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Bones hated this type of place. The pile of bodies squished together like they were in a tin of sardines, the overwhelming scent of alcohol pervading every inch of space, the random people glancing his way - or worse, coming up and speaking to him, forcing him to put on a face and pretend he wasn’t itching to run out of there as fast as his legs would take him. By far though, the thing that got to him the most was the noise. The thumping of the bass that seemed to jackhammer right into his skull, the blare of the music so loud that it became more of a wall of sound than any actual song he could decipher; the clinking of glasses from the bar that he sat in front of, the cacophony of voices yelling to each other over the music, the beeping and zinging of the arcade machines off to the right. It all piled on top of each other and made his heart pound in his chest.
He told Jim he didn’t want to come here. A dinner at a nice restaurant or a stroll around the city would have been preferable, but no, that wasn’t good enough. You couldn’t pick up girls at a restaurant, and it was too cold to walk the streets.
“Come on Bones,” Jim said, throwing his arm around the Doctor’s shoulders. “Lighten up a little. One night at the club won’t kill you.”
If only you knew, Bones thought to himself bitterly. “I’m too old for that stuff now,” he grumbled as they walked down the sidewalk, the neon signs of the strip lighting the night like a christmas tree.
Jim squeezed him. “What are you talking about? You’re in the prime of your life!” His tone was jovial, the exact opposite of how Bones was feeling.
“Can’t we just get a bottle of whiskey and drink on the beach?” The soothing waves sounded a thousand times more appealing than sitting in a raucous nightclub.
The Captain pouted and shook his head. “No, you’re not getting out of this one. You’ll have a great night, trust me.”
Bones looked over to his left where Spock had been walking beside them all this time, but just as he had been before, the Vulcan stayed silent. So much for getting any help from that green-blooded brick wall. Although to be fair, Bones was pretty sure Spock wasn’t much happier about this than he was, the hobgoblin just wasn’t as vocal.
So that was how he found himself in a club, sipping gin and tonic to try and calm himself, while sitting at the bar and desperately wishing Jim would get tired and call it a night. In his anxiety, he surveyed his surroundings. The strobe lights were giving him a headache, but through the flashes he noticed a familiar face emerging from the crowd. Spock came up to him, holding an empty glass and placed it on the counter looking none too amused.
“I assume that was Jim’s glass,” Bones yelled, although he was pretty sure with Spock’s superior hearing the Vulcan would have been able to hear him over the music if he was speaking at normal volume.
Spock looked over into the crowd and sighed. “He is with an Orion woman and I don’t think he will be done for awhile.”
Bones had to shake off the dissonance he felt at the sight of Spock yelling just to speak to him, and for once not because they were in the midst of a heated argument. He followed Spock’s gaze and watched the mass of gyrating people on the dancefloor with a grimace. The sweat on their skin was visible from here, shining in the flashing blue lights. A shiver went through him and suddenly Bones was acutely aware of how hot he was, and how tight the arms of the jacket he had been forced to wear were. He would have worn only a t-shirt but it was cold, and he didn’t want Jim or Spock to make a scene out of him not covering up properly, but now it was getting to him. The fabric on the inside of the leather pressed against him, trapping his arms uncomfortably - he felt like his skin couldn’t breathe, like his arms were constricted even though the jacket fit perfectly. Bones squirmed in his chair, trying to ignore it, but the blasting music and the thick smell of alcohol, food and sweat fused together seemed to make his discomfort worse.
With a relenting grunt, he put his half-empty glass on the counter and began shucking his jacket off. Beside him, he could see Spock watching as he slid his arms out, giving himself immediate relief, and proceeded to tie the offending piece of clothing around his waist. “I’m hot,” he explained, gesturing at nothing in particular.
Spock nodded and leaned back against the bar. The sight of the Vulcan being so calm pissed Bones off. Surely they must have been feeling the same way, but Spock was cool and unaffected as ever. It made Bones want to scream, more out of jealousy than anything else. He wanted to be enjoying himself, wanted to see the fun in dancing under the flashing lights and the blaring music but he just couldn’t. It was horrendous, irritating, it physically hurt him to be here.
His heart started pounding faster. Suddenly he was hyper-aware of all the movement around him. The people coming up to the bar and ordering drinks, the ones passing him to get to the toilets, those that were heading for the dancefloor. He could feel their presence as they moved around in his space, hear all their voices at once, see all of them simultaneously. The music began making his ears ache, the bass beating his eardrums without end. Bones’ breathing started to quicken, the oxygen in his lungs becoming harder to maintain. The glasses clinking behind him rattled his skull, more people milled around him, it was becoming hotter-
“Leonard, are you okay?”
Spock’s voice was the last straw. Without being able to stop himself, Bones slid off the barstool he’d been sitting on, slapped his hands over his ears and began heading for the exit. He ignored the people around him, focused solely on his escape. The door seemed much too far away but soon enough he had reached it and then he was out in the open air. As he stumbled out of the club he breathed a sigh of relief, walking over to the gutter and sitting down. He could still hear the muffled base of the music from inside, but the cold air, the stillness and the relative quiet instantaneously calmed him.
He was so immersed in his thoughts that he started when Spock sat down beside him. If Bones didn’t know better he'd have sworn there was a look of concern in those mysterious eyes. “Should I take you home so you can access your medical kit?” he asked, a hint of worry in his voice.
Bones huffed. If only it were that easy, sometimes he'd have given anything to be able to cure this with a quick hypo. “I’m not sick,” he said, looking over at the Vulcan. “A medical kit won’t help me. Well, maybe some benzo’s will, but I don’t want to go to sleep right now.”
Spock pressed his lips together but did not say anything. Bones wished he would be more verbal - try as he might, a lot of the time they ended up in arguments because of simple miscommunication, and that miscommunication happened because Bones found it near impossible to gauge Spock’s emotions or intonation most of the time. He wanted to understand, but his mental blocks just got in the way, and Spock’s Vulcan repression only made it that much more difficult. It wasn’t either of their faults, but it did infuriate the Doctor, which invariably led to him taking the frustrations he had with himself out on Spock.
He looked down and began kicking a pebble on the ground with his foot. Might as well tell Spock now, there was no point trying to hide it after his little episode. “I haven’t mentioned it before,” he began hesitantly, “but I’m autistic. I get sensory overload sometimes, especially in loud, busy places. That's why I didn’t want to go here.”
Spock considered this for a moment before responding. “That explains a lot.” Concise, but it only left Bones with questions.
“Like what?” He asked, lifting his head.
Spock put his elbows on his knees and steepled his fingers. “Well, given that I now have the context which you have just provided me, many of your behaviours make a lot more sense. Like how you tend to lean towards wearing your medical scrubs more than your standard uniform.” He turned to Leonard. “Would I be correct to assume that you dislike your arms being covered?”
Bones blinked and sat up straighter. “I- Yeah, that’s right. I hate wearing those damn long-sleeved tops. My arms can’t breathe!”
“You also hate having your neck covered,” Spock supplied, his mouth tilting into an almost-smile.
That made Bones chuckle. He nodded and pulled at the loose neckline of his t-shirt. “Yeah, same thing as my arms.”
Spock nodded. “So, you haven’t been complaining about the dress uniforms just for the sake of complaining.”
“Unfortunately, no,” Bones replied, rolling his eyes.
“You bob on your feet quite often and talk with your hands, are those stims?” Spock continued, still offering little in the way of emotion.
Bones paused for a moment, contemplating that. He’d never really thought about it before, but yeah, he guessed those were stims. “Probably.”
The Vulcan stared at him, studying his face for a while in silence. “You would have a hard time reading faces. I imagine it would be even harder to understand me.”
“I do get frustrated about that,” Bones confessed. “That's why I get so angry when we talk. I want to understand you, and for you to understand me, but it’s hard when I can’t read your face or your body language, and when my thoughts don’t align with most other people’s so I inherently get misunderstood a lot of the time anyway.” He shot Spock a half-sided smirk. “I guess you could say the way I think is illogical.”
Spock let out a huff at that and relaxed his arms. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
Bones turned away and let his gaze drift over to a nearby neon sign advertising woodfire pizza. “I didn’t want to be treated any differently. I wasn’t diagnosed until I was in my twenties, so I had more than my share of ostracisation when I was a child. I didn’t want to go through it again in my adulthood.” He turned back to Spock. “You haven’t even seen half of it. Tonight, this was a minor meltdown. You’d never forgive me for the things I said or did when I’m having a full-blown episode. I scream and yell, say the worst things I can think of because everything around me is too much to bear and I feel like I have so much pent up energy that I need to explode.”
Without warning Spock stood up and held out his hand to Bones who stared at it in confusion. “Come,” the Vulcan said, wriggling his fingers, “I’ll take you back to the hotel.”
It was with some hesitancy that Bones took Spock’s hand and let himself be pulled to his feet. “I didn’t say I want to go home.”
Spock turned around and began walking down the street, forcing Bones to follow him. “No, but you are distubed being here, and I do not want you to experience what you have just described to me.”
Bones blinked and looked over at Spock, surprise written on his face. “Okay, I’m starting to get the damn heebie-jeebies now. How can you read me so well?”
“As the only Vulcan on board the ship, I have had to study the behaviour of humans in order to acclimate to being around them. I have picked up patterns of behaviour exhibited by most of the crew, more so for the senior staff of which I work most closely.” Spock looked over and met Bones’ gaze. “Your behaviours always stood out to me. You were different, your idiosyncrasies, manner of speech and typical reactions diverged greatly from all the other humans. So, I took it upon myself to focus on you more, in order to understand you.”
The Doctor didn’t know whether to be horrified or flattered by that. His face contorted into some type of expression reflecting incredulity, and he threw a hand up. “Why would you focus on me?”
Spock raised an eyebrow. “You are my friend.”
Bones withdrew slightly at that, not out of disgust but out of sheer disbelief. “I didn’t think you liked me,” he said, barely above a whisper.
The Vulcan smirked. “I do. I like that you are different, because I am too.”
It was true, but Bones still felt a pang of frustration in his chest. Spock was respected and while people didn’t always understand him, his idiosyncrasies were brushed off as his Vulcan manner. Bones wasn’t given that benefit of the doubt. “Everyone just sees me as the scary doctor, they think a ball of anger is all I am. In truth, I’m only angry because nobody understands me, or if they do, they don’t bother to listen.”
“And I am the emotionless Vulcan,” Spock replied. “A literal alien to most of the crew.”
“I’m an alien to my own species,” Bones retorted bitterly.
“That is what makes us the same,” Spock said, his tone even. “I suspect that is why we argue, we’re the only two that fixate on things so heavily that we feel the need to stand our ground. We may have opposing viewpoints, but in the end they both come from a place of being misunderstood and needing to be listened to.”
They walked for a few minutes in silence as Bones absorbed those words. Logically Spock was correct, it would appear they were more similar than he had realised. All of this was a lot to take in, but in a weird way it validated him like nothing else ever had. Before he realised what he was doing, he stopped walking. Spock got a few steps ahead before he also stopped and looked back at the still Doctor.
“Are you okay?” He asked, eyes steady.
Bones closed the gap between them and stood in front of him. “I’m still not sure I understand. I’m just an old country doctor, a weird one at that. Why would you deem me worthy of extra focus? Even if we are friends, I don’t feel like I deserve that kind of attention. It’s not like I’ve been the nicest person to you.”
Spock tilted his head to the side. “Leonard, you are very harsh on yourself. You are worthy of my attention, even if you don’t think you are. That being said, I have focused on you because I feel a connection between us that I do not feel with anybody else.”
“Really?” Bones blushed and looked down at the ground. “Laying it on a bit heavy there, don’t ya think?”
“I’m not sure what ‘laying it on a bit heavy’ means, but I assure you I am only speaking the truth,” Spock said, watching as Bones took a sudden fascination with the ground.
Suddenly, the doctor’s head snapped up, his face beet red and lips pressed together in a fluster. “You stupid hobgoblin! You-you,” he heaved a sigh and seemingly broke. “You’re really sweet,” he finally said, “as much as it pains me to admit it.”
The faintest ghost of a smile flitted over Spock’s lips. “Thank you.”
Bones huffed and reached forward, taking Spock’s hand in his own. Surprisingly, Spock did not pull away and let the doctor lace their fingers together. The Doctor was very much aware of how intimate this was for the Vulcan, but he somehow felt like he had been told it was okay. He turned around and began walking again, pulling Spock into line with him. “You want to go sit on the beach? It’s nice at night, you can see the moon reflected in the waves.”
Spock kept his gaze ahead, looking off into the neon-lit beyond. “I would like that.”
Yes, this was much better than being in a club.