Chapter Text
Almost every mother cried during the birth of their children. Usually either from the pain or from joy, the exception being the handful of known species that lacked tear ducts. Winona Kirk cried for a different reason, because as she was bringing her son into the universe, her husband was being ripped from it.
A lot of mother’s also cry from joy after their babies are born, from the joy. Once again, Winona cried for a reason. As she held her son for the very first time, she held Jim for the very first time, she noticed his soulmark. His soulmarks.
One of them, red little dots on his fingertips. The other a dark green splash across his neck. Her perfect little baby, lucky enough to have been blessed with a soulmate and the mark to go with it, unlucky enough for one of them to be violent.
Violent enough that they were going to try and kill him.
Vulcan was one of the planets where soulmates were the rarest. To see someone walking around with a complete or incomplete mark was something that few got to experience. Spock’s father told him that soulmarks were something to be kept hidden, something shared between T’hy’la and no one else.
Of course, with the rarity of soulmates on Vulcan, Spock had two. Both of them indicating someone his soulmate had red blood. His classmates teased him for it as he crew older, indicating that in something as illogical as soulmates, it was logical for him to have human ones. Since he himself was a half breed.
One was easier to keep hidden than the other, the point of a single finger making a red dot in the middle of his chest. The other was not so easy to hide, the mark of someone wrapping their entire hand around his wrist.
Still, Amanda insisted that the soulmarks were a good thing. They he never feel bad for hiding them because they were proof that he would never be alone.
Growing up in a small town in Georgia, the only people with soulmarks that Leonard ever encountered were his family members. It seemed that soulmates seemed to run in the McCoy family.
Even amongst a large family, each and every one with a soulmark, Leonard was different.
For starters, he had two of them; one of them on his wrist with a thumb extending into his palm and the other on the tips of his fingertips. The other issue was that one of them was bright green rather than the red that everyone else in the family had.
Somewhere out there in the stars, was a soulmate that wasn’t human, but that was waiting for Leonard none the less. Down here on Earth, there was another person doing the same.
***
“ I think he’s had enough. You can go now, Cadets,” The older man asked, the patrons of the bar clearing a distinct path for him to walk through. Another Starfleet person, this time an officer rather than a cadet. “ You alright, Son?”
“ I had it handled,” he lied through his teeth. Getting off the table as the patrons slowly trickled out of the bar, leaving Jim uncomfortably alone with him. “ Do I know you?”
Jim wasn’t ashamed to admit that he had slept with a lot of people, some of whom were definitely around his guys age. Although usually the one-night-stands that came back to bite him in the ass weren’t the older ones, and they definitely were not polished and pristine Starfleet commanders.
He chuckled, sitting down in across from Jim at the table. “ No, but your dad did,” Jim’s blood ran cold for a second. “ He’s the reason I was able to track you down.”
Jim sat up, plucking the tissues out of his nose and throwing them in front of the officer on the table. He crossed his arms, hoping that the alcohol wasn’t making him look like an idiot, “ So, what do you want with me?”
He handed an old-fashioned address card, with the address to a Starfleet yard just outside of Riverside, one that Jim may or may not have broken into a couple of times to get parts. “ I want to recruit you. I think that you have some real potential, but the shuttle leaves at 7:00 a.m. tomorrow from this address, so I guess we’ll see.”
With that, he got up and left, leaving Jim with some credits to cover his drinks from the night. He paid the bartender and exited the bar— looking around the parking lot for a couple of seconds before realizing that someone, likely the guy who was talking to him, had had his car impounded.
” Well,” he muttered to himself as he set off down the dirt road towards the farm. The night air was cool, sinking into his bones even though his warm leather jacket and his shirt. “ Nothing like a twenty mile walk home to sober you up.”
He was wrong of course, the walk from the night before did not help when the next morning he woke up with a splitting headache and pressure behind his eyes. “ Fuck,” he groaned, cracking his back in his bed.
Thankfully there wasn’t much thought that needed to be put into packing up the house, Jim was always careful to keep a go-bag, which held all of the stuff that he would need at The Academy. Other than that, all he had to do was unplug all of his machines and turn off the lights. There wasn’t really any food in the house anymore, just some booze in the fridge and some cans in the cupboard.
He grabbed his leather jacket, which had been thrown carelessly onto the couch the night before, and slipped into the boots that he had strewn randomly on the carpet.
Since his car had been impounded, Jim was left with the motorcycle only as a means of transportation. Not that it mattered, he had been driving both since he was twelve years old. As he headed down the road, he didn’t even bother to say goodbye to his house.
He’d spent his whole life there, even inheriting the damn thing from Frank just because there was no one else to give it to, but it still wasn’t anything more than a means to an end. A thread in the tapestry of shit that was Jim Kirk’s life.
Jim caused quite the commotion as he road straight through the Starfleet camp, having to swerve around several officers to avoid hitting them. It was his kind of style, but he felt bad about the shear panic that was on the face of one of the younger looking guys.
“ Dude, is that a real motorbike?” Someone asked as he pulled up to the shuttle, kicking up a storm of dust behind the bike.
“ Yep,” he tossed the keys up the air. “ Here, it’s yours now.” The man went silent as Jim smiled at him, jumping up into the shuttle. Clearly he had gotten there just in time because there were already loads of people in the shuttle.
He sat down, strapping himself in right before another man was escorted in by Starfleet officers, practically kicking and screaming. “ Dammit, I don’t need a Doctor! I am a Doctor!”
Jim laughed slightly as he sat down directly beside him and continued to argue with the officers. Mentioning something about aviaphobia that he didn’t quite catch. He turned to Jim as he strapped himself in, “ I might throw up on you,” he informed, looking grim about his situation.
Jim smirked, “ I think that these things are pretty safe-” but Jim was cut of pretty quickly.
“ Don’t pander to me, Kid; one tiny crack in the hull and we boil to death in thirteen seconds— solar flare might crop up and cook us all in our seats. Hell, some of the passengers are blue. And wait until you’re sitting pretty with a case of Andorran shingles, see if you’re still so calm when your eyes are bleeding— space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence.”
It was one hell of an angry rant, only made better by the thick Georgian accent in his voice. Even Jim didn’t think that it was polite to laugh to his face moments after meeting him. “ Why are you here then? You know that Starfleet operates in space right?”
“ My wife took the whole damn planet in the divorce. I’ve got nowhere to go but up and nothing left but my bones,” he muttered, pulling out a flask from his pocket and screwing the top off and taking a swill. “ Leonard McCoy,” he said offering Jim the flask.
“ Jim Kirk,” he said, “ It’s nice to meet you… Bones.” Just as he took the flask from the older man, their fingers brushed slightly, sending jolts of electricity down through Jim.
It wasn’t like the normal static shock that you got every so often— even with the anti-static electricity clothes that every wore— it was deeper. It ran all the way through Jim, from the top of his head to the tips of his feet, warming his entire body.
He looked down at his hand, which was holding the flask as Leonard did the same thing. Lo and behold, his soulmark had turned from the deep red that he was accustomed to, to the dark black of a completed soulmark.
“ Shit,” he muttered, a bright smile on his face anyway, taking a gulp of the bitter scotch in the flask. “ I think we’re gonna need more than just this flask.”
Leonard nodded, smiling at him. “ As a doctor, I should advise against self-medicating with alcohol, but in this case I think you’re right. First place we go is the bar.”
It didn’t take long for them to down both Leonard and Jim’s flask, leaving them with nothing to really do but sit there and wait for the alcohol to sink in. Thankfully, it also didn’t take long for the shuttle to arrive in San Francisco, giving them access to all of the alcohol they could ever want. With the obvious exception of Saurian brandy— unless of course you knew where to look.
Meanwhile in San Francisco, three thousand kilometres away, Professor Spock was finishing up teaching a class when he felt a small pang in his chest. Had he been fully human, his students may have noticed what happened, but he was not, and therefore he remained fully composed.
“ Have a pleasant afternoon students, and remember to complete the assignments before I begin calculating summative marks.” He said, hastily wrapping up the lecture, though not more hastily than his students began to file out of the room.
Once he was alone in the classroom, he looked down as he soulmark, the red having darkened slightly. It was likely that the one on his chest would appear the same. Meaning that his two soulmates had already found each other.