The stars are all wrong on this planet, and as it rises, the moon sits too large on the horizon.

Next to Spock in that cave, their shoulders pressed together for that entire night, the extra light had lit Spock's chest as McCoy watched it rise and fall. Now, hanging there just above the edge of the mountains, that same moon feels blazing, like it shines with the heat that seared across McCoy's shoulders in the mine camp all day.

Enough. He turns, gravel crunching under his boots. Sweat and grit catches between his neck and the collar of his - Spock's - shirt. It's too small and it rubs at him, a forgotten annoyance while he was working that now is grating. It's too much really, and he'd strip it off and leave it on a rock, but it'd probably just earn him a very logical lecture on how few supplies they have with them, to be discarding them here and there across this damn planet. And now, a longer stay in this place than they ever intended. For what, he doesn't know. Some shot in hell that they'll figure out a way out of this. Fly back with a full complement of crew, resurrected from the narrow, dark caves they're hanging in.

The rooms he had trained in during med school had been lit up as white as sickbay on the Enterprise. Clean and scrubbed and achingly bright until his eyes had nearly hurt for the shine of it. Outside the windows, tree branches had shifted and at night, streetlights cast their orange glow. There was no neon blue of warp trails, no empty black where the stars didn't even twinkle, just shone hard and dull. If he had stayed, he would have walked out of work at the end of the day to a wind that pressed sweet and warm on his cheeks, the chirp of the bird calls he grew up with. Impossible really, to have had that, when he had crawled away from that life and onto a shuttle, but the thought of what might have been hangs like a burn in his chest all these years later. Always has, like one of these days he'll push a door open and there will be moss hanging from the trees and that old, cracked, sunbaked pavement leading the road home.

He hauls himself over a rock. Dirt is worked into his palms with the effort of scrambling through the trees. He smacks his hands on his thighs to brush off what he can, but it doesn't amount to much difference. Out here, he can breathe easier, leaves crunching under his boots and wet logs to make his way over, not the gravel and dirt of the mine camp. But that fresh air doesn't unravel the stickiness of anger caught in his chest and neither does the rises of hills he tops, a scramble up one and down the next.

He's clumsier as he presses on, his foot driving down into a hole he can't see. He swears and catches himself. The ship without Jim. Ass, he thinks. Leaving them with Spock. No, if Jim left, the crew would splinter, McCoy with them. He's started over before, and now the thought of it isn't as heavy as it once was. New place, new career, new people. He's never managed to get himself pointing in one direction for very long. Maybe the Enterprise was only ever another stop along the way. A bump in the road as it were, no matter how sure it had all seemed, up there every day with the lot of them all.

When there's a break in the trees, he looks up. The stars are all wrong, but they haven't been right for years. If he squints, maybe they can be fireflies hanging in the blue dusk of evening.

He jerks around at the sound of footsteps. Then he sighs.

"Quit following me around."

Spock slips down a bank of roots that twist their way out of the hillside. "It is dangerous."

He seems nearly out of breath. McCoy looks away.

"I'm fine," he says. "Jim said I was a good shot, if you care to remember."

"You do not have a phaser with you." And then, "I have perfect recall."

"Dear Lord, of course you do." A puff of white hangs in front of McCoy's mouth when he blows out a breath. He can see Spock's exhale too. All it does is stir the memory of hot fingers under his and the nudge of a nose.

McCoy turns and keeps walking.

Even footfalls follow him down the hill in front of him.

He smells it first. Acrid, burning plastic and metal, the sharp stench of low hanging smoke. He finds a foothold on a rock and levers himself over it to better see. For all his effort, what he gets is a swamp of vertigo. Fingers dug in tight fists to his palms, he stares. Up this close, with trees and rocks for reference and not the blanket of black space, the saucer of the Enterprise is larger than it ever seemed at Spacedock, resting here against the ruts it's drawn. The fires that burned have mostly flamed out, but enough still flicker to cast the jutting decking in dancing orange.

The hand that falls on his shoulder is likely meant to hold him back, but McCoy scrambles down the hill all the same. He's drawn forward towards it, those streaks of black, scorched soot on shiny deck panels. How many times had he told Jim he was sick of that tin bucket, only to now be nearly skinning his knees to get to it.

He'd read the mission report. Combustion of the thruster propulsion systems, Jim and Chekov sliding down through the bridge view screen. Someday, the Franklin might reach home again, but the Enterprise is here to stay, settled amongst rocks, strung up at an awkward angle like a frisbee thrown but not caught.

"Stop," Spock calls. A loose rock skitters past McCoy. "Wait."

The hull is sun warm, or maybe that's the remnant heat of a burnt out fire. Flames have melted polymers into lumpy drops that have dried hard. Down the curve of the ship, as far as he can see, windows are blown out. He carefully runs his hand over the hole it's created in front of him. Whatever poor soul had this cabin, they had a nice view, once. Must have been a sight to see the nebula with all its colors, that last evening they had on board.

With a push, he heaves himself up and into the opening. It leaves his hands black with soot. He wipes them on his shirt and pretends not to hear Spock's more graceful scramble after him.

The name on on the plaque leading to the hallway reads 'Benia, Sally, Lieutenant, Junior Grade.' McCoy frowns. He didn't know her.

There's no shake of the ship beneath his boots, not how it rolled and pitched the last time he walked down these corridors. There's only the off kilter slant of how it finally came to lie at rest, and the angle makes it all wrong to use Jefferies Tube ladders. But the path is familiar even at an awkward crawl, and he picks his way through the decks, these halls with burned out holes in them, a maze of once white corridors that for a time he had been sure he'd never learn his way around, every turn looking the same as all the rest.

He has to shoulder open his own door. The manual release only gives him a handspan and there's no pneumatic hiss that welcomed him after a shift, boots shucked off and the shower turned on hot. Behind him, Spock hovers. Though he always does. Only the familiarity that McCoy finds in his own quarters makes it out of place, that hesitancy with which Spock lingers in the doorway. McCoy certainly never invited him in here, never tipped his head towards his door in the invitation he so often extended to Jim.

His books are scattered everywhere and blue shirts spill out of a drawer, still half folded. A holo of his mom lies shattered. When he pokes at the screen, the glass is splintered. He sets it in its place on his desk and works open a jammed drawer. Gravity is against him and he has to shimmy it an inch at a time. But inside the stack of filmplasts are the same as he left them only days ago. From beneath them, he pulls out an envelope, weathered and creased and bent at one corner. Unburnt, untouched, though he checks it anyway, thumbing past old transcripts and a weathered diploma and licenses to the worn letters he long ago slipped in there. Hand written, like his father always preferred. McCoy used to lean over and watch him write, years before he'd ever been a recipient of one. Often, a big hand closed over his to guide the pencil across the page. The hazy blue smoke of the pipe his father always had would dangle from his lips, thick with the scratch of pen to paper.

McCoy flicks the envelope closed and creases the flap down with his thumb.

"Don't you have anything you want?" he asks.

From the doorway, Spock says, "No."

"Nothing?"

"My father has my belongings from Vulcan."

"Oh."

"It is of no matter."

"Still."

Not that long ago, half a mention of the same would have cowed Spock. Sent him into a silence that lasted hours. These days, Spock's expression is as even as it ever is. Whatever ache clung to him has long since mellowed into this quieter, duller softness and when that exactly changed, McCoy can't quite guess. Now, that way Spock's watching him makes McCoy's neck prick. A haughty shoulder turned to him might actually be better. Whatever Spock is seeing, the shift in him isn't enough to let on an answer, and he silently steps into the room.

He looks around with a mild curiousness that McCoy has seen on too many M-Class planets and his quarters aren't a goddamn investigative site. Spock can keep that interest reserved for sensor results, tricorder readings, and particularly fascinating trees, not the book he picks up and examines.

"Melville?" Spock asks.

"Why not?"

"It is hardly what I might have predicted," he says and McCoy snorts, sure his reading hasn't actually ranked high on what Spock idly wonders about.

"It's Jim's," he says.

"Ah." Spock turns it over and reads the back cover. "I see."

McCoy tries to see his quarters as Spock might, but even the mess of it doesn't render it unfamiliar, not the lines of the bulkheads he grew so used to, the shadowed door to his bathroom, the bed made with the hospital corners McCoy had tucked neatly in that last morning when he still thought he'd be climbing into his bed that night. McCoy sinks onto the edge of his mattress. God, had he hated this room those first days. Weeks. Longer probably, though eventually he had forgotten to care. A poor habit of his, he knows. Grinding at what irritates him until he can't keep track of all the little things and eventually gives up trying. Hell of a way to settle into a place though, to make it a home through acquiescence. Not at all what he had wanted, but what he had ended up with, and hell if there hadn't been some good times in there, mixed in with the rest.

The give of the bed is so familiar beneath him. He'd probably lay down if Spock weren't there, if the angle of the deck didn't mean he'd be half off balance.

He doesn't let himself consider that a gentler landing and some solitude, he might just stay there. Stretched out in the most recent place he'd hung his hat.

Instead, he rests his forearms on his thighs, his hands dangling between his knees. "I'm tired, Spock."

"That, then, would explain the desire for your own bed."

"What if I don't want to do this anymore?"

Spock abandons his post by the door and that stance of his too, trading that too straight back for sitting next to McCoy. He doesn't slump like McCoy does, but how he rests his hands in his lap could nearly be the same, though with an air of carefulness that bled out of McCoy long ago.

"What would you do instead?" Spock asks.

"Hell, I don't know." He tips his head back. A chunk of ceiling tile is missing. He used to stare at that same spot at night, the ship humming and alive around him. Now, the silence is awful. He's had plenty of sleepless nights in here, a host of them that he could lay out for Spock, a history of the mission mapped out in lost crew members, dead on his biobed that led to hours with his eyes tracking over the darkness. His throat hurts. All of that is best laid to rest in the quagmire of memory. He swallows and rubs his fingers into his eyes. "There's sick people back on Earth. Or-" He waves towards Spock. "-New Vulcan. Maybe your idea of clearing out of here for that sand-ball of a planet wasn't half bad."

"There is very little in the way of alcohol there."

McCoy sits upright. "Which reminds me."

He shouldn't, but old habits and the comfort they bring are enough to quiet that voice that crops up. The cabinet's door is twisted to the point it takes a good tug to pull it open, no easy glide under his hand, but the bottle is there all the same. He pops it open and the burn of it down his throat is full of Jim's eyes across the table. He closes his own as he swallows. When he opens them, he holds the bottle out to Spock.

Eventually, Spock takes it. He holds it all wrong, like it's too big for his hand, and then raises it and takes a careful sip.

"I believe that my people may be, as you would say, 'on to something' with such little import placed on such a beverage."

"You had three drinks at Jim's party."

"Which were far more pleasing than this."

McCoy grabs it back. "This is the good stuff. I don't want to hear it."

He knows Spock's watching as he takes another swallow. He follows it with a third and drags the back of his hand across his mouth.

"Drinking with a head injury is not wise," Spock says.

"And drinking alone is never fun." McCoy bumps the bottle into Spock's arm. Don't, he thinks to himself but Spock is just there next to him and he bounces the bottle into him again. "C'mon."

When Spock takes it, he just holds it balanced on his thigh. "Would you truly consider a career on New Vulcan?"

"I don't know. Sure." McCoy shakes his head. That dull throb is still there, mixed through with whiskey now. "Why do this out here? Think about how understaffed the hospitals are on New Vulcan. Or- hell, hover car crashes on Earth. Why is this somehow more important? Isn't a broken leg somewhere hospitable the same as one here?"

"It is duly noted that you referred to New Vulcan as 'hospitable'."

"There's something insane about sending crews out to the edge of it all, Spock." He drags the bottle out of Spock's grip. "We're here to explore, but how many people have to die before it's not worth it? What possible balance of new knowledge is worth this cost of life?"

Spock is just watching him. He's always too intense. Too warm, too smart, too quiet. It chafes at McCoy, though hasn't it always. Never irritating enough to quit himself of time spent with Spock, but enough to get under his skin. Though McCoy never was good at staying away from what's not good for him. Like a moth to flame, Jocelyn had said once. He frowns and tips the bottle up against his mouth.

"There is less death for the fact you are here with us," Spock finally says.

"There'd be less death if we all had the sense to sit at home. Go to work, drive back again, have our families and our friends. What's the point of this?" He nods outside, the window that once showed him the stars now covered in a spray of dirt. "You know how far we all are from our families? Can't we at least die with someone there to hold our hand?"

"It is just as possible to be lonely in one's home as it is anywhere else."

"But at least it's home." He tries for a grin and it comes easier than he might have thought it would, but whiskey's good like that. "We'll never agree, will we?"

"No."

"Cheers to that." He tips the bottle towards Spock. "I don't blame you for wanting to be with your family."

The breath Spock lets out leaves him looking hollow. "I believe I am only just now learning what that means."

"Hey." McCoy pushes his shoulder into Spock's. "I am sorry about the Ambassador. I hope you know that."

Spock's chin dips down with his nod. "That is… appreciated."

"C'mere." It's the whiskey that makes McCoy sling his arm over Spock's shoulder. That feels important to let register. The fact that he doesn't resist the urge, he pushes away. Spock is so stiff. Jostling his shoulder hardly helps but McCoy tries all the same, his hand holding onto the top of Spock's arm. "You know, I think you were wrong."

"I am hardly surprised."

With his free hand, McCoy waves the bottle at the room. "You said you wanted to live as he did, and the Ambassador spent his career here, with us. It'd be illogical to skip out on that."

Spock's eyes are dark. He's not blinking. Most Vulcans don't need to, not as much as McCoy considers normal, but Spock does. Not now, because he's just staring. But ordinarily. Fascinating, McCoy had once found him before he'd developed the good sense to start rolling his eyes at the word. A mishmash of genetics and body parts that shouldn't work and yet do. Very much so.

McCoy tightens his grip on the bottle. Spock is still staring at him.

"Who the hell knows who you'd end up as if you didn't have us around," he says. "We might even be good for you."

Spock leans closer. McCoy watches him do it. Edge in and tip his head slightly and part his lips. McCoy's stomach flips over.

This time when Spock kisses him, McCoy knows it's coming. He could pull back, turn to the side, move away from those lips pressing to his. Tell Spock that they shouldn't.

He doesn't. Spock's hair is softer than he would have thought and he digs his fingers into it. Messes up that terrible haircut and licks at his mouth. Their kiss tastes of whiskey and he's only sure that he expected this all to be worse than it is. Harder fought and awkward when it's instead a simple push of lips and hot breath.

Spock's tongue dips into his mouth. McCoy can't quite breathe and he's pretty sure he needs to. A warm hand pushes down the length of his neck and his lips are caught at with an edge of teeth. The bottle slips from his fingers to thud dully on the carpet. Under McCoy's hands, Spock's sides are hard muscle and the fine lines of his ribs and McCoy palms at them, over where Spock's heart runs too fast, that breakneck pace of a beat like a thundering, rolling peal tumbling downhill. He grabs there, a solid spot to grip at while his lower lip is licked, but his hold is too tight and at the pull, Spock's body gives, a curve of strength that fits to McCoy's front.

"We should-" 'Stop' is the next word. Logical it is, to grind this whole thing to a halt. McCoy's skin is too small and hot and when hands lift the hem of his shirt he shucks it off, strips it from himself and tries to pull air through a chest that is too tight.

It's been so long that fingers on his bare back are novel. A palm pressed to his shoulder blade, the fabric of Spock's uniform brushing his chest. He should blink his eyes open and think, but beyond the thin skin of his eyelids is the mess of his room and it's simpler to be borne back into the mattress, no matter that it smells of smoke and the sour burn of the fire still raging elsewhere in the ship, that it's Spock of all people.

"Dammit." He can't get his hand beneath his head to grab where it stings. Above him, Spock's eyes are wide, his lips wet. McCoy frowns. "I told you it hurt."

"Repeatedly." Spock rolls off and unbuttons his pants. They're really doing this, then. Still, it takes McCoy a moment to catch up to the fact of it. Spock hikes his shirt off and pulls it over his head. His skin is so pale over the play of lean muscle. McCoy drops his boots on the floor with twin thuds and fumbles at his fly.

McCoy is well acquainted with that stretch of shiny green skin over Spock's ribs. But the last time he saw it, he was wearing scrubs and the med center at Yorktown was lit up bright white around them. Maybe it's better like this, emergency lighting that can't entirely fight through the gloom of his quarters.

He knows the rest of Spock's body too, but not like this. Not a palm fitted to his flank, the knock of their feet bumping together, the hard bony nudge of his knee into McCoy's thigh. Spock crowds over him and kisses him again, answers the stutter of his touch, that sweep of hesitancy, with a hand slipped down the front of McCoy's body and McCoy gives himself over to the allure of that directness, that frank way Spock has swinging from irritating to convenient in the first tug of his hand.

McCoy can do this too, this bluntness of it all. It's easier than some alternative that's laced through with sentiment. He licks at his lips and bumps his chin into Spock's cheek as he levers himself upright. Already, his stomach simmers liquid with heat.

"I've got-" He elbows Spock to the side. A yank of a drawer and then the bottle he fishes for is in his palm.

Impossibly, Spock's knee falls outward. McCoy stares at it like he's never seen the inside of a thigh. But he's been here before, leaning over a warm body, the air growing humid between them, the navigation of elbows and legs suddenly a careful dance. And so he doesn't give into the thought of how long it's been, doesn't let himself trace backwards to the last time his skin touched skin, just flicks open the lube and tries to focus on nothing at all beyond smearing it over two fingers with the pad of his thumb, the anticipation that's taken over his body with a headiness that leaves him halfway close to dizzy.

He watches as if from some distance as he hovers between Spock's open knees, the scene written before him in snatches and bursts of sound, corded together in a string of sense that he can't quite grasp. The shine of lube, the breath Spock catches and then releases immediately like he didn't mean to be caught at such overtness from the touch of McCoy's fingers, how the bedspread creases under McCoy's knees. He has half a mind to tug it smooth again but he can't spare the hand for it and probably couldn't maintain his balance anyway, not with the room crooked and pitched. So he braces his palms on the mattress and doesn't look at the fact that it's Spock framed in like that, just focuses on the flare of pleasure that lights hot through his gut as he pushes inside him.

He closes his eyes. His toes curl. People do this together for a reason, he remembers now. This slip and push against each other, the grab for friction and another's body pressed up close. Spock doesn't haul him closer still which is a relief, for even without an arm wrapped over his back, McCoy finds the hand curled around his elbow to be plenty.

Ok? he could ask but he's not sure what he'd do with an answer and anyway, Spock is working himself over with his other hand and McCoy can well enough hear how Spock's breath betrays him in its increased pace, that shallowness and tension. McCoy is sure he's equally laid bare, likely flushed and he knows he's panting, but he doesn't look, doesn't check to see himself reflected in Spock's expression. If Spock's even watching him, if his eyes aren't screwed shut as tightly as McCoy's, phosphenes flaring in the rhythm he starts between their bodies.

The rushing seesaw against the heat building at the base of his spine and the need to savor this is too familiar. He doesn't do this enough. Hell if he knows why right now. Make this last, he tells himself. Firmly, because he knows what'll happen if he centers his mind on the jolt of pleasure that sings through him with each thrust. He's too sure of the barrel forwards. Beneath him, Spock tips his head back. His hips lift, impatient, and the choice is made for McCoy, even biting at the inside of his cheek as he is, even with his own quilt scrunched in sweaty palms like he can keep a grip on himself through the hold.

"Fuck," he says as instinct takes over, a fast, hard drive that he can't slow, that breakneck search for more that rushes through him and leaves him gasping against Spock's forehead.

It makes him nearly miss the moment where Spock stops breathing altogether, but certainly hears him start again, Spock's slowing pump of knuckles brushing McCoy's own stomach where he's sagged forward.

McCoy licks at his lips. His mouth is dry. Spock's hand is still on his arm. His thumb is brushing back and forth.

He sits back and clears his throat. There's semen smeared on his stomach. Spock's, too. What in fucking hell did they just do.

But the silence is too much and he's afraid it might bring the sort of answer he's not especially looking for, so he squirms away, ignoring the green flush on Spock's skin, the shine of lube smeared over his inner thighs. There's no point in trying to run the tap in the bathroom, no clean washcloth to dampen under it, so when McCoy gets his feet under himself, he goes to his dresser and fishes out an old shirt. His thighs are shaking. The shirt lands next to Spock's hip and McCoy leaves him to it, hunting around for his own pants.

Socks, and then boots. He doesn't sit on the bed to pull them on. Jesus, he thinks. Goddamn. His undershirt is tangled in the sleeves of his uniform and he pulls them apart in sparks of static electricity.

Spock gets up off the bed while McCoy has his head inside his shirt, and by the time it's yanked down, Spock's holding his own pants in front of himself. McCoy smooths his hair out of habit, the same as he always does when he pulls a shirt on. As if this is at all familiar. His heart hasn't slowed and he angles his shoulder towards Spock, knowing clear well how unfair it is to blame his pulse just on the rarity of sex.

An intake of Spock's breath has McCoy looking up from adjusting his shirt, sure that Spock has pulled on that new skin over his ribs. But instead of that flash of pain Spock is always trying to hide, he looks like he's about to speak, mouth parted and tension held around his eyes. McCoy doesn't know whether to be relieved or not that Spock has his shirt back on and his pants fastened around those slim hips.

"If you are considering a change of career," Spock says and then pauses, his head tipping. McCoy's hands still on the hem of his shirt, waiting, but Spock doesn't continue and the silence only resolves itself in an increased sing of tension.

Out with it, McCoy thinks. Good God, don't keep him waiting, not now.

But instead of breaking the silence that hangs, Spock just stands there, stock still at first and then his eyes growing wide and his shoulders locking. McCoy watches his hand rise from his side and frowns at the gesture, trying to make sense of it.

Then, a bite of cold to his neck. His skin is still flushed and the cool prodding is all the colder for it. Spock's eyes hold his and McCoy doesn't move, not with that phaser jabbing at the base of his skull.

"What is this?" he hears. The voice is low. McCoy stares frozen at Spock.

A hand grips the other side of McCoy's neck and he doesn't let himself flinch as he's yanked backwards, down into the point of the phaser. He knows the face that crowds into the side of his vision from mission reports, but his tongue is thick in his mouth and when it works it against his teeth to speak, words don't come, just the rise of the faint taste of copper.

"I hear noises." The hand tightens. "Fighting, I think. But you are not scavengers like the rest."

"Manas," Spock says for both of them.

"Yes," Manas says and McCoy can feel the word in his own chest. "And now we wait. For your captain will come. He always does."