Archive of Our Own ^beta

I. Prologue

Outside the hospital, a world that strangely failed to exist inside these walls, chaos, death, and instability ruled in ways that they hadn’t in over two hundred years. The death toll climbed and climbed, an insurmountable mountain made small. Piles of sheared metal and glass shards grew taller, tiny against Vengeance and hollowed-out half-skeletons of buildings too stubborn to topple.

The sky had fallen, and there was nowhere that made sense. There was no up or down, no answers, no guarantees, and nothing safe. There were the same minutes and hours, over and over again, filled with a bottomless certainty of failure. Nights came and went slowly, like days and afternoons and all the inbetweens.

Bones slouched in a hard-back chair next to his best friend, wishing he had a bottle of any kind of booze in his hand, gaze focused out the window. Somewhere, the sky turned wispy vanilla and antique orange, but the sky here still suffocated in black smoke: a better sight than the bookend to a family tragedy that should have already been memorialized and buried.

“Did I do this for you, or for everyone else?” Bones asked, eyelids heavy and cold, every blink a kind reprieve he hardly deserved. “Things we should have talked about before they god damned happened, huh.”

His voice sounded tight and hoarse even to his own ears, but it was still lost in the sounds of mechanized, regulated breaths and digitized heartbeats. Life support, because the serum wasn’t doing a god damn thing, and because Jim was still gray and lifeless, in all the ways that mattered, the same he’d been zipped inside of a body bag.

Everyone’s puppet, Jim Kirk, even in death.

II. Part One

The decontamination process complete, Bones led Spock to intensive care and gestured invitingly to Room 1002. Spock hesitated, looked questioningly at Bones, and then stepped through the open doorway and haltingly approached Jim.

From Spock's perspective, it must have looked bad. And it was. The initial serum had been awfully ineffective, healing fractured bones but leaving random bits and pieces of damage and, of course, a body decimated with radiation. There were still cuts on Jim's face and bruises on his neck and arms, stark against his pale skin. He still didn't breathe on his own and, if not for the endless circulation of cold packs, he would have already burnt up from the fever.

“May I touch him?”

Bones nodded before he realized that Spock wasn't looking his way. He cleared his throat and said, “Yes.”

It was an odd thing to watch Spock rest an uneasy hand on Jim’s bare forearm, taking care to avoid the IV band, eyes searching for something known only to Spock. Bones felt like a trespasser in an intimate moment, in his own damned domain, and he didn’t like it. Not at all.

Less than a week ago, this kind of display would have sent Bones reeling. Only, he’d been the one to treat Spock’s bloody, fractured knuckles, not very many words between them, except, “I used to do this for Jim more often than I cared to back at the Academy” and a too-quiet, weak “I do not wish to discuss the matter further.”

“Doctor, what is his status?”

Any other day, Bones might have rolled his eyes, commented on how Spock sounded like he was talking about anything except someone’s life, and/or sarcastically pointed out that Jim's status was awfully self-explanatory. Not today, though, not after watching Spock walk into this room as though he was desecrating something sacred.

“After we moved forward with the full transfusion, his temperature spiked dangerously,” Bones explained. “It could either be because his body is fighting or responding to the treatment. His immune system is gone, though, so it's likely the latter. And that's good. A little precarious, but good.”

Bones’ unspoken hunch was that Jim’s body was rebooting, his owned damned warp core snapping back into place. The fever that had made Jim hot to the touch and slick with sweat only meant that the marathon was on. Bones was ready to run it for as far as Jim would let him, and, after that, as far as his own desperation would take him. He still hadn’t decided how far that might be, ethically or otherwise.

“Then we still do not know if he will survive,” Spock said.

There was nothing accusative about the statement, only a sadness that Bones pretended not to hear. Maybe, even for a Vulcan, not all the logic in the universe could quell the inane hope that four and a half days of an unethical maybe-treatment could definitively raise the dead.

“May I have a personal moment, Doctor?”

Bones nodded, left the room, and so much wished he hadn’t looked back to see Spock smooth away sweat-laden hair from Jim’s forehead and run his fingers down Jim's faintly-scarred jaw line. Bones had no idea about when Spock suddenly started to like Jim, just as he was sure that Jim had no idea about the mess he might be leaving behind.

Mere minutes later, Spock found Bones pretending to do important things at the nurse's station.

“That's all?” Bones asked, falling into step with Spock. “You were barely there for five minutes.”

“As you warned beforehand, the Captain's immune system is compromised. It is not logical to risk unnecessary complications.”

It wasn't the time to call Spock out on his apparent breach of logic in seeing Jim to start with. Bones simply offered a thoughtful “hmm” and stopped when Spock paused at the turbo lift.

“I can't leave the floor,” Bones said, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “I'll keep you updated. And come back any time; we'll make it work. Enterprise is the only family he has.”

Spock furrowed his brow, though Bones didn't understand why. Spock knew the facts, just not the ugly, drunken details, of Jim's personal life.

“I...” Spock closed his mouth and then opened it again. “You likely perceive my behavior as strange. But what I...feel, and what I believe he felt, is the loss of all that might have been. And the inefficient use of the time we had. Your efforts are appreciated, Doctor.”

Bones looked away, speechless and, quite honestly, surprised by Spock's words. He'd only known Jim for four years – only four – but he could hardly remember a time when Jim wasn't at his side. He couldn't say he'd felt as though those years had been wasted, but the thought of losing the years they should have had resonated. Hard.

“It's not over yet. And he's not done.”

Spock stepped into the lift without another word and disappeared behind the whoosh of the door.

In all their years, Jim had never made Bones a liar. If he started now, he'd kill him.

Jim was a storm that didn’t know it couldn’t tell which way the wind was blowing. From the day Bones met Jim, the kid had been in motion: constantly moving, constantly doing, constantly changing.

“He found me in a bar, man. ‘I dare you to do better.’ What the fuck,” Jim sneered, fewer years ago than really seemed possible, eyes glassy and dull, nose bloodied, knuckles a swollen mess of broken flesh. “‘I dare you to go fuck yourself,’ is what I should’ve said. How ‘bout that. Fucking prick. Like I want to be here. Shit, Bones, my head hurts.”

If there hadn’t been something – so much – deeper than what Jim tried to make the world believe about him, Bones would’ve never stuck around for the bullshit drama parade. He suspected that that might have actually been exactly what Jim was expecting, if not hoping for: an excuse to drink, fight, and fail so hard he could say that he'd proved Pike wrong.

After a few months, Starfleet became less and less and less of the abstract, monolithic enemy Jim had always seen it as. The shift in Jim's perception was palpable in a way that Bones couldn't quite remember, let alone describe, but there'd been...something. A change.

The only problem was that not even the Academy could keep Jim busy: he wrote papers and finished homework so quickly and half-assedly that Bones just waited to lose Jim to academic expulsion. When that didn’t happen, Bones looked at Jim’s record, saw the grades and the comments (things like “needs challenged” and “too smart for his own good,” mostly), and needed to sit down.

“Oh, what, are you kidding? I can do this stuff in my sleep.” Jim looked so surprised that there was even a question about his scholastic aptitude that Bones couldn’t think of anything to say, other than, “All right… Can I ask you some questions?”

To Bones’ knowledge, Jim never told anyone that he tutored (“Damn it, Jim, you’re helping, not tutoring!” “No, I’m not that nice. Buckle up, Buttercup.”) Bones in gen-ed engineering and physics. And Jim was good, so good at it. He was enthusiastic and eager, which usually didn’t characterize Jim unless there was a party, a particularly good-looking cadet in one his classes, or a terrible plan to antagonize a disliked professor. Patient, even. Invested. And do you think he let Bones encourage him to become a student teacher at the Academy? Absolutely not.

It was the definition of “the most difficult part of caring about Jim Kirk.” Jim didn’t see the good in his own self. He didn’t see his own potential, not really. So, sure, he spent two quarters on Farragut and earned “some fancy award, who cares, Bones?” He didn’t see how his flaws – his irritating, never-ending, god damned flaws, and Bones just wanted to shake the kid until something rearranged itself in his head – were holding him back.

Often, Bones wondered if that’s how Pike felt, too, and he wondered if Pike, like him, felt too slow to catch up with the Kirk brand of moving target. And he’d wondered, so many times, whether Jim was going to tear the world apart, or if he was going to tear himself apart, like it’d ever really been a question of which one.

God damn it.

God damn it.

“I’m tired of this, Jim,” Bones said. He meant every word. “You know I love you, but I’m… Shit. Not fair. Sorry.”

It wasn’t fair, even if it was true, and even if Bones was still chasing the moving target, which, right now, was more than dead but less than alive.

The fever had subsided. Jim’s skin was a normal-ish color. He breathed on his own, lived on his own. Victory, right? Wave the flags, pop the champagne, shoot the fireworks. Except, his pupils didn’t respond to light. His body didn’t respond to pain. His brain activity was more than minimal but far, far less than normal. Barring another miracle, Bones thought it likely that he’d managed to save Jim’s body but not Jim.

“I’m sorry I’ve done to this to you,” Bones said. “I…”

Bones looked away from the vitals display, to the floor, to the window, and finally, grudgingly, to Jim. He was just so still. Quiet. Peaceful. The same he’d been inside of a body bag.

Maybe this had been how Spock had felt, useless on the technically-correct side of a pane of glass, as close as he was ever going to get again. Hope turned to fear turned to “maybe, maybe, maybe” to failure and regret.

Bones regretted this. He did. He really did.

“This was selfish,” Bones said. “And you deserved better.”

He deserved better than to die younger and more horribly than his father, but Bones couldn’t help but think even that was preferable to this. And there it was. There it really was.

Bones left the room, initially intending to go to his lab and do who knows what. Stare at the same blood sample, or scour the same scans, as though any of it would be any less inevitable.

Before he caught up with his own decision, he was inside the turbolift. His skin itched, his gut constricted, and he ignored every faint “Doctor McCoy!” he heard on his way out of the building.

He sucked in the first breath of fresh air he’d had in days, barely noticing the hint of smoke that stuck in his throat, and sat down on the first completely open bench he found. He focused on the little things, the everyday things, and pretended that life would go on.

It was mid-afternoon, overcast, and unseasonably cold. A strong wind rustled the endless canopy of leaves into motion, creating a tangle of light-filtered shadows on the ground. Diffuse plumes of black smoke were just visible in the sky.

“Doctor McCoy?”

Bones didn't need to look up to know the owner of the voice, but he did anyway.

“Commander?”

Spock was in dress uniform, back as stiff and straight as ever, expression unreadable. Bones lifted his eyebrows, prodding.

“How is the Captain?” Spock asked, a degree of obviousness in his voice.

What a joke. What a complete joke, that Spock, of all people, still bought into this farce.

“The serum worked,” Bones answered, leaving his other thoughts – and the truth – unspoken. “Just waiting for him to wake up.”

Something flashed through Spock's eyes that Bones couldn't decipher. He wasn't crazy enough to try.

“Are visitors permissible? The crew has been...impatient.”

Bones huffed out a dry laugh and waved his hand. “Go for it.”

***

Those three little words spread through the crew like a fuel containment leak.

Bones spent two whole days apologizing to other physicians and staff for the influx of people and, well, the volume of some of the visitors. Today, a message flashed on his PADD from a name Bones didn't even care to look at: “Kirk again. Please contain.”

Bones rolled his eyes and tore himself from research that, honestly, wasn't going so well to start with. He made his way to Jim's room, waving away staff that tried to talk to him about the impromptu Enterprise senior crew party that Bones could hear two hallways down.

“It was a beetle! The size of my head! And I said, uh uh, no way, no how, this is not happenin'!”

“Yeah, I have plants like that.”

“Plants? Plants? Are you mad, laddie? These were beetles! With pinchers and a thousand and two little beady eyes and oh, you would've done somethin’ else if you'd seen'em, believe you me!”

“Some of my plants bite. The Terangian species Scirpus muscipula senses movement and can extend itself over five feet to capture its prey.”

“Wha... Why in the world would you have somethin’ like that? It's not on the Enterprise, is it? Does the Captain know?”

Silently, Bones leaned in the doorway and just watched and listened. If his heart could have been warmed (and it couldn't, no matter what Jim used to say), it would have been.

It was all of them. Scotty having the piss taken out of him by Sulu of all people, who sometimes wasn't so quiet or well-behaved. Chekov seemed impatiently excited about something and was waving his hands at them. Spock was, well, Spock, sitting at Jim's side, back straight, a PADD and an old book in his hands, expression inscrutable. And Uhura, the only one of them who would actually touch Jim, was shaking with quiet laughter, her forehead pressed against hands that were wrapped around Jim's left.

“Mr. Scott, if you don’t mind my asking, why would you not simply stun the creature and continue with your repairs?”

“What’s this, then? Were you there, Commander? I don’t think so!”

“Oh, oh, in Russia, there is a spider, the Karakurt spider, that is the most poisonous spider in the entire world--”

“Oh, pish posh, that’s not even close to these beetles, lad.”

“It is! One bit a little old lady in my town, and she lost her arm. The whole thing! All of it!”

“You know,” Sulu broke in. Bones rolled his eyes at Sulu’s ominous, calculated pause. “There are plants that can do that.”

Uhura snorted, sunk down, dragging Jim’s limp arm with her, and didn’t stop laughing. Bones heard a muffled, “Oh, my god.”

“No, no I don’t believe you. And this spider, it is huge.”

“Mr. Sulu, do you have verifiable scientific research that these so-called plants of yours truly exist?”

“Wait, really? Sir? With respect, I don’t think Chekov’s spider is nearly as large or dangerous as he would have us believe.”

Jim would’ve eaten up every second of this. Through all of it, Jim didn’t move. Didn’t breathe funny. Didn’t twitch or shift his eyes. Didn't pull his arm back from Uhura. He was still and silent and wrong, and not one of them realized it.

Bones had no idea if Jim was aware at all, but the likely reality that he wasn’t was more than Bones wanted to deal with at the moment. The pit of dread was constant, the weight of it staggering, and their hope, their expectations were more than he could carry.

He closed the door without a word and walked back the way he'd come, aimless because he was allowed to be.

***

The endless parade of visitors gradually tapered off. Life and duty didn't stop just because James Kirk had, and even if the Federation was in a holding pattern, too eviscerated to move. The general crew was expected to say their thank you's and get well soon's and then get back to wherever or whatever Starfleet had assigned them. But the others, Bones just didn't get.

Uhura explained that Sulu and Chekov felt like they didn't know Kirk well enough to sit with him and decided that pulling his ship through would be the better show of respect. At the end of the day, Jim was their Captain, not their friend. Scotty, though as loud and boisterous as ever, actually hadn't handled the visits well and was “sort of a mess. He blames himself for everything.” And no one had actually seen Carol Marcus since Enterprise docked.

And so there were three.

Starfleet had tried, weakly so, to commandeer Bones somewhere else. Bones put in for leave, as if there was such a thing right now, ignored them all, and made it clearer than ever that Jim was still critical.

Spock came once or twice every day for varying periods of time; sometimes with Uhura, sometimes without, but always Spock, every day, a book in his hand, and read.

“As his First Officer, I have a duty to...” Spock turned his eyes down, although Bones had neither asked for nor needed an explanation. “I have a duty. If my presence becomes disruptive, please do not hesitate to say so.”

In fact, Bones appreciated Spock's quietude, even if the words Spock read made no sense coming from a Vulcan, not even one who'd ran down Harrison in a fit of homicidal rage.

“'Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn't a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody; it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead.'”

Bones stood just inside the doorway and closed his eyes, Spock's smooth enunciation and pitch-perfect pacing an unexpected match for words that felt so much like Jim that it might have actually, literally hurt.

“Where'd you get the book?” Bones finally asked, stepping inside the room, arms crossed.

“It is part of the Captain's personal collection,” Spock answered, greeting Bones with a fleeting glance up and a small tilt of his head. “Enterprise may be damaged beyond repair, and we were asked to remove all personal possessions. Your staff attended to yours, given your commitments here.”

“Ah. Why'd you pick that one?”

“The Captain has many books. This was...the most worn. I thought he may enjoy it more than the others.” A pang of something passed over Spock's face. Wistfulness, maybe. Maybe. “Surprisingly, I find myself intrigued by its content and would like nothing more than to discuss its meaning with him.”

Bones looked to Jim, the same broken kid in the same bed he'd been for fourteen days, nothing new, nothing changed. Uhura had one hand around Jim's and the other sprawled in his hair, her head on the bed, sound asleep. Bones recalled the faux-animosity between the two at the Academy: heated words and mean glares in hallways, and Jim doing everything he could to maintain her attention.

Success.

“Someday,” Bones said, flatly. He'd put nothing conclusive in his medical reports, not yet. A few more days. Just a few. And then he would write “persistent vegetative state; maximum medical improvement; take my license, I quit.”

“Are you hopeful?”

To be quite honest, Bones didn't even know that the word “hopeful” had any sort of worthwhile meaning to Spock. Once you lose almost everyone you ever knew on both sides of the galaxy on the same day, “hope is just another word for disappointment, Bones. A fool's paradise.”

He thought of a hundred answers, none of them right or wrong, none of them doing Jim justice, and none of them timely.

“Keep reading,” he said instead. “Don't be afraid to touch him. He listens to touch, always has. And, for god's sake, stop calling him 'the Captain.' He has a name; use it.”

“And you believe such measures will advance his recovery?”

Bones dropped his head and took a few moments to center himself, to kick away the sudden rise in irritation. “Sure. What could happen.”

Spock nodded slowly, eyes tumbling back to the hundreds-year-old hardback book that, honestly, even took Bones by surprise. He'd never seen Jim sit still enough to be taken in by a page-turner.

“'Take Daisy, for example. Her song, which had been somewhere in the back of her head for most of her life...'”

On a whim, Bones stayed, sat in the back corner and listened to Spock chart a previously undiscovered side of Jim; watched Uhura sleep; and thought “surprise me again, Kirk, surprise me,” at the dying sun that had somehow become the center of their lives.

And, like the son of a bitch that he was, he did.

“‘‘Oh dear,’ she said, and felt herself, not for the first time in her existence, wishing that she had listened to Morris, who after all, she admitted to herself, by now probably knew rather more about being dead...’”

The vitals screen beeped, a shock of green overtaking red, changing the world. Uhura squawked awake, Jim's hand knuckle-white around hers.

“Oh, my god. Kirk?”

“Doctor!”

Bones was slow to stand, dizzy when he stumbled across the small room, head spinning, the world removed and distant. He heard a groan and saw Jim shift his head toward Spock. And then, just that quickly, it was over. Jim's hand relaxed, he stopped moving, and his eyes never opened.

Bones’ fingers flew over the vitals screen, pulling up Jim's brain activity, front and center. Palpitations stole the breath right out from his chest as he interpreted the readings.

“What, is he waking up? What's going on? Is he all right?”

Bones shook his head, ignoring Uhura because he just couldn't process all of this at once, he couldn't... There was no sense to the readings. Why now? Why after everything?

“Doctor, please. Tell us what happened!”

Shit, even Spock sounded desperate.

Bones dragged his hand over the screen, reverting it back to its default overview mode, and turned a stunned look to Jim. He was in there. He was really there.

“From here on out, he may remember what you say,” Bones advised, a sudden restlessness settling over him. He needed to get himself and those brain activity readings into his lab, now. “Bear that in mind.”

Bones peeled his fingers off his PADD, until now unaware of just how hard he'd been gripping it, and synced it with the vitals monitor.

“One of you, stay. Keep reading. Keep touching. Keep...doing. He's in there.”

Hours passed like seconds. Though the readings were clear, objective, and accurate, Bones checked, double-checked, and triple-checked them.

Normal. Normal. Unquestionably so.

“Son of a bitch,” Bones whispered, even though his lab was private. And it was a good thing too, because if he buried his face in his hands and wept away eighteen days of stress, death, and certain loss, he was the only one who knew.

 ***

“You...are a jackass. Captain. This thing you did, where you pretended you were coming back and then didn't? It's just one more reason you're a jackass, and, let me tell you, you didn't need anymore reasons.”

“Nyota--”

“Like the time you got the Academy to make you treasurer of the Xenolinguistics Club. There's a good reason. Or how you coasted through every single class we had together and were still top of the class. There's a reason.”

“Nyota.”

“He's a jackass.”

“Of which there certainly can be no doubt.”

Bones opened his eyes, the room blurry and the light painful to his sleep-rested eyes, just in time to see Uhura smile. She ran her hand up and down Jim's arm, over and over again, her affection for Captain James T. Jackass unmistakable.

“I miss him.”

“He is missed by many.”

After a few more hours, they both left, leaving the watch and Spock’s growing stack of borrowed books to Bones. After a time, he reluctantly took Uhura's seat and wrapped his hand around Jim's. Maybe all he really feared, through all of this, was touching his friend and finding cold skin again. But he didn't: Jim's skin was warm.

“You gotta come back, kid, or Uhura's gonna kill you. She has a list of all the things you've done to piss her off and, let's be honest, we both know how long that list is. And you've really done it this time.”

It just wasn't right, talking to Jim and not getting anything back. He missed Jim's wit and indiscreet sense of humor. He missed being goaded and smirked at. He missed the quiet moments, so unlike these, when Jim's presence still filled the room. He missed knowing where Jim was.

“Seriously, Jim, the rest of the crew – you think you did them a favor, but it's a crew's biggest failure to lose their captain. You can't leave them with that.”

It didn't happen immediately. It happened inbetween bursts of inspiration, of things to say to make interminable minutes pass quicker. When it happened, it wasn't a squeeze. It was a prolonged grab, Jim's fingers wrapping around Bones' and staying there, weak but undeniable.

Bones stole a glance at the vitals screen; it showed a very small spike in brain activity, confirmation enough. Bones tightened his own grip, wrapped his other hand around Jim's wrist, and struggled to maintain his calm.

It's going to happen.

“I hear you, Jim. I hear you.”

He'd felt this same way when that damned tribble purred back to life, only, then, there'd been things to do. Here and now, there was nothing to do but wait, even if Bones' hard-won instincts told him that the wait wouldn't be much longer.

“Did I ever tell you about Ole Miss? Now, don't get me wrong – nothing quite matches all the shit you've gotten us into – but I think even you'd be surprised to hear of some of my pre-Starfleet stories. They're legendary, you know.”

Bones talked through the night, about anything and everything, all the time wondering if his voice could really be the proverbial star map Jim needed to make it back.

Many days later, he would sort of get an answer to that question. But, the next day, it came as no surprise when Jim woke with a melodramatic gasp, a hundred questions, and more answers than he should've really had after more than two weeks of darkness.

After Spock left, Jim closed his eyes and took a quiet, deep breath. Bones paused and watched carefully, not only to make sure he was all right, but to marvel at life.

It'd worked. It'd really worked. Jim was alive.

“I need the numbers, Bones.”

Jim had been awake for not even five minutes, and, by all indications, barely had the strength to move. He had no right at all to be all-business. Sometimes, even now, even after what Jim’d done for Enterprise, Bones still forgot that Jim was a starship captain and no longer just his troublemaker friend.

“Take it easy for now. Spock is doing a hell of a job and—”

“Just... Just how many?”

Eighty-nine on the Enterprise. Upwards of twenty thousand on the ground.

In an instant, Bones decided to lie. There was no choice. Jim didn’t even know that San Francisco got hit and hearing that number could quite literally be a shock his system couldn’t take right now.

“I don’t know. Too bad you didn’t get a chance to ask Spock, with all that back patting you were doing.”

Jim just looked at him, blue eyes dull. “Bones.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. I’m a doctor, not a statistician.”

Jim closed his eyes, wrinkled his nose, and shook his head the tiniest bit, before the smile he was trying to hold back forced itself out. Bones could’ve watched it all day. When Jim opened his eyes again, he blinked heavily, once, twice, three times, and Bones knew he was fading fast.

“It’s not funny,” Jim said softly.

“No, but sometimes, it’s all right to laugh anyway.”

Even after two weeks, Bones was admittedly a little relieved when Jim slipped to sleep. There would be tomorrow and every day after; today, that was damned well good enough.

 III. Part Two

Bones didn’t remember falling asleep in his lab. He remembered starting to analyze a fresh sample of Jim’s blood and updated brain scans, until his eyes began to betray him. He closed them for just a moment, to clear the haze and start refreshed.

Then he was jerking awake, a painful kink in his neck and a diffuse tension headache rolling through his head, back to front and side to side. He looked at the time – 0940 – with a sense of horror, confusion, and amazement.

He had almost literally lived at the hospital since he’d beamed down with Jim. He’d seen a real bed maybe three times and more than five consecutive hours of sleep less than that. However many days since this all began, and Bones could hardly believe they’d made it this far.

Bones stood and stretched until it hurt, neck cracking, lumbar popping, a hypertonic muscle threatening to spasm. He wiped hard bits of sleep out of his eyes and poured a quick cup of old coffee before swinging by the nurse’s station to sync his PADD with Jim’s overnight chart.

“You just missed Admiral Kelley. Looks like she had a real nice visit with Captain Kirk.”

Bones nodded absently to acknowledge Nurse Barrira’s update, thought “that’s gonna stop real damn quick,” and started to flip through the overnight notes - “asleep, vitals normal” “asleep, vitals normal” “briefly awake: asked for water and was asleep by the time I got back, vitals normal” “asleep, vitals normal” - and was more than halfway to Jim’s room before it clicked.

He just knew.

Bones stopped himself from sprinting. He settled on a swift walk, hoping he was just paranoid and that an admiral was smart enough to realize that Jim hadn’t been briefed in the, oh, six minutes and thirty-two seconds he’d been awake yesterday.

Apparently not.

As he drew closer to the room, he saw a curtain of bright light streaming through the doorway. Although he’d purposefully set and locked the windows to “opaque,” he’d mistakenly counted on two things: Jim not knowing the windows were closed for a specific reason, and Jim being too exhausted and doped up (really, he had enough relaxants in his system to drop a young Gorn, what with his brand new everything and all) to find a way around the programming.

One fucking day. All he’d wanted was one day.

Bones’ heart nearly stopped when he saw the empty bed, white covers in a tangle at the bottom. The display monitor was still actively monitoring vitals, though, and despite the rapid heart rate it was sensing, the audible alarms were silent, likely because of a reason named James T. Kirk. His eyes followed the IV line to the floor, and he made his around the foot of the bed.

And there Jim was, back pressed into the corner between the window and the wall. He stared out the window, straight into the crystal clear view of the destruction, right down to the surreal image of Vengeance lodged in the cityscape.

“Admiral Kelley says ‘hi,’” Jim said, affect flat.

Bones set his coffee cup on the nearest flat surface and carefully considered his options: yell at Jim for getting up and probably falling flat on his ass, yell at Jim for reprogramming the systems that were in place to protect him, or ride this catastrophe out like all the others.

Bones opted for riding it out. He sat down on the floor next to Jim, cross-legged, and regarded his friend with open honesty. “I didn’t think it was right to tell you yesterday. And Kelley, that buffoon, came unannounced. If I’d had any idea, Jim...”

Jim was shaking his head. “He crashed it intentionally. You can tell from the angle of... Well, fuck, you don’t even need to. What are the chances of it coming in so close to Starfleet.”

Back in the day, when Bones looked at Jim’s grades to see how he could possibly still have a spot in Starfleet, a few professors had basically written, “too smart for his own good.” And it was true. Even in his drugged haze, complete with cloudy eyes, slurred words, and what Bones thought were somewhat poorly organized thoughts, Jim didn’t miss a thing.

“What did Kelley tell you, Jim?”

Jim blinked a few times, his eyes studying San Francisco’s battered cityscape. “That ‘San Francisco isn’t your fault, Kirk; this is all on Marcus. Focus on getting well.’”

Jim didn’t sound like he believed it. All Bones knew was that if Jim hadn’t aligned with Harrison, the entire crew would be dead, and there’s not one person worth a damn who could say that Jim’d done the wrong thing. Not with bad intel from the start, an admiral trying to murder his crew, and a failing, sabotaged, crippled ship. And not after... Not after.

“This is...”

“Jim. You were dead when this happened. You were in a body bag in my medical bay, which, let me tell you, I didn’t appreciate. Try thinking about that, huh.”

Jim blinked slowly, took a deep breath, and shook his head, like he could order himself to stay awake. “Just stop.”

“No, no, I won’t, because I know you. I want you to think about what your only other option was, which was to let Marcus kill us all, lay it all on you, start his damned war, and militarize Starfleet,” Bones hissed.

An expression crossed Jim’s face that Bones couldn’t decipher. It scared him, having no idea where Jim’s head was. He had the sense that Jim was quickly going somewhere bad.

“Is that the story you guys’ve been running with?”

“That’s the god damned truth, you jackass!”

Jim’s gaze slid back to the window. The sun made his eyes even bluer and brought out every line in his face. He looked so much older than twenty-six – tired, worn, gutted, and subdued – and sometimes Bones cursed Starfleet for giving Jim Enterprise, no matter how much Jim thought he’d wanted it. But he was alive and himself, mostly, and that’s all that counted right now.

“You can’t even stand, can you?” Bones asked. He raised his eyebrows expectantly and waited for Jim to respond.

Jim closed his eyes, licked his lips and, finally, shook his head and admitted, “I don’t even know how I got down here.”

“Thought so,” Bones muttered and stood.

He hauled Jim to his feet by the upper arms, didn’t say a word about how hard Jim gripped Bones’ own arm, and deftly maneuvered Jim back into bed. Jim's head lulled against the pillow, and he mumbled something incoherent. (There was no accurate way to describe how little Bones missed these times.)

As he pulled and smoothed the covers over Jim's lower body, Bones noticed Jim’s attention was still directed out the window. He’d be damned if that was the last thing Jim was going to see before he fell asleep again.

“Look at me,” Bones ordered. He gripped both of Jim’s arms and gave him a little shake. When Jim complied, Bones looked him straight in the eyes. “We’re glad you’re alive.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Jim asked, more slurred than ever, eyes dragging shut.

“Everyone, you idiot. It’s everyone.”

***

 Jim passed the cognitive functioning assessment without incident. No messing around. No smart-ass jokes or comments, like his answer to “how are a cucumber and a banana alike?” being “I can’t believe this is really on the test, and I’ll get written up for answering it.” Instead, “food; similar shape.” Son of a bitch.

Physical therapy was typically harder to gauge. Physical therapists, by nature, tended to see the very best in their patients. Everything was a good result. But they also developed close personal relationships with their patients and invariably provided useful insight in their notes. An ability to read between the lines was a requirement. In Jim’s case, though, the telling stuff was right out in front.

Bones cringed when he read “fell today and said he ‘wants to stop being such a mess’; progressing well toward goals.” A day later, Bones’ gut dropped when he read a priority-marked entry of “blacked out momentarily; more despondent than usual for remainder of session; progressing well toward physical goals.”

It'd been five days, and after that first day of physical therapy that had gone less than well, Jim strived and did amazingly well physically. He could do most of everything, just slower and shakily. He was also able to stay awake for longer and longer stretches of time, although he tended to “fall asleep” more often when visitors came. And that just about said it all.

“How about a walk?”

It took a moment too long for Jim to look away from the digital book he was staring at more than reading, and, even then, all Bones got was a disinterested look. Never so easily deterred, Bones tossed a handful of clothes to Jim, which landed in a messy pile on top of his legs, and quipped, “Buckle up, Buttercup. Doctor’s orders.”

The glare was worth it.

Jim was not only unsteady and slow, but he was the sort of cranky that reminded Bones of countless hangover mornings. When Bones attempted to place a helpful hand on Jim’s elbow, Jim tugged his arm away and snapped, “I’ve got it.”

“Fine,” Bones conceded, calmly pressing the ground floor button on the turbo lift. “You fall flat on your face and break your nose, though, and I’m handing your care off to Dr. Sarkh. She’s a Betazoid, you know. She’ll pick your head apart like a vulture sifting through a day-old animal carcass on Old 35.”

“Which has been gone for years,” Jim muttered.

Bones glanced at Jim just in time to see the end of an epic eye roll and the start of a beautiful, if short lived, sag against the wall. He just barely refrained from asking if Jim was referring to the road or his head.

When the lift stopped on the ground floor of the hospital, Bones stepped out and walked away at his own pleasant pace, looking back every now and then to make sure Jim was limping along behind him. If Jim looked nothing like a starship captain and everything like a sullen Academy cast-off, what with his green SFA t-shirt, gray sweatpants, and dour expression, well, Bones didn’t say anything.

Bones stopped at the door to the courtyard, an 8,000 square foot wealth of mostly-hypoallergenic plants, flowers, trees, birds, and other small nuisances, complete with paths, benches, quaint little babbling brooks, and, when the wind blew just right, a lovely ocean breeze. Bones did a little lean of his own against the wall, arms crossed, nodding at passersby, and waited for Jim to catch up.

“I hate you,” Jim advised, hand pressed against the wall to steady himself. “I want a new doctor.”

Bones shrugged and waved his hand over the access panel, making a small mental note of the barely-there-but-still-there hard edge in Jim’s voice. “Sure thing,” Bones retorted lightly. “But Dr. Sarkh’s the only one who’ll take you, and she—”

“Vultures on Old 35. Yeah, I heard you the first time.”

They walked in silence for a solid five minutes, which was more impressive than frustrating. Jim grew more and more at ease the further and deeper into the courtyard they walked. His stride became longer and more confident, which wasn't saying a whole hell of a lot, but at least Bones could stop trying to guess which way he’d have to lunge when Jim finally toppled over.

“When was Pike buried?”

Oh.

Bones hadn’t expected that. For a few seconds, he got caught up trying to think of ways to explain why Jim had to ask about that, instead of being told. And then he had to somehow sort through days that bled together and come up with an answer.

Stupid.

“About five days ago,” Bones finally managed, after it clicked. Spock in dress uniform, coolly describing how nice, albeit delayed, the service was, given the state of the Federation and the city, when Jim gasped his way back to them. “I’m sorry, Jim.”

Jim frowned and shook his head. “Don’t be.”

“‘Don’t be,’” Bones repeated flatly.

It was like the Kobayashi Maru, take four. Mentor was murdered before his eyes, buried while he was fighting for his life, after the most literal day from hell to speak of: what’s the big deal? Here, have an apple.

“Why isn’t Starfleet trying to talk to me?”

Bones snorted, almost glad for the change in subject. “Because I’m your doctor, and I said so.”

“Damn it, Bones, I’m—”

Nope, not having it. Not one bit.

“You’re lucky to be alive,” Bones interrupted, adding a little bite to his tone. “And the Federation is lucky to, at some point in the future, have the chance to talk with you, which will happen exactly when I say so. You don't like it, go get your own damned medical license.”

There was nothing like a “thank you” or a “shit, Bones, I owe you.” There was a silence that quickly filled with tension, the antithesis of their friendship.

 If there was one thing Bones didn't do, it was dance, and he sure as hell wasn't going to start now. He stopped and put his hand on Jim's arm, lightly, just enough touch to get the message through without tripping him up.

Jim pulled away and kept walking, wordless, leaving Bones standing still and in disbelief.Bones didn't get it. Not at all.

And then Jim sat down on a bench about ten feet away, legs sprawled, arms crossed, just like old times. Bones sighed, more at himself than at Jim, and sat down next to him, shoulder to shoulder.

“Look, I'm a doctor, not a psychiatrist, but I'm asking you to talk to me.”

A sigh. A gaze everywhere but on Bones. Both of those things, expected.

“I have a job to do.”

“Your job right now is to get well. That's it.” Bones put on his best “I dare you to say otherwise” look. Jim ignored it, wordlessly. “Like you didn't do enough already.”

Jim groaned-laughed, the first real familiar sound out of him all day. “Right.”

“Right, because I didn't have to hear that you were dead through the comm. And I didn't peel back a body bag to... My god, man. Do you have any idea what it was like for us?”

“What do you want?” Jim asked, too still, tone placid. He stared straight ahead, vibrant orange and purple azaleas and a whole tangle of tiny chirpy birds at the end of his line of sight. There was no challenge, no outrage, nothing that Bones knew what to do with. “An apology?”

“No,” Bones shook his head, without a hint of sarcasm. He meant it. “I want you to be all right. You know that.”

Jim's gaze slid to the ground. “Yeah. I got that.”

Four little words, and it all made sense. Jim'd finally self-destructed, and he'd liked it. He'd seen something better. Bones couldn't contend with that.

“What was it like?”

There were stories, had been stories for hundreds and hundreds of years, of what near-death experiences were like. What people saw, felt, said, did. What they lost after they came back. Bones was a man of medicine, and he believed in the indisputable science of the body more than the ephemeral faith of the mind. He believed in hormones and synapses, the inevitable and the immutable. But he would believe Jim.

Jim's sneaker dragged through a fine dusting of dirt, muscles contracting, tendons modulating, knee joint bending, Jim's blood mixing with the last remnants of Harrison's, all of it together something Bones had been calling success.

“It was nothing,” Jim answered, arms pulling tighter around his chest. “I was there, and then I was here.”

Bones didn't understand that. If there was nothing, why was it so bad to be...

“I mean, there were some dreams at the end, I think. Voices, maybe. I don't know.”

“What did you hear them say?”

“They...” Jim trailed off. His body tensed, hands clenched into trembling fists, chest pumping with breaths like he'd just finished a marathon.

Bones slid off the bench to his knees, centering himself in front of Jim, hands tethered to the outside of Jim's thighs. Not that it made a difference. Jim's eyes were unblinking, unfocused, and a million miles gone. Jim was gone.

“Captain James Tiberius Kirk” - full name and rank, to get through to the part of Jim's mind that had been irrevocably programmed by mandatory senior officer conditioning - “breathe. Breathe one, two, three.” Bones punctuated each number with a sharp squeeze to Jim's thighs. “One. Two. Three. Breathe.”

Sequentially, Jim's breathing became less erratic and fell in line with Bones's counting.

“Good, Jim. You're doing real good. Keep breathing.”

Bones moved his right hand to the back of Jim's knee, easily palpating his popliteal pulse. It raced - bambambambambam - even as his breaths evened out. Bones reached for his communicator, before remembering that he’d purposely left it in Jim’s room.

God damn it.

Bones searched Jim's face for signs that he was coming back, but his expression remained blank, stare distant, face flushed with sweat. It'd been at least two minutes. Too long. Bones pushed himself to his feet and gripped Jim's arms – not restrictively, but hard enough to register.

“Jim. I need you to come back.”

And he did. A blink, a spark in his eyes, a gasp of breath, and an abrupt, fleeting expression of vulnerability and panic. Jim took another deep, trembling breath, untangled his arms from around his chest, and pushed Bones away.

“Stop,” Jim said, quiet. “Just...just stop.”

Bones stepped back and kept silent. He dropped his head and just wished this was over, or, at least, as over as it could ever be.

“I'll, uh, get a nurse to help you get--”

“That's the fourth time.” Jim re-crossed his arms, fisted hands tight under his biceps, as if it would mask the shaking. Jim stared at the azaleas, so locked down that Bones really had no idea what to do or say. “They’re going to stop, right?”

It was the first one Bones had witnessed. Coupled with the PT note, it meant that there were two others that Jim had battled alone, start to finish, and still refused to really talk with his assigned, standard-issue therapist.

Bones couldn't even be angry. Instead, he wanted to tell Jim that this was the last time he'd have to claw his way back up from bottom. That he'd more than earned an easy rest of his life. But the evidence showed that Jim Kirk was apparently destined to jump from one tragic catastrophe to the next, because Jim apparently pissed off fate like he pissed off everyone else.

Bones stuffed his hands into his pockets and resisted the urge to rock on his heels. He waited for a few people to pass behind him before asking, “I can’t tell you that. What are they about?”

Jim's answer was a shake of his head.

“You don't know or you won't say?”

Jim ran his hands through his hair, leaving it messy. That ocean breeze blew through, carrying a warm musk of salt and iodine. Jim closed his eyes to it – “God, I’m going to miss this”– and said simply, “It's fine. Don't worry about it.”

That was the thing about Jim: sometimes, he disappointed in all the ways expected.

***

Over the next few days, Bones kept his distance, spending more time in his lab than not. He ensured Jim got dragged to PT and especially to counseling, read the charts, and waited for something to give, but nothing did.

So he ran tests on blood, the only part of this mess he could control. Also, to allay the burning dread in his stomach that something was going to go wrong, like Harrison's blood leaving a lasting impression, or the effects suddenly reversing and tearing Jim apart. Of course, all tests remained normal, and Jim continued to excel at everything except dealing, as always.

In the in-between, he caught glimpses of the crew, snippets of interactions, and, if he eavesdropped more than acceptable, either no one noticed or no one said anything. Either way.

“The structural engineering team has, at last, concluded that Enterprise is reparable. As it stands, the repairs are expected to be...extensive.”

“That's great, Spock.” Jim, of course, sounding superficial, like someone had put him on auto-pilot. “If you need anything--”

“My apologies for interrupting, Jim, but Doctor McCoy has been quite adamant that you are not cleared for any sort of duty. I am inclined to agree.”

“Of course. It's your move.”

Hours later, Scotty: “I just want to apologize – to your face, you know – for, uh…”

“Don’t. Scotty. Don't.”

“Jim, I...”

“Don't.”

There'd been talk among the Engineering crew – talk that Bones forgot how he'd even heard about, but presumably through some combination of Chekov and Sulu, before they'd bailed – of the “epic” blowout between Scotty and Jim. The yelling. The resignation. Jim more rattled and pissed than anyone had ever seen him. Not that it mattered, in the end. Jim tended not to hold grudges, and Scotty was the first reason why they were all alive. Except Scotty could tell all the caricatural stories he wanted, but it wouldn't hide the fact that watching Jim die had changed something integral.

“All right, then. I'll be going.”

“Yeah.”

Bones stayed put in his spot against the wall and waited expectantly for Scotty to leave the room. Head down, Scotty walked right past Bones, stride hurried. Bones pushed off the wall and caught up, a hand on Scotty's shoulder.

“Mr. Scott!”

Scotty stopped, turned, and looked at Bones, sucking in a breath as he squared his shoulders and tried to look whole.

“Care for a drink?” Bones offered.

As if Scotty would ever turn down a drink.

In his lab, Bones pulled out two tumblers and a tall, quite-against-regulation bottle of aged scotch. He filled both glasses to the brim and pushed the closest one to Scotty. Scotty took it and drank half on the first go. Bones decided to put the bottle away, very quietly, before taking a sip of his own.

Scotty wasted no time, tearing right in: “It's not right. None of it. He's all of twenty-six years old, actin' like he has a right to do...what he did. In my warp core. And now this snit of his. I won't be having it!”

“He's the Captain,” Bones replied, as if he'd figured out how to come to terms with that fact. Before Marcus and Harrison, he at least could have pretended that he had. “And he's my best friend.”

It felt good to get that out. To admit that no matter how well Jim recovered, he was always going to be Jim, the kid who came with no guarantees. That another day may come when Scotty and Chekov trailed behind a body bag into his med bay, only there wouldn't be another extraordinary way to make Jim breathe again. There would just be a dead kid. A good person. A remarkable captain. A pain in the ass.

Scotty drained his glass, made a brief, pained face, and looked at Bones with nothing of his usual levity. “You expect that to end well, do you?”

“I don't have much choice in the matter, do I?” Bones stared at his glass, decided against the rest, and slid it over to Scotty. “And what about you?”

“What about me?” Scotty huffed. “I have a ship to fix. He's your problem. Right up until the point where he's my problem again. And then we'll have another drink.”

“He's everyone's problem.”

“Aye,” Scotty agreed. His expression softened, and he raised his glass. “But there are worse ones to have.”

Bones almost smiled at that.

Scotty left and Uhura came, smiling at Bones as they passed each other in the hall. Bones threw a lazy hand in the air in greeting, and he definitely noticed the box of Relleian candy carried behind her back. (Jim went nuts for that stuff.) Bones didn't quibble about the candy, or even about her stealing Jim from his room for over an hour.

A great sign, or so he'd thought.

Uhura found Bones afterward. She brought some sort of sandwich that Bones barely tasted and a large, steaming cup of light-roasted hazelnut coffee from the expensive place down the street. Bones narrowed his eyes and wanted to know how she knew that was his favorite brew, but he didn’t think it wise to ask when she handed it off to him.

“Level with me, Doctor. He barely talks, and he’s…spacey. Kirk’s a lot of things, but not that.”

Bones heard her, loud and clear, but still became defensive. He read accusation in her tone. Or maybe he just wasn't ready to have someone else confirm that while Jim was clearly alive, there was an argument to be made that he hadn't made it all the way back.

“For us, it’s been close to a month. For him, it’s barely been over a week, and, honestly, we’re asking a lot of him. I’d say he’s doin’ pretty damn well, given the circumstances, wouldn’t you?”

If it wasn’t true, Bones wouldn’t say it. He never offered Jim any excuses he didn’t deserve, because the kid knew how to sprint sixteen miles with the smallest ounce of leniency. He’d found that out on, oh, day two.

Uhura deflated and nodded, head dropping into her hands. “I just want things…to be normal again,” she said, looking at him sideways. “I want to be able to trust in the world we live in.”

Bones considered that and offered her a half-hearted, tight smile. He couldn’t think of an encouraging word to say and refused to say what was really on his mind, which was that after the past year, the world might have been pushed too far to come back.

“They asked me…” Uhura shook her head angrily, earrings jingling. “They asked me what I thought he should have done differently. And you know what I told them? I told them that I don’t know, because if he’d done anything differently, I’d be dead right now. Blown up or…burnt up. And that the only thing Kirk didn’t think of that day was himself. There was no way to win,” Uhura spit out, like it was a dirty word.

Bones didn't say that he'd been asked the same question, along with others more geared toward his own conduct. “Unethical? I'm his next-of-kin, if you hadn't noticed, and he gave me full rights to drag his ass back from the dead, so, if you don't mind, I have more dragging to do.” He didn't say that his answer had been incredibly similar to Uhura's, if not a little more colorful.

Instead, Bones added Uhura to his list of crew members never to piss off and decided that he wasn't going to let Jim off easy. Not now. Not ever.

That night, Bones swatted at Jim’s legs until he sat up and made room for Bones to sit down. Bones kicked off his shoes and sat cross-legged on the bed, nonverbally daring Jim to say anything. Jim blinked at him. Arguments not forthcoming, Bones split up a thick deck of colored cards, handed half of them off to Jim, and ordered him to start shuffling.

“Your bedside manner’s getting weird,” Jim finally offered. He glanced briefly at the cards before he started doing a half-assed job of shuffling. His hands shook, barely enough to notice. “Phaser XIII? I kill you at this.”

“Because you cheat.”

“No, I don't.”

“You hide cards.”

“That’s not true.”

“It’s entirely true, and, tell you what, I dare you to do it today.”

Jim tossed the barely shuffled half-deck back to Bones and asked, “How do you not have better things to do than this?” He sounded close to his old self: irritated, baiting, and genuinely curious, all at the same time.

Bones thought about it for a second. Technically, Bones could go home, sleep, catch up with the world, and maybe have a drink or two without worrying about what he’d find in the morning, because Jim was clear out of the nebula. On the other hand, he didn’t become a doctor to leave the first chance he got.

Or, put more plainly: “What, and leave you here looking pathetic?”

Jim rolled his eyes. “Just deal.”

As the game progressed, it became painfully evident that Jim’s head was anywhere else. He stared blankly at his hand, didn’t organize his cards, and didn’t seem at all perturbed when Bones laid phase after phase before Jim did. He didn’t even throw an obligatory fit when Bones had four wilds in a single hand. He didn’t talk. No, “hey, send that hot nurse my way more often,” or “how’s the ship?” or “hey, I’m going to sneak out of here and wanted to know if you wanted to come.”

After about a half hour of it, Bones couldn’t help himself. “I’d ply you with booze to make you talk, but I’m your doctor, not your enabler,” Bones said. He drew a high card he already had three of and discarded it with ample scorn.

Jim’s breathy laugh was unexpected. “That’s sort of the problem.”

“Sounds like you finally have something to say,” Bones retorted, too quick on his feet. He regretted the challenge the moment he issued it.

Jim discarded his third seven in a row, even though he was on a phase where he needed a straight of nine. Jim wasn’t playing; he was pandering. A flare of anger that followed the realization made Bones reach out and pluck (most of) the cards right out of Jim’s hands.

Jim exhaled loudly and looked at Bones derisively. “C’mon. I don’t want to do this.”

“Well, I don’t want to do half the shit you make me do,” Bones replied. Like dismantling torpedoes and listening to “it's the Captain... He didn’t make it” over the comm. “You said there’s a problem, so let’s hear it.”

“Only half?” Jim deflected. “It’s fine. Let’s play.”

Bones laid his own hand on the bed, face up. Game over.

“You won’t talk to me. You won’t talk to the people who’ve sat here and willed your ass back to life. You won’t even talk to the people getting paid to talk to you. They’re going to take Enterprise from you, Jim.”

Bones raised his eyebrows expectantly, desperately. Jim replied two-fold: with his best incredulous “fuck you” look and with, “I’ll talk when I’m god damned ready and they already--”

“Oh, bullshit, you’re as ready as a Trarakian lealet in winter ever is, which is never!”

“One, that makes no fucking sense, and you make that shit up, I know you do. And, two, you know what, Bones, I’m--”

“No, but I’d like to know, so why don’t you--”

“It’s you!”

The outburst was over before it’d barely even started, and Bones had to rewind a bit to catch that last bit. And rewind again and again, just to make sure he’d really heard it.

Jim’s mouth was hanging a bit open, like it often did when he was speechless, and he blinked rapidly as he looked down at the two cards crumpled in his clenched hand.

“Well, don’t stop there,” Bones encouraged. “Go on.”

“You...” Jim closed his eyes and breathed, shakily, before he opened them again and looked at Bones with nothing but apology. Nervousness built in Bones' gut, as he realized that Jim was actually going to talk this out, finally. “I’m... I don’t agree with what you did. It’s not right. It’s not fair.”

It felt like red-hot ice was freezing his veins from his feet to his eyeballs. Bones swallowed against a dry, constricted throat and couldn’t look away from his friend – from the anguish and the guilt on his face.

“Life ain’t fair, kid,” he said, a default response without any thought behind it. Filler, to give himself time to get his head on straight.

“No, it’s not,” Jim agreed, more emotion and passion in his voice than Bones’d heard in twenty-something days. “I have twenty-eight missing crew, all of them more than likely floating dead in space after being ripped out of...”

Jim stopped the oncoming tirade and swallowed hard. “I saw people, my people, die. I watched it. And I did the only thing I could to stop it. And, so, you tell me, you fucking tell me, why I’m here and they’re not.”

Somewhere in the middle of that, Bones had stopped looking at Jim in favor of the window. The sky had finally shaken the remnants of Harrison’s destruction and shifted into wispy vanillas and antique oranges, but there was still nowhere that made sense. There were no answers or guarantees and nothing safe and certainly no end in sight to the bottomless certainty of failure.

And Jim was still waiting for his answer. The first thing that came to mind was horrible and unfair and not at all what he wanted to say, but he said it anyway: “What can I say, Jim, you don’t believe in no-win scenarios.”

If Bones focused well enough, he could see Jim’s reflection in the window. He saw Jim’s face slacken and the near-imperceptible shake of his head. He saw betrayal.

“Yeah. Right,” Jim said, neutral. “Sorry.”

Bones felt like a fool, sitting this close to his best friend and not even being able to look at him, and he felt like a fool leaving the room without another word. Or his shoes.

Bones walked home anyway, wearing an old pair of shoes that belonged to the late Dr. Alnaria, who hadn’t survived Harrison. He dodged blockades and cordoned off areas, walking six blocks out of his way because so much of San Francisco had fallen, and opened the first bottle of hard liquor he could put his hands on.

He sat in his living room and navigated through news streams that had devolved more and more since Nero and, now, “rampant corruption in the Federation's highest ranks, threatening our way of life,” until he fell asleep. He dreamed of a twisting, winding, ever-changing maze that led to an impenetrable glass door speckled with blood and, of course, an ungrateful jackass laying dead inside a warp core.

IV. Part Three

“Tell me I’m not alone.”

It was a year and a half ago; relatively speaking, a lifetime.

“You’re sleep-deprived and drunker than an Indoran yullie. That’s all I’ll tell you.”

Using doctor tricks only taught in med school, Bones assertively forced Jim’s body to turn and began to pull his leather jacket off – left arm first, because Jim was using his right to rub his face, mess up his hair, and sometimes gesture profoundly.

“Wait, isn't that like a skunk?”

Bones paused, tightening his grip on Jim’s boneless left arm, and regarded the back of his friend’s head with a questioning look. (An Indoran yullie was nothing like a skunk.) It took a few moments to click. “Fine, sure. You can be drunker than a skunk, if you like that better. I don’t care.”

Jacket off and tossed somewhere on the floor, Bones pushed Jim toward the couch and made him sit. Only, Jim didn’t sit, he melted into a sprawl, legs stretched out, arms spread wide, ass hanging half off. Bones sat next to him, hand deliberately placed on Jim’s upper thigh.

“I can’t believe she’s dead,” Jim breathed, sucking in a shuddering, desperate breath. “They’re all dead.” His face wrinkled up. “Oh, my god, we’re cursed,” he exclaimed, an epiphany.

Bones squeezed Jim’s leg. “No such thing as curses,” he said, although Bones didn’t think Jim was technically wrong. It just wasn’t the grand cosmic vendetta that Jim was probably thinking of.

Everyone knew that Jim shared, never celebrated, his birthday with the day his father died on Kelvin. Most of no one knew about Sam, a quiet, tragic waste of life into the Iowa night. And, five days ago, a fuel containment leak ignited Deep Space 3and took the mother Jim never talked about, never called, never…

“Then what is it? What the fuck is it?” Jim laughed without any mirth and dropped his head into his hands. “Oh, my god, it’s all so fucked up.”

Bones moved his hand to Jim’s back and rubbed wide circles, feeling hard knots of lean muscle and the rise and fall of uneven breaths. “You’re not alone, Jim.”

Always moving, Jim sat up, hands dropping into his lap, eyes closed. Puffy. Red. “I don't know why you stick around for this shit. You shouldn't.”

What he meant was: I'm not worth it.

“Jim...”

“I’m sorry I do this to you.”

And he really was, Bones knew. It’s just that Jim strived for better only when he absolutely had to, and Bones never intended to be a person Jim had to strive to keep.

“Christ, kid, you look like ten kinds of shit right now," Bones deflected then, and it was what he said a year and a half later, now.

Bones had intended to keep it light, but, no, really, there were lines like jagged cuts and dark patches under Jim’s eyes, more visible than they should be in the dim dusk.

“Feels like more than ten,” Jim answered, a little curt. “How long’ve you been waiting?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Bones said. “I’m sorry. Just like I’m sure you’re sorry for bailing at the hospital.”

Bones didn’t mention the need-to-hit-something rage that sort of happened when Nurse Brasinski told him this morning. Or pounding on the door to Jim’s whore-mongered apartment (“Is that even a word? And that’s not what it is; stop it.”), until a neighbor politely told him off. Before he realized that Starfleet had been waiting over a month for the day Jim flounced from the hospital, and Bones resigned himself to a long-suffering day of waiting in the quad outside Starfleet Command.

“Yeah, Command couldn’t decide what they thought about that,” Jim said, as he shrugged out of his gray dress jacket and draped it over his arm. “About a lot of things, actually.”

Bones wasn't sure how to take that and wasn't even sure how to ask. All he knew was that the senior crew, including himself, had taken a unified stance, hopefully one good enough that Jim would survive the suicide run he’d likely attempted today.

“Can we just be good?”

“Yeah, sure, why not,” Bones answered, no hesitation. “You wouldn’t know what to do without me, anyway.”

Jim slung an arm around Bones’ shoulders, the fabric of his black shirt itchy but the skin underneath radiating warmth and life, and started walking toward a string of restaurants about three blocks down. Bones let him lead.

“If I don’t eat, I’m gonna di…definitely do something unpleasant.”

“Oh, good, at least you can forget that happened,” Bones grumbled.

“What? I didn’t say it.”

Jim slid into the first restaurant they came upon: a sort-of-nice-ish-if-you-squint, seat-yourself place with grease, grease, and, oh, more grease. It was so Twenty First Century “Never Synthesized!” American (and proud of it) that Bones almost felt guilty for swallowing against a sudden influx of salivation.

Jim zeroed in on an open booth in the back corner and burrowed in the seat closest to the wall. Bones sat across from him. Now that Jim was in the light, and Bones could see just how incredibly wrecked Jim looked, he felt almost helpless without a tricorder and a staff of medical professionals. After all, Jim’d only been awake for eight days, not nearly enough time for fourteen hour debriefings about what would hopefully go down as the last worst day of his life.

“How hard do you think you need to keep pushing yourself?”

Jim smiled, just a little. His eyes were washed out, more green than blue, and red-rimmed from what Bones was sure was exhaustion. “Until it's done. Don't pretend you don't get it.”

Bones opened his mouth to say something profound and life-changing, but a server popped up out of nowhere.

“Coffee, black, a lot of it, and whatever sort of sandwich hasn't been sitting in the back for five hours, waiting for some poor--”

“I apologize for him,” Jim interjected smoothly. Bones rolled his eyes at the way Jim smiled at the server. All charisma. “How about a --”

“No alcohol. I mean it.”

Jim ignored him. “A water and two of the greasiest burgers ever, lots of fries? Thanks.” Jim’s eyes followed the server until he walked out of earshot and then glared at Bones. “And you call me an asshole?”

“Not recently, no, but I’ve been thinking it a lot.”

Jim laughed that sort of giggle-laugh of his. It tapered out into a quiet, drawn-out groan. Bones noticed the holographic daily specials menu being turned and turned and turned in Jim’s hands; he hadn’t seen him pick that up.

“I’m sorry about what I said.”

Bones looked up and was surprised to see Jim looking at him instead of everywhere else. He let Jim’s words settle, and he let himself accept the absolution, until he realized that he may still owe Jim an apology of his own. It’s not one he believed in.

“Should I apologize to you for what I did?”

Jim broke his gaze and took a blank interest in the specials hologram. “Remember the time I said my family was cursed, and you told me there was no such thing?”

“I can't believe you remember that.”

Jim smiled. “You said I wasn't alone. And I apologized for putting you through so much of my shit.”

And then Jim puked over the back of the couch, passed out in a pool of his own drool for fourteen hours, and, seven months later, saved the world and was given command of the Federation's flagship. Life was funny – also, incredibly terrifying – that way.

“Yeah, sure.”

“To both of those things, thank you.” Jim's eyes were back on him, an inescapable gravitational pull, as if there was any other way to describe what it was like to be Jim's friend. “You're an incredible doctor and...the very best friend. In a lot of ways, I wouldn't be here without you.”

For lack of knowing what else to say or do, Bones simply nodded. Jim had never sounded like this before – not so calm or collected, not while acknowledging and expressing something like that.

The food came just in time and settled uncomfortably in Bones' stomach. He decided to not mention how little Jim actually ate himself – a few bites of the sandwich that was better in theory than in reality, a few soggy fries – before leaning against the wall and dozing.

Minimal cajoling and a short walk to Jim's apartment later, Jim fell into his bed with a grunt and slurred, “Alarm set 0830. Round two's tomorrow.”

The computer chirped confirmation, as Bones sat down next to Jim, took his closest wrist, and pressed his fingers against Jim's radial artery.

“Stoppit.”

“You're supposed to be hospitalized right now,” Bones reminded. “I'm checking your vitals, and if I don't like what I find, I'll give you one guess as to where you're going.”

“To sleep.”

Instead of answering, Bones counted the beats of Jim’s pulse and was relieved to come out with a number on the low range of normal. He checked Jim's temperature with the antiquated technique of the back of his hand against Jim's forehead and found dry, normally warm skin. For now, it would have to do.

Jim was already asleep: face relaxed, chest rising and falling, deep and steady. Bones watched for longer than necessary, convincing himself that this was real: Jim was alive, his body had healed, and the man inside was rebounding in all the right ways.

Jim was alive. He was alive.

“I don’t know if I could stand to lose you again,” Bones said, quiet enough to not wake Jim. “Lights off.”

***

The next morning – 1148 was still morning – Bones woke in Jim's guest room and silently cursed Jim's affinity for perfectly comfortable beds and soul-devouring bedding. The urge to lay and doze was ridiculously difficult to overcome. Overcome it he did, though, straight into Jim's kitchen, where he found a depressingly empty refrigerator, expired coffee, and a synthesizer that spit out some sort of sad excuse for a breakfast bagel.

In the living room, Bones found his PADD and a message Jim had sent over two hours ago: “If you want, you can stay. Keyed you into the system.” Translation: “I'm not doing nearly as well as I'm pretending and need you here.”

Relief was about the extent of what Bones felt about that. He hadn't actually planned to give Jim a choice in the matter: either Bones stayed, or Jim went back to the hospital. The only reason he hadn't made Jim go back last night was because he was so clearly doing much better out here, at least emotionally.

Out the panoramic window – and no one ever said Starfleet didn't take care of its crew, especially its captains (despite recent events indicating otherwise) – Bones saw crews dressed in bright oranges and greens hard at work still, clearing layers of debris that still served as temporary little placeholders for the holes in the city. Beyond the demolished buildings, there was the shore line and the missing boardwalk, the one where he and Jim had escaped to in the days after Enterprise limped home after Nero.

“There isn't anyone left,” Jim had said, like it was news.

Eight starships had responded to Vulcan's distress call, and only one had returned. Everyone in the Federation knew about Enterprise and her crew, what they'd done: saved Earth and countless other worlds, all because of a domino of unlikely events pushed into motion by a kicking and screaming cadet with the last name everyone recognized.

“There's no one.”

“Well, hopefully, Starfleet can pull it together.”

“Have you thought about how many futures Nero extinguished? I've been trying to get my head around it, you know, like map it out. Everything and everyone that was lost that we'll never, ever know about.” Jim sort of laughed, breath hitching in his throat. “Once you start thinking, hope is just another word for disappointment, Bones. A fool's paradise.”

“Have you been drinking?” Bones asked, only somewhat facetiously. Jim was typically only philosophically maudlin when intoxicated, but there'd been times, like now, when Jim didn't need to have his hand held by cheap booze to get going on a bad thought.

“Maybe I should be. They're giving me Enterprise.”

Bones stopped cold in the middle of the pier. People had to walk around him, and he heard angry words in a language he neither recognized nor particularly cared about at that moment. There were so many things wrong with what Jim had just said. So many places to start, like with a simple, “What.”

The ocean breeze blew through, carrying a warm musk of salt and iodine. Jim closed his eyes to it, the fading bruises around his eye and strangulation marks on his neck concealed by the night. “God, I’m going to miss this.”

“They're making you captain. Straight from cadet. And they're actually going to repair Enterprise?”

Jim laughed, genuine, loud, and hard enough for Bones to see veins in his forehead. Jim leaned against the old wooden railing, an intentional relic from the past. The breeze blew his hair away from his forehead.

“That would be great. Here, have a ship with a busted bridge and no warp core. Boldly go.”

Despite himself, Bones smiled. The next words he stumbled over and didn't mean, not even a little: “You're going to do great.”

Jim was a good enough kid, but he was no captain, no matter how right he'd been about Nero.

For his part, Jim saw straight through the lie, like always. He looked up and straight into Bones' eyes, the intensity of the stare something Bones was unable to maintain. He looked away, out into the cloudy horizon and dark water, and didn't hear Jim's “It's late; I'm gonna head back” until Jim was already at the end of the pier.

Bones didn't know it then, or even in the weeks and months after, but it was the last time Jim was Jim, before Enterprise changed him in infinitesimal ways, day by day by day, until he was laying sightless inside a radiation decontamination compartment, the last star falling even as Enterprise ascended into the sky.

If it was guilt or shame or something else entirely, Bones didn't know, but he blinked away the sight of the demolished shoreline and ignored the whatever-it-was feeling broiling in his gut.

He spent the day at the hospital, addending, finalizing and signing charts, evaluations, notes, and discharge orders. He sat in his lab and looked blankly at his various computers and equipment, all silent and useless to him for the moment. His research and accomplishments were in Starfleet's hands, for better or for worse, and there was nothing left for him here, not right now. He packed up basic medical necessities and left.

He headed to the market he hoped was still there – and it was – and painstakingly picked out quality ingredients. Pasta that he knew to boil well. Vegetables just on the right side of ripe. Premium mushrooms. Meat with minimal fat.

As he was leaving, his PADD chirped with a message from Jim: Got done around noon. Spock's here.

Bones shook away surprise that Starfleet was already done with Jim and was half a block from the market when it struck his brilliant mind: he not only didn't have enough food for Spock, but that Spock didn't eat meat. With a defeated sigh, he turned tail and went straight back, grimacing at the same vendors and cursing Jim and Spock under his breath all the way back to Jim's apartment.

Upon entering, he found Spock sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table. A three-dimensional holographic display of Enterprise's engineering schematics slowly rotated above the table, certain parts glowing red, others blue. Spock tapped away on his PADD and looked less than terribly happy.

Jim was stretched out on his stomach across the entire couch, arms wrapped tight around the pillow his head rested on. He was unmistakably asleep and, upon closer inspection, didn't appear to have pants on, if the gray dress pants draped over the back of the couch and the bare leg sticking out from under the blanket were any indication.

“Gotta admit: this isn't the first thing I would’ve guessed I’d walk in on.”

Spock looked up with a raised eyebrow. “Good evening, Doctor. We were attempting to approve the proposed repairs for Enterprise. The Captain evidently had alternative plans.”

Bones walked to the kitchen, dumped his bags hard on the counter, and huffed, “Get used to it. And he's not supposed to be working.”

“A quite logical notion, however one that has been disregarded for two consecutive days. I had assumed that you approved. Also, Jim intimated that if he must work, he would prefer to do ‘something productive.’”

“Whatever,” Bones groused. That was a ball that was already rolling, and he was too damn tired to be chasing after it. “At least tell me he ate something.”

On cue, Bones waved the refrigerator open and found the same empty, depressing waste of space that'd been there this morning. Bones began to put the groceries inside, still in their bags and none too quietly.

“It is curious you would make such a query. Jim advised that he was 'too hungry to eat,' a human condition which strikes me as most peculiar.”

That deserved an eye roll, for more reasons than Bones cared to keep track of, and he awarded it one in earnest. “He just rolls right over you, doesn't he?”

To his credit, Spock tilted his head and nodded. “More often than I would care to admit to.”

Bones smiled, just a little. For a Vulcan that tended to be a rageful little piss monkey, his sense of humor was sometimes keenly on point. From the kitchen, Bones took a second look at the Enterprise hologram.

“So, what’s been decided on?”

Spock hit a button on his PADD. The hologram disintegrated into a burst of dots and coalesced into a cross-section of the whole ship.

“Vengeance presents a slew of upgrade possibilities, all but one of which the Captain refuses to consider,” Spock explained. Bones hoped that Spock didn't think for one second that Bones hadn’t caught the irritated look that crossed Spock's face.

“Let me guess: he wants to go real damn fast.”

“Regardless of countless other benign advancements, which include automation for the most vulnerable sections of the ship. He has offered no compelling rationale to support his argument in opposition.”

Bones didn’t need to hear Jim’s side of it to agree. Vengeance was one of the greatest missteps the Federation had ever taken; there was no sense in validating it, even if it meant losing ground. But that was an argument to be had between a captain and his first officer (and likely some admirals), not a doctor.

Instead, Bones stole a look to Jim, still sound asleep, and steeled himself against an acute burst of panic. He had to remind himself that Jim was neither dead nor in an insensible coma; he was napping.

Regardless, Bones grabbed his tricorder and PADD from the counter and went the short distance to the living room. Over the back of the couch, he hovered the device over Jim's body, top to bottom. Heart rate: low. Blood pressure: normal. Temperature: low side of normal, but that's how Jim ran. Respiratory rate: normal.

He stuck a monitor to Jim's cheek, stomach sort of dropping when Jim didn't even move, let alone start complaining. Readings poured into his PADD, only one of them cause for alarm: very low blood sugar. Easily correctable.

Bones let out a heavy sigh, plucked the monitor off Jim's face, and sagged against the back of the couch.

“Doctor?”

Bones regarded Spock, who looked at Bones not with question but with what Bones interpreted as concern and understanding. Bones shook his head and didn't say anything.

“I myself find it difficult to refrain from worrying about his health, however illogical. As his doctor, you, at least, have justification.”

Bones waved the tricorder back and forth in the air and replied, “Stop worrying; he's fine.”

Ah, shit. He felt like he was leaving Spock hanging; Spock, who'd been nothing but supportive and on-point throughout this entire ordeal. Like apparently grabbing Jim the moment Jim left Starfleet Command; that was pretty impressive.

“As his doctor, I know he's fine. He's been fine. It's just...too good to be true sometimes.”

Spock looked at Jim, fingers tightly curled around his PADD. “It is not rational.”

If Spock was talking more about himself than Bones (and he was), Bones didn't mention it. Instead, he went back to the kitchen and pulled out the same bags he'd just put away not five minutes ago.

“Hope you're hungry for real food.”

First, Bones had to wash the poor excuse for a skillet and two sauce pans that Jim had to his name; if the fine layer of dust was any indication, they hadn't been used ever. He ran them through the sonic wash and dove straight into the comfortable mindlessness of cutting, chopping, and mincing. And then full-on cooking, a hobby he hadn't properly engaged in for nearly a year.

About a minute after the Laurentian chops hit the pan, sizzling and steaming (with a healthy helping of vegetables simmering in a wide sauce pan for Spock), Jim's voice carried from the living room, like clockwork.

“Is Bones cooking? Holy shit, Bones is cooking. Bones, what are you cooking?”

And then a thud, Spock's cool “Jim, are you--”, and a “What? Yeah, I'm not so good in the morning,” and a “it is barely seven o'clock in the evening,” and finally, Jim's voice way too close to Bones, “Same difference. What're you cooking?”

Bones turned away from the cook top and physically maneuvered Jim three steps back. Bones looked down, then back up, and raised an eyebrow. “Nothing for you--”

“Don't do that thing with the eyebrow; that's Spock's thing.”

“--unless you put some damn pants on. And if you're going to get nasty, I'm leaving.”

Jim looked down, sighed, and walked off out of sight, but not before throwing out, “It better be what I think it is.”

It was exactly what Jim thought it was: mushroom pork marsala and fettuccine, a McCoy family tradition, taught to him by his father, and first experienced by Jim during that rocky first year at the Academy, when Jim was still learning that people could do nice things just for the hell of it.

And maybe that was the unshakable feeling of something bad in Bones' gut: that Jim's trust in Starfleet was hard-won and largely reliant on ever-steady Pike, and now Pike was dead and the admiral of all admirals had hunted and nearly murdered Jim's entire crew. That Jim was handling this all too well, and a Kirktastrophe was lurking behind some unknown corner.

Bones didn't say any of that, when Jim strolled back into the living room, freshly showered and appropriately dressed. Instead, the three of them ate together, just like on Enterprise, except Jim didn’t own a dining room table (“What? When am I here?”) and they had to sit at the coffee table instead.

Their conversation, as always, veered off into all sorts of crazy directions. Bones mostly sat back and listened, let Jim try to explain to Spock why “I hate you so much, Bones” was not, in fact, “hardly an appropriate way to express gratitude, let alone properly convey the savory nature of Doctor McCoy’s cooking.”

“On Earth, it is.”

Bones rolled his eyes and decided that he had to side with Jim, or else he would never hear the end of it. “Jim's not wrong.”

“He means I'm right.”

“And, yet, I am inclined to wonder as to the reason why Doctor McCoy would not simply say so. Perhaps because he knows, as I believe is the adage, that it would 'go to your head.'”

Jim narrowed his eyes and aimed his empty fork at Spock. “There's a regulation about back talk.”

“I have no doubt that you are well-acquainted with that regulation.”

“I have no doubt that you would be, if people didn't think they just heard you wrong.”

Bones tuned them out, happily so, and didn't waste much time thinking of how strange the two were. Going from mutiny, to throwing each other off ships, to all-out shit-beatings on the bridge, to command stealing, to an oddly close friendship and protectiveness of each other. The year was forever, or so they said, and it fit the two perfectly.

Which is why when Bones came back to reality, he was surprised to hear the bite in Jim's tone.

“Spock, it worries me that you don't get it.”

“It is not logical. The advancements are beneficial and--”

“So, you want to keep building this road to hell, only you plan to stop right before you get there?”

Bones caught up pretty fast: they were arguing about the repairs for Enterprise. Great.

“Wait, this past month wasn't hell?” Bones asked, only a little sarcastically.

“Bones,” Jim warned, a severe undertone in his voice. He didn't take his eyes off Spock.

“Admiral Marcus is dead. Vengeance poses no threat. And, still yet, I do not believe you are able to consider this matter objectively.”

Jim didn't take the bait and say the number of things that Bones expected him to.

“Spock. There is nothing good that comes from Vengeance. There's nothing. Marcus was completely fucking wrong, and, in being so, nearly destroyed our entire way of life. We are not going to pick and choose pieces of his delusions to sanctify. I'm not doing it. You're not doing it. And, god help me, Starfleet's not doing it.”

Spock's eyes were dark, hands clasped ever so tightly in his lap. His expression revealed nothing. “Captain--”

“One more thing,” Jim interrupted. His PADD chirped and he looked at the screen, a brief flash of surprise softening his expression. When he looked at Spock again, he was all business. “Don't, for one moment, think I missed how most of what you're asking me to cannibalize from Vengeance has to do with automating Engineering and, in particular, the management of catastrophic warp core failures.”

Jim let that last bit hang in the air. Bones resisted the urge to whistle, because there it was. There it really was. Instead, he collected the empty plates, retreated into the kitchen, and pretended that the sonic wash required his presence.

“Point being: before you continue to imply that I'm emotionally compromised, check yourself.”

And then Jim was up and at the door, leather jacket in his hand.

“Hey, where do you think you're going?!” Bones demanded.

“Dr. Marcus finally wants to talk,” Jim answered and left, no apologies.

The silence he left behind was uncomfortable and suffocating. Bones stacked the cleaned and dried plates and pans back in their cabinets and neatly placed the cutlery in their drawer, every clink and clang loud and blatant. Bones visually scanned the kitchen and found nothing else left to do; and so, he moved to the arch between the kitchen and living room and leaned into it.

Spock didn't move or speak. To Bones' human eyes, he seemed gutted. No surprise: Jim pretty much splayed him open, relentless.

“Sounds like he means to go after Starfleet about this,” Bones said. “He needs you to stand with him.”

Spock's eyes drifted up. Bones offered him a tight smile.

“Do you recall the day I first visited him in the hospital?” Bones nodded. “When I asked you to leave, I attempted to meld with his mind. I could not find it.”

Bones thought back to that visit, the one that lasted no more than five minutes and ended with Spock, in hindsight, sounding rather final about things with Jim. And it explained the days without any word at all from Spock. It didn't explain why Spock came back, or spent days reading to Jim.

“We now have the chance to reduce casualties on every Federation starship. To prevent, to the very best of our ability, the circumstances that led to so many deaths on Enterprise, including his. He considers it unwise. I consider it necessary.”

All Bones could think was that Spock was more of a mess right now than either himself or Jim. He felt remiss in his own duties as CMO, in failing to recognize that Spock was not invulnerable, as best evidenced by how Harrison had been captured.

“If I recall correctly, about a year ago, you considered that ‘cheating,’” Bones said. He watched Spock's face carefully: the initial wrinkle of his brow followed by the slow widening of his eyes, as it sunk in. “I'm taking you off active duty for a few days. Get some rest, Mr. Spock.”

Bones half-expected a lecture on Vulcan sleep cycles. It didn't come.

“Perhaps that is for the best.”

And didn't that just say it all?

By the time Jim came home, Spock had been gone for nearly five hours, and Bones had found Jim's collection of hard liquor and made himself quite at home.

“Go to bed, Bones,” Jim said, before the door closed or he'd even hung his jacket.

“You know, I think Spock agrees with you,” Bones greeted between sips of some wonderful sort of off-planet brew. He almost felt guilty for opening it. Almost. “He's just terrified of you voluntarily dying horribly again.”

The sigh was intentionally loud and dramatic. “Yeah, I got that. Thanks.”

“You were pretty brutal with him. All Captain. No Jim. Even on a good day, that's usually a hard sell.”

“Wow, you're drunk; that made no sense,” Jim said, right before he sat down heavily, unexpectedly, next to Bones.

Jim grabbed a half-empty amber bottle. Before it reached his lips, Bones snatched it out of Jim's hand and set it as far out of reach as possible.

“Oh, c'mon!”

“Panic attacks stop yet?”

Jim cleared his throat, left the bottle and all its friends alone, and focused on the muted news program streaming on the in-air holographic screen.

“Didn’t think so,” Bones muttered. “So, explain to me why you’re on this sudden tear. Why Jim Kirk gives a damn.”

“I got kicked out today,” Jim replied. “Yesterday? Whatever. They didn’t like what I said. Harrison killed three admirals, a captain, and three first officers; Marcus’ unsanctioned warship the size of fucking Iowa crashed into the capital; Enterprisebarely made it out alive; and they still don’t know what to do. And there’s something wrong with me.”

Bones nodded seriously. Only Jim could get kicked out of his own debriefing, when Command was likely the most sympathetic toward him, the kid who died for his crew. “‘The size of fucking Iowa’ – now, is that the official measurement?”

Jim slouched into the sofa, maybe only a little embarrassed. “So it reads on the record.”

“You might have…”

“Exaggerated, yeah.” Jim ran his hands over his face and groaned. “Computer, stream some stupid old video, volume five.”

Some stupid old video with shuttles, oil drillers, and something about losing independence replaced the news stream. Jim stared at it with his “either we’re going down or they are” face, arms crossed tight around his chest.

“Starfleet doesn’t know which way to jump. Was Marcus essentially right, was Marcus essentially insane, or are those two things even mutually exclusive? They don’t know. The Federation is a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada. And they don’t know.”

Bones snorted. “Do you really blame them? Half the fleet and Vulcan got destroyed, Jim. And, maybe you haven't heard, but one of their captains is barely twenty-six years old.”

“Oh, don't you fucking start,” Jim muttered and kicked Bones' foot off the coffee table. Bones kicked back, reminding even himself of a little kid. “Militarizing isn't the answer to a maniac accidentally coming back in time and fucking shit up, or to an admiral using that as an excuse to kill indiscriminately and start his pet war. I won't be a part of it.”

“Jim--”

“No. No. Do you know how much restraint it took when I met Nero? To offer him the chance to peacefully surrender instead of killing him? And then to work with Harrison, after everything he did, on the slim chance that Enterprise just might survive?”

Bones thinned his lips. And then took another drink. For some reason, he had the crazy idea that it'd taken Jim's life to do that last part.

“It was all the Starfleet bullshit I’d bought into. Be the better person. Be the good captain. Follow regulation. And for what?”

Bones rubbed his face with his free hand and drew the only conclusion he could: “So, you must’ve gone drinking with Dr. Marcus, otherwise you wouldn’t be thinking that you have ever, once in your life, followed regulation.”

“I believe I did.”

Jim looked over at Bones, lips twitching. Bones gave first, laughing drunkenly, his head lulling against the back of the couch. Jim just smiled and looked the same kind of tired he'd been for days.

“I'm serious, Bones,” Jim said, the smile draining from his face. “If I can't change it, I can't be a part of it.”

“I’ll remind you that you’re still closer to that coma than not,” Bones argued. “I’m asking you as a friend and telling you as your doctor to relax. Everything will be fine.”

“Sure,” Jim answered, smile tight and patronizing, just like they taught in command school.

Bones closed his eyes and decided to deal with it in the morning. Probably with an array of hyposprays.

He woke lying full-body on the couch, drooling on a throw pillow like an infant, with a blanket draped over him. That feeling, that unshakable bad feeling, was front and center, and he knew without checking that Jim was gone.

That feeling told Bones to check his PADD, and he did, grabbing it off the floor and unlocking it with a swipe of his index finger. It was the first message of many, an automated change of status report. And though Jim’s rank still read “Captain,” and his assignment still read “U.S.S. Enterprise,” his status was a bright red “authorized leave of absence, indefinite.”

“Son of a bitch.”

Part V: Epilogue

Starfleet's preliminary investigation concluded within a week. Jim Kirk was a hero twice over within the span of fourteen months. He was twenty-six and legend.

There were darker-than-white lies that didn't sit entirely well, mostly to do with how Harrison got on board Vengeance and just how dead Jim was by the end of it. Maybe it was naïve to think that the Federation could survive the hard-line truth: that it had been the safest and most viable option to rely on a terrorist than their own admiralty. Maybe it had to be good enough to let Starfleet take the hit and paint Enterprise and her captain as the near-martyred hero.

Bones signed his name to it. They all did. Jim did.

“It is often easy to forget how fragile we became, after Narada,” Spock said, “and, in the process, how so much of ourselves changed. It is easier to not question if we have lost the way to return to what we once were and are supposed to be. It is a question that we cannot ignore.”

“I'll drink to that,” Bones said, and did.

Spock cocked an eyebrow. “I believe he is singing.”

Bourbon went down the wrong pipe. Bones sputtered and coughed his face red, while Spock remained impassively engrossed in his PADD.

“What?” Bones rasped. “Who?”

“Jim,” Spock supplied, as though it should be obvious. “In his continued attempts to convince me of ‘the error of my ways,’ he sent me part of a report he is writing before Enterprise docks for preliminary repairs.”

“You mean to tell me that you've been talking to him?! Damn it, Spock, he should still be hospitalized and...wait a red-horned searat second. Youknow where he is?!”

Spock was back to being smug. Had been, since he'd “requested the presence” of Bones at a “mutually agreeable” location. Because it was just too hard to say, “Dr. McCoy, let's get lunch at Sunrise Bay Cafe. They have vegetarian options and a bar.”

“Affirmative. I had presumed you knew as well, as his primary care physician.”

Bones narrowed his eyes and decided he was done, absolutely done, with Spock. There was just no talking to the pointy-eared bastard. But Jim, on the other hand, was a different story.

“I'm gonna kill him.” And that was never going to sound right again, not ever. “Where is he?”

“As Enterprise is scheduled to dock in the Riverside Shipyard next week, I presume he is already there, as it is, coincidentally, his hometown.”

Bones froze, almost literally. Shivers ran down his arms. For all Jim supposedly talked about himself, Riverside, Iowa was on the other side of a very well-constructed wall, of which Bones had only seen – and heard – a few cracks. Riverside was no good for Jim. Starfleet knew it. To send Enterprise there...

Bones drained his glass and set it back on the table, more gently than necessary, his decision made and cemented before the glass clinked against the tabletop. Spock popped an eyebrow.

“Well? Are you coming?”

 ***

The Shipyard was a small step up from a dive.

It was still early, so the place wasn’t darker than an Effurian mungle pit like most bars, and the music was neither overly loud nor irritatingly obnoxious (yet). Otherwise, its flashing neon lights were straight from the ‘40’s; there were cobwebs and overgrown tufts of dark gray dust on the ceiling; the checkered floor made Bones’s head hurt; and the whole place smelled like booze, sweat, and armpit.

Of course the Academy kids loved it, at least when they were here. There was a temporary moratorium on new cadets, until San Francisco was anywhere near back on its feet. Bones assumed that, normally, this place would be crawling with Academy hopefuls, instead of just the locals and the totally-obvious-who-it-was man sitting at the very back of the establishment.

Jim stood out amongst the locals like an overgrown Chevaran warraw on a cold day, which was saying something. His elaborate disguise – a new-looking, gray Iowa U sweater with the hood up – was severely undercut by the messy blonde hair sticking out and his ridiculous blue eyes, which were like a beacon yelling, here I am, I'm finally bad at something, find me. He had his feet up on a spare chair, a single bottle of beer sitting on the table, and was poking intensely at a PADD. Although Bones seriously wondered how drunk he was, on the outset, he looked good. Really, really good.

“I do not understand the appeal of such an establishment,” Spock said, a little too loudly and a little too deliberately to just be culture shock. “It also appears to be quite unclean, which I am certain is contrary to some form of local regulation.”

Bones rolled his eyes, shook his head, and didn’t even bother engaging in a would-be argument about Spock having to have had some experience with bars while at the Academy. It’s not like they were terribly better in San Francisco than they were here. Instead, he took Spock by the elbow and directed him to where Jim sat. To his credit (not), Jim never saw them coming.

“You’ve got a lot of nerve, you know that?” Bones snapped. “Hi, by the way.”

Jim looked up and only let a little surprise show through on his face, which instantly turned into a familiar look of sheer annoyance. “God fuck it. Really?” Nevertheless, Jim sat up straight, waved his hand in the general direction of the chairs, and tossed his PADD on the table. “I can’t with you two. At all.”

“Oh, is that so?” Bones retorted. He grabbed Jim’s bottle of beer, ready to tear into a whole litany of why the hell Jim shouldn’t be drinking, let alone while in a half-abandoned dive in the middle of nowhere barely a month after being god damned son of a bitching dead, but it all died on his tongue. The bottle was full and warm without even a drop of condensation. “Oh.”

Bones set the bottle back on the table and pushed it back into place, raising his eyebrows threateningly when Jim threw him a scornful expression and facetiously mimed back Bones’ “oh.”

“Jim, although I admit my own complicity, it is very unwise to have—”

“Shut up, Spock,” Jim interrupted, pinning Spock with a piercing, really blue glare. Before Spock could ignore him, Jim said, in the most even tone he could muster: “Starfleet seems to think I owe them for the you-know-what, and they don’t want the Federation’s ‘newest advancements’ to go to waste. They also seem to think I’ll be the captain of a warship.”

“You’re not quitting Starfleet,” Bones ordered, before he could really think about it. But the reaction was worth it, because, at the same time, Spock flipped and Jim threw his hands in the air.

“I’m sorry?!”

“God, I hate you!”

“I was not aware that--”

“I’m not!”

“Jim, you said it--”

“I. Came. Here. To. Think. (Mostly.) That’s it. Christ al-fucking-mighty!”

Bones cleared his throat and stole a look back towards the front of the bar. They’d earned a lot of stares and growing whispers. It suddenly occurred to Bones that Jim’s feigned attempt at looking like a college student might’ve actually been working. He half-wondered why the people here didn't already recognize Jim but, then, it was only three in the afternoon, and Riverside wasn't as small as Jim made it out to be. These people were likely not really Jim's crowd.

Jim also noticed the extra attention from the patrons and just threw his elbows on the table and buried his face in his hands. Bones faintly heard, “Fuck you, Bones, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” and Bones almost smiled, because, yeah, he’d done a hell of a job bringing Jim back from the dead, absolutely no question about it.

“Jim, I don’t understand,” Spock said. “I am certain that Starfleet will listen to us, with regards to acceptable upgrades. Additionally, you have more than earned command of the Enterprise and the respect of her crew. Is that not what you have always wanted?”

Jim actually laughed, but mirthlessly. Bones tamped down on a cringe, because he remembered that laugh from long, painful nights at the Academy. It suddenly struck him how different Jim was from that person. How far he’d come. And how easily being back in this place dragged the damaged parts of him out.

“No, Spock, no. It’s not.”

There was a time when this bar was as far as Jim ever saw himself going. “‘I dare you to go fuck yourself,’ is what I should’ve said. How ‘bout that. Fucking prick. Like I want to be here.” It didn’t make any sense, none at all, that he’d run back here at the first chance.

“I still do not—”

“All right, look, I’m not quitting, and I’m not turning anything down.” Jim said pointedly. For the next part, he lowered his voice and regarded them both seriously. “A lot happened, and a lot’s changed, and you both have done more for me than I ever could have asked for and could actually ever repay, so don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t appreciate this.”

“Hey, this is what friends are for,” Bones argued, jabbing a finger near Jim’s face, which was summarily batted away. He ignored the brief look of animosity that flickered over Jim’s expression. “And you coming back here? It doesn’t make a lick of sense, so why don’t you try and explain it, so we can all feel better.” Bone might’ve said that last part a little patronizingly.

Jim didn’t say anything. He just looked at Bones, inscrutably. Spock opened his mouth a few times to say something, but Bones jabbed him in the side real hard to shut him up.

“Excuse you, Doctor!”

“Since you two seem to be mostly friends now, here’s your first lesson, Commander: anything you say, he’ll use to get out of this. Trust me. Been there, done that, have the eye strain from all the eye rolling.”

“Damn it, I’m right here,” Jim said. “And, Spock, while that is entirely true, that’s bad advice.”

Spock cocked his head and totally did not smirk. “In this particular instance, the doctor’s logic is actually quite sound.”

Bones rolled his eyes but otherwise let the faint praise and all the damning that went along with it slide.

Jim leaned back in his chair, but not before taking his PADD to keep his hands occupied. “You don’t even want to hear why it’s bad advice?”

“Not in the least,” Spock said, giving Jim some beautiful grief by simply not engaging.

“So, you two are working together now? That’s really weird. I also disapprove. One of you is getting transferred.”

When neither of them said anything, it was Jim’s turn to roll his eyes.

This – right here, doing this, the three of them – felt so on and so right. Bones tucked away the thought of we almost lost this before we ever had it for another time and a private bottle of something real old and real smooth, before another thought of he’s the captain; you’re almost guaranteed to outlive him took a little more doing to shove away.

“Fine. Shit.” Jim cleared his throat and stared at the PADD. “I, uh, hate this place. I hate it. But there are...things I need to put behind me, before I can be – will be what Enterprise needs.” He looked up at them, all seriousness, and waved his PADD. “And there are things Starfleet needs to do, before it can be what we need. I can’t guarantee that will happen. But I'm going to do everything I can to try.”

Bones didn’t know what to say, but Spoke said it for him, only a little more tritely than Bones would have preferred. “The captain’s logic is also sound.”

“Stopped clocks,” Bones said.

Jim rolled his eyes and shook his head. It was the best Bones had ever seen him.

--end