Second Contact

Author: Gyptian

Rating: PG-13

Genre: AU, Action/adventure, Romance

Disclaimer: Not mine.

Author's note: This can be read as a standalone. If you'd like to read more, this is the main part in the series that is, in order, "Sarek's Log", "Abducted", "Challenge and Marriage" and "Like My Father". Thanks for all your reviews so far, everyone who's commented. It's very motivating!

Summary: A 21st century AU. The Orions are coming to Earth, but so are the Vulcans. While a fledgling Starfleet prepares to fight them off, Jim has gone into hiding with his team to continue the development of the first faster-than-light ship in a small town in Georgia. Spock finds him there and hopes to recruit him to convince humanity to accept Vulcan as ally. It may be Earth's only hope for survival.

/`/`/`/`/`

On the 5th of October 2043, a sunny autumn day, Doctor Leonard H. McCoy was officially free of his wife. It was also the day he was caught by a stranger who would become a friend by the name of James T. Kirk.

At 4 o' clock, he left his lawyer's office and found himself in want of a drink.

At 6 o' clock, he found himself in want of a fifth drink.

Somewhere between sundown and midnight, he stumbled over Kirk, who was exiting the library. "Watch where you're going!" came out as a gurgle. An arm around his chest had prevented him from face-planting on the pavement.

As a mark in his favour, Kirk sat him down on a bench and didn't call the police. "You're worse than my ex-stepfather."

"Just signed away my money, life and soul. Just got my bones left. Am allowed to be drunk."

"They healthy bones?" he was taking off McCoy's shoes and laying him down. Good man.

"Yeah, and I'd know. I'm a doctor."

"Then you've got more than the poor kids in Africa." His wallet and keys were taken from them. He made to grab them back, until he saw they were put into his shoes. Thoughtful. That only left him with his clothes and a light jacket.

"Don't talk ter me about poor kiddies over thattaway," he waved a flopping hand north-west. "Been there, healed 'em, donated ma T-shir'"

"Good of you."

That was the extent of his first meeting with Kirk, because now that he was horizontal and more or less comfortable, he proceeded to pass out.

/`/`/`/`/`

He woke up to find his shoes, keys and wallet missing. His head felt like it had exploded, but it had done so often enough that McCoy knew how to work around it by now. Move slow.

His phone had been left behind, in a inside pocket of his jacket, one he'd never used before or even knew existed. After a few panicky minutes of checking over his clothing and cursing the stranger who'd robbed him, he found it. Folded around it was a piece of paper, which read "John Smith", and a phone number. On the back it said, "You can pick up your stuff here. Mention the hydrangea bush."

He ran a frustrated hand through his hair, winced at the sting of pain that sent through his head and dialed the number. "Jones," a cool female voice said on the other side of the line.

"Yeah, uh, hi. I, uh, my stuff was taken last night by a John Smith? I'd like to come pick them up. Something about a hydrangea bush."

He could hear muttering in the background. Then, "Excuse me a moment. Stay on the line." The last part said insistently enough to make him straighten up.

A door closed in the distance. Silence. A door slammed. He winced again. Footsteps.

"Yes, your shoes were dropped off here, with content. You can pick them up." She gave him the address of a pastel-pink two-bedroom place on the edge of town.

"Thank you," he said, because his mother had taught him to be polite to strangers. Strangers who were fellow victims in a prank.

He went to find a bathroom and some painkillers. If his night of sleeping like a drunk on a park bench and his barefoot walk of shame was going to be the talk of the town, he'd at least make sure his hair was combed and his scowl was suitably intimidating.

See if he touched a bottle outside the safety of his home again.

/`/`/`/`/`

"You disgust me, Kirk," Uhura announced.

She exited the elevator, the only entrance to their bunker. It was a large square room with floor-to-ceiling closets covering every wall and a large table in the middle. If they put away the benches, there would be space for their bed rolls on the floor should they have to hide here during an attack. They all sincerely hoped it wouldn't come to that.

Kirk shot her a grin. "Good day to you too, fair Uhura." In the safety of their bunker, they could use each other's names.

"Did you have to do that to a man already down on his luck?" She seated herself besides Scotty, who was already holding out a cup of coffee to her. "Ugh, reheated."

"It is never a bad time for a man to learn to drink responsibly." He turned back to his calculations. He and Chekov had bet the pick of the night's movie on finishing them first. They were checking the volume of several uneven cilinders that would fit inside each other like babushka dolls.

She snorted. "Every curtain twitched while he was walking down the street."

"See? I'm providing free entertainment for senior citizens." He turned over the page full of his uneven scrawl and started on the other side. Chekov was mostly staring at a near-empty page and magicking numbers around in his head.

"Kirk!" she snapped and loomed over him. "He got a call while he was at my place, telling him he'd lost his job because he was late for his shift three times in a row. They didn't believe him when he said he had to pick up his shoes." She slapped her hands over his notebook. "It was his dad calling, Jim, that he could come gather his personal belongings and last month's salary. Are you proud of yourself?"

He lifted his head. "Sounds like a nice family."

She growled at him. "Do you even care?"

"Yes. I left him his clothes." He pointed at her hands. "Do you mind? If Chekov wins we'll be watching another film noir tonight. And I still want to pick your brain afterward on how the hell we're going to communicate with aliens we don't understand."

She sank down onto the bench behind her. "I still think you're a slimy worm."

"But it's a worm that's in love with your brain and your nimble tongue and those long lines of perfection you call legs."

"Die in a fire, Kirk." A reluctant smile curled one corner of her lips. Scotty had quietly refilled her cup. She handed him the screwdriver he'd need next before he could say anything. He was disassembling a spare tablet.

"I shall obey your every command, my lady, and die a painful death to prove I lust after you so, so much."

"Is very respected literary tradition to die horribly after pining melodramatically after a beautiful lady," Chekov put in, who was still learning to make sarcastic comments and usually took a while to contribute to a conversation. Uhura toasted his attempt, as well as the fact that he'd finished his calculations while Kirk talked.

"I like you Chekov. I'll like you even more if you pick a movie with lots of car chases tonight."

"As you wish, my lady." She offered him another toast and sipped the reheated coffee. Kirk's scrawl increased in spikiness while he finished up his contribution so he and Chekov could swap and check each other's work.

An hour later, Sulu returned with a pot of freshly brewed coffee. He was summarily crowned king of the bunker. Chekov cut him a crown from the paper he hadn't used.

/`/`/`/`/`

McCoy was greeted by a sad-eyed father and a theatrically sniffing receptionist. "Spare me the lecture," he told them as he brushed past on his way to his office.

"Leonard," his father said, who'd never been able to tell when McCoy's temper was about to flare. "Be reasonable. You've been negligent in showing up on time for a while now. I've got patients waiting for hours for you to visit them. We're a highly respected private practice. Now I hear you've been running around town drunk or hung-over -"

McCoy whirled and socked him in the jaw. His father fell on his ass and he was on him in a blink, hands around his thick throat and shaking him until his flabby cheeks jiggled.

"That you kick me when I'm down, well, I almost expected it. That you supported my wife, when you know SHE cheated on ME is harder to take. But YOU let them TAKE MY LITTLE GIRL AWAY FROM ME without a peep and I WILL-"

He broke off when slender hands grasped his own. They pried him loose from his father, who fell over backwards like a sack of sand. He was purple and unconscious. McCoy let out a little whine and scrambled back.

"Oh God, I almost killed him, oh God, oh God, oh God." He clawed at his face. His hands were caught again. He looked up in the face of his guardian angel.

"Calm down, Leonard," the mirage said, in the same voice it had always done, the few times he'd needed to do a difficult operation and the one disastrous time he'd been flown to someone's ranch in a helicopter. He'd discovered his fear of flying.

He blinked, and discovered he had tears in his eyes. He blinked again and the mirage resolved into Christine Chapel's face.

"You need to pack your box and leave now, Len, before Maggie calls the cops. We could hear you out in the hallway." When he continued to look at her, not comprehending what she'd said, she pulled him up and sat him in a chair with a glass of water. She took the box that had been placed in the middle of the desk, like he needed the reminder, and started packing away the books and the photographs, his personal tablet computer and the collection of Mickey Mouses in the window sill. They were a favourite of Joanna's, she'd played hours with them every time she visited her father at the office.

He sat in the chair until she made him stand. He finally spoke, then. "I can't go, Christine. I don't even have anywhere to stay."

"Not everyone's deserted you, Len." She pointed at the box she'd put down by the door.

"You..."

"I quit. Ron and I already talked. You're welcome to the spare bedroom." She picked up her box and waited for him. She didn't say anything when he carefully put his father in a position in which he could breathe more easily. Nor when he picked Jocelyn's photo out of the box and put it back on the desk. Not even when he deliberately let the sharp end of a key trail over the antique wooden paneling in the hallway.

At the front desk, Maggie was touching a handkerchief to her eyes, taking care not to smear her make-up. She jumped when Leonard let his box thump down in front of her. "You'll find Doctor Horatio McCoy in my former office, Maggie," he said evenly. "Do not move him. If he doesn't wake up in fifteen minutes, call an ambulance. When he's awake, make him put ice on his throat."

"Yes Doctor," she squeaked. "Nurse."

/`/`/`/`/`

Wednesday morning found him having a late breakfast with Ron Hastings, who kept up a one-sided conversation from behind his newspaper. McCoy tuned in when the library was mentioned. "...some new guy'd been chatting up the biddies of the book-and-quilt club. He kept them all talking and laughing for ten minutes, then went straight into the stacks and came back with a book on glue, of all things."

McCoy crunched down on the last of his bacon. "Sounds like a real heartbreaker. What was he, seventy?"

The newspaper was closed and folded. "No, that's the oddest bit. Patrick said he was in his twenties. He stayed there the whole afternoon, reading books on all sorts of outlandish subjects."

McCoy's eyes widened. "I think I ran into him." He dropped the roll he'd been about to bite and scratched the stubble on his cheeks in thought. "He stole my shoes."

"Say what? Is he a thief?" Hastings looked ready to grab the phone.

"No, more like a brat. I got 'em back, but I had to walk across town in my socks."

"Huh." His friend drummed fingers on the table.

They both looked up when the kitchen door opened. Chapel stepped in with the groceries and a blush that wasn't from the cold. Her blonde hair lay tousled on her shoulders.

"Uh-oh," Hastings said, sounding amused for a man whose wife-to-be was near to fluttering her lashes at the stranger who followed her in. "Found yourself another gentleman for your collection, have you?"

"Just a nice young man who helped me carry my bags. I bought more than I thought." She took both bags from the man. He handed them to her without comment.

McCoy eyed him. He was the introverted type, impassive and inside too much to catch any real sun. Likely had some type of scientific degree. Baggy clothes and a beanie that was almost too large for his head made him look sloppy. "Did your mum knit that sweater?" he asked rudely, when the man's silence began to unnerve him.

A raised eyebrow was his reply. Cold-blooded bastard. "She did."

A clear tenor, McCoy noticed. He might be part of a choir. He ought to fit right in, in this nothing-place of a town.

"Never mind him," Chapel said. "Len, this is Spock. I ran into him at the supermarket. He was looking for someone and got lost. I didn't recognise the name, but I told him you were a Doctor and knew many people, so you might be able to help him." A pointed look told him he'd suffer if he didn't cooperate.

McCoy grunted. Tall, dark and weird turned to Chapel. "Miss, does that not mean I should pay him mind?" Instead of correcting him, she blushed some more. Beanie-head gazed down at him from behind a long, straight nose, like too many of his stuck-up ex-patients. "Doctor, have you heard of a man named John Smith?"

He was about to bark he hadn't, when he remembered the brat, and the note. It would be very satisfying to sic this weirdo on him in revenge. "Yeah, actually I do. Or, I know someone who knows where he is." He stood up and retrieved a crumpled ball from his jacket pocket. "Here, call this number."

The only reaction was a hand that snatched the note from his inhumanly quick and a wobble of wonky eyebrows as the note was read. The man left as he'd come in, without a word.

"Well!" Chapel exclaimed, hands set on her hips in the southern ma'am's clearest sign of outrage.

"Not so much of a gentleman after all?" Her fiance chuckled. He was gathering the dishes.

McCoy grabbed a cloth and attacked a yolk stain. "I don't understand what's so funny about your woman crushing on others willy-nilly."

Hastings made him surrender the cloth. "Not every admiring look makes for a cheated-on husband, old man."

"Yeah, yeah." McCoy leaned over the table, focusing on the grain in the wood. He found it was hard to breathe. "Sorry."

"No harm done, love." Chapel put a soft hand on his shoulder, rubbing. When he'd collected himself, he turned to look at his friends, lost.

"Right. We are going to look for a job," Chapel decided after a tense second. She turned to her fiance. "You are going to make sure you finish that book on time, because you're currently the only one of us with an income."

Hastings' eyes bugged out. "What?"

"I told you what Horatio was doing."

"Yeah, and we agreed Len could stay with us for as long as he liked. You never said anything about getting another job." He sighed. "You and your idealism. Brings home the lost and the chivalrous to feed them and quits her job in the name of friendship."

She raised her chin. "Precisely."

Hastings put an arm around each of them. "I guess we'll figure it out. Len's got you to cheer him up. You've got us to make fun of you. And I've got both of you to bug me if I'm lazing around." He pressed a kiss to Chapel's cheek and slapped McCoy on a shoulder and left for his shed-turned-office in the backyard.

Chapel threw a towel at McCoy and started on the dishes. "He was a bit pale, wasn't he?" she asked over the splash of water in the sink. "D'you think he left so suddenly because he was unwell?"

McCoy snorted. "After you told him I was a doctor and probably that you were a nurse yourself? That would be stupid." After he'd dried the plates, he said, "He did look a bit green around the gills. Y'think he's part alien?"

She ruffled his hair. "Don't you start that nonsense, McCoy."

"Or a goblin. A fancy one? A hobnobbin' goblin? A hobgoblin?" With each question, he retreated a step to get away from Chapel flicking suds at him.

You're such a folktale yourself sometimes, Len, you've got no right of speech."

/`/`/`/`/`

The second time McCoy met Kirk was that evening, when he was pulling an evening shift as a volunteer at a free clinic one town over. Here the poor went for things too simple for the hospital but too serious to let it heal on its own. Some rich folk came in, with complaints they didn't want their own doctor to see.

He'd just finished comforting a girl whose boyfriend'd refused protection and whose parents were threatening to kick her out. She'd come to him.

He found the blond-haired man leaning against the wall, hood of his shirt up over his head, barely able to hold himself upright. "Now who's drunk?" he asked him.

Kirk was staring after the girl. "You made a girl cry?"

"What made her cry is confidential, thank you very much."

"Oh." McCoy finally took pity on him and helped him drag himself into the room.

"So, did you want a detox or something?" McCoy turned to get out a form and a pen. Hardcopy was still considered proof, so he had to fill it in there first.

"No." Kirk said, pronouncing the letters almost seperately. "Had a bad reaction to cough syrup. Got dizzy." He rattled off the six-syllable name of a drug that had been on the market not two months and promised to cure the common cold, without a stutter.

"You got drunk, or dizzy, on that? That's insane."

The other man nodded once and let his head hang. "Yeah," he told the floor. "Got crazy allergies." He reached across McCoy's desk, turned the screen to him, brought up the page to the national medical archive and started to type, from the wrong side of the keyboard, the fifty-digit alpha-numerical code of his patient file. No one had ever remembered that, that McCoy knew of.

He put down the form so he could click through the file entitled "John Smith". "Twenty pages of information on your allergies alone. That's..."

"196 known allergies. Probably a lot more unknown." McCoy was distracted from his reading by two muddy boots that appeared on his desk. His scowl at least made them disappear, though the young man didn't look penitent in the least. "That's not why I came to you, Bones. It's getting better pretty fast. I could have slept it off."

"Bones," McCoy repeated, just to be sure he'd heard correctly. He turned off the screen.

"Yeah, Mr just-got-my-bones, right? So, Bones for short." He nodded and crossed his arms as if it made sense.

"Right." Perhaps it was time to pick his battles for the sake of expedience. "If you didn't come here 'cause you're drunk or to rub your irritating self in my face, what are you doing here?" He put his elbows on his desk and leaned forward.

Kirk mirrored him. "I need stitches." He shoved his hood down and turned his head around, so McCoy could seen what'd been hidden beneath it.

"How'd you manage that?" McCoy asked, so he wouldn't call the kid a thousand names for leading him by the nose for an entire conversation while he had a hole in his head. He stood and turned to a back closet with basic medical supplies, got out some disinfecting wipes and a pair of scissors, and threaded a needle onto some self-dissolving thread. Best invention ever: stitches that didn't need to be removed.

"I fell out of a tree because the alien you sent over to my house startled me."

In shock, McCoy pricked himself in the finger like a fairytale princess and proceeded to swear like a sailor. He grabbed his chair for support, needle still in his suddenly-sweaty hands and feeling like he'd nodded off and was having a nightmare. It wouldn't be the first time.

The bratty twenty-something in front of him had disappeared, and changed into a serious man who was sitting military straight in his chair, hands lying half-curled on his thighs. "I am Lieutenant James Kirk-"

"No."

"-son of Admiral Winona Kirk-"

"Please tell me you're having me on."

"- and Captain George Kirk, who died saving us from aliens abducting humans from Earth for purposes unknown -"

"No, no, just no."

"- and I found an alien on my doorstep today, while I'm supposed to be hiding from said aliens for very, very important and very, very classified reasons."

"I've died and gone to hell."

Kirk bared his teeth at that. "No more than the rest of us, if we don't succeed in kicking alien butt a second time."

He sat down in his chair now that the attack on his sanity seemed to be over. "Kill me now." He put his head between his knees.

"I can, if you want me to," was the answer, in such an even tone that McCoy had to look up to see that yes, he meant it. "Or you can tell me what happened, because it sounds like you didn't know what you were doing."

McCoy set his hands on his knees to lift his suddenly very heavy head. "I sent someone your way this morning who looked kind of odd, but that was all."

"I figured, or you really would be dead by now. Tell me everything, in detail, from the beginning."

McCoy did. After he'd taken care of the head-wound. Crazy or not, he was a doctor.