Star Trek fic? Much love to smokexscribbles for taking a look at it for me <3, but I'd like to get a little bit more feedback on this before I go about cross-posting it. It is the first non-anon piece I've done in a while. So.

Title: K (or Constant)
Characters: Kirk, Chekov, Sulu; Sulu/Chekov
Warnings: Um, swearing? Introspection on a large scale. Probs spoilers for XI. Switching from 3rd to 2nd person and back. Chekov, which in rare cases causes heart palpitations and fainting from adorable.
Summary: There is no universe where Captain James Tiberius Kirk believes in no-win scenarios.


There is no universe where Captain James Tiberius Kirk believes in no-win scenarios, Chekov thinks.

Now, there’re probably a couple universes out there where Captain James T. Kirk doesn’t cheat on the Kobiyashi Maru. He probably just straight up, flat out wins, to be quite honest; while the odds of that are… (negligible, if he runs them, more rounding error than anything; an outlier, an irregularity, regularly dismissed) James-Tiberius-fucking-Kirk-like. There’s probably even a universe (maybe two, if he pushes the numbers like Scotty does every time they take a hit) where J. T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise is celibate, god rest his eternal soul. But his captain, this Jim, the one that pulls them out of black holes and doesn’t back down from fights and jumps off a drill and dives after Sulu and trusts in everyone – he doesn’t believe in no-win situations.

Pavel Chekov wonders what characterizes him, in every world. Is he always Russian? It seems impossible for him not to be. Is he always young, always smart, always record-breaking? Is he always so shy, so nervous? Does he grow up so fast, does he always join Star Fleet, can he always save Sulu when he’s falling? Better question – does he always love Sulu?

He can’t pinpoint his own defining characteristic in that way, can’t see it so clearly. It just shows so strongly in the Captain, like it does in no one else. It doesn’t matter, Chekov realizes, if Jim isn’t or won’t or doesn’t cheat on the Kobiyashi Maru. It doesn’t matter if the test itself even exists. This is a man who is always cheating the Kobiyashi Maru, in the sense for which it is. If that even makes sense, which it doesn’t, for what it is.

It’s easy to spin yourself round in circles in your head, until nothing makes sense and your brain gets dizzy. Words start to sound wrong if you say them enough, turn them round in your mouth and over in your head. Sometimes you can’t over think it, because if you do you start doubting and then they die.

Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu is Hikaru Sulu and Pavel Andreievich Chekov can’t imagine changing a damn thing about him in any universe because he’s perfect right now. Maybe that compromises him, like Commander Spock, First Officer Spock, XO Spock is always saying. Maybe he’s not fit for his position because his eyes drift to Hikaru’s hands and his mind spins that word round and round again, hi-ka-ru-hi-ka-ru until it’s not right. And then he puts it back together again with pieces of words Hi-ka-ru has said to him today, with fragments of the smiles Pavel gets and thanks God for every Sunday in space.

Whichever parts of Hikaru are kept a constant (K? K=H? For what values?) and whichever parts of Pavel stay the same, he hopes the part of Hikaru that smiles at him in the mornings and kisses him like that before his shift always stays. He hopes maybe whichever part of him it is that Sulu loves stays, so that maybe in every world that’s the same. If the constant part of him was Hikaru, and the constant part of Hikaru himself.

Captain James Tiberius Kirk can keep his goddamn Kobiyashi Maru.