Archive of Our Own

Three months ago, Jim Kirk opened his eyes in a med center in San Francisco to find that Leonard McCoy had followed through on a threat he'd made three years before.

"You die on me, Jim, I swear to God I'll drag your carcass back to the ship and bring you back to life myself."

Who knew he could make good on a promise like that?

The city of San Francisco was being rebuilt, and so was the Enterprise. Her command crew had been scattered for lack of a working ship, but everyone had gotten to pick their own assignments, with the clear understanding that, when there was a ship, they would be on it.

Jim was given an office at the temporary Starfleet HQ and given pretty much nothing to do. Which wasn’t what he needed at all. Downtime meant thinking, and thinking meant thinking about Pike and Khan and dying—

So when Bones announced that he was headed out on the Donovan to help contain a plague that’d been accidentally unleashed by some research facility on Yaasia, Jim had promptly hitched a ride.

He was surprised when he was granted the temporary transfer—no ship needed two captains, after all—but Admiral Torres looked at him with a little smile and said, "We know this has been difficult on you, Kirk. You need to be out there, doing things."

She sounded just like Pike, and it was all he could do to nod politely and not make an undignified run for it.

Chekov was assigned to the Donovan as well, coincidentally, adding another type of engine to his knowledge base by helping to upgrade her systems. He was also endearing himself to Captain Seward. Jim figured, someday, he’d lose the young Russian to a chief engineer job.

For lack of anything else to occupy his brain, Jim buried himself in being useful—in “doing”. He kept in touch with everyone, read a lot of books, studied the schematics Scotty sent him for every new system on the Enterprise and tried not to think about the fact that he’d been dead. Really dead. Alive only because of the blood of your enemy dead.

Now the Donovan was headed back to Earth with the Yaasians’ thanks. They could have made the trip straight through, but Seward figured they all deserved a little R&R after such a stressful mission, and planned a couple of stopovers on the way.

So it was that Jim found himself sitting at a cafe in Junian Station, the Federation outpost on Parata, being browbeaten by his best friend.

“Come on, Jim,” Bones cajoled, swinging the key of the rental vehicle in front of his face. “You don’t want to spend the entire trip shut up in the only technological city on the planet, do you?”

“I happen to like technology, Bones,” Jim snapped back. “And so do you.” He glared at his friend suspiciously. “Why are you suddenly so excited to visit the farm? Thinking of quitting Starfleet retiring to Iowa?”

Bones blinked; just shut down for a second. He did that a lot lately—like he kept running over what happened with Khan, too, and didn’t like it any better than Jim did. Which was more than enough reason to take him up on his offer.

Jim grabbed the keys from McCoy’s hands. “All right, fine. Let’s go find some cows to tip.”

Bones eyed him doubtfully. “You can’t really tip cows,” he refuted.

Jim smirked. “Oh, I beg to differ, Dr. McCoy,” he replied with a smile as they settled into the land vehicle they’d hired for the day. Thing looked like a car, but it handled like a bad-tempered donkey.

The Donovan was parked in space above them, and the crew rotated through shore leave. Retrotechs, so-called because they strove to reduce their dependence on modern technology, had founded the independent Earth colony before the Federation even began, building numerous towns and small cities, all based around traditional farming and light industry. They chose not to join the Federation when they were invited, but they were friendly enough, politically speaking, and had allowed the Federation to found Junian as a way station and autonomous city. It was a smart idea, letting the Paratans take advantage of a variety of spacefarers who, just once in a while, craved actual fresh food grown in honest-to-goodness dirt.

Jim maneuvered the vehicle through the streets of the Federation outpost and was soon speeding down a long, flat road that made him think of his stepfather’s sports car. Bones seemed relaxed beside him, staring out the window at field after field of corn-equivalent.

“See, Jim? Nature. It’s nice,” Bones declared, squinting up at the twin suns that beat down on them.

Jim shrugged. “It’s Iowa.” Or close enough. The corn was bright blue, but...

Bones snorted in agreement. “You missing home?” he asked. He knew the answer.

But Jim gave it to him anyway. “Not remotely.”

“Oh, come on, Jim,” Bones scolded him. “You have to admit, it’s kind of nice to get away from modern civilization once in a while.” He looked back at the corn. “Hell of a lot simpler.”

It was, actually. “I suppose I could do with less life-and-death in my life,” he commented, damning himself when Bones tightened up beside him.

None of them really talked about what had happened when Jim was dead, but Scotty had made some off-handed remark about what Bones would have done if Jim hadn’t woken up. He should have thought before he spoke.

But of course, now he didn’t know what to say, so Jim let the silence hang for a minute, glancing in the rear-view mirror. A small plane was in the sky off to the left. Probably crop dusting or something. Parata wasn’t a complete non-tech planet, like Kilkala or Maton; they had planes and cars and electricity just… not much else.

“You saved my life,” he finally pointed out quietly, when the tension in McCoy’s neck started giving him a headache.

“I took a damn fool risk and crossed my fingers,” Bones muttered. Words tumbled out, like they’d been sitting on his tongue for months. “Wasn’t much better than the people who let loose that plague on Yaasia. Hell, I wasn’t much better than Khan. ”

"What?" Jim shook his head in exasperation. “You were nothing like Khan,” he disagreed. “And those guys on Yaasia should never have been experimenting on sentient beings. Which —” he pointed out quickly, before Bones could cut him off at the knees. “—isn’t what you were doing with me.”

Bones glared at the corn. “How’s that, exactly?”

“You’d seen Khan’s blood work miracles before—”

“On a tribble !”

“On Thomas Harewood’s daughter,” Jim rode over him. “Anyway, Bones, it’s not like you had much choice.”

“Oh, I had a choice,” Bones disagreed blackly. “Just not one I could live with.”

Jim grinned wryly. “Not one I could live with, either, as it—” His head came up in surprise as the plane buzzed them low enough to make him swerve. “What the hell are they doing?”

Bones looked out the window, watching the flying machine. “I don’t know. Joy-riding?” That last was a subtle dig, but there was more annoyance in his voice than amusement.

Jim glanced out the side and back windows and tried to pinpoint the plane again, wishing the Paratan car had better visibility.

“Jim, look out!”

Bones’s cry snapped Jim’s attention back to the road in front of them. The plane was honestly landing on the road in front of them, and Jim tried to steer toward the corn instead of hitting it. But the antique car wasn’t as maneuverable as his stepdad’s Corvette. The vehicle slid sideways and slammed into the plane on the driver side.

Jim’s head smacked into the side window and bounced off, and Bones called to him as his world went dark.

*********

“Come on, Jim. Wake up!”

Bones. Sounded pissed.

“I’m awake,” he offered, not sure that was really true.

“You didn’t see any No Trespassing signs, did you?” Bones asked mildly. There was a thread of pain in his voice, though, and that served to wake Jim further. “Because we sure as hell pissed someone off.” His voice dropped to a predictable growl. “Been on-planet a total of ten hours and we’ve already caused an interstellar incident.”

“You were the one who wanted to go to Iowa,” Jim murmured, blinking his eyes clear as he sat up. His head throbbed and his side and back and jaw hurt, but he didn’t think he was badly injured.

“Looks like sentimentality is going to be the death of me,” Bones grumped.

Jim peered over at him. Through a double wall of metal mesh. “What the hell?”

Bones sat in the middle of an 8-by-5 cage, identical to the one Jim was sitting in. The two cells were about a foot apart, the mesh tight, but big enough to get a finger through. The cages went all the way to the ceiling, so they were tall enough to stand in, and Jim did just that, wincing at the jab of pain in his back as he rose.

“Who…?”

“I don’t know,” Bones said, holding his right arm. Probably slammed it against the side of the car when they hit. The right side of his face was bruised up, too. “The impact knocked you out, but I caught a glimpse of someone before they shot me with some kind of tranquilizer." He gave Jim his get-yourself-to-medical look. "I’m hoping they hit you, too, and you didn’t just crack your skull."

"My skull is fine," he refuted, ignoring the ache in his temple.

"Thick, anyway," Bones jabbed. "I just woke up about ten minutes ago, and all I can tell you is that the accommodations suck.”

Jim had to agree. They were in a simple barn, it looked like, but bare of the equipment and crap Jim was used to seeing in such a structure. The ceiling above them must be the floor of a hayloft. The windows were small, but there was plenty of light, owing to the two suns. What the hell had happened?

On instinct, he reached for his communicator and cursed.

“Gone,” Bones confirmed. “Everything is.”

“Fantastic,” Jim grumbled.

“And don’t—”

Jim yelped more in anger than in pain as he touched the mesh door and got a shock of electricity.

“—touch the cage,” Bones continued, voice thick with sarcasm.

“Thanks for the tip,” Jim muttered.

The main barn door opened, silhouetting a man and a woman, both with slightly wild blond hair. They walked forward silently, the woman just behind the man and clearly cowed by him. The man was big and stocky and had an air of anger.

“You’re awake,” he said roughly. “Good.” He gestured to the woman. "Get moving, Hannah," he ordered.

Hannah shot him a worried look, but knelt next to Bones’s cage and opened the case she carried.

“Didn’t want you to just fade away in your sleep,” the man continued, addressing McCoy coldly. “That’d be too easy for you.”

“Look,” Jim started, his palms sweating as Hannah withdrew an antiquated hypodermic needle and a vial of clear liquid from the case. “There’s been some mistake here—”

“Shut up,” the man growled at him, eyes still on Bones in a way that made Jim very, very nervous. “Don't bother covering for him. I knew it was him the moment I saw him in that Federation town.” He walked up to McCoy’s cage, his manner ugly and dangerous. Bones, being Bones, just stared back at him, non-threatening, but with clear steel in his eyes.

“I don’t know who you think I am, or what that person’s done—” Bones began reasonably.

“Don’t try to—”

“We’re Federation officers,” Jim broke in, a little desperate. Hannah paused and glanced up at him, fear and bitterness and doubt mixed in her blue eyes.

"Keep moving Hannah," the man growled. Hannah startled and pulled out a small black box from her skirt.

"His name is Leonard McCoy—I’m James Kirk. We’re from the Federation ship Enter—Donovan ." Jim tried again.

He damned himself for the habitual slip when the man sneered. “Can’t even get the name of your ship right, huh?” he growled. He wasn't just angry, Jim realized. He was grief-stricken. Maybe a little crazy. Jim knew the signs better than he wanted to. “We’ve seen your fake Federation tech before," he growled. "Got all your counterfeits locked away. And don’t go thinking your business associates will find you. We’re shielded from your supertech here.”

A hum rose from the mesh encircling McCoy as Hannah pressed a button on the black box. "It's ready, Joseph, but—"

"Good," Joseph replied, taking out a key and unlocking McCoy's cage. Bones flashed a look of fear and readiness at Jim. He could fight his way out. Maybe. He'd sure as hell try, Jim knew. Whatever was in that needle, it couldn't be good.

Bones moved almost immediately, but Joseph just absorbed the one surprisingly brutal blow he managed to land before he had the smaller man by the neck, slammed up against the wall of the cage. Jim’s cage was still electrified, but it didn’t stop him from throwing himself against it, the shock insignificant compared to McCoy’s danger. The cage shook, but it held.

"You're gonna pay for what you've done, Findlay," Joseph grated, pain and hatred in the words. "You're gonna end up just like them.” His voice cracked in grief. “Mindless, drooling, twitching every limb until your brain finally melts." He turned to Hannah, wincing as Bones kicked him hard. Didn't make him let go, though. "Give it here."

"Joseph—" she began in a tiny voice.

"Give it here, Hannah!" Joseph's hand on Bones's neck had tightened, and McCoy's face was red, his chest heaving with the inability to draw a breath.

She inched forward and Joseph took the needle from her.

"You can't do this!" Jim cried, watching as Joseph stuck the needle into McCoy's arm and pushed the plunger.

"I’ll send you and your friend here back to your people," he said, cold and desperate. He turned his gaze on Jim, and Jim glared back. "We'll show you what happens when you poison innocent farmers."

Joseph let Bones go and watched him crumple to the floor before stepping out of the cage.

“What did you give him?” Jim growled, limbs tingling from his contact with the cell door. He stood in the center of the space now, glaring at the man he really was going to kill if Bones died.

“Justice,” the man replied. He walked out without a glance back, but Hannah darted one look at McCoy where he lay gasping on the floor before she re-electrified his cage and ran after Joseph.

“Bones?” Jim called, desperate for an answer. It didn't sound like they meant his death to be fast, but...

McCoy lay sprawled on the floor, trying to catch his breath. “That’s just great,” he sighed roughly.

Jim couldn’t help a relieved smile. Bones would go to his grave grumbling like an old man. The words in his mind froze him. “How do you feel?” he asked cautiously.

“Like I need to retake self-defense,” McCoy replied, sitting up and gazing around them. He put one hand to his bruised neck and rubbed. “I don’t feel like I’m going to drop dead right now, though, so maybe we better figure out how to get out of here before I do.”

“What do you think they…?” Jim asked, hands balled into fists. How was McCoy supposed to know what they injected him with? Dumb question. “All right, maybe there’s a way to disrupt—OW!” He jerked his hand away from the cage, shaking it.

“Electrocuting yourself won’t get us out of here any sooner,” Bones pointed out. He hauled himself to his feet, grunting in pain and holding his injured arm a little tighter.

“Yeah, well… I’m open to suggestions,” Jim replied.

“I’m a doctor. If you wanted an engineer, you should have brought Scotty.”

“Scotty would’ve found a bar with me and we wouldn’t be in this mess,” he pointed out.

What the hell were they going to do now? The car they’d hired was Paratan-made, but the rental company was Junian. They had monitors in the vehicles, so the company would have been informed that there was an accident and checked it out. He glanced over at Bones, whose neck was coming out in bruises. He looked okay. For now.

"He was big," Jim joked after a moment, trying to lighten the mood. “Good shot, though."

"Yeah, well, I don't have as much experience as you do trying to beat the daylights out of people." There was something slightly bitter in the words.

"I don't know, Bones," he disagreed. "There was that one bar brawl on Candli Outpost..."

That got him a smile, small though it was. Bones walked from one end of his cage to the other, and Jim did the same, searching for weak spots.

After a while, Jim shook his head. "These were built in a hurry," he remarked. "But they look pretty sturdy."

"And there's the matter of a couple thousand volts going through them," Bones put in crankily, walking the length of his cage again. “Too many times knocking yourself against that, and you’ll stop your heart.”

"Not the voltage that'll kill you. It's the amps," Jim said, an old image of his own burned hand and his stepfather’s glare coming to mind.

"What?"

"Nothing," he replied. "Just something I heard once.” He considered the mesh walls. “Probably a cattle fence they’ve rigged up.” He glanced up after a minute when the silence went on too long.

Bones had stopped moving and now stood in the middle of his cage and sort of... vibrated .

“You okay?” Jim asked carefully.

“Fine.” McCoy met Jim’s disbelieving gaze and sighed. “Agitated. A little nauseated, too.” He shook his head and tried to focus. “Are you going to work on getting us out of here, or just stare at me?”

Jim surveyed their surroundings again and saw exactly what he’d seen the last time. An empty barn with an electrified wall between him and it. The floor was cement and the ceiling was four feet above his head. The cages were both bolted into floor and ceiling at regular intervals along the length of each wall, and of course, there was the electricity.

If he could manufacture a reason for one of them to open his cage, though. Assuming they came back…

"Hannah didn't seem too onboard with this plan, did she?" he asked distractedly, still hoping to find a hole in the cage that he could exploit.

"She seemed terrified of her brother is what she seemed," Bones snapped.

"How do you know they're brother and sister?" Jim wanted to know. Sure they looked a little similar, but that was a leap.

"Resemblance is pretty obvious, and he sure as hell treated her like a little sister."

"What does that mean?" Jim asked, examining the ceiling. He had no idea how he could get up there, but it was only wood...

Bones snorted. "Spoken like an only child." That stung, though he was sure Bones hadn't meant it to. "The glares my sisters used to give me..." He sighed. "They weren't quite as homicidal as old Joseph, though."

Jim was caught by the distant tone, and his gaze returned to the other cage. He went still, his stomach dropping. McCoy flexed his hands carefully, grimacing. God, already?

“Bones?” Jim asked quietly.

“Paraesthesia in my hands,” his friend said abstractly, discounting it. He was trying hard not to pace, which just made him look like he was going to fly apart at the seams. “Joseph seemed pretty out of control,” he observed, giving Jim a significant stare. “I wonder who Findlay killed.”

“Someone important,” Jim replied quietly. Joseph had a pain in his eyes that Jim was pretty sure he would have seen in his own after Pike was killed, if he’d been able to stomach going near a mirror. Made him wonder if Hannah was up to pulling Joseph back from the brink. If it wasn’t already too late.

“By poisoning them?” Bones asked. He was green around the gills. “Lucky me.” God, that stuff worked fast.

“We need to figure out a way to contact the ship.”

How, Jim had no idea. He was used to being left to figure things out without a playbook, but trapped in a box with nothing to work with and his best friend dying by inches on the other side...?

“With what?” Bones asked. “The place is empty and our captors aren’t exactly the helpful type.”

“There’s a way,” Jim maintained. “We just have to find it.”

“You’re good, Jim, but you’re not that good.” Bones ran a hand through his hair, then brought it down so he could watch it shake.

“They’ll find us, Bones,” Jim assured him, trying for his usual blithe tone. “The rental company has probably already found the car and alerted Seward. She’ll send someone to investigate and they’ll track us down. You know they will.”

“He said they had the place shielded,” Bones gave up and paced, which just made him look like a trapped tiger instead of an overwound toy. “Damn it, you’d think Starfleet identification would count for something, even here!” His voice sounded thicker than before, like his tongue was numb.

“Do you have numb tongue!?” asked a bright voice in Jim’s memory. “I can fix that!”

But can you fix this?

It took a minute to find his voice. “Since when did something like shielding stop Chekov?”

Bones examined his hands again, touching his thumbs to each of his fingers in turn and standing still in the middle of his cage. “Those two are desperate, Jim, but I don’t think they’re stupid,” he pointed out dully.

“Doesn’t matter,” Jim replied, sweat rolling down his back at his friend’s slightly vacant gaze. “They’ll be here. Just hold on, okay?”

“I’m pretty sure I’m—” McCoy’s face suddenly went pasty gray and he threw up, the impulse coming on him fast enough that he didn’t have time to turn to the side before the heaving started.

“Bones?” Jim watched and listened helplessly as McCoy sank to his hands and knees and kept heaving. “Bones!” It went on for long minutes before he finally ran out of steam, collapsing just to the side of the mess he’d made, his back still toward Jim’s cage. Jim wasn’t even sure he was breathing. “Damn it, Dr. McCoy, answer me!” he commanded, sinking to the floor and slamming a fist against the wall, electricity be damned.

How the hell was this happening so fast!?

And yet it seemed to take forever before Bones finally stirred, rocking slowly onto his back and opening his eyes to stare at the ceiling. “Well, this is fun,” he rasped.

“Bones—”

“Acute alkaloid poisoning, probably,” McCoy continued, his voice monotone, as if he was reciting from a textbook. The lack of precision in his speech scared Jim. A lot. “Numbness and tingling in the extremities.” He propped himself up painfully on his good elbow, and Jim cursed the fact that he couldn’t get near him. “Muscle spasms and vomiting.” Almost on cue, McCoy’s left leg gave a spastic twitch. He chuckled blackly at the stain the episode had left across his chest. “I need a new shirt.”

“Again?” Jim replied, on reflex, because if Bones could make a joke right now, so could he. McCoy glared at him, fever spots red on his cheeks, and Jim fought hard to look innocent. “What? You say it to me.”

“Probably won’t get to again,” Bones said darkly.

“Come on, Bones—” Jim started.

“Certain meta—” He winced as a spasm twitched through his injured right arm. “Certain metabolic syndromes increase... alkaloid toxicity,” he explained, stopping in the middle as a pain shot through him.

“And?” Jim asked, wanting Bones to keep talking. Because if he was talking, he was breathing and if he was breathing, he was living.

“The original Mars colonists developed a genetic defect—” he had to pause again in pain and Jim wanted to hit something very hard. “Kinokamura Syndrome. From the radiation of the trip.” He hissed as a larger spasm shook him. “They didn’t even know until they started having children. Easy to treat with medication, but passed down to the majority of offspring.”

Jim had heard of Kinokamura—he didn’t remember any of the specifics, but it was a footnote to the history of space exploration; a lesson in the dangers and heroism involved in Earth’s first trips into the universe. He hadn’t known it was personal history for his best friend, too.

“Your family were Martians?” Jim asked. “I’ve known you for nine years—you never told me that.”

Bones shrugged spastically. “My great great grandmother came back to Earth—” he groaned, good arm wrapping around his belly— “but the damage was already done. I should have learned from her mistake and never left the planet.” He rolled toward Jim and laid his forehead on the floor. “Fever’s going up,” he observed clinically. “At this rate, I've probably got a few hours. Whatever you’re planning on doing, you’d better get to it.”

Jim didn’t have any plan, damn it. Berating himself for his pessimism, he shook his head. “No.” There was no way this was happening. He leaned too close to the wall and jerked back as the electricity ran through his hand and through his body to the floor. “No, Bones, come on. Just hold on.”

“Trying,” Bones whispered.

The door to the barn opened a sliver and Hannah crept in, angry and scared. She watched Bones as she approached, glancing at Jim only briefly.

“This is him?” she asked softly, a hot grief in her voice that matched Joseph's fury. “The one who destroyed New Matria?”

“No,” Jim replied, fervent and scared to death. “No, it’s not. He isn’t this Findlay guy that you think he is.”

Hannah eyed him doubtfully. “He looks like him.” She studied Bones again, where he lay on the floor, the spasms increasing. “They all did that in the end,” she said. She was fascinated by his suffering—but Jim didn’t think she was happy about it. “After their minds died.”

Bones gazed up at her and Jim could see, under the pain and the fear and the outrage, that unquenchable compassion that made Bones who he was. “What happened?” McCoy asked unsteadily, pushing himself up to kneel back on his heels.

Hannah frowned at him, clearly not believing that he didn’t know exactly what had occurred. “The land wasn’t worth that much, Findlay,” she scolded him bitterly. “You could have found another place. My father and the others in New Matria—they just wanted to farm. It’s all Dad ever wanted.” Her eyes hardened even as she started to cry. “But you had to have it, didn’t you? For your grand technological dream.”

She turned to Jim, and he held her gaze with sincerity and innocence, all the while feeling each and every spasm that went through his friend’s body.

“I know you all think retrotech isn’t sustainable anymore. You think we need spaceports and satellites—like letting the Federation have their cut of the planet isn’t enough.” She growled her annoyance. “You people poisoned the wells so you could have their land.” Her voice cracked with emotion. “Forty-five men, women, and children. Mindless now. Laid out in beds just waiting to die.”

“Oh God,” Bones muttered, closing his eyes.

“They’re still alive?” Jim asked, sick to his stomach at the thought.  

“If you call it living,” the woman quipped bitterly.

Bones fought off another bout of nausea; from the horror of what had been done to these people or from the poison, Jim honestly couldn’t say.

“They were all just sick at first,” she said. “Fever, aches, throwing up—like from food or a virus. Then pains in their muscles and numbness in their arms and legs. Then the seizures started and their minds just...  went away, little by little.”

“Zombie weed,” Bones whispered, mouth tight as he tried not to throw up again.

The woman glared. Jim just looked a question at him.

The explanation came in fits and starts as Bones panted in time with the pain. “ Oxalatis Martocitum. It’s a water plant. Probably grows great here.” He gazed at Jim hopelessly, flushed and hot and angry and terrified. “Turns people into mindless zombies.” His snort was weak. “Hence the name.”

Mindless, drooling, twitching every limb until your brain finally melts.

“Lucky for me, I’ll miss that part—” Bones ended his quip on a wordless groan and curled forward, forehead on the floor again. “How long did it take?” he ground out as the cramps left him for a minute. “For them to…”

“Two weeks, for my dad,” she replied, still confused by him asking the questions at all. “Some went faster.”

“Low concentration,” he muttered breathlessly. “Probably just planted live specimens in the wells themselves.” Bones’s sincerity was clear as he met Hannah’s eyes. “The wells could be decontaminated,” he promised her.

Jim gaped at him—was he really considering helping these people?

“The condition might even be reversible in some of them. If we could beam a few of the patients up to the Donovan , maybe we could— God…”

She stared as he heaved without bringing anything up, furious at her own uncertainty. “Why would you tell me that?” she asked, incredulous.

“Because he isn’t Findlay,” Jim said, trying to draw the woman’s focus back to him as McCoy turned his stomach inside out.

“No, you just want to use them as pawns,” she averred, though she sounded less sure of herself. “Trick us into giving them to you—or use their cure to make us give you everything.” Her gaze wavered back and forth between the two of them.

“He wants to help them!” Jim grated out, forcing himself not to yell. “He’s a doctor—he saves lives, he doesn’t destroy them!” He moved forward, the sparks his hand gave off as he hit the electrical field for a second shocking her into meeting his eyes. “Please believe me. Please !”

“None of them were like this so fast,” she whispered after a long moment, uncertainty and regret in her body language. Her eyes never left the other cage.

Bones groaned, turning his head toward her while still curled forward. “Your brother must have concentrated the dose—wanted to make sure—” He hissed out a breath and went silent.

“He’s dying,” Jim said, his throat nearly closing on the word. “I don’t know where the man is who did this to your family, but he is not him . Look at him—he isn’t going to live long enough to be the example your brother wants him to be.” He took a deep breath to keep from screaming. “He doesn’t deserve to die.”

The woman’s head tilted to the side as she scrutinized McCoy. Bones was rocking now, but he still hadn’t straightened back up. Jim was afraid he couldn’t.

“Hannah!”

Joseph's voice sounded from somewhere outside and startled them all. Bones whimpered as his body jerked in surprise.

“Please!” Jim begged. “I need to contact my ship. They can help him.” I hope. The doubt in her eyes was growing.

“Hannah, where are you!?” Joseph called again, more insistent.

“I have to go,” she told Jim, frightened again in the face of her brother's anger. “Joseph can’t find me here.” She ran to the door, then out and away as if Hell was on her heels.

Jim slumped down to sit cross-legged on the ground again, staring at his friend as Bones tried to hold himself together. Almost literally.

Like he could sense Jim looking at him, Bones sighed and rolled his head around again to meet his eyes, pain and fear searing out from him. “They aren’t the bad guys here,” he whispered. And then he chuckled in a way that made Jim want to throw up himself. “Doesn’t mean I don’t want to kick Joseph’s ass, but…”

Jim sighed. Maybe he had learned something since he’d come back to life, because he actually saw Bones’s point. “Maybe not, but they aren’t the good guys, either. And they’re not going to let us go.”

“I know.” Bones kneeled silent for a long moment. “He’s trying to save his own people.”

Jim clenched his fists. “So was Khan.”

“Yeah, well, you shouldn’t have tried to kill him, either.”

The words were a shot to the gut, filled with anger and grief and recrimination. “Bones—”

“No.” Bones took a deep breath, fire in the words though his eyes were growing dull. "Chris Pike was a dad to you, and I get—that." He looked Jim in the eyes. "But killing in his name? That's not who he was.” He closed his eyes. “When he got back to the ship with Khan still alive, I told Spock it's not who you are. Is it?"

A protest died on Jim's lips. “No. It’s not.”

It wasn’t. And maybe that was the whole reason he’d been working so hard not to think about what had happened. Grief had turned him into something he just couldn’t be and he was afraid he’d never be the same again.

“Sure as hell isn’t who I am, either, Jim, so don’t get any God damned ideas about vengeance, all right?” He sighed, toppling to the side in exhaustion. “Vengeance isn’t justice.”

But you’re still dying.

There was nothing to do but sit and watch—he couldn’t even bring up enough anger to sustain him, because these people... There was nothing to say, because Jim honestly couldn’t find any words that would push past the horror in his throat. Fast death in a blaze of glory was one thing—burned out like a bad crystal—but this…?

He didn’t know how much longer it was before Bones finally faced him again, skin red with fever and pain.

“Jim…” he begged, unable to finish.

“I know,” Jim replied dully. Because he did. Propped up in a radiation-filled chamber, feeling his cells cooking... he knew exactly .

God, was this how Scotty had felt when he was cursing him out, demanding that he get his “mad ass” into the decon airlock and start the scrubbers? He remembered Spock’s face, so damned out of focus and yet completely clear; the single tear that ran down the Vulcan’s face. A world away and watching, helpless…

“Was it hot?” Bones asked, staring at him.

“Yeah,” he whispered, trying not to get caught in the memory of it. “It was.”

Bones shook hard for a long moment and Jim held his breath until the seizure ended and McCoy collected himself. He was dying—and for something he didn’t do. Something he’d never do. And there wasn’t a damn thing Jim could do about it. Except be here. Having Spock there in the engine room had made a difference, he remembered. All the difference.

“We never talked about it,” Bones said at length.

“I kind of hoped you just didn’t want to,” he replied, trying for a flip tone.

“I didn’t bring it up because I figured you’d been through enough. Me punching you out wasn’t going help.” He sighed unsteadily. “Wasn’t going to change the way you do things, either.”

“What do you mean?” Jim asked, not sure he wanted the answer.

“I mean one day you’re going into that body bag and you’re not coming out again.”

Bones had told him once a few weeks ago, when the doctor was drunker than he should have been, that he wasn’t “going on any damn five year mission with a suicidal captain.” At the time, Jim had put it off to the stress of everything, but...

“I didn’t see any other choice,” he said quietly. “I couldn’t let Scotty do it—”

Bones let out a death-rattle laugh. “God, you’re really going to do this now, aren’t you?”

“You started it,” Jim shot back, then sobered immediately. This was the way they always dealt with it—all of them, in fact: find a place to make a pithy comment and drag everyone away from talking about it. “There were people still on the ship, Bones—you included. What was I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know,” his friend replied. “I don’t know, I just know what it was like to…” He hissed in irritation. “ Damn it , Jim, when you died—” Another seizure took him and tears hit Jim’s hands where they lay open in his lap.

“I’m sorry,” Jim breathed as the body in the next cage shook.

“You… should… be,” Bones replied in bits and pieces as his body calmed, a shade of his usual acid in the tone. He collected himself with a visible effort.

“A captain goes down with his ship,” Jim whispered. “Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be?”

“And what happens to the rest of us when you die and the ship doesn’t go down?” Bones asked, his voice now thready and a little garbled. He breathed shallowly for a few long minutes. “Look, just admit you were a selfish asshole and don’t do it again.”

Jim laughed involuntarily, dropping more tears. “Bones…” Don’t do this...

“Do me a favor…” McCoy’s voice petered out into nothing, and the tremors stopped.

Jim waited and tried to decide whether his best friend was still breathing. “Bones?” What favor? “Bones!”

No reply came.

He stared at the unmoving body until he just couldn’t anymore—seconds that felt like eternity. And then his gaze drifted and settled on the cage around him and a terrible stillness came over him, like the feeling he’d had right before he’d decked Scotty and walked into an active warp core.

The door might be electrified, but it didn’t look unbreakable...

“It isn’t the volts that’ll kill you, Jimmy,” his stepfather told him, when he was all of seven years old and had shocked himself on a fence near their house. “It’s the amps. Electric fence just doesn’t have the amperage to fry you—hell, even the voltage isn’t going to kill you outright.” He’d grinned a little cruelly. “Doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt like hell.”

“Only time in my life I’ll hope you were right,” he told the spirit of the man who’d dragged him through his childhood. He stared at the body in the cage and prayed that sometime soon he’d hear his friend giving him hell for taking this kind of risk again. He was a selfish asshole. He’d saved Spock on Nibiru and he’d gone down to Kronos and he’d stepped into a “radioactive catastrophe waiting to happen” and all because he wouldn’t— couldn’t —lose the people he loved.

“Sorry, Bones,” he whispered.

And then he sat back on his ass and kicked the door, hard. The electricity jolted from his feet straight through to his bones and Jim gritted his teeth at the pain and kicked again. And again. And again.

“Oh, come on!” he groaned, giving himself a second to rest and staring at his smoking boots. His heart raced and he was sure it had skipped a few beats already. God, this hurt! “The warp core wasn’t this hard!” Bones still hadn’t moved. “You better be alive,” he panted, willing his lungs to keep working right.

The next hit slammed the door open and Jim pulled his legs back as fast as he could so he wouldn’t land on the live wire that made up the bottom of the cage wall. The current still ran through the metal, but the door was open and Jim sat there, unable to stop shaking and twitching for a long minute while the electricity drained out of him.

“Bones, I got it,” he called unsteadily, pretending the other man could hear him. He hauled himself to his feet and slid past the door, careful not to touch it again.

He staggered up to the cage beside his own, still shaky and aching, and peered in. “I got it,” he repeated, thinking—hoping—he saw Bones breathing. Searching around again, he spied a small cabinet on the far wall. He hadn’t been able to see it before, past McCoy’s cage.

He tottered over to it and opened it to find the generator that probably powered the cages; hell, maybe the whole farm. He switched it off and sparks stopped flying from the ruined door of his own erstwhile prison.

“Thank God,” he whispered. There was a wrench on the shelf above the generator, and he grabbed it and headed for the one cage left, destroying the lock and throwing open the door.

He fell to his knees and rolled the body over, praying. “Bones, come on…”

McCoy’s eyes were open a sliver, though it was clear he wasn’t conscious. But he let out a breath. Another. Jim dropped his chin to his chest and blew out a breath of his own.

“Damn it, Bones,” he whispered, lips curling into a painfully relieved smile as his eyes teared up.

Joseph suddenly barged in, angry and self-righteous, and Jim’s hands balled into fists.

“You can’t save him,” Joseph said, an old-fashioned gun in his hand and pointed at Jim’s head as he approached the two men in the cage. “He’ll end up just like them.”

No, Jim’s mind screamed. He won’t. He won’t live that long!

He was on Joseph in a second, smacking the gun away and bearing the larger man to the ground. Joseph struck him in the side of the head, but Jim barely felt it. All he could feel right now was the certainty that Bones was dying— like Pike did —and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do except make sure that the man who did it paid for it.

“Stop!” Hannah’s voice dimly penetrated, sad and scared and horrified.

Joseph took advantage of the distraction and got his legs up to kick Jim off of him, landing him back in the cage beside McCoy’s body.

“Joseph, please !” she cried, as Jim shoved himself to his feet and brought Joseph down by sheer force of will.

He raised a fist—

“Is this who we are now, Joseph?” Hannah asked tearfully.

Sure as hell isn’t who I am, either, Jim.

Jim froze. No. No it wasn’t. He looked up at Hannah’s tear-stained face, then down at Joseph, whose anger was tempered now by fear. Jim yanked the larger man up, forcing him to stare at the motionless body in the cell.

“He’s not Findlay,” Jim declared again, the calm pronouncement taking every ounce of his energy when all he really wanted to do was keep pounding this man into the ground. Joseph’s eyes went round, finally seeing the truth of it.

“And even if he was, all you’d be sending them is a body,” Jim murmured, shoving Joseph away and heading back to Bones, who still hadn’t moved, damn it. Jim turned exhaustedly to the man who’d done this and saw a shadow of horror in his eyes, a glimmer of remorse. “Is that really going to save those farmers?” he asked.

Because that was the crux of this after all. Vengeance isn’t justice.

“No one can save them,” Joseph choked out. He gestured helplessly at McCoy’s body. “He’s doomed them all to that... horror.”

“ Not. Him. ” Jim took a deep breath. Bones seemed to think there was a way to reverse what had happened to those people, and if there was a way to save them …

“Let us go,” he commanded softly. “Let me prove to you we are who we say we are. Let me contact my ship and get him help, and I promise we’ll see what we can do to help your people.”

“Listen to him, Joseph.”

Both men turned to Hannah where she stood away from the confrontation, holding a basket and looking stricken. “He said he could save them.”

“He’d say anything, Hannah—” Joseph tried, though Jim could see him crumbling.

“But what if it’s true!? ” she grated with more courage than she’d shown before. Joseph didn’t move and Jim put his hand on Bones to feel the barely detectable rise and fall of his breath. “We could have Dad back again,” she whispered desperately, reaching out finally to grasp her brother’s arm. “And if he isn’t Findlay, can you have his death on your hands?”

The chest beneath Jim’s hand stopped rising and falling for a long moment, then started again. A rapid heartbeat and pervasive fever remained throughout. Jim fought the urge to jump up and force Joseph to get him what he needed.

Sure as hell isn’t who I am.

“Is this who you are?” Jim pressed.

Joseph stared at the cell where Bones lay silent and frozen. The horror in his eyes grew, and Jim knew that feeling, too. Because once you didn’t have vengeance, all you had was grief.

“Get them their things,” Joseph muttered, as if none of it mattered anymore. He was crying suddenly. “Just get them and let them go.”

Hannah knelt beside Jim and showed him the basket. “When you cut the power, you cut the shielding,” she said gently. “They’ll hear you now.”

With a shaking hand, Jim grabbed his communicator and opened a channel. The heart under his hand stuttered. “ Donovan , this is Kirk.”

“Kirk, where the hell have you been?” Anna Seward sounded ready to spit nails. “I got a call telling me that you and Dr. McCoy—”

“We have a medical emergency,” Jim broke in, gesturing for Hannah to move back. “I need you to lock onto Dr. McCoy and myself and transport us directly to Med Bay.”

Seward took a moment to answer. Her voice was soft and sad and Jim knew she’d been informed of McCoy’s depressed life signs. He wondered if they’d lose their lock on Bones if he...

“Transporting now,” she said, steel and determination in her voice.

Jim couldn’t do anything more but pray as the beam took them.

*********

It was three hours later before Jim felt like he could breathe again.

They’d transported into a maelstrom of activity. A ship full of doctors guaranteed that Bones was put on machines almost immediately, but stabilizing him took a little more work. Jim had managed to spit out the name of the poison McCoy thought they were working with and then he had to explain about Bones being a Martian (which caused a number of the doctors and nurses to curse and move faster) and then Anna Seward was, gently, right in his face to have him explain what happened. She was the captain here, after all, that was her job.

His job was to sit in a chair next to a bed that glowed with a containment field that allowed for a high concentration of oxygen for the patient.

Leonard McCoy looked horrible, but at least he’d stopped twitching. His systems had shut down and getting them back online wasn’t as easy as just kicking the engine, apparently. Jim’s own bruises and bumps and burns had been tended, but he didn’t really feel them, except as part of the all-encompassing hell of what was going on.

God, were they not even safe on a low-tech shore leave?!

“Captain Kirk?”

Jim turned his head to see one of the Donovan ’s horde of doctors, Maktainia Jonn, standing beside him and studying Bones’s vitals readout. The Trill’s symbiote was old—older than Earth’s push into space—but his current host was barely twenty-five. Jim couldn’t believe a man less than a decade younger than him could make him feel so old.

“How’s he doing, Mak?” Jim asked. He’d helped the younger man out a lot over the course of the emergency on Yaasia. He liked him.

“He’s holding his own,” Mak replied with a realistic optimism that was far too wise for his young face. “But then, that’s what Leonard does best—grits his way through it and comes up with a miracle.”

Jim nodded. It really was, and Jim and a whole hell of a lot of other people were alive because of it. If only he could come up with his own miracle.

“Captain Seward wanted me to let you know she’s made contact with the leaders in New Matria and explained the situation,” Mak continued, stepping forward to adjust a few controls on McCoy’s bed. “Some of us are heading down to examine the farmers. See what we can do.”

There wasn’t anything to say to that. He hoped they could help.

“Give him some time, Kirk,” Mak said, gripping his shoulder as he turned to go. “Leonard will be awake and driving you insane before we even reach Earth, I’ll bet.” He smiled. “You did good, Captain.”

Jim snorted as the Trill left. To Bones, he murmured, “I feel like I should be insulted that a punk kid just patted me on the head.” Bones, of course, didn’t answer.

“Captain?”

Jim turned around, wincing at the ache in his back, to see Chekov standing behind him, uncertainty making him seem even younger than he was. A smile surprised Jim, breaking across his lips at the clipped Russian accent.

“Mr. Chekov,” he greeted him, trying to sound normal and reassuring.

“Is Dr. McCoy…?”

“Maktainia Jonn says he’s stable,” Jim told him. Not that stable was much to go on.

Chekov walked past his chair and stared down at Bones’s pale face. McCoy’s fever was down. They were trying to flush the poison out of his cells and get his organs working again. And hoping there’d be a mind there if he finally woke up.

“I did not think we would have to do this again so soon,” Chekov murmured quietly.

Jim was confused—until it dawned on him that he’d probably looked a hell of a lot like this less than a handful of months ago. “He’ll be all right, Pavel,” he said quietly.

Chekov took a deep breath. “Yes. I know.” The grin he turned on Jim was startling. “We cannot return to the Enterprise an officer short.”

The laugh bubbled up and Jim let it. “No. We wouldn’t want to do that,” he agreed.

“ Lieutenant Chekov, please report to engineering ,” came a tentative call over the comms.

“ O gospodi, eti lyudi! * ” Chekov exclaimed. Jim wasn’t sure exactly what it meant, but he’d heard the young man say it before and he always translated it in his head as, I work with idiots. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, casting one more glance at the bed. “I will come back. When I can.” And then he was gone.

“Never change, Chekov,” Jim murmured. He considered McCoy and decided he definitely had a little more color in his cheeks. “You either.”

**********

The detention facility in Junian Station was state of the art. It reminded Jim more of the brig on the Enterprise than he wanted to admit, actually, and a bizarre sense of déjà vu gripped him as he was led to the fourth cell down the line.

Joseph and Hannah Kitransson sat silently together on one of the two bunks in the little room. Hannah looked up at Jim as he walked into view, her face full of fear and remorse. Joseph didn’t move, his gaze blank and defeated and horrified, and Jim should have felt something—vengeful, angry, something . But he really didn’t.  

Joseph was just a pitiful reflection of his own grief that he wasn’t sure he much wanted to see. If Khan had been a normal person and Uhura hadn’t been a buzz of reason in his ear, he’d’ve beat the man to death in cold blood on Kronos. He would’ve been Joseph, trying to exact personal, physical revenge.

That’s not who you are, Bones whispered in his mind.

“You sent doctors,” Hannah murmured in shock, walking to the edge of the room, where the forcefield created a wall that didn’t burn or shock. “After everything…”

“Dr. McCoy wouldn’t expect anything less of us,” Jim replied dully.

“I’m sorry,” she sighed. “I’m so sorry. My brother—”

“The Paratan Security Force picked up Findlay and his associates,” Jim said quietly, cutting off her explanation. He didn’t want to hear it. “He’ll pay for his crimes.”

She nodded sheepishly. “And us?”

Jim felt a flare of anger, then. It was good to feel something, he supposed. “You assaulted and poisoned a Federation officer,” he told her coldly. “The Junian counsel will decide what the punishment is.” He took an unsteady breath. “The charges will depend on Dr. McCoy.”

On whether he lives or dies . The thought threatened to drop him into an abyss he’d already visited before.

“How is your father?” he asked, the words thick and hard to form.

A tear rolled down Hannah’s face. “Your doctors think he will recover,” she said quietly. “Your friend—”

“Take care of him,” Jim interrupted. God, he wanted to hit someone. He looked beyond her to her brother, to his hands balled in impotent fists, and the impulse left him. “Take care of them both.”

And then he turned and walked away. There were better places to be, after all. And worse…

********

“I’ll give Dr. McCoy your regards,” Jim said tiredly. Spock was the third of the command crew to check in. Jim had nothing to tell him.

“I fail to see how conveying regards to an unconscious individual would elicit a satisfactory response,” was Spock’s predictable comment. He was always more Vulcan when he was on New Vulcan, and you had to take that into consideration.

“Well, I doubt he’d expect it of you, Spock, so I guess I won’t bother.” After another 48 hours and no improvement, Jim wasn’t really in the mood to take much of anything into consideration.

Spock blinked at the anger, and Jim immediately let it go. “I’m sorry, Spock,” he said with a sigh. “I just...”

“Dr. McCoy was similarly reactive mere months ago, Captain,” Spock broke in quietly. “I suggest that we look to the final outcome of this crisis to be equally similar.”

“In other words, let’s hope this works out as well as me coming back from the dead?” Jim translated. He smiled. “Thanks, Spock.”

“Indeed.” Spock was silent a long moment. “New Vulcan is not far from your current position,” he started tentatively. “I do not believe my presence here is vital to the current discussions.”

“No, stay where you are,” Jim told him. “I’ll keep you up-to-date—when I finally have something to report.” He closed his eyes. He’d caught a nap for a couple of hours but it wasn’t enough to make up for the last few days.

“He will be okay, Jim,” Spock told him—the sincerity and assurance snapping Jim’s eyes open again.

“That your Vulcan intuition kicking in?” Jim asked with a chuckle.

“A… friend’s hope,” Spock allowed.

Jim nodded. “I’ll let you know when things change,” he promised, closing out the communication.

He sat back, stretching carefully and ignoring the way his body hated him for sitting in this chair forever. Funny, he hadn’t been stiff at all when he woke up from being dead. It was like he’d finally gotten to rest for the first time since Christopher Pike picked him up off the floor in that dive bar in Iowa.

“You had napkins hanging out of your nose, did you not?” Pike remembered brutally.

Jim chuckled. “Yeah… That was a good fight.”

“‘A good fight.’ I think that’s your problem right there.”

It wasn’t his only problem, was it?

"I figured you’d been through enough. Me punching you out wasn’t going help.” Bones had sounded so defeated. “Wasn’t going to change the way you do things, either.”

Jim sighed. “This might, though,” he murmured. This sitting by a bedside, waiting endlessly…

He turned from the comm console back to the bed in question, and froze. Two very confused hazel eyes were staring at him.

“Hey,” he murmured, walking forward and stopping just outside the oxygen field.

Bones gazed, unblinking, for a long moment and Jim started to worry. Three of the twenty-eight New Matrians that had regained consciousness so far had a fair amount of mental impairment. Jim had hoped…

“From one cage to another,” Bones whispered finally, throat dry as his eyes flicked around. He must have noticed the oxygen field. "Get me a glass of water? A man could die of thirst in one of these.”

Jim cleared his throat and smiled a little unsteadily. “You’re not dying of anything,” he said, maybe a little too forcefully.

“But I’m here with water anyway,” Mak said smoothly, magically appearing to reach a glass of water through the oxygen field.

“All your brain cells there?” the Trill teased, an edge of seriousness to the words.

“Am I in space?” Bones asked, carefully sipping the liquid from his half-lying position. How come he could always manage not to soak himself when he did that?

“Yep,” Mak replied, watching the readouts of Bones’s brainwaves on the monitor above his head.

“Then no,” Bones replied, eyes closing again. “I’m clearly insane.” He looked up at Jim and his eyes softened at the tears Jim knew were in his eyes. “Guess you were right. They did find us.”

“No,” Jim told him, grinning as Mak adjusted the oxygen field. “ You were right. They weren’t the bad guys.”

Bones studied him critically and frowned at the bruises on his face. "But you had to go and beat the crap out of him anyway, didn't you?"

Jim nodded his thanks to Mak as the doctor left them alone.

"I didn't try to kill him, though," Jim said flippantly. "That's progress, right?"

Bones managed to glare, which was a hell of a feat, given that he looked like he was going to pass out any minute.

Jim took a deep breath. "He was me," he said finally. "I was there and you were dying and I was so damn angry and… Then it was like I was looking in a mirror." Which sounded stupidly corny and completely accurate.

"And..." Bones asked, sounding stronger already and leading him forward in that way he had. God, Jim had missed him! How the hell did Bones wait like this for three weeks !?

"And I stopped. First instinct is to seek revenge, right?" He grinned softly in apology for his actions. "For some of us, anyway."

"Oh, I like a little revenge every once in a while," Bones joked.

“Their father is getting better,” Jim said, not willing to turn the conversation the way they always seemed to these days. “Only you would be worried about the people who were poisoning you.”

Bones shrugged, closing his eyes. “‘The best revenge is to be unlike he who injured you.’”

Jim knew the quote, though he’d never internalized it, obviously. “Marcus Aurelius.”

“ That’s who we are, Jim,” Bones said seriously, opening his eyes to give Jim a candid gaze stripped of all the usual bullshit between them. “Starfleet, the Enterprise , us .”

The Enterprise …

“You saved the crew,” Spock had said, when Jim was dying in the warp core. Words spoken in grief and anger and shock that Jim had done what he’d done.

He hadn’t saved the crew. It was the other way around—it always had been. Spock and Uhura and Scotty… Chekov with his endless energy. Sulu’s quiet strength.

And Bones: pessimism and compassion and, apparently, an idealism Jim hadn’t known he had. Or maybe he always knew it. Maybe that was what had stopped him from taking his own revenge on Joseph. The knowledge that Bones wouldn’t thank him for the death.

Jim knew he wouldn’t have thanked Spock for Khan’s death, either.

“Yeah,” he agreed easily, feeling lighter than he had since he’d returned from the dead himself. Bones looked like he could use another day of rest. “Yeah. Just took me a while to get it.”

“Nobody kicked you out of here, did they?” Bones asked, closing his eyes again. “Get Jonn back here. I’ll have him do it.”

McCoy was half-asleep already, but here, alive, notdeadthistime .

“I’ll be back,” Jim promised.

“Like a bad penny,” Bones observed.

Defying doctor’s orders as usual, Jim waited until he was sure Bones was sleeping before he left. He’d have to call everyone.

The rest of us .

*********
the end