McCoy keeps his hands in the air, knees digging into the carpet, and eyes on Manas.
"Our captain doesn't know we're here," he says.
Manas shoves his phaser closer to Spock's face. Spock doesn't take a step backwards, but there's not much further for him to go, crowded back against the bulkhead like Manas has him.
"You think I do not know what this is?" Manas flicks his fingers against the insignia on Spock's chest. Spock doesn't blink at the proximity, his expression cool. "You think I do not know? No so much has changed between my time and yours, Doctor McCoy."
"The geology of this planet interferes with our ability to trace signals, if that is your point," Spock says like Manas doesn't have his face an inch from Spock's own. Spock's knuckles press to the wall next to his shoulders, the underside of his wrists pale again the cuffs of his sleeves.
"You have your Lieutenant Uhura. You have your Mr. Scott. You have your captain." Manas smiles. The expression is gruesome. "You think they will not find you?"
"Just you against our crew?" McCoy asks. His arms are starting to ache. He's good and tired of holding his hands up in surrender and he doesn't much like Manas stalking around his room. "I don't think I'd like your odds, if I were you."
Manas angles his head towards McCoy. "Do not speak."
McCoy shrugs with a casualness he sure as hell doesn't feel. "Last I counted, we arrived with a full complement of crew and your buddies were dead."
"Be silent," Manas says, louder. His phaser twitches in his hand.
"Just saying," McCoy says, eyeing those heavy boots on the carpet where he once walked barefoot after a shower. "And I'm not talking about your damn drones."
Manas crouches down in front of him.
"Silence," he whispers, stands, and whirls around, his phaser cracking across Spock's face. Green splatters the wall, Spock's lip split open.
McCoy scrambles forward, lifts a knee, and gets his toe curled under to stand. But there's a boot in the center of his chest, a light touch of a toe to his sternum and that phaser trained once more on Spock. Blood coats the side of it.
Manas smiles. "If I count, it was three of us versus your ship, and now your ship lies broken and your crew too."
"Spock," McCoy whispers.
Spock licks at his lips and keeps his eyes on Manas. His tongue comes away green and blood dribbles down his chin. McCoy spent an evening in that cave wiping crusted blood from Spock's ribs. Now, it would smear over Spock's jaw if McCoy tried the same. His fingers rub against the palm of his hand.
"You found your crew once," Manas says, three strides to McCoy's desk and three back again. He doesn't lower the phaser. "Do not speak to me of rocks. They will come again."
"We tracked a crew member's mucus excretions," Spock explains like Manas is a science ensign with a mistake in his lab protocol. "Your plan is illogical."
Good on Keenser. Though now when McCoy thinks back on those moments on the bridge of the Franklin, it's not the flare of triumph that he remembers most clearly, that moment when he realized that smoking snot was unique enough to be pinpointed on this planet, but instead Spock with his hand cupped over his side. Funny what sticks in the mind in those moments, those flashpoints of memory that get etched in, re-lived in the drift before sleep when his thoughts wander in the quiet hours that follow.
Now, he's sure that he'll forever see Manas standing over him and how he wipes flecks of Spock's blood from his hand.
Damp sweat sticks McCoy's shirt to him. He doesn't care for that careful examination Manas is giving Spock, how he puts his face so close, how he leans so far over Spock that Spock's head has to tip backwards against the wall.
"I have not seen one of your kind in some time," he says. Spock doesn't flinch when Manas takes his jaw in one hand, tipping Spock's head at an angle. "Strong, aren't you."
"Comparatively speaking," Spock says through the blood on his mouth and the hand biting into his skin. McCoy's breath comes too fast. He tries for the same calm Spock has clinging to him, but his heart is a dull pound in his chest and his palms are clammy. He's not made for this, these face offs, this headlong rush of adrenaline. Jim should be here. He and Spock would talk their way out of this and McCoy would patch them up in the safety of sickbay, annoyed as all hell with them both, relief nearly shaking his hands when neither was looking.
Manas tips Spock's chin up. With a single step, he's close enough that their bodies brush. McCoy winces because Spock won't.
"Better than a human," Manas says. Spock surely can feel his breath. McCoy's own neck itches as Manas pulls Spock's head to the side and examines where his pulse flutters.
That phaser is still in Manas' hand. Lowered to his side, but the grip on it is tight. He's too well trained to let his fingers loosen. Even with his attention riveted on Spock, McCoy's sure he's keeping track of every twitch, every shift of weight.
Well. Nothing for it then, but to make the most of that slice of focus.
"It's all relative," McCoy offers. In his best laid plans, Manas turns, Spock gets an opening, and they manage to get out of here.
Of course in his best, best laid plans, they're halfway back to the Franklin by now - or hell, wiling away an afternoon on Yorktown - but McCoy's been making peace with the unexpected.
"Stronger," Manas says, his eyes never leaving the lines of Spock's body. "Yes? And faster?"
"Comes at the expense of poor thermoregulation," McCoy says as if Spock doesn't look as cool as a goddamn cucumber.
"Even out here, we hear what happened to your planet." Manas' nose brushes close to a pointed ear. Spock's chest is even in its rise and fall. "So few of you left now."
"Glad you kept up on the news," McCoy mutters.
"What a shame," Manas says. "Such vigor. Such might, when so many species have none."
Spock stares across the room, unblinking.
"Hey," McCoy says. "Enough of that."
"Krall might have had you for himself," Manas says and there's that smile again, that toothy twist of his mouth. Disgust flexes the tendons in McCoy's neck.
"You're not keeping anyone," McCoy says.
Manas's tongue peeks out, gray and wet between his teeth. "You will make an excellent supplement."
"Let's call Kirk," McCoy says. "Speed this thing along, I'm getting pretty damn tired of having my knees on the floor."
"It has been some time since I've fed," Manas says and the hand on Spock's jaw slips behind his head.
For a moment, nothing. Then, Spock's eyes swim blank. They stare empty at the ceiling and gray tinges his face around the dark run of veins.
"Stop," McCoy shouts into the silence. A phaser blast never comes at his yell and when McCoy lurches to his feet Manas doesn't turn towards him. Instead he shakes, and Spock shakes with him.
"Spock!" His voice sounds tinny and too small. The room narrows, fading gray and black with panic and the pallor of Spock's face. McCoy staggers on the slanted floor, a hand on the edge of the bed for leverage to push himself in a lunge towards Manas.
He falls short, too much distance between them. His palm hits the carpet and the breath shoves out of him. Spock's boots skid against the floor, his heels trying to dig in for purchase.
Somewhere, Manas laughs.
McCoy drives himself upwards, scrambles for a foothold, hands fluttering over the floor. A nudge of something hard against his fingertips, and then a solid weight that he can heft in his palm. He brings it up with him as he rocks onto his knees, his feet, swings it with his weight behind it into the back of Manas' head.
His ears ring in the quiet. The bottle of whiskey drops from his hand with a thud. Manas lies face down, his mouth parted and his legs kicked out at the wrong angle.
"Spock," McCoy says and then is next to him, warm cheeks under his hands and brown eyes blinking open.
Spock kicks Manas' phaser from his hand and his fingers close over McCoy's wrist. "Is he alive?"
"Are you ok?" McCoy asks but Spock slips past him. He's left standing there, empty handed and breathing hard.
Spock scoops up the phaser, checks its settings, and sticks it in his waistband. A distant part of McCoy's brain protests, but it's no longer connected to his mouth. He knows he's gasping, sucking down air. Move, he thinks.
McCoy presses two fingers to Manas's throat and he gives Spock a nod when he finds the flutter of a pulse.
"He's alive." He works his tongue through his mouth, wipes his palms down his stomach to dry them. "And that didn't even break the bottle."
"Well done," Spock says and in the buzz of McCoy's mind he's late to roll his eyes at Spock's tone.
At least Spock can take a tone. McCoy has rarely been able to temper that rush through him, to set it aside in the moment like Jim can, like how Spock always seems to, emerging clear headed and ready. He wants to go, to move, to do something other than stand in the silence that's settled, Manas at their feet and the bottle laid at an angle on the sloped deck.
Slowly, McCoy picks it up. And then the envelope that he got out what seems like hours ago. But it was minutes, likely. He doesn't look at the bed.
"What do we do with him?" McCoy asks.
"We take him with us."
"You're kidding," McCoy says. "The way back is straight up hill."
"Which perhaps should have been considered before walking down it."
"I'm not the one who followed me," McCoy says but Spock isn't listening, already bending down to heft Manas. "Hey. Wait, would you?"
McCoy's hand has found Spock's arm. He looks down at his own fingers curled there around the curve of Spock's bicep. He jerks his hand back.
"Manas was not incorrect that I am considerably stronger," Spock says.
The shapes of McCoy's fingers are still in the folds of Spock's sleeve.
"Your side," he says.
"I am quite able to make the climb."
"Your lip."
Blood smears the back of Spock's hand when he lifts it to his mouth.
"I am fine," Spock says softly.
McCoy turns away and shuffles through his desk. "Not a good look, Spock."
He makes Spock sit. The slant of the ship, is all. McCoy tips his chin up and the dermal regenerator buzzes in his hand. A better angle like this, not being face to face.
In the corridor, Spock starts towards the way they climbed in, but McCoy stops two doors down.
"One second," he says, leaving Spock with Manas half resting on the floor as McCoy shoves at the door to Jim's room. There's a small pile of papers in Jim's sock drawer, the same place they were tucked years ago at the Academy, and a holo of his parents next to his bed. They look so young. McCoy's been older than that picture of them for some time, but now they're even younger than Jim is. Maybe not Winona - Mrs. Kirk, McCoy tried to call her once - but George will never face crow's feet, the injustice of creaky knees and a sore back.
"Sufficient?" Spock asks from the doorway. McCoy looks up from the picture.
"Yeah," McCoy says. Spock has drips of blood on his shirt. He could change, could grab a fresh one from his quarters, but he doesn't seem inclined towards the sentimentalism of visiting his old rooms. Figures, doesn't it.
McCoy tugs Jim's door closed behind him. Jim had smacked his hand against the jamb and grinned, that first day they'd had on board. McCoy had hated this place back then. So slickly white, so needlessly shiny and clean. Couldn't wait to be off of it, counting down the days until shore leave, for five years to tick past them.
He blows out a breath. How long ago that was, Jim nearly bouncing down these halls.
"Is that all?" Spock asks.
"One more thing," McCoy says. Years may have passed, but he knows a good thing when he sees it. He grins at Spock like everything is normal, like none of this evening happened, this day, this goddamn week. "I'm not leaving that bottle behind."
…
Jim's waiting for them.
"The patrol needs work," McCoy calls when they're in earshot. Jim's silhouette spins around.
"Bones?" Jim asks. He breaks into a jog, gravel kicking up in a scratch of stones and dust behind him. When he reaches them, he grabs onto McCoy's arms, open mouthed and blinking too fast in the moonlight. "Are you- What-"
"Hello," Spock says, a step behind them.
"Spock," Jim whispers and those hands disappear, one wrapped around Spock's forearm and the other waving behind him. "Lieutenant! Ensign, they're over here."
McCoy shuffles to the side as security comes running. Two of them lower Manas from Spock's shoulder. Sulu arrives at a sprint, out of breath. Behind him, Uhura presses her commlink pressed into her ear with one hand, relaying orders to abandon the search twice over, and then three times.
"Sorry," McCoy says.
"You found Manas?" Chekov asks when he gets there, staring as hard as Sulu is.
McCoy watches two ensigns cuff Manas's wrists. His head lolls against his chest.
"He found us," McCoy says.
"Are you ok?" Jim asks.
"Fine." McCoy looks over at Spock. There's still a crust of blood beneath his chin, nearly obscured in the dark. No one else would even know to look for it.
"What happened?" Jim asks. "Where did you two go?"
For a walk seems too trite for Jim's worry. Manas is limp as the ensigns drag him away. His boots leave twin furrows as they drag through the dirt. McCoy can't quite get his mouth around the truth. He licks at his lips. Jim waits, watching him.
"We found the Enterprise," Spock offers into the silence. "The saucer is in a better state than its exterior condition would suggest."
"You went to the ship?" Jim asks and his voice cracks over the words. McCoy looks away, off towards the suggestion of mountains against the stars in the sky. "We left it on fire. It was-" Jim waves, as if his hands can conjure up the flames. "-Burning."
"Fire retardant bulkheads," Scotty says. He has a comm in one hand and a phaser in the other. "That's my girl."
"It's ok?" Jim asks.
"It crash landed in the middle of a forest, Jim." McCoy shakes his head. "It's exactly how you'd expect it."
"What were you doing there?" Jim squints at them with that confusion he wears so well.
A laugh escapes McCoy's mouth. One that's too high pitched. It takes him a moment to say, "Getting attacked."
The words sound too slow to him. Too much of an edge to them. Jim stares. McCoy doesn't look at Spock.
"That's mine," Chekov says and when he points to the bottle, McCoy dumbly holds it out to him. "Where did you find it?"
"Ship got all shook up," McCoy says. Now he's not looking at Jim, either. "The place is a mess."
Chekov's eyes narrow. "This bottle is opened."
McCoy takes a deep breath of the night air. He wants it to clear his head. Mostly, his mouth just fills with dust.
"This planet is lousy with scavengers," he says and gets himself to smack Chekov on the shoulder like it's a night in the rec room.
Chekov follows him when McCoy makes towards the ship. "And it was missing before we arrived at Yorktown."
"Don't know what to tell you, kid." If only it could really be like this, if the ease in his voice travelled down any deeper.
"If I am correct," Chekov says, "I would say that-"
McCoy spins around, walking backwards now. "Hey. Are you even old enough to drink?"
"Am I old enough to- I am old enough!"
In sickbay, Manas is under three armed guards. Nurse Navares is standing over him with a tricorder and a furrow between his brows. He actually sighs with relief when McCoy reaches them.
"I'm not sure what to make of these readings, sir. His blood oxygen levels should be critically low, but there's no corresponding organ damage. He has low blood glucose too, and his pulse is slow, but really the only thing that seems wrong with him is a contusion on the back of his head and what looks like a fairly severe concussion."
"Is this working now?" McCoy asks and pulls the tricorder from the nurse before the man can hold it out to him. "Any sign that he's coming around?"
"Just for preliminary scans. And no, sir, he's still out."
"Good." There hadn't been any signs of him stirring on the climb back up to the Franklin either. And McCoy would have noticed, a half a pace behind Spock, complete silence between them except for the crunch of brush beneath their boots and McCoy's labored breathing. Spock hadn't even broken a sweat, not with Manas draped over his shoulders and not with the length of that uphill scramble.
McCoy scans Manas, confirming the ensign's readings, and then hands the tricorder back. "You call me if he so much as twitches."
"Is there anything to do in the meantime?"
"Fluids and regular scans of his vitals. I'm sure the Captain will want to speak with him when he wakes up."
If, McCoy doesn't say.
But it's not Manas that Jim is apparently intent on seeing, hovering outside the door to McCoy's room. Spock's too. McCoy can hear the whine of the sonic shower through the door. Not exactly a resounding endorsement of the Franklin's soundproofing.
"Manas is stable," McCoy offers, a thumb hooked back over his shoulder towards the Franklin's tiny medbay. His legs are sore from the climb, cramping up now that they're back on the ship. "Any update on the rest of the crew?"
Jim has his arms crossed, feet spread apart. His jaw is set. "Don't do that."
"Jim…"
"That was half of our ship's personnel out there looking for you, and don't try to tell me that it was Spock's idea."
McCoy crosses his own arms. "I wasn't going to."
"You can't take off like that, on an uncharted planet, without- without at least telling us where you're going, Bones! What the hell were you thinking?"
"I told you, I'm sorry."
"Did you even think about what might have happened to you?"
"We found Manas," McCoy says.
"Manas found you! Spock said he had a phaser on you both, and that you two barely got away." Jim's hands are waving in time with his voice. It's raised loud enough that McCoy has to assume everyone up and down the corridor can hear them. "And what the hell were you two doing that he snuck up on you like that?"
McCoy wants to laugh again. Instead, he coughs into a closed fist. "Jim."
"I'm serious, Bones." Jim's eyes are wide and they're growing red. "That's twice now on this damn planet, the two of you out there…" His breath shakes when he blows it out. "I don't know what I'd do."
Wouldn't matter if you'd've left. But the words just bang around in McCoy's head because he won't speak them. Jim likely hears it anyway, his chin ducking and the corners of his mouth twitching.
"Here." McCoy reaches into his waistband.
Jim stares at the handful of papers and the holo McCoy holds out. It's a long moment before he takes them.
When McCoy squeezes his shoulder, it shakes. Jim clears his throat. "Thanks."
"'Course."
"I know you're mad at me." Jim blinks too quickly. "I'm really sorry, Bones."
His life would be a lot easier if staying angry with Jim wasn't so damn difficult. "I know you are."
He watches as Jim thumbs through the letters. Decades old now, written out in George's handwriting, a careful 'Winona' at the top of each one. His scrawl was half as bad as Jim's is.
"Hey," McCoy says. "Don't tell Chekov about that whiskey, you hear?"
Jim tries and fails to smile. "Did Spock let you have it? Isn't stealing against regulation sixty one point three?"
With terrible clarity, McCoy remembers Spock's lips pressed to the bottle. How soft his mouth looked, the angle of his chin. McCoy clears his throat. "Sixty two point three."
"Ah, well."
He lets himself think that lingering with Jim in the hall is solidarity, not the intimidation of those sonics, the idea of Spock in there. But then Jim is squeezing his arm and McCoy is pressing his palm to the back of Jim's hand in a rough pat, and Jim is gone, bent over his letters as he sets off down the hall.
Which leaves McCoy with a blank, closed door and the growing allure of just sleeping in his clothes in the hall.
He should have kept that bottle.
It's when he has his shirt off that he remembers that it once was Spock's. Those matching thick stripes on the cuff, the cut of it that suddenly reminds him that it's slightly unfamiliar. Figures that even in the relative privacy of being alone in his room, he can't get away from the man, not the faint sounds from the bathroom and not in the fabric he bunches up and shoves into the recycler.
Let the guts of the ship deal with it. McCoy is more than ready to be done with today.
The sonics cut off with no warning. Which leaves him barefoot and bare chested, waiting for the door to whir open.
Spock has a towel knotted around his waist and what might be surprise on his face that McCoy is standing there. It's gone before McCoy can really tell. Maybe he should still be in sickbay, or maybe Spock thought he'd actually sit down to debrief with Jim.
Which only makes McCoy wonder at all the two of them talked about while McCoy was checking over Manas.
But Spock isn't exactly forthcoming, green rising in his skin from the sonics, and a hand holding his towel closed. McCoy doesn't need to think about what's under it. The shapes his mind can now fill in between Spock's waist and his thin calves, swathed over in light cotton. Though he's not sure he even looked at Spock's knees, the length of his thighs. He chews on the inside of his cheek.
Spock steps forward and McCoy moves back, his shoulder hitting the edge of his bunk. There's not really enough room for them to shuffle around each other and McCoy's feet feel heavy when he tries.
"Pardon me," Spock says.
"No, go ahead," McCoy says and waves towards the bathroom.
Spock looks at his hand and then at the doorway. McCoy scratches the back of his neck.
"I am finished."
"Of course you are." McCoy has to search for what to say next and it comes a beat too late. "Took you long enough."
His arm brushes Spock's as he edges past. It makes his skin tingle through his whole shower, even as he scrubs at it, annoyed.
In the mirror, the face that stares back is drawn and tired. He passes his palm over his chin and grimaces, sure he should shave. But Alpha shift isn't that far away and he weighs just sinking into bed against dragging a razor across his cheeks. In the end, he pulls out a packet of shaving cream, Yorktown stamped on it next to a Starfleet crest, and smooths it over his face like it's something typical, this cramped bathroom, the ache to his muscles, how his head swims. He tugs the skin of his neck taut with his fingers, working the razor around his jaw. It's these little things that are the most familiar, out here in the unknown black of space.
Spock is sitting on the edge of his bed when McCoy's finally done. He looks up as McCoy finds a pair of boxers and a t-shirt, but stares back at the floor as McCoy dresses.
He tosses his towel onto a hook. Spock's is hanging next to it, far neater.
"Well," McCoy says. He hopes he has the energy left for the ladder up to his bunk. He eyes it, and then Spock. Spock's own shirt is long sleeved, the cuffs ending in a neat line at his wrists. Even in the dim light, McCoy can see how plainly the fabric outlines the shape of his body. He grips the side of the ladder, gets a foot on a rung. "Goodnight, then."
McCoy drags himself into his bed, kicking at his sheets until they're more or less over him. But Spock hasn't laid down yet. Instead, McCoy hears him stand and then sees him, their eyes level.
"I do not want you to leave."
McCoy blinks. Then he runs his palm over his face, wanting only that when he opens his eyes, the room will be dark, Spock will be in his bed, and this entire day won't have happened.
"Good news. I'm stuck on this rock just like you are," he says.
"I am serious."
"You always are."
McCoy covers his face with his arm, turning into the crook of his elbow. What a complete ass he is and he knows it too, to let that silence stretch between them. It's some time before he hears Spock settle into his own bunk.
Twice, McCoy starts to speak, but both times he never finds out what he might say, the impulse stilled before any words come. He eventually drifts off, the quiet of the room nearly complete except for how Spock shifts in his bed, the constant rustle of someone not sleeping.