[fic] when they know, and when they don't (iii)
Author: rebel_quietude
Warnings: unbetaed, angst with no redeeming qualities, jim's particular phobias.
Word Count: 3,206
Summary: There are moments, really, when Jim almost forgets. These are the moments when he remembers. (This chapter Bones POV).
Warnings: completely, irrevocably unbetaed - and not very carefully edited, either.
Disclaimer: Slightly less poor. But not as rich as I'd be if any of this was mine.
A/N: Takes place in the 'greatness' verse, but tangential to that story line.
It's not like he's asking for a goddamn organ donation. It isn't as if it'd require any actual effort on the kid's part. A conversation, a bit of a smile - he knows his darlin' girl well enough to see she'd be putty in his hand after the first ten minutes. He's not expecting' miracles - not looking for babysitting, or Christmas presents, he's not expecting 'Uncle Jim.' But the man's been practically living in his back pocket for the past two years. He'd dragged Leo by his collar from a pit of depression that came so close to absorbing his family and his career that he shudders now to think on it. They're practically goddamn brothers, and this reluctance of the kid's to meet his dearest darlin' girl is just getting ridiculous.
It hadn't been a spur of the moment decision. He might not be much of a dad, after all, but he does have his girl's best at heart and he isn't about to rush her with new names and faces unless he's damn sure they're sticking around. He's got precious little time with her as it is - just every other weekend he goes down to Georgia for, and odd holidays - and he's not ashamed of being protective of her time with him.
He'd figured, though, right about the time he was adding the kid's name next to his granny's as 'kin to be notified,' that if he was willing to die for the asshole and knew damn well the opposite was also true, it might be a good idea for the infant to meet Joanna. He's not askin' for it, exactly, but he's not adverse to the idea of 'Uncle Jim.' Kid hasn't mentioned family once, not in the entire two years they're been partners in crime - he figures the least he can do is share a bit of his.
This is the third time, though, and at this point he figures it's something he can't force. It's not that he's hurt, exactly. God knows the last thing he'd want to do to Jo is introduce her to someone who wouldn't take proper care. But it means he'd read the kid wrong, and he's trying his damnedest not to be insulted on her behalf, and quite frankly his own.
He'd figured that anyone who went so very far out of their way to look after a friend might be interested in the most important thing in that friends life. Hell, he'd figured Jim'd see it as the honor it was - nobody else'd gotten an invite to meet his daughter on those few weekends Jocelyn let him bring her up to San Francisco. Jim's the only one he'd been able to bear the thought of splitting her attention with - not in the least because he thought it might do the kid some good, that limitless affection of an almost-three-year-old.
They're sitting in the diner, though, after the third invitation to a late Sunday breakfast on a morning when he's damn sure Jim doesn't have anything else going on, and the booth across from Jo's messy egg edifice is still empty.
He'll read Jim the riot act when he catches up with him after putting Jo back on the shuttle to Georgia - but he doesn't think he'll invite him again. It's disappointing, this sudden disjoint. Thus far, he and the kid have been surprisingly, astonishingly in sync. He supposes 'Uncle Jim' might have been to good to be true, though, and if the kid doesn't get what a gift he'd been offered, well, that's not anything Len's gonna beat himself up for. He'd tried, dammit.
. . . . . . . .
It wasn't the first time the kid'd been read the riot act, and god knows it wasn't gonna be the last. Jim'd taken it harder that usual, though. He laughed it off in the staff meeting the admiral had called him to task in the middle of but went straight to Len's bourbon stash afterwards.
Len had tailed Spock to the Captain's quarters, afterwards, a little worried. He'd been the one to piece Jim back together after Spock had dragged him from that godforsaken pit of a planet, and regardless of the brasses' opinions on Jim's 'interpretation' of protocol, there was no doubt he'd done good.
By the time Spock walked into the room the idiot was well on his way being being good and smashed. Bones could tell, because he made an aborted motion to his boot when the hobgoblin walked in unannounced. He only did that when he was too goddamn sloshed to control his reflexes.
They catch Jim mid-rant, which he shows no sign of abating in deference to their presence.
"He calls me reckless? He fuckin' dares? Who the hell does he think he is? Man has seven kids, Bones. Seven! And he's got the nerve to accuse me of recklessness? Spock, back me up here."
"Captain?"
"What's the probability that a child, with all the marvels of modern science, will have some problem - congenital, symptomatic, environmental, what have you."
"Such a statistic is impossible to determine without more specific parameters, Captain."
"Broken bones. Chicken pox. Random high fevers. Kids get sick, kids get lost, kids are at the mercy of every sick fuck and malfortune. Completely vulnerable, completely dependent. And he has the nerve. Is he really that arrogant? Or just stupid? Either way, he's got a hell of alotta nerve calling me to task over that orphanage."
"Still not following, Jimboy." Leo walks over to the kid's bunk, where he's rambling with decreasing coherence, and starts divesting him of his boots. The AARs can wait until next alpha, he supposes, but he'll be damned if the kid's getting a detox hypo after getting this shitfaced before the reports have been sent up.
"He's got kids, Bones. A lot of them. Seven of them,” the kid looks straight into Leo's eyes, blue as anything, like he can impart the importance of his rant through sheer desperation. “There's a fifteen percent chance one of his kids'll die before him if he lives past ninety. There's a three percent chance one of them will develop a dehabilitating illness in the next fifty years. There's a six percent chance at least one of them will develop an addiction. He's got four daughters. Do you know one in four women is raped before the age of eighteen, Bones? For boys, one in eight. Do you understand me, Bones? It's statistically probable. Does he think he really have the arrogance to think he can protect them? Does he think he can stand in front of them with a phaser and a pathologist and policeman at all times?"
Leo reigns in his own temper, thinking of Jo and resisting the impulse to tear into the infant's opinions on the procreation of the species. "Kid, I think it's time for you to sack out. You're gonna feel like shit in the mornin, and don't tell me you didn't bring it on your own damn self."
Spock seems a little more curious about Jim's chosen topic than Leo, who might have heard it before once, or twelve times. Leo figures he's rubbing off on the kid.
"I am afraid, Jim, that you are not adhering to any recognizable progression of logic. If you will allow the inquiry, what prompted this line of discourse?”
"He has the nerve to say it wasn't my place, guys, to interfere on Lemopolis. Kids, Spock. As if there was any other fuckin' choice.
"These kids - he creates them, he forms them, from he and his partner and time and fuckin' evolution, and he takes these pieces of his own goddamn soul and casts them to the void. He has the most precious, precious parts of himself, and he gives them names and faces and minds of their own and he can't protect them, Bones, he can't possibly. He calls me reckless, Spock? What'll happen when something happens to one of them? When they're lying there, more precious than anything in the universe, and he has to acknowledge he can do absolutely shit to save them? And he looks at me across that vid and tells me that my judgment is clearly compromised? How does he differentiate? What's the difference between those kids and his, the fuckitty fucker!”
Leo was a bit taken aback; the kid hadn't ever gotten to this end state argument, usually preferrin' to sack out unconscious after ranting on the evils of kids.
"Don't get me wrong, guys. I hope to god he's lucky. I hope to the powers of the 'verse that he has some cosmic guardian or lucky horeshoe or what the fuck ever. Or maybe that he really is just that good. But he's got a hell of a lot of nerve, calling me to task. A lotta fuckin' nerve.”
By the end of this, Jim's mumbling with his elbow thrown over his face, and after ensuring he's out for the count Leo thows Spock a glare and a nod toward the corridor. After ensuring the kid's on his side with a trash receptacle by the bed in case Leo's brandy makes a secondary appearance over the course of the evening, Spock and Leo let themselves quietly out.
They stare at each other in the hallway for a taunt moment, air between them thick with all the questions Leo can feel the hobgoblin preparing himself to ask, and he wheels on his heel, 'cause hell with that. Leo hightails it, feeling the stare continue in the back of his shoulder blades as he speeds down the corridor and resenting the hell out of it. He hates that he's not protecting the kid's secrets, as he normally might be - he just doesn't goddamn know.
. . . . . . . . . .
Leo means, the next day, to track Jim down and find out what the hell that was. He's tried it after every time 'the rant' has made an appearance, and even if every time the kid's given him that two-centimeter deep smirk, he keeps trying. Jim Kirk's more slippery than great-aunt Jill's fifth husband, but Leo's never let that stop him before. Something sure as hell hit a sore spot with Jim on Lomopolis, and it's driving him crazy tryin' to figure out just what.
The kids were okay. They'd need some careful watching, for a while now, but he's got his most compassionate nurses on it whenever he steps foot out of sickbay and they'll have five-star counseling and care when they reach Muave. It still makes him sick - grafting a solar system's government with a 'utopian children's care colony' that in practice more closely resembles a penal planet - but the kids are young, and resilient, and Leo'd have to be an idiot not to notice that his kid tends to just fall apart, after, if it's kids.
He can't seem to get through that goddamned two-centimeter smirk, though, and he can tell it'd take hours of jackhammering to scratch the surface. He's planning his moment, though, but then there's another disaster, and another, and the rant falls off of his radar, just another oddity in the mess of opposing parts that make up James T. goddamn Kirk.
. . . . . . . .
They land on December 23rd, two weeks behind schedule, but Leo doesn't give a crap and nobody else does either cause it's Christmas, goddammit, and he's spending it with his little girl for the first time in three years. The Romulans are quiet, the Klingons are quiet, the whole goddamn federation seems to be quiet and it's too good to be true so Leo needs to get off this goddamn ship before the shit hits the fan. If his comm goes off this week he's going to take Jo and hide in the Himalayas.
He can hear the kid in his quarters as he walks by with his duffel. Leo stands there, trying to decide whether to drag the kid by his collar to Georgia for Christmas, 'cause he's damn sure Jim doesn't have anywhere else to go. He can hear, though, the 'sirs,' coming from the other room, and figures the kid's making good on his promise to try and wrangle a full month's leave out of the brass. He sends a text, instead, and walks down to the shuttle bay.
His little girl looks huge, grown like a weed in the nine months since he's seen her. She still runs to him and throws her arms around him like when she was four, the first time she met him coming off a shuttle. There are glad shouts all around the landing padd as crew members unload by the handful to peer anxiously about, trying to spot families and friends. When Leo stands up with his Jo wrapped around him like a monkey, he sees her eyes are just as suspiciously glossy as his, but she glares defiantly and he can't help but grin without comment.
They have to wait for all the families to trickle out in front of them, the sea of people chaotic with shouts of well wishes and warnings to stay out of trouble he knows damn well will be ignored. He'd given his own safety brief (god knows he doesn't trust Jim to impart the true horrors of STD's), and ticks off in his head the ones he's going to have to read the riot act when they return. Sulu, God bless the bastard, already has an arm around Chekov, promising to show him the delights of the seedier side of Los Angeles. Leo sends him a glare, and they duck behind Petty Officer Blenden's ginormous clan.
The last shuttle has landed in the meantime, and Leo continues to interrogate Jo on her use of the word 'boyfriend' in her last letter- she's seven years old, goddammit - as he eyes the last of the crew filing out. Scotty, and Spock, and last of all Jim, and it doesn't bother him a bit, really, to see those last two standing awkwardly alone.
Jim gets over it quick, and starts grinning at everybody and joking and generally being the life of the party. But it doesn't fool Leo - nor the hobgoblin, from the way his eyes never leave the Captain.
In just a few minutes, the landing platform had emptied out, and after a whispered conversation Leo puts Jo down and takes her hand as she drags him up to the kid.
“Hi! I'm Joanna McCoy. My daddy says that you're really smart, and brave, and the best friend he's ever had.”
Leo chokes a little, feeling his face turning red, and closes his eyes briefly thinking of the endless, endless ways this conversation is going to come up for the next, say, five years. There's silence, though, and he opens them again, bracing himself for the first witticism.
The kid's just standing there, though, staring at Jo and looking like that time when he was run through by the Klingon - whatever it was. It'd been hell to put him back together. The silence gets longer, and longer, and Jim just stares, and Leo feels a churning in his gut and grips Jo's hand harder and wants to know what the fuck is going on in the kid's head.
“I'm real glad to meet you, Joanna McCoy. Your daddy's not so bad, himself,” the kid finally replies, but it's too late and his voice croaks and his face is pale and Leo takes a moment to wonder if Jim is really, truly, actually afraid of his little girl.
That's enough encouragement for Jo, though, who inherited her daddy's appreciation for social delicacy, and without further ado she throws herself at Jim's legs with scarcely less enthusiasm then she'd shown for greeting Leo. All the sudden Leo can't breathe as he watches Jim hesitantly, slowly, reach his arms around to return the hug, and he finally identifies the expression on the kid's face as grief.
. . . . . . . .
It was stupid. A flower. A goddamn flower, on a mission Leo'd known was going too well to begin with, and here's the goddamn kid again on his biobed convulsing and turning blue and he'd had goddamn enough, already.
He does his job, and he does it well, and his nurses are as faultless and efficient as they damn well better be in his sickbay. In half an hour they have Jim resting comfortably, and he gets to call up to the bridge to let Spock know he isn't Captain yet and hear him pretend his finger hadn't been resting on the call button, waiting for news. Spock gives him a impersonal, non-emotive response- to which McCoy calls bullshit, if only in his own head - and closes the link.
It's two hours later when he finally sat down in his office to do the paperwork. Leo supposed it made him a bad person, how he sometimes relished the stories he could piece together in people's medical files. Births, adventures, vicarious experiences all. Not the kid's, though. That one just pissed him off.
He always tried to skim over the worst bits, when he had to find a relevant section. They always caught his eye regardless, glaring and leaping up from the padd, like spikes. His mood could be counted on to be foul, afterwards, so it was probably just as well Jim'd been unconscious pretty much every time he's gone through it. He notates the flower and the planet in the allergy section, snorting at the thought that his med file is really the only thing the kid's enemies would need if they want to kill him off.
His eye glances over, as always, that compelling notation on 'toxic substances:' “500 cc's Ritocomen, 10 May 2247.” Jim would've been just fourteen. An overdose that large of that particular psychotropic - most notoriously used by old world crime rings to interrogate their victims - should have killed him. If would absolutely screw with his immune system enough to produce his spectacular allergies.
He can feel his teeth grating as he skims down, trying not to see any more than he has to, until he reached the end of the med file. It's his least favorite section. There were no entries under 'Relatives.' They were all under 'Relatives, Deceased,' with names, date and cause. Most of the cause columns, in Jimmy's file, are missing, and Leo knows damn well the kid filled most of it in himself.
It catches his eye, the entry he'd been reminded of two months before when he'd seen the kid's face meeting Jo on the landing pad, and he feels the acid in his stomach as he lets that old Academy-days hurt go. “McAllister, Riley. Female. Maternal cousin. 16 June 2242 to 12 May 2247.” There was no cause of death.
Leo pours himself a brandy, and goes to sit by the kid. He starts mentally preparing his rant, even as he clamps his jaw on the questions he knows he ain't gonna ask. Someday, goddammit, the kid will tell him.