I Just Dance [3/?]

[ifeelbetter]

Title: I Just Dance [3/?]
Author: ifeelbetter
Pairing: Kirk/Spock eventually, Chekov/Sulu
Word Count: 2,856
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Don't own, won't ever, wish I did.
Summary: AU So You Think You Can Dance. Kirk is a tapper and everybody keeps telling him tappers don't win. Insert reference to no-win scenarios here.
Notes: Music references: Jim and Sulu's duet is OK Go's It's Tough To Have A Crush. Nyota and Spock's salsa is to Celia Cruz's Rie Y Llora because of how much I deeply love her.

Part I / Part II


VII. First Routine, Jim

There had been some big legal thing the year before--everyone had heard of it, no matter how disconnected they were from reality TV. A same-sex ballroom couple had sued the show and, somehow, that meant that the show had to prove itself gay-friendly this year. The only difference this made for the contestants was a fairly superficial one: they could end up with either gender as their partner.

Jim was fine with that. Hell, he was a little excited by anything that lowered the chances of him ending up with Nyota, who looked like she might hate him not a little bit.

She and Spock had become bestest buddies. As if Spock wasn't already halfway terrifying on his own, her glowering face behind him made Jim re-think the precarious friendship they may have been on the brink of forming.

They picked names out of a hat. It was very old school. It was even a bowler hat.

Jim was torn between pumping the air victoriously--which might have been too obvious re: his complete and utter terror of Nyota--and grinding his teeth when Spock picked Nyota's name. They were the first to be paired up which was fine because of how they probably painted each other's toenails while watching black and white films and eating tubs of Ben & Jerry's in the evenings.

Jim wasn't jealous of Nyota, obviously. He just thought Spock had impressive skills and would probably treat his partner like gold. And he had those hands.

He settled for snorting.

Things were going decently. A couple of girls got paired up and they high-fived daintily. It would have been rude to snort twice in five minutes. Jim mourned inwardly that he had already used his snort quotient on Spock and Nyota.

Jim could do basic mathematics so he already knew that there was a pretty good chance of at least one pair of guys being partnered.

He picked Sulu's name out of the hat when it was his turn. They were the only all-guy pair that week.

It was a lucky coincidence that he and Sulu had worked out a secret handshake the night before. It involved a lot of tricks like under-the-arm, behind-the-back, slapping-both-sides-of-the-hand, etc. They did the secret handshake, all five minutes of it, in celebration. The camera crew loved it.

They were doing a contemporary routine which was hilarious considering the predominance of contemporary dancers in the Top 20 and how neither Sulu nor Jim was one of them. They were assigned Mandy Moore who seemed less crazy than some of the other choreographers.

She told them, before the door had even finished closing behind them, that she wanted to do a gay story. She looked like she was expecting a lot of resistance and was revving up for a convincer.

Sulu and Jim looked at each other. Jim shrugged.

"OK," said Sulu.

Mandy blinked.

Jim didn't blame her for the pause. It took a lot of people a minute to figure out how very flexible he was about gender. And Sulu was a b-boy. It's, like, the only kind of dance that you can be butch about.

But Jim had seen Sulu flirt with Pavel. It was irrefutable.

Mandy recovered relatively smoothly and explained the concept of the piece. As far as Jim could tell, he and Sulu were childhood friends who bickered a lot in a pull-your-pigtails kind of way until they figured out they were actually in love. It was very cute, maybe even a tad saccharine. But that was probably for the best, giving them both a chance to prove they were more than the surface packaging.

It was totally comfortable, too. They had been sharing a room since they got to LA and had gotten close. And Sulu flirting with Pavel was nothing short of the cutest thing this side of a basket of kittens so bonding hadn't been hard.

During one of the breaks, the camera crew pulled them aside for a brief interview.

"Is it uncomfortable to pretend to be in love with a guy?" asked the guy behind the camera, not even bothering to poke his head into view.

Jim pulled Sulu's face towards him, scrunching it into a fish-face. "Who wouldn't love this face?" he said.

Sulu shoved him off. "The guy part isn't the hard part," he said, with a sigh towards the camera. "It's this guy. You'd have to be his mother to love him."

"You only say that because I haven't pulled out my Blue Steel face yet." He puckered his lips at the camera. "Now no one can resist me."

Sulu rolled his eyes.

That was, of course, the promo they used on air before their routine. That, and a hint that Sulu was having trouble with the choreography which he totally wasn't. The show had to find its drama somewhere.

The routine went off without a hitch, even the final moment where Sulu was supposed to turn towards Jim and have, like, have a gay epiphany. They'd giggled like pre-teen girls every time in rehearsals. This time, though, Sulu gave him the right kind of Look and Jim was able to keep a straight face at the idea of pining after him.

When they stood next to Cat for their review by the judges, Jim noticed a couple of fans in the back of the theater with a giant sign.

It said: "Team Jim." There was a stick figure crying in the corner with an arrow identifying him as Spock.

He scanned the theater quickly while Nigel waxed poetic about Sulu's authenticity of emotion. Sure enough, there was a Team Spock group with a sign as well.

Since when were he and Spock teams?

He tuned back into the judges when Adam Shankman started to cry.

They were shuffled offstage eventually with glowing reviews from the judges. Neither he nor Sulu had to do their solos till late in the second hour so he excused himself and ran away to find a computer.

If they were in the audience with signs, they would definitely be on the internet. And he had to know.

It wasn't hard to find. There were fanclubs. It was the second week of performances and there were fanclubs. He had a Team Jim fanclub.

He printed out a screenshot of Spock's fanclub. He deserved a little gloat.

Bones, who was even grouchier than usual during show nights, was flipping an unlit cigarette around his fingers just offstage.

"Have you seen Spock?" Jim asked.

Bones shrugged. "They said something about stretching." He raised an eyebrow at Jim. "I saw the Team Jim signs, by the way."

"I know!" Jim said, grinning. "I have a team."

"You do know the sparkly vampire has a team too, right? You're in the same category as a sparkly vampire now."

"I am definitely more like Team Jakob, thankyouverymuch." He grinned again when Bones had to raise the other eyebrow. "I am confident in my masculinity and have, yes, seen Twilight." He elbowed Bones who grumbled. "Plus, chicks dig that shit."

"Right. Chicks."

Jim gave him the finger (which, really, was the only appropriate response) and continued his search for Spock.

VIII. First Routine, Spock

Spock was, indeed, stretching in one of the backrooms.

Jim barged through the door, letting it slap heavily against the wall. "You're totally the Team Sparkly in this--" he began to say but froze mid-sentence when he actually looked up from his stack of paper.

Nyota's leg was rubbing against Spock's neck. Jim really was having trouble coming to grips with the entire visual but that element in particular seemed to be on loop in his head. There was also Spock's hand, weaving between her legs and resting on her thigh. That was important too.

He gaped.

Nyota leaned forward a tiny bit as Spock lifted her and suddenly her leg was hooked over his shoulder and that was the moment--and it had been a longtime coming, what with the absolute meltdown his brain had been in since he opened the rehearsal door--that Jim realized this was their routine.

"Oh shit. I totally thought I walked in on you two banging for a minute," he said because he had never really learned where the brakes were for his tongue.

Spock raised an eyebrow at Jim and lifted Nyota entirely over his head. She was perched there, all swan-like and graceful, until she ruined the moment with a totally unladylike snort.

"It's salsa, Jim," she said in her best how-have-you-managed-to-be-this-old-and-this-stupid voice. "Close enough." She flipped forward off of Spock's shoulders, sliding down his entire body slowly.

Jim swallowed.

"Yeah, I'm getting that," he said.

Nyota came to a halt lying on the ground between Spock's feet. He sighed and offered her a hand up.

"Was there a purpose to your intrusion, Jim?" asked Spock.

"Yeees," said Jim slowly, trying to rush his brain back into operation and away from salsa (which, apparently, meant choreographed sex and hot damn). He blinked. "Yes!" He shook the wad of papers in his hand. "Teams, that's what's up."

Nyota rolled her eyes. "I need to finish with makeup," she told Spock, grabbing her bag and heading towards the door. She twirled her fingers without glancing behind her. "Bye, boys."

"Teams?" asked Spock, his head tilting to one side slightly. It was a little ridiculous how dry the tilt of his head made Jim's throat feel.

"Yeah, like the vampire and the werewolf with the tweeny-boppers?" said Jim, revving up his gloat. "You're totally the vampire in this storyline, though."

"I fail to see the connection between us and--" Spock struggled for about half a second for the right word "--occult lore."

"I'm just insisting now, before you are fully briefed on the subject, that you are sparkly and I am not."

"I concur that you are not--" Spock sniffed slightly, pronouncing the next word with delicate disdain "--sparkly."

Jim smirked. "Not unless you ask real nice." The smirk changed seamlessly into a leer because Jim had skills like that.

Spock coughed politely and turned his gaze to the papers in Jim's hand.

Jim handed him the pile and slung an arm around his shoulders so that he could point out the funniest bits.

"You are saying that our fans have construed a false sense of combativeness between us due to the editing process of the initial episodes?" Spock said, flipping through the pages.

"Yeah," Jim said, leaning towards Spock's neck and letting his words puff against Spock's skin, "They totally thought we were being combative that time during the last day in Vegas." He leaned slightly closer, his lip almost grazing the space just below Spock's ear, right along the cheekbone. "Me? I just thought it was the sexual tension."

Spock coughed again but it came out more like a gasp. He was completely motionless, every muscle grounded to a complete halt. "That was not my conclusion," he said carefully. He took a deliberate step away from Jim and then a second deliberate step.

Jim rubbed his neck awkwardly. Maybe he had gotten this all wrong after all.

Spock didn't meet his eyes quite when he held the pile of papers out, arm completely straight. "Thank you for the information," he said solemnly, as if this was something other than wack-a-doo hilarious. "I am ... intrigued by the various interpretations of our interaction."

"Yeah?" Jim folded his arms.

"Yes. I will meditate further upon the issue." Spock said with a sort of polite half-nod and left the room.

"...what the fuck?" Jim asked the empty room.

He would have followed Spock and pressed the issue--like, very literally--but Spock and Nyota's salsa routine was next and they were being rounded up by the various technical people.

Jim did wait in the wings to watch the routine, though, because he had a libido.

It was everything he'd hoped. Maybe even more. He was a little surprised that this was fine for a family audience but George Carlin's favorite seven words were still no-go for network television. Surely the thing Nyota did at the end, upside down, was far more likely to change the course of a pubescent child's life than the occasional curse.

The thing Spock did with his hips while she was upside down? It was nothing short of fully clothed pornography. Jim would be dreaming about that thing Spock did with his hips for years and his sheets would need to be changed hourly.

The judges agreed with him for the most part but were less insistent on the obvious pornographic nature of the routine than Jim was in the privacy of his own mind. Nigel went off on a bit of a tangent about Celia Cruz's position as the Queen of Salsa and how proud she would have been to see Nyota's backwards-something-cross-something.

When the pair ran backstage, Nyota stomped immediately towards Jim. She poked a finger at his chest.

"OK, fine, so it worked for us this time--" she said, obviously entering into an argument Jim hadn't been privy to for the first couple of rounds but seemed to be doing decently nonetheless "--but don't you ever pull that bullshit again. I will find you and I will end. You."

"You're going to have to specify about the bullshit. I pull a lot of bullshit in a day," he said meekly. "No, like, totally serious here. What'd I do?"

She did a brief check for cameras and then hissed, "The thing. With Spock." She looked exasperated with his stupidity, raising one eyebrow. "Look, it's a tricky routine anyway and then, with all the--" she made a gesture that could have meant anything but seemed to be indicating vaguely towards Jim's groin "--right before we go on. It's just not sporting, OK?"

"Right. I see. Yes." Jim's brow furrowed at a thought. "Did Spock say that he--"

"God. I'm not Oprah. I don't care about the sex you're obviously not having, OK? Just don't not have it right before I need him to be limber. No more of that."

"I'm not allowed to..." Jim's brow furrowed even more "not have sex with him right before you perform?"

"Yes!" Her tone definitely implied that he was a moron but he was OK with that, surprisingly.

"He didn't seem--" Jim began again, attempting some return to logic again.

"Just don't do it again!" she hissed, with a final jab. Her costume was tiny beyond belief and what was there seemed to be made of a half dozen red feathers. They swirled around her angrily as she spun on her heel.

Spock appeared at his side as Nyota stomped away.

"I observed your performance earlier," he said. If Jim had been one of the apparently large number of people who knew how to raise only one eyebrow, he would have employed the skill then. He couldn't do it so he employed a skill that usually escaped him as well: he held his tongue.

Spock continued after the pause. "I found your performance...moving." Jim waited another beat to see if he'd continue again. He did. "I was surprised to discover you both could be--" his jaw moved a little as he sought the correct word. Jim watched the tiny movement with avid interest. "--so open-minded."

Jim snorted. "You have no idea." He nodded towards one of the other wings.

Pavel was supposed to go on next with a blonde girl who was quite a bit taller than him. Judging from their costumes, Jim guessed they were going to do something drastically outside Pavel's comfort zone. Sulu was fussing over Pavel's hair and only half-heartedly pretending to be doing something other than gazing into Pavel's eyes. Pavel was supposed to be making a similar effort at pretense but was failing utterly.

Spock followed Jim's gaze.

"They're sort of absurdly adorable," Jim said.

"That is undeniably true," agreed Spock. Jim grinned at him.

"You still 'meditating' upon the various 'interpretations of our interactions' or have you come to some sort of conclusion?" Jim asked. He tried to look innocent. "I only am asking for a progress report."

"I am conducting research," Spock said. Jim could tell that a smile was pulling at the edge of his mouth.

"It seems to me," Jim said, letting one of his hands brush against Spock's, "that you need to add a level of practical research. You know...in the field." He let his hand graze Spock's thigh which, honestly, had been an effort of will to prevent happening earlier. He kept the touch light, though, the merest brush of his little finger.

Spock's jaw shifted slightly again and Jim was leaning towards it without even really meaning to. He turned his head slightly so that his eyes met Jim's.

"I believe you are next," he said simply. He pointed behind Jim towards the docket. "Your solo?" he added smugly.

"Shit." Jim raced away to get his stuff in order and to find his damn tap shoes.