Vulcans Don't Get Angry
Lookit, I wrote something for the kink meme o_O
This is also the first thing I has writ with Joanna in it. Yaay.
Title: Vulcans Don't Get Angry (or 5 times Spock surprised McCoy with an emotional reaction)
Fandom: Star Trek
Pairing: Spock/McCoy, (but it can be read as friendship or OT3)
Rating: PG-13 for naughty words and explosions?
Summary: Does what it says on the tin. Leonard slowly stops thinking of him as "that pointy-eared bastard" and starts thinking of him as "my pointy-eared friend".
A/N: Written for this prompt in st_xi_kink
One
It all happened so fast - that self-assured bastard of a Vulcan throwing Jim off the ship, Leonard's argument with Spock that had left him shaking with anger, and Jim's sudden reappearance on the bridge. Leonard had been so relieved to see his friend alive an in one piece that he'd hardly been listening to the words that passed between him and the acting-Captain, so he almost jumped with surprise when Spock gave an angry shout and was suddenly drop-kicking Jim with all of his Vulcan strength.
Vulcans didn't get angry. They didn't lose control so completely, and they certainly didn't half-choke people to death just for insulting their mothers. But Leonard had forgotten; Spock's mother wasn't Vulcan.
Spock relaxed his grip and Jim gasped for air in between painful sounding coughs. The situation was over as quickly as it started; the pointy-eared bastard was telling Leonard to note the incident in his medical log, and Leonard was concentrating on not having a fucking heart attack. When Spock left the bridge to calm the fuck down, Leonard pulled himself together and started bitching at Jim, because if he could still bitch at Jim there was still hope for the universe.
Later, he noted it in his medical log. He wouldn't forget Spock's human heritage again so easily.
Two
Jim was bleeding, Sulu was bleeding, Uhura was bleeding and Leonard only had one pair of hands. Thankfully, he hadn't gotten through med school by dithering during a crisis. Nurse Chapel tended to the gash in Jim's arm while Leonard took an unconscious Uhura from Sulu's arms and instructed Sulu to put pressure on her chest wound while he fixed her stomach.
Four hours and some complicated surgery later, and Leonard was peeling off his blood-drenched gloves, wiping the sweat from his brow and trying to explain in terms of logic why Spock shouldn't be allowed into the recovery room.
"Lieutenant Uhura is in a fragile state. The next few hours are crucial - she needs to be monitored and I don't need you getting in the way."
"I fail to see how my presence at her bedside could impede your monitoring equipment," Spock shot back, as calmly as ever. "I merely wish to sit with her, as you have done with the Captain on no less than fifteen occasions in the past five months."
"I'm the Chief Medical Officer, I can sit where I damn well please in my own sickbay!" he snapped. "You can come back and sit with her when I decide that her condition's stable."
Spock set his jaw, and Leonard was suddenly reminded of another incident, months ago, when he had seemed perfectly calm up until the moment he lost control. "If you continue to provide no logical reason for preventing me from being with her, I will take the issue up with the Captain."
Leonard scowled, his eyes narrowing. He was ready to fight, to keep pushing the Vulcan back until he snapped, but as his gaze swept upwards to meet Spock's, he realised that it wasn't the Vulcan he was dealing with. Spock's eyes were entirely human, and they shone with determination and concern. It was like looking into a mirror of his own past, back in the day when he'd still been in love. Jocelyn had landed herself in hospital with a broken leg and he'd been damn close to breaking the attending doctor's nose in his insistence that he be the one to fix her.
"You touch anything, you're out," he said, stepping aside. Spock looked at him with curiosity for a moment, but his concern for Uhura outweighed his fascination with human illogicality. A couple of strides later and he was at her bedside, cradling her hand in his own and stroking back the hair from her forehead with the other.
Three
No-one had seen it coming, or at least Leonard damn well hadn't. Maybe Uhura had discussed it with her closest friends beforehand, but he was too closely associated with Jim to be counted as anything more than her doctor. The first he heard of the breakup was an overheard conversation between Chapel and one of the other nurses, speculating on whether she had a chance with Spock now that Uhura was out of the picture.
Leonard wasn't big on gossip, but he happened to be best friends with a damned idiot who was far too nosy for his own good, so it wasn't long before he found out that Uhura had been the one to "do the breaking-up with". If you asked Leonard, that sentence didn't even made a shred of sense, but Jim was more likely to take a vow of celibacy than to listen to his opinion.
He still wasn't giving a damn about the gossip when he walked into the rec room one day and found it deserted but for one lone half-Vulcan sitting at a table clutching his guitar/harp thing and looking morose. Leonard's first instinct was to leave and pretend he'd never been there, but Spock looked up from his instrument and fixed his gaze on him, so that plan was out.
"Forgive me," Spock said, his voice a little less than perfectly even. "If you would rather be alone, I will leave."
He even started to stand up, the bastard, so Leonard took a step forward and made a vague 'sit the fuck back down' gesture. He took the seat opposite Spock and rested his elbows on the table.
"Is this some kind of angsty reminiscing-about-the-good-times thing?" he asked. "Because I've been there, and believe me when I say that dwelling on it ain't going to help."
He expected Spock to deny the accusation of emotional behaviour and make logical excuses for sitting alone hugging a reminder of his relationship with big watery puppy eyes, but instead he looked down at the table like it had all the answers and said: "I assume you have an alternative prescription in mind?"
Leonard took him back to his quarters, got him drunk on the good stuff and let him cry quietly into his shoulder. He didn't mention it the next day when he popped up to the bridge to bitch at Jim, but Spock turned around and gave him a brief nod before turning back to his readings.
Four
They'd been on their way back to Earth, Leonard was almost allowing himself to get excited about seeing Joanna again, and Command had asked them to swing by New Vulcan on their way back to see whether the colonists were OK, because God forbid the Vulcans should ever ask for help when they needed it.
The air was too dry and the sun was too hot and the people were too damn enigmatic, but things seemed to be going well for them, so Leonard anticipated a short visit. Jim, Spock and Uhura had gone off to talk to a bunch of stiff-backed dignitaries while Leonard had been shown around a state-of-the-art medical facility by an equally stiff-backed doctor. Despite the dryness of his tour guide, he'd been impressed by the facility, and was surprised to find himself in good spirits at the end of the day.
Jim came to find him, having escaped the Vulcan dignitaries with Spock in tow. The half-Vulcan turned with interest to the scanner Leonard had been examining, and Jim wandered around the room aimlessly, touching things he shouldn't have been touching while Leonard and Spock geeked out over the shiny new equipment. His little bonding moment with the half-Vulcan had broken the ice between them, and although they bickered twice as often as they'd used to, Leonard sometimes caught himself thinking of Spock as a friend.
"If you two are done drooling over the equipment, we ought to be-" Jim was saying as an explosion went off in the distance. All three of them ducked instinctively, but when it became apparent that none of them were hurt, they rushed off towards the commotion, Jim in the lead.
The explosion turned out to have come from the children's ward. Jim leapt over a charred body and started overturning wreckage, looking for trapped kids. Spock went to help him, but Leonard slid to a halt beside a young girl with one leg at a funny angle and started scanning her. She couldn't have been any older than five or six but her face was dry and calm as Leonard straightened her leg as gently as he could and called for someone to bring him the right equipment.
Suddenly, someone was tugging at his uniform, and he looked around, ready to snap at whoever was trying to distract him from doing his Goddamn job.
"Doctor McCoy," said a cool, female voice. "You and your colleagues are in danger. I must insist that you leave."
Leonard noted the insignia of a high ranking doctor and asked her what the hell she was doing. "I'm not leaving, not when there are people here I can help." He looked around for Jim and Spock, but saw nothing but smoke and confusion.
The damn pointy-eared woman was tugging at his shirt again, trying to get him to leave the girl. "For an explosion to occur while you were visiting the hospital is unlikely to be a coincidence. This would not be the first anti-Federation attack that has occured recently, and I can only extrapolate that you were the intended target."
Her words finally filtered through to him, and he stood up, looking for Jim and Spock once more. A mess of blonde hair caught his eye, and he breathed a sigh of relief to find Jim making his way through the clearing smoke towards him.
"Jim, what the hell is going on?" he asked. It wasn't that he didn't already have a pretty good idea, but it reassured him to know that Jim was in charge of the situation.
"Terrorist attack," Jim said, his shoulders tense. "They expect a second explosion any minute now. We need to evacuate."
"Right," Leonard said, bending down to gather the Vulcan girl in his arms. He looked around once more and frowned. "Where's Spock?"
Jim's mouth set in a hard line. "He won't leave."
Cursing, Leonard dumped the kid in his arms and started pushing his way through the crowd of bodies and wreckage until he found a cluster of Vulcans trying to convince Spock to move.
"You're attempting the impossible," he muttered, pushing them out of the way. "Go make sure the children are out, I'll deal with this."
He turned to Spock, who was crouched on the floor beside a bookcase that had fallen over, spilling PADDs everywhere. His arms were around a half-unconscious little girl and the look of determination in his eyes told Leonard what he already knew.
"We cannot attempt to move her," Spock told him. Leonard pushed his hands out of the way, noted the huge shard of metal sticking out of her chest, and nodded.
"So what do you suggest we do?" he demanded. "Stay here and die with her when the next bomb goes off?"
"I suggest you work quickly to stabilise her condition," Spock replied, as calm as if he'd been asked whether he wanted tea or coffee. "If you remove the object and close the wound, she has a 60% chance of surviving being carried to safety."
Leonard stood up, located his med kit, grabbed a local anaesthetic and injected her with it.
"I'll need you to apply pressure," he said as he pulled on a pair of gloves. "As soon as this thing comes out, there's going to be a lot of blood. You ready?"
Spock nodded tersely. Everyone else had evacuated; they were the only two left in the ward. Leonard thought he heard Jim hailing him on the communicator, but he ignored it as he got a firm grip on the shard of metal and prepared to pull it out, Spock's breath hot and sharp against his neck.
They made it out three seconds before the second explosion, Spock clutching the little girl to his chest. Leonard would have taken the time to be surprised by the Vulcan's stubbornness, but he was just fucking glad to be alive.
Five
They made it to Earth a lot later than expected, but still alive, and that was what mattered. Seeing Spock so protective of that young Vulcan girl had given Leonard something to think about, but it wasn't until Jim asked whether Spock knew any of his family on Earth that Leonard considered including the half-Vulcan in his plans.
He was kind of surprised that Spock agreed to go camping with him and Jim and Joanna. The calmly delivered justification for his acceptance was that he had never been camping before, but Leonard had a suspicion that Spock liked spending time with them. Not that the green blooded bastard would ever admit it, of course.
Spock got along with Joanna surprisingly well. She'd learned about Vulcans in school but had never met one, and despite Leonard's insistence that she keep her manners, she wouldn't stop asking questions. Leonard could've sworn he saw the hint of a smile twitch at the corner of Spock's mouth as she pressed her ear against the side of his abdomen and listened to his heartbeat, but he put it down to his imagination.
They set up two tents - one for Jim and Spock, one for Leonard and Joanna because he wouldn't let his baby girl sleep alone in the wilderness. Spock and Joanna watched with fascination as Jim bullshitted his way through starting a fire the old fashioned way, insisting that he'd been a boy scout in his youth.
"If you were a boy scout, Uncle Jim, I'm the tooth fairy," Joanna told him as he failed for the seventh time to make a spark with two rocks he'd found. "Just let Mister Spock use his lighter like he told you in the first place, it's way more logical."
Leonard sat down next to Jim, grabbed the rocks and pretended to bash his head in with one while he tossed the other over his shoulder. "Just get the fire started so I can cook the beans," he grumbled.
"Don't eat anything he gives you," Joanna whispered conspiratorially. Spock raised an inquisitive eyebrow. "He puts liquor in the beans," she explained. "Makes 'em taste like paint thinner."
"Everyone's a critic," Leonard remarked.
"I like your beans," Jim said. He'd finally taken Spock's lighter and the fire was starting to catch.
"I doubt the ethics of supplying alcoholic beans to your eight year old daughter," Spock said. The firelight was reflected in his eyes, catching the amusement in them and emphasising it until his expression almost seemed human.
Leonard tipped half the beans into one pan and half in another, adding a good deal of moonshine to the first. "OK, here's the deal," he said, passing one pan to Jim so that they could each hold one over the fire. "You can have your boring beans, but we're sticking to my traditional recipe. And you can't tell us off for singing."
Joanna reluctantly agreed to this arrangement. Spock tried the alcoholic beans and found them "surprisingly good", whatever the hell that meant. Of course his beans were good. The food, the alcohol and the pleasant warmth of the fire were starting to creep over Leonard as he leaned back against his log, a contented smile on his face.
Spock toasted marshmallows. Jim told them a ghost story, but Joanna insisted that they were doing it wrong and took over. Leonard let the words wash over him and looked over at Spock, who looked as sleepy as he was. Come to think of it, this was probably the first time Leonard had seen him relax in any position other than straight-backed and cross-legged. He was actually slouching, his back against a rock and his legs sprawled out beside the fire. Leonard reached out with one foot and nudged one of Spock's boots, catching his attention. He smiled at his pointy-eared friend across the fire and Spock smiled back, an honest-to-God proper smile.
The fire died down, Joanna fell asleep on Spock's shoulder and Leonard carried her to bed. He heard Jim and Spock settle down in the adjacent tent and heard them say goodnight to each other.
"'Night Bones," Jim called softly.
"'Night Jim," he called back, careful not to wake Joanna.
"Goodnight Doctor," Spock called, and Leonard smiled, warmed to his bones.
"Goodnight Spock," he murmured, resting his head on his pillow and letting his baby girl's soft snores lull him to sleep.
This is also the first thing I has writ with Joanna in it. Yaay.
Title: Vulcans Don't Get Angry (or 5 times Spock surprised McCoy with an emotional reaction)
Fandom: Star Trek
Pairing: Spock/McCoy, (but it can be read as friendship or OT3)
Rating: PG-13 for naughty words and explosions?
Summary: Does what it says on the tin. Leonard slowly stops thinking of him as "that pointy-eared bastard" and starts thinking of him as "my pointy-eared friend".
A/N: Written for this prompt in st_xi_kink
One
It all happened so fast - that self-assured bastard of a Vulcan throwing Jim off the ship, Leonard's argument with Spock that had left him shaking with anger, and Jim's sudden reappearance on the bridge. Leonard had been so relieved to see his friend alive an in one piece that he'd hardly been listening to the words that passed between him and the acting-Captain, so he almost jumped with surprise when Spock gave an angry shout and was suddenly drop-kicking Jim with all of his Vulcan strength.
Vulcans didn't get angry. They didn't lose control so completely, and they certainly didn't half-choke people to death just for insulting their mothers. But Leonard had forgotten; Spock's mother wasn't Vulcan.
Spock relaxed his grip and Jim gasped for air in between painful sounding coughs. The situation was over as quickly as it started; the pointy-eared bastard was telling Leonard to note the incident in his medical log, and Leonard was concentrating on not having a fucking heart attack. When Spock left the bridge to calm the fuck down, Leonard pulled himself together and started bitching at Jim, because if he could still bitch at Jim there was still hope for the universe.
Later, he noted it in his medical log. He wouldn't forget Spock's human heritage again so easily.
Two
Jim was bleeding, Sulu was bleeding, Uhura was bleeding and Leonard only had one pair of hands. Thankfully, he hadn't gotten through med school by dithering during a crisis. Nurse Chapel tended to the gash in Jim's arm while Leonard took an unconscious Uhura from Sulu's arms and instructed Sulu to put pressure on her chest wound while he fixed her stomach.
Four hours and some complicated surgery later, and Leonard was peeling off his blood-drenched gloves, wiping the sweat from his brow and trying to explain in terms of logic why Spock shouldn't be allowed into the recovery room.
"Lieutenant Uhura is in a fragile state. The next few hours are crucial - she needs to be monitored and I don't need you getting in the way."
"I fail to see how my presence at her bedside could impede your monitoring equipment," Spock shot back, as calmly as ever. "I merely wish to sit with her, as you have done with the Captain on no less than fifteen occasions in the past five months."
"I'm the Chief Medical Officer, I can sit where I damn well please in my own sickbay!" he snapped. "You can come back and sit with her when I decide that her condition's stable."
Spock set his jaw, and Leonard was suddenly reminded of another incident, months ago, when he had seemed perfectly calm up until the moment he lost control. "If you continue to provide no logical reason for preventing me from being with her, I will take the issue up with the Captain."
Leonard scowled, his eyes narrowing. He was ready to fight, to keep pushing the Vulcan back until he snapped, but as his gaze swept upwards to meet Spock's, he realised that it wasn't the Vulcan he was dealing with. Spock's eyes were entirely human, and they shone with determination and concern. It was like looking into a mirror of his own past, back in the day when he'd still been in love. Jocelyn had landed herself in hospital with a broken leg and he'd been damn close to breaking the attending doctor's nose in his insistence that he be the one to fix her.
"You touch anything, you're out," he said, stepping aside. Spock looked at him with curiosity for a moment, but his concern for Uhura outweighed his fascination with human illogicality. A couple of strides later and he was at her bedside, cradling her hand in his own and stroking back the hair from her forehead with the other.
Three
No-one had seen it coming, or at least Leonard damn well hadn't. Maybe Uhura had discussed it with her closest friends beforehand, but he was too closely associated with Jim to be counted as anything more than her doctor. The first he heard of the breakup was an overheard conversation between Chapel and one of the other nurses, speculating on whether she had a chance with Spock now that Uhura was out of the picture.
Leonard wasn't big on gossip, but he happened to be best friends with a damned idiot who was far too nosy for his own good, so it wasn't long before he found out that Uhura had been the one to "do the breaking-up with". If you asked Leonard, that sentence didn't even made a shred of sense, but Jim was more likely to take a vow of celibacy than to listen to his opinion.
He still wasn't giving a damn about the gossip when he walked into the rec room one day and found it deserted but for one lone half-Vulcan sitting at a table clutching his guitar/harp thing and looking morose. Leonard's first instinct was to leave and pretend he'd never been there, but Spock looked up from his instrument and fixed his gaze on him, so that plan was out.
"Forgive me," Spock said, his voice a little less than perfectly even. "If you would rather be alone, I will leave."
He even started to stand up, the bastard, so Leonard took a step forward and made a vague 'sit the fuck back down' gesture. He took the seat opposite Spock and rested his elbows on the table.
"Is this some kind of angsty reminiscing-about-the-good-times thing?" he asked. "Because I've been there, and believe me when I say that dwelling on it ain't going to help."
He expected Spock to deny the accusation of emotional behaviour and make logical excuses for sitting alone hugging a reminder of his relationship with big watery puppy eyes, but instead he looked down at the table like it had all the answers and said: "I assume you have an alternative prescription in mind?"
Leonard took him back to his quarters, got him drunk on the good stuff and let him cry quietly into his shoulder. He didn't mention it the next day when he popped up to the bridge to bitch at Jim, but Spock turned around and gave him a brief nod before turning back to his readings.
Four
They'd been on their way back to Earth, Leonard was almost allowing himself to get excited about seeing Joanna again, and Command had asked them to swing by New Vulcan on their way back to see whether the colonists were OK, because God forbid the Vulcans should ever ask for help when they needed it.
The air was too dry and the sun was too hot and the people were too damn enigmatic, but things seemed to be going well for them, so Leonard anticipated a short visit. Jim, Spock and Uhura had gone off to talk to a bunch of stiff-backed dignitaries while Leonard had been shown around a state-of-the-art medical facility by an equally stiff-backed doctor. Despite the dryness of his tour guide, he'd been impressed by the facility, and was surprised to find himself in good spirits at the end of the day.
Jim came to find him, having escaped the Vulcan dignitaries with Spock in tow. The half-Vulcan turned with interest to the scanner Leonard had been examining, and Jim wandered around the room aimlessly, touching things he shouldn't have been touching while Leonard and Spock geeked out over the shiny new equipment. His little bonding moment with the half-Vulcan had broken the ice between them, and although they bickered twice as often as they'd used to, Leonard sometimes caught himself thinking of Spock as a friend.
"If you two are done drooling over the equipment, we ought to be-" Jim was saying as an explosion went off in the distance. All three of them ducked instinctively, but when it became apparent that none of them were hurt, they rushed off towards the commotion, Jim in the lead.
The explosion turned out to have come from the children's ward. Jim leapt over a charred body and started overturning wreckage, looking for trapped kids. Spock went to help him, but Leonard slid to a halt beside a young girl with one leg at a funny angle and started scanning her. She couldn't have been any older than five or six but her face was dry and calm as Leonard straightened her leg as gently as he could and called for someone to bring him the right equipment.
Suddenly, someone was tugging at his uniform, and he looked around, ready to snap at whoever was trying to distract him from doing his Goddamn job.
"Doctor McCoy," said a cool, female voice. "You and your colleagues are in danger. I must insist that you leave."
Leonard noted the insignia of a high ranking doctor and asked her what the hell she was doing. "I'm not leaving, not when there are people here I can help." He looked around for Jim and Spock, but saw nothing but smoke and confusion.
The damn pointy-eared woman was tugging at his shirt again, trying to get him to leave the girl. "For an explosion to occur while you were visiting the hospital is unlikely to be a coincidence. This would not be the first anti-Federation attack that has occured recently, and I can only extrapolate that you were the intended target."
Her words finally filtered through to him, and he stood up, looking for Jim and Spock once more. A mess of blonde hair caught his eye, and he breathed a sigh of relief to find Jim making his way through the clearing smoke towards him.
"Jim, what the hell is going on?" he asked. It wasn't that he didn't already have a pretty good idea, but it reassured him to know that Jim was in charge of the situation.
"Terrorist attack," Jim said, his shoulders tense. "They expect a second explosion any minute now. We need to evacuate."
"Right," Leonard said, bending down to gather the Vulcan girl in his arms. He looked around once more and frowned. "Where's Spock?"
Jim's mouth set in a hard line. "He won't leave."
Cursing, Leonard dumped the kid in his arms and started pushing his way through the crowd of bodies and wreckage until he found a cluster of Vulcans trying to convince Spock to move.
"You're attempting the impossible," he muttered, pushing them out of the way. "Go make sure the children are out, I'll deal with this."
He turned to Spock, who was crouched on the floor beside a bookcase that had fallen over, spilling PADDs everywhere. His arms were around a half-unconscious little girl and the look of determination in his eyes told Leonard what he already knew.
"We cannot attempt to move her," Spock told him. Leonard pushed his hands out of the way, noted the huge shard of metal sticking out of her chest, and nodded.
"So what do you suggest we do?" he demanded. "Stay here and die with her when the next bomb goes off?"
"I suggest you work quickly to stabilise her condition," Spock replied, as calm as if he'd been asked whether he wanted tea or coffee. "If you remove the object and close the wound, she has a 60% chance of surviving being carried to safety."
Leonard stood up, located his med kit, grabbed a local anaesthetic and injected her with it.
"I'll need you to apply pressure," he said as he pulled on a pair of gloves. "As soon as this thing comes out, there's going to be a lot of blood. You ready?"
Spock nodded tersely. Everyone else had evacuated; they were the only two left in the ward. Leonard thought he heard Jim hailing him on the communicator, but he ignored it as he got a firm grip on the shard of metal and prepared to pull it out, Spock's breath hot and sharp against his neck.
They made it out three seconds before the second explosion, Spock clutching the little girl to his chest. Leonard would have taken the time to be surprised by the Vulcan's stubbornness, but he was just fucking glad to be alive.
Five
They made it to Earth a lot later than expected, but still alive, and that was what mattered. Seeing Spock so protective of that young Vulcan girl had given Leonard something to think about, but it wasn't until Jim asked whether Spock knew any of his family on Earth that Leonard considered including the half-Vulcan in his plans.
He was kind of surprised that Spock agreed to go camping with him and Jim and Joanna. The calmly delivered justification for his acceptance was that he had never been camping before, but Leonard had a suspicion that Spock liked spending time with them. Not that the green blooded bastard would ever admit it, of course.
Spock got along with Joanna surprisingly well. She'd learned about Vulcans in school but had never met one, and despite Leonard's insistence that she keep her manners, she wouldn't stop asking questions. Leonard could've sworn he saw the hint of a smile twitch at the corner of Spock's mouth as she pressed her ear against the side of his abdomen and listened to his heartbeat, but he put it down to his imagination.
They set up two tents - one for Jim and Spock, one for Leonard and Joanna because he wouldn't let his baby girl sleep alone in the wilderness. Spock and Joanna watched with fascination as Jim bullshitted his way through starting a fire the old fashioned way, insisting that he'd been a boy scout in his youth.
"If you were a boy scout, Uncle Jim, I'm the tooth fairy," Joanna told him as he failed for the seventh time to make a spark with two rocks he'd found. "Just let Mister Spock use his lighter like he told you in the first place, it's way more logical."
Leonard sat down next to Jim, grabbed the rocks and pretended to bash his head in with one while he tossed the other over his shoulder. "Just get the fire started so I can cook the beans," he grumbled.
"Don't eat anything he gives you," Joanna whispered conspiratorially. Spock raised an inquisitive eyebrow. "He puts liquor in the beans," she explained. "Makes 'em taste like paint thinner."
"Everyone's a critic," Leonard remarked.
"I like your beans," Jim said. He'd finally taken Spock's lighter and the fire was starting to catch.
"I doubt the ethics of supplying alcoholic beans to your eight year old daughter," Spock said. The firelight was reflected in his eyes, catching the amusement in them and emphasising it until his expression almost seemed human.
Leonard tipped half the beans into one pan and half in another, adding a good deal of moonshine to the first. "OK, here's the deal," he said, passing one pan to Jim so that they could each hold one over the fire. "You can have your boring beans, but we're sticking to my traditional recipe. And you can't tell us off for singing."
Joanna reluctantly agreed to this arrangement. Spock tried the alcoholic beans and found them "surprisingly good", whatever the hell that meant. Of course his beans were good. The food, the alcohol and the pleasant warmth of the fire were starting to creep over Leonard as he leaned back against his log, a contented smile on his face.
Spock toasted marshmallows. Jim told them a ghost story, but Joanna insisted that they were doing it wrong and took over. Leonard let the words wash over him and looked over at Spock, who looked as sleepy as he was. Come to think of it, this was probably the first time Leonard had seen him relax in any position other than straight-backed and cross-legged. He was actually slouching, his back against a rock and his legs sprawled out beside the fire. Leonard reached out with one foot and nudged one of Spock's boots, catching his attention. He smiled at his pointy-eared friend across the fire and Spock smiled back, an honest-to-God proper smile.
The fire died down, Joanna fell asleep on Spock's shoulder and Leonard carried her to bed. He heard Jim and Spock settle down in the adjacent tent and heard them say goodnight to each other.
"'Night Bones," Jim called softly.
"'Night Jim," he called back, careful not to wake Joanna.
"Goodnight Doctor," Spock called, and Leonard smiled, warmed to his bones.
"Goodnight Spock," he murmured, resting his head on his pillow and letting his baby girl's soft snores lull him to sleep.