The ambulance ride back to Starfleet Medical Center was quiet and somewhat awkward. Jim had opted to stay in the wheelchair, rather than lie down on a stretcher. That was fine, if he had the energy for it; the chart from Grady Ross said that he'd been sedated for the entire night, so he'd been lying flat for long enough. Leonard pulled a tricorder from a shelf overhead and set it up to scan on standard human settings: Jim's oxygen was too low, as was his temperature and his blood pressure. He'd sustained massive bruising and two cracked ribs, no doubt from chest compressions.
It was a crying shame that for all their modern technology, the standard treatment for true cardiac arrest was still so damaging, though that spoke more to the limits of the human body than to the limits of human ingenuity. Of course, humans were a lot more resilient than many supposedly "superior" species gave them credit for. Jim's almost flippant comment about being hit by the "CPR train" spoke of a resilience that Leonard was perhaps not prepared for. Was this a common enough occurrence that Jim knew immediately upon awakening what it felt like to have been resuscitated?
This was not the moment to interrogate him about it. One of the medics had been reading the tricorder over Leonard's shoulder and Jim nearly jumped out of his skin as the man moved toward him with a hypo.
"No drugs," he croaked, waving the man off weakly, but the medic wasn't easily dissuaded.
"It's just a pain reliever, standard procedure," the medic said, reaching forward again even as Jim cringed away. Leonard put on his best scowly face. This was one of his pet peeves.
"D'you speak English?" he said loudly. "The patient just said no drugs."
The medic froze, mouth falling open. Leonard took the opportunity to place himself physically in between the man and Jim, who was practically coming out of the chair in anxiety.
"Sir, standard procedure-"
"-does not involve forcing medication on an unwilling patient." Leonard relieved him of the hypo, tossed it into a nearby bin. "He's conscious, lucid and able to communicate, and we don't perform any procedures on such a patient without consent. Clear?"
The medic nodded, reddening, and slunk off toward the front of the cabin. They were still a few minutes out from the hospital and the ambulance sped along smoothly. These things had the highest of the high-end shock absorbers, so as to keep from jostling unstable patients on the way to safety. Leonard had already commed ahead for a room to be ready and had Grady Ross transmit the kid's chart to the 'fleet's databanks. Pike had left Jim in Leonard's hands with the intention of checking in with his office and then bringing Jim lunch at the hospital in a couple of hours.
Leonard glanced down at Jim, wondering if he would even want to eat. He was sitting hunched down in the wheelchair, hands pressed over his face and visibly trembling. This was hardly a shadow of the bright, confident boy he'd lived with for the last six months. The sight tugged on Leonard's heartstrings in a way that it normally wouldn't have, but he couldn't help mentally comparing the kid to a half drowned puppy that needed to be pulled out of the water.
"Hey," he said, dropping to his knees in front of the chair. Jim peered at him over pale fingers. "I'm sorry."
"S'okay," Jim said, his tongue still not quite with it. "All of 'em do it."
"I know. It's hard to stop somebody who really believes they're doin' the right thing."
"Tell me about it." Jim rubbed his face with one hand, and Leonard noted that his fingernails looked more purple than they should. Maybe it was the lighting in here, or maybe Jim was anemic. He decided not to say anything about it now.
"You told the doctors at Grady Ross not to give you any drugs, either." Leonard said, tugging on the short sleeve of Jim's white ICU pajamas to get his attention, "People usually don't say that for fun."
"Maybe I like the pain," Jim said, "and I wanna keep it. Been told 'ma kinky bastard."
"Dammit, this is serious-"
"So maybe my 'mmune system rode the short bus."
"Better answer. Pike said he thought you had weird allergies."
Jim nodded, making no comment, staring at his own lap. This didn't really say too much about the kid's state of mind, but Leonard made another mental note. Victims of cardiac arrest often struggled for a time as their serotonin levels normalized. In nature an arrest meant sudden death, so upon survival the brain was often not sure what to do. Chances were this would pass in a few days and the kid would be fine.
"Kid, you gotta help me out here," he cajoled, not really hopeful. "Can we give you anything at all for pain? I know there's no way you ain't hurtin' right now."
"Nope. I'm screwed as usual." Jim finally looked at him, and frowned. "Don' look like that, Bones, s'not your fault."
Leonard forced the guilty look off his face and patted the kid's hand as the ambulance pulled to a stop. The feeling he loathed the most was helplessness, the same one that had cropped up as his father had grown sicker and sicker. He hated not being able to help, and had said as much. But his dad had just grinned at him weakly and said, sometimes the best medicine amounts to a little TLC. And while that was true enough Leonard had never been one to just give up when told he couldn't do something.
He bit his lip as the medics wheeled Jim down the sterile hallways and into a prepped recovery room at the back of ICU wing. Surely, he told himself, he could find something that he could do. He picked up a PADD on the way in and called up Jim's chart from the other hospital. The medics tried to lift Jim out of the chair but Leonard shooed them away and let him climb out of it and onto the biobed on his own. The sensors came on immediately, showing the same readings on the screen over the bed that Leonard had already deduced from the tricorder.
"Bones." Jim was still sitting, drowsily, arms locked around his knees. Leonard touched the remote on the bed and adjusted it so that Jim could lean back against it without lying down. "You should get somebody else."
"To do what?" he replied absently, fiddling with the temperature setting.
"To babysit me." Jim finally reclined back against the bed when Leonard pressed him into it with one hand. "You're missing class."
Leonard raised an eyebrow, threw a blanket over his new patient. "What, you don't trust me?"
Jim's face reddened a little as he pulled at the blanket. "I do trust you."
"Then what? Missing one class won't ruin me."
"I just... really fucking hate doctors." He grasped a fistful of Leonard's coat again, almost as if he wanted to tear it off. "Don't want you to be one of them, you know? Don't want to hate you."
"Well, I'm off-duty so you can just pretend that I'm not one of them for now."
"Bones."
Leonard sighed. He didn't really have a good reason not to turn Jim over to another doctor, and yet he was firmly against the idea. There were other doctors on the floor right now—good ones—but the thought of leaving Jim at their mercy made him nervous. In his head he could see that medic again, advancing on Jim with a hypospray full of anaphylaxis. In spite of the staff's good intentions, Leonard's instincts told him that a hospital was not a safe place for the kid to be.
And his dad had always told him to trust his instincts, hadn't he?
"Kid, just don't fuss right now, ok?" He sat on the edge of the bed, fingers working over the PADD to call up Jim's medical records so he could compare them to the chart from the other hospital. "Let me handle this, and we'll talk about it again when you're better. Deal?"
Jim nodded, apparently too wrung-out to argue. The PADD was still searching, so Leonard reached over the bed and pulled a package of tubes and a nasal cannula out of the cabinet, along with a small aerosol can and packet of Vaseline. Jim didn't argue or move away while Leonard connected the hoses and draped the tubing carefully across his face, just sat there looking somewhat defeated. The monitors over the bed adjusted themselves to a happier state after he turned on the oxygen, though.
Jim did flinch when Leonard tugged gently on the tape inside his left elbow, because as he'd suspected the skin underneath was already angry and red. He saturated the tape with the contents of the metal can he'd taken down, and Jim looked surprised when the tape then came away with no resistance. Leaning across the bed, he repeated the procedure on the other taped elbow, then ripped open the packet of Vaseline and spread a thin layer of it over the affronted skin with one finger.
"Seriously?"
"What?" Leonard gathered up the discarded wrappings and threw them into the trash.
"I usually just rip the tape off."
"And I bet it usually leaves big nasty welts all over your arm that don't go away for a week or two, too."
"... pretty much."
"Well, next time, just tell somebody and they'll get the tape off before you leave. You're probably allergic to the adhesive, and that's actually pretty common." Leonard peered down at the PADD, flipped through to a list of Jim's known allergies and Jesus fucking Christ, what the fuck?
"There won't be a next time."
"You know, something tells me there will." Leonard reached into his pocket and pulled out Jim's epi-pen, which still had two doses left, and tapped the kid on the arm with it. Jim took it, a strange look on his face.
"Where'd you find this?" he said, twirling it between his fingers.
"In a dumpster behind a coffee shop. Your jacket and your comm are in Pike's car."
Jim's eyes widened, and Leonard could practically see the gears turning as he worked out what must have happened. He opened his mouth to speak, but then closed it again, staring at the pen in his hand. Leonard turned back to the PADD, scrolling through the history and coming up very short. There was nothing beyond the last five years, which was weird, and a lot of the stuff that was there was incomplete.
He was about to ask about it when a nurse came in with a portable blood scanner. Leonard scribbled down a short list of items he wanted and she was gone again, promising a quick return. He turned back to Jim with the scanner in hand, pulled an alcohol swab and a cotton ball out of a cabinet and sat back down on the edge of the bed.
"Gonna have to prick your finger," he said. Jim held out one hand to him and when Leonard took it it was cold. He adjusted the bed's temperature again before wiping the index finger with alcohol and pressing it to the bottom of the scanner against what he fondly thought of as the "stabby bit." He was sure there was a proper name for it, but he could never be bothered to remember.
The device took its drop of blood and Leonard handed the cotton ball to Jim, who already knew to press it between his thumb and bleeding finger. Kid was almost a pro. Leonard put the scanner down while it worked and was rummaging in the cabinet for something he could tape the cotton ball with when Jim spoke:
"Sorry, Bones." he said.
Leonard looked down. "For what?"
"For the dumpster." Jim twitched a little. "Pike said you thought I must be lying in a ditch."
Leonard resisted the urge to pat him on the head like a puppy. "Not your fault, kid." He pulled out a roll of stretchy athletic tape and shut the cabinet. "Shit happens, and I have a tendency to blow things out of proportion."
Jim was going to say something else, but the nurse came back in at that moment. She had a tray with various bits and pieces on it, and a cup of ice, which she handed to Jim. It was a testament to how bad Jim must have felt that he took it with just a nod of thanks, and did not offer her so much as a flirtatious grin. She also had a lightweight metal gas tank with her, which she set down behind the head of the bed near where the oxygen hoses were connected. Leonard thanked her and dismissed her, looking over the blood scanner's readout.
"What's in the tank?" Jim asked, playing with the ice.
"Nitrous oxide." Leonard pulled down a splitter hose and set about connecting it to Jim's oxygen. "Same stuff dentists use. Not the same as real pain reliever, but it'll take the edge off some. Take a few deep breaths." He turned the nitrous on, ensuring that Jim was still getting enough oxygen to make the monitors happy. "I'm gonna have to give you an IV, and I need you to not pull it out, ok?"
Jim nodded, already visibly relaxed from the gas. He turned his head against the pillow to watch as Leonard picked up a saline IV bag from the tray and a handful of pre-filled syringes. He held them up for Jim to inspect.
"This one is multivitamin," he said, "and here's some vitamin D, some extra potassium for your heart, a tiny bit of norepinephrine to raise your blood pressure—I normally wouldn't do that, but it ain't a drug—and this one is iron. Did you know you're anemic?" Jim nodded but didn't elaborate. "And all of that's ok? You're not going to pull it out?"
"It's fine," Jim murmured, suddenly grinning like an idiot, "and you're a fucking genius."
"I like to think so." Leonard dispensed the syringes into the saline bag and shook it up. He snapped on a pair of gloves. "You feelin' good right now?"
"Yeah, really."
"Good. Give me your hand." Leonard swabbed the back of Jim's as-yet unpoked left hand with an alcohol pad and picked up a butterfly needle off the tray. It was an easy stick, and Jim offered no resistance. The kid's hands had warmed up some, and he seemed content to lay back against the pillow while Leonard wrapped the needle down with more athletic tape, hung the bag, and gathered up more wrappers and bits of tubing for disposal.
"Bones?"
"Kid?" Leonard glanced at the monitor, which was very satisfied and green now that Jim's blood pressure was rising incrementally toward a more normal level. Then he looked down at Jim, who looked infinitely better than he had when they'd arrived less than an hour ago.
"How long do I have to stay here?"
Leonard pulled up a chair next to the bed, having settled everything else to his liking. Jim was stabilized and warm and in somewhat less pain, and under the circumstances he considered that a win.
"Hard to say, but I'll try to make a deal with you." He touched the remote, lowering the head of the bed until Jim was lying down but still not quite flat, and the kid automatically shifted onto his side facing Leonard. "I really should make you stay for at least forty eight hours. But, today's Friday and it's almost ten hundred. Pike said he wanted to bring you lunch. If you will nap until he gets here, and eat your lunch, and then lay quietly and rest for the afternoon, I will take you home with me at say, nineteen hundred. On the condition that you wear a monitor bracelet and you stay in for the whole weekend. No drinkin', no girls. You'll lay on the couch and do homework. Understand?"
Jim nodded, that funny nitrous-induced glaze in his eyes, and nestled obediently into the pillow. Leonard ordered the lights down and settled in to study his glowing PADD as they both lapsed into comfortable silence.