Ficlet
Title: Lessons
Author:
i_msoashamed
Rating: PG-13 (There's no sex in this one either. Unless a Spones mindmeld is your kink, like mine is.)
Summary: Spock and McCoy are in a semi-permanent mind meld, giving each other access to one another's knowledge and skills. In this next installment, McCoy teaches Spock how to take care of patients, while Spock teaches McCoy music.
Pairing: Spock/McCoy
Word count: 1,823
Warnings: I tried to write fluff again and brought the angst instead. If fluff's more your thing, you might enjoy Coffee & Tea.
Disclaimer: Paramount is watching us masturbate.
Injuries weren't unusual on away missions. Kirk thought that this time they'd actually done fairly well: a brief spat with the natives had resulted in only one cadet getting his knee shot full of lead pellets. It was extremely painful but certainly not life-threatening, and Kirk had gotten his people back together and beamed up with a minimum of fuss. The only injury he had sustained was when he had slid down a gravel embankment and sliced most of the skin from the palm of his hand, and he headed to sickbay thinking of the reports he would be filing for Starfleet.
When he got to sickbay things were strangely quiet. Bones should have been shouting at his orderlies as he dealt with the injured cadet, but instead Nurse Chapel was leaned up against the doorframe with the stylus of her PADD pressed gently to her lips. He was about to say something when he realized what she was focused on: the sight of the cadet lying on a biobed, at ease on a hypospray's worth of painkillers, with Spock and McCoy standing over him. Both the black head and the brunette were bent over the leg wound, but only Spock was performing the manipulations needed to tease the bits of metal from the flesh.
It was strange to see Spock in doctor's scrubs.
"Oh, sorry Captain--" Nurse Chapel had just noticed him, but he held up a hand to forestall her doing anything: he didn't want to interrupt the scene in front of him.
McCoy was speaking in a hushed voice, much as one would would when witnessing a butterfly collector set something unbelievably delicate into place. "Avoid the vein...a little to the left...there now...you have it!"
As Spock pulled the tiny bit of metal from the wound and dropped it on the tray, Kirk saw that Bones was giving him the lightest of touches on the upper arm. Strengthening the bond.
"Now close it up and we're good to go."
"I know that as well as you, Doctor," said Spock, but there was warmth in his tone. As Spock ran the dermal regenerator around the torn and bruised flesh, setting it to rights, Kirk saw McCoy slip an arm around the Vulcan's waist. McCoy looked...happy. Kirk tried to remember the last time McCoy had looked this happy for this long and could only think of the time when that alien priestess had offered to marry him.
"We're finished," said Spock cheerfully.
That's a new tone of voice for you, Kirk thought.
"Thank you--" the cadet seemed briefly confused by this two-headed entity that was regarding him with identical expressions of satisfaction--"Mr. Spock."
"Go on now and get yourself a new uniform." Bones slapped the cadet lightly on the back as he slipped off the biobed. He noticed his Captain for the first time. "Oh, no, Jim, not you too."
"Just a scratch." He showed Bones the skinned palm. As McCoy went to work with the dermal regenerator, Spock took up the tray of medical instruments and used gauze to clean and dispose of. Only Kirk was facing the right way to see that after Spock set the tray down by the sink he hesitated.
"Middle cabinet, top shelf," said McCoy without looking up.
The missing item turned out to be soap. "Neat trick," Kirk remarked.
McCoy looked up at him with a smooth, sly grin. "Oh, we can do better than that."
Spock dried his hands, then set a chair in the middle of the room. He sat in it backwards, Kirk noticed, with his arms folded on the back of the seat. McCoy took a roll of gauze bandaging from a drawer and wound it around Spock's head in an improvised blindfold.
"There now, Jim, you stand over there behind Spock." The Doctor himself went and sat on the vacated biobed.
Kirk went to stand by the sink. He spread his hands in a What now? gesture.
McCoy shrugged. "Do something."
"Anything?"
"Pick something up."
Kirk did so.
"Tweezers," said Spock, and proceeded to name each item as Kirk picked them up. "A cotton ball. Scalpel. Robert Crater's Study of Ancient Vaccines, disk two. " There was no way he could see what was happening...except that McCoy was sitting there grinning, watching every move Kirk made.
"Vulcan ears," said Kirk dismissively. Somehow he wanted them to be wrong, to show this whole thing up as some kind of elaborate trick the two of them were playing after a whole week with no insults and no arguments and absolutely no remarks about green blooded hobgoblins. Or perhaps it was just because McCoy looked so goddamn smug.
Kirk took out his PADD and called up a document. "Read that, but don't say anything aloud."
McCoy had hardly glanced at the PADD when Spock began reciting, "'Four score and seven years ago...'"
But that was one of his favorites, of course Spock would know that. Kirk changed it to the latest course changes, then to Terran news and Spock recited the baseball scores flawlessly, plucking the words from McCoy's mind as fast as he could run his eyes over them. Finally Kirk got frustrated enough that he opened a document he knew Spock had never read: a fembot fantasy special.
"Captain," said Spock, "I refuse to recite pornography in Nurse Chapel's presence."
"Oh, don't mind me, gentlemen," said Chapel. The other two men had forgotten about her until now. She moved away from the doorway, skirting carefully around the seated Vulcan, and began to shut down the biobed that McCoy was sitting on, turning off panels and folding cords.
Kirk grinned and nudged the doctor's thigh. "Just a paragraph," he said. "It's not so awful."
After three years in deep space and meeting all kinds of creatures, Kirk had seen and heard some very strange things. But none were quite as strange as listening to Spock's deep voice talking about voyeurs and clone girls and lust:
"'Don’t get up.' Meg said softly. 'We want to put on a show for you.'
"Meg laughed. Her laugh was so close… close to the laugh that came from the same mouth so long ago. It stung a little in my chest, but I knew that unlike k8 Meg loved me.
"The two identical girls kissed. Pouting lips on pouting lips. There were interesting things about the two of them, like how rough they seemed to be with each other. I asked Meg about it once and she explained that they knew each other’s limits so well that it was easy to be ro--"
Chapel slipped a hand over McCoy's eyes, and Spock's voice cut off as abruptly a tape being shut off. "That's enough," she said quietly. If it were anyone less professional, Kirk thought, her eyes would have been full of tears.
* * *
The mess hall doubled as a rec room during off hours. This sometimes resulted in entertainment for the rest of the crew, and tonight was no exception. Almost the entire bridge was finding excuses to linger over dessert or to get another coffee, because Spock was teaching Bones how to play the Vulcan lyre.
Rand was sitting next to Kirk. She leaned her head towards him and said, "Those two."
"Yeah," said Kirk, "who would have thought?"
Spock was standing behind the Doctor, his long fingers lined up with the surgeon's as he demonstrated the proper placement, murmuring advice in his ear. Bones, though to Kirk's knowledge he had never picked up an instrument in his life, was taking on a very competent stance.
"It's the bond," said Rand, "isn't it? He knows it because Spock knows it, and now all they have to do is show the muscles..." She trailed off, shaking her head at the implications. Kirk glanced farther down the table: Chekov looked enraptured, Sulu bored.
"I wouldn't do that," said Sulu loudly. "Not if you paid me."
Chekov looked disappointed in this opinion, and Kirk stored that knowledge away for later when he asked Uhura about crew gossip. "But, Mr. Sulu, it is rather romantic, is it not?"
Sulu snorted. "I don't know if feeling everything someone else feels is what I'd call romantic. If Doctor McCoy goes on a two-day bender, will Spock feel it?"
"I don't know, Ensign," said Kirk with just enough edge to warn Sulu that it was perhaps not in his best interest to go on about his superior's vices. Spock had explained that the difference wasn't so much in kind as in degree: with a full bond you felt all things another person was feeling, down to the heartbeat and respiration. He thought, This way they're still two separate people.
"Oh, God, that vould be horrible!" said Chekov. "Vat if you got the stomach flu?"
"Or colic," said Sulu, which started off a spate of sophomoric giggling between them.
Rand smacked Sulu on the back of the head. "Hush, you two." What had begun as the plinking of a scale was becoming a louder, and more confident series of notes: McCoy was moving into the opening bars of a song. Kirk thought that perhaps it was a Terran melody, but the Vulcan lyre gave them such an odd, vibrato quality, and the notes were so widely spaced, he couldn't be sure.
Then there was a hush in the mess hall. Spock had begun to sing.
In Peking
There is a son who
Is much greater
Than you want to be...
His voice was not the best, but each word was clear despite the low tone, and of course he had perfect pitch. McCoy wasn't even looking at the strings any more: every particle of his attention was focused on the First Officer, and each note fell exactly into place.
It was that focus, Kirk reflected, that they both had for one another, so complete that Kirk thought a bomb could go off behind them without it damaging their perfect calm. It was what he had sensed in sickbay earlier, how they were more wrapped up in each other than in the patient before them. Once again, he found himself wondering if such closeness was a good thing, if it was even healthy...
The song turned out to be a bit of nonsense, though a strangely haunting one. Kirk led the applause that followed, which seemed to startle them both, and Bones flushed slightly. Spock gave a little bow, and just for a moment--or did Kirk imagine it?--his eyes lingered on those of his captain.
Admit it, Kirk thought to himself, you're jealous.
_________________
Credits:
The "fembot fantasy special" is from an original piece of erotica by Jack Stratton called "The Long Run". He posts everything under a CC License, so I didn't think he'd mind if I filched a paragraph for my own uses.
The song is "Peking Saint", as sung by Cat Power.
Author:
i_msoashamed
Rating: PG-13 (There's no sex in this one either. Unless a Spones mindmeld is your kink, like mine is.)
Summary: Spock and McCoy are in a semi-permanent mind meld, giving each other access to one another's knowledge and skills. In this next installment, McCoy teaches Spock how to take care of patients, while Spock teaches McCoy music.
Pairing: Spock/McCoy
Word count: 1,823
Warnings: I tried to write fluff again and brought the angst instead. If fluff's more your thing, you might enjoy Coffee & Tea.
Disclaimer: Paramount is watching us masturbate.
Injuries weren't unusual on away missions. Kirk thought that this time they'd actually done fairly well: a brief spat with the natives had resulted in only one cadet getting his knee shot full of lead pellets. It was extremely painful but certainly not life-threatening, and Kirk had gotten his people back together and beamed up with a minimum of fuss. The only injury he had sustained was when he had slid down a gravel embankment and sliced most of the skin from the palm of his hand, and he headed to sickbay thinking of the reports he would be filing for Starfleet.
When he got to sickbay things were strangely quiet. Bones should have been shouting at his orderlies as he dealt with the injured cadet, but instead Nurse Chapel was leaned up against the doorframe with the stylus of her PADD pressed gently to her lips. He was about to say something when he realized what she was focused on: the sight of the cadet lying on a biobed, at ease on a hypospray's worth of painkillers, with Spock and McCoy standing over him. Both the black head and the brunette were bent over the leg wound, but only Spock was performing the manipulations needed to tease the bits of metal from the flesh.
It was strange to see Spock in doctor's scrubs.
"Oh, sorry Captain--" Nurse Chapel had just noticed him, but he held up a hand to forestall her doing anything: he didn't want to interrupt the scene in front of him.
McCoy was speaking in a hushed voice, much as one would would when witnessing a butterfly collector set something unbelievably delicate into place. "Avoid the vein...a little to the left...there now...you have it!"
As Spock pulled the tiny bit of metal from the wound and dropped it on the tray, Kirk saw that Bones was giving him the lightest of touches on the upper arm. Strengthening the bond.
"Now close it up and we're good to go."
"I know that as well as you, Doctor," said Spock, but there was warmth in his tone. As Spock ran the dermal regenerator around the torn and bruised flesh, setting it to rights, Kirk saw McCoy slip an arm around the Vulcan's waist. McCoy looked...happy. Kirk tried to remember the last time McCoy had looked this happy for this long and could only think of the time when that alien priestess had offered to marry him.
"We're finished," said Spock cheerfully.
That's a new tone of voice for you, Kirk thought.
"Thank you--" the cadet seemed briefly confused by this two-headed entity that was regarding him with identical expressions of satisfaction--"Mr. Spock."
"Go on now and get yourself a new uniform." Bones slapped the cadet lightly on the back as he slipped off the biobed. He noticed his Captain for the first time. "Oh, no, Jim, not you too."
"Just a scratch." He showed Bones the skinned palm. As McCoy went to work with the dermal regenerator, Spock took up the tray of medical instruments and used gauze to clean and dispose of. Only Kirk was facing the right way to see that after Spock set the tray down by the sink he hesitated.
"Middle cabinet, top shelf," said McCoy without looking up.
The missing item turned out to be soap. "Neat trick," Kirk remarked.
McCoy looked up at him with a smooth, sly grin. "Oh, we can do better than that."
Spock dried his hands, then set a chair in the middle of the room. He sat in it backwards, Kirk noticed, with his arms folded on the back of the seat. McCoy took a roll of gauze bandaging from a drawer and wound it around Spock's head in an improvised blindfold.
"There now, Jim, you stand over there behind Spock." The Doctor himself went and sat on the vacated biobed.
Kirk went to stand by the sink. He spread his hands in a What now? gesture.
McCoy shrugged. "Do something."
"Anything?"
"Pick something up."
Kirk did so.
"Tweezers," said Spock, and proceeded to name each item as Kirk picked them up. "A cotton ball. Scalpel. Robert Crater's Study of Ancient Vaccines, disk two. " There was no way he could see what was happening...except that McCoy was sitting there grinning, watching every move Kirk made.
"Vulcan ears," said Kirk dismissively. Somehow he wanted them to be wrong, to show this whole thing up as some kind of elaborate trick the two of them were playing after a whole week with no insults and no arguments and absolutely no remarks about green blooded hobgoblins. Or perhaps it was just because McCoy looked so goddamn smug.
Kirk took out his PADD and called up a document. "Read that, but don't say anything aloud."
McCoy had hardly glanced at the PADD when Spock began reciting, "'Four score and seven years ago...'"
But that was one of his favorites, of course Spock would know that. Kirk changed it to the latest course changes, then to Terran news and Spock recited the baseball scores flawlessly, plucking the words from McCoy's mind as fast as he could run his eyes over them. Finally Kirk got frustrated enough that he opened a document he knew Spock had never read: a fembot fantasy special.
"Captain," said Spock, "I refuse to recite pornography in Nurse Chapel's presence."
"Oh, don't mind me, gentlemen," said Chapel. The other two men had forgotten about her until now. She moved away from the doorway, skirting carefully around the seated Vulcan, and began to shut down the biobed that McCoy was sitting on, turning off panels and folding cords.
Kirk grinned and nudged the doctor's thigh. "Just a paragraph," he said. "It's not so awful."
After three years in deep space and meeting all kinds of creatures, Kirk had seen and heard some very strange things. But none were quite as strange as listening to Spock's deep voice talking about voyeurs and clone girls and lust:
"'Don’t get up.' Meg said softly. 'We want to put on a show for you.'
"Meg laughed. Her laugh was so close… close to the laugh that came from the same mouth so long ago. It stung a little in my chest, but I knew that unlike k8 Meg loved me.
"The two identical girls kissed. Pouting lips on pouting lips. There were interesting things about the two of them, like how rough they seemed to be with each other. I asked Meg about it once and she explained that they knew each other’s limits so well that it was easy to be ro--"
Chapel slipped a hand over McCoy's eyes, and Spock's voice cut off as abruptly a tape being shut off. "That's enough," she said quietly. If it were anyone less professional, Kirk thought, her eyes would have been full of tears.
* * *
The mess hall doubled as a rec room during off hours. This sometimes resulted in entertainment for the rest of the crew, and tonight was no exception. Almost the entire bridge was finding excuses to linger over dessert or to get another coffee, because Spock was teaching Bones how to play the Vulcan lyre.
Rand was sitting next to Kirk. She leaned her head towards him and said, "Those two."
"Yeah," said Kirk, "who would have thought?"
Spock was standing behind the Doctor, his long fingers lined up with the surgeon's as he demonstrated the proper placement, murmuring advice in his ear. Bones, though to Kirk's knowledge he had never picked up an instrument in his life, was taking on a very competent stance.
"It's the bond," said Rand, "isn't it? He knows it because Spock knows it, and now all they have to do is show the muscles..." She trailed off, shaking her head at the implications. Kirk glanced farther down the table: Chekov looked enraptured, Sulu bored.
"I wouldn't do that," said Sulu loudly. "Not if you paid me."
Chekov looked disappointed in this opinion, and Kirk stored that knowledge away for later when he asked Uhura about crew gossip. "But, Mr. Sulu, it is rather romantic, is it not?"
Sulu snorted. "I don't know if feeling everything someone else feels is what I'd call romantic. If Doctor McCoy goes on a two-day bender, will Spock feel it?"
"I don't know, Ensign," said Kirk with just enough edge to warn Sulu that it was perhaps not in his best interest to go on about his superior's vices. Spock had explained that the difference wasn't so much in kind as in degree: with a full bond you felt all things another person was feeling, down to the heartbeat and respiration. He thought, This way they're still two separate people.
"Oh, God, that vould be horrible!" said Chekov. "Vat if you got the stomach flu?"
"Or colic," said Sulu, which started off a spate of sophomoric giggling between them.
Rand smacked Sulu on the back of the head. "Hush, you two." What had begun as the plinking of a scale was becoming a louder, and more confident series of notes: McCoy was moving into the opening bars of a song. Kirk thought that perhaps it was a Terran melody, but the Vulcan lyre gave them such an odd, vibrato quality, and the notes were so widely spaced, he couldn't be sure.
Then there was a hush in the mess hall. Spock had begun to sing.
In Peking
There is a son who
Is much greater
Than you want to be...
His voice was not the best, but each word was clear despite the low tone, and of course he had perfect pitch. McCoy wasn't even looking at the strings any more: every particle of his attention was focused on the First Officer, and each note fell exactly into place.
It was that focus, Kirk reflected, that they both had for one another, so complete that Kirk thought a bomb could go off behind them without it damaging their perfect calm. It was what he had sensed in sickbay earlier, how they were more wrapped up in each other than in the patient before them. Once again, he found himself wondering if such closeness was a good thing, if it was even healthy...
The song turned out to be a bit of nonsense, though a strangely haunting one. Kirk led the applause that followed, which seemed to startle them both, and Bones flushed slightly. Spock gave a little bow, and just for a moment--or did Kirk imagine it?--his eyes lingered on those of his captain.
Admit it, Kirk thought to himself, you're jealous.
_________________
Credits:
The "fembot fantasy special" is from an original piece of erotica by Jack Stratton called "The Long Run". He posts everything under a CC License, so I didn't think he'd mind if I filched a paragraph for my own uses.
The song is "Peking Saint", as sung by Cat Power.