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Leonard McCoy shook his head. “You’re kidding, right?” he asked over the comms.
“As you know, Dr. McCoy, I do not kid.” Which was, of course, Spock’s way of kidding. “Captain Kirk and the away team have been... politely asked to leave the planet and are en route to the medical bay.”
Because where else would Jim stop first, right?
“It wasn’t my fault,” were the first words out of Jim’s mouth as he limped in the door, Chekov on one side of him, Miller on the other, Jim himself hopping on one leg and soaking wet.
“Is it ever?” Leonard asked. “Just put him there,” he told Chekov. “You know the drill.”
The young man nodded because he did, indeed, know the drill. Leonard often wondered why the kid didn’t get himself transferred to somewhere less volatile. Like the Romulan border.
“Are you two okay?” he asked briefly. He gave the junior officers each a once over as Jim groaned and laid back on the gurney. They both looked fine, but you never could tell.
“Yes, Doctor,” Chekov assured him. “We were unhurt in the… negotiations.”
One of these days, Chekov was going to lose that inscrutable look of his and laugh in Jim’s face. Leonard really wanted to be there to see it.
“All right,” Leonard told them. “Go get yourselves cleaned up, then.” He glanced over his shoulder at Jim, who was pulling at his sopping wet shirt like a five-year-old. “I’ll take care of the captain.”
Taking a deep breath, Leonard turned fully to face the man in question. Right at the moment, the leader of the Federation’s flagship was pretty pitiful. He looked like a drowned rat—a beaten, drowned rat—and his left pant leg was torn to the knee. His shin bled from a long scrape, and he was still picking at the sodden fabric over his chest, huffing.
“I need a new shirt,” Jim declared petulantly. Leonard snorted and picked up a scanner to run it over Jim's body, starting with the scrape on his leg.
“Again?” he asked. It was a little mean, but Jim… Leonard honestly wondered sometimes why this man, of all people, was the one they sent in to meet and greet with new cultures. Life and death situations, sure, Jim Kirk was your guy. But without really trying, he did tend to start a bar brawl more often than not when it came to friendly conversations.
“Hey!” Jim shot back, panting a little in his indignation. “I did exactly what the xenoethnologists told me to…”
There was some contaminant in the water of the fountain he’d been thrown into, of course. Space was a God damned dangerous place and the human body could only withstand so much bombardment by alien microbes. Leonard put down his medical scanner and turned around to set up a hypospray as Jim prattled on, getting more and more worked up.
“...and then I bent at the waist and whistled and… Man, I feel really weird… ” Jim trailed off, but Leonard hadn’t actually been listening much anyway and he only heard the last bit distantly.
God damned space bugs. A broad spectrum antibiotic might—
The small scanner suddenly smacked into the back of his skull and dropped to the floor. Leonard whirled around, ready to take Jim’s head off—only to find his friend bright purple and fighting to breathe. It was a fight he wasn’t winning, and the annoyance in his eyes at being ignored was matched only by the fear of failure.
“Damn it, Jim,” Leonard growled, grabbing the scanner off the ground and setting it to scan Jim’s chest. His lungs were rapidly filling with fluid and his throat had swollen shut.
“I need 25ccs of medhydriepiphrine!” Leonard called, using a blade off the nearby tray to slice through Jim’s shirt and rip it down the center. Jim glared at him, and Leonard took it as a good sign. “Now you really do need a new shirt,” he quipped, trying not to show his worry as Jim’s bare chest moved convulsively while his throat and lungs failed to get air past the fluid.
Jim mouthed a word that might have been “asshole,” but fell back almost immediately, his face going tight with pain.
“25 ccs of MHE, Doctor,” one of the nurses announced, handing him the hypo. He’d’ve liked to use the kinder standard protocol, but Jim had already shown himself to be too sensitive when it came to immune reactions. This damn stuff wasn’t kind at all, but even in Jim Kirk, it should stop the reaction quickly.
Leonard hoped .
Jim curled up off the table, around the hypospray, as the medhydriepiphrine went in, then flopped back in a dead faint. His heart rate spiked too high, then dropped to almost nothing.
“Come on, Jim,” Leonard murmured, watching his friend’s motionless chest for far too long. His own heart skipped a beat. He didn’t want to risk any more stimulants right now, but if Jim didn’t start breathing soon… “Damnit, come on !”
Jim’s body finally tried one more time to suck in a breath, and this time it took. So well in fact, that he overinflated that little space left in his lungs and starting coughing, bringing up the fluid that had been killing him. Leonard grabbed a basin and moved forward to slide an arm behind his back and sit him up.
“What the hell!?” Jim gasped after a long moment, hand pressed hard to his chest as he stared at the half-full basin. “What did you shoot me up with now?” The demand was laced with pain and the cough he gave was wracking.
Leonard shook his head in irritation and placed the basin on the table beside the bed. He needed to get a glass of water for Jim to rinse out the taste at least, but he couldn’t seem to move, his hand still on Jim's shaking back. Shaking—which meant he was still alive. They'd been close before, of course, but every time was just too damn close to contemplate.
"Seriously, Bones,” Jim grated carefully. “I feel like you cracked my chest open.” Leonard sympathized. He knew the MHE burned like fire going in, but it did the job. Thank God.
“Yeah, just be glad it worked,” he replied. “You damn near drowned in your own secretions.”
Jim gave that a moment to soak in, leaning back a little against Leonard’s arm. “So what happened?”
“Allergic reaction,” Leonard growled. “The water they threw you into sent your system into shock.”
“Allergy?” Jim whispered, throat raw from the swelling and limbs still shaking from the injection that brought it down. “I’m allergic to water now?”
“Apparently,” Leonard replied more easily as his own heart calmed at Jim’s typical, expected, livingbreathingnotdeadthistime whining. “Well, something in the water.”
He moved away finally, reluctantly, taking another hypospray from the nurse who’d been standing there waiting patiently. He nodded his thanks and smiled slightly as she left a glass of water on the table and took the basin. He was coming down from the shock of it now, as he always did, and letting the knowledge that they’d made it through another one put him back on an even keel.
“As long as we’re in this sector, we should probably make sure you have some MHE on your away missions,” he counseled as he injected the recovery drug that would stop Jim from having a secondary reaction.
Jim glared at him, still rubbing his chest.
Leonard smiled wryly. “Along with an extra shirt.”
******
the end