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San Francisco, Earth
Leonard tapped his datapad, closing the last page of the mystery novel he’d started yesterday, just after they’d arrived on planet. “Predictable,” he groused.
And now he had nothing to read.
A five-year mission. Damn it, why the hell had he ever thrown in with Jim Kirk anyway? Bad enough they’d gone through what they’d gone through in the last few years, but now Jim was headed to a meeting with Pike, dead set on lobbying to have them go out there on the edge of known space and do it all over again.
“Think of how exciting it’ll be, Bones!” Leonard mimicked, putting down his datapad and standing to stretch. He and Jim, as they usually did when they were on-planet, shared a room in the upper officers quarters at Starfleet HQ. The view out to the bay was spectacular, and Leonard remembered for a minute why he often missed Earth.
“A five year mission,” he said aloud this time. “Hell, with our luck, we probably won’t even survive three.”
The door to their quarters swished open and Leonard turned from the view to find Jim radiating anger as he stepped through and let it close.
“No five year mission, huh?” Leonard said quietly, trying to dispel the mood.
Jim tossed his dress cover across the room, where the hat landed on the coffee table and slid off. “I don’t know, Bones,” he grated, pulling off his dress jacket and very precisely hanging it on the hook by the door, though he clearly wanted to throw it to the floor as well. “Why don’t you ask Admiral Pike?”
Leonard followed him as he stalked to the bedroom and stripped to the waist. “I need a new shirt,” Jim growled
Again? Leonard thought sadly. “What’d you do to piss off Pike this time?”
“I saved Spock’s life,” Jim grated, pulling off his boots and pants and rummaging through his clean clothes for bar attire. Okay, this was bad, clearly. “And apparently he really is just a self-serving Vulcan and he hung me out to dry and now —” he pulled a shirt over his head and glared at Leonard bitterly. “I guess you’ll be looking for a new captain.”
“What?” Leonard asked, trying to parse what Jim was saying, even as the man got himself dressed for a fight and brushed past him. “What the hell are you talking about?!”
Jim stopped—mostly, Leonard hoped, because he could hear the concern under his exasperation—and hung his head. “They took her away from me, Bones,” he whispered, on the verge of tears and trying so damn hard to deny it.
Leonard was sure he hadn’t heard right. The Enterprise ? “Jim…”
“I can’t, Bones,” Jim said, stiffening up and grabbing his jacket on his way out the door. “Just… Not now.”
*****
He'd left Jim alone to blow off steam, knowing from experience that it was the best way to get him to calm down and look at things more reasonably. And then he'd called Spock, which only served to piss him off.
“What the hell happened?” he demanded, unable to keep the anger out of his voice as he remembered Jim’s destroyed whisper.
“Doctor?” Spock responded, puzzled.
“The admiral took the Enterprise away from him?!” Leonard barked, incredulous.
There was a very long pause on the line. “I was unaware,” the Vulcan said simply. “Has Captain Kirk been removed from active duty?”
“I don’t know,” Leonard growled, anger draining away and leaving worry. “He blasted out of here without giving me the whole story. He said it had something to do with what happened in that volcano.”
Again, Spock had to think before he spoke. “I truly did not believe that my report would do anything more than illustrate my own responsibility in that particular instance.”
Leonard had sighed. Of course Spock had put the whole damn thing in his report. Probably made Jim out to be a hero—and therefore the one to take the fall for violating the prime directive so spectacularly. “Well, let’s hope he sees it that way when he calms down.”
After that, Leonard had turned on the newsfeed and found out about the explosion in London. He watched the coverage with sadness and disbelief, but at the time they hadn’t been releasing anything to the media, and the damage was blamed on a catastrophic generator malfunction. He hadn’t started to really worry about Jim until the room’s communicator had buzzed two hours later.
“McCoy,” he’d answered, hoping it wasn’t the police calling him to bail Jim out already.
“Dr. McCoy, it’s Chris Pike.”
Funny, Leonard had thought he had words for the man, but when faced with the sad tone in the older man’s voice, he found he couldn’t think of a one. “Jim’s not here,” he answered, knowing that would be his question.
“I figured,” Pike said with a tired smile in his words. “Any idea what dive he’s crawled into?”
Normally, Leonard would have told him to go to Hell. But Jim needed help, and obviously, Pike had things he needed to say.
“I have a couple of ideas,” he’d offered.
An hour and a half later, the world had been turned on its ear.
Like nearly everyone else, Leonard had been denied access to the scene of Harrison’s attack, and communication was understandably restricted. He’d managed to talk to Spock briefly once—enough to know that Jim was alive and Chris Pike wasn’t and Spock wasn’t coping nearly as well as a Vulcan should with all this. Scotty was called in to do a detailed scan of Harrison’s pod, and Leonard had spoken to him a little more at length. Jim wasn’t even answering his comms, and with Chris Pike dead in the attack, he figured his friend was finding a way to blame himself.
“I dinnae think he’s well,” Scotty had told him candidly when he asked how Jim was doing. “But he’s upright and fighting. Grief can hurt a man worse than phasers, you know?”
Yeah, Leonard did know. By the time he’d finally talked to Jim, the younger man had been more broken than he had ever seen him—and not just physically, though he was in worse shape there than he was willing to admit. Or realize.
It hadn’t actually surprised him that Jim blew off his physical, but when he had a chance to check him out—as much as Jim would let him while apparently plotting his and everyone else’s demise—he’d been downright alarmed at the damage that had been done. Jim’s vitals were so far off that there had to be something going on besides being knocked around a little.
Not that Jim was going to let him address the problem, of course. Oh no! He was going to single-handedly deliver revenge on the man who’d killed Admiral Pike. Because somehow that would make some kind of difference.
Twenty hours after Jim had walked into their quarters and thrown his hat across the room, Leonard stood in the middle of Medical, feeling useless and impotent. He gritted his teeth as Jim announced the damn fool plan he and the Commodore had hatched to blow the saboteur off the face of Kronos—hopefully without starting a war Leonard was a little worried they couldn’t win.
“Tensions between the Federation and the Klingon Empire have been high,” Jim explained unnecessarily, sounding off and rough and wrong to Leonard, even over the ship-wide comms. “Any provocation could lead to an all-out war.”
“Tell us something we don’t know,” Leonard murmured. God, where was Jim’s Iowa boy scout soul right now? He couldn’t really think murdering a man at the risk of interstellar war was the answer here?
The comms were silent as he pondered. Apparently Jim was pondering, too.
“I will personally lead a landing party to an abandoned city on the surface of Kronos—”
“You’ll do what !?” Leonard exclaimed, causing heads to turn all around him as Jim continued. “Damn it, Jim.”
“...capture the fugitive John Harrison and return him to Earth so he can face judgement for his actions.”
“If we live that long,” Leonard groused.
“All right,” Jim said, as if he’d just settled something in his own mind. “Let’s go get this son of a bitch. Kirk out.”
“‘Let’s go get this son of a bitch,’” Leonard parodied, heading to his office so he could talk to himself in peace. “Think you’re God damned Superman in a gold shirt and you don’t care what the hell the repercussions are.”
He sat hard in his seat and thought over the last day.
That Chris Pike was the father Jim had never had wasn’t a secret. He’d given him direction, a purpose. Hell, he’d even kicked his ass when he needed it. Jim wasn’t going to be rational about anything in all of this. And deep down, Leonard couldn’t blame him. But it wouldn't bring Pike back. Hell, it was more likely to end Jim in a bodybag alongside him.
“Dr. McCoy?”
The sound of Spock’s voice over his private comm startled and worried him and he opened a reply channel immediately.
“McCoy here,” he offered.
“The Captain has retired to his quarters,” Spock told him. “I believe he may be in need of your assistance.”
Leonard rose, cursing inwardly. “Is he sick?” he asked. Damn it, he knew Jim was hurt worse than he was letting on. “Why didn’t you send him here?”
“I do not believe Captain Kirk’s need is strictly medical.”
Leonard smirked, wondering at the mother who had managed to raise a kid with a spark of humanity on a planet full of Vulcans.
“I’m on my way,” he promised.
“Jim?” he called, walking into the unlit front room of the Captain’s quarters as the door swished shut behind him. He had bothered to knock, but when no answer was forthcoming, he’d just used his medical override and walked in. It wasn’t like he hadn’t done it before.
“In here, Bones,” Jim’s quiet voice came from the bedroom.
The captain of the Federation’s flagship stood in the middle of his room, looking like a child too exhausted to get dressed for bed. His gold command shirt was off, and he was struggling out of the rest of his uniform.
“I need a new shirt,” he grumbled tiredly, muffled by the material of his undershirt.
Leonard stepped forward and helped him pull the shirt off, hissing angrily at the state of Jim’s back. “Jesus, Jim—did you see anybody about these, or did you just play Superman and ignore them?”
Jim’s back was a mass of bruises, one particularly vicious one from where it looked like he’d been blown back against a table edge. There were cuts and scrapes too. Leonard would have run a regen over a few of them, right when they happened, but of course he’d never gotten the chance.
“Got checked out while Scotty was going over Harrison’s pod,” Jim admitted tiredly. He just stood there, like he couldn’t figure out how to move at this point.
“I’m amazed they didn’t give you something to help reduce those,” Leonard murmured, running a soft hand over the black bruising at mid-back, thinking of the scene of destruction Scotty had described after he’d gone over the council room. How damn close had they come to losing Jim, too?
Jim sighed, leaning into the touch. “Actually, I think they did. I just…”
“Forgot to take it,” Leonard finished for him. “Jim…” He really didn’t know what to say to make this better.
“He said he saw greatness in me,” Jim whispered, nearly falling as he sat heavily on the edge of the bed. The eyes he turned on Leonard were shining with tears. “Pike.”
Leonard moved to sit next to him, close enough to share heat. “He was a good man.”
“Yeah,” Jim said fondly. “He was. Don’t understand what he saw in me.”
Of course you don’t, Leonard thought with a sigh of his own. Jim Kirk had no end of ego, but the respect of someone like Christopher Pike just flummoxed him. “He thought you were a man who would do the right thing, no matter what.”
Jim snorted. “That was why they took the ship away from me in the first place,” he argued.
“They took her away from you because you were being a cowboy,” Leonard disagreed. “He knew you better than that. He knew you did it because you didn’t have any other choice but to do the right thing.”
“You make me sound so noble.” But Jim’s heart wasn’t in the verbal back and forth, and neither was Leonard’s.
“You proved him right today,” he said quietly.
Jim laughed, wincing in pain. “I almost didn’t,” he admitted. “If it wasn’t for Jiminy Cricket…”
Leonard smiled. “Spock, you mean?” he asked.
“He’s discovered his hidden calling. James Kirk’s conscience.” Jim’s hands were raw, too, where the captain clenched and unclenched them. “God, I wanted to deck him for ratting me out.”
Leonard didn’t reply to that. Pointing out that Jim probably should have at least mentioned the massive screw-up on Nibiru in his own report wasn’t going to get things done here. Instead, he opened the small medkit he’d brought with him. “Lie down on the bed for me,” he asked.
Jim smirked a sad imitation of his usual leer. “I’m not in the mood, Bones.”
“Words I never thought I’d hear you say,” Leonard quipped back softly. “On your stomach. I want to get a look at the damage, since you wouldn’t let me do it earlier.”
Jim laid himself out without speaking, though he grunted in pain as he turned his head and pillowed it on his folded arms. “I didn’t mean to blow you off—”
“Yes you did,” Leonard replied as he knelt on the bed next to him. Jim had bruised his liver, which Leonard had known from the scan he’d run earlier. The bleeding hadn’t been bad, but it was bad enough, and the mild concussion hadn’t helped. Leonard ran a scanner over him. His electrolytes were still… “When did you eat last?” he asked.
“Um….” Jim replied predictably.
Leonard sighed and reached for a nutritional booster, plugging it into his hypospray and then plugging the hypospray into his friend’s bare arm. Jim was finally looking like he’d sleep now, and Leonard wasn’t about to demand he sit up and eat.
“Comm lock,” he ordered the room in a murmur. “Medical override McCoy, six-five-five.” Spock would jut have to understand. If someone called Jim, he’d rouse himself and jump back into it without pausing to think about the cost to his health.
“Alone at last,” Jim joked, half asleep. Or maybe just too wrung out to mount much effort.
“Yeah, don't get any ideas.” Leonard gave him something for the pain. He’d put some of that Mucdilivian balm on the bruises later. For now, he just scooted up to sit against the headboard, looking down at Jim as the younger man stared into nothing.
“I don’t want to disappoint him,” Jim whispered, all of ten years old.
“I know,” Leonard told him quietly.
Jim turned his head away and settled himself awkwardly as the pain medication took away the last thing keeping him awake.
“But I really want to kill this bastard.”
Leonard put a hand on Jim’s head and settled in himself.
“I know that, too.”
******
the end