On the biobed, Manas looks small. Stripped of his armor and dressed in a thin hospital gown, his arms are wiry and thin, his chest sunken. Maybe there's some injustice to that, a cotton sheet where he had once worn layers of synthetic reinforcement, but mostly McCoy's concerned with weak vitals and how someone so slight can be responsible for so much.

But old age comes for everyone, and it seems that in the end Manas is the same as the rest. McCoy is halfway sure that next time he looks there will be wisps of white hair covering that gray scalp of his, deep lines furrowing his forehead and the sides of his mouth, some signal of his decaying humanity showing through the other species he's mixed into himself.

Manas' wrists are still cuffed to the bed. Across the room, there's two security officers at parade rest. Staring down at Manas' prone body, McCoy can't help but give into the surge of relief that lingered overnight. Jim was right. It was crazy, what they did.

Though everything he shouldn't have done yesterday is a muddle of memory he'd rather not dwell on. Best left to lie. Illogical, or something a hell of a lot like it. He grimaces. At least he has the good sense to be embarrassed at his relief that sardine tin of a ship or no, he's not tripping over Spock this morning. What exactly to say to your XO, to your best friend's best friend after a quick roll around in the sheets. McCoy rubs at the bridge of his nose. He could have used that goddamn vacation on Yorktown, and if last night wasn't proof of the need to blow off some steam, he's not sure what is.

He jumps at the sound of footsteps. The morning has been an exercise in yesterday catching up with him in a heavy weight he can't quite slip out from under. What in actual hell, he's been thinking on a loop since he woke up and now his blood is singing too fast at the noise. But it's only Jaylah in the doorway and the ongoing audience of the red shirts. She pauses when she sees him and then those same firm strides carry her into the room.

"What can I do you for?" he asks and sets his tricorder down in favor of his coffee cup. Bitter and replicated, but still hot. He'll take it. As well as some decent company. He's not overly keen to let his mind wander since the track it takes leads through the forest, down the mountain, and to a mattress sized slice of the Enterprise, the whisper of Spock's breath ghosting in his ear.

But he gets brushed past and left to sip at his coffee as Jaylah takes a slow turn around the room.

"He is alive," she says. Her jaw flexes.

"And I intend on keeping him that way, so don't be thinking of any funny business."

"What is funny business?"

"Anything fishy."

"What are fish?"

"You don't have fish here?"

"I have nothing here," Jaylah says and turns her back to him. McCoy frowns into his coffee.

"Hey, now." He walks around the other side of the biobed to where she stands, but he can't quite make out her face, not with her head ducked down like that. Still, it's better than talking to her ponytail.

"I didn't mean anything by that," he says. When she doesn't look up at him, he blows out a breath. "Are you ok?"

"You have him here. On this." Her palm smack the biobed. "My house."

McCoy blinks. He lowers his mug. Maybe musing over everything he and Spock shouldn't have done would actually have been better than this. "That would… I can see how that would be upsetting."

"You don't ask. Starfleet, you never ask, you tell. You order. Do this, do that."

"Hey, would that we could, I'd spirit you right on out of here," McCoy says. His eyes flick towards the bulkhead. Through it is the corridor, a set of out of date science labs, and the hull of the ship. Beyond lies the mine and their crew in it. He doesn't turn around to look at Chapel laying behind him, stock still and terrible in her quiet. "I don't like being stuck here much either, is what I mean. And I imagine you're enjoying it even less."

"I promised I would never return here."

"Jim can be pretty persuasive." McCoy sips at his coffee, his eyes lifted towards the ceiling. "Believe me."

"Believe what about you?"

"Just a saying," he tells her, but she's still watching him. He sighs. Uhura should be doing this, or Jim, not him. He's never been good at this. "I just meant that I didn't exactly intend to end up all the way out here, but Jim Kirk happens to good people."

Jaylah's sets her mouth and pushes her lips together. "But now you are here. Helping him."

"Starfleet operating orders, ma'am."

"You do not think they are wrong? To come here and to save him?"

He feels his forehead tighten. He hasn't had enough coffee for this. "He's in need of medical attention."

"But would you help him anyway?" she asks, her fingers flicking at Manas's bed. "Without your commands? These- these instructions you receive?"

"C'mon now, that's not fair," he says, but Jaylah just tips her head back, narrow-eyed and glaring. "He's sick, and I'm a doctor."

"Not fair? You save him. He breaks my leg. In two places, steps on it with his-" She tosses her hand towards the corner where Manas' clothes are piled. "His boot. My back, my head. My father, he holds down." She raises her hands and mimics a grip on her throat. McCoy stares at her. "Manas was bleeding, blood on my father's face. Who would you heal then, Doctor McCoy? Who do you save?"

He holds out a palm in a poor pass for appeasement. "Our staff treats anyone who's in need of medical attention."

"Everyone."

"'Fraid so."

"And if it is just you? No team of your people to help you?"

"Nurses, you mean? All of our officers are trained in first aid," he says.

"And if they are not with you?"

"We use a triage system. Whoever is in more serious need gets help first." Or whoever is more likely to survive. He rubs his thumb over the handle of his mug.

"So you treat him," Jaylah says. "You treat Krall."

McCoy tips his palm up, lifts his shoulder. So hollow, all of this. "We do. If Krall hadn't died- If Jim hadn't killed him, then yes. We would have, at Yorktown."

"Do you not think? Do you not care what this means?"

"Jaylah," he says, lowering his voice and making as if to step around the bed towards her. The only effect it has is to draw her up tight, her arms locked and her mouth hard. He pats his palm at the air, searching for what to say. But this has always been hard to explain hasn't it, those medical ethics that stretch beyond what seems like common sense. It's not up to him, he could tell her, but it's too weak to rely on Starfleet's explanation when it's the same as the one he would give himself.

He tries to pretend it's not relief he feels when he hears someone race down the hall towards them.

Chekov skids around the doorway. "Sir! Sir, I have rerouted the axial transmitter through the bionueral transducer matrix, which allowed me to calibrate duotronic pulse sequencer and with that, I could-"

"-Breathe, kid."

"The scanners! They are working! You can now…" Chekov blinks, eyes wide. McCoy's sure they make quite the sight, him and Jaylah with Manas between them, her stare and his palm still raised. He drops his hand.

Manas' biobed beeps in time with his pulse, slow and regular. If only the whirr of machinery were louder. McCoy sets his mug down with a hard click. "Thanks for your work, Mr. Chekov."

"What has happened?" Chekov asks.

"Just a light chat about values and morality," McCoy says. He shakes his head at Chekov when he takes a step towards Jaylah, but Chekov ignores him.

"What is wrong?" Chekov asks. His hand hovers near Jaylah's shoulder.

"Give me that," McCoy mutters and yanks the tricorder from Chekov's other hand.

Chapel's eyes don't shift behind her closed lids. Above her, a readout shows her pulse and blood pressure, the mix of the cocktail of nutrients they have her on. He brushes her hair back. To better scan her. Come on, Chapel, he won't say out loud, not with the guards and now Chekov and Jaylah in the room.

But whatever those wires poking into her neck are doing she isn't exactly waking up to tell him, and the tricorder he runs over her beeps and whirs without showing him more than a few lines of readout that he squints at. He doesn't resist pressing his fingertips to his forehead. A headache is threatening and he has half a mind to give the tricorder a solid whack on the edge of the bed to see if it helps the damn thing be useful.

"Anything?" Chekov asks.

"I can't tell much with this. I'll need to upload it and pick through the output data," he says.

There's no silver bullet waiting on the screen, not that he much expected it. Still, a prescription for a specific stimulant would have been pretty damn useful. Some serum to replicate a hundred times over until they had enough. The setting to dial a hypo to so that he could walk down the line of the crew in that cave, all of them hanging there like they're just waiting for him to figure all this out and wake them up. He rubs his palm over his face.

"Do you need my padd?" Chekov asks. He looks so hopeful.

"Sure," McCoy says. "That, and some time."

"Time?" Jaylah asks. "We have too much of it."

McCoy heaves out a sigh that catches in the back of his throat. "Don't I know."

…

By nightfall, McCoy has abandoned working in sickbay, the rec room, and even the bridge in exchange for his own bunk. The ship is too small and so is his room. Their room. He pulls his padd closer to his face when the door opens for Spock.

"Evening," he offers when the quiet becomes too much.

"You were not at dinner."

Or lunch, Spock could surely point out.

McCoy scowls at Chekov's padd. "M'working."

"Sufficient blood glucose levels aid-"

"-Preaching to the choir," McCoy says easy as could be, eyes trained on the graph he's compiled and not Spock moving around.

"I was doing no such thing."

Spock pulls his boots off and sets them again the wall considerably neater than McCoy left his. There's the rounded curve of a pale shoulder and then Spock's arm lifting through the sleeves of a clean shirt. McCoy tightens his grip on his padd. Ignoring that man has never gotten McCoy very far, though his life would be a hell of a lot better if it did.

"Any news on Manas?" he finally asks.

Spock settles blessedly out of sight on the edge of his own bed. "You would have heard if there was."

"Right."

McCoy pulls his knees up, then stretches his legs back out and crosses his ankles. Then uncrosses them, sets his padd aside and talks himself out of picking it up again. Instead, he swings himself down the ladder.

He has to step around Spock's knees to get anywhere, not that he has a place he's going. He taps his padd into his palm. He'll check on Manas. Again. Or the crew, out in the swampy humidity of the mine. His neck pricks at the thought. Maybe Jaylah is up for another philosophy debate.

"May I look at what you have done?"

I know how to do my damn job, McCoy could say. But the cool silence of the room is too heavy to snap at Spock through and he lets Spock take the padd from him.

As Spock bends over to read, McCoy can study the top of his head, the slope of his shoulders. The skin of his neck is nearly white between the crisp line of that haircut and the collar of his shirt.

McCoy looks away.

"I haven't seen a stasis system like this before," he says to his own pillow. It's eye level, not the same height as his waist, not like Spock is with how he's sitting. "The good news is that they're somewhere well past being unconscious, so there's little likelihood that they're aware of anything that's happened to them."

Spock's still reading. McCoy plows onward in the room's quiet.

"If there's any good in the universe, they were already knocked out when he put them in those things, but that might just be a pipe dream," he says.

"Have you deduced a method to revive them?"

"No." McCoy sighs. "I haven't."

"Is there any variation among non-human crew members?"

"You think I wouldn't have checked?" McCoy glares at that shiny cap of hair. "Chapel's the only damn one Jim let us bring in, if you don't remember."

"I remember," Spock says softly.

McCoy clears his throat. He wants to go. Though where to, he has no idea. Just scratch at the itch to move by sticking his feet into his boots and pushing out the door.

"Whatever tech they're using out there, it seems to be all the same," he says. The mess hall, maybe. He really didn't have dinner, now did he. McCoy shifts, willing to answer more needless questions if Spock would only keep talking. As it is, his attention on the padd makes it impossible for McCoy to focus on anything else but him, his eyes flicking to the ladder, to the corner of his mattress, to their boots, and back always to Spock again.

That's the problem with away missions. For the few seconds of nausea inducing panic as the shit hits the proverbial - and inevitable - fan, there's the hours that drag. Sometimes it's better to be up on the ship with the familiar rhythms of shift changes and duties that carry on the same as if they were comfortably at warp, rather than be part of the team muddling through their latest catastrophe that Jim likes to call missions. Though if he's up there in orbit, then he's just waiting for bodies to beam back, Jim covered in blood as often as not and Spock just as bad off and already denying it.

Still, he might not mind that familiar wait if it meant not being forced to linger here, because in the absence of anything to do, his padd in his hands, a tricorder, a hypo, he's left prodding at the thought of Spock and it doesn't help being half crammed in a room the size of a closet with the man.

McCoy crosses his arms. At least that ache in his back is the same as ever.

"What is the matter?"

McCoy stops rubbing at that spot, his arm hooked over his other shoulder. "Nothing."

"Are you injured?"

"I'm fine."

Spock's still watching him. McCoy looks anywhere else he can find to rest his eyes on.

"Have you come up with some genius solution?" he finally asks, pulling his hand from his shoulder to wave at the padd.

"No."

"Great," he says and lets himself roll his eyes.

"However, I did notice that you overlooked the readouts that display the delta waves of the crew's neurological scans."

McCoy shakes his head. The man is infuriating. "I didn't overlook them, there's just nothing to note."

"On the contrary-"

"-Oh, you're a doctor now too?"

"On the contrary, this readout clearly illustrates that the calibration done by Mr. Chekov inaccurately adjusts the frequency level. Correcting for that-" Spock spins the padd around. "-Reveals a pattern that would, I believe, be very much of note."

"Damn." McCoy jerks the padd from Spock, tapping at it to resize the graph and then tracing his finger over the peaks and valleys of the graph.

"If I am not mistaken, the distribution is far lower than normal."

McCoy sinks onto the bed next to him. "I've never seen them that slow."

"A side effect of the stasis systems they are held captive in?"

"Maybe." McCoy purses his lips, his fingers flicking over the graph. He knows Spock is watching him work. Feels the course of it over his skin. "It'd go a long way to explaining how Manas and Krall could hold them like that for so long."

"Would accelerating their brain activity then revive them?"

"I don't think so." McCoy flicks to his earlier work and superimposes Spock's graph over his own. "No, it wouldn't. We're looking at the symptoms of them being so far in stasis - so deeply asleep, as it were. As for the cause… it could be those wires stuck in them, or it could be something else entirely. And as for undoing it, hell Spock, I don't know. The way out may not be the way they got into this state to begin with."

"You are saying it may not be as simple as reversing what Krall did to them."

"I don't know," McCoy says. He can hear the edge of frustration in his voice.

"Where does that leave us?"

"Hell if I know."

McCoy clears his throat. There's only a small gap between their thighs. He's sure he didn't meant to sit down so close.

"Thanks," he finally says.

"I did very little."

"Still."

Spock doesn't seem inclined to argue. McCoy bends over the padd again, but he doesn't have anything else to do with it and Spock will realize too quick that how he's poking at it doesn't have any purpose. He sets in his lap and covers it with his palms so that he doesn't start drumming his fingers on it.

"I can rescan Chapel," he says when the silence begins to stretch. "I'll have Chekov help this time and see if we can't dial in the calibration to dig a bit deeper into what's going on." He rubs his palm over his face. "Think he's up? We could get a jump start on this."

"I believe he is has already retired for the evening."

McCoy has half a mind to wake Chekov up, though he doesn't actually push himself to his feet. The kid will be more useful after a decent night's rest.

McCoy would be too, which is why he's going to lever himself back up into his bunk.

Or go back to sickbay and scan Chapel himself. Won't be the first time he's avoided his quarters for the draw of more work, though typically it's because four walls and a bed are too quiet some nights. And it would be useless anyway without Chekov's help, a voice in his head says that sounds entirely too much like Spock.

Elbows on his knees, McCoy pushes his face into his hands. A long day, after a long week, after too many goddamn long years. And this stay on Altamid is hardly over yet. He sighs when that muscle in his back pulls, straining at how he's leaning forward. He grimaces and reaches around to rub at his shoulder.

"You are in pain," Spock says and McCoy yanks his hand back.

"Just a sore shoulder," McCoy says.

He begins to push to his feet, but warm fingers interrupt him. Just there, light, on his back. He swallows. Spock searches over his shoulder blade and zeros in with maddening precision right on that knot that has set up residence between his scapula and spine.

Supraspinatus. Serratus posterior. There's another muscle in there. Spock's thumb pushes against it and McCoy flounders for the name.

What a good reason to tuck himself away in his own bunk with Gray's Anatomy and no uncertain terms that he wants to be left alone. He leans forward, curving his shoulder so that Spock can reach better.

"There," he says even though he tells himself not to. But that sure pressure is making his head drop forward. His lips part.

"What caused this?" Spock asks and McCoy snaps his eyes open.

"Starfleet," McCoy says. "One Jim Kirk."

He doesn't groan when Spock starts rubbing in a circle. His tongue pushes into his lower teeth and he bites back on the sound that wants to rise.

"And Kirk's first officer," he adds for good measure, sure that if he doesn't, a noise is going to escape him anyway.

"Curious."

"It's - ah - logical."

A second hand joins the first, long fingers curling over McCoy's shoulder to straighten him from his slump. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see neatly trimmed nails.

Spock works the knot beneath his thumb. McCoy shifts his feet against the floor. It nearly hurts, how Spock rubs slowly back and forth over that spot. Feels good too, in a way that McCoy has long since forgotten. Hands on him that aren't his own, that pull of someone else's touch. He can't quite stop how he arcs into it.

"Is it?" Spock asks. His voice is low and so close.

"Is what?" McCoy asks as Spock presses with what must be two fingers.

"That is flawed reasoning."

The hand on McCoy's shoulder shifts to lay flat at the base of his neck. Fingertips brush over his skin. An inch upwards and they'd be in his hair.

He listens to himself say, "Ok."

McCoy flushes hot when those fingers settle more firmly on the skin at his collar. Spock's hand doesn't stop its slow circles on his back. His whole body is too warm.

"Sit up," Spock says, but where a lecture about posture should be, instead Spock just moves closer. McCoy watches Spock's thigh brush the side of his own. It pushes the fabric of his pants against his leg and he can feel every inch of it against his skin.

McCoy has to work his tongue through his dry mouth to say, "I am."

"Hardly," Spock says and that hand on McCoy's neck drops to his waist. Fingers cup the side of his ribs. Cool air hits where Spock's touch had been on his nape. In his chest, McCoy's heart pounds.

"What-" McCoy says and does straighten, his thighs flexing and more fully pressing into Spock's. He now knows what Spock's leg would feel like beneath his palm. Good. It'd feel good, all the trimness of a well cared for body. McCoy liked - likes - to touch. Did and still does, even if he'd pushed that fact away for so long he's mostly forgotten it. He lifts his hand and turns- and the padd slips from his lap to hit the floor.

He jerks backwards at the noise.

For a heartbeat, they watch each other. Their faces are too close.

It's the worst sort of staring match. McCoy smoothes his hand down his chest, straightening his uniform. Then, he bends for the padd and pushes himself away from Spock. The bedspread pulls taut between the dips of their weight. He knows his face is flushed and can feel the rush of his own blood.

It's too unfair to ask Spock what the hell the two of them are playing at. He's not sure he wants to hear Spock's answer anyway, so he fumbles for the next best thing.

"This isn't a good idea," he says. It could be. God, it really could be. But, no. He shakes his head. At Spock, and himself too.

But where Spock should be agreeing, should be nodding and giving him a pedantic speech about logic, instead Spock's eyes just travel over his face. McCoy wonders if he's imaging the faint stain of green on Spock's cheeks.

McCoy clears his throat and tries to think past the race of his own pulse, the casual expectancy of the open angle of Spock's thighs. If McCoy leans over there, he's sure of what will happen. He grips at the padd hard enough his fingers slip on the casing, sweat slick and clumsy.

He tries again. "I don't think this is something we should be doing."

He waves between them for emphasis. Or for clarity maybe, because Spock is hardly agreeing with him. Though hell if McCoy knows what he would have expected, except maybe anything but this. Any single thing except this, inches apart, Spock's eyes warm and dark, and McCoy's skin warmed over with the flush of slow, sure touches.

"Why?" Spock asks and the urge to argue with the man is annoyingly subsumed and muddled up in the shape of how Spock's mouth moves as he says it.

McCoy shoves the thought of those lips away with a short laugh. "You can't be serious."

"You think I am not?"

Oh God. He triest for a deep breath.

"I don't sleep where I work, Spock."

"A misnomer, as we all live aboard the ships that we serve on." McCoy narrows his eyes, unsure if Spock is irritating him on purpose or trying to flirt. The fact that McCoy doesn't know is only made worse by the fact that he might have missed this all along, misinterpreted that impertinence, that cheek for years now.

But that can't be. This has to be some terribly ill-advised Vulcan joke, except that if Spock is anything, he's earnest. And a complete pain in the ass, but McCoy has always known that at least, even if this version of Spock who sits too close, who looks at him like that is entirely new.

"Spock," McCoy says. He's going to end this, for good, because this is… this is ridiculous. Absurd, he repeats to himself, specifically at that twitch in his pants. He's seen a lot of insane things in his time in Starfleet, but this takes the cake. "I'm not looking for anything."

And especially not with you, he doesn't add, not with how Spock is still watching him. McCoy is growing suddenly sure that whatever Spock is, he isn't joking and McCoy doesn't need to make this worse. There's no flippancy on Spock's face, just a slowly spreading stoniness, so that it's only once Spock's expression has tightened that McCoy can realize how expectant he looked.

McCoy licks at his lips. It's awful how still Spock is sitting.

"Spock-"

"-Of course." Spock stands. "Logical, Doctor."

For once, the title sounds cool. Detached in a way it never does. McCoy grimaces.

"C'mon, it's not-" That McCoy doesn't… like him, at least of a sort. But it's Spock, and it's him, and McCoy is pretty sure that there couldn't be two people less suited to starting something up. He swallows thickly.

"I appreciate your forthrightness," Spock says and then he's standing and in two steps across the room, he's gone.

"Spock," McCoy says again, but it's to the door that's already slid shut.

He groans and drops his face into his palms, annoyed when his shoulder doesn't protest at the motion, when there's no tug of sore muscles, just the remnant of warm, liquid heat and an ease in his back that feels nothing at all like relief.