Archive of Our Own ^beta

She really had gotten the entire planet in the divorce. Her family was rich as all get-out and she’d hired an army of lawyers who'd threatened to bury him in legal proceedings for centuries if he so much as thought about getting custody. She'd gotten the house and the money and Joanna and he'd gotten a one-way ticket to Starfleet. He'd loved her as best he could for as long as he could manage and when they couldn’t hold it together anymore she'd taken his life, his child, and his future.

Two days later he got Jim Kirk.

It didn’t seem like a fair trade at the time.

His life in exchange for Jim Kirk who talked his ear off and stole his alcohol, Jim Kirk who was pathologically afraid of doctors, Jim Kirk who needed him in so many of the same way Joanna had. Stupidly young and just about as dumb as he was brave. An accident waiting to happen.

He’s left Jocelyn behind but he can still hear her voice, low and sweet, telling him he’s gonna fuck it up all over again.

*

They've already got a room prepared for him once he gets off the shuttle and finishes puking all over the ground. Off the shuttle and into a dorm building without so much as a “how d’ya do.” He’s got a bunk bed and one desk – the room used to be a double, and he can see the scrapes on the floor where the second desk used to be. The one perk of being a nontraditional student.

The mattress is too short and the bathroom’s smaller than his closet but it’s still better than what he’d had before (a king-sized bed and a blanket waiting for him on the couch). There are uniforms tucked into the drawers - drawers he actually has to pull to open – it'd be quaint except they all got stuck when they got about half-way open.

Red uniforms. Red uniforms in exactly his size. He never gave anyone his measurements but when he slips on a uniform it fits him perfectly. The mirror’s not full-length and it cuts him off around mid-thigh, he has to bend down to see the top of his head, he’s almost disappointed when he recognizes himself in it. He doesn’t feel like himself. He combs his hair and slips on his shoes and sits on the bed, waiting for something to happen.

*

He doesn't see Jim again until orientation. About a hundred late arrivals are crammed into a small lecture hall and Jim Kirk’s sitting in the back row with his feet up on the table and a smirk decorating his split lip. Len decides to sit next to him because it's nice not to be the most out-of-place cadet in the room. Jim's still got bruises around his mouth and eye and the cartilage in his nose looks like it’s healing crooked.

"You come here often?"

Jim's smirk is as cheesy as his pick-up line.

"If you’re going to flirt with me you should buy me a drink first," he grumbles. The room's old. The paint on the walls is peeling, the chairs are all too small - he's not sure how Jim's managing to lean back in his without tipping backwards. He has to bite back the urge to tell Jim to cut it out – he’s left his daughter behind. He doesn’t need another kid. Doesn’t need any more problems.

“How ‘bout I buy you a drink after?”

He’s got a bottle of whisky waiting for him in his room. “No, but thanks.”

Jim shrugs and sets his chair down with a loud bang right before the lecture starts. Len settles in and does his best to ignore Jim.

Afterwards he walks back to his room alone, gets out the bottle, and drinks until he looks in the mirror and can’t see anything but a blur of red and brown.

*

Leonard McCoy is an excellent cook. Back in Georgia, when he’d had people to feed, he’d cooked all the time. Omelets from their own free-range chicken eggs, healthy snacks for Joanna to take to school, romantic dinners for two whenever he’d had the time. Well-balanced, delicious, aesthetically pleasing – he was a Southern boy, and his grandma had taught him that the best way to a person’s heart was through their stomach. (Of course he’s also a surgeon so he does know that the quickest way is actually with a hi-powered laser, but he’s not going to mention that to his grandma.)

So it irks him that he can’t feed Jim. Or, more accurately, that Jim won’t let him. And he’s not so much irked as – confused. Maybe a bit worried. But just a bit. It’s just that no one turns down Georgia peach pie without a damn good reason. And he’s still waiting to hear Jim’s.

He’d tried simple things at first: inviting Jim to the cafeteria, bringing an extra muffin with him to their physics class, packing an extra sandwich in his bag for lunch. He’d felt like he was in the fifth grade again and trying to make friends with Jeff Greenley who wore old clothes and had a bad haircut and never brought lunch in with him. But Jim Kirk is not Jeff Greenley.

When Jim gets fed up with Len’s attempts at being subtle, he grumbles something about allergies before stalking away. So he pulls up the kid's medical records, and, yeah, he's allergic to pretty much everything. He can eat rice, a few varieties of fresh fruit, and the protein mash that’s usually reserved for emergency rations.

He tries a few different recipes, working from those ingredients. Pies with a rice-based crust, protein bars with dried fruit mixed in, he explores the off-world fruit-like options to try and mix with the rice. When he finally comes up with something edible, he calls Jim up and tells him to get his ass over to his quarters.

He doesn’t bother to clean up the leftovers before Jim comes over. He’s seen Jim’s room and refuses to set foot in his cesspit of a bathroom, and besides, it’s not like Jim’s ever critiqued his housekeeping before.

But Jim walks into his apartment and all he seems to care about it the mess in the kitchen. He just stares at the scraps on the counter and the failed dishes in the sink, doesn’t even look at the pie on the table because he’s too busy glaring at the trash can.

“I don’t like to eat,” Jim says, after a minute of the most uncomfortable silence that’s ever fallen between them.

“Um – is that supposed to be news?”

He can see the muscles in Jim’s jaw tighten. “I don’t like to eat in front of people. And I don’t like to eat food that creates a lot of byproduct in the manufacturing process. And I don’t – ” his eyes are still fixed on the food but his whole body’s tense, like he’s prepared to defend himself, like he’s getting ready to run. “And I don’t want you to cook for me.”

And he leaves, then, with a sick look on his face.

*

He doesn’t figure it out from that. Doesn’t figure it out from that, or from the year and a half long gap he’d puzzled over in Jim’s medical file. Doesn’t figure it out until Jim decides to tell him. Jim pulls him off the sidewalk on a Tuesday morning on his way to his first class, homework half-done but his hangover in full swing.

He gets why Jim tells him that way. Bones can’t continue the discussion because he’d miss his exam, won’t make a scene with so many people watching.

On a Tuesday morning, Jim, who smells like a brewery and looks like he hasn’t slept in days, tells him the truth. “I ate a lot of waste on Tarsus,” Jim whispers, and Bones stares at the bags under Jim’s bloodshot eyes for a few minutes. Jim waits until he sees the realization dawn on his face before continuing. “There wasn’t much of it. And I was allergic to most of it. But – but I ate it anyway. Scraps and refuse. Plants. Grass, when I got hungry enough that just chewing anything I could get my hands on seemed like a good idea.”

He stands on the quad under San Francisco fog, Jim’s hand tight on his bicep, his bag digging into his shoulder, a blueberry bagel with extra cream cheese and a coffee with both cream and sugar heavy in his stomach.

“So you don’t like to eat,” he says, when he realizes Jim’s waiting for him to say something and the only words that comes to mind are Jim’s, stilted and awkward.

Jim nods and gives Bones’ arm a squeeze before he lets go and walks away.

He doesn’t usually think of Jim as his kid. An annoying little brother, sometimes, partner-in-crime, drinking buddy – he doesn’t usually feel like he needs to protect Jim. Like he’d give up everything he has (however pitiful it may be) to go back in time and see Jim Kirk, young and scared and clueless, and save him.

He can’t go back in time. But he’s pretty sure that Jim Kirk still needs saving.

He hikes his bag up higher on his shoulder and goes to class.

*

He misses Joanna. Misses her every day. Sitting in the quad watching other students playing frisbee, eating ice cream, watching fireflies. Every short woman with brown hair turns his head - it's misinterpreted as flirting, a few times, but he deflects as best he can. He falls asleep every night in a twin-sized bed with his medical books digging into his ribs until the alarm from the PA wakes him up in the morning, and every second in between and sometimes in his dreams, he misses his baby girl.

He'll be ready for her when she turns eighteen. When he gets to see her again, talk to her, hold her. He writes letters to her in his head all the time. Tries to explain his side of the story to her, make her understand, I didn't want to leave. I love you. I screwed up. He'd put work in front of family and ended up without either. He'd be angry if he weren't sad.

*

“Sometimes,” Jim murmurs, dawn pouring through their window and glinting off of the bottle of whisky, “I think about what I would have chosen.” Len watches his Adam’s apple move when he swallows another mouthful, thinks about the way it had to burn down his throat, thinks about the way it would taste if he leaned over and kissed Jim right on the mouth.

It’s not a train of thought he’s ever ridden before but the alcohol derails him enough that he just blinks and lets it pass, writes it off as an aberration.

Jim takes another drink, this time from the bottle.

“Chosen between what?”

Jim smiles like a shark. Soft lips wet with spit and alcohol, a smile dangerous for its false innocence. Its smoothness. “On Tarsus. Sometimes I wonder if Kodos made the wrong decision or not. Wonder – I wonder how many people would have died if he hadn’t separated the colony. A lot of people starved. But a lot of people lived, Bones.” He tries to take another drink but the bottle’s empty and the sunlight’s starting to light up the whole room, these aren’t the kind of secrets that live during the day.

Bones doesn’t have an answer.

Jim falls asleep about an hour later. His neck tilted at an uncomfortable angle to rest on the edge of Bones’ desk, his arms limp at his sides, lips parted.

Bones has a question, too. Bones has lots of questions. What would Jim do if he kissed him, how’s he going to get through flight training, why’d he decide to be a doctor since it means that he has to watch so many people die – he has a lot of questions. But the one that he asks himself over and over, the one that he chases down to the bottom of the bottle, the one he uses when he needs a good cry, is what should I have done differently?

Jim’s asleep on his floor and their last bottle’s empty and the pile of books he has to read is threatening to topple off of his bed.

He only has one holo of the three of them together. Jocelyn and Joanna and Len, awkward and staged, fake smiles on all of their faces. He left them behind and he doesn’t even have a good picture to remember them by.

He knows he fucked up. He just hasn’t figured out what he did wrong, where exactly he took the wrong turn, doesn’t know how not to fuck his life up all over again.

He tosses a blanket over Jim, grabs a book from the stack, and reads until he falls asleep with his head pillowed on Jim’s strong shoulder.

*

He’d fallen in love with Jocelyn in an instant. Walked out of middle school on the first day of the fall semester and seen the sunlight reflecting off of the swirl of her long hair. She was always in motion – bent in a laugh or tossing her hair to punctuate a point – he’d seen the shine and the swing of it, the curve of her thin shoulders in a thick knit sweater, and been lost.

It takes him months to fall in love with Jim. Because Jim’s an acquired taste. Jim takes time. Jim changes as time passes, as he begins to relax, changes the more he reveals – Len’s never met anyone else who protected themselves that completely. Every new secret that Jim shares makes him seem more fragile, more vulnerable, more dangerous. And every secret is shared so carefully that Len is beginning to think that Jim’s never had anyone to tell them to before now.

Jim tells him secrets when Len’s too tired to talk. Or when he’s on his way out the door, or about to take a call from home – whenever there’s no chance at all that Len could follow up on it, force him to say anything more than the precise sentences that he delivers in hushed, careful whispers. Every secret is a test to see how Leonard will react. And he knows that, even if Jim doesn’t, and is as gentle with Jim as he can manage.

My stepdad was a mean drunk, he says before tossing Len the boot he’d been searching for and slipping out the door. My brother OD’d when I was fourteen when they walk out onto the quad after class, if Pike hadn’t pulled some strings for me my criminal record would have kept me out of Starfleet, and then finally one night when Len isn’t nearly as drunk as Jim thinks he is I think my mother blames me.

Jim sends his mother a card on every major holiday and a hand-made one on her birthday. Records short messages and scrawls a generic note and sticks them in the mail with a shrug and a grin, a nonverbal maybe this time, she’ll write back.

Jim’s the loudest, bravest, most alive person Len’s ever met. And sometimes also the most innocent. I think my mother blames me, he’d said, without a hint of confusion or blame or anger in his voice. Like he was confessing a truth that was too old for him to be ashamed of it anymore.

Len, who carries blame around with him like a backpack, who knows how comforting it can be, says nothing. This isn’t a hurt he can heal by disproving it. Not a misconception he can correct. It’s mostly precious just because Jim trusts him with it.

So he’ll hold onto it. Until Jim grows past it, until the confidence that’s blossoming inside of him every day convinces him of his own worth, hold onto it with sweaty hands and crossed fingers and the foolish hope that one day Jim will get a reply in the mail saying sorry. I love you. Or until Jim realizes that he’s not the one to blame.

*

When the fall break of their second year rolls around Jim’s run out of secrets and Bones has started introducing himself as Bones – no, damnit, I meant Leonard he decides to take Jim home for Thanksgiving. The boy’s got nowhere else to go, got no one else to take him in, and even if he can’t eat his uncle’s famous stuffing or try his grandma’s legendary cranberry sauce because he’d swell up like a balloon right afterwards, well – Thanksgiving’s not about food. It’s about family.

He takes Jim home and grins as the grandkids drag him off to play, roughly wipes away the lipstick marks his aunts leave on Jim’s scarred cheeks, and keeps him close by his side when Jim gets uncomfortable and slips on his ‘captain’ face.

His grandma adores Jim from the second she sees him. He’s not sure if it’s because of the lost-little-boy air Jim exudes or the many stories Len’s written her about him, but they get on like a house on fire. Jim just – fits. In a big house, surrounded by kids, fussed over by the single cousins. And Len gets to smile at him and introduce him and take care of him and he hates himself a little for missing Joanna less than he had the year before

*

He still doesn’t know where he fucked up, with Joanna and Jocelyn. Doesn’t know for sure that he won’t make the same mistakes, won’t somehow turn someone he loves into an enemy. But he’s spent a year and a half getting to know himself again. He knows how hard Jim had to work to trust him. Knows how much Jim’s put on the line. And he’s pretty sure, at this point, that the biggest mistake he could make would be to do nothing.

So when Jim sits down next to him on the porch and starts picking at the paint peeling on the handrail and rambling about constellations Bones figures that kissing Jim is the only thing that makes sense.

The first time he’d successfully piloted a shuttle Jim had been standing in the shuttle bay, waiting anxiously for the shuttle’s ramp to extend and for Bones to exit. And when he’d walked out and flashed Jim two thumbs up his entire face had changed. He’d sprinted across the deck and hit Bones so hard they’d slammed onto the metal floor, Jim wrapped around him like a monkey, his ecstatic laughter echoing through his entire body. He’d almost kissed Jim, then. Only the instructor’s presence had stopped him.

There’s no instructor now. No instructor and no adrenaline and no excuse. Just Jim Kirk on his old porch, their shoulders brushing against each other, the stars Jim’s telling him about shining overhead. Jim stops talking when Bones shifts sideways and puts one hand on the side of Jim’s face, deliberate and careful, his blood pounding in his ears just as hard as it had all those months before.

He almost stops a dozen times. He leans in slowly and Jim’s expression doesn’t change – he just stares at him, his eyes huge and scared, breath quick and nervous. He almost stops but doesn’t and when he finally presses their lips together, when he finally finds out how soft Jim’s lips really are, Jim sobs around his mouth and then lunges forward, presses him back against the steps, devours his mouth like he’s been waiting for Bones to do exactly this, like he’s never wanted anything more than the friction of stubble against his cheek and the parting of Bones’ lips beneath his. Jim kisses like he’s trying to convince him not to leave.

When he starts to draw away to breathe Jim pulls back quickly and presses himself against the railing, as far away as he can get without standing up and walking away. He presses his fingers against his mouth and stares straight ahead, into the dark fields behind the house, Bones wishes desperately for some secret he can share with Jim. Some way to say yes - but his words are inadequate and angry even at the best of times. So he settles for holding Jim’s hand. The same way he had with Jocelyn back in middle school, sitting on these same steps, his fingers curled over hers like the branches of a willow tree.

“Thanks,” Jim whispers, his fingers tightening almost painfully around Bones’. “For everything.”

He doesn’t say anything. Just holds Jim Kirk’s hand and stares up at the night sky that they’re going to explore together.