#because there is no Kirk who rocks men's worlds quite like he does

[martianbugsbunny]

"God Made Girls" is an objectively horrible song but it instantly becomes 100x better if you just replace the word "girls" with "Kirk"

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Barrage

For @whumptober2021 day 3:  taunting | insults | “Who did this to you?”

CW: War whump, WWI, dehumanization, vampire whumpee, degrading language, negative/panic stimming due to sensory overload, casual ableism (it’s not intended as such, but effectively is), period-appropriate xenophobia, implied future loss of limb, brief religious talk at end

1918, the Western Front of World War One

-

If he’s screaming, he can’t hear himself over the sounds of the artillery.

Shells fly through the air with the only warning a high whistle before they burst apart in blasts that shake the trenches like an infant with a rattle, knocking free dirt from the sides of the trenches.

It drifts down to land on his shoulders, settling over the hands he has over his head. His palms press against his ears and it does nothing, absolutely nothing. There are tears in his eyes, fear bleeding pink into mud that simply turns darker, seeing no difference between vampiric saltwater and blood. 

Not that there is much of a difference, really. 

His mouth is wide open against the ground, throat taut, lungs tight with the expulsion of air but the vibration of sound in his throat is so overwhelmed by the rumbling of the earth and the barrage slamming into the ground around him that he can’t feel if he’s making any sounds or not.

If he had a beating heart it would be pounding, but it lays still in his chest, locked in the final heartbeat he’d had more than a decade before. 

That he is already dead never quite undoes the visceral horror of sounds too loud for a human mind to understand, destruction too total and complete. The part of him that is still human shrieks at him to run, but there isn’t anywhere to go.

The barrage is everywhere, it’s in everything. The trees blast apart above their heads, branches and fragments of bark and leaves rain down into the trench. 

The other men hunker down, trying not to look directly up, each of them with eyes closed or staring off into space, flinching now and then, hands trembling so hard their rifles rattle. There’s no point in moving - the shells will find them if they so much as pop up over the bags. All they can do is wait, and wait, and hear the sounds without knowing which come from their own side and which from the enemy.

In a moment like this, the human body knows only terror, and there is nowhere to run to escape it.

Finally, the sounds start to die off. A final whistle, a single explosion, and then everything falls silent.

Not that the vampire boy can tell, not at first.

His ears keep ringing, painful noise that is inside him and not without. He slowly pulls his hands off from his ears and pushes up to his knees, shuddering, rocking back and forth in an attempt to soothe his nerves. He can feel, now, the vibration in his throat. He can’t hear himself but he must be humming, low and tuneless, trying to drown out the panic. 

Once the shells have finished, the gunfire begins.

“Here they come! Steady aim, boys, the Krauts are on us!”

The sound of the soldier’s voice seems tinny and small, so distant, trapped behind the ringing in Tristan’s ears. He screams himself, into the mud beneath him. Someone races past, stopping briefly to pat his head. If they speak, he can’t hear them over the shrieking noise inside his mind.

Short reports break through the air like thrown knives, the soldiers in the trenches alongside him popping briefly up from behind their protective shield of sandbags to fire on the German infantry who come out of the shell-smoke like a swell of horrible phantoms. 

They fall, they cry out, they hit the ground.

Sometimes the Americans let out a cry themselves, someone is fired upon and falls. Someone else yells in fierce victory. Someone shouts a curse. 

He hears a man shout, “I won’t die today!” and hopes it’s true.

Tristan loses time, shivering compulsively and curling into himself, humming and rocking until the ringing finally starts to die down. Longer, still, as long as the rifles continue to fire. He hears a wild, high-pitched cry, and glances up to see a German with a bayonet through him drop to his knees and then fall into the trench, landing less than three feet away.

The man’s probably dead before he hits, but Tristan still screams and pushes back, scrambling until his back hits the wall. His knees are damp from the mud he’s curled up in and he doesn’t care, he’s never cared. All that matters is finding some small hint of peace.

It seems like an eternity before even the gunfire starts to go quiet.

There’s a voice that calls, but he can’t care enough to let the sounds filter into understandable words. He smacks his hands into the mud, again and again, pushing himself forward and back, finally leaning down to knock his head into the ground, over and over. Each contact with solidity is a soothing rush, slowly working its way down his spine and through his muscles, reminding him that the noise is gone, the noise is over.

The voice calls again.

There’s no more guns firing, no more shells. The world settles into an awful heavy silence that is nearly worse than the sounds. They’re in the middle of a forest more vast than any Tristan has ever seen before, and there are no birds, because there are no more trees for the birds to live in.

Only the doughboys and the enemy, everyone the walking dead. They’re as dead as Tristan is, their bodies just haven’t figured it out yet. And they won’t get back up when they fall.

The vampire keeps knocking his head into the ground. It helps to stop his thoughts from spinning and swirling in a mad spiral inside.

It doesn’t help enough.

He’s brought back to himself by a kick, a fellow soldier’s boot knocking hard into his hip and sending him onto his side. He grunts and looks up, squinting. The German soldier’s corpse is gone - they’ve moved it while he was locked within himself, within his terror. The sky above them has a sickly glow beneath heavy clouds brought on by smoke from the fires and explosion. 

The soft sound of distant wounded calling for help filters into his understanding. 

The soldier that kicked him, Kirk, gives him a grin. The man’s face is streaked with mud, dark with it, and only his teeth and his eyes show white. “Hey, medic. Didn’t you hear the officers?”

Tristan looks up at him, and slowly shakes his head. His ears ring, a little, but all their ears ring. They’re all shouting just to be heard.

“Huh. Well, trench got blown apart off to the east. It’s your time to do what you do best, fangs. Go sniff out the ones we can save.” Kirk grins. “Like a fucking dog.”

The vampire closes his eyes, shuddering, looking away, shaking his head more in denial than in real refusal. It feels like the shells are still breaking apart inside him, shuddering rumbles inside his nerves now, not up in the sky. His whole body shakes. “I, I, I c-c-can’t, can’t, I-... I c-can’t go, go up there, c-can’t-”

“Doesn’t matter what you wanna do or not, bloodfuck. You think any of us would be here if anyone important gave a damn about our feelings? Gotta earn your bloodbags, don’t you? Get up there with the dogs where you fucking belong. ”

The other soldiers laugh as Kirk kicks him again. Their laughter isn’t even mean, exactly, but carries an edge of hysteria. It’s a release of tension after the barrage for them, after the gunfire, after the loss or three or four of their own, listening to how Kirk talks to him. It makes them all feel better, reminds them they’re still alive by reminding them that the vampire isn’t.

And, for whatever it is worth, it seems they’ve held the line.

To Tristan’s mind, a bit of land doesn’t seem worth what they are being asked to suffer.

He uncurls himself slowly, his bones aching in protest of his movements, his body begging him not to show himself above the bags, to be potentially seen by a German sniper just waiting for the American soldiers to pop up thinking it’s all over and make excellent little targets.

The vampire reaches out with a trembling hand to pick up his helmet where it’s been discarded beside him, stuffing his hair up underneath as he pulls it on. He tries to buckle it, but he keeps dropping the straps. His fingers won’t close, they’ll only shake. 

Kirk finally huffs a sigh and leans forward, grabbing him by one arm and yanking him over, taking the straps in hand and doing the buckle himself, jerking it too tight until the vampire whimpers at the pinch. “You’re fucking useless, bloodsucker. Go on. Serve your fucking country, like the rest of us. We’ll see you later. Hey. We made it, huh? This time we keep breathing. Well, we keep breathing, anyways. You keep… uh, whatever it is you do.”

The vampire nods, slowly, eyes searching Kirk’s for some hint of something other than his hatred. 

For the first time since they were shipped out, Kirk’s expression does soften. 

Just a little bit. 

“Come on, bloodfuck.” He says the insulting name almost like an endearment. “Don’t look like that. You’ll be all right,” He says, voice low, giving the vampire’s chin a playful little shake. “It’s just the artillery, just a little scrap. They brought out their big guns, and look at us, we still got our limbs, ain’t we? You still got those chompers. Hell, none of us wet ourselves this time, so we’re doing a sight better than last time.”

The other soldiers chuckle, a little. Someone mumbles, “That was once.”

“Oh, hush it, Fallows, nobody looks down on you for it, everybody’s a bit crackers the first time they get shelled.”

“Yeah, Fallows, we’ve all been there.”

“Listen, after my first time it took me three weeks to go to the latrine without a buddy just in case, you’re all right.”

The soldier who must be Fallows shifts, but he half-smiles, a little, comforted by the camaraderie around him. Tristan’s heart hurts, wishing he could be part of it, not kept apart by the curse in his blood. 

A different soldier - Tristan thinks the man’s name is Davies - pulls out a canteen of what is probably supposed to be water and almost certainly isn’t. The American army doesn’t imbibe, officially, but Tristan’s never seen an officer who didn’t look the other way after a battle if his men needed liquid courage to make it to the next one. 

“I, I, I’m scared,” The vampire whispers. A tear trickles down the cleared path along the dirt in his face, following the trails of those he’s cried before. Kirk looks at him and rubs his thumb over the vampire’s high cheekbone, smearing dirt back over. Like trying to fill in a dried riverbank. “I’m, um, sc-scared of the sounds, Kirk.”

“So’re the rest of us. Fritz never does it halfway, does he? I get you. We’re still here, for now.” Kirk pats the side of the vampire’s face, almost gently, and then pushes him backwards with a sudden resurgence of his usual careless violence. “Now go find the crump-hole Fritz made of the others and pull out the wounded.”

He has to do this. It’s his job, and it’s the only reason he hasn’t been staked out like the ones who refused to go willingly. The vampire swallows, nodding slowly, and turns away. He has to jog down the narrow line of the trench, past rows of soldiers who watch him with dulled eyes that stare far, far past him. Twice he pops his head up, just for a second, to get a better look at where he should go. 

Ahead of him, the No Man’s Land stretches. It’s a hellscape, cratered and with any hint of greenery long gone. A morass of mud and the still-standing stump of the occasional tree. There are dead men out there, he can smell them. Some new dead, mostly old, the ones that aren’t worth pulling back behind the lines, not yet. Some wounded men who call for water, for help, but who mostly call for their mothers.

Tristan would call for his, too, if he thought it would help.

There’s dead Germans out there, he can see their uniforms on the prone, still bodies. Some of their wounded cry mama, mutti, mutterchen. A few cry papa, vaterchen. Tristan has seen enough dead - some by his own hand, though he never wanted to kill anyone, William didn’t tell him how not to and he had to find that out on his own - to know that nearly everyone, at the end, thinks finally of who they love most.

Someone cries, in a broken voice, “Cady, help me,” and Tristan closes his eyes against the pleading in the sound. 

Seems like more Germans than Americans, this time, and he might see some French, too. It’s hard to tell, with the smoke is still rolling over the land.

He hopes they don’t try to gas each other again. It doesn’t affect the vampires, but he’s seen too many men die choking on their own lungs already, he’s ready to never see such a thing ever again. 

He sighs, gets back down into the trench, and keeps moving.

The ranks thin out, and he finds himself utterly alone for the last few hundred yards.

There’s a brief burst of gunfire that has him shaking again, flinching and stumbling into a depression underneath the top, where a soldier might sleep at night. The vampire stays there, curled up tight staring in fear, until the gunfire subsides.

Once it fades, he hears the barking.

Ambulance dogs.

“Medics! We have wounded!” A man’s voice cries, rough-edged. “We need help!” Ahead of him, the trench collapses in on itself, blown apart by shells. A soldier’s rifle lays in the mud, bayonet glinting faintly. Next to it, a photograph, a young man and woman standing next to each other, dotted with dirt. The woman has a slight smile on her face, and the young man’s arms are around her waist. They look happy.  

The vampire’s throat closes as he looks at it. She’s very pretty, he thinks. She’ll be very sad when she hears that her soldier isn’t coming home. He wishes he had any photographs of his parents. 

If he must be damned to never see them again, even in Eternity, it seems doubly unfair that he can’t even find an image of them to remember them by. He’s sure there were photos taken at the island where they were processed, but those photos weren’t for them. They were kept by the men and women who barked orders at the young Tristan and his parents as they went through the line. 

“We have living wounded!” The man calls again, much closer, and the vampire jolts back into motion. He picks up the photograph and tucks it into one of the pouches at his waist, next to a small vial of plain alcohol he uses to wash out wounds.

He can see the dogs up top as they dig, paws burying themselves with incredible speed in loosened mud as their handlers move next to them, encouraging them. Every dog wears a big white square patch with a cross on each side, marking them as ambulance dogs. The vampire has a patch on his left arm like that, marked with a cross for medic - and a V to make sure he is always known for what he is by anyone who sees him. 

As if the fangs don’t give him away. As if the way his eyes look in the darkness isn’t a clue all its own. 

There’s a high-pitched bark and a shout of triumph, and the vampire looks up and sees a man so covered in dirt he seems less human than golem being helped to his feet. He’s miraculously uninjured except for having been half-buried in mud. 

“Let’s go, soldier,” The dog’s handler says, and then moves quickly away. The soldier follows him, shuffling more than walking, staring around in amazement that he’s still alive.

The Germans could fire again at any moment, of course, and the vampire finds himself frozen, staring up into the yellow-tinged dark sky. There’s a low rumble, a whistle and boom, and he flinches before he realizes the sound is so distant that it must mean shelling much further down the line than he is.

That doesn’t mean what they’re doing is safe.

He’s still staring up at the sky, waiting for the barrage to begin again, when something closes tight around his wrist and he jolts to the side with a cry of shock and fear.

It’s a hand.

A hand, reaching out from the mud. Dirt is ground into every knuckle, under the torn fingernails, into the callouses worn into the pads of his fingers. The hand grasps wildly, blindly, trying to find anything to hold onto.

There’s a living man buried under the mud.

The vampire has to work his throat to find his voice, and when he does he cries out, “We, we, we have living wounded! Living wounded! B-buried, buried, help! I need help!”

There’s a flurry of movement as the vampire lurches forward, gripping onto the hand and digging with his other, trying to give the man who must be in there some reassurance that he is felt, seen, found.

Trying to give him some air before whatever he’s got runs out. 

One of the other medics hops down and lands roughly on their feet next to him. It’s another vampire, one that Tristan has never seen before. They’re older-seeming, with straggly long dark-blond hair barely held back in a plait down their back. The vampires aren’t usually allowed to speak to one another for fear that they’d plan some sort of mutiny, and so the other medic is silent other than a soft grunt, digging into the dirt with their bare hands with inhuman rapidity, uncaring for the possibility of injuries because they simply cannot hurt their muscles any longer.

Tristan feels the hand he’s holding squeeze and he gives two squeezes in return. We’ve got you, just hold on, hold your breath, just a little longer.

Eventually the frantic work of the other medic reveals dirtied blond hair, helmet-less, marked with mud and blood in equal measure from a cut they can see as the man’s forehead is revealed. Then his eyes open wide and very blue, he gasps in air.

“Pl-please,” He manages, his voice a rasp. “Please, help me-”

Tristan exhales an unnecessary breath in relief, and smiles. “Hold, hold, hold on, hold on, we’ve got you, soldier.”

The man sees his fangs but he’s too full of the rush of adrenaline at the prospect that he has been saved from suffocation to be scared of them. Instead he starts to cry, weeping and holding onto Tristan with a bone-crushing grip. 

The other medic hisses as they dig in and find a dead soldier on top of the living one. This one has the telltale slightly-open eyes of someone long gone, body still warm. There’s an awful caved-in look to one side of his head that Tristan refuses to allow himself to see. “Must have protected him that way,” The vampire notes, coldly informative, uncaring. “Dead took the brunt of the blows. One lucky man, one unlucky one. Flip of a coin, living or dying.” They sound like they don’t care at all.

Tristan wonders how long they’ve been a medic. If they maybe felt more at the beginning.

The smell of blood moves through the air like a bubbling stew, making Tristan’s mouth water. He holds back as best he can, pulling to help dislodge the survivor from the dirt his compatriots have died in. 

Some of them still haven’t yet - the vampires can scent the difference between dead and living, and there are more soldiers still breathing under the rubble. He can smell that some are so wounded they won’t last long. Others, though, they’ll get out in time.

Tristan doesn’t look at the slack expression of the dead soldier whose body kept this one alive as he is revealed. The survivor comes free - first his shoulders, then his arms come up to grip tightly around Tristan’s waist. His torso is revealed, his hips…

It’s only when they finally get him fully freed, laying on the ground, that Tristan realizes one of his legs is… wrong. Bent wrong, nearly blasted off. He swallows at the sight.

“We, we, we need a stretcher,” Tristan says, frowning. The soldier groans, as if only now beginning to feel the pain of the shattered bones from his thigh down to his foot. “He, he, he can’t walk. He’s gonna lose the, um, the the the leg.”

“God, no,” The soldier pleads to no one in particular. “Please, no, not my leg…”

“Hush. Better that than your eyes or your face, mouthbreather.” The other vampire launches themself at the side of the trench, clambering back up - only for there to be a sudden burst of new gunfire, and Tristan stares up in panic as the vampire’s body jolts as three bullets pass through them.

They stumble backwards, briefly, then bare their fangs in the direction the gunfire came from and hold up their hands with middle fingers raised high above their head. They give a loud, half-mad trill of laughter.

“Have at it, Huns, I’m already dead!” 

Then they turn on their heels, moving at a rapid jog towards the medical tents nearby. There are bullet holes in the back of their uniform, new fresh ones alongside several that have already been patched up from earlier hits.

“Please, I have to-... have to go home,” The survivor of the bombardment says in a whisper, and Tristan turns back to him, nodding slowly. The man’s face is pinched with agony, but… but he’s familiar. “I can’t die here, fangs. I can’t.”

“Don’t, um, don’t don’t don’t worry… you’ll go home, you will.” He doesn’t know that, not really, but it’s what every soldier wants to hear, and the doughboy beside him lets out a breath of relief and smiles, a little, trusting him. Tristan hitches in a breath, and digs into his belt-bag, pulling the photograph out. It’s the same young man as the subject of the photo, his sweetheart next to him. Maybe she’ll see him again after all.

He holds it out. He sees the soldier blink, struggling to focus.

Tristan clears his throat. “I, I, I… um, I found this.”

The soldier grabs it with his free hand and gives a hysterical, relieved laugh, pulling it to his lips and giving it a kiss. “Marta,” he breathes. “Oh… thank you, fangs. Thanks for finding it.” he looks up at Tristan with a bright smile, teeth seeming terribly white in his dirt-coated face.

They are so rarely kind to him, the soldiers. 

The vampire closes his eyes against a new rush of tears. He whispers, “Look, look, look at the, the, the photo for just a moment for me,” and lifts the soldier’s wrist to his mouth. The soldier knows the score - he doesn’t even go tense. He's probably been bitten a few times before.

When the vampire sinks his teeth in, it’s as gentle as possible. He takes little blood, only pushes venom into the wounds until the soldier’s body goes limp and relaxed, his eyes still locked on the photo of the woman he wishes badly to go home to.

“Tell, tell, tell me, um, about… about, about Marta,” The vampire says, glancing up. He can hear further shouting. The other vampire’s voice, which  means help is on the way. “While we wait for the stretcher.”

The soldier’s eyes drift shut.

“She’s… she’s nineteen. Preacher’s daughter, her ma and two sisters died from the flu this year. She’s got four little brothers who made it, though. We were married just before I was sent to basic training, last fall… Hey.” The soldier looks right at him, meets his eyes. “What’s your name, fangs?”

No one ever asks him that.

He blinks once, twice, three times. “What?”

“Your name. What can I call you?”

“Uh, Tristan, um, Medical, um, Un-dead Medical Private Tristan Higgs.”

“Huh. I’m Dennis. Just… I don’t care for all the titles we get. Just say Dennis. Tired of bein’ called by what I am and not who.”

He nearly laughs. He knows the feeling. “Nice, um, nice to meet you, Den, Dennis.” 

“You, too, Tristan. You’re Irish, right?”

Tristan nods, a little, his smile widening slightly. “Was. Been in New York since, ah, before the turning of the, um, the the century.”

“Were you a vampire when you came here?”

Tristan swallows, looking away. “No.”

“Oh.” Dennis falls silent, for a moment, then squeezes his hand. “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to bring on bad memories.”

“That’s, um, that’s all right.” Tristan settles onto the muddy ground, with the body of the soldier who didn’t make it visible in the dug-out part of the cave-in, and listens. The other soldier, he thinks, likely would have his own people waiting for him, who now must be told the terrible news - but this man, Dennis, he’ll go home to his Marta, one-legged but alive. 

Dennis never lets go of his hand. 

Whenever his face starts to show his pain again, Tristan lifts the man’s wrist back to his mouth, fills him with venom again, and asks him more questions about home.  

Dennis thanks him for it, every time. 

He says Tristan reminds him of his own brother, who’s still back home working the dairy farm he grew up on. “He’s always been better with the cows than people, anyway. He’d hate all this racket,” Dennis murmurs.

“I, I, I hate it, too.” Tristan smiles, just a little. “I’d say you, um, you get used to it, but…”

“You don’t,” Dennis says, heavily.

“Right. You… no, um, you don’t.”

Tristan hopes Dennis gets to go home to his pretty Marta, his brother and the cows, and never come back to this hell the rest of them are trapped in until its bitter end. He hopes, deeper than that and in a secret place within himself, that he will redeem some of the damnation of what he was turned into by doing as much good as he can while he’s here.

He can’t go home.

Home is people, not a place, and his are long, long gone.

But maybe if he suffers for the good of the living, he’ll be seen as redeemed enough by God and His angels to be allowed to see his mother and father again.

-

@mylifeisonthebookshelf @insaneinthepaingame @keeper-of-all-the-random-things @burtlederp @finder-of-rings @endless-whump @newandfiguringitout @astrobly @gonna-feel-that-tomorrow @pretty-face-breaker @doveotions @boxboysandotherwhump @oops-its-whump @cubeswhump @whump-tr0pes @downriver914 @whumptywhumpdump @whumpiary @orchidscript @nonsensical-whump @outofangband @what-a-whump

[random-thought-depository]

The infamously corny Star Trek TOS episode The Omega Glory was on TV last night and I watched it. My ideas for how I’d rewrite it to make it less silly:

---

The Yang ancestral culture wasn’t literally the USA, it was just a society that looked kind-of sort-of like the USA in the same way some pre-Columbian American and ancient Indian societies may have looked kind-of sort-of like ancient Athens. That by itself would make the episode much less stupid, and you could keep most of the same basic ideas.

Since we’re not bound to absurd levels of parallelism anymore, I’d personally be inclined to make the Kohms light-skinned blue-eyed blond(e)s and make the Yangs darker-skinned with darker hair and eyes, and imply that the Kohm ancestral society was fascist instead of communist. Maybe sprinkle some symbols distantly reminiscent of Nazi iconography around the Kohm village. It’s not like there was any meaningful connection between the Kohms and communism anyway, and I feel this resonates better with a lot of the ideas the episode was going for. Admittedly, this is probably influenced by my own biases.

---

Basically swap the roles of Cloud Williams and his mostly silent female companion who doesn’t really do much.

Why? Let’s think about how Yang society might work for a moment. I’m going to say they’re horse-riding big game hunters, like the nineteenth century Great Plains native American cultures on Earth, because 1) that fits with the idea that they’ve been driven into marginal lands and had to become nomads, 2) if you want nomads capable of assembling armies of thousands of people it’s either that or Eurasian-style herders, 3) it fits with the “they’ve become like native Americans” idea. They’re very slow-aging, theoretically capable of living over a thousand years ... but if they’re like their precedent cultures on Earth they probably live fairly rough and dangerous lives and I think would probably tend to live only a few decades or centuries before dying in a hunting accident or battle or something like that. But... going by Earth precedent, it would probably be mostly the men who do the most high-risk activities of hunting and war, which might result in very gender-asymmetrical life expectancy patterns, where men tend to only live a few decades or centuries while women stay relatively safe and have a decent chance of living to be thousand year old ancients. This would be compounded by 1) a lower death rate would mean a lower birth rate for replacement rate reproduction, 2) they’re almost immune to infectious diseases, which would make childbirth in primitive conditions much safer, so that would greatly reduce the probable primary cause of death for women in such a society (childbirth complications). So I think it’s pretty plausible that they’d have a more-or-less matriarchal society where women have a lot of power because they live a lot longer and hence have a lot more time to accumulate experience and become repositories of culture (important for a low-tech nomadic society that will have a mostly oral culture!).

So, I’d gender-swap Cloud Williams; my version of her would a matriarch with a leadership position in her tribe because she’s one of its oldest able-bodied members, she’s got a thousand years of experience and she’s had time to memorize a lot of the oral histories of her tribe and become basically a living library. Why would such a person be anywhere near a battlefield? Well, “the oral histories of her tribe” would include a lot of war stories, with detailed and often basically accurate descriptions of tactics and strategy because that’s how knowledge of how to win wars against Kohms and rival Yang tribes is transmitted in her society. She’s a living tactical manual, so of course she leads her tribe’s warriors in battle.

She could have a companion who’s a big guy who doesn’t talk much and does the brute strength side of what in the episode is Cloud Williams’s role (fighting Kirk in the cell, ripping out the bars). Maybe he’s her grandson, and was captured with her because one of his roles in the tribe is to be her bodyguard in battle.

----

Related to what I just said, have a bit where Captain Tracey says that he expected the primitive and superstitious Yangs to be overawed by phasers, but instead it was almost like they have a recent cultural memory of war with modern weapons and war against technologically superior opponents and they quickly started using effective counter tactics. Given the explanation in the episode for the long lifespans of people on Omega IV (very strong selection pressure for disease resistance), none of the Yangs would actually remember the ancient high-tech Yang civilization and original war against the Kohms, but the generational transmission chains from a lot of presently living Yang matriarchs to that time might be relatively short. For a lot of the presently living Yang matriarchs shooting down Kohm helicopters with surface-to-air missiles and ambushing Kohm armored columns in mountain passes might be something like “my grandma’s time.”

----

The reason the “Eee Plab Neesta” sounds like gibberish is that Cloud Williams is reciting it in its archaic original language, which the living Yang language has evolved into mutual incomprehensibility with. The Yangs might have one lovingly preserved paper copy of their equivalent of the Declaration of Independence, but their culture is mostly oral, and they mostly preserve the “holy words” in the heads of the matriarchs, who memorize it and transmit it from mother to daughter exactly (“by heart”), being careful to get every syllable right so it does not become distorted. The oldest matriarchs can still speak the ancient language, but for most of the Yangs, especially the relatively short-lived men, it’s like me listening to somebody recite Beowulf in its original language.

This is more-or-less my headcanon for what’s going in the actual episode too: the “Eee Plab Neesta” is just the text in its original now archaic form of the Yang language, which the universal translator can’t translate because it doesn’t have a big enough sample to work on. I’d make that much more explicit though.

The way I’d handle the scene is to have Cloud Williams start to recite the Eee Plan Neesta, and then have Kirk ask her what it means and suggest that she try to translate it into the everyday language of the Yangs so all her people could hear it with understanding, and of course it wouldn’t be the actual Declaration of Independence but something different but with a similar spirit, something like this:

“We the people of these five colonies of the nation across the sea and seven nations of the original inhabitants of this land, establish a Union, which we found in and organize according to the following principles: that all people are equally precious, that laws exist by the consent of the people and to serve the people, that leaders serve the people and hold their offices by the consent of the people...”

Then have Kirk give his speech about how these words are meant for everyone and not just for chiefs and should be something shared among all the people and lived by and not something gatekept behind archaic language most people can’t understand. Have him reference the USA founding documents by saying that his world has something very similar and he knows from the history of his own world how world-changing these ideas can be and how precious they are.

----

Obviously you can’t do that “the Yangs try to find out if Kirk recognizes the holy words, and Kirk almost recognizes them but not quite” thing with this version, so the equivalent I propose is:

Kirk recognizes the original functions of Yang “holy relics,” i.e. relics from the ancient Yang civilization: one is part of a machine that once carried people through the air (it’s a snapped-off piece of a helicopter blade), one was a device for seeing far away things as if they’re near (it’s a broken pair of binoculars), one was a machine which people could use to talk to people who were beyond the horizon (it’s a broken-down cell phone), etc.. OK, the last thing is anachronistic for TOS, but if I were writing this as a fanfic it’s what I’d do.

Cloud Williams starts to recite a long epic poem the Yangs have that tells their entire history, to see if Kirk will recognize it. Of course Kirk doesn’t, but while the Yangs don’t have history books they do use visual textile art as an aid to memory and they’ve set up a big story cloth that depicts the narrative in the room and Kirk goes over to it and starts pointing to pictures on it and correctly interpreting them:

“Here, the Yangs were oppressed by kings. The Yangs rebelled and overthrew their kings and made a new nation that had no kings. After this the Yangs became very rich and very powerful, they built great cities. The lords of the Kohms were threatened by this and they used terrible weapons on the Yangs and invaded the Yang land with great armies. Here’s a Yang city being destroyed in an instant by a Kohm weapon. The Kohm lords were so threatened that they tried to destroy the Yangs’ whole way of life. The Yangs retreated to the bad lands and kept fighting. Here are Kohm flying machines attacking a Yang village, and a Yang warrior hiding behind a rock destroying one of those flying machines with a lance of fire. The Kohm lords couldn’t overcome the Yangs until they brought the Death Thirst to the Yang lands in a box and let it out. But that weapon had a life of its own, and turned against the Kohms, and almost destroyed them too. Only a few Yangs survived in the bad lands, and the Kohms claimed the good Yang lands and settled them. But the Yangs survived, they learned the bow and the lance, and eventually their numbers started to increase. The survivors lived longer than people had before; you interpreted this as a gift for the Yangs and curse on the Kohms by the Great Spirit, so that both might live to see you retake what was once yours. And little by little, you did retake what was once yours...”

----

One way to suggest the Enterprise crew making a positive difference on Omega IV at the end of the episode: have Kirk convince the Yangs to spare the Kohm civilians in that village.

The victorious Yangs are all set to give the last Kohms the Numbers 31 treatment, which is what they usually do when they overrun a Kohm community. Of course, Kirk is horrified by this, and he manages to use arguments involving the Yang “holy words” to convince the Yangs to be merciful instead. “Your own holy words say that every person is equally precious! Every person! That includes the Kohms too! If you really mean it, it includes the Kohms too! They’re no threat to you anymore! Did you fight for so long just for a chance to do to them what they tried to do to you? If so, how are you any better than them? Your own holy words claim to be for all people! Your own holy words say that all people are more alike than they are different, and all people are capable of appreciating the gift of freedom! If that’s true, then your holy words are for the Kohms too! That’s why the Kohm lords were so threatened by you, because they were afraid of what would happen if the Kohm people heard those powerful, good words! Tell the Kohms about your holy words!”

So Cloud Williams agrees to make a merciful and peaceful settlement with the “last of the Kohm places,” let it integrate peacefully into Yang society with no further bloodshed and no abuse inflicted or spoils taken. And then Kirk says “If you mean your words of freedom, your work didn’t end today, it’s just starting. Build good seaworthy boats that can cross the ocean, and send people to the Kohms across the sea, so they can hear your words of freedom too! The words of your ancestors are for them too! You’d never be able to conquer them, but they can hear your words!”

[redshirtgal]

At the beginning of “Catspaw” Lt. Jackson opens communications with Uhura and says “One to beam up, Enterprise!” Shortly after Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy reach the transporter room, Jackson begins to materialize and then falls flat to the floor without moving a muscle. It almost hurts to watch, but it is just one of the perfectly executed stunts performed by Jay Jones. Jones recalls that at the time, he had never watched the show. So when he received his copy of the script, he was puzzled by the phrase “beam up.” It took until the next day for him to find out after he had flagged down a young boy on a bicycle and asked. By the way, look at Shatner’s quick reaction as Jones tumbles past his feet. Some fancy footwork there, Captain!

But this was not the only place you saw him during this episode. During the scene just after Korob dies trying to help Kirk and Spock escape, the two are attacked by Sulu, Scotty, and Bones himself - all under the control of Sylvia, of course. In the photo above, that is not Dr. McCoy you see attempting to swing a morning-star. That is his stunt double, Jay Jones. Jay claimed that Gene Roddenberry took a liking to him and sent the word down that he should be given all the work he wanted.

Jay played a number of other crewmen in the series, and several times his stuntman experience came in handy. In the redshirt bloodbath episode known as “The Apple,” he appeared as Ensign Mallory. The hapless young man was not there when Spock first found out the rocks were explosive. While scouting, he manages to find another one the hard way and is killed. This was one of the two episodes where Jones suffered serious injuries. In this case, he had even lobbied director Joe Pevney to do the stunt, saying he did not want to do it “the Mickey Mouse way.” Pevney refused the request at first because of the danger and then relented. According to Jay, there was a jumper trampoline buried under the ground that he was supposed to hit and then the explosive would go off. However, the special effects person timed it just a split second too late. In his own words, “The force hit me in the stomach, burned my side, blew the skin off my rib cage and impacted all this dirt into my sinuses. I couldn’t open my eyes or breathe.” Still, he told an interviewer that it could have been a lot worse even though he did wind up in an emergency room. (The explosion also caused short term hearing loss in both Shatner and Nimoy as well as permanent tinnitus). Most of his roles did not involve much dialogue, but he had his largest number of lines in this episode. 

Actually, his worst injuries on the set occurred on another episode, ”Who Mourns for Adonais?” This time he was doubling for James Doohan as Scotty. The first injury occurred when Apollo slaps Scotty and Jay had to do a backflip over the stone table shown in the above photo.  The first time, he hit the corner, so the table was chained down for the next attempt.  This time, he caught the table’s edge in the kidneys. Already sore from that injury, he had to do another stunt where he was strapped into a wire vest, raised up six feet in the air and then propelled backward.  In the stunt industry, it’s known as a neckbreaker.  However, the wire pulley yanked him four or five yards farther than planned and he went through the wall, striking his head on the concrete floor.  He was taken to the hospital with a concussion. And actually Jay did have a stroke of good fortune - he narrowly missed another prop which could have caused an even more serious injury (according to The Star Trek Compendium). Again, he brushed off the injury as not all that bad.

 Despite these injuries Jay Jones continued as Scotty’s stunt double for two years. Above you see him encountering a railing on the bridge in “The Changeling.” (Scotty certainly got smacked around a lot, didn’t he?) And he would often double for other guest stars. More on that later. In the book Science Fiction Television Series, Jay claimed that he was the unofficial stunt coordinator for The Original Series. He would come up with new stunts and work with the directors and cameramen on how best to implement them in certain episodes. Jay complimented Star Trek on calling back the same stunt people to work again because they all were familiar with the production staff and had built a rapport with them and each other. He said in some TV series, the director sometimes asked the impossible and could have possibly gotten someone killed. On the Star Trek set, he knew the directors cared about the stunt workers.

And he continued as an extra in episodes during that time, including one as the gangster Mirt in “A Piece of the Action” and several as an engineer. You would think he’d want to stay as far away from a redshirt as he could after his injuries.

Jay got to appear as a Klingon three times during his time on Star Trek. His first appearance was as Tige Andrew’s stunt double in the role of Kras in “Friday’s Child.” (left) And he doubled for Ned Romero as Krell in “A Private Little War.” (top right). He donned the Klingon costume one last time as one of Kang’s crewmen in “Day of the Dove.”

And what does Pavel Chekov have to do with this story? Jay Jones says that there was a push to add some more recurring characters at the time he made his first appearance on “Catspaw.” In fact, they asked him if he would try out some accents in a few test shots. However, he had recently tried a French accent in a stage production and botched it terribly, so he refused. Only later did he realize he would have been trying out for the role that eventually became that of Chekov. Oh, well.... at least he didn’t have to wear that terrible wig until his own hair grew in.

Jimmy (”Jay”) D. Jones came to Hollywood after being in the rodeo circuit. His first work as a stuntman on television was in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. where he was often Robert Vaughn’s stunt double. He also had an acting part in one episode - that of  Professor Walter Powers in the episode “Yo-ho-ho and a Bottle of Rum.” This was the job he left when he joined Star Trek. (credit to Brad Fillipone for finding the above photos for me)

Jay came from good stuntman stock. His dad was Carl Pitti, a very well known stuntman/actor in the industry who had worked on such shows as The High Chaparral. He was Henry Darrow’s double in his role of Manolito for an episode.

Interesting side note: Carl Pitti was a fan of The Original Series and watched it religiously. But he was aghast when he watched his son get thrown in the air by the mistimed explosion in “The Apple.” Jay said it literally made his dad sick to his stomach.

Jay often appeared in the same series as his father, starting with The Man from U.N.C.L.E. After Star Trek ended, he was also stuntman for The High Chaparral and appeared in the episode “Alliance” as Lt. Cooper. (Photo above)

Jay appeared on other Westerns as well. In fact, he doubled for Slim Pickens in a brutal bullwhipping scene in the 1967 movie Rough Night in Jericho. He used the same bullwhipping skills against Dan Blocker (Hoss) in a 1971 episode of Bonanza titled “Kingdom of Fear.”

One of his last acting jobs was in Kung Fu, playing a demon Caine encounters in the spiritual world during the episode “One Step to Darkness.” If you want to watch that segment of the show, here is a link. https://youtu.be/EDmvigzLJHw

In 1977, Jones left stunt work and acting for the racquetball courts. He began playing the amateur circuit in the 1972-73 area. Despite getting off to a rough start, in 1975 he won the national amateur division at Las Vegas. From there, he began competing in the pros and over the years had a decent showing. Keep in mind he was in his thirties when he started and most of the pros were a lot younger. He did win the 1981 U.S. National Singles Championship for his age group of 35+. Jay was interviewed in 1977 by the Tucson Daily Citizen after he had advanced to the semifinals of of the Tucson Pro-Am Racquetball Tournament. He admitted to using a mini-receiver which emitted a steady hum that helped him concentrate. But it also allowed him to hear advice from a friend who was women’s pro player as well. The interviewer went on to mention that Jay Jones was also a hypnotist and psychologist. Now how amazing is that?

Above photo - Hall of Famer Ed Remen and Jay Jones at the men’s semi-finals. Unknown what year, but from the website where it appeared, most likely around 1981. Jay is on the right.

Over the years, Jay Jones seems to be quite active, appearing at conventions for The High Chaparral (above he appears on an interview panel for the 50th anniversary) And I am not positive about this, but he may be the reporter whose byline is Jay Jones in at least two articles for the Los Angeles Times. In a 2013 article, he reports on a charity racquetball event. And in a story dated this past May, the same person reports on a rodeo event. What other person do we know who has experience in both activities?

Jay Jones!

[winterverses]

Walking Wounded - Intergalactic

Sugar overload for Christmas... I meant to have it done on Thursday but it needed a bit more polish. Anyway, here’s my take on how the Beastie Boys exist in the same world as Star Trek. It takes place sometime after Chapter 62, but I never nailed it down any further than that. Enjoy!

Anne shifted to sit against the headboard and tucked her feet under her, smiling a little as she watched Jim sift through music on one of the powerwalls. They were still ‘arguing’ about late 20th century/early 21st century pop music-- a topic that had grown to be contentious and usually ended in pretend make-up sex. Anne’s taste ran to either classical rock, obscure rockabilly, punk, loud angry music in general or bubblegum-sweet ridiculous bullshit that was made specifically to appeal to the masses. Jim was more than all right with the first few, but he hated the last with a fiery passion because it got stuck in his head, and he’d be wandering the apartment singing the words to ‘Whenever, Wherever’ under his breath until Anne called him on it, at which point he’d get cranky and put on some classical rock like Jimi Hendrix’s cover of All Along the Watchtower.

“Look, Bad Romance is a masterfully crafted pop song. Even you have to admit that,” Anne said, pretty specifically to piss him off. She was right and he knew it, but she’d caught him humming the tune a few hours ago and he was still mad about it.

Jim snorted. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, flipping through the conveniently placed powerwall to find something he wanted to listen to. “Forget it. It’s mass-produced crap that’s meant to specifically to be catchy--”

“But that’s what makes it so great,” Anne said. “Come on, it's drenched in Hitchcock references, even the chord progression in the chorus is a Hitchcock reference, and it still topped charts everywhere. It’s way more cerebral than you think. And it’s catchy, she took some risks with it--”

“It’s overproduced, it’s-- we’re not having this discussion again. You want masterfully crafted? Here.” He flipped a song on. “God, I haven’t heard this one in ages. Everyone always plays Sabotage.”

The robotic voice started up, then the bass hit with a nice little rumble. This apartment had a gorgeous audio setup. “Oh, beautiful. And yes, this one’s about as close to perfection as you can get, especially with all those rough edges.” Anne grinned. “But sometimes you just want something really slick.”

Jim looked over his shoulder at her, raising an eyebrow, a little grin playing at the corners of his mouth. “Anne Madeline Hardesty, I think you know I get all the slick I can handle with you around.”

“Ooh, very nice,” Anne laughed. He wasn’t serious. Neither was she. Yet. They’d just gotten out of the shower, and it was probably time for food before they let themselves get carried away again. “That was a really excellent turnaround, James Tiberius Kirk. Almost as good as watching you turn around.”

He laughed, flipping the covers back and getting into bed beside her, leaning against the headboard. “Okay, it makes sense for me to like asses, but you’ve got no excuse. What’s up with that?”

Anne felt her need for food starting to wane while her other needs waxed. “Well, let’s put it this way, James Tiberius: Old West riders had spurs; I've got nails instead.”

The look in his eye suddenly got more serious, his gaze flicking over her loose hair and bared breasts with growing want. “Hmm. That’s a comparison worth testing, I think. How about it? Wanna go for a ride?” He grinned widely and waggled his eyebrows, extremely pleased with his terrible innuendo.

“I can’t believe you get me to fuck you with shitty lines like that,” Anne snickered.

“Works every time. So far, anyway. I guess you just like shitty pickup lines,” Jim laughed, draping an arm over her shoulders and pulling her close.

“I swear, I’m going to write a tell-all book and include every single one of those lines in it, and you’ll never get laid again,” Anne said, her body already starting to react, her nipples tightening into little pink points. She rested her head on his chest, her hand sliding down his thigh, not quite touching the inside of it.

“Great idea. If you list all your favorite songs in it, you can call it ‘I Have Bad Taste in Everything, Including Men.’”

Anne sighed heavily. “Jim…” There was no way to answer that, so Anne just reached up, grabbing the back of his neck and pulling him into a kiss. The downturn into sexual territory was sharp and sudden, with her fingernails already digging in lightly and his free hand seizing one of her breasts, plucking gently at the nipple.

It would have gone on, too, and probably would have been quite satisfying if Anne hadn’t caught one of the last lines of the song and froze. She couldn’t be right.

Jim was immediately pulling away. “You okay?” he asked, worried, his hand having moved to her shoulder.

“Yeah, I’m all right,” Anne said, glancing around for a padd within reach. There were none.

“Music pause,” Jim said, correctly interpreting why she wanted the padd. “What’s up, gorgeous? Something wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Anne said. “Music repeat last fifteen seconds. Twenty seconds.” As the music started, “Jim, listen to this and just tell me I’m not insane, okay?”

He listened with her, concerned, and heard the line. She knew he did, because his eyebrows rose. “Huh. That’s a hell of a coincidence.”

“That’s crazy. That’s not even coincidence anymore. Here, grab me a padd and I’ll see if I can find out what that’s all about. Come on now-- Spock pinching necks? That’s too weird to be coincidence.” Anne took the padd he offered her and started to tap away, pulling up all the associations she could from that song. Fortunately, the song had been thoroughly analyzed… but what Anne found was even more unsettling. “It says here that Spock was a sort of folklore figure who showed up in San Francisco in the 1980’s. Apparently he claimed he could telepathically talk to whales, and the neck pinch comes from an incident where he shut down a punk kid on a bus who was listening to his music too loud and bothering everyone. He pinched the punk’s neck, and the kid passed out.” Anne looked over at Jim. “It says here he had a companion that he called Admiral Kirk.”

Jim paused at that, frowning, his entire body still. “Well, it could still be a coincidence,” he started.

“Bullshit,” Anne said immediately. She didn’t like to talk about his work much, but… “Jim, I get that there are things you can’t talk about, but can you at least tell me whether you know anything about this?”

Jim was silent for a while, frowning down at the padd in her hands. “Well… not really. Maybe. It’s--”

“It’s a long story?” Anne asked. On impulse, she told the padd to cross-reference all the Beastie Boys lyrics with terms that would only be found in post-warp literature. “Jim.” She showed him the padd. “Klingons. Look, this can’t be a coincidence. I can’t write this off.” She paused. “You know I won’t tell anyone… but I need this explained. How are these things showing up in lyrics by one of your favorite bands?”

Shaking his head slowly, Jim glanced up at her, then back down at the padd. “That’s the thing. I can’t explain it.” He hesitated, looking back at her, searching her face, then seemed to make a decision. “But I can guess.”

“I’m listening,” Anne said quietly.

It took him a moment to organize his thoughts. “I can’t go into too much detail on this, but we’ve had proof that time isn’t… isn’t as solid as we think it is. There are at least two timelines that we’re certain exist side-by-side. Maybe more.”

“How do you know this?” Anne asked, fascinated. “What was the proof? Can you tell me?”

Jim sighed, settling her against him and leaning back on the pillows. “The proof was Spock, actually. Another Spock. He’s-- he died shortly before the Altamid incident. Old age. He was a hundred and sixty two years old.”

Anne couldn’t muster up an intelligent reply. “What the fuck,” she breathed. “And you’re sure? Genetics testing--”

“Absolutely sure. Hell, I mind melded with him, before Spock and I were even friends. He was Spock. No doubt about it.” Jim looked down at her. “You know you can’t tell anyone, right? Some of this is classified. If anyone ever finds out you know… well, it wouldn’t be pretty.”

Meeting his eyes squarely, Anne said, “If there’s one thing I know, Jim Kirk, it’s how to keep a secret.”

He knew that. Even if he didn’t know the reasons she said it-- especially because he didn’t know the reasons she said it. He just nodded and continued. “All right. Well, what happened was pretty complicated, but what it boils down to is that there was a split in the timeline the day I was born. In the other timeline, my dad never died because the Narada never came back in time to kill him. And I can’t really get into all of the factors here, but because of some weird time shit, all of reality changed. Some changes were big. Some of them weren’t. But the upshot, at least in how it applies to the song, is that either the other Kirk and Spock did it, or it was me and I haven’t done it yet.” He laughed, looking pensive, shaking his head. “I told you my life gets really weird sometimes.”

“Huh.” It sort of changed her perspective on him. “So… that other you, he knows about you?”

“I don’t know. Never met him. I don’t think he does, because I don’t think the other Spock ever managed to go back. I get the impression that… that once Vulcan was destroyed, he felt like he was needed here.” Jim gave her a humorless grin. “Vulcan was never destroyed in the other timeline.”

That gave Anne pause. A universe where Vulcan still existed, where Jim had grown up with a father who cared about him… “Sounds like a better place,” she said wistfully. “Maybe I wouldn’t have been-- wasn’t-- taken in that timeline.” She laughed, her voice soft and a bit rough. “Or maybe I didn’t even exist. Who knows?”

“I don’t know. I got the impression that the other me didn’t have many attachments aside from his crew,” Jim said, his voice almost apologetic.

“Maybe we never met,” Anne said, turning the possibility over in her mind.

Frowning, Jim shook his head. “Maybe we just met under better circumstances.”

Anne laughed. “Oh, then we definitely wouldn’t have ended up like this. That would have been a wham bam thank you ma’am situation on both our parts, assuming the broad strokes of personality are the same.”

Jim’s frown only deepened. “No, I don’t think so. I mean, it’d be pretty in character for that guy to have a fling, but I don’t think he’d just fuck off after a couple days or whatever. That would be pretty stupid.”

“Oh come on. Nothing’s set in stone. If you and I didn’t have a reason not to fuck, we’d have gotten it out of our systems and then gotten scared and run off,” Anne teased, wondering why he looked so balky.

“That’s dumb,” Jim said, his frown turning into an actual scowl. “I guess it’s a possibility, but he’d have to be kind of a coward--”

“James Tiberius Kirk,” Anne said slowly, her eyes widening, and had to stop herself from laughing again. “You’re mad at him.”

He immediately started to backpedal. “What? No, I’m just-- well, come on, if he couldn’t figure out--”

“Yes you are,” Anne marveled. “You’re mad at him because he might not have stuck around to do--” she flapped a hand around at the bedroom and its luxurious appointments, “--all this.” They both knew she didn’t really mean the bedroom.

“I’m not mad at him--” Jim started, his frown reappearing, then his shoulders sank and he sighed. “Okay, maybe a little. But he would have to be really stupid to have the possibility of something like this and just let it go without ever… I mean, even with all your rotten music it’s still pretty damn great.”

Anne watched him without speaking for a few moments, just… just appreciating him, blue eyes, messy hair and all. If he wasn’t himself, she wouldn’t have fallen so hard for him, and that other Kirk definitely wasn’t her Jim. “This makes me right again, you know,” she said, a little irony in her smile. “Reality had to bend for you to exist, mon étoile.”

He just laughed once or twice, looking away, like he wasn’t really sure how to react to that. “Given all the shit that’s happened, I can’t exactly be glad that we’re in this timeline here.”

“I can, and I will,” Anne said lightly. She knew he was feeling a little guilty, as if his happiness in this moment was the only thing on the other side of the scales from all the havoc the Narada had wreaked. “If some other me exists in that timeline, she’s enjoying what she has, whatever that is. Why should she be the only one? Why shouldn’t I enjoy what I have?”

“What you have, huh?” he asked, looking skeptically at her, trying to suppress the tiny smile that wanted to touch the corners of his mouth. He wanted to be convinced that it was all right not to be guilty over it. Good, because it was. No one needed him to self-flagellate. “And what’s that?”

Inspiration struck, and Anne deliberately looked down, then up at him from under her lowered lashes. “Someone awful enough to love my shitty music and my shitty pickup lines.”

Bemusement replaced his skepticism, and that smile made a tentative appearance, uncertain of its welcome. “Is that so?” he asked, not really sure what she was driving at; she hadn’t been the one with the shitty lines.

“Jim Kirk…” Set ‘em up, and knock ‘em down. Anne smiled invitingly at him. “...come and rock the sure shot.”

He knew the lyric immediately, and that grin widened, became sunny and uncomplicated and boyish in the wake of her easy delivery. His arm slid back around her, yanking her into his lap, his other hand tipping up her jaw. As if she needed the cue. Anne was already curling up against him, wanting to feel that smile on her lips, glad she’d driven away that guilty look. After some time and a few kisses, once their breathing had started to roughen and pulses were getting quick, Jim laughed and said, “She’s the cheese, and I’m the macaroni.”

“No fair, you had time to think about it,” Anne pretended to protest. “Mine was really good, I did that really well--” Both laughter and another kiss cut her off, and like music and pickup lines, it didn’t matter whose were whose. Either way worked just fine for both of them.