Considerately Kill Me (Kirk/McCoy R)
Title: Considerately Kill Me
Rating: R
Pairings: Kirk/McCoy, mentioned Scott/Chapel
Word Count: 2,215
Warnings: Mirrorverse, bloodletting, unbetaed
Summary: For this prompt at buckleup_meme and the hc_bingo prompt old school medical treatment - McCoy closes his eyes, grateful, and waits for the pain to pass as death finally overtakes him.
+++
"I need you to kill me," McCoy says while eating dinner in the captain's quarters, taking a sip of wine while looking at Kirk like he'd told Kirk that his next round of vaccinations were up - perfectly professional and emotionless but expecting an argument.
"Are you out of your damn mind?" Kirk asks, and it makes McCoy smile into his glass as the words he's so used to saying to Kirk are reversed onto him. "I'm not killing the best doctor in the empire."
"If you don't someone else will," McCoy replies, setting down his glass before folding his arms across his chest. "I'm dying."
Kirk looks like he's waiting for the punchline, his eyes narrowed as he examines McCoy like he can see his body slowly deteriorating. "Bullshit."
McCoy sighs, rolls his eyes, and continues like hammering in enough information will force Kirk to believe him. "Xenopolycythemia. My marrow's producing too many red blood cells. I'll have a year at the outset if someone else doesn't get to me first because of how weak I'll become." His expression turns wry. "I'm dying because of my bones."
"Shut the hell up and eat your dinner," Kirk says, his voice gone cold, but McCoy can see the slight tremor in Kirk's hand as he brings his fork to his mouth.
+
Kirk doesn't believe him until he storms into McCoy's quarters and goes straight for his bathroom to see McCoy standing in his shower, naked with rivulets of blood running down his legs and body, as he cuts lines into his skin using a scalpel with an actual metal blade.
McCoy's skin looks abnormally pale, even to him, and the stark contrast of his blood - redder than usual because of the proliferated blood cells - doesn't help. He's dizzy with blood loss, but the tricorder is giving him a blood pressure reading that he likes more than what it was showing him before, so he pulls at the cuts, not letting them clot.
His mouth pressed into a tight line, Kirk steps into the shower, and McCoy leans into him, closing his eyes to keep the room from spinning as much, and he can feel Kirk kiss the pulse point in his neck as McCoy's blood soaks into his uniform.
"Nothing's fucking killing you," Kirk says harshly, his fingers digging into McCoy's shoulder blades. "Not me, not anyone on this ship, and certainly not this disease." He spits out the last word, and for a moment McCoy almost believes him.
He knows he'll be begging, later, when the symptoms are so bad that he's bed-ridden and can't even move to take a piss. He knows he'll beg like his father had at the end when he'd been suffering, and McCoy hopes that Kirk will be as merciful as he'd been.
+
The bloodletting works for a little while. It brings his blood pressure back down whenever it gets too high, but at the same time it makes his immune system produce even more cells to replace those that had been lost. It stops being enough six weeks in, and on the seventh week McCoy's veins and arteries are so swollen that he has a constant headache and can barely even bend his fingers or toes anymore.
Another two weeks and he can't move them at all, and Kirk makes M'Benga the Acting Chief Physician while confining McCoy to the captain's quarters.
He reads medical journals on his PADD because Kirk won't let him do anything else. The captain's removed anything and everything that could conceivably used as a weapon. Killing himself hasn't been an option he's considered, but he supposes that by the time he gets to that point, he won't have the strength to, anyway.
"I need you to find me something," he says when Kirk returns from his shift.
"I'd guess fried chicken, but I think you need to watch your cholesterol, Bones," Kirk responds, and it's a bad joke that has both of them averting their gazes because they don't want to see the emotions in each other's eyes. McCoy doesn't need to know that Kirk cares enough that this is hurting him, and Kirk doesn't need to know that despite confronting it and causing it so many times, McCoy is afraid of dying.
"I need a high-flux hemodialysis machine."
"I'll get engineering to make the damn thing," Kirk says, full of conviction, and McCoy thinks he could love him if they'd been born in a class that was permitted such a weakness.
+
The machine looks exactly like the pictures McCoy's seen from the twenty first century.
"I think Scotty and Chapel are fucking," Kirk says as he watches McCoy try to stick the IV catheter into his vena cava. He can't grip it well enough, though, so Kirk takes the hollow needle and follows McCoy's directions. "Does your head nurse want you dead?"
"I'm dying anyway. She wouldn't have to bribe Scott to go against your orders if that's what she wanted." If the machine doesn't work, though, McCoy wants to see what Kirk will do to Scott and Chapel - assuming it doesn't kill him.
Kirk's fingers feel so cold against his chest as he inserts the catheter. He leans back when he's done, one hand still pressed to McCoy's sternum.
"Now just turn it on," McCoy says, and with the flip of a switch McCoy's blood is being drawn out of his body, filtered, and fed back in. If the membrane was sized correctly, not all of his red blood cells are being returned, and while it's far from a cure, it will at least give him more time. He just has no idea how long it will be until the dialysis machine can't keep up with his bone marrow's cell production anymore.
After an hour, McCoy can bend his fingers again, and he takes advantage of it by grabbing Kirk by the hair and crushing their mouths together, and as much as McCoy wants to feel Kirk's body flush against his chest, he can't risk the catheter getting either pulled out or pushed in too deep.
The wall comm chimes, causing Kirk to pull away with a snarl as he stalks over to the panel, slamming his fist on the button to open the channel. "What is it?"
McCoy can just imagine how nonplussed the Vulcan is by Kirk's irritation. "You have an urgent message from Earth, Captain, and it's not from Imperial Command. I've taken the liberty to forward it to your ready room as your private quarters aren't as secure."
"This better be important," Kirk replies before closing the channel. He points at McCoy, "And you better still be alive when I get back."
"Yes, sir," McCoy says, offering a lazy salute.
+
It's nearly six months that the dialysis machine keeps working. During the first three months McCoy doesn't even feel sick, but then his body starts adding cells faster than the machine can take them away, and changing the size of the pores in the membrane only helps so much before it's just removing all of his blood.
His condition deteriorates rapidly. McCoy's extremities are swollen from too much blood running through his body, and he's too hot and sweating constantly. He can't move, forget even opening his eyes most of the time, and Kirk's assigned Chapel to take care of him every waking moment. Kirk has no problem threatening Scott's life to keep her in line, and McCoy's not strong enough to tell him that Chapel is the only one he trusts, the only one on his staff that he knows would never betray him because she'd have nothing if McCoy hadn't given her the job.
The only time Chapel's not taking care of him is when Kirk is. Kirk talks to him the entire time, but McCoy is clueless about what he's saying, can't hear over the blood roaring in his ears.
McCoy has no idea how much time passes. He just knows that it is, and the more that goes by, the higher the chance of a clot dislodging and going to his heart or his brain.
"Please," he says, or at least he tries to say, but Kirk just brushes his hair aside, pressing a cool kiss to McCoy's forehead as he keeps talking.
+
McCoy feels too heavy, like there's lead running through his veins instead.
He can see the light come on through the insides of his eyelids and forces them open, squinting at the silhouettes of Kirk, Chapel, and M'Benga. Kirk has blood all over his uniform and Chapel's gaze keeps darting down to the tricorder in her hands, but what holds McCoy's attention the most is the hypospray M'Benga is holding.
"Thank you," McCoy says, squeezing his eyes shut against the relieved tears that threaten to spill out of his eyes.
A hand is holding his, so McCoy opens his eyes again, and he wishes he could tell what Kirk is saying to him. Kirk's mouth stops moving, and he's watching McCoy like he's waiting for a response, but McCoy doesn't know what he's supposed to do or say. Minutes, maybe hours, pass before Kirk turns to M'Benga with a decisive nod, and the hypospray is pressed against the base of his neck, the drug released into his system.
McCoy closes his eyes, grateful, and waits for the pain to pass as death finally overtakes him.
+
He doesn't die, though.
At first nothing changes, but then, beyond anything McCoy thought possible, his body hurts even more. He thrashes and screams until either passing out or being sedated, he's not sure which, but then M'Benga will be in Kirk's quarters again with another hypospray and the process starts anew.
McCoy wakes up to the sound of a heartbeat, and it takes him a while to notice that it's not his own blood rushing through his head that he hears, but that he's lying down with his head against Kirk's chest.
He opens his eyes, uncertain as to why he can hear again, why he's sweating and feverish but he doesn't feel like his entire body is distended anymore.
"Jim?" He croaks, then coughs, and then Kirk's moving under him and pressing an ice cube to his mouth.
"It's okay, Bones; you're going to be okay."
"I feel like shit," he says, swallowing the small amount of water and licking the moisture from his lips. "A different kind of shit but still shit."
"The medication is killing the defective cells in your marrow, and your immune system is taking care of the excess red blood cells."
"Contradictory son of a bitch," McCoy growls. "I tell you to kill me and you cure me."
"Sorry, Bones, but you're stuck with me for a while longer yet."
+
His first day back on duty, McCoy finds an unfamiliar humanoid body in his autopsy lab. The specimen had been in unusually perfect health, cut short by aggressive torture that McCoy recognizes as Kirk's signature style. He remembers the day that he thought they'd come to finally put him out of his misery, the blood that had been staining Kirk's uniform, and McCoy wonders if it would match the body on his table.
He pulls off his gloves and throws them in the resequencer. These humanoids are so much more interesting to him alive anyway. Feeling generous, he lets Chapel play with the body. She'd been a medical student before the unfortunate accident that made her unable to practice, after all.
McCoy goes to Kirk's quarters when his shift is over and waits nearly an hour before Kirk arrives.
"Did you get your welcome back present?" Kirk asks with a self-satisfied smile.
"You know I prefer working on the living," McCoy replies, giving Kirk an obvious once-over. "It's less fun when they aren't responsive."
"Well, that was just the first part," Kirk says, fingers working at his gold sash and then shrugging out of his vest while keeping his eyes locked with McCoy's. "They called themselves the Fabrini - had this fancy medical database that Spock knew about."
"I'll be sure to thank him next time I'm on the bridge," McCoy responds dryly, not liking the idea of owing anything to the Vulcan, especially his life, but apparently he does.
"Not our Spock, the other one." Kirk toes out of his boots and makes quick work of his pants until he's standing halfway across the room from McCoy in nothing but his underwear. "You died in his universe, and they came across the Fabrini with their cure years later."
Owing his life to the other Vulcan isn't much better to McCoy, especially since the other one had confessed to killing Kirk in his own timeline, but at least it'll be some time before he has to see that Spock again and affect some gratitude.
"So what were you saying about part two?" McCoy asks, watching Kirk cross the room with a deliberate slowness, the visible outline of his erection the only sign that he's not being intentionally obtuse about the reaction he's trying to get out of McCoy.
"It's right here," Kirk answers, cupping himself and moaning like an expensive whore before sliding onto McCoy's lap, straddling his legs to lean in for a possessive kiss.
Rating: R
Pairings: Kirk/McCoy, mentioned Scott/Chapel
Word Count: 2,215
Warnings: Mirrorverse, bloodletting, unbetaed
Summary: For this prompt at buckleup_meme and the hc_bingo prompt old school medical treatment - McCoy closes his eyes, grateful, and waits for the pain to pass as death finally overtakes him.
+++
"I need you to kill me," McCoy says while eating dinner in the captain's quarters, taking a sip of wine while looking at Kirk like he'd told Kirk that his next round of vaccinations were up - perfectly professional and emotionless but expecting an argument.
"Are you out of your damn mind?" Kirk asks, and it makes McCoy smile into his glass as the words he's so used to saying to Kirk are reversed onto him. "I'm not killing the best doctor in the empire."
"If you don't someone else will," McCoy replies, setting down his glass before folding his arms across his chest. "I'm dying."
Kirk looks like he's waiting for the punchline, his eyes narrowed as he examines McCoy like he can see his body slowly deteriorating. "Bullshit."
McCoy sighs, rolls his eyes, and continues like hammering in enough information will force Kirk to believe him. "Xenopolycythemia. My marrow's producing too many red blood cells. I'll have a year at the outset if someone else doesn't get to me first because of how weak I'll become." His expression turns wry. "I'm dying because of my bones."
"Shut the hell up and eat your dinner," Kirk says, his voice gone cold, but McCoy can see the slight tremor in Kirk's hand as he brings his fork to his mouth.
+
Kirk doesn't believe him until he storms into McCoy's quarters and goes straight for his bathroom to see McCoy standing in his shower, naked with rivulets of blood running down his legs and body, as he cuts lines into his skin using a scalpel with an actual metal blade.
McCoy's skin looks abnormally pale, even to him, and the stark contrast of his blood - redder than usual because of the proliferated blood cells - doesn't help. He's dizzy with blood loss, but the tricorder is giving him a blood pressure reading that he likes more than what it was showing him before, so he pulls at the cuts, not letting them clot.
His mouth pressed into a tight line, Kirk steps into the shower, and McCoy leans into him, closing his eyes to keep the room from spinning as much, and he can feel Kirk kiss the pulse point in his neck as McCoy's blood soaks into his uniform.
"Nothing's fucking killing you," Kirk says harshly, his fingers digging into McCoy's shoulder blades. "Not me, not anyone on this ship, and certainly not this disease." He spits out the last word, and for a moment McCoy almost believes him.
He knows he'll be begging, later, when the symptoms are so bad that he's bed-ridden and can't even move to take a piss. He knows he'll beg like his father had at the end when he'd been suffering, and McCoy hopes that Kirk will be as merciful as he'd been.
+
The bloodletting works for a little while. It brings his blood pressure back down whenever it gets too high, but at the same time it makes his immune system produce even more cells to replace those that had been lost. It stops being enough six weeks in, and on the seventh week McCoy's veins and arteries are so swollen that he has a constant headache and can barely even bend his fingers or toes anymore.
Another two weeks and he can't move them at all, and Kirk makes M'Benga the Acting Chief Physician while confining McCoy to the captain's quarters.
He reads medical journals on his PADD because Kirk won't let him do anything else. The captain's removed anything and everything that could conceivably used as a weapon. Killing himself hasn't been an option he's considered, but he supposes that by the time he gets to that point, he won't have the strength to, anyway.
"I need you to find me something," he says when Kirk returns from his shift.
"I'd guess fried chicken, but I think you need to watch your cholesterol, Bones," Kirk responds, and it's a bad joke that has both of them averting their gazes because they don't want to see the emotions in each other's eyes. McCoy doesn't need to know that Kirk cares enough that this is hurting him, and Kirk doesn't need to know that despite confronting it and causing it so many times, McCoy is afraid of dying.
"I need a high-flux hemodialysis machine."
"I'll get engineering to make the damn thing," Kirk says, full of conviction, and McCoy thinks he could love him if they'd been born in a class that was permitted such a weakness.
+
The machine looks exactly like the pictures McCoy's seen from the twenty first century.
"I think Scotty and Chapel are fucking," Kirk says as he watches McCoy try to stick the IV catheter into his vena cava. He can't grip it well enough, though, so Kirk takes the hollow needle and follows McCoy's directions. "Does your head nurse want you dead?"
"I'm dying anyway. She wouldn't have to bribe Scott to go against your orders if that's what she wanted." If the machine doesn't work, though, McCoy wants to see what Kirk will do to Scott and Chapel - assuming it doesn't kill him.
Kirk's fingers feel so cold against his chest as he inserts the catheter. He leans back when he's done, one hand still pressed to McCoy's sternum.
"Now just turn it on," McCoy says, and with the flip of a switch McCoy's blood is being drawn out of his body, filtered, and fed back in. If the membrane was sized correctly, not all of his red blood cells are being returned, and while it's far from a cure, it will at least give him more time. He just has no idea how long it will be until the dialysis machine can't keep up with his bone marrow's cell production anymore.
After an hour, McCoy can bend his fingers again, and he takes advantage of it by grabbing Kirk by the hair and crushing their mouths together, and as much as McCoy wants to feel Kirk's body flush against his chest, he can't risk the catheter getting either pulled out or pushed in too deep.
The wall comm chimes, causing Kirk to pull away with a snarl as he stalks over to the panel, slamming his fist on the button to open the channel. "What is it?"
McCoy can just imagine how nonplussed the Vulcan is by Kirk's irritation. "You have an urgent message from Earth, Captain, and it's not from Imperial Command. I've taken the liberty to forward it to your ready room as your private quarters aren't as secure."
"This better be important," Kirk replies before closing the channel. He points at McCoy, "And you better still be alive when I get back."
"Yes, sir," McCoy says, offering a lazy salute.
+
It's nearly six months that the dialysis machine keeps working. During the first three months McCoy doesn't even feel sick, but then his body starts adding cells faster than the machine can take them away, and changing the size of the pores in the membrane only helps so much before it's just removing all of his blood.
His condition deteriorates rapidly. McCoy's extremities are swollen from too much blood running through his body, and he's too hot and sweating constantly. He can't move, forget even opening his eyes most of the time, and Kirk's assigned Chapel to take care of him every waking moment. Kirk has no problem threatening Scott's life to keep her in line, and McCoy's not strong enough to tell him that Chapel is the only one he trusts, the only one on his staff that he knows would never betray him because she'd have nothing if McCoy hadn't given her the job.
The only time Chapel's not taking care of him is when Kirk is. Kirk talks to him the entire time, but McCoy is clueless about what he's saying, can't hear over the blood roaring in his ears.
McCoy has no idea how much time passes. He just knows that it is, and the more that goes by, the higher the chance of a clot dislodging and going to his heart or his brain.
"Please," he says, or at least he tries to say, but Kirk just brushes his hair aside, pressing a cool kiss to McCoy's forehead as he keeps talking.
+
McCoy feels too heavy, like there's lead running through his veins instead.
He can see the light come on through the insides of his eyelids and forces them open, squinting at the silhouettes of Kirk, Chapel, and M'Benga. Kirk has blood all over his uniform and Chapel's gaze keeps darting down to the tricorder in her hands, but what holds McCoy's attention the most is the hypospray M'Benga is holding.
"Thank you," McCoy says, squeezing his eyes shut against the relieved tears that threaten to spill out of his eyes.
A hand is holding his, so McCoy opens his eyes again, and he wishes he could tell what Kirk is saying to him. Kirk's mouth stops moving, and he's watching McCoy like he's waiting for a response, but McCoy doesn't know what he's supposed to do or say. Minutes, maybe hours, pass before Kirk turns to M'Benga with a decisive nod, and the hypospray is pressed against the base of his neck, the drug released into his system.
McCoy closes his eyes, grateful, and waits for the pain to pass as death finally overtakes him.
+
He doesn't die, though.
At first nothing changes, but then, beyond anything McCoy thought possible, his body hurts even more. He thrashes and screams until either passing out or being sedated, he's not sure which, but then M'Benga will be in Kirk's quarters again with another hypospray and the process starts anew.
McCoy wakes up to the sound of a heartbeat, and it takes him a while to notice that it's not his own blood rushing through his head that he hears, but that he's lying down with his head against Kirk's chest.
He opens his eyes, uncertain as to why he can hear again, why he's sweating and feverish but he doesn't feel like his entire body is distended anymore.
"Jim?" He croaks, then coughs, and then Kirk's moving under him and pressing an ice cube to his mouth.
"It's okay, Bones; you're going to be okay."
"I feel like shit," he says, swallowing the small amount of water and licking the moisture from his lips. "A different kind of shit but still shit."
"The medication is killing the defective cells in your marrow, and your immune system is taking care of the excess red blood cells."
"Contradictory son of a bitch," McCoy growls. "I tell you to kill me and you cure me."
"Sorry, Bones, but you're stuck with me for a while longer yet."
+
His first day back on duty, McCoy finds an unfamiliar humanoid body in his autopsy lab. The specimen had been in unusually perfect health, cut short by aggressive torture that McCoy recognizes as Kirk's signature style. He remembers the day that he thought they'd come to finally put him out of his misery, the blood that had been staining Kirk's uniform, and McCoy wonders if it would match the body on his table.
He pulls off his gloves and throws them in the resequencer. These humanoids are so much more interesting to him alive anyway. Feeling generous, he lets Chapel play with the body. She'd been a medical student before the unfortunate accident that made her unable to practice, after all.
McCoy goes to Kirk's quarters when his shift is over and waits nearly an hour before Kirk arrives.
"Did you get your welcome back present?" Kirk asks with a self-satisfied smile.
"You know I prefer working on the living," McCoy replies, giving Kirk an obvious once-over. "It's less fun when they aren't responsive."
"Well, that was just the first part," Kirk says, fingers working at his gold sash and then shrugging out of his vest while keeping his eyes locked with McCoy's. "They called themselves the Fabrini - had this fancy medical database that Spock knew about."
"I'll be sure to thank him next time I'm on the bridge," McCoy responds dryly, not liking the idea of owing anything to the Vulcan, especially his life, but apparently he does.
"Not our Spock, the other one." Kirk toes out of his boots and makes quick work of his pants until he's standing halfway across the room from McCoy in nothing but his underwear. "You died in his universe, and they came across the Fabrini with their cure years later."
Owing his life to the other Vulcan isn't much better to McCoy, especially since the other one had confessed to killing Kirk in his own timeline, but at least it'll be some time before he has to see that Spock again and affect some gratitude.
"So what were you saying about part two?" McCoy asks, watching Kirk cross the room with a deliberate slowness, the visible outline of his erection the only sign that he's not being intentionally obtuse about the reaction he's trying to get out of McCoy.
"It's right here," Kirk answers, cupping himself and moaning like an expensive whore before sliding onto McCoy's lap, straddling his legs to lean in for a possessive kiss.