Hi. First off-Hello Star Trek Fandom! First time writing for you guys, gotta say, I hope you like it =P
Secondly, I know this whole 'Into Darkness Bones coping with Jim's Death' thing is old news here, but I wanted to put my own spin on it, put in my two cents worth.
Because this is, literally, not worth more than two cents.
Still, I hope you enjoy it, and feedback is wonderful so...yeah. TO THE STORY!
Disclaimer: God I wish I owned it, but I'd probably screw it up so it's for the best that Star Trek does not belong to me. =/

Entire Galaxies in His Eyes

Len was a Doctor.

Oh, he was other things too-a father, an ex-husband, a friend, a son and the best friend of the biggest pain in the ass to traverse the galaxies-but Doctor was what people thought when they heard his name.

Leonard 'Bones' McCoy-Doctor, Chief Medical Officer on the USS Enterprise.

No Doctor was an idiot.

Well, actually, some were but Len wasn't.

Len wasn't an idiot and he was a Doctor, so he knew that sometimes, just sometimes, there were people you couldn't save.

Sometimes you had to lose a few.

Sometimes, even though he tried-and tried hard goddammit-he couldn't save everyone.

He was good, but he wasn't God. He was just a Doctor, and Doctor's didn't save lives so much as prolong them and sometimes some people dont' have any time left on the clock.

It's a lesson every Doctor learns early on, and it's the hardest one you have to learn.

The first couple of times he lost a patient? Yeah, it was hard.

Miriam Elizabeth Lebeau (who went by 'Missy') was sixteen. She had long, dark hair and bright green eyes and the kind of smile that lights up an whole persons face and shines in their eyes. She laughed loud and often, and when she spoke she spoke with her hands and her face, gesturing wildly and laughing as she told her stories.

Len couldn't save her, and watched as those arms she waved around when she spoke grew thinner and thinner, watched as her long hair fell out and her laughter stopped ringing out through the ward.

Watched as she withered away.

That was the first, and every Doctor clearly remembers his first, because the first is the most painful. And for Len, the first just had to be the one he sacrificed his nights for, the one who had to introduce him to her family, the one who just had to connect with him and understand him and befriend him and nine years later Missy's little brother still sent him a card every Christmas.

There were others of course, and Len remembered them too, maybe not with the same clarity but he still remembered their faces, their names, how they died, what he'd done wrong or the things that he just couldn't control.

The point was, Len knew better than most that people died.

He was a Doctor, he knew Death intimately, and he knew it was people's nature to eventually die.

You're born, you live a few messy, pain-filled decades and then you die, and no matter what age you are, at your funeral some jackass always says it's 'before your time'.

Bullshit.

Bull-fucking-shit.
There was no set time for you to die, no point you reach where magically you've been on earth long enough for it to be considered ok for you to die.

The cold, hard truth is that every second you spend breathing, thinking, living, could be your last.

Any second you could be ripped away at any second and isn't that a beautiful fucking tragedy? Any moment you could drop down dead and when you thought about that it leant a sort of...beauty to every second, made everything so much more vivid and clear and real.

That is, if you liked that sort of crap.

It's always too soon though, for people who love you. Len's seen it countless times-families begging, pleading, bargaining for someone's life, for a few more years or days or hours, or even the chance to see them smile or hear their voice one last time.

Life didn't work that way though-you couldn't just wish for something. Death was final and absolute, there was no way to raise the dead.
Len wished it wasn't so, but the fact of the matter is everyone dies, and when it happens, when that shitstorm of death and grief and pain happens to you, you have to stick your chin up and deal with it. Len knew all this like he knew all 206 bones of the human bodies and the exact time his daughter was born.

It's what made it hard for him to make friends. The longer he spent around death, the more it dawned on him that eventually, someone he knew would die and it would hurt, and it would hurt a whole fucking lot.

And then his wife banged their neighbour and divorced him because of 'irreconcilable differences' and took his home, his money and his daughter away from him and left him with nothing, no way to move forward, no other option but Starfleet.

Len was weak, that's what he puts it down too. He was weak and tired and sad when he met Jim, so he let him slip through the cracks. This kid was young and funny and charming and Len was lonely.

Jim Kirk had entire galaxies in his eyes.

He had entire galaxies in his eyes, and the promise of some great and glorious future and a magnetic personality so what was Len supposed to do?

You can't refuse people like that, even though it broke his heart because the moment he saw those endless, shifting constellations shining through Jim's smile Len had known that this kid-this brilliant, amazing kid-wasn't meant to last long.
People like Jim never did.

It was basic astronomy, after all; the brightest stars, the ones that burned the hottest, always burnt out the fastest. As it was with stars, so it was with people. The ones who had the most hunger for life, the most potential, the ones who burned the brightest burned themselves from the inside out until nothing was left but a pretty corpse a broken family could cry over and dump in a hole in the ground.

And Jim Kirk, well...he had 'Live free, live hard, die young' written all over him, shining through every cocky grin like those damned galaxies Len saw in his pretty-boy blue eyes.

He was captivating, he was mesmerising and he was dangerous. He'd bring Len nothing but grief in the end, the kind of guy Len should avoid at all costs.

But Jim, Jim had this gravity surrounding him, and even though Len fought, he couldn't fight that magnetic pull forever and, before he knew it, he was trapped in orbit surrounding James T. Kirk.

And part of Len didn't even really mind. He didn't mind being caught up the hurricane that was Jim Kirk, and even began to forget the wreckage that would be left behind once the kid was done tearing a hole through his life and spinning him around so fast he could barely breathe.

Jim was like that-so bright and bold and awe-inspiring that you started to forget that, even in his best moments, the sand was spiraling down the hourglass.

It was a stupid decision, one of Len's worst, befriending Jim, but Jim hadn't given him much of a choice in the matter and Len just couldn't help himself.

There was something just so...tragically beautiful about a dying thing.

He wasn't trying to be deep or poetic or philosophical or something, it was just true.

Knowing something is dying makes their every second it lives so much more wonderful, because that smile could be their last, or those words might never be said again, and it was thrilling and heart-wrenching and beautiful and bitter and Len honestly wasn't surprised that life, fate, God, destiny, whatever decided to fuck him up by making Jim-reckless, glorious Jim-a magnet for all sorts of ridiculous trouble.

Len honestly wasn't surprised when whispers of a fatality reached the sickbay.
Len honestly wasn't surprised when he saw the still face of his very best friend-his alive, marvelous friend-looking up at him.

Len honestly wasn't surprised at all.

Len had been preparing for this moment every since he first realised (while leaning over a dopey and smiling Jim, cleaning out the cut above his eye where some idiot had smashed a bottle on his head) that he was stuck with the cocky little bastard, Len honestly wasn't surprised one bit that Jim had finally gotten himself into a whole mess of trouble Len for once couldn't pull him out of, but no amount of preparation or expectation could prepare him for the moment when he saw his best friend's corpse.

Nothing can prepare someone for that, for looking down at someone who had been so alive-so briefly alive-and realising that their seemingly inexhaustible luck had finally run out.

Jim was gone.

Dead.
Not moving.
Not talking.

Not breathing or thinking or being.

Jim was gone, and with him he'd taken a part of Len, the part that answered to 'Bones' and cleaned up after a bratty young Captain who'd wormed his way into Len's heart and decided to set up permanent residence there.

The knowledge that Jim was really, truly gone, that's he'd never perch himself on Len's desk and distract him from work again, never drunkenly grin up at Len and call him Bones and talk about how glad he was that they met, that they were friends, never comm down to the Med Bay just to piss him off, broke him inside.

Jim would never be Jim again.

He'd lived free, lived hard and died young and left behind a pretty corpse just like Len knew he would right from the very fucking beginning and it hurt.

Jim was gone.

Jim had died.

Jim was glorious and amazing and he'd died a slow, painful death and death did not suit him, not at all, and every second that passed just hammered it into Len's heart that he was deaddeaddeaddead and what the hell was he supposed to do now?
Meeting Jim had reincarnated him, grumpy, aimless Len had become Bones, and what was Bones without his pain-in-the-ass, arrogant, reckless, stupid best friend?
There could be a Jim without Bones, but not a Bones without Jim.

Len remembered Missy, with her lively eyes and her lively laugh and her lively smile and how she'd died, remembered his Attending smiling at him sadly and telling him he couldn't save everyone, that no one can beat death altogether, just con it for a while, and tried not to cry.

He wasn't an idiot, he was a Doctor, and he knew, he knew he couldn't save everyone.

But, even knowing that Jim was one of those people who were born to streak across the sky like a comet and then disappear, then die, some part of him had hoped that it would be different, that he'd somehow save Jim.

What was the fucking point of being a doctor if he couldn't save Jim.

What was anything without Jim? What was the Enterprise, the crew, his life without Captain James Tiberius Kirk, who was too busy being a stupid hero to realise the hole he'd leave behind in peoples lives.

The planet had collapsed and Len had spent so long in orbit he didn't know what to do now.

There was just no point.

Len was a Doctor, Len was Jim's friend and he'd failed to save him and nothing meant anything any more.

This just wasn't right.

This couldn't be happening.

No, Len couldn't, wouldn't let it happen.

Everything he knew told him he couldn't raise the dead, but he'd find a way. He'd fucking find a way because this was Jim dammit and he couldn't let him down.

He wasn't God, but he was damned fucking good dammit and he'd find a way.

Jim had brought him back to life after all, why couldn't he return the favour?

Jim Kirk had entire galaxies in his eyes.

Len would not rest until he made those galaxies shine again.

That's it!
Review if you have time, tell me what I'm doing wrong, characterisation issues ect...
I'm fairly new to this fandom, and pretty inexperienced fanfiction wise, so any advice would be helpful and accepted warmly. And I'm Australian, so some words like 'realise' we spell with an 's', not a 'z' No flames though please, they just make me sad. =(
Thanks for reading!
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