I want the K (if I'm not too late).
You'll have to take my word for it: 7, Romantic Kiss
He'd never been able to decide, in Jim's terms, which one of them was the "Good Cop" and which the "Bad Cop". He was sure that the Superintendent would argue the point with more repute, but Pike had never seemed to feel the need to bother. Especially not when, as they were, they were such a dynamic and relatively effective team.
Attempting to bring down the smoky rings of Chicago crime, in particular it's stiffening Red influence, needed a team that was dynamic and effective. And thanks to Spock, they even managed to be somewhat eclectic, which was one of the few saving graces when they went undercover. No one trusted anyone that looked or behaved too American when it went deep in districts like 31.
The lead that Jim had landed the week before, thanks to a plucky Red kid, Chekov, who was paying his ticket to American citizenship by helping them, had led to a hounds den so deep in 31 he was sure he wouldn't walk out without a bullet in him somewhere. It was, according to Chekov, a kingpin that he was penciled to meet. Aside from the Chief himself, the biggest and baddest of them all.
Khan, they called him. Like Kipling's tiger.
When Spock finally managed to find the place, he was convinced that he'd come to the wrong place. Though brothels, coyly disguised under escort or masseuse services often, were not uncommon, queer oriented ones were either entirely unacknowledged or nonexistent. And to have a kingpin be hiding in a backward whore's den was certainly not a predictable turn in events.
All the same, Spock was sure that he had remembered the address correctly, and comported himself according to the instructions that the boy Chekov had provided. Asking for "the Fifth Floor Special", accepting no less than a "receipt", and going nowhere but to the elevator. The elevator key, which one needed to get to the fifth floor at all, was his proof of purchase. And the dark man at the front desk had, though while keeping a keen eye on him, had shown no indication of being otherwise suspicious.
Upon his arrival to the fifth floor, he was surprised for yet the second time that night. Rather than finding a tawdry, velvet-carpeted vixen's den, he was welcomed into a quiet, if not somewhat shadowy study. The books that lined the walls were nearing innumerable, given their variable size and shape. Every surface, even the Queen bed left heaped with tousled bedding, was laden with papers and volumes of God knew what.
And sitting amidst it all, his angular face illuminated by a dim and dusty desk lamp, was the tiger himself. Khan, much to his surprise, was just as pale and drawn a man as most others that wandered the streets of Chicago looking for a ventricle out of hell. His eyes gleamed in a way that belied what could be his otherwise banal presence, and made Spock immediately aware that he had the right man.
"Well," the man said, his tone as dark as the room they were ensconced in, "perhaps now this wild goose chase may finally be over."
Spock was a man of logic. Integrity, loyalty, but always reigned over by facts and not by feelings. That night, their sober conversation and equally sober relations made him disbelieve that statement. For, as a man of logic, to be swept up in the chimerical eyes of a known killer and feel the sting of something possessive and hating and wonderful, there was no greater doom than to willingly cast aside reason.
Yet come morning, by which time the lamp had burned out and the only light eeked in from a gun-slat window, he found himself more enamored of an assured doom than he had ever been with a reasonable life. Perhaps all along that was why he'd shacked up with Jim Kirk, a man apparently hell-bent on getting himself killed in a blaze of glory. Was why he had left home, and everything he could have had, to stick it to those who had ever doubted him. Particularly when that doom meant waking up to even breathing on his shoulder and an expanse of skin that he could stake a claim on shamelessly. Khan was not a man lacking in strength. But Spock could be stronger.
Would be stronger, to truly bring the chase to an end. What that meant, and what it would look like should he succeed, he hadn't the slightest. But when Khan blinked awake against his shoulder, and melted into a half-dozing kiss that could have liquefied the stars, Spock found that it didn't matter. The purpose of the journey, his mother had always said, was to savor the process and not fret over the result.
