Chapter Text
“Try again.”
Leonard opens his eyes, arms empty, and Jim is already three steps ahead, midday sun turning his hair gold. It reminds him of San Francisco and summer days in the Academy and the simple world of before.
“C’mon! we can’t miss the ferry, Bones!” Jim pauses, reaches back, fingers wrapping around Leonard’s wrist like he’s a toddler eager to show his parent the world. His face is unlined – not yet a captain. “Keep up, old man.”
Jim is laughing as he takes two steps into the street and one of the few ground based trolleys left in the city plows right into him. His body is loose limbed like a broken puppet tossed into the air. There’s a thump like buildings falling where his body lands ten feet away.
For a breath, Leonard considers just sitting down where he is and waiting for it to be over. It would be quick. He can already see that there is nothing to be done. Not even the prayer of a chance he has sometimes when it’s a disease or a poison. But he can’t ever ever ever leave any Jim to die alone.
He gets to Jim’s side in four steps. There’s blood spread out like a wing from where Jim’s leg is torn away at the knee and when Leonard slides his hand underneath his head, he feels wet mushiness that makes his insides scream not good not good.
“Jim,” he murmurs. He skates his thumb down the side of Jim’s cheek, mopping up the blood trickling from a split over his eye. “Hey, it’s okay.”
Someone is calling an ambulance and he can hear a child crying. But it’s all distant and abstract – a silent movie playing behind him as the world in front of him moves in loud, fast reds and blues.
Blue eyes crack open a sliver, pain glazed and fading. “Buh-Bones.”
“Shh, darlin’, it’s okay. I’m here. I’m right here with you.” He reaches into the bag that’s always with him, finds the morphine hypo by touch alone and lifts it to Jim’s neck even as the younger man chokes and strains to keep his eyes open. “Hush.” Even a few deaths ago, his fingers had shaken so hard during these times – these ones when there was never any chance at all and the only thing he could do was keep Jim comfortable and calm, tell him he was loved and he mattered before he slipped away as peacefully as Leonard could make it.
The hypo goes in with a hiss and Jim’s face relaxes. His hand, which had been fisted around Leonard’s sleeve, loosens and slips to barely hang on to his fingers.
“Suh-sorry,” he splutters, blood staining his teeth red. His breaths are getting fainter, morphine dulling the pain and slowing him down so he’ll slip under easy, like falling into bed after a long day in the sun. It’s only been a few seconds since he got hit – and it will only be a few seconds more.
Blood and blond mix together when Leonard brushes the hair from his face, cupping the familiar cheek and treasuring the pulse that will be throbbing there for just a few seconds more. “It’s okay, Jim. It’s okay. You can rest now.”
“Doesn’t hurt,” Jim slurs, manages to hook his fingers around Leonard’s thumb. His eyes are drifting but he struggles to focus onto Leonard one last time. A smile twitches the corner of one lip before his fingers relax. His eyes close then and Leonard knows it’s done.
He’s holding a limp, empty body, blood staining the ground and his clothes and his face is stinging like he’s supposed to cry but nothing has come out for days. He can’t remember the last time he cried. At least this one was quick, he thinks.
The air around him pinwheels and the familiar numbness creeps up his fingers. When he can no longer feel the weight of Jim in his arms and the world is a painting melting into fire, the voice booms out of the empty blur:
“Try again.”
When Jim came to him, face set like a determined bulldog puppy, and said he was going to try the Kobayashi Maru for the second time, Leonard had said he was crazy, loudly and continuously.
“It’s meant to be no-win, Jim. Why are you throwing yourself against an immovable wall. You know even fucking lab rats are smarter than you – they stop doing something that causes them pain.”
Jim had let him rant and then asked him to be his helmsman. “I have to do it, Bones. I have to figure it out.”
Leonard had never understood Jim’s drive. Not the second time, not the third time.
Now, he thinks, when he opens his eyes and he’s laying on a feather bed, white curtains blowing above him, he understands why you would throw yourself at an immovable object. Why you would play the game even when you know the deck has always been stacked against you. Why you hold on and fight just a little longer even when you know the outcome is fixed before you began.
When you have something to lose.
Jim is asleep next to him, one hand tucked under his face and the other flung toward Leonard, finger tips brushing his ribs. He’s breathing evenly – but this isn’t Leonard’s first rodeo.
He rolls to his side and grabs the always present medical bag, finding the tricorder.
Ten or fourteen times ago, he’d woken up in some place like Georgia with Jim spooned behind him. They’d been young, back on leave from the Academy if the course schedule tucked under Jim’s bag had been an indication, and Jim had been glowing and eager, making Leonard pancakes and dancing around the kitchen. They spent the entire day in bed. And in the evening, despite Leonard’s protests, they’d gone for a ride on Jim’s motorcycle.
Nothing had happened.
They’d laid on a look-out point and counted the stars and eaten sandwiches. Jim hadn’t choked or crashed off the motorcycle or fallen off the cliff or tripped on his own goddamn feet and sent a rock into his brain. There had been no crazed mugger, no falling comet, no wrong place wrong time. It had been serene.
As they had gone to bed that night, Leonard had let himself think that it was over. That this was the end. He’d finally passed the fucking test and now he was with Jim in an idyllic world until the cycle was complete.
The next morning, Jim had started coughing up blood. By noon, he couldn’t get out of bed, pale as milk and fever bright. Some goddamn parasite from some planet that Leonard didn’t even recognize was sitting in his gut and there was nothing to be done. The emergency room he took Jim to said they’d never seen anything like it, said if they’d caught it a few hours before that maybe… but now just, “keep him comfortable, here’s morphine, we’re so sorry.”
It took Jim three days to die. He’d withered in agony, shakes and sweats and seizures as his body turned into a weapon to kill him. He can still remember Jim, unable to even lift his head and agony twisting his mouth into a rictus, gripping his hands and trying to make Leonard promise that he’d be all right after he died, to go back to the Academy and take a job on some space station. To be safe and happy. Leonard had kissed his eyelids, held him in his arms, and promised Jim anything to give him some sort of peace. He had finally succumbed to the parasite, securely cradled against Leonard’s chest. Jim had gasped and shook, but his eyes had never left Leonard’s until they glazed in death. Jim never died alone.
After that, Leonard never took anything for granted. Everything was a test. Every moment. He wasn’t sure how he would ever pass. If he even could pass. But he couldn’t stop trying.
The tricorder hums and Leonard pokes as it slowly calculates. When the results scroll down, he sucks in a breath. He wants to slam the device into a wall because it’s clearly not working right, except that he knows it is.
Now that he’s more awake, he notices the room. The oxygen tanks and mask sitting next to Jim’s side of the bed, the neatly lined hypos on his side of the bed, the thinness of Jim’s wrists, the hoverchair in the corner of the room.
Brain tumor. They must’ve caught it too late for intervention. Now it’s huge, pressing against his brain stem. From the size of it, Jim has only days, if not hours, before he’ll slip into a coma and never wake up.
Even though he knows the end to this story (he’s lived it dozens and dozens of times before now), he panics and lunges across the space between them, gripping Jim’s face between his hands because what if he is already gone what if he has arrived to only watch him slip away without ever opening his eyes. The soft glow of morning hid the gauntness of his cheeks; but, now that Bones is close, he can see how the skin beneath his eyes is so dark and thin, how his lips are white and chapped, how pain lines have settled across his forehead.
He doesn’t know what he wants. If Jim doesn’t wake up, that means Leonard can lay here in quiet while he slips away – maybe use the time to figure out a way to beat this and get back to some place where Jim isn’t dying in his arms.
He’s not even sure what reality is. What if Jim is just as dead back there and reliving his death over and over is all Leonard has left of him. He shakes the thought away. All Leonard needs right now is to see Jim’s eyes, to live in these seconds where he’s still warm and breathing.
“Darlin’,” he murmurs, so close his lips brush Jim’s. “Open your eyes. Wake up for me.”
Jim’s eyes flutter, murky blue peeking out and settling on Leonard. “Bones,” he says. “Not dead yet, huh?” He manages a grin, the thinness of his face making it stretch his cheeks in an unfamiliar way. Just as quick, he frowns. “Hey, no tears. We said no more tears.”
Leonard wonders how long they’ve known about the tumor. If it’s been weeks or months or days and Jim has made his peace and maybe Leonard has made his peace too. Maybe Jim is ready to slip away this time. Then again, Jim has been dying for days weeks months now and it still hurts just as badly every time. Maybe there are some things that he can never be at peace with.
A shaky hand wipes his face, brushes down his cheeks, rests on his lips. “You’re beautiful,” Jim murmurs. And then, more quietly like the whisper when a dream is almost over, “I wouldn’t change a thing.”
Leonard leans close and kisses his cheeks, his chin, his mouth. “I love you,” he says, because he didn’t say it when Jim lay dying after the bus.
Jim smiles brilliantly, like the sun when all the rain has gone. “Let’s stay in bed today. I’m… I’m kind of tired.” His eyes are not quite focusing anymore, skating around Leonard’s face.
“Is your vision okay?” Leonard asks, resting his thumb underneath the left one.
Jim shrugs. “Been going in and out still. I can see you out of the left one. Even if you do look a little like the watercolor Joanna made me last time we were on earth.” He leans closer. “I know what it means, Bones. Let’s just… just lay here, okay? Tell me about your grandma’s chicken again. How we’ll eat it next time we go to Georgia.”
Leonard’s mouth is dry like dust. “Can I get you water or morphine or…”
Jim shifts so his head is tucked under Leonard’s chin. “Just you, Bones. Need a bedtime story to help me sleep. Again. All I do is sleep.” His voice goes shaky for just a second. “I think this is the last time though.”
Through the thin tshirt, Leonard can feel all the knobs of Jim’s spine, his chest falling and rising, the fine trembles as his control deteriorates. He tightens his arms, like holding Jim will keep him here.
“Okay, darlin’, let me tell you a story….”
Jim stops breathing two hours later. Leonard doesn’t move, pushes his lips against Jim’s cold forehead and breathes in. “I’ll save you,” he says against the last flutters of Jim’s pulse. “I will save you.”
“Try again.”