Title: On Borrowed Time
Title: On Borrowed Time
Pairing: Leonard McCoy/Daisy Adair
Fandoms: Star Trek & Dead Like Me
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2100
Disclaimer: Two canons and neither are mine, solely borrowing.
Summary: Daisy's tired of her last thought being her truest and she thinks that McCoy could be her answer. Really, he's just one more step on her way to the final destination.
Notes: Thanks plentifully to f_vikus for the beta! No real spoilers for Dead Like Me.
When he meets her, she’s not Jocelyn McCoy. She’s not even Jocelyn Darnell. When he meets the beautiful blonde woman with that perfect little red dress and a smile that’s meant just for him, she tells him that her name is Daisy Adair, but she’s getting tired of it. She has a post-it note in hand and she’s eyeing up a man in the corner of the bar. He’s a patient of McCoy’s and has been having heart difficulties.
Daisy Adair presses a kiss to his cheek and whispers something in a sweet and sticky drawl about coming to get a drink when she’s done. It doesn’t take long for her at all. She’s busy in the corner with Hank McCreary one minute and then the next Hank is sloping over and there’s blood everywhere and McCoy is in action trying to patch him up.
He’s still there long after they call time of death and the place has been cleaned up by paramedics and janitors.
“You still want to grab that drink, honey?” Daisy offers softly, tipping her head to one side and extending her hand out to him.
“He was in fine shape the last time I saw him,” McCoy protests. He’s all of nineteen and he’s practicing medicine and he’s yet to lose a patient on his table, but he just watched a patient die right in front of him, even if it hadn’t been his jurisdiction.
Daisy just smiles sweetly at him and McCoy feels his heart beating faster than before. “This is why people should have safety locks on their Swiss-Army knives,” she sing-songs. “C’mon, you owe me a drink.”
He buys her a beer and takes her into the corner booth where he asks where she’s from and she tells him ‘oh, just a little place’ in a drawl that makes him feel like he’s home. They curl up when she gets a chill and they talk about what it feels like to really be lonely.
At the end of the night, he kisses her full on the lips and marvels that she tastes like strawberries and peaches all at once.
“You’re so full of life,” he whispers against her pale skin, trying to brush at her pulse when she keeps trying to bat him away.
“You might be a genius, sweetie,” she whispers right back as he tugs her along to his place, “but you’ve got that all wrong.”
When they get to his loft, he takes her to his bed and leans up against the sheets with the crook of his knees pressed against the mattress. His fingers are dexterous and smooth as he unzips her dress and he looks at her, really looks at her in the dim moonlight of the room. He’s struck by how she can take something so simple as vintage-beige underwear and still look so stunning.
“Are you sure?” he asks because his mother raised him to be a gentleman.
“I’m tired of staring at a piece of paper and knowing it’s the truth,” is all she says to him.
It doesn’t make sense right then.
Years later, it will and McCoy will hate himself for not probing any further.
*
“I’m tired of being Daisy Adair,” she announces one fine day after they walk in the park. She disappears on him for twenty minutes, but returns soon after an ambulance clears the parking lot. She winks and tells him that she just had to powder her nose and he promises her that she’s never looked more beautiful. “I’ve been the prettiest flower in the garden too long, I am tired of Daisy Adair.”
“I had an aunt named Jocelyn once,” McCoy says as he links their arms and they stroll in the warm sunshine of the day. “She used to say there was nothing like an old name to make everyone in the world forget you.”
“Jocelyn,” Daisy echoes thoughtfully. “What was her last name?”
“Darnell. Aunt Jossie, Damned To Hell, Ma used to say,” McCoy informs her. “You know Southern women.”
“Oh, do I ever,” she agrees and her drawl is thick as the honey she drizzles over her blueberry pancakes in the morning. They amble around and McCoy feels like he’s the prince of the ball because he’s got the prettiest girl on his arm. He’s forgotten, almost, what it’s like to be in love. He’s forgotten the way that his heart beats faster and his head swims and when he sleeps, he only thinks of her.
It’s been a long time since McCoy felt like this and he doesn’t want to let it go.
“Would you be just a little bit mad if I took her name?”
McCoy knows that Daisy hasn’t got family anymore and that she’s something of an orphan in a big bad world. She seems weary so much of the time and when he’d asked about friends, she purses her lips and tells him about a man named Mason who used to be lighthearted and now bears burdens on his soul and a girl named George who ‘grew up far too fast’. There are two others, Roxy and Rube, but she says that they’ve long moved on. “They left us here,” was all she’d said mournfully.
McCoy knows that it isn’t really his choice, but she looks so eager to have this as she turns her gaze to him. “Sure you don’t like being Daisy anymore? I mean, I like it.”
“And I used to, but…I need change. Leonard, let me be Jocelyn?”
It’s a proposal and though she doesn’t get down on one knee, it feels almost like it’s that important. So McCoy says yes and lets her sign papers and lets her have this little thing so small as a name, this thing that seems so very important to her.
She’s not a Darnell for very long anyway because McCoy is head over heels in love with this bright spirit of a woman, blessed with sunshine and a smile to warm the room. It’s not long at all before he gets his mother’s engagement ring from the safe and begins to make plans.
*
She had told him, once, that she didn’t want to get married. Here, on one knee in a park, McCoy has decided to deliberately forget they ever had that conversation. His heart is trying to leap out of his chest and he’s trying to remain calm, but he doesn’t think that any man in the world who’s proposing has ever been simultaneously calm. It seems fairly impossible, in fact.
She darts her gaze around as if searching for witnesses before clasping her purse in her lap and leaning in. “I told you I didn’t want to get married!” she hisses at him, affronted. She’s acting like he’s assaulting her rather than trying to give her the happiest moment of her life. McCoy is nothing if not a stubborn bastard, though, and so he doesn’t move and she starts to falter. “Oh, honey,” she sighs, sounding pained. “Leonard. I like you. I love you. If you don’t want to get caught up in a messy amount of business, you need to put that ring away right this second.”
McCoy’s never been the smartest man in the world when it comes to romance, though, and he just keeps presenting it to her. “Joce. Daisy…”
“Don’t call me that,” she begs quietly, closing her eyes tightly, the cascade of her blonde hair so perfectly lit by the sunlight in this unique moment.
McCoy takes her left hand and slides the ring on despite not having an answer right at that moment. He’s gentle and watches the silver brush against her palm and how it makes her shiver. The diamonds catch the light and she finally lets go of the breath that she had been holding.
“Oh, you’re so stupid,” she breathes out at him in accusation, finally looking at him.
McCoy feels slightly triumphant because she isn’t rejecting the ring. Instead, she’s twisting it back and forth like a combination lock and giving him a pitiful look of sympathy. It’s as close to a yes as he feels he’s going to get and so he wraps his arms around her lithe body and presses close to claim a kiss that he knows she doesn’t just give up lightly. “Stupidest man and possibly the happiest,” he whispers against her cheek. He hears something crinkle, like paper, but when he pulls back to look at her, she just smiles in delight. “Wanna go and celebrate?”
“I just have to pop out to run a quick errand,” she says, smoothing her hand over her dress and brushing away tears that McCoy wishes to be happy ones. Years later, he’ll know better, but right then he thinks she’s over the moon. “Do you want me to make a reservation at our favorite restaurant? Or do you want to tell your parents first?”
“I want to tell the world,” he announces excitedly. “But maybe we should start with them.”
It starts with his parents and it ends with them. It’s almost fitting.
*
McCoy knows why they turn off the lights in the hall at night, on the dubious reasoning of saving power. It creates a haunting atmosphere and as he steps out of his father’s room for the last time, he rubs a hand over his face and tries to ignore the stubble and the greasy texture under his thumbs.
Daisy is standing out in the hall in the shadows looking more like a ghoul than the beautiful girl she is and she’s holding a post-it note in her hands.
“D, McCoy,” she says softly. “For a minute, I wanted to believe that maybe it was me,” she admits, the dullest of lights catching her diamond ring and making it glint slightly. “Maybe it is. Maybe this is what my very long life has been leading to.”
“What are you talking about, Joce?” McCoy demands. He sounds hoarse and tired and old. Good god, when did he get to be so goddamn old? His father fell ill with this disease three months ago and he’s been chasing tails to find a cure, but nothing follows through and now his father is begging for it to all be over.
And here stands his beautiful wife of three years in a dark hallway talking rubbish.
“Leonard, I know this is it no matter what happens,” Daisy says as she steps forward and leans in to kiss his lips slowly and softly. “I loved you. I love you,” she pleads painfully. “I picked the wrong men for so long and you were so right. Sometimes I think that’s why they made sure his name ended up in my palm.”
“Jocelyn…”
“After this, Leonard, it’s over,” she says quietly. “Whether it’s my time or not. I know what has to happen.”
He’s going to take the plug that’s giving his father breath. He’s going to slow down the machine that’s pumping his blood. He’s going to take away his father’s life and Daisy knows all of this.
“Two hundred years ago and change, I asked myself why no one ever loved me,” she admits. “But you did. You have. I’m going to take good care of your father, Leonard. Sweetie,” she says, smiling through her tears and looking nonetheless beautiful for it, “I’m going to make sure everything is okay.”
She kisses him on the cheek and the warmth of her touch lingers on, still warm while he watches her leave to the sound of his father’s vitals flatlining.
*
“My ex-wife took the whole damn planet in the divorce,” he says on a shuttle towards a place that doesn’t rise with a sunrise, doesn’t cast blue lights around him and take away his father and his wife in one fell swoop. “All I got left is my bones.”
The kid beside him smiles and his eyes are as blue as Daisy’s departing lights. McCoy thinks to himself that if Daisy finally got what she wanted, maybe he’ll get what she wants for him, too.
“I just want you to be happy,” she’d whispered, glancing over her shoulder towards the lights and David McCoy waiting in the distance. “But it’s my time to go. I’ll keep an eye out for you. Especially when you’re all alone in the shower,” she adds with a wink and one last kiss to his lips.
He doesn’t understand. All he knows is that everything is about to change irrevocably.
“Thank you for loving me, Leonard McCoy.”
THE END
Pairing: Leonard McCoy/Daisy Adair
Fandoms: Star Trek & Dead Like Me
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2100
Disclaimer: Two canons and neither are mine, solely borrowing.
Summary: Daisy's tired of her last thought being her truest and she thinks that McCoy could be her answer. Really, he's just one more step on her way to the final destination.
Notes: Thanks plentifully to f_vikus for the beta! No real spoilers for Dead Like Me.
When he meets her, she’s not Jocelyn McCoy. She’s not even Jocelyn Darnell. When he meets the beautiful blonde woman with that perfect little red dress and a smile that’s meant just for him, she tells him that her name is Daisy Adair, but she’s getting tired of it. She has a post-it note in hand and she’s eyeing up a man in the corner of the bar. He’s a patient of McCoy’s and has been having heart difficulties.
Daisy Adair presses a kiss to his cheek and whispers something in a sweet and sticky drawl about coming to get a drink when she’s done. It doesn’t take long for her at all. She’s busy in the corner with Hank McCreary one minute and then the next Hank is sloping over and there’s blood everywhere and McCoy is in action trying to patch him up.
He’s still there long after they call time of death and the place has been cleaned up by paramedics and janitors.
“You still want to grab that drink, honey?” Daisy offers softly, tipping her head to one side and extending her hand out to him.
“He was in fine shape the last time I saw him,” McCoy protests. He’s all of nineteen and he’s practicing medicine and he’s yet to lose a patient on his table, but he just watched a patient die right in front of him, even if it hadn’t been his jurisdiction.
Daisy just smiles sweetly at him and McCoy feels his heart beating faster than before. “This is why people should have safety locks on their Swiss-Army knives,” she sing-songs. “C’mon, you owe me a drink.”
He buys her a beer and takes her into the corner booth where he asks where she’s from and she tells him ‘oh, just a little place’ in a drawl that makes him feel like he’s home. They curl up when she gets a chill and they talk about what it feels like to really be lonely.
At the end of the night, he kisses her full on the lips and marvels that she tastes like strawberries and peaches all at once.
“You’re so full of life,” he whispers against her pale skin, trying to brush at her pulse when she keeps trying to bat him away.
“You might be a genius, sweetie,” she whispers right back as he tugs her along to his place, “but you’ve got that all wrong.”
When they get to his loft, he takes her to his bed and leans up against the sheets with the crook of his knees pressed against the mattress. His fingers are dexterous and smooth as he unzips her dress and he looks at her, really looks at her in the dim moonlight of the room. He’s struck by how she can take something so simple as vintage-beige underwear and still look so stunning.
“Are you sure?” he asks because his mother raised him to be a gentleman.
“I’m tired of staring at a piece of paper and knowing it’s the truth,” is all she says to him.
It doesn’t make sense right then.
Years later, it will and McCoy will hate himself for not probing any further.
*
“I’m tired of being Daisy Adair,” she announces one fine day after they walk in the park. She disappears on him for twenty minutes, but returns soon after an ambulance clears the parking lot. She winks and tells him that she just had to powder her nose and he promises her that she’s never looked more beautiful. “I’ve been the prettiest flower in the garden too long, I am tired of Daisy Adair.”
“I had an aunt named Jocelyn once,” McCoy says as he links their arms and they stroll in the warm sunshine of the day. “She used to say there was nothing like an old name to make everyone in the world forget you.”
“Jocelyn,” Daisy echoes thoughtfully. “What was her last name?”
“Darnell. Aunt Jossie, Damned To Hell, Ma used to say,” McCoy informs her. “You know Southern women.”
“Oh, do I ever,” she agrees and her drawl is thick as the honey she drizzles over her blueberry pancakes in the morning. They amble around and McCoy feels like he’s the prince of the ball because he’s got the prettiest girl on his arm. He’s forgotten, almost, what it’s like to be in love. He’s forgotten the way that his heart beats faster and his head swims and when he sleeps, he only thinks of her.
It’s been a long time since McCoy felt like this and he doesn’t want to let it go.
“Would you be just a little bit mad if I took her name?”
McCoy knows that Daisy hasn’t got family anymore and that she’s something of an orphan in a big bad world. She seems weary so much of the time and when he’d asked about friends, she purses her lips and tells him about a man named Mason who used to be lighthearted and now bears burdens on his soul and a girl named George who ‘grew up far too fast’. There are two others, Roxy and Rube, but she says that they’ve long moved on. “They left us here,” was all she’d said mournfully.
McCoy knows that it isn’t really his choice, but she looks so eager to have this as she turns her gaze to him. “Sure you don’t like being Daisy anymore? I mean, I like it.”
“And I used to, but…I need change. Leonard, let me be Jocelyn?”
It’s a proposal and though she doesn’t get down on one knee, it feels almost like it’s that important. So McCoy says yes and lets her sign papers and lets her have this little thing so small as a name, this thing that seems so very important to her.
She’s not a Darnell for very long anyway because McCoy is head over heels in love with this bright spirit of a woman, blessed with sunshine and a smile to warm the room. It’s not long at all before he gets his mother’s engagement ring from the safe and begins to make plans.
*
She had told him, once, that she didn’t want to get married. Here, on one knee in a park, McCoy has decided to deliberately forget they ever had that conversation. His heart is trying to leap out of his chest and he’s trying to remain calm, but he doesn’t think that any man in the world who’s proposing has ever been simultaneously calm. It seems fairly impossible, in fact.
She darts her gaze around as if searching for witnesses before clasping her purse in her lap and leaning in. “I told you I didn’t want to get married!” she hisses at him, affronted. She’s acting like he’s assaulting her rather than trying to give her the happiest moment of her life. McCoy is nothing if not a stubborn bastard, though, and so he doesn’t move and she starts to falter. “Oh, honey,” she sighs, sounding pained. “Leonard. I like you. I love you. If you don’t want to get caught up in a messy amount of business, you need to put that ring away right this second.”
McCoy’s never been the smartest man in the world when it comes to romance, though, and he just keeps presenting it to her. “Joce. Daisy…”
“Don’t call me that,” she begs quietly, closing her eyes tightly, the cascade of her blonde hair so perfectly lit by the sunlight in this unique moment.
McCoy takes her left hand and slides the ring on despite not having an answer right at that moment. He’s gentle and watches the silver brush against her palm and how it makes her shiver. The diamonds catch the light and she finally lets go of the breath that she had been holding.
“Oh, you’re so stupid,” she breathes out at him in accusation, finally looking at him.
McCoy feels slightly triumphant because she isn’t rejecting the ring. Instead, she’s twisting it back and forth like a combination lock and giving him a pitiful look of sympathy. It’s as close to a yes as he feels he’s going to get and so he wraps his arms around her lithe body and presses close to claim a kiss that he knows she doesn’t just give up lightly. “Stupidest man and possibly the happiest,” he whispers against her cheek. He hears something crinkle, like paper, but when he pulls back to look at her, she just smiles in delight. “Wanna go and celebrate?”
“I just have to pop out to run a quick errand,” she says, smoothing her hand over her dress and brushing away tears that McCoy wishes to be happy ones. Years later, he’ll know better, but right then he thinks she’s over the moon. “Do you want me to make a reservation at our favorite restaurant? Or do you want to tell your parents first?”
“I want to tell the world,” he announces excitedly. “But maybe we should start with them.”
It starts with his parents and it ends with them. It’s almost fitting.
*
McCoy knows why they turn off the lights in the hall at night, on the dubious reasoning of saving power. It creates a haunting atmosphere and as he steps out of his father’s room for the last time, he rubs a hand over his face and tries to ignore the stubble and the greasy texture under his thumbs.
Daisy is standing out in the hall in the shadows looking more like a ghoul than the beautiful girl she is and she’s holding a post-it note in her hands.
“D, McCoy,” she says softly. “For a minute, I wanted to believe that maybe it was me,” she admits, the dullest of lights catching her diamond ring and making it glint slightly. “Maybe it is. Maybe this is what my very long life has been leading to.”
“What are you talking about, Joce?” McCoy demands. He sounds hoarse and tired and old. Good god, when did he get to be so goddamn old? His father fell ill with this disease three months ago and he’s been chasing tails to find a cure, but nothing follows through and now his father is begging for it to all be over.
And here stands his beautiful wife of three years in a dark hallway talking rubbish.
“Leonard, I know this is it no matter what happens,” Daisy says as she steps forward and leans in to kiss his lips slowly and softly. “I loved you. I love you,” she pleads painfully. “I picked the wrong men for so long and you were so right. Sometimes I think that’s why they made sure his name ended up in my palm.”
“Jocelyn…”
“After this, Leonard, it’s over,” she says quietly. “Whether it’s my time or not. I know what has to happen.”
He’s going to take the plug that’s giving his father breath. He’s going to slow down the machine that’s pumping his blood. He’s going to take away his father’s life and Daisy knows all of this.
“Two hundred years ago and change, I asked myself why no one ever loved me,” she admits. “But you did. You have. I’m going to take good care of your father, Leonard. Sweetie,” she says, smiling through her tears and looking nonetheless beautiful for it, “I’m going to make sure everything is okay.”
She kisses him on the cheek and the warmth of her touch lingers on, still warm while he watches her leave to the sound of his father’s vitals flatlining.
*
“My ex-wife took the whole damn planet in the divorce,” he says on a shuttle towards a place that doesn’t rise with a sunrise, doesn’t cast blue lights around him and take away his father and his wife in one fell swoop. “All I got left is my bones.”
The kid beside him smiles and his eyes are as blue as Daisy’s departing lights. McCoy thinks to himself that if Daisy finally got what she wanted, maybe he’ll get what she wants for him, too.
“I just want you to be happy,” she’d whispered, glancing over her shoulder towards the lights and David McCoy waiting in the distance. “But it’s my time to go. I’ll keep an eye out for you. Especially when you’re all alone in the shower,” she adds with a wink and one last kiss to his lips.
He doesn’t understand. All he knows is that everything is about to change irrevocably.
“Thank you for loving me, Leonard McCoy.”
THE END