Chapter 4: Of Doctors and Friends

The first impression he had of Dr. Leonard H. McCoy, the man he had dubbed and would thereafter call "Bones" was that the man had a seriously bleak outlook on life. Not that Jim begrudged him that. After all, Jim was Jim, the man the universe had seemed so determined to hand out a bag of shit instead of the proverbial lemons. So okay the man had a bad case of aviophobia. And he had to be seriously mental, or extremely desperate, to enlist in Starfleet when it operated in space even if he had "nothing left except his bones." Or that vomiting your breakfast and at least a quart of scotch on your seatmate's lap was certainly not the best way to introduce yourself. But for some reason Jim found himself drawn to the good doctor.

And fate it seemed had decided to amuse itself when, arriving at the dorms, he found himself face to face with the doctor who, apparently, was destined to be his roommate the next three years. So they proceeded to re-introduce themselves after the fiasco on the shuttle at another good old bar and, as per Jim Kirk fashion, a round of bar fights.

And Bones, despite his grumbling, patiently healed Jim in the common room when he had adamantly refused to be brought to medical. It would be the first of many such occurrences over the years.

Jim would eventually learn, over the course of many other nights nursing a pint of beer or just hanging out, that Bones had been married before to a bitch called Jocelyn. That he had one sweet young daughter who his ex-wife had taken full custody of. That she had cheated on him but had taken the "whole damned planet" during their divorce, leaving Bones with little to his name other than the money he spent getting to Riverside. And that he was still drowning in the guilt that he'd had to euthanize his own father at his father's request after months and months of futile research to find a cure only for it to be discovered a week after his father's death.

On that point, Jim could completely understand the feeling of icy self-hatred and the lead weight that would settle somewhere in the gut. And while he divulged his ugly childhood with Frank one heavily drunken night, he let Bones believe that the guilt he felt was connected to those experiences. He let Bones believe that the worst he had experienced was child abuse at the hands of his step-father rather than the horrifying torture he'd experienced at the hand of a madman that he had not only hero-worshiped but had, in his own way, probably loved.

So he wasn't playing fair. But there were just some things that were best left in the black void. Besides, he had been firmly warned by Starfleet Command about divulging his past - not that he had any inclination to in the first place. Let the world believe that he was no more than George Kirk's son, a boy weighed by a dead man's legacy and a less than stellar childhood.

It seemed so wrong to accept Bones' kindness when he wasn't being completely honest. But he did.

The nights that nightmares made him toss and turn, made sleep impossible, and left him screaming hoarse into the night, Jim clung to Bones like a drowning man would to a life raft. Those nights, Bones would get up and walk over to where Jim would lie on his bed and instead of a hypospray of sedatives, would get underneath the covers and hold Jim tight, whispering in the dark that everything was alright, and that Bones was there and would always be there. And for a short time, Jim would believe. He would believe that this time around, he wouldn't be abandoned and betrayed. He would believe that, for just this moment in time, everything in the universe was all right.

And as the days, weeks, and months rolled by, he found himself relying on that kindness more and more. He found himself finding comfort in the sight of Bones sitting at his desk, brows furrowed while trying to study for his Xenobiology exams or finding the good doctor's scrubs tossed aside haphazardly after a particularly hard day at Academy medical. It seemed all so normal, all so natural, that the two of them should co-exist, Jim and Bones, with all their constant bickering, the doctor's grousing and being a mother hen, and Jim's ear-splitting grins at Bones' frustration.

So when the doctor's touches after patching him up after yet another bar fight started to linger longer and the arms encircling Jim after yet another nightmare pulled him closer, Jim couldn't help but be freaked out. After all, despite his reputation as a ladies' man, truthfully, the level of devotion that he could see staring at him from Bones' eyes was something he had only ever seen once. And that had not been a pretty sight. So was it any wonder that Jim bolted, literally and metaphorically.

Jim chose to stay away, spending his nights in various female cadet's quarters. It didn't matter whether the cadet was actually a human or humanoid, all that mattered was that he could drown his own fears and insecurities in another's bed. With these women he played fast and loose, making it clear he was there for the sex and nothing more. After all, he had no intentions of ever entering into the sort of commitment that would lead to the lady walking down an aisle.

He knew he was hurting Bones, saw it in the sadness that tinged the man's eyes even though the rest of his demeanor seemed unchanged. But Bones let it slide. He did not question when Jim would wander in at three in the morning smelling of booze, women, and sex. He did not question when Jim sported hickeys and quietly put a dermal regenerator over the offending spots until they vanished. But he made it abundantly clear that what he had said then, in the darkness of the night as he had held Jim close, he held fast to. Bones wasn't going away anywhere. He would stay by Jim's side through thick and thin. Through hell or high water. And damn, if that didn't sound like a wedding vow.