templemarker

Notes: Written for lisamariedavis in the first round of the Trek Exchange. With thanks to marcolette, ailleann23, minim_calibre, and affectingly. Trek XI, the five-year mission. McCoy/Kirk.

***

McCoy finds him in his ready room, dark blond head bent over a console.

“TWO DAYS,” he bellows, before the doors have even finished closing, sure the bridge can hear him. Jim’s so surprised to see him blasting into the ready room that his hand flies, knocking the coffee next to him to the floor.

Before Jim can work up to annoyance from surprise, McCoy points an accusing finger at his face and repeats, only slightly more softly, “Two days, Captain! We’re two days into this mission and you’ve already managed to fill up my sickbay! Two days out of five years, Jim!”

Jim’s face flashes between confusion, frustration, understanding, and finally stops on amusement. “They’re called routine physicals for a reason, Bones,” he says easily, standing from behind his desk to come around and lean against it, arms crossed against the bright gold of his tunic.

“They were supposed to get ’em before they left Starbase One,” McCoy grumbles.

“Hey, I have to give you something to do, otherwise you’d go stir-crazy thinking about how much time there is between now and the next time you set foot on solid Federation ground,” Jim points out, smile chasing across his face. He stands, walks up to McCoy, and claps a warm hand on his shoulder. “Just think of it as getting to know the crew, Bones,” he says, walking out.

“Busywork, more like,” McCoy says.

That’s how it starts.

*

“It’s been a year and a half since we lost Lieutenant Mitchell,” Jim says quietly, staring out in to the multicolored strobe light that’s supposed to be warp space on the view screen in Rec 2. It’s actually the computer’s interpretation of what most hominid beings could handle warp space looking like, and mostly comes off like a really intricate finger painting.

“A good eighteen months, though,” Bones returns, stretching out his long legs against the boring beige of the carpet. Harb really ought to change the color, he thought, letting his hand rest lightly on Jim’s shoulder.

A year and a half from when Jim lost his first crewman on this high-tail mission into unknown space. He’d taken it hard; Jim hadn’t known Gary Mitchell personally, but it was never easy watching someone die. Especially not someone you were responsible for. There were four hundred and fifty-four souls aboard the Enterprise, at least on this leg of their mission, and it was clear that the only person more concerned than Bones with the welfare of each and every one of them was the Enterprise’s captain.

Jim turns his head to look at him, and Bones had never wished harder for a man to age; twenty-seven years instead of twenty-six might take a little more of that youthfulness out of the grief in his eyes.

“C’mere,” Bones said, pulling Kirk close and tucking him into his shoulder. They’d gained necessary distance, five years out of that first shuttle ride and pushed into positions they weren’t quite prepared for. Distance that sometimes fell away when they had a private conference like this, the rec room empty but for the soft hum of the starship herself.

“You know I still can’t call you ‘Captain,'” McCoy said to break the quiet companionship of the moment. Jim laughed wetly into the fabric of his uniform, and McCoy resolutely looked out the viewer.

“I’ve noticed you only use my rank when you’re trying to get my attention,” Jim said, grasping at McCoy’s tunic to right himself again, his face inches from McCoy’s own.

“Or when you’re pissing me off,” McCoy reminded, trying not to look into the crazy, present blue stare of his commanding officer.

He was rewarded with a smile, and his arms betrayed him a little, tugged Jim close again. They watched null space pass them by, pleasant as a riverside.

*

Three years in, and Leonard’s running on three hours of sleep in five days, hyposprays of food supplements and so much artificial adrenaline he’s taken to hiding from Chapel so she doesn’t lecture him–or worse, sedate him.

The Siren Moon Compound out in the Pleiadic Cluster was a human colony, but not a Federation-sanctioned one. They’d received the distress call fifty lightyears away, weak as hell and so damn heartbreaking that no one had commented on the shore leave they were sacrificing to go out and aid a group of people who had called the service they were in “fascist militaristic imperialism dressed up in diplomatic suits.”

For starving beings, they’d have been willing to give up far more.

Leonard had never heard of anything this bad. Half of ’em had vitamin deficiencies so bad they’d be in rehabilitation tanks for months; the other half were no better, hollowed-out shells of former health compromised by sudden, unwelcome sickness.

The children broke his heart. He couldn’t talk about them, could barely get through their exams. He desperately wanted to be back in Georgia, arms around his little girl, far away from all this hellish wasting disease.

He’d finished checking a four-year old girl for petechiae and internal bleeding, her half-dead brother looking on brokenly, anxiously, from the bed next to her, when a hand curled around his waist and warm breath hit his ear. “Bones, you stupid man,” he heard, sparing one moment to enjoy the touch of healthy flesh against his own, before everything went black.

Leonard woke up in the clean-smelling comfort of his own room, silent and empty of any other bodies except, unsurprisingly, Jim’s prone form next to him. Jim was fully clothed, still in his boots, and he didn’t make a sound in sleep; he just had his arms around a pillow, mouth slightly open and drooling. Leonard rubbed a hand against his face, and tried to sort out time. The chronometer displayed twenty-two hours since he last recalled checking the time; right before he’d ushered a patient into M’Benga’s surgical room, praying the damn liver graft would take.

His first instinct was to jump out of bed and run to his sickbay, but Jim snorted and shuffled a bit and something in him stopped. Jim had drugged him, forced him out of his own damn office, exercised something other than the privilege of command, that was sure enough. But he was man enough to admit that sometimes he needed a little kick in the pants, a little sense beat into him every now and again. Jim was probably right. Not that Leonard would ever let him know that.

He stayed under the covers, reading the news updates he’d entirely ignored from the last week, drinking the water on the table and injecting himself with the hypospray next to it. Leonard might give Chapel hell for her obvious collusion in this, but not today.

The first stirrings of Jim beside him drew Leonard out of his study, and he watched Jim twitch awake with all the grace of a child. It was charming, in an uncoordinated dumbass sort of way.

“I’m sorry,” Jim said around a yawn, serious look in his eyes. “It had to be done.”

He must have been more fucked up than he realized if Jim started off with an apology.

They stayed in companionable silence as Jim pulled off his boots and padded to the coffee-maker, ordering a mug for each of them. Leonard joined him at the small table in the far corner of his quarters, covered with PADDs and spare styluses. He didn’t stiffen when Jim tucked his feet beneath Leonard’s knees, and didn’t pause in taking Jim’s free hand. He refused to be ashamed of needing this right now.

Jim took a long sip of coffee, set the mug down, and looked directly at Leonard. “I never told you about Tarsus IV,” he said.

*

Bones never thought drydock could look so goddamned sad.

Maybe it wasn’t the skeletal frames hanging starkly against the green-orange of Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards. Maybe it was the hangdog look on his captain’s face at the thought of how long the refit would take.

“Scotty says they’ve got some nifty inversion drive they want to outfit,” Bones tried, not that he knew what any of the gobbledegook coming out of that man’s mouth meant most of the time. “Seems a good chance they’ll want to put it on our good bird, huh?”

“No,” Jim said moodily. “I already spoke to Komack. They’re giving it to the Excalibur. We’re getting the new deflector shields and photon banks, and the retrofitted cloak they pulled off the Romulan cruiser the Farragut took out last year.”

Bones inwardly swore; he’d been pretty sure, from what Kirk and Spock had been discussing over dinners in the Ready Room, that when the old girl was ready to fly again they’d be out on the borders of the Neutral Zone, patrolling instead of exploring. They didn’t have a choice–ever since the Klingon Star Empire and the Imperial Romulan Empire formally declared hostilities, starships were recalled more and more from the far edges of space to keep the borders obvious and clear to all parties involved.

It sure didn’t make anyone happy, though. No one liked preparing for war.

They were two of the last off the ship, and Jim had elected to pilot his personal shuttlecraft out to Utopia Station One. He didn’t even try to steer it, though, one of the few occasional pleasures he was allowed on a ship full of more qualified pilots. He just set it to auto, swiveled the chair around, and made a face at the wall.

“You want a lemon to suck on, too?” Bones said, trying to get a rise out of him. Thirty looked better on Jim than it had any right too; it had worn down his boyish face into a sharper, rakish charm. He knew every bone in that face intimately. If anyone knew the shape of Jim Kirk, it was him.

Jim snorted. “I’m not really happy about leaving her here,” he confessed, like it was some big damn surprise.

“No shit, Sherlock,” Bones said drily, cribbing one of Jim’s favorite old sayings. “It’s not like you’re going off to be useless. Admiral Oliver’s got you jumping hither and yon practically the whole sixteen months.”

The captain shifted in his seat. “About that,” he hedged.

“James Tiberius Kirk,” Bones barked, looking Jim full-on, ignoring the little smile edging the corners of Jim’s mouth, “if you somehow messed up the diplomatic tour Starfleet spend eight months preparing for, the tour that I had to change my lecture schedule at Starfleet Med for, so help me god–”

Jim raised his hands in defence. “I just asked for two weeks delay! That’s all!” he said. “It works with your schedule. I know, I checked. I should’ve asked first.”

Bones made a face. “And what do you want to propose to do with this two weeks off?” he asked, crossing his arms.

“I thought we could go to Georgia,” Jim said plainly, “and then Iowa, maybe stop over someplace for a couple days to ourselves.” He shrugged, like it wasn’t obvious he’d gone to great trouble to plan this little runaway. “Or you can go right into teaching teenagers about space, death, and disease. It’s up to you.”

The shuttle was quiet for a moment, until Bones kicked Jim in the shin and Jim swore like a sailor. “About time I introduced you to proper sweet tea,” Bones muttered. “Whatever they cook up in those damned computers never tastes right.”

He watched out of the corner of his eye as Jim smiled, took the shuttle off autopilot, and flew them into the bay.