornery, Jimmy,” Leonard calls after him, as Jim stalks away to the recycler. “Just for that, I’m joining your new book club!”