Wow first new post since '06, and we will never speak of those old things again.
This is my first time dabbling in Star Trek and its a fairly new fandom to me so bare with me I suppose.
This was very accidentally prompted by a two sentence horror story I saw on Tumblr.
"My daughter won't stop crying and screaming in the middle of the night. I visit her grave and ask her to stop, it doesn't help."
"Jo. Please. You have to stop." Leonard whispered to the darkness.
It had been two months since the death of his daughter, nearly that long since he'd had any decent sleep.
Every night he saw Jo's ghost, heard Jo's ghost. A mangled little girl in a bloody green dress. Crying. Screaming.
"Daddy! Help me! Please it hurts!"
"Jo… I know… but please, you need to stop."
She seemed so real, like he could almost reach out and touch her if he wanted to. He didn't want to. He didn't even want to see her like this. He wished he couldn't remember her like this, but it would be burned into his memory forever.
The sound of Joanna crying was the first thing Leonard noticed as he came to.
"Jo? Baby, ya ok?" He started to twist around in his seat when a sharp spike of pain gave him pause. Left radius and ulna fractured by the collision whipping him into the side of the hover car, forth and fifth ribs on that side cracked if not broken for the same reason.
"Daddy! It hurts! Make it stop!"
Leonard was not about to let his pain keep him from his little girl. "It's okay baby. It's gonna be oka…" He trailed off as he turned and caught sight of his daughter for the first time since the accident. Nothing was going to be okay.
The passenger side back seat of the car had taken the brunt of the impact. Joanna's seat had taken the brunt of the impact. Shrapnel from the door was imbedded in her side, there were deep lacerations on her face from the shattered window, the right side of her chest may have been crushed altogether, he couldn't tell beneath all the blood and twisted metal.
"Help me Daddy! Please!" already her voice was growing softer, weaker.
"I'm here Jo." It took longer than he would have likes to crawl into the back seat. "I've got you." He wrapped himself around his daughter's frail little body, trying to jostle her as little as possible.
"Make it stop hurting Daddy." Tears ran down Joanna's ruined face.
"It'll stop soon baby."
"Promise?"
"Promise."
"You'll make it better?"
Breath caught in Leonard's chest but he managed to force out "Promise"
"Daddy…"
"I'm right here Jo."
"I love you…"
"I love you too baby girl."
The sound of approaching sirens joined the sound of bystanders yelling for help. Leonard didn't care. It was already too late to save his little girl.
By the time an ambulance arrived Joanna McCoy had already died in her father's arms.
"Jo I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. But please, you have to stop."
For the moment at least, the ghost faded.
Over the next month it only grew worse. Leonard hadn't slept in days. He was seeing Joanna everywhere. In his quarters, on the bridge, in the corridors, in the med bay.
"Daddy. You promised. You promised you'd make it better. You didn't make it better." She preyed on his guilt now. "You lied to me Daddy." She'd become cruel.
"Jo… there was nothing I could do."
"It was your fault."
"I know." and it was. It was definitely Leonard's fault. Had he not taken her out that day…
"Bones. What's wrong?" Jim put his hands on the older man's shoulders so he couldn't escape this time.
Leonard blinked bloodshot hazel eyes. He wasn't even really looking at his friend, he was looking at the bloody specter behind him.
"I bet mommy really hates you now."
That was true. Jocelyn was well on her way to that even before the accident.
"Bones, hey." the captain waved one hand in front of Leonard's face and snapped his fingers. "Enterprise to Doctor McCoy, do you copy?"
The doctor blinked the world back into focus and Joanna disappeared. "Dammit Jim. You know what's wrong."
"Bones, don't lie to me. This is more than…" Jim wasn't sure how to finish his statement.
"Jim…" He tried to shake off his captain.
"No Bones. You're in pain. Not just because of… of Joanna, but real physical pain too."
"It's nothin' Jim." and that was true. Compared to the pain of his broken heart the growing twinge in his chest was nothing, almost less than nothing. "I'll be alright."
"Then give yourself some time away. Doctor M'Benga will put you on medical leave if you need it. You look like you're going to collapse at any moment."
"There's no need for that, just skipped coffee this morning, " A lie. Coffee was the only thing keeping him on his feet. He faked a smile, "The ship needs her CMO after all."
"Just don't try to operate on anyone with your hands shaking like that."
Leonard smiled again, more genuinely this time, "I won't Jim."
"Were you able to discern what is wrong with Doctor McCoy?" Spock asked the captain over his first chess move.
"Other than the obvious? No."
"There is quite assuredly something wrong with him."
"Spock, he lost his kid. Give him a break."
"Jim, it is more than that. This is not simply emotional. He seems to be experiencing psychosomatic pain in the ribs that were broken in the crash. In addition I have seen him speaking to empty space and shadows when he believes no one can see it. I believe he may be hallucinating."
"That seems a little far fetched. What the hell would cause that."
"I do not know but I have examined the evidence logically and have come to the only plausible conclusion."
"I'll try to talk to him again before his next shift, but I doubt I'll get anything more out of him."
Leonard's final tipping point came only a few days later. An explosion planet side had caught the away team off guard resulting in several injuries. The worst of which, though minor, were to the captain.
"Bones, your hands steady enough to fix my face?" Jim asked as he walked into the med bay with blood on his face and blood on his shirt.
The doctor looked up from his work and stifled a gasp. All Jim's injuries were confined to his right side. His mind immediately raced back to Joanna and suddenly she stood before him again.
"Don't worry Daddy. I'll fix Uncle Jim."
Leonard tried to blink her away… and only managed to blink his daughter's injuries onto his captain. Suddenly it was so hard to breathe.
"See? I told you I'd fix him Daddy."
"Bones? You ok?" Jim reached out with his bloodied hand.
Leonard stumbled backwards. "No… no… not you too. Not you too."
"Bones what are you talking about?"
It felt as if all the air had gone out of the room. "Not you. Not you." He continued breathlessly.
"Calm down. You're starting to scare me."
"I'm scaring you? I'm… not the one… walking around… with… half his face gone."
"Half my face gone? Bones it's a few scratches."
The doctor could only shake his head when gasps for breath changed to coughing as pain flared in his chest.
"Nurse Chapel I think we're gonna need you over here." the captain called.
Leonard looked down at his shaking hands and was shocked to discover blood. "Wha…?" the world went grey and tilted sideways.
"Bones!" Jim lunged forward to catch his friend before he hit the floor. "Nurse Chapel!" he called again. "It's okay Bones, it's gonna be okay."
"Nothin'… is… okay…" He managed, more blood appearing on his lips, before darkness closed on him.
Leonard woke to the sounds of a biobed monitoring someone's internal functions, only belatedly did he realize that he was the one being monitored.
"Bones. I know you're awake. Nice thing about these biobeds, they tell me that. Don't bother faking it."
"Jim."
"Yup."
"What happened?" He ran a hand over his face, finding his head clearer than it had been in a long time.
"It's been two days since you started coughing up blood and passed out. Granted you spent a good deal of that first day in surgery."
"Surgery?"
Jim twisted in his seat and grabbed a small jar from the workbench behind him and held it up for him to see. "That psychosomatic pain you've been having apparently wasn't so psychosomatic after all. Doctor M'Benga dug this out of your lung."
Preserved in the specimen jar was a black centipede like arthropod about half a centimeter long.
"It tore a bunch of blood vessels when you started freaking out."
"I didn-"
"Yes Bones, you did. You started hyperventilating when I walked into med bay." Jim sighed before continuing. "It's not your fault. The little bastard's been giving off a narcotic substance trying to keep you numb to the fact it was there. Spock tested it. He said it was hallucinogenic."
Leonard groaned.
The captain took that as a confirmation that he had indeed been seeing things. "You saw something when I came to have you fix my face, didn't you?"
He took a deep breath, wincing at the lingering pain in his chest. "Mostly I've been seein' Jo, but when you came in you… you looked like her Jim." He turned his head away, not wanting his captain to see the tears that were starting to flow. It was the first time he's cried since Joanna's funeral.
He needed no further explanation than that. "Let it out. It'll help." Jim reached out and took his friend's hand. "I'm sorry, Bones." they sat together in silence for a few moments before the captain spoke again. "This is my fault."
"No it's not."
"But it is! Best we can figure is you picked the thing up when I was trying to keep your mind off the pain with away missions. It's my fault you had a parasite living in your chest and fucking with your head!"
"And that pain is my fault. It's my fault that my daughter is dead!" Leonard snapped.
"No Bones. You can't possibly think that."
"She couldn't have told me anything I didn't already believe."
Jim squeezed Leonard's hand tighter. "Stop. You can't keep blaming yourself. If you wanna blame someone, blame the bastard that ran the light, blame God, hell you can even blame me… but don't blame yourself."
"That's rich comin' from you."
"Yeah, I suppose it is." the captain couldn't help the hint of a smile that tugged at the corner of his mouth at that. "You'll get through this Bones. It's gonna be hard and it's gonna take time and some days you're gonna feel like you'd rather throw yourself out an airlock that keep going, but it'll get better. I'm here for you. We're all here for you., isn't that right Christine?" He asked as the head nurse crossed the med bay to check her colleague's condition.
"We'll help you however we can Len." She said with a soft smile.
"Thank you." Leonard closed his eyes and allowed himself to relax, feeling better than he had in months.
Notes:
This bastard was born after shooting angsty prompts back and forth with a friend for a couple of days. I made it clear that I wanted no prompts having to do with dead children. I know myself well enough to know what would eventually come of it. Then Tumblr happened. Goddammit! And my natural instinct to break my favorite character took over, and this developed over the next couple days. I fully believe that I am a truly horrible person.
The title was suggested by the very same friend in reference to Joanna and the "icky parasite." You know, I'm pretty sure we're both horrible/
So there you have it! My first Star Trek fic! Good? Bad? Meh? Please let me know so I can improve!