Star Trek fic: The broken clock is a comfort. Kirk/McCoy (R) 2/2
5, 630 words.
(Part One.)
Part Two.
The first time Leonard McCoy finds himself kissing Jim Kirk, they’re in his old apartment. He’s only known the man a day, but Jim tells him they’ve known each other for a hellova lot longer than that. Longer than Bones can even remember, longer than Bones can even know.
He meets Jim for the hundredth time when really it’s the first, and he meets him for the first time, when really it’s the hundredth. Their life is more than a little complicated, all twists and turns, (‘swings and roundabouts’ Jim used to joke) but it’s perfect in all its dysfunctional ways, and Bones’ll be damned if anything thinks it can ruin something so many years in the making.
~*~*~*~*~
There’d been an explosion in the hanger bay and Jim was too close to the blast. Thrown into the air, he lands in a heap on the ground. There’s a horrific piece of shrapnel in his side and it’s the last thing he sees, fingers coming away bloody, before he falls back unconscious.
By the time Bones is back in his own time and rushing to the hospital, Jim is already hours in to his emergency surgery.
There’s nothing Bones can do, when he was younger all he ever wanted to do was be a doctor, save strangers to make up for letting his mother die time after time. His father told him how unrealistic it was once the extent of his son’s condition was made clear to him. He would never be able to go through medical school or a residency, the stress alone of being responsible for so much would probably have him travelling faster and faster.
The library job was good. It meant he could hide away in the periodicals for hours and hours and no one would think anything of it. Disappearing at lengths at a time meant the book was a little harder to find. No one died because of it.
Here? All he can do is pace.
He doesn’t stop when Nyota begs him to sit, or when Spock implores him to do so. His father calls his name; tries to reason with his son in the gruff tone the boy should be used to.
He stops when two nurses and another doctor run past him. He stops when a door opens and all he can see is white coats stained red.
He stops.
~*~*~*~*~
“I wasn’t even flying.”
“I know, I know.”
~*~*~*~*~
A little girl stands at the end of the corridor, she smiles at Bones while the Doctors check on Jim in private. She smiles even though Bones probably looks like he’s about to kill someone, teeth bared and barely holding it together.
She smiles and vanishes into thin air.
~*~*~*~*~
Their arguments fade into the netherworld that is life before the accident, and when Bones’ father drives him to the hospital to pick up Jim, he’s holding a lottery ticket in his hands that will most certainly be a winner. Jim doesn’t go back to work, neither does Bones, and they spend hours searching for the right house, the one Bones will recognise until finally it’s there, and they take it and it’s perfect.
Two and a half weeks later they’re toasting to new life and happy beginnings when they hear a noise in the foyer.
Bones is bleeding on the ground, gasping, naked, before he vanishes again into thin air. Spock, Uhura, Bones and Jim stand slack jawed in the same place for at least an hour.
~*~*~*~*~
“I’ve never seen you older than forty. But maybe that’s because Dr. Puri finds a cure.”
“He’s not going to find a cure, Jim.”
~*~*~*~*~
“Is this Mr. Leonard McCoy?”
“Uh yeah, this is he.”
“Sir, I’m calling from Northwestern Memorial Hospital, I’m afraid I have some bad news. You are aan acquaintance of Jocelyn Darnell, yes?”
“Uh, yeah, we used to date a long time ago, what’s this about?”
“I’m sorry to tell you this over the phone but Ms. Darnell was in a car accident last night, her injuries were very severe and I’m afraid she died nearly an hour ago.”
“Oh god.”
“Sir, there is another pressing matter. With Ms. Darnell gone, custody of your daughter falls to you.”
McCoy drops the phone as the air seems to disappear and all he can hear is a tinny voice saying “Mr. McCoy? Mr. McCoy?” over and over again...
~*~*~*~*~
A version of him that has yet to meet Jim gets around, it would seem, and the news hits hard. He remembers her. It’s her lipstick in the cabinet, old and left behind and he’s not entirely sure why he hasn’t thrown it out but…he just hasn’t.
He met her when he was drunk in a bar, and despite the cliché, he used to spend so much of his time drunk in bars that it’s really no surprise. But she liked him despite that, and that counted for something. Lots of something’s.
It’s even harder when out of the blue he’s given full custody. Jocelyn, his first real love, killed in a car crash and all of a sudden McCoy’s reminded once more of his hatred of cars and planes and metal boxes with flawed human beings in charge of their vast powerful engines.
And now there’s a baby in his arms, and Jim reads out from the certificate they’ve been handed, that her name is Joanna and she’s thirteen months old.
Bones doesn’t know how the hell that works out with times and dates, but he’s the father and this is his responsibility and his hands won’t stop shaking.
Neither do Jim’s.
~*~*~*~*~
McCoy steals a guy’s wallet, having already stolen someone else’s clothes and he makes it to the EL just before it leaves the platform. He sits himself down and can’t hide his smile when he sees the face of woman in front of him as she puts down her broadsheet newspaper.
“Are you Annette McCoy?” He asks without skipping a beat.
“Yes,” she smiles, a little uncertain, but not unkind..
“I love you. I mean, your work, your singing-you have a great voice.”
“Well thank you. People don’t usually recognise me on the subway.”
“My name’s Leonard.”
“How funny, I have a son named Leonard. He wants to be a Doctor like his grandfather. Three years old and he’s already saying things like that.” She smiles, lost in her fond memory of her son’s statement with a too-big-toy-stethoscope around his neck.
“I met someone, and ever since I feel safe. And, and I have a daughter, and I don’t know what I’m doing but somehow I think it’ll be alright. I wish they could hear you sing.
“Maybe they will one day.”
He doesn’t smile at that, he can’t.
“I’m really glad I met you.” He tells her, preferring this memory of his mother alive and kind rather than afraid in the front seat of their car.
“I’m really glad I met you too.”
He stares out of the subway car and stands ready to depart.
“Make sure they know how you feel.” She tells him with a knowing smile, “It never hurts to say it out loud.”
“Your son loves you very much.”
“I know.”
~*~*~*~*~
He wakes up in one of the enclosure’s at the Lincoln Park Zoo, a host of school children laugh on the other side of the glass and McCoy has enough time to scramble out of there before anyone gets a good look of anything.
It’s when he’s leaving the staff changing room that he hears it. A very distinct cry of ‘Daddy’ that was certainly aimed in his direction. He turns and sees a young girl bounding towards him, and before he can think, she’s leading him outside and away from her school group.
By the time they make it to the zebras he’s found out that here, Joanna is ten years old and already she seems like the smartest kid he’s ever met, next to Jim that is. She’s seen her grandmother at the opera, and him and Uncle Jim fighting. She’s even seen her mother on a few occasions, and Bones tries to wrap his head around the fact that he’s passed on his genetic problem to his daughter.
“Uncle Jim says you an I are exactly alike, but Dr. Puri calls me a prodigy because sometimes I can choose where I go.”
Too soon, her teacher is calling for her, and when Joanna admits how much she’s missed her father, he dares to ask how long it’s been.
“How old were you when I died?”
“Five.”
“Five.” He repeats, his mouth dry.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told you.”
“No, its okay, I haven’t travelled past my own life before. How’s...how’s Jim?”
“Okay…sad.”
Before they can discuss anything else, her teacher calls once more, and she has to leave.
“I love you daddy.”
“I love you too, kiddo.”
~*~*~*~*~
Jim is silently freaking out and Bones can tell from the man’s pace as he walks from one end of the room to the other trying to calm Joanna’s cries.
“You’re thinking too loud.” Bones says, taking Jo in his arms and cradling her carefully. Mindful of her head, he kisses Jim to silence any retort the man might have.
“Everything’s going to be okay.”
“It is?”
He doesn’t say they have five years left. He doesn’t say that Jim will have to do this alone soon. He just smiles, lies through his teeth and says, yeah, yeah it is.
~*~*~*~*~
Winona treats Joanna like her own grandchild, and sits happily playing with the little baby’s tiny hands as McCoy’s father plays the violin. Pike does a lot of smiling, and clasping Jim on the shoulder whenever they’re over for a birthday party, and he sees Jo getting bigger and bigger. She crawls, and then she staggers, and then she’s walking towards McCoy’s open arms.
When she’s three she’s precocious, and she finds an old stethoscope at her grandfather’s home. She uses it to keep her dolls happy and healthy while her Uncle Jim goes through roll after roll of film documenting her childhood. They have stacks of tapes with birthday parties and Christmases and holidays and snow days and thanksgiving. When she’s old enough to hold a violin in her small hands, her grandfather begins to teach her how to play it. He’s over three times a week and Bones relishes the chance to just watch them together.
Jim doesn’t see the way McCoy’s hands shake as he hangs up w birthday banner that says Joanna is five years old today. He’s more interested in looking out into the garden at Joanna playing with another girl. She’s wearing an oversized jumper that looks like one of his own.
She’s time travelling. Bones tells him at the window, watching carefully as the elder Jo puts her arm around her younger counterpart and whispers something, he can just about lip-read the words, This year.
“You wanna talk about it?” Jim asks when she comes back into the house alone. He mistakes her sadness for that same feeling her gets when Bones leaves him behind. But McCoy knows that’s not the problem, and deep down he thinks Jim does too.
He’ll find out eventually. He always does, and they'll deal with it like they always have, with fear and trepidation and unfailing support from one another.
~*~*~*~*~
He lands in the snow in the middle of nowhere and whenever he tries to wade through it he only finds himself sinking deeper. He’s shivering and he can’t breathe and his legs are screaming and then so is he.
And everything melts around him until Jim is by his side and Jo runs in with blankets and in the din of his pain he thinks he hears his daughter dial 911. He moans in pain and at the loss of her innocence because of him.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, shhh, it’ll be alright.” Jim repeats over and over, hoping it’s true.
~*~*~*~*~
He dreams of a world that isn’t, of a time he’ll never travel to, a man with a clipboard tells Jim he’s suspended. Though Bones never hears what he’s suspended from. They’re both dressed in red, and the damn uniform is chaffing.
He looks at his best friend, left behind again and last night’s words are echoing in his ears. He sneaks Jim aboard and wakes up when the explosions start. He thinks he might have been in space, and that it wasn’t as horrific as he’d usually suppose.
He looks around the hospital room. Folded bodies of family and friends are crammed onto seats in the corner of the room. By his side Jim is asleep, drooling ever so slightly on the white hospital sheets.
He looks up at the television hanging from the ceiling as a man runs across the screen dressed in a poorly made alien costume. He wonders where the remote is, and how long everyone sat watching the sci-fi channel before falling asleep. He wonders what time it is, and why everything’s kinda fuzzy. He forces himself to stay calm because he really doesn’t want to go anywhere just yet.
Jim stirs and that’s when he’s told, in a pained whisper-to make sure Jo doesn’t stir in her grandfather’s arms, and Spock and Nyota stay asleep curled up against the wall-that though his foot was saved, he’ll be wheelchair bound for quite a while.
Jim’s shining blue eyes are dull and sad, and the reality of that bleeding version of himself they saw in the hallway washes over him in waves. If he can’t walk, he can’t run, if he can’t run, he can’t...he can’t...
He spends the next few days sleeping, and pretending to be asleep even when he’s awake. The first few times Jim calls him on his bullshit, but stops when he realises it doesn’t make a difference. He holds his hand, and makes sure Jo’s okay, and stays by Bones’ bedside for as long as he’s needed.
~*~*~*~*~
“It’s like sneezing.” Bones told him once when he was in bed with the flu. “You can try to stop it, but it’s inevitable and you can’t control it. Sometimes you do it again and again and you can’t stop for so long...but then sometimes it just happens once and then you’re okay for a little while.”
His response had been to sneeze and bury his head into the pillows. Bones had smiled, reaching for his hand and holding it in his own. It’s their way of reminding each other they’re there. Brushing knuckles in the kitchen as Bones desperately attempts to teach Jim to cook, tracing life-lines on palms in boredum before sleep.
Clutching tight to hands slick with blood as he dies in-
Jim wakes with a start and nearly falls off of the stool by Bones’ bedside.
“I hate how much time we spend in hospitals, terrified.” Jim sighs and tells his “sleeping” lover. “I hate how much time we waste by being asleep. I just...I need you and you won’t even-”
“I’m sorry.” McCoy whispers, still asleep, yet somehow aware.
“’s not your fault.” Jim responds, squeezing Bones’s hand until they’re both a little more grounded.
~*~*~*~*~
Sometimes he pours himself a drink he won’t ever take a sip of, and sometimes Jim gets the wrong idea because he’s so strung out form stress of the unknown that he’s barely holding it together.
“You wanna drown your sorrows? Fine! Sit there and travel and get stuck somewhere and come back even worse off then you are now. Do it, I dare you, I dare you to destroy everything ahead of schedule.”
“There is no schedule!”
“Really? ‘cause it sure as hell feels that way. You die. We saw it, we were standing right here and we saw it. “
“How do you think I feel, Jim? Dammit, I die! I don’t get to watch Jo grow up, my own damned daughter and I won’t be there to walk her down the aisle. I won’t be there when she gets a car, or falls in love.”
“Won’t you? You’ve already seen her older, you might again.”
“Before I die in a pool of my own blood?”
They stop. Out of breath, exhausted. Bones regrets it because now he can’t get the image out of his head and there’s a pain in Jim’s eyes that won’t go away.
“I don’t want to drown my sorrows.”
“I know, and I know all you want to do is stay every time you go but it’s hard to be the one left behind.”
~*~*~*~*~
Joanna asks him to try to stay and McCoy wonders if she thinks he hasn’t already been trying. She tells him to sing, but it doesn’t work, and he’s in the garden and there are fireworks above him and he limps over to the window in time to hear someone scream Jim! and hospital and he’s watching himself die in the hallway of his lovely home.
He disappears, leaving nothing but a handprint on the frosted windowpane.
“Bones? Are you okay?” Jim asks, helping McCoy back into his chair and grabbing a blanket from the sofa to cover him with.
“I may throw up on you.” Is his only response.
~*~*~*~*~
Over Christmas he helps teach Jim how to cook, without cremating the bird, and Joanna how to pick lock, feeling for the careful click that will save her life one day. She knows the entire medical encyclopaedia backwards (though that was of her own doing rather than his insistence) and she’s already surpassing everyone’s expectations with the violin.
New Years Eve comes far too quickly, and McCoy acts jumpy and unlike himself all evening.
“You have to tell them.” Uhura says gently, hand on his shoulder, standing behind him as they both watch their spouses laughing in the kitchen. Spock ensures that Jim doesn’t set fire to anything, while Bones’ father plays Joanna a piece of music on the violin, having already exhausted the in’s and out’s of his medical bag for her curious mind to play with.
“I’m going to.”
He’d told Nyota almost by accident. She’d caught him staring out at the snow, and the fireworks in the distance and had badgered him until he tiredly answered that tonight was the night he would die.
Her silence made him realise what he had done almost instantly, but it was too late to take it back, and as a result she had spent most of the night dabbing at the corners of her eyes whenever she thought nobody was looking.
He asks Spock to follow him outside
“I just wanted to say thanks for everything.” He starts, wringing his hands and trying to look his friend in the eye without flinching.
“What are you talking about?’
Straight to the point.
“Something might happen tonight, and, Spock...I know we haven’t always...gotten along, but, I really do think of you as-”
“I am, and always shall be, your friend, McCoy.”
Bones bows his head, and Spock shocks them both by initiating a hug between the two of them. This is it, they both know it.
“I can’t bare the thought of telling Jo in person, I’ve already told her so much and she’s so clever and beautiful and...oh god, and Jim.”
“Jim what?”
Jim has joined them outside and he’s worried and he’s holding about four blankets in his arms and complaining that neither of them should be outside in this weather, New Years or not, it’s damned freezing. Spock excuses himself and squeezes McCoy’s shoulder as though it will lessen the nerves coiled in and around his stomach.
“What’s going on?” Jim presses when they’re alone, draping the blanket over Bones and huddling in the freeze. McCoy doesn’t answer.
“No.” Jim says stubbornly. “No.”
“Jim...”
“Why did you let me invite all of these people?”
“I didn’t want you to be alone.”
And then the realisation that he soon will be is almost too much to bear.
“I wouldn’t change anything. I’ve been in love with you all my life.” It’s a quiet admission that Jim’s been over and over in his head for so long, and that kiss...that kiss on his eighteenth birthday that cemented it all... “I couldn’t even change it if I wanted to.”
But he doesn’t want to. He’d never change it, not for anything. This life he’s had, while not without it’s problems, is the life he chose. He could have walked away in the library and stayed away but this future was meant to be and it’s his for the keeping.
“Don’t go.” Jim breaks his own rules and begs Bones to stay, kissing his with fervour, feeling as though he’ll never get to do it again and he must, he must.
“Jim, you know if I could stop it I would.”
“Just think real hard, you’re the smartest man I know, aside from Spock. Just try, please for me, for Jo, just try.”
Their foreheads meet in a bowed gesture of fear and love and sadness.
“I’ve been trying ever since I met you. I can’t change this. I can’t.”
When it happens…when...when Bones is gone and Jim’s breath hitches because in seconds, or minutes or...maybe even hours, he’ll appear again in the foyer at the bottom of the stairs. They would plant Santa’s footsteps in fake snow there, walking from the chimney through to the living room where their tree stood tall.
Those memories were fresh in his mind and soon he would be forced to face another. Of Bones prone at his feet, gasping, bleeding, eyes locked and-god, no, this can’t be happening it can’t be, there must be something they can-
A gasp. A cry. Screams, and he’s running.
“Jim!”
“No!”
~*~*~*~*~
He hears hunters in the woods and with a sickening lurch of his stomach he realises he’s behind the meadow where it all began, and that voice is Jim’s uncle, Chris Pike. The man had embraced Bones with smiles and pats on the back and now he has a shotgun in his hands and the movement between the branches is enough for him to pull the trigger.
The shot blinds Bones with pain, so much so that he doesn’t feel the snow beneath his back as his blood stains it red. Pretty soon he doesn’t even feel the hardwood floor beneath him either but he sees himself standing staring and he’s arrived too early and in a second he’s gone again and lying on the same floor-aged with time and sticky fingerprints left by little girls. In the distance he hears shouting and his vision is filled with Jim and Joanna and his father and he knows friends are close by and they’re all there and he doesn’t want to leave and, and, and....
It hurts to breathe, it hurts to keep his eyes open, it hurts to see the hint of betrayal in Jim’s gaze that Bones didn’t warn him before tonight, that he’d gotten an hours notice of the end of the world and here it was laid out in front of him, blood soaked fingers cradling his lover’s head as he stuttered his daughter’s name.
It hurts to breathe and the silence hangs around them like a veil, broken only by his harsh breathing and soon even that’s gone.
“No, no, no, no, no.”
Jim rocks back and forth, grabbing McCoy’s limp form in his arms and begging him to come back, to time travel, to breath, to do something. Joanna is held at bay by her grandfather and shielded from the painful sight by Spock and Uhura’s shocked sadness.
He feels a tiny spark of panic when the pain fades away, and everything slows down to a snail’s pace, and he finally has time to think.
Sometimes he hates that their life consists of bursts of moments interlaced with past, present and futures encounters of each other. But then he meets his daughter when Jocelyn has already ended their latest argument with an announcement of her intentions to not keep the child.
Sometimes he resents that his life is controlled by his condition, but then he buys the lottery ticket, and they live in their dream home and their lives slowly but surely become whole until Bones himself feels that Jim’s statement finally rings true. That they’ve known each other forever, destined to be together.
Sometimes, no, most of the time he wishes he could make it stop. But then he thinks about everything it’s given him, and he thinks about this moment. This embrace and how much is means to the grieving man in front of him. This chance to say stop waiting, when he somehow knows he won’t get the chance to say it when he wants to. When his world is taken from him in a mess of red.
The world catches up to him then.
“I love you,” Jim whispers, Bones whispers too. They whisper again and again to one another in a mess of hurried feelings and emotions, rushed by time and fate and-god there’s so much blood. Someone calls an ambulance, there’s movement all around him but all Bones knows is Jim’s blue eyes staring down at him and his mouth moving but the sound’s out of synch. Always out of synch. And all Jim knows is that his world is falling down around him and he doesn’t know what to do.
“Come back. Come back, please come back.”
Spock clutches Nyota tighter at the words-broken and pleading-as though he’s afraid that death is contagious.
“Don’t leave, don’t leave me. Please, Bones, please.”
~*~*~*~*~
I’m falling apart, I’m barely breathing, with a broken heart, that’s still beating. In the pain, there is healing, in your name, I find meaning. So I’m holding on, I’m holding on, I’m holding on. I’m barely holding on to you.
--Lifehouse.
~*~*~*~*~
Every night Jim waits until bedtime to grieve. He pushes it away all day, gets on with his work, his reading, bringing up Joanna, tidying the house. And as soon as it’s dark, he crawls into bed and lies there with his clothes on. He breathes in the lingering smell on the pillow and closes his eyes, fingers digging deep into the bunched up quilt-a poor substitute for a husband.
And every night Joanna hugs her Uncle Jim and hopes to make him feel better.
“What can I do?” She asks her father one day, as she steps off of the school bus and into his waiting arms. “How do I fix Uncle Jim?”
“Just being there’s enough Jo, sweetie, trust me, that’s all you can do.”
~*~*~*~*~
Joanna wields the baseball bat with grace and efficiency, and sends the ball flying through the air. She drops it when she sees her father emerge from the bushes, and runs forward screaming ‘Daddy!’
McCoy knows from her eyes that it’s a year he’ll never grow into. A time he won’t know chronologically.
“Go to the house!” She yells with authority to the younger children playing with her. “Go get Uncle Jim, hurry!”
Spock and Uhura’s children race back to the house and Joanna finds solace in her father’s warm hug.
“How old are you?”
“Nine years old.”
“You’re nine? And Jim still leaves clothes?”
“He says you never know.”
“I’m leaving.” He tells the beautiful young girl standing before him. It’s not a statement of want or need; it’s the resented truth of the matter, the feeling inside of him. Damn it, he knows and he can’t do a thing to stop it. All he can do is wait and stand it and his stomach’s churning because in the distance there he is.
“No daddy, sing.” Joanna implores.
“I can’t sing.” McCoy reminds her. So he runs instead.
In the distance he sees a figure. A gold shirt over a black undershirt. Black jeans and black boots and run run run faster faster faster.
“Jim,” he breathes, before he too begins to run, before he starts to bridge the space between them both.
For Bones it’s a gap he can’t begin to understand. Because he’s not the one left waiting, he’s always the one that leaves.
His lover is at home, the man he adores is back in his time, grumbling at how something so small can scream so loudly, and cry and...well, you know.
This Jim is older, and Bones is sure he’s never seen him run with so much determination. He’s practically leaping towards him, and anyone else would have fallen by now or slowed their gait but not Jim, never Jim.
They crash together. Buried heads in necks and shoulders and the intake of breath from the both of them at the intimacy and the closeness. Bones knows Jim needs him and damn it he will be there for him, he has to be, for the both of them.
“I...”
Words fail them both, tears falling as the transience of the moment hits home.
“I can’t stay.”
“I know.”
For Bones his world is complete, they have fought and they have been hurt and his every second is haunted with the possibility that he might travel right then and there and then what?
But he feels safe and he feels secure and this Jim running towards him has lost that, McCoy knows.
Their embrace is tinged with the tragic understanding that Jim is grounded in the future, in a world without his Bones. McCoy can feel it in the tight hold Jim has on him, short fingernails digging through the jumper and shirt always left for him in the trees behind the meadow. Their meadow. He can feel it in the staccato of Jim’s breath on his neck, hitched and out of control, so unlike his stoic partner. This Jim has lost so much, but this Bones can still go back to the security, even if it is marred with the knowledge that it is not as everlasting as he would have liked to think when the two of them were younger.
“Why didn’t you tell me the date? I could have waited.” He hates the seconds they missed together when they’ve already lost so much time.
“Listen to me, Jim. I don’t want you to spend your life waiting.”
“But...”
“No, no but’s, stop. Stop leaving clothes, stop hoping. Live your life, I never wanted it to be like this, I didn’t want you to be kept waiting.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too, so, so much.”
The moment McCoy’s lips touch Jim’s own, the time traveller begins to vanish until there’s nothing left but a heap of clothes on the grass below, slowly growing damp on the damp ground. Jim falls to his knees and busies himself in folding the discarded garments. The heap of all that was left as once more his best friend, his love, his husband had disappeared.
The shirt and jumper and jeans used to be among the clothes his mother would cling to in grief of his father’s passing and now they’re a symbol of his childhood and his life of picking up the pieces Bones left behind.
The clothes smell of the past, like suddenly someone’s bathed them in the right amount of shampoo and cologne and aftershave and toothpaste and musk….
For a moment Jim feels it all rushing back to him, the loss, the grief, the anger at being left behind. For a moment, he wants to curl up onto the ground and scream. Another part of him wants to hit something hard.
And then he sees Joanna, and she’s still smiling in the wake of her father’s unexpected visit. She’ll see him again, Jim knows that much at least. In a few years she’ll be playing with her younger self and she’ll let slip that Daddy’s going to...
Stop it.
The moment passes. The anger dissipates as Joanna holds out her hand. He doesn’t put the clothes back in the woods. He doesn’t scream, or yell, or punch anything. And he certainly doesn’t feel the urge to fly up into the clouds or run away.
“C’mon kiddo,” he says with affection, pulling Jo up into his arms and walking back through the meadow to the main house. “Shouldn’t keep Spock and Uhura waiting.”
~*~*~*~*~
I still see your reflection inside of my eyes. That are looking for a purpose, they're still looking for life.
--Lifehouse.
~*~*~*~*~
Jim will see Bones once more in his lifetime. His hair will be grey, and he’ll be worn down with the kind of tiredness that doesn’t go away with any amount of sleep. His friends have passed, and Joanna’s happily married, successful, vibrant.
He can’t feel that in himself any more. He doesn’t have the energy to really care. And then Bones will appear in the doorway, and Jim will smile, having half expected something similar to occur, despite any promises he may have tried to keep about not spending his life waiting.
There, held tight, they find each other again, out of synch, but together.
They will not speak, but they will hold one another tightly, and just as Bones will die in Jim’s arms in his own future that has yet to come; Jim too will pass in the arms of his late lover. When the fire in the living room dies, Bones will vanish and in the present time, when he comes back to bed, Jim will glide his fingers through McCoy’s hair.
“Where did you go?” He’ll ask, half asleep, deciding not to mention the tear tracks on Bones’ face out of courtesy.
“It doesn’t matter,” Bones will reply, smiling at the youth and life in Jim’s face. “Today’s what’s important, everything else can wait.”
“Mmm,” Jim mumbles, happily, sidling closer to McCoy. “I couldn’t agree more.”
-Fin.
(Part One.)
Part Two.
The first time Leonard McCoy finds himself kissing Jim Kirk, they’re in his old apartment. He’s only known the man a day, but Jim tells him they’ve known each other for a hellova lot longer than that. Longer than Bones can even remember, longer than Bones can even know.
He meets Jim for the hundredth time when really it’s the first, and he meets him for the first time, when really it’s the hundredth. Their life is more than a little complicated, all twists and turns, (‘swings and roundabouts’ Jim used to joke) but it’s perfect in all its dysfunctional ways, and Bones’ll be damned if anything thinks it can ruin something so many years in the making.
~*~*~*~*~
There’d been an explosion in the hanger bay and Jim was too close to the blast. Thrown into the air, he lands in a heap on the ground. There’s a horrific piece of shrapnel in his side and it’s the last thing he sees, fingers coming away bloody, before he falls back unconscious.
By the time Bones is back in his own time and rushing to the hospital, Jim is already hours in to his emergency surgery.
There’s nothing Bones can do, when he was younger all he ever wanted to do was be a doctor, save strangers to make up for letting his mother die time after time. His father told him how unrealistic it was once the extent of his son’s condition was made clear to him. He would never be able to go through medical school or a residency, the stress alone of being responsible for so much would probably have him travelling faster and faster.
The library job was good. It meant he could hide away in the periodicals for hours and hours and no one would think anything of it. Disappearing at lengths at a time meant the book was a little harder to find. No one died because of it.
Here? All he can do is pace.
He doesn’t stop when Nyota begs him to sit, or when Spock implores him to do so. His father calls his name; tries to reason with his son in the gruff tone the boy should be used to.
He stops when two nurses and another doctor run past him. He stops when a door opens and all he can see is white coats stained red.
He stops.
~*~*~*~*~
“I wasn’t even flying.”
“I know, I know.”
~*~*~*~*~
A little girl stands at the end of the corridor, she smiles at Bones while the Doctors check on Jim in private. She smiles even though Bones probably looks like he’s about to kill someone, teeth bared and barely holding it together.
She smiles and vanishes into thin air.
~*~*~*~*~
Their arguments fade into the netherworld that is life before the accident, and when Bones’ father drives him to the hospital to pick up Jim, he’s holding a lottery ticket in his hands that will most certainly be a winner. Jim doesn’t go back to work, neither does Bones, and they spend hours searching for the right house, the one Bones will recognise until finally it’s there, and they take it and it’s perfect.
Two and a half weeks later they’re toasting to new life and happy beginnings when they hear a noise in the foyer.
Bones is bleeding on the ground, gasping, naked, before he vanishes again into thin air. Spock, Uhura, Bones and Jim stand slack jawed in the same place for at least an hour.
~*~*~*~*~
“I’ve never seen you older than forty. But maybe that’s because Dr. Puri finds a cure.”
“He’s not going to find a cure, Jim.”
~*~*~*~*~
“Is this Mr. Leonard McCoy?”
“Uh yeah, this is he.”
“Sir, I’m calling from Northwestern Memorial Hospital, I’m afraid I have some bad news. You are aan acquaintance of Jocelyn Darnell, yes?”
“Uh, yeah, we used to date a long time ago, what’s this about?”
“I’m sorry to tell you this over the phone but Ms. Darnell was in a car accident last night, her injuries were very severe and I’m afraid she died nearly an hour ago.”
“Oh god.”
“Sir, there is another pressing matter. With Ms. Darnell gone, custody of your daughter falls to you.”
McCoy drops the phone as the air seems to disappear and all he can hear is a tinny voice saying “Mr. McCoy? Mr. McCoy?” over and over again...
~*~*~*~*~
A version of him that has yet to meet Jim gets around, it would seem, and the news hits hard. He remembers her. It’s her lipstick in the cabinet, old and left behind and he’s not entirely sure why he hasn’t thrown it out but…he just hasn’t.
He met her when he was drunk in a bar, and despite the cliché, he used to spend so much of his time drunk in bars that it’s really no surprise. But she liked him despite that, and that counted for something. Lots of something’s.
It’s even harder when out of the blue he’s given full custody. Jocelyn, his first real love, killed in a car crash and all of a sudden McCoy’s reminded once more of his hatred of cars and planes and metal boxes with flawed human beings in charge of their vast powerful engines.
And now there’s a baby in his arms, and Jim reads out from the certificate they’ve been handed, that her name is Joanna and she’s thirteen months old.
Bones doesn’t know how the hell that works out with times and dates, but he’s the father and this is his responsibility and his hands won’t stop shaking.
Neither do Jim’s.
~*~*~*~*~
McCoy steals a guy’s wallet, having already stolen someone else’s clothes and he makes it to the EL just before it leaves the platform. He sits himself down and can’t hide his smile when he sees the face of woman in front of him as she puts down her broadsheet newspaper.
“Are you Annette McCoy?” He asks without skipping a beat.
“Yes,” she smiles, a little uncertain, but not unkind..
“I love you. I mean, your work, your singing-you have a great voice.”
“Well thank you. People don’t usually recognise me on the subway.”
“My name’s Leonard.”
“How funny, I have a son named Leonard. He wants to be a Doctor like his grandfather. Three years old and he’s already saying things like that.” She smiles, lost in her fond memory of her son’s statement with a too-big-toy-stethoscope around his neck.
“I met someone, and ever since I feel safe. And, and I have a daughter, and I don’t know what I’m doing but somehow I think it’ll be alright. I wish they could hear you sing.
“Maybe they will one day.”
He doesn’t smile at that, he can’t.
“I’m really glad I met you.” He tells her, preferring this memory of his mother alive and kind rather than afraid in the front seat of their car.
“I’m really glad I met you too.”
He stares out of the subway car and stands ready to depart.
“Make sure they know how you feel.” She tells him with a knowing smile, “It never hurts to say it out loud.”
“Your son loves you very much.”
“I know.”
~*~*~*~*~
He wakes up in one of the enclosure’s at the Lincoln Park Zoo, a host of school children laugh on the other side of the glass and McCoy has enough time to scramble out of there before anyone gets a good look of anything.
It’s when he’s leaving the staff changing room that he hears it. A very distinct cry of ‘Daddy’ that was certainly aimed in his direction. He turns and sees a young girl bounding towards him, and before he can think, she’s leading him outside and away from her school group.
By the time they make it to the zebras he’s found out that here, Joanna is ten years old and already she seems like the smartest kid he’s ever met, next to Jim that is. She’s seen her grandmother at the opera, and him and Uncle Jim fighting. She’s even seen her mother on a few occasions, and Bones tries to wrap his head around the fact that he’s passed on his genetic problem to his daughter.
“Uncle Jim says you an I are exactly alike, but Dr. Puri calls me a prodigy because sometimes I can choose where I go.”
Too soon, her teacher is calling for her, and when Joanna admits how much she’s missed her father, he dares to ask how long it’s been.
“How old were you when I died?”
“Five.”
“Five.” He repeats, his mouth dry.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told you.”
“No, its okay, I haven’t travelled past my own life before. How’s...how’s Jim?”
“Okay…sad.”
Before they can discuss anything else, her teacher calls once more, and she has to leave.
“I love you daddy.”
“I love you too, kiddo.”
~*~*~*~*~
Jim is silently freaking out and Bones can tell from the man’s pace as he walks from one end of the room to the other trying to calm Joanna’s cries.
“You’re thinking too loud.” Bones says, taking Jo in his arms and cradling her carefully. Mindful of her head, he kisses Jim to silence any retort the man might have.
“Everything’s going to be okay.”
“It is?”
He doesn’t say they have five years left. He doesn’t say that Jim will have to do this alone soon. He just smiles, lies through his teeth and says, yeah, yeah it is.
~*~*~*~*~
Winona treats Joanna like her own grandchild, and sits happily playing with the little baby’s tiny hands as McCoy’s father plays the violin. Pike does a lot of smiling, and clasping Jim on the shoulder whenever they’re over for a birthday party, and he sees Jo getting bigger and bigger. She crawls, and then she staggers, and then she’s walking towards McCoy’s open arms.
When she’s three she’s precocious, and she finds an old stethoscope at her grandfather’s home. She uses it to keep her dolls happy and healthy while her Uncle Jim goes through roll after roll of film documenting her childhood. They have stacks of tapes with birthday parties and Christmases and holidays and snow days and thanksgiving. When she’s old enough to hold a violin in her small hands, her grandfather begins to teach her how to play it. He’s over three times a week and Bones relishes the chance to just watch them together.
Jim doesn’t see the way McCoy’s hands shake as he hangs up w birthday banner that says Joanna is five years old today. He’s more interested in looking out into the garden at Joanna playing with another girl. She’s wearing an oversized jumper that looks like one of his own.
She’s time travelling. Bones tells him at the window, watching carefully as the elder Jo puts her arm around her younger counterpart and whispers something, he can just about lip-read the words, This year.
“You wanna talk about it?” Jim asks when she comes back into the house alone. He mistakes her sadness for that same feeling her gets when Bones leaves him behind. But McCoy knows that’s not the problem, and deep down he thinks Jim does too.
He’ll find out eventually. He always does, and they'll deal with it like they always have, with fear and trepidation and unfailing support from one another.
~*~*~*~*~
He lands in the snow in the middle of nowhere and whenever he tries to wade through it he only finds himself sinking deeper. He’s shivering and he can’t breathe and his legs are screaming and then so is he.
And everything melts around him until Jim is by his side and Jo runs in with blankets and in the din of his pain he thinks he hears his daughter dial 911. He moans in pain and at the loss of her innocence because of him.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, shhh, it’ll be alright.” Jim repeats over and over, hoping it’s true.
~*~*~*~*~
He dreams of a world that isn’t, of a time he’ll never travel to, a man with a clipboard tells Jim he’s suspended. Though Bones never hears what he’s suspended from. They’re both dressed in red, and the damn uniform is chaffing.
He looks at his best friend, left behind again and last night’s words are echoing in his ears. He sneaks Jim aboard and wakes up when the explosions start. He thinks he might have been in space, and that it wasn’t as horrific as he’d usually suppose.
He looks around the hospital room. Folded bodies of family and friends are crammed onto seats in the corner of the room. By his side Jim is asleep, drooling ever so slightly on the white hospital sheets.
He looks up at the television hanging from the ceiling as a man runs across the screen dressed in a poorly made alien costume. He wonders where the remote is, and how long everyone sat watching the sci-fi channel before falling asleep. He wonders what time it is, and why everything’s kinda fuzzy. He forces himself to stay calm because he really doesn’t want to go anywhere just yet.
Jim stirs and that’s when he’s told, in a pained whisper-to make sure Jo doesn’t stir in her grandfather’s arms, and Spock and Nyota stay asleep curled up against the wall-that though his foot was saved, he’ll be wheelchair bound for quite a while.
Jim’s shining blue eyes are dull and sad, and the reality of that bleeding version of himself they saw in the hallway washes over him in waves. If he can’t walk, he can’t run, if he can’t run, he can’t...he can’t...
He spends the next few days sleeping, and pretending to be asleep even when he’s awake. The first few times Jim calls him on his bullshit, but stops when he realises it doesn’t make a difference. He holds his hand, and makes sure Jo’s okay, and stays by Bones’ bedside for as long as he’s needed.
~*~*~*~*~
“It’s like sneezing.” Bones told him once when he was in bed with the flu. “You can try to stop it, but it’s inevitable and you can’t control it. Sometimes you do it again and again and you can’t stop for so long...but then sometimes it just happens once and then you’re okay for a little while.”
His response had been to sneeze and bury his head into the pillows. Bones had smiled, reaching for his hand and holding it in his own. It’s their way of reminding each other they’re there. Brushing knuckles in the kitchen as Bones desperately attempts to teach Jim to cook, tracing life-lines on palms in boredum before sleep.
Clutching tight to hands slick with blood as he dies in-
Jim wakes with a start and nearly falls off of the stool by Bones’ bedside.
“I hate how much time we spend in hospitals, terrified.” Jim sighs and tells his “sleeping” lover. “I hate how much time we waste by being asleep. I just...I need you and you won’t even-”
“I’m sorry.” McCoy whispers, still asleep, yet somehow aware.
“’s not your fault.” Jim responds, squeezing Bones’s hand until they’re both a little more grounded.
~*~*~*~*~
Sometimes he pours himself a drink he won’t ever take a sip of, and sometimes Jim gets the wrong idea because he’s so strung out form stress of the unknown that he’s barely holding it together.
“You wanna drown your sorrows? Fine! Sit there and travel and get stuck somewhere and come back even worse off then you are now. Do it, I dare you, I dare you to destroy everything ahead of schedule.”
“There is no schedule!”
“Really? ‘cause it sure as hell feels that way. You die. We saw it, we were standing right here and we saw it. “
“How do you think I feel, Jim? Dammit, I die! I don’t get to watch Jo grow up, my own damned daughter and I won’t be there to walk her down the aisle. I won’t be there when she gets a car, or falls in love.”
“Won’t you? You’ve already seen her older, you might again.”
“Before I die in a pool of my own blood?”
They stop. Out of breath, exhausted. Bones regrets it because now he can’t get the image out of his head and there’s a pain in Jim’s eyes that won’t go away.
“I don’t want to drown my sorrows.”
“I know, and I know all you want to do is stay every time you go but it’s hard to be the one left behind.”
~*~*~*~*~
Joanna asks him to try to stay and McCoy wonders if she thinks he hasn’t already been trying. She tells him to sing, but it doesn’t work, and he’s in the garden and there are fireworks above him and he limps over to the window in time to hear someone scream Jim! and hospital and he’s watching himself die in the hallway of his lovely home.
He disappears, leaving nothing but a handprint on the frosted windowpane.
“Bones? Are you okay?” Jim asks, helping McCoy back into his chair and grabbing a blanket from the sofa to cover him with.
“I may throw up on you.” Is his only response.
~*~*~*~*~
Over Christmas he helps teach Jim how to cook, without cremating the bird, and Joanna how to pick lock, feeling for the careful click that will save her life one day. She knows the entire medical encyclopaedia backwards (though that was of her own doing rather than his insistence) and she’s already surpassing everyone’s expectations with the violin.
New Years Eve comes far too quickly, and McCoy acts jumpy and unlike himself all evening.
“You have to tell them.” Uhura says gently, hand on his shoulder, standing behind him as they both watch their spouses laughing in the kitchen. Spock ensures that Jim doesn’t set fire to anything, while Bones’ father plays Joanna a piece of music on the violin, having already exhausted the in’s and out’s of his medical bag for her curious mind to play with.
“I’m going to.”
He’d told Nyota almost by accident. She’d caught him staring out at the snow, and the fireworks in the distance and had badgered him until he tiredly answered that tonight was the night he would die.
Her silence made him realise what he had done almost instantly, but it was too late to take it back, and as a result she had spent most of the night dabbing at the corners of her eyes whenever she thought nobody was looking.
He asks Spock to follow him outside
“I just wanted to say thanks for everything.” He starts, wringing his hands and trying to look his friend in the eye without flinching.
“What are you talking about?’
Straight to the point.
“Something might happen tonight, and, Spock...I know we haven’t always...gotten along, but, I really do think of you as-”
“I am, and always shall be, your friend, McCoy.”
Bones bows his head, and Spock shocks them both by initiating a hug between the two of them. This is it, they both know it.
“I can’t bare the thought of telling Jo in person, I’ve already told her so much and she’s so clever and beautiful and...oh god, and Jim.”
“Jim what?”
Jim has joined them outside and he’s worried and he’s holding about four blankets in his arms and complaining that neither of them should be outside in this weather, New Years or not, it’s damned freezing. Spock excuses himself and squeezes McCoy’s shoulder as though it will lessen the nerves coiled in and around his stomach.
“What’s going on?” Jim presses when they’re alone, draping the blanket over Bones and huddling in the freeze. McCoy doesn’t answer.
“No.” Jim says stubbornly. “No.”
“Jim...”
“Why did you let me invite all of these people?”
“I didn’t want you to be alone.”
And then the realisation that he soon will be is almost too much to bear.
“I wouldn’t change anything. I’ve been in love with you all my life.” It’s a quiet admission that Jim’s been over and over in his head for so long, and that kiss...that kiss on his eighteenth birthday that cemented it all... “I couldn’t even change it if I wanted to.”
But he doesn’t want to. He’d never change it, not for anything. This life he’s had, while not without it’s problems, is the life he chose. He could have walked away in the library and stayed away but this future was meant to be and it’s his for the keeping.
“Don’t go.” Jim breaks his own rules and begs Bones to stay, kissing his with fervour, feeling as though he’ll never get to do it again and he must, he must.
“Jim, you know if I could stop it I would.”
“Just think real hard, you’re the smartest man I know, aside from Spock. Just try, please for me, for Jo, just try.”
Their foreheads meet in a bowed gesture of fear and love and sadness.
“I’ve been trying ever since I met you. I can’t change this. I can’t.”
When it happens…when...when Bones is gone and Jim’s breath hitches because in seconds, or minutes or...maybe even hours, he’ll appear again in the foyer at the bottom of the stairs. They would plant Santa’s footsteps in fake snow there, walking from the chimney through to the living room where their tree stood tall.
Those memories were fresh in his mind and soon he would be forced to face another. Of Bones prone at his feet, gasping, bleeding, eyes locked and-god, no, this can’t be happening it can’t be, there must be something they can-
A gasp. A cry. Screams, and he’s running.
“Jim!”
“No!”
~*~*~*~*~
He hears hunters in the woods and with a sickening lurch of his stomach he realises he’s behind the meadow where it all began, and that voice is Jim’s uncle, Chris Pike. The man had embraced Bones with smiles and pats on the back and now he has a shotgun in his hands and the movement between the branches is enough for him to pull the trigger.
The shot blinds Bones with pain, so much so that he doesn’t feel the snow beneath his back as his blood stains it red. Pretty soon he doesn’t even feel the hardwood floor beneath him either but he sees himself standing staring and he’s arrived too early and in a second he’s gone again and lying on the same floor-aged with time and sticky fingerprints left by little girls. In the distance he hears shouting and his vision is filled with Jim and Joanna and his father and he knows friends are close by and they’re all there and he doesn’t want to leave and, and, and....
It hurts to breathe, it hurts to keep his eyes open, it hurts to see the hint of betrayal in Jim’s gaze that Bones didn’t warn him before tonight, that he’d gotten an hours notice of the end of the world and here it was laid out in front of him, blood soaked fingers cradling his lover’s head as he stuttered his daughter’s name.
It hurts to breathe and the silence hangs around them like a veil, broken only by his harsh breathing and soon even that’s gone.
“No, no, no, no, no.”
Jim rocks back and forth, grabbing McCoy’s limp form in his arms and begging him to come back, to time travel, to breath, to do something. Joanna is held at bay by her grandfather and shielded from the painful sight by Spock and Uhura’s shocked sadness.
He feels a tiny spark of panic when the pain fades away, and everything slows down to a snail’s pace, and he finally has time to think.
Sometimes he hates that their life consists of bursts of moments interlaced with past, present and futures encounters of each other. But then he meets his daughter when Jocelyn has already ended their latest argument with an announcement of her intentions to not keep the child.
Sometimes he resents that his life is controlled by his condition, but then he buys the lottery ticket, and they live in their dream home and their lives slowly but surely become whole until Bones himself feels that Jim’s statement finally rings true. That they’ve known each other forever, destined to be together.
Sometimes, no, most of the time he wishes he could make it stop. But then he thinks about everything it’s given him, and he thinks about this moment. This embrace and how much is means to the grieving man in front of him. This chance to say stop waiting, when he somehow knows he won’t get the chance to say it when he wants to. When his world is taken from him in a mess of red.
The world catches up to him then.
“I love you,” Jim whispers, Bones whispers too. They whisper again and again to one another in a mess of hurried feelings and emotions, rushed by time and fate and-god there’s so much blood. Someone calls an ambulance, there’s movement all around him but all Bones knows is Jim’s blue eyes staring down at him and his mouth moving but the sound’s out of synch. Always out of synch. And all Jim knows is that his world is falling down around him and he doesn’t know what to do.
“Come back. Come back, please come back.”
Spock clutches Nyota tighter at the words-broken and pleading-as though he’s afraid that death is contagious.
“Don’t leave, don’t leave me. Please, Bones, please.”
~*~*~*~*~
I’m falling apart, I’m barely breathing, with a broken heart, that’s still beating. In the pain, there is healing, in your name, I find meaning. So I’m holding on, I’m holding on, I’m holding on. I’m barely holding on to you.
--Lifehouse.
~*~*~*~*~
Every night Jim waits until bedtime to grieve. He pushes it away all day, gets on with his work, his reading, bringing up Joanna, tidying the house. And as soon as it’s dark, he crawls into bed and lies there with his clothes on. He breathes in the lingering smell on the pillow and closes his eyes, fingers digging deep into the bunched up quilt-a poor substitute for a husband.
And every night Joanna hugs her Uncle Jim and hopes to make him feel better.
“What can I do?” She asks her father one day, as she steps off of the school bus and into his waiting arms. “How do I fix Uncle Jim?”
“Just being there’s enough Jo, sweetie, trust me, that’s all you can do.”
~*~*~*~*~
Joanna wields the baseball bat with grace and efficiency, and sends the ball flying through the air. She drops it when she sees her father emerge from the bushes, and runs forward screaming ‘Daddy!’
McCoy knows from her eyes that it’s a year he’ll never grow into. A time he won’t know chronologically.
“Go to the house!” She yells with authority to the younger children playing with her. “Go get Uncle Jim, hurry!”
Spock and Uhura’s children race back to the house and Joanna finds solace in her father’s warm hug.
“How old are you?”
“Nine years old.”
“You’re nine? And Jim still leaves clothes?”
“He says you never know.”
“I’m leaving.” He tells the beautiful young girl standing before him. It’s not a statement of want or need; it’s the resented truth of the matter, the feeling inside of him. Damn it, he knows and he can’t do a thing to stop it. All he can do is wait and stand it and his stomach’s churning because in the distance there he is.
“No daddy, sing.” Joanna implores.
“I can’t sing.” McCoy reminds her. So he runs instead.
In the distance he sees a figure. A gold shirt over a black undershirt. Black jeans and black boots and run run run faster faster faster.
“Jim,” he breathes, before he too begins to run, before he starts to bridge the space between them both.
For Bones it’s a gap he can’t begin to understand. Because he’s not the one left waiting, he’s always the one that leaves.
His lover is at home, the man he adores is back in his time, grumbling at how something so small can scream so loudly, and cry and...well, you know.
This Jim is older, and Bones is sure he’s never seen him run with so much determination. He’s practically leaping towards him, and anyone else would have fallen by now or slowed their gait but not Jim, never Jim.
They crash together. Buried heads in necks and shoulders and the intake of breath from the both of them at the intimacy and the closeness. Bones knows Jim needs him and damn it he will be there for him, he has to be, for the both of them.
“I...”
Words fail them both, tears falling as the transience of the moment hits home.
“I can’t stay.”
“I know.”
For Bones his world is complete, they have fought and they have been hurt and his every second is haunted with the possibility that he might travel right then and there and then what?
But he feels safe and he feels secure and this Jim running towards him has lost that, McCoy knows.
Their embrace is tinged with the tragic understanding that Jim is grounded in the future, in a world without his Bones. McCoy can feel it in the tight hold Jim has on him, short fingernails digging through the jumper and shirt always left for him in the trees behind the meadow. Their meadow. He can feel it in the staccato of Jim’s breath on his neck, hitched and out of control, so unlike his stoic partner. This Jim has lost so much, but this Bones can still go back to the security, even if it is marred with the knowledge that it is not as everlasting as he would have liked to think when the two of them were younger.
“Why didn’t you tell me the date? I could have waited.” He hates the seconds they missed together when they’ve already lost so much time.
“Listen to me, Jim. I don’t want you to spend your life waiting.”
“But...”
“No, no but’s, stop. Stop leaving clothes, stop hoping. Live your life, I never wanted it to be like this, I didn’t want you to be kept waiting.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too, so, so much.”
The moment McCoy’s lips touch Jim’s own, the time traveller begins to vanish until there’s nothing left but a heap of clothes on the grass below, slowly growing damp on the damp ground. Jim falls to his knees and busies himself in folding the discarded garments. The heap of all that was left as once more his best friend, his love, his husband had disappeared.
The shirt and jumper and jeans used to be among the clothes his mother would cling to in grief of his father’s passing and now they’re a symbol of his childhood and his life of picking up the pieces Bones left behind.
The clothes smell of the past, like suddenly someone’s bathed them in the right amount of shampoo and cologne and aftershave and toothpaste and musk….
For a moment Jim feels it all rushing back to him, the loss, the grief, the anger at being left behind. For a moment, he wants to curl up onto the ground and scream. Another part of him wants to hit something hard.
And then he sees Joanna, and she’s still smiling in the wake of her father’s unexpected visit. She’ll see him again, Jim knows that much at least. In a few years she’ll be playing with her younger self and she’ll let slip that Daddy’s going to...
Stop it.
The moment passes. The anger dissipates as Joanna holds out her hand. He doesn’t put the clothes back in the woods. He doesn’t scream, or yell, or punch anything. And he certainly doesn’t feel the urge to fly up into the clouds or run away.
“C’mon kiddo,” he says with affection, pulling Jo up into his arms and walking back through the meadow to the main house. “Shouldn’t keep Spock and Uhura waiting.”
~*~*~*~*~
I still see your reflection inside of my eyes. That are looking for a purpose, they're still looking for life.
--Lifehouse.
~*~*~*~*~
Jim will see Bones once more in his lifetime. His hair will be grey, and he’ll be worn down with the kind of tiredness that doesn’t go away with any amount of sleep. His friends have passed, and Joanna’s happily married, successful, vibrant.
He can’t feel that in himself any more. He doesn’t have the energy to really care. And then Bones will appear in the doorway, and Jim will smile, having half expected something similar to occur, despite any promises he may have tried to keep about not spending his life waiting.
There, held tight, they find each other again, out of synch, but together.
They will not speak, but they will hold one another tightly, and just as Bones will die in Jim’s arms in his own future that has yet to come; Jim too will pass in the arms of his late lover. When the fire in the living room dies, Bones will vanish and in the present time, when he comes back to bed, Jim will glide his fingers through McCoy’s hair.
“Where did you go?” He’ll ask, half asleep, deciding not to mention the tear tracks on Bones’ face out of courtesy.
“It doesn’t matter,” Bones will reply, smiling at the youth and life in Jim’s face. “Today’s what’s important, everything else can wait.”
“Mmm,” Jim mumbles, happily, sidling closer to McCoy. “I couldn’t agree more.”
-Fin.