Notes: anon - they are! I am gobsmacked as to how only you and I seem to notice.

Arc One, Part One

Once, the ninth of April would have meant taking the day off from the hospital – or the clinic, or the medical school, or – whatever. It would have meant taking the day off, handing a squalling child over to her babysitter for the day, and going...somewhere. Once, dinner by the river and a drive out into the country, some half-hearted stargazing and then some gazing at something entirely different.

But that had been two years ago. Three, four, five years ago. That hadn't been last year, and it wasn't today, and it wouldn't be another ninth of April ever again.

Now, the ninth of April was...

It had been a quiet shift. Eight hours of the odd broken limb, and he was signed off before the first trickles of the early drinkers had begun to drift in – and there wouldn't be many anyway. It was a Monday night; all the serious drunks were still recovering from the weekend.

Normally, McCoy liked the quiet shifts. He could actually stay and talk to the regulars in the intake wards. He could go on the meal round with Christine and brighten up the geriatric ward by actually letting them play the fifties jazz that Dr. Puri hated with a passion. He could even, God forbid, get some paperwork done.

But on the ninth...

There was just nothing to take his mind off it. His brain had woken up that morning and kicked right into gear with there's nobody here. Jocelyn was gone. He wasn't waking up an hour and a half before the alarm because there was a toddler trying to climb up into the bed with them and kneeing him in the crotch or the ribs in the process. And he couldn't even go downstairs and grump at his wife for letting JoJo having sweets before breakfast.

He didn't hate her. He'd never hated her, not really, and he wasn't even all that angry anymore. No use pretending – their marriage had been doomed from the outset, and at least he got to see Jo every weekend. She'd been more than fair. And sure, he hadn't liked getting divorced, and he was suspicious about how fast she'd moved on, and he still woke up most mornings wishing they had tried just that bit harder, but he wasn't exactly broken like he had been in the immediate fallout. He wasn't totally ruined by it. He was alright.

Just alright, though.

He still missed her. He didn't really love her anymore, if he ever had, but he missed her. He missed being married. He missed having someone waiting when he left work; he missed texts asking when he'd be home, or messy jumbles of letters saying Jo had gotten hold of her cell again. He missed her - her perfume, her shoes by his in the hall, her blouses hung up in the walk-in closet in their bedroom, and finding stray pairs of reading glasses all over the house and – the house. He missed their house, with the cracked kitchen tiles, and the stain on the window seat, and the constant mess of a small child. His new house was fine, but it wasn't their house.

He didn't have pencil marks on the walls in Tenth Avenue.

So a quiet shift...at least something – something – meant something else to think about besides his missing family. Let him stop counting until his next weekend with a little girl hanging off his hand and begging to go over the bridge just one more time, Daddy... – he'd have crashed the bus himself just to have something to do, and then Dr. Puri had turned round at quarter to seven and said, "Nothing's going on, Len, you might as well get yourself home."

Dr. Puri was only ever relaxed one day in every three hundred and sixty-five, and he had to choose the ninth of fucking April.

He didn't feel depressed, exactly – and hell, even if he did, a bottle of Jack and an evening with his feet up and a selection of his favourite, nothing-to-do-with-ever-having-had-a-family-and-more-like-being-a-student-again movies would have sorted him out just fine for the rest of the day – but the low-hanging cloud suited his mood, and the traffic made him feel at home, almost, jammed amongst a hundred other people feeling just the damn same. Probably about their ex-wives and shared kids too.

The ninth of April hadn't been the wedding anniversary. He hadn't liked their wedding anniversary – middle of October, fucking miserable no matter where in the damn country you spent it – and he'd stuck to the ninth of April, their original anniversary (in his mind, anyway). She'd liked it once. She'd always laughed and bragged to her friends how they had two anniversaries. That was how great they were. Her husband took her out and pretended to listen to her stories about the bitchy receptionist twice a year.

Only that was how great they weren't anymore.

On the ninth of April, their high school had announced the date of the senior prom. He'd wasted no time, and asked her to go that very afternoon, and they'd been an explosive item ever since. They broke up when he went to medical school, and got back together halfway through when she showed up at his dorm room in nothing more than a pair of stockings and a sweater. They'd had two pregnancy scares, and a year of hell when she'd gotten an abortion and not told him until he'd seen her name on a test results file in the clinic during the middle of his clinical skills exam. And then she'd gotten pregnant again, not six months after his graduation, and he'd wanted a family, and he offered her a faux-gold ring and they'd moved to San Francisco in time to set up home in a tiny apartment with a drawer for a crib ready for their little girl, and she'd lugged the baby about while studying for her law exams, and he'd been in the emergency room twelve hours a day just to keep them afloat in a city more expensive than the biggest casino in the south.

And they were a family – he came home at all hours of the night, exhausted, and she'd be up with their crying daughter on her shoulder and a microwave meal half-defrosted on the bench, and she'd scowl at him over the top of her glasses and say, "I'm just asking for one fucking hour, Len, is that too much to ask?" And he'd snap back something caustic, about his hours and his pay and how her family weren't exactly sending food parcels to help, and then he'd go to bed and nurse a headache through the day, only to get up for the night shift and begin all over again.

And then one November, with a howling toddler on her hip and one argument too many, she'd just upped and said, "This isn't going to work, Len. We never shoulda done it."

By the ninth of April, he was divorced. He'd been married for three damn years, and his momma couldn't talk about it, and his poppa died not six months later swearing up and down they were tricking an old man on his deathbed, that his Lenny would never have divorced nobody, not in a million years, he would never have done that to their baby girl.

Only they had – they'd had to, in the end, because it was all well and good living and loving while you were both always working, but eventually you had to learn about each other too, and somehow they'd never done that. They'd always been young and stupid and having fun; they hadn't thought about things like arguments over the goddamn gas bill, and you spent how much on diapers? And he didn't really regret the divorce, so much, and he could go and pick up Jo from her momma's and make polite conversation now, even if they weren't friends, but...

It wasn't Jocelyn he missed, really, but home. He wanted to go home – and there wasn't any such place.

He had made a small life for himself in the year since the final divorce papers came through, though. He made a tidy wage, and with no family and no saving for more children and no vacations, he kept it all as well – and had secured himself a tidy home in a quiet suburb of San Francisco itself. He kept a shoddy lawn, but a pristine kitchen, and his meticulous care of his car drew smirks and snickers from his new neighbours – and thus he met Jim Kirk.

Jim Kirk lived in the house opposite: built to be identical, and a world apart. It had all the same room dimensions, the same cheap-wood stairs, the same tiny porch with a leaky overhang – but Jim's house was nothing like McCoy's. Its colour scheme – if 'scheme' was appropriate – was the bastard love child of bad taste and colourblindness; a gaudy yellow bathroom lit up most of the upper floor by itself, and the only carpet in the place that wasn't lily-white or bright blue was the plain beige of the room he rented to his lodger. Jim's lawn was littered with car parts, the garage was permanently wide open and filled with absolute crap, and he habitually left his door open and roamed through his territory in less clothing than was publicly acceptable.

Jim Kirk was bold as brass – a cross between a southerner for sociability, and a northerner for lack of manners. With twelve hours of McCoy moving in, Jim had been on his doorstep with two bottles of beer and tips on how to avoid getting sucked into the never-ending conversation that was a simple 'hello' to Mr. Archer two doors down. With a week, he had dragged McCoy out to three different bars and displayed where his funds went (on poorly-played games of pool and even worse attempts at hustling) without shame or care. And within a month, he had more or less taken up residence as a permanent feature of McCoy's life, somewhere between downright annoying and grudgingly nice.

In the immediate aftermath of the divorce, Jim had been a welcome distraction. He was a tenacious guy, but pleasant in spite of it; he was an idiot, but well-meaning enough that McCoy didn't mind; he was cocksure and arrogant, but young enough to grow up yet. He was old enough to know that things weren't always okay, and he had his own shadows and scars – but he was also young enough to bounce back from everything with more force than strictly necessary. He had brushed off McCoy's anger and displacement like it was nothing more than mist, and wriggled and squirmed his way past the gruff aggression and the irritated snarling like he knew – like he knew, right from the start, what lay beneath.

Hell, maybe he had. Jim Kirk was a lot of things, but he wasn't a stupid man.

And used to Jim Kirk – a year today since the divorce, so eleven months since that bottle of Peroni was waved in his face at the front door – he wasn't surprised to find the objectionable man himself waiting in the twilight at the gate when McCoy pulled the car up.

Jim just looked like a jackass. He always had; McCoy had never seen him in any other state. All leather jacket and beat-up jeans and grubby white t-shirt that had seen better centuries, and in dire need of a shave and a haircut before he ended up looking like something conspiracy theorists would sell their mothers to get photographs of, he lounged on the gatepost and grinned at McCoy's headlights without even squinting the glare. He had a smile that infuriated or charmed at equal turns – a lazy smear of expression across the lower half of his face, two-thirds mocking and one-third relaxation. He had, he claimed, a winner's smile; the amount of fights it caused, McCoy doubted the assertion.

"You're early," he said around that smile. "I haven't even had the time to check out the night school students yet!"

"Lucky for them," McCoy grumbled. "Whaddaya want, Jim?"

"Monday night!" he said cheerfully. "Two for one deals at Harry's, and those killer cheeseburgers. And fuck you, I don't care if they'll kick my heart to the curb, it'd be a great way to go."

McCoy grunted. Even he could see why someone would want to gorge themselves to death on the burgers at Harry's. Even if everything else on the menu was seriously questionable.

"Thanks, Jim, but..."

"Do I look like I'm asking?" Jim drawled. "Look at this face. This is my serious business face. You come and get a couple of beers and a monster cheeseburger – look, there'll even be this vegetarian guy there so you can gross him out with your autopsy stories."

"I'm not up for a party."

"It's not a party."

"So why in the hell is 'some vegetarian guy' going to be there?"

"Because I used to work with him, Jesus," Jim rolled his eyes. "I do get to know people the normal way, y'know."

"So this is the only other person you know, aside from me, that you haven't slept with?"

Jim snorted. "There are loads of people I haven't slept with, jerk. And trust me, if he even hinted, I'd be in there. With knobs on."

"Ew."

"Yeah, bad phrase."

"Stop watching British movies."

"Never," he said breezily, peeling himself from the fencepost. "C'mon, Bones, it'll keep you busy and hating everyone I associate with on instinct. And it'll give him someone to talk to that isn't me and his lousy ex."

Oh, that sounded promising.

"Jim, I am not getting involved in someone else's drama. I get enough of that at work."

"No drama, promise. Except me," he finally unwound himself from the post. "C'mon, man. Go get changed – don't shave, you'll pull if you don't shave, ladies like that scruffy look, trust me – and come out for a beer or three."

"You said two."

"Whatever," Jim said dismissively. "Trust me. Trust me."

Later – much later, years later, years and lives later – McCoy would say that trusting Jim was something that people should do once and only once, and deny having ever done it at all for the rest of their lives.

He trusted him.