The Button

by Angel Baby1

In a life tainted by magic and evil, Jim makes his way from a young age as the apprentice of a powerful medium and her monster slayer husband. Eventually, the stars call to him, whispering of an unnatural enemy. Something will have to be done about that. Something will also have to be done about the stubborn Vulcan who thinks one shared childhood adventure makes them friends.

3. The Doctor in the Fairy Ring

AN: BLAM, here it is: Bones' chapter, wherein he meets Jim, Kit, Sulu, and Chekov, who all endeavor to make his life more difficult in any ways they can.

This ends at Starfeel Academy, yaaay. (Poor Bones.)

ALSO I changed a bit at the end of the previous chapter, so make sure you peek at it or the next one will be a little confusing at first.

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The Doctor in the Fairy Ring

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In the deep dark of the woods near his house, Len McCoy stood beside a ring of mushrooms. Despite the tall trees growing all around it, the ring was illuminated by a bright ray of late morning sunshine. The mushrooms, fat stems capped with wide white hats, seemed almost to gleam. Somewhat fittingly, a black cat stepped out of the shadows to sit just at the sunlight's edge.

Len hated it on sight. He hated the cat, the mushroom ring, this forest, and the baby cradled in the bend of his left arm. None of it deserved to be here, ruining his life like it didn't matter.

The baby fussed weakly, fighting the sedative Len had fed it at breakfast when Jocelyn wasn't looking. Jocelyn would be furious if she knew. But then, Jocelyn didn't know. Len didn't need her to.

He could fix this on his own.

Len squared his shoulders and stepped toward the mushroom ring, shifting the baby so he could toss it in the middle. The black cat stood and began walking in his direction.

A hand from out of nowhere gripped around his elbow.

Len startled so badly he nearly dropped the baby.

"Careful," a male voice said just beside his ear. "You don't want to hurt her."

"Don't I," Len snapped in return, yanking his arm out of the stranger's hand.

"Not if you want your daughter back whole."

Len jerked around in shock, finally setting eyes on the new arrival. He was a kid, maybe somewhere in his teens, looking fresh-faced and not even old enough to shave. Blond hair hung across his forehead and curled around the bottom of his ears. He wore clothes too big for him, making him look frail. Despite that, his posture was confident, his shoulder and back straight under Len's suspicious gaze. His eyes were blue, the right pale as the sky at noon. The left was darker in a strange pattern that Len would have guessed was a tattoo or contact.

It didn't feel like a tattoo.

It felt…deep. Dark. Black sapphire like a warning around four tiny, distinct spots of blue. It drew him in the way mud caught horses, sucking and inevitable.

Something bit his ankle.

Len drew back with a gasp, cursing as he looked down.

The black cat looked back up at him, expression utterly unimpressed.

"Thanks a lot," Len muttered.

"You're welcome," the cat said.

Len yelped and leapt even further back.

One of the cat's ears flicked. "Not very brave," it murmured.

"Kinda smart though," the boy replied, crouching so the cat could spring up to perch on his shoulder. "Good instincts."

The cat made a derisive sound but didn't say anything else.

Thank the lord.

"I'm Jim," the boy said, turning back to Len. He jiggled the arm the cat was on. "This is Kit. We're not here to help you, but it looks like we might be going to the same place. Might as well go together, since you don't seem to have a good grasp on what's a good idea to do and what isn't."

"How do you know?" Len snapped.

The boy—Jim nodded toward the baby. "That's a changeling child, and you were gonna toss it in a fairy ring. Bad idea, if the goal is to get back the baby they took from you."

"I have to save her," Len said, some of his desperation seeping through the cracked walls of the fear and anger that motivated him. "I won't let them keep my baby girl."

Jim shrugged. "Good goal. It won't be a fun life for her on that side of things. Chucking the impostor into a fairy ring still won't help you."

Len struggled with his distrust for a long minute. "Okay," he said at last, and slowly, the concession drawn from him like taffy on a pull. "So why not?"

"Fairy rings summon fairies that force the mortal who crossed into them to dance," the cat said, "unto death. You're not tossing in a mortal though, are you?" She pricked her whiskers forward in consideration of the changeling. "You're tossing in another fairy. They'd just take it home, and you've lost your bargaining chip."

"Not to mention what they'd do to your daughter," Jim added. "Y'know. In revenge for trying to hurt one of theirs."

Len's trembling arms tightened around the baby. His heart raced in his chest. "So what do I do?" he asked hoarsely. "How do I save her?"

"We have an errand," the cat said. "Not with whatever traded babies with you, but in the same neighborhood. You can come with us."

"Why would you help me?" Len demanded. "What's in it for you?"

"Nothing's in it for us," Jim said with an eye roll. "We're just…fucking morons."

"And you can take me to my daughter?"

"We have bigger fish to fry," the cat said.

"Rude, Kit," Jim said mildly. He tilted his head in thought. "True though. But like I said, we'll be in a similar neighborhood."

"Okay," Kit said to Jim, twisting around to paw at his nose, "but you gotta promise me not to get further involved than that. No negotiating for the human baby. No, like, offering yourself in its place."

"No monster slaying?" Jim asked with a grin.

Kit shook her head. "I could probably be convinced." She turned to Len like he was the intruder. Which, well, there were two of them. He probably was. "What's your name? Or I can just call you Moron the whole time."

Len scowled. "I'm not actually a moron," he said. "I know better than to give my real name to…whatever it is you are. Names have power, Kit."

"You don't say," Kit drawled.

"Where did you learn about that?" Jim asked, turning in a slow circle to assess the clearing around the fairy ring. He began walking in the direction of the sun.

"Same place I learned about changelings," Len said, watching Jim's shadow grow longer the closer he got to the light source.

"Cagey," Kit observed. "Cute, but not helpful. We're going to need to know where you got your education so we can have some idea on what help we might be able to expect from you in the future. My money's on hedge witch," she added to Jim.

"I am a med student," Len sputtered.

"So's a hedge witch-in-training," Kit snarked. "Plus that's not a no."

Once the sun was fully behind Jim, he turned to face the fairy circle. "Might have guessed he was learning to be a doctor," Jim said absently, stretched his hand out so the shadow it cast spilled into the fairy ring. "He reminds me of Wentworth."

Kit made a sound of deep comprehension. "Just another grumpy pile of bones."

"I am not the skeletal figure here," Len hissed. "Each of you looks half starved!"

Jim ignored him, even as Kit flatted her ears and poofed up her tail and growled low in her throat. "Who's starving?" she demanded through her snarl.

"Bones didn't mean anything by it," Jim said, lifting his free hand to pet her calm. The other, still extended over the ring, clenched abruptly, digging its long, shadowed fingers into the earth surrounded by mushrooms.

His shade drove divots into the ground, four deep parallel trenches, until they snagged on the turned soil. Jim lifted and pulled, drawing the circle up into a mound even as the world around them groaned in protest. The trees darkened and shook; the birds took flight; the lush, green grass browned everywhere his shadow touched it.

In the distance, a hawk screamed its fury.

Still Jim pulled. His left eye gleamed like polished bone painted the color of the sky on the edge of a hurricane. The mound rose, crowned by the fairy ring, until it was nearly as tall as Len.

"That's enough, Jim," Kit told him. She twisted around to bite his ear when Jim didn't respond.

The kid sucked in a breath, eyes wide the moment before he shut them tight. His forehead creased and beaded with sweat. The fingers on his extended hand began to shake. At last, he breathed out, and curled his hand into a fist.

Light returned to clearing.

"What was that," Len breathed.

"Just a little trick," Jim said as he struggled to control the tremors rattling his underfed body. It took him less time than Len would have guessed.

Len hesitated a long moment before saying, "Listen, as a doctor, I don't think y'all're in any condition to—"

"Don't even get me started," the cat sighed. "You're not even actually a doctor yet, and even if you were, he won't listen. It's been, what, over a year? Since what happened to his body happened, and look at him. A stiff breeze could bow him over. Sometimes I make him wobble. He's the worst at taking care of himself."

"Thanks, peanut gallery," Jim grumbled, straightening so he could approach the hill he'd created. "Are we gonna do this or what?"

"Not if you're gonna die doin' it," Len said. He walked toward the forest line to retrieve his backpack, juggling it with the changeling on his way over to Jim. "There are protein bars in the front pocket." He shoved the bag toward Jim. "Eat one or we're not going."

"Or you're not going," Jim reminded him, hands in his pockets rather than reaching for the bag. "Kit and I are going either way."

Kit leapt lightly from Jim's shoulders to Len's.

Jim heaved a deep, put-upon sigh. "Fine," he said, taking the bag to rummage through it. "I'll eat one protein bar—"

"There's a bottle water too," Len said. "Because hydration is important."

"Of course there is. One protein bar," he said brandishing it at Kit. He tucked it under his arm to pull out a bottle of water, which he shook at Len. "One water. Then can we please just go and get this over with?"

"Fine by me," Len said. Jim drank half the water in a single gulp, devoured the protein bar, and finished the rest of the bottle, all in under five minutes. "Well that was gross and deeply unhealthy," the med student commented wryly.

"At least he ate," Kit murmured in his ear. Jim slung the bag on his own back, lifting one shoulder as invitation to the cat. She jumped back over to her usual perch, butting against Jim's blond head with a slight purr. Jim shut his eyes, only for a moment, then turned back to the mound.

He didn't speak. But something in him, something that buzzed like mayflies in Len's ears, said Open.

A door appeared in the hill. It sprung open when Jim approached it. He held it wide with his left hand, then gave Len a little bow to usher him through.

Filled with equal amounts of trepidation and resolve, Len walked forward.

…

Len cradled Joanna in his arms, pressing her face into his shoulder as he soothed her crying, and tried not to look at the dismembered body of the…whatever it was at Jim's feet. "What are you?" he asked, not looking at Jim either.

"Not anything, really," Jim said. Len's eyes flicked to the teenager's face at the bleakness in his words. Jim's shadow still stretched across the floor, sharp and angular, looking nothing like it should, causing the creature's body to bubble and hiss everywhere they touched. "I've tried to be a lot of things. The only one that's really stuck is monster hunter. So I'm that, I guess. A bad thing that kills bad things."

"That's so stupid," Kit hissed from her place twining in between Jim's ankles. "You aren't bad. You made a mistake as a kid. How much longer will you make yourself pay for it?"

Len's grandmother had been really thorough in his education. She taught him everything she knew, any detail that might one day help him save a life—his own or someone else's. "The things in the dark are there whether or not you know about them," she'd said the one and only time he'd ever complained about the lessons that took up every spare moment of his time after school. "Who knows who might one day need you to have this knowledge. Now sit down before I tell your mama you fussed at me."

So Len knew a lot of things about a lot of things, even putting aside his ongoing education. He knew about the creatures that preyed on children, the things they did to lure them into their nests. His grandmother had showed him images of long, creeping hands, friendly faces and eyes so dead they weren't even real. He knew about the buttons.

"The Beldam," he breathed, all his attention zeroed in on Jim's dark blue eye, flat and menacing when he used his power. "You survived the Beldam?" His hold on Joanna tightened. "Good god, man. Will she… Can she track you? Is she going to come after you?"

"We killed the Beldam," Kit said, calm and unflinching in the face of Len's disbelief. "She got to Jim before I could stop her, but we killed her in payment for the eye she took. Sadie Doyle bound the button. Even still, there's some…" She tilted her head as though searching for just the right world. "Let's call it spillover."

Len felt shock buzz under his skin, numbing his mouth and cheeks. "You're the Doyle boy?" he heard himself ask as if from a great distance. "They said you died. On…on Tarsus. There was something there, and you killed it, and it killed you. No one's heard of you since. Why are you in Mississippi?"

"Mississippi was the closest door to the creature I wanted to kill," Jim muttered, paying more attention to shaking the goopy innards of his latest enemy off his arms than to Len and Kit's conversation about him. "So here we are. I might as well have died back then; what does it matter where I am now?"

Kit whipped around to bite his ankle. When Jim cursed, she said, quite primly, "We've talked about this."

Jim scowled down at her. "You said you'd object to me saying things like that, not that you're bite me!"

"I said I'd object strongly," Kit said, eyes wide and innocent as a kitten's.

"Can we get back to the Beldam and your rumored death?" Len demanded. "Why haven't you told the community! Last year's fair had a commemoration ceremony for you!"

"Was I in it?" Kit asked, tail lashing.

Len threw his free hand in the air. "Yes!" He immediately began soothing Joanna when she fussed at him.

"It's not my fault they don't know I'm still working," Jim objected. "The Doyles and the Hendersons don't think I'm dead."

"Although that's probably due to how you live with them," Kit pointed out. "Well, with the Hendersons, when you live anywhere nowadays, but you sleep off a lot of your injuries on that couch in the Doyles' suite they never remember having bought for you."

"Sleep off?" Len sputtered.

Jim tilted his head as though listening for something. "Sounds like company incoming," he said, kneeling so Kit could hop onto his shoulder. She made a face at the ichor, but did all the same. "Let's get out of here."

"Hey," Len protested, following in Jim's wake. "Hey! Are you telling me you just sleep off your injuries? That's not how that works!"

"Is," Kit said, curing her tail around Jim's head to tickle his ear with it. "Ever since Tarsus, anyway. Jim doesn't want to bother Dr. Wentworth. Not when his abilities are—"

"So," Jim interrupted firmly, "must be nice to have your daughter back."

Len shifted Joanna against his shoulder. "It is. But it'd also be nice if I knew you kids were taken care of once this is over."

"We take care of ourselves fine," Jim said, pressing forward into an imposing darkness. He reached out to grasp something unseen, then turned. Light spilled into the shadows around them. Len squinted against it before following Jim through the doorway.

And back into the forest where they're started.

The mound collapsed behind them, returning to a simple fairy ring.

"Don't come back to this area," Jim told Len, lifting a hand in goodbye. "Have a good—"

"No," Len said, mulishness rearing its head at last. "Not until I check you over. Heaven only knows the kind of damage that…whatever…did before I found you. You're sitting through an exam and that's the end of it."

Jim stared at him. Exasperation built in his expression like heat in a kettle close to boiling. "You're not even a real doctor. You could be faking that you know anything about medicine at all! What makes you think I would—"

"I'm a med student, not a charlatan! I have more than enough first aid training to—"

"Real or not," Kit interrupted, "I'm not going anywhere until you let him fix you up." She knocked her head sideways into Jim's. "You won't go to Wentworth, so Bones it is."

"I am not," Jim began hotly.

"We should go back to my house," Len told Kit, rearranging his estimation of who the more reasonable of the two was. "I have to put Jo down, and I have a small office that can double as a clinic around the back."

"Lay on," Kit replied.

Len hesitated. "Have you..." He shook his head, then made himself ask. "Have you read Macbeth?"

"It is a tale told by an idiot," she said, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

"I need a drink," Len said, turning to lead them to his house.

"Same," Jim muttered.

"What're you?" Len demanded, rocking Jo a little to encourage her to sleep. "Like, twelve?"

"Sixteen," Jim said defensively.

"Oh good," Len muttered to himself, "he's sixteen."

"You should notice I'm not following you," Jim called from the clearing.

"You will be soon," Kit said. Len glanced back in time to see her jump lightly from Jim's shoulder, then set off into the woods.

"Hey!" Jim protested. "I don't have to follow just because you are. I could go home without you!"

Len slowed down so Kit didn't have to run to keep up. "Want a ride?" he asked, looking down at her picking her way over the cluttered forest floor.

"Give it a minute," she said, leaping gracefully over a large root.

Behind them, Jim cursed. "You could get eaten!" he scolded, scooping her off the ground when he caught up.

She let him snuggle her close like a favorite teddy bear. "Bones will make you feel better," she said. "Then we can go home. I know you hate it; it's gonna happen anyway. Make peace with your future."

Jim scowled but didn't reply, his fingers itching over her head.

"You two need to stop calling me Bones," Len sighed. "I don't care how skinny your doctor was—"

"Skeleton," Jim interrupted, still not looking at him.

Len frowned at him. "What?"

"Wasn't skinny. Dr. Wentworth is a magical animated skeleton. Been working in medicine since nobody knows when."

Len turned that over in his head a few times. "Wouldn't mind picking his brain, 'scuse the expression. He must know a lot."

"Hedge witchery only gets you so far," Kit commiserated, lifting her chin for a scratch when Jim's fingers moved that way.

"I'll let you get away with calling me a hedge witch—"

"Because it's what you are."

"But y'all have to stop calling me Bones." He nodded. "Call me my actual name."

"We don't know it," Jim pointed out sullenly.

"Leonard McCoy."

They both stared at him. "Ew," Kit said.

"We could go with McCoy," Jim suggested.

"I go by Len," he protested. "There's nothing wrong with Len!"

"Except that we'd know it's short for Leonard," Kit said, flicking her tail and pronouncing it Leo-nard. "We could call you Nard instead."

"Len is fine," Jim told Kit. "We've called worse people by worse things. We won't even know him long enough for it to be a problem."

"Well I'm still calling him Bones," Kit said. "It's way better than Len."

"You shouldn't call me anything," Len said, "not in front of the, uh…uninitiated."

Kit rolled not just her eyes but her whole head. "No, go on, keep telling me the ways I should act to protect myself, I haven't figured it out yet on my own. I'm riveted."

Len felt a blush rise in his cheeks. "I was just trying to be helpful," he protested.

"Yeah and I'm sure it'd be great advice if I were an idiot."

"Is that your house?" Jim interrupted, looking forward toward the forest line.

Len lifted his gaze to check. There it was: the little cottage he'd rented with Jocelyn since way back when they first moved out of the college dorms. Affection warmed his chest. "Yes," he said.

"Over the hill and through the woods," Jim sang softly.

"To Bones' house we go," Kit trilled in conclusion, rising up to butt her head into Jim's chin. He nuzzled her thoughtlessly, gaze still caught on the house.

Len reached out to bump his arm. "Come on," he said gently. "It won't be that bad."

…

It was that bad.

Joanna didn't want to be put down. Not for a nap, not in her high chair, not for anything.

Kit had devoted herself to the mission of exploring every nook and cranny, particularly those that put her directly underfoot.

Jim was a terrible patient. He sat on the edge of Len's counter rather than the patient table, swinging his legs and refusing to answer any diagnostic questions seriously.

In the end, anyone could have predicted Len's patience snapping.

He thrust Joanna into Jim's arms, surprising them both silent. Jim cautiously adjusted Jo until he was holding her much the same way he'd held Kit in the forest. After a moment, he winced slightly, and shifted her so most of her weight was off Jim's left arm.

Joanna stuck one fist in her mouth, sighed mightily, and laid her head on Jim's shoulder.

Len grabbed the hem of Jim's shirt and jerked it upward. "A-ha," he crowed softly, palpitating the revealed bruise stretching across Jim's ribs and down almost to his hip. "Why didn't you just admit it? We could have gotten through this so much faster."

"Because he's an idiot," Kit said from the living room, followed by the sound of something thudding to the ground.

"Can we get this over with?" Jim asked. He hiked Jo a little further up his shoulder, letting her tuck her face into his neck while she settled in for a nap. Blue eyes flicked down to her. "Not that different from a werewolf pup, is she?"

"Know a lot of those?" Len asked, crossing to the large cabinet of herbs that took up most of the exam room's far wall. He shuffled through, throwing bits and pieces of different plants into a little bowl that he'd grabbed from a shelf on the way over.

"Way too many," Kit called.

"Dave has a lot of cousins," Jim said. "Lots of nieces and nephews. Werewolf runs in the family, I guess. And we're pretty cheap babysitters. Well, we were. Not a lot of time for it anymore."

Kit trotted into the room, something small and fluffy stuck on one whisker. "Not now that everyone thinks we're dead," she said, hopping up onto the table beside Jim. She snuffled carefully at the back of Jo's head, giving it a quick lick before curling up to clean her paws.

"Why is that, anyway?" Len asked. He set his bowl down on a sturdy surface and went to find his pestle along with some lavender and witch hazel oils. "What's all the secrecy about? The whole community still mourns your loss."

Jim shook his head. "I needed the community for leads when I was little. I don't anymore. Not since Tarsus."

Len picked up the bowl so he could look at Jim while he ground the herbs and oils into a fragrant paste. "What happened?" he asked.

"There was a monster," Jim said, looking at the floor between his feet. "It took a lot more…effort. To kill it. Than I was used to." His mouth pressed into a thin line. "More sacrifice."

"Must have taken an awful lot of power." Len scooped some of the paste onto his fingers, going over to spread it gently over Jim's bruises. "Maybe too much for a proper binding. Even one made by Sadie Doyle."

"I don't want to talk about it," Jim said.

"Kind of need to though," Kit told him.

Jim shook his head.

"What're you thinking?" Len asked, stepping back to consider his work. "There's nothing I can do?"

"There isn't anything you can do," Jim said, moving to pull his shirt back down.

Len swatted at his hands. "Give it ten minutes to dry. I'll make more; you need to reapply every three hours for four days, then go outside and let the full moon shine on it."

Jim and Kit both stared at him. "Are you actually a hedge witch?" Kit demanded.

Len took Jo with a shrug. "Never denied it. Pairs well with the official academic doctorin' I'm after. Let me put her down for a nap, but don't go anywhere." He leveled a stern look on Jim, then moved it down to Kit, who was more likely to cooperate. "I have some ideas."

He didn't expect them to still be there. Hoped, yes, but didn't expect.

Kit was sitting up now, biting the hem of Jim's shirt so he couldn't stand, her ears laid back against her skull while she growled.

Len put his hands on his hips and looked at her with deep admiration. "You're just a stubborn little cuss," he said proudly, "aren't you?"

"Yes," she said through the shirt.

"All right," Jim grumbled, tugging at his shirt. Kit continued to refuse to let go. "All right! I get it, okay? I'm overruled. We'll see what he has to say."

Kit spit out the soggy material. "You just have to make things hard," she complained, turning her frustration into action by twisting around to groom her back fur.

Jim looked guilty. He reached over to stroke a hand down the twist of her spine. "Sorry," he murmured.

"What happens to me if you let this kill you?" she asked into the fluff of her tail.

Len's worry spiked when Jim didn't deny it, just looked even more guilty. He glanced up at Len. "We'll ask Bones," Jim said. "He'll have a good idea. My ribs are already feeling better; he must be good at this stuff. Maybe there's a plant or something for…" He gestured helplessly at his left eye. At the button that tied him to a dead monster. "Y'know. This."

Len grabbed a chair and dragged it over until he was close enough to watch discomfort flicker in Jim's face. He pulled a penlight from his pocket and shined it in first the pale, then the button eye. None of Jim's pupil was visible under the Beldam's curse. Len couldn't check it for responsivity the way he could the right.

It did react though.

The button gleamed, drawing the light into itself, consuming it until its black was more complete than the endless space between stars. Then it began to stretch out, not in any way Len could see, but on a level he could feel, in all the place Grandmother had taught him to know. It reached for him, thin fingers of want, ravenous for the Other that lived inside every McCoy, back to the beginning. But Len's grandmother had taught him more than just how to heal.

She'd taught him to say no, too.

Len pulled the pendant he wore concealed until his shirt up and over his head. "Shut your peepers," he said, distantly gratified when Jim obeyed. He pressed the pendant, and its centuries old protective spells, against Jim's trembling eyelid. His other hand wrapped firmly around the back of Jim's skull.

Below what any of them could hear, something screamed.

Jim jerked hard, shocked and already trying to get away again.

But Len was ready, and kept his hold on both the pendant and Jim's head firm.

Kit pressed close to Jim side, purring as hard as she could in comfort.

The screaming crescendoed, layering on top of itself until Jim was panting with the effort of keeping in a matching shriek of his own.

Len held on.

At last, the screaming broke, choked off by the relentless, quiet strength of the McCoy clan charm.

"Okay," Len said, releasing Jim at last, giving his patient enough room so he could gather Kit close to his chest, clutching her like a lifeline. "That should do for a first line of defense. But we'll need something better for day-to-day. She'll get used to that trick eventually. It'll be less effective every time. Best we get working on some way to cut her off entirely."

"What do you mean?" Jim rasped.

"You talk about her like she's still alive," Kit said.

Len shrugged apologetically. "Things like the Beldam don't die. She's not a species; she's a category. You cut her good, and it'd probably take a generation or two for her to pull herself back together in normal circumstances, or if you hadn't survived. But the button is a link that never broke. She set her mind to feed on you, and so she is. You're a smart kid; you've felt it by now."

Jim looked away when Kit turned her face up to him. "Jim," she said, a little brokenly. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"What could you have done?" he asked. "What could any of us do, if even Sadie's ward didn't work?"

"Well, that'd be because she didn't know what she was working against," Len said, sitting back in his chair. "No offence to her. Sadie's a legend. But she didn't know it was a button when she bound it, did she?"

"No," Kit agreed. "We were still in the Between behind her wall. She had to bind it to pull us through."

Len opened his mouth to ask more about that, then closed it with a sigh. Not the time. "Anyway." He shook one of Jim's knees to get his attention. "We don't want to bind it, kid. It can't be bound, not forever. We have to get protections set up to buy some time, then figure out how to break the link."

Jim touched his cheek just under the button eye. "I could get rid of it?" he asked wonderingly.

"Sorry, kid." Len's heart ached for the boy as his expression fell. "We can't back it up, but we can stop it getting worse. The parts of her already in you can't be cut out. What we can do is stop the infection from consuming you. Make sense?"

A sigh shivered out of Jim. "Makes sense," he said. He tried on a smile without much success. "It's more hope than I had this morning."

"Is this why you've been so gung-ho about the monster hunting?" Kit demanded, standing up to plant her front paws on Jim's chest. "Are you trying to get yourself killed?"

"Before I become her?" Jim bowed his head. "I'd do anything to avoid that."

"Except ask for help, apparently!"

"I'm sorry," Jim said helplessly. "I didn't know what to do. I'm sorry."

Len stroked a hand down Kit's back to try and calm her down. "Now, darlin'," he murmured to her. "It's okay. You know full well Jim's an idiot."

"Hey," Jim protested weakly.

They both ignored him.

"If I could figure it out in an hour," Len continued, "you've known about it for years."

"Practically since birth," she grumbled, letting Jim wrap her in a hug.

"You're so mean to me," he said into her fur.

Len and Kit both let him pretend he wasn't crying in relief.

"Now then." Len slapped his leg. "This is gonna take some trial and error. Bit of experimentin'. I'm not gonna do that while you're still healing, and the McCoy protection should hold up pretty good until then. Let me know if you notice anything getting worse." He hesitated, then looked down to address Kit, still snuggled to Jim's chest. "On second thought, you tell me if anything gets worse. I'll get you my contact info. Do you have a PADD of your own, or do you use Jim's?"

"I'm an internet sensation," Kit purred. "I'll give you my most secure account."

"Wait," Jim said. "An internet what?"

"Good girl." Len pushed away from the table to stand with a stretch. "You kids staying for lunch? Jocelyn shouldn't be back for a few hours yet, so we don't gotta try and figure out an explanation. I'm fixin' to cook some comfort food. God knows we could use it."

"You don't want your wife to know?" Jim asked, glancing around at the herbs and witch tools and other signs of Other. "About me? Or about any of this?"

"Nah." Len shook his head. "She's about as mundane as they come. We were high school sweethearts, known each other even longer'n that. I tried to tell her more than a few times, but you know how some mundanes are. The bus they're on could run over a pair of walkin' talkin' skeletons and they still wouldn't notice." He smiled fondly. "She thinks all the herbs and such is a lot of hokum. Best not to stress her incredulity. You want some grilled cheese? It's an old family secret. I use three different types of cheese."

"Can't say no to cheese," Kit pointed out. "Much less three kinds of cheese."

Jim stood, cradling her close. "We're in," he said. "Show us the way to the kitchen."

Len did his best to fatten them up in the single meal he had. He stuffed Jim full of gooey cheese and bread and butter until he looked close to falling asleep. "So," he said to wake the kid back up, pulling apart one of his sandwiches to watch the cheese stretch tantalizingly. "This is a weird time of year to find a teenager wandering the woods hunting monsters, even one you're your background. Where do y'all go to school?"

"We don't," Jim said, chewing sleepily on a piece of crust.

"Haven't in ages," Kit agreed from her spot curled up in the crook of Jim's right arm.

Len felt himself begin to swell with outrage. "Your guardians just let you—"

Jim shook himself awake. "What? No. The Hendersons are great. Wait, what are you angry about?"

"You should be in school! Monster hunter or not!"

"Oh that. Well, I was." Jim shrugged, popping another perfectly golden triangle of cheese bread into his mouth. "Then I finished, so I stopped."

Len frowned. "You finished?"

"High school," Kit confirmed. "Jim got way ahead before Tarsus, then used that to get into a program on Tarsus for advanced kids or something. Finished up most of what was left of high school in the first couple of months, then knocked the rest out in the hospital after."

"That's not possible," Len insisted.

"No?" Kit started washing her paws. "I guess you'd be the expert, then?"

Len deflated. "It's not usual for someone to be able to get through high school at your age," he told Jim. "I'm…surprised."

"Genius," Kit yawned.

Jim rolled his eyes. "Anyway," he said dismissively, "yeah, haven't done school in a while."

"You should work on some higher level stuff," Len said, leaning back in his chair. "There are some pretty easy intro ones you can do through my university. I could get it set up for you. Never know when you'll need higher learning," he explained when Jim looked doubtful. "Did you not like school?"

"Eh, school's fine. I mean." He bobbed his hand in a so-so gesture. "I like the learning. Some of the tests are a little, like. They feel arbitrary. I don't like the busywork."

"Who does?" Len chucked. "If you like learning, let me set you up with some stuff. You can poke at it if you want, and ignore it if you don't. We can keep loading up your PADD with optional courses until you get bored or graduate. C'mon," he cajoled when Jim seemed to hesitate. "What could it hurt?"

"Maybe I'll try," Jim hedged. "Maybe."

"Load it up with math and music and engineering and stuff," Kit said, still fastidiously cleaning her paws. "He like that kind of stuff."

"Give me your PADD," Len demanded. He spent the next half an hour dragging reluctant admissions from Jim about what he liked and didn't like, then handed the PADD back over. "There," he said, ushering them to the front door with a jar of the salve and a bag of brownies for the road, "I've done all I can to get you headed down the long road of blessed learning. You'll be prompted to officially register after three completed courses, but the form's not bad. Mostly for enrolment statistics. I'll release you back into the wild with a promise that you'll keep me updated on how you're feeling. And also maybe on your classes."

Jim made waffley sounds, but Kit immediately rattled off her main contact name and asked for Len's in return. "If he doesn't put use the bruise cream as ordered," she said from Jim's shoulder, ignoring his pissy expression, "I'll call to tattle."

"You would, too," Jim muttered.

"As for the classes," she added, "once he gets started with them, good luck shutting him up on anything interesting he learns."

"I hate you."

Kit kissed Jim's cheek with her whiskers. "Liar."

Len reached out to scratch under Kit's chin. "You are a good cat,"

"I know," she purred.

---

For a while, everything worked out pretty well. Jim healed, even while running over all and sundry fighting creatures and saving folks. He made sure to visit Len once a week to continue working on ways to sever the button's link. Failing that, they practiced techniques to maintain Jim's control of its dark encroachment.

He loved his classes, just like Kit had predicted, and often wrote long, rambling essays to Len about how the psychology and math and physics classes all overlapped. Len got the psychology, but the rest wasn't exactly his specialty. Interesting reads, though.

Five months into their friendship, while Len sat at a small table in the biggest library on campus, flicking through files on his PADD and trying to study, Kit called. Len felt a shiver of dread slide down his spine when he read her name in the display: Kit never called. When she needed to tell tales on Jim, she did it via one of several messaging applications.

What could make her call?

"I don't know what to do," she said as soon as he accepted the call, breathless across the long distance. "He won't move. I can't get him to move."

Len threw himself out of his chair and toward the library's nearest exit. "Where are you?" he asked. She described as best she could, a warehouse somewhere in the lower part of town, long abandoned and falling apart. Len pulled on his jacket as he ran, weaving in and out of milling students on his way to the garage. It took him forty minutes to find them. As soon as he got out of the car, he grabbed his emergency med kit and broke into a sprint.

Jim was screaming.

"Good god," Len cursed, rushing through a gaping hole in one wall.

Kit met him barely a step inside the building. "We were fighting something," she said, rushing around his feet once before darting off into the growing shadows. "I don't know what it was. Jim seemed to, but he didn't think it was important. He didn't tell me. We were talking about surprising you after we wrapped up. But it wasn't a thing, it was a colony. Jim couldn't keep track of them all, and the button got away from him. He's alive, but he won't get up, and he won't stop—"

"Screaming," Len said grimly, finally running out into the main part of the warehouse.

The whole area was ruined. Slime and bubbling ichor radiated outward from what looked like the crater of an explosion. Bits of the creatures, whatever they had been, were flung over broken boxes and other detritus. The ground looked scorched.

In the epicenter of the destruction, writhing on his back, voice broken with the force of his screams, was Jim.

Len dropped to his knees by the teen, doing a quick visual sweep to make sure the issue hadn't been compounded by an external wound. Once assured of Jim's physical state, he dug into his bag for his family's ancient emergency blanket woven thick with protections. He spread it over Jim with a practiced flick of his wrists. As soon as it settled, Jim's taut body collapsed to the ground. He panted like he'd run a marathon, face twisted in pain under a layer of sweat, cheeks fever red.

"What happened?" Kit demanded, pressed close in the curve of Jim's right shoulder. "What is that?"

"Heirloom," Len said distractedly. He laid a hand over Jim's eyes and turned his attention inward, trying to feel the ebb and flow of the kid's energies, seeking out the underlying issue.

The explosion was not metaphorical. Somehow, in fighting the creatures, Jim's firm grip on the Beldam's darkness slipped. It bled through all the layers of him now, eating his will from the inside, too wriggling and slick for him to gather it back up easily.

Luckily, Len had some tricks.

He turned back to his bag, digging through for a set of velvet sacks. Each one rattled and clicked as he sorted through for his goal: two small pieces of clear quartz, one turquois piece of fluorite, and one yellow citrine. He put one of the quartz on the center of Jim's chest, the other on his forehead. The fluorite and citrine he placed carefully on either side of his head, then went into bag.

"What are you doing?" Kit begged, tail lashing. "How will this help?"

"It'll sound really smarmy," Len warned her, eyes on his task as he sorted through his herb pouches for the plants Jim most needed. "That doesn't make it not true."

"I don't talk because I'm special," Kit said. "Other cats don't talk because people aren't usually interesting enough to talk to. That sounds fake too, right? But it's not. So just tell me."

Len nodded shortly. "We're all of the earth, if you go back far enough," he said. "If you know how it all works together, you can use crystals and other stones and petrified wood and all that to aid your body's natural abilities." He gestured dismissively. "It's not gonna turn you superhuman, or give you psychic abilities if you don't have them, but it'll give you a boost. Which, you can see, Jimmy kind of needs right now."

Kit flattened her ears in agreement. "So what are these?"

Len touched each stone as he talked about it, avoiding the quartz on Jim's chest as it slowly cracked and turned black. "Clear quartz cleans and activates energy centers, purifies you, physical, mental, spiritual, the whole shebang. I'll lose these to clearing out the Beldam's reach, if they do their job." He moved his finger to the pale teal stone, then the yellow. "Fluorine. Citrine. Both help mental clarity. Fluorine can also help with healing and protection against disease."

Kit looked up at him anxiously. "Does this count as disease?"

"Should." Len gestured toward Jim's pained expression. "It's not natural. That should count enough for the stones to do their work. I'm hoping this combination will help Jim focus and push back against the spread of the darkness, let him put it back behind a fence."

"A fence won't hold," Kit exclaimed.

Len's mouth went tight. He resumed digging through his bag. "I'm gonna make him a tea. He'll have to take it daily. Sometimes twice, when it's bad. Try to think of the button as a tumor. We'll get it smaller with continuous medication, then cut it out at its roots."

"He'll kill you if his hair falls out," Kit said, something hysterical under the words.

"That's not how tumor treatments work anymore," Len said. The quarts on Jim's heart cracked down the middle, then crumbled into dust. Len brushed it carefully into a heavily warded container, then replaced it with another piece.

An hour and seven more chunks of quartz later, Jim began stirring. Len scooped some of the paste he'd made out of rosemary, basil, ashwagandha, as well as other assorted focus and protection herbs onto one finger. He pried Jim's mouth open to smear it on the inside of his cheek. Jim licked it automatically, making a horrified face at the flavor.

"Big baby," Len complained. "Eat it, it's good for you." Once Jim seemed to have consumed most of it, Len set a hand on his sternum, to ground the teen as much as draw his focus. "This is important," Len murmured. Jim cracked his eyes open to look at him, one bright, the other dark as the deep ocean. "I know you're tired." Len patted his chest gently. "I know it hurts, kid. We can work on both of those later. Right now, you've got to concentrate. I gave you some tools to help, but you'll have to do the hard work yourself. Can you feel the button?"

Jim shut his eyes to look for the darkness that lived inside him. He inclined his head, enough to show agreement, not enough to knock the stones from his forehead.

"Good boy." Len gripped his shoulder. "You can feel how loose it is, can't you? It's gotten away from you. You need to pull it back. I bled off as much as I could, so it should be possible now."

Fear creased Jim's face. He tried to shake his head, then had to stop when the stones moved.

Len set them back in place. "I know it's hard. You still have to. If you don't want her to use you to get back into the world, you have to do your best to corral her again. Turn her into something you can use. A weapon, or a shield. It's stop-gap. But you need to do it, darlin'. There's no surviving if you don't."

Jim tried. He broke two more quartz crystals, trying hard to push out what was too much to handle, reaching for what he could. Len sang to him, soft and comforting, old words in an old language, a story of strength, a blessing for courage. Kit curled up against his neck, purring hard, lost without the ability to help her boy. And Jim fought, more stubborn at sixteen than most of Len's classmates put together.

Eventually, he won.

Sort of.

"I can't make it stop," he said, eyes still shut, unmoving on the ground. "Some of it is out and I can't get it back. But I can…can kind of. Push it out. I think—I'll be more visible to things that aren't human. More Other." His forehead went tight. "Soon I won't be anything but Other. And something…something's different. I need…" His eyes snapped open, looking out into a distance no one else could see. "I need to go to California."

Len blinked. "…What?"

"I can see it. It's coming. For the boy. He's important. I have to help him."

"Is this like with Tarsus?" Kit demanded, finally uncurling from her hiding spot to stand on Jim's shoulder and look down into his face. "We barely survived last time!"

"Is what like Tarsus?" Len demanded.

Kit made a frustrated noise. "Tarsus called to him. Or, well, the monster did. It wanted to do something so terrible, it resonated with the button. So we went to Tarsus to stop him."

"You what?" Len nearly shrieked. "You idiots!"

"If it wants the boy," Jim rasped, "I can't let it have him. If it wants him that much, he has to be important. Later. I can't see why now, it's for later, and I have to—"

"Shit," Kit whispered. "The spillover. He's not just more visible to the Other, he's more open to it instead." She shook her head. "It'll be like Tarsus all the time."

Len sat back, thinking hard. "There are ways to increase psychic sensitivity," he said. "There have to be ways to dull it too. I've never heard of someone wanting to turn their sixth-sense down," he said with a frown. "But that doesn't mean no one ever has. I'll ask around."

"This isn't a third eye issue though," Kit pointed out.

"I'm a med student," Len grumbled, "not omnipotent. I have to do my best with the information at hand."

"And," Jim groaned, swiping the stones off his forehead before trying to sit up, "you have to pass your classes too. Don't try and come with us."

Len took the stones from Jim with a helpless shrug. "I know I can't. It's not that I don't want to help. I do. But I have obligations here, to Jo and Jos, to my school. I can't—"

"I just told you you shouldn't," Jim said waspishly, getting to his feet with all the wobbling and weakness of a newborn foal. "Don't worry about it."

"Promise me you'll came back to Mississippi if you get hurt." Len gripped Jim's arm as much to steady him as to hold him in place until he agreed. "Don't leave until I make you some teas, get together some stones, some runes and other things that'll help. Give yourself a few days, a week to feel better. Stronger. Don't be stubborn about this, Jim. Let me set you up to succeed."

Jim looked like he wanted to refuse on principal but lacked the strength.

"A few days won't hurt," Kit said, bumping her head against his ankle. "We can call Sadie, ask if she knows a way to hide us from things that might be looking. And we haven't spoken to Donna or Dave in ages, they'll want an update."

"Where will we stay?" Jim asked, bending with a strong wobble to pick her up.

Kit scoffed. "Are you kidding? After you nearly died killing these whatevers? We're having the client put us up in a fancy hotel."

"Yeah okay," Jim sighed, nuzzling his face into Kit's warm body. "Just for a few days though."

"A few days," Len agreed.

…

A week later, Jim finally tracked Len down on campus. "No more evasion," he snapped, mismatched blue eyes snapping with anger. He made enough of an unusual, compelling sight, slim and golden with a black cat draped across his shoulders, to draw more attention than was preferable. "You and Kit have plotted against me long enough. Give me what you wanted me to have or I'm going without it."

Kit twisted her head into Jim's cheek in the gesture meant to communicate an eye roll when she wasn't safe to actually roll her eyes.

"We got a solid week out of it," Len said mildly, hooking a hand around Jim's arm to tow him to a quieter place. "Y'all can't deny the results."

"Whatever," Jim huffed. "Just give me the–"

"You can't say what you want out loud without making us both look crazy," Len interrupted. "And anything you use as a stand-in will sound like I'm a drug dealer. Let's find someplace quiet."

"Eh." Jim tilted his head side to side, not in disagreement so much as indicating the potential for alternative conclusions. "I bet I could phrase it so you sound less like a drug dealer and more like a pimp, if that's easier."

Len squeezed Jim's arm warningly. "Somewhere private, Jim."

Jim wiggled his eyebrows. "That's the spirit."

Len shoved him into the first empty classroom they came across. "You are a brat," he grumbled, setting his bag down on a desk to rummage through it. "Tea," he said, holding out a jar of leaves and berries and little flowers. Jim took it without word. Len heard him unscrew the top and take a cautious sniff.

"Smells good," he said, sounding surprised.

"I'm not going to give you something terrible," Len said, "you wouldn't drink it consistently."

"I could make him," Kit offered.

Len shook his head and straightened, three small velvet bags—blue, green, white—in his hands. "If you have to make him, it won't turn into a habit." He held each bag out, one at a time. "For focus. For healing. For protection. Sleep with them under your pillow whenever possible. If you're struggling, take the stones out of the bags and hold them in your hands. You can do it with all of them, or just whichever you think you need most at that time." He set two of the bags into Jim's outstretched hand and opened the third to wiggle a small tag out of it. "Each bag has a description of what stones are inside." He flipped the tag open to show the neat lines of writing inside. "When the stones break—and they will, you draw on them hard—go to any gem shop and replace. Bury the stone fragments; the earth will clean all that up. If you toss 'em in the trash, we're gonna end up with Beldam-powered rats or some other godforsaken monstrosity. Get it?"

Jim nodded. "Got it."

"Good." Len eyed him like he didn't believe him but couldn't figure out a polite way to say as much. He put the tag away and gave Jim the last bag. "Think you can help him keep the stones straight?" he asked Kit.

She flicked her tail. "Don't even insult me with questions like that, I've been managing Jim since he was ten."

Jim made a face but didn't protest.

Len crossed his arms. "When are you leaving?"

"Now." Jim tucked the stones and tea into his ever-present satchel. "We only stopped by to pick this stuff up."

"Sentimental," Len drawled. "You shouldn't have."

"I came to say goodbye," Kit said, walking forward to butt her head into Len's hip where it leaned against the desk.

Len pet a hand down her spine. "At least someone has some manners."

"Sorry," Jim said, rolling his eyes. He scooped Kit up. "It's not exactly goodbye though, is it? We'll see you again."

"For a visit," Len threatened, eyes narrowed. "I've about had my fill of having to save your scrawny ass." He snapped. "Speak of! Give me your PADD."

Jim wouldn't until Kit bit his ear.

Len loaded a series of programs onto the unit. "Diet, nutrition, weight recovery," he rattled off. "There." He passed the device back. "Now your PADD will track your progress and send me periodic updates. If you go back to eatin' like a bird, I'll. know. And I'll find you."

"Spoken like a true mother hen," Jim sighed. "I'll be fine, Bones. You taught Kit to be as paranoid as you are about what I'm eating."

"More," she said smugly, flicking her tail under Jim's nose to make him sneeze.

It occurred to Len that he didn't want them to go. They had to: Jim's nightmares and the pull to California were getting worse. If he didn't follow it, he could go mad.

But Len wanted them to stay. They were safe with him in Mississippi. Bad things would find them here, sure. Bad things would always be drawn to Jim, and Jim to them, as long as the button connected him back to the Beldam. If he was in Mississippi, Len could fix him. Put him back together.

"We need to go," Jim said, soft and kind, as though he could hear Len's twisting regrets.

"I know," Len sighed, trying to shake off his melancholy and generalized feeling of doom. He cleared his throat. "I have lab in about ten minutes anyway. I won't make you promise to be safe—neither one of us would believe it." He ducked his head to catch Jim's eye. "Promise you'll try, though?"

Jim pursed his lips, then nodded.

"Good boy. Now, g'wan. Get out of here." He attempted a smile. "I'll see y'all soon, okay?"

"Okay," Jim agreed, smile faint but genuine. He resettled his bag and nodded again, just once but firmly. "Okay. We're going."

Len wanted to add a hundred different entreaties for Jim to take care of himself, but it wouldn't help. So instead he hugged Jim, rough and surprising, and left before Jim could comment.

He didn't see Jim for another eight months.

---

The teenagers fell sideways into Len's study mid-argument. One of them, flushed and bloody from a cut in his forehead, had a freakin' sword.

The other one was Jim.

They started wrestling on the floor almost as soon as they landed on it from the portal that spat them out about a foot and a half up.

"What the hell," Len said, awake enough to be annoyed but lacking the coffee—or booze—to really work up a proper rage. He planted his foot on Jim and pushed, forcing the two apart. "You're damned lucky Joss took Jo to her grandparents' for the weekend while I'm doing exams," Len grumbled. "Break it up or I'll break your heads!"

They scrambled apart, Jim wedged against the cabinets, the stranger staggering to his feet by the windows.

"Send me back," the unknown teenager said. He brandished his sword, a slim, elegant rapier. "Send me back right now, or I'll gut you!"

"Good fucking luck," Jim growled, shadow stretching under him to creep against the light toward the boy.

Len yanked open one of his herb drawers to throw a handful of sage at Jim. "Knock it off!"

Jim blinked hard, shaking his head both to get the dry herbs out of it and to clear his rage. His shadow wavered, then shrank, pulling back into him when he shut his eyes to concentrate on it. "Sorry," he said, accepting Len's hand up when it was offered.

"Where's Kit?" Len asked, patting Jim down to look for her.

"Not here," Jim said tightly. He took a deep breath.

Before he could explain, the other kid interrupted. "Is that the cat?" he demanded. "It got in the way. I was trying to defeat a monster, then this idiot—" He flicked a hand at Jim.

"Wouldn't finish that, if I were you," Len said as mildly as he could. "This idiot killed a Beldam at ten, with the help of the cat. Don't push."

"I can defend myself," Jim said with a sour expression, trying to shake off Len's tricorder when he got it out but submitting when his squirming didn't help. "Where'd you get that?" he asked sulkily.

"School," Len replied, turning the tricorder on the other kid, who held still like he was used to it.

Odd.

"And who're you?" Len prompted while checking the readouts for both potential patients. "Why were you tangling with a monster in the first place?"

"I'm Sulu," the kid said. "I didn't tangle with a monster. It had a problem with me. And bullshit, nobody kills a Beldam."

Len rolled his eyes, going over to his cabinet of ever-growing medical supplies. He started to sort through for the right hypos to heal the assorted injuries and vitamin deficiencies and exhaustion and stress markers and such. "Believe what you will. At least your disbelief means you're part of the community." He went to Jim first, driving three hypos into his neck in rapid succession. "More on that later, though. Where is Kit?"

Jim swallowed hard. "The monster got her. I think it's a siren, maybe driven off from its colony, definitely crazy. She's been luring people in and drowning them in a really populated area." He inclined his head toward Sulu, who was holding still for Len's treatment. "He was hunting it down, but he didn't get it right. Kit acted as distraction so we could get away and regroup, even though I told her not to. The siren caught her. I don't think she's hurt, I think the siren likes her snark. But we've got to get back and finish this before that welcome wears out."

"How did y'all manage to get here through a portal?" Len asked, stepping back to lean against his desk with his arms crossed.

"Some guys owed me a favor one time," Jim said evasively, refusing to make eye contact. "I've been carrying it around for a while. It'll get us back, too, once we're ready. But first we need your help."

Len raised one eyebrow. "First I need some answers." He pointed at Sulu. "What in the hell were you doing going after a siren alone? Also, you're a suspiciously good patient. You get in a lot of scrapes?"

Sulu hesitated, looking between Len and Jim, then sighed deeply. He sheathed his sword. "That's all related, actually," he admitted. "As for being a good patient, I got sick a lot as a kid. If I fought my doctors, my mother would let me have it pretty thoroughly. There's a lot of stuff you can take away from a sick kid to make his life miserable." He shrugged. "Guess the habit stuck.

"The monster hunting is my grandma's fault. She used to sit with me nearly every day, telling me all kinds of stories, mostly about either folklore or space travel. She's from Japan, but she spent most of her life in Starfleet. Made for a weird combination of interests. Once I got stronger, I went out looking for the things she described. I found them, and they hit hard. So my grandma taught me how to fence to protect myself. I've been hunting them ever since.

Jim nodded thoughtfully. "That explains why they wanted you dead so bad."

"He's who you went for?" Len demanded.

"What?" Sulu asked, looking confused.

"Active hunters don't usually last long," Jim said with a nod for Len. "Too much bad karma." He shot Sulu a frown. "You might try negotiating once and a while."

Sulu made a disgusted sound. "Who would negotiate with monsters?"

Jim and Len both raised their hands. "Not everything dark is evil," Jim said. "You're right about this siren, she needs to be dealt with. But how are you going to do that with a regular blade? We need to soup up your sword, then go find her original colony. Once they agree that we can take her out, we can get them to give us a charm to find her, and finish this."

"Is that why we're here?" Sulu asked, looking around again. "To do something to my sword?"

"Oh no," Len said, putting up his hands. "Whatever it is, Jim, no. I have tests! A lot of tests!"

"We just need a couple of runes," Jim protested. "How long could it possibly take to etch them in the sword? Then you can go back to your work! We'll leave you alone for ages, promise."

"Your promises mean nothing to me," he grumbled.

Jim sucked in a sharp breath. "Please," he said softly, two-tone eyes desperate. "To save Kit."

Len deflated. "To save Kit," he agreed. "All right. What do you need?"

What they needed were runes to protect against the siren's magic so Sulu could get close enough to fight. Jim was mostly immune, due to the button, but he wasn't skilled enough at weapons to stand up against a centuries-old creature who couldn't be talked out of fighting and wouldn't be vulnerable to an ambush. Jim also wanted sigils to strengthen the weapon, keep it ever-sharp, resist against breaking, all sorts of things. By the end, the symbols stretched from hilt to tip, gleaming faintly in darkness, shining straight through one side of the sword to the other.

"Whoa," Sulu breathed, turning his blade in the light to watch it glow.

"See?" Jim judged him in the side with an elbow. "I know what I'm talking about. Well." He cocked his head thoughtfully, then shrugged. "Eh. Most of the time."

Sulu grinned at him, wide and excited, before carefully sheathing the sword. "Listen," he said to Jim, so seriously Len and Jim both raised their eyebrows. "If it's true that you killed a Beldam, and it's true that your eye is a button, then you should be able to use what's left of her power. You don't need me for this. You don't need anyone. Why not just, I don't know, let your power consume the siren?"

Len turned to watch Jim as he answered, cataloging the stress in his shoulders, the anxiety and rage in his clenched fists.

Maybe he'd make Jim a new emotions bag. Something calming. Blue lace agate for sure, Lepidolite, jet stones...

"I don't think of the button as a weapon," Jim said, voice low and dark for so young a man. "I made a mistake by letting her do this to me." He jerked a hand up to indicate his left eye. "I'll spend the rest of my life making up for it. Most of that will be me trying to keep her power contained. If I let it out every time I could, it'd take me over. Burn me out." The long muscle in his jaw clenched. "She'd wear me like a suit. Worse, she'd be out in this world, and there's not a lot that could stop her after that. So yes." He crossed his arms under a bitter expression. "I could do this alone, if that's how I wanted the world to end. But it's not." Jim's arms lifted and fell in an encompassing gesture. "Here we are. Also," he added, pointing at Sulu, "you worked really hard for this for a really long time. You have first dibs on turning the siren into a corpse. We just gotta make sure we do it the right way."

Sulu nodded, something like respect glinting in his eyes. "Seems fair," he said.

"Okay." Jim clapped once and rubbed his hands together. "Are we ready?"

"Hey, whoa, wait, no I don't think so," Len interrupted when Sulu stepped forward in agreement. He snagged Sulu by the sleeve and made "I'm watching you" fingers at Jim. "Stay," he ordered before adding, "Come with me," to Sulu.

"I don't think I like," Jim managed to say before the door closed in his face.

Len stood in the hallway with Sulu, trying to look as intimidating as he could. "Jim's got something of a reckless streak," he said, "and if you're gonna be with him, you've gotta be on the lookout for it."

Sulu raised his hands defensively. "I didn't sign on to be a babysitter."

"No one ever does," Len growled. "But he's gonna be in the thick of it with you, and I don't assume you want his grizzly death achieved for the sake of your survival on your conscious, do you?"

"But," Sulu protested, tapering off quickly under the heat of Len's glare.

"Do. You."

"No," Sulu said weakly. He cleared his throat and straightened out of his slight cower. "But I'm also not responsible for him. I'm not an adult yet, so he's got to be responsible for himself."

"He won't be," Len said, throwing his hands in the air. "I've set him up as good as I can, but I'm in school, I have a wife and daughter, I can't be galavanting all over eternity after him, making sure he eats right and tends to his wound."

"Neither can I," Sulu stressed. "Okay, okay," he added when Len drew in a deep breath to yell some more, "maybe I can watch his back while we're together. Only when we're together," he stressed. "I don't plan on following him all over eternity. For one thing, I have a family too. For another, I'm not going to hunt monsters my whole life." He dug his PADD out of a cargo pocket on his pants. "Give me your information, I'll let you know how Jim's doing. While we're together."

"Good." Len took the PADD and quickly added his details. "What're your goals?" he asked absently as he typed.

"Starfleet." Sulu looked bashful when Len glanced up at him in surprise. The teenager shrugged. "My grandmother told me her space stories too, remember? I thought it was my duty to protect San Fran while I lived there, but I don't plan on living there forever. I'm going to explore new worlds, find new monsters to protect people from."

Len made a thoughtful sound. "Well how about that." New ideas started to blossom in him mind. "That might be the perfect solution."

Sulu frowned. "To what?"

"Nothing." Len waved him off, handing his PADD back. "Never mind, it's not even about you. Thanks for agreeing to help."

"Like it was much of a choice," Sulu muttered.

Len ignored him and pulled the door back open.

On the other side, Jim looked as puffed up and mean as Kit on her worst days. "I don't know what you think you're—"

"Ready when you are," Sulu said with a wild smile.

Jim hesitated, clearly wanted to continue to yell at Len but also eager to get back to the siren. "Okay," he said reluctantly. One finger jabbed at Len. "But we're not done with this! Once I get Kit back, I'm calling you to figure out what you said to Sulu!"

"Y'all take care now," Len said, smile sweet as honeysuckles.

Jim flicked him off, then pulled a small bean out of his pocket to throw it at the far wall. At the point where it hit, reality caved inward, making a tunnel straight from where they were to where they'd been.

"Stay safe," Len threatened over the roar of wind and displaced space.

"I'll have Kit message you," Jim called back.

Sulu nodded firmly at Len's demanding stare.

The teenagers shared an excited look and leapt through.

"I've got to ward this place better," Len said wearily.

---

Kit Henderson

Rescue done!

Leonard McCoy

That took three weeks!

I thought you were all dead!

Kit Henderson

Okay so technically the rescue was

done a while ago and we got a little

distracted. But we're all safe! Sulu

handles his sake better than Jim,

but not as great as Grandma Sulu.

Leonard McCoy

YOU LITTLE SHITS

Leonard McCoy

Wait is his LAST name Sulu?

Kit Henderson

Yeah his grandma won't let him tell

us his first name. Names have power,

and all that.

Kit Henderson

Anyway we're all safe, the siren is dead,

her old colony gave each of us a boon

for taking her out, Jim thinks he's dreaming

about a nest of some bad shit in Seattle, so

we're headed there next. Sulu's switched to

distance education so he can come too,

because the boon is really helpful and he wants

more stuff like that in his 'just in case' folder.

New friend!

Leonard McCoy

That's a little mercenary

of him. At least you have

a partner in trying to make

Jim behave.

Kit Henderson

If that's how you thought this partnership

was going to go, you were wrong.

Her next message was a picture of Jim and Sulu leaping off a cliff edge onto the back of an enraged siren, Sulu with his sword brandished high, Jim with the fingers of his forward hand tipped in clawed shadows.

"God damn it!" Len shouted.

The librarian threw a stylus at his head.

"Sorry," he muttered, slouching in his seat. Once settled, he backed out of the image to compose his next message.

Leonard McCoy

THAT LITTLE SHIT

Leonard McCoy

You tell that enabler I'm

COMING FOR HIM

Jim Henderson

good luck getting away from school

long enough to find us in Seattle!

Leonard McCoy

DAMN IT JIM

Jim Henderson

;)

---

Kit continued to send him periodic images and updates. Occasionally Jim would chime in to annoy him, or Sulu—who had apparently decided to hop on the crazy train after all—to ask advice on fixing this or that injury. Len got really practiced at talking someone else through a medical procedure.

His entire second year of med school slipped away like that.

A few months before the start of his third year, break already made busy with volunteer rotations at the university's Medical Center, Kit called.

Len answered the call with a worried hiss. "Let me sit down," he said before Kit could drop whatever bomb she had. It took him less than a minute to shove his groceries in the fridge, bags and all, and sequester himself in his office. "Okay," he said, taking a seat at his desk and bracing his free hand against the edge. "What happened?"

"I broke my PADD," Jim said. "So I'm borrowing Kit's."

"God damn it, Jim!" Len pressed his hand against his thundering heart. "I thought you'd killed your damned fool self again!"

"Hey," Jim said, sounding offended. "I've never actually gottenmyself killed."

"Not for lack of trying," Kit and Sulu chorused in the background.

"No shit from the peanut gallery, this is serious," Jim grumbled. "Bones, what do you know about vampires?"

Len looked at his communicator like it was malfunctioning. When he was sure he'd actually heard Jim, correctly, he shook his head incredulously. "Isn't your adopted mom a vampire? A big-wig vampire? And by that I mean, one of the most power vampires on the face of the god damned Earth? What under all the stars in the sky could I possibly know that she doesn't?"

"Your mom's a what?" Sulu asked, surprise in his voice. "Wait, what did you say your last name was?"

"What did you say your first was," Jim countered smugly. His voice got closer when he turned back to the communicator. "Listen, Bones—"

"Len."

"Eh. Listen, they're making it hard to concentrate, let's take this somewhere a little more private."

"You are going to make me sound awfully suspicious," Len said, trying to fight his grin, "havin' jailbait talk to me like that."

"Technically," Jim said around the sound of a door closing, "I'm not jailbait anymore. Just turned eighteen, remember?"

"Not the point," Len sighed. "Now, spit it out. Why do you need to talk to me and not Donna Henderson?"

"…Well." Jim cleared his throat. "See, the problem is, there are treaties."

Len narrowed his eyes. "Treaties?"

"Yes. Between Donna and…other places. She stays in New York because she doesn't like to travel, which is due at least in part to her being really powerful. If she travels freely, she has to, like, submit itineraries and sign a bunch of forms promising not to take over the assorted covens and etcetera. Then if she deviates from any of that, there are international conflicts and it's all just a mess. So I don't want to get her involved because she'll want to come here and that…wouldn't work out so great with my timeline. Plus even if she doesn't come, the local covens might think she's, like, involved. Which she isn't! It's important to remember she isn't. Involved. No international incidents here!"

"Jim," Len said, as calmly as he could. "Where are you?"

"…Somewhere in Russia, I think?"

Len cursing was long and varied. Occasionally he could hear Jim sharing highlights of it with his stooges, also in Russia with him. They all made impressed noises, commenting on how they should write it down to memorize and use later.

"Did you learn all this in med school?" Jim asked when Len finally managed to bring himself back from the edge.

"I have a rotation at the center in half an hour, Jim!" Len exploded. "I do not have the time for international vampire politics!"

"Luckily," Jim said, "that's not what I need you for. We're not gonna stay in Russia, Bones. We just need to figure out the best way to get home with a maybe abandoned, maybe rogue vampire in tow."

Len pinched the bridge of his nose. "I'm going to go gray, Jim," he said. "I'm not even thirty, I'm going to lose all the color in my hair because of nonsense and shenanigans—"

"That's fair," Jim interrupted. "I'm sure you're building up to another educational and interesting and tempered rant, but, Bones, we don't have a lot of time here. Can you help or not?"

After about half a minute of breathing exercises and fiddling with some blue lace agate, Len sighed out all the air from his lungs. "Okay, Jim," he said. "What's the problem?"

Following Jim's dreams and a pull he hadn't felt since Sulu, they found a vampire, young in every sense of the word. He'd been bitten by a crazy, powerful rogue, which Jim had taken apart en route to finding the boy's hideout. It took them nearly a full day to talk the fledgling vampire out of the little cave where he was waiting to starve to death, and then another hour to get him sufficiently knocked out so he wouldn't drain Sulu dry. They used some local connections to get enough donated blood to pull him back from the edge.

The boy's name was Pavel Chekov. Once Jim had his name, he used an old ritual of Sadie's to bind the boy to himself, subduing both his powers and his hunger until they could find a safe place for him. Pavel had submitted an application to join Starfleet Academy, and he was enough of a genius to make that his acceptance was all but guaranteed. Jim's initial plan had been to escort him there and release him into the wild.

Until they'd discovered the snag.

"You bound him?" Len shouted, leaping out of his chair in outrage. "How deeply?"

Jim's fidgeting was audible through the call. "Uh…I wouldn't necessary call it deep so much as thorough?"

"Damn it, Jim!"

"Well, I'm sorry! I didn't mean to make him a thrall. Or, like, nearly a thrall. Thrall-ish? Whatever he is, I didn't mean to! Tell me how to undo it and I will."

"I can't just tell you," Len groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose again as he slumped back into his seat and started a mental tally of all the things he'd need to buy. "You'll have to come here."

"…You're sure?"

"Or to Donna," he sneered.

Jim drew in a sharp breath that he exhaled in slow defeat. "Okay," he said, weariness transforming to determination in the space of a single word. "This is gonna be tricky, but we're up to it. We'll be there soon."

"Be where?" Sulu called out.

"Give me a sec," Jim shouted back. "See you soon, Bones," he said, hanging up before Len could protest, "That's not my name."

Figured.

…

Two weeks later, they arrived. Jim's whole batfuck crazy posse.

Plus one.

Pavel was adorable. He looked maybe fourteen, hair a riot of untidy curls, face sweet and nervous. Len resisted the urge to stuff him with grits and bundle him in all the McCoy family's fluffiest blankets.

Instead, he whacked Jim on the back of the head, stabbed Jim and Sulu each with a nutrients hypo, pet Kit nose to tail, and held out his hand. "Len McCoy," he introduced himself, waiting patiently for the new vampire to accept the greeting.

"Chekov," the child murmured, accent thick, grip strong and cold. "Pavel Andreievich. It is, ah. Good to meet you?"

"Wish it were under better circumstances," Len said, releasing Pavel's hand to scrub at his own two-day scruff. He stabbed an accusing finger at Jim. "I have work, y'know."

Jim shrugged. "When don't you?"

"Never," Kit told Pavel and Sulu. "The answer is never. He always has work."

"It's a miserable existence," Jim agreed.

"From what I hear," Len said to Pavel, beckoning him forward into his office, "your goal is to be in a world of hard work yourself. Starfleet, huh?"

"Oh yes." Pavel's enthusiastic nods set his curls tumbling across his forehead. "I have wanted to be in Starfleet for years." He took the seat Len indicated without question. "For practically my whole life! I would like very much to explore the stars. Can you imagine?" His expression went dreamy with excitement. "All those unexplored worlds and peoples!"

"I can imagine, all right." Len shuddered. "All those explosions and diseases and death." He started rummaging through his drawers for the appropriate diagnostic tools. "You wouldn't catch me alive on one of those flying rust buckets. Only a battered hull between me and the cold, crushing vacuum of space? No thank you. Hold still," he added almost belatedly, stabbing a hypo into Pavel's neck to get a sample of blood.

The reaction was instantaneous.

Pavel went berserk. His fangs dropped, nearly tearing through his own lips, while his thrall lashed out in a nearly physical psychic attack. Len fell backwards, would have crashed to the floor if Jim hadn't caught him first. Kit leapt up to the top of the highest shelf, an observer too remote to reach.

"Stop," Jim said. Not sharp or angry or afraid, not surprised, not upset. A simple, firm command.

Pavel froze mid-lunge, lips pulled back in a snarl, eyes solid black.

"Tell me who you are," Jim ordered.

"Pavel Chekov," the boy snarled.

"Tell me how you feel."

"Hungry," he hissed.

"Tell me how you want to feel."

At last Pavel struggled, pulling his arms in and straightening. "Like myself," he whispered, eyes sliding shut. "Not like a monster. Like Pavel Chekov."

Jim steadied Len and pushed the older man behind him. "Feel like yourself," he said. "Like Pavel."

The vampire seemed to shrink in on himself. His hands inched up to cover his face in something like grief. "I am still," he gasped, just on the edge of a sob, "hungry."

"I can," Len began.

"I will stay with you," Jim said, still an order. "You will wait with me. Len and Sulu are leaving the room. You will not think of them while they are gone."

Pavel sunk down into his chair, head nodding once.

Jim nudged Len toward the door, not taking his eyes off Pavel.

Len dragged Sulu into the kitchen and pulled an old-fashioned emergency transfusion kit out from under the sink.

Sulu looked confused. "Why do you have—"

"Not important." Len set himself up with the machine. "I'm donating blood to help Pavel." He looked up at Sulu with the shade of a glare. "Are you helping or not?"

Instead of answering, Sulu rolled his sleeve up.

Within ten minutes, they had a hearty meal for a baby vampire.

Len put the first serving in a cup that had a lid and a straw and passed it through a crack in the door to Jim. He and Sulu pressed their ears to the door to try and eavesdrop on the fallout. There were murmured voices, low at first then louder in relief. The straw made a slurping sound, and Pavel's accompanying whine could probably have been heard from the street.

"Not all at once," Len called through, then cracked the door to slide a sealed pitcher of the rest of their blood inside.

Jim appeared to pick up the pitcher, face pinched around a tight smile. "Give me your cup," he said to Pavel, closing the door behind him.

After a few minutes, the door opened again. Jim ushered them back inside. "Sorry about that," he said.

"It's pretty common with new vampires," Len said, leaning Sulu in toward his desk. "Especially if he lost his sire. You gonna be okay if I give us some blood replenishers?" He asked Pavel.

The kid looked humiliated, curled in on himself where he stood in the far corner, still sipping from his cup. "I am much better now," he said softly.

Jim pulled himself up to sit on the far counter. "This was my fault," he told the others. "I'm the most familiar with vampires, and I didn't keep Pavel properly fed. I'll do better."

"I cannot go to Starfleet like this," Pavel said, voice breaking on the final word. "I am a danger to everyone." His expression firmed. "One of you must—"

Jim threw a balled up piece of paper at him. "Don't even finish that thought," he threatened, though not in the tone he'd used earlier to command Pavel's obedience. "Nobody's gonna kill you. We'll figure this out, and you'll go to Starfleet, and maybe Sulu will finally finish his enrollment too, and you can both travel the stars and whatnot, explore new worlds, et cetera."

Kit leapt down from her observation post, walking confidently along the counter toward Pavel. "I didn't take you for a coward," she said, flicking one ear back toward Jim. "You were fighting when we found you. Now you're gonna give up? On life? On your dream? On the work Jim and Sulu and Bones have put into you?"

Pavel shook his head, reaching out a trembling hand to pet Kit when she got close enough. "I want to see the stars," he whispered hoarsely. "If it were up to me, I'd be on my way to the Academy. But what can I do, Kit? What can anyone do against this hunger?"

"If Donna can do it," Kit said with a solid bump of her head against Pavel's knuckles, "you can too."

"I do not even know a Donna," Pavel objected. He began scratching under Kit's chin.

"She's the head of most of this half of the world," Len said.

Jim made a sound of objection. "Eh. She doesn't really rule it though? She's really hands-off these last few centuries."

Sulu threw his hands in the air. "That doesn't make her not the most power vampire on Earth though."

"The most powerful vampire on Earth?" Pavel squeaked.

"She's not that scary," Kit said.

"Unless you mess with her family," Jim added in the interest of honesty.

"Which, ta-da." Sulu made jazz hands in Jim and Kit's direction. "Two of her family, right here."

Pavel began to look a little panicked. "What?"

"You didn't recognize the last name?" Len asked, rooting through his cabinets for a vampire self-control kit. "Henderson is pretty well-known in the community."

"Jim did not tell me his last name," Pavel shrilled. "And I do not know of any community! I did not know of any vampires until the one that bit me!"

"Wampires," Sulu echoed under his breath, hiding his grin behind a hand.

"Now is not the time!' Pavel wailed.

Len held up both hands. "Now, everybody, just calm down. I didn't know you were new to the whole magic and cryptids are real thing as well as vampiring," he said to Pavel. "That was my mistake. Assumptions aren't any better for a doctor than a hedge witch. I'll be more careful goin' forward, okay?"

"…Hedge witch?" Pavel asked, a little tearfully. Jim refilled his cup and encouraged Pavel to drink.

"It'll steady your nerves," he insisted. "I've got a whole crash course planned for him," he added to Len. "It'll take a few months to get him totally up to speed, but that's probably about as long as it'll take to learn to eat right and control the blood lust."

"He needs to get his thrall sorted too," Sulu pointed out. "If he can't dazzle, he won't be able to get compliance for feeding."

"We'll use you for practice," Kit teased, showing all her pointy teeth in a grin.

Sulu rolled his eyes but didn't object.

"I will miss my first semester," Pavel said, sipping sadly at his blood.

"Deferred," Jim insisted. "Speaking of." He smiled blindingly at Len. "We set it up to have his mail rerouted to here. Hope you don't mind."

"It's a little late to be worrying about that," Len grumbled. "Jos'll love having random stranger's mail sent here."

"Oh good," Jim said blithely. "Now let's focus on the real issue at hand here: breaking my accidentally too strong binding on poor Pavel so we can set him up to be read for campus by next semester."

Pavel sighed deeply around his straw.

"Thing is," Len said, handing Pavel the bag of assorted herbs and stones that he could use as a focus point, "I'm not sure we can break it."

"What!" all four of the children cried.

Len held up his hands defensively. "Hey, don't shoot the messenger! Listen, it looks and sounds to be like you didn't really bind Pavel in the first place. Or, if you did, it got a little mixed up along the way." He gestured at Pavel's corner where he was doing his very best impression of a wilted flower. "The way he reacts to you isn't the way a bound person does. He obeys without struggle. If he were bound, he'd be able to push back verbally, if not physically. But there's no resistance. Y'ask me, that's more like—"

"A sire," Sulu breathed, eyes wide.

"Bingo." Len crossed his arms, eyebrow arched in challenge. "You did a silly thing with good intentions, and now you're linked. You want to be unlinked? Pavel's got to do it, the same way any struggling baby vampire would."

"He's got to grow up enough to throw me off," Jim groaned. He dragged a hand down his face. "He's got to want me to leave."

"But I do not," Pavel said hesitantly. "You and Sulu and Kit are all I have in life now." He squinted. "…In afterlife? How could I want you gone?"

"It usually takes years for a young vampire to grow up enough for that."

Pavel's face went sad and tragic again. "I will never grow up," he said with a slight chin wobble. "Now it seems I will always be like this. Fourteen. Forever."

"Not quite," Len corrected him. "As long as Jim is your sire, or functions the same way, he can will you to keep growing. Once you split off on your own, you won't have the control over yourself that he does, and at that point you'll be set in time."

"In that case, I must not outgrow Jim." He turned shining eyes on his stand-in sire. "I must keep you with me until I am properly grown in all sense of the word. Will you let me do this?"

"What?" Jim exclaimed. "But I—You were gonna go to Starfleet! I have no intention of enrolling, and how could I stay close enough otherwise? How old exactly do you want to be?"

"Eighteen would be enough." Pavel stepped a little closer, hope bright in his face. "Please, Jim, it is only four years. Three and a bit!"

"Huh," Sulu said.

Jim whirled on him. "What!"

He shrugged. "Nothing. It just occurred to me that Pavel would graduate pretty much around the same time he hit eighteen. If he's gonna be in the Academy all that time, there's a pretty easy way to stay with him."

"No." Jim stabbed a finger at each of them in turn. "No, no. No."

"Aw, but Jim." Kit's expression was wicked. "Don't you remember my long-lost dream of being the first cat to graduate Starfleet?"

"I don't want to be a Starfleet brat!

"Well you oughta left his actual sire alive then, should you?" Len gestured at Pavel. "You meant well in rescuing him, but that rescue isn't even half done. You followed your dreams to him, so follow it through."

Jim made a sound like broken glass in a blender. He strode from the room, pacing back and forth in front of the door.

"I'm impressed," Sulu muttered to Pavel. "I thought for sure you'd fold when he started to get mad."

"I have had a shit month," Pavel replied, sipping serenely at his cup. "I will not let my salvation from it go. Besides, Jim is very smart, I think. Too smart for monster hunting his whole life. He will come into Starfleet with me, and maybe you as well, and we will shake them to their foundations."

"You are a surprise a minute," Sulu laughed. "Let's do it."

Finally, Jim stalked back into the room. "Fine," he spat. Then he took a deep breath and turned to Pavel. "Fine," he said again, resolved and calm like the dark of the sea. "I'll do it. Or, I'll try. I haven't attended regular school in basically ever. It'll take a while to put together an application."

Pavel went over to Jim to rummage excitedly through his satchel for Kit's PADD. "Do not worry," he said, flicking through the screens show Jim the results. "Kit and Sulu and I, we have been working on this since the beginning. It needs only your approval. If you look through it over lunch, we can submit it before dinner! I am quite confident you will be accepted same as I." He beamed at Sulu. "Same as all of us."

Jim turned with slow, fatalistic intent to settle his murderous gaze on Kit. "You planned this?'

Kit began washing one of her back feet, spreading the toes so Jim could see each and every claw.

"We hoped it would work out this way," Sulu said with a shrug. "There was just no way of knowing for sure." He grinned at Len. "We needed a second opinion."

"They got you good," Len chortled.

"It will be a good place for us," Pavel insisted. "It will be marvelous."

"This is going to need some fixing," Jim said, accidentally absorbed in his application. "Like, you didn't even get my name right. This whole document is suspect."

Len and Sulu both blinked. "But you said you were adopted by the Hendersons," Sulu said.

"That's what I thought too," Len agreed.

"Yeah." Jim shrugged. "They never let me change my name though. Part of the, like, adoption agreement with my birth mother. She insisted I keep her last name, something about history with my birth father or something weird. Not worth mucking up the adoption for," he stressed to his audience.

"So what's your last name?" Sulu demanded. "C'mon! You'll know soon enough anyway, so my full name is Hikaru Sulu. What's yours?"

"James Kirk," Jim replied, already focused on fixing his application. When he looked up, Len, Sulu, and Pavel were all staring at him, mouths agape.

"Is that bad?" Kit asked uncertainly.

"You're going to cause a riot," Sulu said, somewhat giddily. "The brass are going to flip out."

"You tell me about how the community works," Pavel said, crossing the room to loop one arm through Jim's, "and I will tell you who Starfleet thinks you are. I will tell you your legacy. This is going to be wonderful."

"It can only end in tears," Len groaned.

The trio began their first semester only a few months later, and Pavel was proven almost instantly correct. But so was Len. Jim took to Starfleet like a belligerent duck to uncertain waters. Most everyone assumed Jim had died at some point in childhood, so to have him show up from out of the blue, a creature of light and darkness with intelligence nearly unrivaled by his classmates, caused what Len would describe in later years as "something of a stir".

Kit continued sending him periodic updates, paired with supplemental materials—usually embarrassing pictures or videos—from Sulu and Pavel.

Time passed. Jim and crew finished their first year at the Academy. Len thrived in his rotations at the Medical Center. Joanna continued to grow and develop in her own little person under the watchful eye of her parents. Everything seemed to be going so perfectly.

For a while.

---

During his last year of med school, Len's life fell apart.

His advisors were all clamoring for him to pick a specialization, a hospital, a mentor for his residency. None of the options felt right; none of them really fit.

Joselyn left him, unable to accept the reality of being a doctor's wife. For the first few months, she claimed it was just a separation, that they'd work through it and be stronger. She took Jo, most of Len's friends, the house. Everything. She never came back. Her last contact was divorce papers.

Jim called.

Len sat in what had been his office, now packed and ready to be shipped to a new place he didn't even have. He stared at the incoming com, hardly processing. His thumb swiped over the screen almost without though, patching Jim through.

"Come to Starfleet," Jim said without pause. "Do your residency here. We've already got most of you application filled out; Pavel can send it over whenever you're ready."

"How did you know to call me?" Len asked, voice rough as he rubbed a hand over his eyes.

"Kit and I hacked your PADD aged ago, and she monitors it pretty much constantly. We know everything that happens to you."

Len snorted, leaning back in his chair. "Now pull the other one."

For a few heartbeats, Jim was silent. "I'm dreaming about you," he admitted, low and intense the way he only got when he was really worried. "Again. There are things that thrive on the kind of sadness you're putting off, even before we talk about how tasty your magic is. Together? You're a buffet at a five-star restaurant."

"Five star restaurants don't have—"

"You're weak when you're unhappy," Jim continued right over him. "Less attentive. More open to attack. You need to get somewhere safe to recover. There's nowhere better for you than Starfleet. Sulu, Pavel, Kit, and I are renting a four-person apartment not far from campus. We have space for you. And if you won't be safe with a vampire, a monster hunter, and a half-Beldam, then there isn't a safe place left in the whole world."

Len blew out a harsh breath. "…Again?"

"What?"

"You said you're dreaming about me again. When did you dream about me before?"

Jim made an impatient sound. "The fairy ring, okay? I dreamed about the monster on the other side of the fairy ring, and you were central. If you'd gone through on your own, it would have eaten you, which would have been bad, okay? What does this even matter?"

"You weren't dreaming back then," Len protested. "You didn't start dreaming until your shields cracked open."

"I dreamed about Tarsus," Jim said, sounding defensive. "For years, I dreamed about that place. It would have been the dawning of a brand new type of horror. So would your death, consumed by that thing, and your daughter with her untrained magic."

Len shut his eyes on a new stab of pain. "I won't get to train her," he said brokenly, leaning forward to brace his elbows on his knees, head in his free hand. "Jim, she'll grow up without me."

"You can still train her," Jim insisted. "Don't you remember the old ways? You can enchant letters for her eyes only. Write what you know, send it to her. She'll find it when she's ready and come for you."

"Jos is so angry." Len scrubbed a hand over his eyes. "I should have spent more time with her, given her more attention. I didn't realize she felt neglected—I didn't know. I swear, Jim, if I'd known, I would have—"

"I know," Jim murmured, voice so understanding it almost physically hurt to hear. "Nobody knows how hard you fight for your friends and family more than I do. You've spent a lot of time saving me over the years. Let it be my turn now."

Len went.

His advisors gave him glowing recommendations for Starfleet Academy. He graduated on a Friday and arrived on campus the next Monday. Jim and his crew were waiting for him at the shuttle port, ready to haul his remaining belongings—mostly medical and magical supplies—to their shared space.

Even Pavel was there, protected from the sun by a bright yellow parasol edged with delicate lace, smile wide and excited. "You are rooming with Jim," he said, bouncing in place enthusiastically. "We have made space for you in both that room and the communal area. I am sure you will like it!"

It wasn't home. Right then, it felt like nothing ever would be again. But they'd done their best, hauling in a cabinet for him to use as a hedge witch supply storage. Len moved his hand just above the doors, trying to figure out which of them had set up the protective and dampening spells. Jim, mostly, with his unique undercurrent of hungry, patient darkness. Maybe a bit of Sulu, for stability. Pavel either didn't know any spells or lacked the necessary skill to layer them with the others.

Len could teach him, now that they were gonna share a suite.

Jim took Len's bags and dumped them in their room. "I won't say it'll be okay," he said, carefully not looking in Len's direction. "It'll get…normal. If you give it enough time." He brushed a finger under his own left eye. "You'd be surprised what you can adapt to."

"Time heals all wounds?" Len suggested bitterly.

"No." Jim shook his head. "This isn't a healed wound. But it's cauterized. You and Kit and Sulu and Pavel, you all helped make the bleeding stop. Maybe someday it'll be a scar, but if that ever happens, it'll be the kind of scar that hurts when the weather changes." He huffed a disgusted breath at himself. "Sorry, that's kind of stupid."

Len pushed his shoulder. "You've always been kind of stupid, kid. It's not surprising at this point."

Jim rolled his eyes, dumped Len's bag on what was presumably his new bed—based on Kit curled up and sleeping on the other—and headed back into the living room. "We're getting pizza for lunch," he called over his shoulder. "Be ready to go in, like, ten minutes."

"Bring me back some chicken," Kit muttered around a huge yawn, squirming around to lay on her back before going back to bed.

A laugh bubbled up, small and weary but no less surprising for it. It felt like months since he'd had anything in his life to make him life.

Jos was gone, Jo with her. The home Len had spent the last four years building was ruined. He would be a Starfleet doctor as far into the future as he could imagine, following Jim into the black, maybe with Sulu and Pavel, maybe not. Nothing was as solid as it looked. Nothing was as lasting.

Only Jim. Only the button's darkness and Jim's struggle to contain it.

There were worse ways for Len's fairytale to fall apart.

"You're eating a salad," he told the other three humans, dropping his bags on the floor before going back out into the main room where they were waiting for him. Len pointed a finger at Jim, then dragged it through the air to encompass the other two. "Well," he amended, giving Pavel a once-over. "Maybe not all of you."

"I can eat," Pavel insisted, readying his parasol for the midday sun. "It does not nourish or satisfy me, but it is enjoyable as part of what I once was." He looked wistfully into a middle distance. "I do miss garlic bread though. You know," he added to Len as they all headed toward the door, "garlic bread was invented in Russia."

Len felt his face contort in confusion. "…What?"

Pavel nodded firmly, popping his parasol open just before stepping outside. "Yes, it was quite an interesting story. Perhaps you would like to see it!"

Len glanced back at Sulu and Jim, who were, instead of closing the door behind them, making some kind of bet. "If it doesn't include Catherine the Great," Sulu said, apparently in clarification, "then you lose. Is that what we're saying?"

Jim made an impatient go on motion. "Yeah, man, what else? I've got two weeks of dish duty."

"Call," Sulu said, jotting a note on a scrap of paper and stuffing it in his pocket.

Pavel looped an arm through Len's before Len could figure out what was going on. "You will like this story," he decided.

"What the hell," Len sighed, decided to just go along with it. "I guess I will."

He didn't.

But pretending wasn't bad.

So he kept doing it: pretending every day that things were fine, that he could recover, that joining Starfleet was a choice and not a survival strategy. It didn't work. But someday it might.

He kept doing it.