A Mighty Fine Man - Part 3/4

[zauzat]

Part 1 * Part 2 * Part 3 * Part 4

Pike stared grimly at his monitor. He’d give anything for a distraction right now, a call to take, a problem to solve. The last five days had been awful. He’d run until his knees hurt so badly he could barely get up the stairs to his office. He’d worked until he’d marked every sim assessment, reviewed every student report and revised the curricula for all his courses. He was an efficient man at the best of times. Now he was so far ahead of himself he had no idea what to do next.

His comm buzzed and he glanced at it before typing a rapid reply and then pushing it away from him in frustration. Another message from the doctor. He’d been ignoring them for days now. They’d started with the normal things about 48 hours after their ill-conceived encounter. ‘I need to talk to you’, ‘I’d like to apologise’, ‘we need to discuss this’. He’d ignored them, unable to think of a single thing to say that would explain his behaviour without further unwanted humiliation. Of course, McCoy being who he was the message then escalated to: ‘if you don’t fucking answer this, I will storm into your office and raise hell, don’t think I won’t, answer me dammit!’ Pike had given in and now sent back ‘go away’ in reply to each message.

So now he got a random selection on any given day of ‘I’m sorry’, ‘you’re an idiot’, and ‘I’ll go away when you say it like you mean it’. He had no answer to that one. Instead he’d gone to a party at the Barnetts’ house and picked up a sweet young thing, all generous curves and soft curls. He’d been bored with her before they’d even left the party but had seen it through like a gentleman. Apart from nearly dislocating her arm when he pulled her off as she prepared to go down on him he thought he’d managed to play his part fairly well. By the next morning he could barely remember what she’d looked like.

He’d made a second attempt, going to the officers’ club and picking up a feisty XO in the city on a brief shore leave. She was brash and confident, with a filthy funny mouth, and he’d let her tie his hands to the headboard and then do as she wanted with him. She’d made a stunning picture riding him like a bronco but he’d kept wondering what the doctor would look like in the same position. It was all a farce anyway; she had neither the strength to genuinely threaten him nor the brutal wit to genuinely disparage him. He’d tried his damnedest to think of something else, anything else, but when he came with his eyes closed it was to the image of McCoy’s scowling face with just one corner of those full lips lifted in the smallest of smiles.

Both women had called him since, leaving hints in the first case and demands in the second that he contact them. He was ignoring both of them. He put his head in his hands, feeling abruptly overwhelmingly tired. He had moments when he resented McCoy and moments when he missed him. Sometimes felt that he was owed an apology by the damned man and sometimes that he ought to offer one of his own. Both were difficult given that he couldn’t imagine looking him in the eye ever again.

Pike looked up in relief at the incoming call from his assistant.

“I’m sorry to disturb you sir, but it’s the Starfleet Surgeon General.”

Pike recalled that he’d met the woman once while having lunch with Phil Boyce. “Admiral Turnbull. How can I help you, ma’am?”

A lilting voice echoed briskly across the line. “Captain Pike. I seem to recall that you are a friend of our difficult doctor, Leonard McCoy.”

“Not exactly a friend...”

Turnbull ploughed on without pause. “And you are aware that all cadets, medical included, have to pass those confounded compulsory flight tests. I looked at your Academy scores, Captain. Most impressive! You’d have qualified as a pilot if you hadn’t chosen command.”

“Thank you...”

“So the thing is that McCoy is about to crash out. As you know you get five chances to pass the solo flight sim and he’s failed four of them. If he blows the last one, we lose him for good. It’s all unmitigated bullshit to me, mind, complete waste of time for our medical specialists. These people are meant to save lives, not fly ships, but we live with the regulations.”

“But those tests are easy….”

“And so they are, but it turns out that McCoy’s bloody petrified of flying.”

“And he enlisted?”

“Yes, brave man, or mad, whichever. Look Pike, we need him, you like him and you’re a top class pilot. Sort it out. Do whatever it takes. That’ll be fine, won’t it? Good man, knew I could rely on you!” And Turnbull was gone.

Pike stared at his comm in consternation. He had just been expertly railroaded by the Surgeon General. Whether he liked the doctor was immaterial. Ignoring his inexplicable fascination with the man, the two of them got on like oil and water. They would just end up having a stand-up row in the flight centre. He had to find a way out of this.

He was staring blankly at his desk when a reminder chimed on his diary. Kirk was about to arrive for their weekly chess game. Now there was a possibility. Kirk was friends with the doctor, why wasn’t he sorting this mess out? He’d pass the whole thing over and solve the matter that way.

The weekly meetings with Kirk were the one good thing to come out of his acquaintance with McCoy. Ostensibly they weren’t meetings at all, Pike was simply teaching Kirk to play three-dimensional chess every Friday afternoon. The first few times had been awkward with Kirk radiating that unattractive brash cockiness that Pike had finally realised was a cover for nervousness. Once the boy gained confidence, the sessions had become fascinating, their conversation covering topics as varied as diplomacy, battle tactics, motorbikes and San Francisco bars. Jim’s quickness of mind was startling and his thirst for knowledge, particularly real first-hand experience, was unquenchable. Once he had dropped his defences he was also awkwardly grateful for Pike’s ongoing interest in him.

“I hear McCoy is having problems with his flight sims.”

Kirk, who was gazing in perplexity at a trap that Pike had slowly been manoeuvring him into for the last 10 minutes, answered distractedly. “Yes, I got him through the crew sims, mostly by acting as his co-pilot and doing most of his job as well as mine. But the solo sims are a disaster. And I nearly had it all fixed for him, too!” Kirk moved a piece which, while not getting him out of trouble, weakened Pike’s trap. Kirk wasn’t yet good enough to always spot the snares early on but he was damned good at wriggling out of them in the end stages. Pike stared at the board in frustration. The man would be an extraordinary player in time.

“Nearly had it fixed?” Pike prompted. Any easy way out of this mess had to be encouraged.

“Yes, well, you know how he gets five tries at the solo? The first one was truly, epically awful. So on the second I did all I could to distract him and he really did well, except for the panic at the end and the crash landing. But if you looked at the bigger picture he’d just about passed. So while he was throwing up in the john, I was sweet-talking the TA who was supervising the sims. And I nearly had her too, had her comm number and had nearly persuaded her to massage Bones’ numbers when he came back and realised what I was doing and pitched a fit. Man, he can be loud when he’s pissed! Anyway, he absolutely refused to let me help him any further with any sims. All I could do was get him to promise not to take the test for a while, give himself time to calm down.”

Pike stared at him incredulously. “Cadet, have you just admitted in front of an instructor to attempting to cheat test results?”

Kirk offered his most charming smile. “Did I? I’m sure that’s not what I meant. I was just trying to help. Just like I shouldn’t be doing brain surgery, Bones shouldn’t be trying to fly shuttles. Each to our own, that’s all I’m saying.”

“Hmmm.” Pike regarded him levelly as Kirk did his utmost to appear absorbed in the game while radiating innocence. He suspected that Kirk would get himself in serious trouble one day with his flexible attitude to rules but right now that wasn’t Pike’s problem.

So Kirk probably didn’t know that McCoy had tried the test twice since and tanked both times. While the man considered his next move, Pike called up McCoy’s test results on his padd. They truly were abysmal.

“Is he really that afraid of flying?”

“God yes, he’s terrified. Have I ever told you how I first met him?” Kirk settled back into what Pike thought of as his story pose, as he prepared to spin a tale that probably wasn’t entirely true but was guaranteed to be funny. Pike sighed inwardly. He really didn’t want to hear yet more about the damned man that he’d been obsessing about all day, but Kirk’s distraction might allow him to rebuild his trap on the board.

“So I staggered on to that shuttle of yours the morning after the fight. I’d stayed awake all night, was in the same clothes from the bar. In honour of Starfleet I had at least washed the blood off my face! I figured there couldn’t possibly a putative cadet in a worse state that I was. I was quite proud of that fact!”

“I bet you were,” Pike muttered as he carefully placed a seemingly minor piece in a seemingly unimportant position and waited to see what Kirk would make of the move.

“So I take my seat and there’s this dude being hauled out of the bathroom by a lieutenant. And she’s asking him if he needs a doctor and he’s cursing at them: I don’t need a doctor, dammit! I am a doctor! You can imagine!”

Pike couldn’t help the smile. Yes, he could imagine.

“Anyway, he gets pushed down into the last empty seat which is next to me. And he’s bitching that he doesn’t need a seat, he had a perfectly good seat, in the bathroom, with no windows. And then he turns to me and announces: I might throw up on you. Which is a hell of an introduction.

“He’s out of uniform with three day scruff on his face and he’s looking pretty manic. So I’m trying to calm him down a bit, spinning him some soothing bullshit about how Fleet shuttles are pretty safe. And he just goes off on this spectacular rant about all the ways you can die in space. I can’t remember all of it but it ended with this killer line about how space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence.”

“Dear god,” Pike muttered, now thoroughly distracted from the chess board. “Why did the man ever enlist?”

“That’s exactly what I wondered. I told him: dude, I hate to break this to you but Starfleet operates in space. And he said that his ex-wife took the whole damned planet in the divorce, and all he had left was his bones. And then he offered me some god-awful bourbon that he had in a hip flask and we’ve been bosom buddies ever since. He’s awesome!”

Kirk suddenly jumped up and headed over to Pike’s monitor. “Wait, this you’ve gotta see.”

Pike abandoned the game with relief. Kirk had wormed his way out of the trap, although Pike wasn’t sure if he’d realised it yet. Best to give up while he was still ahead.

“Cadet, are you busy hacking into the admittance records? You don’t have clearance for that!”

Kirk looked briefly sheepish. “Yeah, well, just look in the other direction for two minutes, won’t you. This is worth it.” Pike stared out of the window, shaking his head at himself. The number of rules that he bent for these two men was extraordinary.

“Look! This is gold! They took the enlistment ID photos when we landed. Bones got himself cleaned up later and had his redone to provide the utterly anodyne one that he now has on his cadet card, but this is the original.”

Both men looked down at a photograph of the doctor. His hair was a riotous mess across his forehead. His lips were full and pink against the dark scruff of a days old beard. He was glowering suspiciously at the camera, small worry lines pulling his eyebrows together. Pike thought that he looked tired and beaten down, yet oddly determined.

Once Kirk had left, Pike continued to stare at the photo. This was a man who’d lost everything to his ex-wife’s family and yet had found the strength to start over. This was a man who was terrified of space yet had the courage to enlist in Starfleet. This was a man who could not afford to fail yet refused to let Kirk cheat on his behalf.

Damn the doctor for getting to him like this. Pike quickly called the sim centre and booked a test for the following morning. He then sent McCoy a curt message telling him to be at the centre by 10.00. With luck the doctor wouldn’t bother to come and Pike could write the whole thing off while still being able to say that he tried.

*

Pike arrived the next morning dressed casually in jeans and a sweater. He’d give the doctor ten minutes and then take his bike for a spin around the bay. To his surprise the doctor stomped in at one minute to ten and planted himself in front of him, arms crossed defensively, glowering. Pike took in the unshaven face and the red eyes. The man hadn’t made much of an effort. He hadn’t even bothered to put on his uniform. Pike grabbed him by his shirt and pulled him close, letting the man’s warm scent fill his nostrils.

McCoy froze and then pulled away roughly. “I’m not drunk! I haven’t touched a drop since getting your comm. Thanks for bothering to check whether I was actually available this morning and all. I had to swap shifts at the last minute which didn’t make me popular at the hospital.”

“I doubt that you’re popular there anyway,” Pike snapped. Everything the doctor did seemed to be rubbing him up the wrong way. “Now why are your flights results so appalling?”

"I suffer from aviophobia. In case you don’t understand big words that means fear of dying in something that flies!"

Pike clenched his fists by his side. How had this gone so wrong so fast? He’d put up with exactly 30 seconds more of this before telling the man where to get off. Starfleet would just have to live with one doctor less. “And why do you suffer from aviophobia?”

There was a long silence. The doctor was staring fixedly at the floor. Although his anger continued to simmer, Pike’s curiosity was aroused. There was a story here. He waited silently.

“The Spirit of St Louis,” McCoy said softly.

Pike could place the reference easily. The crash was notorious, even though it had happened over a decade earlier. The vids were still found on the networks. The pilot had done an illegal fly-by past the spectacular viewing windows of the newly renovated Atlanta shuttle port. He’d lost control and the shuttle had crashed and gone up in a giant fireball right in front of the spectators. Pike had been in deep space, near the end of his service on the USS Olympus but the images of the crash had reached them even out there.

“Did you see it happen or was someone you knew on it?” Pike asked.

“Both,” the doctor replied shortly.

Pike made the connection almost immediately. His mother. Fuck. Now he really was going to have to make an effort to help.

“Let’s get started.” Pike escorted the doctor to the pilot’s seat of the shuttle. As a solo sim McCoy could not have a co-pilot and no one was supposed to be standing by the shuttle either. But as Pike was running the session without an audience and under his personal authorization, he decided to ignore that fact.

The doctor was already rigid with tension, his hands fisted white-knuckled on his thighs. “Don’t start yet,” Pike ordered. “Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and talk me through the procedures.”

He was taken aback when McCoy gave him a word perfect recitation of the manoeuvres needed to launch, fly and land the craft. “I damned well know my stuff,” McCoy snapped in the face of Pike’s surprise. “I’m not a fool and I’ve studied this to the point of exhaustion. It’s just that when I’m supposedly up there and the visual and sound effects come into play the panic descends like a red mist.”

“Do it again,” Pike ordered, “eyes closed, talk through it, put your hands where they need to go to do the various procedures. That got him a weak smile from McCoy. “I really don’t think Starfleet will let me get away with flying a shuttle with my eyes closed!”

Once again McCoy proved that he knew what to do. Pike made his repeat the entire procedure three more times in quick succession, talking through the actions, this time with his eyes open and focused on the controls. Each time he did the procedures perfectly. And then Pike ordered him to do it yet again as he switched the sim on. “Just repeat exactly what you’ve done the last five times. Talk the procedures as you do them. Focus on the instruments, focus on my voice.”

McCoy tensed up immediately but not as badly as at the beginning. He got the shuttle started, down the runway and into launch. It was shaky but at least he was in the air. He followed the required flight path with some dips and wobbles but nothing that would result in failure. And then he brought the shuttle into the landing trajectory. Pike could see the sweat trickling down his forehead, smell the stench of fear.

“Keep on talking,” Pike ordered. “Tell me what you’re doing.”

“I can’t,” McCoy croaked in a desperate whisper, “I can’t control it!”

“Doctor! You can. Ease back on the throttle, watch your horizon line. Tell me what comes next!” McCoy seemed to respond to the bark of authority. He pulled the shuttle back into line and continued to whisper the landing procedures. At every pause, Pike filled with the silence with his own voice. “And now? What comes next? Talk to me, doctor!”

The shuttle touched down unevenly, bounced madly and began to swerve. McCoy covered his face with his hands. Pike grabbed the controls and brought the vessel to a standstill. It was entirely illegal but the doctor had done it all himself right up to touchdown. In the captain’s opinion it was enough.

McCoy was hunched forward, his face buried in his hands, as Pike called up the final result. He really hoped that the vomiting thing wasn’t about to happen.

“Doctor. McCoy! Look at me, dammit!” Pike was battling to get his attention. “Look at the results. You’ve passed!”

“I passed?” McCoy stared incredulously at the screen. He hadn’t passed by much. Pike personally would rather face up to a battalion of Klingons than trust the other man to pilot to him anywhere. But he would stay on as a Starfleet doctor and that was all that mattered.

“I passed! I fucking passed!” McCoy turned to Pike, grabbed the captain’s face with both his hands and kissed him.

The captain’s first disjointed thought was that those hands really were large. They cupped his face from chin to temple, holding it warmly and securely as soft broad lips mashed against his own and the tip of a wet tongue licked along the seam of his mouth. Pike felt his own surge of panic. It’s just a kiss, he told himself. It’s just a mouth, no different from doing something with a woman.

It was a lie. It was utterly different. Everything was bigger, the hands, the mouth, the hot tongue that was pushing irresistibly between his lips. Most of all the sheer authority of it was different. McCoy knew what he wanted and he intended to take it. Pike’s senses swum as he surrendered to the moment and focused exclusively on the plush agile tongue that was plundering his mouth.

McCoy started to explore after a while, trailing wet kisses across his cheek and nibbling his way down the cords of his neck. Pike let his head fall back, shivering. The brush of the doctor’s stubble across his own skin was electrifying, reminding him with every movement that this was a man and a powerful one at that. He pushed the other man away. “Christ McCoy, this is really not the place for this.”

McCoy regarded him curiously. “So does that mean that there is a place for this? Now that’s interesting. I’ll be getting back to you on that. But right now I’ve got things to do.”

He grabbed Pike by the hand and began to tow him to the door. “I’ve got the rest of the weekend off, now that I’ve swapped shifts. I’m going to have a drink or thirty to celebrate and you’re coming with me. By tonight I intend to be as drunk as a three eyed spider on a blue tick dog.”

Pike knew he shouldn’t be encouraging the doctor’s drinking but dammit all, he felt in need of a stiff one himself. “I’m not getting drunk with a cadet in San Francisco,” he protested.

McCoy eyed the bike that was parked outside the flight centre. “Fair enough. That monster’s yours? And you do actually know how to drive it, right? The parents of a nurse at the hospital have a beach house on the Big Sur coast. The keys are under the mat, I’ve an open invitation to make use of it, and there is a beachfront bar just down the way. Power up that bike and let’s go watch the sun set down there. We’ve got comms and credits with us. Let’s just go!”

Pike stared at him, wondering how long it was since he had done something so utterly impulsive. That was of course not including that afternoon that he wasn’t thinking about. Well over a decade probably. And didn’t that thought make him feel old. Maybe it was time to take Boyce’s advice.

“Fine,” he said straddling the bike. “Let’s go. Although I’m sure that nurse was hoping that you’d take her down there, not me!”

“Whatever,” McCoy said dismissively as he settled in behind Pike. “She should get her gaydar repaired. I’m done pretending to be something that I’m not.” He moulded his chest against the other man’s back, pressing his thighs tightly around him, wrapping his arms about his waist and pushing his hands in under Pike’s shirt to rest against warm skin. “I hope the damned shields on this thing work. D’you know how many ways you can die riding a bike?”

Pike laughed and deliberately dipped the bike round a bend. Force shields had eliminated the need for helmets on bikes and he loved the feel of the wind whistling around him as he pushed the bike towards its limits. It was years since he’d had a friend ride with him on a trip like this.

The doctor had his face buried against the back of Pike’s neck. “Are you OK back there?” he shouted. “I’ve got my eyes very tightly shut,” mumbled McCoy against his ear. “Tell me when we get there you speed freak!”

*

They lounged on the deck of the bar, watching the sun descend slowly towards the Pacific, a glimmering red ball sinking through bands of rose-edged cloud. Pike was reminded yet again why he had missed the doctor over the last week. He made for wickedly scurrilous company. And even when he was insulting Pike, as he did on a regular basis, there was a deeply buried tease in his warm hazel eyes that made it impossible to take offence.

Pike was already tipsy and McCoy was out-drinking him by two to one and was only eating at Pike’s insistence. He hated to think what that lost year between the death of McCoy’s father and his enlistment in Starfleet must have been like. But Pike wasn’t going to go there today. Tonight was about celebration and oddly enough about friendship, although the captain couldn’t quite work out how on earth they’d managed to become friends.

Abruptly McCoy changed the topic from his default one of the incompetence of anyone who wasn’t himself. “So about that afternoon in your office…”

“We’re not talking about that,” growled Pike.

“Yes we are. I was madder than a mule chewing on bumblebees after that hospital fiasco and I was trying to pick a fight with you, as I think you know. And then you just…. Jesus, Pike, what in hell’s name did you think you were doing?”

“Oh for god’s sake, call me Chris. And did I mention that we’re not talking about that?”

That got McCoy smiling and frowning at him at the same time, an interesting effect. “Right. Leonard. But you know that. And I need to know how to get it to happen again without ending so badly!”

“It’s not happening again,” snapped Pike, draining his drink and gesturing for another.

“Why not?” demanded McCoy, for whom tactfulness was clearly a lost art. “I know you’re attracted to me, I’m pretty sure you liked kissing me earlier today. What’re you so afraid of?”

Pike directed a poisonous glare at him and wondered if there was any way to get on his bike and head back to the city without looking as if he was flouncing off.

McCoy was staring at him as if he was some lab specimen that was very much not doing what was expected of it. “You know, Pike - dammit, Chris - you really confuse me. I only ever started flirting with you because I thought it would piss you off!”

“And only you would think of pissing off superior officers as some kind of leisure activity,” muttered Pike into his drink.

“A man has to have a hobby,” McCoy retorted. “Anyway, you went with it. For all your prim and proper act, you proved to have a sense of humour and just sometimes, you flirted back! That really threw me, I can tell you. So then of course I had to keep going to find out how much I could get away with. I never expected it to come to anything.”

McCoy left a meaningful pause. Pike stared into his drink as if the answer to the meaning of life was floating in it. Dammit, he wasn’t ready for this. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to move forward but he didn’t want to kill the possibility either.

“OK, if you won’t talk then I will. Finish the full disclosure. If you’re going to turn me down you may as well have a reason for it.”

Pike waited warily, glad of a possible change of subject.

“Remember how I told you that my father-in-law found me in the storeroom with his son? His hot and willing son? Well, Andrew, the fucker, pinned the blame on me. Told his Daddy, and I quote, that I had tempted him from the paths of righteousness. Abandoned me to the wolves and went grovelling back to his family.”

Pike topped up their glasses and waited. McCoy was staring morosely out at the slowly darkening sea.

“Then it all went into the death spiral, in more ways than one. My Daddy was getting rapidly worse. My family and the Darnells were sharing the burden of sitting with him through his last months. Father-in-law summoned me into his office and told me that despite my ongoing sojourn in the valley of evil, he was prepared to do me a favour, for my Daddy’s sake. If I agreed to an immediate divorce, with all our joint assets going to Jocelyn, and my losing my job and leaving the state, they wouldn’t tell my Daddy the truth about me before he died.

Pike stared at him, appalled. “The fucker! And you put up with that? With your temper? I can’t see you rolling over so easily.”

McCoy shrugged. “I said yes to everything. I just wanted to get on with my research, try to find a cure. It was hopeless of course, by then I’d totally lost perspective, but no one stepped forward to try and help.

“The divorce went through weeks before his death. I sat by his bedside, in the company of my ex-wife and her father and we played happy families for my Daddy. He never knew. The pain became so bad at the end that he begged me to turn off his life support. I so badly wanted him to hang on, to give me more time with my research. But in the end he was pleading with me and none of my work was leading anywhere and I had failed him in every single way, even if he didn’t know the whole truth. So maybe in this one final thing I could do right by him.”

McCoy lapsed into silence, staring unseeing out to sea, his eyes a glassy shimmer. Pike ran through the story in his head. There was still a piece missing, he could feel it, a final nail that had the doctor entombed in his coffin of misery. Something that Turnbull had said all those weeks ago echoed in the back of his mind. “Wasn’t a cure found for pyrrhoneuritis sometime soon after?”

McCoy drained the rest of his drink as Pike watched him. “Full marks, Captain. You are well informed,” he replied bitterly. “Yeah, that was the final straw. If only I’d resisted his pleas a little longer… It was found by the Chinese following a parallel research path to my own. If I’d known, if we’d collaborated, we might have found it sooner. But everyone at Emory was so secretive about their research, patent rights and all that crap. And the Chinese? No one at Emory kept up with Chinese research. All that alternative medicine stuff, duck entrails and powdered rhino horn, don’t you know?”

McCoy waved to the bartender for more alcohol. “And my Daddy’s body was hardly in the grave before my ex-father-in-law started claiming that financial irregularities had been uncovered relating to my research work. That was bullshit. Something else was going on but by then I cared about nothing. I just wanted to escape. I told the fucker that I had nothing left to lose. If he started trying to pin something on me, I’d tell the world about his faggot of a son. If he left me alone, I’d go. So he did, and I did.”

The doctor continued to stare moodily at the sea. All his happiness and confidence from earlier in the day had leached away and Pike felt a pang at the loss. “Yeah, not much of a catch, am I?” he said softly. “All I do is fail those I try to love.”

“At least you try,” Pike replied, surprising himself. “The coward’s way out is not to love at all. You’re braver than I am.”

McCoy had turned to stare at him incredulously. “Braver than you? What the hell does that mean?”

Pike wasn’t entirely sure what he meant. This was certainly not the sort of thing he ever talked about, not even to someone as important to him as Boyce. He fumbled on, trying to make sense of his own jumble of thoughts by speaking them out aloud.

“My father was a Captain and he lived for the job. I’m not really sure why he married at all, maybe he felt it was expected of him, I don’t know. But my mother loved him dearly and I adored him, even if I barely knew him. When I was nine he was injured on duty and came home to us, newly promoted to Admiral, to recover from the trauma. But he never did, really. It puzzled me that I couldn’t see these injuries. It puzzled my mother that the brass made little use of him following his promotion. But of course he knew the truth. The damage was mental and he’d been booted upstairs and then put out to pasture. He didn’t take it well. Mostly he took it out on me.”

Pike paused. He couldn’t bring himself to show quite the brutal honesty that the doctor managed. Still a sideways glance at McCoy suggested that the man was capable of guessing what he was hinting at.

“The last time that I ever spoke to him was on the day I left home for the Academy. But I did get curious, once I was studying psychology on the command track, once I began to realise what effects trauma could have on a man. I tried to hack into his records but couldn’t break the code. I tried again once I’d been made a Captain and found that whatever the events that had caused the injuries, it was all hidden behind a level of classified clearance that I still didn’t have.

“I only found out a few things by accident, after I’d been captured by the Ngultor and Phil Boyce was able to access certain medical records as part of researching how you help a man recover from alien mind control.”

“Alien mind control?” McCoy sounded torn between fascination and disgust.

“Long story, for another time. The first of two times that it has happened to me.” Pike took a deep breath and soldiered on. He had talked before about what had happened to him, he wouldn’t have been cleared to continue his command if he hadn’t opened up to the Starfleet psychologists. But he’d never told anyone about what he knew of his father’s experience.

“My father experienced something similar, taken captive by a newly discovered race, kept in solitary confinement while they probed his mind in an attempt to understand this alien being. He’d left his crew with orders to retreat if the situation became too dangerous. The aliens were playing with his perceptions and he convinced himself that he’d been abandoned, that he’d have to survive alone forever. Obviously they rescued him eventually but it seems that the damage was done. He couldn’t regain his capacity to command, he couldn’t bring himself to trust his crew.

“And he brought that trauma back to earth with him. Didn’t trust my mother any longer, suspected her of illicit affairs. It nearly broke her heart, all she had to offer him was her love and he’d sealed himself off from everybody. He decided I was too weak to survive in such a harsh world, too trusting. He took it on himself to toughen me up, open my eyes to the realities of the world, teach me that there was no one I could rely on except myself. He beat it into me, literally, that I was all on my own, that I could only trust myself, that I must never give up control to anyone else.”

“But you don’t believe all of this?” McCoy queried. “You come across as very controlled but in all other respects as good with people and with plenty of friendships.”

“Friendships, yes,” Pike replied slowly, “but people really close to me? Not so much.” He drummed his fingers on the table, trying to think through what he was really trying to say. “I rebelled against everything my father told me, except his expectation that I would enter Starfleet. I actively sought mentors and alliances, and found two particularly important ones, in Richard Barnett and in Phil Boyce. Both times that I came under alien mind control myself, I tried to empathise with my captors in order to attempt to outwit them, and right through it all I believed fiercely that my crew would come for me in the end. And they did.”

“Very clever, you allowed yourself to bend, and as a result you didn’t break.” McCoy was clearly fascinated, leaning forward intently, his eyes alight with curiosity.

“I’ll tell you the details… another day. It wasn’t without consequences. That is why I’m currently grounded, rehab time for multiple mental trauma. But I’ve made use of all the help Starfleet can offer. And I’m getting another ship. Unlike my father, I’m still fit for command. And finally, knowing that, I can feel sorry for him, rather than angry.”

Pike sighed heavily. His parents. Now there was another messy relationship that he hadn’t faced up to yet. But right now that wasn’t his concern. Right now he was trying to find a way out to the man across the table from him, a way through the walls he had built around himself.

“I thought I’d rebelled against all he tried to teach me, but I’m starting to realise that in some ways I just ended up learning warped versions of his lessons.”

“What do you mean?” McCoy asked.

“He told me to trust no one. I just learnt to distrust those who claimed to love me, to distrust my father for hurting me and my mother for failing to stop him. He told me I had to learn control. And I did, the control to hide my tears from him, to hide my despair from everyone around me. I’m his son, by both nature and nurture. I live behind iron walls of control and choose not to love because it only leads to disillusionment.”

He looked across at McCoy, the doctor’s features now soft in the fading light of dusk. Somehow the gathering darkness made it easier to offer some basic truths. “I’ve always been attracted to powerful men. Hell, I had the most inappropriate crush on Richard Barnett right through the Academy, although I hid it ruthlessly.” That confession startled a laugh out of McCoy and his pleasure touched Pike, reinforcing his determination to finish this confession.

“I’ve never acted on it, not beyond friendly fumblings, a man helping out a friend, nothing with any emotional connotations. I’ve generally gone with women. Without meaning to sound patronising, I don’t feel threatened by women, no matter how capable they are. They are just too different. And I’ve never been attracted to effeminate or submissive men. But powerful men, strong, capable men… That challenges me.”

“And you’re telling this to me because…?” McCoy queried, puzzled.

“For god’s sake, doctor, you’re supposed to be some kind of genius. Try putting two and two together.”

McCoy stared at him for a moment and then gave him that half-smile that Pike liked so much, just the corners of his mouth curving up, as if they had escaped briefly from the iron control of his usual grumpiness. “Huh. Not exactly how I see myself, but I think I’ll take it as a compliment. We should drink to that!”

By now they were both thoroughly drunk and the light was fading fast. With what common sense remained to him, Pike decided that they had better find the beach house while they could still walk straight. And so he found himself some time later lying on the sand just down from the porch of the house, wrapped up in a couple of old quilts that they had found, watching the waves rolling in and drinking bourbon straight from the bottle.

Although McCoy’s ability to hold his alcohol was truly impressive, the man was finally losing control. Pike would have staked a month’s salary on the doctor being a morose, bitter drunk but he could not have been more wrong. It turned out that McCoy became sweetly affectionate and handsy. It made Pike wonder what the man might have been like without the death of his parents, the failure of his marriage and the stress of his sexuality.

He was now lying with his head on Pike’s chest while patting distractedly at his arm, examining him with squiff-eyed concentration.

“Such a pretty captain,” McCoy informed his earnestly. “Of course, Jim will be a pretty captain too. Do they choose you for the pretty, I wonder? But Jim’s always up to something, always on the edge of trouble. And you are so very proper. Pretty proper captain. Such a poker up your ass. It’s a nice ass, you know. I should know. I looked!” He whispered this confidingly to Pike.

“I looked more than once. Such a pretty ass. But the poker’s a problem. I could take it out for you. I could! I’m a doctor, did you know? I could take it out for you and replace it with something much better. Like my cock! I’d like that. I bet I could get you to like that! My cock buried balls deep in your pretty ass. I’ve got big hands, have you seen?”

McCoy helpfully patted Pike’s arm with a hand. “You know what they say about big hands on a man. And it’s true. I’ve got a big cock too. I could fill you up so very nicely.”

Pike considered the large hand currently wrapped around his bicep and thanked his lucky stars that the darkness hid his blush. Although the doctor seemed to have forgotten, Pike remembered exactly how big that damned cock had been. Fortunately their mutual advanced drunkenness left them both with little hope of getting it up, so he didn’t have to decide right away how he felt about this generous offer. The doctor was still murmuring quietly to himself about the pretty as he finally drifted off to sleep on Pike’s chest.

Pike lay staring at the stars that were slowly appearing above them. He had travelled so very far through the universe, encountered places and beings and cultures beyond the imagination of most Terrans. But he had never let anyone explore that particular territory, not with cocks, not with fingers, not with toys. It had always seemed too submissive, too vulnerable, to give his body over to another man to use.

Yet he could not tear his mind away from McCoy’s offer. What would it feel like to have those thick fingers squirming up into his ass? Just how much could that tight ring of muscle stretch? And was there any truth in all that stuff about the prostate? Considered objectively he wasn’t quite sure about the idea of the doctor pushing that cock into his anus. The thing had made his jaw ache. How much worse would it be squeezed into his ass? And yet just thinking about it gave him a curious shivery feeling inside.

Ever since he had walked out of his father’s house for the very last time, he had determined that he would control his destiny. Could he bring himself to put his pleasure in another man’s hands? Could he bring himself to trust another man that far? Hell, not just some other man. Could he trust himself to Leonard? Did he want to try? He fell asleep wondering whether he had the courage to do it.

Part 4