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Let's Call the Whole Thing Off by ninety6tears
Fandoms: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
22 Nov 2013
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Summary
They’ve been debating this damn thing since the day they met. Once they become friends, the argument becomes more of a conversation. With time, maybe more of a declaration.
(AU, loosely based on the movie When Harry Met Sally.)Series
- Part 1 of Let's Call the Whole Thing Off
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She closed her eyes, and she didn’t think of what it had been like to fall asleep with him as much as she thought of these past months, the better part of a year that she’d spent with him, falling slowly awake.
(“The thing is, I think she knows deep down that there are other ways they’d be incompatible, and she can’t seem to take that step to admitting it’s just all-around not meant to be. That’s an old story, isn’t it? The type of person who finds it easier to love the people who can’t love them back?”Their talk had slowed their progress to a stroll. Jim zipped his jacket up a little higher, considering. “I was thinking, you'll say predictably...about how there aren't a lot of social norms that make it easy to at least start talking more with someone you admire from a distance. It's hard to find a way to, like, platonically ask someone out. And if it wasn't like that, I doubt it would be so hard to be so into someone who could never love you back. I don't know, it's just strange to consider the fact that unrequited love has to not just be an unfortunate thing, but an actual humiliation. Somebody could love a person irrevocably, for years and years and never expect anything back, and that's shameful, but once the affection is returned, we upgrade it to the much more desirable descriptions like 'unconditional.'”
She looked ahead, slow to respond. “I just think it gets precarious to nurse too much of a fantasy life over somebody else.”
He made a gesture of mild frustration. “Why can’t it be inert, why can’t it be invisible?”
“Any little asshole can love somebody. It’s what you do with it that matters.”
“Okay, but that goes back to how we talked about it in the first place. You could have serious feelings about somebody and you could be willing to humiliate yourself to make them feel better, or quit your job for them or take a bullet for them and like, you’re saying that’s less than when you could be fucking them into a mattress on a nightly basis and—”
“Jim. Jesus. Maybe you get there a little faster when romance is in the picture. What’s the difference between making somebody laugh hard, or making them feel good in any other way, and making them...well. You know? I mean, have you ever considered that having that with somebody you’re also close to in those other ways could be worthwhile to people because it’s far more intense than anything else, that it actually is greater than the sums?”
They’d reached the store front, and Jim turned in to face her, both of them stopping as he looked at her with some now vaguely unhappy sort of concentration. Finally he asked, “Is it like that for you?” in honest curiosity.
Years ago he couldn’t have dragged this truth out of her if he’d tried it all night, and yet she only realized it just then: The equal ground was felt like the bottoming rattle of an elevator, and her honesty surprised both of them. “I don’t know, is the thing.”
She turned to go inside, and there was a heaviness to the way Jim seemed to be watching for her mood.
“I guess we just listen to completely different instincts.”
He shifted the bag up under one arm, nodded. “Okay.”
A little tired on her feet now, she looped her arm through his so he would slow his pace down to hers.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, just getting sore.”
“You wanna trade shoes?”
“Ha-ha,” she intoned.
They were approaching a thirty-something woman who was taking the trash out in a matching sweatsuit and cradling her cell phone into the shoulder, talking not loudly but quite discernibly as they went by: “...no, I told him, I said that I’ve fucked at least thirty-nine bass players with condoms and his was definitely the smallest, so if he thought he was gonna pull that—”
Nyota’s hand clamped tight over her mouth as Jim squeezed her into picking up the pace, both of them barely managing to tamper in their explosions of laughter before they were a few houses down.
When they arrived back, Christine and Leonard were on opposite ends of the couch facing into each other, her legs loosely crossed around her water glass and one hand animatedly explaining something. They barely seemed to have noticed the other two coming in until Leonard looked over at Nyota almost tripping on an uneven wood panel and got apologetic about the state of the apartment.
Christine said, “Hey, Nyota, we never heard about your dead-guy crush.”
Laughing a little, Nyota stalled for a second and said, “Bruce Lee.”
Jim made a face like he’d lost a game. “Damn. Not exactly ancient history, but who can argue with that?”
Leonard and Christine resumed some story with flitting easy interjections from both of them while Nyota opened a beer and went with Jim next to the balcony window, where they just stood for a moment, as softly wordless as the first snow coming down outside.)
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