Author's Note: I received so many Story Alerts from the first chapter - I was so thrilled that people enjoyed it so much. Thank you to everyone who read the fic, and a special thank you to those who reviewed. I hope you will enjoy the second chapter as much as you did the first, and I hope you will all be kind and leave me a review. Thank you, have a lovely weekend, and, as always,

Live long. Live well. Write. Read. Dream.

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage."

~ Lao Tzu

II

The sound of the medical transport's siren called Leonard McCoy's attention back from where it had been wandering toward desperation. He was standing outside of the bar where the explosion had taken place, waiting for the transport to arrive. He was trying to get the images of fire and burning bodies and phasers piercing flesh out of his head, but it wouldn't quite leave.

He didn't recognize the faces of the people who moved past him – couldn't quite concentrate on anything but their grim expressions as they moved in and out of the bar, using emergency transporter signals to send some of the more dire patients directly to the medical facility, and loading up the others. Leonard waited as they loaded up those who had been injured, and startled briefly when someone grabbed his arm forcefully, pulling him to the transport vehicle. He had been injured by the Nautiliad and needed medical attention, but he would be all right. There were others worse off than he was.

The ride to the hospital seemed to fly by in seconds, and he wondered if he had fallen asleep or passed out in the vehicle, but no one said anything. He was pulled from the vehicle, the stern treatment oddly not harming the burns on his skin, as someone held fast to his arm and led him into the hospital. People in stretchers were rushed past him, and though many split off and went other directions or seemed to disappear when he wasn't looking, there was always one right beside him. Too many people had been injured… and where was Jim?

"Easy, Doctor McCoy – let me fix this up."

"No, now hold on a minute, I'm fine – where the hell is Jim?"

"Jim, sir?" The doctor working on him didn't stop in his efforts to take off Leonard's shirt, and he rolled his eyes.

"Jim— James Kirk. He was at the bar with me. Was he brought in on a stretcher?"

"Yes, sir, I believe so."

"You believe so?" When the man didn't reply, Leonard jerked away from th steady hands sewing a gash closed on his arm. "Look, I'm glad ya all willin' to help me out, but there are people hurt a lot worse than I am, so go help them and jus' tell me where Jim's a'."

"He's in surgery, Doctor McCoy, but you really must let me fix you up before you leave."

"I'm fine!" he snapped, jumping off of the table and heading for the door. "Go help someone who needs ya. Damn fool," he muttered.

The operating room had two nurses in it when he arrived, and Leonard shivered when he stepped into the room. Jim was lying on a gurney in the middle of the room, his skin pale, eyes closed. He was bare-chested, with a sheet pulled up to just below his ribcage. There were cuts and scrapes over his arms and chest, a few scratches on his face, and burn marks all down his left side, like he had been standing to the right of the bomb when it went off. The white sheets on which he lay were turning a prominent crimson from the blood running from a gaping wound on his right shoulder. He seemed to be growing paler as every second passed.

"Doctor McCoy," the one nurse greeted. Beyond the mask she wore, McCoy could recognize the emerald-green eyes of Nurse O'Shal, who he frequently, and rather reluctantly, worked with on a regular basis. Regardless of his personal opinion of her, he was rather glad to see a familiar face. He couldn't quite focus on who the other nurse was. His eyes kept straying back to Jim, blood pooling beneath him.

"Any idea what happened?" Leonard asked, trying hard to keep his tone professional as he pulled on a pair of gloves.

"He was caught in an explosion," the nameless nurse said in a sweet voice. "Asides from the burns and scratches, something sharp struck his shoulder and severed an artery. He's bleeding out."

This was all said with the clinical detachment of someone who had taken the job for the money. Leonard wished he could focus on the nurse's face so he could remember to file a serious recommendation to have her fired, but he couldn't look away from Jim.

"I ca' see he's bleedin' out," he snapped at her instead. "Why haven't ya used a stabilizer t' stop the bleedin'?"

"His artery has been severed, Doctor. A stabilizer would merely delay the inevitable. Triage would demand that we focus on patients with a better survival rate and this patient be left to God."

"This patient has a name, Nurse! An' I ain't gon' leave 'im t' God or any'un else! Ya don't like I', ya ca' clear out!"

A snarl still on his face, Leonard turned back to Jim, hands moving to grab the necessary tools. O'Shal was there, then, silent as she always was around him, but getting the stabilizer and setting it up to stop the bleeding from Jim's wound. It should have been put there already, and Leonard didn't have it in him to thank the nurse for something she should have already done – something that could make a difference.

The tools he held quivered in his fingers as he sought the severed artery, to fix them in place and heal them. His hands never shook, and he wondered now at how they trembled, quivering at the ends of his arms. Still, he worked despite the shuddering, fitting the artery together, using a regenerator – did it matter which one, so long as it worked? – to speed the healing of the artery, sucking the blood out of the wound, and then using a dermal regenerator to heal the skin of the wound.

Except, Leonard hands were still shaking, and there was a scalpel in his hands – why was there a scalpel in his hands – and he was trying to cut out something from Jim's wound; a piece of whatever had sliced up his shoulder was still imbedded in the wound. But his hands were shaking and the scalpel wasn't steady, and then the tiny blade, so small but so, so sharp, sliced through that same artery, and then there was blood, new blood, fresh blood, and it was all over. Jim was bleeding all over the gurney and the sheets and he was white, so white, white as the sheets, and he wouldn't stop bleeding and Leonard could hear from somewhere the steady beeping of a heart monitor, only it seemed to be blaring together, the beeping one long drone of steady sound, in his mind one long, steady line of red sound and Leonard couldn't understand where the droning noise was coming from, because Jim was right here, Jim was fine, Leonard was taking care of him and that meant Jim would be fine, except that his artery was severed and there was blood blood blood and Jim wasn't fine, he was dead, and there was blood, and Leonard couldn't stop shaking quivering shuddering—

Leonard snapped awake with a cry, a name on his lips. Shivering, the doctor rolled over on the cold floor and threw up whatever he had eaten at the bar.

He coughed, trying to hold himself up on weak arms, spitting the foul taste of bile from his mouth, as he shivered violently.

It had been a dream... just a dream. He hadn't been fixing Jim up at the hospital – at least not this time.

Leonard looked down at his hands, only to find that he couldn't see them. In fact, he realized, as he lifted his head and looked around him, he couldn't see anything. There was no way to tell, of course, whether he was blind or it was just ridiculously dark, but Leonard was more inclined to think the latter, if only to preserve his sanity. He shivered again. He was cold, goosebumps running up and down both his arms and legs. He could feel his hair, wet and flopping against the back of his neck, water trickling down his back.

Pushing himself to his feet unsteadily, he felt the walls of… wherever he was. They were smooth, and gave a hollow banging echo when he rapped his knuckles against them. The sound seemed to go up a long ways, as though it were an incredibly tall building. Leonard rapped his knuckles against the wall again, louder this time.

"HEY!" he yelled, his voice echoing loudly against his own ears. "HEY—" he racked his brain for the Nautiliad's name. "—Z'HANI! LET ME OUT OF HERE!" Wherever "here" was, of course. This cold, wet, dark place that he most certainly did not want to be in. He didn't remember being brought here. In fact, he didn't remember a whole lot after they had left the bar.

Of course, his last memories of the bar itself had likely been the cause of that all-too-real nightmare.

The phaser held low enough to be inconspicuous had stilled him, kept him from leaving, and made him complacent. The surprise of having a weapon pulled on him had kept him from moving right away, when the Nautiliad turned suddenly and fired at the bartender. Even now, Leonard could recall the trajectory of the gun's fire. The bartender had been killed instantly, and Z'hani's movements had triggered those who had come with her, as phaser fire had briefly opened up in the bar, before the bomb had gone off.

Leonard remembered how Z'hani had moved – swimming over the ground like liquid, as fast as a river, and wrapping arms too strong around his torso and bodily hauling him toward the door. He had fought her, oh, how he had fought. When he'd realized that trying to pry her arms off of him was useless, he'd gone to attempting to throw himself out of her grasp and kick her in the shins at the same time. It was during one of these attempts that he'd looked up and, somehow, of all people in the bar, locked his eyes on Jim.

Cuts and scratches adorned the young man's face, and pain radiated in those neon blue eyes that stood out, bluer than any eyes the doctor had seen before. Jim's shirt was torn, scrapes and what looked like burns on his arm, cuts through the shirt on his chest, and one long gash on his right arm, deep and bleeding heavily.

He had gotten a glimpse of the younger man as Jim pushed himself to his feet, and saw his face screw up in pain, his mouth open in a cry that couldn't be heard over the chaos in the room, just before the young man slammed to his knees and fell forward. Leonard remembered yelling out Jim's name, sudden fear rushing through him, a need to go to his friend – his friend – and make sure that he was all right. Only the arms of the Nautiliad tightened around him, and when one reached up to clap over his mouth, Leonard sank his teeth into the webbed hand, and he remembered the acidic taste of blue blood on his tongue as his bit harder and harder.

And then pain exploded behind his eyes as something knuckled and heavy struck him in the side of the head, and darkness had claimed him into the Nautiliad's whim and the darkness of a nightmare.

Leonard frowned into the darkness, lingering as it intended to. He tried to let the thought slide, but the idea of him being unable to see… doctors couldn't be blind, and Leonard McCoy was a doctor, damnit.

But when he wasn't thinking about the possibility of being blind, his thoughts wandered back to Jim. Jim, who he had seen collapse in pain, bleeding from what his nightmarish mind had proclaimed was a severed artery. Thankfully, Leonard's brain was pointing out to him the various reasons why it was probably not a severed artery, but it had still been a badly-bleeding wound. A bomb had still gone off in the building. There had still been people, with guns, in that bar!

Leonard leaned against the wall and slid down into a sitting position, ignoring the cold water that soaked into his jeans. He ran a hand over his face, weary and worried. Damnit, he'd never say it to him, but Leonard liked Jim! That kid, annoying as fuck as he was, was one of the few people in his life that Leonard could honestly call his friend. The only problem was that he was a damn coward when it came to admitting it, always worried about being hurt in the end, and he had yet to tell the kid that he cared about him, too. He had yet to actually let Jim know that he was his friend.

He thought back to earlier that night, or by now it might have been yesterday. When he had arrived at the bar and had snapped at Jim for telling the waiter that Leonard didn't need to order anything. He'd wanted a drink, because things just weren't going well – Finals were always hard and it was a stressful time for him, especially since they always seemed to fall right around his birthday, and that was never an easy time, stuck at the academy in San Francisco and not able to see his daughter. He'd wanted a glass of whiskey, and he'd snapped at Jim for not letting him order it, only to find out that the kid already had ordered it, because of course he knew what Leonard drank. Leonard was finding out, more every day, that Jim paid a lot of attention to the little things when it concerned other people. A lot more than people usually did.

And Leonard remembered the look on Jim's face when he had continued to glare at him. The dimming of his eyes from that radioactive blue, the smile that wilted like a dying flower from his face, the happiness fading from his eyes, and then, the worst part – that mask going up, with the fake smile that most people would fall for, the one that could swoon a girl and stop a murderer and make a professor reconsider a grade. It was the smile that never touched Jim's eyes, but the one that almost everyone seemed to fall for. Almost.

Leonard was becoming increasingly aware of that smile. He was, sadly, becoming more and more acquainted with the consistency of it, realizing that Jim hid behind that false grin too damn much. He'd tried to tell himself that he didn't know why he hadn't hit Jim as hard as he intended, but lying to himself wouldn't get him anywhere. That damn kid was hurting, and you didn't have to be a doctor to see that; you just had to care.

And Leonard McCoy cared a lot about Jim Kirk. Too damn much, in fact.

Fuck.