Chapter Text
The water splashed against the tiles, quietly. But the bath's gone cold. The steam evaporated. Now he just sits against the tub's edge, submerged almost to his nose, eyes unfocused somewhere in front of him, waiting for something to happen.
It hadn't been a good day.
Hard to explain it any better than that. But for some reason, a bad day for Bones McCoy is like having your teeth pulled one by one. Every good day rushes by so quickly that by the end of it he remembers nothing, and falls asleep late, so quickly that none of it lasts. Every bad day just gets worse. They had started out on the original uprising; Gornian, turns out, and it'd gone so badly that the sickbay became full of dead and dying within hours. All before breakfast. He hadn't had time. Kirk had been livid. Doctor McCoy had spent the next few hours after that ignoring his subordinates' questions, sitting very still as his captain paced back and forth in his office, yelling about nothing, and the ship sped away. He hadn't felt smart enough to reply with anything witty and clever, nor anything at all. Really, all he wanted to do was punch his captain in the jaw. But he would've lost that fight, and lost it badly. His own body isn't built to fight, and Kirk is strong, and good at coming up with punishments. More creative than him.
He wouldn't hesitate to use those punishments even on someone he calls a friend.
He can't exactly blame him for that. No one draws as much suspicion from their captains as the doctors. Doctors who could poison you in your sleep; slip the stuff into food and drink and shower water. Doctors who could simply let you die the next time you came into their table wounded. That's why Kirk had chosen a friend as his chief medical officer, and not another man. You need a doctor you can trust, as a starship captain. It's the only way to survive.
Certainly, it had nothing to do with McCoy's other talents or skills. He has none. At least, that's what he's wholly convinced of right now, as the water grows colder, and the high starts to wear off.
Oh, yes, he'd jumped for the old stash of Gamman fire the moment Kirk had left. He hadn't even been willing to experiment. Strange drugs and hallucinogenics are a hobby to him. A specialty that often leaves him sitting up late night after night, synthesising new poisons that'd make his captain's enemies see things so terrible they wouldn't dare so much as raise a finger to him, next time he asked them for what he wanted. Of course, if it was just a hobby, he wouldn't personally feel like he also needed it to get through the day... Then again, how many officers on this ship didn't have similar vices. Kirk had always known about his weakness for the stuff. He had taken him on in spite of it.
Imagine that. The legendary James Kirk, and his closest confidante, who isn't a lover, or a second in command. No, it's his doctor. His doctor, who could poison him in his sleep. Who knows every damn secret. Disgraced, kicked out of the Academy, forced back into the army once his luck and money ran out. Who never advanced beyond lieutenant commander because he didn't have the stomach for outright murder, never dared challenge someone who might just kill him right back instead. And of course a killer himself, regardless, who had caused the death of his own father — by all rights a much more skilled doctor than himself — all because he was too busy frying his brains with any alien substance he could get his acid-stained hands on.
Drowsy, he glances down at those hands, hanging over the edge of the bathtub, limply. The metal has almost cut of circulation to his fingers. The fingertips are stained permanently lighter than everything else in patches. Acid burns, indeed. He lifts them, slowly.
He wonders why that last one bothers him so much.
Killer. Everyone on the Enterprise is a killer. Who isn't, these days. They're all killers. It's how you get the job. All a bunch of killers, killing their way through the galaxy, through the ranks, through their lives.
Maybe being a killer and a doctor doesn't mesh as well as it should. The two cancel each other out. Rather than giving you the power over people the profession promised him in his youth, it just seems to make it all pointless. He doesn't get to decide who lives and who dies. Kirk does the deciding. Bones just makes it happen. Every life saved is another lost to torture or assassination. And still he can't wrap his aching fingers around the captain's thick neck.
Right now he hates the man. For getting him onto this godforsaken ship, for yelling at him, and for telling him what to do. And for looking at him like he actually gives a damn about him, sometimes. Like they're friends on the job, sharing a secret.
This doesn't feel like a job. It's a death trap, one he only has to commit to when he's sober. Days of blood and chaos, people running in and out, security guards who won't keep their hands off his tools and his nurses alike. A crew that is always, always looking out for their own. A ship full of backstabbers. An office strewn with leftover experiments and broken glass. A sharp haze hangs in the air in there. Like bleach, it smells. It's killing his nose, as well as his fingertips' sense of touch.
Well. Kirk seems to be thriving on it.
So does their dear third in command, Sulu. Enjoying that chaos. Living in it, navigating it like a fish swimming upstream, eager to climb the rapids. Spock, that stone-faced green-blooded bastard, is indifferent to it, as always. Of course. Instead it's just him. The doctor, who could offer his captain a glass of brandy one late night, watch him sip it, watch him talk... Wait until his speech slurred and his hands failed him. Until he dropped his glass on the table and slumped over and died.
The doctor who hasn't done that yet. Because he and Kirk were friends, once. Because he's too much of a coward. And because he still couldn't make himself look him in the eyes and do it, he knows, even if he were a total god damn stranger.
He still wouldn't get his chair, anyway. He never could. What use would a surgeon be up there...
A door close by opens. When he tries to focus, or move anything other than his eyes or his hands, an overwhelming sense of nausea threatens to sink him directly into the lukewarm water. His own quarter, or the adjacent?
He waits for another moment...
Adjacent.
He relaxes again. Moreso than he has been relaxed before, earning him a noseful of water. He tries to sit up, just a little. But it's alright. It's just Scotty, not an assassin, or any other danger. Not Kirk, either, or his horrible first officer. All of them seem horrible to him right now, 'cept for Scotty. Horrible and loud and demanding, the lot of them. All ready to disturb his drugged-out stupor. Although, much like the warmth of the water, that's about as good as gone.
He had lucked out on his quarter arrangement. The man he shares a bathroom with is as quiet as they come. He hardly ever talks. When he does, his voice is always low, and gravelly in a way that suggests it's been damaged. He suspects an accident with the wires; electricity, or fire, maybe. He's wondered without asking, turning it into a guessing game for himself... An electrical fire. Phaser damage. Something else.
Scotty drinks a lot. But that too is generally peaceful. McCoy gets his rest in his quarters, undisturbed. And whenever something happens, their captain gets another bright idea or all hell breaks loose due to another assassination attempt, he knows the chief engineer won't run around screaming about it. Even if he has a tendency to get into fights. Even he is subject to promotion by assassination, as little respect as engineers get on a starship. And maybe that's part of it. Neither of them get any kind of respect. Frankly, on a ship full of optimistic murders all gunning for the captain's chair, the two of them must come across as loners. Strange. With motivations those who only care about the Chair can't understand.
No respect, even from the captain, he thinks glumly. Or at least this one. Come to me with every little problem, throw my tools around the room and bang every single man woman and alien that works under me all because you think the nurses have less power than most others, and that turns you on. Like yeomen. Well, he's not wrong there either. And there McCoy sits, in the middle of it all, a sickbay strewn with drugs, listening to his nurses take bets on when the next new recruit is going to pass out from the pain. He often makes his own estimates, less optimistic than theirs. He's usually right... But never voices any of them out loud.
He's only vaguely aware that he wouldn't talk like this, on most days. He has a lot to thank Kirk for. Most of what he has, actually. His position as chief medical, his place aboard this ship, the conquered worlds from which to take those drugs and plants and theories, scientific research on pain relief and curing hallucinations, paranoia and fatigue gathered all over the galaxy.
It just... Hasn't been a good day, today. Not at all.
The door to the bathroom opens. He doesn't bother to pull the curtain; he's pretty sure that if he tries it he's going to throw up. Just stays leaned over the side of the tub and follows Scotty with his eyes as he slinks in, almost carefully. Out there he moves with certainty. He has to. He has to command respect on purpose, when his position won't give it to him naturally. But he deflates when the door to his quarters closes on him. Well, Bones can relate there. And he's all covered in oil again. And blood... He wonders what the hell's happened to him as the chief engineer pulls off his boots and overalls, then goes to rinse his hands off in the sink. All with just a few glances his way.
He sighs. Noticing as he does it that it's expelling some of the leftover panic from his lungs.
He's used to Scott. They've been aboard this ship for years now, sharing quarters. Sort of. Well, sharing a bathroom, at the very least. After a while, the posturing and hostilities wear off by necessity. Neither of them have the energy to keep it up every night. Just shower, and stumble off to bed in the silence. Nod at each other as you pass. Watch the other move instead of worrying, for once. Listen to the whirring in the walls.
McCoy has sometimes imagined that maybe the man understands the feeling...
Mentioning it, or trying to explain out loud what exactly that feeling is, though, might as well be a death sentence, if said to the wrong person.
It telegraphs weakness, doesn't it. To admit you don't enjoy the chaos, well, that could be as good as suicide out here.
"Scotty."
He stops the man right as he's about to slip back into his own quarters. He freezes in the doorway, but relaxes quickly and, at the wave of a couple of fingers, comes back over. At another wave of the same two fingers he begrudgingly gets on his level on the floor, too, giving him a confused and somewhat annoyed look in the process of obedience. McCoy points, seeing his own fingers swim slightly in his vision as he tries to focus.
"Who did that to you, eh?"
Montgomery Scott wipes some of the blood off his lip with his 'til-then clean hand.
"Eh. Sulu," he mutters, looking off. "Said I stepped out of line disciplinin' one of my own men instead'a calling on him."
"That man's going mad with power," Bones drawls, still with a hand half raised. That bleeding nose looks broken. The part of his brain that's still a doctor sticks to it, wondering. "I give it a month until he's dead."
Scotty shrugs.
"Two, maybe," he concedes. "He's got a lotta people willing to do his dirty work."
"They mistake his madness for something else, as per usual..." He raises a hand enough to touch his face, and Scotty flinches back, swatting his hand off.
"Ow."
"Let me look."
"Bastard."
McCoy ignores his squirming, tilting his head the right way and running his thumb over the bridge of his nose. Sulu had gotten a very good swing in, apparently.
"What's it," the engineer mutters darkly, "you gettin' a kick out of showing me I lost a fight, is that it?"
"Lost?" He looks up. "You lost?"
Scotty looks away again, glancing up towards the mirror. He nods, once.
Both of them know that's not a good look. You don't want to be seen losing fights like that, not to a bully like Sulu. That projects weakness, too, and must be why Scotty is being so flaky and snappy about it. McCoy gets another glare when he makes him look back at him; let him continue his examination. He's got a split lip too, although that looks less like a nightmare.
"You're lucky he didn't try the knife," he says.
"He wouldn't bother with a knife on me."
It's Bones' turn to narrow his eyes. He searches his face for a moment, looking for some kind of sarcasm...
No. Self-pity, instead. Bitterness. Eyes that only make half an effort to meet his own.
Both of them feel like fuck-ups too easy to fight.
"Stop whining," he mutters instead, but his tone is low. "And hand me that towel."
To his surprise, he's obeyed again, and the other man actually sits still and lets him halfway clean up the mess he's made of his face with only a few wordless complaints. His hands stay in his lap after the first telling off. Nobody wants to be difficult with their doctor. At the very least he won't get any oil or whatever else in an open wound. His face is already scarred, maybe from the same accident that screwed his voice up. Better not make it any worse.
Besides, doing his job is making McCoy feel better. Even if it's simple, it's something he trusts himself to do. More than he trusts anyone else on the vessel, anyway. And it's not like Scotty's going to stab him in the back.
When he's done, he's getting cold, and doesn't feel quite as much like he's going to throw up or black out of he moves. Shifting a little and sending some of the water spilling over the edge, he moved back a little to look over his handiwork. He shivers.
"How long've you been in here?" Scotty asks, shifting as the water splashes against his knee.
McCoy shrugs, glancing around. Since whenever Kirk got the hell out of his office and let him go home, is the real answer. Now that his brains are coming back to him he realizes he must look like hell itself; bloodshot and sleep deprived, curled up with his still-greasy hair a mess over the edge of the tub like he's planning on drowning. Then again, he suspects he's always a bit of a sad sight. Some days he wonders if everyone notices.
Projecting weakness just by existing.
He glances guiltily at the clock. Scotty catches it, and gives him another look. At first he mistakes it for a glare, but the longer he has to exist under it — and the seconds drag on — the stranger it gets. There's a tinge of reproachful something-else in there, a sort of question being asked. Something like curiosity, but sadder. He would've then mistaken it for pity. He almost does. Maybe he's even right, maybe it is.
He shifts in the water.
"What're you giving me that look for," he mutters over his arms. "What do you want."
Scotty gathers himself up, and gets to his feet. When he turns away, it's back to the mirror, to take a second look at his face. Now much cleaner.
He stares at his own reflection for a moment. Then another glance at McCoy.
"D'you need a robe," he offers.
McCoy stares at him for a moment. He guesses again. Recognition. Pity. Curiosity, but sadder.
He nods.