Fic: Say Goodnight, Not Goodbye (1/3)
Title: Say Goodnight, Not Goodbye
Author: Gixxer Pilot
Summary: “You know what your problem is, Jim? You don't respect the chair.” He does now, thank you very much. ***Into Darkness spoilers***
Author's Notes: So. Star Trek: Into Darkness. My thoughts on the film can be summed up in one simple sentence: Gix was not impressed. It was a cluster for me, from start to finish. From the weak and recycled plot to the completely off base characterizations to the giant, gaping plot holes left over at the end, I felt incredibly let down by a crew that had four years between films to figure this stuff out. It just seemed wrong to me, introducing a slew of new fans to 'Trek (which is always a good thing in my book) to the franchise with something so subpar and all around egregiously out of character.
But disappointment is a great motivator, and I was writing literally the moment I returned from the theatre. Admittedly, I'm still wondering if this story's premise toes the line of cheesy but I really did like the interactions between characters and dialogue that came of it once I completed the story. I think it boiled down to the fact that I believed there was so much there in terms of character development to offer the audience that wasn't used advantageously (or indeed at all). This is my little offering of an attempt at fixing it. Enjoy!
Disclaimer: Clearly, I don’t own Star Trek. Because if I did, Into Failure Darkness Failure wouldn’t have been (in my humble opinion) a predicable, plot-hole ridden, out of character, this-has-been-done-before trainwreck. No, I do NOT have strong opinions. Nope. Not at all.
Chapter | 1 | 2 | 3 |
========
Chapter 1
“Hey, Bones? Got a minute?”
McCoy sighed and looked up from his paperwork. “Not particularly, no. But seeing as I stood over your dead irradiated body little more than three weeks ago, I think I can make some time. I need a break anyway. What do you want, Jim?”
Kirk fidgeted uncharacteristically in the doctor’s doorway, words caught in his throat.
“Well, goddammit man, spit it out! I don’t have all day! I’ve got the brass and their merry band of salivating assholes jumping down my throat at every chance they get because they’re wondering what kind of miracle cure brought you back from the dead and I, for one, am not willing to tell them shit. Bunch of classless, unethical idiots who don’t know their asses from their elbows. They’d probably managed to find a way to fuck up a cure for death by takin’ out a world or two while they were at it--” McCoy ranted, hands waving theatrically about his face, in the seconds before his brain caught up with his mouth. He stopped, dropped his hands and swiped his fingertips across tired eyes. Through his hand, he drawled out, “Ah, shit. I’m sorry, Jim. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that you, Pike, all of this--it’s gettin’ to all of us, you know?”
“I hear ya, Bones,” Kirk breathed out. He motioned towards the general living space that made up the CMO’s quarters, now nothing more than a burned out hulk of a certifiable disaster area after the fight with the Vengeance. “Permission to enter?”
The doctor lifted a small mountain of PADDs from the coffee table, hesitated for a brief second, muttered a quiet, ‘Aw, fuck it,’ and then dropped the entire lot unceremoniously on the floor behind him. Waving a hand in Jim’s direction, he replied, “Granted, though a part of me can’t believe you’re actually asking to come in instead of just inviting yourself. All that time in purgatory or wherever the hell you went while you were comin’ back from the dead musta’ drilled some manners into your thick skull.”
Kirk chuckled, noting the molasses-thick accent rolling off McCoy’s tongue. Drawl that heavy meant one of two things: Bones was drunk, or he was exhausted. It only took Jim one quick glance at his friend’s lined face and drooping eyelids to discern the latter was the right answer. Stuffing his hands into his pockets, he lifted his left foot and said, “Nice to know you haven’t lost that famous acerbic wit of yours, doctor.”
“And I’m glad to see you haven’t lost your idiot complex. Now get your scrawny ass in here and close that damned door. Don’t need to be givin’ the whole ship a show,” he half-ordered, watching as Kirk picked his way over and around the smashed furniture and broken personal items that were littering what was left of the CMO’s quarters.
“Maybe next time, Bones. I’m not really up to that kind of thing yet,” Jim finally said with a weak waggle of his eyebrows, the smirk missing much of its characteristic Kirk charm.
“And yet here you are,” McCoy answered as he took in Kirk’s equally haggard appearance.
“You ever going to clean up in here?” Jim asked, shifting the topic smoothy as he rooted around and through the various piles McCoy made of his demolished personal belongings.
McCoy snorted. “What’s the point? This ship needs a complete retrofit. Figured I’d let someone else make themselves useful and do it for me. God only knows it’s the only privilege of my rank. Besides, there’s nothing left in here I want anyway,” he added softly.
Jim toed through the charred remains of McCoy’s desk, noting the stack of PADDs fused to the console and the small pile of fried holocubes still sitting on Bones’ counter. He cringed, knowing what kind of work the doctor kept on them. Looking up, Kirk pointed to the PADDs and asked, “How much did you lose?”
“All of it,” McCoy replied with a heavy sigh. “Years of research, articles I was working on.”
Jim plucked one of the holos from the counter and attempted to turn it on. It flickered, sputtered and then died. “Bones, I’m sorry,” he said earnestly. “If I could do it over again, I would have--”
The doctor cut Jim off with a quick wave of his hand, closing his eyes as memories of Kirk’s still body pushed themselves to the forefront of his mind. “Don’t, Jim. They don’t matter. It’s just research. Nothing that can’t be done again.” Bones stopped, stared at Jim and sighed. He couldn’t do this, couldn’t have that conversation right now. He’d done well enough holding it together for the sake of the rest of the crew during the two weeks Kirk was unconscious, but he was too tired, too hopped up on stim shots and coffee and too on edge after losing his best friend to think clearly enough to talk about the emotional ramifications Jim’s death and miraculous resurrection.
Thankfully, Kirk seemed to get the message. He nodded silently and all but collapsed onto the plush chair opposite McCoy.
Bones regarded his best friend carefully. In a lighter tone, he told Jim, “Now, not even a week outta your sickbed - against my better judgement mind you - and you’re already invading my personal space. Must be mighty important that you feel it can’t wait.”
“You know me so well,” Kirk quipped, interlacing his fingers as he leaned his forearms on his knees.
After years as Jim’s Kirk’s best friend, confidant, and the man who sewed his dumb ass back together while cursing a blue streak, Len could read Jim’s mood simply by looking at his body language. Head down, shoulders hunched, eyebrows pinched together right above his nose. The last time he’d seen that kind of apprehension was...
...Right after the Narada. Right after he told Kirk Pike might not live, and if he did live, he may never walk again. Right after he told Jim that his mentor’s career was almost certainly over, if not his life. Right before he found the golden fucking horseshoe of cures, right before he realized in that one instance, he’d rather be lucky than good.
He wished some of that luck had leaked over to this crisis. Chris.
McCoy pursed his lips, pushed himself off the couch and padded silently to the liquor cabinet stationed in the corner of the room. Opening the door, he pulled out a bottle of Kentucky’s finest bourbon and two glasses. He made his way back to the couch, dropped the booze on the table and poured two healthy glasses. Handing one wordlessly to Kirk, he nudged the younger man when Jim didn’t automatically reach up to accept the glass. “Thank God this survived. Here. Take it. Doctor’s orders.”
“Thanks,” Kirk replied, if only out of habit. He took a sip of the smooth liquid and nodded his head. “This is pretty good, Bones. Really good, actually. A lot better than that paint thinner you normally drink.”
The doctor swallowed audibly. “It was from Chris,” he admitted, forcing himself to raise his eyes to meet his captain’s. “He gave me a case when the Fleet cleared him for active duty. Guess he thought he’d never walk again and wanted to thank me. Still not sure what I did.” He paused, sighing heavily. “Seemed appropriate now, and you looked like you could use it.”
“You always know,” Kirk replied, echoing his earlier reply.
Alarm bells started firing in McCoy’s head. Kirk’s clear distraction was disconcerting, incongruous to a man who was the consummate observer. Schooling his face to keep the open shock from leaking its was out, he answered, “Most of the time.” The doctor took a long pull from his own tumbler, leaned back into the soft cushions and closed his eyes. “Helluva month.”
“Yeah,” Kirk agreed quietly as he took another sip.
McCoy swirled the drink around his glass and let the silence coat the room for a couple of long minutes. He leaned forward, refilled his glass and propped one bare foot up on the coffee table. “Now as much as I love your company, I know you didn’t come here just for a drink and to stare at the walls. What can I do for you, Jim?” he asked earnestly, his tone surprisingly gentle and without its normal stinging barbs of sarcasm.
“Have any of your patients ever talked to you about their...experiences?” Kirk blurted out before he could stop himself. “You know, being dead, or knowing they were about to buy the farm?”
“Experiences?” McCoy questioned. “As in angels and trumpets and pearly gates? That kind of hocus pocus?”
“Yeah, like that. Kind of.”
“Kind of?” McCoy’s right eyebrow lifted gracefully from its parade rest spot while he said, “Jim, I’m a doctor, not a mind reader. And if you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly firing on all cylinders here. I’m going to need more than that.”
The captain shook his head and jammed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “You know what, forget it. I’m sorry to have bothered you, Doctor. I should go,” Kirk, flustered, nearly babbled in a rush. He set his tumbler on the table, hopping from the chair as he practically fled the room.
“Oh, no,” McCoy began, vaulting off the couch as he placed himself between Kirk and the door to his quarters as he mentally kicked his own verbal insensitively. “Jim, that came out wrong. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
Kirk looked down at McCoy’s arm and then back up to the man’s face. He started blankly ahead but didn’t make any more to leave the room. Shaking his head, he said, “It wasn’t you, Bones. It never is, tact or no.” Lifting his eyes to search the various patterns of scorch marks on McCoy’s ceiling, he exhaled a hard breath and added, “God, I feel ridiculous.”
The doctor cursed quietly under his breath. He laid one hand Kirk’s bicep and the other his chest while he looked the younger man in the eyes. Jim might try to deny it, but the ashen pallor and rapid breathing were not all attributable to his most recent brush with death. Searching Kirk’s face, McCoy damned his own hypocrisy straight to hell, narrowed his eyes and said, “You came here to talk and I’m not letting you leave until you do.”
“And I’m telling you I’m not ready,” Jim replied, his tone firm bordering just on the right side of defiant.
McCoy increased the tension on Kirk’s bicep and physically pushed back on his chest. “Jim, hear me out. I don’t have to tell you that you’ve been through an awful damned lot in the past three weeks, more than any man has an expectation to withstand,” McCoy took a breath when Kirk didn’t move. “Now if you want to leave, I’m not going to stop you. But I’m telling you as your physician and more importantly your damned fool friend that you need to talk. If not to me, then to someone else. You’re the captain, and we need you.”
“I’m not the captain anymore, Bones. I’m just---I don’t even know what I am.” Jim felt the shaky, heart pounding adrenaline rush fade from his body. He hated when McCoy was right (which was, sadly, often) but he couldn’t keep up the pretense of anger, not when Bones’ words hit so close to home. He sank down back to the safety of McCoy’s living room furniture and put his head in his hands.
McCoy laid one brotherly hand on Jim’s shoulder, giving it a squeeze as he resumed his seated position. He sat forward, and as Kirk had done earlier, interlaced his fingers and rested his forearms on his knees. With his hair shorter than it had been during the Narada debacle, it no longer flopped in front of his face after he’d showered and he found himself almost missing the distraction of moving it back into place. It gave his hands something to do. Instead, he settled for a deep breath, steeling himself before he admitted, “I try not to think about the afterlife. Means I’d be dead in order to see it.”
“Does that scare you, Bones? Death?”
“Hell, yes it does. God only knows why I signed up for five years on this flying deathtrap with all you adrenaline junkies when I’m terrified of dying.” McCoy paused, poured himself another drink and lifted it to his lips. He bobbed his eyebrows up and down and added almost casually, “Not that you’d--,” cutting himself off as quickly as the sentence tumbled from his lips.
“What was that, Bones?”
McCoy shifted in his chair, uncomfortable, and cleared his throat. “Nothing,” he muttered. “Just my mouth gettin’ ahead of my brain again.”
Kirk’s head snapped up. He titled his head to the side, his brain filling in the likely end of McCoy’s statement. His facial expression went from surprise to defiance, touched on anger for a moment before it finally settled somewhere between embarrassment and agreement. “You know, about a month ago, you’d have been right about that.”
“And now?”
“And now,” Kirk answered, trailing off as he searched for the right words. Fixing his best friend with a self-deprecating smile, Jim replied, “And now I think there’s a really good chance you’re wrong. You’d be surprised what being dead does for your ego.”
“You care to enlighten me?”
“I don’t know if I can really explain it. It’s a little...odd,” Kirk began.
“Try,” McCoy replied.
“I had this really weird dream. Or at least I think it was a dream.” When McCoy simply tilted his head, Kirk took a long breath and continued. “It sounds so lame, but I swear I had a heart to heart with Pike. Except I know that’s not possible because he’s dead, and I don’t believe in supernatural bullshit like that. Or at least I thought I didn’t. But I also didn’t believe Marcus was a raving lunatic, or that he’d decide to thaw a super soldier popsicle for shits and giggles.”
McCoy blinked. Once, then twice. “Wow,” he said, his tone clipped but succinct. Raising his hand, he rubbed his temples in small circles with his fingertips, willing the ever present headache to dissipate.
Jim bent his neck forward and hunched his shoulders. Curious eyes regarded his best friend. “I know I was rambling, but Bones? Tell me what’s going on in that brilliant head of yours.”
“Goddamned déjà vu,” McCoy said with a shake of his head, almost as if he was trying to shake off the incongruence of the statement with the person who said it. “It’s just that - aw hell, I don’t even know how to say this.” He leaned back on the couch and put his arms behind his head. “Still, I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me, with you bein’ like Pike and all. Half the time, I was convinced that you two shared a set of chromosomes, with how you acted like one another.”
Jim was incredulous. “What? You lost me.”
“I could have the JAG up my ass for what I’m about to tell you because I’m about to break doctor/patient confidentiality.” McCoy tilted his head back and forth, like he was mentally weighing pros and cons. He licked his lips and continued with, “But fuck ‘em. I suppose I could make one more exception in a lifetime of exceptions for you. I don’t think Chris would mind. The answer to your question, the one you asked about the afterlife - it’s yes.”
Jim’s eyes lifted to the ceiling of the CMO’s quarters as he processed the information, the dots sliding together in his head for form a solid picture. “Pike? Pike was the one who asked you the same question?”
“Not exactly the same question, but similar enough in circumstance. Either way, damned eerie, ain’t it?” McCoy settled on the couch and stretched out his entire frame. “Tell me about yours.”
Jim toed off his boots (he was well aware of the ‘no footwear on the table’ rule in McCoy’s quarters) and plopped his socked feet on the table. He stared up at the ceiling and started off, “It was right after I’d crawled back to the access door for the warp core...”
========
Next Up: Jim discovers just how strange the human mind can be.
Author: Gixxer Pilot
Summary: “You know what your problem is, Jim? You don't respect the chair.” He does now, thank you very much. ***Into Darkness spoilers***
Author's Notes: So. Star Trek: Into Darkness. My thoughts on the film can be summed up in one simple sentence: Gix was not impressed. It was a cluster for me, from start to finish. From the weak and recycled plot to the completely off base characterizations to the giant, gaping plot holes left over at the end, I felt incredibly let down by a crew that had four years between films to figure this stuff out. It just seemed wrong to me, introducing a slew of new fans to 'Trek (which is always a good thing in my book) to the franchise with something so subpar and all around egregiously out of character.
But disappointment is a great motivator, and I was writing literally the moment I returned from the theatre. Admittedly, I'm still wondering if this story's premise toes the line of cheesy but I really did like the interactions between characters and dialogue that came of it once I completed the story. I think it boiled down to the fact that I believed there was so much there in terms of character development to offer the audience that wasn't used advantageously (or indeed at all). This is my little offering of an attempt at fixing it. Enjoy!
Disclaimer: Clearly, I don’t own Star Trek. Because if I did, Into Failure Darkness Failure wouldn’t have been (in my humble opinion) a predicable, plot-hole ridden, out of character, this-has-been-done-before trainwreck. No, I do NOT have strong opinions. Nope. Not at all.
Chapter | 1 | 2 | 3 |
========
Chapter 1
“Hey, Bones? Got a minute?”
McCoy sighed and looked up from his paperwork. “Not particularly, no. But seeing as I stood over your dead irradiated body little more than three weeks ago, I think I can make some time. I need a break anyway. What do you want, Jim?”
Kirk fidgeted uncharacteristically in the doctor’s doorway, words caught in his throat.
“Well, goddammit man, spit it out! I don’t have all day! I’ve got the brass and their merry band of salivating assholes jumping down my throat at every chance they get because they’re wondering what kind of miracle cure brought you back from the dead and I, for one, am not willing to tell them shit. Bunch of classless, unethical idiots who don’t know their asses from their elbows. They’d probably managed to find a way to fuck up a cure for death by takin’ out a world or two while they were at it--” McCoy ranted, hands waving theatrically about his face, in the seconds before his brain caught up with his mouth. He stopped, dropped his hands and swiped his fingertips across tired eyes. Through his hand, he drawled out, “Ah, shit. I’m sorry, Jim. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that you, Pike, all of this--it’s gettin’ to all of us, you know?”
“I hear ya, Bones,” Kirk breathed out. He motioned towards the general living space that made up the CMO’s quarters, now nothing more than a burned out hulk of a certifiable disaster area after the fight with the Vengeance. “Permission to enter?”
The doctor lifted a small mountain of PADDs from the coffee table, hesitated for a brief second, muttered a quiet, ‘Aw, fuck it,’ and then dropped the entire lot unceremoniously on the floor behind him. Waving a hand in Jim’s direction, he replied, “Granted, though a part of me can’t believe you’re actually asking to come in instead of just inviting yourself. All that time in purgatory or wherever the hell you went while you were comin’ back from the dead musta’ drilled some manners into your thick skull.”
Kirk chuckled, noting the molasses-thick accent rolling off McCoy’s tongue. Drawl that heavy meant one of two things: Bones was drunk, or he was exhausted. It only took Jim one quick glance at his friend’s lined face and drooping eyelids to discern the latter was the right answer. Stuffing his hands into his pockets, he lifted his left foot and said, “Nice to know you haven’t lost that famous acerbic wit of yours, doctor.”
“And I’m glad to see you haven’t lost your idiot complex. Now get your scrawny ass in here and close that damned door. Don’t need to be givin’ the whole ship a show,” he half-ordered, watching as Kirk picked his way over and around the smashed furniture and broken personal items that were littering what was left of the CMO’s quarters.
“Maybe next time, Bones. I’m not really up to that kind of thing yet,” Jim finally said with a weak waggle of his eyebrows, the smirk missing much of its characteristic Kirk charm.
“And yet here you are,” McCoy answered as he took in Kirk’s equally haggard appearance.
“You ever going to clean up in here?” Jim asked, shifting the topic smoothy as he rooted around and through the various piles McCoy made of his demolished personal belongings.
McCoy snorted. “What’s the point? This ship needs a complete retrofit. Figured I’d let someone else make themselves useful and do it for me. God only knows it’s the only privilege of my rank. Besides, there’s nothing left in here I want anyway,” he added softly.
Jim toed through the charred remains of McCoy’s desk, noting the stack of PADDs fused to the console and the small pile of fried holocubes still sitting on Bones’ counter. He cringed, knowing what kind of work the doctor kept on them. Looking up, Kirk pointed to the PADDs and asked, “How much did you lose?”
“All of it,” McCoy replied with a heavy sigh. “Years of research, articles I was working on.”
Jim plucked one of the holos from the counter and attempted to turn it on. It flickered, sputtered and then died. “Bones, I’m sorry,” he said earnestly. “If I could do it over again, I would have--”
The doctor cut Jim off with a quick wave of his hand, closing his eyes as memories of Kirk’s still body pushed themselves to the forefront of his mind. “Don’t, Jim. They don’t matter. It’s just research. Nothing that can’t be done again.” Bones stopped, stared at Jim and sighed. He couldn’t do this, couldn’t have that conversation right now. He’d done well enough holding it together for the sake of the rest of the crew during the two weeks Kirk was unconscious, but he was too tired, too hopped up on stim shots and coffee and too on edge after losing his best friend to think clearly enough to talk about the emotional ramifications Jim’s death and miraculous resurrection.
Thankfully, Kirk seemed to get the message. He nodded silently and all but collapsed onto the plush chair opposite McCoy.
Bones regarded his best friend carefully. In a lighter tone, he told Jim, “Now, not even a week outta your sickbed - against my better judgement mind you - and you’re already invading my personal space. Must be mighty important that you feel it can’t wait.”
“You know me so well,” Kirk quipped, interlacing his fingers as he leaned his forearms on his knees.
After years as Jim’s Kirk’s best friend, confidant, and the man who sewed his dumb ass back together while cursing a blue streak, Len could read Jim’s mood simply by looking at his body language. Head down, shoulders hunched, eyebrows pinched together right above his nose. The last time he’d seen that kind of apprehension was...
...Right after the Narada. Right after he told Kirk Pike might not live, and if he did live, he may never walk again. Right after he told Jim that his mentor’s career was almost certainly over, if not his life. Right before he found the golden fucking horseshoe of cures, right before he realized in that one instance, he’d rather be lucky than good.
He wished some of that luck had leaked over to this crisis. Chris.
McCoy pursed his lips, pushed himself off the couch and padded silently to the liquor cabinet stationed in the corner of the room. Opening the door, he pulled out a bottle of Kentucky’s finest bourbon and two glasses. He made his way back to the couch, dropped the booze on the table and poured two healthy glasses. Handing one wordlessly to Kirk, he nudged the younger man when Jim didn’t automatically reach up to accept the glass. “Thank God this survived. Here. Take it. Doctor’s orders.”
“Thanks,” Kirk replied, if only out of habit. He took a sip of the smooth liquid and nodded his head. “This is pretty good, Bones. Really good, actually. A lot better than that paint thinner you normally drink.”
The doctor swallowed audibly. “It was from Chris,” he admitted, forcing himself to raise his eyes to meet his captain’s. “He gave me a case when the Fleet cleared him for active duty. Guess he thought he’d never walk again and wanted to thank me. Still not sure what I did.” He paused, sighing heavily. “Seemed appropriate now, and you looked like you could use it.”
“You always know,” Kirk replied, echoing his earlier reply.
Alarm bells started firing in McCoy’s head. Kirk’s clear distraction was disconcerting, incongruous to a man who was the consummate observer. Schooling his face to keep the open shock from leaking its was out, he answered, “Most of the time.” The doctor took a long pull from his own tumbler, leaned back into the soft cushions and closed his eyes. “Helluva month.”
“Yeah,” Kirk agreed quietly as he took another sip.
McCoy swirled the drink around his glass and let the silence coat the room for a couple of long minutes. He leaned forward, refilled his glass and propped one bare foot up on the coffee table. “Now as much as I love your company, I know you didn’t come here just for a drink and to stare at the walls. What can I do for you, Jim?” he asked earnestly, his tone surprisingly gentle and without its normal stinging barbs of sarcasm.
“Have any of your patients ever talked to you about their...experiences?” Kirk blurted out before he could stop himself. “You know, being dead, or knowing they were about to buy the farm?”
“Experiences?” McCoy questioned. “As in angels and trumpets and pearly gates? That kind of hocus pocus?”
“Yeah, like that. Kind of.”
“Kind of?” McCoy’s right eyebrow lifted gracefully from its parade rest spot while he said, “Jim, I’m a doctor, not a mind reader. And if you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly firing on all cylinders here. I’m going to need more than that.”
The captain shook his head and jammed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “You know what, forget it. I’m sorry to have bothered you, Doctor. I should go,” Kirk, flustered, nearly babbled in a rush. He set his tumbler on the table, hopping from the chair as he practically fled the room.
“Oh, no,” McCoy began, vaulting off the couch as he placed himself between Kirk and the door to his quarters as he mentally kicked his own verbal insensitively. “Jim, that came out wrong. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
Kirk looked down at McCoy’s arm and then back up to the man’s face. He started blankly ahead but didn’t make any more to leave the room. Shaking his head, he said, “It wasn’t you, Bones. It never is, tact or no.” Lifting his eyes to search the various patterns of scorch marks on McCoy’s ceiling, he exhaled a hard breath and added, “God, I feel ridiculous.”
The doctor cursed quietly under his breath. He laid one hand Kirk’s bicep and the other his chest while he looked the younger man in the eyes. Jim might try to deny it, but the ashen pallor and rapid breathing were not all attributable to his most recent brush with death. Searching Kirk’s face, McCoy damned his own hypocrisy straight to hell, narrowed his eyes and said, “You came here to talk and I’m not letting you leave until you do.”
“And I’m telling you I’m not ready,” Jim replied, his tone firm bordering just on the right side of defiant.
McCoy increased the tension on Kirk’s bicep and physically pushed back on his chest. “Jim, hear me out. I don’t have to tell you that you’ve been through an awful damned lot in the past three weeks, more than any man has an expectation to withstand,” McCoy took a breath when Kirk didn’t move. “Now if you want to leave, I’m not going to stop you. But I’m telling you as your physician and more importantly your damned fool friend that you need to talk. If not to me, then to someone else. You’re the captain, and we need you.”
“I’m not the captain anymore, Bones. I’m just---I don’t even know what I am.” Jim felt the shaky, heart pounding adrenaline rush fade from his body. He hated when McCoy was right (which was, sadly, often) but he couldn’t keep up the pretense of anger, not when Bones’ words hit so close to home. He sank down back to the safety of McCoy’s living room furniture and put his head in his hands.
McCoy laid one brotherly hand on Jim’s shoulder, giving it a squeeze as he resumed his seated position. He sat forward, and as Kirk had done earlier, interlaced his fingers and rested his forearms on his knees. With his hair shorter than it had been during the Narada debacle, it no longer flopped in front of his face after he’d showered and he found himself almost missing the distraction of moving it back into place. It gave his hands something to do. Instead, he settled for a deep breath, steeling himself before he admitted, “I try not to think about the afterlife. Means I’d be dead in order to see it.”
“Does that scare you, Bones? Death?”
“Hell, yes it does. God only knows why I signed up for five years on this flying deathtrap with all you adrenaline junkies when I’m terrified of dying.” McCoy paused, poured himself another drink and lifted it to his lips. He bobbed his eyebrows up and down and added almost casually, “Not that you’d--,” cutting himself off as quickly as the sentence tumbled from his lips.
“What was that, Bones?”
McCoy shifted in his chair, uncomfortable, and cleared his throat. “Nothing,” he muttered. “Just my mouth gettin’ ahead of my brain again.”
Kirk’s head snapped up. He titled his head to the side, his brain filling in the likely end of McCoy’s statement. His facial expression went from surprise to defiance, touched on anger for a moment before it finally settled somewhere between embarrassment and agreement. “You know, about a month ago, you’d have been right about that.”
“And now?”
“And now,” Kirk answered, trailing off as he searched for the right words. Fixing his best friend with a self-deprecating smile, Jim replied, “And now I think there’s a really good chance you’re wrong. You’d be surprised what being dead does for your ego.”
“You care to enlighten me?”
“I don’t know if I can really explain it. It’s a little...odd,” Kirk began.
“Try,” McCoy replied.
“I had this really weird dream. Or at least I think it was a dream.” When McCoy simply tilted his head, Kirk took a long breath and continued. “It sounds so lame, but I swear I had a heart to heart with Pike. Except I know that’s not possible because he’s dead, and I don’t believe in supernatural bullshit like that. Or at least I thought I didn’t. But I also didn’t believe Marcus was a raving lunatic, or that he’d decide to thaw a super soldier popsicle for shits and giggles.”
McCoy blinked. Once, then twice. “Wow,” he said, his tone clipped but succinct. Raising his hand, he rubbed his temples in small circles with his fingertips, willing the ever present headache to dissipate.
Jim bent his neck forward and hunched his shoulders. Curious eyes regarded his best friend. “I know I was rambling, but Bones? Tell me what’s going on in that brilliant head of yours.”
“Goddamned déjà vu,” McCoy said with a shake of his head, almost as if he was trying to shake off the incongruence of the statement with the person who said it. “It’s just that - aw hell, I don’t even know how to say this.” He leaned back on the couch and put his arms behind his head. “Still, I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me, with you bein’ like Pike and all. Half the time, I was convinced that you two shared a set of chromosomes, with how you acted like one another.”
Jim was incredulous. “What? You lost me.”
“I could have the JAG up my ass for what I’m about to tell you because I’m about to break doctor/patient confidentiality.” McCoy tilted his head back and forth, like he was mentally weighing pros and cons. He licked his lips and continued with, “But fuck ‘em. I suppose I could make one more exception in a lifetime of exceptions for you. I don’t think Chris would mind. The answer to your question, the one you asked about the afterlife - it’s yes.”
Jim’s eyes lifted to the ceiling of the CMO’s quarters as he processed the information, the dots sliding together in his head for form a solid picture. “Pike? Pike was the one who asked you the same question?”
“Not exactly the same question, but similar enough in circumstance. Either way, damned eerie, ain’t it?” McCoy settled on the couch and stretched out his entire frame. “Tell me about yours.”
Jim toed off his boots (he was well aware of the ‘no footwear on the table’ rule in McCoy’s quarters) and plopped his socked feet on the table. He stared up at the ceiling and started off, “It was right after I’d crawled back to the access door for the warp core...”
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Next Up: Jim discovers just how strange the human mind can be.