Fic: Dawn On (1/1)
Title: Dawn On
Rating: PG-13
Characters: James T. Kirk, Leonard H. McCoy
Word Count: 2,220
Summary: Sometimes, Jim wonders why he’s friends with Bones. For mijan, who requested “Jim realizing something really profound about who Bones really is” at my Winter Gift-Fic Extravaganza. Spoilers for Star Trek XI (2009).
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot.
Author’s Notes: For mijan: I don’t even think this actually fills your request much at all, really, for which I apologize. As I said - total muse-block (which is like a cockblock, but almost worse), which I battled by trying to find the most unorthodox way I could think of to do what you’d asked (i.e. humor), plus me channeling fratboy!Kirk like woah, resulted in this, which is... I don’t even know. Enjoy it if you can ;)
Dawn On
“You don’t have to come, you know.”
Bones barely spares him a glance as he packs his kit, grabbing away at his stocks with practiced ease, the speed of knowing exactly what he needs, and where to find it, like he knows the bones of the hand, or... something else equally medically-important. “There are a lot of things I don’t have to do. But I still do ‘em.”
“You’ve got patients here.”
And that eyebrow cocks; Jesus, when that eyebrow cocks. “You plan on being gone all goddamned day?”
“No,” Jim concedes, follows when Bones walks away without warning, loses himself in the rows of supplies, slides between them with a strangely fluid sort of grace, grabbing here and there like it’s synchronized, like it’s planned; “it’s just a quick exchange, we’ll be in and out.”
“Then Chapel can handle ‘em ‘till I get back.”
“Look,” Jim says to his friend’s back - his fucking friend who doesn’t even fucking listen to him half the time; listens even less now that Jim’s his goddamn captain, which is just plain wrong (though not surprising) - because Bones is already on to collecting god-knows-what in the next aisle of chemical cocktails that Jim can’t tell the difference between except to distinguish ‘oooo pretty color’ from ‘that looks like cat piss.’ “Sulu’s got this contact, some... exotic orchid dealer he keeps up with,” and Bones, he’s about as deliberately uninterested as Jim’s ever seen a person look; which would be discouraging to anyone other than Jim Kirk. “She’s meeting us as soon as we get down there, it’s all planned. There’s just about a zero-chance of us getting gunned down,” which is important to point out - considering the fresh scar just below his collarbone from the puncture wound a spear’d given him from some angry natives just last week - if he’s going to spare Bones the beaming down and the schmoozing and worst of all, the beaming back up (because he claims there’s a difference, and Jim’s found it’s really fucking useless to argue). “She’s kind of a big deal, apparently,” Jim rambles idly, watching as Bones stacks hypo vials like a game of Jenga (he loves Jenga, always has, ever since he found that ancient, dry-rotted box of it under the floorboards in the farmhouse of the... second bastard is mother married); “They like plants around these parts.”
Bones snorts at that, that derisive little sound that says ‘you’re such an unbelievable jackass’ in the most loving way fathomable. “The fact that the planet’s called Verdantia wasn’t a dead giveaway?”
“Fuck you, not to mention completely irrelevant to my point here.” Sometimes, Jim wonders why he’s friends with Bones.
“Jaineson and Cardoza are the only other crew members coming down with us, and you cleared them both yourself - they’re completely immune to every possible contaminant the sensors can detect on the surface,” Jim flicks a protruding bit of something that looks suspiciously like cotton with his finger before it rubs against his forehead as he swings around the pole at the end of the row, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet with the momentum just before he careens into Bones (who’s rolling his eyes at Jim’s behavior before he even catches the man in his peripheral vision, Jim’s sure of it); “right down to that weird squirrel-tailed flower that spews those poison needle things.” And that thing’s a nasty fuck, all spindly and twitching - he’d found himself on the wrong side of one the last time they’d run into ‘em, and had barely lived to tell the tale (which, incidentally, is one good reason why he is friends with Bones; to keep that ‘had barely’ from becoming a ‘had not’).
“You know I don’t trust your goddamn sensors as far I can throw ‘em,” comes the predictable growl from between the cordrazine (Jim knows that one) and the stuff that looks like his grandmother’s pea soup (Jim doesn’t know that one, just knows he doesn’t like it). “Coulda missed something. Better safe than sorry.”
“Exactly!” And Jim, whose eyes are wide with victory and whose fingers are pointed at Bones as if he’s just solved the case of who-done-it, barely even pauses to catalogue the half-amused way that his friend’s lips quirk, the way Bones only half-turns, only half-looks Jim’s way from under heavy lids, through eyes that smolder like the sun on the sea. “You don’t trust the sensors, just like you don’t trust the transporters! You hate transporters.” And hate, in this case, was the understatement of this century, as well as the next. “And you hate setting foot on alien planets about twenty-times more than even that.” More like fifty-times more; but admittedly, Jim was prone to exaggeration, once in a blue moon. “You nearly upchucked your lunch on my boots when we went down to Sevros VII last month -”
“Hold it right there, kid,” Bones spins to him, making direct eye contact for the first time in the course of the conversation - which, by Jim’s count, happens a whole three minutes earlier than the average occurrence rate for their frequent heart-to-hearts. “Don’t you go painting me for some pansy who can’t hold his queasy stomach; the gravity on that godforsaken slab of rock was fucked up in ways I don’t even pretend to understand.” He grabs at another hypospray, rolls it along his palm in evaluation, places it back in storage and grabs for another, holding it to the light; “Ensign Renier looked green for at least a week after that fiasco.”
“Fine, I’ll give you that one,” Jim concedes with a shrug (not that Bones sees it, because he’s already whisked off to grab god-knows-what else he needs for the meet-and-greet mission of smile-and-fucking-wave that he doesn’t need to be a part of in the first place); “But my point is,” and here’s where Jim finally gets him, comes around the edge of one row and catches him from the front, backing him towards a wall until he pays him the heed he deserves (deserves!); “is that your presence on this mission, while welcomed, is not required by protocol.” He reaches out, grasps Bones at the biceps, feels the tension in his muscles where those science blues clash with his golden sleeve (with the braid on it that proved he deserved to be heeded, goddamnit); his eyes soften as he locks gazes with Bones, as his thumb strokes idly back and forth across the curve of his arm; “I’ve never seen anyone hate beaming more than you,” Jim tells him (doesn’t tell him that he’s pretty sure there’s not a soul that’s ever lived or died that hates beaming quite like Leonard McCoy); “I’m just, trying to look out for you, y’know?”
And they’re quiet for a moment, like it’s special, those seconds where some kind of metaphysical bond is solidified between two people, that stretches far out into the cosmos and resonates deep in their souls (and Jim can buy that, kind of, except that he’s hungry and he’s wondering what his replicator can do with a gyro, because he hasn’t tried it yet, and he’s craving one like a pregnant woman).
“Jim?” Bones says after the pause runs its course, voice steady and calm, with just a little give in it as he pops one last thing into the kit before looking up to meet Jim’s eyes.
“Yeah?”
The kit snaps closed with a dramatic flare that anyone would appreciate (and that he, being Jim Kirk, enjoys in particular); “Shut the hell up.”
And that’s typical, Jim thinks, as he watches Bones stride away without him; real fucking typical. Man doesn’t listen to anyone; how the bastard got through the Academy with an attitude like that is absolutely beyond him - the nerve of some people (and before anyone mentions it: no, Jim Kirk is not a hypocrite. At all.)
“Captain?” He almost jumps at the voice that pipes behind him, almost stumbles and takes down the emergency collection of old-fashioned syringes with the actual-factual needles in them (and fuck, he should take those sons-o’-bitches down, he’ll take death over that shit any day) as he turns to the blonde who resembles, quite strikingly, his CMO’s right hand. Figuratively, of course (she doesn’t look anything like a hand).
“Nurse,” he answers with a nod, and no, his eyes don’t dip to the swell of her bust (he’s totally over the obligatory Chapel-crush by now).
“If I may, sir,” Christine says, with just a lilt of something that anyone else would think was fatigue, but that Jim knows (knows) is the distinct sign of agitation, of absolute incredulity that Bones has undoubtedly schooled her in, as if a prerequisite for the position of head nurse was the flawless capacity to mock Jim’s occasional obliviousness. Fuckers. “Did you happen to notice what it was that the Doctor added to his kit just now?”
He nods, because shockingly he does know - he’s learned to fear it like the plague, for as much as he gets jabbed with it: some super-antihistamine that’s saved his hide more times than he can count, but that he swears, swears hurts more going in than anything else Bones tends to shove against his neck (one day, he’s going to be so awesome that he’ll be able to change whatever he wants back at the Academy, and his first order of business? Improving Medical’s courses on bedside manner. Specifically the ones that apply to administering hyposprays).
“Do you know what it’s for?” Chapel asks like she’s talking to a complete and utter moron, or a tree - hell, she’d spoken more nicely to Uhura when her memory’d been wiped by that goddamn Nomad thingy (but then again, Chapel and Uhura are all tight and shit).
“Of course I know what it’s for,” he snaps, just a little (not so much to matter, but still more than he should); “I’ve only been stabbed with it about a million times.”
“Exactly.” And she stares at him like he’s impenetrable (which is true, in the flattering way; but she’s looking at him like it’s true in the insulting way, too, which kind of sucks). So he thinks on it, thinks hard; the vials, for allergies - Sulu’s just about inhumanly tolerant when it comes to reactions, has yet to test positive for a single allergic reaction to so much as ragweed. And not that he routinely memorizes his crew-members’ medical profiles, but he’d already pointed out specifically (not that it’d helped him any) that Jaineson and Cardoza were immune to everything Verdantia had to throw at ‘em. Bones himself was pretty damn resilient (even to those squirrel-tailed monstrosities, because those had done a fucking number on him-
On him. Jim. They’d done a number of Jim, and Jim alone.
Exactly.
Well fuck; now that makes sense.
He looks after Chapel, who’s glancing over at him knowingly where she’s conveniently taking inventory, and he’s torn a little between feeling flattered and guilty; and it’s a really disorienting combination of emotions that he doesn’t particularly care for, and he thinks he’d really like a shot of something Scotty’d be able to steer him towards at the end of his shift in order to remedy the effect as quickly as possible.
He makes his way to the transporter room without incident, where the rest of his team is already waiting - with the addition of his well-meaning (though stubborn-as-fuck) plus-one - and it’s before he gives the command (though after he rests a hand on Bones’s forearm, locking their eyes for the instant it takes to show that he gets it, and that he’s grateful) that he makes his decision.
He’s gonna go with feeling flattered - apparently, Bones likes him enough that he’d prefer he didn’t die from anaphylactic shock. Which, all things considered, is pretty cool.
He still wants a drink after his shift, though.
(And if Scotty fails him, he knows where Bones hides his stash).
Rating: PG-13
Characters: James T. Kirk, Leonard H. McCoy
Word Count: 2,220
Summary: Sometimes, Jim wonders why he’s friends with Bones. For mijan, who requested “Jim realizing something really profound about who Bones really is” at my Winter Gift-Fic Extravaganza. Spoilers for Star Trek XI (2009).
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot.
Author’s Notes: For mijan: I don’t even think this actually fills your request much at all, really, for which I apologize. As I said - total muse-block (which is like a cockblock, but almost worse), which I battled by trying to find the most unorthodox way I could think of to do what you’d asked (i.e. humor), plus me channeling fratboy!Kirk like woah, resulted in this, which is... I don’t even know. Enjoy it if you can ;)
Dawn On
“You don’t have to come, you know.”
Bones barely spares him a glance as he packs his kit, grabbing away at his stocks with practiced ease, the speed of knowing exactly what he needs, and where to find it, like he knows the bones of the hand, or... something else equally medically-important. “There are a lot of things I don’t have to do. But I still do ‘em.”
“You’ve got patients here.”
And that eyebrow cocks; Jesus, when that eyebrow cocks. “You plan on being gone all goddamned day?”
“No,” Jim concedes, follows when Bones walks away without warning, loses himself in the rows of supplies, slides between them with a strangely fluid sort of grace, grabbing here and there like it’s synchronized, like it’s planned; “it’s just a quick exchange, we’ll be in and out.”
“Then Chapel can handle ‘em ‘till I get back.”
“Look,” Jim says to his friend’s back - his fucking friend who doesn’t even fucking listen to him half the time; listens even less now that Jim’s his goddamn captain, which is just plain wrong (though not surprising) - because Bones is already on to collecting god-knows-what in the next aisle of chemical cocktails that Jim can’t tell the difference between except to distinguish ‘oooo pretty color’ from ‘that looks like cat piss.’ “Sulu’s got this contact, some... exotic orchid dealer he keeps up with,” and Bones, he’s about as deliberately uninterested as Jim’s ever seen a person look; which would be discouraging to anyone other than Jim Kirk. “She’s meeting us as soon as we get down there, it’s all planned. There’s just about a zero-chance of us getting gunned down,” which is important to point out - considering the fresh scar just below his collarbone from the puncture wound a spear’d given him from some angry natives just last week - if he’s going to spare Bones the beaming down and the schmoozing and worst of all, the beaming back up (because he claims there’s a difference, and Jim’s found it’s really fucking useless to argue). “She’s kind of a big deal, apparently,” Jim rambles idly, watching as Bones stacks hypo vials like a game of Jenga (he loves Jenga, always has, ever since he found that ancient, dry-rotted box of it under the floorboards in the farmhouse of the... second bastard is mother married); “They like plants around these parts.”
Bones snorts at that, that derisive little sound that says ‘you’re such an unbelievable jackass’ in the most loving way fathomable. “The fact that the planet’s called Verdantia wasn’t a dead giveaway?”
“Fuck you, not to mention completely irrelevant to my point here.” Sometimes, Jim wonders why he’s friends with Bones.
“Jaineson and Cardoza are the only other crew members coming down with us, and you cleared them both yourself - they’re completely immune to every possible contaminant the sensors can detect on the surface,” Jim flicks a protruding bit of something that looks suspiciously like cotton with his finger before it rubs against his forehead as he swings around the pole at the end of the row, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet with the momentum just before he careens into Bones (who’s rolling his eyes at Jim’s behavior before he even catches the man in his peripheral vision, Jim’s sure of it); “right down to that weird squirrel-tailed flower that spews those poison needle things.” And that thing’s a nasty fuck, all spindly and twitching - he’d found himself on the wrong side of one the last time they’d run into ‘em, and had barely lived to tell the tale (which, incidentally, is one good reason why he is friends with Bones; to keep that ‘had barely’ from becoming a ‘had not’).
“You know I don’t trust your goddamn sensors as far I can throw ‘em,” comes the predictable growl from between the cordrazine (Jim knows that one) and the stuff that looks like his grandmother’s pea soup (Jim doesn’t know that one, just knows he doesn’t like it). “Coulda missed something. Better safe than sorry.”
“Exactly!” And Jim, whose eyes are wide with victory and whose fingers are pointed at Bones as if he’s just solved the case of who-done-it, barely even pauses to catalogue the half-amused way that his friend’s lips quirk, the way Bones only half-turns, only half-looks Jim’s way from under heavy lids, through eyes that smolder like the sun on the sea. “You don’t trust the sensors, just like you don’t trust the transporters! You hate transporters.” And hate, in this case, was the understatement of this century, as well as the next. “And you hate setting foot on alien planets about twenty-times more than even that.” More like fifty-times more; but admittedly, Jim was prone to exaggeration, once in a blue moon. “You nearly upchucked your lunch on my boots when we went down to Sevros VII last month -”
“Hold it right there, kid,” Bones spins to him, making direct eye contact for the first time in the course of the conversation - which, by Jim’s count, happens a whole three minutes earlier than the average occurrence rate for their frequent heart-to-hearts. “Don’t you go painting me for some pansy who can’t hold his queasy stomach; the gravity on that godforsaken slab of rock was fucked up in ways I don’t even pretend to understand.” He grabs at another hypospray, rolls it along his palm in evaluation, places it back in storage and grabs for another, holding it to the light; “Ensign Renier looked green for at least a week after that fiasco.”
“Fine, I’ll give you that one,” Jim concedes with a shrug (not that Bones sees it, because he’s already whisked off to grab god-knows-what else he needs for the meet-and-greet mission of smile-and-fucking-wave that he doesn’t need to be a part of in the first place); “But my point is,” and here’s where Jim finally gets him, comes around the edge of one row and catches him from the front, backing him towards a wall until he pays him the heed he deserves (deserves!); “is that your presence on this mission, while welcomed, is not required by protocol.” He reaches out, grasps Bones at the biceps, feels the tension in his muscles where those science blues clash with his golden sleeve (with the braid on it that proved he deserved to be heeded, goddamnit); his eyes soften as he locks gazes with Bones, as his thumb strokes idly back and forth across the curve of his arm; “I’ve never seen anyone hate beaming more than you,” Jim tells him (doesn’t tell him that he’s pretty sure there’s not a soul that’s ever lived or died that hates beaming quite like Leonard McCoy); “I’m just, trying to look out for you, y’know?”
And they’re quiet for a moment, like it’s special, those seconds where some kind of metaphysical bond is solidified between two people, that stretches far out into the cosmos and resonates deep in their souls (and Jim can buy that, kind of, except that he’s hungry and he’s wondering what his replicator can do with a gyro, because he hasn’t tried it yet, and he’s craving one like a pregnant woman).
“Jim?” Bones says after the pause runs its course, voice steady and calm, with just a little give in it as he pops one last thing into the kit before looking up to meet Jim’s eyes.
“Yeah?”
The kit snaps closed with a dramatic flare that anyone would appreciate (and that he, being Jim Kirk, enjoys in particular); “Shut the hell up.”
And that’s typical, Jim thinks, as he watches Bones stride away without him; real fucking typical. Man doesn’t listen to anyone; how the bastard got through the Academy with an attitude like that is absolutely beyond him - the nerve of some people (and before anyone mentions it: no, Jim Kirk is not a hypocrite. At all.)
“Captain?” He almost jumps at the voice that pipes behind him, almost stumbles and takes down the emergency collection of old-fashioned syringes with the actual-factual needles in them (and fuck, he should take those sons-o’-bitches down, he’ll take death over that shit any day) as he turns to the blonde who resembles, quite strikingly, his CMO’s right hand. Figuratively, of course (she doesn’t look anything like a hand).
“Nurse,” he answers with a nod, and no, his eyes don’t dip to the swell of her bust (he’s totally over the obligatory Chapel-crush by now).
“If I may, sir,” Christine says, with just a lilt of something that anyone else would think was fatigue, but that Jim knows (knows) is the distinct sign of agitation, of absolute incredulity that Bones has undoubtedly schooled her in, as if a prerequisite for the position of head nurse was the flawless capacity to mock Jim’s occasional obliviousness. Fuckers. “Did you happen to notice what it was that the Doctor added to his kit just now?”
He nods, because shockingly he does know - he’s learned to fear it like the plague, for as much as he gets jabbed with it: some super-antihistamine that’s saved his hide more times than he can count, but that he swears, swears hurts more going in than anything else Bones tends to shove against his neck (one day, he’s going to be so awesome that he’ll be able to change whatever he wants back at the Academy, and his first order of business? Improving Medical’s courses on bedside manner. Specifically the ones that apply to administering hyposprays).
“Do you know what it’s for?” Chapel asks like she’s talking to a complete and utter moron, or a tree - hell, she’d spoken more nicely to Uhura when her memory’d been wiped by that goddamn Nomad thingy (but then again, Chapel and Uhura are all tight and shit).
“Of course I know what it’s for,” he snaps, just a little (not so much to matter, but still more than he should); “I’ve only been stabbed with it about a million times.”
“Exactly.” And she stares at him like he’s impenetrable (which is true, in the flattering way; but she’s looking at him like it’s true in the insulting way, too, which kind of sucks). So he thinks on it, thinks hard; the vials, for allergies - Sulu’s just about inhumanly tolerant when it comes to reactions, has yet to test positive for a single allergic reaction to so much as ragweed. And not that he routinely memorizes his crew-members’ medical profiles, but he’d already pointed out specifically (not that it’d helped him any) that Jaineson and Cardoza were immune to everything Verdantia had to throw at ‘em. Bones himself was pretty damn resilient (even to those squirrel-tailed monstrosities, because those had done a fucking number on him-
On him. Jim. They’d done a number of Jim, and Jim alone.
Exactly.
Well fuck; now that makes sense.
He looks after Chapel, who’s glancing over at him knowingly where she’s conveniently taking inventory, and he’s torn a little between feeling flattered and guilty; and it’s a really disorienting combination of emotions that he doesn’t particularly care for, and he thinks he’d really like a shot of something Scotty’d be able to steer him towards at the end of his shift in order to remedy the effect as quickly as possible.
He makes his way to the transporter room without incident, where the rest of his team is already waiting - with the addition of his well-meaning (though stubborn-as-fuck) plus-one - and it’s before he gives the command (though after he rests a hand on Bones’s forearm, locking their eyes for the instant it takes to show that he gets it, and that he’s grateful) that he makes his decision.
He’s gonna go with feeling flattered - apparently, Bones likes him enough that he’d prefer he didn’t die from anaphylactic shock. Which, all things considered, is pretty cool.
He still wants a drink after his shift, though.
(And if Scotty fails him, he knows where Bones hides his stash).