I Will Try to Fix You
If there is a walking embodiment of Leonard's policy of space being nothing but disease and danger, it's James T. Kirk. It doesn't seem that there's a planet that exists where he doesn't get himself injured, or where the local fare has a spice that is in almost everything and that spice just happens to be something the captain is ridiculously allergic to. If Leonard had a credit for the number of times Spock has had to drag an anaphylaxis-ridden Jim into sickbay, he'd be a much richer man, that's for sure.
It's after one such occasion that Jim is laid up in sickbay, after something Spock reported as having the look and feel of an apple but the taste of a blueberry (Leonard's paraphrasing here, of course; Spock was much more descriptive and much more pompous about the whole thing) had caused his throat to close up tight as a Vulcan's anal sphincter muscle. That is to say, very. At least according to Leonard's research, read: Sharing a Starship with Commander Spock.
Jim also has these ugly purple blotches all over his skin which, while rather foreign, are nothing more than another reaction to the acids in the fruit. Alien fruits cause alien reactions, and Leonard knows this, but that doesn't stop him from being vividly disconcerted by Jim's eyes being almost swollen shut by the large, bruise-like discoloration.
"Are you out of your allergy-prone mind?" he demands, as soon as Jim has been given a sufficient amount of time to rest and Chapel has let him near the bed, because she knows as well as he does that it pisses him off when Jim pulls stunts like this. "Are you two? Do you just stick things in your mouth willy-nilly?"
"It looked like an apple," groans Jim, and Leonard knows that he's got a headache along with everything else—he told Chapel—but Leonard can't frankly bring himself to care.
"You were on a foreign planet!" cries Leonard. "The rule of thumb on any foreign planet is 'all is not as it seems'! This is first-year shit, Jim, come on now!"
In response, Jim rolls over and buries his head underneath the biobed's hard pillow. "Bones, please."
"Don't you 'Bones, please' me. I'm not fucking happy with you."
"Okay. Fine. Could you be not happy a bit quieter? My head is killing me...and I feel like I'm gonna puke."
"You feel nauseous?" Leonard mumbles, and gently palpates Jim's stomach to look for tension. Even though he's supposed to be mad at Jim, he's never been able to abide by anyone being in pain or distress, least of all someone he considers family. Up here in the black, Jim is just about the closest thing to family he has.
As if to answer, Jim gurgles, "Gonna be sick," and flops over to retch towards the floor. Leonard can't see it, which he's grateful for, but the ensign in the adjacent bed looks a little bit green himself, as he watches the captain regurgitate whatever else he'd eaten down on the planet. Chapel, because she's ridiculously smart and Leonard is indebted to her a thousand times over, pulls the curtain around the captain's biobed before they have some kind of sympathetic vomiting epidemic on their hands.
At least Jim seems a little bit more comfortable once he's gotten whatever it was out of his system. Not that 'post-vomit' is incredibly comfortable for anyone, but he closes his eyes and lays back and relaxes for the first time since coming into sickbay slung across Spock's shoulder.
The biobed had not alerted him to any gastric distress. Either the thing is defective, which Leonard doubts even though he is entirely too skeptical of modern technology for someone who was trained in medicine during the age of tricorders and dermal regenerators, or the nausea is more a side-effect of the pain Jim is in cranially. It's not the first time that Jim has gotten a migraine after coming out of an episode of anaphylaxis. He'd wonder if it was a symptom normally experienced, but he doubts that most people go into anaphylaxis often enough to tell if migraines are typical or not. It's usually something that people with allergies actively avoid.
Jim, of course, is anything but usual.
"Migraine?" Leonard guesses. He should have known it was more than a headache, even though Chapel had reported that Jim's pain was being caused by 'minor constriction of the cranial blood vessels.'
"Yeah," Jim murmurs, eyes still squeezed closed.
"Photosensitivity?"
"And sound," Jim mumbles, slightly unintelligible due to the pillow he's just pulled over his face. He's getting slowly restless again. Hopefully, Leonard can give him something for his pain before a repeat performance begins.
"I can fix that," Leonard says in an almost-murmur—not quite, of course, because he's still angry at Jim, goddamn it—and gets up to retrieve the proper medication.
He comes back with a few different things, a hypospray and a pair of pills among them, and presents them to Jim to choose whichever he considers the lesser of two evils at the moment. It only takes him a moment to choose to the hypospray, which means the need for relief is so urgent that he's willing to tolerate his least favorite thing—the sting of a hypospray—to get it immediately. That, or he's just not sure he'd be able to hold down pills in his current state.
"Next time you're confronted with a foreign fruit," Leonard mumbles as he loads the hypo, because he's a jackass and he can't let things go but that's his fucking job, after all, "I want you to think of this little adventure and have Spock scan it for any of your known allergens before you eat it. Actually, I'd prefer it if you'd restrain yourself and not eat it in the first place, but I know that some things just aren't going to happen."
Jim gives a little grin that has exhaustion and pain etched into it, but at least it's a smile. It's quickly gone, however, when Leonard presses the hypo into his neck and pushes down the trigger. He's gentler than he would usually be, because even though Jim had pissed him off, he's in pain enough. When he takes the hypo away, he rubs the little red spot with his thumb and murmurs, "Get some sleep."
As the cocktail of medications go to work, Jim closes his eyes.
It had all happened so fast.
The planet Aradia Prime is a hotbed of geological activity. The tectonic plates of the planet are about a thousand times more active than those on Earth ("Please do not subject the geology department to hyperbole Captain; the tectonic plates of the planet Aradia Prime are a mere 183.46 percent more active than those of Earth; hardly the thousand you just claimed") which, of course, makes it a great fucking idea for an away team with three of the highest ranking officers on the ship (CO, XO, and CMO, to be exact) to beam down with Enterprise's geological department.
It's not rare for Leonard to beam down onto planets where the environs pose a threat to the away team. It's also not rare for the CSO to oversee the operations of the science department, and if the CSO also happens to be the XO, he supposes it's kind of unavoidable. However, there is no reason—no reason on God's green Earth or Aradia Prime's vaguely copper-colored soil or Enterprise's shiny chrome warp nacelles—that the fucking CO should be down on a planet with three times the geologic activity of Earth, where he's good for literally nothing except standing there and looking pretty. Aradia Prime is an uninhabited planet. There is no need for diplomacy here.
Jim had literally come down to sit on a rock and stare at the guys and gals from geology do their thing.
The presence of the captain, whose life is arguably the most important on the ship (According to the Admiralty; Jim is under the impression that all lives aboard his ship are equally important, and Leonard is inclined to agree with him) is doing nothing for Leonard's stress levels. Never mind the fact that he's already on edge because the ground under his feet is in a constant state of restless movement. It feels like there is something very large, very far away, jumping up and down repeatedly and unceasingly. It's incredibly disconcerting.
"Torres!" he bellows to the head of geology, Veronica Torres, who's standing in the middle of the gaggle of geologists who have looks on their faces like Christmas has come early. "How much longer are we down here?"
"These instruments are delicate, Doctor," she replies, back to him as she watches one of the ensigns dig a hole for some long, rod-like thing to be buried in. "They need to be handled with utmost care. We'll be down here as long as we need to be in order to get these instruments in place."
"Careful, Lieutenant," Jim calls from his rock. "Doctor McCoy might be in a different department, but he outranks you."
Torres sighs loudly and replies, "Yes, Captain," in way that would result in reprimand for insubordination from practically any other captain in the fleet. Jim just lets it go and continues playing king of the mountain with the rock he's on, or whatever he's doing up there.
"I agree with Doctor McCoy, Lieutenant," Spock says. He's appeared at Leonard's elbow sometime between now and ten seconds ago. "Returning to the Enterprise promptly would be wise. The tension in the fault line is precarious and our window of opportunity is closing." Which basically means "This entire continent is going to quake soon and we need to be off this planet when it happens."
One good thing about the situation is that Arcadia Prime experiences seismic events on a predictable basis. They've spent a week in orbit trying to establish a pattern and, once they had, beamed down at the nearest window of low activity.
If their window of opportunity is about up, that does not bode well.
"I'm not sure, sir..."
"Estimate, Lieutenant!" Spock barks.
Torres jumps, turns around to look at Spock, and that's when it all goes to shit.
The restlessness of the ground goes from vaguely disconcerting to absolutely earth-shattering in the space of five seconds. The rock formations around them—which Leonard is beginning to realize are not so much formations as debris from other quakes—start tumbling down, right towards the geological team. The ensign with the instrument disappears when a massive boulder comes down, and Leonard hopes that she is behind it and not under it.
Spock moves quickly, grabbing Torres and another ensign and pushing Leonard himself out of the way before a rock comes down on where his head was a second earlier. It should disturb him that he's so used to having his life saved and saving other people's lives that he just swats vaguely at Spock's shoulder in gratitude before running in the direction of the ensign—God, what's her name? Ensign...Ensign Jefferies?—he'd last seen before the rock came down.
"Jefferies?" he bellows.
He comes around the rock, dodging further projectiles. All he can see of Jefferies is her hand from under the rock. She's under it. She's dead. Fuck.
"Kirk to Enterprise!" comes from his left, and he realizes that Jim has followed him. "The planet has destabilized, beam us up, beam us—"
Something comes down in Leonard's peripheral vision and Jim is suddenly gone, he can't see him, something's hit him and God, oh God—
Then he hears a scream and he can't say he's ever thought a scream was such a beautiful sound, but it means Jim is alive, not crushed under a rock, and he needs to get to him but for some reason his vision is going fuzzy and he can't see to navigate around the rock and there's no ground under his feet—
The transporter room of the Enterprise erupts into chaos as soon as the landing party is beamed back up. Spock, Lieutenant Torres, and the two uninjured ensigns quickly jump off the pad, and Leonard frantically turns around to find Jim. The first face he finds is the shattered Ensign Jefferies', and even though there is a twinge in his chest, he submits to the fact that there is nothing he can do for her now. There is, however, something he can do for their injured captain, who is screaming and clutching his left arm.
"Fuck, fuck, Jesus fucking Christ, oh God, fuck, Bones!"
"Hold on, Jim," Leonard says. Kneels next to him and takes his hand away from his arm. It's a compound fracture, and although it's not pretty to look at, it's not the worst that could have happened. He's not about to tell that to Jim, though, who's obviously in a world of pain from his bone literally ripping its way out of his body.
"Shit, Bones," Jim hisses through gritted teeth. There are tears streaming down his face, but Leonard doesn't blame him at all. He makes a sound like a sob underneath a groan and tosses his head back. "Hurts."
"Shhh, I know."
Even though there's nothing technically wrong with Jim's legs, Leonard knows from experience—both personal and secondary—that when you're in that much pain, you don't walk too good. Still kneeling next to Jim, he opens his communicator and snaps, "McCoy to medical, we've got one injured and one dead. I need two gurneys to transport and an OR prepped, do you read me medical?"
"Aye, sir, medical reads you," comes the reply, from a voice he recognizes as Chapel.
He slips his communicator back into his pocket and looks up to see Jim staring at his arm with wide eyes.
"Jim," he says in a warning tone, "Don't look, alright? Just don't."
"I'm fine, Bones," Jim says. It's to keep face. "I'm not...not some kind of..."
"I'll tell you what you are," Leonard says, and forcefully turns Jim's chin up, away from his view of his shattered humorous, "You're going into shock. Relax. Don't look at it. Look at me, sugar, look at me."
Jim squeezes his eyes closed and whispers, "Fuck, Bones, my arm."
"I can fix it, Jim," he assures, as Chapel and two other nurses roll in the gurneys. "I can fix that."
It takes two hours of surgery to remove the shards of Jim's bone from his arm, regenerate the bone mass lost, and regenerate the two pieces of bone back together before closing him up. He's sedated for a further five hours, just so he can sleep through the worst of the pain.
The biobed alerts him when Jim regains consciousness, and Leonard pokes his head around the corner of the curtain. Like he can sense his presence, Jim turns his head and opens his eyes just barely. "Hey."
"Hey."
"You fix me, Bones?"
"Yeah, Jimmy," he assures. "I fixed you."
They don't get a lot of laughs in sickbay. Some days are better than others, and—thankfully—most days are business as usual. Crewmembers come in for minor injuries or their typical checkup, they get treated, they leave. Most days, most, do not involve copious amounts of blood or broken bones or, worst of all, Leonard filling out that dreaded death certificate.
However, running noses and vitamin boosters are not exactly amusing. In fact, it's downright boring. On slow days it's like minutes take hours and the only amusing thing to do becomes playing cards with Christine and Geoff in his office.
Sometimes they play spoons with PADD styluses. That's fun. But it's nothing really laugh worthy.
However, when the captain comes in one day, sans ability to speak, well...Leonard would be lying if he said that it wasn't somewhat amusing.
The best part, though, was not the mere idea that Jim could no longer speak. The best part was the story behind the captain's sudden muteness.
"So, how did this happen?" asks Chapel, who's running a tricorder over Jim's neck. Vocal chords are a logical place to start to figure out why Jim can't speak. It's not that he's physically incapable of forming the words or anything, because he's been attempting to speak the entire time—'Bones' is a recognizable word that his mouth has formed at least a dozen times, as well as 'motherfucker'—but there is no sound coming out.
To Leonard's surprise, Uhura laughs. Jim glares at her, and she only laughs harder.
"Okay, so, the natives," she giggles, flicking hair behind her ear, "They, um...well, okay, the princess' guards had these weapons. Do you know what a Taser looks like? They stopped using them about two hundred years ago, but they're these—"
"I'm familiar with them," Christine says, waving her hand. Leonard stands by and watches because she's got this and he's enjoying the show.
"Well the natives are not exactly...trusting of men. It's a heavily misandristic society, so they demanded that the landing team consist entirely of women. But because it's a diplomatic mission, the captain obviously had to come along..." here, Uhura has to stop because she's laughing too hard.
Yeoman Rand, who had also been beamed down to the planet, takes up the explanation. "They said that the captain was only allowed in the palace provided that he didn't speak directly to the princess, and that all of his statements go through me and then one of the guards, before being told to the princess. Also, they said that they were completely at liberty not to transfer the information if they didn't deem it relevant or worthy."
"Janice was his keeper," giggles Uhura. "And it was all going really well until he got tired of the princess' continual jabs at the weakness of men—which, I mean, okay, she was getting a little bit out of hand, and I probably wouldn't have stood for it if it had been about women, but still—and he said, I kid you not, look here sister—"
"Sister!" Janice shrieks from behind her hands.
"And before he can get any further, one of the guards has gotten him right in the throat with one of those...those Taser things and for a second he didn't think it did anything, then he opened his mouth and tried to talk and he fucking couldn't! The best part was his face, oh my god, it was just," she widens her eyes and opens her mouth wide and presses a hand to her throat. Behind her, Janice does her own impersonation of the captain's face. "And it was just...god, it was beautiful. We got out of there, of course, but he can't talk, it's amazing."
Jim mouths something that is obviously 'insubordination.'
"I kept them from locking you up," Uhura says, raising her eyebrow. She knows Jim wouldn't write her up for anything short of murder. It's the same for most of the senior officers, and boy do they take advantage of it. Leonard's no exception.
"It looks like the device paralyzed his vocal chords," Chapel says, looking at the tricorder. "It should be temporary."
"Shame," Uhura mutters, and walks out of medbay with Janice on her heals, both women laughing themselves silly.
Christine walks away too, and Leonard pretends he doesn't notice her giggling to herself.
It's not out of anything malicious. Jim should know by now that the entire crew knows how lucky they are to serve under him. It's just a little fun because they know that Jim isn't really harmed.
Well, maybe his ego is hurt.
Jim holds out a hand and Leonard realizes he's asking for the PADD that he's holding. He gives it up willingly, and Jim pulls up a blank page so he can scribble on it. With a finger, because a stylus would be too classy or something.
They're laughing at me.
"Yeah," chuckles Leonard. "So am I."
More scribbling.
I wouldn't have laughed at them. If the situation had been reversed.
"I know," Leonard says, and shrugs. "But you know as well as I do that it's different. Plus, they'd be singing a different tune if they'd actually hurt you. I'm assuming negotiations fell through?"
Jim nods, scribbling, and holds up the PADD. They're an overly hostile race as it is. The pros outweigh the cons as far as dilithium is concerned.
Leonard nods.
I have no voice, is what Jim scribbles next. Can you fix that?
"I can fix that," Leonard replies. "Wondering if I want to though."
Irate scribbling.
INSUBORDINATION, DOCTOR?
Leonard just snorts, because Jim formally reprimanding him is even more unlikely than him doing it to Uhura, and goes to find a vial of antiparalytic.
"Spock to Medical. Are you there, Doctor McCoy?"
"McCoy here. What do you need, Spock?"
There is a pause, and Leonard taps his fingers onto his desk because he knows that sometimes, Spock takes pauses for dramatic effect. Then Spock says, "The captain has informed me that he will not be overseeing the bridge today, citing contagious illness. I recommended that he report to sickbay to have himself treated. Has he arrived?"
This sends a spark of worry down Leonard's back, but he determinedly does not imagine the worst case scenario. Instead, he takes a glance out into the bay, assesses that there is no Jim Kirk-shaped lump on one of the beds (There are, in fact, no lumps on any beds) and returns to the console to inform Spock, "No, he hasn't come down yet. When did you talk to him?"
"Seven minutes and thirty-eight seconds ago," Spock replies, and Leonard takes the chance of Spock not being able to see him to roll his eyes. "I gave him sufficient time to report to sickbay, even provided the heavy traffic in the lifts at this time of morning. If he has not reported, perhaps you should assess his condition by going to his cabin."
"Did you actually speak to him face-to-face, Spock?"
"I saw the captain, yes."
Well, at least Jim doesn't think it's so contagious that he needs to quarantine himself in his room. After being friends with Leonard for so long, Jim is a pretty good judge of those sorts of things.
"What was his symptomatology? That you could visually identify?"
"The Captain appeared to have a flush on his forehead and cheeks typically associated with higher than normal body temperature in humans, mucus seeping from his nose, and pallor to his skin."
Not for the first time, Leonard wonders why Spock has to make everything such a production. Flushed, runny nose, and pale would have more than fucking sufficed.
"Okay," Leonard replies. "I think I know what he has. It's nothing serious and should clear up in a couple of days, but he was right to lock himself up. It's pretty contagious when people are elbow-to-elbow like this."
It's also not the first time that Leonard has mentally bemoaned the petri-dish like environs on a starship to himself.
"If you do not mind my inquiring, what do you believe the captain to have contracted?"
"A typical Terra-strain influenza," Leonard replies. "He'll be pretty damned miserable for twenty-four hours or so, but he has a pretty healthy immune system. It's nothing to worry about."
"Thank you, Doctor," Spock says, and Leonard can almost hear his brain going into a litany of 'fascinating' over the comm.
"No problem, Commander," Leonard replies, and goes back to the very important task of seeing how many PADD styluses he can balance on one finger at a time. The first of his daily check-ups is not due to come in until 1100, and sickbay is fucking boring when you've got literally nothing to do.
His console comes to life again, about fifteen minutes later.
"Kirk to medical."
"McCoy here," Leonard replies, even though Jim had directly contacted his office from what Leonard is assuming is his quarters, so this is probably intended to be a personal call. "What do you need, Jim? Heard you were laid up with the flu."
There is a pause, then, "I'm sure Spock didn't say it that way."
Leonard snorts. "He didn't. What do you need?"
"Someone to talk to," Jim mumbles. Christ, he sounds like he swallowed glass. That must be one mother of a sore throat that kid is nursing.
"Can't imagine it's too comfortable for you to talk with your throat the way it's sounding, kid."
"It's not," comes the reply, after an extended pause of hesitation. "But I...get lonely. When I'm sick."
It's obvious Jim is not completely coherent, and Leonard knows that when Jim is impaired, whether it be by booze or sickness, he's a little less filtered than he would usually allow himself to be. One might think that 'censor' is a word that does not exist in Jim Kirk's vocabulary, but Leonard knows that there are things that Jim doesn't talk about. Like feelings. Jim is not a feelings person. Of course, he's hardly Spock. He'll show all the emotion you please—anger, happiness, sadness.
But it's the things in-between, the things the emotions come with—what's causing the anger, the sensation of wellbeing that happiness gives him, the bone-deep weariness that sadness causes—that trips Jim up.
Leonard knows that Jim wouldn't be professing to loneliness unless it was absolutely true, and unless he was really hurting.
He also knows that he doesn't have anything to do for another hour and a half, and unless something catastrophic happens in the next seven hours—which is unlikely, because they've plotted a course for Starbase 17 and it's still four days away at max warp—there's nothing to do down here that his nurses can't see to.
Contemplatively, he thumbs the transmit button on the console and says, "Alright, Jim. Give me a few minutes, okay?"
"Okay," comes the answer, and Leonard knows that Jim isn't sure what he's going to do, but he's too out of it to question it.
Christine is sitting at her station—as Head Nurse, she has her own little area, which is a step above the corner that the other nurses all have to share between them—when he comes around the corner to find her.
"The captain has the flu."
"Wonderful," Christine deadpans, not looking up from what he believes to be a medical journal. "He hasn't been sick yet. Is he going to be as much of a baby as I suspect he'll be?"
"Probably," Leonard replies, shrugging. "He sounds pretty miserable, though, so I can't blame him."
"You'd think," Christine mutters, twirling a stylus around her index finger, "that we'd have a better treatment than a half-assed vaccine for influenza by now."
"Well, it's more annoying than anything, so I guess people just don't want to expend the effort to cure it when there are deadlier things to play with." As he says this, he wanders over to the general medical supplies cabinet and starts compiling the essentials, tissues and painkillers and such. Most of the drugs that do more than cure headaches or quell nausea are locked up in a room behind the door next to Christine's station, and only high-ranking medical personnel have clearance to it. To take things to extra levels of paranoia, there is a cabinet in Leonard's office that only he and M'Benga have access to, which contains addictive substances and substances which could potentially be poisonous if administered to the wrong humanoid.
For this expedition, however, Leonard only needs to arm himself with the typical paraphernalia for sniffles and coughing and aches and pains. These he swings over his shoulder in a soft-sided medical bag.
"I'm going to check up on him," Leonard tells Christine.
"I'll comm if things get busy," Christine replies, completely uninterested, but she does trill, "Have fuuuun," ominously as he walks out the doors. He shakes his head to himself.
It takes him four minutes to reach the captain's quarters, and by now it's probably only been seven minutes since he talked to Jim, but he gets a bit nervous when he knocks and Jim doesn't reply.
He's about to put in his medical override—which he tries to avoid doing because it's recorded as a medical emergency when he does it and one always has to think ahead to debriefings at the end of missions and the incredulous faces of the Admiralty when you explain that on star date such and such point whatever, Captain Kirk came down with the flu and I used my emergency override because my best friend had the sniffles—when Jim finally says—groans—'enter,' and the door slides open for him.
Even though he's a doctor, even Leonard doesn't know how in the world a room with a sick person in it has such a unique smell. It's not even the smell of vomit, because he's sure Jim hasn't thrown up—he recognizes that smell, thank you kindly—but just the smell of being generally unwell.
That smell hits him full in the face when he walks in, and he knows that Jim really is just as miserable as he sounds.
The blankets move a bit, and tufts of blonde hair peak out. Jim mumbles, "Hi."
Leonard walks over to Jim and leans down to press his lips to Jim's forehead, and sure enough he's burning up.
"Where's your tricorder?" Jim mutters when he pulls away.
"I don't need a glorified fuckin' paperweight to tell me when someone has a fever, Jim," he says. It's less snappy than usual, and he knows he's being unfair to the tricorders—they're nice little pieces of technology, when they're used to supplement diagnostics and not the other way around—but he doesn't feel like defending his actions right now.
Truth is, sometimes when you're feeling poorly, a kiss to the forehead makes you feel just that little bit better.
"I feel like shit," Jim whispers, then swallows laboriously and closes his eyes. Leonard, because he's fucking sentient, knows implicitly how he feels. Floating in a haze of hot sickness and prickly discomfort is nothing unfamiliar to anyone who's had anything even so mild as a cold.
"I can fix that," Leonard murmurs, brushing the hair back from Jim's clammy forehead. He can't cure Jim, but maybe he can make him a bit more comfortable.
Jim leans into his hand and smiles slightly. "I knew you'd say that. You'll always fix me, won't you Bones?"
It's not a question. Not really. Jim says it like he knows it's a certainty. Leonard swallows thickly, because it feels like Jim has taken his heart into his hands and let it whisper all its secrets into his ear. Or maybe it's just fucking obvious that Jim is the center of his universe, that he'd quicker beg God to take him instead than let Jim die, that the day Leonard can't fix Jim is the day he loses the will to live.
"Yeah. I'll always fix you, darlin'. Always."
If he says it a bit more harshly than is warranted, if it sounds more like sacrament than just affirmation or even a promise, Jim doesn't mention it.
There is nothing okay about this situation. It's something Jim would say when exasperated, but Leonard isn't exasperated.
He's numb. He's cold and he feels like he can't breathe, but none of that really bothers him, or even registers. What does register is Jim, cold and pale and stiff, on an exam table. In a body bag. Dead. Jim Kirk is dead.
Outside observers wouldn't have a hope of knowing what's going on inside his brain. He keeps himself firmly in check, because he's still the Enterprise's CMO and he has a duty to this ship. Later, when he's alone and Geoff is taking care of the autopsy—because it's got to be Geoff; he's emotionally compromised beyond belief and he would never be able to bring himself to do it, besides—he'll break down. He's already planning his descent back into depression and alcoholism, sinking into the familiar darkness and not coming out. Not this time.
There will be no Jim Kirk on a shuttle in Iowa to pull him back out. No ray of sunshine to signal the end of fathomless, darkest night.
"Dammit, Jim," he whispers. He can't...he can't.
There are so many things he never said. It's the eternal cliché and he realizes it, even through the pain, but it's true. He's left so much unsaid between them, things that he told himself he would tell Jim, someday, when the time was right.
The right time will never come now.
To add insult to injury, Leonard knows that Jim was aware of the things he couldn't say.
He can't look at Jim's face any longer. Not with the knowledge that it will never again be animated. He walks away, turning his back on Jim for the first time and God, it hurts—it feels like something's been ripped out of his body and it's not a kind of pain you recover from—but he thinks, maybe, Jim would forgive him.
The tribble he was working on earlier is still on Christine's desk. That part of his brain that's still functional—there's a part in everyone's brain, he thinks, that keeps working and narrating even when the rest of the brain or body can't bring itself to work—wonders why no one has cleared it away by now.
Then he realizes it's breathing.
It's cooing. It's making little tribble noises and its furry belly is huffing up and down and it's alive.
It takes him a moment to connect the dots and come to a logical conclusion that's more than miracle, but when he does and it's all registered and sunk in a bit, he snaps into action, pushing and shoving all pessimism into the back of his mind because he can't afford to second guess himself right now, not when they've got limited time to move and enough time has already been wasted, Christ why couldn't he have noticed a bit earlier.
It takes three of them to wrestle Jim into the cryochamber, and Leonard determinedly doesn't think about how heavy he feels, how lifeless.
They send Nyota down to Spock, and when they reappear with Khan, slung over Spock's shoulder inelegantly, like he's more worthless than a sack of wheat and though it goes against Leonard's very nature as a doctor, he is inclined to agree—except the warm blood in the man's veins is the only thing that might bring his best friend back from the dead.
If it wasn't the last option, Leonard wouldn't be doing it. He doesn't want anything from that man anywhere near Jim. But it has to be done.
When everyone has left, allowed him to be alone to think, to figure out how he's going to take the properties of Khan's blood and make them into a solution that will bring Jim back to life, he presses his palm to the glass of the cryochamber and whispers, "I'm gonna fix you, sugar."
Death really isn't something that's fixable. It's a natural law, really.
When that law was written, they obviously didn't take into account Leonard McCoy.
It's times like these that Leonard is glad he and Jocelyn were never able to conceive, despite eighty-five percent of their marriage being spent in the attempt. They never really figured out which one of them it was with the faulty plumbing, but they were just never able to have one. Leonard was broken about it, because of the two things he'd wanted to be in his life, doctor and father had been the ones that really stuck.
Perhaps, though, it's better. There was no child to think about in the divorce, which made it a much cleaner, we'll-each-take-what's-ours situation. There is also no child to feel guilty about leaving behind on Earth while he's up in the black.
Mostly, though, he's kind of glad that there are no real obligations of where to be or what to be doing while on shore leave. It leaves him free to do a lot of things that would have been out of the question had he been responsible for a child.
Somehow he ends up jogging in the rain on a nippy May morning in Iowa, three months after he'd brought his best friend back to life.
The rain had started when he was already half a mile from the house, and it wasn't like he was going to get any less wet by turning back and not finishing the entire mile, so he'd just continued. It's a warm rain, and a light one so the road under his feet doesn't turn into mud so much as it just gets soft and spongy. Everything smells of clean soil and ozone.
It's peaceful.
The house is still quiet when he gets back. It's just now starting to get a lived-in feel after God only knows how many months of being empty, with Winona 'God-Knows-Where doing God-Knows-What' according to Jim.
He thinks Jim is asleep. That's before he rounds the corner and finds him sitting actually on the kitchen counter, staring out the window. He's in shorts and a tee-shirt and he's barefoot. Looks strangely vulnerable sitting there like that.
"I'd almost forgotten what rain sounded like," Jim mumbles. His knees are pulled to his chest, arms wrapped around them to keep himself in an upright position. He looks and Leonard and says, "You're wet, Bones."
"No shit, Sherlock," Leonard replies, because he vowed months ago not to treat Jim like a piece of breakable china, even though all he's wanted to do since Jim woke up is wrap him in something—like bubble wrap or foam padding or even, maybe most of all, his own arms—and protect him from anything that might ever try to hurt him again. Instead he rubs his arm over Jim's tee-shirt.
"Fuck," Jim hisses, sitting up straight in an attempt to get away from Leonard's arm. "You are a fucking asshole."
"It's just a little water."
"If I wanted water, I would have asked for it in a cup," Jim snaps, and squirms in exaggerated discomfort. Leonard just rolls his eyes and goes through the motions of making a pot of coffee.
"Bones?"
"Yeah?" Leonard has always watched coffee makers brew, eyes beady with the expectation of caffeine. This day is no exception.
"I, um…" Jim sighs, and all at once he sounds upset. Leonard turns around, coffee forgotten, to look at his friend. Jim has tucked himself into an even smaller ball, and the body language doesn't bode well for anyone; much less a man who constantly projects an air of come at me. Eventually, Jim mumbles, "I'm not…okay," into his knees.
"Yeah," Leonard says, because he's not exactly sure what Jim needs in this situation and probing for more information is the only action he can take right now. "I know that. I don't think any of us are okay right now."
Jim sighs loudly and rests his forehead against his knees. All Leonard can see of his face are his bangs tumbled inelegantly onto his knees. From the depths of his cocoon, Jim says, "There are things that I need to say…that I haven't said. And I know I need to say them. Dying told me that. But I'm…I'm scared, Bones, because I think I'll mess things up even more than they already are if I say them."
Okay, so this is going in an entirely different direction from what Leonard was expecting.
"What kind of things, Jim?" Leonard asks, stepping closer to the counter, but no so close to tempt himself into reaching out and touching Jim. That probably isn't what he needs right now. Most people don't like to be touched when they're going through some kind of emotional upheaval.
Jim raises his head up, plops his chin onto his knees, and says, "I think you know, Bones."
Now Leonard does draw closer, belly against the counter, palms flat against the countertop and face more or less level with Jim's. "So we're actually going to talk about this."
"I almost died, Bones."
"You did die, Jim."
"Exactly," Jim mutters. "I think we've proven that putting it off isn't an option anymore. There's been…something there. Here. Ever since we met. It was probably just sexual for a while but then we got to know each other, and…Bones, you're the best thing to happen to me and I don't want to lose you, alright? It sounds really…dumb or immature, I don't know, but I was in a bad place when I met you and I'm…afraid of going back to that place. I'm afraid, really. Just in general." He gives one of those self-deprecating laughs that Leonard is more than personally acquainted with, but it hurts him to hear it coming from Jim. "I'm a starship captain and I'm afraid."
Jim looks away and his lips, just barely, wobble. He sucks in a deep breath that hitches halfway through with the result that he presses his hand to his mouth. Leonard can see his jaw harden as he clenches his teeth together and his heart hurts even more.
Before he even thinks about what's coming out of his mouth, Leonard murmurs, "I can fix that, darlin'," and leans his face against Jim's knees, presses his forehead against Jim's and kisses him.
Jim drops his legs down onto the counter and kisses back, pulling himself forward on the counter so Leonard is slotted between his thighs. Something in Leonard disentangles after years of being knotted up as Jim runs his fingers through his hair and opens his mouth against Leonard's.
Leonard doesn't think that he will ever stop having to fix Jim.
Not that he hopes he ever has to.
End
Notes: I refuse to acknowledge Chapel's absence from the movies. It's against my religion.
Having said that, this was my first Start Trek fic (Or, rather, the first published one; I have like three others sitting around on my computer waiting to be finished) in four years, and I've only ever written one Spuhura one before. McKirk is new territory to me that I actually wasn't into until it sort of found me on Tumblr.
Anyway, I digress. I hope this was enjoyable for all and a satisfactory attempt. Thank you so much for reading!