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When Bones gets the news, a crushing weight settles somewhere in his chest, wraps itself around his shoulders and clings. They don’t think to call him first, when it happens. They don’t think to call him at all. He should’ve been there, they should’ve brought him to Jim first, he could’ve done something, could’ve at least tried. Instead all he gets is a body bag wheeled into his medbay. He’s not even sure who it is until they pull down on the zipper.
And then, suddenly, it feels like gravity has gotten heavier. He can hardly stand, can hardly breathe, isn’t sure what the hell he’s supposed to do now, when the only reason he really agreed to be here in the first place was because of Jim.
The thing is, for all his protests and lectures, Bones never really expected that anything bad could happen to Jim. It didn’t seem possible. It still doesn’t seem possible, even with this new reality opening up around them. It’s a joke. It has to be a joke, or maybe a nightmare, one where he bolts upright still half asleep and hoping “dear god please tell me my brain made that all up.” He’ll regain full consciousness, eventually, and everything will gradually get more solid and palpable and real, and Jim will be there like he’s supposed to be, like nothing ever happened, because nothing did ever happen.
The thing is, it doesn’t work like that. Nothing ever does, and Bones knows that better than most.
But the other thing is, when he’s trying to process, trying to let everything settle, trying to get used to the idea of a world without a James Kirk…the other thing is something stops, gives him pause. It’s a slight movement in his peripheral vision, accompanied by a soft sort of purring.
The other thing is that Bones never learned how to give up on things. He couldn’t give up on his job, and his marriage started crumbling; he couldn’t give up on his marriage and it made their relationship even worse; he can’t give up on Jim. Even though Jim is dead and has been for the greater part of the last two hours, he can’t give up on him.
It’s going to be what kills him.
They’ll have his license, they’ll have his rank, they’ll have his entire life and livelihood. He’ll lose sleep. He’ll run the risk of losing his sanity. It might not even work. Knowing this, he calls for a cryotube anyway.
Nobody stops him.
*
It may come as quite the shock, but tribble anatomy and physiology is actually leagues different from human anatomy and physiology. Just because his experiment worked on a glorified bunny rabbit doesn’t necessarily mean it can bring Jim back from the dead. It would certainly be all too easy if the same serum he’d been fiddling with that brought the tribble back from the dead worked just as well on a human person.
He takes blood samples first. Tries not to think about how the blood in Jim’s body is now a finite resource. Tries to remind himself that if this works, the regenerative properties of the serum will replace it all, anyway. Tries to convince himself that it will work at all, because the only thing keeping him from losing his mind completely is the idea that Jim will be waiting for him at the end of it. Tries not to convince himself that it will work, because if it doesn’t then he’s not quite sure what will become of him.
Mostly, he tries not to think about any of it. It’s just an experiment, just like med school, just like the research lab at the academy. Nothing to worry about except preparing slides and observing the effects under a microscope and waiting for bad things to happen. Hoping for good things to happen, but knowing that he was taught to never take anything for granted. If there's one thing he learned in med school, it's that you should always expect to have to try again.
The first thing he tries is a direct transfusion. It works about as well as you’d think. The sample of Jim’s blood underneath the microscope caves in on itself and clumps together, all but laughing in his face for daring to think it might work.
He didn’t really have much hope for that one. He just needed a control.
The tribble resurrection serum gets its shot next, mostly because he’s not sure where else to start. Nothing happens, at least not immediately, and this is what he had been afraid of: the waiting. Just because he didn’t get immediate results doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work eventually. He can’t rule it out, not without giving it time. And he can’t try to figure out an alternative until he has his results.
It’s going to be a long night.
*
Bones wishes he could say he didn’t spend the better part of the night pacing around the lab and checking for results every twenty to thirty minutes. As it is, he has no reason to lie, not when one of the two people in the room was himself and the other was dead.
He also wishes he could say he didn’t spend most of the night trying to think of Jim as simply unconscious rather than dead, like he’d just gotten himself into some fool spot of trouble and shown up outside Bones’ door for help like he’d done a million and one times since they’d known each other. Bones isn’t sure he’d want to lie about this one, though, if anyone else were there to question it.
It takes a few hours but eventually, on one of his passes past the microscope, he sees something. It isn’t much of a something, but it is promising. At the very least it’s more than what he expected.
The cells seem to be merging. There’s nothing to suggest that the properties are transferring over, that the cells are at all regenerating, but they are merging. And it’s something.
He wracks his brain for other genetic combinations, any potential additives he could use to get the result he wants. He wracks the lab cupboards for anything he thinks might help and gets to work.
*
By the next night, he has five more tests running and can confidently say that the tribble serum won’t do much more than cause the cells to merge. Four of the five tests are variations of the same serum, and the fifth is something completely different—a last Hail Mary attempt if the other four don’t work as well as something to keep his mind busy while he waits for the others to start producing results.
He’s been awake for over forty hours at this point, and the lack of sleep is starting to make itself known. And he’s not an idiot, he’s a doctor for god’s sake he knows he’s better off to Jim with at least some sleep, but any time he thinks about letting himself drift off the ever-present dread that’s made its home in the pit of his stomach wakes up and starts whispering.
What if something happens while you’re asleep? What if one of them works faster than you’re expecting, but because you’re asleep you don’t notice? What if you can bring him back within the hour but you have to wait until morning because your sorry ass couldn’t handle staying up for just a little bit longer?
He wouldn’t fall asleep on you.
And Bones would give him hell for it. But the dread argues a persuasive case. What if?
So he looks at the sign on the case of stim hypos that says “for emergencies only” and decides that if there was ever a situation that he deemed an emergency, it would be this one. It works almost immediately, makes him a little clearer albeit a little manic, but it works. He can make it another day, he thinks, before he’d need another dose to keep him awake. He tells himself he won’t need it, that one of the five new serums he’s made will work and Jim will be fine and he will be able to sleep by mid-afternoon at the latest.
But he is a doctor. He expects to have to try again.
*
By morning it’s clear that three of the five new serums aren’t doing anything, aren’t even merging, and the other two are barely doing any more than that. If he’s generous, he can say they show signs of potential regeneration, but that’s not going to help him here. It’s his best friend, not a research article for a medical journal.
Bones saves the two that show the most promise to work with later and studies what went wrong in the other three. He has to make several new controls to see what’s stopping the merging so he doesn’t repeat the same mistakes and resigns himself to settling for yet another night of rather unrewarding waiting.
The next day the stim hypo has worn off and his control test reveals that half his guesses on what additives would promote regeneration of dead tissue were wrong. It’s been four days, he hasn’t slept for three, and he’s really starting to wish he had learned to just give up on things. He spends half the morning with his head in his hands trying and failing to keep his breathing steady while reminding himself of the things that did work to keep his morale up. It doesn’t quite work, but there’s a voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like Jim Kirk that says, “I don’t believe in no-win scenarios,” and that gives him enough of a boost to get up and keep working.
*
This time there’s ten. Ten tests, all different, all accounting for adverse reactions between any additional chemicals he may have added. One test involves gene splicing, but he doesn’t really expect that one to give him any results. It’s mostly so he has something to do with his hands while he waits for anything to happen with the other nine.
Still, though, ten tests. That has to increase his odds at least a little bit. At some point, one of them has to work. The law of averages, if nothing else, is working in his favor. If he runs more tests at a time, he’ll get there faster.
*
Bones has taken to talking to Jim while he waits. He has no misconceptions that Jim will be able to hear him, but it helps. It gives him some sense of normalcy to hang onto, even if talking to your frozen best friend while you run some pretty illegal tests on his blood in an attempt to bring him back to life is just about the least normal thing he can think of.
Yelling at Jim is normal enough, though, whether he’s currently frozen or not. Calling him a “damn fool idiot” who “never thinks about himself” and “is the reason I have several ulcers and am likely to have a heart attack by forty” is reminiscent enough of the things Bones has told him at two in the morning after a few ill advised bar fights that it gives him at least a modicum of comfort.
He gets no response back, which distracts from the fantasy a little bit, but his sleep deprived brain fills it in for him.
Okay, but I won, come on Bones, I don’t start fights I can’t finish.
I’m sure you’d just tell me the ulcers give character.
Please, I give your life the excitement it needs, without me your heart would just stop all together. Be real boring, I bet, running around looking at holograms of the Vulcan integumentary system and trying to remember why you ever thought staying on the ground would be so much better than going into space.
Bones holds on to that first one.
I don’t start fights I can’t finish.
It’s always been true before. He hopes it holds true now, too.
*
When he checks on his tests in the morning, one of them actually shows regeneration. The cells have merged, repaired, and multiplied. It works. He barely spares a moment to wonder how badly his hearing with the medical board will be before he gets to work developing enough of the serum to bring Jim back.
*
He wishes he could say it was instant. It wasn’t. If injecting the serum onto a slide of what could not have been more than ten microliters took a full night to develop, injecting the serum into a person and waiting for it took take hold takes days.
It would be easier to wait through if he wasn’t so bone-deep exhausted. After the first couple days, Bones hasn’t let himself use any stim hypos both for fear of developing a dependency and because he’d like to keep at least some form of his medical license. He’s not sure how Jim is going to survive past his resurrection otherwise. Even so, he hasn’t let himself drift off for more than ten minutes at a time.
It’s both self-imposed and involuntary. If something happened at this stage in the game, if an alarm went off and he didn’t hear it, if the whole thing goes to shit because he missed something, he would never forgive himself. He didn’t come this far just to let a few minutes’ rest get in the way of finally getting his best friend back.
Even if he did let himself sleep, though, he’s not sure he could. As it is, every time he drifts off his mind fills with swirling visions of death and decay and what if I was too late, what if I missed my window, what if what if what if.
They’re the same thoughts he has when he’s awake, but at least when he’s awake he can see the readouts next to Jim’s hospital bed and reassure himself that everything is still going fine. If not ideal, then at least stable. He’ll be out of the woods any day now.
I don’t start fights I can’t finish.
*
It’s two weeks later when Jim finally opens his eyes, and Bones hates himself for being in the middle of one of his ten-minute naps when it happens. He’s attuned himself enough to minor changes in the room’s atmosphere at this point, though, that the deep gasp he hears makes him bolt upright out of his seat.
“Don’t be so melodramatic, you were barely dead,” he says, to distract from any lingering concern that may still be present in his features. To distract from the fact that Jim was dead, capital D and everything. He waves the tricorder around to take a quick, cursory reading. It’s as much to reassure him that Jim is actually alive and okay and here as it is to give him something to distract himself with.
Bones has never cried in front of Jim, not even at the academy at three in the morning when they were both stupid drunk and talking about their own miserable histories. He’s not about to start now.
“It’s the transfusion that really took its toll,” he continues. He’s always found comfort in medical procedure. If he explains it as something routine, something mundane, if he plays it off as less than it actually is, then maybe he won’t lose it completely. “You were out cold for two weeks.” Scared the hell out of me, he doesn’t say. Thought you’d never wake up.
Thought I did everything I could and it still wasn’t gonna be enough.
“Transfusion?” Jim asks.
And Bones knows Jim was clinically dead for nearly a week, but even so he’s usually not this thick. He raises an eyebrow. “Your cells were heavily irradiated. We had no choice.”
It takes a couple seconds more, but understanding seems to dawn over Jim’s face. “Khan.” Something else lights up in his eyes then, too. Something a little like worry, maybe, with a little bit of awe mixed in. Bones can’t stand looking at it.
“Yeah, once we caught him I synthesized a serum from his super blood.” Maybe if he turns it into a joke the ache in his chest will go away. Maybe Jim will take everything he says at face value without reading too much into it and they can move on without ever having to talk about this again. Without ever having to talk about what it means.
“Tell me, are you feeling homicidal, power mad, despotic?” Bones asks. What he means is, tell me, are you okay?
Jim smiles, just a little. He’s never been good at just taking things at face value.
“No more than usual,” he says. What he means is, yes, thanks to you.
The thing is, they will have to talk about it, eventually. Once Jim is cleared to leave, he’ll read the reports, and he’ll know what happened, and everyone else will figure out that Jim was supposed to be dead but now he’s here, and Bones will have to answer to someone.
The thing is, Jim will read him the riot act and Bones will read him the riot act right back, but they’ll both be saying “I missed you” underneath it all. Reality will settle around them, then, just a little. Everything will start to get more solid and palpable and real, and Jim will continue to be there. Like he’s supposed to be. Like nothing ever happened.
Because the other thing is that Bones never gives up on things. Half the time it ends up biting him in the ass. He’s willing to admit, though, just this once, that maybe sometimes it’s a good thing.