Big Damn Fic

Another exerpt from the Sex Pollen Fic I Will Finish If It Kills Me. And, um, I think I have to revise my estimated word count up again from 10k to...longer than 10k. Where did this damn plot come from?

Caution never worked on Kirk; he had a bad habit of getting around Spock’s defenses and forcing him up against the wall. More often than not, it didn’t work, at least in chess – Spock kept the tally in his head, and it stood at 115 wins, 24 losses. But it was a better record than anyone held against him since Gaila was assigned to another starship. And though he was loathe to concede that his interest was anything but academic, it nevertheless brought the faint quirk of a smile to his lips to watch the outrageous moves Kirk devised in his attempts to defeat him.

In the long days after he and Kirk were separated by biology, it was the chess games he thought about most often.

It wasn’t a fixation. Or an obsession. His father would have sternly disapproved if he thought his only son was putting such emotional importance in a pastime, an intellectual exercise used to encourage social bonds with the man his life depended on more days than not.

It was just that he had become accustomed to spending his evenings sitting across a table from Kirk, watching the expression that flickered across the man’s face like firelight and listening to stories that he knew to be gross exaggeration peppered with dramatic license, punctuated by soft exhalations of victory or frustration, depending on whether his latest gambit had succeeded. He…enjoyed it, even. Enjoyed the risks Kirk encouraged him in, enjoyed how transgressive he felt as he took action with only the barest of forethought. Enjoyed the way Kirk smiled at him when he did.

When he played the ship’s computers at chess, there was no risk, no transgression, every move planned a dozen squares ahead and played out diagram-perfect, and for the first time in his life it bored Spock to metaphorical tears.

He started the first game the day after McCoy let them both out of Sickbay, as a way to take his mind off of their predicament and its lack of a solution. He’d played the computer many times before; when he was young, of course, and his mother was too busy to play with him, but also on dull shuttle trips and during quarantine and the week it had snowed too hard to leave the dorm, after the second day when he’d finished all his coursework for the month. The computers were an ideal partner, programmed with a nearly infinite number of moves and capable of responding to any of his.

He gave up on the game after half an hour. It wasn’t challenging. It wasn’t satisfying. It wasn’t Kirk.

The first week he mostly ignored it, and it wasn’t hard, with as many changes in personnel and procedure as he had to implement to work around their condition. Between the paperwork, which had to be filled out in triplicate, and the crew, who did not seem to understand the meaning of final, he barely had time to sleep, let alone start chess games he never finished.

But the second week the Enterprise had settled back into an uncomfortable routine, and Spock found himself with long afternoons stretching before him in which he had no duties to perform. And when he exhausted the possibilities of meditation, and exercise, and the libraries, he found himself thinking, once again, of chess.

At the end of the second week Spock hacked into the Enterprise’s computer and started rewriting the chess program.

AND AFTER THIS IT'S ALL PUNCHING ROMULANS AND CUDDLING.