[FIC]: Five Times Spock Suffered For His Profession (...), McCoy/Spock, PG-13
Title: Five Times Spock Suffered For His Profession (and Pulled Someone Else With Him)
Author: dancing_mercury
Fandom: Star Trek (XI)
Characters/Pairings: McCoy/Spock, Kirk, Uhura
POV: Spock
Rating: PG-13 for some swearing, little blood, boy touching (as usual!)
Words: 2.083
Inspired by: This prompt as well as the 2x2 square on my hurt/comfort bingo card.
A/N: 2k words seems to be the sweet spot…even if I only need 500 for bingo fills. Oh well.
1.
Spock feels slimy. He’s just walked three miles through a swamp filled with unidentified flora and fauna, so by the time he hits dry land again he’s dripping head to toe in foreign…substances. It’s different colours and different viscosities, and it drips off of him and his clothes like honey.
Scientifically, this is disgusting. He’s certain that his tricorder is ruined, his communicator is only surviving because its case it waterproof, his clothes will be disposed of the moment he’s on the ship, and some substance is hardening in his hair that might not come out with standard regulation shampoo.
Then he gets to the village after walking through ferns and vines, and he finds his captain sipping a cool drink, perfectly dry, with only three spears pointed at his immaculate gold command shirt. The captain eyes him over once as he stands there, expression neutral and his body filthy, before grinning at him. “Want a drink, Spock?”
--
Later, Leonard has a fit over the cocktail of indigenous toxins he’s absorbed into his body. “What the hell did you walk through?”
2.
In his youth, he had traveled once to the poles of Vulcan for a mandatory school survival expedition. He has been wary of such climates since then, especially after the entrance to his igloo had been completely covered by an overnight blizzard.
The situation seems eerily familiar in the sense of the cold and the isolation, except this time he’s stuck in some sort of the glacier. Smooth ice walls climb at least twenty feet above his head. His exhales a crystallized puff as he looks around at his temporary prison, pushing himself up from the ground and to his feet. A gust of wind rushes over the top of the hole, brushing feathery snow down at him.
The scientific intrigue of this planet has waned past his interest. Taking the communicator from his belt and flipping it open, he utters in a low tone, “Spock to Enterprise.”
“Enterprise to-” Nyota’s voice is cut short by another gust of wind above him, and all he hears is static from then. Resigned, Spock flips the communicator shut, and settles down for a long and arduous night on ice and rock. The once-new tricorder lies in pieces against one curved wall where it had originally fallen; he has to estimate the temperature around him.
--
“This could’ve been a lot worse.” Leonard lectures at him, operating on the fine muscles and blood vessels of his left hand under the small surgical stabilizer. Spock continues to stare at the ceiling. “Frost bite isn’t something you can brush off. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got twice the epidermis as the rest of us.”
“I understand, Doctor.”
“Sure you do.” Leonard replies, annoyance laced through his voice and his eyes still focused on the work at hand. “That’s why I’m fixing your fingers and you’re staying another night in sickbay.”
3.
His fruit-yogurt parfait is half done when the red alert sounds. Spock walks quickly for the bridge, joins a breathless and hastily-dressed Jim in the turbolift, and before they’ve even taken their seats on the bridge the Enterprise rocks with her first hit of the day.
“Who the hell are these people?!” The captain shouts to the bridge as a whole, fingers digging into the back of his chair.
“Klingons, Captain,” Nyota answers first, tapping away at her console as she tries to open a channel.
“Fuck.” Spock can hear the fump of Jim flopping into the chair and the noise of the buttons being jabbed. “Scotty, get the photon torpedos ready. Uhura, open up a channel. If they don’t want to leave, we’ll give them a little push.”
--
Seventeen hours later, Spock wanders into sickbay to see the casualties of the fight. No deaths, fortunately, but historically, no one has emerged unscathed after any ‘containment fields’ have fallen in the vicinity of crew members.
“You need something, Commander?” Leonard’s voice catches him off-guard from his right.
Spock glances over, hands neatly folded behind his back. “I was checking the state of the injured due to our recent engagement.”
“Well, they’re just peachy here.” Leonard takes a padd from a nurse as he walks up to Spock, glancing over it briefly before signing off and handing back. “And if you don’t need anything, I can get back to fixing ten cases of plasma burns.”
Spock blinks at Leonard once, nods, and then turns to leave. “Spock,” He stops when Leonard calls his name again after a beat. “…get some rest.”
The bed feels strangely cold and empty, but he accepts it for the night.
4.
For once in the past month, he doesn’t spend the day beaming down to a dangerous and tectonically active planet, nor does he work a sixteen-hour shift because Klingons or Romulans occupy their sector. Instead, he spends ten hours and fifty-three minutes taking care of a chemical spill in Laboratory Six, settling a professional dispute between two of his physicists, and synthesizing a new compound they may or may not need at the next outpost they come to.
At ten hours and fifty-seven minutes, he’s sitting down behind his desk typing out a report to Admiral Pike, as per his quarterly schedule. It’s the only thing he’s actually planned to do that day.
One hundred words in, the console tells him he has a call. For a moment, he considers discarding it, but as it’s audio only, he accepts. “Yes?”
“Spock,” Leonard’s voice filters through, slightly gruff with fatigue but still warm and welcome. “It’s late. You should go to bed.”
“When I have completed my last task, Leonard.”
“You’ve worked long enough.”
“This report only requires another page of summary. In the mean time, I suggest you heed your own advice.”
Leonard sighs over the communication, and he hears the chink of a glass being set down. “Talk to you tomorrow.”
5.
The planet reminds him of Vulcan in some ways. Sands surround him in an endless desert, but on this planet the dunes are black from the constant volcanism. Basalt and obsidian mix together underfoot, grating against each other as he begins to step towards the remains of the research facility half a mile in front of him. The volcano just behind it oozes gently, calm in this lapse between eruptions.
The captain walks to his right, a little in front of him, and Leonard walks to his left, a little behind, as they continue their ginger trek towards the building. Spock maintains a routine of looking at the volcano, checking on his companions, and then checking his tricorder. The heat thickens as they walk, pressing against his face and warming his lungs.
It’s achingly familiar to him, but Leonard’s less enthusiastic about it. Spock hears something sneered about “summers in Atlanta,” and Jim’s corresponding eye-roll is nearly audible itself. He glances back at Leonard carefully stepping over a rock aspiring to be a boulder, and then adjusts his tricorder.
--
Twenty minutes later, the scene is less than idyllic. His calculations about the volcano’s eruption cycle is woefully incorrect for reasons he can’t discern right now. Jim’s got two boxes under one arm as he runs, Leonard has one, and Spock has the strap of a bag slung over his shoulder. The ground shakes beneath their feet as they run and the volcano belches out steam, lava, and large rocks that make dangerous projectiles.
They duck behind a large rocky outcrop, pressing their backs against the rough rock. Jim flips open his communicator. “Scotty!” He yells, barely heard over another billowing roar from the volcano. “Beam us up!”
“Just gimme a minute, Cap’n!”
“We don’t have a minute! It’ll be like Pompeii over here!”
The earth shakes again and the tremors knock them all to their feet. Spock can feel the sharp rocks biting into the skin of his hands as he pushes himself up. First, he aids his captain to aid him to his feet. That done, he starts to make his way over to Leonard when the volcano lets out an enormous explosion, and a plume of smock and rock erupts miles into the sky. He stumbles in the force of the shockwave, but he manages to reach out a hand to Leonard, helping him up. Briefly, he can hear the sound of objects whistling through the air around him, though the outcrop around them should protect him from certain angles-
A blinding pain suddenly spreads from the back of his head, and the world tilts at interesting and changing angles. His balance suffers, and he falls forward against Leonard with his hands gripping at his shoulders. Leonard’s hands feel nice at his arms and waist, though his entire existence takes on an ethereal quality when he reaches back to feel the back of his neck. It feels slippery. Bringing his hand forward again, his fingers and palm are streaked with dark green blood.
“Fascinating.” He murmurs, before the world heaves again and his memory goes black.
--
The first sound he hears upon waking up is the fast, steady thrum of the heart monitor on the biobed. His own, of course, nobody else has the same count of two-hundred-fifty-seven. As far as he can tell there is no one else in the room. When he opens his eyes, however, he sees Leonard storming in with a sense of conviction and a frown. “Commander.” He’s displeased.
“Doctor.” His voice sounds and feels hoarse, and when he tries to sit up, Leonard does two things in quick succession: he pushes him down to the mattress by the shoulder and then fills the glass with a little straw at the side table with water.
“You’re lucky that rock didn’t hit something important,” Leonard grumbles as he gives Spock the glass. The cool water feels excellent against his throat. “Anything deeper and it would’ve lodged in your cerebellum.”
“I did not intend to be hit initially,” Spock props himself up on an elbow to place the glass back on the side table, and again Leonard has a hand at his shoulder to ease him back down to the mattress again.
“That’s not the point.”
Leonard sits down by his side and takes his hand within his own. Spock can feel the calluses of his fingers massage his palm and his knuckles, and the simple pleasure of it spreads warmth through his entire body. He inhales a deep breath before his entire body relaxes into it.
“I don’t want you in here anymore, Spock. There are some things I can’t fix and if you keep running into things like this, you’re going to get one of them.” Leonard’s fingers dig a little harder into the skin, just momentarily; the pressure eases again when Spock begins to tighten his hand. “Getting hit in the neck is not fascinating, it’s fucking terrifying--”
“Leonard.”
“-especially when you’re bleeding and passed out and there’s a goddamn lava flow barreling toward us-”
“Leonard.” The doctor stops his rant but gives him a weary, worried look. Spock twists his hand in Leonard’s grasp so that it is fingers closing over a cooler hand and pulls it closer to his face. He brushes his cheek against the knuckles, and then Leonard cups Spock’s face against his palm. “I shall endeavor to be more mindful of my surroundings and my safety, for your benefit.”
A sigh. “Yeah.” The syllable is laced with incredulity and Leonard’s eyebrows are still furrowed together in concern, but his thumb is brushing pleasantly against Spock’s cheek. Spock’s attention focuses more on that. “Wish you would do it for your benefit, too…but I’ll take it.”
Spock’s eyes drift close when Leonard leans forward and pushes aside his bangs to give him a light kiss on his forehead. It brings a sense of contentment as well as a feeling of lethargy; Spock doesn’t feel compelled to open his eyes again. “I’ll be back later,” Leonard says quietly, slowly drawing his hand back. “Just have to fill out a few forms.”
“Could you not complete them in my company?”
“…I guess,” Leonard chuckles, and by the shift of the blankets and the bed, he stands. “You’ll be asleep, though.”
Spock curls up on his side, hand tucking underneath the pillow. “That is irrelevant.”
He’s still awake enough to hear the pneumatic hiss of the door as Leonard leaves, or so he thinks.
Author: dancing_mercury
Fandom: Star Trek (XI)
Characters/Pairings: McCoy/Spock, Kirk, Uhura
POV: Spock
Rating: PG-13 for some swearing, little blood, boy touching (as usual!)
Words: 2.083
Inspired by: This prompt as well as the 2x2 square on my hurt/comfort bingo card.
A/N: 2k words seems to be the sweet spot…even if I only need 500 for bingo fills. Oh well.
1.
Spock feels slimy. He’s just walked three miles through a swamp filled with unidentified flora and fauna, so by the time he hits dry land again he’s dripping head to toe in foreign…substances. It’s different colours and different viscosities, and it drips off of him and his clothes like honey.
Scientifically, this is disgusting. He’s certain that his tricorder is ruined, his communicator is only surviving because its case it waterproof, his clothes will be disposed of the moment he’s on the ship, and some substance is hardening in his hair that might not come out with standard regulation shampoo.
Then he gets to the village after walking through ferns and vines, and he finds his captain sipping a cool drink, perfectly dry, with only three spears pointed at his immaculate gold command shirt. The captain eyes him over once as he stands there, expression neutral and his body filthy, before grinning at him. “Want a drink, Spock?”
--
Later, Leonard has a fit over the cocktail of indigenous toxins he’s absorbed into his body. “What the hell did you walk through?”
2.
In his youth, he had traveled once to the poles of Vulcan for a mandatory school survival expedition. He has been wary of such climates since then, especially after the entrance to his igloo had been completely covered by an overnight blizzard.
The situation seems eerily familiar in the sense of the cold and the isolation, except this time he’s stuck in some sort of the glacier. Smooth ice walls climb at least twenty feet above his head. His exhales a crystallized puff as he looks around at his temporary prison, pushing himself up from the ground and to his feet. A gust of wind rushes over the top of the hole, brushing feathery snow down at him.
The scientific intrigue of this planet has waned past his interest. Taking the communicator from his belt and flipping it open, he utters in a low tone, “Spock to Enterprise.”
“Enterprise to-” Nyota’s voice is cut short by another gust of wind above him, and all he hears is static from then. Resigned, Spock flips the communicator shut, and settles down for a long and arduous night on ice and rock. The once-new tricorder lies in pieces against one curved wall where it had originally fallen; he has to estimate the temperature around him.
--
“This could’ve been a lot worse.” Leonard lectures at him, operating on the fine muscles and blood vessels of his left hand under the small surgical stabilizer. Spock continues to stare at the ceiling. “Frost bite isn’t something you can brush off. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got twice the epidermis as the rest of us.”
“I understand, Doctor.”
“Sure you do.” Leonard replies, annoyance laced through his voice and his eyes still focused on the work at hand. “That’s why I’m fixing your fingers and you’re staying another night in sickbay.”
3.
His fruit-yogurt parfait is half done when the red alert sounds. Spock walks quickly for the bridge, joins a breathless and hastily-dressed Jim in the turbolift, and before they’ve even taken their seats on the bridge the Enterprise rocks with her first hit of the day.
“Who the hell are these people?!” The captain shouts to the bridge as a whole, fingers digging into the back of his chair.
“Klingons, Captain,” Nyota answers first, tapping away at her console as she tries to open a channel.
“Fuck.” Spock can hear the fump of Jim flopping into the chair and the noise of the buttons being jabbed. “Scotty, get the photon torpedos ready. Uhura, open up a channel. If they don’t want to leave, we’ll give them a little push.”
--
Seventeen hours later, Spock wanders into sickbay to see the casualties of the fight. No deaths, fortunately, but historically, no one has emerged unscathed after any ‘containment fields’ have fallen in the vicinity of crew members.
“You need something, Commander?” Leonard’s voice catches him off-guard from his right.
Spock glances over, hands neatly folded behind his back. “I was checking the state of the injured due to our recent engagement.”
“Well, they’re just peachy here.” Leonard takes a padd from a nurse as he walks up to Spock, glancing over it briefly before signing off and handing back. “And if you don’t need anything, I can get back to fixing ten cases of plasma burns.”
Spock blinks at Leonard once, nods, and then turns to leave. “Spock,” He stops when Leonard calls his name again after a beat. “…get some rest.”
The bed feels strangely cold and empty, but he accepts it for the night.
4.
For once in the past month, he doesn’t spend the day beaming down to a dangerous and tectonically active planet, nor does he work a sixteen-hour shift because Klingons or Romulans occupy their sector. Instead, he spends ten hours and fifty-three minutes taking care of a chemical spill in Laboratory Six, settling a professional dispute between two of his physicists, and synthesizing a new compound they may or may not need at the next outpost they come to.
At ten hours and fifty-seven minutes, he’s sitting down behind his desk typing out a report to Admiral Pike, as per his quarterly schedule. It’s the only thing he’s actually planned to do that day.
One hundred words in, the console tells him he has a call. For a moment, he considers discarding it, but as it’s audio only, he accepts. “Yes?”
“Spock,” Leonard’s voice filters through, slightly gruff with fatigue but still warm and welcome. “It’s late. You should go to bed.”
“When I have completed my last task, Leonard.”
“You’ve worked long enough.”
“This report only requires another page of summary. In the mean time, I suggest you heed your own advice.”
Leonard sighs over the communication, and he hears the chink of a glass being set down. “Talk to you tomorrow.”
5.
The planet reminds him of Vulcan in some ways. Sands surround him in an endless desert, but on this planet the dunes are black from the constant volcanism. Basalt and obsidian mix together underfoot, grating against each other as he begins to step towards the remains of the research facility half a mile in front of him. The volcano just behind it oozes gently, calm in this lapse between eruptions.
The captain walks to his right, a little in front of him, and Leonard walks to his left, a little behind, as they continue their ginger trek towards the building. Spock maintains a routine of looking at the volcano, checking on his companions, and then checking his tricorder. The heat thickens as they walk, pressing against his face and warming his lungs.
It’s achingly familiar to him, but Leonard’s less enthusiastic about it. Spock hears something sneered about “summers in Atlanta,” and Jim’s corresponding eye-roll is nearly audible itself. He glances back at Leonard carefully stepping over a rock aspiring to be a boulder, and then adjusts his tricorder.
--
Twenty minutes later, the scene is less than idyllic. His calculations about the volcano’s eruption cycle is woefully incorrect for reasons he can’t discern right now. Jim’s got two boxes under one arm as he runs, Leonard has one, and Spock has the strap of a bag slung over his shoulder. The ground shakes beneath their feet as they run and the volcano belches out steam, lava, and large rocks that make dangerous projectiles.
They duck behind a large rocky outcrop, pressing their backs against the rough rock. Jim flips open his communicator. “Scotty!” He yells, barely heard over another billowing roar from the volcano. “Beam us up!”
“Just gimme a minute, Cap’n!”
“We don’t have a minute! It’ll be like Pompeii over here!”
The earth shakes again and the tremors knock them all to their feet. Spock can feel the sharp rocks biting into the skin of his hands as he pushes himself up. First, he aids his captain to aid him to his feet. That done, he starts to make his way over to Leonard when the volcano lets out an enormous explosion, and a plume of smock and rock erupts miles into the sky. He stumbles in the force of the shockwave, but he manages to reach out a hand to Leonard, helping him up. Briefly, he can hear the sound of objects whistling through the air around him, though the outcrop around them should protect him from certain angles-
A blinding pain suddenly spreads from the back of his head, and the world tilts at interesting and changing angles. His balance suffers, and he falls forward against Leonard with his hands gripping at his shoulders. Leonard’s hands feel nice at his arms and waist, though his entire existence takes on an ethereal quality when he reaches back to feel the back of his neck. It feels slippery. Bringing his hand forward again, his fingers and palm are streaked with dark green blood.
“Fascinating.” He murmurs, before the world heaves again and his memory goes black.
--
The first sound he hears upon waking up is the fast, steady thrum of the heart monitor on the biobed. His own, of course, nobody else has the same count of two-hundred-fifty-seven. As far as he can tell there is no one else in the room. When he opens his eyes, however, he sees Leonard storming in with a sense of conviction and a frown. “Commander.” He’s displeased.
“Doctor.” His voice sounds and feels hoarse, and when he tries to sit up, Leonard does two things in quick succession: he pushes him down to the mattress by the shoulder and then fills the glass with a little straw at the side table with water.
“You’re lucky that rock didn’t hit something important,” Leonard grumbles as he gives Spock the glass. The cool water feels excellent against his throat. “Anything deeper and it would’ve lodged in your cerebellum.”
“I did not intend to be hit initially,” Spock props himself up on an elbow to place the glass back on the side table, and again Leonard has a hand at his shoulder to ease him back down to the mattress again.
“That’s not the point.”
Leonard sits down by his side and takes his hand within his own. Spock can feel the calluses of his fingers massage his palm and his knuckles, and the simple pleasure of it spreads warmth through his entire body. He inhales a deep breath before his entire body relaxes into it.
“I don’t want you in here anymore, Spock. There are some things I can’t fix and if you keep running into things like this, you’re going to get one of them.” Leonard’s fingers dig a little harder into the skin, just momentarily; the pressure eases again when Spock begins to tighten his hand. “Getting hit in the neck is not fascinating, it’s fucking terrifying--”
“Leonard.”
“-especially when you’re bleeding and passed out and there’s a goddamn lava flow barreling toward us-”
“Leonard.” The doctor stops his rant but gives him a weary, worried look. Spock twists his hand in Leonard’s grasp so that it is fingers closing over a cooler hand and pulls it closer to his face. He brushes his cheek against the knuckles, and then Leonard cups Spock’s face against his palm. “I shall endeavor to be more mindful of my surroundings and my safety, for your benefit.”
A sigh. “Yeah.” The syllable is laced with incredulity and Leonard’s eyebrows are still furrowed together in concern, but his thumb is brushing pleasantly against Spock’s cheek. Spock’s attention focuses more on that. “Wish you would do it for your benefit, too…but I’ll take it.”
Spock’s eyes drift close when Leonard leans forward and pushes aside his bangs to give him a light kiss on his forehead. It brings a sense of contentment as well as a feeling of lethargy; Spock doesn’t feel compelled to open his eyes again. “I’ll be back later,” Leonard says quietly, slowly drawing his hand back. “Just have to fill out a few forms.”
“Could you not complete them in my company?”
“…I guess,” Leonard chuckles, and by the shift of the blankets and the bed, he stands. “You’ll be asleep, though.”
Spock curls up on his side, hand tucking underneath the pillow. “That is irrelevant.”
He’s still awake enough to hear the pneumatic hiss of the door as Leonard leaves, or so he thinks.