Chapter Text
STARDATE 2258.44
It’s over, the fight against the rogue Romulan ship, but even then, it’s not quite over yet.
Even though Jim’s outsmarted Nero and gotten the Enterprise away from the black hole which swallowed the Narada, Leonard still has his hands full; he’d dragged Captain Pike right out of Jim’s arms and into the medbay, and got right to removing anything left of the Centaurian slug and trying to mitigate the thrashing that blasted thing’s toxins had done to the man’s brain stem, but Pike wasn’t the only person in need of medical attention. They’re still reeling from the initial attack, beds still packed to the brim with hurt crewmen, and still people kept filing in from injuries sustained while they narrowly escaped following the Romulan ship into nothingness.
Leonard is still performing surgeries when the ship lands; there aren’t enough medical staff qualified for this level of operations aboard the Enterprise, not after so many crewmen had been killed only hours before, and so he moves from bed to bed to bed overseeing multiple surgeries at once, hovering around the line of officers trailing out of the medbay with lesser injuries that he can handle with an osteo-regenerator and some hyposprays when there’s even the slightest moment to spare. Along the line, he even takes a moment to show some of the nurses how to treat of some of the more common-but-above-their-pay-grade injuries, leaving them with enough knowledge to abate the damage well enough so that the patients could seek further help on the ground, before returning to the operating table for the next procedure he’s needed for.
With landing planetside comes a wave of reinforcements: staff from Starfleet Medical, who lead out the patients able to walk, wheel out the others, and lighten his burden.
Captain Pike, despite Leonard wrangling the man out of the woods and into some semblance of a stable condition, is still in no condition to be moved, and so Leonard hovers by the man’s bedside, monitoring every reading the machines give him, long after the other patients he’s treated have been carted away to a proper facility. He’s grateful for his years of practice in the operating room back in Georgia, grateful for the way his hands haven’t begun to shake despite how exhausted he is, how he can still think clearly, how he can recall any knowledge he needs for whatever ailment he’s expected to cure, how he hasn’t fallen apart on his feet yet.
He’s still struggling to adjust to his promotion-by-fire to CMO in the wake of earning it only by virtue of surviving the sudden attack, instead of dying like Doctor Puri had. Sure, he’d held up under pressure, performed all the procedures according to his long years of experience, barked orders to the rest of the medical staff, taken up the helm that was thrust upon him, and maintained the sickbay during the entire crisis, but now that it’s over-- no more bodies to count and collect, to identify, no more patients to treat or examine-- it feels like it’s finally sinking in.
He’s not sure how much time has passed with him circling Pike’s bed, watching for any changes, making sure the man’s condition doesn’t take a turn for the worse, but eventually Doctor Phil Boyce-- the fucking Surgeon General, of all people-- walks in to relieve him. He hears the man’s thanks: a personal one, since Boyce and Pike have been close friends ever since their academy years, not unlike Leonard and Jim-- but his exhaustion is beginning to catch up to him, and so he mumbles something along the lines of, “just doing my job, sir,” and hobbles out of the sickbay on unsteady legs.
The ship is just about empty, now, everyone else having gotten out as soon as they had the chance. Leonard, after stopping himself from kissing the grass beneath his feet, makes a beeline for his dorm--the one he’s shared with Jim, ever since the kid showed up for a study session in their second semester, armed with a duffle bag and a smile, and never really moved out-- and once he gets in, he kicks his shoes off and hurries to lock himself in the bathroom with hands that have started to tremble.
His breathing is uneven, he notices with clinical detachment, as he leans back on the door behind him and sinks down to the floor, shuddering with an overwhelming flood of both dread and relief coursing through his veins, adrenaline wearing out and replaced with panic and nausea.
Leonard doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting there, by the time he’s settled down, only that the tile floor has become uncomfortable and cold beneath him, and his neck stiff from hanging between his knees, bracketed by his arms. His breathing has finally steadied enough for him to push himself back up onto his feet and stretch, releasing the crick in his neck. He stares at his face in the mirror, notices the dark, purpling shadows beneath his eyes and his normal resting-frown sunk even deeper than usual, and looks back down to the sink. He splashes his face with water, shivering a little from the cold, then wipes it with an old towel before stepping back out into the bedroom.
For a moment, he glances at Jim’s empty bunk by the window ; It’s made, though messily, the pillows askew and blankets barely smoothed across the mattress. Leonard faintly recalls nagging Jim about it over comms during a tight break between surgeries, grumbling “If I come back to our room and it’s the same shithole you left it before your hearing, I’ll clean it up with a blowtorch.”
It’s one of the few times Jim’s ever listened to him without a protest of “Oh come on , Bones!” and with that realization, he feels like laughing and feels like crying.
But he does neither, instead settles into his own bed, picking up the photograph on his bedside-- Joanna smiles toothily up at the camera, cheeks round and flushed, and with an arm around her, David McCoy presses a kiss to his granddaughter’s curly hair. His dad would be proud of him, he thinks, would wrap him in his arms again and kiss his forehead like he did when Leonard was a little boy.
He hasn’t seen his daughter since he left home three years ago, and for all he knows, she’s forgotten who he is-- and maybe, that’s for the best. Setting the photo down, he lays back against the pillows and covers his eyes with an arm, tries to recall the warmth of his dad’s embrace and how it felt to cradle his daughter in his arms with her own clinging around his neck, and falls asleep longing for people he’s left long behind.
---
While the Enterprise undergoes repairs for the damage sustained between the destruction of Vulcan and the Narada’s missiles, her crew seems to be in the mood to celebrate. It makes sense: they’ve survived a freak attack, avenged their fallen friends from the other nine starships sent to help the Vulcans, and now they’re all being hailed as heroes for their service. The media sends camera crews to San Francisco to interview the crew-- mostly for Jim, as Starfleet’s newest poster boy for heroics, but the rest of the bridge crew gets attention too. The people absolutely eat up Chekov’s wide eyes and baby face, love Uhura’s poise and linguistic skill, and Sulu’s got a roguish sort of charm that anyone can see. On the other hand, Commander Spock doesn’t do so well, too blunt and dispassionate for the camera, and Pike’s been using his recovery as an excuse to avoid interviews at all costs.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop paparazzi from coming to the hospital.
Boyce sics Leonard on them when the man discovers his penchant for being all-around disagreeable and his talent for getting people to leave him the hell alone. It sure doesn’t paint a pretty picture of him, but he sees his own face in the paper the next day, from a message sent by Jim accompanied by a winky face emoticon. It must have been taken without him noticing, because the photo shows him standing tall and in conversation with one of the nurses, rather than red-faced and yelling at the photographer to get the hell out, this is a hospital, not a red carpet, damn it! , and sits atop an article that describes him as noble and heroic for his work, despite both his less-than-kind words to the reporters and his best efforts to avoid the spotlight.
Outside of interviews and work, everyone spends a lot of time partying to celebrate their victory, to remember their friends, and maybe to forget the loss, too. But Leonard’s never been the kind of man who liked parties, not since his days in undergraduate pre-med, when he was barely legal. Nowadays, he prefers to drink in private, with his best friend at his side, but Jim’s a Captain now, promoted officially despite his probation for the Kobayashi Maru disaster, and at his side, Commander Spock stands tall and infallible as ever.
The two are near-inseparable these days, always at each other’s sides, except for when Uhura manages to steal Spock away and Jim finds his way to Pike-- whose injuries from Nero’s interrogation have landed him in a wheelchair-- pushing his chair along while talking captain business, about the Enterprise and her future. Leonard sees Jim, Spock by his side, or Pike at his front, sees the back of his head and his sure-shouldered silhouette, certain of himself for perhaps the first time-- well and truly having grown into his own skin, no longer the Kelvin baby, but undeniably, unshakably James Tiberius Kirk , captain of the USS Enterprise, the youngest in the history of the fleet-- and god , Leonard is proud of him, he really is, but more than that, he misses his best friend.
They share a room, but never seem to see each other anymore, their schedules functioning on opposite lines with Leonard now working several night shifts at the hospital; nobody else seems available or willing to take them, those left of Starfleet’s medical staff too busy mourning or partying or living their lives, and Leonard has no life to live beyond his job, without Jim Kirk’s bold stride to follow.
A smarter man might seek to build something more for himself, to meet new people and make new friends, but for all his smarts, Leonard has always been one to act more from his heart than from his brain. That first year they’d been friends, when Jim’s birthday rolled around and he saw the way his friend looked up at the night sky as they shared a beer and saw that look of longing and loneliness, he knew that he’d follow Jim into the black, never leave his side, and he’d be damned if he broke his word. Leonard’s been in love with Jim for a long time-- possibly even since the day he stumbled off that shuttle and lost his lunch on Jim’s shoes, and looked up at his face expecting scorn and disgust, ready to apologize, but was met only with mirth sparkling in Jim’s eyes and a hand that helped him back to his feet.
There’s no point in trying to explore who he is without Jim, because there is no Leonard H. McCoy without James T. Kirk, so much so that he can barely recognize the man he was before he met him.
So, no. He doesn’t look for anything new to keep himself occupied now that Jim’s too busy. He reunites with an old friend found in a silver flask kept in his breast pocket, works damn hard at his job, continues as he always has, and feels the lack of Jim in his life like a lost limb, but what else can he do but carry on?
He’ll continue his assignment on the Enterprise the next time she takes off, actually ready to be her Chief Medical Officer this time, and life will keep on going.
STARDATE 2258.61
A particularly rough week sees Leonard in one of the quietest bars near campus on a cold Friday night.
Although nobody seems to be in need of his surgical skills these days, Starfleet never has any shortage of medical work that needs to be done, with so many of their staff killed in the destruction of Vulcan and the overflow of refugees fleeing the dead planet. He’s spent the last seventy-two hours working around the clock between assisting their research teams to develop a functional parthenogenetic implant, to little success, and helping with the Vulcan refugees’ trauma recovery, barely qualified for half the assignments they’ve put him on. He’d made it back to the room dead on his feet and blacked out on the couch for near seventeen hours afterwards, waking up to a message from Boyce to not come in for work and to “learn to take a break, for god’s sake.”
He’s hunched over a journal detailing biosynthetic organ replacements on his PADD, nursing a glass of whiskey, and he thinks that Boyce would probably have stern words for him if he saw what Leonard was reading, still trying to work even off-the-clock, but what the older doctor doesn’t know won’t kill him.
Leonard reaches a passage detailing the brain’s electric signals transposed through artificial organs when someone takes the seat next to him. It wouldn’t have broken him from his focus, if not for the bar having few enough patrons that no stranger would take a seat next to him when there was plenty of room elsewhere. He turns his head, one eyebrow raised skeptically, and is met with a man whose name he can’t quite recall.
He remembers him vaguely, the genius engineer who somehow managed to beam Jim back from Delta Vega up onto a moving ship, standing dripping wet and asking for a towel while Spock nearly strangled Jim on the bridge. Lord knows why the man’s decided to join Leonard for a drink. He’s usually accompanied by that short green fellow, whose name he also can’t quite recall, but the guy’s nowhere to be seen. He twists on his stool to address the man… Simon-- Stock--
“Er-- Scott, was it?” The man nods his head in acknowledgement. “What brings a guy like you to this part of town? Thought you engineerin’ types never left ship.”
“Aye, Scotty’s the name. At yer service, Doctor.” The man raises his beer, and Leonard clinks his own drink against it, one cynical eyebrow raised. “Needed a spot of air after workin’ on the lady Enterprise ‘til sundown but fresh air didnae really do the trick. When all else fails, booze never disappoints. Walked in ‘ere and recognized ye, all lonely-like. Thought ya might like some company, a familiar face-- Oy, barkeep, do us a couple more rounds will ya? ‘S on me, Doc, don’t you worry yer wee head.”
Scotty’s accent is thicker with the burn of booze on his tongue, but he looks earnest and laid back in a way that makes Leonard shrug, before downing the rest of his glass.
“Alright, then. Never been one to turn down a free drink.”
---
And so begins an unlikely friendship:
They both end up in that same bar a few times over the next two weeks, and eventually move from the bar to drinking at Scotty’s place. Apparently, it’s been a long time since he’d had living quarters on Earth, but Starfleet had given him a nice apartment in the temporary officer’s lodging used between missions. He rarely spends any time there, Scotty says, falls asleep while tinkering about on the ship more often than not, unaccustomed to comfortable lodgings anymore after spending so long on Delta Vega.
Even so, they find that they enjoy the privacy offered from the place, and even save some money buying their drinks by the bottle rather than by the glass.
---
“Say, how’d you manage to beam up onto a moving ship anyway?” Leonard asks one night. “Thought that sorta thing ain’t possible.”
Scotty’s eyes brighten instantly, and he launches into a tirade about quantum theory and astrophysics that sends Leonard’s already-inebriated brain spinning.
He’s a man of medicine, not of physics, and though the academy requires a certain level of that sort of nonsense, Leonard’s never been good with equations and mechanics. Still, he listens intently, nodding when it feels appropriate as his companion continues on about molecular dynamics and relative electromagnetism and all sorts of technical mumbo-jumbo that Leonard’s got no clue about.
It takes Scotty several minutes to realize that Leonard got lost somewhere between subatomic traction and photoelectric matrix fields. The man looks sheepish, like he’s gonna apologize, but Leonard just rests his chin on one hand propped up elbow-to-knee with a grin and says, “Well, the hell’re you waitin’ for, man? Celestial kinematics ain’t gonna explain themselves, are they?”
And that sends Scotty on another tangent, about one of his projects from his teenage years. His hands wave wildly, and he sloshes a bit of vodka out of his glass and onto the table, but the way he talks about his life’s work is soothing. Leonard might be clueless, but he listens all the same, because it ain’t boring either.
At least, not when raved about in that ridiculous accent.
---
Thursday nights become Drinking-at-Scotty’s Nights. Leonard marks himself as “unavailable” on the work calendar for those hours. Scotty drags himself out of the ship soon enough to clean grease off of his forehead and hands before Leonard makes it to his door with a fresh bottle of scotch. The recliner by the window becomes Leonard’s spot, while Scotty lounges on the loveseat with his feet on one armrest and his head perched on the other.
Leonard catches himself glancing at the clock in his office on Thursdays, towards the end of his afternoon desk shift, and instead of staying overtime, he packs up swiftly, finally having a place to look forward to going. An appointment to drink with a sort-of-colleague once a week isn’t all that much, but it’s something , and between this and sitting alone at a bar drinking by himself, it’s not a hard choice to make.
Sometimes they only drink in silence, just leave each other to their own thoughts, but most of the time, they chat, talk about their work now-- Vulcan PTSD rehabilitation is a bitch, and apparently so is trying to configure a new warp core for a ship on the scale of the Enterprise-- but avoid anything deeply personal.
Leonard’s got three years worth of stories about Jim’s antics to tell. He recounts all sorts of ridiculous plots that Jim’s dragged him into and revels in the cackle it brings out in Scotty’s laugh when he can’t hold it back, hand pressed to his gut in mirth at the one about the Andorian cadet who nearly flayed their captain alive when he accidentally performed a gesture that amounted to a marriage proposal to the guy’s girlfriend.
Scotty tells Leonard a bit about his brother and sister, Robbie and Clara, both younger than him, and there are plenty of stories to be told there, but the real fun comes from Scotty’s own days at the academy. He learns that the man’s five years older than him, but had enrolled in Starfleet fresh out of undergrad, some fourteen years ago, and as a wild young prodigy in his twenties, got up to all sorts of mischief, particularly with his tumultuous relationship with Admiral Archer-- which, as Leonard recalls, is what got him sent to Delta Vega in the first place.
It’s only after Scotty’s shared his tales of his young college days that Leonard shares anything about his own, being in med school, when he actually did go out and party from time to time, being late for class because of a crazy bender the night before, old friends he hasn’t thought about in years, but still, he doesn’t say much about his then-girlfriend, how he was endlessly faithful to Jocelyn despite being long-distance, what it was like applying for grad school after finding out he had a baby on the way, and Scotty doesn’t press for more, doesn’t go where he isn’t invited, and Leonard’s grateful for the way the other man finds no discomfort in the obvious gaps in his stories.
STARDATE 2258.87
There comes a night when Jim comes back to their room and Leonard’s got the night off, or rather had been told not-too-kindly by Doctor Boyce that if he didn’t take a night off, he’d be hypo’d and sent home on a stretcher. Leonard’s on the couch, nose buried in an article about the newfound applications of dermal regenerators on produce to extend shelf-life, when he’s startled from his reading by the doorknob rattling and in walks his best friend who he’s barely seen in weeks.
“Bones!” Jim smiles wide, and Leonard smiles right back. “It feels like I haven’t seen you in ages!”
“Welcome back, Captain .” Leonard sets his PADD down. “We should catch up. I’m sure you’ve got lots of new stories to tell about Starfleet administration. We could uh, go out for a drink, if you want?”
“Oh-- nah, I’m beat. I’ll pass.” Jim collapses into the couch next to him, leans his weight comfortably into Leonard’s side. “It’s so much procedure , and you know how I do with pomp and circumstance.”
“Damn right I do.” The feeling of Jim’s body next to his is warm, achingly familiar and sorely missed. He leans back into it, and closes his eyes gently. “You’ve got a responsibility to do it now, though.”
“Yeah, yeah…” Jim sighs, then sits straight up suddenly and Leonard has to catch himself before he falls over, but Jim just grabs his shoulders and smiles before carrying on in that rambling, excited way that crinkles his eyes at the corner and has his eyes sparkling with amusement. “But-- listen, Bones, I gotta tell you about this thing that happened.”
It’s actually pretty embarrassing, the affection that flutters in Leonard’s stomach as he watches the way Jim gestures and laughs through his own story. He’s talking about Spock-- “the guy’s actually hilarious ! If you really look closely, even if it looks like he’s got no expressions, he gets super worked up about everything . There was this one guy in security, rambling on about strength being better than smarts-- the way Spock raised his eyebrow, I swear, if he had any less self control he would’ve throttled him--”
“Like he throttled you ?” Leonard asks, before he can stop himself. Jim stops abruptly, frowning slightly.
“Oh, c’mon, that’s not fair. It wasn’t his fault. I was trying to get him to snap, and his mom had just died. I used that against him.” And yeah, he can understand that, even without Jim’s trademark puppy-dog eyes looking at him disapprovingly, so he just waves dismissively at Jim to carry on, and he does, talks about how boring the bureaucratic stuff that comes with being captain can be, but one of the perks? The yeomen-- being surrounded by beautiful women to assist him. Of course, as captain he can’t fraternize willy-nilly with people under his command, but he can certainly appreciate from afar.
It sobers Leonard, Jim talking about women and flirting and sex, because for all the carnal relations his friend had partaken in during their academy years with anything that moved, he’s never once looked at Leonard in that way, never seen him as anything more than just Bones, the best friend, who always had his back and could never leave him behind, but never anything more.
Maybe Leonard wasn’t suited for it, anyways, too raw after his divorce and after seeing that mess, Jim had no interest in getting involved in that way, and who could blame him for that? The guy’s seen Leonard at his absolute rock bottom, at the worst of his depression and alcoholism and grief for both a daughter-- still alive but entirely out of his reach-- and a home he could never return to, not after tearing his family apart.
But still, he listens, lends a supportive ear and a stern hand where needed. He’s always been Jim’s confidant, has been for the last three years and even though the kid’s more confident now than he’s ever been, Leonard knows that he’s still needed. And he might love Jim, but that doesn’t need to change what they have.
Their friendship comes first, and Leonard isn’t willing to risk losing that just because he wants more .
STARDATE 2258.93
Scotty’s on a tirade about Keenser tonight. It started as a rant about how the other engineer is always getting on his nerves, but in order to truly understand, Scotty says, Leonard has to know about how Scotty messed up and beamed Admiral Archer’s dog far, far away, leading to his assignment on Delta Vega, and all the fights he and the little alien have picked with each other since the day they met. Scotty’s wrapped up in a story about how they used to steal each other’s lunches, and he’s complaining nearly to the degree that Leonard himself tends to do, but he can tell that behind the annoyance, Scotty’s fond of his friend.
Keenser, “the wee bastard,” has been making friends, according to Scotty. Despite never speaking, the Roylan seems to have charmed some of the cadets in the engineering department, and has apparently been taunting the Scotsman about his newfound popularity. Leonard might not have really believed it, but their weekly booze nights have become more frequent, and it must be because Scotty’s both bored without Keenser to squabble with and wants to bitch about it to someone, and Leonard’s a great listener.
Really, he is.
Usually, anyways. Right now he’s only half-listening and ends up interrupting the complaints of how Keenser’s stomach is the size of a bean, and he had no use for Scotty’s entire sandwich, by clearing his throat. Scotty, who speaks as if he’s rolling down a hill, growing more animated as the story unfolds, stops abruptly, mouth shutting in surprise.
“Leonard.”
Scotty’s look gets even more confused than before, so Leonard explains, “Enough with that ‘Doctor’ crap. I’m beginning to believe you don’t even know my damn name. You can call me Leonard, seein’ as we’re both off duty.”
“ Leonard ?” Scotty wrinkles his nose, takes another gulp of his scotch. “Nah, too stuffy. Ye got a middle name, then?”
Leonard rolls his eyes, answers “ Horatio, ” in his best deadpan drawl, and Scotty visibly winces.
“Ack, ye poor thing. How about… Len? Ooh, Lenny? Rolls right off the old tongue.” When Leonard grimaces, Scotty only laughs, raucously, but without bite “Oy! Yer the one who insisted I call ya by yer name. Not my fault yer proper name sounds like an old grandpappy-type.”
“You’re one to talk, Montgomery . Pot, kettle.”
“Ah, ye got me there, friend.”
And with that, Leonard becomes Len . But from time to time, Scotty calls him Lenny with that light-hearted, teasing tone, and if Leonard doesn’t really complain, Scotty doesn’t point it out, either.
STARDATE 2258.103
It’s Joanna’s eighth birthday today, and the third one in a row that Leonard’s missed. He’s sent a paper letter, like he always does-- her mother blocked his comm signature the day the divorce papers went through-- but he’s willing to bet that Jocelyn won’t give it to her anyhow. Probably chucked it in the bin the moment she read his name on the return address.
Jim’s busy tonight, can’t make it to their usual tradition of drinking themselves blind in the evening, but he makes time to grab lunch. He’s only got time for a half hour but it’s a half hour that lets Leonard sit quietly and listen to Jim’s yammering and try to forget, and he’s thankful that he gets that much at all.
He’s been working the whole day-- clocked in at the ass-crack of dawn and took up on any task that needed doing just to keep himself busy until Jim came by, and he spends the next hour running errands throughout the hospital between his usual duties in the trauma-recovery wing, even insisting that Doctor Boyce’s assistant take an extra break and delivers the man’s coffee personally.
Boyce isn’t impressed by his workaholism rearing its head even further today. The older man takes the coffee but chides him for overdoing it-- sends him away with a “quit doing other people’s work, McCoy! Running a hospital isn’t a one-man job, and we’re not going to pay you any higher for doing more than you were asked of,” and for the rest of the day Leonard twiddles his thumbs and does only what he’s actually supposed to, then clocks out for the night and calls Scotty up for a drink.
It’s not a Thursday, but lately they’ve been adding extra nights to their weekly routine to the point where it’s stopped being Thursday-nights-at-Scotty’s and become Monday-or-maybe-Tuesday-and-Thursday-and-sometimes-the-whole-damn-weekend. It’s not just drinking anymore, but they most definitely keep the drink flowing.
One night, Scotty had gone on a mad tirade about the latest big shuttle-chase film absolutely botching the mechanics of how actual real life shuttles work, citing it as “absolute mince ! Complete ‘n total horse-shite!”
Leonard knows the feeling well-- fictional medicine is almost always a complete load of crap, and patients will come in thinking that they know more than him just from watching some ridiculous Betazoid hospital soap opera and he’s got to explain for the millionth time that no, comas don’t work like that. After trading stories of various ways television and film have disgraced their professions, words didn’t seem to cut it anymore, and they’d pulled up the video player to watch the blasphemy firsthand.
So now, they take turns on the weekend: Scotty introduces him to action-packed vehicle thrillers, from the twenty-first century’s automobile races to today’s space-flight chases, and Scotty’s fuming at the inaccuracies helps distract Leonard from thinking about getting trapped in some hunk of metal flying in the void. In turn, Leonard brings him into the world of trashy medical serials, revisiting older classics alongside catching every week’s new episode of the 255th season of Grey’s Anatomy to bitch about the latest surgery they’ve fudged their way through.
Leonard’s got a bag he keeps packed by the door that he grabs on his way out of his and Jim’s dorm, just in case he and Scotty indulge a little too much and he decides to crash on the couch. Scotty’s learned how he likes his eggs cooked in the morning, and Leonard brews the coffee nice and strong for the both of them, slips in his granny’s old hangover cure in as a thank-you for his friend’s hospitality.
And so on Joanna’s eighth birthday Leonard needs something to distract him, and he suggests they watch that one bullet-train movie that Scotty said was actually good, offering to bring dinner: takeout from the good Thai place by the hospital.
When Scotty greets him at the door, he feels a little guilty. The man clearly hadn’t expected to leave work when he did; his hair is mussed up and he’s still in uniform, but he’s smiling all the same and ushers Leonard inside, grabbing the bag of food to dig in quickly as he beelines for the couch. Leonard takes his seat in the recliner and eats his noodles quietly, accepts the glass of whiskey when it’s offered to him.
Scotty chatters throughout the entire two hours of the movie, about engines, about the plot, about how as a teenager he carried a torch for the lead actress, but Leonard doesn’t say a word in return. Scotty’s concerned, and it shows on his face, but he carries on, knows by now that Leonard likes to listen. When the credits roll on and Scotty gets up to toss out the takeout containers, Leonard refills both of their glasses with more whiskey. He hands Scotty’s glass to him as the other man sits back down and lounges back into the cushions.
Silence falls upon them; Scotty’s run out of things to say about the movie, and he’s never been one to pry into Leonard’s thoughts, but Leonard decides that Scotty deserves to know why he’d asked for company, why the engineer had to drag himself away from his passions to help Leonard drink his problems away.
“It’s my daughter’s birthday.” He says quietly. Scotty’s eyebrows raise, but he doesn’t say anything, waits for Leonard to continue. “Her name’s Joanna. Just turned eight. She’s back home, in Georgia. I… I haven’t seen her since I joined the fleet.”
“What’s the wee lass like, then?” Scotty asks, after Leonard can’t find the words to say any more.
“She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” Leonard smiles wryly. “The sweetest little girl on the planet. Pretty as a peach, and brilliant, too-- I bet she’ll end up with more degrees than even me, when she’s through.”
Once he’s opened the floodgates, Leonard can’t seem to stop. He talks, and talks, and talks, and talks, and talks about his baby Jo, shares damn near every single thing he can remember about her, and Scotty laughs and smiles in that way that means that he’ll remember these stories, too. Leonard skirts around talking about Jocelyn, and Scotty-- as usual-- doesn’t ask. When Leonard runs out of things to reminisce about he grows quiet again, finishes somberly with, “I miss her more than anything. Not a whole lot I wouldn’t do to hold her in my arms one more time.”
Scotty raises his glass, face soft and kind in sympathy, and declares, “To distant family.”
Leonard echoes his words, knocks his own glass against his, and as he swallows a generous gulp of the drink, he wonders who the distant family Scotty raises his glass to might be.
STARDATE 2258.137
One of his patients passed away overnight. Leonard had walked into work in the morning to find a nurse wheeling the body out of the patient’s room with a somber look on her face.
The patient, Varnok, was one of the Vulcans who made it out before Nero destroyed their planet, but his wife and child were lost in the attack. Leonard had been assisting with his trauma recovery, employing his masters in neuro-psych -- human neuro-psych, mind you-- beyond any recorded cases of psychotherapy he’d heard about. With Vulcans and their aversion to showing emotion, the fraction of their population who had survived provided a genre of PTSD that nobody could ever have predicted. Some got over the loss quickly, deeming it illogical to dwell on the dead when they should be focusing their efforts on assisting those remaining, but others were too ashamed of their grief to allow it to show, internalizing and suppressing it to disastrous results, and turns out, Varnok was the latter.
Varnok had been resistant to human methods, found the idea of talking through emotions and finding comfort in others to be against the Vulcan way, and refused. He’d insisted that he had no need for such treatments, that resisting the deterioration of his body would be futile and do more harm than good. Leonard had done everything he could think of to help, but there simply was no convincing the Vulcan. Varnok had already resigned himself to his fate, hadn’t fought against it, felt there was little left for him to live for and in his blank face Leonard could see the sorrow that he had tried not to show.
Leonard had looked into Varnok’s eyes and saw his own father, lying on a hospital bed in Georgia, a dying man with no fight left in him, ready to depart the land of the living. He wanted to yell, to beg the Vulcan to try , but didn’t; he only tried to salvage Varnok’s dying body so that his mind might recover, in time. But he was too late.
Now, looking at the shrouded corpse as the nurse wheels Varnok away, he feels the morphine dial beneath his fingers, sees his father’s chest rise and fall for the last time, hears the tinny whine of the heart monitor flatlining, and clutches his PADD close to his chest, eyes closed.
He hasn’t been to church since he was a child, when his great-grammy Lucille used to dress him up in his Sunday best and he’d fidget in his seat all throughout mass, but today, he prays that if there’s any sort of afterlife, that Varnok might be with his wife and his son, and he misses his father as though he were still that little boy in itchy clothes holding his great-grammy’s hand.
Later, he drowns his sorrows in brandy, alone in his room. His finger hovers over his ma’s name in his contacts, nearly presses down when his hands grow unsteady with drink, but he’s still got enough agency to shut the communicator off and toss it aside before he makes a call that he’ll regret.
STARDATE 2258.138
Admiral Pike wheels into Leonard’s little office around noon.
Leonard had been taking his lunch break in private; he’s still kind of hung over from the night before, and not much in the mood to make small talk with the nurses or any patients walking about. He’s just taken a generous bite out of his roasted potatoes-- one of the better meals available in their small cafeteria-- when the door opens and Pike enters the room. He’s not expecting visitors, and when he sees who it is, he narrowly avoids choking on his mouthful of food and manages to swallow awkwardly as Pike watches amusedly.
The man waits politely for Leonard to settle, doesn’t begin speaking until Leonard’s chased his embarrassment down with a gulp of water and finished fumbling about like a fool.
“Doctor McCoy.”
“Good morning, sir.”
“Phil tells me you’ve been doing phenomenal work.” Pike says, and Leonard has to stop himself from disagreeing immediately-- he sure doesn’t feel like he’s been doing anything remotely along the lines of phenomenal. “Not in so many words-- you and him are the same sort of cantankerous bastards who pretend not to like anyone-- but he’s been just about singing your praises for the last few months, and it’s a shame I haven’t yet had the time to come down here to see it for myself.”
“Oh, that’s--” Leonard cringes, a little, “Really-- there’s no need, I’m just doing my job--”
“I see that in the three years you’ve been with the fleet, you still haven’t learned how to take a compliment.” Pike looks amused, but unimpressed, and Leonard deflates a bit. It’s true: back when Pike had tracked him down in Georgia at Boyce’s suggestion, the man had commended him for his early publications on neuro-grafting procedures, and he’d only brushed it off as a stroke of dumb luck during a miraculous operation. But Leonard can’t feel all that proud of his recent work, seeing Pike still in that chair because Leonard hadn’t been able to salvage his damaged spinal tissue, and remembering that once he gets off his lunch break he’s got to file the paperwork for the handling of Varnok’s remains.
“Alrighty then, sir, let’s get to it. I’m pretty sure you didn’t come ‘round here just to watch me squirm.”
“Quite right, Doctor. I came here to thank you, personally. I was certain I was done for, three months ago, but you managed to keep me alive during what was already a major crisis, and if that isn’t the mark of a brilliant doctor, I don’t know what is. You saved my life, and I wanted to give you my gratitude face-to-face.”
Leonard wants to protest again, but Pike raises a hand to halt him. “Save it, McCoy. Take the damn compliment. I’m sure you’re aware of Kirk’s new, official captaincy, as well as that we’re reworking the crew rosters. Now, he’s got no real say in the matter, but even without him threatening to retire if we don’t bring you on as his CMO, we were never even considering sending someone else onto our Federation’s flagship, even if, technically, you’re still a cadet. When she’s back up and running, you’ll be serving as the head of the Enterprise’s medical staff again, and I have faith in your ability to keep that crew in shape.”
His ma would whack him over the head for not saying “Thank you,” but Leonard’s mouth won’t seem to work properly, so he just nods firmly. It’s enough for Pike, though, because the man smiles wryly.
“Well, I won’t take any more of your time. But if you ever need anything, you’ve got my comm signature. I owe you my life, and that’s not a debt I take lightly.”
Pike swivels his chair around without waiting for a response, and begins to wheel his way out the door. Leonard relaxes back in his seat, relieved, and takes a swig of water from his canteen, when Pike suddenly turns his head back again.
“By the way, you’ll receive a communication from Command tomorrow to commend you for your hard work these last few months. Congratulations, Lieutenant Commander McCoy.”
Leonard’s not so lucky this time-- his water ends up spewed across his desk and he curses, mopping up moisture from his PADD. Pike’s laugh rings out through the hallway, the bastard.
STARDATE 2258.143
They graduate officially on the 22nd of May. He’d been on a bit of an accelerated track-- he’d entered the academy with all his medical credentials lined up and more, didn’t actually need any sort of degree, so he’d skipped out on the classes which focused on fundamentals in favor of spending his time doing practicals in the hospital for credit, and beyond Xenobiology and other extraterrestrial-oriented courses, he’d only had to take the gen-ed requirements for all cadets, like self-defense and rudimentary engineering and-- god help him -- piloting. For Leonard, graduation was pretty much just a formality that would qualify him for a real position in the Fleet.
Jim, the smug bastard, had made good on his promise of graduating early that he’d made so long ago. The others that he knows from the Enterprise, Uhura, Sulu, Chekov, he has no idea if they’re on schedule or what-not, but it seems like Starfleet’s decided there’s no point keeping them there any longer after what they’ve already been through. He guesses they’ve received sudden promotions just like his, from cadet straight to lieutenants, or something, without spending the usual terms of service as ensigns. But, really, there’s no jump in rank quite like Jim’s: cadet on thin-fucking-ice, nearly expelled, straight to the captain of the Federation’s shiny new flagship.
If it were anyone else, Leonard wouldn’t believe it, but Jim’s exactly that kind of unbelievable guy who blows them all out of the water like that.
Nero’s attack had obliterated most of their graduating class. While he and the other graduates sit onstage, they keep the front section of seats empty, filled instead with pictures of everyone who died that day, and it’s a sobering reminder of just how lucky he is that he’d smuggled Jim onto the ship quick enough to save them from that same fate. There should have been a sea of cadet-red uniforms filling the front half of the stadium, but instead they’ve all fit on the small stage, stared at by hundreds of framed photographs of their dead peers.
He can see Gaila’s photograph in the front row, her hair a shock of fiery orange, and her green skin and her beaming smile near glowing just as she had in life. There must be hundreds of other photographs of cadets and officers he’s met over the last three years who he’ll never see again, and he’s probably already forgotten most of their faces. Skipping out on so many classes meant that he never had the chance to get to know most of the people he’d graduate with in the last few years, and he hasn’t really regretted it until now, now that any chance of knowing them in the future has vanished. Not for the first time, Leonard feels like a lucky bastard for surviving.
The audience of family members in the back mirrors them in size. Starfleet Academy graduations are typically bustling with folks travelling in from all over the galaxy, but there’s only a fraction of that this year, with so few people left to walk across the stage. They’d all been given a number of tickets to send to family, and Leonard himself had sent some to Georgia, one to his ma, but when he scans the seats he doesn’t see her. The others had gone to Jocelyn, though he’d known it was pointless-- there was no way his ex-wife would have even considered coming all this way just so his daughter could see him graduate. Those tickets must have gone straight into the garbage.
He sees Jim avoiding looking at the audience, a fake smile plastered to his face as he chats with the classmate seated next to him-- Leonard knows that Jim didn’t send any tickets out, that he doesn’t have anyone he wants to come see him.
There is, though, one face in the audience that makes Leonard smile when he sees it. Scotty’s lounging in the first row of family members, in civvies rather than uniform, grinning up at him and Jim and the rest of the Enterprise’s graduates. The Scotsman catches his eye and grins wider, mouths “congrats, laddie” at him as if Leonard isn’t thirty-one years old, and he rolls his eyes back, but returns the grin all the same.
STARDATE 2258.159
Leonard’s a summer boy, born and raised in the sweltering heat of Georgia’s brutal summer sun. Summer in San Francisco is completely different: his last two summers were meteorologically comfortable instead of the kind of hot and humid that makes you crave a nice, tall glass of nana’s sweet tea.
For everyone else, though, it’s pretty hot out, and that means they’ve got the air conditioning on, which means Leonard ends up wearing long sleeves and complaining about the chills while Christine Chapel, who’d been on the Enterprise with him and helped keep their overcrowded medbay together and is the only nurse brave enough to risk his wrath, teases him for his delicate disposition. He snarks right back at her and they carry on all the way to the cafeteria and back to his office.
It’s nice to bicker with someone who’s not afraid to retaliate with the same level of meaningless bite. Christine’s an older sister, she once told him, and she’d grown up with enough little brothers to deal with Leonard’s prickly personality, even if he’s an entire decade her senior. He’ll miss her when the Enterprise goes back out-- she’s chosen to take a planetside assignment for the next few years instead of returning.
When they aren’t bitching at each other, they bitch with each other, about whatever difficult patients-- or, more often, coworkers-- who’ve rubbed them the wrong way, this time. Christine’s telling him every juicy detail about Nurse DeLane, who’s too much of a gossip for her own good, and Leonard sees the irony in that, when he hears the ringtone indicating a call coming his way.
“Aw, hell. Who’n the blazes is--” He starts, but the caller ID stops him dead, and Christine leans over to have a look herself.
“Your mom?” Leonard hasn’t told her all that much about his life before Starfleet-- hasn’t even told her that it’s his birthday today-- and he gets the impression that she doesn’t really care, which is refreshing. The line keeps ringing and Christine prods at his shoulder. “Well? Aren’t you going to answer that?”
Before he can, though, the trilling tones stop. One of Christine’s thin brows remains arched high in a way that usually makes Leonard proud as she stares at him.
“It’s for the best.” He grumbles, flipping the device so that its screen faces down. “Not that it’s any of your business-- now, carry on, you. What’s that you were tellin’ me ‘bout that little chatterbox down in psychiatrics?”
---
His ma leaves a message, but he doesn’t listen to it until he gets back to the dorms. For a moment, Leonard seriously considers deleting it without listening, then hates himself for even thinking about it. He hasn’t heard from his mother in three years, and even if he feels abandoned for that, he’s only human, and he feels like a little boy with how badly he wants to see her again.
“Message from: ‘Ma’ on stardate 2258.159.” the answering machine reports blankly from where Leonard’s set it on the coffee table, before playing the recording.
“Hi Leo. It’s your mama.” She starts. God , Leonard’s missed her voice. “I got that ticket you sent me in the mail. I’m sorry I didn’t come to see you graduate, I… I’m sorry for a lot of things, baby. I didn’t even know you’d joined the Starfleet, never thought I’d live to see my baby boy board a shuttlecraft of his own choosin’. Bet you knew that, though, figured I wouldn’t know to look there. You’ve always been smart like that. But when I heard about that attack earlier this year on the news, the last thing I thought I’d see was a photo of you among the survivors.”
There’s a moment of quiet, like she’s trying to find the right words. Leonard brings his knees up to the seat of the couch and hugs them to his chest, resting his chin on them as he listens.
“Oh, Leo, I don’t know what to say… You’ve got every right to be upset with me for how I treated you. When we lost your father, I was too blind to see that you were hurtin’ just as much as I was and I pushed you away. And for years I was too ashamed of how I treated you to ask you to come back home, but when I found out you’d been out there during that attack, I… Baby, I could have lost you too, without ever seein’ you again, and I don’t think I would survive that, sweetheart.”
His ma sounds choked up, probably crying and it tugs at Leonard’s heart the same as it always has. His ma’s never been the type to cry at much, but they’ve lost family before, when he was younger, and despite her efforts to hide it, he’d heard it from behind closed doors. The last time he heard her cry, she’d told him that she didn’t want to see him ever again, only weeks before the divorce, and not long after his father’s death. They haven’t spoken once since then.
“I’m too old to cling onto my pride now. All I want is to have you back in my life while we still have the time. Now, I know I’ve got no right to ask this of you, baby, ‘specially after what I said to you, but please… call me, when you have the time. I love you.”
His comm reports the end of the message, and asks him if he’d like to replay. Moving to grab the device and press one to stop playback, he falters for a moment, hand hovering above the table. Before he knows it’s happening, he’s called his mother back, the line rings only twice, and there’s a click.
“Hello?” Eleonora McCoy asks, tentatively, “Leo, honey, is that you?”
Well, no use trying to go back now. You’ve dug this grave, dammit, now go lie in it .
He swallows nervously, raises the comm to better catch his voice, and says, “Hi, ma… It’s been a while.”
---
Jim wakes Leonard from where he’s sprawled on the couch, well past midnight. His body aches from the awkward position he’d fallen asleep in after drinking himself blind when he’d got done talking to his ma, and his best friend is trying, but failing pretty miserably, to carry him back to his own bed without waking him.
Leonard tries to protest being carried but can only manage a wordless groan. Jim laughs, and Leonard feels it through his entire body from where he’s half-still-on-the-couch and half-curled-awkwardly-in-Jim’s-arms. “Shut up, old man, and let me get you to bed, okay? I know I missed out on buying the birthday boy a drink, so this is gonna be your gift this year, alright? I’ll get you a real present when you’re lucid enough to appreciate it.”
He’s got no response to that, arm slung around Jim’s shoulders and leaning heavily into him, and then passes the fuck back out again the moment Jim’s dumped him onto the mattress.
---
The following Thursday, Scotty greets him at the door with a whap on the shoulder and scolds Leonard like a child for not telling him about his birthday. He’s got no clue who told the man, but Scotty brings out one of his finer bottles of scotch, and launches into a story about grand Aberdeen birthday celebrations that have Leonard laughing so hard that he snorts that scotch right out through his nose.