Title: Every Single Time
Author: mrasaki
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy
Rating: NC-17
Wordcount: 1650
Warnings: None
A/N: Written for the 5 Acts meme, for echoinautumn, for the kink "mutual masturbation." HUGE thanks to dizilla and lauriegilbert for beta and advice!

~oOo~

"Why am I in here?" Leonard groused, even as he pulled himself along on his elbows and knees and tried to remember not to lift his head too high. The precaution didn't work; he caught himself high above his eyebrows on a low hanging bulkhead with a hollow bang. "Fuck!"

Jim stuck his head around the corner. "Careful," he warned, a trifle belatedly, then withdrew his head before Leonard could chuck something at him. Leonard's legs were cramping, his back was creaking in protest, his hands were covered in dust, and now his head had joined the hallelujah chorus of pains and aches. Except Jim didn't seem to give a single damn about Leonard's body giving up the fight because Jim was a vile person who had commed Leonard in the middle of what passed for night on the Enterprise and had made weird, sexy moaning sounds like he was touching himself and was enjoying not having Leonard's hands on him, very very much.

Well, okay. Leonard had hidden depths of petty jealousy in him, yes. But he could've lived with Jim being a fucking cocktease in the interests of getting a solid eight hours of shut-eye, because dammit, he was old and the bags under his eyes weren't going to go away by themselves. But Jim - with his unerring instinct for knowing exactly when Leonard was about to to hang up on him - had added, "Come down to the sector 5C jeffries tubes, Bones. I've got something you have to see."

Leonard had been about to say, "It'd better not be your di—" but the comm had gone dead, and there he had been caught on the hook of his own curiosity. He knew Jim generally tried not to waste his time, so whatever Jim was up to, surely it wouldn't be a total bust. And the one thing that Leonard could never resist – besides Jim sleeping all melted up against his side, all hot skin and slack limbs – was his own godddamn curiosity. Which got him in more tight spots than Jim ever had, to be totally honest.

So now he was here in the bowels of the ship, in a claustrophobically small tunnel leading to god knows where. He was beginning to wonder if he should go on a diet because he didn't remember jeffries tubes being quite this tight before since the last time he'd had an adventure in one, five years ago.

He followed Jim's heels, which were always just a little out of reach, through endlessly white tunnels lit with cold blue light, passing little hatches that opened into other endless white tunnels. He couldn't shake the feeling that they were mice, stuck in a never-ending maze. Of doom.

Finally Jim stopped. Leonard had been looking down at his hands, and now bumped his forehead against Jim's ridiculously hard ass. "Jim!"

The tunnel split here into three directions, and one up into a shaft. "Oh," Jim said, in a way that Leonard knew meant trouble.

"'Oh?' 'Oh?' The last time you said that, Chekov got shot, remember that?"

Jim ignored him. "This wasn't here before."

Leonard collapsed on his face. "We're going to die." He snuffled some dust up his nose and sneezed. Every muscle ached, his knees were rubbed raw, and he had to be on shift in three hours. "Lost in the goddamn Enterprise."

Jim looked back the way they came. "We might've taken a left when we should've taken a right."

"If we starve, I'm going to eat your corpse."

Jim rolled his eyes. "We're not going to die, you melodramatic asshole. We've just got to backtrack a little."

Leonard rolled over and stared at the ceiling that was caustrophobically a little too close to the floor. "Where are you taking me, anyway?"

"Come on. Don't you trust me?"

The thing was, Leonard did. Damn his face, he did, though god knew why. "No."

Jim's grin, already weak, faltered before he got it under control again. Leonard's heart clenched. It was too easy to forget in the face of Jim's usual nonchalance that Jim cared what Leonard thought, that Jim sometimes misread what Leonard meant versus what he said.

"Hey," Leonard said. He sat up and promptly clocked himself again. "Fuck! Fucking goddamn fuck!"

That surprised a laugh out of Jim.

"Glad you can laugh," Leonard muttered, rubbing his sore forehead, "I'll be lucky to have two brain cells left to rub together after this little escapade."

"Bones," Jim said, and pushed Leonard back down onto his back. His face was very close now, upside down in Leonard's vision, his breath puffing on Leonard's chin. He licked Leonard's lower lip, then inside.

"If you think—" Leonard said, muffled by a moan as Jim did something wicked with his tongue against what felt like Leonard's tonsils, "That—you—can—get away with—oh—"

Articulation floated out of reach as Jim moved down – up? – Leonard's body, the low ceiling forcing them to press closer than was strictly comfortable, their sweat-sticky skin sliding and catching as they writhed together.

Then Jim was nuzzling him, mouthing him through his pants, and Leonard was pretty sure he was going to come in his pants like a randy kid if Jim didn't cease and desist in the next fifteen seconds, but his surviving brain cells couldn't muster themselves enough to form a protest. Leonard caught the twinkle in the peep of one blue eye, and knew. Using sex as a means of getting out of trouble had to be the lowest form of trickery in the book, but he had to admit Jim knew the Book of Leonard from cover to cover.

"Okay," he panted, "You—asshole," and grabbed Jim's hips, which were only a tantalizing few inches from his own face, and palmed the hardness there. Much to his satisfaction, Jim jerked, thumping his tailbone into the ceiling hard enough to make the welds creak.

The recycled air in the corridor quickly got stale and hot, as they panted and writhed, half crazed in the confinement of their clothing and the close quarters, elbows and knees bumping into bulkheads. Zippers came down, victim to fumbling fingers. Leonard smoothed his hand over Jim's slick erection. Jim made soft panting noises as his hips pressed down, his hips thumping rhythmically against the metal bulkhead above, driving into Leonard's fist even as his hand kept pace on Leonard's cock. It was bruising and breathless and claustrophobic, like having sex in a coffin, but Leonard's orgasm shook through him in a white-hot flare even as the comparison came to mind.

Jim collapsed on top of him in a boneless, wet heap. Unable to breathe, Leonard seriously debated biting him. He instead settled for patting him awkwardly on the back, because that was the only part of Jim he could reach that was semi-post-coitally-romantic.

Finally, thankfully, Jim picked himself up – thumping his tailbone again and wincing – and observed, "There's an exit fifty yards up that way."

"You—" Leonard sputtered. Jim rolled off up against a bulkhead to face him, wincing as his tender backside came into contact with the metal again. "Did you just get me out of bed and down into god knows where just to have sex?"

Jim glared at that, as indignant as a man who'd just had an orgasm could manage, even as he shifted around awkwardly to get his pants back on. "I could think of a couple more places more comfortable than a stupid jeffries tube to have sex in, Bones. And sexier." He lifted one sticky hand. "And more sanitary."

"Then what—"

"I found—" he stopped, looking frustrated. "It's a viewport, okay? Into the warp core." He paused, seeing the look on Leonard's face. "It's pretty, okay? All glowing blue shifting light, almost alive – I can't tell begin to describe it, you just have to see it." He stopped again, now defensive. "What? Can't I show you something pretty if I want to?"

Leonard kissed him then, long and full. When they parted, Jim looked bewildered. "You crazy kid," Leonard murmured, and definitely didn't say anything really fucking hokey like You can take me anywhere you like.

Jim's bewilderment shaded into uncertainty, blue eyes scanning Leonard's face. "So you want to go back to your quarters, then?" Solicitously now, "You look tired."

Leonard began tucking himself away, grimacing at the wet spot in his pants, trying to think of a way to phrase his answer. When he was done, he found Jim grinning knowingly at him. "What?" he asked, warily.

"So that's a yes."

Leonard debated saying no for a long, serious moment, in which visions of his soft bed - and the toilet, for that matter - danced in his head like sugarplum fairies, but - he sighed, and flapped a hand at Jim in a Go on, then, do your worst gesture.

Jim's grin only widened. "Say it, Bones."

"I'm not saying shit, dammit. It's bad enough that I'm out here, in the middle of goddamn nowhe-"

"Please?" Jim leaned in and whispered in his ear, all hot and moist breath, a nibble that shivered Leonard to his toes. "I'll make it worth your while."

Leonard stared at him. Dammit, this just wasn't ifair/i. "For the love of -" Jim licked his lips, and Leonard crumbled. "All right, all right, stop that." He sighed, and intoned unenthusiastically, "Lead on, yon brave and fearless leader."

Jim looked positively gleeful. "See, that wasn't so hard, was it, Bones?" He gave Leonard a hard peck on the lips and started crawling back the way they'd come.

"The things you make me do," Leonard grumbled and followed, swallowing a smile before Jim could see.