Work Text:
Bones has never really given a thought to his caffeine addiction. Really, it’s never seemed like a big deal to him; he’s just always dismissed fact that he’s had to drink more than four full mugs of espresso a day to function as a relic of a stressful med school career and a stressful job.
Until now.
Now being that he’s finally managed to coerce Lieutenant Marcus to coming to his quarters with him (“for a cup of coffee”) and found it totally plastered with photos of him with two bendy straws in his nose, the other ends of which were in a jug—no, a small barrel—of what looked like iced green tea. No, scratch that, one photo. The photograph was plastered on the ceiling, all over the walls, on the windows, printed on the sheets of his bed, the pillows, and EVEN TAPED TO THE MIRROR. Bones didn’t dare go into the bathroom, because it was no doubt also all over the shower stall, and the seat of the toilet. His face got hot and his hands started twitching. Whoever did this was going to die. He was sure it was Jim. Was it Jim? It must have been. But it was so thorough, so painstaking. Jim didn’t have the patience or—
there was a giggle behind him, and Bones turned to realize that to his total horror Carol was still there, hand still in his, and hand politely at her mouth to prevent guffawing.
“Um, Leonard. What is that photograph from?”
Bones felt all of the blood drain from his face and his stomach lurched. “I-I-” He took a deep breath. “I need a cup of coffee.”
—
Ten minutes and a large mug of coffee later, Carol looked liable to explode. Her face was violently red, and she kept having to clamp her hand over her mouth and look around, which kept making it worse because EVERYTHING was covered in the photo. And apparently staring at him set her off too. Eventually she couldn’t handle it any more, and Carol took a deep breath:
“so,” stifled snort “um…” giggle, “where’s that photo from,” a cough that was sounded suspiciously like a laugh, “exactly?”
Her hand came back up to her mouth as Bones took a large swig of coffee and prepared himself.
“We ran out of coffee once,” he said, mostly to his mug, being totally unable to look Carol in the face, “and I get really bad headaches without coffee and the only thing we had left was these gross canned Irish coffee things and so I ended up getting royally drunk and then we were totally out of those and the only thing on board with caffeine in it was Liutenant Uhura’s bottled iced green tea. And um. Well I was drunk and I guess I must have forgot that Spock had a cam—SPOCK.” Bones dropped his coffee, utterly destroying his beautiful new carpet, and ran from the room. Carol sprinted after him.
Bones nearly crashed into the glass doors as he careened onto the bridge. Jim was curled up in his chair with tears streaming down his face, whispering “he’s gonna kill you” repeatedly between hysterical fits of laughter. Chekhov was giggling manically, Sulu was chuckling under his breath. Bones whipped around, searching for Him. The Betrayer. The Vulcan. Spock.
And there he was, cool as can be, not even a twitch in the corner of his mouth, standing against the window with his hands behind his back.
“YOU. I’M GOING TO FUCKING—”
“Lieutenant Uhura, the book now if you please”
Bones neither had the time to process this statement nor lunge for Spock when something flat and hard hit the back of his head and his vision went black.