Title: Many Bells Down (1/?)
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Pairing: Kirk/Spock/McCoy
Summary: Sequel to Along Comes a Stranger; Riverside ‘verse. Dating Bones and Spock is wonderful, better than Jim imagined. Then Bones’ mother arrives, Spock receives the offer of a lifetime outside of Riverside, and Jim has to make a series of choices that could completely change his – and ultimately Riverside’s – future.
A/N: Title taken from E.E. Cummings poem which begins:
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down) […]
This Riverside is a pretty how town, in my opinion. :)

Part One

Where are you running to, James?

That voice… he hasn’t heard that voice in months, not since the nightmare stopped.

The diner. Trelane—pinning his body down, telling him this is the way it was supposed to end, as the fire spreads and takes everything, him included. He hates waking up from that too-real dream, even knowing he is safe because Bones has a hand on his back, kneading muscles locked in fright, and Spock has gotten up to turn on the lights so that he can see there is no fire.

The man to whom the voice belongs is gone. Yet here Jim is out on the open road, in the dark long before dawn, with nothing but stretches of countryside before him as he speeds down an abandoned highway. He is running, he knows this. Even with the desolate landscape, Jim is being followed by a nameless thing.

Is it his own fear?

Is it Eleanor’s words, her angry tirade YOU. I don’t know who you think you are, James Kirk, but I’ll certainly tell you who you aren’t—and that’s the right person for my boy! You’re no good for Leonard!

The Harley is a sweet solace under him, all sleek power and the promise of escape. If only he can get far enough, go fast enough…

Jim Kirk pulls on the throttle, whole outside but wrecked within; his shadow is cast long and low across the road, racing him, it seems, into the night.

~~~
Two weeks earlier…

Jim falls in love with Joanna at first sight. The feeling isn’t mutual right away, of course; the little girl only has eyes for her father, which Jim begrudges neither Bones nor Joanna. She doesn’t notice Jim overly much until he nicknames her Princess and sneaks her out to a farm neighboring the Kirk’s land to look at baby ducks. She hides one duckling in her skirt pocket to gift to Uncle Spock (why Spock? Jim muses) but Jim gently explains that the baby duck would be lonely without its brothers and sisters and mama. She concedes his point and lets it toddle back to its family.

After this adventure, Jim’s existence gains more importance to Joanna. She begins to take note of things he can do for her. She wants a ride on his motorcycle (at her somewhat excited demand, Leonard scoops up his daughter like a protective papa bear and attempts to eradicate Jim with his laser glare) so Jim has to whisper a promise in her ear that they can try it much, much later when her daddy isn’t so grumpy. When Jim is nearby, she asks to ride his shoulders, a service which Jim is happy to provide. (Spock is too tall for comfortable shoulder-riding in Joanna’s opinion, and her father is too short. Jim is just right. She says this like she’s quoting a fairy tale.)

Joanna approves of Jim’s wide grins, love of ice cream, and his long arms which can swing her in circles around and around the lawn for hours without tiring—or until they are both too dizzy to stand upright. To Kirk’s chargrin, however, Joanna thinks he is as pretty as her favorite blue-eyed china doll (the one Granny gave her last Christmas, she says) and so, because he is pretty and he is male, she is going to marry him one day. She’s Princess Joanna and he will be her Prince Jim.

At that proclamation, Bones chokes on his own spit, Spock makes a bee line for the privacy of a bathroom (to regain his cracking composure, no doubt) and Jim lowers his head under the stern stare of Mrs. Eleanor McCoy.

Eleanor is another matter entirely. Upon their introduction, she looks congenial, pleasant even, until the moment her eyes—Bones’ changeable, soulful eyes—fix upon someone other than her kin. She strips flesh from bone with one look, leaving no place for secrets to hide. Jim would not say her expression is hostile, yet the word disapproving would be too mild of a description. It’s Leonard the woman pulls into her arms immediately as she and Joanna descend the Greyhound bus, whispering something to him that softens the lines of her face. Jim and Spock—they are scrutinized and kept at a formal distance, though Spock less so. Maybe Jim’s imagination is over-active, but he is certain that Eleanor McCoy—mother of Leonard Horatio McCoy and grandmother of Joanna McCoy—automatically places Spock in a class far above Jim. Spock has the potential to be worthy, is what he reads in the firmness of her mouth; whereas Jim might be lucky to receive a word from her edgewise. How ironic, considering when Eleanor arrives in Riverside, she knows nothing of James Kirk at all.

Days later and a lack of warmth is still prevalent in her greeting to the lawyer (does she blame Spock for the catastrophe of Leonard’s divorce trial? Jim wonders) and to the mechanic (in his case, she is obviously making a pre-emptive strike). Yet Bones has said nothing of it, and Jim hasn’t the heart to pull the man’s attention away from the daughter he thought he would never see again.

Jim thinks these thoughts, as he has so many times over the last two weeks, while he parks his motorcycle in the downtown area of Riverside and unhooks his helmet. Becoming Prince Jim to Joanna has not won him the affection of Bones’ mother. And now, every time he is the vicinity of the tenacious woman, he regresses into an awkward, bumbling teenager, full of uncertainty and a need to have her approval. Amanda Grayson, Jim decides, wasn’t a tenth as scary as Eleanor McCoy.

Jim doesn’t dislike Eleanor. In fact, he sees where Bones gets his personality—from the quick temper and stubbornness, the unbreakable family loyalty, and even the laugh (Bones’ laugh, his mother’s laugh, different pitches of the same joy)—and that endears the small woman to Jim. He imagines her hand upon his arm would have an identical comforting weight as Bones’ hand. But he can’t seem to persuade her to accept him in the smallest of ways.

Bones doesn’t understand, finds Jim’s whimpers of God no, do we have to eat dinner with her again? rather funny. Jim knows that he should be glad Leonard seems secure in his feelings for Jim, that the man isn’t swayed by his mother’s hints that he can do so much better than Riverside (and essentially Jim). Yet he can’t help but want assurance, real verbal assurance. And Spock is of little help in a way that has Jim wondering what might be going on in Spock’s life that has gone unmentioned. Spock is distracted nowadays, often communicating with his firm in Boston, finally succumbing to a return trip there. Jim has tried broaching the subject before and had the conversation quickly steered in another direction.

Huffing out an exasperated breath because, honestly, he is becoming sleep-deprived from such circular thinking, Jim steps onto the sidewalk and makes a bee line for a particular corner store.

A tiny bell on the door rings to announce Jim Kirk’s entrance into the lingerie shop. The first thing he spies, besides the flash of Gaila across the shop holding a black bra against a young woman, is the unusually large glass vase of red roses displayed grandly on the corner of the shop counter. Since Gaila will finish with her customer before acknowledging his presence, he meanders in that direction to get a closer look at the flowers. Curious, he reaches out to pull the small white card from between two stems to see who sent them.

“No touching!” interrupts one of his favorite people. Gaila walks behind the counter and starts straightening the blooms as though Jim had messed with them (which he hadn’t dared do).

“You have an admirer?”

The smile curving her lips is not for him. That makes Jim all the more curious. Gaila says, “He’s a new beau of mine. We met at The Jade Leaf. I was all alone, having been stood up by a jackass not worth mentioning, and there he was—my knight in shining Armani!” Her eyes twinkle. “He’s a friend of Gary’s. We had dinner together.” Her tone suggests they are way past the dinner-together stage.

To feel a pang of jealousy is ridiculous but Jim is male and Gaila will always be just a little bit his. He tries to change the subject, to address a more pressing need. Gaila lifts one of her delicately shaped eyebrows when Jim puts on his charmer’s smile.

“Have lunch with me.”

“I have a lunch date.” Her quick rebuttal is a sharp sting to his pride but Jim keeps his smile in place, knowing that Gaila didn’t mean it to hurt.

“Is there room for one more?” he asks politely, loathing the thought of eating alone today for some reason.

She stops flipping through a clothing catalogue to look at him in sudden understanding. “Oh, Jim, I’m sorry. It’s a real date, not just lunch with a friend. So if you come along…”

“Awkward city.” Jim sighs dramatically. “Why am I all alone?”

Gaila puts aside the catalogue. “Where are your two sidekicks?”

He blinks. “Since when are boyfriends called sidekicks?”

The red-head chuckles. “Welcome to a woman’s world, honey.”

He’d be stupid to comment on that. “Spock’s in Boston until Friday, and by the time I got to the clinic to take Bones to lunch, he’d already run off with Christine.”

“Why wouldn’t he? She’s a hot blonde.”

“I’m a hot blond,” argues Kirk.

“But you don’t have breasts,” Gaila argues back.

Jim pulls up his t-shirt, exposing his chest, and grins. “I do have breasts. They’re flat breasts.”

She swats at his head. “You beast, this is a respectable establishment! Quit flashing my customers!”

A low tittering sounds behind Jim. He turns and looks. Two elderly women smile good-naturedly at him from the other side of a rack of nighties and lace. Jim jerks his shirt back down, flushing.

Gaila makes a tsk-tsk noise then procures a pocket makeup mirror from thin air in order to reapply her lipstick. Jim’s sneaky fingers snag the card from the bouquet of roses while she is occupied.

“Khan?” he reads. “What kind of name is that?”

“What kind of name is Spock?” she counters.

“It’s sexy,” says Jim defensively.

She smirks at him. “I’ll bet, especially when you’re moaning it.”

His mouth almost drops open. Gaila leans over the counter and gives him a peck of kiss at the corner of his mouth. “You’re so cute when you blush, Jimmy.”

“You’re an evil woman.”

“I’m a gorgeous evil woman.” She pats her curly hair. “Khan says he admires red hair. It symbolizes a fiery nature.”

Khan sounds like a douche bag, but Jim doesn’t say so. He slides the card across the counter to Gaila. “My guess is he’s loaded.”

“Oh, very endowed,” she emphasizes, deliberately misunderstanding him.

Jim rolls his eyes and tucks his hands into his jacket pockets. “I’ll be on my way, then, before my ego is completely trampled.”

Her eyes give him a slow once-over. “You’ve nothing to worry about, sweetie. I remember your endowment, too. It’ll do.”

Jim starts backpedaling towards the door. “Goodbye, Gaila!” he calls out too brightly.

She waggles her fingers at him, no doubt amused at his hasty retreat. Just as the door to the lingerie shop swings shut, Jim sees a slew of female customers converging on Gaila. His face burns at the prospect of what details she is going to tell them about her former lover and his acceptable “endowment.”

As Jim is fishing for his bike keys on his person, a man in a perfectly tailored suit, hands relaxed in trouser pockets, strides with purpose down the same street, heading in the direction from whence Jim came. He has shoulder-length black hair, a strongly handsome face, and attentive eyes which miss nothing and assess everything. Those eyes pause on Kirk’s back, just briefly, before tracking onwards. Jim never turns around; had he, however, this moment would have become the first meeting between James Tiberius Kirk and Khan Noonien Singh.

Pushing open a door with a bell for the second time that day, Jim isn’t able to say a word before he is swept into chaos. His mother, Winona Kirk, has his arm in a death grip and is dragging her only son toward the kitchen.

He whines, “But it’s my lunch break! I’m hungry!”

She ignores him. “The chicken salad goes to Table 3. Table 4 hasn’t had their orders taken yet. Then go see what Sulu needs help with.”

The battle is lost before it’s begun. He slips behind the fairly new counter of the Enterprise Diner and collects several plates of food, frowning down at the order slips to figure to whom the food belongs. Uhura shoulders him aside, snapping, “Either move or work! Can’t you see we’re packed?”

Jose is going to kill him, Jim thinks. Late again. And it’s not like he’s lying when he says he was forced into slave labor (that is, sadly unpaid labor) by his mother.

Come to think of it, Jose did tell him to avoid the diner and get back to work on time.

Oops.

Deciding to blame the entire situation on an errant Bones—really, why is lunch with Christine better than lunch with his boyfriend, anyway?—Jim grabs the tray of food with both hands and hurries to take care of the Enterprise’s customers. He wouldn’t admit it to anyone, especially not his mother, but seeing the diner booming with business puts his mind at ease. It makes the memories of the charred hull of the old diner less painful.

“Of tragedy comes the promise of new life,” he murmurs to no one in particular.

Kirk smiles and flirts his way from booth to booth, accepting compliments and thank-you’s and Why, little Jimmy, aren’t you the spitting image of your father! with a pleasantness that, in most cases, greets him in return. Some people ask him if he knows what kind of building is going up around the corner where a wide lot has been cleared for construction. He says he hasn’t a clue. Others want to discuss the weather at length, or list their latest physical ailments since it’s common knowledge he is living with a doctor.

“I heard some foreign executive wants to buy out the Derby hospital. Can you imagine? Buy a hospital!” exclaims one customer sitting by herself.

Jim nods absently as he refills the lady’s coffee cup. “Definitely not. I only make enough money to save up for a vacation every five years.” He’d like to go to Yosemite National Park one day, see a spread of forest from a mountain’s vantage point. But that’s a quiet dream.

She agrees with him wholeheartedly.

And if the customers aren’t trying to root out more gossip, they are intent on making their own. A couple is arguing loudly at a back table. One small girl whaps her brother upside the head with a fork.

These are his people, the people of Riverside, Kirk thinks proudly. He couldn’t imagine life anywhere else.

Thirty minutes later, when the lunch crowd ebbs with the change of the hour, Jim pokes his head around the kitchen door, apple in hand, and quirks his mouth. He looks at Sulu from over his shoulder, the chef still working diligently at the stove, and asks, “Do you think it’s safe?”

Sulu grunts as he tosses two pieces of bread onto the grill top to toast. The kitchen boy Pavel, on the other hand, is more than willing to answer—and investigate. The bright-eyed young man scuttles across the kitchen, then peers under Jim’s arm into the main dining room.

Eyes wide, Pavel offers, “Perhaps it is. Ms. Winona is at the register, da?”

Meaning, now is as good a time as any to make a break for the door. Jim hands Pavel his half-eaten apple and salutes. “If I don’t make it, tell Sasha of my undying love for her.”

Pavel grins lopsidedly. “This she knows, Jim.” He hurries back to Sulu’s side.

Jim hums to himself as he ambles along the outside of the diner counter. Pausing purposefully in the line of sight of the register, he cries, “Bye, Mom!”

Winona nods to the two men holding bills, takes their money for their meals, and returns the proper change to each. Then she wipes her hands on her apron, asks the other people in line to pay if they wouldn’t mind waiting for a moment and heads for Jim at the opposite end of the diner. In passing the kitchen window, a perfectly timed sandwich plate appears and she picks it up.

Jim is ready to receive his parting hug and opens his arms, saying, “I’ll see tomorrow for dinner, right?”

Winona smiles at him—and shoves half of the sandwich from the plate into his open mouth. “You need to eat before you leave, baby.”

Jim instinctively bites down on the sandwich, having little other choice, and then chews a mouthful of it thoughtfully for a few seconds before swallowing. Turkey, bacon, and swiss with honey mustard. Sulu is taking pity on him today. Bits of sandwich in hand, he complains, “I have to get back to the garage. I’m twenty minutes late already.”

She points at a swivel-stool along the counter. He obediently sits down and starts on the other half of the club sandwich. “I called Jose while you were flipping burgers. He said it’s fine.”

Jim muffles his chuckle with a french fry. Jose wouldn’t dare not say it’s fine to Winona Kirk. Although… “It’ll be even finer if I take him a slice of chocolate pie,” he wheedles.

As if hearing her cue, Uhura slides a small to-go box under his nose and smirks at him. He peeks into the box: two slices of chocolate pie. Wow, Jose might just forgive him after all.

Jim finishes his plate of food, kisses his mother on the cheek, sticks his tongue out at Nyota, and exits the Enterprise Diner in a very good mood.

His good mood vanishes at the end of the work day when he returns home. The apartment is eerily quiet, except for the noise of the refrigerator and the ticking of an old clock in Bones’ bedroom. Jim sinks into the couch, realizing that even the company of Spock’s cat, Bo Peep, would be better than this silence.

But everyone—save Spock, who is hundreds of miles away—is at the large house Spock is now half of a month away from owning outright. Bones, Joanna, Bo Peep… and Eleanor.

Does he dare go over there and crash the McCoy family time?

Jim swallows once, mouth dry, and takes a swig from the open beer bottle in his hand. His eyes track to the telephone, linger there.

The clock keeps ticking, the frig keeps droning on. Eventually Jim sighs, picks up the television remote, and bypasses the news channel for a basketball game.

How strange his life is right now; strange, indeed, because though Jim Kirk is no longer alone, no longer relationship-less or love-less, tonight feels exactly like one of those long, lonely nights before Bones and Spock came to Riverside and changed everything. But it’s only temporary, Jim reassures himself. There’s tomorrow, and he’ll arrive at the Riverside Clinic a little earlier so he can treat Bones to lunch. He’ll dig out that phone number Spock left behind and together he and Leonard can catch Spock between meetings in Boston.

Who knows. Maybe tomorrow will also be the day he manages to find his way into Eleanor’s good graces.

Jim can only hope.

Still, the telephone remains silent and he doesn’t use it to make a call either, simply for the sake of hearing a warm, familiar drawl.

Next Part

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• Many Bells Down (12/12) – from November 9, 2011
• Many Bells Down (11/12) – from November 8, 2011
• Many Bells Down (10/12) – from November 6, 2011
• Many Bells Down (9/12) – from October 30, 2011
• Many Bells Down (8/12) – from October 28, 2011