Author's Note:
This was based on a tumblr post, which can be found either on my tumblr, .com, or on my ao3, which is periferal same as my ffn. It's my first attempt at a road trip fic, really, and it's all meant in good fun.
See general disclaimers here. As stated, some elements from AoS, but is really mostly ToS specific.
Hope you enjoy, please leave a review if you do!
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They've run out of gas money. It's hilarious (it's not hilarious, only Jim calls it hilarious upon a retelling) because they've run out of gas money in Fuckall, Georgia (that's what Bones calls it, though Jim's been thinking it) and Atlanta's only a few more hours of driving away.
So, Jim being Jim he heads to the closest restaurant looking place he can find and barges into the kitchen, demanding more than asking whether they're looking for anyone willing to wash dishes.
Bones, who's not exactly drinking but not exactly sober, looks up at the human chaos entity and hears about half a sob story and, in a moment of impulsive generosity that likely involves his not being terribly employed at the moment, offers to help.
Jim isn't stupid. He looks at Bones with a kind of suspicion that the doctor understands on a personal level, but the kid nods and says, "Look, I have some friends with me."
Bones will be the first to admit he assumes the kid means a girlfriend, probably, a boyfriend maybe. Why else would he be passing through a shithole town like this?
What Bones doesn't expect is a pointy-eared honest to god hobgoblin alien, who blushes bright green of all colors when Bones cracks a comment about strange hookups.
Jim waves the joke away and asks the alien, "Does he look honest?"
The alien looks at Bones like he can read his soul, and it's goddamn uncanny. "Yes," the alien- who is apparently named Spock, like that goddamned fifties pediatrician- says, and Jim nods.
"Alright," the kid says. "You know if you drag us to your basement to eat us Nyota's gonna kill you."
Nyota, he finds out, is a childhood friend of Jim's and she is absolutely terrifying, in a way that almost reminds him of his ex-wife, minus the old hurt.
Of course he lets the three idiots stay at his place, old dump of a half-abandoned farmhouse though it is.
Long fully sobered up, he debates with himself whether he should give them beers. He has no idea how drinking ages work with green-blooded aliens, but he assumes the two humans are at least old enough to drive, probably a bit older.
He doesn't think to actually ask.
Eventually he offers anyway because what the hell, it's not as though the two policemen responsible for this town are going to leave the fire station long enough to bother with underage drinking. It'd be pointless, and more than a little hypocritical.
Nyota and Spock both refuse, but Jim grabs one and clicks it against the one Bones has taken out for himself.
"You a doctor?" Jim asks, looking at his beer more than drinking it, and Bones realizes that he's looking up at the certificate of commendation he keeps forgetting to take down.
"Yup," Bones says. He doesn't say that he hasn't worked at a hospital in a year now.
"Huh," Jim says. He's now lying on his stomach on Bones's good couch. He pokes at Spock, whose sitting a little stiffly at the far end of the same couch. "Hey," he says, "I'm assuming you have doctors on your planet?"
Bones has to wonder whether Spock finds it strange that these three humans he's revealed himself to don't seem terribly bothered. Bones himself is more vindicated than anything- he's not the sort to believe in magical white people aliens living in the center of the Earth, but the idea of their speck of a planet being the only one out there has always been foreign to him.
"Of course," Spock says. His tone could almost be condescending, but Jim smiles at him in a way that looks a lot more real than the kid's smile had been back at the restaurant. "It is far more advanced than Earth technology."
"I mean you do have spaceships," Jim says. "I wonder if Mom's found that yet?" he asks the air more than Spock.
"The cloaking device I installed on my ship is beyond detection by what is available to your mother," Spock says, and Jim laughs and pokes him again.
"I know, I know," he says. "You wonder why we're here, Doc?" Jim asks. He starts calling Bones Bones a little later.
"'Course," Bones says. "It's not every day I get aliens camping in my guest room."
"I'm looking for my father," Spock says.
"Huh," Bones says. He shushes the scientist part of his brain that wants to ask whether father means the same thing to Spock that is does to literally all of humanity.
"Why Georgia?"
"We're looking in cities," Jim says, implying Atlanta.
Silence doesn't so much fall as ooze over the four of them, and Bones realizes that Jim is less drinking and more watching Bones drink.
Making an executive decision for once in the past ridiculous year of his life, he screws the cap back on his bottle and walks over to put it back in the fridge.
"What's wrong with you, Doc?" Jim asks, in a flight of perceptiveness that Bones gets used to, eventually.
"I'll tell you eventually," Bones says, not quite realizing he's promising a longer interaction with these three than he ever intended.
He can't figure out at first why Nyota's with them. Jim's obviously attached himself to Spock like some kind of friendly parasitic vine, and Bones catches glimpses of fondness in Spock's otherwise inscrutable eyes. But Nyota is the kind of smart that makes Bones think of college degrees, not that goddamned VW Bus Jim calls the Enterprise and a roadtrip adventure for an alien's dad, or with sitting on the half-decent rug which represents half of what Bones got from his marriage.
"You have any idea how shitty the linguistics classes are at the local community college?" is all she says in answer. "And Jim needs someone who can speak Vulcan, if Spock's translator ever breaks down."
That answers another question Bones hasn't really thought about.
"How the hell do you speak Vulcan?" Bones asks.
Nyota shrugs. "I have my ways," she says. "That, and Spock's jurry-rigged his ship's computer into the Enterprise and it can teach me."
"Your car can talk," Bones says to Jim.
Jim smiles blindingly in Bones's direction. He's not fooled.
Bones isn't terribly religious but still he looks vaguely skyward and mutters "Jesus mother of Mary."
"You have the order reversed there, Bones," Jim says.
"Go to bed," Bones says, both because he's run out of things to say and because it really is late now.
"Show us to the basement, Doc," Jim says.
Nyota's eyeroll only increases Bones's admiration.