San Francisco skies are clear and blue above the Bay, the sun heaping sparkles of light onto the crest of each wind-blown wave, and Leonard McCoy's mood is as black as ship's night.
His pension. His damn pension. Five years up in space having his atoms regularly scattered across the cosmos, beaming down to unknown planets in unknown quadrants to get shot at, knocked silly, and robbed of his own mind — all of it predicated on the vaguest and most idealistic of hopes that something he can do might help someone who needs it, somewhere — and Starfleet has thenerveto withhold his final hurdle to retirement. All because they want to send him back out to the edge of the universe to practice crackpot or cutting-edge medicine — which one, precisely, is still to be determined — on an experimental new medical frigate, with minimal crew and almost no defensive capabilities. As if he's got nothing better to do with his life!
(The fact that he actually doesn't doesn't piss him off any less.)
"Remember when I retired?" he grouses, ignoring the various sideways looks of alarm from the people walking past him on the steps. "Sound familiar? Retired! Seven letters on any crossword! It means 'I quit already'!"
A lady veers around him in a wide arc, her two kids clutched defensively against her hip. Guilty, McCoy forces himself to stop in place on the curb and take a deep breath, before anybody can try to certify him.
(Although maybe getting certified might solve the problem, because then they couldn't send him back into space, not legally. Or maybe they could! Hell, they sent a mad son of a bitch like Matt Decker into space, maybe they'd just buckle his seatbelt reeeal tight and hope for the best.)
"You always said you'd end up talking to yourself if you weren't careful, Len," he mutters. And ranting at full volume on a public street about the smothering bureaucracy sure as hell counts as that, however justified it may be.
Standing still doesn't help; his temper continues to smolder, ticking hotter and hotter as he steams on the sidewalk out front of Starfleet Headquarters. It's a lovely summer's day, breezy and warm, the whole city shining like burnished gold in the early-noon radiance. The park across the street is viridescent year-round, and currently teeming with life: couples walking dogs, families on picnics, teenagers learning how to hover-skate. Farther out beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, a motorized sailboat skips gaily over the tranquil waters, its solar-powered holographic sail a faint, triangular shimmer; more gelatinous in appearance than the traditional, opaque white of faux-cloth favored by most devoted solar sailors.
It looks like a damned postcard. One that McCoy would like nothing more than to be receiving far the hell away from here.
Even the sight of the Bay, visible from where he is at the top of the hill, doesn't present the soothing image that it ought to — although that's mostly because there's an eyesore of a hovercar parked smack dab between him and the view, mocking his sight with its Academy bumper sticker. Dated 2254, but still remarkably pristine, he notices, in spite of its age. Must belong to someone who's not on Earth very often.
Stepping forward to get a better look at it, he realizes that part of the reason the car stands out so much is because of how precariously it's tilted, the front right corner wedged no less than forty degrees above the curb it's crawled onto. Both bumpers are littered with dings and scrapes from what one can only assume were other such misadventures; the whole creation is more heavily scarred than some Klingon war veterans he's met, and despite the fact that Leonard McCoy doesn't even own a hovercar himself — for the very same reasons this person should never have owned a hovercar, either — he can't help but cluck disapproval at such a display of carelessness.
Who on God's green earth doesn't know how to properly park a hovercar in this day and age? Who in Starfleet parks like that, aside from Jim Kirk?
Jim Kirk. McCoy feels his teeth grind together with all the stale frustration that name evokes. His old friend and captain hadn't even been present at his meeting with the rest of the admiralty, and don't that just sting like a sumbitch.
Hell, it's not hard to feel abandoned by the man. Bad enough that Spock went off on his Kolinahr at the end of the five year tour; that had at least been understandable. The Vulcan never did manage to find a way to balance both halves of himself in any way that satisfied him, always the square peg no matter how far into the distant reaches of the galaxy he went; being an outcast in both the societies that were meant to embrace him must have finally gotten under his skin. His leaving wasn't totally unexpected — it hurt, of course it did, it was a tremendous loss — but it was one they could have learned to survive.
Jim, though…
They'd all thought he'd be the last of them to go. 'Too in love with the stars to leave them', as Uhura often said, and everyone who ever served under him agreed: nothing could pry James T. Kirk off the bridge of the USS Enterprise but the hand of God, not with the whole wide universe still out there to explore. And even the hand of God would have to put up with a hell of a fight.
To have Jim accept the admiralty in the same breath as Spock's goodbye had signalled the death of the universal constant. The eventual death, though slow, of the five-year family of the Enterprise.
Without a captain to keep faith in, everyone had drifted apart: taking different assignments or accepting promotions long overdue. That might have been the wound that cut the deepest. The long-term members of the crew — Scotty, Uhura, Sulu, Chekov, Chapel, McCoy — used to joke amongst themselves that Kirk was the glue that held them all together, but they'd never actually meant it. They were all friends of their own accord outside of work, outside of Jim; they sat together at mealtimes, and told jokes, and kept company. They visited each other's quarters between shifts to trade gossip and make plans, remembered and celebrated birthdays, took shore leave together. Everyone had been introduced, at one point or another, to everyone else's families.
But once the news got out that Jim was leaving, all of a sudden, things were awkward. It was rare to have a companionable discussion that didn't end in a long silence and uncertain excuses, not knowing when the next time you'd pick up the thread would be. Leisure time became individual, shared hobbies dwindled; the rec rooms were empty more often than not. Communal meals were eaten quickly or at separate tables or taken privately in rooms. Like the impending loss of their captain was a guillotine blade dangling just overhead, waiting to come down and sever this life from the next.
It was around then when McCoy had realized that although he'd joined Starfleet for himself, he'd joined the Enterprise for Jim; and without him, what would be the point of staying?
'His patients,' is what he was supposed to answer. Or saving lives, or the future of medicine. That was what Jim had been counting on when he accepted the admiralty, wasn't it? That he'd leave, but that everyone else would carry on, still doing their duties to the best of their abilities; like no one would notice the gaping voids where their charming, once-in-a-century captain and his inscrutable, once-in-a-lifetime first officer used to be. Like there was anything worth staying for without James T. Kirk there paving the path to the future, one that you knew you could trust to be as solid and sturdy and dependable as the man who made it. As though any life beyond those five years could possibly compare, in richness or in scope — could ever begin to come close— to what they'd had.
Screw that. Screw Jim. Retirement had been McCoy's personal rebellion, an act of protest: they weren't cogs in a machine, dammit, they were a family, and losing two of their own couldn't just be accepted and overcome simply by waving a magic wand and declaring someone admiral! Things were different under Kirk's command, in a way that no one who hadn't been there could ever hope to understand, a way impossible to replicate under any other captain. Exciting, intriguing, sincere…but above all, decent. Everyone treated with respect, every idea entertained, every situation approached with the hope of a happy ending; every loss taken hard, but shared.
With Kirk, and Kirk alone, it was plausible to face down impossible odds and still come out a winner. McCoy didn't want to do his work in conditions where any of that was a question.
Handing in his resignation had been his ultimatum to Jim, a last-ditch attempt at saving the best thing he'd ever had with the best man he'd ever known, and when it was coldly accepted, McCoy had known in his heart it was the end.
It's been just over a year now since the last time they saw each other; just over a year from the last time any of them had set foot aboard the Enterprise. Still, the grief clings on. So does the resentment, to his great shame — a rotten limpet affixed to his soul that's taken to whispering insidious reminders of better times and better friendships; inviting him to wonder what James T. Kirk is up to these days, even as McCoy sits with his daughter drinking jenli in the cool shade of a most perfect Georgia evening, the way he'd dreamed of doing every minute that he couldn't.
And now, after everything, he can't even be allowed to live in peace with his decision. No, he's being blackmailed by Starfleet into going back out onto the frontier! Back among the stars — back exploring the great and many mysteries of the universe, where lie millions of potential medical breakthroughs that could go on to save millions of lives. New people to meet, new worlds to visit, new discoveries just waiting to be made.…
Lord, is he really this angry just because a secret part of him is excited to get back out there?
"Damn it!"
That Starfleet Academy sticker with its shiny, hole-punched arrowhead glints tauntingly in the sunlight. McCoy nails it squarely with the heel of his boot, scuffing the golden Federation logo with a smear of asphalt.
Then he does it again.
His foot throbs with the impact, but hell is it satisfying; enough that he keeps on kicking, again and again, over and over until all the bright, cheerful colors are marred with pitch and the corner tears off, and tiny glints of metal start to show through the spaces in the Academy slogan like the sleek silver hull of the Enterprise herself.
Damn the admirals. Damn the 'Fleet. Damn the Federation. And damn James T. Kirk!
"Bones?"
McCoy reels back in mid-swing and wobbles dangerously on one leg, windmilling his arms to keep from crow-hopping right off the curb. He totters in place for a moment, uncoordinated and graceless, before regaining his balance; then he whirls around, shocked.
Like a phantom conjured out of the past, Rear Admiral Kirk is staring at him bemusedly from the bottom of the steps to Starfleet Headquarters.
Speak of the devil, and the devil shall appear.
McCoy gapes back, not quite willing to believe his eyes. The last time he'd seen his friend, Jim had still been the eidetic image of the golden boy, still easily distinguishable as Starfleet's very own 'cadet captain' — five years older than when he started, five years more weary, but with the same purposeful swagger, the same assured demeanor, the same stubborn refusal to back down from a fight. The same glimmer of radiant, visionary fire in his eyes.
The man in front of him now is almost unrecognizable in comparison, with his flag officer greys and his shorter, darker hair: tanner, trimmer, more tired. The brashness of youth has worn away like old varnish, yielding to a quiet confidence that, though understated, seems to emanate ten feet out ahead of him like a physical force. Although the intervening year hasn't cost him an ounce of command presence, there's a new underlying solemnity that gives McCoy the strangest impression of looking at a Kirk turned inside-out — all the shrewd, strategic intellect that had been his hidden weapon during the starship years, exposed; all the famous, righteous passion that had been his strongest armor traded inwards.
But in the midst of all that's changed and strange, there is a single, small consistency that manages to tie this new Kirk to the one he knew: an Old Earth paperback tucked under one arm, its deep green cover stark alongside a bevy of file folders. That little idiosyncrasy, more than anything else, convinces McCoy that what he's seeing is real.
"Captain," he says automatically. Then, correcting himself, "Admiral." Finally, most naturally of all: "Jim."
Kirk's face does a curious sort of spasm, like he doesn't know whether to find the response funny or sad. "Bones," he says again slowly, testing out the sound as though it's part of a costume he hasn't worn in a long, long time; one he isn't sure will fit him anymore. There's a smile curled around the single syllable for only someone who's known him well to pick up on — a weirdly Vulcanesque way of both showing and concealing emotion that sends McCoy rocketing back to another time, another place; another friend. "Didn't you quit?"
McCoy snorts his contempt and fixes his hands to his hips, the old rapport coming back to him both easily and honestly. "Well I sure as hell thought so. Apparently a couple of your hare-braided cohorts disagree."
Kirk's face does another comical little thing at the wordplay: half-exasperated, half-amused. "You're saying Starfleet went out of their way to keep you around? The world really is going to hell."
"When it does, you can find some other schmuck with too many PhDs who'll patch up your third-degree burns. Believe me, they won't last twenty hours dealing with you on bed rest."
Despite the light-hearted tone of their banter, it doesn't escape the doctor's notice that his old friend seems to be studying him intensely: sharp brown eyes scanning his face from top to bottom, as fixed in their focus as phaser beams. Oddly nervous under a magnitude of scrutiny that he hasn't had to contend with since the last time he was assigned a uniform, McCoy bounces on the balls of his feet, only to stop and shift his weight with a muttered 'ow' as the ache from kicking a car too many times in a blind fury decides to make itself apparent.Physician, heal thyself, sneaks through the back of his mind, gravely intoned by a man no longer there to say it aloud.
He sees Kirk zero in on the movement with the quick-brightening light of curiosity, and continues hastily, "Anyway, I'm just passing through. But what brings you down to this neck of the woods, Jim? Last I heard, you'd landed yourself a cushy little office space over on the Academy grounds."
"Command briefing," comes the reply, accompanied by a passing grimace. Unsurprisingly, Kirk seems to be about as equally enamored with the admiralty as McCoy is, at present. (Well why the hell did he go and join it, then?) "They're looking at undergoing a…total refit, for the Enterprise. They wanted my professional opinion on whether they ought to scrap the original model entirely or give it an upgrade."
McCoy swallows past a sudden lump in his throat, nodding gruffly. "No one better to ask."
"No, I don't suppose there would be." Is that an inkling of regret he detects there in the admiral's voice, or one of wistful nostalgia? Either way, he understands it; even as once more, that creeping resentment makes itself visible to him, sullen and childish and wholly unfair. It didn't have to be like this, you know. You could have stayed.
Then the mist clears from Kirk's eyes, and he levels a look upon McCoy that the doctor has seen a hundred times before, landing every time as severely as a principal lecturing a student in his office. "Which leads me to a question of my own, seeing as I can think of no one better to answer it than you, Doctor: exactly what component of 'do no harm' includes an exception for beating the snot out of innocent hovercars?"
McCoy winces internally. (And externally, as he shifts his weight again off of the insistent, balloon-sized pulse keeping time in his big toe.) It's not a great look for a first re-encounter — especially, he has to tell himself manually, when the person you're re-encountering is now a member of the brass.
Still, the reminder of the much-dented bumper with his boot prints smeared all over it dredges up enough of the old leftover anger to work himself up into a hearty rant, and rant he does. "'Innocent'? Jim, this is just about the worst-parked vehicle I've seen since Chekov took that brand new lander out for a spin on Malachar VI and spun a quarter axel off of one tail light! It's an abomination to both traffic laws and the laws of nature, and it's a goddamn eyesore to boot! If I hadn't kicked it myself, I'd have mistaken it for a hunk of scrap that rolled off the back of a Scotty supply truck, and called the Department of Waste Management to haul it away to the nearest slag furnace!"
Once again, there's an odd little spasm of Kirk's facial muscles, and his voice dances with blatant amusement as he says, "Is that right?"
McCoy nods vehemently in earnest, warming to his theme. "That's damn right, and you know what else? I think the people who park like this should be court martialed, or at the very least hung from their bootstraps in the Academy lecture halls, as a reminder of what not to do if you want to become a productive member of society. I mean, if you've already been a full-fledged member of Starfleet for any time long — well over sixteen years, if that bumper sticker is anything to go by — then you've damn well had long enough to learn how to manage even the most complicated of equipment in a way that doesn't take up everyone else's space, waste their time, and get in the way of what would otherwise be a pretty spectacular view! Efficiency is one of the first tenets of service you learn at the Academy; they virtually sandblast it into your brain! There's simply no blessed reason good enough to forget it! Dammit, Jim, I have half a mind to plant myself here and wait for the driver of the blasted thing to come out from whatever the hell meeting was so important as to let 'em eschew all basic notions of common human decency, just so I can kick him, too."
He pauses to take in a deep breath as he winds down, the elastic, bright red tunnel vision of rage expanding back out to encompass a fuller range of sight. Kirk hasn't moved an inch, still standing there staring at him, with only an eyebrow quirked in patient, faint amazement and something else underneath the surface that McCoy can't quite put a finger on. It reminds him, after a bizarre fashion, of Spock's mother Amanda telling them stories about the sehlat, Vulcan's teddy bear: indulgent and laughing, although not meanly, at someone else's expense.
Briefly, Kirk's eyes flicker past him to the hovercar, then back. To the hovercar, and back. Eloquently, his eyebrow ticks a fraction ever higher — and at his side, his free hand shifts, eliciting the muffled jingle of car keys.
Long-fried synapses in the rusty logic center of Leonard McCoy's brain elect to meet and spark, a day late and a dollar short.
"This is your car," he announces stupidly.
The corners of Kirk's mouth twitch indecisively, as reluctant as they are compelled to rise. His eyes are fluid, roving between states of emotion like some non-Newtonian substance passing through states of matter. It's a strange expression, one that McCoy recognizes with unexpected fondness as a look most suited to observing rows between a unique First Officer and a curmudgeonly CMO in a delicate hour: the discipline and responsibilities of an officer warring against the warm exoneration and inclination toward instant forgiveness of a friend.
The stars must be kind, because the latter set of emotions wins out; the jovial, teasing tone that follows is one McCoy has long associated with an all-clear signal flown by Kirk's infamous temper, a deceleration from Yellow Alert down to 'all is well'. "I'll take your opinions under advisement, Doctor. Surely, your advice comes from a place of many long cycles of experience successfully operating Earth vehicles — incidentally, I'd love to see which model you eventually settled on, given how long a hike it is to get all the way here from Georgia without one. Just where did you park, again?"
"You're not very damn funny," McCoy grouses half-heartedly, crossing his arms in an effort to defend himself from the embarrassment burning up the tops of his ears. Secretly willing the Bay to surge uphill and wipe them both out in a freak flash flood before he has to go home and relive this disaster of a conversation in his nightmares. (And if the water happens to go for that Admiral Son-of-A-Bitch Komack too, well…they do say good things come in threes.) "Will you forget this whole thing if I offer to pay for lunch?"
The proposal comes out so naturally that he almost misses the fraughtness of emotion that lurks behind it — all the many things left unsaid between one regular ship's meal together and one that had been the last. The too many things that were said in anger, from the day Kirk announced his promotion to the day McCoy resigned his commission.
To tell the truth, a part of him doesn't think he could bear it if Jim were to decline the invitation and carry on up those steps to Starfleet Command alone, putting his back to McCoy and all their years of friendship and disappearing into the seat of authority they'd both railed against their whole careers; it would be a last betrayal from which the prognosis of recovery was grim. Hell, he'd yet to pull it all back together from the first one.
But as it turns out, he needn't have worried. Kirk's eyes still glitter with barely-contained mirth, but ever the diplomat, he does the doctor the dignity of letting the situation slide, trading his files from one arm to the other and tipping his head amicably in the direction of the corner market. "Come on, Bones. If we walk, maybe you can find yourself the personal scooter of some poor diplomat to box on our way to Angelo's."
Keeping a sardonic 'yes sir' to himself, Leonard McCoy follows his captain, sparing one last mutinous look at the damnable hovercar. As it happens, it's a beautiful day; and what's more, he can't recall for the life of him whatever it was that had led him to such a bad mood in the first place.