Leonard H. McCoy had a bad feeling.
Like, a really bad feeling.
Leonard had always put a lot of faith in bad feelings. He had bad feelings a lot, about a variety of things, and most of the time those things turned out to be bad. Therefore, his feelings were accurate enough that he didn't question them often. Call it what, intuition? A sixth sense? A bullshit meter? Whatever it was, it was going off right now, and he didn't like it one damned bit.
He'd made it back to the apartment just after midnight and flopped onto the couch, nothing out of the ordinary there. Jim was nowhere to be seen, and that was weird because he usually waited up for Leonard to come back before he went to bed. He had a theory about that, which was that Jim was afraid of being alone and didn't want to fall asleep with no one else in the apartment, but he kept it to himself. Leonard's second Ph.D had been in psychiatry, and within a week of their meeting he'd already pegged Jim as somebody with Serious Issues.
Usually he made a habit of trying not to shrink his friends, he really did. And hey, who was he to call anybody out on their mental problems? Leonard had his own fair share, between his dad's awful death and his nasty divorce and his terror of anything that flew—so it wasn't like he could just come out and accuse Jim of being damaged, because who wasn't? Everybody had their own demons. On the face of it, Jim was all sunshine and confidence, and if he'd passed Starfleet's psych evals that must be good enough.
Leonard dragged himself into a sitting position. He called Jim's name, but there was no answer. Turning his head back toward the door he just came in, he saw that Jim's jacket wasn't on the hook on the back of the door, meaning he must be out. Jim liked to go out and get drunk, pick up girls and get in fights. He'd gathered that much in their six months as roommates, even though the last thing Jim usually wanted to talk about was himself. That in itself was another sign of Serious Issues, but again, not Leonard's business.
The kid had been a godsend, really. After being vomited on, Leonard couldn't see any reason why the kid would want to keep hanging out with him, but a week later they were sharing an apartment and eating Chinese food together at lunch, as if that's the way it always had been. He'd learned quickly that Jim was easy to talk to, a good listener, never judgmental and would agreeably let Leonard rant and rave about shit at the hospital, shit in class, shit with his ex, or just shit in general. And despite his growing reputation as a playboy, he somehow never brought girls back to the apartment and always came back before curfew.
Somewhere the kid had learned to toe the line just right without openly defying the rules. If he'd put that genius IQ to use somewhere else he could have really made something of himself already. And yeah, he could be a little abrasive and a little obnoxious, and Leonard knew of at least two fights he'd gotten into, but overall he was a stellar roommate and was becoming a good friend. Leonard didn't begrudge him a little fun, but they had class tomorrow and it was well past curfew. Jim was always back at the apartment on time. The apartment itself mystified Leonard; how does a nineteen year old get issued graduate-level quarters? He'd asked, of course, but Jim had evaded giving him a straight answer.
In any case, he should have been back by now.
And it was giving Leonard a really, really bad feeling.
Shit. He pulled out his comm and punched in Jim's code, hoping the kid wouldn't be pissed about being checked up on. Leonard had inherited a nasty tendency to worry over the smallest things from his father, although he'd been assured his whole life that this was a good trait for a doctor to have. Normally he'd let Jim have his privacy, but since he saw no explanatory note lying around the common area or kitchenette and he'd had no messages left on his comm, he suspected that Jim hadn't intended to stay out past midnight. That, and he had a bad fucking feeling.
Beep beep, no answer. His bad feeling wasn't getting any better. But then, what could he really do? If the kid had gone somewhere, it wasn't Leonard's business to insist he come home. And he couldn't call campus security, he'd be laughed at over nothing more than a MIA teenage boy and bad feeling. He'd last seen Jim leaving their afternoon classes, when they'd parted ways in front of the main building. Jim was headed for coffee, Leonard for the hospital ER. In spite of being overqualified to work in an emergency station, he had to get in those hours working with Starfleet policies and space-related illness and injury if he wanted an assignment after graduation. He just prayed day and night that it would be a terrestrial assignment.
A second call met with no answer again. He hopelessly fired off a text message. What to do? Should he call security after all? Wait—couldn't he use the 'net to locate Jim's comm? If he did, would he be violating the kid's privacy? Dammit, the kid was probably fine, he was probably out with some girl at her place and he'd probably show up for class in the morning covered in hickeys and wearing yesterday's uniform. Or he was drinking with some friends in one of the dorm rooms and had fallen asleep, and he'd show up for class reeking of stale beer and with a dick drawn on the side of his face.
But what if he wasn't fine? What if he was lying in a ditch somewhere, bleeding? What if he'd been robbed, or gotten in a fight, or hit by a car, or caught Antarean Flu and was vomiting his stomach lining all over some dark alley? He'd looked fine when he'd left campus, but sometimes these things come on quick. Leonard got up and started to pace. Jesus fucking Christ, stop panicking, moron! he told himself. He already knew that his imagination had a tendency to run away from him under stress, which had been one of his ex's main complaints about him.
Breathing slowly through his nose, he stopped and stood still. Finally came to a decision. He went to the bathroom and opened a bottle of sleeping pills, broke one in half, and downed it with a cupful of water from the sink. He really should eat before he slept, but he didn't think his nerves could take it. Jim was fine, Jim was surely safe, and he'd be back in the morning. And if he wasn't, Leonard would simply put in a call to Jim's adviser, Chris Pike. The guy was always sympathetic to the student's needs, and surely he'd make finding Jim safe and sound a priority over punishing him for a one-off.
He finally fell asleep on the couch under a spare blanket, comm clutched in one hand. Good lord he should not be this freaked out over one teenage boy staying out all night. It was what the kids did, right? He ordered his brain to relax. But in a fitful sleep he saw his father's face, telling him to trust his instincts, to wash his hands, to look at the patient as often as the chart, to first do no harm. He saw Jim's face the first day he'd met him, not golden smiles and light but bruised dark and bloody. He saw his imagination's version of the blank shapes of Jim's parents, distant and indifferent. This pulled him out of it, and he sat up on the couch with a groan.
No doubt, his subconscious was trying to tell him something. Leonard knew nothing about Jim's parents, except that they belonged to Starfleet, but he did know the signs of someone who'd been emotionally neglected as a child. The kid went out and drank and fought because he didn't know how to deal with himself, and he was the kind of kid who would resent being checked up on but who really needed checking up on. Leonard was the kind of doctor who did the checking up, and his bad feeling had grown steadily worse over the few hours he'd slept. There was practically a cloud of doom hanging over his head.
The sun was up, at least. Jim wasn't here. Leonard got up, tossed the blanket aside, and sat down at the terminal in the common area. He hadn't even been in his own room today. Hadn't even showered or changed out of his scrubs and lab coat. He ordered the computer to ring up the GPS satellites and home in on Jim's comm signal, then watched in abject horror as the screen quickly zoomed in from a bird's eye view to street view... to a dumpster behind a coffee shop on the other side of town.
Swearing in three languages, Leonard was out the door and halfway across the campus before the computer could helpfully ask him for another location to find. Pike had better fucking be there.