Work Text:
1.
Jim perched on the biobed swinging his legs, while Bones lectured him on the nigh-deathness of his recent injury, jabbing his fingers emphatically at the bio-screen above the bed. Jim wasn’t entirely sure why this concussion was so much worse than the 25 he’d had already (this year), but going by the Bones’ pissy expression the good doctor felt strongly on the issue. It might help if he listened to the words instead of keeping an eagle eye on the bottom of the regulation-blue top. It kept promising to clear the top of his pants and flash some skin, but never quite delivered.
“But what does that bit at the top mean?” asked Jim.
“What?” said Bones. “Dammit, Jim, are you not listening? This is your life we’re talking about!”
“I’m listening, I just want to know about that bit at the top”
Bones pointed at the top left, his blue shirt rising a good centimetre clear of the top of his pants. “You mean the time?”
Jim had forgotten about the black undershirt that they all wore, and which was the only thing Bones was flashing.
Damn.
2.
Jim blurred back into consciousness to Bones’ scared and angry face above him. His stomach hurt in an oh-god-bleeding-out-from-a-massive-sword-wound sort of way. Bones was almost leaning on him, pressing his previously-blue shirt on top of the gaping wound while blood soaked through it.
Jim was nothing if not focussed.
“Bones. Black shirt. More absorbent. Try that….as well” he gasped out.
Bones didn’t hesitate or question- he lifted one hand off the wound, still pressing firmly with the other one, and went to drag his shirt off by the hem.
Unfortunately Jim passed out again before he could lift it.
Double damn.
3.
Most of the bridge crew were crowded around the same table in the bar and Bones, a little worse for drink, was regaling them with stories of their captain’s bar-room brawling history, gesturing grandly to illustrate punches and thrown glass-ware.
Jim egged him on, congratulating himself on his own tactical genius. Bones was wearing a button-down shirt and had never, in all the time Jim had known him, owned a singlet.
“…and it took 30 minutes with the dermal regenerator to fix that one up” Bones finished to the hooting and hollering of Sulu and Chekov. Uhura looked like she was trying not to laugh. Spock didn’t look like anything.
“Bones” said Jim “That’s not a good story. Tell them the one about the Gidorfax in that bar down by the canals. Now that was awesome.”
“Awesome?” drawled Bones thickly. “You pickin’ a fight with a being about 3 feet taller’n’you?”
“He wasn’t that tall” said Jim, trying to keep the anticipatory glee off his face.
“Not that tall?” said Bones, shifting in his seat. Jim licked his lower lip. “He was about this…” began Bones, lifting his arm.
Before he could finish, Jim was spun around in his chair by a gray-faced alien with feathers sticking out like a crest. “You think you can fight?” said the alien, and punched him in the face.
Jim felt pretty frustrated at that point, so it was great that the subsequent all-comers-welcome-brawl gave him a chance to work that off.
4.
Jim had seen Bones’ chest before. Back when they shared a dorm he’d seen the smooth muscles and sparse dark hair of his chest once or twice a day. He’d admired it every time, but kept his hands off for obvious can’t-ruin-my-only-friendship type reasons. Moronically, Jim had thought that having that daily temptation removed would make it a bit easier to think of Bones as just a friend. He hadn’t realised that the sight was apparently addictive, and after 3 months in space he was starting to have withdrawal symptoms.
Which was his only excuse for ‘accidentally’ spilling a mild acid solution onto Bones’ shirt one day when they were both in Spock’s lab.
“Oh god- quick- get that off!” he exclaimed, feeling like everything his step-father had said about him after the car incident was probably deserved, even if it had been said prematurely. He was almost grateful when Spock sprayed Bones with some kind of white foam instead, and he left the lab without meeting anyone’s eye.
5.
The away mission went badly, as they tended to do, and Jim, Bones and Sulu were trapped in a holding cell while the natives set up their execution. 3 walls were solid metal, about 15mm thick going by the reverb when he hit it, but the 4th was a forcefield and there was some kind of electrical circuit board in the wall next to it, on their side. Not the control board- the natives weren’t that stupid- but it was an ‘in’ to the system and Jim didn’t need much more. It didn’t take long for Jim to work out what to do, and his shoulders relaxed when he realised that Bones wasn’t going to die today (neither would he or Sulu, and of course that was good news too). Jim felt he deserved a reward.
“I need something to insulate my hands. Bones- pass me your shirt.”
Bones stripped off his blue shirt and handed it over, muttering and drawling something that Jim wasn’t really listening to. The tight-fitting black shirt gave a nice view, pulled tight across Bones’ well-defined pectorals, but Jim thought he’d done well enough to deserve better.
“I’ve got two hands, and these shirts don’t rip” said Jim.
Bones just lifted one of his eyebrows at him and stepped up his rant to a level that even Jim, with long years of experience, couldn’t ignore. “So the Captain’s too good to give up his own damn shirt, is he?”
Jim was about to make it an order, but Sulu had just handed over his own shirt, and not even Jim could think up a reason for needing a third.
Sulu would be lucky if Jim didn’t leave him behind.
Plus 1.
Jim sat at the small table in his quarters, scowling at the glass in his hand. Concentrated, tactical genius would find a way to get the doctor’s shirt off. Somehow.
Jim contemplated engineering a fabric-eating microbe that could inexplicably infest the entire ship. It would mean seeing a lot of bare chests that he wasn’t interested in, and some that he would need therapy to forget, but at this point it might be worth it. Jim started scrawling on a PADD, trying to remember which bio-engineering agents were already stocked on board.
The door chimed. Jim glared at it, but said “come in” anyway, as he started sketching out the DNA structure.
Bones walked in and Jim slid the PADD under his arm. If he was subtle, he could get in the desk drawer before Bones could see the active screen.
Bones took both his shirts off in one smooth movement. Jim forgot about the PADD and stared at the muscled planes for a good minute. Bones crossed his arms, accentuating his pectorals further. The hair on his chest ran downwards until it turned into a treasure trail. Jim licked his lower lip and watched it carefully.
Eventually Jim’s brain kicked in, and he thought to ask “huh?”, though it came out sounding a lot more like “ggnngh?”.
Bones’ face, when Jim finally looked, was exasperated but also somehow fond. He rolled his eyes at Jim then stomped over to push his chair back from his desk. “Jim” he said, pulling him up from the chair by his shirt. “You’re not subtle. You never have been subtle. And while I might have respected your ‘hands off’ policy while we were at the Academy, if you’re going to keep doing damn-fool things to take a look rather than just asking” Bones wrapped one of his large, solid hands around the back of Jim’s neck and pulled him in for a rough kiss “that respect is over.”
“Ggnngh” replied Jim intelligently.
Bones kissed him again, a little slower, licking into Jim’s mouth with gentle but insistent strokes. Jim moaned and got his hands up onto Bones’ chest, stroking just below his collarbone.
“I want you” said Bones, his voice gruff, while he nipped at Jim’s jawline. “You want me?”
Jim moaned an affirmative.
“Then you got me. I think our friendship will survive just fine, somehow.” Bones licked around the curl of Jim’s ear and pulled back to smirk. Jim stared at Bones with wide eyes for a moment, then narrowed them. This was not how this was going to go down, he thought with new resolve.
Jim took the offensive, kissing Bones until he was noisy then pushing firmly against his chest until he was moving backwards towards the bed. Jim bit firmly on Bones’ lip and swallowed the resulting grunt with a deep kiss, licking the moan right out of his mouth. The bed hit Bones in the back of the legs and he went down in a pliant heap of muscle, spread out before Jim on the covers.
Jim pounced.