Chapter Text
“Would you still love me if I were a worm?”
Jyn muses idly, long hair fanning out in a golden halo over the pillows. As her body grows looser and more pliant, her lips always seem to follow suit. She is in a ‘chatty’ mood this evening, though Spock never knows how she is meant to partake of their verbal sparring with her head between her thighs.
“I fail to understand your preoccupation with these improbable hypotheticals.”
Spock starts her evening routine at the ankle. She digs the pads of her fingers into the taut muscle of Jyn’s calf and traces the grooves of her leg, absorbing the delightful shivers of satisfaction that prick electric under her touch. This has become their ritual, a meditation for two. Jyn keeps the score from all the stress and anxieties of her captaincy in her body, and Spock enjoys the sensual pleasure of worshiping every square inch of her skin with her telepathic fingertips.
“Improbable? Really? I think we’ve had stranger afternoons.”
Jyn arches her back like a cat, reaches under herself to unclip her bra before tossing it across the room as though it’s caused her personal offense. She makes an inelegant little moan when Spock’s thumb finds a knot in the meat of her ass—the same one she always gets from sitting at the conn every which way save for the manner the chair was designed.
“In this scenario, do you retain sentience and memory of your human form?”
Spock follows the bottleneck curve of her waist, counts her ribs along the way towards the rise of her chest. Jyn has a quirk about having her nipples touched and so steals one of her hands before she makes it that far. She slips her silken fingers round the wrist and draws it to her lips.
“Just answer the question, darling.”
Jyn’s face spells out nothing but mischief and she parts her lips to swallow two of Spock’s fingers. The inside of her mouth is warm and wet, and the texture of arousal rises to mute any other sensation Spock might inherit from her psionics. She laves her tongue around the digits, all sloppy and careless of how it looks from the perspective of her observer.
“If you spontaneously developed annelid morphology… I would—mhmm—prepare a suitable habitat designed to… to adequately provide for your species’ unique…nnh…needs and exhibit you with my other exotic specimens in science lab four…”
She struggles with her capacity for coherent speech as Jyn continues to make of her mouth a thinly-veiled innuendo for what she hopes Spock might do between her thighs momentarily. Spock can deny it all she likes, but Jyn is too clever for her own good. She knows the mess—her wanton little sounds, her disregard for decorum, the saliva dripping down her chin, the stain of her lipstick on Spock’s fingers… All of this is far more seductive than her Vulcan sensibilities would ever allow her to admit.
“Awww you would still love me!”
Jyn sucks off her fingers with a small pop, a few wet gossamer threads still tying her swollen lips to Spock’s skin. She holds onto her wrist, spit dripping down the palm of Spock’s soggy hand. She squirms her hips in that rhythmic little figure eight she does to shimmy out of her underwear, at least to the point where it's around her thighs.
“Your definition of love is as broad as it is fascinating.”
Spock lets Jyn guide her hand between her thighs. She rucks her hips, grinding into the touch how an impatient cat might beg to be pet. She is already so wet she is making a mess of their bedsheets.
“You know just what to say to make a woman swoon.” Jyn likes to play captain even on her back, likes to have her way and have it the moment she asks for it. She snakes her fingers through Spock’s hair, docking their bodies together and forcing her concentration to be split between her hand on her cunt and her tongue in her mouth. Lucky, then, that Vulcans are adept at multitasking. “Hmmm… What about my clone? Would you fuck her?”
Jyn’s words stick in her throat when Spock slips two of her fingers inside. She inhales the scent of her perfume in the hollow of her neck, curls her fingers just so and feels the sensory experience vicariously through their bond. Jyn’s arms wind around her back, drawing her down into the mattress as she relaxes into the slow, methodical rhythm of her ministrations. She puts a hand to Spock’s hip, encouraging her to take her own pleasure in grinding her wet sheath against her thigh.
“I believe we established in our previous discussion that, while technically an act of infidelity, scientific curiosity would be an acceptable use of the ‘hall pass’ in the event of sexual contact with our respective clones, alternate counterparts, or other equivalent sentient likenesses but excluding replicants and artificial intelligences.”
Spock works her open, diligent and well-practiced. She knows all her buttons and switches, how to program the sequence for her decompression. Patience, like waiting for the airlock to come online. Some things cannot be rushed. She adds another finger, meeting little resistance, strokes her clit with the heel of her palm how she likes. Jyn’s leg flexes under her sheath when she curls her toes. Once she’s been rendered suitably docile, Spock breaks their kiss to trail her lips over the pale plain of her stomach. She lifts Jyn’s knee to hook it over her shoulder, the soft fat of her thigh pressed to one ear.
“Yeah but like…” Jyn gasps, eyes rolling back at the alien sensation of Spock’s feline tongue—rough like sandpaper—nothing at all like a human. She insists the effect is so pleasing it's illogical that Vulcan women take their men to bed at all. “What if she was my dark mirror from some twisted, imperialist timeline?”
Jyn reaches down, resting her middle and forefinger over Spock’s psypoints, to share in her journey towards climax. Spock presses her fingers again inside, hunts the proper angles, the right pace, the perfect pressure to play her game. Jyn is inside and outside and everywhere—her mind, her body—she experiences the sensations reverberating through her in sync like licking herself.
“Would.”
Spock breaks focus long enough to flick her eyes up and watch her reaction.
“What!” Jyn balks. She pinches the tip of her ear with her nails. A tease. “Last time you said ‘pass’ on my male clone, but now you’re saying ‘smash’ on my evil clone?”
Spock raises a single sardonic eyebrow.
“I am homosexual. This answer should not be unexpected.”
Spock, all spite, sucks the swollen nub of her clit between gentle teeth. Jyn chokes on a hoarse sob of overstimulation, thighs quivering and tears pricking around her eyes. The conversation is forgotten after that, and Spock is suddenly quite content to share the company of the Jyn who’s right here.
⚢ ˖⁺‧₊˚♡˚₊‧⁺˖ ⚣
It’s just one of those days, what more can you say?
Jim’s been given the run around—literally—all afternoon by a horde of creatures which can only be described as hexapedal face-stealing leopards.
“Are you certain you do not mean face eating, Captain?” Spock’s voice, blessedly, comes in through the communicator static at last. Never let both ranking officers leave the ship simultaneously unless anchored in spacedock or so sayeth the holy fleet regs. Fuck playing by the book, this is the last time Jim beams down anywhere without his science officer.
“No, I definitely meant face stealing!” Jim jams the communicator in the crook of his shoulder so he can fire on this… thing barreling down on him with Sulu’s face on its weird hairy jungle cat body. It calls to mind one of those imperial guardian lions outside old Chinese palaces. It yowls in his borrowed voice when Jim takes out one of its knees, and the sound makes his skin crawl. It’s got five more legs where that came from, though, so it hasn’t slowed down. All he’s done is made it angrier.
“Shit.” Jim hisses under his breath. He’s running short of corners to back himself into. All that’s left is scrambling up a vertical rock formation like free climbing El Capitan. Well, beats dying. “Scotty, beam me up, goddamnit!”
Jim bites down on the communicator between his teeth to keep the comm line open and takes a running leap as high as he can, grunting with effort to catch the handholds. He feels a pull in his arm and hopes he’s not ripped his rotator cuff again already. If this cat doesn’t kill him, Bones will.
“I’m doing all I can, Sir!” His voice sounds like it’s passing through a warp pedal meant for an old-school electric guitar. All their electronic equipment’s been on the fritz since the moment they dropped in. “This whole planet has got the strangest isotopic signatures I’ve ever seen, the nuclear magnetic resonance is fubar. I’m having to shim the lock manually.”
The evolutionary advantage of the human body is, ostensibly, endurance running, but Jim’s been sprinting his heart out for over an hour in a thin oxygen atmosphere. His command jersey’s torn open and bleeding across the back. It’s taking every ounce of spiteful survivalism in his cockroach husk of a body to fight his way up this cliff.
Jim is struck momentarily by the same thought he always has in these situations:
If I die now, I’ll never get to tell Spock I love him.
It’s a stupid thought considering no matter how many times he has it, nothing ever changes. No near-death experience yet has had the power to cure his terminal chicken shit disorder. The old thought, the pre-Spock-pining thought, was always I didn’t die once just to come back and die here. That one had a much more captainly zing to it than his new-found romantic melodrama, but it’s not like he has any control over which of his myriad of poor life choices flash before his eyes.
He’s trying to focus his attention on all the crimps and smears on this ascent instead of big doe-brown eyes when he feels the familiar golden tingle of the transporter deconstructing his anatomy. He breathes a heavy sigh of relief, relaxes into the data stream, and lets the wind carry him home.
“...Jyn?”
“And a tonic, if you’re offering.” Jim comes round on the transport deck to the familiar smell of the Enterprise ozone scrubbers and the voice of a woman he doesn’t know. His head feels like it’s been beaten in with a tire iron and he’s lost half his jersey. The scraps of what remains are so bloodied you might mistake him for a red shirt, but he’s been worse for the wear.
He hauls himself upright, throwing his boots over the lip of the receiving stage. When he looks up, he doesn’t recognize… any of these people. They look vaguely familiar in an itchy sort of way like he should recognize them. He doesn’t panic yet—this is clearly the Enterprise and they are Starfleet officers. He must have hit his head harder than he thought if he’s forgotten the names of their newest transfers.
“Where’s Scotty?” Jim rubs the bridge of his nose, trying to avoid humiliating himself by spilling his guts on the deck. “Please tell me he pulled Sulu and Chekov out of there first…”
“Ah… I’m right here. Lieutenant Commander Morag Scott, unless you’ve another ‘Scottie’ in mind… Sir?” The transport engineer does a double take. She checks the rings on his sleeve and appends the title on as an afterthought. What the hell? “But not to worry, they’re both fit as fiddles.”
She turns to the doctor, a haggard woman with hair greying at the temples who looks like she’s been rode hard and put away wet a few too many times despite her age. They share a concerned glance and now’s about the time Jim starts to get antsy.
“Look, I don’t really know what’s going on or if you’re new here but uhh…” Jim’s not sure how to run this one. Could be they’re crazy, or maybe he’s crazy, or a little of both. He tries to play it safe and possibly save a little face by banking on them having a sense of humor. “I am the Captain of this ship. James T. Kirk, USS Enterprise? Maybe you’ve heard of me. Well anyway, if you could phone the bridge for Uhura so we can get this sorted out—”
The doctor kneels down to inspect him with the tricorder, and her eyes go wide when it beeps.
“When hell breaks loose in Georgia, the devil deals it hard…” She shakes her head, whistling through her teeth. It’s jarring, almost unheard of to run into someone with the same coastal southern accent as Bones. What are the odds? Certainly not high. “His DNA is a perfect match. Well, save for the last chromosome. What do you reckon? Did the transporter scramble her genes or’d we catch the wrong fish?”
The doctor and the engineer both turn to the third officer for some sort of guidance. Standing beside the transport control panel is the most smoking Vulcan baddie this side of Shi’Kahr. She’s all dolled up in the men’s science blues, but the tomboy look suits her. Jim could swear if he didn’t know better she looks just like…
“Spock?” He blinks in disbelief, but she doesn’t disappear.
“Correct,” she says, joining the doctor in kneeling down to inspect him.
She’s got this regrettable bob with a microbang that’s eerily familiar. Long hair is probably illogical or something. Same dips and cuts to the bones in her face as his favorite Vulcan, albeit with that feminine kind of fat to it that makes all women look soft to the touch. She searches his face with those big doe-brown eyes and—yep, it’s undeniable. Jim would know those eyes on any body in any universe. He just wishes there were a Spock out there somewhere who didn’t look at him with disgusted exasperation. Another swing and a miss, he supposes.
“Look, if you don’t believe me I can prove it,” Jim says. “Ask me anything only the captain would know. I can give you the protocol ID codes, my childhood comm number, a list of ex-lovers who can pick my birthmarks out in a lineup…”
This strange feminine Spock is searching his face for something, though he has no idea what. He squirms uncomfortably under her attention. She lifts her hand to reach out and touch, then retracts, thinking better of it. Jim fights back a swell of guilty disappointment. If this is some kind of traumatic brain injury induced wet dream, it’s a weird one. It’s taking a long time to get to the good part and, really, the genderbender is overkill. Not like he’d have any reservations about riding the male version into the sunset.
“Would you still love me if I were a worm?” She says, apropos of nothing.
“Wait—I’m sorry—what?” Jim feels like someone just cracked his brain open like an egg into a frying pan.
She turns to the doctor and raises an eyebrow, a Spock universal constant.
“I believe we have the wrong fish.”
⚢ ˖⁺‧₊˚♡˚₊‧⁺˖ ⚣
Jyn usually likes cats.
She is, admittedly, partial to the cute, purring lap-sized variety as opposed to the insect-legged face-stealing forest stalker wearing Chekova’s plump, barely legal cheeks. Nor did she realize it was possible to meow in Russian—they probably invented that, come to think of it.
“Darling please tell me the rest of your family has better manners.” Jyn jams the comm in the crook of her shoulder so she can strip out of her boots. She starts scrambling barefoot up into the branches of a tree that’s neither deciduous nor coniferous but a decidedly tacky mauve color.
“As I have already explained,” Spock’s voice, blessedly, comes in through the communicator static at last, “the similarities between Vulcans and the Terran felis genus are best attributed to convergent evolution—”
“Quit fuckin’ about!” Scottie can be heard off-key in the background. They’re both likely hovering over the transport terminal running calculations. “You rug munchers can have yourselves a shag when we’re not knee-deep in shite!”
“I’m waxed if you must know, Miss Scott.” Jyn grunts, heaving herself up over the next branch. She feels a pull in her arm and hopes she’s not torn her rotator cuff again already. If this cat doesn’t kill her, Bones will.
She stops to catch her breath, air hunger at last getting the better of her after hours sprinting through the humid jungle in a low oxygen atmosphere. Her feet are blistered, leaving bloody footprints in the bark. She looks down, and the creature is raking its claws into the trunk, gouging huge channels out of the wood.
Jyn is struck momentarily by the same thought she always has in these situations:
I love you. I trust you.
She reaches for that red thread that spans the space between their minds. No matter the distance, no matter the circumstances, Spock is always there to answer with her steady, implacable reassurance.
“Captain, Miss Scott is attempting to establish manual lock and shim on the transporter, however the resonance shift is convoluted by the atypical isotope signatures on the planet’s surface,” Spock says. Even with the strange warp and weft of the comm signal, she can hear her hands flying across the console keys.
“Make it quick, goddamnit!” She rips out her phaser and sets it to kill, pleading with it to warm up faster.
“Beam out in two point four minutes,” Spock says, even-keeled. Jyn shuts the comm and stuffs it in her pocket.
“Two point four minutes… Two point four minutes…” She mumbles to herself, a promise, a mantra. “I can do that.”
She perches herself where she’s got the best view of the south side of the tree between the canopy and takes aim at the cat. Her hands are shaking with exhaustion, making it hard to line up the shot. She pulls the trigger, and Annie Oakley manages to shoot out one of its eyes, but that only makes it angrier. The tree begins to quake and a deep crack like a thunder strike rings out from the core where it’s starting to snap in half. It can’t take much more abuse.
With nowhere to jump, Jyn clings to the sturdiest looking branch she can find and holds on for dear life. She squeezes her eyes shut and finishes Spock’s countdown in her head. Five, four, three, two…
One. Spock doesn’t know the meaning of ‘margin for error,’ and right on cue she feels the familiar golden tingle of the transporter deconstructing her anatomy. She breathes a heavy sigh of relief, relaxes into the data stream, and lets the wind carry her home.
Jyn rematerializes on the transport platform to the familiar smell of the Enterprise ozone scrubbers. Her feet are torn to pieces, and when her soles meet the floor she winces and loses her balance. She’s about to eat a face full of raw deck, but someone manages to catch her before she can truly humiliate herself.
“Jim!”
Oh lovely. She's back in high school, when Frankie would call her a boy’s name for cutting her hair short.
“Twenty-two twenty called, they want their joke back…” Jyn’s head aches worse than it did the morning after their shore leave on Antares IV when she drank a whole fifth of tequila and the worm too. Her body feels like she’s been chewed up and spat back out again even if she did manage to avoid that fate in a more literal sense.
The thumb of the hand that caught her brushes the small of her back through her split command dress and a gentle purr of familiarity rubs against her mind that she instantly knows is Spock—though there is something… off about it that she can’t quite place. Jyn blinks her eyes open against the harsh lights of the transport deck as reality comes back into focus and finds herself not in the loving embrace of her beloved wife but a man.
Certainly been a long time since that's happened, but she’s had weirder afternoons.
The Vulcan stranger gawks at her with big doe-brown eyes and a look of shocked and dazed confusion that could only be clocked by one well-practiced in the subtle art of reading non-expressions. But he isn’t a stranger, not really. The bond sings where the little red string in the back of her mind has been plucked—the wrong note, but beautiful nevertheless. The same adorable bangs, the dips and cuts of the bones in his face she’s spent countless nights memorizing by touch alone. And the eyes—it’s undeniable. Jyn would know those eyes on any body in any universe. He might not be her Spock, but he’s still a Spock and if she’s gone and gotten herself in trouble, she’ll take whatever Spock she can get.
“Well aren’t you just…” Jyn licks her lips, lets her eyes trail deliberately up and down his body before flashing him a foxy little smile. “Darling.”
His face stings green as fried tomatoes before his grip slips and he drops her on the floor.
“Hey, ouch!” Jyn rubs her ass where it connects with the ground, flips her matted blonde curls out of her face with a petulant little huff. “Is this your first rehearsal or what, Romeo?”
“Doctor, we need to conduct a full medical examination. I believe there has been a transporter malfunction.” Spock says, the obvious panic in his register apparently only obvious to her. He kneels down but keeps his distance, hands hovering over her like he’s afraid to touch for fear of contracting some foreign pathogen. Probably cooties.
“Aye, we've got eyes.” The engineer manning the transport controls chuffs. “Beamed down with a laddie and came back with a lassie, we did.”
“Excuse me, do we know each other?” Jyn glares at the unfamiliar transport tech with his Morag-esque accent and figures they must have picked him up at the last port because there’s no way she’d forget that receding hairline. “I didn’t think so. It’s Captain Kirk to you, thanks.”
The doctor, a man of a certain distinguished, folksy charm if that’s what we’re calling functional alcoholism these days, rolls his eyes and pulls out a tricorder. Jyn’s not panicking yet—this is the Enterprise and these are Starfleet officers. But they’re all… male. Jyn’s Enterprise has the highest percentage of female officers of any complement in the fleet. Not that she’s trying to be sexist or anything, that’s rather passé, but… where are they?
And why is this Spock acting so jumpy with her? He won’t even look her in the eye, though he thinks he’s being real subtle about watching her out his periphery. Her Spock hasn’t been such a mine field to navigate since back before—
“Well butter my ass, she ain’t lying.” The doctor shakes his head, whistling through his teeth. He reminds her of Bones, which helps to settle her nerves somewhat. “She’s the captain, alright. Genetically, at least, not accounting for the obvious minor change.”
Spock levels the old country doctor with a decidedly unamused glare. It reminds her of another snippy little cat fight she’s always breaking up. She’s starting to assemble the puzzle, piece by piece. They were expecting their own captain, her counterpart maybe, who is Jyn-but-also-not-Jyn and…
He doesn’t believe her. Spock, of all people. Jyn deflates, more heartbroken than scared if she’s being honest. She’s always been under the impression that the connection she and Spock share is a universal constant. A fixed-point star from every position—Polaris—a guide to look for even with the world tilted on its axis. If this is some kind of traumatic brain injury induced nightmare, it’s a weird one. It’s taking a long time to arrive at the moral, and really, the reprise of ice-queen Spock is just overkill.
“You… You really think I’m lying? About being the captain?” Jyn says. Whatever this place is—wherever or whenever—she refuses to accept that he can’t see her. “Well I can prove it. Forget the protocol ID codes, I’ll… Let me show you.”
Jyn raises her hand to her psypoints in the traditional kash-nohv gesture and zeros in on Spock, frustrated and expectant. His face hardens to stone, anger at the gross cultural offense simmering right under the surface.
“You do not understand its meaning,” he spits, all Vulcan venom.
“Oh fuck you, asshole! Of course I know what it means!” Jyn grinds her teeth behind her cheek, recoiling defensive. She’s heard this speech from the xenophones on New Vulcan dozens of times, she’s not going to suffer it here, on her own starship no less. “You think me and my Spock don’t meld? What kind of monster do you take me for?”
Mr. Spock-came-back-wrong goes stock still, save where his hands are now quivering with nerves.
“You and the ‘Spock’ of your acquaintance—” He wrings his hands in his slacks, swallowing heavily.
“I’d say we’re a bit more than ‘acquaintances,’ you and I,” Jyn gives him a smug little smirk, the cat who got the cream, that he bodies like a bullet to the chest.
“—you partake of such deep mind melds… frequently?” He finishes quietly, like he is frightened of hearing the answer.
“Obviously,” Jyn bites. She resents the implication that she’d doom her Vulcan wife—her bondmate—to suffer the pain and isolation of a union where she’d offer her body but not her mind. Because of what, some illogical human preoccupation with mental privacy? She’s not that shallow.
Spock’s face flushes green again, up to the tips of his ears this time. He bolts upright in a flash, and with a quick aboutface, storms all cold-fusion Vulcan fury straight out the turbo door. He doesn’t turn back to look at her before he goes.
“...Was it something I said?” Jyn asks softly, listening to the heavy footfalls of her only lifeline in this twisted reality fade out into the distance.
And then it hits her like a truck—this Spock and her counterpart… they aren’t bonded.
“Toto,” the doctor sighs, long suffering. He shakes his head and offers her a gentlemanly hand up off the deck. “I get the feeling you aren’t in Kansas anymore.”