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Chapter Text

“….we found him…”

“ – ock said to just get him back…”

“What did they do to him?”

“I don’t know. This is just something I’ve never seen, I don’t know how to treat it…”

“…out of his mind…”

“Just keep that SHUT, for God’s sake - ”

“…the restraints – “

“He tore through the restraints”.

“…f you sedate him…”

“…..I already have”.

Chapter Text

The only thing that is apparent is that he is angry. Raging, in fact. Wild. Dangerous.

He is roaring aloud, sometimes wordlessly, then names and phrases that they don’t know….now the sound is torn through with a metal-edge sharp note of utter despair and this is harder to hear than the fury. The blue is a cold, distant, furious storm, not the earnest, always-laughing blue – the only blue in the world that is truly warm.

It is not Jim’s blue.

This is not Jim.

Spock is aware of words being spoken around him, as he stands on the other side of the glass (even just that one time made too many times that he had been separated from Jim by mere glass, while Jim is, on the other side of it, slowly being taken away from him….)

There are several voices. The doctor’s. Scotty. Uhura.

“….since we got him back – “

“….what have they done?”

“….time to decipher those images they sent, that might….”

“Nothing is working – nothing…”

They are all muffled, conjoined, distant. They don’t matter. Nothing else matters except the scene Spock is witnessing now: Jim, alone in body and in mind, being torn apart from the inside out.

They may be talking, they may be talking about what is to be done. But, as he stands at the glass in his fixed, silent poise, suffering with and for the man on its other side, all Spock knows is that the whole world is burning, and no-one seems to have noticed.

Chapter Text

Then he turns abruptly to McCoy.

“Let me in.”

“I can’t let you in, Spock”.

Leonard looks genuinely sorry.

Spock wants to kill him.

Beyond the glass, Jim howls. He is struggling to breathe, and he is foaming - at the corners of his mouth, where the torn leather restraints are chaffing his skin....

Leonard watches, clearly distraught. Spock feels a distant stream of the doctor's pain, and sees that its source is Jim. Yet Leonard continues to insist -

“I have sedated him twice Spock. Twice - and he is still screaming”.

Spock's resolve does not waver for a moment.

“Open the door, Doctor”.

“Spock, he’s – "

And then, suddenly -

“Let him in”.

It was Scotty.

Doctor and First Officer turn to Chief Engineer. All are met by each other's distress. 

“Leonard – let him in, man”.

“I can’t”, Bones shouts now, mad himself with fear and distress. “He's dangerous”.

And Scotty looks directly at Bones, in defiance, conviction, and confidence.

“Not to you two”.

Chapter Text

Spock steps in to the room. Bones follows him, and stands just inside the door, his tension so all-consuming that Spock can feel it even at a distance. He lets Spock approach Jim first, aware that they may need Spock's particular form of psychological connection.

Spock assumes a position only just beyond where Leonard stands. He doesn’t want to crowd his captain. Because as evident as the anger is, Spock can hear Jim’s fear resounding through the room as clearly as if it were a siren. Jim stops still, eyeing Spock from beneath a brow so low and dark that on this face that usually exudes an intergalactic light all of its own, it is an uncommon and vile perversion.

But….he quiets.

Behind them, there is nervous silence from the onlookers. But it is also one of anticipation. They trust Spock. Most of all, they trust Spock with Jim.

Spock knows Jim recognises him. Recognises him on that level that only they have. Intensely intimate, in no need of being verbally expressed, capable of transcending any distance, deeply felt and understood, unique. Spock had not needed to hear Jim’s frantic voice from inside this room to know the level of his distress. He had been able to feel it radiating from him as soon as Jim had been brought back aboard the ship. Earlier. When he had heard Jim scream from a planet away.

For a moment, the two men regard each other, Jim shaking, his breathing erratic and fitful, his skin a slick sheen of sick, cold sweat. He is thin. Spock can see his clavicle - deep, dark, scooping hollows. The ladder of bones on his chest. The veins like pipes in lines stretched out down his biceps. The restraint harness, torn leather straps still attached, pulls at the skin of his exposed torso, not at flesh. He is filthy. He is covered in welts, raw, wide wounds that look like burns, bruising so vivid that it seems to unfurl and spread even as Spock observes it. There is a deep cut below his left eye that is still bleeding freshly. There are livid stripes across his shoulders and back, from which skin hangs in tatters that ought not to be possible to create from the human body. Some are clearly infected. He is a broken, pitiful, wretched sight. And the wounds that Jim was suffering that they could not see – those wounds that were bleeding out loud through Jim’s ragged, raised voice, his mental anguish, his inability to comprehend his surroundings – were, Spock knew, far more severe.

But, he is here. He is no longer lost to them – he is here, physical and real in front of Spock, where Spock can see him, hear him. Moreover, their captain – his captain - Jim - was already fighting this. He had already found it within his battered self to fight back, despite the fact that not even Jim himself knew what he was fighting. Spock knew, looking at Jim in front of him now, shaking, afraid, torn, there could be no doubt that he had ever looked as beautiful. And Spock was an academic and emotional expert in Jim’s beauty. To him, it was synonymous with all the light of all the stars in the universe.

Spock remains motionless, watching, just allowing his presence to take shape in Jim’s mind. Then he addresses him as his captain always wants him to, as it is more important now than ever before that he does.

He speaks softly.

“Jim”.

And all the observers hear is that word spoken so gently, and with such compassion, that it appeared to have translated itself into another and completely unknown language.

Jim doesn’t respond at first. Then, gradually, he starts to sink down to the floor, his eyes never leaving Spock’s face, watching him darkly from inside the bars of some terrible, unseen cage. Spock tenses imperceptibly, should Jim collapse – but Jim maintains control, for now. Eventually, Jim is on one knee in the far corner from Spock, bearing his weight on his hands pressed to the floor in front of him, like a runner in the starting blocks. Like a dog in the traps. His sides are heaving. Spock sees the foam where the restraint harness is pushing and pulling the sweat over his ribs, tearing at the skin. Suddenly a line of blood runs out from under his arm, and tracks down to the floor. Spock hears Bones’ sorrowful whisper behind him.

“Oh Jim….”

Spock kneels slowly down, so that he and Jim are still level. But their physical proximity, is not, Spock already knows, the issue. There is a horrifying darkness here that separates them. Jim is only light – a light with the strength to bind Spock’s heart to him in its rays day after day. Spock is looking for it, searching Jim’s face, watching the blue as it twists and broils at such terrible, terrible distance. But Jim has stopped raging. He is looking back at Spock with an expression Spock cannot fully interpret – but his gaze becomes steady, and suddenly, just for one moment, his sight clears, and Spock sees it, a distant flash of brilliance over churning grey seas. Then it is gone, as Jim’s eyes close, and he crashes to his side, unconscious, finally defeated by the trauma and the sedation.

Bones is past Spock in a moment, and on his knees beside Jim, turning him over (“Alright Jim, alright, it’s alright, it’s alright”) loosening the restraint harness, checking his airways, pulling from his pockets a plethora of syringes and hypos and sterile wipes, the med team darting to their stations, prepping the biobed, the IV, switching on monitors, every one working soundlessly and with rapid medical efficiency. Bones thrusts two, three hypos into Jim’s neck, avoiding any raw, inflicted skin. Then he picks Jim up, and takes him straight to the biobed.

Spock is at Jim’s bedside in four strides. The moment Bones lowers Jim’s lifeless form to the sheets, the alarms erupt, and the air is shrapnelled with a thousand shrill sounds. Jim is struggling to breathe, and his mind is struggling for every iota of sanity. He is destroyed. He is conscious again now, panicking and stricken, straining against Bones as the two other medics attempt to insert cannulas, to get his head back and a tube in.

“Jim”, Bones is saying, “come on kid, we need to get this down you, come on-"

But Jim is choking to drag air in, like the time that Orion ambassador insisted that they shared the Immel tea as a welcome ceremony, and Jim had – of course – been allergic to it. Bones abandons the tube, yells to his staff for a hypo which is slammed violently into his hand. He stabs the hypo directly into Jim’s chest wall.

“Breathe! BREATHE, JIM, DAMMIT – BREATHE!”

Spock is watching, barely able to stand still, thoughts racing, heart aching. Bones next manages to get the IV line in, but the hypo hasn’t taken full effect and Bones can’t hold Jim still enough to insert the trach tube. The air is tearing in and out of Jim’s lungs with a force that sounds as though the fibres will surely rip apart. Wherever Jim is, Spock knows, it is not here in the med-bay of his beloved Enterprise, on this biobed, with his best friend’s arms around him and his devoted First Officer beside him. And a thought that came to Spock the moment he had laid eyes on this treasured and tormented human being, takes full form. Spock can see something reflected in Jim’s eyes, something that none of the rest of them can see, something that is not in the room with them. He is seeing something completely different. He is somewhere completely different. Spock very much doubts that it is Leonard Jim thinks is trying to catch hold of him. And he needs bringing back.

Whether or not his next action was entirely logical, or a completely impulsive one borne of his sheer inability to control his emotions when it came to this man, Spock would later not be able to tell. But he did it now unthinkingly, and – to even his own bewildered surprise – with complete ease. He reaches around the doctor, who is fighting not Jim, but Jim’s hysteria, and - advancing beyond that usual boundary, and preparing himself for the inevitable intensity that he is more than willing to bear for Jim, a thousand times over - lays his hand upon the bare skin of Jim’s heaving chest.

Jim touches Spock all the time, in his warmly solid and idly comforting ways. But this. This is different. This is a Vulcan touch. Spock can do something with this touch that no one else can. He can go in there with him.

Rundustbloodhiderunnobloodrun fired immediately into Spock’s own consciousness. He pushed it aside. Later, now was not the time.

Bones whips round at him, at once incredulous at the interference and desperate for the effect he knows only Spock’s touch can give.

The touch has its effect. Jim starts to calm. Jim’s eyes slide shut, and – before the trach tube is even in - he takes his first properly deep breath since they got him back. He is still twitching in pain and distress. But now….now there is someone there with him. Spock knows that Jim will feel him as close as his own blood. Knows that Jim will feel him standing alongside him.

He stretches his fingers slightly against the cool human skin beneath them, feeling bone, damage….. Feeling Jim’s heart… Spock pauses his movements here, over the place on Jim’s chest that is pounding, and for a moment – any longer and Spock would succumb to the overwhelming tide of emotion that threatens to engulf him, and render him useless to Jim - allows himself to feel…..Jim Kirk’s heart. That wonderful, kind, brave heart. It beats with such readiness, such spirit, despite the desolate state of its owner. Spock had once rejected Jim for his human foibles, his recklessness and irrationality – his personality. Now, with the alarms screaming around them, and the medical team working at a rate Spock has never witnessed, and Jim broken and shattered beneath his touch, Spock cannot fathom how he ever doubted the enormity of this human’s might. He is, he realises not for the first time, in awe of what he had once thought of as those weaknesses. They are not weaknesses. They are honours.

Bones lays Jim down now, working fast. He makes the incision, and the tube is in. Jim’s breath now bubbles and echoes, sucking hollowly and widely through the artificial channel. But he is breathing regularly. Bones immediately turns his attention to the equipment around them, snapping medical implements together, pulling wires into place, pressing buttons, desperately trying to bleed as much information – any – information, from any of the machines.....

Jim does not know what Spock really feels for him. He can’t possibly. Not merely because Spock has not told him, but because even if he did, Jim would never be able to comprehend the depth of Spock’s devotion to him. Not with all the intelligence and rationality and wild thinking in the world would anyone ever be able to comprehend it. It was simply not for the mind of any species to be able to understand, and although Spock was entirely at the mercy of something that bordered on the illogical, the supernatural, this was a place he would willingly occupy for the rest of his life.

No-one else knows either. But now, the doctor is next to him, and Scotty and Uhura and Sulu are just beyond the glass, and he is aware of their own awareness that there are only two people who could be truly alongside Jim in this state, and there is only thing to say that will come to mind in the face of this awfulness – but it is also the only thing that he knows he wants to, and must, say.

He presses his hand more deeply into Jim’s skin.

“Do not worry, Jim. We are here”.

Chapter Text

When they first got him back from Platonia, he had been unconscious. The moment it had become possible, Scotty had beamed Leonard down, and then Leonard and Jim back up, Jim lying motionless in the doctor’s arms – under Spock’s specific instructions to get the Captain out immediately, under any circumstances. Spock remained behind, locked in the near-impossible negotiations that had released their captain, even his Vulcan shields shaking under the sheer brutality and might of the Platonians’ psychokinesis, already inwardly collapsing with the desperation to get back to Jim.

Leonard had rushed Jim to the sickbay with almost reckless speed, his nurses and staff running alongside, taking on all barked instructions. Jim was emaciated, unresponsive, his vitals barely perceptible. Almost at a loss as to how to begin, the tricorders in the med teams’ shaking hands all shrieking in unison, Leonard hypoed Jim with an electrolyte-rich serum of potassium and sodium. Then, just as Leonard was injecting a strong pain relief, Jim woke up.

Except for what emerged from the just-previously unconscious man was not their Jim. It was an incensed and terrified replica. He went straight for the nearest nurse, Richmond, catching him a glancing blow across his jaw. When Jim lashed out again, spattering them all with blood and fluid as the tubes were ripped from his veins, Leonard had tried to get hold of his shoulders – and Jim had turned on him. Shocked, and struggling to maintain his medical proficiency in the face of Jim’s heart-breakingly uncharacteristic aggression, Leonard shot the heaviest sedative he dared into Jim’s neck, as Jim thrashed for freedom beneath him. Jim had started to shout now, names they didn’t know, incomprehensible phrases, strings and strings of words in various languages. Leonard was calling his name again and again, in the desperate hope that Jim would hear him, Bones, fighting for him from however far away he seemed to be. But it was to no avail. He vomited, twice. And to Leonard's horror, the sedative had failed to take effect.

Richmond, Causter, and Gabe, Leonard's most trusted male members of staff, Richmond with a shadow of purple growing across the right hand side of his face, added their weight to Leonard's attempt to restrict Jim’s violent writhing, but Jim had the advantage of that most powerful of all muscle enhancers - fear. Each man was kicked, lashed, elbowed. Leonard had no doubt that Jim would have bitten one of them if he had the chance. He had no other option. He had called for the restraint harness. Richmond had wrenched it from the cupboard, where it had hung gloriously unused for so long, and between the four of them they wrested the frantic man into it. Tears threatening, Leonard realised that even the smallest of the buckles would barely tighten it around Jim’s shrunken frame.

The restraint room being adjacent to the medbay, the four men prepared to move him. Leonard pushed a second sedative into him. There was still no effect. With Jim fighting, yelling, grappling, and utterly utterly delirious between them, they staggered in to the restraint room, and wrested him onto the biobed with the attachment straps. Hating every moment of the process, hating the Platonians, himself, and everything in the goddamn bastard sick and unfair universe, Leonard secured the straps, and Jim was held.

His staff let go, stood back – panting. Christine arrived with the cannula equipment, and Bones went straight back to getting it in, as well as the drip, hands moving over Jim’s all-too-medically-familiar body rapidly, in sequence. For perhaps ten seconds, Jim acquiesced to the restricted movement, not relaxing, but at least ceasing to thrash. Sweat dripped from his elbows, from his face, and down his chest. Bones wiped it gently away, still not ceasing in his efforts to start administering to Jim what basic help was available at this stage. Then, whatever it was in his tortured mind that had control of him registered the restraint – and panic was thrust into the already appalling concoction of fear, pain, and anger. Bones was almost thrown from the bed as, with a roar that made all five grown individuals want to cover their ears like children, Jim threw all his weight upwards against the straps. Meagre as that weight was, his state of mind was enough. They tore almost instantly, and Jim stumbled away from the bed. He stood facing the opposite wall, clearly hallucinating, and confused. Bones, rising slowly and cautiously to his feet, said his name one more time. A question. But when Jim had turned to him, his features possessed by a manic, unseeing fury, Bones had known instinctively to get everyone out.

When Spock had finally arrived half an hour later, it was to find Leonard's medical team, along with Uhuru and Scotty with their hands over their mouths, on one side of an observation glass, while Jim raged beyond it. The doctor, himself standing on this side of the closed door, was beside himself, alternating between anger, fear, frustration, and despair. It was almost more than Spock could bear.

Now Jim is lying unconscious between he and the doctor, and Spock, with his hand on Jim’s almost convulsing chest, watches Leonard. He and his team are working frantically, Leonard barking about sutures and infection and allergies, his attention divided perfectly between the monitors, the tricorders, his staff, Jim’s skin, hands working cleverly over, around, and in the body that he knows so well. He is, Spock knows, doing everything possible, and he is doing everything right. There is not one other being in the universe to whom Spock would entrust Jim’s health. Spock was more grateful to Leonard in this moment than he ever had been, and regardless of some prevailing opinion, Spock’s regard for Leonard was great. But – and by this time of this Spock unfortunately had no doubt – there was part of Jim’s condition that even Leonard could not treat, at least physically. Leonard was an excellent psychologist, and even more of an expert in the psychology of Jim Kirk. But this…..Spock could not identify this. 

Through his hand where it lay on Jim’s chest, Spock could feel the darkness. It spread out between them like a featureless leviathan, callously defying the white brilliance of the sickbay – low and flat in its weight, shifting slowly and heavily, a solid malevolent force dense with loathing, fear, shame, and revulsion. Spock could not have imagined this in Jim, this sick black shadow. It is not part of him, of who he is….but it is in him. And, Spock could see, it was only cast in such shade because of the power of Jim’s own radiance. What had happened that this poison had been created in him? What horror had caused this lurching thing of disgust, terror, and dread? Spock was afraid.

For he would have to enter it, to cross it – to see the true extent of Jim’s pain - to get to Jim.

Spock looked up at Leonard, into the worn, tight face of this good man, whose own fear was as palpable to Spock as his own, try as he might to surpress it. It was in that stifling of it that Spock could see it the most; the doctor’s firm, professional exterior was being betrayed by the tremor of his surgeon’s hands, the high, tense line of his shoulders.

“Leonard”, he said softly.

Leonard glanced up from where he was working at Jim’s throat, securing the trach tube to ensure Jim would continue to breathe.

“Spock – “

No time for Leonard’s rebukes, understandable as they were, given his preoccupation with the crisis unfolding before them. His preoccupation with Jim. Spock spoke firmly across him.

“I believe the most effective course of action would be for me to assess the Captain’s mental state while you treat him externally”.

The anger that flushed Leonard’s face was, Spock knew, a result of the doctor’s sheer frustration, the constant basic fear that whatever he did would, this time, not be enough.

“He is my patient, goddammit”, Leonard shouts, admist the clamouring sound of emergency surrounding them, his southern accent thick in his agitation. “I’ve let you stay because it’s Jim, and because it’s you, but you start interfering with me as his doctor and I will literally beat you out of my sickbay, do you understand?”

It was to Spock’s not uncommon advantage here that he was Vulcan, and able to maintain composure in the face of emotional tirades. But for the second time in five minutes, he knew instinctively that it would be beneficial to act impulsively. He reached across the small distance between himself and the doctor’s arm, and took hold of Leonard’s bicep.

Bones seized instantly as he felt Spock’s presence at the edges of his own blood. He made a movement to pull his arm away, but something stopped him, and it wasn’t just the superior strength of the Vulcan. Although he reeled on Spock first in aggression, he felt his anger dissipating almost immediately. Spock was looking directly into his face, one hand on his arm, one on Jim’s still hitching chest, and Leonard, standing there, hands covered in Jim’s blood and sweat, saw and felt that there was a connection that may well indeed provide one vitally necessary part of Jim’s treatment, whatever that treatment was going to turn out to involve. And God knew, Leonard would try anything. If Spock could see something he couldn’t…. Leonard would sooner have died than risk missing it. Spock knew that. He had used his touch just enough to bring Leonard’s emotional pitch down enough that he could see it too. Resignation took over his features. But he still had to ask, was still the doctor. Jim’s doctor.

“Are you proposing a fucking meld?” he hissed, quieter now, but willing, at least, to engage. “Because Spock, c****t, subjecting him to that now….you might break whatever last sanity he has left”.

“I firmly believe, Leonard, that no further damage could be done in that way. Jim is in severe mental and psychological distress, the result, I think, of malignant forces having invaded his brain. The presence of a trusted entity cannot, I venture to argue, worsen that injury”.

Leonard could not argue with him. It was not simply Vulcan logic. It was simply true. He looked down at Jim on the bed – broken, beaten, suffering – and his heart contracted so hard he felt sick. His Jim. His beautiful, brave, spirited boy. He swallowed, and nodded.

“Do what you have to do, Spock”, he said, wearily. “But…”, and here his tone darkened. “Know this. I will be monitoring Jim for the slightest degree of increased distress of any kind, you got that? The first sign that this is not going how you expect it to, and I pull him out faster than warp speed on steroids, regardless of you. You may be able to go in there with him, but I have kept him alive and safe on the outside for all these years, and I will never waver one step away from doing that for as long as there is breath in my body. Ok?”

“I would hope as much, Leonard”.

With that the look the two men exchanged a look, specific to them, that conveyed far greater mutual sympathy and understanding than any of their words.

Leonard nodded, checked the surgical tape over Jim’s trach tube one last time, and stepped around to the opposite side of the bed, from where he could watch every last one of Jim’s vital signs with unparalleled intensity. His heartrate, his blood pressure, his pain levels…his brainwaves. The rest of his staff were watching, Christine at the fore of them, awaiting instructions in light of this new development. Leonard glanced at them, and motioned softly for them to keep a distance, but remain on standby. They understood. Then he looked at Spock.

“Take his hand, doctor”, Spock said. “I have no doubt that Jim will be aware of your presence also, if through a different medium. You are his anchor. Keep him secure”.

Spock turned his full attention to Jim. The darkness loomed, awful and toxic…Spock once again felt fear arise from his currently exorbitant human emotions. He was deathly afraid of the magnitude of Jim’s anguish, he was afraid of feeling hopeless in its force. But his fear of failing Jim surpassed any that he might have of what was to come.

And in that resolve, he closed his eyes, bent his head, mentally braced, and reached for Jim’s temple.

Chapter Text

DUSTBLOODHEATHIDERUNBLOOD erupted at maximum volume in his mind.

Now the words were accompanied by rapidly moving images, some obscure and unfocused, some graphic and brutally terrifying, all grey and moving at a sickening speed. The images were firing out one after another

DUSTRUNBLOODHIDERUNBLOODDUSTHIDERUNBLOOD

in no order, with no sequence. There was no sense, no structure in Jim’s mind. Just this. A blizzard of horror, the only consistency in which was the imprinted mantra of those four concepts, that was shot through every flashing vision like dirty veins.

For a moment, Spock almost baulked, aware of his own mind contemplating if this might not be possible. He steeled himself against the onslaught, and concentrated on holding on, on grounding Jim, on giving him something was familiar. Real.

It is a massacre. Screaming. Dirt, running with sinuous rivulets of black blood. Jim’s own terror an almost physical actor in this scene. It is a younger Jim, how old, Spock cannot tell. But young enough that he ought to have been in the remainder that were protected. But he was not. He was the protector.

The man he was going to become already rising out of this frightened child.

At first, in among the confusion through which Spock looks for some kind, any kind, of consistency in which he can begin to make sense of this gory disorder, this is all Spock can feel and hear – Jim’s own near-crippling fear, doing furious battle with his resolve to look after, and to lead. Spock can see the bodies, piling, broken and sagging, then – later – rotting, moving again, this time with the writhing of the maggots eating them from within. The smell is beyond putrid. So is the smell of the survivors, often vomiting as they now creep through the sea of decay and human detritus, searching for anything vaguely edible. These survivors are desperate.

These survivors are children.

DUSTRUNHIDEBLOODHIDERUNBLOODDUST

Then, he feels the hunger.

A hunger like no pain he has ever experienced, it jolts into his insides like a snake strike. A furious itch that stretches the jaw and makes the limbs jerk involuntarily. Sleeplessness, a state of constant wired vigilance, bones starting to bruise from the pressure of even short attempts to sleep. It grows by the day, filling Jim up like the result of some disgustingly ironic gluttony, and then pushing on even further. He hears the sacrifice burn in Jim’s blood as he gives any meagre find to the younger children.

He feels time. Feels the constant inescapable cold and damp of no shelter at nights; he feels the furnace of exposure to the sun in the day. He is aware of terrible isolation. Vast, dust-whipped expanses of desert, stretching out wild and hot beneath endless skies.

Jim keeps them moving across it. Internal isolation, Jim’s fear under the weight of the responsibility. The fear that no-one is coming. The others’ fear of the same. Jim keeps them moving across it.

Across the dust, through the blood, running, hiding....

Something else comes from this, something that takes longer to materialise in Spock’s mind into something recognisable. It is indistinct and muffled, as though it had no real shape in the first place. The shape of uncertainty. Doubt. Ambiguity. Spock cannot fathom it. The fear and dread associated with this place he understands. But a sense of vagueness…he cannot make the connection.

Then there is a beat of a thought in the young Jim’s mind – fleeting, but enough. Waiting. It is a sense of waiting. Jim is waiting for something, expecting it, but unable to determine how or when.

He is waiting for their rescue.

The hunger permeates all. The disease, the discomfort….all would have been gratefully accepted for one moment of relief from the abhorrence of this constant deprivation.

Arising next from this foul soup, he feels Jim’s wounds, the blisters, the infections. His chest is wracked with continual bubbling coughing, a thin line of blood sometimes runs from the corner of his mouth, his hands shake even as they attempt to hold tools, or climb, the palms worn raw, and sickness ravaging his nervous system. He is poisoned more than once. Spock starts involuntarily as Jim vomits up nothing but pain. Famine is infusing every iota of their impoverished existence.

Spock’s hands reflect this tremor where they rest at Jim’s temples, and Spock is aware of the doctor’s hand tightening around Jim’s. Do not pull him out. Leonard nods once, and Spock can hear the doctor’s own heart beating through Leonard's grip on Jim’s hand.

Spock is awash with the perpetual danger and anxiety of this forsaken place, and almost overcome by the violence of the effort that it is costing Jim just to stand up. And Jim, all this while, is still standing. His heart aching within him, Spock watches in abject horror, as this small, golden boy, alight with intelligence and warmth and spirit, was made dirty, and wretched, as he struggled so terribly with the appalling world around him. He was fragile and vulnerable, and brave – and so utterly, almost recklessly, determined. Even if by some random anomaly Spock had not known it was Jim’s mind he was in, he would have known this boy anywhere. His name, was James Tiberius Kirk. Even then, wherever and however it was that this ghastly time and place had been relevant to Jim, he was still leading, still going ahead into all new areas, still carrying the youngest children, still orchestrating the search for food, still keeping them together for warmth, still keeping them – a little crew - safe. Spock sees that when Jim coughs he tries to do it away from anyone else. He wipes his hands on trousers already stiff with caked blood and dirt, and pulls himself up higher, taller, more resilient. He is suffering, traumatised, lost, alone, and starving to death. But he is still standing. Jim’s bravery hurt to witness almost more than his misery. Spock had never doubted the depth of this aspect of Jim. He had seen it in a thousand contexts. He owed his own life to it. But he had never seen it so fully constitute the whole extent of Jim’s persona. Jim had been born shining, and nothing had or could ever extinguish that light. There, in Jim’s mind, Spock felt his love for Jim grow even further. He had truly believed that such a thing was not, by this time, possible.

Spock’s own reflections were suddenly swarmed by the pestilence of the images in Jim’s mind. Abruptly, there was a kick in the meld, and Spock recognised present Jim’s awareness of Spock’s presence in his psyche. The distant echoing heartbeat of the doctor began to rise.

Jim’s pride became a feature of this repulsive landscape, the self-preservation that had brought him this far broiling feverishly with his younger self’s fear and (shame?) anger. Unconscious as Jim was, he was fighting Spock.

Spock is unsure of why. Jim is protecting the images so furiously that Spock is unable to tell whether they are memory, or whether they have been projected artificially. At that moment, and on that basis, the meld begins to quake. Spock is aware of Leonard’s voice. Jim could take it no more.

Neither could Spock. He pulled away slowly, so as not to jar Jim’s wounded mind. He let go of the psi points, but only in as far as he released the necessary pressure. His hand he kept on Jim’s face, moving it down slightly so he could run his thumb over his cheekbone, in reverence, and in desperate, desperate sadness. He felt rather than saw or heard Jim’s intake of breath as the meld was broken.

And Jim woke up.  

Leonard was moving quickly again now, tricorders, PADDs, serums, infusions…. Jim reacted to none of it. This was the terrifying difference. In comparison to the railing, wild, violently defensive man they had fought to gain control of since he was brought to the medbay, Jim was now still, impassive. A blank.

Leonard sat down on the edge of the bed, running the tricorder. Spock could hear him speaking to Jim from far away. Spock’s own mind – and he knew Jim’s too – were still partly in that unspeakable place abandoned by all vestiges of humanity. But…Jim was conscious. Finally, actually, aware…and aware of them.

Spock kept his gaze steady and strong on Jim’s face. Jim wouldn’t meet it. He sat pliant beneath Leonard's safe, administering hands, unresponsive and uncaring. He looked at Leonard when he spoke to him. His eyes followed Leonard as he moved around the room. But he didn’t answer. Spock knew Jim was conscious of himself again. He also knew that he absolutely no interest at all in it being this way.

Then a pink tinge spread along Jim’s lower eyelids, the certain indicator of supressed tears. The blue shone like fractured diamond. He was shuddering with every in-breath, with the effort of holding himself together, when it was clear that he was gradually breaking apart. Spock could see the starving, terrified child in this face – in his Jim’s face – so brutally clearly that it physically hurt him. He could see it still lingering behind the wonderful man he had become, full of nothing but kindness, strength, compassion, and courage. He could so easily have been broken. In many ways, he was – in those parts Spock had occupied in those moments. But he chose not to be. Every day, he chose to be the person – the captain – to whom they were all so completely devoted. The best captain Starfleet had ever had. Would ever have. Again, he gently brushed his thumb over the same place, and brought his other hand up to cup Jim’s face, holding him as tenderly as possible. A torrent of Jim’s emotions poured through the contact, wounding and helpless. But Spock was ready for them – and he could bear them. He would shoulder them for his captain. Because he heard just one phrase, a representation of the resilience and character of James T. Kirk, that, in amongst the cacophony of distress, was a siren sounding out all the clearer.

Help will come.

“Jim”, Spock whispered, their faces close. “Oh Jim…..”

After a few moments of that proximity, Jim finally met his eyes, and his breath caught at the depth of love and concern he saw there. It was, as is so often the case, what broke Jim’s resolve, and a quiet outpouring began. With no hesitation, Spock pulled him in against his chest. Without ceasing in his work, Leonard pulled the privacy curtain around Jim’s bed, sealing them all into a private world in which respective rank and positions disappeared. Then Jim wept, held firm in the presence, comfort, and protection of the people who loved him most in the world.

Chapter Text

And so, Jim was awake. He had maintained the consciousness that he regained at the end of Spock’s meld, aside from the periods of sleeping that Leonard was gently but firmly helping along with regular sedatives, and he was responsive, and – during the times that he had the energy to retain control of his own mind - lucid.

But for all Jim was cognisant, and actually present in the reality of here and now, rather than in the animalistic aggression-inducing hell of the state of mind in which they had found him, to say that this was Jim would still be a wretched error. Leonard worked around Jim, hour after hour, intense, determined, grim. He had done what he could physically with the dermal and bone regenerators, repairing broken ribs and multiple other fractures as far as he could, although there were still numerous sites of internal bleeding that would need constant observation. The protoplaser had treated just enough of the tissue damage that Bones was able to use dressings for the remainder of the lacerations.

But Jim was, despite Leonard's unrelenting efforts, extremely ill - both inside and out.

He was, firstly, shockingly – excruciatingly - thin. He had been brutally starved, and it was disturbing to observe. There was an unnatural inward curve between his shoulder and the top of his arm. When he held his arms out, his elbows and wrists were twice the width of where there ought to have been flesh. Leonard could literally take hold of his collar bone, as if it was a handrail. There were bruises on his hips where the bone was pushing against the skin. His ribs had become an abysmal human xylophone. Every section of his backbone creaked visibly when he moved. His thighs and stomach were concave. It was an appalling contrast to the strong, robust form that usually sat so healthily beneath his uniform. When Leonard had passed the tricorder over Jim’s major internal organs, he had seen the strain setting in on each and every one…

Complicating this was the fact that Jim had caught an infection. It had revealed itself to Leonard within a few hours of their getting Jim back, the tricorder and the bio-function monitors informing him of a rocketing white blood count – and a temperature raging so viciously that one could almost see Jim’s ravaged body quaking with its blows. Sweat poured continually from Jim’s every pore while he shivered uncontrollably beneath the blankets, his skin at once burning and like ice to the touch. His eyes were rimmed with red, his skin a flat beige pallor marked with hectic patches of violent greyish purple. The unnatural heat in his core was making him constantly nauseous, and thus eating to restore his emaciated body was a gruelling and punishing task. Leonard administered serum after serum, flooding Jim’s system with any and every of the (minimal) antibiotics to which Jim was not allergic. The plasma infusion unit was in constant motion, as Leonard tried to literally wash Jim’s blood from the inside out. Nothing was touching it.

Then, there was his mind.

Very little had been said about the meld. After releasing Jim, Spock had sat back, stunned, his own mental strength shaken and battered – and the look on his usually so contained face had given Leonard the information of a thousand tricorders. At first, Jim had been unresponsive. Conscious, but not cognizant. Then, as he was thrust suddenly back into awareness of his surroundings, he had immediately started to draw rapid, shallow breaths – trying to sit up, clutching at the sheets, legs scrabbling, trying to form words that were interrupted by his gasps, panic enveloping him…

Leonard dropped straight to his knees and seized Jim’s hand, pulling it to his chest, placing his free hand to Jim’s cheek. Jim wrapped his fingers around Bones’ bicep, and even in his extreme gratitude for Jim's responsiveness, the medic within him still registered the ominous weakness of the grip.

“Jim? Jimmy? It’s alright kid, we’re here, you’re alright, I’m here, we’ve got you, you’re safe, you’re back…”

And Jim had turned wide, sore eyes on Leonard, and finally – for the first time since they had got him back – actually seen him.

“Bones...?”

His voice was a cracked whisper.

“Yeah, Jim – it’s me…..” He tried to smile as he wiped a tear from Jim’s hot too-hot cheek. “Hi there”.

Jim shakily took and then released a slightly longer breath. Then he slowly looked across to see Spock on his other side, who was gazing at Jim with that intensity that had brought them through galaxies together and that had transcended time itself, and something final about this last piece in Jim’s framework of security had locked into place, and he dropped back against the pillows, breathing calming just enough that he allowed his eyes to close, and his body to take a frail step towards some semblance of relaxing.

Relief pounded out across the whole medbay, Leonard and Spock at the epicentre of the pulses, both their heads dipping just slightly as their chests thumped in unison through the adrenaline surge. He was back. Not a single person who was there that day would ever have begrudged their captain's tears as then followed. Each of them cried their own.

Finally, Jim had slept.

Leonard, heartened to a small extent by Jim’s cognizance, returned to now further assuring some kind of medical stability – such as it was. But the question remained…

He had barely been able to bring himself to ask – and Spock had barely been able to answer.

“What?.....”

“I cannot, Leonard….”. Spock took a deep breath, and the fact that this was so visible shook Bones to his soul. “All I know is that they have tortured him with these images….”

“What images?”

“They are indistinct….corpses.…children….blood. Jim in pain….he is leading someone somewhere. They are hungry…”

“Of course his brain would have registered hunger – they fucking starved him into oblivion. Even entirely unconscious his body would have been aware of this level of physical deprivation”.

“Yes, but that is part of the problem. Because Jim is protecting the images. I am unable to fathom if they are real, or fabricated – induced through telekinetic persuasion….”

Leonard now holding Jim’s hand where previously he had had his fingers over his pulse, looked at Spock for a long while. Spock stared ahead, the Vulcan impassivity that so defined his features twitching in shock. Between them on the bed, Jim lay hot and exhausted, chest heaving. Then Spock looked back to Jim, touched his forehead with the fingertips of his right hand, and some kind of resolve crossed his face. He rose to his feet.

“We will need to request of the Platonians that they divulge to us the nature of the psychological torture”, he said, his voice at once stoic and laced with a fraying edge of barely concealed desperation. “While Jim is shielding to this extent, we cannot begin any kind of therapeutic process”.

Bones nodded, laid Jim’s hand gently down at his side, and resumed the only thing he could do.

Which was nothing.

Now, in the few days that had followed, Jim was beset by frequent hallucinations, frighteningly long periods of time in which the medbay was no longer the medbay, and its occupants no longer his most treasured people, or members of his precious crew. In these times he would still know Leonard, screaming for him from somewhere in the depths of his mind that had been thrown into such shadow, and he would still know Spock, that part of Jim’s psyche that was inextricably linked across time and space to the Vulcan recognising the presence of this integral part of his own self. Leonard and Spock, as was their remit, responded to these lapses in a perfect balance comprised of their own connections to Jim, and a combination of their respective qualities. When Jim woke yelling for him (and God how that sound threw Leonard back to rare but awful nights at the Academy when Jim had nightmares and Leonard would quite literally pull him up out of them and hold him, pale and sweating, against him…. Was this connected? Jim would try to laugh them away, he never revealed the content of the dreams…but, Leonard had thought, both then and now, at least Jim had found that if he yelled for someone, for the first time in his life someone would come), Leonard came and lifted him out of the darkness and soothed him with his particular combination of medicine and safety that had, for Jim, always lain in those Georgian hands of healing and admonishment and gruff affection. And Leonard would keep close to Jim, working quietly nearby in his taciturn loyalty, until the eternally reliable daily arrival of Spock, whose devotion to Jim lay in his stalwart unflinching poise, and his quiet, methodical approach to his own area of Jim’s care, which now involved reading to him.

Read to him, Nyota had said, gently, pressing two books in two different languages into his hands. He likes words, he likes your voice.

Leonard couldn’t help but smile wanly to himself as he listened to Spock’s soft, articulate, unwavering voice weaving words into the quiet of the medbay - and Spock would often answer that smile with a barely discernible eyebrow raise that Leonard knew was the Vulcan's own peculiar signal of his appreciation of the doctor’s presence. They kept talking to a minimum, and when they did speak it was, for Jim’s sake, only light and superficial conversation – which Leonard had to admit was almost hilarious, as Spock had about as much of a grasp on human small-talk as he did on breeding kittens, and Leonard's own idea of small-talk was telling everyone to piss off out of his sick-bay and just sit somewhere where you won’t injure yourselves for five minutes. Their roles on the ship were different now, too, regarding Jim’s absence. Spock, of course, was Acting Captain. Leonard's position of CMO had never been more important. But in their own ways, he and Spock kept a consistent yet subtle communication between themselves that also had a degree of supportive companionship. There was someone else with which to share this ordeal. Together, they were at the forefront of keeping the Enterprise afloat. Between them, they served Jim with love, faithfulness, and efficiency.

But Leonard watches Jim at all times, and although at times Jim might appear to be in a state of some kind of stability, the doctor knows that that is a cruel joke. This quiet is not stability. It is the gun re-loading.

For Leonard, despite his and Spock’s fellowship and collaboration, was now acutely aware that he, like Spock before him, was now seeing something in Jim that this time Spock was not. That he was party to details about Jim’s condition of which Spock would not be aware. This was becoming palpably clearer by the day. Firstly, Jim didn’t ever want Leonard to leave him. He was piteous in his need for Leonard's safety, Leonard's hands, Leonard's voice nearby, and even more so in the fact that he tried not to show it. And the reason that Leonard was seeing this when Spock was not was that Jim held more resolve in Spock’s presence. Jim couldn’t – he wouldn’t - show this to Spock. Leonard suspected that this was partly because of what Spock had seen in the meld. He had come skin to skin with whatever it was that was torturing Jim, he had experienced every iota of James T. Kirk’s most beaten and broken parts, he had breathed the air in Jim’s mind. It was also partly because of their connection in commandership. Jim was still Captain of the Starship Enterprise. He still considered himself responsible for her efficacy, her abilities, her safety and her course. If he had temporarily had to pass this responsibility to his Executive Officer, so be it, but his connection to the ship was thus through that officer, and he would not allow that connection to be sullied by his weakness.

No, it was Leonard who saw the real vulnerability, the same that only he had seen on occasions at the Academy – the raw, unbridled, sufferings of the bright and beautiful little boy from which this bright and beautiful man had grown. There was a reason Leonard called him ‘kid’. Jim had had no-one else, Leonard was the first to care for him. All through the Academy, through the phases in which Jim's periodic bouts of illness brought him quite literally to his knees as he attempted to carry on regardless, to Leonard he was a child just trying to be strong. He didn’t have to. Leonard knew. On the second day he’d been awake, he’d had the first true panic attack of this episode. Chapel called Leonard straight away. Leonard held on to him with a deathgrip, Jim’s fingers clutching at Leonard's chest as if his hands could lock on, nails breaking the skin. "You’re safe Jim, you’re safe, you’re with me, I’ve got you, I'm here…...I’m here….." He held him hard, fiercely, pinning his limbs, holding him as tightly as he could against his chest, repeating a refrain that had become nothing short of a mantra. “Alright kid, alright….it’s alright, it’s alright, we’re here, I’m here..” Eventually, Jim had cried. Leonard didn’t let go, rocking him gently back and forth. “I know Jim, I know……I know.....”.

So Spock reads to Jim, and Leonard interjects occasionally with suitably grouchy and cynical comments during whatever he is doing at the time, and Jim gives watery smiles when he can manage, and just watches them, and listens.

Today, while Spock is reading, Leonard is taking Jim’s blood pressure.  

“Jim”, he says quietly, sliding an arm behind Jim’s back, his deep voice resonating just below Spock’s but not interrupting, “I need to sit you up for a bit, ok?” Jim nods silently, adjusting himself as much as he can in order to help. He looks painfully uncomfortable. “Come on kid – “

Spock finishes the chapter just as Leonard is wrapping the grey band around Jim’s upper arm. He watches the doctor’s hands tightening and tightening it, both he and Leonard pointedly avoiding exchanging their wincing facial expressions induced by the narrowness of Jim’s body. Although they usually avoid this topic when Jim is conscious, Spock is due on shift, and he wants to inform the doctor of some minor progress in the negotiations with the Platonians. He is confident he can deliver the information with appropriate sensitivity.

“Nyota has made no formal advancement with the communications, Leonard”, he begins, “although nor has she been conclusively or expressly denied. In this particular context, we must consider that to be a positive outcome –"

Suddenly, with absolutely no warning, Jim throws up, straight over Leonard tunic. Leonard looks entirely unperturbed as he swiftly removes the band and leans round to adjust the angle of the biobed again so Jim can sit up further - especially now he has to avoid choking.

“Oh excellent shot, Jim”, he says, “probably the best one to date I think. Here we go look…”

Christine has pushed a bucket onto Jim’s lap between them, and Leonard positions it so that Jim can continue to be sick. She then hands Leonard a cloth with which to wipe himself down, which he barely uses – instead quietly asking Christine to pass him the tricorder. The doctor is keeping his tone light for Jim’s sake, but Spock can hear and see the undertones, that are awash with severity. He passes the device over Jim’s upper body even as Jim continues to expel what little was in his stomach, rubbing a large hand over Jim’s back as he watches the screen. His face is grim. He closes off the tricorder and moves closer to Jim, murmuring soothingly to him and using a moderate pressure to push upwards on Jim’s back from the bottom of his ribs to his shoulder blades. Spock sees that he is encouraging the upwards spasms, inciting him to clear his system, his airways. His movement is repetitive – well practiced. It strikes Spock that this is more than Leonard's medical familiarity with vomiting patients. This is a familiarity with a vomiting James Kirk.

“What is causing this, Doctor?” Spock asks. Leonard doesn’t look at him.

“At the moment, the infection and spiking temperature, mainly”, the doctor answers, taking a cold cloth brought to him by Christine and pressing it to Jim’s forehead as Jim finally reaches the end of retching and falls back, exhausted. Jim is, even to the Vulcan’s eyes, of a distinctly green pallor.  

“Mainly?” Spock inclines his head to the angle that Leonard knows to translate as Spock having ‘received insufficient information’.

Leonard gives Jim a glass of water and, holding a metal kidney bowl just below his chin, tells him to rinse. Although it isn’t audible, Spock knows he sighs.

“Jim has always had a few problems with his digestive tract”, Leonard explains, shortly. “It tends to be the first place that’s affected, by any illness. Also, with an infection this severe, his body is under huge stress. Not to mention the fact that he is already mentally and emotionally stressed, probably to the point of breakdown. He is being sick because his central nervous system recognises that it is under threat, and it thinks it has to prepare his body for some kind of escape. It just dumps all ‘unnecessary’ material, any extra weight. It’s clever. But in Jim, it is cleverer than it needs to be. Which is just Jim all-fucking-over”.

Spock can tell there is nothing harsh in the curse. It is Leonard’s standard way of expressing frustration and concern. He watches the doctor take the bowl from Jim’s lap and set it down on the side behind him. Spock sees that even in that meagre amount of water and saliva, there is pink foam. The doctor sees it too.

“Let’s clean you up a bit kid”, Leonard says softly, and wipes Jim’s flushed face with the cool cloth, his actions gentle, one hand cradling his jaw so he can get the best angle. Then he shifts Jim slightly and repositions the biobed so that he can fall asleep, the captain looking alarmingly frail as he is moved by Leonard’s broad hands. Leonard is a doctor, Spock reflects to himself, not a nurse – and he has a team of nurses for such tasks as these. But he nurses Jim himself as though he were his child. Spock experiences a surge of gratitude unlike any other.

“But also….” Leonard continues, quietly, pushing a few damp strands of hair away from Jim’s forehead and giving his hand a squeeze before standing up and reaching into the med-stand for a rehydration hypo. He stalls his words, appears to wrestle with something within him. Then he sets his face to resolute, and continues. “….also, he has always struggled with eating. And sickness. When we were in the Academy, Jim would suddenly stop eating the way some people change holo channels. I had to watch him all the time. Sometimes it seemed as though there was a connection between that and stress – exams, etc. Sometimes it just seemed entirely random. He was better if it was me who handled our eating routine – gave him breakfast, ate with him at the cafeteria at lunch, made sure he was home for dinner. But not always. He’d lose weight quickly, what with his energy levels. Damn kid never sat still. And he never wanted to admit it could be a problem. A deeper problem. But there were some periods where I seriously considered just holding him down, shooting him up with electrolytes and spoon-feeding him myself”.

Leonard paused here, and put two fingers to Jim’s neck.

“Sharp sting, ok Jimmy? You might recognise it, I’ve done it to you once or twice”.

Jim is asleep to the point of unconscious, and barely moves as Leonard injects the rehydration hypo into where his fingers have just been. But Spock recognises Leonard's valiant attempt at their own shared personal brand of humour. He is, he realises, unbearably touched at the gesture.

“Then”, the doctor continues as he discards the hypo and pulls out the tricorder again, “there were the periods of sickness. He wasn't making himself sick, not intentionally. He always swore blind that he wasn’t, and we were together enough of the time that I would have known. Also, he’d let me in with him, when he was ill – to the bathroom or wherever. He was definitely being sick involuntarily, at least at those times. But it was almost impossible to determine what was causing it. Sometimes he was sick before eating, sometimes afterwards, sometimes in the middle of the day when there was a good few hours on either side. He wasn’t ill as such….no temperature, no infection, no virus…. Just….this…sudden vomiting. I examined him over and over, when he’d let me. You know – when he didn’t push me off laughing and calling me a grumpy mother hen. There was never anything conclusive. An elevated heartrate here, a tremor there, electrolytes out of whack - but then, that would often be to do with the fact that he’d only just been puking himself inside out. Fucking medical mystery. I had to pick him up from classes or the bathroom in a lecture building a few times, because he’d been sick mid-way through class. Actually, Nyota was there the first time - she'll remember. I took him home, and Ny picked up the anti-nausea hypos Jim wasn't allergic to and brought them over to our apartment. She was great. But yeah, I had to get him up in the night, when he threw up in his sleep. He threw up in my bed at least ten times. The little shit”.

Leonard smiles wistfully here, not, Spock knows, so much at the memory of waking up to Jim throwing up on him in the night, but at Leonard's own personal interpretation of a term of endearment that he would have thrown at Jim (as both his friend and physician) at the time. A loving insult that the doctor would have given his right arm to have Jim awake enough to react to now. But the smile vanishes as quickly as it vaguely appeared, and Leonard continues to try and explain to Spock some kind of background to this development in Jim’s condition.

“He developed gastric ulcers from the regularity of bringing up the acid. Kid was in terrible pain a lot of the time. His liver struggled. I threw so much medication through him he probably would have alerted a sniffer dog - but we never got to the bottom of the actual cause, I was never sure if he even knew”, he says. “It was as though it was being caused by somewhere so deep inside him it wasn’t even conscious.

“Anyway, there were times when he was okay for months. And times when he was being sick five, six, ten times a day. Or more. I just….did whatever I had to. We learned to manage it, between us. He didn’t shut me out. He found it easier to eat if he was just given an exact amount, so we ate just the two of us, most of the time. He did better with bland foods – rice, plain pasta, white bread. Or protein bars if we were really fucked. Drove me utterly fucking crazy, not being able to get anything even like nutritious down him. But in these phases when everything was likely to make a reappearance anyway….. Didn’t seem as though it was going to make much of a difference what I gave him. I was just happy if he swallowed and it stayed south of the border. And, well….” Leonard gave shrug of submission, something that Spock considered to be entirely uncharacteristic of the usually brutally determined doctor. “….We’ve been dealing with it ever since”.

Leonard remembers those nights. Him sitting against the headboard on his bed in the dark with Jim curled between his bent knees like a small child, leaning on his chest, the sheets pulled loosely around them both, the bowl in Jim’s own lap. Leonard would sometimes keep one hand on the bowl, just in case. He was often quicker than Jim at pre-empting it. Perhaps it was the medic in him. Perhaps it was the presence of Jim in his blood. Sometimes they’d be talking quietly – or rather Leonard would be talking to Jim – in an attempt to distract him from the permeating nausea. Sometimes it would be silent between them, a holo playing quietly in the background, Leonard gently stroking the hair from Jim’s temple as Jim’s head rested on his shoulder, the other hand on Jim’s knee. Even if Jim had fallen asleep, there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t be sick. Most of the time, Leonard managed to be alert and on hand enough to execute the necessary damage control. On those other times that he’d mentioned to Spock, when Leonard had already gone to bed, or Jim, feeling ill, had crept into bed without him knowing and had had the unfortunate incident overnight, he’d had to relocate them to Jim’s bed in the middle of the night, and deal with everything else in the morning. Or vice versa, if they’d started in Jim’s. And Jim had always been so sorry, so guilt-ridden and embarrassed, that Leonard applied for and received two extra sets of bed linen, so that he could change the bed as quickly and as efficiently as possible the following morning, so that Jim didn’t have to see him do it, or beg and plead to do it himself, trying to take the bedding from his own bed to put on Leonard’s, or fretting about the too-regular trips to and from the sonic washers. 

Jim had been sick a day or so ago, and Leonard had tried to pass this off to himself as part of the infection. But he knows…. He knows what they might really be facing. He has done it before. But not in such dire circumstances. 

Now, with Spock sitting ramrod straight and looking to him as though Bones was about to produce the cure for cancer, Leonard runs a hand down his face and mentally flicks through the list of anti-emetics to which Jim was not allergic. He cannot bring himself to tell Spock that, of all these possible controls there are for this aspect of his condition, in Jim’s case, there are very few. Worse, in this particular situation they have very little margin of error. With Jim this malnourished and underweight, a phase of constant vomiting like those days at the Academy would put him in very grave danger indeed.

“Leonard?”

Leonard starts, and realises he has been silent for some time. He makes a concerted effort to square his shoulders and emit the physical impression that he knows what to do next, that they – he - will remain in control, and that Jim will remain safe. For Jim. And for Spock.

“Sorry, Spock….Just reminding myself of the options”. He picks up the kidney tray and passes it to Christine, who, to Spock’s eyes, appears to know exactly where she is taking it and why. To Leonard's eyes, she is an angel with whom he needs almost no communication in order to convey his sense of helplessness, or his instruction that no-one else must know of it. “I’ll run a few tests and administer all treatments that I know Jim can tolerate”.

Spock looks somewhat doubtfully at Jim’s ravaged body, but when he looks back up at Leonard he has arranged his features into an expression of trust. Something in Bones quails at that, at the magnitude of what may lay before them.

“I would only expect as much Leonard”, Spock says, standing up. “I must shortly be in attendance on the bridge. Please keep me informed”.

“As always, Spock”.

There is no need to smile at each other or exchange any other kind of pleasantries as they part ways. They are long past that.

And there is, Leonard now knows as he follows Chapel to the lab, so very much farther to go. 

Chapter Text

Spock stood at the projection screen on the bridge with his hands behind his back, projecting a perfect image of authority and cooperation. On the screen before him sat Parmen, his contemplative face – for which he had been bred –  a repulsively triumphant and superior façade that nonetheless belied his desperate quest for power. Spock was sickened, although his own Vulcan poise was far more successful in concealing emotion than that of the Platonian leader.

But the fact remained that, at this present moment, Parmen did have that power. Below deck on the Enterprise, Jim lay violently ill, the damage to his mental strength caused by these terrorists dressed as philosophers worsening his physical condition by the hour. Bones and his team were working tirelessly, but Spock had been right when he predicted before the meld that Jim’s psychiatric condition would need to be treated as rigorously as his physiological illness. And Bones, certain now that the way in which they were seeing certain parts of Jim’s condition manifest itself externally – the vomiting, the panic attacks, the hallucinations – were part of a much longer history to which he had been witness for so long without being able to identify or decode its true basis, agreed that they had reached a point from which Jim would struggle to properly return if they did not find and heal that cause now. He may, the good doctor had said to Spock, recover physically. He may even, in style true only to Jim, regain much of his mental stability. He would take his place as captain again, and the world – the universe, their universes – would look as it should. But he had not said this to Spock in hope, but in warning. His message was the neurological pathways would become engrained if they were allowed to prevail. Each time Jim succumbed to the strength of his mental pain, it would be more and more difficult to correct the course of his thought. If they did not lose him this time, there would be a next time. He simply could not help it.

The Platonians had broken Jim, it was true. But – and this killed Spock and all those involved in what had palpably become a rescue mission much bigger and more dramatic than simply retrieving Jim from the planet – they were the only ones to have truly perceived what it was lying just below the surface in Jim’s mind that would trigger this break. They had been the catalyst for this. Without further information from Parmen on what they had subjected Jim to, on what these images Spock had seen flooding his mind were and how and if they could be deciphered, they were helpless. The Platonians held the key. For hours, Spock, Nyota, and Bones had talked about how the negotiations with Parmen should be directed. It was absolutely imperative that the process was worked sensitively, cleverly, and skilfully – in order that the information they would hopefully eventually gain could be used to their own, to Jim’s, advantage. But it hadn’t need to be said that it was, of course, only Spock who could undertake it. Only Spock had the ability to shield sufficiently against Parmen’s mental powers – and this ability was already wavering as it was assaulted by the depth of his love and concern for Jim. But that depth was nothing if not blistering ammunition for Spock’s resolve, and it was not only Nyota who wanted to weep at Spock’s bravery and resilience here, but Bones and Sulu also – and all other members of the crew who would at some point in this terrible time witness Spock’s manner, possession, and composure in the face of his own torment.

And so, it had been suggested by Nyota but swiftly agreed to by all that there was to be no anger or retaliation in the conversation. They were to apparently play into Parmen’s hands, to bolster his megalomaniacal level of power.

But a brutal and ironic catch 22 lay in the process. For Parmen was psionic. Therefore, he knew their situation exactly. And it reinforced every weapon in his armoury.  

Jim had gone planetside on Platonius for the purposes of furthering political and social relations with the Platonians – ironically with the specific intent of sharing views on knowledge, and the value of contemplation. It was the Federation's notion that the Platonians’ emphasis on understanding and philosophy could be of nothing but benefit to an organisation of such interracial, interspecieal, and intergalactic diversity – and that the Enterprise, comprised as it was of a microcosm of that diversity would be an ideal, sympathetic, and thoroughly appropriate representative through which to begin building this relationship. More, its captain, James T. Kirk – with his genius level of intelligence and his reputation for being able to charm the very stars out of the sky – was thought to be a model candidate for creating the connection. And so he had appeared to be, when he arrived, along with Spock and three ensigns of various backgrounds, at the Greek-themed headquarters of the republic. They had been warmly welcomed, and Parmen had held council with Jim for several hours in the magnificent stone chambers, Parmen stately and regal in his robes and headdress….before it became evident that Jim was losing some kind of control. Spock was speaking with Eraclitus nearby but not within earshot, and therefore had a subtle but keen eye trained on his captain – and he had started to see Jim exhibit signs of distress he had not witnessed in Jim before. Firstly, Spock had noticed that at random and increasing intervals, Jim would tap his leg, or his lower arm – wherever was out of sight to Parmen – three times with his index and next finger. Nothing more, just that – three taps, one-two-three…and he was then still again. But the intervals between the taps began to decrease, until Jim was visibly doing what could only be called ‘fidgeting’, moving almost continually in his seat, eyes darting around the room, hands in constant motion clasping each other, or his thighs, or crossing and uncrossing his fingers. At this point, Spock had politely begun attempting to bring his conversation with Eraclitus to a close – and it was then that he noticed he too was not as able to direct his thoughts and words as he should be. Eraclitus had moved closer, waxing lyrical about the power of Socrates’ method of conversational philosophical preaching, and Spock had been simultaneously appalled by his proximity, and unable to move away. From the corner of his eye, he had seen Jim start to sink down in his seat in front of Parmen, something in his expression slack and full of dread – and Spock had felt the first vestiges of panic. His sharp Vulcan mind was still capable of informing him that Eraclitus was exerting a force over him and that he needed to get away…..and that was when he realised he was paralysed.

There was sudden laughter in the room, Parmen leaning forwards from his stone throne towards Jim as the captain pressed himself as much as he could into the back of his own seat, clearly under some kind of external physical mastery also. A door opened and the three ensigns crashed into the room embroiled in a violent and utterly inexplicable fight, tearing and kicking at each other, delivering blow after blow, apparently utterly insensible of the pain they were inflicting. Then the room had filled with Parmen’s followers, Jim was swallowed from Spock’s now desperate line of sight – and Spock had woken several hours later in a weirdly decadently decorated cell, his shields and body bruised. He was not alone – the three ensigns were there, and as their commander regained consciousness they shrank against the wall in unison. After having attempted to beat each other to death, they had, apparently, then turned on Spock. As soon as he was able, Spock held up a hand and reassured them that he did not hold them accountable, and that not one of them had been acting of their own volition. His next question, although he dreaded to ask it, was if any of them knew the whereabouts of the captain. They did not.

Over the next few days, Spock and the ensigns were kept in the cell, visited occasionally by a Platonian bringing water, and minimal food. Spock noticed that they were fed nothing of the planet’s native kironde-rich food. They were not going to be given the chance to improve their own tele and psychokinetic powers. Shaken and disorientated by their own abuse, neither Spock nor the ensigns could piece together any memory that might indicate what had happened to Jim. Their PADDs had been taken away, and there was no chance of contact with the Enterprise. They could only hope that its crew were aware of the turn in the situation, and that they were organising how they would retrieve their missing crew members, commander, and captain. In his heart of hearts, Spock hoped for Bones. Nyota would be at the forefront of the necessary communications, and Spock trusted her abilities implicitly. But Bones would be at the forefront of the fight.

On the fourth day, they were told they would be allowed contact with Jim. By which it had been meant that they would be allowed to hear him scream from a distance, for hours on end. The ensigns, two of them just barely in their twenties, huddled closer and closer together, unable to listen. Spock had been unable to stop.

On the sixth day, Spock had lost his composure. When the Platonian came to feed them, Spock had launched himself at him, executing a vicious Vulcan pinch that almost killed him. Spock had been imprisoned for a week in absolute isolation.

In the second week, Scotty was allowed to beam back Spock and the three ensigns. Jim was not part of the returned party. No-one – not Nyota, not her communications team, not Spock – could fathom what they wanted with their captain. Spock had been incensed at arriving back on the ship without Jim, and had demanded that they return him immediately to negotiate his release. The Platonians blocked all beaming capacities on the planet and refused, informing the crew of the Enterprise that their captain was undergoing some highly necessary education. Bones was beside himself, and eventually it was Sulu who gently but authoritatively insisted that Bones could not be on the bridge when he was this frantic. Bones had argued, had almost cried, had argued further…and then accepted that such behaviour would not aid their situation. He and Scotty had sat in the engineering quarters for six straight hours, drinking dodgy whiskey that to Bones only tasted of his bitter missing of Jim.

For another three weeks, the Enterprise had sat above Platonius in a silence and darkness more terrible than any of that in space. The Platonians had gone quiet; they responded to no communications, they sent none of their own. It was as if the planet had suddenly been deserted. Spock lost weight. Bones lost weight. Bones held to his one duty of maintaining everyone’s health as far as he could - but life itself was on hold. Nyota kept a faithful and patient vigil on the comms, and persisted in attempting to contact Platonius on the hour, every hour. Her actions became mechanic, automated. But she would not give up. Scotty worked indefatigably at bypassing the block, but he was not working against technology, but against a force of nature to which no expertise or machinery was even vaguely relevant. Sulu left his navigation post only for the restroom, and for the four hours of sleep that Bones was enforcing on everyone. Chekov followed Sulu’s pattern, but in alternation. Except for one night when, passing the young officer’s quarters, Bones overheard crying – and insisted that Sulu leave his post to go to him immediately, and that Chekov and Sulu took the same shift pattern for a few days. God knew, he said, face pale and grim, everyone needed all the support they could get. And what he didn’t say was that his own form of support was currently missing, and that Bones felt as though part of his soul had been torn out through his throat.

But he was not alone. Bones and Spock spent much of their own time silently side by side on the bridge, watching the screens, watching the stars, watching the planet below them, both childishly imagining that for as long as they had eyes on it, they somehow had eyes on Jim. Around them, day by day, the atmosphere on the ship was dying. Voices were heard less and less. Smiles exchanged were fewer and fewer. Tension seeped into every action, every word. A hush descended over every quarter, every shift, every crew member, as though the ship was in suspended animation. Which it was. Its warp core may have been perfectly healthy, but without the energy and the force of the warmth and light of its captain, it was beginning to cease to function. The Enterprise was sinking. 

Finally. The seventh week. 7.09am. The communication screen on the bridge came alive. The crew in that early morning consisted of most of the now finishing Gamma shift, and the faithful five from Alpha, whose shift patterns had ceased to matter. Six, including Scotty below decks.

In the change over, as the rest of Alpha came on to the bridge and stations were assumed and the usual handovers exchanged, they might not have noticed at first the first gleam of the screen.

But what no one could have failed to notice was the laughter.

Terrible, mocking, caustic laughter, that was so at odds with the tone on the ship, and that contrasted so abruptly with any sound that had been heard on board for approaching two months. But confusion snapped rapidly into attention as Parmen materialised on the screen, he and Eraclitus the source of the mordant sound, their mirth caused by their own inflated and monstrous sense of power, and the sight of the Enterprise crew – tired, worn, anxious….just waiting, because there was nothing else for them to do.

Spock, who had taken up his heavy-hearted position in the captain’s chair, was on his feet faster than a cat. Nyota’s hands flew to the panel, to ensure the line of communication was maintained. Bones, commed immediately by Sulu, almost fell in his haste through the doors out of the turbo lift from the medbay. And before anyone could stop him, Chekov had reacted to the laughter by taking two steps towards the screen with his fists clenched, yelling in rapid Russian, before Sulu had caught him and drawn him aside.

Then Parmen sat before them, a grotesque mockery of human sense in his robes and other filaments of wisdom. They were prepared to talk now, he said. The captain had had to undergo an essential journey, which they believed he was now completing. They would not welcome the sight of their captain, but they ought not to. His condition was necessary. Their shock at it was necessary. Within a day, he had stated, he would allow Commander Spock to return to the planet – but in the meantime, he would also allow them to witness some images that would be crucial to the completion of James T. Kirk’s journey. Slowly, a blurred, beige-coloured illustration began to appear on the screen….

And here was where Spock had made one single mistake.

The blocks on Platonius had been temporarily lifted, and the Platonians – clearly not anticipating the exceptional speed of Montgomery Scott – were not prepared for Spock to beam down immediately, demanding the instant release of their captain. Parmen had been incensed at this usurpship of his position of authority, and had only eventually agreed to release Jim because Spock had argued that ultimately, with the state Jim was in, the crew would be forced to return to Parmen for that understanding of what had happened to him. Parmen could now play the long-game. But for all Spock berated himself mercilessly for allowing – for causing, he thought, although Nyota tried desperately to reassure him that it was not so – this situation, he was willing to accept an eternity of self-flagellation in return for getting Jim away from there.

And when Spock had theorised that they would need to know what it was in Jim’s mind that was instigating his initial violent behaviour, and the sorrowful struggle with reality that he had endured since the meld, it was partly because Parmen had insinuated that most of Jim’s battle would be with his mental pain.  

So now, Spock stood once more before Parmen at the bridge’s main communication screen, face impassive, heart attempting to claw its way from his chest, on this next stage of negotiations in which his role was perhaps the most crucially subtle of any position he had ever occupied. He needed to exercise damage control in their relations with the Platonians – he needed to pacify and appease and flatter….and he needed this approach to be what eventually yielded the most critically vital of information: What it was that they had done to Jim. With the exception of Bones, who was at Jim’s side in the medbay to keep his attention away from what might be happening on the bridge, Alpha crew were at their stations, so evidently poised and alert that it hurt Spock to think of how proud Jim would be at the sight of them.

Parmen smiled a horrible facsimile of a smile, the self-satisfaction etched into his face as though he were one of the Acropolis’ Greek statues. The conversation had only been running for ten minutes or so, but Spock knew he had made no progress.

“Your captain is weak, Commander Spock”, Parmen leered.

Spock resisted the temptation to raise his chin in defiance. He settled for truthful words spoken calmly.

“He is the strongest being I know”, he replied.

Parmen laughed.

“And yet, he was undone by his own weakness!” he exclaimed, slapping his hands on the opulently embellished arms of his seat. “I must inform you, Commander Spock, that none of the cause of your captian’s ailments lie with us. We may have instigated this reaction – but they themselves are not our doing. They are entirely organic to him”.

Spock held Parmen’s gaze. This contributed to his suspicion that what he had seen in Jim’s mind was not artificially induced – that those images were indeed a part of Jim’s own memory, and what had taken place on the planet was that the Platonians, Parmen, had gained access to those memories that Jim had repressed so severely, and subjected him to reliving them again, and again, and again…until Jim had lost awareness of the boundary between his presence in those memories and his presence in the here and now. But he would not reveal to Parmen that he had deduced this. Parmen did not, given his now distance from Jim, know about the meld, and thus he did not know that Spock had his own source of information that was indicating to him the direction he needed to go in order to help Jim. Parmen still held that every iota of intelligence he gave to Spock was new. He was, if only on this small but essential premise, wrong.

And Spock knew exactly how to maintain this presumption of Parmen’s, while also furthering his own knowledge. Hands still clasped behind his back, he made sure that his features continued to present nothing but sincerity.

“You say that you have instigated this reaction”, he said. “But may I ask why?”

Parmen leaned back.

“Self-reliance is not a gift, Commander Spock”, he said. “Nor is knowledge. Both must be learned..carefully cultivated. And knowledge and self-awareness are the strongest forms of individual knowledge, I would have thought you with your Vulcan heritage would have agreed”.

“I do not disagree. But it is not within my knowledge how it could be acceptable to torture someone into that state”.

“Torture?” Parmen attempted a look of intelligent incredulity. Spock wanted to phase him through his faux Greek pillars. “Oh no, Commander Spock, this was not torture. It is enlightenment. I repeat - what he has experienced has not been projected by us, it is entirely already a part of him. We simply took what was within his mind, within his past, and looked properly, as he refused to do – as he has refused to do for so many years”.

Parmen paused here, and Eraclitus spoke instead.

“You see, crew of the SS Enterprise, most heralded and enviable ship in the Federation,” - he got to his feet and spread his arms wide, as if he were giving the presidential speech at an international political conference and could take for granted that everyone would enrapturedly absorb his every syllable. Spock’s skin crawled at the sound of his voice,

 – “your Captain – the legendary James Tiberius Kirk – is a fraud”.

Nyota barely contained her hissed intake of breath. Sulu seized Chekov’s arm, as Chekov leapt to his feet in a reiteration of his earlier reaction, tears glistening, face red. Scotty swore violently under his breath, folding his arms so forcefully across his chest in his effort to contain his rage that he looked in danger of crushing his own ribs.

As for Spock – one single muscle in his jaw ticked, and then he was still. 

But to the rest of the crew, Spock’s fury tore through the bridge like rabid wolves.

His impulse to tell the Platonians that they were the frauds was so intense he almost opened his mouth to allow the words to come. But Nyota caught his eye, and silently warned him.

 I know, he heard. But we cannot insult them now.

Spock recalibrated.

“A fraud?” He was buying time.

“Yes!” Eraclitus exclaimed, with an exaggerated shake of his voluminous and grandiose sleeves. “You believe him to be invincible, and he is not. He has led you to believe that he is wise, and astute, and vastly capable. He is misleading you, even as he attempts to lead you through the very universe. He has made you believe he has the correct knowledge, but he does not even have the appropriate knowledge of himself - the most primary of all wisdom. You have seen for yourselves now, we have exposed the weakness – it was only prudent to do so”.

Spock was deeply grateful that they were not in the Platonian’s physical presence, and that they could not exercise the psychokinetic power which would clearly have been imbibed in these words. Nonetheless, Spock was aware of a degree of danger, so potent was that force. He was suddenly possessed by an urgent and exhausted need to close the communication.

He inclined his head in what he hoped conveyed some humility, although his blood raged within him.

“I understand your intent, your eminence”, he said. “May I ask where this leaves us and the crew now?”

“We have brought enough of his mind to light for now”, Parmen said. “We have records of what haunts the great James T. Kirk’s mind – but they are not for your eyes at present. If your captain deserves that station, he will begin to manage the situation himself. If not…” Parmen gave a deep sardonic laugh,”…then we will perhaps reconvene to reconsider what aid we can or indeed ought to offer”.

Spock hid his shudder. He nodded to Parmen.

“Very well”, he said. “I thank you for your time”.

“We do not require your gratitude, Captain Spock. Our work is complete. You may contact us again if necessary. We will consider what further part we wish to play then”.

“I understand”, Spock replied. “And it remains Commander Spock. Spock out”.

With that, Nyota closed the channel.

There was silence on the bridge for some time. They were not making the progress for which they had hoped. The Platonians had played with Jim's sanity, really, for nothing. They had nothing to gain, nothing to lose....the wellbeing, the very existence, of Jim Kirk was, ultimately irrelevant to them. It had been a cruel, senseless, futile pastime, that had left a man almost dead. And they had no remorse. Worse - they believed they had somehow bestowed upon them a favour. Spock was unsure how one was meant to contend with such a situation.

Nyota went to Spock’s side, and touched his shoulder.

“It is simple power play”, he said in a low tone, staring straight ahead. “There is no need for this….”

Nyota shook her head. 

“So what next?”

Spock was spared the pain of searching for answering words that he knew he did not have by the faint hiss of his comm, followed by Leonard’s voice.

“McCoy to Spock”.

Spock slid the comm from its holster.

“I am receiving, Doctor McCoy”.

“Any news?”

If Spock had been barely able to break it to Nyota that he was losing confidence in this, their one solution, his inability to inform Leonard was, quite frankly, crippling. But…Leonard’s voice was, in actual fact, the connection to one last vestige of encouragement that was forming in Spock's mind. Spock left the chair to reply to Leonard in the slightly more secluded section of the deck, and pushed his own voice into holding some indication of conviction:

“Negative, in short, Doctor”, he said, “the Platonians are resolutely holding to their position of power. But – they have confirmed that what I saw in the meld has not been artificially imposed in Jim’s mind. The images are from his memory. Which means we do, at least, have a degree more information”.

Spock did not have to see the doctor’s face – he heard the frown over the comm, and he almost smiled, despite himself. Then he did hear Leonard let out a long breath, before he echoed Nyota’s earlier question.

“So what now?”

“I will meet you in the medbay at the end of shift Doctor, if I may. We will discuss this in sufficient length then. What I will say now is that going forwards is going to require the Captain talking – and that you will be integral to that process”.

Leonard grunted over the comm.

“I don’t think he can, Spock. I don’t think he knows what it is he needs to talk about”.

“And that, Leonard, is where we may well need further input from Parmen. But we will go as far as we can without that input first”.

There was a pause, and Spock heard murmuring as Leonard replied to a question from one of his staff. Then his voice was clear again.

“Alright, Spock. I’ll believe you. It’s not like we have any other fucking option”.

From nowhere, Spock suddenly heard Jim’s weary but affectionate voice: “That’s the spirit Bones”.

And he wanted to cry so badly he was certain the feeling would never reach its end.

Chapter Text

It had been fifteen days since they had brought Jim back from Platonius.

Bones, for whom tiny but persistent spasmodic and involuntary twitches of fatigue had begun to frequently besiege the small muscles in his upper arms and thighs, could, at this moment, think of nothing but that number.

He was currently sitting in his office, behind his desk with his hands on its surface, but not working. Gaze fixed ahead and apparently alert, but not seeing.

Fifteen days.

More specifically, he could think of nothing but its fractions.

Three lots of five.

Three...lots.....of five......

The first five, in which Jim had attempted to eat, and been sick perhaps three or four times during the whole period.

The middle five, in which Jim had started refusing to eat, and was being sick three or four times a day.

And the most recent five, in which Jim was being sick after ingesting anything at all, solid or liquid.

Fifteen days.

Before Bones’ open eyes, the havoc that the past three sets of five had wreaked upon Jim’s body presented itself again and again….His cheekbones, straining prominently. His skin, ashen. His arms, almost skeletal. His pelvis, almost shatterable. His ribs…. God his ribs. Earlier that day, Bones had put his hands either side of Jim in order to help him shift position, and his fingers had slipped seamlessly into the grooves between the ladder of bones there. All five fingers, slotting perfectly into five unnatural alleys.

Five, and five, and five….

Three lots of five….

Fifteen days….

Bones closed his eyes, and felt his heart pounding so hard it pulsed the sweat from his skin.

The previous night. Suddenly, the biobed is wailing. Bones, thrust out of sleep with a violence he is becoming depressingly used to, throws back the sheets, leaps to his feet, and stumbles through the partitioning door. Christine is half way to the bed already - but Jim is yelling for him.

“Jim - ” Bones, sitting down so rapidly on at Jim’s side that he almost misses the bed, gets hold of Jim under his armpits and pulls him into sitting. Jim reaches for him straight away, and Bones gathers him in, holding him as close and as tight as possible, sheltering him.

“Okay Jim, I’m here, it’s alright…I’m here…I’m here…”

Bones hasn’t needed to see the screens to identify the source of the alarm – Jim’s heartrate is over 160bpm, and he’s hyperventilating. Swiftly assuming medical control, Bones moves Jim to hold him slightly away from him. Jim, wide-eyed and frantic, fights the sudden appearance of that bit of distance, but Bones stands firm.

“Jim, it’s alright, I’m still here, I’ve got you – but you need to breathe, we need to breathe together, ok? Breathe….As deep in as you can, then long on the out, ok? Come on, breathe with me….”

Jim nods over his constricted chest, trying. He can’t get the first breath in. Bones grabs him closer, and puts a hand on Jim’s breast bone, the other gentle but firm at the back of his neck.

“Alright Jim, push this hand away” (he taps Jim’s chest) “try to lift it away from you, alright? Breathe in, focus on my hand, let your chest push it away from you….”

At the moment, Bones’ hand is bouncing erratically on Jim’s ribs, being jerked by Jim’s natural agitated effort to simply suck in any air. Bones gently squeezes the hand on Jim’s neck, and keeps up his mantra.

“Try and relax Jim, just try for one deep breath, as deep as you can, come on, lift my hand away…”

Jim struggles, and Bones is beginning to consider a sedative, but finally, he feels one small but deliberately controlled upwards movement from Jim’s lungs.

“That’s it kid, well done, come on, keep going – deep in, long out, deep in, long out…”

And eventually, Jim manages to get a rhythm going, shallowly at first, but then, as oxygen returns and panic fades, the air begins to seep further down, and he can draw longer and longer breaths, although they are shuddering, and exhausted. Bones keeps his hand on Jim’s chest until it is moving reliably, regularly, more slowly. Then for reassurance as he lays him back down. Jim closes his eyes, heart still hammering under Bones’ palm, but rate decreasing as Jim eases into the sheer relief of being able to breathe. Bones rubs slow but light circles on his chest. He knows Jim’s lungs will feel stretched, overworked. He doesn’t want him to start coughing. It will tear the already devastated fibres.

Bones sits at Jim’s side with his hand on Jim’s chest until Jim is completely still, and his breaths are coming in short, quiet exhales. He is asleep.

“Alright Jim,” Bones whispers, for comfort now more than anything else. “It’s alright….”

“I’m not sure how”, he had been tempted to add. But this was his own weakness.

A small rap at the door literally knocked him back into some kind of consciousness.

“Come in”.

The door didn’t need to be opened by the handle, it was never properly closed at the moment. Instead it was pushed quietly, so that the gap expanded to reveal Chapel standing apologetically in the opening.

“Sorry, Doctor McCoy, I know you’re nearing the end of your shift”.

Bones smiled, and he realised that it hurt to do so. That particular set of muscles, at least, was not being overworked.

“There is no such thing as a shift for me at the moment Christine”, he said, kindly. “What is it?”

“The captain is clearly in some discomfort, and he is running a high fever again. The alarm didn’t sound as I was with him as it went off – I silenced it. But he only wants you for an examination”.

She threw him a small smile of encouragement.

You’re doing an incredible job, Leonard…. Your patients are the luckiest in the world. Your Jim is the luckiest of all patients to have you as both doctor and friend. Keep going.

So why couldn’t he stop this?

“Alright Christine, thank you”.

He pushed himself up from the desk on his hands, waiting a few moments while his own rapidly dropping blood pressure caused his vision to darken, then pulled himself upright, and followed Chapel back into the too-bright (too fucking cheerful) lights of the medbay.

Jim’s bed was closest to the door to Bones’ quarters, obviously, and as soon as he set foot in the room he could see the pinched tightness of Jim’s grey face. When Jim wasn’t admitting to pain, this was the signal that, to Bones’ eyes at least, did it for him.

But he knew it was bad when Jim spoke immediately.

“Bones….I can’t….I need to….but it hurts…”

Jim was trying to sit himself forwards, attempting to take his weight on his arms as though he were sitting on fire. His legs, even in their wasted state, were kicking a-rhythmically, twisting in an effort to get away from something. They were classic signs, and Bones knew immediately what to look for. Throwing a quiet word of dismissal aside to Chapel, who had been standing at his side waiting to assist, Bones took two steps over to Jim’s bed, and reached under the edge for the catheter bag. It was empty, aside from a infinitesimal amount of painfully dark yellow liquid.

“Jim”, he said, putting the back of his hand to Jim’s forehead to feel the temperature burning more fiercely than before, “can you not pee?”

Jim bit his lip, still writhing, which was costing him precious energy. He shook his head.

“God, Bones, honestly….it feels like I’m desperate, but – “

He cut off here, squeezed his eyes shut, and let out a hiss of pain.

“But I can’t – “

Bones already had the hypo in hand. He pushed it into Jim’s neck without any preamble, then pulled out his tricorder.

“It’s a urinary infection, Jim”, he said, running the tricorder across Jim’s pelvis and watching the screen. He paled at its feedback.

“Or, more accurately, a kidney infection. Stomach ache? Backache?"

"Yes", Jim breathed, "all of it".

Bones motioned to Chapel to come back to the bed and take the PADD, which she did, looking down at the screen. With a barely perceptible nod, she disappeared to retrieve the correct antibiotics.

Bones put his hand to Jim’s shoulder and gently pushed him back against the pillows.

“I know, kid, it’s nasty. And anyone would have thought that you’d have at least got this from more interesting activity than slowly dying on me”.

Jim threw him a look that he had honed perfectly in their academy days, when Bones would berate him about protection, and unknown alien STDs, and other untold horrors that Jim was fairly sure Bones mostly made up just to frighten him, or for his own slightly sadistic entertainment.

But try as they might, this was no joke. Jim’s kidneys were struggling badly. It was the first sign of the starvation related organ failure Bones had been dreading.

“Ok, first things first”, Bones said, in a gentle tone. Now he had Jim lying back, he could do what he needed to. He waited a moment while Christine hooked up the new IVs and left (subtly pulling the privacy curtain closed around them), then put on a pair of gloves and slid his hand under the sheets to where the catheter tube met Jim’s body. He had done this so many times with Jim, he didn’t even need to look.

“I’m going to change this, for one thing, ok? The pain relief will kick in soon, and they're the fastest acting antibiotics that I can give you. We'll start flushing it through in no time".

Jim nodded miserably. He was completely silent as Bones worked carefully through the sensitive process, but he managed to joke towards the end.

“You know Bones, I’ve often thought when you’ve been doing this that it’s not exactly how I’d imagine what your hands would be doing down there. Although I do quite like the idea of the gloves…”

Bones looked up from his position at Jim’s hip. Under the sheets, he tapped lightly on Jim’s inner thigh.

“May I remind you Jim that you are in a pretty vulnerable situation right now. Any more jokes like that and I won’t be responsible for my actions”.

“Oooh, what actio – “

“You’re incorrigible, James Kirk”, said Bones, withdrawing his hands as he finished the last adjustments, and repositioning the bag. “And you don’t half know how to choose your moments”.

“You mean this isn’t wildly sexy to you?”

“If it was, I’d have lost my license a long time ago. Which, in turn, would have meant you would have died a long time ago. Neither of these are particularly erotic thoughts”.

Jim laughed, such as he could manage.

It was a sound Bones would have died to hear properly again. But, as he knew it would, it triggered a coughing fit, and almost immediately – but not before Bones got the bowl in front of him - Jim threw up.

Ten minutes later, when the spate had passed and the pain relief was starting to take effect, Bones sat down on the edge of Jim’s bed. He knew his face was grave. Jim watched him through exhausted eyes.

“Any better down south?" he asked.

Jim gave a faint nod. 

"You're going to feel that for a while, I'm afraid. Kidneys are responsible for basically washing your insides - when they're working perfectly you'd never know they were there. And when they're in trouble, well....they make up for lost time".

"I think mine might be having a wrestling match".

"Well it doesn't matter too much if one knocks the other out. You can make do with one. It's just...not the end game, is it".

Jim shook his head sadly. 

Bones sighed. A moment of honesty had arrived. And he knew, that Jim having been his patient for so long, had recognised it too, because he looked away, but without disengaging, which was code for he was listening, but unlikely to like it. 

Jim”, Bones began. “You have this infection because your organs are malnourished. They can’t protect themselves – and that infection you had before has been given easy access”.

He saw Jim’s face tighten in prediction of what was coming. Bones put his hand on Jim’s arm, and watched as Jim’s gaze dropped to it.

Bones’ hands. Jim loved Bones’ hands. Georgian, strong, broad, tanned, hands that had lifted his little girl, that had then had that denied them, that had saved lives, been inside bodies….hands with clever fingers, unbelievably gentle and sensitive despite the irritable waving around in which they were mostly engaged. Expressive. Jim loved those hands. They had picked him up, seized him, stopped him, pushed him, shaken him, held him, cleaned him up, cleaned up after him, woken him up, put him to sleep, wiped his tears, caused them, been covered in almost every fluid possible – held his blood. They had smoothed his sheets out, sworn at him, opened the whiskey. They had never flinched. They had been on either side of Jim’s face because their owner was yelling at him, or because he needed him to look at him, to listen. Those hands had stroked his hair away from his feverish forehead, and had wanted, on more than one occasion he knew, to slap him. They represented the care he had taken of all the crew, the skill, imbibed with expertise. They were doctor’s hands. But more importantly, they were Bones’ hands – and Jim knew that he would know them anywhere, on any plane of reality, for all of time.

“Jimmy…”

Jim started slightly, and looked back up into Bones’ face. Jim was unable to hold concentration on anything for very long at the moment, and Bones knew this. But he was looking intently at him.

“……Jim we have to start getting something substantial into you.  I know we’ve exhausted most of our usual means, but there are still some things to try. We have do that now, okay?”

It was no lie that they had used up all of their old reliable methods. White bread, and rice, plain pasta….everything that Bones had depended upon back at the Academy when Jim was having a particularly bad phase and nothing would stay down. Even these tried and trusted old faithfuls were being defeated by Jim’s physical and apparently psychological inability to keep anything down. Now, with this new development, Bones felt the first vestige of panic. He pushed it away.

“So”, he continued, attempting a bright tone despite Jim’s look of utter desolation, “fluids. We’ll do as much of it as we can with fluids. For one thing, it’ll ease your waterworks. Get something running through there that doesn’t feel like mashed up fire ants”.

“Shakes?” Jim asked, quietly.

“Shakes”, Bones nodded. “And protein bars. But we’ll start with shakes”.

What Bones didn’t tell Jim was that he was starting to worry about the safety involved in trying to get him to eat solid food. With his potassium this low, the function of digestion could well…..

No. They weren’t there yet.

“Wait here”, he said, patting Jim’s leg and standing up.

“What, like I was going to get up and run away?”

“I know you, Jim”, Bones called over his shoulder as he disappeared into his office. “And I’ve seen you do worse than that to get out of medbay”.

Shortly after, Bones reappeared at Jim’s bedside, where Jim had been almost asleep. He awoke to find his vision obscured by something so un-utterably green that it made grass look purple. When his focus returned somewhat, he was able to distinguish that this greenness was contained within a cylindrical glass, and that that glass was being held by Bones in front of him, as though he were expected to drink it.

“What the hell is that?”

“Not that I appreciate you questioning my methods Jim, but it’s a fruit protein shake. Strawberry, raspberry, banana, and plain yoghurt. Well, as close to as the replicator could manage”.

“Why is it so green?”

“Because it also has spinach in it”.

“Spinach isn’t a fruit!”

“Neither is yoghurt, but you didn’t complain about that. Now drink it”.

Jim eyed the concoction with a level of suspicion so cartoon-like that Bones almost laughed.

“It looks like Vulcan blood”.

“Ah, well then I may as well come entirely clean. Hadn’t you noticed that you haven’t seen Spock today?”

“Bones….”

“Okay, okay, so likening it to drinking the blood of your First Officer isn’t helping. But you’re still going to drink it. Put it this way - just drink it before I strap you down and catapult it into you, because so help me God, Jim, I’ll do it. On the end of a machete. From a distance. While the machete is on fire. Here you go look…“

Bones produced a pink straw and stuck it in the liquid.

“Bones… The straw. Is standing. Up….. By itself”.

“Yeah, well, I got as much into it as possible. It’s either that or we do two separate ones?”

“No no, it’s fine!”

“Besides, I seem to remember you drinking Joanna’s homemade tomato ketchup when she gave you that with a straw – and that was part mud. A lot mud, actually. And the rest was nail polish remover”.

“That’s different. She’s six - six year olds are terrifying if you don’t do what they say”.

“More terrifying than me if you don’t do what I say?”

“She’s your daughter, Bones, and she’s got the six-year-old thing. That’s a double whammy of scary. Plus, you know - ” Jim gave a slight shrug. “ - it was Joanna”.

This was one of the very few things in the world that had the power to move Bones to tears. Jim’s love for Joanna, and hers for him. He had introduced them on only the fourth time he’d been allowed to see Joanna after the divorce, once the first few times were over and he was sure that Jocelyn wasn’t going to suddenly change her mind and stop his access again. He’d not only been like a dead man walking while separated completely from his daughter, but like a man who had already been through the guillotine and somehow gruesomely survived. And Jim had bled every drop alongside him. So, just a year into his and Jim’s friendship at the Academy, he’d invited Jim to come with him to Georgia one weekend, where they’d have Joanna at Leonard’s mother’s for the weekend.

It had been mutual love at first sight. Of course, Leonard suspected that a lot of this immediate and natural affinity came from the fact that Jim was also basically a six year old, and he sounded off to his mama in the kitchen on the second day while Jim and Joanna were outside playing The Floor is Lava on the hay bales in the front yard with the three family dogs and about sixteen bantam chicks that both of them kept trying to rescue that now he essentially had two kids. His mama knew him well enough to hear what he was really saying, and, smiling at her handsome son, took his chin in her hand, and turned his head to the window, and told him to look. Just look. Look at that happiness. Know you’re a part of it. Know you made it happen. Allow it. Be in it.

Jim and Joanna had been mad about each other ever since, and Bones had felt something close to bliss every time he saw the two of them together.

Now, in the terrible present, Bones looked down at Jim lying on the bed, so fragile and thin, holding his glass of the only concoction Bones could think of that might go some way to stopping this terrible process, and for the first time since that weekend in Georgia, he was glad that Joanna wasn’t here to be with them. But he still loved that he could see Jim’s love for Joanna. It just made everything so, so much worse. What would he tell her if….

No. They weren’t there yet.

Bones smiled at him, and gave the glass a gentle push in Jim’s direction.

“Well I’m the closest thing at the moment. Can you do it for me, just for now?”

Bones could see the struggle behind the sapphire. And the fear. That inexplicable fear that was still causing night terrors and hallucinations, the fear that seemed for Jim to have become indistinguishable from food, and from eating. The fear that Bones suspected was pouring out of Jim every time he vomited.

But he did it.

Bones sat quietly by while Jim gradually made his way through the shake. He flicked through a few messages on his PADD, and sent a few outstanding ones. He didn’t want this to have to be a show for Jim, any more than it already was. He wanted to try and retain some remnant of normality, even though they’d been here together so many many times before.

But this time was different, and although Bones was feigning his attention being elsewhere, and although he was indeed capable of reading and sending messages in his professional capacity while his mind was otherwise occupied, the terror that had been lurking within him was becoming more distracting by the day. For Bones knew that he was guilty of something so awful, it may well be violating his oath.

Avoidance.

He knew what was coming for Jim, if they couldn’t turn this around, if he couldn’t start eating and/or keeping anything down. But Bones himself couldn’t face that just yet, even though he knew it was probably best…..So he had taken this route – of shakes and protein bars – in an attempt to buy their way out of the last chance saloon.  

Jim finished the shake, and handed the glass back to Bones with only a small grimace.

“Itwasnthabad”, Bones heard, faintly. 

“Sorry, Jim?” Bones tilted his head in mock inquiry. He had very well heard Jim the first time.

“I said it wasn’t that bad! You’re such a moron”. Jim batted Bones’ arm lightly with the back of his hand.

Bones winked at him, and repositioned himself on the bed to wait the fifteen minutes (fifteen days.....three set of five.....) to see if the shake would come back up.

It did.

Chapter Text

They were two days into their visit to that Last Chance Saloon. Looking on his PADD at the various reports and summaries generated by Jim’s bio-monitors, the darker humour in Bones was sorely tempted to rename the various bio-feeds with that very title. After all, they were very much in danger of being firmly evicted from the bar. Of being chased out in a volley of gunfire and the very real potential of a sudden, senseless, and undeserved - except for the mad musings of some power-jealous despot – death.

Bones was administering (for there was no other verb for this process – he was not ‘giving’ it to Jim, he was not offering, or providing….he was dispensing, in the pure and simple medical sense of the word) four shakes a day to Jim – and Jim’s body was dispensing it right back, every time. Sometimes not all of it would reappear; Bones took some encouragement from the fact that for perhaps two out of the twenty or so episodes of vomiting that occurred every day about a third appeared to have stayed down.

It was better than nothing.

This phrase, ‘better than nothing’, Bones reflected, had become the summary of his entire medical capability when it came to this situation with Jim. The very thought of that drove him to the sort of distraction that cannot help but manifest itself physically. When the words passed through his mind, as they did on an hourly basis, Bones found that they seemed to have converted themselves into a hard and fast neuro-stimulation. He immediately wanted to lash out – not to cause pain to anyone or anything else, but to inflict upon himself some kind of recognisable, tangible embodiment of the frustration and sheer helplessness that the words represented. And still, each time, he gathered himself, centered his thoughts on what could be done, what was still possible….He knew that a significant part of him had ceased to believe in these possibilities. But it was his only weapon. And he was fighting for Jim. He would not reject any means available to him, however brittle and transient he knew they really were.

Jim had committed to the shakes and protein bar schedule with a ferocity that broke Bones’ heart. He was trying. Goddammit, the kid was trying. Bones handed him glasses full of liquid that looked as if they had been poured directly from the source of a rainbow – Jim drank it. He gave him glasses of liquid that looked as if they had been dredged from the bottom of a nuclear lake – Jim drank it. Bones sat close to him throughout, sometimes telling him of the more mundane daily happenings on the ship, sometimes relaying memories of JoJo when she was very little, sometimes maintaining an understanding quiet, one hand close to or on Jim’s free arm, one hand pretending to focus his attention on business on his PADD.

Frequently, no matter how they approached eating – that most basic and necessary of human functions - Bones would wipe Jim’s silent tears.

“What is it, Jim?......” He whispers, late one evening when it has taken Jim over an hour to get through just one dose of liquid. He leans in so that his voice is low and quiet in the space between them. Pushes the hair away from Jim’s face. Soothing. “What’s doing this to you?......Try and tell me….”

Jim shakes his head, pressing the now empty glass onto Bones’ lap with a thin and trembling hand. Useless.

Spock, vigilant that night beside Jim’s bed as often as he can be, waits for Jim’s answer with an expectant intensity that Bones tries to avoid, but that he appreciates at least one of them is demonstrating. Jim can look at neither of them. Bones sets the glass aside and takes out his tricorder. He doesn’t need to. Jim is sick before the screen is lit.

Bones’ own heart almost stops at the sight of the fluid that Jim expels. It is black. The moment Bones sees this is the same moment the tricorder reports the relevant information. Jim is having a bleed. Spock leaps to his feet, in a terror that to Bones has become blatantly evident even in the motionlessness of his face. Bones almost wrenches his arm from the socket in his urgency to seize the internal regenerator. Bones calls for Chapel and two further nurses, who sedate Jim while Bones concentrates on what regen treatment he can administer immediately. The blood is coming from Jim’s oesophagus – it is deep, but the bleed is only a fissure, not a rupture. Not yet. And Bones is successful with preventing this small tear from rending his entire throat from end to end. This time.

Soon, though. Jim’s system cannot bear this brutality much longer. His body is coming apart. It is taking itself apart. It is a slow and gradual suicide, that is also weirdly oxymoronic in the fact that it is involuntary. But it is becoming a certainty.

It is time to make the decision.

He does. 

______________________________________________

This afternoon, Bones tasks Chapel with giving Jim the next scheduled protein bar. He needs to see Spock. Partly because they need to reconvene on what the next steps ought to be regarding Parmen and the obtaining of the information they need to begin treating Jim psychiatrically. Partly because Bones needs the company of someone who is suffering to the same extent he is. Everyone on the ship loves Jim, this he knows. He is their captain – their leader, protector, defender, and confidant. But – and this he also knows – should Jim die, their lives would resume normal functioning within a sensibly expected length of time. They would mourn, their professional lives may change through new orders, or a newly appointed captain, they would undoubtedly remember James T. Kirk for the rest of their lives, and pass on his memory and legend to their children, and their children’s children…..but all of this would be a reasonable reaction to what had always been a very reasonable possibility in this line of work.

Bones needed the presence of someone for whom the loss of Jim Kirk could never, in an entire remaining lifetime, be processed as a reasonable event.

Also, Bones now had to tell Spock about his next intended move. Jim had deserved to know first, he deserved the chance to fight by himself one last time. And so, before he left Jim with Chapel, he had explained. 

Jim had laid unmoving under Bones’ hand resting softly on his chest, looking at him steadily. Bones had placed his hand there a good few moments before he began to speak. He had found there to be a significant correlation between Jim receiving physical contact and a reduction in his hallucinations and panic attacks. For this, Bones was unspeakably grateful. He had historically relied on touching Jim for a great deal of his role in Jim’s life, whether as his doctor, or as his best friend who had fought, laughed, cried, yelled, learned, drank, failed, won, and slept beside him. Jim’s tactility had always been a draw to Leonard, despite his own habitual efforts to retain distance between himself and any other person. Bones had wondered at first whether it was because he was missing JoJo with such savage desperation, and having Jim to depend on him but to also drag him in a million separate joyful directions at once reminded him of his child. He had decided in the end that this was certainly part of it, but by then Jim Kirk had carved a space in Leonard McCoy’s heart all of his own, and Bones was unable to tell where his own happiness ended, and Jim began. If, indeed, there was such a separation.

Whatever the Platonians had done to him, they had not destroyed the part of Jim that meant that Bones could touch him and instantaneously watch the number on the heartrate monitor start to fall….

Jim’s heartrate remained steady now, as Bones had spoken quietly to him.

“There will be only one way, Jim, in which we can help bypass the vomiting problem. If you can’t physically eat, and it very much looks as though that is the case, then we will have to do it artificially. I don’t want to do this to you. But I think I may have to. Very soon.”

Jim’s gaze had not faltered. Bones had talked on. He had started now. But he needed to muster some of his customary brevity in which to see this through. He took a breath.

“There is also the fact that you are already very sick. Your body just will not be able to withstand this continual lack of nutrition. Do you understand? So…..if, in a day or so, we can’t turn this around ourselves – it will be the tube. Okay? I will have to NG feed you. End of story”.

Jim had been silent for a minute or so. Bones stroked some damp hair away from Jim’s temple, and waited patiently for the response. When it came, Jim’s voice was small, and young.

“We always avoided it before, didn’t we.”

He was referring to their time at the Academy, when Bones had – perhaps three times at most, when it was at its worst – mentioned the notion of the tube, and the fact that this may well become their only option. Jim had loathed the idea. Had fought against it so vehemently that Bones had seen him almost pass out from the effort of holding his breath while the waves of nausea broke over him and he resisted them….For a night, once, they had sat together on the bathroom floor while the urge attacked again and again and again, and Jim had defied it again and again and again. Eyes closed, rocking, breath coming in forced bursts from his nostrils, fingers clenching over the opposite forearms which in turn were wrapped around his stomach. His nose had bled. His eyes were bloodshot. The fury of his thwarted body turned its focus to his skin instead, which erupted in vicious hives that Bones had to dress as soon as they appeared just to stop Jim from trying to rip them down to the bone. A true Starfleet captain in the making, all determination and courage in the face of apparent assured defeat. When they had woken up, cold, stiff and aching on the hard tiles the following morning, and realised they had made it not just through those six hours from 10pm the previous evening, but also through the recent four hours in which they had actually slept, Bones had wanted to weep in this, one of the two proudest moments of his life. The first had been the birth of his daughter. And this was the second – shivering and sore on an Academy dorm bathroom with his best friend, who had managed, of his own sheer bloody-mindedness, not to be sick for ten hours, while a faint laugh of defiant disbelief arose between them as they absorbed the enormity of the achievement.

‘They’. ‘Them’. ‘We’. Bones had been with Jim every step of the way along this long and dangerous journey, though he knew not where they had come from, to where they were going, or what was at its cause. And he wasn’t about to stop now. ‘They’ it would stay.

“We did, Jim”, he had nodded, with a faint smile. “Because you are strong, and brave, and so fucking determined that it scares the shit out of me on an almost daily basis. And we’re going to try and keep avoiding it, just like you did before. I just needed you to know. To know that that would be my next move. We’re in this together. I want you to still have all the information possible, okay? I want you to be in this with me, as much as you can be, even though we’ve reached the stage where I have to make some of the decisions. Okay?”

“…..Okay”.

Bones had produced the mid-morning protein bar.

“So….” He held it up. “…..Ten rounds with the cookie dough flavour?”

Jim had tried to smile, and took the bar from Bones with a trembling hand.

Bones watched him for a moment as Jim solemnly picked off a corner and looked at it with a sadness that tore Bones’ heart like the sickness was tearing Jim’s insides, before turning round so that he could sit back against the metal rail that served as a headboard, and put one arm around Jim, wedging him into the crook between his arm and his chest, where Jim had laid so many times before when he was ill like this. Jim pressed into him, and, with one single deep breath, got the bar down in under ten minutes.  In less than five minutes, he was retching. Bones had turned to face him, taken hold of his shoulders, tried to encourage him to breathe, to think “down”, to relax, to fight…. And Jim was once more sick down Bones’ medcoat, albeit partially this time, as Bones was ready with the kidney bowl.

“Never mind, Jim”, he stated as he cleaned them both up, kind and firm, his innate knack for conveying to Jim both a medical and a personal level of care radiating through all of his words, “we’ll just try again.”

An hour or so later, he gave the 3pm protein bar to Chapel, along with loose instructions to encourage him, but to let him try as hard as he could on his own. He wouldn’t be long, he said.

‘This is probably his last chance’, he didn’t say.

Bones finds Spock in the science lab, the Vulcan taking solace from the calm and methodical movements required of his hands for the various delicate procedures with which he was currently involved. Bones watched him through the glass panelled door for a while, following Spock’s hands as they moved from station to station, transferring information, gathering it, exchanging implements, monitoring feedback. It was systematic, controlled, precise, exact…..

Bones thought of the work of his own hands. On Jim’s breaking body…He, too, was a scientist. He didn’t wear the blue shirt for nothing. But nothing in the science of Jim’s body was certain, nothing was exact, precise, or predictable. Jim had, for Bones, become one long desperate and spontaneous experiment, in which hypotheses were not strong, methodologies were inconsistent, and the results inconclusive. Bones leaned his forehead against the glass, watching Spock just a few meters away, who remained oblivious to Bones’ presence. His skin touched the cold blueness of the glass, and the silence of his surroundings became a weight the likes of which he had never known. He had thought the vast expanse of the hot summer Georgian evening to be the heaviest non-tangible thing. But he was wrong. This silence, which would only be brief, for all of his responsibility crowded and pressed at its edges, waiting to drag him back in, was heavier than the Enterprise itself. And of that Bones was sure, because he and the man just beyond him were between them holding the Enterprise up.

Finally, he put his palm to the entry panel, and stepped in behind Spock. When Spock turned to look at him, Bones saw that there was a faint dark green tinge under his eyes.

Spock nods at him, setting aside his instruments.

“It is good to see you out of the medbay, Leonard”, he says. “I realise this is an entirely misplaced, inappropriate, and illogical thing upon which to remark, given that you cannot help but remain in the medbay almost permanently at present – but there is a trace of normality in your being outside of it that deceives my brain into temporarily believing that we are not in our current situation. I am aware that this is not reality, and that to succumb to that belief, even temporarily, is highly unlikely to be helpful. But – “

“But you are human, Spock”, Bones interrupts, with the small barely-a-smile that despite its apparent ‘weakness’ is actually reserved all for this particular dynamic and this one alone. “At least, partly human. And we all need a little escapism sometimes”. He shrugged. “I think we can’t really help but do it. It’s a defence mechanism”.

“I appreciate your generosity of spirit, Leonard”, Spock replied. “I believe with that some further introspection on my part, your words will have significantly improved my attitude to that aspect of my reaction to these appalling circumstances”.

Bones gave a quiet snort. “At least I’ve improved something”, he said, sitting down in one of the revolving chairs at the room’s central console. He knew it was self-pitying and unconstructive, but he too was giving way to the odd humanity-induced crack in his otherwise tirelessly determined exterior. It was ironic, he thought, that he was doing so to the very being whose humanity he had questioned for so long – but this was perhaps why it was so powerful to do so. Spock’s unwavering Vulcan stalwartness encouraged Bones’ own ability to push the weeping human inside of him aside in order that he might continue to function for Jim – and Bones diluted Spock’s iron-like resistance to emotion. Between them, Bones realised, they were becoming quite a unit.

“Do not blame yourself, Leonard, for the current apparent futility of Jim’s condition”, Spock said, with surprising gentleness.

Bones shook his head.

“I might not be to blame in a positive ‘you caused this’ kind of sense, Spock”, he said, “but it is my job to at least heal him from these conditions…and there is no-one else responsible for that, so…in a negative sense at least, yeah – I’m to blame”.

“Leonard, we know that in this particular situation I am in an equal position to you in relation to Jim’s illness, if not a more powerful one… and thus far I too have been unable to help him”.

At that, Spock came and stood at Bones’ elbow, back straight, hands clasped behind his back, shoulders squared, features intent, in a stance so like that which he adopted at Jim’s right hand on the bridge that Bones suddenly felt invasive, as if he had walked over someone’s grave. To have Spock standing beside him not in challenge, contest, defiance, or clash of wit, but in solidarity and companionship was to Bones such a concrete expression of the severity of these times that it was all he could do not to push the Vulcan away. But he could feel the deep heat of Spock’s Vulcan physiology, and it was some contact of the kind that Bones was sorely missing -

….door opens slowly, cautiously. The familiar silhouette cast in grey across the dimly lit floor. Bones opens one eye and smiles to himself as the figure quietly closes the door behind it and creeps closer to the bed.

“Bones….?”

Bones has already lifted the edge of the sheets and shifted back a few inches.

“Just get in and shut up”.

But he smiles as he says it.

The figure, which now it is close enough to slide into bed with him has taken on a distinctly captain-like resemblance, slips into the sheets and sinks into a shape against Bones’ body that it itself has worn and carved out over the years. Like a door and its frame, the contours are smooth and flush with time. They close together silently and perfectly.

A few minutes later, a whisper.

“Still don’t tell anyone that I’m like this, ok?”

“That the Captain needs a teddy and I’m it? Too late Jim, I already commed Chekov. That boy couldn’t keep a secret if it had herpes. The whole ship will know by 7am. Sorry kid”.

He felt Jim smile against his chest.

A few minutes later still:

“It’s not that I need a teddy, you know that right?”

Bones nodded once in the darkness.

“But you’re right about me needing….and you being it”.

Bones squeezed Jim to him.

Next,

“Besides, I think you’d make a great teddy. You know, the kind where all the fur has been loved off”.

“Okay - you want to sleep in the hallway?”

Jim laughed.

A few minutes after that, they were asleep.

 - Bones pulled himself back. He looked up at Spock.

“Yeah….we need to talk about that”.

“I agree. But let me begin by asking – how is he? Duty dictated that I was unable to pay my customary visit to the medical bay before shift this morning, and I thought it best to execute these final tasks of the shift before going to Jim in order to reduce the chance that I would be called away.”

 Bones held up a hand.

“It’s alright, Spock”, he calmed, “Jim missed you, but he understands. So do I. He knew that you would have come at some point, without question. But to answer your first question…..I need to talk to you about that too.”

Spock raised one eyebrow in an enquiry that could not have been more fiercely demanding than if he had held a gun to Bones’ head.

“It’s nothing new”, Bones said, quick to reassure. “Well…his condition is not new. This part of the treatment is”.

Spock’s ears moved.

“I request that you inform me at once, Doctor McCoy”.

Bones noted the use of his formal title. Nothing he was about to say was going to appease the fear that was generating Spock’s retreat into regulation and reserve. He sighed.

“Jim is worsening by the day. By the hour. I won’t sugar coat that. I don’t want to, and you don’t want to hear it. So there we are”.

Spock waited, aware that these words were a preliminary, and that the doctor was not finished.

“Spock, are you at all familiar with nasal gastronomic feeding?”

Spock gave a short nod.

“I am aware of the practice, and of its uses. Although I believed it to be a more prevalent form of therapy in the treatment of humans with eating disorders than in general medical practice”.

“That’s it”, Bones said, shortly. “It is”.

When he said no more, Spock was forced to ask.

“And do you believe Jim to have an eating disorder?”

Bones could not decide if he was sickened or relieved to finally be having this most to-the-point of conversations. He had stepped around it long enough. He was aware now that he was on the broken glass, and that, although this was ultimately the only route, his feet would bleed. But it was a sharp and sweet pain that served to inform him it was necessary, and that it was only by going from one edge of the vicious circle across the middle to the other that he could actually see that other side. For as long as he simply followed the outer edge, he would simply go on following that line round, and round, and round, indefinitely. Until he lost his mind. Or Jim died. With Spock, Bones thought, they had a chance of making it across the centre. He drew himself up.

“Yes”, he said. Declared. “Yes, I believe Jim has an eating disorder. He is terribly ill, yes, and there are a hundred reasons why he may be vomiting as constantly as he is. But they don’t show up on the bioscans – and in any case, I don’t believe any of them to be the cause for Jim. I think there is something serious in his psyche, a trauma he hasn’t dealt with that has somehow manifested itself in a need for starvation, a need to avoid eating, and in the vomiting as Jim unconsciously tries to get rid of whatever it is that’s tormenting him. I think he knows this is the case, but has become so good at the voluntary inability to recall that he has forgotten this is what it is. Now, he is truly physically ill – because of what Parmen did to him and because that triggered this reaction – and so the physical illness has become more dangerous, and has again diverted attention away from the real cause. But that he has disordered eating is a fact. And that this is an emotional response to suffering and distress has, if I’m honest, been clear to me for years. So, yes, Jim has an eating disorder”.

Spock considered this.

“I was under the impression that eating disorders usually involved a strong correlation with an irrational fear of weight gain”, he said. “Does Jim exhibit this symptom as well?”

Bones scrubbed his right eye with the heel of his hand. He felt a trace of annoyance that Spock was bordering on questioning his medical judgement. His medical judgement of Jim, no less. But also, there were things here he would really rather not remember, and much less now associate with Jim. But he had to be glad, he supposed, that he had this experience. He may as well tell Spock. It would perhaps convince him to trust Bones with what was coming next – and his recent closeness to Spock also pressed upon him a degree of sympathy, despite his irritation, for the Vulcan’s obvious feeling of helplessness. Spock understood this aspect of the situation even less than Bones did, and that, the doctor knew, must be terrifying.

“Spock”, he said, careful to keep anything patronising out of his tone; he wanted this to be a statement of fact, not a demonstration of his superior knowledge. “Long before I joined Starfleet, when I was training back in Georgia, I did a six-month placement at a psychiatric unit in Atlanta which specialised in adolescents with mental health problems. Namely, self-harm and eating disorders. The care in that place wasn’t good. For one thing, no-one understood it. All these kids who were just refusing to eat and wasting away. Dying, sometimes. They were just seen as idiots. “Just fucking eat, for God’s sake”, was written all over the rest of the staff’s faces. But the worst thing was, none of the staff seemed to be able to see how desperately sad the patients were. That’s the first thing I saw when I got there, their sadness. Or their pain, their anger…. Whatever it was, it was sad, and it was eating them up from the inside out. So they’d stopped eating from the outside in, the two things just offset each other.

I got it. I don’t know why, but I just…got it. Within a couple of days, I had my head around the thing, and for me it was, I don’t know, easy, I guess, to work with the patients. I mean, anorexia and bulimia are seriously complicated conditions, and it was obvious that most of them would have to do a lot of work to really start a proper recovery – but the main thing between me and them was that I didn’t treat them with the derision that most of the other staff did. I didn’t dismiss them when they cried at mealtimes, or threw a tantrum in the hallway because they’d been made to sit down and stop pacing, or refused to get on the scales. I didn’t yell at them when I found they’d been hiding weights in, well, let’s just say often quite inventive places, at weigh-in. In the night you’d hear one or two them running up and down the stairs that led to the unit – burning all the calories they could. Most of the nurses would just drag them back to their room and lock them in. What, so they could just do two hundred sit up and press ups instead? Absolutely no point. When it was me that got to them, and stopped them, I’d use distraction techniques with them instead until the worst of the urges had passed…It was just….I don’t know, instinctive, somehow. Who couldn’t look at some of these behaviours and not just see how desperate and wretched the person had to be to go through them was beyond me. Honestly, Spock, the lengths some of them went to to avoid eating, or to purge afterwards – or the things they did to fake their weight on weigh-day. The time and the concentration and the effort that went into the planning or the disguising….you see, many of the sufferers were vastly intelligent people. It’s a thing with this disease, the association with intelligence. For some reason, EDs love it. They can feed off it. Every pun intended. They can use every last iota of logic and lateral thinking and rationality to their advantage, to convince the sufferer that they’re doing the right thing, that they must keep doing this thing, that they need it – and they can keep inventing new ways in which to protect themselves. All the while, they’ll be convincing the sufferer that it’s them who’s making these decisions – that this is something they actually want. Even if they reach a stage at which they don’t want it, they’ll still choose it. Not that it’s really a choice….Not when it feels to them as though stepping away from the ED is essentially the same as signing their own death warrant.

You see, I always saw the ED as a separate entity to the sufferer – and one that was basically holding them hostage. As soon as you threaten an ED with treatment, or with food, basically, they’ll hit the fucking roof – taking the sufferer with them. Hence the tantrums in the hall, and the frequent rage-induced plate throwing and storming out in the dining room, etc. But if the ED is in control, they stay nice and quiet. You don’t want them to be nice and quiet – it means they’re winning. It means there’s no fight – and if there’s no fight, there’s no progress. No win for the sufferer. No recovery. It was just so obvious to me that whereas EDs are always bandied about as being a need for control, people with the illness are just so not actually in control. Everything they do, every decision, every movement, is tightly controlled, yes. But they’re just a puppet to a sick, despotic master who makes them feel as though they’re being kept safe, when actually they’re slowly being killed by that very thing that makes them safe. It’s perverted.

That’s why I had more sympathy, I think. These weren’t just people who made insane choices when it came to food and deserved to be shut away for their own good and fed and medicated until they were ‘better’. That approach never works, by the way – quickest way to either murder or suicide, believe me. These were people with a serious illness that had taken hold when they were at their most vulnerable, who in many cases didn’t really understand where it had come from or what it was doing – who only understood that they needed to do what it fucking said, because arguing with it was dangerous. It would creep up on them, crawling into every aspect of their lives looking as though it was rescuing them from some terrible trauma, until it itself was the trauma and they realised too late that they were now its slave”.

Bones cleared his throat. Images of purple-grey, papery skin, and protruding bone swam unbidden through his mind. Partly memories, partly preoccupation with the man in his sick bay whose life he was trying to save. Needed to save, for every reason under the sun.

“That’s why I had no problem with Jim”, he said, by way of bringing his explanation to an end. “When we were at the Academy, and he was showing signs of using control (he air-quoted here, to re-emphasise his point that he didn’t believe Jim, as the sufferer, was actually the one in control) of his eating to avoid or hide something deeper. As I said before, I genuinely do not think that he was bulimic – he wasn’t and isn’t making himself sick. That part is involuntary- that can happen with EDs, if there has been something physical in the past that caused the condition. As for fear of weight gain, that has usually been a secondary symptom of his. He doesn’t have body dysmorphia, he doesn’t believe he’s overweight. He is probably in the small number of anorexia sufferers who can actually truly see their own weight, or lack of, in reality. But being thin…that is a representation of the deprivation that he needs to subject himself to. So keeping the thinness is important to him, just not for one of the usual reasons”.

Spock saw that he was clenching and unclenching his right fist.

“Except”, the doctor continued, softly. “I have every problem with Jim. Because it’s Jim. I may have found it easy to understand and treat the patients in that unit, but I never forgot that eating disorders are one of the most vile, destructive, insidious, and indestructible illnesses known to man…They are dangerous, and painful, and ultimately completely fatal. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. And I would change places with Jim in an instant”.

Chapter Text

Spock stood in respectful silence for some minutes after the doctor had finished speaking. He was standing close enough to Leonard to be able to gain a distant sense of the emotion that was attached to these memories, and Spock did not reject the feeling, but rather felt that it was required that he too feel it, as a mark of regard for this good man.

Leonard, for his part, was looking down at his hands, his thoughts – Spock could see – at once disorderly and indistinct. He was tired. But then he raised his head, passed a hand over his eyes, and tapped his palm on the console three times, as if re-establishing to himself his existence in the present. When he spoke again, he answered what would have been Spock’s imminent question, regarding that next stage of Jim’s treatment.

“You know as well as I do, Spock, that I can’t let Jim continue in this state”, the doctor said. “No-one has to be a doctor to see that. So I’m sorry to say that we’ve reached the stage where I am going to have to tube feed him. I don’t want to do it – it’ll be uncomfortable, and undignified, and it will take away the last bit of power that Jim has to fight this himself. But I think it’s fairly obvious now that Jim just doesn’t have the strength to use whatever little power is left to him. The eating disorder, whatever this type is, is in full swing now, and it’s stripped Jim of all his armour. So it’s me versus it. And so help me God, I will kill that thing dead if it kills me too”.

The doctor’s characteristic scowl flashed across his face at these last words, and Spock suddenly realised just how grateful he was to see it. For too long, Leonard’s expression had reflected nothing but anxiety, deep worry, fear, and sadness. Spock, the Vulcan reflected to himself now, had longed to see that fight on his friend’s face – the fight that was so vital to the every-day running of their ship, their team, their family. The fight that was so vital for Jim.

Spock knew that his silence conveyed his acquiescence with the doctor’s decision. Nonetheless, he had numerous pressing questions.

“What, exactly, does nasal gastric feeding involve, Leonard?”

Leonard huffed a humourless laugh.

“Shoving a pipe up someone’s nose and into their stomach so that you can flood their system with liquids available in a myriad of godawful colours while they have no choice about it”, he answered. “To be blunt about it. If you want a slightly rosier picture, it’s a way of ensuring the person receives continual nutrition and hydration without their having to swallow. And as we have both seen, Jim’s swallowing capability seems to have turned itself inside out. I actually mean that, by the way. In a medically serious way. His gag reflex, which is responsible for ejecting anything intrusive or alien or dangerous should be working in balance with the muscles responsible for swallowing, the two of them ensuring that what is meant to go down does, and stays there, and what is meant to kept out is pushed away. The swallow valve, which faces downwards, has been hijacked by his gag reflex. It is working overtime. In the wrong direction. So I am going to avoid that area altogether, by going in through the nasal cavity”.

Spock nodded. Then, after a pause, he asked,

“Is it dangerous?”

Bones allowed himself a moment to consider how he ought to answer this. No, was the short answer. There were minimal risks involved with NG feeding. But Jim was so fragile. The slightest invasion to his body may trigger a catastrophic reaction that Bones might be unable to control. There were, technically, other possibilities, but these were of an even higher risk. He decided, on reflection, to answer Spock’s question by diverting to his reasons for avoiding these other methods.

“The other option is what is known as gastrojejunal tubing, or GJ feeding”, he explained, as if he were talking to the parents of a sick child. Despite what everyone may have thought about Leonard McCoy’s bedside manner, or lack, thereof, he had it in abundance in the right circumstances. And Jim had always, to Bones, been the embodiment of the right circumstances, whatever the context. His respect for Spock’s devotion to Jim fell into the category of James Kirk circumstances, and thus his bedside manner – these days - extended to Spock as well.

“In GJ feeding, a tube is inserted directly through the stomach wall, into the small intestine. But when it comes to Jim, there are two problems with this. The first is that it requires a surgical incision, and he has no immune system. Virtually no white cells to speak of.  The chances of his contracting an infection through the incision site are extremely high. The chances of him being able to fight off that infection – well, you do the math. Secondly, a GJ tube can be extremely uncomfortable. One slight misplacement onto a nerve, and the patient is in abominable and constant pain. Thirdly, Jim does not like being touched around the midriff. I know this mainly through being his doctor…..and partly through having shared a bed with him on a fairly regularly basis”.

If Spock had raised his eyebrows at this, Bones was pointedly not looking. In any case, this was unimportant. What was important was what it meant for the current situation.

“He hates anything touching the skin of his stomach….hates it to the point where it is capable of inducing vomiting. I am fairly sure that this external stimulus is connected to whatever it is internally that is causing the sickness, but I still can’t fathom any of it. Anyway – my job is to feed him, and to try and control the vomiting. I can’t use a method that I know is likely to cause it, however much it may look, on paper, as though it would be a more effective way to bypass his gag reflex. As long as I insert the tube properly….”

Spock interrupted.

“I am certain, Leonard, that your execution of the described technique will be of the highest medical quality”.

 Bones gave him a tight smile. 

“We’d best hope it is”, he said.

Then he asked Spock a question of his own.

“You’re going to ask me how effective I think it’s going to be, aren’t you?”

“As you are no doubt aware Leonard, a significant proportion of my own reassurance concerning a variety of matters depends upon statistical probability. It is the only way I can, to utilise a human turn of phrase, ‘make any sense of’ certain states of affairs”.

Bones smiled properly this time.

“Yes, Spock….I am aware”.

Bones stood up from the console and ran his hands through his hair. Then he turned to Spock and put his hands on his hips, not in defiance, but in acknowledgement and tired acceptance of the severity of their circumstances.

“Look, I can’t say for certain that this will work”.

Spock’s lower right eyelid singularly disclosed his pained disappointment.

“But I can say that, if Jim not having to eat reduces the frequency with which he is being sick, then there should, logically, be an improvement….especially as at the same time he will be being steadily fed”.

Logically. When, he wondered, did he become a great champion of Vulcan comfort? But then he looked at Spock’s face, and realised that it was about the time that he realised Spock would suffer just as much as he would at Jim’s pain, and was suddenly almost overcome with an uncontrollable need to just hug the green-blooded, pointy-eared bastard, and weep into his shoulder while Spock wept into his, the two of them united in the idea of losing from their two respective worlds the sun, and all warmth that went with it.

Spock’s expression did not change. But he nodded slowly, as his slow acceptance of the doctor’s words took shape in his mind.

“What, then, is your plan regarding our treatment of Jim’s psychological condition?”, he asked.

“If Jim becomes stronger, we may be able to talk to him about the meld”, Bones replied. “I don’t think it will be possible before then. He can’t concentrate at the moment…..He is starving to death, his body isn’t concerned with anything else. And he’s tired. Obviously. But I did want to ask you about where we’re going from here…. Do we go back to Parmen for more information? Do we wait until Jim is a bit better and then work with him ourselves? You’re at the helm of this part, Spock, you’ve seen what I can’t. And I have enough to decide on. You decide this”.

Spock was ready with his answer.

“I believe that the most favourable approach would be to attempt to work with Jim- through a meld between myself and him. As you say, this will be contingent upon our observing a significant improvement in Jim’s condition. If this becomes untenable, I will resume negotiations with the Platonians.”

Bones was satisfied with that. For now, at least, they could banish the loathsome idea of the perverted despots who had done this to Jim, and – temporarily – ignore the impending magnitude of what they would have to undertake with Jim once he was strong enough to cope. The deep, invasive quest into those recesses of his psyche that were, from a distance, nonetheless dragging him towards his physical demise. Plus, Bones knew. Knew that if anyone in this entire universe could face and conquer the mental demons that currently had hold of Jim, it would be Spock. Spock frequently demonstrated a faith in Leonard that the doctor sometimes found hard to bear. The pressure and the responsibility, in addition to his own desperate personal need for Jim to just fucking well be ok, was sometimes so much that he almost physically staggered beneath the weight. He didn’t resent Spock for this. He just occasionally wished that the Vulcan’s belief in him was not quite so steadfast. But, he had to admit, he had his own faith in Spock that could hardly have been any less demanding. He knew Spock could do it. Spock would win. His heart was fairly cheerleading for him.

For the next few minutes, though, there was quiet between them, Spock re-positing various instruments and dials ready for the Gamma shift, and Bones watching him, fatigue and relief washing over him in equal measure as he simply watched someone else work on something that was not life or death, that was not of crucial, critical, ultimate importance. In this silence, they shared the companiable union that can only be borne of something in which two people – and no other two people – are together. No-one else understood. No-one else needed to.

At length, Spock completed his routine tasks, and Bones made his way to the exit panel on both their behalves.

“Depending on how Christine got on with Jim’s mid-afternoon protein bar, I will have to put the tube in later today”, he said, matter of fact. “Do you want to come and see him for a bit beforehand?”

Spock followed him to the door.

“Any other intention would have been entirely alien to me, doctor”, he said, as he pressed the panel himself and exited the lab. And Bones was left wondering, as he followed Spock out and down the corridor, whether Spock had just made a joke, and what weird and fucked up world this was in which he was living, in which Vulcans joked, and maniacal men in white dresses controlled their future – and James T. Kirk was not in the command seat of the SS Enterprise.

............................................................

Bones entered the medbay ahead of Spock, and – after reassuring himself that Jim was still present in the far bed closest to his own quarters and winking at him - made sure to catch Christine’s eye. She came to him immediately, although she had dutifully and subtly arranged her features into an expression of complete neutrality. Lord bless the woman.

“Ok”, he said, as he disinfected his hands. “How’s he doing?”

“He’s about a quarter of the way through that protein bar, Doctor McCoy”, Christine said. “I’m afraid I can’t get him to go any further. He both doesn’t want to, and can’t”.

“That’s ok, Chris.” Bones forced a smile. “Not unexpected. Thank you. Well done for getting at least some of it down him. It’d take most people a slingshot and a decent sedative when he’s like this”.

“Not you though, Doctor McCoy,” she smiled.

Bones didn’t return the smile.

“We’ll see”.

Spock was already seated in his customary chair at Jim’s bedside before Bones reached them both. He smiled at Jim (and to his horror, tears leapt to his eyes), then swept up his medical chart and pulled the curtain around captain and first officer.

“Not too long, okay?” he said, allowing a sense of apology to filter through his tone. He and Spock exchanged the briefest of glances, through which Bones was reassured that Spock was working with him. Then he dropped the curtain into place, and left.

Spock could not help but be transfixed by Jim’s body. He had not seen him in full light for three days, only being able to visit overnight in the brief hours in which he was not required on shift, when Jim was likely to be asleep, and securely bound beneath Leonard’s careful blanket administrations. Now, in the white, clinical half-light of early evening, Spock could see the depth of every shadow on Jim’s face, neck, collarbones, arms…. Even his Vulcan restraint was struggling to ensure him against revealing the anguish this caused him.

Just in front of him lay Jim’s hand, palm turned upwards, a cannular running into the crease of his inner elbow. Spock let his eyes run over this, tried to convince himself that this was treatment and not additional pain, that this was necessary, and good…..But nothing was good. Not with the brightest light in the galaxy flickering into non-existence in a narrow hospital bed under a greyish artificial beam that was but a mockery of the very concept of illumination.

In the end, it was Jim who spoke first.

“Hey Spock”, he whispered.

Spock looked suddenly at Jim’s face, a look of utter incomprehension on his face. That look, Jim had seen only once before….

“Spock…”, Jim whispered. “Please say something”.

Spock hauled his consciousness back within his own control. He had wanted these moments with Jim to be as normal as possible, full of their own particular connection and unfettered by the doom that seemed to crowd from all around them. But Spock could see that this was not a time in which what he wanted ought to feature. His role in Jim’s life was to guide – to protect, advise, and support. Whereas this may have been his professional capacity, such was his bond with Jim that the dynamic of their relationship surpassed any such boundaries. When he spoke next, his own words were a surprise to him. He had not planned them, he was not aware of them now, even before they arrived in his voice.

“Jim…..” Jim was looking at him with a soft expression, as if he understood. “Jim, when Leonard is treating you – when he makes decisions, and when he must administer certain therapeutic methods - ….you must comply. I request most firmly that you comply, Jim. No…..I beg of you that you do”.

Here, Spock touched the inside of Jim’s wrist. The emotional connection opened immediately. The cacophony in Jim’s psyche was quieter at the moment, dulled by starvation and physical distress. But whereas this may have reduced, so too had the usual music that was all Jim Kirk’s own personality. Spock removed his hand. Not because he was afraid of the intensity below the touch. But because he was afraid of the absence of it.

Beneath him, so thin and weak on the bed, Jim smiled up at him.

“Is that an order, Acting Captain Spock?” he jibed, gently.

Spock was aware that this was a joke. But he could give the entirely honest answer in completely seriousness.

“Yes.”

And Jim just smiled, the insubstantial volume of his body still, for Spock, overridden by the momentous effect of that smile, faint as it was.

They talked for a few minutes more, and then Bones was at the curtain, moving not brusquely, or abruptly, but with an authority that would inform even the slowest of minds that it is now his jurisdiction that has come to bear.

Spock stood up.

“I must depart now, Jim”, he said. “I believe the doctor needs to do some work with you. Remember what I asked of you. But I will return”.

And no matter the outcome of this, no matter what came next, or where and when or if at all they were allowed to go next on this vast journey that was their lives together, Spock knew in this instant that Jim’s whisper would haunt him for the rest of his days.

“I know”.

With that, Spock stepped out from behind the curtain. Here he found that Leonard had brought across a trolley bearing a metal tray on which there were assembled a number of implements ready for the procedure that the doctor was about to undertake with Jim. Among those implements, a length of rubber tubing, surgically sealed in plastic at present, lying silent and white and grotesque against its gleaming silver background.

Bones appeared in front of him, and they met each other’s eyes. Grim but determined.

With that, Spock left the medbay. Bones watched his retreating back for a moment – then slid back inside the curtain, to where Jim was waiting for him to save his life.

Chapter Text

The faint hiss of the medbay door sliding closed behind Spock signifies to Bones a different kind of sealing in. It is just him and Jim in this now, for the time being at least. No one can come in or go out of their current position. It is just the two of them. And as much as Bones dearly longs for it to be just the two of them in the bar of an evening, or driving down to Bones’ mothers’ in Georgia while on shoreleave to see Elenora and JoJo leaping and waving from the front porch of the old McCoy family farmhouse as they emerge through the hot, red, low dust, or even bickering on the bridge over whether or not Jim is allowed to even bloody TOUCH anything on this planet, Jim, and I will personally inject you with peanut butter, and well just come with us then Bones, I’ll even let you bring your pet tricorder, plus they’ll have wiiiiiiine…..

…it wasn’t. It was none of those scenarios. It was Leo McCoy, a doctor, yes, but a human being first, scrambling continually for solutions, answers, remedies - and Jim Kirk, a broken and lost soul who had carried everything alone his entire life, now almost dead under the weight, despite the fact that he was now surrounded by people who would have instantly died in order to take the load away from him. How had it come to this, Bones wondered, as he closed the curtains around Jim’s bed. All their training, all that time at the Academy – and for him the many many years of medical training beforehand - all these years together surviving fiasco after crisis after catastrophe in space, Captain and CMO of Starfleet’s flagship craft….reduced to just two people, on a quiet hospital bed, doing their very best to simply make it from one unguaranteed moment to the next. What had it all been for?

But then, Bones realised, as he turned to face Jim and inwardly took a long, deep breath. It had been so that they had at least survived to this point. They still had each other. And if he wanted any of that again – if he wanted any of those memories or hopes or mental images to be possible – this was where he, they, had to start. On this new and treacherous diversion that would hopefully bring them back to the road on which they had walked together for so long.

The rest of the protein bar which Christine had not been able to convince Jim to eat was wrapped up on the table beside Jim’s bed. Bones decided to address this first – to use it as the preamble. 

He sits down on the bed next to Jim, who looks forlorn, resentful, and so unbearably frail it makes Bones hurt in places he didn’t know existed.

Jim is entirely silent. He is looking just past Bones, at an unfocused point that makes Bones feel sick himself. Even awake, Jim is now struggling to retain his grip on consciousness. Bones isn’t even sure if Jim is aware he is there.

But he can’t back down now.

‘Hey Jimmy”, Bones says, gently, slowly raising his hand and, when Jim doesn’t jump at the touch, running his fingers lightly through the hair lying across Jim's forehead, sweeping it to the side. Jim looks up at Bones then, and sees him, and Bones smiles.

That’s all he does for a minute. He simply allows some quiet to go by before he speaks again.

“I know you’ve struggled this afternoon”, he says, eventually. Softly. Jim says nothing.

Bones waits again. Jim seems content to just lie beneath his touch, so he moves his hand to Jim’s cheek and slowly rubs his thumb along the line of his cheekbone. Then he asks, quietly,

“Do you want to try with me for a bit?”

Jim looks at him uncertainly, but gives a single nod.

That will do.

Bones picks up the protein bar and breaks a piece off.

‘We’ll do it in three parts, ok? Just start here”.

He gives Jim the smallest bit. Jim eyes it with a mixture of revulsion and hatred. But he does begin to eat it.

Behind them, just beyond the curtain, activity continues as normal. Some members of staff are in need of Bones’ attention – apologetically, but necessarily nonetheless. He responds to them all effectively and concisely, turning to look at them over his shoulder if they go as far as to move the curtain, but not turning his body away from Jim’s. He has to be in this with Jim, while not crowding him. It is an almost impossible balance, and one that seems to change every time they do this. But Bones can read Jim as though he is black paint on white glass, and he can keep changing – for as long as it’s needed.

“Next bit?”

Jim takes it off him. He manages that as well, but when Bones goes to offer the final piece, Jim’s resolve breaks. At the same time his stomach lurches, and he sits up quickly.

“Woah”, Bones says, quickly disposing of the remaining protein bar and taking hold of the kidney tray. “Ok, I don’t think we need to push that for now….we’re just going to see the whole lot again aren’t we”.

Jim swallows hard, and takes a deep breath. He grasps weakly for Bones’ hand - Bones takes it the moment he sees Jim reaching for him. Sweat appears in a sheen across Jim’s forehead with the effort of controlling the nausea. He closes his eyes. He is unsuccessful.

Bones gives the kidney bowl and towels to Christine, who slides back out through the curtain without a word, but with a look of infinite sympathy on her kind face. Bones is not sure who she is more sorry for – Jim or himself – and he is not sure he can bear to know the answer.

Bones readjusts Jim’s sheets, more for something to do with his hands than anything else. He is procrastinating now. Delaying. Wasting time.

He brings the top of the sheet into a perfect line around Jim’s empty chest, then leaves his hands lying softly atop the linen, eyes on Jim’s face. Outside in the medbay, it is quiet now. Just the beeping of Jim’s monitors. The occasional rustle of sheets. A faint cough. Perhaps a distant laugh from somewhere on the deck above, the laugh's owner in that enviable state in which such a sound could leap unbidden from their chest, unburdened by anxiety or fear.

“I can’t do it”, Jim whispers, at last.

“I know”, Bones whispers back, kindly, hand on the back of Jim’s neck, bringing their foreheads together. He closes his eyes. “I know Jim. It’s okay. It’s okay”.

 “I hate this”. An even smaller whisper.

“I know that too”. An even kinder one.

Bones presses a kiss to his forehead, then leans into him again.

Several times, Bones almost opens his mouth to speak. Every time, it feels as though his tongue is harnessed from the inside. Just a few more minutes.

But Leonard McCoy is a brave man. He sits up, reluctantly breaking away so that he can speak to Jim directly.

“Jim… Jimmy, do you remember what we talked about this morning?”

Jim made a movement of his head that could have been a nod. It was difficult to tell.

Bones tried more directly. It was going to sound terribly patronising. But, with Jim in this condition, even a medically untrained eye would be able to see why it was that the doctor was asking these kinds of questions. He was not doing it to treat Jim like a child. He was testing his capacity. 

“Do you remember that we talked about what would happen if you weren’t able to eat anymore?”

This time, Jim did nod.

“Okay, that’s good. And do you understand, Jim? Do you remember why it is that I have to do this, why I have to make this decision?”

“…yeah”.

“…okay”.

A pause. 

Then,

“……..Bones?”

“Yes, Jim?”

“Just so I can be really sure.....because things are a bit hazy at the moment and I don't always remember completely.....are you going to make me have the tube?”

And despite it all, despite the fact that he has explained, and that Jim has apparently understood, and that there is nowhere else to go from here, Bones’ heart seizes so hard at the vulnerability in Jim’s voice that he almost puts a hand to his chest. He closes his eyes briefly. Then, as if he can convince either himself or Jim that this is not already a done deal, he looks up at Jim’s stats.

The stats. Regardless of the glaring fact that there is no choice over this now, the stats still present themselves to Bones’ medical brain in logical, systematic order. There is a numb sort of escapism in them….they are the facts. Just the facts. And they support him entirely.  

Jim’s white cell count is on the floor. Another infection is a huge possibility. A likelihood, in fact. And without nutrition, there is simply no feasible way he can push that count back up. He can inject him, do it artificially. But Jim is allergic to that serum, and whereas Bones has antidotes for that, there is only a certain amount of times in which he can safely subject Jim’s body to that brutal cycle of action and reaction. His electrolytes too, are barely registering. With his potassium this low, getting Jim to eat properly will actually soon be the more dangerous option. What little potassium he had would shoot straight from his heart to his digestive system – and his heart would stop. Simple as that. Bones had seen it. For the same reason, Bones cannot risk any more vomiting. Potassium expelled out...heart gives in. And artificial sodium would dehydrate him. Thamine is the only thing Bones could actually give him now that wouldn’t be dangerous, and that’s a temporary fix, in pill form. He can’t avoid it. This is the end of the road, after all those years, all that effort at avoiding it. It’s time.

He looks down at Jim.

“Jim - my darlin’….”, he murmurs, trying to find the words, still carding through his hair.

And if Jim hadn’t known the answer before then, he would have then.

“….I have to. I’m sorry. We’ve tried”.

Jim nods miserably. Then he squeezes Bones’ hand slightly – the fastest movement he’s made for weeks.

“I only want you, though”, he whispers. “Just you – “

“You will have me”, Bones says, leaning in again so that he and Jim are breathing the same breath and putting his hand to Jim’s cheek, “I’m going to do all of it, ok? It’ll be me who puts it in, and I’ll do every dose. No-one else. Just you and me”.

Jim swallows, and nods.

“Do I have to keep the tube in all the time?”

“Yes, Jim. Taking it in and out each time will destroy your throat. It will be uncomfortable, at times. But it’ll be much less uncomfortable if we give your throat time to get used to it.

I’ll be right here, the whole time, okay?”

“……okay”.

An hour later, and the tube was in. Bones had given Jim a mild sedative, to numb as much of the discomfort as possible without disabling Jim’s own ability to help the process by occasionally swallowing if Bones needed him to, and applied a nasal vasoconstrictor spray to help ease the tube through Jim’s nasal cavity. Bones was as gentle as possible without taking excess time, sliding the tube, heavy with xylocaine lubricant, up Jim’s nostril and directing it down the back of his throat, trying to avoid Jim’s already massively oversensitive gag reflex. Jim did retch once, and Bones stopped immediately, patient while Jim swallowed twice, three times, four times, as Bones instructed him. Then he carried on, with a dexterity that ensured the edge wouldn’t catch his oesophagus on the way down. God knew, there was enough trauma in there. Once it was in, and Jim was as comfortable as could be, Bones scanned his stomach to check that it wasn’t in the bronchi. To be entirely sure, he extracted a small amount of fluid from the tube, and tested the Ph. Finally, he was satisfied that it was sitting correctly. Jim had been extremely quiet, not just a side effect of the sedative. He watched Bones from under heavy eyelids, entirely pliant under his hands, heart-breakingly resigned to this new and brutally offensive invasion of his body. Bones had caught Jim’s eye from time to time, and smiled comfortingly at him – something that only his level of expertise could achieve alongside such medical skill. Or rather, something that only Bones could achieve when it came to Jim.

“Not long, Jim”, he’d whispered. “You’re doing really well”.

When he was done, Bones hooked the tube up to the large syringe at the end of an electronic pump – the dispensing cylinder - hanging above the bed, and adjusted all wires, including that to the cannula in Jim’s hand, so there was no unnecessary pressure working on the tube now assaulting Jim’s already breaking body. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed with the surgical tape in his hand. This part was the nurses’ job – all of this could have been, in fact. But Bones would have no-one else attempt even a fraction of this procedure when it came to Jim, and the rest of the staff knew better than to ask. He cut several pieces of tape to length, sticking a corner of them temporarily to the metal edge of the bed while he curled the tube up and over Jim’s ear, and positioned it against his cheek. Jim flinched once, as the tube twisted to lie flat against his skin, and Bones moved it with instinctive and instantaneous proficiency.

“Sorry Jimmy”, he murmured, taking the first piece of tape. Holding the tube delicately against Jim’s too-hollow cheekbone with three fingers, he carefully placed the strips of tape one after the other along its line with the other hand. This completed, he gave a final check over the equipment, then sat with one hand over Jim’s legs.

“Okay?” he asked, softly.

Jim gave a nod that didn’t require him bending his neck, for fear of pulling at the tube. Seeing this, Bones put his fingers back on the tube.

“Nod again for me Jim, properly this time. Put your chin down. It’s okay, I’ll stop it pulling”.

Jim complied, while Bones watched the changing tension of the tube. He reached over and loosened the length that ran from the bed to the cylinder, adding an inch or two more slack. Then he removed his fingers.

“One more time?”

Jim inclined his head forwards again, this time without Bones holding the tube, and found that there was no difference caused by the movement.

“Better?”

“Better”. His voice came out thick, and hoarse.

“Any nausea?”

“No more than usual”.

Bones didn’t say anything for a while. He just sat and stroked the hair at Jim’s temple, watching his face, letting Jim relax into the contact, bringing his heartrate down.

“Okay”, he said at length, removing his hand reluctantly and producing his tricorder and the PADD. He scanned Jim for his blood pressure and oxygen levels. Stable. “We’ll give that half an hour or so, then we’ll get the first lot down you”.

“You and me have a dinner date?” Jim attempted to quip.

“That’s it”, Bones said with a smile. “An alarmingly-pink raspberry flavoured Fortisip dinner date, to be exact. Don’t say I never spoil you”.

Jim smiled, and that smile from under the tube plastered to his gaunt yet beautiful face was almost more than Bones could bear. Internally pulling himself together, he stood up.

“Try and get a bit of sleep for a bit”, he said, pulling Jim’s sheets up over his chest. “I’ll be right around here, if you need me. I’m not going anywhere”.

Jim had actually slept for twenty or minutes or so, then woke up to Bones quietly taking some fluid out via the syringe to check the tube’s position, before filling the dispensing cylinder with the supplement fluid. Then he gave Jim a tight smile, and opened the clamp. He sat with Jim throughout the whole hour it took for the cylinder to empty into Jim’s stomach, one hand on one of Jim’s, and one eye on his tricorder the whole time. When it was done, and Bones had flushed a few ml of water through to clear the tube, Jim was beyond exhausted.

“That’s all the electrolytes you’ve got left in your body trying to run digestion at the same time as keeping your heart beating”, Bones had explained. “Which is why –“, he gestured at the NG equipment. “Why all of this. Anything solid…too much for your body to do. I won’t lie to you kid, you’ll feel pretty grim for a while. Best thing you can do is go to sleep”.

As if Jim had had any choice. Bones stayed with him until Jim was truly asleep, his breathing even and his position on the bed assured so that he wouldn’t turn over and pull the tube. Then Bones, reassured to some extent that they’d at least begun the process of getting desperately needed nutrients back into Jim’s body, was eventually persuaded to go to the mess for half an hour, and leave Jim in the care of Gabe and Christine. He resisted, of course, aware that he’d be virtually unable to function without Jim actually physically under his eye.

But they knew, and he finally reluctantly agreed, that he just needed to just see the outside of the sickbay for a bit. Recharge his own diminishing resources. So he’d had a shower (five minutes, then checked on Jim, who was deeply asleep), pulled on all new uniform (two minutes, then checked on Jim) that had mercifully been delivered back to his quarters at some point today (and despite the fact he knew it was clean, he still had to check...until he realised the smell of vomit was not on any of his clothes anymore, but simply in his nostrils) checked on Jim, then made his way out, Christine shooing him like a chicken from a yard, Bones literally backing out the door so as to watch Jim for as long as possible. He wouldn’t be long, his staff knew – Doctor McCoy may trust them as his team, but ultimately he trusted no-one else with Jim. They half expected him to just stand outside the doors.

And he was sorely tempted to. He stopped outside them as they slid shut, and for a few moments he was violently visited by the mental image of himself inserting the tube down Jim’s throat, Jim lying weak and fragile beneath him, hating every moment of the procedure, but tolerating it, because it was Bones doing it, and because Bones had said so. He put a hand over his eyes. He couldn’t leave him. He raised his hand to the panel – and at that moment, footsteps became audible in the corridor, and Nyota and Scotty appeared.

“Leo”, Nyota said, and her voice was so gentle, and so comforting, and so loving, that Bones could have fallen asleep in an instant, right where he stood. Instead, he slowly allowed his hand to drop, as he watched them approach and join him outside the medbay door.

He realised then just how terrible he must really look, for suddenly Scotty’s face split into a myriad of horror –

“What's - he’s not –“

“No, no Scotty!” Bones interjected, holding his hand up to Scotty instead of the panel. “It’s ok. He’s…..he’s stable. It’s just that I’ve had…..I’ve had to put a feeding tube in him. He can’t eat, you see. He can’t keep anything down. He’s…..well he just needs some help”.

Scotty seemed to relax slightly, although he barely looked less aghast. Bones was touched at the scot’s obvious devotion, that he was so prepared to demonstrate.

Nyota, on the other hand, looked fairly stricken.

‘Spock mentioned that you needed to try something more severe, he didn’t have time to explain”.

“Yeah, well. There it is".

“Can we see him?” Scotty asked.

Very few answers had ever been clearer to him. Jim’s dignity was as much his charge as his physical health. Not like this.

“No. Sorry”.

Then, in case he had sounded too abrupt, he added, “not at the moment, anyway. He just needs a few days”.

Scotty nodded his understanding.

For a few moments, they stood in slightly awkward silence. This was unusual – they were all old and great friends, with years of history, and perfectly companionable silences, behind them. But it was not clear here quite where the dynamic of suffering was. They were all suffering for Jim. But, and it was this that made Bones uncomfortable, they were obviously also suffering for him. And he could not decide whether he craved this sympathy, or despised it.

In the end, Nyota – as ever – the wonderful, calm communications officer who could do more with a situation in which there was no communication at all than anyone on any planet who spoke a thousand languages, perceived what would be best. She put a warm hand on Bones’ arm, and gave an almost imperceptible pull that was nonetheless an entirely immovable command.

“Come on, Leonard”, she said. “Come to the mess with us for an hour or so. Come and get something to eat”. She walked him away from the door and down the corridor, and although Jim was still behind it, attached to that monstrosity, the part of Bones that was so sore and tired, the part that was just so desperately missing his best friend for whom he was entirely responsible for getting back, allowed him to be led for a time, in body and in mind, Nyota’s comforting tenderness before him, and Scotty’s never-changing presence at his back.  

Chapter Text

Sitting in the mess, they talked gently around him, not wanting to allow all the focus to rest on what they really wanted to talk about – not wanting to demand more of him when he was on this brief break from the onslaught - but not excluding him. Nyota, Scotty...Hikaru and Chekov had joined them also.

Spock.

Baritones. Bass. Muted, softer, higher pitches. Lilting accents. Gentle laughter. Murmurs. The soft glow of the end of Alpha shift lights….

Forehead resting on his arms laying crossed in front of him on the table, Bones’ consciousness was currently adrift in a weird amalgamation of gentle relief and sudden violent jolts of reality; sleep kept creeping unbidden and unseen towards him, and he would only realise that he had been at the cusp of unconsciousness moments after it had silently claimed him – at which point he would remember what was happening in the sentient world, with his heart having received this same message in the form of a direct electric shock, and he would jolt back into wakefulness, his mind as vigilant and as watchful on Jim, Jim’s condition….as always……….until the soporific sound of his family’s voices infiltrated past his defences……….and the cycle began again………….

Part of him was dying that this wasn’t just normal, that it wasn’t he and Jim here with their friends, himself bickering with Spock, Jim causing all sorts of non-captainy-like havoc…. But the other part, that was just so wrung out with strain, and grief, and fatigue, and constant constant fear, was glad just to hear their voices.

Jim was, for the moment, at least fed. They had started the process that would take them back to recovery. He was, Bones’ hoped, just slightly safer than he had been two hours ago. Quite what was behind it, they would now have to deal with later; there was no time right now for the answers, only for the solution. And there was a difference.

Bones did know beyond all doubt that they could not deny the problem this time. If he and Jim – and Spock – had to venture through psychological and emotional territory that was as cripplingly dangerous as his current physical state, they could at least arm themselves with the notion that it simply had to be done. And if Jim could regain some kind of physiological strength, he could fight. Fight with all the bravery and resilience that had made him James Tiberius Kirk, Jim, Leonard’s beloved best friend, Spock’s eternal galactic other half…..Captain Kirk.

Although, even now, with Jim asleep below, nutrients in his system for the first time in literally plural months that wouldn’t simply be expelled back into the silver recesses along a conveyer belt of kidney bowls, Bones was worried. As if his mind was now a honeycomb structure that would crumble into echoing caverns of dust if not filled with the structure of anxiety. He was uncomfortable about the NG tube. Something told him, had been telling him from the beginning, that the NG tube was not the most sensible option. That it wouldn’t solve their most obvious problem.

But then, how Jim reacted to being touched around his middle…. Leonard’s brain turned on this. And turned, and turned, and turned, and turned…..

Bones could get away with touching him there from time to time. If they were sleeping in the same bed and Bones turned over so that they were flush together, or so that Jim was the one curled tight around Leonard’s back.

And turned……

But then, if Bones accidentally brushed a hand against Jim’s midriff in the night, or if he (on one occasion only had this happened before Bones learned the lesson) pulled up Jim’s tunic to inject a particularly heavy hypospray into the wider muscle of Jim’s torso, Jim reacted as if Bones had tried to brand him. It was the only time, despite the frequent joking threats, that Jim had actually nearly hit him during a physical.

And turned….

The whole of his stomach being pressed against was fine, it seemed.  But not if he was specifically touched.

No, he was right. He had been right. Right not to use the GJ tube. He couldn’t put Jim through that as well. And besides, it was predominantly the action of eating that induced the vomiting. The whole point of the NG tube was to avoid this action. Hence, they would avoid the vomiting.

Yes. He was right.

His brain suddenly honed back in on his surroundings with a crescendo of awareness, and he lifted his head. He realised that the table had gone quiet, and that its occupants were looking at him. He would usually have felt monumentally awkward, as he always did when there was undue attention upon him, and especially when Jim was not there to subtly but firmly deflect it – or to encourage it, such was his joy for celebrating and praising the actions of those he loved, but in such a way that he somehow bore most of the pressure of the situation. But, the source of their attention was visible on all their faces. They were looking at him with nothing but care, and deep affection. And even Leonard H McCoy could not deny in this moment that he needed some kind of comfort. 

“You’re doing brilliantly, Leonard”, Nyota said, softly, at his shoulder. She was brave to directly address it. “We know it’s awful. But it’s Jim. If there is anyone who can fight anything, it’s him. And if there’s anyone who can give him that ability to fight, it’s you, and Spock. You’ll find a way, between the three of you”.

Nyota smiled at him, patted his arm. On his other side, Scotty gave him a brief clap on the shoulder, and Chekov smiled a too-young smile that made Bones think of innocence and ease... And his tough Georgian exterior almost gave way. Their sympathy, their understanding that he was treating Jim, and that it was near-on killing him, was almost too much. He linked his fingers together, glared down at them, and was on the verge of asking someone to just bring him the entirety of Chekov’s dodgy vodka stash….

Then his comm went off.

Christine’s voice was frantic. He was on his feet almost before she had spoken, the rest of them leaping up alongside him, immediately panicked.

“Doctor McCoy! Leonard! Leonard - he’s throwing up the tube!”

Chapter Text

The scene into which Bones arrived only a minute later, sweating and terrified, was nothing short of carnage. The biobed alarms were at full volume. The staff were in full emergency mode. Two nurses met him at the door, quite literally gibbering in their panic, their voices merging and intersecting sharply - 

‘We’d just checked the line when he started to cough – “

“We thought he was going to be sick, but that it’d come up regardless, it can – “

‘Get out of the WAY". Bones pushed past to them to the bed, where Christine and Gabe were struggling to hold Jim - who was fighting the tube as if he were being electrocuted. They hadn’t dared touch the tube itself, not while Jim was beyond their control. The pain and the trauma it would likely cause if they had forcibly removed it would have been intolerable. But just one glance told Bones exactly what was happening: Jim's throat had swelled in reaction to the tube, and at the same time, he had started to be sick. Now the tube had moved so that it was resting directly on his gag reflex. Jim was entirely unable to stop the inevitable grisly reaction.

Moving faster than any of them had ever seen him, Bones yanked open a nearby medkit, and grabbed three anti-inflammatory hypos. Slamming his hand into Jim's shoulder in order to hold him still enough just for a moment, he administered one hypo straight into the base of Jim’s throat. There was no time in which to wait for it to take effect, or to inject the next ones. Jim had inhaled as he went into panic and there was fluid in his lungs - the clash of coughing against the vomiting impulse was suffocating him. The tube needed to come out - or Jim would choke to death on it. But he couldn’t pull it so quickly that the reflex would cause Jim to inhale more into his lungs. With the lightening synapses of an exceptional medic, Bones replaced Gabe in holding Jim down, and thrust the remaining syringes into his hands.

“Right", he barked over the volume of the alarms, Gabe clutching the hypos, scared but nodding, "if he’s sick while this comes up, I need you to punch these straight into his chest wall, have you got that? One on each side. Get the inflammation down as soon as possible. Otherwise his oesophagus will contract further around it and we have one choking drowning patient, a ruptured oesophagus, and either a surgery on our hands or an instantaneous bleed out. He will survive neither of those outcomes, you understand?”

He whipped back round to Jim, whose hands had seized around Bones’ wrists. Clear fluid was running thickly from his nose and mouth.

To Jim - “I'm here Jim, I’m here, the tube’s coming out, ok? I’m taking it out right now”.

To the rest of the staff, so they could prepare for all eventualities this could cause - “On my count – one”, to Jim, “Jim this is going to hurt, ok kid? I’m sorry” – he got his fingers around the tube at Jim’s nostrils, “two”, with his other hand he ripped the tape from Jim’s cheek… “three – “

With that, Bones clenched his fingers around the polyurethane piping, and began to pull.

It was always a horrifying sight – the length of it, the thick coating of xylocaine and bile, the idea of where it was coming from. Bones pulled as firmly and as smoothly as he could, trying to be quick without shocking Jim’s body. It didn’t work. No sooner had Bones brought it to half way than Jim really was sick, the muscles forcing the liquid contents of his stomach up around the line of plastic still invading his insides. It was, Bones knew, cripplingly painful. They didn’t need the screaming biobed to tell them that. The only just administered fluid was pouring out over Bones’ hands and down his arms, warm and viscous, and he barked to Christine to direct it away from Jim, to get as much of it out of him as possible, as he himself continued to struggle with the embedded tube. He needed Jim to hold his breath as he pulled, to minimise the trauma, but it was far too late for that. Jim was coughing uncontrollably at the same time, around the tube, every paroxysm pulling the tube back from Bones’ hands. Worse, the vomiting was constantly triggering his swallow reflex. His throat was literally fighting back against Bones. And – as Bones had predicted – his oesophagus was contracting. A thin line of blood, diluted only by thick saliva, ran from the corner of Jim’s mouth. The tube had torn it.

“Fuck – Gabe, punch them in, now!” he yelled, struggling to keep his hands where they needed to be, fighting to maintain his grip through the lubrication on the jerking tube.

Bones couldn’t stop the process now, they needed to be brutal if this was going to end soon, though it tore his own insides out the further he pulled, Jim coughing and retching. His lips were turning blue. Each desperately attempted breath was no more than a brief and stilted high pitched shriek. Hands slipping altogether on the xylocaine, Bones lost hold of the tube for a moment – and at the same time lost his resolve to do this as medically well as possible. He needed to get the fucking tube out, that was the only objective here. Christine replacing the tube back into the fingers of his right hand, Bones seized the join between Jim’s neck and shoulder. He knew Jim could hear him. Gabe thrust another kidney bowl beneath them, not that it was any help. Bones knew what would happen the moment the tube came out, and a kidney bowl would be of poor use.

“Jim" Bones was in command mode now "– you have to try and hold your breath for me, ok? Just for a moment, just one try Jim, come on – “

Quite how, Bones would never know, but Jim did try, and just in that one split second Bones took his chance, and pulled, hard. Jim gave a retch that spasmed his entire body, and Bones was terrified that they might cause him to seize – but he had to carry on, Jim was trusting him to make it stop, and by God, he was going to make it stop. Gabe stamped the second hypo in, and at that same moment, the tube moved. It had dislodged. The blood running from Jim's mouth increased. Bones, one hand around Jim’s jaw to keep him steady and the fingers of the other around the fucking pipe that was threating to kill him, gave a last pull, as firmly as he dared, and finally, the rest of the tube slid grotesquely from Jim’s throat, followed instantly by every last fluid ounce of what was left inside him, interlaced with filmy lines of bloody saliva. Bones paid no attention to it spattering across him as he dropped the tube, and uncapped a hypo, hands slick with bile, saliva, blood, and lubricant.

Jim dragged in a harsh, rough breath through his excruciating throat, tears streaming down his cheeks, and there was the sharp hiss of the hypo behind his ear as Bones targeted the pain. Then his throat was opening, and his stomach was receding away from his lungs, and the tube was gone, and as he coughed, the liquid shifted from his lungs and expelled. His breath began to return. He was still coughing, but with everything up, at least his diaphragm had been released from the vacuum that had so tried to force everything inwards, rather than out. He felt Bones wiping his face with a cool cloth. It was over. 

Bones leaned over and turned off the alarms - and the entire room shrank suddenly into a vast and shell-shocked quiet.

It was an awful sound, this inaudible/mute reaction to the horror of what had just happened. Gabe stood back and dropped the spent needles to the floor, sweat running down his face, looking grey and almost as sick as Jim. Christine, the discarded tube in her hand, sat down directly where she had just stood, shaking. For well over a minute, nobody spoke, or moved, except for Bones, silently wiping Jim’s hands, cleaning what he could from the surface of the bed, gathering the medical implements so they could get the sheets off and tackle Jim’s clothes. The staff watched as he took some tissue and held it to Jim’s nose, which had suddenly started to pour with blood. The tube had also torn the capillaries here on the way out (although the volume of blood told Bones that they had avoided a full rupture. Not a soul in the universe had ever given more thanks for a smaller mercy). He spoke quietly and soothingly to Jim, rubbing his thumb across Jim’s hot cheek – “It’s okay Jim…I know, I know, I know….it’s okay…” – but otherwise the silence told the rest of the staff everything they needed to know.

Doctor McCoy’s silence. It was terrifying. They had fucked up. They had all fucked up. There was nothing about this diabolical scene that was ok, not the tube, now lying cooling in the nurse’s hand, covered inside and out with a sheen of bloody bile, not the copious wash of regurgitated supplement spread liberally across the bed, the floor, Bones, and his staff, not the discarded kidney dishes that they had – with such blind and thoughtless optimism – originally picked up when Jim first started to vomit, before they realised it was so much more serious. Not their chief medical officer, grim and mute, his face set into an unreadable expression as he alternately swabbed the nosebleed, and pinched the bridge of Jim’s nose.

It was another full minute in this solemn atmosphere before he said anything to any of them. Jim had calmed down, and the bleeding from his nose had mainly stopped. He lay under Bones' hands with his eyes closed, his chest still hitching regularly in aftershock. He was exhausted. Beyond exhausted. In every way that it was possible to be.

When Bones spoke, he didn’t look at them, and his voice was low – a monotone. Despite his quiet composure, everything about his demeanour screamed displeasure. Failure. Worse. Defeat. The staff weren’t sure at whom this was directed – them personally, himself, or the entire tragic situation that had led to this fiasco in the first place. What they did know was that he wouldn’t allow them time for self-pity. The best they could hope for now was damage control. 

“Get me 3g of sulcrafate suspension and 200mcg misoprostol. Someone get the regen on his chest, find those tears in his oesophagus. Pain relief hypos. New sheets, call laundry for Jim’s clothes… I don’t care who does what, sort it out between yourselves. Just fucking do it".

Gabe moved first, taking away the soiled implements that Bones had removed from the bed, and beginning an attempt at tidying up the remains of the debacle. Christine stood up, disposed of the tube into medical waste, and retrieved the sheets from Bones’ feet. Another nurse retrieved the medication. Bones stayed where he was on the bed, tunic soaking, still occasionally wiping the blood from Jim’s nose and lips, ignoring his surroundings except for taking from the nurses the medications he was passed, and giving spent ones back, doggedly administering what remedies he could, fully aware as he coaxed Jim into drinking the suspensions that it was likely to come back up.

It did, Bones ready with the kidney bowl. Not much this time. Literally just the liquid he had swallowed ten seconds previously. Straight back. Flecked with yellow and pink foam. Like nothing that should ever come out of a human being.

He passed the bowl to Gabe, without looking at him. Christine passed Bones a new white hospital t-shirt and boxers, with which Bones gently replaced Jim’s own saturated clothing. Christine put fresh sheets on the next bed, and Bones and Gabe moved Jim over between them, his frame frighteningly light. They reattached a new IV. Inserted a new cannula. Replaced the oxygen. Then Bones asked to be passed a sedative. Christine, in her discretion, prepared one of a sensibly high dose. Bones pushed it into Jim’s neck – no point in allowing him to stay awake and suffering for any longer – and dropped the used hypo to the floor. Then he stroked Jim’s cheek with his thumb again as Jim fell asleep, eyes never leaving his face.

“I’m sorry Jim”, he whispered. The staff stood still and reverently behind him, almost deferential in this terrible time, their hearts aching for their captain, and for their superior, as Bones’ own remorse, a sore, sorry, and helpless thing, filled the room. “I am so very, very sorry”.

Chapter Text

They heard the doctor before they saw him.

Nyota and Spock, having run down straight after Bones the moment he had received the comm from medbay, had been stopped at the door by a nurse, and prevented from following him in. This they simultaneously understood, and did not: Jim’s situation was an emergency, only authorized medical personnel could be in the room, and they were the only ones who, at that time, were truly needed. It was necessary. And yet, being ignorant to what was happening mere feet away from them and yet entirely hidden was, even Spock would concur, terrifying.

It had been entirely silent in the corridor, behind the sealed panel. Deafeningly, infinitely, piercingly silent.

In this silence they had waited, their spiraling and speculating thoughts saturated with anxiety, until the panel slid open, and the same nurse directed them to go to the CMO’s quarters via the corridor access, rather than through the medbay. Nyota had not been able to prevent herself from leaping childishly to the balls of her feet in an attempt to see past the nurses’ shoulder, to see where Jim was, what was happening. If he was still alive. But in there too, it seemed, there was a dreadful quiet.... The nurse’s face was as stoic and as impassive as the regular arrangement of Spock’s own features (although now the Vulcan’s were strained with concern, and frustration) – they could tell nothing. But Leonard must have known they were there. And clearly whatever had occurred in sickbay warranted their knowing. With trepidation threatening to cripple their every move, Spock and Nyota made their way to the side access to the doctor’s office.

The door was already partially ajar. And it was here that they heard Leonard expel one long, drawn-out breath, before uttering in a whisper that was the vocalized embodiment of shattered glass, the words,

“Fucking hell…..”

Spock placed his hand to the panel to instruct the door to open fully, and allowed Nyota to step into the room before him. He sealed the exit, and turned his attention to the room.

Leonard was sitting on the stool, elbows on his knees, face in his hands.

He is a mess. Tunic and sleeves covered in the drying supplement that Jim threw up, fluid and strands of blood, and lubrication from the tube still clinging to the backs of his hands, hair awry with sweat, eyes rimmed with red. Spock can sense that he is at once inexorably angry, and close to tears. For now, Spock can only watch. He is, as yet, unsure as to how to proceed with his questions in the face and fact of Leonard’s distress, especially when he is well aware that this which is affecting Leonard will shortly be affecting him to the same degree. He is afraid. He temporarily reserves reaction.

Again, that punitive hiss - “Fucking hell”.

Leonard gets up suddenly, ineffectually, wandering about with his hands on his hips, or scrubbing over his mouth, or gripping at each other over and over. He stops, leaning forwards with both hands gripping the edge of his desk. He is bracing himself, they can see. He shakes his head, eyes closed.

“What an absolute shitstorm….. What an absolute fucking shitstorm. We can’t go through that again. We can’t let that happen again”.

He looks angry, afraid, and utterly, utterly defeated.

Both Spock and Nyota are frightened by that look.

“Leonard”, Nyota begins, gently – “why don’t you go and get cleaned up – “

But there is a knock, and Christine comes in, without waiting for an answer. She closes the door behind her – shielding the doctor’s fraying state from the rest of the medbay.

“Leonard”, she says, tone placating but immediately direct, “don’t –"

“No, you don’t even fucking try, Christine, please”, Leonard barks, turning on her, and even she flinched slightly. Christine could manage standing in the face of Bones’ frequent outbursts, but this….. This was different. The man was hurting on a level that was not to do with his continually thwarted attempts to obey his Hippocratic oath. “Do not even try! I should have used the Gastorjejunal tube, I –"

“No, Leonard –"

“I knew, from the beginning, I fucking knew – but I was too weak to insist on it, too fucking concerned with how Jim would feel to do the things that would actually save his goddam life–“

“Leonard!”

The severity and volume of Christine’s tone almost matched his, and he paused.

“Leonard, you know full well how traumatic the GJ tube would have been, and that the risk of infection was simply too high. When you say ‘you knew from the beginning’, that is what you knew – that is why you made the decision on the NG tube. In the wake of what just happened I know it is easy to look back and think you would have done things differently, but you wouldn’t have done. It was a measured decision, and it was the correct one”.

Bones puts his face in his hands again, where he stands in the middle of the room. All observers can see that he is at breaking point, that he simply does not know where or how to even put his body in order to tolerate the horror of the situation. Tears have begun to slide quietly down Nyota’s face. Spock shifts slightly closer to her.

“But the vomiting”, he groans, his voice muffled against his still slippery, bloody palms. “I have literally no idea what is wrong with him, the one symptom I have to work with is the vomiting….and I didn’t even treat him in the most appropriate way for that….”

Here his voice breaks, even from where it comes to them from behind his hands. “I couldn’t do it…. I couldn’t do it because I couldn’t do it to him”.

“Jim would have gone on being sick whether the feeding was done through the GJ or not”, Christine said more gently, taking a step towards him. “It’s the nature of his condition. This way, you made the most obvious choice in how to avoid him having to swallow, and having to physically eat. It was the most sensible approach, the best first step. Like I said…he would have gone on vomiting wherever the tube was placed, and however we administered the fluid. And that part isn’t your fault. This wasn’t your fault, Doctor McCoy”.

She finished with his title, they knew, to emphasize his authority, the expertise on which they all – on which Jim – was so desperately relying. If Bones understood this, it didn’t have the intended effect. His breathing, Spock noticed, had changed. The intake had become an audible heavy drawing in of air, and the outward only a brief shallow expulsion, that was not proportionate to the first... Spock recognised this sign. Leonard went back to leaning on the table, and when he spoke, it was down at his hands, and his voice was the same dark monotone with which he had spoken in the medbay as they cleared away the detritus of the disastrous tube attempt. 

“I don’t know what to do”, he said. “He won’t or can’t eat, and when he does he’s sick. I know he’s been trying, but then he’s sick anyway, the gastritis – for want anything else to call this motherfucker - will see to that. I can’t give him anti-emetics, he’s allergic to them The protein bars haven’t worked, the supplement didn’t work…He throws up the tube. ….We don’t have anything to work with, he’s so thin. There is no room for error now. None. I got him on the scales yesterday…his BMI is 14.9. He can’t stand up anymore, he is losing motor functions. His kidneys started to pack up a week ago. His electrolytes, his blood pressure, his immune system….everything is on the floor. He is dying now. Literally, he is dying” - with a sudden movement that startled them all, although perhaps Spock slightly less so, for he had foreseen the high probability of this, Bones seized the medkit on his desk, and threw it with all his considerable force against the wall –

“HE IS DYING, AND I CAN’T FUCKING DO ANYTHING TO STOP IT”.

What followed this was a roar of pain and infuriation so primeval that all three other occupants of the room knew in an instant that they would never forget its sound. Bones threw a second medkit, and his chair. Turned over the desk. Threw his PADD to the wall. Glass shattered, chemicals sprayed across the room, metal clanged against metal at a volume of the bells of hell. Around them, fragments and shards of broken material began to accumulate – the direct physical conversion of Leonard’s insufferable, excruciating anguish. “DOES NO-ONE FUCKING UNDERSTAND YET?” he yelled, turning to them, clearly if irrationally demanding an actual answer. “JIM IS DYING! I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN PREVENT IT, AND I AM LOSING HIM! WE ARE OUT OF FUCKING OPTIONS! I AM FAILING HIM!

He threw a savage kick at the demolished table, which slid further through the debris. He let out another roar, this time verbalised with the worst iteration of ‘GOD-DAMMIT’ they had ever heard. There was no sign of the torment of his state of mind abating. Desperate to help, desperate to make it stop, to make something even half way to right, Nyota went to go towards him. But Spock placed a warm hand on her arm. She turned on him, incredulous.

‘Let him, Nyota”, Spock said quietly, his eyes on the breaking doctor before them. “Let him rage”.

Finally, after almost another minute, in which Bones’ emotions wore as thin and as exhausted as their beloved captain in the room next door, all fight left him. He was rinsed out, they could see in his eyes, hollow, and drained of all further reaction. He fell the short distance back against the nearest wall, and slid down to sitting, landing with his hands resting on his knees bent in front of him, staring into space.

It was still. Glass clinked once in a corner. An old Earth medical volume slid with a papery sound from a broken shelf to the floor. A fluid of some kind dripped from a metal edge.

Then, the first small movement in several minutes -

‘I’ll find someone to help clear up”, Christine whispered. And left.

Nyota was next. Slowly, as if approaching something dangerous, she cautiously went towards Leonard, and seated herself on the floor, close by, but not touching. There was not even a flicker of awareness from Leonard that she was there. So she moved as close as she dared, and carefully slid two hands around his bicep, and rested her cheek against his shoulder. Her tears ran silently into the accumulation of matter on his tunic. Then Spock joined them, sitting opposite Leonard, bolt upright, but thoroughly present in his own almost unbearable pain.

And there the three of them sat, silent and unmoving, for almost ten minutes. It was not a reflective silence. None of them could bear to contemplate what may lay in wait for them.

However, Bones had been thinking.

Still without moving, without changing his deadened empty stare into space, he said into the quiet,

“There is one option left’.

His voice was gravelled, and deeper than usual. Torn like Jim’s by that which had wrenched its destructive way out of him and out into the room around them.

Nyota lifted her head. She dreaded his next words. They didn’t come. It was Spock who encouraged him.

"What is that option, Leonard?” he asked, softly.

Bones gave one nod to whatever random far away space into which he was still staring. A signal that whatever it was he had been contemplating, he had made a decision on. This time when he spoke, he did look up. Directly at Spock.

“Induce coma”, he said, flatly.

Spock held his gaze.

"What will that entail?” he asked.

Leonard shifted, slight animation beginning to return as he formulated the last desperate possibility into some kind of actual medical hope.

"Jim can neither eat, nor hold down what he is made to eat. His own worst enemy now is his body. Where Jim himself is willing, he is fighting his body at every moment. His body is fighting him. I don’t know why, I don’t know what has really caused it to get this fucking far. I should have been able to get the infection and the gastritis and the vomiting under control, but…as you have said all along Spock, the psychological aspect is vital here. And we simply cannot work with Jim at a psychiatric level while his level of basic cognizance is dropping all the time.

But. What I do know is that when something is fighting you, you attempt to disable it. That’s what we do with Jim. We disable his body’s attempt to override the treatment – to override me. This is what inducing a coma will mean. His body will be rendered unresponsive. In that time, he will not be able to vomit the tube up. He won’t be able to vomit at all. I can feed him via a different method, restore his body whether it likes it or not, to some kind of level where, when he is conscious again, he might have some chance of regaining some strength. I know he will hate it..." He swallowed here, hard. "But he won’t know anything about it”.

The practical explanation over, Bones’ temporary presence of mind deserted him again. He swallowed once more, and fell silent.

Spock knew that the doctor was waiting for one of them to ask the inevitable question. Nyota was looking at Spock with a terrible mixture of faith and trepidation on her face.

He asked.

“And what are the risks associated with it, Leonard?”

He had absolutely no interest in hearing the answer. But it came anyway, when Bones looked up at him with a deathly resigned desolation that Spock would have surrendered his commandership never to see again.

“....That he never wakes up”.

Chapter Text

Somewhere, in some other time and space, there is a light shining that – for those privileged enough to have it in their life – will simply never go out. Proximity to it is not necessary; for as long as memory retains it, it will glow as brightly and offer as much warmth as if the recaller were standing on the very surface of the sun.

In this other time and place, that light embodied has hopes. It fears. It loves. It laughs with friends. It makes plans, and fills every corner within its radius as if it is vision itself.

In this other time and place, life is fair and kind – and events that happen are in reasonable balance with events that have gone before it, and that will come after. Life is comprehensible. Life is just. 

But this is not that time and place. And life is neither just, nor fair, nor kind.

For where once that light seemed inextinguishable, and as if it could and would protect everything within its vicinity simply by its very existence, it is, somehow, now fading. It lies on a hospital gurney, oblivious to all around it, flat and lifeless, its lustre waning and deteriorating even beneath the fierce white artificial strips above that in comparison seem dismal. It is dying, as its personification is dying – diminishing into a pallid grey that has started to colour the world of those watching it in its place, a dullness creeping imperceptibly yet steadily in across the ground, like a moorland fog at night.

What should never be muted is dwindling. What should never be lessened is shrinking. What should never fade is perishing.

No.

This is not that time and space.

Doctor Leonard Horatio McCoy stands at the foot of Captain James T. Kirk’s bed, and waits for his staff to finish their final preparations.

Jim is unconscious. This was at once the best and the worst way in which to approach what they were about to do.

The doctor stands unmoving, darkly watching the nurses complete their administrations. In his hands he holds various implements and apparatus. Once the staff are finished, he will step forwards to perform his part of the process. Like a man going to the gallows. Except it is the man on the bed who he is sending. And that man may have to hang there for a very long time until he is either rescued - or dies.

No. This is not that time and space.

Chapter Text

They had sat for what felt like hours in the silence that followed Bones’ final summary of the only option that remained for Jim. Bones, Spock, and Nyota….time ticking away….yet each of them unsure of quite how to physically move themselves in this situation. Something as simple as lifting an arm, or unfurling a leg, or pulling themselves to standing, seemed so mundane – so ordinary – that it just didn’t seem possible that it was required in order for them to do anything else.

The circumstances were unbelievable. Everything else ought to be too.

But in reality it was only ten minutes before the panel slid open, and Christine stepped in. She observed the three of them, and respectfully did not react. Instead, she joined the silence, quietly awaiting the next instructions from her CMO.

This was the catalyst Bones needed. Following the outpouring of anger and fear and frustration, his mind and heart had come to a plateau in which no emotion, or reaction, could either increase or decrease the extent to which his heart was being brutalised within. The only option left now was action. This was the only means through which he could assuage the wound that was deepening like decay in his soul. He had to move. He had to do.

Slowly, for he was stiff with stress and the fatigue that dragged at his spirit, Bones rose to his feet. For his own self-drive, he drew himself to his full 6’2” height, something the muscles in his back informed him he had not done for some time.

“We are going to induce coma, Christine”, he said, matter of fact. “Pentobarbital, nothing else, usual Jim reasons why. When he is under, we will insert an IV to feed him via total parenteral nutrition. It’ll go through his neck. His chest wall is too brittle”.

Christine nodded. Any further explanation was unnecessary. PNT fed a patient directly into a vein. It meant no eating, no absorption, no digestion.

No vomiting.

“I’m assuming Leonard that you will both induce him and insert the IV?”

Bones nodded curtly. Yes, he would be responsible for inflicting the two most savage afflictions that Jim had endured thus far. Under his own hands – hands that Jim knew and trusted – Jim was about to come into perhaps more danger than he had been exposed to even while captive under Parmen. The urge to take a shard of glass from the floor and run it through both palms was, for a moment, almost overwhelming. But he forced himself to remember – as treacherous as this territory was, and as grievous as the actions felt, this approach was meant only to bring peace to Jim’s now pitiful existence. Whether this peace was what allowed Jim to gather himself towards a recovery, or whether it was the calm in which he would quietly and blessedly lose the battle, Bones could not tell. Either way, he knew, in a way in which he knew only certain things – he hated space, he loved his daughter, Jim Kirk had saved his life in every way that it was possible for a person to be saved – that he was doing the right thing.

Perhaps Spock could have told what the outcome may be. Could have seen inside Jim’s mind, and found whether Jim was able to fight, or whether he was simply going to embrace this long awaited release, and go to sleep. But now was not the time. Not anymore. And Bones knew this was why Spock had not advocated the subject again. They had pushed Jim too far, for too long. As essential as it was that they continued the work that Spock had begun during that meld (oh so long, long ago, it seemed), they could only embark on that road if Jim was able to turn back from this one. He was dying. No amount of psychological intervention was going to aid that now.

“Then I’ll start the prep”, Christine said softly.

She turned to go. But then she paused. Turned back slightly.

“Do you want to – “

Bones intercepted her.

“No. Don’t wake him up…...… He’s had enough”.

Christine nodded. She did not leave the room quickly enough for Bones to miss the quick flash of her tears.

He swallowed his own.

Then he turned to Spock and Nyota, both of whom had also risen to their feet, and were standing waiting on him. A small piece of glass fell from Nyota’s skirt, from where it had caught. There was a streak of plaster across Spock’s otherwise flawless cheek. Leonard could hardly look into the faces of either of them, beleaguered as they were with their suffering, and the detritus of his own.

But he owed it to them. They had come this far between them – the four of them. Leonard’s tireless medical crusade. Spock’s reading to Jim from Shakespeare, and failing to understand the (Bones saw in his mind’s eye Spock air quote with his eyebrows as he said the word - )“humour”, or from Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd and Jim actually laughing at Spock’s shock at the finale…Nyota’s constancy on the bridge, at Spock’s side, in her comfort of Leonard….And Jim himself, who had fought  so hard for so long, determined, Bones was sure, to live for them far more than he was determined to live for himself. He owed it to these two incredible human beings (for Spock had never looked more human to Bones than he did now, while waiting to see his adored Captain be reduced to nothing more than an artificially breathing husk) to allow them to see this through with him for as long as they could. He himself could not break down again. It was for him now to lead – not with caution, as he had done with the NG tube, but with assertion and courage and determination. Through this approach he would be leading Jim into great peril. But it was only through this that he would be able to lead him out again.

He motioned gently at Spock and Nyota with his hands to go into the medbay ahead of him. Spock led them, Nyota holding Spock’s arm whether in reassurance of him or herself, Bones could not tell. Either way, it was heartbreaking. He followed them out of his quarters, and silently they assembled around Jim’s bed.

Jim was more still than Leonard had ever seen him. He had slept beside him countless times, and been awake often enough while Jim was asleep to be highly familiar with Jim Kirk’s unconscious sleeping habits. Like in waking life, Jim moved almost continually. A leg bouncing gently. Turning, and turning again. Arms above his head. Arms at his side. On his front. On his back. As if he was always afraid of missing something. Bones would often be awoken by a foot extending into his calf, or a broad, warm back rolling onto his own shoulder, and would be thoroughly exasperated by Jim’s insistence that they both slept in his bed as held up alongside the fact that Bones really could do very little sleeping at all. Even if Bones held him tight, Jim’s very breathing seemed to require a greater range of movement than anyone else’s in the universe. He could not help it. Jim Kirk had not been born to be still.

Now, though. Bones had to resist the highly unmedical urge to put his hand to Jim’s chest to reassure himself he was breathing. The biobed monitors informed him that he was, and there was a faint but perceptible rise and fall of the pale blue blanket that Bones had folded down over him when they had moved him into this bed.

But, God. Not a flicker of a muscle. Not an eyelid twitching. Not a finger lifting. It was, Bones thought suddenly, like looking at a photograph. It was Jim, absolutely. And yet it was not Jim at all.

This, he realised, was what Jim would look like in the coma. Entirely still. Any movement from his chest depleted even further in significance by the fact that it was extremely likely that the respirators would be causing this movement artificially. A replica.

He cleared his throat quietly, and stood aside. His turn would come. These moments were for Spock and Nyota.

Christine and Gabe had started hooking the IV, and preparing the pentobarbital. Nyota tore her eyes from the sight of her immobile captain on the bed to ask Leonard what they were doing. She didn’t really need to know, and Leonard knew this, and knew that she knew this. But it was something practical, and unthreatening, that she could look at for a few moments. Bones understood. It was the entire reason he had become a doctor.

“That’s the barbiturate that will put Jim to sleep and keep him there”, he explained, gently. He moved back slightly to allow Gabe to pass in front of him, and found that he could rest his hand on Jim’s shin. “It’s pentobarbital – it is an old method now, but I expect you can guess why this is the one I’m using…”

Nyota gave a watery smile. “He’s allergic to anything else”.

“He’s allergic to anything else”, Bones repeated in confirmation. “At least, he’s allergic to components of the other options. I have only used this one him once before - but to the best of my knowledge pentobarbital is Jim Kirk hypo-allergenic. Unlike most of the rest of this ship, apparently". 

They watched for a few moments more. And then the staff were almost ready for Leonard. He straightened his shoulders, stepped forwards - and put his hand on Spock’s.

The Vulcan had not moved for the entire time they had been stood beside Jim’s bed. Bones was forcibly reminded of Khan, and the deathly terrible warp-core incident, and Spock’s constant upright vigilance beside Jim that he kept every moment that he could. Then, though, they had been watching Jim improve. Each day, imperceptible as it was at first, they had seen his vitals return, his blood start to move, his organs begin to function, his brain waves regain normality…. Never before had Spock had to watch such deterioration in the man to whom he was so devoted, and certainly had he never expected that, if they should find themselves in such a situation, he would have to watch Jim’s condition be actively worsened if they were to have any chance of regaining him.

Spock did not move as Leonard touched him. Instead, he asked a question so fundamentally removed from anything even vaguely Vulcan sounding, and in a voice so small, that Bones wondered if he had heard him correctly.

“Do we have to say goodbye?”

Bones refused. He was going to refuse to say goodbye to Jim, when he administered the dose of barbiturates in a few short minutes. He would not say goodbye. He would not let Spock and Nyota say it either. And yet they could not be denied the moment to say anything that, if the most terrible should befall them, come some time in the future they would look back and regret not saying while there had been even this remote chance that Jim might hear them.

“Just say…” he began, “......Just say whatever you have to”.

Nyota reached forwards and took Jim’s hand. Heavily sedated, and exhausted to the point of beaten, there was no reaction from Jim – but his hand was still warm, like his charm and his love had been, and this was enough.

“You come back again, Captain, do you hear me?” she whispered – and as soon as she began to speak, her tears began to fall. Behind her, Spock’s joined them. “Don’t you dare not come back”. She forced a small laugh. “For one thing Sulu is a despot whenever he has to replace Spock in the chair…”

Leonard raised a thin smile on Jim’s behalf. But even that lightest moment of humour died in an instant. Nyota’s face fell again. She squeezed Jim’s hand between both of hers.

“Just….come back”.

Bones heard the sound of a tear falling to the crisp sheets.

Nyota made room for Spock. Spock, to Leonard’s surprise, did not touch Jim. He had expected him to, especially given what they had shared in the meld. But perhaps that was it. Spock was avoiding reigniting any kind of thought or memory that might cause Jim further mental trauma while he was physically so vulnerable. Instead, the Vulcan stood looking down at his Captain, a deep, resigned grief on his features that was all the more terrible for its subtlety. When he finally did speak, it was only two words – and here, he did put out a hand as if to gently touch with his fingertips the skin of Jim’s cheek.

“Jim…. Ashayam…”

And just like that, there was nothing else left to do but to wait for the medical staff to complete the last parts of the prep before Bones could administer the dose of barbiturates. He allowed Spock and Nyota to stay.

Then he was seeing himself putting on gloves, and inserting the PNT into a vein at Jim’s throat, and ensuring the correct placement of breathing apparatus should they begin to need it, and watching the fluid decrease from a syringe as he slowly depressed the plunger of pentobarbital into Jim’s system as he sent the most precious thing in the world to him into an oblivion which may well, in the end, equate with death.

It took almost half an hour before he could be sure it had taken full effect. As for Bones’ words to Jim, he had only three, which he repeated to Jim constantly throughout that time, one hand on Jim’s chest as Jim descended into somewhere that no one could follow, hoping that Jim would hear them and use their echo to remember, when the time came, how to find his way out again.

“I’m right here…..I’m right here…..I’m right here…..”

Then it was done.

With that Bones dropped the syringe and gloves on the floor. Quietly but determinedly, he walked past Spock and Nyota towards his quarters. He went into the shattered ruins of his office, closed the door behind him, and resumed his previous position on the floor with his back against the wall.

Then he opened - and drank – a bottle of whiskey, the helpless darkness enveloping him, as it had Jim.

Chapter Text

 “What?.....”

“I cannot, Leonard….”. Spock took a deep breath, and the fact that this was so visible shook Bones to his soul. “All I know is that they have tortured him with these images….”

“What images?”

“They are indistinct….corpses.…children….blood. Jim in pain….he is leading someone somewhere. They are hungry…”

“Of course his brain would have registered hunger – they fucking starved him into oblivion. Even entirely unconscious his body would have been aware of this level of physical deprivation”.

“Yes, but that is part of the problem. Because Jim is protecting the images. I am unable to fathom if they are real, or fabricated – induced through telekinetic persuasion….”

Bones, now holding Jim’s hand where previously he had had his fingers over his pulse, looked at Spock for a long while. Spock stared ahead, the Vulcan impassivity that so defined his features twitching in shock. Between them on the bed, Jim lay hot and exhausted, chest heaving. Then Spock looked back to Jim, touched his forehead with the fingertips of his right hand, and some kind of resolve crossed his face. He rose to his feet.

“We will need to request of the Platonians that they divulge to us the nature of the psychological torture”, he said, his voice at once stoic and laced with a fraying edge of barely concealed desperation. “While Jim is shielding to this extent, we cannot begin any kind of therapeutic process”.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

It had been a month since the ship’s CMO had made the decision to place its captain in an induced coma. Four weeks. Four whole weeks in which death had pollutedly lingered so persistently at the periphery of everyone’s consciousness, and yet had been filled with so much…..life.  

For life on board the Enterprise had somehow gone on. It had struggled at times, under the obvious strain, but at most others it was beset with the plain and repeated ordinary that just never stops marching by on time’s ceaseless path of routine and commonplace, no matter how strange or uncommon the circumstances. Ensign Thompson’s youngest daughter had learned to walk. One of Scotty’s engineering team had discovered that his wife was having an affair with a woman. A litter of tribbles had been found living inside one of the cafeteria replicators. A malfunction had occurred in one of the navigation systems that threatened to lead them four earth years off course before Chekov and Sulu corrected it. 

There had been a brief outbreak of the common cold – rare, rather than common, these centuries - among the gamma shift.

A suspected serial thief on E deck.  

A couple of birthdays.

Thanksgiving.  

The centre of the Enterprise was, now, the medbay. Here, its heart lay. It was only just still beating. But still beating it was.

And life was the same here too. Completely and absolutely different, no doubt. Yet entirely the same. Every day, the artificial sun rose on the artificial new day. At the designated time of that day, CMO Doctor Leonard McCoy would arrive on his shift, and review the files on his current patients. He would give all appropriate instructions to his staff for the shift and plan his priorities. He would hold his clinic, and work accordingly with the crew members who came to him under his care. He prescribed, admitted, discharged, treated, examined, assessed, monitored, evaluated, and withdrew within precise medical guidelines – and sometimes just outside, as was the particular (warped genius) approach of Doctor McCoy.

At mid-shift, he would attend the handover between the early staff and the late/twilight staff, and ensure all patients were at their correct status. Then he would commit himself to his paperwork, and focus his attention on his sicker patients, the ones that could wait for him because they had no choice but to go nowhere. The bedbound. The chronic, the acute.

The terminal.

At not one point did he allow Jim Kirk to feature in this latter category.

When it came to Jim’s treatment, Leonard was the primary physician. This had never been voiced among the staff or between him and them – it was a matter of fact. Doctor McCoy monitored the captain’s condition, and administered any required treatment. Doctor McCoy checked his vitals, and supervised the biomonitor screens for any change – for better or worse. He had installed four additional monitors in his office and quarters that exclusively read Jim’s bio-information, and had this same information fed to two additional PADDs, which were mobile, and thus allowed him to shore up every last moment of time in which there could be any danger of his losing contact with Jim’s status. In these ways, he was maintaining a vigilance over Jim that, though it was clearly tiring him, was preferable to the exhaustion that would accompany the worry if he had not taken this approach. It was he who decided when Jim should be moved, and who by (himself always included). It was he who handled the placement and function of the PNT tube. All this he did understated and unobtrusively, neither drawing attention to the situation, nor deliberately directing it away. It seemed as though he had absorbed Jim’s unconscious presence here in his sick bay as a sort of tragic and unavoidable but yet manageable fact – like having lost an arm, and accepting and committing to the slow, dogged, but necessary process of learning to use a prosthetic. He would not give up. He would not accept Jim’s case as helpless. He took up the mantle of hope of every day, and bore it with a strength that his staff had only ever seen in one other man.

They could not know that Doctor McCoy was only barely above basic functioning.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Of course he was drinking. He had been drinking when he very first met Jim – and Jim had somehow managed to cure him of that addiction, even despite all the while dragging him out to get wasted. Even though Leonard had been dependent on alcohol at that time, and the excuse that the kid gave him to get “out on campus” to “socialise” provided a very welcome disguise indeed, somehow, somewhere along the line, that dependency had begun to recede. He started to notice it at four in the morning, when he and Jim would still be up talking, sitting crammed into their little window seat to watch the sun rise over San Francisco, and he would realise that he was no longer drunk, and that it was better this way. Then at two in the morning, when he had Jim had bailed early from a campus party to come back to their room and play shithead with a ridiculous three packs of cards, and they’d made the best hot chocolate he’d ever had, by literally throwing chocolate into a pan and pouring the kettle over it. He’d noticed it at seven in the evening, when Jim would get home from combat training, and Leonard would realise that he had looked forwards to this moment in the day more than he had to having the first drink. He had never stopped drinking entirely - he had never stopped enjoying the sensation, or being aware of the sense of it ‘taking the edge off’, as he used to say to Jim, who would raise a sceptical eyebrow and pat his arm. But there had, he had realised, been a point at which his dependency on it had been replaced with a dependency on Jim Kirk. Whether or not this was any more healthy, he wasn’t sure. But at least it wasn’t in danger of losing him his position in Starfleet, or his medical licence. Or his life.

Only Jim Kirk could fucking cure an alcoholic by exposing them to alcohol.

Now, though, Jim wasn’t here. He wasn’t here to stop him, or make him, or weirdly stop him by making him or whatever Jim-Kirk-style-brand-of-witchcraft he’d used to break Bones of that dangerous, spiralling habit. To an extent he was. Bones knew he must stay sober on shift if for nothing else than for ensuring that Jim was treated properly, and that Jim was safe. And he knew he must stay sober for the sake of his role on the ship in general. These people depended on him, and there were already too many people in the world who depended on him whom he had failed. Jim, and his daughter. It was only two. But it was too many.

So he didn’t drink on shift, and he made an effort to stop and to sleep for a decent stretch in between shifts.

But the rest of the time, lonely, afraid, and sad, and slowly but assuredly approaching that often unavoidable downwards vortex of self-sabotage….

Yes. He was drinking.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Spock’s existence had narrowed. He realised this as he stood at the main communication screen on the bridge for the fourth hour that day, Nyota at her station behind him, loyally inputting the signal to Platonius, Spock waiting for any sort of response. This was his world now, his universe.

Horribly ironic, given that gazing upon this screen essentially involved looking out upon eons of actual universe.

But if the universe was defined as all matter, and all space, and all time of which he was aware, then the transferral of the definition was a logical inference. This, here, was where his life began and ended. In front of this screen, the only vestige of hope in this wasteland of thwarted solutions. This was where all other life that he truly knew of began and ended.

This was where Jim’s life currently began, and ended.

This was his Universe.

It was peculiar, he thought. Spock had never envisaged reaching such an impasse. He had thought his knowledge to be too great, his mind too wide, his awareness too superior. And yet, in all that wisdom, he had never imagined that his entire intellectual empire could crumble to dust as the result of the loss of one single person. Perhaps, he reflected, as he stared silently and unmovingly into the black beyond the cruelly blank glass of the screen, that was where his mind had failed him. It had not, in its vastness, been able to comprehend the importance of the narrow, and the close. He had not needed to look into space to see infinity, or an example of the wonderfully incomprehensible that the cosmos had to offer. Jim Kirk was the example of that wonderfully incomprehensible. And Spock would love him for far longer than infinity.

Spock roused himself from his reverie.

The meld.

Another meld was not, he believed, at this time possible. But it might be, if he had even meagre further information with which to proceed into the process. This way, he would be able to hone his own focus within Jim’s mind, he would perhaps be able to make some kind of sense of those images, emotions, and phrases that had besieged his and Jim’s psyche’s during Spock’s last attempt. What he needed, essentially, was a code. Something that would serve as a sort of map through the trauma and the suffering, so that he could reach Jim, come alongside him, and lead him out through the tyranny. Without such a guide, Spock would simply once again be lost in the tide of whatever it was that had now engulfed Jim so entirely - physically, mentally, and psychologically. And this was all assuming that Spock could perform a meld at all, that it would be possible to engage with someone whose mind had been subsumed into an artificial unconsciousness.

It was this for which he was waiting on some kind of merciful communication from Parmen. He and the doctor, along with Nyota, Scotty, Sulu, and Chekov, had discussed other options: threats to Platonius from Starfleet, embargos enforced by The Federation, prohibitions, sanctions….warfare. But all of these methods would, they knew, be futile. It was a fierce pride that drove the Platonians, and to apply these sorts of pressures would only result in a rebound. Their only option was to ingratiate themselves to Parmen and his people, to flatter, to entice, until by such means the Platonians were sufficiently adulated into voluntarily exercising their one true power….

Their knowledge of what had happened to Jim.

Spock knew that they needed the Platonian pride to come to their aid, and in order for this to happen, the Federation, Starfleet, the Enterprise – Spock – would have to eliminate their own. It tasted like poison, to Spock, this grovelling approach. They had destroyed Jim, and now Spock and his company were reliant on them for his restoration.

But of all the men – of all the captains – in the universe, Spock knew that Jim would have done this if this was what was required. James Kirk was a proud man. But he loved his family to a depth far greater than that. He would not have been like Parmen, and allowed people to suffer simply because he wanted a certain image of himself to prevail. And it was precisely that sort of attitude that had led them to the position in which they currently were. If Jim had been capable of being in charge throughout this saga, if it had not been him that had been the victim of it, Spock knew that he never would have allowed it to happen.

And so, even while he lay so distant and remote and removed, Jim was still leading.

And Spock still followed.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

It is 3:10am.

Under the dull blueish light of the night-time medbay, Bones sits in a chair at Jim’s bedside – and watches him.

He just sits, in the clinical quiet, just watching him. Jim’s face, taught with suffering even in the depths of coma, is grey. Just the sight of it turns everything inside Bones to a noxious black.

3.18am.

Bones hasn’t moved. He watches Jim’s chest rise and fall, sometimes regularly, sometimes with a slight hitch that sends a cold bolt of fear through Bones’ own blood.

3.24am.

For the first time in over an hour, Bones moves. Quietly, he pulls his chair closer to Jim’s bedside. There is something he needs to do.

With the very barest of motion, Bones raises his hand and places it carefully on Jim’s artificially moving chest. Then he taps gently. Just his fingertips, just on Jim’s breastbone. Three taps.

Onetwothree.

Nothing else moves. There is no sound.

Onetwothree.

Three taps. It was once a code they developed at the academy, when Bones had noticed that Jim unconsciously did a similar thing when he was distressed or preoccupied and trying to hide it. Three taps, usually with the first three fingers of his right hand, against whatever surface they were on – the table, his knee, his PADD. He would often try to smile and laugh and talk as normal during these times - but the three taps. It was his tell. Until one evening, after watching Jim beside him on the sofa give the three taps on the arm where his hand lay, repeatedly for an hour, Bones had taken a risk. He reached across the small distance between him, and echoed the three taps, gently on Jim’s bare forearm. Jim had been startled out of an absence, he jumped slightly as he looked down at Bones’ fingers resting where he had left them on his arm. Then he had looked up at Bones, and found his best friend’s face to be a well of sympathy. Bones had asked softly if he wanted to talk about it. And Jim’s gratitude for Bones’ understanding when Jim could not bring himself to express something, and had not even realised was seeping from him anyway – at least to the eyes of someone who loved him completely – had reduced Jim to tears. Bones had gotten them both up, and drawn Jim into bed with him, buried them beneath a warm, dark, comforting heaviness of blankets, and held him close through the night, executing a gentle three taps wherever his hand happened to be on Jim’s back, or side, or shoulder, whenever Jim woke up. After that, they had used the three quiet, barely noticeable taps as a signal, a private cipher, in any time, place, or situation in which either of them needed the other. It had come to convey a deep and comforting understanding, a calming reminder of the other’s presence in each other’s lives, and the tenderness between them, despite Bones’ temper, and despite Jim’s wanton sacrificing himself on the altar of the gods of trouble.

Perhaps, Leonard hopes, despite even when Jim quite possibly already lies well beyond the brink of death.

3.40am.

It is still quiet, except for the constant dismal beep of the biomonitors. Christine has arrived, and Bones knows that if he needs to leave Jim under the observation of someone else for a short time, this would be his moment to do so.  

He can go to bed, attempt to claim some of the crucial sleep that his body has been demanding and his mind fighting….

He is tired now. He has to admit that. He is so tired that every step he takes feels like he is trying to walk upright during a shuttle launch. Sometimes, the floor is not where gravity had always assured him it would be. The wires in his head have come loose. Nothing is connecting. Things are starting to cease to make sense. He can’t absorb properly, he can’t process, he can’t output – and this is not the result of (although not improved by) the alcohol. Everything has retreated to an irretraceable distance. His hearing has the unnerving tendency to zone in and out. He is existing at the far reaches of his own cognizance. Even in the brief moments of unconsciousness that he does manage, his mind is not fully at rest. It is turning and turning and turning…Jim’s condition, Jim’s treatment, what he does see he can do, what he can’t see….turning and turning and turning into a tighter and tighter space until the tension is forced out and knocks out into his chest and he sits up with a start, and the whole exhausting cycle starts again.

But really, it is not just that he is tired.

It is that he is sick of it. Sick of everything.

He is sick of the alarms and sounds from Jim’s biobed providing the soundtrack to his consciousness, or blasting him awake – not because of any inconvenience or disruption, but because of his own leaping heart rate that threatens in those moments to choke him like Jim choked on the tube…. He is sick of seeing Jim so ill, and being unable to fix it. He is sick of Jim being in pain and being unable to take it away like Jim always trusts him to…He is sick of watching Jim’s spark flicker and wane under his fingertips, and not being able to fan it back into roaring ignition … He is sick of being responsible for mending this damage, and failing. He is sick of the need to comfort Jim that pours from him as if he’s bleeding, and being unable to give it, and of the fact that, now, Jim is unable to receive it. He is sick of the looks the rest of the crew give him whenever they see him – a terrible mixture of hope, dependency, and sympathy. He is sick of their faith in him, even though he knows he would be sick without it. He is sick of being lonely without Jim to yell at, fold his arms at and scold at grouchy length, laugh with, gripe to, drink with - sick of not having Jim to go to in this crisis.

And he misses him. God how he misses him. Jim is, at the moment, all Bones thinks about, all he talks about, all he does, every moment of every day, without fail. Jim’s existence is bound to Bones’ hands with a celestial force. And yet Bones misses him so badly, so painfully, that it is as if Jim did die in the warp-core after all, and that Bones never saw him again. He’s angry. He wants to smash every goddamn monitor within reach. And this feeling is worse, because Jim would playfully berate him for his anger, joke about awarding him a commendation for his exceptional bedside manner, pretend to be delighted at Bones’ wonderfully supportive reaction when Bones yells bloody murder at him when Jim reveals the next mad idea that’s likely to get him wounded, or kidnapped, or terrorised. And he’d pat Bones on the shoulder in his predictably cavalier way, with that smile and that look that told Bones that no matter how much the doctor protested, they were together in this and always would be - the look that would make Bones shake his head, grunt some idle insult under his breath, make a mental note to later down two shots of whiskey, and continue on with his job as Jim’s CMO because Jim was his captain, his best friend, and quite literally the centre of this godforsaken universe of darkness and disease and silence that he had ended up stuck in day after day because he’d followed Jim here…

….Then memory and imagination fold outwards and back into reality as he focuses again on the thin, pale form unconscious on the bed in front of him, and realises again that Jim is right fucking here, and yet none of that is happening. He closes his eyes against the sheer bloody-minded injustice of it all, and internally screams.

3:42am.

Christine and he have exchanged nods, but other than that she has perceptively and respectfully busied herself with looking at the updates to other patients’ charts, checking over medkits, and doing some perfunctory cleaning.

Bones thinks about it. Despite the inducing of the coma, he is still getting up with Jim five or six times a night at the moment, as Jim suffers through an unconscious but continual cycle of temperate spikes, palpitations, and small electrolyte-stimulated convulsions. Even if, by some unholy miracle, Bones is not awake the moment these changes register on the biofeeds, the team always eventually call him, because it is only Bones who could come even vaguely close to having the required level of expertise, and because they know that, really, even though he is not conscious, Jim only really wants Bones. But they don’t need to call him. Because there is no “eventually” about it. Bones will wake the moment that Jim does, and his instantaneous rising panic quite literally forces his rising to his feet. In amongst all the horror at the moment, of which there does not yet seem to be a discernible end, Bones simply cannot abide the idea of more fear, the fear every time the alarms go off, of what he will find this time he gets to Jim’s bedside. He knows he must tolerate the emotional and physical fatigue, and that he must also continue to cope with the sense of being bereaved. These are the mantles that he was always going to have to bear in his particular position as both Jim’s doctor and best friend – he can accept these sensations, painful as they are, and not allow them to interrupt the one thing he can do for Jim at the moment, which is treat him, determinedly and resolutely.  But the fear…he is struggling to accept the constant fear. It is eating him alive from within, dragging at his core hour after hour, day after day. This will interrupt how he does his job, and he is the only one who can do that job. He cannot break.

3.49am.

He decides.

Without looking away from Jim’s face, or moving his hand, he speaks softly to Christine.

“You can leave Jim, Christine. Thank you. Just attend to the other patients”.

She understands what he intends, but she is concerned for him, and that too is understandable.

“Doctor McCoy”, she begins, so kindly that it makes Bones want to swipe his arm across the instrument tray with the frustration of trying to contain his tears. “You can’t stay– “

“I can, actually, Christine”.

She regards him for a moment, clearly thinking he had misunderstood her. Softly, she explains -

“I was going to say you can’t take the night shift as well”.

“Since when do I not take the night shift?”

She pauses uncertainly. Then she chooses her words.

“As long as you get some rest, Leonard”.

She is looking at him steadily. Firmly. With almost a warning. Bones nearly smiles. He has taught her well.

“I will”.

She gives him a curt nod that is not without kindness. She understands.

“I’ll be in the office if you…if he needs anything”, she says. Then, without Bones needing to say a word, she pulls the privacy curtain around the bed, and she is gone.

Bones blessed her retreating footsteps, and turns his attention back to Jim.

It isn’t difficult to find room on the bed with Jim. There is not much of him, and besides, they have shared much smaller spaces than this, many a time. His body knows how to adjust to Jim Kirk’s.

He is painfully reminded of nights at the academy, sharing the sofa, sharing a bed......

He is, nonetheless, particularly careful in his movements, so as not to disturb Jim, but as he lays down and puts an arm around Jim’s too-thin chest, and tucks the younger’s man frame into his own, he thinks -  though it is not possible – that Jim shifts into him.

Then, Bones feels between them for Jim’s hand, and, taking it in his own, puts two finger tips to Jim’s wrist, over the pulse.  He pauses all other movement while he registers the thin rhythm of Jim’s fraught heartbeat into his own body. He next slides his other hand in between Jim’s neck and the pillow, so as to lay it against the exposed skin of Jim’s throat. Jim’s temperature seeps into the skin of his own hand. He shifts one final time until they are both comfortable, and his and Jim’s bodies slot together. Then, as they settle, he reaches behind him, turns off the biobed’s vitals monitors, and - at last - closes his eyes.

The peace is instantaneous – a soft, heavy stillness that is pure balm to Bones’ aching head. The only sound is Jim’s breathing. His actual, real-life breathing. The only sound in the world that, in this moment, really matters.

And that’s how he sleeps. He himself as Jim’s bio-monitor - a sorry if tender facsimile of their usual animated dynamic, and yet, in this awful time, the only way that Bones can ease just a fraction of the yawning cavernous loss in his own wretched heart. 

6.10am

Spock jolts awake in the captain’s chair, alone on the bridge save for the silent skeleton crew of the end of gamma shift, sitting suddenly bolt upright, almost unable to believe what is materialising before him.

The communication screen has lit up.  

Chapter Text

Leonard was woken by a sensation unlike any of those which his unconscious was trained to monitor even when his waking mind was oblivious. It was not Jim’s pulse, not his heartrate, not his temperature, not his movements, nothing that he could tell from his customary warm position curled into Jim’s side, within a cocoon possessive with fatigue….not Jim at all.

Someone else’s voice. The limp, heavy, involuntary movement of his own body, as it was being shaken by an external force.

Another voice, muffled, yet close, drawing nearer as he fought his viscous way upwards to full awareness.

Christine, holding his comm – Nyota’s voice over the waves.

“…..nians….the bridge…..ock…….”

All at once, clarity snapped into sharpness around him. He sat up - mindful of Jim’s delicate body at his side – but fast.

Then the world realigned, and made sense. Christine’s face, her voice, Nyota’s transmission.

The Platonians were in contact.

Then he was gone.

----------------

Leonard arrived on the bridge to find Alpha shift assembled at stations and poised with one singular focus: the screen, on a channel broadcasting to the entire ship. Upon that screen, Parmen – a disgustingly ostentatious display of humanity, Eraclitus beside him. In front of that screen, Spock, standing dignified and courageous and patient - the epitome of all the strength of humanity…..when he himself was not even entirely human. The rush of pride Leonard experienced in the moment at which he saw Spock standing tall and ready on the illuminated platform was matched only by the haste in which he reached Spock’s side. Here, Spock moved the hand closest to Leonard just enough that he could put the back of his own hand to Bones’ wrist. As he did so, Bones felt the shock of the opening connection, and almost turned to Spock with the force of the disbelief and the intensity. But he stopped. In an instant, through the words of Spock’s own mind that suddenly spilled into his, Leonard understood. This was the moment they had been waiting for – that they had so desperately needed. There was a chance, here, that Parmen was about to give them that urgently awaited information that would aid them, aid Spock, in fathoming the psychological carnage that had unfolded in James Kirk’s mind to the extent to which it had – to all intents and purposes – killed him. Parmen may have been brought to this point by some other means of political coercion, although all parties with any involvement in this situation knew by now that he would never admit this, but he still retained the one weapon of which it was impossible to strip him – his psychokinesis. This power he could exert even if to some extent he had been coerced into this communication with the Enterprise. This was the entire central fact of his command, and his danger. If Spock was to have any chance of manipulating the small degree of weakness Parmen was exhibiting by initiating contact with the Enterprise once more, he – and his cohorts around him – would require strength in numbers. Through creating this minor but tangible connection with Leonard at his side, Spock was crafting a fortified forcefield of their minds that would pose a far greater barrier to Parmen’s penetrative abilities than if their minds remained separate.

Bones felt, and sensed, this explanation rather than heard it, and it was all the clearer for it. Within moments, he regained his own control, and turned back to the screen, careful to keep his and Spock’s minute physical connection hidden. Together, they stood in the full force of Parmen’s dangerous psychokinetic trajectory. Together they held up their combined shield, with all the might of the Enterprise crew behind them. What happened next would determine the fate of everyone on board…and the fate of a man who both beings stood here were quite sure was at the centre of more universes than they would ever truly know.

Parmen spoke first.

“Acting Captain Spock”.

His voice was of a falsified depth, his face a simulation of artificial regality. Bones felt Spock’s revulsion combine with his own. He moved his hand a fraction closer to the Vulcan’s. Spock reciprocated.

But Spock had to respond to the Platonian.

“Master Parmen”, he intoned, with that slight incline of his head that Bones had come to learn was associated with almost every one of Spock’s reactions: Disbelief, mistrust, consideration, respect, acquiescence…hatred. Even without the partial bond currently flowing between them, Bones would have known which of these it was.

But, Bones realised, Parmen couldn’t see it. His haughty expression pooled into one of smugness, and satisfaction. He believed he had broken Spock, that he was the one in control. Spock’s resourceful defence was working.

Parmen raised his chin, as if addressing his subjects. Spock lowered his, as if preparing for assault. Leonard concentrated on fortifying his own reaction to Parmen, and conveying this through all of Spock’s visible communications. The strain of it was beyond immense, but it was a disguise like no other. Vulcan and human, Acting Captain and Chief Medical Officer of the Starship Enterprise…. The two beings most devoted to Jim Kirk. They stood impenetrable.

Parmen continued.

“Acting Captain Spock, Captain Spock, or Commander Spock….whichever title you would prefer, we really have no heed for”, he said. “We make contact with you today purely on the basis of our own values and our own desires to see wisdom and rationality prevail throughout a universe that seems bereft of such standards”.

“We are grateful for the communication”, Spock replied. “We, too, wish to see such standards encouraged”.

“Encouraged, Spock, no”, Parmen admonished. “Enforced”.

Here, Leonard’s own determination wavered. Spock steadied him through a slow but steady stream of quiet words through the bond. Bones could feel both their heartbeats.

“We hope, by now”, Parmen was saying, “that you have had ample opportunity to see for yourselves the real weakness of the person – for I really cannot say man - you all call Captain. That you have now wholly observed his flaws, and the very real damage to yourselves that these flaws can cause. You have been without a captain now for many weeks, perhaps months, am I correct?”

Bones heard Nyota’s words even before she spoke them.

“The Enterprise has never been without its captain”.

Fearing a disruption to their so vigilant interactions, Bones almost turned to her. But Spock stopped him. Relying on Spock’s superior knowledge of psychic connections, he obeyed Spock immediately.

Spock was right. Parmen was laughing.

“You are not wrong, my good lady”, he said. “The Enterprise has indeed still had its captain – and what has been the result of that? Your missions are on hold, your orders from the great Starfleet ignored…your futures have been uncertain, your time on this already lengthy mission needlessly and selfishly extended”.

Here, Parmen leaned closer to the screen. Leonard sensed the danger that Spock had already been anticipating. Parmen’s next words were laced with a dark and calculated poison.

“Your lives….the life of every single one of you on board….have been disregarded in favour of the wellbeing of someone who has failed you…”

He turned his head purposefully to Sulu.

“A small daughter, growing up missing a parent….”

Sulu’s knuckles whitened only slightly where they gripped the arms of his seat. He was standing resilient….but his jaw was tense.

To Chekov –

“A young man who left his family too soon and has had no chance to prove to them his worth…”

A muscle flickered in Chekov’s lower eyelid.

To Scotty –

“A man taken for granted, his credit so often stolen by the very person he strives so hard to serve….”

Within the vague bond, Leonard felt Spock pull his own mind into a new trajectory. He allowed his to follow, and saw the line of Spock’s reasoning. Parmen was communicating to the whole ship; his mental assault on those present here was only the beginning. Parmen’s intention to was psychologically turn Jim’s entire crew against him; the two of them could hardly be enough to ward off an intentional psychosomatic attack this wide. They needed Nyota to narrow the broadcast.

Without having to ask, Leonard knew. Deftly, but without sudden movement – in a way that only surgeon’s hands knew how – he made a lowering motion behind his back, and prayed that Nyota would, after all their years together, interpret it correctly. Whether or not she had done, and whether or not she had acted upon it, neither Leonard nor Spock could currently know. Their only small source of hope was that Parmen had not reacted. Conversely, he leaned back in his stone seat and allowed a wide, sickly grin to spread across his face from beneath his brow. He believed he was in control.

“Now”, he said, stretching his long fingers one by one, “it is only fair that you all witness the true extent of that weakness to which I have been referring”.

Simultaneously, Leonard and Spock’s hearts both dropped in fear at what they were about to witness, and lifted with the hope that they were about to be delivered some vestige of hope for saving Jim. As their hands were joined, so were their spirits.

“I will allow you a brief foray into the images that we collected from Captain Kirk’s brain”, Parmen continued. “Images that you were certain myself and my people had artificially implanted. I can assure you that there is nothing artificial about what you are about to see – except for the lies that your Captain has fabricated in order to bury the reality. This should prove his cowardice, his inability to cope with the practicalities of life…..his, need I emphasise this, defects in areas in which he ought to, as your leader, have none”.

In a self-possessed flurry, Parmen stood, and shook his sleeves.

“Communications Officer Uhuru!” he called, as if summonsing a slave, “a portal, if you will!”

From the fraction he could see of her from the corner of his eye, Leonard could see that Nyota was opening such a channel. Spock was motionless beside him, though he could feel the Vulcan gathering his mental capacity, his concentration, his attention to detail….every iota of information here was crucially important.

Then a wide strip of light erupted circularly around the bridge, every screen in the full connected loop just above their heads bursting into illumination. Currently a yellowish blank, the screens shimmered and glowed in a pattern of nothingness. But closer inspection revealed that this was not actually nothing. There were distinguishable shapes behind the shifting glimmer – people, actions, objects….All was disjointed and disconnected, vague and without full form, and the shapes dissolved as quickly as one laid eyes upon them….but for the briefest of moments, they were distinguishable, and real.

This was a psychokinetic projection screen. Currently, with no intentional projection being aimed at it, it was reflecting the mental processes of those closest to it. Sulu, Chekov, Scotty, Nyota, Leonard, Spock…… a slow, curling smoke that was an amalgamation of their minds passed in shadow form gently through the screens around them. Leonard had not seen this PPS on board the Enterprise in use before. And neither, he sensed, had Spock.

Fascinating.

And despite everything, Leonard almost smiled. 

Then Parmen was wringing his hands in barely supressed glee.

“Excellent”, he growled. “Then I shall begin”.

Nyota made some final adjustments.

For a few moments, nothing.

Then the shadows furling and unfurling on the screens froze – and disappeared.

With what they were replaced was a nightmare that not one of those present would ever, even in many later years, find less horrifying than in these first moments. Within their unified minds, Leonard and Spock stood close together. They braced. 

The scene materialised.

A mound of bodies – perhaps half a mile wide, festering exposed beneath the midday sun.

Some new.

Some decayed to slime and teeth.

It changed.

A group of dirty faceless youths, stumbling and crying through a rancid pool in the desert heat. Human detritus.

A sound began. A low humming that escalated to a fierce, raging, constant drone that dug down into the ear and left the hearer begging for escape. Flies.

Now, night. These same youths – children – huddled infection to infection in the damp. As morning light is introduced, two are dead.

The images move faster now, a rapid accumulating awfulness created from dry winds of grit, heat of toxicity, fear….open rolling landscapes of nothing but dust and exposure, broken limbs cracking further as they haul over rock, endless putrid mounds, desperation, dried crusts of blood, the bones of the dead….

....and the bones of starvation.

From somewhere behind them, Scotty audibly swallows back a retch. Nyota gives a choked, stifled sob.

"Is that what they did to him?" she whispers, her voice contracting around her own reflex to vomit, induced by the scene before them, and by the concept that humans could inflict this upon each other - either in reality, or artificially as part of intentional torture. "Is this real?"

Bones watches the images in silent, sickened transfixion. Through his observation, he sees the emotions that are inherently bound up with the images.

Fear, anger, hope, guilt, fear....

They are Jim's emotions. Slowly, he begins to know how to answer Nyota's question. In these images, Jim was re-living something. The Parmenians starved him, and tortured him. But Leonard knows....what they are seeing is not what happened in recent captivity. He feels Spock's growing awareness of this fact join his own.

Then images on the screen shake apart, and reform.

Children. Diseased, impoverished, malnourished, violent, weeping.

Dead.

There is something close to a plea in Nyota's voice in her next words. "Where is this from?" she implores, out loud, but to no-one. "How have they thought this up?"

"They haven’t" said Spock. And not one of them had ever heard such pain in his voice. "These are neither recent nor artificial images. They are memories – older memories. It is real".

A last shift on the screen, and a final image materialises. 

Nine children. And standing at their head - starved, wasted, and filthy, and full of his own fear but a heartbreakingly ferocious determination to protect the poor souls gathered with such dependency behind him - the child Jim. 

Leonard's creeping recognition and dread is at last confirmed. 

“My God….” he breathes. “…....It’s Tarsus”.

Chapter Text

The images have come to a halt on those nine children, standing trembling in a landscape of unimaginable horror. This final picture remains frozen on the screen, as all those who are viewing it on the bridge are also frozen.

For the briefest of moments, it occurs to Leonard that Nyota has not closed down the communication – and that rather, by fixing this scene to the screen, she is prolonging the agony.

But then he looks again at the picture, and sees as if entirely anew the twelve year old Jim standing dirty and determined at the head of this sorrowful band of despairing souls, and realises that she is entirely correct to ensure that they look at this image for as long as possible. Jim has had to endure this for most of his life. It is their role now to endure it with him.

Suddenly, the fixed image changes. Leonard knows he is not the only one to physically flinch in fearful anticipation of what might come next.

Now there is no more dust, or red, blowing tundras….It is Jim still, but he is alone. A small, dimly lit, faintly yellow room. Cold, especially in contrast to the aggressive heat of Tarsus. His clothes have not been changed, dried blood and vomit encrusting every fold. He alternates between huddling against the far wall, and pounding at the door. As he attacks the bars at its small window, they do not need audio to know that he is screaming. And when he cringes in the corner, any previous inclination to cry long since extinguished, his hopeless silence is loudest of all.

Gradually, the assembled group realise that these are post-Tarsus images. These are taking place once the Federation had retrieved the survivors – just Jim and his boys – from the surface of that Godforsaken world. This was, to all intents and purposes, Jim’s rescue.

And it amounted to nothing more than solitary isolation, and neglect.

Beside Leonard, Spock stands still in a way that only a Vulcan can while simultaneously posing the most palpable of threats. Through their thin connection between their hands, Bones can feel Spock’s rage. His disbelief. His grief. He chances a sideways glance at the commander. Spock’s lower left eyelid, where his vision is fixed to the screen, twitches once. Only once. In his heart, Leonard knows, he is tearing Parmen apart.

He returns his own gaze to the screen.

For Leonard himself, tears are close. All those nights he sat with Jim through the phases of vomiting, held him, cuddled him to sleep, cleaned him up. All those times Bones came to collect Jim when he’d been too ill to get himself home from lectures, or training, and someone had known to 'just call Leonard'. Every time he’d sat with Jim through breakfast, lunch, dinner, distracting or encouraging him….All that time, this had been ravaging Jim’s mind. Eating his heart and his soul while his body ate, and was poisoned by, itself. This little boy. His beautiful Jim. Trapped in a dank and yellow tiled room, alone and more ill than he had ever been in his life. Still trying to get to the children, to protect and reassure them. Just a child himself. A poor, skeletal, dirty scrap of a thing in oversized rags and bare feet, whose only power was in the strength of his mind and his heart.

And Lord what might there was in that.

The only thing that keeps Leonard from sobbing is his fury.

The image pauses again. The silence that has descended among the crew is filled with the wrath of all the hounds of hell.

Parmen sees this.

Parmen smiles.

“You see”, he intones, in what he clearly believes to be a tone of superior wisdom. “You see what your Captain is really made of – of what besieges the very most core of his mind. His health. His abilities….”

Parmen hissed the last word as if he did not believe it was vocabulary they had ever encountered.

“It is true that we incited this state of mind in Captain Kirk – that we made it possible for him to be fully absorbed by the reality of his history and the character in him that that history has created. The false character, through which he attempts to hide the fact that, ultimately, he is incapable of functioning normally”.

Do not argue, Leonard. There is no more arguing to be done.

Leonard almost started at the words. No-one had spoken aloud, and yet the voice was close – so close that for a moment he wondered if these were simply his own thoughts. Then he realised. Spock was speaking to him through the partial bond. He moved his own hand slighty against Spock’s, outside of Parmen’s line of sight, experimenting as far as he dared in this precarious situation with how to respond in kind. But before he could fathom this, he heard Spock again.

There is no need for you to project your thoughts, Leonard, I am already fully aware of them. I only need you, now, to follow any instruction that I give you, whether directly, or indirectly.

Bones assumed Spock knew that he understood.

“This episode in the Captain’s life is not reflective of his overall capabilities as both a person, and a Starfleet Captain”, Spock said.

Leonard sensed he was enticing Parmen. Behind them, Nyota was working swiftly on something at the controls to the communications screens. She was moving quickly, but subtly. Leonard did not know if Spock was aware of this activity.…. He suspected he was. He squared his shoulders, and waited.

“On the contrary!” Parmen exclaimed, “it is this very episode that demonstrates the ineffectuality of his capabilities! And I hope…”

Here, Parmen’s tone and face shifted to an ugly, hungry, craving….

“I hope”, he shook his sleeves, and tossed his head, triumphant in his own evil, ‘that every man, woman, and species on your ship has seen - has been allowed to see – the true extent of their Captain’s weakness. This man, whom they follow wantonly into danger, into – often – death itself…he is fragile, he is feeble, he is pathetic…..how could they possibly trust commands from such a person! It is unwise, and foolish! And this is Starfleet's flagship vessel? We are deeply insulted by the fact that Starfleet could ever have imagined that we would take leave of our rationality in such a way as to build relations through this medium. It is ridiculous!"

And here, standing with the sudden purposefulness and projection of iron-like will that had made her for so long such an indispensable part of the Enterprise’s heart, Nyota was on her feet. She slammed her palm onto a single button on the panel before her, and the screens switched in an instant. Now, rather than displaying the sick child Jim, alone in his miserable cell, broken and damaged, the screens held the feeds from every camera from every last section of the ship. In front of those cameras stood the crew of the Enterprise. Hundreds of them; Row upon row upon row of members from engineering, tactical, counselling, operations, security, science, navigation – chiefs, officers, ensigns, civilians. Each and every one of them looking into the camera – looking at Parmen – defiant, and solid. And Bones knew – Nyota had not disconnected Parmen’s projection from the rest of the ship, despite the psychokinetic risk. She had trusted the crew of the Enterprise to resist Parmen, in favour of defending their captain. She had trusted them to see these images from Jim’s past, and react with nothing but loyalty, sympathy, and devotion. She had trusted them to love their Captain unconditionally, as they had when they first came aboard the ship, and as they would for the rest of their days. She had trusted them to love him. And she was right. Assembled now in front of the screens that had shown them the very worst of the inside of their Captain’s shattered mind, they united in footage of their own – a show of faithfulness and allegiance that no-one but no-one but James T. Kirk could ever have inspired.

Spock raised his eyeline from Parmen to the screen, and then back to the Platonian.

“You see”, Spock said. “You may have a degree of power over minds- you may be able to inflict misery and influence at will, or induce a person to experience the worst moments of their life to the extent to which it seems as though they are comprised of nothing but those experiences….But you have no power until you can appreciate the strength of collective unity. I do not believe you have ever really encountered this – not in your society, nor in that of the society you preach. And so you must be forgiven for having overlooked this error in your calculations”. 

Parmen’s face contorted with a broiling rage.

“But an error it is, your excellency”, Spock continued, and no-one could miss the dark sarcasm even in the Vulcan’s voice. “And it is one that has cost you the reward of whatever cruel and purposeless project this has been”.

“Commander Spock!” Parmen was on his feet, apoplectic at his own inability to control the situation any further. Desperate to regain some kind of manipulation, his next suggestion could not have been more unfortunate for his cause. “I demand that you return to Platonius and explain to me personally this – this surfeit of disrespect”.

Spock moved his hand just once against Bones’.

Follow any instruction I give you.

“I will gladly acquiesce to this request”, he replied, calmly. “I believe our chief engineer can arrange this within moments”.

Come with me, Leonard.

Spock strode forwards to the transporter pad, Bones alongside him. Scotty approached the transporter controls rapidly, but apprehensively, his eyes trained on Spock in an obvious question. He was at Bones’ shoulder, farthest from Spock – who stayed purposefully at Bones’ right side - almost ready to speak, to question, quite rightly, the sense in willingly stepping into Parmen’s immediate vicinity.

Tell him to be prepared to transport us directly back, Bones heard.

“Just a few moments, Scotty”, Bones murmured to him. When Scotty opened his mouth to respond, Bones stopped him with one swift glance. Scotty swallowed once, nodded – and activated energise.

Within moments, Spock and Leonard materialised before Parmen, who was already striding towards them, Eraclitus and other lesser members of the twisted society scattering insipidly aside.

Do not react.

As Parmen reached them, robes asunder, face reddened and furious, Spock gave his customary single nod of acknowledgement – that signal that Bones had come to learn could represent everything from a rational acceptance of orders, to a highly self-contained non-verbal expression of the words “your presence and your ideas are despicable”. Here, Leonard recognised this gesture as the latter. Parmen, for all his supposed ability to see and direct the thoughts and actions of others, did not. As soon as he was within three feet of Leonard and Spock, Spock tilted defly forwards, placing his right hand flat on the floor, and propelling his weight up and over this arm through his shoulder, so that his entire body rotated once around the hand that acted as a pivot, and brought his left foot into sudden brutal contact with the side of Parmen’s head. The entire sequence of movement from beginning to end was so quick, so adept and so precise, that Leonard barely had time to register Spock’s change in position. But then Parmen was unconscious on the ground, undignified and degraded, and guards were running at them, and Spock had taken Leonard's arm and contacted Scotty. Within moments, they materialised back on the Enterprise's transporter pad – and Nyota terminated the connection with Platonius.

For several stunned seconds, Leonard swayed on the pad – Scotty had him by the shoulders, and was calling to him as if from a great distance, but Leonard couldn’t focus on him. He was only aware of Spock’s hand, gripping his arm tightly now, and Spock’s voice still present in his head,

How soon, Leonard?

Bones was struggling to comprehend,

How soon…..you…can…….we………

Then suddenly, the meaning of the events of the last hour aligned themselves into something he had almost begun to abandon….

Hope. They had hope.

His senses shot back. His focus returned. He put a hand to Scotty’s shoulder in momentary reassurance, then turned to face Spock, who had fixed him in a stare of ferocious intensity. 

As soon as possible, Leonard replied through the bond. And with that, he and Spock stepped down from the pad, and left the bridge, purpose exemplified in every one of their moments.

They were going to get him.

Chapter Text

It never failed to astound Spock how much presence Jim Kirk had, even when he was unconscious.

Standing as he and Leonard were now, either side of Jim’s biobed, where a poor shell of the robust, shining being that was their captain lay in a silence so extreme it was materially palpable, still everything in their vicinity gravitated towards Jim. He commanded attention. Not demandingly, or aggressively - there was no need for this. He simply couldn’t help it. Jim had a lure like no other phenomenon Spock had ever encountered. It was what had made him so furious with him, all that time ago, during the Kobayashi Maru. It was what had been capable of driving Spock to total emotional compromise – despite, even, the fact that Jim had fabricated the instrument that had done this. It was what made Spock unable to walk away, and, finally, what had inspired him to devote his life and work to following, working with, and serving Captain James Tiberius Kirk.

Across from him, the doctor touches screens, touches sensors, touches controls- touches Jim. They had arrived in the medbay at an urgent speed; at last they had something with which to move forwards, even if how to execute that next moment was still somewhat of a mystery to them both. They hadn’t spoken on their rush from the bridge to Jim’s bedside, both men internally preoccupied with their own role in what was to come, and with trying to determine these roles when, ultimately, neither of them really knew ‘what was to come’ at all. They had come to a halt at Jim’s bedside, and were – as they were every time, even Bones with his constant attendance at Jim’s side – shocked at his fragility. Spock had envied Leonard as, after only a slight hesitation, he had started ensuring that – medically speaking at least – Jim might have the strength to endure the mental trauma that he was about to undergo. Spock coveted the fact that Leonard had something tangible, something recognisable, something standard to do. Not only was he immediately occupied, and distracted to some extent temporarily from his own spiralling fears and trepidation, but Leonard’s task here was familiar to the doctor, easily passed off as ordinary medical attention. Spock’s role…..Spock had no idea what awaited him on the other side of connecting his mind to Jim’s. In the last meld, Spock had barely been able to maintain their link, and he certainly hadn’t been able to make any sense of the complex cacophony of images and emotions that had intertwined around and throttled Jim’s bright mind.

But, Spock berated himself, he must not begrudge the doctor these moments in which some of the responsibility had shifted away from him. Leonard had worked to keep Jim alive with a strength that Spock had witnessed in very few – if any, aside from Jim – human beings, and he done so alone, and in the constant fear that his next action, his next decision, his next movement, would be the one that would cost Jim his life. Leonard looks intolerably exhausted, and Spock understands. Leonard has, by default, borne much of the terrible burden of the past months on his own. Only he has been in a position to treat Jim as has been required, both medically and emotionally. Spock knows he has been drinking too much. He knows Leonard is sleep deprived, and that he has barely been eating. Leonard had endured this strain with a resilience like no other – he deserved, just for a few moments, to sit and wait for someone else to provide a few of the answers. Their long range game plan with Parmen had worked; they had usurped him precisely on the basis of his own pride, and had done so whilst avoiding Parmen’s own particular brand of cowardly power. This – the information on Jim’s history, and the insight into the terrible world in which at least a part of Jim was still living that Spock now possessed – was what they had fought for, all these months. It was Spock’s place, now, to lead the battle.

The human rises in Spock suddenly, and he wants to reach over to this good man, take his shoulder, and assure him that all will be well. But this humanity is also selfish, and childish, and equally he wants Leonard to take his shoulder, and assure him of the same thing.

But he cannot submit to such indulgent behaviour.

He must begin with the basics. He refocuses his mind, and redirects his attention back to the medical environment in which they are standing.

At present, he is watching the doctor, awaiting his agreement that Jim is in as tolerable state of health as they could expect.

Watching him now, Spock does not know if the doctor is even aware of the extent to which he makes physical contact with Jim. When he adjusts the various tubes running in and out of Jim’s body, Leonard may not even be looking at his hands, his attention instead on a nearby screen that is giving vital feedback of some kind on this particular part of Jim’s condition – but his fingertips rest against Jim’s skin. Now, when he sits on the edge of the bed to run the tricorder over Jim’s chest, or stomach, he sits hip to hip with him. When he leans forwards, or over, regulating monitors and machinery, his hand is on Jim’s shoulder, or his arm, or shin.

Spock is aware that this is something that will be crucially important. 

Around them, both outside the curtain and inside, a small team of medics has started to assemble. They are those who have been regularly involved with Jim’s treatment (as far as Leonard has allowed). Gabe. Richmond. Nurse Chapel. Leonard murmurs quiet instructions to them, and each is now occupied with some small but vital part of the medical back up. Patiently, Spock waits. Finally, the activity lessens, and the atmosphere quietens.

It is no less intense.

Leonard straightens up from where he has been performing the last of many – and, Spock suspects, probably unnecessary – scans over Jim’s body. They have no way of knowing now what effect the next stage in their plan will be. This is unchartered territory, both medically, and in terms of a meld. They are, to all intents and purposes now, entirely alone.

Leonard vocalises this fact quite simply.

“I can’t do any more, Spock. What now?”

Spock would contemplate his answer, but this is futile. He has no idea whether or not his answer is correct, and no more reflection will provide a clearer answer. They must now simply choose a route, and adere to it.

“I believe, Leonard, that it would be beneficial to maintain Jim in the state of coma while I attempt at least the first stage of the meld. But if you disagree, I will of course defer to your medical judgement”.

Leonard makes a minute adjustment to the fluids that are dripping steadily into Jim’s system through the PNT tube at his throat – more out of his inability to do nothing than out of medical necessity, Spock knows - then takes a step back from the bed, and literally spreads his hands out in front of him.

“Even in medical terms, Spock, your guess is as good as mine”, he growls. He is nervous. “I know of no medical precedent for a Vulcan mind-meld having been performed on someone who is in a coma – mainly because it’s goddamn batshit crazy - I don’t have the first clue about the psychology of this. I have to say, I think this is your country now. I’ve made him as medically stable as possible - my only criteria here is to make sure it stays that way, and as far away from further damage as possible. On everything else - I’ll take instructions from you”.

From his peripheral vision, he saw that Nyota and Scotty had appeared in the medbay. Leonard noticed them also. Spock gave a single short nod of approval to Nyota, who returned the like, and stood herself solid to the floor. She would be a vital ally to them both, Spock knew, if either he or Leonard could not withstand what would inevitably be an extremely painful event.

“My only instruction to you, Leonard, is that you stay close to Jim”, he said. “I do not know in what state Jim’s mind will be, or even whether it will be accessible to the meld – but if it is anything as I have reasoned and projected it to be, he will, wherever he is psychologically, still be aware of his present surroundings. It is imperative that these surroundings remain as familiar and as safe as possible”.

Leonard nodded. One of his hands had come to rest on Jim’s wrist.

At this point, Spock touched Jim for the first time, simply allowing his palm to lightly brush Jim’s bare forearm. This was in minute introduction to the possible onslaught that would be invoked by the actual meld. But Spock, prepared as he was for a confusion of noise and anguish, had not expected the first sense that struck him through the touch-telepath communication. He spoke before he had even processed it.

“There is a depth of a relationship here of which I was not aware….” Spock began.

He looked up at the doctor – and although he thought he saw Leonard glance at Nyota for a fraction of a second, he found Leonard looking steadily back at him.

Spock now felt Nyota’s eyes on himself. And with a discernment and sensitivity that few would have believed of a Vulcan, he bypassed this issue without a sliver of further reaction. He placed himself in the chair at the head of Jim’s bed, and aligned himself so as to be in the correct position.

“Then I will begin”, Spock said.

Leonard made an involuntary movement, which he quickly absorbed into his body as something he had intended. Though he kept his hand on Jim’s wrist, he covered his face with his other palm.

Spock understood this also – there was a significant part of him, too, that wanted to delay this, to plan further, to mediate for longer, to consider the outcomes a final time, to formulate responses to all eventualities……

…..but that was hopeless now. For this there was no guide, no roadmap….no preparation.

With a final exchange of looks with Leonard, and a decisive last gathering of his own composure and control, he reached forwards, and once more placed his fingers at Jim’s temples-

.................................................................................................................................................

Spock had expected a rush. Noise. A deafening clamouring of fear and rage. The same chaos and disorientation of the last meld with Jim. He had been prepared for this – now that he knew it was Tarsus, he could have made more sense of the melee.

But there was none of that.

The only rush was in reverse – that of receding noise as the sounds of the medbay and the reality in which he bodily was retracted to a far distance.

And after that – silence.

Then, a colour began. It seeped in so gradually at first that it was like a dawn…difficult to ascertain the degree of change while there is only darkness with which to compare it. But as Spock stood, and waited, a faint yellow became definite.

Gradually, this yellowish hue takes on corporeal form. It is the colour of the air in a place that is materialising around Spock even as he watches. As if there is a filter of carpet-burning smoke over everything. Withered, dry grass appears beneath his feet. A dusty road blooms and curves away into the dank fog. A barn, perhaps, dilapidated and grey, appears as a lurking silhouette some half a mile away.

There is a very faint wind. Apart from this, all is still.

Spock stands in the silence. He knows to wait.

He can hear flies.

He waits on.

Finally, there is movement at the far outer reaches of what is visible in this lonely land. A small figure, distinguishable only if one does not look directly at it, has appeared on the dust laden road.

It is moving awkwardly, as if in pain, but purposefully. It knows where it is going. Spock knows that he is its destination.

It is a young boy.

He is armed, but not on the attack. Nor does he look defensive. He looks apprehensive….but hopeful.

The boy approaches. Spock sees the colour of his eyes first.

And although he tries in advance to prepare himself for this meeting, even his Vulcan self cannot shield against the sight when this eleven year old boy emerges from the acrid, sickly air, to stand in front of him.

Somehow, he musters the one very simple phrase that he knows he must say.

“Hello Jim”.

Once more, he hears those words echoing out across the landscape.

Then a pink tinge spread along Jim’s lower eyelids, the certain indicator of surpressed tears. The blue shone like fractured diamond. He was shuddering with every in-breath, with the effort of holding himself together, when it was clear that he was gradually breaking apart. Spock could see the starving, terrified child in this face – in his Jim’s face – so brutally clearly that it physically hurt him. He could see it still lingering behind the wonderful man he had become, full of nothing but kindness, strength, compassion, and courage. He could so easily have been broken. In many ways, he was – in those parts Spock had occupied in those moments. But he chose not to be. Every day, he chose to be the person – the captain – to whom they were all so completely devoted. The best captain Starfleet had ever had. Would ever have. Again, he gently brushed his thumb over the same place, and brought his other hand up to cup Jim’s face, holding him as tenderly as possible. A torrent of Jim’s emotions poured through the contact, wounding and helpless. But Spock was ready for them – and he could bear them. He would shoulder them for his captain. Because he heard just one phrase, a representation of the resilience and character of James T. Kirk, that, in amongst the cacophony of distress, was a siren sounding out all the clearer.

Help will come.

Jim observes him for a few moments. His expression is interested, but entirely neutral. Spock mirrors him. Finally, Jim speaks.

“You look familiar”.

Spock inclines his head.

“I am glad to hear you say so, Jim”.

Jim scratches at the dirt with the long stick he has been using as a crutch, but he does not take his eyes from Spock’s face. Spock returns his gaze, and wills his physical self to resist the threat to the meld caused by his emotional reaction to seeing this face so far removed from where it ought to be.

He waits for young Jim to speak again. In amongst the very little that Spock knows about how to deal with this entire situation, he knows this – that he must let this young Jim lead. Then, and only then, will adult Jim have any chance of following a path that connects his younger self’s experiences to his present day self in such a way that he mentally and emotionally lives through them. Spock does not know where this journey might lead, but Jim must be allowed to develop organically from this place, where he is trapped and ill and terrified, towards the place where his body has gone, even if his mind has not. It must come from Jim. Of this Spock is absolutely certain.

Which is why, at Jim’s next words, spoken as the young Jim squints up at him through the burning smog and the dusty sunlight, Spock knows what his response is to be.

“Have you come to take me back?”

“No, Jim. In fact, I believe I have come to take you forwards”.

Chapter Text

The wind is the only sound. It moves the baked grass, and the dried leaves. Other than this, it is entirely still.

Vulcan and boy observe each other across the space between them.

Spock is acutely aware that this is Jim’s mind. Every iota of his surroundings is currently being generated by Jim’s consciousness. And the scene is this – the small, dirty, starved, lonely little blonde boy with the wounds old and new, standing alone in a silent landscape that is as perfectly preserved as a painting.

Gone is the terrifying vortex of the first meld, the thunderous repetitive panic, those words -  run, dust, blood, hide – that had stampeded through every moment, the corpses, the pestilence, the fear, the rolling inescapable heat, the confusion, the constant horror of what had happened on Tarsus IV. There is only this. There are no other words in Jim’s mind. No awareness of anything else. No other senses, or emotions, or responses. There is just stillness, and quiet on this wide, barren plain – and a man and a boy stood within it, quietly watching one another.

This is the coma.

Spock has never experienced a meld like it. And there is something incredibly serene about it, despite what has happened in this terrible place. The feeling does not come from the surroundings, but rather from something more deeply physical within Jim. Spock realises that this is the medication. And that Jim really has been at some kind of peace since Leonard placed him in the coma. The good doctor’s judgement had been one hundred per cent correct.

But they cannot stay here. 

Suddenly, young Jim speaks.

“You know my name”.

Spock is fascinated. Never before in a meld has an individual communicated with him in a way that is detached from that individual’s current state of mind. This projection of the young Jim is Jim’s sub and indeed un-conscious, and yet those aspects of his mind are so entirely active and dynamic that they have created an actual independent re-embodiment to personify them. But then, Spock reflects to himself, he ought to have been prepared for the fact that Jim’s Kirk mind would unlikely conform to any convention or expectation.

“I know you well, Jim”, Spock says, quietly. He is unsure how far to allow conversation to develop – how much this might complicate the already almost unfathomable situation before him.

“How do you know me?” Jim asks.

Spock smiles. This he can answer.

“We are friends, Jim”, he says. “Friends of the greatest constancy and depth. We have been friends many times before, in other times and places. And we will be friends again, in others”.

Jim nods. At least part of him understands.

Abruptly, the scene around them changes. Spock now finds himself standing beside a shack constructed of rusted corrugated iron and ill-fitting planks of wood. Jim is at his side, bending down to a cleverly concealed entrance that looks at first glance as though it is simply a gap that leads through between this shack and the one next to it. In actual fact, a narrow, sharp left turn gives access to the inside of this pitiful little building. It is clear, from both what comes to Spock from Jim’s heart at this moment, and simply from observation and knowing Jim Kirk, that Jim built this.

Jim does not go inside. He crouches next to the opening, and raises his hand to a plane of wood to his left. He taps upon it three times.

“I have other friends”, he says, in a distant voice. “They were in here”. He taps again, lightly, just with the first three fingers of his right hand. A signal. “They would tap back, when they were inside. There were eight of them. Each would tap back” – he taps again in demonstration, “so I knew they were inside. That they were safe”. He drops his hand. “They don’t tap back anymore”.

Spock bends low enough that he can see through to most of the dirt-floored room within. There are piles of foul smelling blankets, and a few unidentifiable bones, but otherwise it is empty. 

He is confused. Spock had expected to see the bodies of the other children. In his mind he begins to ask, ‘where are they Jim?’ but then he looks down at Jim, and his confusion converts instantaneously to apprehension.

Jim has become entirely vacant. His gaze is unfixed, and unfocused. His stance has slackened. He is, Spock is immediately aware, no longer present. And at the same time, Spock realises that the cerebral world around them is, too, losing clarity. Spock can no longer see clearly more than six feet in front of them; there is no sense of distance, or time, or perspective. A grey vacuum begins to press in on them from all sides. Young Jim sways beneath it as if it is physically crushing him – and now there is something beyond the crumbling edges of this scene as if behind a curtain; figures moving, shouting, indiscernible but present enough for Spock to feel an overwhelming tide of the first of Jim’s actual emotions since he began the meld. Fear.

And suddenly, Spock realises.

The children didn’t die. They were rescued. Along with Jim. This part of Jim’s mind is fabricated. It is not just the coma that has induced this peculiar permeating stillness in Jim’s mind, although that has certainly made Jim’s existence in this state easier to maintain. No - this abandoned Tarsus, of which Jim is apparently now the sole occupant, is being artificially created by Jim’s unconscious mind in a fierce, distorted attempt to avoid experiencing what came after Tarsus, which equalled if not surpassed the brutality of Jim’s experience of the after-math of the infamous massacre. Jim has voluntarily stepped back into the framework of this isolated desert because it was the most bearable of the two situations (and how that hurts Spock, to realise this) – and now, it is collapsing.

Spock sees immediately what must be done, although he has never heard of a precedent for it, and doubts that many more will follow this instance. But he does not dwell on it. He kneels in front of the young Jim, who doesn’t even register his presence, and seizes his temples.

The final vestiges of the simulated Tarsus are ripped away, and now, at last, Spock finds himself at once almost drowning in the surge and magnitude of Jim’s true emotion.

And Spock chastised himself for his naiievity in believing that what he witnessed in the previous meld demonstrated the true extent of Jim’s trauma. For where Jim had suffered on Tarsus as the result of evil and corruption, what he experienced at the hands of those he thought he could trust was far more cruel. If only for the reason that it would be this that would destroy his psychological ability to ever truly move onwards.

This is the cell that Parmen had shown them in those final images. Spock could only imagine that it had been intended to be a hospital room, but it is not. It is a cell. Yellow tiles. Yellow ceiling. Peeling yellow paint. That yellow hue drifting across the false Tarsus’ landscape…Yellowing crusts on bodily fluids, dried upon the floor…..

Jim’s mind is sick with fear and fever, but the projection is, to Spock, as sharp as glass.

They are trying to feed him.

But his starving body is intolerant now, to almost everything. He is being sick constantly.

The more he vomits, the more stringent – and punitive - the efforts to make him eat.

His wounds are largely untreated.

Day and night are indeterminable.

Unable to simply step out of the constant vigilance that was required to keep himself and his children alive on Tarsus, both waking and sleeping, his mind sporadically falls back to Tarsus – visiting upon him violent flashbacks; dead bodies moving with maggots, flies crawling over open blisters, bloated infant corpses, alleyway walls spattered with human matter – and the hunger. The constant, stretching, terrible hunger.

Adults come and go. Jims cries out to them, tries to reach them as they pass just beyond the bars, but they ignore him, or reprimand him.

The Federation do not trust that he was not part of the uprising. Jim is, at present, a war criminal.

One guard beats him.

Another does more than beat him.

More shocking to Spock here is how little shock Jim himself experiences

But the sickness….

He is being sick because his malnourishment is not being treated properly. Because he is scared, and anxious, and ill.

He is punished for vomiting.

He is being sick out of fear.

They stab the GJ tube in.

He is being sick because he is allergic to everything in the fluid which they are now injecting directly into his system.

Jim tears the tube out….

The site becomes infected….Jim’s tiny body does not have the strength to bear this intrusion...

They sew it into him. Jim picks at the stitches, crying, hot and delirious with fever. No care, no comfort….

There is no end to it. No end to the memories, to the vomiting, to the loneliness. The dread.

And Spock knows, finally, that he has found him. Jim had been lost to them. He had been lost to himself, trapped somewhere in the farthest reaches of his own mind where he was not consciously aware of this horror, and yet it continued infinitely on. Jim had made an effort of gargantuan proportions to reclaim some kind of normality into his life after this episode; his success and his boundless capacity for kindness were testament to this, and to the sheer volume of his spirit. But, as Leonard had clearly observed over the years, Jim had fallen back into here time and again, though he knew not what 'here' was, nor how to avoid it, or recover from it. And he would continue to do so, until perhaps this dark and terrible space claimed him forever.

Spock had found him.

Chapter Text

As he releases Jim from the meld, Leonard is at his shoulder, insistent, his concern radiating from him and into Spock, susceptible and vulnerable as Spock is in this moment to the emotion of others.

“Spock – his vitals are hammering out every-which-way, what’s – “

He does not finish, for Spock reaches towards him instantly, extending his hand to Bones’ own head.

“My apologies, Leonard, for this unpermitted intrusion, but time is critical – “

And Leonard only has time to register Spock’s voice, as ashen as his face, before the Vulcan’s fingers connect with his temples, and his consciousness is abruptly thrust into images and sounds that are not in his own mind, but in Spock’s; the immediate and violent recollection of what Spock has just witnessed in Jim’s.

Jim weeping in fear and rage and pain, scrabbling at his stomach, where a thin rubber tube has been both sewn and taped into his insides; Jim’s fever, a response to the poorly performed insertion of the percutaneous endoscope; Jim’s constant nausea, and his fear of the indifference of those who are meant to be caring for him towards the fact that he cannot tolerate the substance they are pumping into him; Jim ripping the tube out, because they have stitched it in rather than using the external fixing plate; the fluid trickling down his thin, pale skin, mixing with his blood; Jim standing at the bars of the little yellow room alternately shouting for the other children in his unthwartable need to protect them, and crying in his own wretched suffering; the dark…the loneliness….the smell…..

Now the vision starts to fade as Spock’s ability to maintain the clarity of this direct transmission from Jim’s mind to Leonard’s via his own diminishes, and Jim and the cell recede into an indistinct confusion…..

Then Spock drops his hands from Leonard’s face, and collapses back onto the seat behind him, and Leonard stumbles under the release as if he has just received a blow. He catches hold of the rail of Jim’s bed and steadies himself just enough to reach out and quell the shrieking alarms of the biobed.

Then there is a sudden silence, that is heavy with shock, and disbelief.

Leonard remains bent double, his hands on his knees, his breath coming rapid and disjointed. When he can manage, he breathes the only words rampaging through his mind –

“J***s fucking C****t……”

From where he has fallen into the chair, exhausted and numb, Spock nods mutely.

After a few moments, it is Leonard’s medical instinct that drives him to lift his head, and raise the gargantuan effort that is required to push himself upright. He has realised something…

He pulls the sheet down Jim’s emaciated body, exposing his torso, and swiftly but gently lifts the edge of Jim’s t-shirt up so that he can inspect his skin. Leaning in closely, and using two fingers with just enough soft pressure that he can move the skin around, Leonard finds – beneath the scattering of golden hair that lies flat against Jim’s lower stomach – a tiny scar. It is barely visible – it has clearly had a dermal regenerator passed over it multiple times….but not times enough. For there it is – the small, white testament of this part of Jim’s terrible past, marring the otherwise perfect skin of this once perfect body Leonard thought he knew so well. How could he have missed this – how, why, did he not think to check more thoroughly for any physical external indicator of why Jim was so fiercely and unconsciously protective of this part of his body. He could have made more connections, perhaps started asked more accurate questions that may have encouraged Jim to begin processing what was behind his repetitive illness. He knows Jim, every inch of him, as his doctor and in other ways….How had this escaped him.

With that, a wave of anguish that he has been managing to hold at bay crashes upon his heart. Tarsus. Jim was on Tarsus. And Bones had never known. He hadn’t known that his beautiful, headstrong, confident, vulnerable boy had endured one of the foulest events in human history – that he had survived what no person and certainly no child should ever have done, or that he was so utterly broken by it that his damaged mind had literally been trying to pour itself out of him ever since.

Entirely lost, and feeling something close to sheer hopeless defeat, Leonard collapses to his knees where he is at Jim’s side, and covers his face with his hands.

Spock, drained and shaken, rises in his chair, assuming something more like his customary poise. He is already greatly wearied by the meld, and he does not know for how long he can maintain true efficacy if he continues the connection with Jim now – but it is imperative that he does. His secondary meld with the young Jim – the meld within the meld - has dispossessed Jim of the protective shield in which he had been existing while in the coma; the deserted Tarsus to which Jim had chosen to retreat because he could not progress through the trauma of those events and what came after. Spock has revealed the bitter truth of the reality Jim’s subconscious believes it is living, and brought Jim into acute awareness. And he has left him there. Although the alarms are now silent, Spock does not require medical training to understand that the images on the monitor that is connected to Jim’s brain activity are displaying severe distress. It is essential that he goes back to get him – and brings him home.

“Leonard”, he says, authoritatively – for the doctor needs this in this moment – but also gently, for he feels acutely his friend’s self-flagellation, “In an effort to provide with you the most help possible, I have shown you the most urgent part of what I have discovered in Jim’s mind, but I must also inform you of what I believe to be the psychological process that Jim and I must now undergo”.

Leonard lifts his head, and immediately looks up at the monitors, dismayed at their information. Even in his own pain, his first instinct is Jim’s welfare.

“What the fuck is going on, Spock?” he whispers. “Where is he? Where were you?”

“I will try to apprise you of the sequence of events that have taken place in Jim’s mind in as succinct a form as possible”, Spock replied. “But they are extraordinary, and confused, and my account may not entirely accurately convey the reality of the situation. It is also important that we avoid losing time now – as I know you are aware, Jim’s consciousness is in a highly precarious state and I believe that immediate action is required so as to avoid causing further damage from which we may not be able to recover. Although I myself require some minutes in which to re-centre my ability to effectively perform a meld”.

“Just tell me what I need to know, Spock”, Leonard says. He gets to his feet and takes Jim’s hand, but he has squared his shoulders, and the line of his jaw demonstrates to Spock that the good doctor has reclaimed a degree of resolve. He is ready. Spock only hopes that he himself is still capable of executing this next crucial stage of the journey through Jim’s wounded psyche.

“I initiated two melds during that time in which you will physically have seen me engaged in only the one”, Spock begins. “Upon entering Jim’s mind at first, I found Jim to be the child that we saw in the images projected to us by Parmen – and that he was living alone in a deserted wasteland that I came to realise was the planet Tarsus once Earth forces had arrived and Kodos’ rule had been overthrown. I believed this to be where Jim’s mind had perhaps become trapped – but I did not believe I necessarily had all the information; it was unclear to me why Jim would have remained here after the rescue, and he did not seem to be exhibiting signs of trauma”.

Leonard listened in both wonder and horror.

“Did he….”, his voice was an involuntary whisper, “did he know you?”

“I was familiar to him, yes”, Spock replies, “but he did not use my name, and he was unaware of how he and I were acquainted”.

Leonard nodded, dumbstruck. He had threaded his fingers through Jim’s, and had to resist the urge to hold Jim’s hand to his own chest.

“The scene then changed, and I found myself with the young Jim at the shack I believe he made a dwelling for himself and the children he cared for – a place of relative safety, so decrepit that no-one would have thought to look for human life in it. He explained to me that upon returning to the building his signal to the children within was three taps on the wooden door – and that each of the nine children would also perform these three taps as a means of informing Jim that they were within. At first, I expected to see Jim’s mind’s projection of the children inside the building – but they were not there. It was then I realised that the scene around us was dissolving, and that Jim had become unresponsive. I understood then that our current surroundings were, in fact, artificial – and that Jim was himself maintaining them. It was at that point that I comprehended what was next required – that I would need to engage in a meld with the young Jim in order to access whatever it was the defence a gainst which had resulted in this false setting. The moment I touched the young Jim’s psi points, Tarsus vanished, and was indeed replaced by something that was, in comparison to the deserted Tarsus, far more disturbing. This, you have now witnessed for yourself”.

Three taps, Leonard realises....Jim's signal for safety. 

“He voluntarily went back to Tarsus?” he asks, aghast.

“To post-rescue Tarsus, yes”, Spock confirmed. “Whereas Tarsus was the original cause of his terror, and of course of the condition in which he arrived back on Earth, the treatment he received immediately after Tarsus was equally intolerable, both mentally and physically. I believe that he was never able to process these events, and thus a large part of his mind did not develop and grow as it naturally should have done. It remained embroiled in that time and place. Basically – he never recovered”.

Bones understood. Quite how, he didn’t know, for this was so far beyond the realm of his Georgian scientist comprehension that he felt he ought to be laughing. But whether it was Spock’s characteristically careful description, or the fact that what Spock was telling him accorded so perfectly with Leonard’s long-held suspicion that Jim’s severe digestive issues had a psychological root, the unfolding realisation of what had happened to Jim – what was happening to Jim – was as clear as glass.

He ventured to add his own expansion of the explanation.

“When Parmen tortured him”, he said slowly, looking into space as his senses slowed to allow his brain maximum function, “he dragged those memories up and weakened Jim so badly that he didn’t have the mental strength to distinguish between memory and the present”.

Spock inclined his head in agreement.

“Precisely, Leonard”, he said. “In that very first meld that I undertook with Jim while he still did not know us, it was clear that Jim was reliving the events of Tarsus to the extent to which he was unaware of reality. That connection was, however, enough to allow Jim to return to some extent to the present – but directly after the memories of Tarsus that Parmen had instigated would have followed the memories of what happened after Jim was brought back to Earth”.

“So he started being sick…”

“Exactly. Jim would not, of course, be aware that his subconscious was repeating a series of past events. But his body was – and it reacted accordingly. And there he remained until he was placed in the coma. It is my amateur medical assumption that your inducing of the coma, Leonard, made it possible for Jim’s mind to establish some kind of – I will not say peace, for the connotations of that word are inappropriately positive – but armistice, perhaps, in which it found a degree of quiet. It could not take a place from further forwards in Jim’s memory, for I believe he was psychologically too ensnared in his illness both mental and physical by that point for his mind to function outside of it. So it returned him to a version of Tarsus in which Jim was the sole occupant, and therefore safe. Relatively speaking”.

“Starvation would have always felt safer to Jim than eating”, Leonard reflected aloud, not necessarily even speaking to Spock. “Back before the yellow room”.

‘Quite”, Spock said, directing his tone so as to recapture Leonard’s attention. It worked. Bones looked back at Spock, inhaled, and asked what was now clearly the next question.

“What next? What do you do? What do we do?”

Spock had cleared his mind just sufficiently that he now felt able to undergo this next stage. Before answering Leonard, he realigned his chair at the head of Jim’s bed, and straightened his back.

“I am going to return to Jim’s unconsciousness, wherein he is trapped in that room – and I am going to endeavour to make a kind of contact with him through which I can aid him in understanding that he has lived past those events. It is my hope that I can guide him through a series of memories that will restore and make stronger Jim’s authentic reality. Memories of what came later in his life – all that is good, and safe. Starfleet. The Enterprise. The friends and family who are so devoted to him. My presence in his life. You, Leonard”.

If Spock had added a slight emphasis on these last two words, it was done subtly, and kindly. Leonard nodded.

“For your part, Leonard, I require the same of you as before. Please monitor Jim’s physical condition externally. I defer of course to your medical judgement should there be any reason you think the process suddenly becomes threatening to his physiological well-being, but again I ask that for as far as possible you allow the process to continue”.

Bones swallowed.

“Understood”, he said. He laid Jim’s hand back on the sheets, and adjusted the angles of several screens so that he was able to see them all from his position at Jim’s side. He took up his PADD, and positioned the tricorder so that it was mere inches from his right hand should he need it urgently. Then he met Spock’s eye, and gave an almost indeterminable nod. There was, he allowed himself to believe just for these moments, a faint but concrete chance that if Spock was right – and in his heart Leonard knew that he was – they may see Jim again. Not this pitiful, wasted shadow, but the real James T. Kirk. Their Jim. His Jim.

Spock returned the nod, and then turned his full attention back to the man who lay dying inside and out on the bed before him. He reached for Jim’s temples, and in his heart reached for Jim’s heart – and, for what he hoped would be the final time, began.

Chapter Text

Entering this meld was an entirely different experience to that of the one he had just performed. Far more like the very first meld, in which Jim’s mind was a cacophony of horrors, Spock found himself beside Jim in the little yellow room while the trauma that was besieging Jim’s mind raged around them like inescapable thunder. This was no false projection. This was the raw actuality that Jim was currently living, even while in the enforced unconsciousness of the coma.

But there was one advantage, cruel as its effects may be, to the fact that Jim’s mind was trapped in an experience that was not concurrent with his actual stage in life. This was that, not unlike the reason for which Spock had been able to communicate with Jim while in the artificial Tarsus, the young Jim here was still detached from his own real consciousness. He was a separate entity to it. This was only to some extent of course – but it was enough. For it meant that Spock could communicate with him, and if he could communicate with him, he had a chance of being able to take Jim beyond this hell in which he was so ensnared that it was killing him and towards and through the real rescue that had happened later in his life. The rescue that had occurred when Jim regained some health, grew up, and went on to join Starfleet and meet those individuals who had saved him. Spock’s heart wept for Jim; the Tarsus Nine may have been taken off that planet on that day, but Jim had had to wait over a decade to be freed – and even then that liberation into a world in which he was loved, and safe, and cared for had not touched these darkest recesses of his mind. Much of him had lived on Tarsus and in this little yellow room for all his life since. Standing in the rancid, torturous space as he was now, Spock could not conceive of a more devastating existence.

The young Jim was lying awkwardly on the stained, hard bed in the farthest corner. He had not registered Spock’s presence, and his empty gaze was blank, filmy with infection and malnutrition. Entirely uneducated as he was as to this type of meld, Spock’s only approach was to experiment. So first, he spoke aloud.

“Jim…”

There was no response.

Finding to his disbelief that he was able to physically move at will while telepathically occupying Jim’s own mind, Spock took two steps closer to the bed. Again, he said his name – softly, keeping his voice low, and from becoming just another threat in this abyss.

Again, there was no response.

Then suddenly Jim stood up, and went to the bars. For a moment Spock thought he had moved in reaction to Spock’s voice, but his demeanor and the intentional direction of his movement straight past Spock to the front of the cell informed him otherwise. As he passed in front of Spock, it was all Spock could do not to scream in outrage. Jim was so frail that his knees visibly shook as they bore even his minimal weight. The feeding tube was strapped to his naked torso with tape now dirty and frayed, although these authorities, whoever they were, had clearly reinserted it. It was still attached to the bag that hung from a rusty pole near the bed, and as Jim moved away from it the tube pulled at where it joined his emaciated body, and Jim jolted so violently at the pain that his legs almost gave way. He was barefoot, blisters clearly visible. His body was covered with welts and lesions so inflamed and reddened that many were openly weeping. His face and hands were swollen – evidence of just some of the allergic reactions he had undergone as he had been variously force fed, their ignorance leading them to poison him again and again. The swelling was just enough to interfere with his breathing, and the exertion of moving from the bed to the door forced the air through his throat in sore rasps. Even in his absorption in Jim’s mind, Spock was aware of his own relief that Leonard was not able to see this. As Jim lifted his trembling arms to grasp the bars at the door, Spock saw every sinew and bone creak beneath the almost translucent skin.

Jim stood at an angle to the door that lessened some of the tension on the tube, and started to call for someone – but his voice was hoarse and faint with constant shouting, and his throat was constricted, and he could raise barely more than a whisper. After perhaps a minute of attempting to attract attention, and having clearly reached a stage in which his body was no longer able to stand up for any protracted length of time, Jim stumbled away from the bars, and back to the bed. Here he resumed his blank, fixed position on the meagre mattress, and was once again motionless.

For how long he had been in here Spock could not guess – but it was long enough that the frantic, enraged Jim that he had seen in here in the previous meld was gone. This Jim had lost spirit and hope. He was giving up. And Spock had never, not once, seen Jim Kirk give up.

It was this thought that caused his heart to twist with grief, and within himself Spock felt something break to an extent he had never imagined possible, emitting just one word in its attempt to capture the volume of the emotion;

Jim.

And then Jim looked at him.

Spock saw Jim’s gaze shift towards himself, and for a moment was shocked into paralysis. Jim could see him. No – Jim had heard him. He had not been able to hear Spock’s voice. But he could hear the call of the Vulcan’s heart to his own. And it was only this, Spock realised, that could have brought Jim’s attention to him. Present as they were in the past of Jim’s mind, audible words would not register. But Spock’s emotion had called to the part of Jim – the adult Jim – that knew him. At last, Jim was aware of him.

“You’re here”, he said, the words coming not through the air but through the connection between their minds. It was a statement of fact, Spock knew, and not a direct recognition – Jim in this state did not have the mental presence to actually be able to truly identify Spock. But something in the rest of Jim’s mind, that was not damaged and broken, had hailed back into this place just enough to allow Jim to recognise that Spock was something that was not a threat, and that was perhaps connected to something else, in some other place and time, that was outside of the filth and neglect of this wretched cell.

…he heard just one phrase, a representation of the resilience and character of James T. Kirk, that, in amongst the cacophony of distress, was a siren sounding out all the clearer.

Help will come.

This was it, Spock knew – this was the moment in which he could take hold of Jim’s faint sense that he had heard in that first meld that something would happen to change this terrible misery and start to build upon it to take Jim forwards in his life. Forwards, to where Spock knelt at Jim’s temples, and Leonard stood in tireless devoted sentry over Jim’s comatose body, and Nyota, and Scotty, and Sulu, and Chekov, and the whole crew of the S.S Enterprise were waiting for the restoration of the man in the service of whom they would gladly risk their lives. Home.

“Jim”, Spock said again, speaking through the meld now. “You do not yet formally know who I am, although I believe you will come to shortly, if I am correct in my prediction of the events that are about to follow. But I am here to take you away from here. You may not understand how, and I will have to implore you to trust me, which I understand will be difficult. But if you can summons the faith to take with me the path that I believe lays before us, all of this will be past”.

“It isn’t past”, young Jim said, sullenly. “How can it be past? I’m here aren’t I? Can’t you see it?” Jim’s eyes widened in disgust and fear and his face darkened. “Can’t you smell it?”

Here, Jim’s stomach gave a violent lurch, and Spock watched in abject pity as Jim vomited a small but painful amount of a thick, viscous, putrid fluid. Never had Spock had to watch Jim be sick without the constant reassuring presence of Leonard there to control the situation (as far as had been possible) and administer to Jim the comfort and treatment that was needed. The Jim lying here was so agonisingly alone in his suffering that for a moment Spock’s own mental reserves wavered under the strain, and their surroundings blurred while Spock struggled to maintain the strength of the connection.

Spock moved, and on the screens Jim’s vitals spiked, and Leonard felt a cold sweat immediately break over every inch of his skin. But the Vulcan was immediately still again, and the biofeeds registered no further disturbance beyond what was usual….With every last iota of will that he could gather, Leonard remained where he was.

“You think you are here, Jim”, Spock managed to continue, “but this is not your actual present reality. This was real to you, once, and your mind was tortured and has become trapped here, in a time and place at which you were very young, and terribly traumatised and mistreated. It has made your body extremely ill, and your mind – already susceptible to lapses back into this era of your life, became even more vulnerable. But you lived past this, Jim. This is not where it ended, and you are not condemned to spend the rest of your existence here. Your life went on, beyond this. To so much more than you could feasibly have imagined during this time”.

Spock was horribly aware of the possible futility of this explanation. This Jim before him was a child, and a desperately ill one at that. He surely could not expect him to comprehend the enormity of what was Spock was telling him – or if he did, to believe him. Spock’s only hope was that Jim’s trust in him – the trust that had allowed Jim in this moment to have a premonitative recollection of Spock of some kind – would be enough. This was the route, Spock decided, that he would take. He would impress on Jim that there were people who had come into his life who Jim seemed to know despite his existence having seemed to have become an eternity in this hellish pit – and that the only way this could be possible was if Jim could be convinced he had a future. That he had already had a future, and that it was still waiting for him.

Young Jim was, at the moment, merely observing him, in neither rejection nor acceptance. But there was – Spock saw, for he knew this look on the face of Jim Kirk no matter at what age he stood before him - a flicker of interest, Spock did not lose a moment. Jim was intelligent – more intelligent than any other human Spock had ever met. He was intelligent enough to have secured the survival of himself and eight other people on Tarsus. In his adult life, he was intelligent enough that he knew to always remain open to possibilities. It was how he learned so much, and so frequently – a ceaseless absorption of information and discovery. This quest for knowledge and willingness to entertain any idea, however bizarre or outlandish or, quite often, dangerous was an inherent part of Jim Kirk. He had been born with it, he would take it to his dying day. Thus Jim was, Spock knew, even at this age intelligent enough that his mind could open to allow the possibility that was Spock was saying was true.

“You know me, in some way, Jim – you are aware that you know me”.

Jim continued to look at him from under lowered brows. He wasn’t hostile. But nor was he yet accepting.

Spock drove on, equally committed to and unnerved by his own actions.

“You know me because you and I meet, some years from now. We are great friends. I know you know this, Jim”. Spock tried for pushing Jim’s own consciousness into searching itself, rather than expecting it to just blithely absorbing Spock’s words. “And I am one of a great many who, in your future, you have met, and who you love, and who love you”.

Silence.

Then –

“Who else?”

Greatly encouraged, Spock’s words came more easily here.

“An engineer – a Scottish man who keeps interesting company and who spends much of his time in a state of extreme indignation. A Captain of a Starship, who perceived something in you Jim that was evident to everyone except yourself, and who – though it gives me great chagrin to admit this – quite simply dared you to be better, and so you were. A communications officer who when you first met her would not even grant you just one basic human societal custom who I had never once seen accede to overwhelming emotion but who I witnessed weep for hours when once you suffered a terrible accident and it was uncertain whether or not you would recover. A very young navigator, whose eagerness to please you is palpably evident in every syllable of his voice. Another navigator who is an exceptional fencer and for whom you are his favoured practice opponent. And – and I mention him at this concluding juncture because I believe he is of the most paramount importance - a doctor”.

At this last word, Jim looked visibly doubtful…..no wonder, given the brutal negligence that he had experienced at the hands of the monsters who called themselves doctors here. But, where Jim’s expression had begun to soften at all those on Spock’s hastily given list, it gave something close to a true lightening at the word ‘doctor’.

“A doctor?” he repeated, faintly.

“Yes”, Spock breathed, even his Vulcan poise quavering under his emotional need to convey the final parts of this vital information to Jim, the information that was clearly so close to convincing him. “A magnificent one, with a great many talents as both a physician and a man. He loves you very much, and he has saved your life many times. In fact, Jim, he is saving your life right at this moment”.

To Spock’s wonder, gratitude, and extreme relief, Jim did not look around at his current surroundings in order to locate this doctor whom Spock had just claimed was acting ‘at this moment’. This was significant progress – more than Spock could ever have hoped for at this point. And it was everything for which he had been constantly internally pleading to nothing and no-one. Jim’s mind was developing its own independent awareness that extended beyond these four walls. When Jim spoke his next words, Spock knew that Jim – and he - were as ready as could be.

“I can hear him”, Jim whispered, and his tone was apprehensive, but almost reverent. “…...He’s right here”.

“That’s right, Jim”, Spock replied. “He’s waiting for you. We all are. If you will allow me, I would like to accompany you out of this room now”.

Spock took a step closer to Jim, and despite Jim’s acknowledgment of certain aspects of this psychologically convoluted situation, Jim shrank back, his state of childhood becoming materially visible once more.

“Ou- out?” he stammered, cringing further in on himself. “You can’t get out – I’ve tried…….”

He fixed Spock with a desperate gaze, and his voice was a childish whisper.

“I’ve tried for so long”.

He began to cry.

Spock wanted to gather the small Jim and all his hurt and fear and pain to himself and breathe them all in, to take away, to make well – to make better. But he could not succumb to his emotional vulnerability where Jim was concerned now. Of all the times in all the places in all the galaxies that they had and would travel together, never would it be so important that Spock remained to Jim what he had become during the course of their partnership, Jim’s counter, Jim’s alternate, all those pieces for which Jim had spaces, all those spaces for which Jim had pieces.

Spock moved closer still. Jim did not retreat this time. He continued to cry, ineffectively hiding his face behind the miserable paltry width of his upper arm, his tears spilling visibly onto the soiled sheet beneath him. His breath hitched, and he raised his head suddenly as another bout of nausea swept over him caused by the weeping. Spock had seen this many times when Jim had been crying in frustration and misery in Leonard’s arms, and almost every time Leonard had had to put himself, Jim, and all their clothing through the sonic washers. But still, Spock could not relent. Not now. He would have carried Jim if he could, but he knew instinctively that this would be ineffective; it was crucial that Jim voluntarily walked away from this place in order to leave it behind him. It had to be of his own volition. It had to be Jim’s conscious decision, to attempt to reclaim the rest of his conscious life. If Spock had simply attempted to synthetically impose this upon Jim, this would be no better than the state Jim was already in. The frame of mind that Spock would have willed and chosen for him may be one of safety and flourishing, rather than trauma, but without Jim’s own deliberate will, the relief would be temporary. There would be nothing to truly anchor him in that other state of mind….and eventually he would relapse into the same ordeal. Its power over him was simply that strong.

But Jim was stronger.

When the vomiting fit had passed, and Spock had reached the bed, he knelt down close to Jim’s hidden face. He spoke as if speaking to a child – because he had to remember that that was who Jim was at the moment. A lost and frightened little boy who had been abandoned, more than once, and who had then abandoned himself in turn to an eternity of loneliness and pain.

“I know, Jim”, he whispered. “I know you’re afraid, and in pain. But I promise you, Jim, that if you observe my suggestions – no, my persuasions, for I cannot withdraw now – that it will come to an end. You need to be brave now, Jim. Brave like you have been all your life. Brave like the man that this wounded little child became in my own existence, alongside whom I stand every day, proud to be a part of his world. It was you who taught me what bravery is, Jim. And now I have come back to remind you. Not to teach you – that would not be possible. Just to remind you”.

For several minutes, Jim did not respond. Despair began to wend its insidious way through Spock’s heart. Quite how they would progress from here if Jim did not comply he did not know.

Then, imperceptibly at first but then with the weak light from the corridor catching upon the brilliant sapphire of those eyes, Jim raised his head to look at Spock from over the crook of his arm. He was listening.

“Jim”, Spock whispered, unable to believe that further words were helpful, unable to stop them coming, “do you trust me?”

And Jim nodded.

Spock returned his nod, though within he was almost overcome with the force of the relief. “Thank you”.

Slowly, for he was still nauseous and weak, and entirely unsure of what was expected of him, Jim sat up and put his legs down over the side of the bed to stand up. Once he was on his feet, he stood at Spock’s side and looked up at him with such innocent vulnerability fused with fierce independence, that Spock did not know whether to take his small hand or hand him a phaser. Spock settled for smiling down at him. Jim took hold of Spock’s sleeve.

“Where do we go?” he asked, his small voice trembling. It was through Jim’s light contact at his sleeve that Spock knew the answer to this – and to how they were to achieve such a thing. Jim providing him with answers to questions that once Spock had never even thought to ask, even in the form of his past self who had not yet even met the Vulcan. It only required that Spock – and Jim - maintained the strength to travel though the depth of Jim’s consciousness that was about to expand before them. Spock reached down and took Jim’s hand.

“I believe that you do know the answer to that Jim. You only require my aid to make the transition. Where do you remember being taken once you had been released from here?”

Jim answered immediately.

“A Federation Hospital”, he said, into the darkness, where his words were swallowed. Suddenly an echo of a scream – Jim’s scream, that he had issued night and day since his first imprisonment in this despicable hole, rose around them, shrill and wild and terrible. It rose and rose like a leaping fire, obliterating sensible thought and rendering useless all other senses. It made the bars of the cell to rattle, the stone of the floors to crack, the crumbling plastered walls to shatter. It caused Spock’s chest wall to vibrate, and Jim to shrink terrified within himself. The smell of vomit came hotter and more sour; the darkness was blacker and farther reaching; all the unholy aspects of the small yellow room were amplified and intensifying, as if Jim’s recollected shadows had come alive and would drag them both back into this appalling living grave for all eternity. But Spock, who of the two was aware that this was no longer real, and no longer needed to have this degree of supremacy over Jim, stood firm - Jim’s hand in his, while all the earthly world screamed around them.

Then, there it was.

Bright, medical lights.

Clean, crisp sheets.

Voices, some near, some distant. All authoritative – but kind. Human presence.

The images here were unfocused and indistinct, but the sensations in Jim’s mind of which Spock now became aware were not. His wounds were assuaged and the tube removed. There was comfort where there had been bone against stone. There was relief from the terrible griping hunger. There was warmth.

Then Jim’s awareness of this, which had been fleeting and imprecise, was gone.

There followed, then, an indeterminable period of vacuity….there is neither nothing right, nor nothing wrong in this space…there is no fear, and equally no joy….there is no love, but there is no sense of loss…there is no colour, but it is not in monochrome….there is no light, but it is not dark….

This, Spock realises, is time. The simple passing of the entity of time, bare and abstract, unfettered by all that with which individuals fill it. All experience, sensory input, understanding is suspended here. They are simply waiting.

Jim is quiet, both at his side, and in the adult mind that they currently occupy.

Then, soundlessly, from the stillness emerges a long dust track. It lies beneath a hot midday sun, where long grass grows on either side and the road runs away from them to meet the endless sky…. In the distance, boys’ laughter, and the sound of pushbikes running over gravel.

Spock looks around, aware of his own great admiration for the sheer vastness of the empty, golden space. But the sensation attributed to this view that he feels inside the mind that is recalling it is something quite different. The place they have now come to, he knows through Jim at his side, is Iowa.

He glances down at Jim now.

Jim is still holding his hand, but he is not looking at him. He is looking into the distance, and something of a small smile begins to shape his face.

His face. Spock realises with a shock of awe that Jim looks different. His face is no longer sunken and grey. The dark circles beneath his eyes have faded. He is still pale, and medically underweight, but not chronically so. He is not entirely healthy, but he is functioning, and gradually strengthening. He is now dressed in a checked shirt and jeans. They are still slightly too big for him, but Spock knows Jim does not resent this. He follows Jim’s gaze into the distance, and sees two young adolescent boys come running from around the side of a barn. One of them is the Jim that stands beside him. From this Jim, Spock hears just one word, spoken with that small smile.

“Sam”.

Before them, the scene shifts and reforms. It is something similar, but the sky here is grey, and the perspective is different. There is a woman’s voice calling from a nearby house. There are male voices again, and they have matured somewhat. The Jim beside him is slightly taller now, his skin faintly tanned, his hair a lighter golden. There is the sound of a motorbike, its engine starting and turning over just once before fading away.

Then this scene is gone, and when the next materialises, Spock realises that, although Jim remains at his side, Jim is no longer holding his hand. For Jim is grown now. He still looks young, Spock realises, compared to the Jim he sees daily now, years into his captaincy. He had always had young features, decreased in age even further by his roguish smile and the light of amusement that so frequently lay behind the intensity of his eyes. But here, he looks fresh. Strong now, well-built, and – Spock realises with equal parts exasperation and affection – entirely ready to throw himself upon a lifelong series of reckless, implusive exploits that are as inexplicably genius as they are dangerous. This is James Tiberius Kirk. And it is good to see him.

Desperate as he may be to do so, Spock knows he must resist speaking to Jim. They are moving through an inexplicably delicate process that is entirely unfamiliar to both of them, notwithstanding the familiarity to Jim of these scenes themselves. Spock knows to allow it to unfold as organically as possible. At Jim’s shoulder, where he so longs to stand once more in their regular life, Spock waits.

It is night here. It is a bar, all colour and noise and rapidly moving figures. Jim is at the bar itself, engaged in a seemingly rather one-sided conversation with a female Starfleet Cadet. At his next realisation, Spock almost collapses in shock. The cadet is Nyota. But he is swiftly recalled by the emotion surrounding him from the mind in which he is standing – and Jim’s reaction to seeing Nyota is a warmth and an affection that Spock had not yet felt amongst the commotion of Jim’s emotional responses. He has recognised her.

And now, Jim does turn to Spock. He is smiling. Not the broad, dazzling, James T. Kirk smile that had become so associated with even Jim’s earliest captaincy. A private smile, that was all the more meaningful for its subtlety.

“Uhura”, he says to Spock.

“Correct”, Spock replies, with a note of sheer astonishment in his voice.

For Spock understands the process now. At the moment his adult consciousness reaches each event, the Jim beside him – the tortured and broken Jim who is fighting for his life in this, the only bizarre and uncertain way they know how – gains full recognition of it, and its relevant people. Spock is at once fascinated, astounded, and deeply moved.

Jim looks back at the scene before them. He frowns slightly.

“It’s strange, though”, he says, more to himself than to Spock. “I don’t know her first name”.

Spock hides his own small smile.

There is a rapid change now – and the date and location remain the same. Jim is bleeding from the face, and he is hot and filthy, and drunk. There is cotton in his nostrils, and impetuousness in his mind. But a man sits across the table from him, and though Spock feels Jim’s acute sense of rebellion in this situation, he also feels Jim’s growing (and somewhat grudging) respect. Accompanying this is a degree of shame in his own behaviour, that Spock cannot help but privately support.

Christopher Pike.

Jim is watching this particular scene in a visibly reflective silence. Spock highly doubts that at this stage the Jim beside him is aware of the events that are to follow concerning Pike. There is no need to enlighten him, even if Spock had had a grain of desire to do so. But Jim’s solemnity indicates to Spock that he is at least conscious of there being some kind of complication here – something to marr the unlikely acceptance that Jim had found in this man.

There is, however, one intervention that Spock can make here.

“Christopher Pike placed an inordinate amount of faith in you, Jim”, he said, quietly. “But it was not misplaced. He was not afraid to take a risk for you – for he knew that you would take a risk for him. The risk that he dared you to take. You did not let him down. He was extremely proud of you. And he loved you”.

Jim nodded.

The bar fades.

Suddenly, Jim’s attention is caught even before the scene becomes visible. He looks up as if he has heard a sound, wide-eyed and expectant. He does not know, at least Spock thinks he can’t yet know for what he is expecting – but as a man’s voice becomes audible, so too does Jim’s heartbeat.

The shuttle. The man’s voice can be heard nearby, though it’s owner is as yet out of sight. The voice is raised in what may be mistaken for anger, but what a more sensitive listener would identify as mainly fear. His words are as yet indistinct. But Jim’s blood is singing.

Spock looks sideways at Jim, who is looking at his own self sitting in his seat in the shuttle, adjusting his straps over his leather jacket that is so out of place among the starchy red stiffness of the surrounding cadet uniform. That Jim is listening, like the others around him, to that voice. But the Jim beside him suddenly turns to meet Spock’ gaze, a question, realisation rising in his eyes…..

“Yes - ”, Spock says, inclining his head gently. He glances up to where a somewhat dishevelled man in a slightly battered overcoat has emerged from the shuttle’s bathroom, engaged in lively discussion with the attendant, “ – here he is”.

And with that, Spock announced the arrival into Jim Kirk’s life of Doctor Leonard H. McCoy.

For as long as he lived, wherever he travelled throughout the rest of his days, no matter what great or noble or remarkable or terrible sights he may come to see, Spock knew in this moment that never would he forget this sight – of Jim watching the moment that his own self met Leonard McCoy. Try as he might want to, there could be no scientific explanation for the phenomenon that was unfolding in the Jim beside him as his observation of this scene began to carve the final stages of his unconscious mind being brought into alignment with his present self. To Spock, it was physically visible. The grudging affection that Leonard would develop for Jim, reluctantly at first, but then powerlessly, finding that he could not function without the chaotic and brilliant little trainwreck that had so cheerfully and easily invaded his life and caused him all manner of trouble and boundless joy….the affection that turned to love, and that fuelled the observation that Jim needed care and comfort, and that led to Leonard realising one day that he may be Jim Kirk’s primary physician, but Jim Kirk was his primary concern, on a myriad of levels, and always would be, for as long the sun rose on his day. Jim’s own regard for Leonard’s pain, and equal disregard for his penchant for loneliness, and then his developing dependency on Leonard’s solid, warm, steady presence, and his gradual ability to be vulnerable with him, to seek him out if he needed him – unless of course, as was so often the case, Leonard had pre-empted him, and found him already. All of this was combining in Jim’s mind, convincing him of the presence of love in his life, and of someone who would lay aside all else to take care of him when no-one else had taken care of him before.

As for this Jim’s reaction, he had only two words, spoken wistfully, and with adoration.

“He’s beautiful”.

Spock follows Jim’s gaze and runs an eye of appraisal over this version of Leonard he had never met.

“He appears rather unkempt to my eye, Jim”, he said, but not without a tone of faint amusement. “But he did an admirable job of overcoming the abject aviophobia you are witnessing now”.

“How?’ breathed Jim, watching Leonard’s continuing rant and trying not to laugh.

“He was going to have to follow you into space”, Spock replied simply.

Jim turned to look at him, but the scene was gone.

Wide fields once more. Early evening, the sun is going down. At the low horizon, towards which they are moving, a farmhouse, its light peaceful and inviting. At Spock’s side, Jim of the same age he had been in the shuttle. At Jim’s side in their observation, Leonard 'Bones' McCoy. Jim’s mind is alive with laughter and with an almost insuppressible joy that makes his chest ache as it bursts within him. Through their proximity, Spock feels Leonard’s emotion – and it is the same.

They reach the farmhouse, and the door opens. They watch as Leonard goes forwards ahead of Jim and bends down to receive into his arms a dark haired little girl who is the strikingly beautiful female version of her father. Spock feels Jim’s heart hitch, and wonders how much more he can bear of this exquisitely painful journey. Joanna. Leonard turns to Jim with her in his arms, and she is already laughing and reaching for Jim, who takes her from Leonard like another parent. An older lady moves out of the glow in the doorway, and draws her son down to her shoulder, and while still holding him there extends her arm to Jim who moves into her embrace with Joanna against his chest. Eleanora McCoy. At last, here, Jim had found a mother.

This scene passes smoothly into the next; Jim at a wooden fence in the low winter sunshine, Joanna on his hip, watching Leonard bring the horses in from the fields. Spock is aware of Jim’s thoughts that here, Bones is not a doctor. He is not the CMO of the SS Enterprise, and Starfleet's finest surgeon. He is simply a southern gentleman who had been born and raised in the broad lands of Georgia….but then Spock alongside Jim watches Leonards’ hands as they run soothingly down the horses’ necks, sees every gentle, knowing, capable touch, and how that touch transcends to every context he's in, and Spock entirely understands Jim’s deep love for those eternally physician hands.

They find themselves in time again. But there is more shape to this passage, Spock realises – more direction. Jim is no longer waiting for what may be about to happen, or for what his mind may next yet choose to visit upon him. Although Jim is still following the physical sequence of events, his mind is broader. It is more open, and more accepting. It is safer, gradually becoming persuaded of the inexplicable arrival of good into a life he had had to remember he’d ever lived. At last, Jim was beginning to take ownership of this, his own mind.

And of this Spock was entirely convinced in the very next moment.

The Academy Board Enquiry.

Jim at the lectern before the board members, stubborn but somehow infuriatingly plausible. Although Spock would never have told him that.

Then, at the other lecturn, the younger Spock himself came to stand – and the Jim at present Spock’s side had already turned to look at him, affection and respect glowing from every inch of his handsome face. Finally, he knew him.

“Hello Mr Spock”.

There were very few moments in his life that Spock would identify as ones in which he would have gladly died having had it than lived the rest of his days without. It was illogical to willingly embrace the concept of one’s premature death based on little more than a single intense emotion.

But there were also times when Spock was grateful to his human side for allowing him such illogical tendencies – for this was one of those moments. Jim, standing here beside him inside his own mind, recognising Spock, and recognising him ahead of being informed of his name. After all they had been through, after everything it had taken and cost them to reach this moment….they were almost there.

Quelling his own tears, Spock mustered a response.

“Hello, Jim”.

After this, there were few such distinct and separate memories. Jim and Spock walked together through a fulfilled and accomplished landscape, in which time passed in various degrees of speeds, and the images and recollections merged to become something more like ordinary memory. Others came: Scotty, Sulu, Chekov, their qualities becoming gently permanent fixtures of this life; Voices, faces, and laughter appeared and faded; hopes and fears rose and fell; times beset with anxiety, times of deep pleasure; reservation, abandon, joy, distress – all came and went alongside, before, and behind them as the two made their companionable way to where Spock believed they would, at least in this form, be able to part ways. Spock could not and would never be able to determine the length of this experience, and although they spoke at some length along the journey, about what Spock would never fully recall. And they were also quiet for long periods. At all times, they were simply watching the calming passage of time that was unfolding their lives together.

Finally, after Spock knew not how long, a large, light room materialised around them. The laughter here was closer and clearer, and the murmur of voices also held some distinctive words and sentences as the small crowd talked and chatted. The clink of glasses. Beyond one set of windows, the afternoon sun streaming down on a Yorktown courtyard. Behind them, through another, lay the USS Enterprise A, under reconstruction. Leonard and Jim are shoulder to shoulder in the crowd, Spock and Uhura close by. This is Jim’s thirtieth birthday party. And, Spock knows, where their time together in this stage of Jim’s journey has come to an end.

For just a few moments, he allows himself to watch the Jim at his side. Jim is watching the scene with an almost melancholy reflective love. Spock sees the years on his face now – the wisdom that has gradually replaced the lines of mischief, the peace that is now seen more often than the wild gleam behind his eyes. This is the Jim that lies beneath Spock’s hands on the biobed, somewhere out there in the grand time and space that is meant to be reality but that Spock cannot fathom is any more real than what he has undergone with Jim from within. This is the Jim who, Spock hopes against all hope, will now wake up.

He finds, to his own surprise, that there are some words he must say before this ends. 

“This is all your doing, Jim”, he said, quietly. “These relationships and these bonds, these loyal individuals who have followed you beyond any sensible line of duty and who will continue to do so again. The camaderie and the loyalty that are essential to the family that you see here – for it is a family – are largely the result of you. Of your spirit, your courage, your bravery. Everything that you have seen, and that you see here, is a testament to the man you have become – the man who grew from that child who survived Tarsus and the terrible events to which he was so unfairly subjected afterwards. You have inspired great devotion, Jim, in all you have met”.

“And a fair amount of antipathy in a few, Spock”, Jim laughs.

Spock raises his eyebrow.

“Very well”, he concedes, “in almost all you have met. But that, too, is evidence of the great strength of your character”.

Jim smiles, his eyes on the crowd. He is, Spock suddenly realises, fading- and Spock knows why. The Jim that has stood beside him since the little yellow room is no longer separate from the adult Jim with whose mind he is currently melded. The part of Jim’s mind that had been so forcibly trapped in the trauma of his past has been calibrated alongside the wider context of the rest of his life. He has, Spock believes, to put it in human terms, come home.

“This is your dynasty, Jim”, he whispers. “And I believe you are ready to truly reside in it once more”.

Jim nods. His smile has not faded, and it remains as he turns to face Spock….but Jim himself is now little more than a translucent shape.

“Thank you, Spock”.

“….you are welcome, Jim”.

And so Jim went.

Chapter Text

“He joined Starfleet because he... He believed in it... I joined on a dare”

“You joined to see if you could live up to him. You spent all this time trying to be George Kirk and now you're wondering just what it means to be Jim”

……“The miserable have no other medicine but only hope”……

...”Fear of death... is what keeps us alive”……..

“I'm scared, Spock... help me not to be... how do you choose not to feel?”

“I do not know. Right now, I am failing”.

“I wanted you to know why I couldn't let you die... why I went back for you...”

“ Because you are my friend”

“Don't agree with me, Spock, it makes me very uncomfortable.”

“If it isn't Captain James Tiberius Perfect-Hair!

“You can fly this thing right?”

“Are you kidding me sir?”

“I told you people I don't need a doctor, dammit - I AM a doctor!”

“As you were”.

“As YOU were”.

“If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.

“Wait a minute, kid. How old are you?

Seventeen, sir”

………..I don't believe in no-win scenarios.

Spock had released Jim’s temples. He sat back. Spent.

On the biobed, Jim lay prone. Still. Unmoving. Non-communicable.

To all intents and purposes, lifeless.

But Spock knew.

He summonsed his physical words from somewhere inside of him that he had not known existed. They were spoken faintly, and with the rarest of visible Vulcan weakness. But not without conviction.

“Leonard……wake him up”.

Bones was, at this moment, as motionless as Jim. He stood opposite Spock across Jim’s body, in his place of constancy at Jim’s side – master of Jim’s each physiological trace, and equally slave to every one of them. He was as stunned by these events as Spock, but not in the mesmerized way that Spock was, who had witnessed happen the very process that was needed, and that they had so desperately hoped for. Bones was in that terrible place of uncertainty, adrift in a tide of doubt and ambiguity at this the very culmination of all they had strived for. Even in his debilitated state, Spock could sympathise with the doctor’s very human state. He had fought harder than Spock until the point of the melds, because there was no-one else who could have taken up this particular battle to keep Jim physically alive, and because there was no-one else who could have suffered more in doing so. Now, at this crucial stage to which he had been so infinitely essential, he was rendered helpless.

Acutely aware of this, and of the resulting need to treat Leonard with as much compassion as Jim himself, Spock mustered the strength to expand on his instruction. He straightened his back, and delved to bring some encouragement to his voice.

“Leonard – you must trust me”, he said. “I realise that you have not been party to the information that supports this request, but I implore you to have faith in my words – and in Jim. You may withdraw the barbiturates that are maintaining Jim’s unconscious state…it is safe to do so”.

Slowly, Bones came to himself. He had been transfixed on Spock, for he didn’t know how long, but he suspected for a protracted length of time. He had endured the past unknown minutes, or hours, or days, in an almost unbearable state of dependence upon the Vulcan’s abilities, and a horrendous surrendering of his own. To have let Jim go, into this fragile, indecisive process after all of his own vigilance, had been a rend in the fabric of his own being. He had been able to do nothing except watch Jim’s vitals rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall, and in his stalwart determination to allow Spock to perform this preternatural task, their one chance, he had resisted every atom of his devotion to his role as medic, and, he felt, to Jim himself. Now, he was being called upon as a physician again – but the instructions equated to nothing in his instincts. Leonard was a brave and valiant man, and it was directly this that flowed into his proficiency as a doctor. Here, however, he felt neither brave nor effective. All he could do was follow these stupefying directions, and yield Jim once again to the mercy of something he simply could not understand.

His voice, however, began to yield words of its own.

“Goddammit Spock, how can I – “

Suddenly his wrist was seized in an unmistakable Vulcan grip.

“Leonard, Jim is here”. Spock was looking at him with an intensity Bones found difficult to engage even in the most trivial of circumstances. But he could feel Spock’s understanding. He listened.

“Jim”, the Vulcan was saying, “our Jim – your Jim - is just on the other side of this physiological barrier. Leonard, it is your turn now”. Spock deployed the weapon he knew could not fail but reach its target; Bones’ responsibility for the man he loved so much. “His consciousness is now in your hands, as it should be. He is ready. Wake him up”.

Moments passed. Then Bones nodded.

“Alright”, he said, faintly.

Spock sank back, and watched as Leonard began to orchestrate the necessary medical administrations. Chapel and Gabe and the accompanying staff took their instructions quietly and without protest, though each moved and worked with a certain awestruck deference.

Finally, Jim was placed in a state in which natural wakefulness could take effect. Leonard, still moving as if in a semi-trance, drew up his seat at Jim’s side, took Jim’s hand between both of his, and held it to his forehead. He closed his eyes. It could be minutes before Jim’s cerebral cortex began to fully activate. It could be hours. All they could do now was wait for the response.

The silence in the medbay was immense. From her position just inside the doorway, Spock could feel Nyota’s tension. It spoke for every person in the room.

But none more than Leonard, for whom the responsibility of Jim's current condition could never be alleviated. 

The silence moved by. Spock saw Leonard’s tricorder by his elbow on Jim’s bed, but, he had noticed, this was not the device through which the doctor was monitoring Jim’s recovery from the coma. Although Leonard’s eyes were tightly closed, and though he seemed to have lost himself in a suspended abstraction of nothing but a fierce hope, Spock was watching the right hand of the doctor’s two that were clasped around Jim’s. The first three fingers of that hand sporadically but repeatedly gave three light taps against Jim’s skin – one two three.

One two three.

Spock was unsure as to whether Leonard was aware of this transmission. But it kept coming, at random but constant intervals.

One two three.

One two three.

Still, this was the only movement.

The bio-monitors emitted their steady emissions. Spock became aware of his own breath, coming in short, fast releases the sound of which he had to stifle.

One two three.

One two three.

One….

Leonard lifted his head from where it rested against his and Jim’s enjoined hands.

He looked first at Jim’s face, and then realised where his focus ought to lie. He turned his gaze to Jim’s hand between his.

Jim’s right hand index finger….

…one….

Leonard gave a short, caught intake of breath.

“….Jim?” The disbelief was evident in his voice. But –

….one……two….

Leonard sat up now. Spock sat forward. Nyota put a hand to her mouth. Chapel took Gabe’s arm.

…one, two……..three….

Jim had tapped back.

Leonard shifted forwards, still gripping Jim’s hand between his own, his eyes going instinctively to the biomonitors, but also unable to look away from Jim’s face.

“Jim? Jimmy, can you hear me? I’m here, Jim….I’m here………”

One two three…. On the back of Leonard’s hand.

He was here.

And slowly, stutteringly…..Jim opened his eyes.

Then Spock smiled his small smile that was reserved just for Jim, and bowed his head in sheer, blessed relief. It is done. The rest of these moments, just at the moment, are for Leonard.

Leonard fell to his knees from his seat, any attempt at medical professionalism vanquished by just that one movement, made by that one body. He seized Jim’s hand harder, and felt Jim squeeze back.

“Jim? He whispers, “My God, Jim….”

Jim’s eyes were glazed, rheumy with vestiges of the illness, and the weeks of the coma. But he focused on Bones. Jim could have no idea at this time of what he had endured in these last months. No conception at all. But if there was one thing of which he was aware right now – actually, properly, and truly aware – it was Leonard.

To everyone in the room, suddenly, Leonard appears as he truly is. Not as the great doctor McCoy, without whose medical expertise James Kirk would have died months ago. Not as the man of great and fierce determination, who has worked tirelessly and endlessly and selflessly for Jim and for others for how long now no-one can remember.

He is, of course, still those things. But instead, it is the toll of them that appears, not the might.

He suddenly looks old. Lined, and pale – grey at the edges, and frayed. His uniform is too loose. His shoulders are curved. He is a human being existing in patches, dark where there should be light, too bright around what should be hidden.

He is a man whose heart has broken every day for as long as any of them are, at present, aware.

Slowly, he sees Jim see him. Jim cannot smile yet, his muscles are still under a heavy influence of the drugs, and will take some time to respond to ordinary nerve impulses. But a smile begins nonetheless.

Then, there it was. Fractured, pained, and barely audible. But utterly unmistakeable.

“…ones…”

“Jim…” Leonard manages, his voice cracking, his entire soul straining in the effort to keep from breaking apart. “Oh Jim……….” He brings Jim’s fingers to his lips, pressing a hard kiss to the frail digits. He is struggling for composure.

Spock intercepts.

“Jim”, he begins, and Jim’s eyes move slowly across to the Vulcan.

“Hey Spock”, he whispers.

Spock smiles at him, the exceptional smile with part laugh that few (save Leonard, in a far off time now comparatively far less dire than this) have ever truly witnessed.

“It is good to see you, Jim”, Spock says, softly.

Jim’s smile cracks into something more recognisable.

“We have seen a lot together, Spock”, Jim whispers.

His voice is pure balm to the Vulcan’s leaden soul.

“We have”, he murmurs. “And now it is my hope that we will still see a great many more together”.

Jim gives a faint nod, still smiling such as he can.

Leonard speaks up here, as the moment assumes a note of frivolity.

“By the way, Jim”, he says, nodding to Spock as he does so, “Spock totally round-housed Parmen. It was fucking awesome!”

Jim’s body jolts a laugh from him, which joins with Leonard’s.

Spock looks mildly perplexed.

“Forgive me,”he says, “but I am unfamiliar with the verb ‘to roundhouse’”.

Jim has managed to allow his body to emit the laugh, and it has loosened his voice to a degree.

“Don’t worry, Spock”, he says, still softly, but with less disjointedness. “It just means you’re a badass….but we all knew that anyway.”

Spock looks appropriately appeased, and Jim gives him an affectionate look that conveys a thousand emotions. Then he turns his attention back to Leonard. The air becomes more serious again. Not with sombreness. Just with the gravity that is due to this long journey that is finally drawing to a close.

Leonard gently pulls Jim’s hand closer to his own body, if such a thing were possible.

“Do you know?”, Leonard whispers, reverently. Reaching forwards one hand, he passes the back of his fingers over Jim’s cheek. “Do you have any idea what you’ve been through?”

Jim’s eyes passed gently over Bones, concerned and grave – but peaceful.

“Only what I see on your face”.

Leonard stalls here. He is caught; trapped between needing to be for Jim now what he needs him to be - strong, resilient, reassuring, constant, and what he can only feel, human as he is. Distraught with relief, and with an overwhelming surge of the horror of what could have been.

He drops his face once more to his and Jim’s hands, hiding the rise of emotion behind them both.

For a few moments there is absolute quiet between them all. A quiet of the perfect kind, when things have aligned in such a way that is desperately hoped for, but entirely doubted.

It is Jim who speaks first.

“Leonard – “, he says, and Jim’s utterance of his real first name forces Bones to look up at him, his cheeks flushed and his eyes reddening.

“It’s ok…” Jim whispers. “It’s ok, Bones….. I’m right here.”

…and that did it. Leonard broke. For the first time since this whole atrocious, heartbreaking, utterly word-defying fucking appalling situation had begun, Bones, kneeling beside the biobed, Jim’s weak hand between both of his that were worn dry with so many weeks of antiseptic and artificial temperatures, put his head down, forehead pressed to Jim’s alive side - and cried.

Chapter Text

That night, for the first time in how long his flagellated mind could not recall, Leonard dreamed.

This was not the type of dream in which he was beset by the relentless nightmare of the sane waking life that infiltrated every moment of his consciousness.

Nor was it the kind of almost lucid dream in which he was horribly and acutely aware of its events and the painfully actual source in reality.

Ultimately, in this dream he was aware of only very few things.

The first was that he was in some kind of place and land – possibly Georgia, possibly Iowa – of wide space, beneath a boundless sky. Stretching indeterminably beyond the horizon, in a myriad of colour and invitation.

The second was that here, wherever it was, there was peace. He sat beneath that endless sky in this unnamed, indistinct land... alone and adrift….and yet the calm was immeasurable.

The third was that he was still. He sat, quiet and motionless, simply looking ahead into the distance… There were no demands, no request, no pressures…..There was no weight.

And the fourth, was this.

There was something on the horizon, which he now watched steadily and without interruption or burden or fear, its gradual appearance stealing across the landscape with amber tones of warmth, and renewal, and promise....

Finally, the sun was coming up.

Chapter Text

Four days had passed since Jim had come out of the coma.

After the first twelve hours or so, in which Jim had graduated from lingering between a deep fatigue and a relatively compos mentis alertness, and moved more towards being able to maintain an actual functioning conversation that demonstrated his cognitive processing was returning to normal, Bones had allowed him to half sit up in bed. The sooner they could start reengagement, Leonard knew, the more chance Jim would have of moving fully out of the coma state.

As Bones helped Jim to sit up – sliding his hands underneath him and shifting him slightly towards the head of the biobed so that Jim’s shoulders and upper torso were at least propped against the pillows, Bones had watched Jim’s movements – and the resultant feedback from the biobed screens - with ferocious scrutiny. Jim was, of course, heavily lethargic, and even these small adjustments had caused a dramatic spike in his heartrate and blood pressure. Bones knew this would be the case, that it medically ought to be the case at this stage. Jim’s body had been artificially incapacitated for weeks, and before that had suffered – was still suffering – from an illness so severe it had almost killed him. That his body was finding it difficult to respond to even the smallest of demands was not only unsurprising, it was expected. Leonard would have been the first to pass this very definite medical judgment, had the patient been any other than this one.

And yet, because it was this patient, Leonard could not help but fret. Had he moved him too quickly? Were his airways functioning normally? Could his bones withstand the change in pressure?  Was his skin tender? Were his electrolytes remaining level?

Leonard's heart hammered in his chest with a repetitive, explosive intensity. He knew he was pale. His hands shook constantly.

Once he had settled Jim, and pounced on his tricorder in order to re-scan him in this new position with a speed close to that of a striking viper, Jim had let out a quiet laugh. Bones glanced briefly down at him, his gaze otherwise transfixed upon the readings on the screen, a furrow of tension and concentration across his brow.

“What?” he asked, eyes still locked on the screen.

 And Jim had mustered just enough energy to be able to raise his hand to Leonard’s face, and run his finger down the deep crease between his eyebrows.

Leonard stopped still at the contact.

Jim’s hand, of its own volition, tracing across his skin……

He lowered the tricorder then, allowing his hands to rest on Jim’s legs. For a few moments, they simply looked at one another, Jim’s expression a smile of gentle compassion, Leonard’s one of confusion, and a helplessness that was entirely unbefitting the magnitude of what Leonard had endured for the past few months.

“I’m sorry Jim”, Bones said at last. He dropped his gaze to his hands where they lay on Jim’s thighs beneath the sheets. “I just don’t…..I can’t….”

“It’s ok, Bones”, Jim whispered, suddenly. His cracked voice belied his still crippling weakness. “Just….try not to worry so much”.

And then it was Bones’ turn to laugh, a huff of exasperated disbelief bursting from him before he could stop it.

“You were essentially dead, Jim”, he whispered back, looking at Jim now. “You do recall how much I constantly worry about you when you’re alive and well and bouncing round the fucking ship and the universe like you’re made of Kevlar, right? Well…. This time you were most definitely not made of Kevlar…..You were barely even made of your own body”.

Bones lowered his eyes again. He closed them, and shook his head. That this was happening – that Jim was here, awake, alive, communicating with him, smiling at him, responding to him…..He could just hardly comprehend it. Every moment felt like a cruel dream in which one is given everything they could ever hope for, while always being vaguely aware that this might not be entirely real, and knowing that at any moment sleep would disappear, and rip away with it any comfort or joy that its imaginings had so playfully and carelessly thrown about, leaving that terrible sense of the dawning of a painful reality. Leonard wanted to touch Jim, really touch him – grip his arms or hold his face between his hands and try to impress through his skin into his own brain the truthfulness of Jim’s presence. But he knew this would be useless. Jim’s illness and eventual absence had left Leonard thoroughly incapable of absorbing anything of this depth. It was all he could do to stare at Jim, look into those unearthly blue eyes and simply try and academically convince himself that this could only be happening because Jim was looking back. Leonard was, he himself was aware, on some very real level, genuinely traumatised.

Jim managed to bounce his thigh slightly beneath Bones’ hand, which brought Leonard back from his confused reverie. There was Jim before him, thin, pale, ravaged by the illness and the weakness of the coma, but here nonetheless. And if he had made it this far, there was every chance….

Bones gave Jim’s knee a gentle squeeze, then smiled.

“Ignore me, Jimmy”, he said. “You know what I’m like. Just an old southern grumpy mother hen. And in this case, the hen had to mother the shit out of you like never before. I’m just….I suppose I’m just finding it hard to believe that we’re here. Ignore me”.

“Impossible”, Jim whispered back.

Of course, it was enormously reassuring that Jim was awake.

Bones and Spock had not yet spoken about the meld, and Bones was unsure of when, if ever, there would be an appropriate time to do so. He was torn between a desperate and almost jealous need to know, and a desperate and almost sickened need not to. This he would have to address, as Jim’s physician – and as everything else he was to him. But for now, it was enough that the Vulcan had succeeded in this astronomically ambitious plan of somehow retrieving Jim from the depths of his own mind that, Bones now realised, had actually held sway over Jim for at least the last ten years in which he had known him. And Spock had not just done this in the way-out, alternative, guitars-in-the-firelight style in which someone might reasonably assume had happened…But with true physical actuality. Leonard’s only role now was to nurse Jim through these early stages, in which body and mind – so newly reunited – were likely to forego the honeymoon period and leap straight to violent and unreasonable conflict.

The night of the first day on which Jim regains consciousness, Bones hears Jim’s cry even before the bio-monitor feed that runs directly to the alarm system on Bones’ PADD (the alarm system to which Bones had all but sold his soul) had even registered the change in his condition.

Heartrate spiking, body heat rocketing, oxygen levels dropping….

Bones spends that entire night cuddling him.

 “Sshhh, Jimmy”, he whispers as he reaches the bed and scoops Jim up (into his previously bereft arms). “I know. I know it’s awful…I know…..Shhhh…….Shhhh…….”

Jim finally fell back to sleep, rocked by Bones’ warm, solid body, and lulled by the deep resonating words of comfort that were poured into his soul.

Then, the next day.

Leonard had sat with Jim throughout the morning, hung in the balance between simply wanting to be with him and being unable to control his compulsive need to check his stats every 0.002 seconds. Eventually, Jim had smilingly told him to leave – to find a change of scenery, or at least move further than the six small inches it took Leonard to lean over to reach his medical supplies. Reluctant at first, Leonard had eventually agreed to leave the medbay for a while; unbeknownst to Jim, he wanted to visit Spock anyway.

He kissed Jim on the forehead, and stayed until he was asleep again. Then levered himself from Jim’s side.  

An hour later, Leonard could hear him even before he reached the medbay corridor, having been summoned by Chapel.  Jim had fallen asleep. And then woken up. Bones not being there when he regained consciousness was, apparently, intolerable.

His staff scatters as he entered the medbay. Bones crosses the room in four strides, and sits down at Jim’s side. He is smiling slightly as Jim reaches for him, and only for him. Bones is not panicking, at this moment, about Jim’s medical state. There are many physiological obstacles that they will have to address, and some may prove perhaps as challenging as what has already gone before. But those are not the most prevalent problems now. The issue here is that Jim needs constant comfort and love and reassurance – and that he needs it from Leonard. This thought, to Bones, is in equal parts both heart-breaking and unbearably adorable.

“Oh Jimmy”, he sighs, kind and protective, “come here, come on”.

He pulls Jim upwards into his arms and wraps him up, enveloping him, holding him like a wounded puppy.  “I know darlin’, I know”, he murmurs soothingly. He continues the reassurance….“I’m here, it’s alright. I’m here…..”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me Bones”, Jim eventually sobs into the depths of Bones’ science tunic, his voice muffled by tears and fabric. Bones brings one hand up to hold Jim’s head steady against the inside of his shoulder, and rests his own cheek against Jim’s forehead so he can speak to him with privacy. All that would be audible to anyone else was an intimate murmuring.

“You’ve been very poorly, Jim”, he whispers, “for a long time, actually. A very long time. You still are. This was never going to be an easy come-back, was it, hmmm?”

Jim is silent, unable to decide which way to turn in among the multiple roads in his head of which he was suddenly and all too acutely aware, and Bones knows not to expect a response. So he keeps rocking him, and keeps murmuring to him, staying as close as he can in heart and body and mind, just letting whatever this toxic waste is that has so poisoned Jim for so long stream out over both of them…..

Then, there was the eating....