fic: first, do no harm (leonard mccoy, st xi)
leonard mccoy, unrequited kirk/mccoy, pg-13, ~5400
allusions to child abuse, unbeta'd, fourth in a series
"The (alternate) life and times of Leonard McCoy before and after James T. Kirk."
The Kelvin disaster scares the hell out of a lot of people.
Leonard’s already old enough when it happens to instinctively agree when his father starts muttering about transporters and how he wishes people wouldn’t bring back “these goddamn diseases from out there” but this drills it into his head. Because sure, most everybody was saved and everybody agrees that captain did a good job, but a nice chunk of people died too. And they died horribly.
Blunt force trauma, he hears, and full-body burns, and some of them were sucked right out of the ship during the attack. This, somehow, is most jarring to him, the fact that people were sucked into space.
“Why were they up there anyway?”
“Hell if I know,” his father mutters, and shakes his head like they were being idiots to even be out there. His mother always sighs tiredly, “you two are being ridiculous” but his father always grimaces and mutters, “disease and death” to Leonard like he’s sharing a secret when she walks out of the room.
Leonard fully agrees with his father.
At first he says, “I want to be a doctor” because it’s traditional, because he’s a McCoy and everybody knows McCoys have always been the best doctors.
Hours are spent on a regular basis with his father at the clinic talking to the people who come and go, all of them on first-name basis with his daddy and all of them trusting him to take care of them. And he does, is good at it, and he knows exactly what to do no matter who it is or what’s wrong with them.
Leonard learns how to battle colds and how babies look before they’re born, watches his father set broken bones and hears about the dumb household accidents that always make his daddy roll his eyes so hard it looks painful. Then he starts paying more attention to what his daddy does because he’s more than just interested in it, presses his ear to the office door and listens to the patients list their symptoms. And after a while, he’s good at knowing exactly what the patient’s got.
His mother always says, “You just do whatever it is you want to do” and his father says, “Whatever you do, you’ll be good at it,” and he already knows what it is he wants to do long before he goes to his daddy and says it out loud.
Nobody’s surprised.
Sometimes he wishes his parents had gone ahead and divorced earlier on- but they don’t, try to do what they believe is best for him and stay married because they love him even if they don’t like each other all that much.
Leonard will never admit how much he holds it against them but Jo down the street has got the same complaints, listens to him vent and then vents herself. She constantly says, “No kids for me” and he nods every time because, yeah, no kids for him either. Then she says, “I just want to go” without knowing exactly where and he nods because he gets it somehow, knows exactly what she’s saying.
He studies things he doesn’t need to if he’s only going to be working in his father’s clinic.
Not just the general knowledge that he already knows better than a lot of the medical students in the larger cities but also more complicated texts on pathology and psychology, public health and disease control because it’s interesting to him. He digs into xenobiology because despite his father’s grumblings, it’s a necessary part of every doctor’s education these days.
His teachers say, “the medical schools are going to fight over him when he graduates” and his father frowns but nods, looks proud and unhappy all at once.
Jo needs a date.
“Just this once,” she promises, and she’s his best friend so he goes with her to the damn dance. They spend the time muttering at each other about everyone else and laughing quietly at a few select people. They end up enjoying themselves immensely. So he takes her to the next dance, and then she takes him to the one after that.
It really does just happen.
Leonard’s already overloaded, a little frazzled, when his father gets sick.
If he had been around, he’d have been able to understand what the dizzy spells and the muscle weakness meant before it progressed too far. Some new treatments can help if it’s caught early enough, Leonard’s read about them in his studies, and his father’s in perfect health before he catches the disease.
But his father had never learned all that much about non-Human medicine and Leonard’s bogged down with his classes and his private studies and all the time he’s spending with Jo so he doesn’t know until the hospital calls him.
By then, the muscle tremors have set in.
Jo helps.
He says not to, that he’ll figure something else out, but he doesn’t mean it and he doesn’t trust anyone else. So she drops out of school (“it’s not dropping out if I go back later,” she says with false bravado) and moves back to Georgia for him because he can’t split his time evenly, moves into the almost empty house and calls him every night with news that keeps getting worse.
Trips back and forth become more stressful, more dread now than just his old wariness so he avoids them when he can, doesn’t go unless he’ll be there more than a week. Tries the strongest drugs he can get his hands on, digs into new treatments that just keep coming out as the medical field develops more and more and doesn’t do a damn thing.
When he’s at school, Jo says, “he’s doing fine” and doesn’t bring up that she has to feed him now because the tremors are getting so bad he can’t feed himself. She promises that the pain medications are still working and doesn’t let either of them dwell on the fact that none of the medications keep working for long.
When he’s able to get to the house, after they’ve put his father to sleep and are sure he’s down for the night, they have sex in his old bedroom.
Jo digs her nails into his arms and moves so hard he’s left dazed, a little lost, but he bucks up into her, closes his eyes and listens to her breathing until they get what they need. Until his mind goes blessedly blank for just a few moments and she sighs in slow relief, rolls away to lay heavy and calm at his side.
If she knows he doesn’t sleep after, she doesn’t use it against him.
His daddy says, “This is what I want” while trying to hide now-useless hands in the sheets that cover him and Jo says, quietly, “This is what he wants.”
Leonard tries one drug and then another, watches pain spike in the readings on the biobed and tries to avoid looking at them as he tries another drug and then another. He digs up more information, more studies, more drugs that can’t do a thing because he hadn’t known a damn thing until it was too late.
“He won’t feel anything,” Jo says in the middle of the night after sex, and he hears not like he does now under her words.
“I can hire someone-”
“He wants you to do it.”
Leonard says, “I’ll do it” but tries more drugs anyway, moves through heavy dissociative medication and then heavy sedation, watches fingers twitch against cotton and numbers spike jagged on a screen even when his father’s deep under.
After he runs out of ideas, his father still lingers for several months.
Jo says finally, “I can do it the next time you leave, bring a nurse in myself” and he breaks and signs the forms because he’s going to be the damn doctor, she hasn’t even gotten through her basic classes yet.
He’ll never tell anyone that he tries to resuscitate his father.
Because there’s a minute right after the machines go silent, numbers static on the screens around the biobed, when McCoy feels okay about it. Numb, he’ll realize later, but he doesn’t understand it now, is incapable of understanding anything other than the fact that his father is gone-
Several seconds, his heart stuttering in his chest, and then he panics.
Starts basic CPR before he can remind himself that this is what his father wanted and grows rapidly more frantic when he doesn’t get a response. He’s halfway to the door, mind a blur of ways to save his father because it's what a McCoy does when the realization jolts back and he turns, stares at the bed with wide eyes and shaking hands.
McCoy makes it, just barely, to the bathroom in time.
Jocelyn comforts him the way she has since they were kids, takes his hand and reminds him that this is what his father wanted- and he’d shake her hand off, push her away, but he’d rather not. Because she’s Jo even if she isn’t anymore, and they grieve together because neither of them have anyone else anymore.
He graduates, top of his class and unwilling to leave Georgia again, and Jocelyn’s found a new school when she realizes she’s late and tells him such.
It all just happens, rings exchanged between sonogram appointments.
Baby Jo rolls across the floor and then crawls, then she grips the edges of her playpen and bounces for his attention until he goes over, lifts her out. She eats her cereal with curious little fingers and then mixes her peas with her mashed potatoes and then decides that she wants pizza every day for dinner.
Jocelyn waits for him to take a break, give her back her time.
Instead McCoy works too many hours, works even when he doesn’t have to, and avoids going home without realizing that he’s doing it unless Jocelyn calls him on it. He spends the time away from the hospital with little Jo instead of his wife and then goes back to work, too grateful to have too much on his plate to think.
He’s so much better at his work.
So much better at the high-stress, the fast pace, the quick decisions that he has to make and doesn’t have time to dwell over. He prefers it to the stillness with his wife, the constant knowledge that his father had adored Jocelyn so much. When Jocelyn slips and expresses her frustration, there are always short words and long glances, a thick silence when he falls into bed. The next morning she always says, “You’re busy, I know” and he says, “I’ll try harder” and things stall again.
When little Jo announces that she wants to be doctor over her cereal, he says, “You just do whatever it is you want to do” and shows her his old medical texts.
(Jocelyn’s old schoolwork sits waiting in the back of their closet, untouched.)
They’ve been together too long when McCoy sleeps with an intern.
He doesn’t think about what he’s doing when he first slips into the room and he doesn’t think about what he’s doing when he engages the privacy lock behind them and pushes the warm body down too eagerly. Instead he thinks you’re being an idiot because this is when he should be getting a nap to keep him going the next few hours and then he thinks, why the hell not? because he can never sleep between shifts these days anyway. (He can barely sleep.)
It’s not even good, has nothing of that unhurried build that he had forgotten he always enjoys so much and never lets himself have, but then he does it again and then again because why the hell not?
The fifth time it happens, he goes home as soon as he gets off work, spends a few hours wandering around the house until little Jo climbs into bed with a last clumsy press of her lips to his cheek. Jocelyn cries and rambles and demands answers he doesn’t have after he tells her, obviously angrier over it than actually surprised- and then is even more frustrated when she finds that he’s already packed his bags, that she can’t even throw him out. He almost says “I know” because he does but somehow even the thought of saying that is tiring, feels like it’s not worth the trouble.
He stays in a hotel for a week and then a month, signs everything away without hesitation when Jocelyn has him come into the lawyer’s office. Then he sits for a while in the hotel and waits for the misery to sink in.
Except it doesn’t.
Leonard doesn’t actually feel any unhappier than he has for so long he doesn’t really remember much else, and when he realizes that, well, that finally makes McCoy feel wretched.
When McCoy gets on the first shuttle leaving the next morning with only the clothes on his back and a handful of things stuffed into a bag, the first time he’s left Georgia in too damn long, he spends the entire trip suffering a panic attack that comes and goes until it all blurs together. It’s a thousand times worse than the nervousness he’s always had on his trips, bouts of anxiety that always came on fast and then ended just as quickly, and he’s sick to his stomach and utterly drained when they finally land in Iowa.
It’s so bad McCoy doesn’t take the next shuttle to San Francisco or the one after that, doesn’t manage to force himself onto a shuttle until the third one arrives and then only by talking to himself the whole time, feeling like a damn idiot because he’s a doctor that hospitals have fought over, not a crazy person.
Still, only the last threads of his pride keep him going.
He does puke on the kid fifteen minutes into the flight, brings up alcohol and not much else and makes a fool of himself. The kid washes it off his jacket in the bathroom- and sits even closer when he gets back. “I was born on a shuttle, they’re durable,” the kid snorts at him like he’s being an infant but he snorts right back and continues counting the rivets holding the shuttle together.
Hours later, the kid follows him off the shuttle when they land with nothing but the clothes on his back and a face full of abrasions that haven’t even been disinfected. Asks like a damn teenager, “Are you sure you want to do the space thing?” and trails after McCoy through the crowds. He disappears, thankfully, while the instructors are gnawing McCoy’s records, glancing at him every few seconds with growing excitement they can’t hide- and then shows up an hour later, plopping down by McCoy on a bench like he owns the whole damn Academy.
“What the hell are you doing?”
The kid just asks, “Why’d she divorce you?” like he has any right to ask McCoy any kind of question, like he’s completely sure it’s his business. McCoy can only ignore him until he goes away, too stunned to think of a response, but the kid pops up again two hours later in his dorm with dinner.
It just happens and by the time the first cycle of classes start, he knows that James Kirk kicks his shoes behind the dresser when he gets back to the dorm and then whines for an hour the next morning when he can’t find them.
McCoy asks, “What the hell are you doing?” those first two months too many times to count but the kid always just shrugs, “I don’t know” and frowns like he finds McCoy fascinating and confusing all at once. Like he’s not sure what he’s even trying to figure out but that he’s completely sure he can figure it out if he just stares at McCoy so long that McCoy always breaks and turns to glare at him, exasperated.
By the third month, he’s so used to “Bones” that Jim’s is the only voice he really responds to outside of classes or the hospital and Jim’s “introduced” him to Uhura.
She’s got two degrees under her belt, a lifetime of discipline in her field, and it’s a breath of fresh air for a man surrounded by cadets unsure what they even want to focus on after they leave the Academy. She understands why the Miasma theory was significant to modern medicine despite the stupidity and the importance of a proper diet to basic preventive health, and he might be bitter that she prefers scotch to bourbon but even that he doesn’t mind in the end because she’s sane.
At least he’s not the only damn professional here.
Within a month of their frazzled first meeting in the middle of the hospital waiting room- “you have to rein him in,” she’d ordered like he could, and then threatened, “or I will” like she could- he’s sure she’s the only one who knows how it’s possible to be driven completely insane by James Tiberius Kirk.
So of course Jim starts trying to needle him for information.
Uhura gripes but the grin she manages to keep off her face slips into her voice, and he decides he’ll never tell her how much she sometimes reminds him of Jim when he actually buckles down and is the man he could be. “It’s just a name,” he offers but he doesn’t mean it, is enjoying the game as much as she is.
“None of his business.”
Because he can’t help himself: “You realize he could just-”
“Yes.”
This is how the Jim Kirk Support Group that never officially exists is created.
Five months in, he accepts that the kid is a genius who says the stupidest shit McCoy’s ever heard in his life, whether it’s that godawful pick-up line to Mitchell (which somehow actually works) or the time he proclaims that Archer’s favorite beagle is “kind of spoiled” right in front of the Admiral. He knows that Jim keeps packets of snack food in the back of the top drawer and has bouts of insomnia that last until McCoy finally shoves his ass in bed and stays in the room to make sure he doesn’t sneak out as soon as he thinks McCoy isn’t looking (the way he does the first three times before he’s caught).
By six months, the trailing (stalking) habit has become a lot less frightening than it was when it first started and McCoy’s completely used to him popping up at the hospital every time he feels like it.
McCoy’s aware of too many things by eight months, has picked up on some things and figured others out. Because he’s taken long courses to understand the nastier side of human contact, knows for a fact that the numbers aren’t as bad as they had been decades before but are still something the medical field is downright paranoid of. But while McCoy’s got his own opinions and questions for Jim’s living family wherever they are, it doesn’t take an idiot to tell that there are some things that Jim would rather avoid ever bringing up in conversation and Jim’s an adult now anyway (most of the time). Besides, it’s not like McCoy likes talking about his parents’ ability to freeze each other out so absolutely or how frighteningly easy it had been to push Jocelyn away when she’d been getting too close. And hell, not enough people understand the damage done by slow pressure instead of quick blows so he won’t be the one to push where it would only cause more damage.
Instead McCoy spends his time wanting to slide blindly between Jim and everyone else, protect him and defend him. Take care of him because nobody else will and he’s the only one Jim seems to accept any care from anyway. He worries when Jim isn’t sleeping and makes sure he eats, sits up with him when he can’t sleep until Jim relaxes and drifts off by himself, looking at least a little at peace.
He says, “I’m a doctor” and the kid says, “Make sure you lock my arm up harder when you get me down” because he’s obsessed with McCoy excelling in hand to hand like McCoy’s ever going to do anything with it. He says, “I don’t need to” because he can’t, because he doesn’t want to, but the kid locks a hand around his wrist, drags him swearing and shaking into flight simulators and shuttles, shoves him brutally past his terror. He says, “I can eat on the way to class” and Jim simply stares at him like he’s an idiot until he sits down and spends the entire lunch break with the kid, eats his whole meal. He says, “I can do my own damn work” and “you’re the insomniac, not me” but Jim just shoves him into bed and stays in the room the whole time to make sure McCoy doesn’t sneak out. (He usually wakes up after these incidents with Jim curled up along his spine like a damn cat, arched close for warmth.)
Eleven months in, Jim gets back late glowing and grinning in that way that McCoy’s only seen twice now. “I saw her,” he announces as he kicks one shoe away (McCoy will dig it out from behind the dresser before he goes to bed like always to spare them both a headache in the morning) and tries to wrestle his jacket off at the same time. “I didn’t even know she was here, but she’s here.” When McCoy frowns, utterly baffled: “Janice, I saw her, fuck, Bones, I didn’t even know...”
McCoy’s got no idea what he’s talking about, only sits and watches Jim look so damn ecstatic that McCoy finally looks away because he feels like a damn voyeur.
“You have to meet her,” Jim says for the thousandth time long weeks later and McCoy grunts in what he wishes was a threat but knows all too well isn’t. “You guys would get along great.” McCoy doubts it, imagines the mysterious blonde Jim keeps describing and just feels irritated, maybe even a little pissed.
“She was really that good, huh?”
“That’s disgusting,” Jim retorts without missing a beat. “Rand’s like my sister, that’s… it would be like incest, Bones.” A beat before he continues with open disgust, “That’s disgusting.”
By thirteen months in, McCoy wishes childishly that Jim would shut up about her.
There’s a trip to Georgia one winter after classes are done for the year, an ache where a friend used to be before, back when Jocelyn had been Jo, and he comes back feeling raw and powerless.
Jim greets him with long days of silence and a too sharp stare but follows him more closely than ever before. The conflicted behavior lasts until the kid drags him out, downs a few shots and decides that McCoy’s been forgiven. This forgiveness is expressed in the open teasing McCoy receives over the fact that he refuses to try any of the beer sitting in front of them on the table and that’s that. Jim downs another, and then another, and sinks deeper into McCoy’s side until the doctor finally finishes his single shot and grabs their jackets.
There’s a mumble, Jim’s edgy anger missing as always when it’s McCoy around while he’s drunk, and then a hand hooks automatically into his belt near his spine. Warmth, a slow flicker of it where knuckles brush skin that almost bothers him but doesn’t, and he supports most of Jim’s weight as they stagger-walk their way back to their dorm room. Somehow keeps Jim from sliding down the wall as he punches their code in once, twice, three times because Jim keeps fucking with the damn lock (“security here is shit, Bones, my dead grandpa could sneak in”) and he’s a bit drunk himself.
McCoy drops Jim onto his bed, regrets it when Jim almost takes him down because he refuses to let go of his belt, and then drags the kid back up to peel the jacket off. Halfway through this operation, he stops, blinks and shakes himself because he can’t get the second sleeve off if Jim doesn’t let go.
“I’ve got you, let go,” he offers uselessly but Jim’s left leg just jerks once against his thigh. He shivers a little, sets a hand on Jim’s knee to push his leg away and pauses when his palm settles on a thigh instead. Can’t stop the immediate flex of his fingers into the muscles covered by fabric, unmistakable warmth of skin out of reach. He stops himself before he does it a second time, closes his eyes and draws his hand back.
Thinks, you just need to get some and then thinks, bullshit.
McCoy sits there for long minutes staring at the shape he can only barely make out in the dark, knowing without having to check that Jim’s forehead is wrinkled up in confusion and his free hand is curled into a fist. That Jim’s back is to the wall as always, body already rolled to face the door even in this state, and it has to kill his shoulder but Jim won’t let go of his damn belt.
Except now he’s breathing easily, and McCoy blames this fact for his weakness. For the fact that he simply mutters, “don’t” to himself and doesn’t force Jim’s grip to open or his fingers to unhook, just settles where he is by a heavy, sleep-warm body and listens to the breathing.
If either of them wants to bring it up the next morning, neither of them do.
If he wakes up after that some nights heated when Jim spends the day flinging him around the damn gym, he’s a little too grateful that he never remembers any of the dreams.
Frustrated, unprepared for this after nothing but a handful of female interns and a single long-term relationship, he childishly considers throwing the damn pillow in frustration but can’t. Because he knows how Jim spooks when he’s jerked out of a deep asleep and he’s unwilling to ever be the one to cause such a reaction.
Instead he swears into the damn pillow and looks over in the dark, checking the line of Jim’s body protectively until he forces himself to go back to sleep, sure Jim hasn’t been disturbed.
Jim’s been nothing but open about his pansexuality since they’ve met. And sure, McCoy’s met a few people in school and through work but it’s different to actually be sharing any space with one.
Especially someone as starved for (and terrified of) physical contact as Jim is.
Because this close, he watches Jim strip off his clothes when he gets in for the night, show his skin right up until Jim gets spooked that somebody gets too close to it. Jim flirts constantly and enjoys sex, never blushes or hesitates to talk about it in front of others, is drawn each and every time to assertive individuals frightening in their fearlessness. Slides his hands with annoying possessiveness over McCoy even when he doesn’t have any reason to and then darts off to whoever is waiting. Jim says, “Bones” with too much emotion freely offered, the tone needling or annoyed or choked with laughter that Jim refuses to restrain. Sometimes, rarely, it’s said in a hushed distressed way that he lets Jim pretend he didn’t hear but responds too quickly to anyway because he knows that tone.
That vague ache that Jim had saved him from is returning and it’s somehow even more dangerous now, overwhelming as it builds, feels like it could tear whatever’s left of him into nothing if he doesn’t escape.
He gives everything that’s left to Jim anyway.
(Uhura stares at him too hard but he glares back and says nothing and she wisely shuts the hell up.)
Jim still pops into the hospital so often the doctors have given up on ever getting rid of him, shows up when he knows McCoy is getting off shift or if he’s not feeling his best, flirts with everyone and sticks close to McCoy.
“So…” The sound of fingers drumming a flat surface, “I was thinking.”
McCoy signs the second form three times, the fourth form twice; checks both and goes to the fifth. Signs it twice and balances the datapad in one hand as he presses his thumb in the bottom left corner. When he hears nothing else, he sighs, grumbles his role. “What, you think now?”
There’s a chuckle behind him, too-short and sarcastic, and a second of silence. Then: “About us.”
The muscles in McCoy’s back seize up, fingers tightening around the objects he’s holding.
When he glances back at Jim, his friend’s staring at him too evenly. “What about us?”
It’s not often that people look at McCoy like he’s an idiot. But Jim’s smart enough to sometimes make him look like an idiot, and he suddenly feels like one to boot. “Us,” Jim explains in a bizarrely unruffled tone. “I know you’re pretty firmly planted in the heterosexual corner of the model but don’t tell me you don’t know how things work.”
Not everyone wants to fuck you, is what he’d like to say, somehow use the words to loosen the sudden knot in his chest that keeps building as he gazes at Jim. But he can’t think because Jim is just staring back at him, tense on his feet but unusually still, obviously wanting an answer.
He has none, struck mute by the words.
Thirty years old, divorced, unable to stop grieving, he can respond in only one way to the demand.
“No.” Jim’s mouth ticks up when nothing else is offered- and it propels McCoy forward, the sudden urge to end it before it can turn on either of them. “Not everyone wants to fuck you, Jim.”
He spots the beginnings of a grin, the edge of Jim’s mouth jerking upwards too easily before McCoy shifts his attention to the datapad that’s already filled out. “No.” His friend’s tone is cool, fixed, and McCoy is nakedly grateful for it even as he can’t meet Jim’s eyes, tries not to reflect on the reasons why he can’t.
“No,” McCoy assures, and then can’t say anything else.
Movement out of his peripheral vision, Jim rocking back and forth on his feet like some restless animal considering what to do next, but all McCoy can do is stare at his own name scattered across the screen in his hands.
“I gotta go,” Jim informs him after another few seconds, kicking his ankle in a bid for attention that McCoy’s become too used to in the last three years. “I’m getting the stick out of your ass this weekend, remember?” The smugness forces McCoy’s head up despite the tension, his eyes to narrow. “You don’t work this weekend!”
“I study.”
“Too much,” Jim retorts and, yes, his weekend is blown. Only a damn idiot would think he has a chance with that look on Jim Kirk’s face. Still, he can’t help but glare too childishly as he watches Jim twirl on one foot and head for the door, looking like the same man McCoy’s been too close to since the shuttle.
Then he’s gone, and the air seems to return to the room.
McCoy mutters, “No” into the sudden quiet and refuses to think about anything other than his work for the rest of the day. Thankfully, wonderfully, there are no moments of hesitation when they meet up again later that day, no pregnant pauses or looks across the room. Hell, they never talk about it again and he’s too grateful for it even as he wavers, considers his options too often but dismisses one in particular every time.
It's a lie, what he had decided before. He can’t give Jim everything.
Bones gives what he can anyway, and hopes dimly, vulnerably, that it’ll be enough.
allusions to child abuse, unbeta'd, fourth in a series
"The (alternate) life and times of Leonard McCoy before and after James T. Kirk."
The Kelvin disaster scares the hell out of a lot of people.
Leonard’s already old enough when it happens to instinctively agree when his father starts muttering about transporters and how he wishes people wouldn’t bring back “these goddamn diseases from out there” but this drills it into his head. Because sure, most everybody was saved and everybody agrees that captain did a good job, but a nice chunk of people died too. And they died horribly.
Blunt force trauma, he hears, and full-body burns, and some of them were sucked right out of the ship during the attack. This, somehow, is most jarring to him, the fact that people were sucked into space.
“Why were they up there anyway?”
“Hell if I know,” his father mutters, and shakes his head like they were being idiots to even be out there. His mother always sighs tiredly, “you two are being ridiculous” but his father always grimaces and mutters, “disease and death” to Leonard like he’s sharing a secret when she walks out of the room.
Leonard fully agrees with his father.
At first he says, “I want to be a doctor” because it’s traditional, because he’s a McCoy and everybody knows McCoys have always been the best doctors.
Hours are spent on a regular basis with his father at the clinic talking to the people who come and go, all of them on first-name basis with his daddy and all of them trusting him to take care of them. And he does, is good at it, and he knows exactly what to do no matter who it is or what’s wrong with them.
Leonard learns how to battle colds and how babies look before they’re born, watches his father set broken bones and hears about the dumb household accidents that always make his daddy roll his eyes so hard it looks painful. Then he starts paying more attention to what his daddy does because he’s more than just interested in it, presses his ear to the office door and listens to the patients list their symptoms. And after a while, he’s good at knowing exactly what the patient’s got.
His mother always says, “You just do whatever it is you want to do” and his father says, “Whatever you do, you’ll be good at it,” and he already knows what it is he wants to do long before he goes to his daddy and says it out loud.
Nobody’s surprised.
Sometimes he wishes his parents had gone ahead and divorced earlier on- but they don’t, try to do what they believe is best for him and stay married because they love him even if they don’t like each other all that much.
Leonard will never admit how much he holds it against them but Jo down the street has got the same complaints, listens to him vent and then vents herself. She constantly says, “No kids for me” and he nods every time because, yeah, no kids for him either. Then she says, “I just want to go” without knowing exactly where and he nods because he gets it somehow, knows exactly what she’s saying.
He studies things he doesn’t need to if he’s only going to be working in his father’s clinic.
Not just the general knowledge that he already knows better than a lot of the medical students in the larger cities but also more complicated texts on pathology and psychology, public health and disease control because it’s interesting to him. He digs into xenobiology because despite his father’s grumblings, it’s a necessary part of every doctor’s education these days.
His teachers say, “the medical schools are going to fight over him when he graduates” and his father frowns but nods, looks proud and unhappy all at once.
Jo needs a date.
“Just this once,” she promises, and she’s his best friend so he goes with her to the damn dance. They spend the time muttering at each other about everyone else and laughing quietly at a few select people. They end up enjoying themselves immensely. So he takes her to the next dance, and then she takes him to the one after that.
It really does just happen.
Leonard’s already overloaded, a little frazzled, when his father gets sick.
If he had been around, he’d have been able to understand what the dizzy spells and the muscle weakness meant before it progressed too far. Some new treatments can help if it’s caught early enough, Leonard’s read about them in his studies, and his father’s in perfect health before he catches the disease.
But his father had never learned all that much about non-Human medicine and Leonard’s bogged down with his classes and his private studies and all the time he’s spending with Jo so he doesn’t know until the hospital calls him.
By then, the muscle tremors have set in.
Jo helps.
He says not to, that he’ll figure something else out, but he doesn’t mean it and he doesn’t trust anyone else. So she drops out of school (“it’s not dropping out if I go back later,” she says with false bravado) and moves back to Georgia for him because he can’t split his time evenly, moves into the almost empty house and calls him every night with news that keeps getting worse.
Trips back and forth become more stressful, more dread now than just his old wariness so he avoids them when he can, doesn’t go unless he’ll be there more than a week. Tries the strongest drugs he can get his hands on, digs into new treatments that just keep coming out as the medical field develops more and more and doesn’t do a damn thing.
When he’s at school, Jo says, “he’s doing fine” and doesn’t bring up that she has to feed him now because the tremors are getting so bad he can’t feed himself. She promises that the pain medications are still working and doesn’t let either of them dwell on the fact that none of the medications keep working for long.
When he’s able to get to the house, after they’ve put his father to sleep and are sure he’s down for the night, they have sex in his old bedroom.
Jo digs her nails into his arms and moves so hard he’s left dazed, a little lost, but he bucks up into her, closes his eyes and listens to her breathing until they get what they need. Until his mind goes blessedly blank for just a few moments and she sighs in slow relief, rolls away to lay heavy and calm at his side.
If she knows he doesn’t sleep after, she doesn’t use it against him.
His daddy says, “This is what I want” while trying to hide now-useless hands in the sheets that cover him and Jo says, quietly, “This is what he wants.”
Leonard tries one drug and then another, watches pain spike in the readings on the biobed and tries to avoid looking at them as he tries another drug and then another. He digs up more information, more studies, more drugs that can’t do a thing because he hadn’t known a damn thing until it was too late.
“He won’t feel anything,” Jo says in the middle of the night after sex, and he hears not like he does now under her words.
“I can hire someone-”
“He wants you to do it.”
Leonard says, “I’ll do it” but tries more drugs anyway, moves through heavy dissociative medication and then heavy sedation, watches fingers twitch against cotton and numbers spike jagged on a screen even when his father’s deep under.
After he runs out of ideas, his father still lingers for several months.
Jo says finally, “I can do it the next time you leave, bring a nurse in myself” and he breaks and signs the forms because he’s going to be the damn doctor, she hasn’t even gotten through her basic classes yet.
He’ll never tell anyone that he tries to resuscitate his father.
Because there’s a minute right after the machines go silent, numbers static on the screens around the biobed, when McCoy feels okay about it. Numb, he’ll realize later, but he doesn’t understand it now, is incapable of understanding anything other than the fact that his father is gone-
Several seconds, his heart stuttering in his chest, and then he panics.
Starts basic CPR before he can remind himself that this is what his father wanted and grows rapidly more frantic when he doesn’t get a response. He’s halfway to the door, mind a blur of ways to save his father because it's what a McCoy does when the realization jolts back and he turns, stares at the bed with wide eyes and shaking hands.
McCoy makes it, just barely, to the bathroom in time.
Jocelyn comforts him the way she has since they were kids, takes his hand and reminds him that this is what his father wanted- and he’d shake her hand off, push her away, but he’d rather not. Because she’s Jo even if she isn’t anymore, and they grieve together because neither of them have anyone else anymore.
He graduates, top of his class and unwilling to leave Georgia again, and Jocelyn’s found a new school when she realizes she’s late and tells him such.
It all just happens, rings exchanged between sonogram appointments.
Baby Jo rolls across the floor and then crawls, then she grips the edges of her playpen and bounces for his attention until he goes over, lifts her out. She eats her cereal with curious little fingers and then mixes her peas with her mashed potatoes and then decides that she wants pizza every day for dinner.
Jocelyn waits for him to take a break, give her back her time.
Instead McCoy works too many hours, works even when he doesn’t have to, and avoids going home without realizing that he’s doing it unless Jocelyn calls him on it. He spends the time away from the hospital with little Jo instead of his wife and then goes back to work, too grateful to have too much on his plate to think.
He’s so much better at his work.
So much better at the high-stress, the fast pace, the quick decisions that he has to make and doesn’t have time to dwell over. He prefers it to the stillness with his wife, the constant knowledge that his father had adored Jocelyn so much. When Jocelyn slips and expresses her frustration, there are always short words and long glances, a thick silence when he falls into bed. The next morning she always says, “You’re busy, I know” and he says, “I’ll try harder” and things stall again.
When little Jo announces that she wants to be doctor over her cereal, he says, “You just do whatever it is you want to do” and shows her his old medical texts.
(Jocelyn’s old schoolwork sits waiting in the back of their closet, untouched.)
They’ve been together too long when McCoy sleeps with an intern.
He doesn’t think about what he’s doing when he first slips into the room and he doesn’t think about what he’s doing when he engages the privacy lock behind them and pushes the warm body down too eagerly. Instead he thinks you’re being an idiot because this is when he should be getting a nap to keep him going the next few hours and then he thinks, why the hell not? because he can never sleep between shifts these days anyway. (He can barely sleep.)
It’s not even good, has nothing of that unhurried build that he had forgotten he always enjoys so much and never lets himself have, but then he does it again and then again because why the hell not?
The fifth time it happens, he goes home as soon as he gets off work, spends a few hours wandering around the house until little Jo climbs into bed with a last clumsy press of her lips to his cheek. Jocelyn cries and rambles and demands answers he doesn’t have after he tells her, obviously angrier over it than actually surprised- and then is even more frustrated when she finds that he’s already packed his bags, that she can’t even throw him out. He almost says “I know” because he does but somehow even the thought of saying that is tiring, feels like it’s not worth the trouble.
He stays in a hotel for a week and then a month, signs everything away without hesitation when Jocelyn has him come into the lawyer’s office. Then he sits for a while in the hotel and waits for the misery to sink in.
Except it doesn’t.
Leonard doesn’t actually feel any unhappier than he has for so long he doesn’t really remember much else, and when he realizes that, well, that finally makes McCoy feel wretched.
When McCoy gets on the first shuttle leaving the next morning with only the clothes on his back and a handful of things stuffed into a bag, the first time he’s left Georgia in too damn long, he spends the entire trip suffering a panic attack that comes and goes until it all blurs together. It’s a thousand times worse than the nervousness he’s always had on his trips, bouts of anxiety that always came on fast and then ended just as quickly, and he’s sick to his stomach and utterly drained when they finally land in Iowa.
It’s so bad McCoy doesn’t take the next shuttle to San Francisco or the one after that, doesn’t manage to force himself onto a shuttle until the third one arrives and then only by talking to himself the whole time, feeling like a damn idiot because he’s a doctor that hospitals have fought over, not a crazy person.
Still, only the last threads of his pride keep him going.
He does puke on the kid fifteen minutes into the flight, brings up alcohol and not much else and makes a fool of himself. The kid washes it off his jacket in the bathroom- and sits even closer when he gets back. “I was born on a shuttle, they’re durable,” the kid snorts at him like he’s being an infant but he snorts right back and continues counting the rivets holding the shuttle together.
Hours later, the kid follows him off the shuttle when they land with nothing but the clothes on his back and a face full of abrasions that haven’t even been disinfected. Asks like a damn teenager, “Are you sure you want to do the space thing?” and trails after McCoy through the crowds. He disappears, thankfully, while the instructors are gnawing McCoy’s records, glancing at him every few seconds with growing excitement they can’t hide- and then shows up an hour later, plopping down by McCoy on a bench like he owns the whole damn Academy.
“What the hell are you doing?”
The kid just asks, “Why’d she divorce you?” like he has any right to ask McCoy any kind of question, like he’s completely sure it’s his business. McCoy can only ignore him until he goes away, too stunned to think of a response, but the kid pops up again two hours later in his dorm with dinner.
It just happens and by the time the first cycle of classes start, he knows that James Kirk kicks his shoes behind the dresser when he gets back to the dorm and then whines for an hour the next morning when he can’t find them.
McCoy asks, “What the hell are you doing?” those first two months too many times to count but the kid always just shrugs, “I don’t know” and frowns like he finds McCoy fascinating and confusing all at once. Like he’s not sure what he’s even trying to figure out but that he’s completely sure he can figure it out if he just stares at McCoy so long that McCoy always breaks and turns to glare at him, exasperated.
By the third month, he’s so used to “Bones” that Jim’s is the only voice he really responds to outside of classes or the hospital and Jim’s “introduced” him to Uhura.
She’s got two degrees under her belt, a lifetime of discipline in her field, and it’s a breath of fresh air for a man surrounded by cadets unsure what they even want to focus on after they leave the Academy. She understands why the Miasma theory was significant to modern medicine despite the stupidity and the importance of a proper diet to basic preventive health, and he might be bitter that she prefers scotch to bourbon but even that he doesn’t mind in the end because she’s sane.
At least he’s not the only damn professional here.
Within a month of their frazzled first meeting in the middle of the hospital waiting room- “you have to rein him in,” she’d ordered like he could, and then threatened, “or I will” like she could- he’s sure she’s the only one who knows how it’s possible to be driven completely insane by James Tiberius Kirk.
So of course Jim starts trying to needle him for information.
Uhura gripes but the grin she manages to keep off her face slips into her voice, and he decides he’ll never tell her how much she sometimes reminds him of Jim when he actually buckles down and is the man he could be. “It’s just a name,” he offers but he doesn’t mean it, is enjoying the game as much as she is.
“None of his business.”
Because he can’t help himself: “You realize he could just-”
“Yes.”
This is how the Jim Kirk Support Group that never officially exists is created.
Five months in, he accepts that the kid is a genius who says the stupidest shit McCoy’s ever heard in his life, whether it’s that godawful pick-up line to Mitchell (which somehow actually works) or the time he proclaims that Archer’s favorite beagle is “kind of spoiled” right in front of the Admiral. He knows that Jim keeps packets of snack food in the back of the top drawer and has bouts of insomnia that last until McCoy finally shoves his ass in bed and stays in the room to make sure he doesn’t sneak out as soon as he thinks McCoy isn’t looking (the way he does the first three times before he’s caught).
By six months, the trailing (stalking) habit has become a lot less frightening than it was when it first started and McCoy’s completely used to him popping up at the hospital every time he feels like it.
McCoy’s aware of too many things by eight months, has picked up on some things and figured others out. Because he’s taken long courses to understand the nastier side of human contact, knows for a fact that the numbers aren’t as bad as they had been decades before but are still something the medical field is downright paranoid of. But while McCoy’s got his own opinions and questions for Jim’s living family wherever they are, it doesn’t take an idiot to tell that there are some things that Jim would rather avoid ever bringing up in conversation and Jim’s an adult now anyway (most of the time). Besides, it’s not like McCoy likes talking about his parents’ ability to freeze each other out so absolutely or how frighteningly easy it had been to push Jocelyn away when she’d been getting too close. And hell, not enough people understand the damage done by slow pressure instead of quick blows so he won’t be the one to push where it would only cause more damage.
Instead McCoy spends his time wanting to slide blindly between Jim and everyone else, protect him and defend him. Take care of him because nobody else will and he’s the only one Jim seems to accept any care from anyway. He worries when Jim isn’t sleeping and makes sure he eats, sits up with him when he can’t sleep until Jim relaxes and drifts off by himself, looking at least a little at peace.
He says, “I’m a doctor” and the kid says, “Make sure you lock my arm up harder when you get me down” because he’s obsessed with McCoy excelling in hand to hand like McCoy’s ever going to do anything with it. He says, “I don’t need to” because he can’t, because he doesn’t want to, but the kid locks a hand around his wrist, drags him swearing and shaking into flight simulators and shuttles, shoves him brutally past his terror. He says, “I can eat on the way to class” and Jim simply stares at him like he’s an idiot until he sits down and spends the entire lunch break with the kid, eats his whole meal. He says, “I can do my own damn work” and “you’re the insomniac, not me” but Jim just shoves him into bed and stays in the room the whole time to make sure McCoy doesn’t sneak out. (He usually wakes up after these incidents with Jim curled up along his spine like a damn cat, arched close for warmth.)
Eleven months in, Jim gets back late glowing and grinning in that way that McCoy’s only seen twice now. “I saw her,” he announces as he kicks one shoe away (McCoy will dig it out from behind the dresser before he goes to bed like always to spare them both a headache in the morning) and tries to wrestle his jacket off at the same time. “I didn’t even know she was here, but she’s here.” When McCoy frowns, utterly baffled: “Janice, I saw her, fuck, Bones, I didn’t even know...”
McCoy’s got no idea what he’s talking about, only sits and watches Jim look so damn ecstatic that McCoy finally looks away because he feels like a damn voyeur.
“You have to meet her,” Jim says for the thousandth time long weeks later and McCoy grunts in what he wishes was a threat but knows all too well isn’t. “You guys would get along great.” McCoy doubts it, imagines the mysterious blonde Jim keeps describing and just feels irritated, maybe even a little pissed.
“She was really that good, huh?”
“That’s disgusting,” Jim retorts without missing a beat. “Rand’s like my sister, that’s… it would be like incest, Bones.” A beat before he continues with open disgust, “That’s disgusting.”
By thirteen months in, McCoy wishes childishly that Jim would shut up about her.
There’s a trip to Georgia one winter after classes are done for the year, an ache where a friend used to be before, back when Jocelyn had been Jo, and he comes back feeling raw and powerless.
Jim greets him with long days of silence and a too sharp stare but follows him more closely than ever before. The conflicted behavior lasts until the kid drags him out, downs a few shots and decides that McCoy’s been forgiven. This forgiveness is expressed in the open teasing McCoy receives over the fact that he refuses to try any of the beer sitting in front of them on the table and that’s that. Jim downs another, and then another, and sinks deeper into McCoy’s side until the doctor finally finishes his single shot and grabs their jackets.
There’s a mumble, Jim’s edgy anger missing as always when it’s McCoy around while he’s drunk, and then a hand hooks automatically into his belt near his spine. Warmth, a slow flicker of it where knuckles brush skin that almost bothers him but doesn’t, and he supports most of Jim’s weight as they stagger-walk their way back to their dorm room. Somehow keeps Jim from sliding down the wall as he punches their code in once, twice, three times because Jim keeps fucking with the damn lock (“security here is shit, Bones, my dead grandpa could sneak in”) and he’s a bit drunk himself.
McCoy drops Jim onto his bed, regrets it when Jim almost takes him down because he refuses to let go of his belt, and then drags the kid back up to peel the jacket off. Halfway through this operation, he stops, blinks and shakes himself because he can’t get the second sleeve off if Jim doesn’t let go.
“I’ve got you, let go,” he offers uselessly but Jim’s left leg just jerks once against his thigh. He shivers a little, sets a hand on Jim’s knee to push his leg away and pauses when his palm settles on a thigh instead. Can’t stop the immediate flex of his fingers into the muscles covered by fabric, unmistakable warmth of skin out of reach. He stops himself before he does it a second time, closes his eyes and draws his hand back.
Thinks, you just need to get some and then thinks, bullshit.
McCoy sits there for long minutes staring at the shape he can only barely make out in the dark, knowing without having to check that Jim’s forehead is wrinkled up in confusion and his free hand is curled into a fist. That Jim’s back is to the wall as always, body already rolled to face the door even in this state, and it has to kill his shoulder but Jim won’t let go of his damn belt.
Except now he’s breathing easily, and McCoy blames this fact for his weakness. For the fact that he simply mutters, “don’t” to himself and doesn’t force Jim’s grip to open or his fingers to unhook, just settles where he is by a heavy, sleep-warm body and listens to the breathing.
If either of them wants to bring it up the next morning, neither of them do.
If he wakes up after that some nights heated when Jim spends the day flinging him around the damn gym, he’s a little too grateful that he never remembers any of the dreams.
Frustrated, unprepared for this after nothing but a handful of female interns and a single long-term relationship, he childishly considers throwing the damn pillow in frustration but can’t. Because he knows how Jim spooks when he’s jerked out of a deep asleep and he’s unwilling to ever be the one to cause such a reaction.
Instead he swears into the damn pillow and looks over in the dark, checking the line of Jim’s body protectively until he forces himself to go back to sleep, sure Jim hasn’t been disturbed.
Jim’s been nothing but open about his pansexuality since they’ve met. And sure, McCoy’s met a few people in school and through work but it’s different to actually be sharing any space with one.
Especially someone as starved for (and terrified of) physical contact as Jim is.
Because this close, he watches Jim strip off his clothes when he gets in for the night, show his skin right up until Jim gets spooked that somebody gets too close to it. Jim flirts constantly and enjoys sex, never blushes or hesitates to talk about it in front of others, is drawn each and every time to assertive individuals frightening in their fearlessness. Slides his hands with annoying possessiveness over McCoy even when he doesn’t have any reason to and then darts off to whoever is waiting. Jim says, “Bones” with too much emotion freely offered, the tone needling or annoyed or choked with laughter that Jim refuses to restrain. Sometimes, rarely, it’s said in a hushed distressed way that he lets Jim pretend he didn’t hear but responds too quickly to anyway because he knows that tone.
That vague ache that Jim had saved him from is returning and it’s somehow even more dangerous now, overwhelming as it builds, feels like it could tear whatever’s left of him into nothing if he doesn’t escape.
He gives everything that’s left to Jim anyway.
(Uhura stares at him too hard but he glares back and says nothing and she wisely shuts the hell up.)
Jim still pops into the hospital so often the doctors have given up on ever getting rid of him, shows up when he knows McCoy is getting off shift or if he’s not feeling his best, flirts with everyone and sticks close to McCoy.
“So…” The sound of fingers drumming a flat surface, “I was thinking.”
McCoy signs the second form three times, the fourth form twice; checks both and goes to the fifth. Signs it twice and balances the datapad in one hand as he presses his thumb in the bottom left corner. When he hears nothing else, he sighs, grumbles his role. “What, you think now?”
There’s a chuckle behind him, too-short and sarcastic, and a second of silence. Then: “About us.”
The muscles in McCoy’s back seize up, fingers tightening around the objects he’s holding.
When he glances back at Jim, his friend’s staring at him too evenly. “What about us?”
It’s not often that people look at McCoy like he’s an idiot. But Jim’s smart enough to sometimes make him look like an idiot, and he suddenly feels like one to boot. “Us,” Jim explains in a bizarrely unruffled tone. “I know you’re pretty firmly planted in the heterosexual corner of the model but don’t tell me you don’t know how things work.”
Not everyone wants to fuck you, is what he’d like to say, somehow use the words to loosen the sudden knot in his chest that keeps building as he gazes at Jim. But he can’t think because Jim is just staring back at him, tense on his feet but unusually still, obviously wanting an answer.
He has none, struck mute by the words.
Thirty years old, divorced, unable to stop grieving, he can respond in only one way to the demand.
“No.” Jim’s mouth ticks up when nothing else is offered- and it propels McCoy forward, the sudden urge to end it before it can turn on either of them. “Not everyone wants to fuck you, Jim.”
He spots the beginnings of a grin, the edge of Jim’s mouth jerking upwards too easily before McCoy shifts his attention to the datapad that’s already filled out. “No.” His friend’s tone is cool, fixed, and McCoy is nakedly grateful for it even as he can’t meet Jim’s eyes, tries not to reflect on the reasons why he can’t.
“No,” McCoy assures, and then can’t say anything else.
Movement out of his peripheral vision, Jim rocking back and forth on his feet like some restless animal considering what to do next, but all McCoy can do is stare at his own name scattered across the screen in his hands.
“I gotta go,” Jim informs him after another few seconds, kicking his ankle in a bid for attention that McCoy’s become too used to in the last three years. “I’m getting the stick out of your ass this weekend, remember?” The smugness forces McCoy’s head up despite the tension, his eyes to narrow. “You don’t work this weekend!”
“I study.”
“Too much,” Jim retorts and, yes, his weekend is blown. Only a damn idiot would think he has a chance with that look on Jim Kirk’s face. Still, he can’t help but glare too childishly as he watches Jim twirl on one foot and head for the door, looking like the same man McCoy’s been too close to since the shuttle.
Then he’s gone, and the air seems to return to the room.
McCoy mutters, “No” into the sudden quiet and refuses to think about anything other than his work for the rest of the day. Thankfully, wonderfully, there are no moments of hesitation when they meet up again later that day, no pregnant pauses or looks across the room. Hell, they never talk about it again and he’s too grateful for it even as he wavers, considers his options too often but dismisses one in particular every time.
It's a lie, what he had decided before. He can’t give Jim everything.
Bones gives what he can anyway, and hopes dimly, vulnerably, that it’ll be enough.