If James T. Kirk has a superpower, it’s getting under your skin.

You learned this on your very first day aboard the Enterprise. McCoy had barely finished introducing you to the Medbay when the Captain himself waltzed in, all swagger and charm, sporting a black eye and a split lip. You knew who he was immediately—every damn cadet at the Academy knew James T. Kirk. The prodigy. The reckless genius. The man who cheated the Kobayashi Maru and made Starfleet brass gnash their teeth. You had thought, naively, that maybe some of those stories had been exaggerated. Then you met him.

That was the beginning of what McCoy would later call “an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object.” You and Jim did not get along. At all.

Jim thrived on impulse, making decisions in the heat of the moment with that signature devil-may-care attitude that left a trail of bruises and bloodstains in his wake. You were precise, methodical, pragmatic. And unfortunately for you, his recklessness meant you spent an ungodly amount of time stitching him back together. If it wasn’t a cracked rib from a bar fight, it was a plasma burn from shielding some random ensign from enemy fire. He treated every trip to Medbay like a minor inconvenience, grinning through the pain as if it was just another part of his job. Meanwhile, you had to resist the urge to strangle him yourself.

Your arguments became legendary.

“There’s something weirdly charming about the way you glare at me like you’re two seconds from stabbing me with my own hypospray,” he quipped, eyebrows raising as you pressed a little too firmly against his wound. “Because I gotta say, your bedside manner is really suffering.”