Commensalism (Kirk/McCoy R)
And now I go back to the dirty/hot/wrong of the Mirrorverse. Title doesn't make as much sense this time around but I like how they make a set and then if I write one called "parasitism" it'll be a trifecta. ;)
Title: Commensalism
Rating: R
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy
Word Count: 3,890
Warnings: Mirrorverse fic, blood play, knife play, part of the Symbiosis Trilogy (see also Mutualism and Parasitism) which is the prequel to Infection
Summary: He wants to see the other man not necessarily broken, but definitely unwound.
+++
His first weekend at the Imperial Academy, Kirk goes out to the bars to scope out the competition outside the classrooms and the barracks.
There's a fourth year cadet who's the same age as Kirk but has the sense of entitlement that the seniors always seem to get who decides that he likes Kirk's mouth. Kirk lets himself get dragged to the bathroom, playing weak and unwilling, but when the fourth year is pushing Kirk to his knees, Kirk grabs the other man's head in both his hands and slams it against the wall. Two of his friends come barging in at the yell and then the wet thud, and Kirk takes an elbow to the nose and a couple jabs at his ribs before he manages to incapacitate one with a kick to his kneecaps before getting a choke-hold on the other.
It's well past two o'clock in the morning when Kirk shows up at the medical dorms, coercing the computer into telling him which room is McCoy's and then the access code to get inside.
He enters the room, taking it in long enough to be pissed off that McCoy got a single before he's pinned against the wall with his arms trapped between McCoy's chest and his own back, a hypospray pressed against his throat.
"I told the computer to alert me if anyone accesses my information," McCoy answers Kirk's unasked question. "You better give me an answer I like or you'll be receiving a lethal dose of pentobarbital."
"Isn't that used to euthanize dogs?" Kirk can feel the sneer McCoy is giving him. "Just wanted to make sure my ribs aren't broken. You're a doctor, right?"
McCoy releases him, stepping away quickly before Kirk can lash out at him if he chooses to. "Just because I'm a doctor doesn't mean I'm your doctor. Now get the hell out of my room - you're dripping blood everywhere." The other man's eyes can't stop looking at Kirk's blood, it seems - the drops on his clothes, the floor, the smear on the wall where his face had been pressed against it. There's a gleam in McCoy's eyes that Kirk recognizes all too well.
He finds himself walking back to his own room actually pleased with how the encounter with McCoy had gone. The man certainly wasn't a pushover - seemed worth it to Kirk to keep an eye on him.
The first thing he does when he crawls out of bed the next morning is hack into his own records, listing McCoy, Dr. Leonard H. as his personal physician.
+
The next weekend Kirk is convinced that his nose is broken and goes stumbling to McCoy's room like he had before.
"Maybe you should stop hanging around people who find your face so offensive," McCoy drawls, hands on either side of Kirk's nose as he presses along it, checking the bone.
"Shouldn't you be using a tricorder?" Kirk asks, wondering what century this man thinks he's from if he's using his hands instead of running a scan, but they are nice hands, so Kirk isn't exactly complaining. He wants to see them causing pain, holding an agonizer, or watch him in surgery where he's literally a god among men, a simple slip of the scalpel all it would take to bring death.
"Go to the infirmary next time if you have a problem," McCoy snaps, which makes Kirk grin.
He wants to see the other man not necessarily broken, but definitely unwound. Kirk watches McCoy watch the blood drip down his face, and Kirk can't help himself when he flicks out his tongue, tasting it on his lips, before deciding he wouldn't mind letting McCoy have a sample. If his nose wasn't broken before it definitely is now as he kisses McCoy, hard and with a lot of teeth, but the doctor is giving back as good as he's getting, and if that wasn't enough to turn Kirk on, McCoy pulling back to purposefully lick the blood off Kirk's lips definitely was.
That's not the first time they fuck, but it is the first time Kirk decides that he wants to for a reason other than a show of power, and he's only able to pull away because Kirk's afraid that for the first time in his life he has a weakness and he doesn't want anyone else to see it, especially McCoy.
When he starts calling McCoy "Bones" he realizes that everyone can see it, anyway, so there's no point in denying himself what he wants.
+
The fight that leaves Kirk worse off that bruised and bloody is with his hand-to-hand combat instructor who seems to have a problem with Kirk's attitude. This is after he lost the Kobayashi Maru the first time, so he is spoiling for a fight, and is smiling and laughing when the instructor doesn't hold back on him until he punches Kirk twice in the left kidney before slamming the heel of his hand at the base of Kirk's skull, instantaneously knocking him out.
Kirk wakes up in the hospital, which is a first. The whole point of his arrangement with McCoy is that he doesn't need to come here whenever he gets injured, and it takes him a few moments to remember what happened and that he didn't arrive there under his own power.
"Fortunately for you, you have a hard head," comes a familiar voice, and Kirk sits up so quickly to look at McCoy that his head spins and he throws up on the floor.
"Fuck," he says, embarrassed but unwilling to show it. This is precisely why he avoids hospitals - his enemies don't need to know that he's compromised.
"Yeah, fuck," McCoy repeats, not making a move to come over and check on him, instead staying at the foot of the bed. "I don't know who else you've strong-armed into keeping an eye on you, but the instructor who did this miraculously turned up dead last night. You should know you've been here for almost two days."
"You pissed because someone beat you to him?" Kirk asks, and McCoy doesn't even need to respond because Kirk can see on his face that it's true. Kirk thinks back to the times he's gone out drinking with McCoy, how people are more likely to avoid him when the other man is there, too, and how it's becoming harder and harder to get into a fight lately. It was almost touching. "Aw, Bones, you really do care. Now I don't feel like I'm contributing to the relationship here. Hey I can kill the ex for you, if you want." Kirk brightens at an idea. "I'll even let you watch," he says in a sing-song voice.
"Shut up, Jim, that's not what I want right now."
He starts. McCoy's never called him by his first name before. "Do you want me to blow you?"
"You just threw up all over the floor."
"I can't help but notice that you didn't say no."
Kirk catches the glint in McCoy's eyes. "Rinse your mouth out and then maybe we'll talk."
+
"Do you have a death wish, Kirk?"
"No, sir." He's in Pike's office, and the captain looks pissed. If he looks pissed then he's probably infuriated, and Kirk wonders if he's going to be spending time in an agony booth in the near future.
"You need to stop getting into fights. You're making enemies already, and I had to pull a lot of strings to get you here. Not only will you look weak if you manage to get yourself killed, but that's not going to help my reputation, either." Pike looks at him pointedly. "Hard to have your own ship when you're dead, Kirk."
Hard to have my own ship when you're alive, Kirk thinks. He wants the Enterprise but knows she's Pike's, and he can't do anything as blatant as kill Pike to get what he wants. "I understand, sir."
"I'm not so sure you do," Pike responds. "Two hours in the booth to mull over your future should do it. You need to learn to pick and choose your battles. Can't attack everyone who looks at you sideways or makes a crack about your father."
Kirk's fists clench involuntarily, and he's glad that he's holding them behind his back so Pike can't see. "Yes, sir."
The agony booth makes his muscles contract, his body curling in on itself in an involuntary reflex from the pain, but he won't scream, won't cry out, won't give Pike that satisfaction as he all but shreds his tongue with his teeth and McCoy has to take more time to fix the muscle than Kirk had spent in the booth.
+
Kirk watches McCoy work on Pike from the observation room that sits about the surgical suite. He'd feel better about being the acting captain if his ship wasn't currently limping back to Earth on impulse, but that Romulan bastard responsible for his father's death is dead, so he chalks the day up to an overall win.
He frowns, recalling how McCoy had poisoned him to get him on the ship to begin with. It wasn't smart of him - there'll be consequences for sure, time in the booth if they don't outright execute him.
He goes back to the bridge for the rest of his shift, taking status reports from all the departments, but the ones from medical he goes down to receive personally.
"Bones!" He greets with a predatory grin as he enters the office McCoy has taken as his own. He looks tired, leaning against the desk like it's the only thing keeping him up. "How's Captain Pike?"
"Healing nerves is painful, so I'm keeping him sedated until we get back to Earth."
Kirk goes around the desk so he's on the same side of it as McCoy, forcing the doctor to sit upright in his chair as Kirk sits himself down on the desk, feeling decidedly courteous as he pushes aside the PADD that McCoy had been staring at instead of just breaking it. "I'll never quite understand how you can be so blase about killing someone except when they're under your medical care."
"I wouldn't be worth anything as a doctor if I just killed all my patients."
Kirk hums in agreement, reaching out with his legs to wheel McCoy's chair closer as he reaches down to massage McCoy's dick through his pants. "If you're feeling up to it," Kirk begins and laughs when McCoy groans in response, "I thought maybe we could go play." He pulls the knife from its sheath as his hip, rubbing the flat of the blade against his own face. "Since I am the captain, now, and I was never assigned quarters, I think we should use Pike's."
"He won't be needing them," McCoy agrees with a malicious grin and a hitch in his breath.
+
Kirk's not an idiot.
He notices when crewmembers disappear only to turn up dead hours, sometimes days, later in the autopsy room sewn back together because the dermal regenerators don't work on dead flesh. There's only one doctor on his ship with such a fondness for old medical techniques that would be able to so flawlessly suture the skin back together, a work of art in the form of black thread crossing red lines on a gray body.
After he nearly gets killed with a fucking spear, of all things, the number increases but not suspiciously so. Kirk only notices because he's paying attention, watching for it. He thinks, maybe, McCoy is projecting. He can't kill Kirk so he kills others in his place. But it doesn't line up, doesn't fit, and it makes even less sense when he catches sight of his own back in the mirror, sees the round scar from where the spear had left his body that was impossible for McCoy to have forgotten to take care of because the doctor simply isn't that careless.
He thinks he understands when McCoy is practically fucking the scar with his mouth. This is why Kirk doesn't say anything when the second scar makes an appearance on his throat. He kind of actually likes the way this one looks. Anyone on his crew who might be looking to make a power play will now think twice when they see that scar, knowing that he'd already danced with death and came through victorious. It vaulted him almost into immortality.
Kirk lies down on his bed, handing McCoy the knife and staying perfectly still as McCoy cuts off his clothes, every so often intentionally cutting just a little too deep to graze his skin, leaving Kirk gasping for more. McCoy draws with the blade across his chest and abdomen, over the tops of his thighs and shoulders, leaving blooming trails of blood in its wake that he follows with his teeth, aggravating the cut, and then his tongue to sooth it away.
"Bones…" He calls out when McCoy pulls away to take off his own clothes before returning to the bed, the knife put away, and he moves a hand to Kirk's throat, holding it in place as he worships that scar with his mouth. Kirk can feel how hard McCoy is against his thigh, and he wonders how much of it is because of the mark that he put there and how much is because Kirk allows it.
McCoy pulls away, the hand on Kirk's throat moving to his hair. "Just hold still, Jim; I have to take care of you."
Any other phrasing would've have left Kirk's mind working in overdrive afterward, but the fact that McCoy had said I have to instead of I need to or I want to or even it's my job to that sends Kirk searching for answers.
+
He finds the file hidden and embedded in his own dossier and if that doesn't raise his defenses, that Starfleet is keeping secrets from him in his own damn records, like nothing else ever had. His anger turns into pleasant surprise almost instantly, though, when he reads through the attachment, finding something he'd never expected to.
McCoy's life is bound to his own.
Kirk laughs, switching his PADD to check out locations of his crewmembers to notice one of the yeomen being reported as missing and that McCoy is in the autopsy room. He decides to pay him a visit and is starting to doubt how aware of the goings on on his own damn ship he is when McCoy manages to take a situation where Kirk should have absolute control and put himself in charge. He manages to keep his calm when he realizes that McCoy is right - their lives are bound, but McCoy owns Kirk. If Kirk dies, then McCoy is to follow him, but if McCoy dies, Kirk also won't last much longer.
He gives it a week to think it over, leaving an ensign in the booth for so long that it actually killed him because the kid had pissed Kirk off and then he simply forgot about him down there. Kirk sent Scotty an expensive bottle of Scotch in compensation for the smell of burned flesh and excrement that he's certain will linger for the rest of the five year mission.
If he's going to admit that McCoy is the one with the power, here, he needs to do it in his own way that twists the situation, still letting him come out on top.
Kirk's mouth morphs into a wry grin when an idea forms, and he can't help but notice how the bridge crew suddenly look more interested in their panels so they don't catch his eye and his potential wrath.
+
Kirk's in sickbay, which in itself is nothing new, but he's seated next to a biobed with an agonizer in his hand and his phaser in his lap, keeping guard. He hasn't slept in nearly thirty-six hours; McCoy has been unconscious for twenty-nine.
The Empire wanted them to check on one of the new planets being terraformed, to make sure the colonists were doing okay and sending them new weapons, planet-based phasers and torpedo launchers, in case the Romulans or the Klingons or, hell, even other Terrans decided to come calling. The planet had dilithium stores, the only thing that made it of interest to anyone, and they'd also been ordered to run health assessments on the colonists to make sure the slightly off for human standards air and water wasn't starting to have any detrimental affects.
McCoy had teleported down with the away team, complaining the whole time, couldn't even say some sun and fresh air would do him some good when it was possible that it wouldn't depending on what shape the colonists were in.
There hadn't been an attack. Kirk actually wishes there had been so then he could blast those responsible out of the sky, but it was a fucking earthquake, of all things. Terraforming left the ground unstable, and they'd been in what passed as the colonists' hospital when it happened, the building falling down around them and McCoy, the idiot, had tackled Kirk to the ground as the roof caved in, his body shielding Kirk's but leaving his own exposed.
M'Benga and Chapel threw around words like "brain trauma" and "unknown short- and long-term effects" in a way that had left Kirk suspicious, so he sat guard, making sure no one trying to kill McCoy, take over his position on the ship while he was down for the count. He gives himself stims every few hours, not trusting the nurses to do it and knowing where McCoy kept his own personal stash. He jolts himself with the agonizer when those are working well enough, fast enough, and the adrenaline from the pain almost seems to work better. He considers suggesting it to McCoy when he finally wakes up.
It's another eight hour before McCoy regains consciousness, and Kirk has the privacy screen drawn and is sitting on top of McCoy before the nurses even register that their boss is awake and they need to check on how he's doing. "How is it helpful to me if you're throwing yourself at death?" Kirk asks, his voice maniacal from his complete lack of sleep.
"You have a better shot at lasting without me than I do without you." McCoy's voice, in contrast, is low and raspy, dry and painful to listen to.
"You're one of the most ruthless, devious bastards I've ever met."
"Takes one to know one," McCoy mutters. "Why the hell are you sitting on me?"
"I've never been on this end of our you almost died, you asshole sex. I don't like it and you need to make it up to me."
While Kirk was talking McCoy had managed to pull the biobed monitor to the side so he could look at it, flipping through the screens and their different readouts. "Well you're going to have to take a raincheck. Think you could do with some sleep, first, Jim."
Kirk really needs to learn to not drop his guard around McCoy as he feels a hypospray being pressed against his neck and then succumbs to darkness.
+
The lieutenant really should have known better than to question Kirk's orders, especially on the bridge in front of his entire command crew, so to prove a point, he kills her brother and then has her sent to the booth. "Long enough that she welcomes death but don't actually kill her," Kirk orders, and Scotty looks very enthusiastic about that idea.
The brother he comms, requesting that they meet somewhere private as Kirk would like to make him an offer. The poor idiot, eager to earn his captain's favor, especially if it means a quick rise in the ranks, is waiting for him in the autopsy room when Kirk shows up, dragging McCoy along after him. "I brought you a present," Kirk announces. "But I want to watch."
McCoy looks extremely pleased while the lieutenant's brother starts to get very pale and even has the nerve to start to beg.
There should be a symphony playing, Kirk thinks, as he watches McCoy work. He kills quickly, efficiently, his medical expertise used in the most ruthless of ways without so much as a drop of blood hitting the floor as they maneuver the man onto the table. There's instruments and machines in here, now, that Kirk has never seen before. Some of them have alien writing on them, and some almost look like McCoy might have created them himself. All of these lives spent, bodies experimented on in death, so McCoy can truly master death not just by causing it but by also driving it away when lesser doctors would say it's too late.
Kirk watches, enrapt, as McCoy cuts down the middle of the man's chest, his gaze clear and focused but not in the same way as when he takes a blade to Kirk's own skin. Flesh peels away easily under his touch, breaking the sternum and spreading apart the ribs for Kirk's benefit, pointing out the heart, an organ so damn important for life that Kirk had always thought it would be bigger.
If it's the blood coloring the tips of his gloved fingers or the way Kirk has always just seemed to get turned on by competence, he isn't sure, but Kirk knows he's getting turned on and almost a little jealous of the way McCoy's hands are touching the body, inside and out. He knows it's a stupid jealousy - McCoy's hands have been in him, like this, during surgery when he's brought Kirk back from the edge, the scar on his back and the one across his throat proof of those moments.
Kirk leans across the table, catching McCoy's bottom lip with his teeth to pull him into a kiss, bringing his hands up to pull at McCoy's hair while he feels hands at his waist, getting blood on his uniform but he doesn't care. He rounds the table, never breaking the kiss, and backs McCoy into the wall. He feels McCoy's hands leave the small of his back, hears the snap of the latex when he rips off the gloves, dropping them to the floor, before those hands are back on him, pulling his sash up to work into Kirk's pants, grabbing his ass, forcing their bodies even closer.
"We could control the whole damn empire, Jim." Kirk barely keeps from falling apart at those words; he's wanted that power for so long, ever since Pike had challenged him back in Riverside, and he wanted to share it with McCoy but never dreamed the doctor would want the same thing. "Or have you forgotten what you said to me on the shuttle?"
"None of these bastards can stop us," Kirk hisses which turns into a groan when he feels those longer fingers wrapping around him just a little too tight, a little too rough, and only McCoy has ever been kept around long enough to know that's how Kirk prefers it. "Fuck, Bones, they won't even know what hit them."
McCoy smiles, and Kirk makes a mental note to send Pike a gift basket as their curse has become a gift and they'll all pay the price for bestowing it.
Title: Commensalism
Rating: R
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy
Word Count: 3,890
Warnings: Mirrorverse fic, blood play, knife play, part of the Symbiosis Trilogy (see also Mutualism and Parasitism) which is the prequel to Infection
Summary: He wants to see the other man not necessarily broken, but definitely unwound.
+++
His first weekend at the Imperial Academy, Kirk goes out to the bars to scope out the competition outside the classrooms and the barracks.
There's a fourth year cadet who's the same age as Kirk but has the sense of entitlement that the seniors always seem to get who decides that he likes Kirk's mouth. Kirk lets himself get dragged to the bathroom, playing weak and unwilling, but when the fourth year is pushing Kirk to his knees, Kirk grabs the other man's head in both his hands and slams it against the wall. Two of his friends come barging in at the yell and then the wet thud, and Kirk takes an elbow to the nose and a couple jabs at his ribs before he manages to incapacitate one with a kick to his kneecaps before getting a choke-hold on the other.
It's well past two o'clock in the morning when Kirk shows up at the medical dorms, coercing the computer into telling him which room is McCoy's and then the access code to get inside.
He enters the room, taking it in long enough to be pissed off that McCoy got a single before he's pinned against the wall with his arms trapped between McCoy's chest and his own back, a hypospray pressed against his throat.
"I told the computer to alert me if anyone accesses my information," McCoy answers Kirk's unasked question. "You better give me an answer I like or you'll be receiving a lethal dose of pentobarbital."
"Isn't that used to euthanize dogs?" Kirk can feel the sneer McCoy is giving him. "Just wanted to make sure my ribs aren't broken. You're a doctor, right?"
McCoy releases him, stepping away quickly before Kirk can lash out at him if he chooses to. "Just because I'm a doctor doesn't mean I'm your doctor. Now get the hell out of my room - you're dripping blood everywhere." The other man's eyes can't stop looking at Kirk's blood, it seems - the drops on his clothes, the floor, the smear on the wall where his face had been pressed against it. There's a gleam in McCoy's eyes that Kirk recognizes all too well.
He finds himself walking back to his own room actually pleased with how the encounter with McCoy had gone. The man certainly wasn't a pushover - seemed worth it to Kirk to keep an eye on him.
The first thing he does when he crawls out of bed the next morning is hack into his own records, listing McCoy, Dr. Leonard H. as his personal physician.
+
The next weekend Kirk is convinced that his nose is broken and goes stumbling to McCoy's room like he had before.
"Maybe you should stop hanging around people who find your face so offensive," McCoy drawls, hands on either side of Kirk's nose as he presses along it, checking the bone.
"Shouldn't you be using a tricorder?" Kirk asks, wondering what century this man thinks he's from if he's using his hands instead of running a scan, but they are nice hands, so Kirk isn't exactly complaining. He wants to see them causing pain, holding an agonizer, or watch him in surgery where he's literally a god among men, a simple slip of the scalpel all it would take to bring death.
"Go to the infirmary next time if you have a problem," McCoy snaps, which makes Kirk grin.
He wants to see the other man not necessarily broken, but definitely unwound. Kirk watches McCoy watch the blood drip down his face, and Kirk can't help himself when he flicks out his tongue, tasting it on his lips, before deciding he wouldn't mind letting McCoy have a sample. If his nose wasn't broken before it definitely is now as he kisses McCoy, hard and with a lot of teeth, but the doctor is giving back as good as he's getting, and if that wasn't enough to turn Kirk on, McCoy pulling back to purposefully lick the blood off Kirk's lips definitely was.
That's not the first time they fuck, but it is the first time Kirk decides that he wants to for a reason other than a show of power, and he's only able to pull away because Kirk's afraid that for the first time in his life he has a weakness and he doesn't want anyone else to see it, especially McCoy.
When he starts calling McCoy "Bones" he realizes that everyone can see it, anyway, so there's no point in denying himself what he wants.
+
The fight that leaves Kirk worse off that bruised and bloody is with his hand-to-hand combat instructor who seems to have a problem with Kirk's attitude. This is after he lost the Kobayashi Maru the first time, so he is spoiling for a fight, and is smiling and laughing when the instructor doesn't hold back on him until he punches Kirk twice in the left kidney before slamming the heel of his hand at the base of Kirk's skull, instantaneously knocking him out.
Kirk wakes up in the hospital, which is a first. The whole point of his arrangement with McCoy is that he doesn't need to come here whenever he gets injured, and it takes him a few moments to remember what happened and that he didn't arrive there under his own power.
"Fortunately for you, you have a hard head," comes a familiar voice, and Kirk sits up so quickly to look at McCoy that his head spins and he throws up on the floor.
"Fuck," he says, embarrassed but unwilling to show it. This is precisely why he avoids hospitals - his enemies don't need to know that he's compromised.
"Yeah, fuck," McCoy repeats, not making a move to come over and check on him, instead staying at the foot of the bed. "I don't know who else you've strong-armed into keeping an eye on you, but the instructor who did this miraculously turned up dead last night. You should know you've been here for almost two days."
"You pissed because someone beat you to him?" Kirk asks, and McCoy doesn't even need to respond because Kirk can see on his face that it's true. Kirk thinks back to the times he's gone out drinking with McCoy, how people are more likely to avoid him when the other man is there, too, and how it's becoming harder and harder to get into a fight lately. It was almost touching. "Aw, Bones, you really do care. Now I don't feel like I'm contributing to the relationship here. Hey I can kill the ex for you, if you want." Kirk brightens at an idea. "I'll even let you watch," he says in a sing-song voice.
"Shut up, Jim, that's not what I want right now."
He starts. McCoy's never called him by his first name before. "Do you want me to blow you?"
"You just threw up all over the floor."
"I can't help but notice that you didn't say no."
Kirk catches the glint in McCoy's eyes. "Rinse your mouth out and then maybe we'll talk."
+
"Do you have a death wish, Kirk?"
"No, sir." He's in Pike's office, and the captain looks pissed. If he looks pissed then he's probably infuriated, and Kirk wonders if he's going to be spending time in an agony booth in the near future.
"You need to stop getting into fights. You're making enemies already, and I had to pull a lot of strings to get you here. Not only will you look weak if you manage to get yourself killed, but that's not going to help my reputation, either." Pike looks at him pointedly. "Hard to have your own ship when you're dead, Kirk."
Hard to have my own ship when you're alive, Kirk thinks. He wants the Enterprise but knows she's Pike's, and he can't do anything as blatant as kill Pike to get what he wants. "I understand, sir."
"I'm not so sure you do," Pike responds. "Two hours in the booth to mull over your future should do it. You need to learn to pick and choose your battles. Can't attack everyone who looks at you sideways or makes a crack about your father."
Kirk's fists clench involuntarily, and he's glad that he's holding them behind his back so Pike can't see. "Yes, sir."
The agony booth makes his muscles contract, his body curling in on itself in an involuntary reflex from the pain, but he won't scream, won't cry out, won't give Pike that satisfaction as he all but shreds his tongue with his teeth and McCoy has to take more time to fix the muscle than Kirk had spent in the booth.
+
Kirk watches McCoy work on Pike from the observation room that sits about the surgical suite. He'd feel better about being the acting captain if his ship wasn't currently limping back to Earth on impulse, but that Romulan bastard responsible for his father's death is dead, so he chalks the day up to an overall win.
He frowns, recalling how McCoy had poisoned him to get him on the ship to begin with. It wasn't smart of him - there'll be consequences for sure, time in the booth if they don't outright execute him.
He goes back to the bridge for the rest of his shift, taking status reports from all the departments, but the ones from medical he goes down to receive personally.
"Bones!" He greets with a predatory grin as he enters the office McCoy has taken as his own. He looks tired, leaning against the desk like it's the only thing keeping him up. "How's Captain Pike?"
"Healing nerves is painful, so I'm keeping him sedated until we get back to Earth."
Kirk goes around the desk so he's on the same side of it as McCoy, forcing the doctor to sit upright in his chair as Kirk sits himself down on the desk, feeling decidedly courteous as he pushes aside the PADD that McCoy had been staring at instead of just breaking it. "I'll never quite understand how you can be so blase about killing someone except when they're under your medical care."
"I wouldn't be worth anything as a doctor if I just killed all my patients."
Kirk hums in agreement, reaching out with his legs to wheel McCoy's chair closer as he reaches down to massage McCoy's dick through his pants. "If you're feeling up to it," Kirk begins and laughs when McCoy groans in response, "I thought maybe we could go play." He pulls the knife from its sheath as his hip, rubbing the flat of the blade against his own face. "Since I am the captain, now, and I was never assigned quarters, I think we should use Pike's."
"He won't be needing them," McCoy agrees with a malicious grin and a hitch in his breath.
+
Kirk's not an idiot.
He notices when crewmembers disappear only to turn up dead hours, sometimes days, later in the autopsy room sewn back together because the dermal regenerators don't work on dead flesh. There's only one doctor on his ship with such a fondness for old medical techniques that would be able to so flawlessly suture the skin back together, a work of art in the form of black thread crossing red lines on a gray body.
After he nearly gets killed with a fucking spear, of all things, the number increases but not suspiciously so. Kirk only notices because he's paying attention, watching for it. He thinks, maybe, McCoy is projecting. He can't kill Kirk so he kills others in his place. But it doesn't line up, doesn't fit, and it makes even less sense when he catches sight of his own back in the mirror, sees the round scar from where the spear had left his body that was impossible for McCoy to have forgotten to take care of because the doctor simply isn't that careless.
He thinks he understands when McCoy is practically fucking the scar with his mouth. This is why Kirk doesn't say anything when the second scar makes an appearance on his throat. He kind of actually likes the way this one looks. Anyone on his crew who might be looking to make a power play will now think twice when they see that scar, knowing that he'd already danced with death and came through victorious. It vaulted him almost into immortality.
Kirk lies down on his bed, handing McCoy the knife and staying perfectly still as McCoy cuts off his clothes, every so often intentionally cutting just a little too deep to graze his skin, leaving Kirk gasping for more. McCoy draws with the blade across his chest and abdomen, over the tops of his thighs and shoulders, leaving blooming trails of blood in its wake that he follows with his teeth, aggravating the cut, and then his tongue to sooth it away.
"Bones…" He calls out when McCoy pulls away to take off his own clothes before returning to the bed, the knife put away, and he moves a hand to Kirk's throat, holding it in place as he worships that scar with his mouth. Kirk can feel how hard McCoy is against his thigh, and he wonders how much of it is because of the mark that he put there and how much is because Kirk allows it.
McCoy pulls away, the hand on Kirk's throat moving to his hair. "Just hold still, Jim; I have to take care of you."
Any other phrasing would've have left Kirk's mind working in overdrive afterward, but the fact that McCoy had said I have to instead of I need to or I want to or even it's my job to that sends Kirk searching for answers.
+
He finds the file hidden and embedded in his own dossier and if that doesn't raise his defenses, that Starfleet is keeping secrets from him in his own damn records, like nothing else ever had. His anger turns into pleasant surprise almost instantly, though, when he reads through the attachment, finding something he'd never expected to.
McCoy's life is bound to his own.
Kirk laughs, switching his PADD to check out locations of his crewmembers to notice one of the yeomen being reported as missing and that McCoy is in the autopsy room. He decides to pay him a visit and is starting to doubt how aware of the goings on on his own damn ship he is when McCoy manages to take a situation where Kirk should have absolute control and put himself in charge. He manages to keep his calm when he realizes that McCoy is right - their lives are bound, but McCoy owns Kirk. If Kirk dies, then McCoy is to follow him, but if McCoy dies, Kirk also won't last much longer.
He gives it a week to think it over, leaving an ensign in the booth for so long that it actually killed him because the kid had pissed Kirk off and then he simply forgot about him down there. Kirk sent Scotty an expensive bottle of Scotch in compensation for the smell of burned flesh and excrement that he's certain will linger for the rest of the five year mission.
If he's going to admit that McCoy is the one with the power, here, he needs to do it in his own way that twists the situation, still letting him come out on top.
Kirk's mouth morphs into a wry grin when an idea forms, and he can't help but notice how the bridge crew suddenly look more interested in their panels so they don't catch his eye and his potential wrath.
+
Kirk's in sickbay, which in itself is nothing new, but he's seated next to a biobed with an agonizer in his hand and his phaser in his lap, keeping guard. He hasn't slept in nearly thirty-six hours; McCoy has been unconscious for twenty-nine.
The Empire wanted them to check on one of the new planets being terraformed, to make sure the colonists were doing okay and sending them new weapons, planet-based phasers and torpedo launchers, in case the Romulans or the Klingons or, hell, even other Terrans decided to come calling. The planet had dilithium stores, the only thing that made it of interest to anyone, and they'd also been ordered to run health assessments on the colonists to make sure the slightly off for human standards air and water wasn't starting to have any detrimental affects.
McCoy had teleported down with the away team, complaining the whole time, couldn't even say some sun and fresh air would do him some good when it was possible that it wouldn't depending on what shape the colonists were in.
There hadn't been an attack. Kirk actually wishes there had been so then he could blast those responsible out of the sky, but it was a fucking earthquake, of all things. Terraforming left the ground unstable, and they'd been in what passed as the colonists' hospital when it happened, the building falling down around them and McCoy, the idiot, had tackled Kirk to the ground as the roof caved in, his body shielding Kirk's but leaving his own exposed.
M'Benga and Chapel threw around words like "brain trauma" and "unknown short- and long-term effects" in a way that had left Kirk suspicious, so he sat guard, making sure no one trying to kill McCoy, take over his position on the ship while he was down for the count. He gives himself stims every few hours, not trusting the nurses to do it and knowing where McCoy kept his own personal stash. He jolts himself with the agonizer when those are working well enough, fast enough, and the adrenaline from the pain almost seems to work better. He considers suggesting it to McCoy when he finally wakes up.
It's another eight hour before McCoy regains consciousness, and Kirk has the privacy screen drawn and is sitting on top of McCoy before the nurses even register that their boss is awake and they need to check on how he's doing. "How is it helpful to me if you're throwing yourself at death?" Kirk asks, his voice maniacal from his complete lack of sleep.
"You have a better shot at lasting without me than I do without you." McCoy's voice, in contrast, is low and raspy, dry and painful to listen to.
"You're one of the most ruthless, devious bastards I've ever met."
"Takes one to know one," McCoy mutters. "Why the hell are you sitting on me?"
"I've never been on this end of our you almost died, you asshole sex. I don't like it and you need to make it up to me."
While Kirk was talking McCoy had managed to pull the biobed monitor to the side so he could look at it, flipping through the screens and their different readouts. "Well you're going to have to take a raincheck. Think you could do with some sleep, first, Jim."
Kirk really needs to learn to not drop his guard around McCoy as he feels a hypospray being pressed against his neck and then succumbs to darkness.
+
The lieutenant really should have known better than to question Kirk's orders, especially on the bridge in front of his entire command crew, so to prove a point, he kills her brother and then has her sent to the booth. "Long enough that she welcomes death but don't actually kill her," Kirk orders, and Scotty looks very enthusiastic about that idea.
The brother he comms, requesting that they meet somewhere private as Kirk would like to make him an offer. The poor idiot, eager to earn his captain's favor, especially if it means a quick rise in the ranks, is waiting for him in the autopsy room when Kirk shows up, dragging McCoy along after him. "I brought you a present," Kirk announces. "But I want to watch."
McCoy looks extremely pleased while the lieutenant's brother starts to get very pale and even has the nerve to start to beg.
There should be a symphony playing, Kirk thinks, as he watches McCoy work. He kills quickly, efficiently, his medical expertise used in the most ruthless of ways without so much as a drop of blood hitting the floor as they maneuver the man onto the table. There's instruments and machines in here, now, that Kirk has never seen before. Some of them have alien writing on them, and some almost look like McCoy might have created them himself. All of these lives spent, bodies experimented on in death, so McCoy can truly master death not just by causing it but by also driving it away when lesser doctors would say it's too late.
Kirk watches, enrapt, as McCoy cuts down the middle of the man's chest, his gaze clear and focused but not in the same way as when he takes a blade to Kirk's own skin. Flesh peels away easily under his touch, breaking the sternum and spreading apart the ribs for Kirk's benefit, pointing out the heart, an organ so damn important for life that Kirk had always thought it would be bigger.
If it's the blood coloring the tips of his gloved fingers or the way Kirk has always just seemed to get turned on by competence, he isn't sure, but Kirk knows he's getting turned on and almost a little jealous of the way McCoy's hands are touching the body, inside and out. He knows it's a stupid jealousy - McCoy's hands have been in him, like this, during surgery when he's brought Kirk back from the edge, the scar on his back and the one across his throat proof of those moments.
Kirk leans across the table, catching McCoy's bottom lip with his teeth to pull him into a kiss, bringing his hands up to pull at McCoy's hair while he feels hands at his waist, getting blood on his uniform but he doesn't care. He rounds the table, never breaking the kiss, and backs McCoy into the wall. He feels McCoy's hands leave the small of his back, hears the snap of the latex when he rips off the gloves, dropping them to the floor, before those hands are back on him, pulling his sash up to work into Kirk's pants, grabbing his ass, forcing their bodies even closer.
"We could control the whole damn empire, Jim." Kirk barely keeps from falling apart at those words; he's wanted that power for so long, ever since Pike had challenged him back in Riverside, and he wanted to share it with McCoy but never dreamed the doctor would want the same thing. "Or have you forgotten what you said to me on the shuttle?"
"None of these bastards can stop us," Kirk hisses which turns into a groan when he feels those longer fingers wrapping around him just a little too tight, a little too rough, and only McCoy has ever been kept around long enough to know that's how Kirk prefers it. "Fuck, Bones, they won't even know what hit them."
McCoy smiles, and Kirk makes a mental note to send Pike a gift basket as their curse has become a gift and they'll all pay the price for bestowing it.