Title: Names

Disclaimer: I wish it was mine, but obviously, it isn't :)
Rating: M, for language and occasional violence
Warnings: Tarsus, f-word
Summary: Jim's not so unused to be called names.
Author's Notes: I didn't expect to get so many hits! Another piece, because I can't stop thinking about it. Honestly, I think it's sort of funny that I'm writing something like this because I tend to enjoy reading things more on the schmoopy side of life :)) Thank you to all of the readers and reviewers!

2.

When Jim comes back from Tarsus IV, he remembers why he hates Riverside. It's five or six months before he goes back to school, a few of those months spent in a hospital playing 2D chess and eating special cashew butter (and it's not fun when they first give him peanut butter, and then three fucking doctors have to lean over him, poking and analyzing read-outs because it's hard to treat a peanut allergy when the patient is allergic to the anti-histamine and too underweight for just about every other hypo that they can think to jab in him), the last part spent climbing out the window in his room to avoid Winona and her long sighs.

When he first goes back to school, he's unwilling to admit he's nervous. He heard Winona and the guidance counselor downstairs a couple of times, thinking they were being so fucking quiet while Winona pretended to be the super-involved Mother ("Oh Jim wouldn't like that", "Jim's too headstrong for that," "Jim is the name of my son who I visit about twice every fucking year") and the counselor/psychiatrist/mindfuck pretended to know what she is dealing with ("Trauma patients tend to react negatively to this," "Immersion, in my experience, is the best technique in the face of a …). He knows that all the faculty probably know is that he was sick, the rest of the information under the HIPPA and Starfleet's respective privacy clauses.

He's not very good at blending in, is what he would say is the first problem. Well, really, what is he supposed to do when some over-stuffed Goliath of a boy is smashing this absolute kid into a locker, grinning like an animal or like Kodos' soldiers or like shit. Jim spends a moment wondering how old this guy was, he has fucking stubble for God's sake, not the peach-fuzz that just about every other boy is trying to cultivate desperately. And Jim, skinny and – sort of short although his height is completely adequate, thanks – can still pack a punch and remembers that fancy move to pull the building-of-a-boy's feet out from under him. The kid, with eyes green and open like one of his kids (and that's not the reason Jim felt so suddenly protective and thought, just for a second, about stomping on the bully's nose) scuttles off, darting back for a moment to get his dropped PADD. And Jim is left with a growing ring of students around him, and isn't terribly cooperative later when the Principal is trying to illicit why, exactly, would he physically attack a student he doesn't even know on the first day of his return?

The Principal sends Jim out, pulls in Derek, the fucking Goliath. But the walls are thin and Jim listens as the Principal placates Derek, "Exceptions must be made when he is so clearly lacking a father figure. You have to be the bigger man here, Derek." And Jim is thinking well Dershit, ek is already the bigger man, has Mr. Tenet seen him?

When they are dismissed together, Derek pushes into him in a way that would appear completely casual and friendly if it didn't feel like a fucking bulldozer.

"Hey, Jimmy-boy, what class do you have next?" the boy asks, feigning interest as he scratches at a pimple in his stubble and shit that's gross.

Jim doesn't answer, not so stoic as disdainful, and the boy bulls into him again. "Com'n, Jimmy-m'boy, no hard feelings, right?"

Jim doesn't pay much mind to the sniggers he leaves when he takes a sharp turn in a hall, walking into Calculus a few minutes late but with a note. It isn't until the next morning, when everyone and their fucking inbred cousins are calling him Jimmy-boy and Little Orphan Jimmy and any clever combination that their hormone drowned brains can come up with that Jimmy starts hating school.

Reviews much appreciated!