For that AU thing: your choice between Photog AU or Immortal!Jim with Robo!M'Benga. :|
So what I read was “do both”
1. Geoff stays fairly frequently with them because he doesn’t have a place in the city. He lives further out into the wilderness, in a house that is less house and more shack-attached-to-a-greenhouse. He likes the minimalism living style, and he can watch the rain fall without getting wet.
2. Geoff and Jim didn’t actually meet at a shoot first, they met at a gala hosted by Vulcan Magazine. To be specific, Jim found Leonard and Geoff having a heated conversation about the National Geographic via Murdoch, and whether or not that would affect the magazine’s rigorously fact-based existence.
4. Jim may or may not be taking pictures of his favorite people at Starfleet so he can give all of them a ‘behind the scenes’ page-a-day calendar for Christmas. It may be reduced to a monthly calendar. He may have misjudged his ability to take a good photograph. He can get the composition... it’s the light he can’t get right.
5. Jim’s favorite movie is Iron Sky because he’s literally a model trying to become an astronaut (+it’s ridiculous as all hell)
Robot!M’Benga, Immortal!Jim
1. Back when M’Benga first started to exhibit hard drive problems, Jim started making backups of all his files, copying them into other bodies in case he could no longer repair Geoff’s structure
2. It didn’t take more than fifty years before the storage type had become competely obsolete, and there was no way of doing anything but fixing the original body with extra parts and hope beyond hope that they’d find a way
3. His best ally in figuring out how to copy the files into new formats is M’Benga
4. The first time Jim realized that M’Benga no longer knew that he was a machine was the first time he asked him for help with a new system and Geoff laughed. “You still can’t back up a human brain, Jim.”
5. Leonard he can keep looking for- even with the probability of finding him before he dies again is minimal- but once Geoff is gone, he’ll be gone for good. Jim has nightmares about this. Constantly.