Fic: You've got no faith in medicine [Kirk/McCoy, pre-slash]
Youguysyouguys, I have the internet! And fic! Fic that is part of a sprawling steampunk AU I have in my head but that won't come out (ask me about Christopher Pike's Mechanical Lion Emporium, I dare you), so might not work and is an odd style and basically what I'm trying to say is that I'm nervous about posting this even though I quite like it, and would appreciate your concrit. Okay? Okay.
You've got no faith in medicine
ST:XI
Kirk/McCoy, but gennish
~1,700 words
Warnings: There are a lot of conjunctions in here. And also it was written for the "runaways/orphans" square on my hc_bingo, but does not deal with this in a socially realistic manner (see: steampunk AU).
McCoy remembers standing alongside Pike on the balcony of the airship as it rose over Main Street on Judgement Day. He remembers the crowds cheering and the banners and the radio announcer saying Pike's army of flesh and blood and thoughtless mechanical men had overcome the unnatural children of Khan, remembers thinking that if he'd survived that then he could survive anything, that he would live forever and do nothing but good.
But then he remembers going back to the city and being faced with long lines of people who'd seen newsreels of the things Khan bred; people who ran screaming from their own biology, who'd gotten scared stupid and were looking for possets and leeches and the memory of fucking water, who reeled back in shock at the mention of anything with the slightest hint of Science to it.
And he remembers being tossed out Mayor Rackham's house for attempting to inoculate his daughter, remembers Chris standing on his doorstep later and saying, "Leonard, you're becoming indefensible."
Saying, "The children think you'll cut them open and keep them in jars."
Saying, "I couldn't help you if this went to a jury. You've burned your way through all the good will this city's got."
And then he doesn't remember much for a long while, until Jim.
*
Leonard comes home to find Chris in his best chair, hat on the table and a glass of Leonard's whiskey in his hand. "I won't keep you," he says.
Leonard weighs up the likelihood of this being a crisis against the likelihood that Chris is just a cryptic bastard who likes to mess with his head. "Is there any point me taking off my shoes?"
Chris smiles as far as his face can. Leonard wants to ask him to sit further from the fire, somewhere where the shadows don't catch the side of his scars like that, because it's taking Leonard a few decades longer to get used to them than he expected. "The young man who does you favours is waiting."
"He doesn't do me any kind of favour. He's nothing but a pain in my goddamn neck."
"Of course he does. You were a closet Scientist. Now you're just an upstanding citizen with a taste for cheap trade. Think of all the dinner parties you'll be invited back to."
Leonard flinches hard enough at the thought that Chris laughs and drains his whiskey. "I can wait til the morning, if it keeps you respectable."
*
The second time McCoy met Jim, he was very drunk and in his parlour - this was at his old house, which was huger and darker than his current one, and had a sort of opulent smell that he'd liked when he was young but since sickened of. He felt like his hands were an inch away from his body and his head was drifting slowly upward. The people in his parlour were uninvited but concerned, staging some kind of intervention or card game, and Jim had barged through the door and rescued him with an emergency.
He doesn't particularly remember the nature of the emergency itself, just that after there was blood up to his elbows and his head was ringing and Jim was saying, "It's not like anyone else would have even come out," like that somehow made things better.
*
He goes to wash and when he comes back down, Jim's in the pharmacy, dislodging the leeches from the side of their tank with a thermometer. It's the sort of activity Jim likes to test his patience with - if Leonard snarls now, or makes some overly concerned comment about the close resemblance of Jim's face to raw meat, he can kiss goodbye to the kid's company for a while. So instead he slips into the seat under the window and says, "Your hair's gone."
"To a better place," Jim confirms, raising the thermometer to eye level to better observe the writhing of a leech. He looks exhausted and a little unsteady, and Leonard wants to ask him to lie down, to just get some sleep or accept some charity or go and be someone else's problem for a while, but that's not how this works and this is the only way he'll ever get Jim to take anything from him at all, so.
"It's probably being soldered to some high-end robot as we speak."
"Aestheticists don't work nights." Jim's tone is flat and fast, like he's reporting back after scouting Pike's factory. Which is actually a pretty plausible off-night, where Jim's concerned. The leech wriggles its way off the thermometer and back into the water. Jim drops the thermometer after it and then busies himself with his second favourite task: opening and closing each of the store’s glass-fronted cabinets with ever-so-slightly more force than Leonard would tolerate from any other being.
"Did you -"
"Sorry."
"Are you -"
"Yes."
"Was - "
"No." Jim smirks. It looks like it hurts. "You're so predictable."
"You always say that."
"Wow. Did that pass for funny in the old days?"
"Who're you calling old?"
"Uh, maybe the doddering war hero?" Having completed his inspection of the cabinets, Jim returns to the tank. He stoops. He observes. He taps the glass near the thermometer. “Can you still sell that?”
Leonard would like to say, “You can have it,” but he’s not allowed. Jim likes to think he’s being brash or obnoxious or anything other than desperately fucking vulnerable, and Leonard likes to pretend he practices medicine. That’s how their arrangement works. Instead he waits for Jim to reach down into the tank to retrieve it, wrap his fingers round the length of glass just a leech wraps itself tenderly around his wrist, then pull out both hand and thermometer and lurch over to Leonard’s window seat while cursing a blue streak.
“It’ll drop off when it’s done,” Leonard chides, as scripted.
“I don’t want it done,” Jim pouts, prodding ineffectually. “Bones, come on, it’s eating me.”
“Don’t be so sinister.” Leonard prises first one sucker then the other away from the back of Jim’s wrist with a fingernail, flicks the leech to the floor then rubs his thumb over the marks it left behind as if that’ll somehow help. “You need to let me wrap this,” he says, and Jim scowls.
“It’s nothing.”
“It needs to get washed and wrapped, kid. Come on.”
“You just want to take me down to your creepy death basement.”
“Every night in my dreams,” Leonard sighs, careful to sound properly put-upon, “when you’re biddable and never bleed on my good shirts.”
“You don’t have any good shirts.”
Jim is wearing one of Leonard’s old dress shirts. Leonard isn’t sure he owns any others. That they never mention this has somehow become significant, though Leonard never wants to figure quite why, or how.
*
Leonard doesn’t remember the first time he met Jim. He doesn’t know what he did then. He’s worried - deeply worried, in a way that translates easily into being deeply certain - that he did something terrible that Jim misinterpreted; that nothing about the way he was back then could have ever made anyone think he was safe.
But Jim keeps coming back and Leonard keeps looking at the kid’s face and realising, with dismay, that he is not the worst man in the world.
*
Leonard keeps his grip firm on Jim’s forearm while he leads him down to what used to be a surgery, back when people would put up with that kind of thing. Now it’s just the nearest source of soap and water.
Jim sits himself up on what was the operating table in a previous life, and keeps watch while Leonard scrubs off his hands then Jim’s arm, wrapping it in tight coils of gauze. Leonard focuses hard on tying up the bite - far more attention than something so tiny really needs - but the only other option is to look up at Jim and there’s something awestruck in the way Jim watches him, like he’s not sure how this could ever be happening to him, and it makes Leonard’s stomach ache.
By the time the arm’s done, Jim’s half-asleep and pliant enough that Leonard can clean up his face, scrub away the dirt and dried blood and god knows what, check that he hasn’t busted his nose or cracked an eye socket. And by then Jim’s gone from swaying to sleeping, like a dial in him somewhere has been turned down by degrees, and when Leonard hauls himself up onto the table, Jim moulds himself to the curve of his shoulder, soft and heavy. “Tell me about the Airshow,” he says, quietly, inevitably. “Tell me about Pike.”
Leonard knows that Jim lost his father in the war and everything else not long after, that he mostly wants to hear that it was all worth something. So he says things like, “Pike’s a great man,” rather than “Pike is a clever man who photographs heroically,” and “We knew we had right on our side,” rather than “We panicked and ran and panicked and ran and almost died of relief when we heard we were winning.” It’s not a crime to lie to Jim, he figures. Kid’s had enough of life straight in the teeth as it is, doesn’t need any more of it. Not when he’s leaning up against Leonard like he trusts him with everything. Not when this is the one day of Leonard’s week (or month or year or whatever timeframe Jim decides they operate on at any particular time) that he actually gets to feel useful.
“You’d be good in the airshow,” Leonard says eventually, inevitably. He rubs his fingers in circles against the stubble on the back of Jim’s head.
“Hmm,” Jim says sleepily, not really confirming one way or the other what they both know: that Leonard is a liar, that Jim will never get together enough to leave ground, that that’s something Jim knows so well he doesn’t need to hear it.
“Tell me about Judgement Day,” he says, and Leonard thinks of the crowd and the banners and the announcer, and then takes a deep breath and says what he needs to.
You've got no faith in medicine
ST:XI
Kirk/McCoy, but gennish
~1,700 words
Warnings: There are a lot of conjunctions in here. And also it was written for the "runaways/orphans" square on my hc_bingo, but does not deal with this in a socially realistic manner (see: steampunk AU).
McCoy remembers standing alongside Pike on the balcony of the airship as it rose over Main Street on Judgement Day. He remembers the crowds cheering and the banners and the radio announcer saying Pike's army of flesh and blood and thoughtless mechanical men had overcome the unnatural children of Khan, remembers thinking that if he'd survived that then he could survive anything, that he would live forever and do nothing but good.
But then he remembers going back to the city and being faced with long lines of people who'd seen newsreels of the things Khan bred; people who ran screaming from their own biology, who'd gotten scared stupid and were looking for possets and leeches and the memory of fucking water, who reeled back in shock at the mention of anything with the slightest hint of Science to it.
And he remembers being tossed out Mayor Rackham's house for attempting to inoculate his daughter, remembers Chris standing on his doorstep later and saying, "Leonard, you're becoming indefensible."
Saying, "The children think you'll cut them open and keep them in jars."
Saying, "I couldn't help you if this went to a jury. You've burned your way through all the good will this city's got."
And then he doesn't remember much for a long while, until Jim.
*
Leonard comes home to find Chris in his best chair, hat on the table and a glass of Leonard's whiskey in his hand. "I won't keep you," he says.
Leonard weighs up the likelihood of this being a crisis against the likelihood that Chris is just a cryptic bastard who likes to mess with his head. "Is there any point me taking off my shoes?"
Chris smiles as far as his face can. Leonard wants to ask him to sit further from the fire, somewhere where the shadows don't catch the side of his scars like that, because it's taking Leonard a few decades longer to get used to them than he expected. "The young man who does you favours is waiting."
"He doesn't do me any kind of favour. He's nothing but a pain in my goddamn neck."
"Of course he does. You were a closet Scientist. Now you're just an upstanding citizen with a taste for cheap trade. Think of all the dinner parties you'll be invited back to."
Leonard flinches hard enough at the thought that Chris laughs and drains his whiskey. "I can wait til the morning, if it keeps you respectable."
*
The second time McCoy met Jim, he was very drunk and in his parlour - this was at his old house, which was huger and darker than his current one, and had a sort of opulent smell that he'd liked when he was young but since sickened of. He felt like his hands were an inch away from his body and his head was drifting slowly upward. The people in his parlour were uninvited but concerned, staging some kind of intervention or card game, and Jim had barged through the door and rescued him with an emergency.
He doesn't particularly remember the nature of the emergency itself, just that after there was blood up to his elbows and his head was ringing and Jim was saying, "It's not like anyone else would have even come out," like that somehow made things better.
*
He goes to wash and when he comes back down, Jim's in the pharmacy, dislodging the leeches from the side of their tank with a thermometer. It's the sort of activity Jim likes to test his patience with - if Leonard snarls now, or makes some overly concerned comment about the close resemblance of Jim's face to raw meat, he can kiss goodbye to the kid's company for a while. So instead he slips into the seat under the window and says, "Your hair's gone."
"To a better place," Jim confirms, raising the thermometer to eye level to better observe the writhing of a leech. He looks exhausted and a little unsteady, and Leonard wants to ask him to lie down, to just get some sleep or accept some charity or go and be someone else's problem for a while, but that's not how this works and this is the only way he'll ever get Jim to take anything from him at all, so.
"It's probably being soldered to some high-end robot as we speak."
"Aestheticists don't work nights." Jim's tone is flat and fast, like he's reporting back after scouting Pike's factory. Which is actually a pretty plausible off-night, where Jim's concerned. The leech wriggles its way off the thermometer and back into the water. Jim drops the thermometer after it and then busies himself with his second favourite task: opening and closing each of the store’s glass-fronted cabinets with ever-so-slightly more force than Leonard would tolerate from any other being.
"Did you -"
"Sorry."
"Are you -"
"Yes."
"Was - "
"No." Jim smirks. It looks like it hurts. "You're so predictable."
"You always say that."
"Wow. Did that pass for funny in the old days?"
"Who're you calling old?"
"Uh, maybe the doddering war hero?" Having completed his inspection of the cabinets, Jim returns to the tank. He stoops. He observes. He taps the glass near the thermometer. “Can you still sell that?”
Leonard would like to say, “You can have it,” but he’s not allowed. Jim likes to think he’s being brash or obnoxious or anything other than desperately fucking vulnerable, and Leonard likes to pretend he practices medicine. That’s how their arrangement works. Instead he waits for Jim to reach down into the tank to retrieve it, wrap his fingers round the length of glass just a leech wraps itself tenderly around his wrist, then pull out both hand and thermometer and lurch over to Leonard’s window seat while cursing a blue streak.
“It’ll drop off when it’s done,” Leonard chides, as scripted.
“I don’t want it done,” Jim pouts, prodding ineffectually. “Bones, come on, it’s eating me.”
“Don’t be so sinister.” Leonard prises first one sucker then the other away from the back of Jim’s wrist with a fingernail, flicks the leech to the floor then rubs his thumb over the marks it left behind as if that’ll somehow help. “You need to let me wrap this,” he says, and Jim scowls.
“It’s nothing.”
“It needs to get washed and wrapped, kid. Come on.”
“You just want to take me down to your creepy death basement.”
“Every night in my dreams,” Leonard sighs, careful to sound properly put-upon, “when you’re biddable and never bleed on my good shirts.”
“You don’t have any good shirts.”
Jim is wearing one of Leonard’s old dress shirts. Leonard isn’t sure he owns any others. That they never mention this has somehow become significant, though Leonard never wants to figure quite why, or how.
*
Leonard doesn’t remember the first time he met Jim. He doesn’t know what he did then. He’s worried - deeply worried, in a way that translates easily into being deeply certain - that he did something terrible that Jim misinterpreted; that nothing about the way he was back then could have ever made anyone think he was safe.
But Jim keeps coming back and Leonard keeps looking at the kid’s face and realising, with dismay, that he is not the worst man in the world.
*
Leonard keeps his grip firm on Jim’s forearm while he leads him down to what used to be a surgery, back when people would put up with that kind of thing. Now it’s just the nearest source of soap and water.
Jim sits himself up on what was the operating table in a previous life, and keeps watch while Leonard scrubs off his hands then Jim’s arm, wrapping it in tight coils of gauze. Leonard focuses hard on tying up the bite - far more attention than something so tiny really needs - but the only other option is to look up at Jim and there’s something awestruck in the way Jim watches him, like he’s not sure how this could ever be happening to him, and it makes Leonard’s stomach ache.
By the time the arm’s done, Jim’s half-asleep and pliant enough that Leonard can clean up his face, scrub away the dirt and dried blood and god knows what, check that he hasn’t busted his nose or cracked an eye socket. And by then Jim’s gone from swaying to sleeping, like a dial in him somewhere has been turned down by degrees, and when Leonard hauls himself up onto the table, Jim moulds himself to the curve of his shoulder, soft and heavy. “Tell me about the Airshow,” he says, quietly, inevitably. “Tell me about Pike.”
Leonard knows that Jim lost his father in the war and everything else not long after, that he mostly wants to hear that it was all worth something. So he says things like, “Pike’s a great man,” rather than “Pike is a clever man who photographs heroically,” and “We knew we had right on our side,” rather than “We panicked and ran and panicked and ran and almost died of relief when we heard we were winning.” It’s not a crime to lie to Jim, he figures. Kid’s had enough of life straight in the teeth as it is, doesn’t need any more of it. Not when he’s leaning up against Leonard like he trusts him with everything. Not when this is the one day of Leonard’s week (or month or year or whatever timeframe Jim decides they operate on at any particular time) that he actually gets to feel useful.
“You’d be good in the airshow,” Leonard says eventually, inevitably. He rubs his fingers in circles against the stubble on the back of Jim’s head.
“Hmm,” Jim says sleepily, not really confirming one way or the other what they both know: that Leonard is a liar, that Jim will never get together enough to leave ground, that that’s something Jim knows so well he doesn’t need to hear it.
“Tell me about Judgement Day,” he says, and Leonard thinks of the crowd and the banners and the announcer, and then takes a deep breath and says what he needs to.