Again, thanks be to Spockaholic. As the old saying goes; the mistakes are mine, the successes are hers. And speaking of mistakes, what exactly does ffnet have against word anyway?
Chapter Two
JT woke up as he normally did; silently and not betraying a thing. He recognized the hated sensation of being strapped to a bio-bed immediately. Of course, normally that was after an allergic reaction had left him convulsing so they just used the normal ones with the buckles he could undo in five to twenty seconds depending on how groggy the medication had left him.
These were not the buckled ones.
The straps were a bit more comfortable than usual and he was willing to bet they were magnetic. It might take him a minute or two to get out.
Of course, now the question was why was he in these new high-tech things. It took a few seconds for him to remember where the ache in his shoulder had come from and he bit back a curse. He'd almost thought neck pinches were something Vulcans had made up, but apparently not; they really could knock people out with a touch. Somehow, he had completely underestimated the threat value of that.
It was a bit more disconcerting than he'd assumed, and that Vulcan had been fast. He wondered if he trained or if it was just innate.
He absently let his mind focus on the question as he felt out the straps, careful not to alert the person sitting by his bed. From their breathing, he thought they were dozing. It was a steady, soft sound, easily counted but not deep enough to indicate proper sleep. As long as he was cautious, he could get out of these things before anyone noticed.
Especially if the hinges were where he thought they were.
Then he heard a whimper. His eyes snapped open but everything was fine. The sickbay was calm and quiet, there were no shadows large enough for anyone to hide in, and Pasha was barely fifteen feet away. Before JT could start to struggle against the restraints just in case, Pasha whimpered again, his face scrunched up as he pulled his thin blanket tighter around him.
"JT?"
JT relaxed. He'd probably have a lot less scarring and mental trauma if he could just ignore a scared child but at least a bad dream was simple.
"I'm here Pasha. Go back to sleep now," he said, trying to remember his St. Petersburg accent. Speaking Russian to the kid wasn't going to be much good if he sounded like a Belarusian and scared him awake. The doctor by his side shifted awake but thankfully kept quiet as Pasha whimpered again.
"JT?"
"Pasha, sleep," he waited until the young Russian had slipped back into sleep before turning a charming grin on the man by his bedside. It took a second to remember what language he was meant to be speaking in, but thankfully his original American Standard was always easiest to slip back into.
"Hey Doc, come here often?"
The blue-shirt ignored him.
"I'm a very understanding man, JT."
JT quickly re-calculated how many ways the man glaring at him could kill him. As always when he evaluated medical personnel, the answer was not reassuring and he did his best to relax into the bio-bed and seem as innocent and helpless as possible. It didn't help. If anything, the doctor's glare worsened.
"I'm very understanding when my best friend wants to play chess with his First Officer instead of drinking with me," McCoy continued. "I'm very understanding when he can get you to eat healthily when I've been telling you for years that grease is bad for you. I'm very understanding about listening to you moan when the hobgoblin won't plait your hair and I'll be damned if I'm going to let you risk all that understanding just because you haven't met the damn walking computer yet, y'hear me?"
"So… is everybody on this ship clinically insane?"
"We've got you as a Captain, moron. And you're going to apologize to the hobgoblin for whatever it is you said. I know it was you," he said before his patient could interrupt. "Nobody can piss off a Vulcan like you can."
"Very paternal," said JT. "I'm guessing daughter? Divorced obviously, wife got custody. How long's it been since you've seen your little princess? She couldn't have been that old back then, you really think she still remembers you?"
"We've been friends almost five years now, kid," he said, trying his best not to react. "Your creepy little intuition trick's not going to scare me."
"Friends, huh? Or were you just looking for someone to replace your daughter?" He leered at him and McCoy felt sick. "Want me to call you Daddy?"
Bones took a slow breath and stared up at the board displaying his patient's vitals. Everything looked good; pulse and blood pressure were stable, no indications of pain outside of tolerable aches, and no irregularities in brain waves. Everything was good. He concentrated on that for a few heartbeats.
"You go really calculating when you're scared, kid. Worse than Spock sometimes," he admitted. "And you bottle in all that anger and stress, but when you're confused, or someone's asking too many questions, you lash out. It's… it's always worse on the people closest to you, but I don't mind. You're my friend, Jim, and God knows you've put up with enough of my crap. Or will put up with I s'pose, time travel and all, but Spock takes things personally. He doesn't just think that someone's having a bad day, he assumes it's something he's done. So you're going to apologize to him, because the you from our time has been working too damn hard for his teenage-self to shut Spock back in his shell now."
There was silence for a moment or two, unbroken by anything but the gentle beeping of the monitors and the near-silent whir of the machinery around them.
"You going to untie me?"
"You going to apologize to the hobgoblin?"
JT nodded.
For once, the idiot actually stayed still as McCoy typed in the commands to release the magnetic bonds. By this point, he knew better than to show him where the manual release was. Somehow, Jim not only remembered that sort of information, but could apply it when severely delusional from a high-grade fever.
"I still say there's no chance in hell I'd join Starfleet."
"Not even on a dare?"
"What?"
"I wasn't there," McCoy shrugged. At the time, he'd been passed out with a bottle of cheap bourbon at the shipyards where the shuttles parked.
"But I've heard the story from half a dozen people. A recruiting officer broke up this fight you were in the middle of and, while you were bleeding on the floor, he looked you up and saw your test scores. When you were conscious again, Pike dared you to do better than your Father. You were on the next shuttle to San Francisco, still concussed and surrounded by all the shiny and eager cadets."
McCoy barely remembered the shuttle ride. He'd been coming down off a three-day bender, hadn't washed in longer and was terrified out of his mind by the thought that he was actually in something that flew. Jim claimed his first words to him were 'I may throw up on you', but the first thing he actually remembered was the next day when this disgustingly cheerful, beat-up kid was bouncing up and down on his bed, announcing that it was morning and calling him 'Bones'.
He'd been even more surprised when the lunatic had seemed to know just about everything about him. That had been before he realized that Jim could not only read people scarily well for a tested psi-null, but didn't seem to even acknowledge computer security… and that he'd been drunker than he'd thought.
"Pike…" JT repeated as he allowed the doctor to check over his wrists and upper chest where the restraints had been. For a Starfleet doctor, McCoy didn't seem to like relying on his gadgets, but at least he broadcast his intentions. He didn't know how much the Vulcan had gotten from that brief touch earlier, but JT knew his shields were pretty shabby these days. Too many nightmares and not enough sleep did that to your defenses.
"Commander Christopher Pike? The guy who did his thesis on the Kelvin?" he asked, finally realizing where he'd heard that name before.
"Same one," grunted McCoy, barely paying any attention as he logged his notes onto a nearby data-PADD. He was still worried about those ribs, but unless this teenage-Jim was going to be here for an extended time, it was probably best not to do anything with them. He knew Jim, as long as he was still functional, he'd completely ignore any injuries. He couldn't risk doing more harm than good.
"Huh. He did some really nice work on that," JT mused. "Research stuff. Not all the sentimental crap the newspapers do."
"Yep, you're president of his fan-club, Enterprise Chapter. Raise your left arm over your head." He commanded, ignoring the dark look from his patient as JT obeyed. "Any pain?"
"No."
"Good, no tendon damage-"
"And let's get one thing straight," he interrupted. "I've never met Chris Pike. I don't know him, I don't know you, and I don't know Spock. You seem to know some things about me you really shouldn't, I'll give you that, but whoever your captain is, I'm not him."
"Jim-"
"No," he said, and McCoy's mouth snapped shut without his permission. He was starting to think that the damn kid was born with that talent.
"My name's JT, not Jim and I'm seventeen, sawbones. Not an officer."
McCoy stared at him.
"What did you call me?"
"Sawbones?" He repeated, his confusion at the intent question eating away at his anger. "It's what they used to call doctors way back when. Suits you, they didn't use tricorders either."
For the first time since he'd heard the news that the entire away team needed medical attention, McCoy felt a smile hovering around the corners of his mouth. Suddenly the teenager sitting in front of him didn't seem strange at all. They were probably causing problems in the timeline backwards, forwards and sideways, but one way or another, they were going to get their Captain back.
"Just call me Bones, kid. And JT? You're still James T. Kirk, seventeen or twenty-seven." His patient stared at him, obviously confused and McCoy couldn't quite help the smile. "I'll go call Spock."
JT nodded and reached for a PADD that'd slipped under the bio-bed. McCoy thought about telling him that sickbay PADDs only had access to the medical computers before shrugging it off. Either he'd hack into the rest of the Enterprise or he'd find some Xeno-biology textbook. Either way, telling Jim he couldn't do something was always bad idea.
He did briefly look over Chekov on his way to his office, but he had another half hour of sedation to burn off. The two Engineering 'cadets' were still in an empty corner of sickbay. They talked quietly to each other every now and then but mostly obeyed his orders to stay put and keep out of the way.
He probably could have used the wall comm-unit for this conversation considering the entire bridge was going to hear it, but he tried to discourage Jim's eavesdropping habits whenever possible. Not that using the comm on his desk would stop a curious Kirk, but at least he'd be able to sit down for this conversation.
"McCoy to Spock."
"Spock here."
"Jim's woken up."
There was a pause and McCoy almost flicked the switch on and off to check if it was working. He hated technology. Thankfully, before he could send a wave of static up to the First Officer, the comm-unit crackled to life once more.
"I am certain, Doctor McCoy, that you will be able handle the situation."
"He's asking for you."
"In this instance, I believe your unpredictable emotionality will be better suited to the situation. Please alert me if he remembers anything that may be relevant to our investigation."
Yup, the hobgoblin was sulking. One of these days, he was going to find whoever had written the Fleet handbook on Vulcans and shove it up their ass. Just about the only person besides that damn thing who insisted Vulcans had near-perfect control over their emotions, was Spock himself, and he threw more tizzy fits than a ballerina. Usually over Jim ignoring him. The pair of them deserved each other.
"Look, you damn walking computer," he growled. "I've got four patients down here who've somehow traveled in time and you can't tell me why. Now I've got to look over every microscopic scan to make sure they're all healthy and not about to keel over from some weird-ass radiation or transporter errors, or whatever the hell else it was that brought them here. I can do that, or I can make sure Jim's not going to escape and cause havoc! Which one's it going to be?"
He half expected the Commander's next words to be a rebuke over repeating classified information on an unsecured system. Instead, the cold-blooded idiot merely replied that he would be down shortly and signed off.
The doctor glared some more at the gadget in front of him before glancing out his open door into his sickbay. Chekov was still out, no noise was coming from the young red-shirts and JT was… well, he was tapping away at the PADD still so he'd probably made it about half-way through the ships firewalls by now.
He sighed and reached for the well-hidden bottle in the bottom of his desk to pour himself a small glass. The scans weren't going to look at themselves and something in them might give Scotty a way to fix things.
True to his word, it only took Commander Spock four minutes and thirty-nine seconds to reach sickbay from the bridge. This was fifty-two seconds longer than usual but that was easily accounted for. With the current circumstances, it was necessary to keep himself constantly apprised of any progress made by the science section.
The thought that the additional fifty-two seconds had not been long enough to reassert his control did occur to him but he quickly dismissed it. The doctor had been quite correct to point out that his responsibility was to James T. Kirk. Until they recovered the away team and their Captain, that meant his duty was to this new, younger and more unstable JT.
It might also grant him the opportunity to inquire after JT's state of mind. While his Captain had an unusually dynamic mind that was oftentimes dizzying to encounter, it had never been painful before. In fact, he usually defined any telepathic encounters with Jim to be unmistakably pleasurable but the previous incident was quite the opposite. Even now, the screaming echoed through his thoughts in a most disconcerting manner.
Upon entering the sickbay, Spock was somewhat nonplussed to discover everything within regulation norms. The only non-recommended action was the fact that JT was currently accessing a data PADD.
He looked up at his entrance and Spock found himself oddly relaxed by the half-smile on JT's face.
"There's my programming all over this," he declared in a recognizably joking manner and Spock raised an eyebrow.
"Indeed? I believe security will be most interested to hear that the ship's computers have been altered in such a manner."
His small jest paid off when JT's half-smile widened into a true grin.
"Don't act so smug, you," he replied. "I recognize those Vulcan programming labyrinths. I've never had the patience to write anything like that in."
That was a curious statement. While almost every Vulcan programmer would include the logic traps into their programming, very few others would ever use such a tactic. Most computer programmers from other species found the habit to be something of a waste of time when there were other, simpler methods that yielded similar results. In effect, most carried the same opinion that JT had just offered, the logic traps were time-consuming to write.
"May I ask where you've encountered such things? It was my understanding that you had rarely been off-planet in your youth."
"Sure," he shrugged. "But every Starfleet base computer keeps an open link with San Fran, who stays linked to just about every major Federation institution there is."
Spock believed he knew what he was implying.
"The San Francisco Ship Yards have had a branch in Riverside, Iowa for approximately 24.95 solar years."
"More like fifteen from my point of view, but yeah. Don't worry though, there's not much point hacking into anywhere if you don't understand the language anything's written in."
Had he been told this even a few hours ago, such a statement may have been reassuring. As it was, he was now trying to estimate, based on his limited knowledge, how many computers on Vulcan had held an open link to Starfleet Headquarters apart from the VSA. Unlike most Terran Universities, the Vulcan Science Academy not only taught students but had also held most of Vulcan's defense technology and other security concerns.
Surely, any rational being would know better than to hack an institution which contained large amounts of military data?
"JT, what precisely was your reason for learning Vulcan?"
Unfortunately for his peace of mind, the human merely smiled up at him.
"See, this is why I've decided I like you, Spock. Speaking of which, I owe you an apology."
He would have to discuss the matter with his Captain when they recovered him. For the moment he merely accepted the deflection.
"Your reactions were perfectly understandable, sir," he said, attempting to reassure him. "It must be thoroughly disconcerting to awaken bereft of any familiar figures, only to be informed that you are not in the time frame you should logically be in."
"Trust me, familiar figures? Really wouldn't have been reassuring. And I shouldn't have snapped at you like that, not about any of it. I'm sorry."
"There is no offense where none is taken," he quoted in the original Vulcan and his future Captain grinned, obviously recognizing the Surakian proverb.
"Thanks. So, when do I get a tour of this place?"
This was the exact situation both he and Doctor McCoy had anticipated ever since the current situation came to light. Unfortunately, he had yet to determine how to deflect the potential disaster with any probable success.
"JT, as I'm sure you are already aware, the risk of temporal paradoxes must be minimized," he attempted to placate. The youth before him shrugged, as if such a thing was expected and perfectly reasonable.
"Okay."
The Captain's easy agreement was not reassuring.
"The amount of information you have been privy to thus far has already put the timeline into jeopardy."
"Sure, gotta protect the timeline," he said, his expression open and honest. Spock had witnessed this precise act being used to great effect on numerous authority figures, including most of the Admiralty.
"Even the smallest of technological changes you would observe, however inadvertently, could potentially change your future actions." he continued to argue.
JT nodded again.
"I understand."
There was no hint of deception in any of his body language. Everything Spock knew about humans in general led him to believe that JT intended to remain precisely where he was without even studying the advanced medical equipment within his reach.
"You plan on escaping from the sickbay and exploring the ship anyway."
"When you say things like that, I really start to believe you know me," replied an admiring JT. "I'll cut you a deal. If you come with, I'll let you choose where we go first."
"Who's going where first?" demanded a voice behind them and Spock froze. It had been made abundantly clear to the entire crew within the first month of shipping out that assisting the Captain's escape from medical care was strictly prohibited. Doctor McCoy had been rather adamant on the matter, and it had only taken until the Captain had joined the first away-team that his reasoning had become apparent. The entire bridge crew had been rather shocked to discover that Jim could still make command grade decisions with that much blood loss.
Fortunately, JT answered instead.
"Bonesey! We're going exploring, you coming with?" he asked in a cheerful tone both adults found eerily familiar.
Spock quirked an inquiring eyebrow at the CMO and JT watched in confusion as the other human blushed slightly.
"Apparently I was doomed from the start," grumbled the doctor. "Two minutes into a conversation and the damn kid was already calling me sawbones."
"Indeed?"
It took JT a moment to realize what the two were referring to but when he did, he barely stopped himself from cursing. He should've realized that older-him had started that nickname… and the thought of 'older-him' wasn't getting any less creepy.
"Hey, you ever heard of a modern doctor that doesn't like to use a tricorder?" he grinned, making sure none of his unease showed through. "Next thing you know, he'll be calling himself 'just an old, country doctor'."
He immediately bristled and JT was certain he'd nailed it. That guess had been a bit of a long shot but the Doc obviously took pride in his roots. It took real effort to maintain that sort of accent when no one around you spoke that way, most people just slowly slipped into the almost tone-flat Standard without even realizing it.
"I'll get my hypos," McCoy growled.
"I believe you were investigating the away-teams scans, Doctor?"
"Yeah, there's a couple of anomalies," he answered Spock as he carefully chose a selection of sleek hyposprays and stuffed them in a nearby case. "The computer's isolating them, but it'll take half an hour or so. In the meantime, no one's going anywhere without medical supervision. Understand me, JT?"
"I'm not sure we know each other well enough for these dependency issues of yours, Bones."
"JT," he said in a threatening tone.
"No ditching the watchdog. Got it," he said and Spock honestly believed that the doctor's resulting growl did indeed resemble that typical of the average canis familiaris. As always, his Captain's response to any indication of danger was unique and the youth just smiled. "So, Spock has first choice on where we're going."
"Lead on, MacDuff."
Spock watched as JT turned to glare at the good doctor and noted the odd smirk McCoy gave in return.
"It's 'Lay on, MacDuff', and you so did that on purpose," accused JT.
"Can't prove it."
Obviously, the abruptly increased age difference had done little to change the strange nature of the Captain and CMO's relationship.
"Gentlemen," he interrupted before JT could respond to McCoy's taunt. "If you'll follow me, I have chosen our first destination."
He believed his future Captain would enjoy this.
"Hold on a moment," said JT and they watched as he walked over to the bio-bed containing the still sleeping Chekov. "Pasha? Pasha wake up for a second."
Spock quirked an eyebrow at the doctor but he only shrugged. Until ten minutes ago he had no idea the kid spoke Russian either. Obviously, the teenage Jim was a bit more open with his talents than their Jim was.
"JT?" murmured Pasha, squinting against the light as he tried to fight the sedative.
"Yeah, it's me," he replied. "I'm just going for a walk. I'll be back in an hour or so."
The young Chekov forced himself to wake up just that little bit more so he could open his eyes.
"You're alright?" he checked, worried despite the way sleep was still calling to him. "The scary man didn't hurt you?"
"I'm fine Pasha, just going to have a look around. You go back to sleep and I'll be back soon alright?"
"Alright," he mumbled, finally falling back unconscious. JT smiled down at him and tucked the blanket securely around Pasha. When he turned back, the two 'Fleet officers were staring at him. He ignored their questioning expressions and switched back to Standard, which was a lot easier now he wasn't fighting off unconsciousness himself.
"Ok, let's go."
