Chapter Text
Making Trouble
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Chapter 4
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The Jirkan guards weren’t really going to knock him out the window, McCoy was sure of that now.
No one was even threatening to throw anyone out any windows.
Any more.
The best McCoy could tell.
It was impossible not to look, though. The view out the light slits of the small room was mind-numbingly impressive, fractionally more-so even than the first cell the doctor had the dubious honor of occupying.
Both were in the tall tower at the top of a tall fortress at the top of a tall cliff where the landing party had beamed in. The glimmers off the fuchsia sea far below were weakening McCoy’s legs and stomach in a way that usually took a rough ride in the transporter; every time he was pushed up against the wall he lost a month off his life.
The light slits were designed so a Jirka would probably just bounce off. Their species had very different body shapes. One good shove and a human would disappear into the empty air beyond.
His arm throbbed angrily, and rather than move closer to the wall again, McCoy almost bared his teeth at the nearest Jirka. His temper was fraying, and he wondered for an instant what this bunch would do if he did just start shoving back. Probably a lot of nothing. Yelling probably wouldn't do any good, either. They were completely ignoring him.
In the aftermath of the sudden attack at their beam-in, the doctor hadn’t had time to register how much a broken wrist hurt until now. The pain as he stood there without distraction was making him queasy, but he didn’t dare do anything but stand there until this mob cleared the room.
He hadn’t had even a second to think before he’d thrown his arm up over the stun-paralyzed Spock’s head and managed to partially deflect the rifle butt of the big Jirkan guard. McCoy might have just let the thick-skulled son of a Vulcan take the full brunt of it if he'd remembered a broken wrist could hurt this much.
... The worst thing about the immediate impact had been the sound, the unmistakable crunch of bone. If that had been Spock’s skull…
With the company he kept, McCoy knew enough to be braced for a white-out ahead of the pain after taking the hit. He’d managed to shake off the shock in time, and with teeth gritted and arm carefully cradled to his chest, had gone trotting after the group of irate Jirka when they went hopping down the central passage of the tower with the limp bodies of the stunned landing party, with so much crosstalk the universal translator was only providing word salad. He'd needed to know what the rowdy group was planning to do with the helpless officers after abandoning the wind-swept beam-in point.
Not toss them out the light slits, at least not then.
The liaison, Gh'o'u'y'so, kept looking back at McCoy with damp, presumably frightened eyes, but it was hustled along at the front of the pack, and the guards scrupulously ignored the doctor trailing along behind them. The only familiar being, the only one who might be induced to explain anything, kept carefully isolated.
When the mob had paused for the Jirka carrying Spock’s dead weight to open a round door and hop through, McCoy had grimly left the Vulcan behind and followed his duty and the rest of the landing party on down through the tower.
To his first cell of the day, where the four were shackled. Actually shackled. To the floor, with manacles and chains on their ankles and how the hell had the previous Starfleet missions not known at least this much about this society? What the hell they were doing assigned a diplomatic mission on this barbaric planet with religious death squads and –
Then Kaison had woken up enough to struggle. McCoy had gone dizzy with his injury and new adrenaline as the security guard was held out the nearest light slit and shaken for her trouble. Knowing she must still be shaken and sick from the alien stun weapon, McCoy couldn’t imagine what it was like to be dangled over that distant sea.
Thankfully, the view or the thin air or the rough handling had caused her to pass out again and she was dropped on the floor with the rest, on some relatively clean straw-like stuff, cuffed but otherwise unmolested. None of the Jirka reached for McCoy, or even looked his way as they secured their prisoners.
He stayed carefully out of their way and they pretended he was invisible, other than absently carefully making sure not to touch him. No one tried to manacle him but no one responded to his questions, either. McCoy knew he couldn’t be too persistent – if he provoked another injury he wouldn’t be any good to anyone.
There was a fuss over locking the round entrance when they left. The cross babble had stilled enough for the universal translator to give McCoy a few key phrases. There was a taboo against molesting or interfering with anyone of McCoy’s “caste”.
Spock’s diplomatic improvisation, to designate him as “Senior Healer”, was actually accomplishing something useful.
The Jirka didn’t end up throwing the lock. Their mistake.
He couldn’t leave until he was sure they all came out of the stun all right, though. The almost-tossed security guard, and then the other three, came to groggy and angry but breathing without difficulty, with stable heartbeats and normally reactive pupils. McCoy had quieted Uhura’s muzzy, insistent demands by slipping out the opening to go for Spock as soon as he confirmed that.
No one stopped him. The identical circular apertures lining the hall on both sides might have confused him, but all he actually had to do to locate Spock's cell was head upwards and follow the noise.
He’d eased up on a new group of Jirka, all of them looking like the plume-yest one from the original mob in dress and feather fluff, half in and half out of the small room they’d put Spock in, talking loudly to one another.
The universal translator made more of their words than it had of the outright rowdy bunch of guards. Their speech was more measured, probably more formal. The scraggly Gh'o'u'y'so was nowhere to be seen.
Whoever they were – Officers? Officials? – they were discussing censure for whoever made "the Vulcan" stay unconscious, and how to soothe someone’s displeasure at the delay. They were all there because the closest high religious crackpot was inconvenienced, McCoy got that much. Great.
They never looked more than once at McCoy, though, none of them, so he guessed word about him had gotten around. What were they doing to Spock?
With his special status, he might be able to interfere with anything terrible just by getting in the way if nothing else. Taking a gamble, he simply started forward.
And found that a path cleared for him when he walked steadily for the cell opening. Not pointedly, but no one made him push them aside.
Once inside, he was jostled against the wall (and thus the terrifying light slits) by sheer volume of beings and lack of space, but no one acknowledged him even as they crowded him over. He let it happen when he saw that the room's prisoners – prisoners! -- were lying untouched on the soft hay-stuff.
Neither was being or had been visibly tortured. They were just being argued over.
The sight of the second prisoner made McCoy shake. He knew he was shocky, but damn the excuse. He'd been trying not to think the worst since seeing Gh'o'u'y'so was a prisoner.
This more socially-elevated mob came rapidly to some agreement at that point. Possibly his arrival had hurried them along, given the not-quite side-eyes he was getting from the ones doing most of the talking.
Most of them left. The two remaining picked up Spock’s still-limp body and secured it to the wall by his upper arms, making the best use they could of manacles designed for their own species.
McCoy bit back his protest, making himself stand where he was. The Jirka were surprisingly strong to look so delicate, and he couldn’t afford to be hurt in a doomed scuffle that would probably just get him manacled somewhere, too.
He doubted his hands-off status would stretch to him actively interfering with their prisoners, and this wasn't the moment to choose to find out.
Then even those two left. No guard came in. McCoy took a few long breaths. He found himself abruptly in windswept, sunlit quiet, almost surreal, alone and free to act.
He only took a moment to step away from the light slits and breathe again before going, careful of his wrist, to kneel beside the crumpled figure in black pants and dress greens shackled by one ankle to the floor.
When he’d seen Jim lying on that floor a fist had loosened in the center of McCoy’s chest. He'd been too busy to notice how afraid he'd been, but it had been hard not to go to Jim instantly. Every instinct he had as a doctor had wanted to see to the unconscious, loosely tangled form. The relief of finally kneeling beside him almost made McCoy dizzy.
Kirk was lying in a pile of the straw-stuff, his face lightly bruised and somewhat flushed. The Jirkan guards had taken McCoy's phaser, communicator and tricorder off him while he was still curled in shock after the blow to his wrist, but they’d missed his hand scanner. It was very limited when used alone, but capable of a basic assessment that at least got the doctor’s heart out of his throat.
Kirk's vital signs were all acceptable, stable, and he didn't have a concussion. He’d been roughed up and mildly sedated, had a lot of bruises and a slightly elevated temperature, but that was all.
Very much alive, which McCoy admitted to himself he had questioned for a couple hours there.
He would take “alive”.
All the talk about summary executions had gotten to him. And he'd had no idea what kind of condition he'd find Jim in, even if he found him. Religious zealots were always the most creative when it came to torture, and the liaison had been so frantic.
Biting down on his back teeth to ignore the pain radiating from his own arm, McCoy rose to check on Spock, too, and was almost as relieved. At least the sacrifice of his wrist had mostly turned the blow. Thick-headed or not, Spock’s skull could’ve split like anyone else’s.
There was a dark, bloody bruise that would probably hurt like hell, but there was no skull fracture and no concussion. Even Spock's fever was still down, and he was already throwing off the effects of multiple stuns, ever-fortunate in his Vulcan-given durability.
Neither would be unconscious much longer.
McCoy found himself a seat on his own pile of the straw-stuff and started working on his wrist with the small protoplaser he had in his kit. It wasn’t the right tool for the job, but it was all he had on him that could help at the moment. His only tools came from the pouch he wore on his belt – his proper kit had been confiscated with the rest of their gear in the beam-in room.
He stared at Spock as he tried not to think about what he was doing to himself even as he did it. There were reasons doctors didn’t mend their own broken bones. At least, non-masochistic doctors didn’t.
The Jirka hadn’t settled for cuffing and chaining Spock by the ankle as they had the Humans and Altarean in the landing party. The half-Vulcan was hung on the wall like a poorly-strung scarecrow, arms secured behind him at the elbows and head hanging almost to his chest. The Jirka had had a lot to say about Vulcans all of a sudden. Or at least, Gh'o'u'y'so had.
Humans too, come to think of it.
They knew Spock was different, that was certain, despite never having met, to the Federation’s knowledge, any species besides Humans and Andorians. Different as in capable of pulling an ankle chain from the mortar, obviously. Different as in the one they asked for because even “they” admitted he wouldn’t lie, too. Like “they” said Humans did.
Whoever the hell “they” would turn out to be.
Sweating, McCoy finished what might be done for his wrist under current conditions. He shifted to let his back rest on the flat wall beside the round entrance door. A door that also had not been bolted…
The cool stone felt good through his uniform at the moment, although with the brisk wind coming in through the light slits it had been unpleasantly chill before the pain made him overheat. Not a good place for either of his friends at the moment, but definitely the least of their worries.
Watching for signs of consciousness in the command team, McCoy noticed a dark sort of security helping him calm as he was finally able to regroup after his non-stop, adrenaline-fueled response to their unexpected "welcome". He found he wasn't as worried as he probably should be, under the circumstances.
The Jirka had made the fatal mistake of putting James Kirk and Spock together in a jail cell. Unmonitored, at that.
To date, history had shown that didn’t end well for anyone not from the Enterprise.
~~
“-oup of flashier ones hasn’t been gone ten minutes, so I’m not sure, Jim.”
The words were empty sounds. Then there was a quiet response he might have found more meaning in, if it weren't for the intense relief at the voice that produced it.
Jim. Jim, alive and speaking. This was a matter for satisfaction and surprise and, to an unacknowledged something in him, a pleasure. Spock gathered the tendrils of his consciousness around this important reality with difficulty, hampered by the same emotion strengthening him into making the effort.
Still drifting, he remembered. The Jirka, operating in bad faith. The bright, wind-swept beam-in location that held only enemies. He’d been stunned repeatedly, that was why his whole body throbbed. Spock focused, and was able to control that pain, to tuck his brain's recognition of the nerve impulses beneath his consciousness. The spike of pain in his head was more resistant to control – there had been one guard, approaching him with his rifle upraised -- wait, had McCoy…
But Spock locked away any emotionalism that came with returning surface thoughts and fought his disciplines into place. First, he must control himself, then he could think of other things.
External awareness started phasing in as Spock succeeded in gaining control of all his pain receptors. Cataloguing the usefulness of his physical state was his next priority. He was mostly upright, his arms bound behind him quite effectively and rendering both uselessly numb. He was chilled through, and it was a struggle to lift his head through the persisting bodily weaknesses, but his limbs and neck seemed without injury.
He took a careful breath, testing his chest, then blinked his eyes to slits, starting to gather himself. The light was fiercely white, and he was just remembering why his face and throat felt odd when a gasp startled him, then, with no further warning, “Ehhtchuu!!”
“Well. He’s awake,” Dr. McCoy said dryly, even as Spock sniffled and managed to fully open his eyes.
The Jirkan sun’s light spectrum would be harsh to both Human and Vulcan eyes, Spock thought absently. The nictitating membrane of his third eyelid swept across his irises as he struggled in the moment to adjust, but he sneezed again before the piercing quality of the light seemed to subside. He was still left sniffling and irritated, but at least he wasn’t.. going… to– “Ehtchuu!!"
In his current position, all Spock could do was sniffle and turn to rub his nose on his shoulder. That it gave him several moments to look away and fully collect himself was coincidental.
He felt more than saw McCoy come to stand in front of him. He’d already sensed as much as heard the captain on the floor to his left. He forced himself to straighten the millimeters his bonds allowed and did not let himself realize how much discipline it took to find the control to face them. Anything so adolescent as embarrassment at this time would be self-indulgence and weakness.
Spock knew he couldn’t afford to be less than absolutely honest with himself or his companions under these circumstances, or he might become a liability. There were so many aspects of his Vulcan upbringing his duty required him to sometimes simply fold away. An honest account of his physical condition would be necessary.
“Just be still, if you can,” McCoy said quietly, with an almost simultaneous whir from his scanner. “These cuffs around your arms are tighter than I would like.”
Spock used the brief interval of the exam to finish collecting himself as well as he could. At least by the time McCoy looked up he was able to meet the blue eyes and say evenly, “How badly were you damaged trying to shield me from the blow of the rifle butt, Doctor?”
McCoy instantly bristled at the censure he heard in the tone, but then Spock sneezed again almost immediately, quietly, twice, then after a hazy moment, again, looking so out of sorts with himself that McCoy bit back the almost-reflexive retort. Spock was still flushed, and even though he only had a slight temperature, clearly his emotional control was still compromised. The color staining his cheeks had to owe more to embarrassment than his still-low fever.
McCoy tried not to kick even Spock when he was down, so he said only, "If I'd known it would hit that thick skull of yours I wouldn't have bothered," and gave a quick summary to his patient on his systemic health, head wound, and temperature.
Spock, as usual, received this with an air of tested patience, the arrogant son of-- But just this once, since McCoy registered that the brown eyes had started drifting left and down at about the same moment they showed full lucidity, again McCoy decided to give him a break. He knew Spock had to know he was in captainly hot water up to the deck. So McCoy kept his remarks to himself and chose the better part of valor, and simply stepped out of the firing line.
Kirk had been watching them intently.
The moment their eyes met, Spock's flush deepened. He cleared his throat carefully and said, “Captain. It is good to find you relatively undamaged,” in as un-inflected a tone as if they’d met unexpectedly on shore leave.
Kirk’s tone was just as calm, but significantly cooler. “It’s not good to see you at all, Commander.” His eyes narrowed for an instant as the glare included McCoy. “I’m certain my orders were that no one was to beam down without my permission. Which I’m certain I couldn’t give while an unconscious guest of the priests.”
Kirk’s color was high, too, but the captain went cold when he was really angry, and his voice and affect were steady and well-modulated.
“Jim–”
“Captain–”
“Be quiet, Doctor.”
McCoy put both hands up in surrender, but his scowl as he crossed his arms made his views on the current discussion plain.
“Captain.” Spock turned quickly to sneeze, and start again. He looked mortified for only a moment when he froze and turned to sneeze twice more, then had to clear his throat rather extensively before he could continue. “I acknowledge that I am in violation of your orders.”
Kirk rose to his knees, arms crossing over his chest in what was not a defensive posture. McCoy knew if the captain weren’t still dizzy he’d be up and at the end of his chain, and as up into Spock’s space as he could get. He was still partly fuzzy from the sedative he’d been given - that was keeping him off his feet - but Kirk did not like this situation and he had not liked hearing McCoy say that their hosts had a special interest in Spock.
Even when partially handicapped, James Kirk's will was an almost physical force when he chose to concentrate it, and even Spock had been known to stammer under its force.
“However.” Spock’s eyes flicked to the chain on Kirk’s ankle with the most fleeting touch of shamed gratitude. “There have been developments of which you were unaware when you gave those orders.” He hurriedly made as short a story as possible out of the day’s events.
Kirk did not like this briefing any more than he had McCoy's, concise and much more informative as it was, and said so. “Who is this ‘they’? This fan of Vulcans may have gotten every human on this planet executed! Someone from off-planet is obviously playing games here.”
“Made sense for us to come after you, then, didn’t it?” McCoy squeezed in. “If these religious caste powers will only listen to him–”
“Doctor.” Kirk said quietly. “Beyond my standing orders that should have kept you all on the ship, you do recall my current orders – most specifically, to you – regarding–”
“Damn it, Jim.” McCoy had not had a good day. He'd spent too much of it in pain and in enemy territory worried for his various crewmates, and his last bit of patience left him. “As CMO I judged him competent to go into the field with medical support, which is why I’m here. Get your head on straight! I know you're worried, but stop being such a damn hypocrite.”
Kirk looked genuinely taken aback by his tone for a moment, and McCoy plowed on, even if it was taking advantage of a man not at his best. That flush on Kirk’s cheeks was fever, even if it didn’t affect a human the way it did the Vulcan hybrid, and McCoy’d noticed Jim pulling off two of his barely-noticeable sneezing fits since he’d woken up. “You’ve got the same virus he’s got, and you’re making less sense! Since when do you stop for recriminations in a mess like this?”
Clearly about to go incandescent about the difference in Spock's fitness versus his own, that last stopped Kirk cold. He bit his lip, then closed his eyes and clenched his jaw and breathed, and seemed to bodily internalize the rebuke by pure force of will, on the spot. After a beat he sat back down between his ankles and put both hands over his face and scrubbed them away with an obvious mental reset.
This was one of the reasons why they let him command the starship, this instant ability to really, entirely reboot in a moment. “Thank you, Doctor.” His eyes when they reappeared were still on Spock, but not glaring. “I need to focus beyond the last of this sedative.” He started to address Spock again, then tightened his lips and rubbed his eyes.
McCoy and Spock exchanged a look, and gave their captain time to think. There were reasons they could trust James Kirk even in compromising circumstances.
“We don’t know how many of my party or yours are going to be held complicit in my ‘crime’, or whether these Jirka, the priests, any Jirka, are going to start manufacturing charges – one execution may kick off a landslide if someone in enough power decides to simplify the situation. Bones, you’re our ace. Do you think you can find where they put our gear? If we could get in touch with Scotty–”
“I can try,” McCoy said without hesitation. “So far they just ignore me, whatever I do.”
“Have you given up the chance of solving this diplomatically, sir?” Spock asked.
“Our original mission has become secondary to the retrieval of my crew,” Kirk said sharply. “I’m now certain the Federation’s contacts here have not been negotiating in good faith. They’ve been intentionally hiding an influential group in their society from us, one that clearly has the power to hurt us and who they aren’t prepared to completely defy for the sake of Federation contact.
“Right now, we get ours, we get out. We learn what we can along the way, that’s a… that’s a–."
His emphatic delivery was broken at the end when he didn’t quite manage to finish that last sentence before having to duck his face to the side, behind his forearm. The way the breeze whipped around the little chamber from the light slits, you couldn’t even hear him sneeze.
He barely sniffed before continuing, “-- a bonus. Even Gh'o'u'y'so lost my good faith when he lured you down here. It’s either in service to the ones believing this mysterious ‘they’ or it’s a puppet. We were sent with too little of the wrong information to sort this out on the ground at this time.”
“You will recommend Starfleet begin a new survey of this civilization from first principles before moving forward with diplomatic overtures,” Spock said.
“Probably,” Kirk agreed, then waved a hand. “Right now we get everyone back to the ship with as little damage to future relations as we can manage. That means clearing out with minimal contact, at this stage in the game.”
So, they needed a beam out. And for that they needed communicators.
Before it came to leaving the cell, McCoy remembered himself enough to protest that he was a doctor, not some kind of ninja, to go covertly skulking around the enemy’s fortress, but his heart wasn’t in it. His superior officers knew that, more than resenting his task, his resistance was the doctor in him not wanting to leave two sick, injured men bound and alone.
Kirk and Spock just listened. They knew the doctor sometimes had to make empty noise, if for no other reason than to remind the universe that he was not quietly accepting his fate.
The fact was, if anyone could do this without losing their nerve, McCoy could, even with a broken arm. If anyone could walk through an enemy fortress and maintain his aplomb, it was their abrasive, steady-handed doctor.
Under sudden threat even Spock took a beat longer to pull himself together. McCoy seemed made by nature to brazen out any abrupt attack by pure spinal reflex. Whether it was a blade to his throat or a phaser to his head, McCoy met personal danger with instant defiance and a cool refusal to be intimidated. He wouldn’t give malice an ounce or second of respect, even when – especially when – it was holding his life in its hands.
It wasn’t the first time his command team had counted on him in such circumstances, but that didn’t mean that he had to like it, or let them think he did.
They certainly didn't like it. His captain was brisk and direct about what needed to be done, and McCoy could see him hating it. Spock was pedantic, and gave unsolicited and unnecessary advice. McCoy answered them both the same way.
He scanned his patients one more time as he let himself wind up the complaints. He gave Spock a shot of the slow-release drug he’d brought to keep the persistent fever down, and Jim something for the full-body pain McCoy could see stiffening the captain’s movements -- the beating had been thorough if not brutal. He added an encouraging squeeze to the shoulder of each while he was doing it which, of course, seemed to bounce off both of them, in their very different ways.
At the very last, he asked, “Spock, that cold. What else do you need?”
“The cessation of solicitude. Time is passing, Doctor.”
Jim huffed a quiet laugh, which made him have to duck away to sneeze, and McCoy turned to point at him and say, “That’s what you get.”
And slipped out the door.
~~~~
tbc