FIC: Posting Bail For A New Life
Title: Posting Bail For A New Life
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy, implied Jocelyn/Gaila
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not only are they not mine, I made an AU into an AU. It's like a never-ending hall of mirrors.
Word Count: 9,155
Summary: AU. McCoy got full custody of Joanna. Jim ran away from Starfleet. They meet in a barn in Georgia and life goes on.
Notes: Written for the st_xi_kink meme!
Life on the farm in Georgia had a fairly set routine since the divorce and McCoy couldn’t find a reason to find anything wrong with it. Mornings started with rousing Jo, continued with breakfast, and then he would drop her off at school before working at the small practice he maintained. He thanked God every day for that practice because it was the baseline reason why he had been able to win full custody, the house, and everything else in the divorce.
Jocelyn had taken it poorly, heading off to Starfleet with the faint hint of gin lurking around her clothes and making McCoy feel a pang of regret. Still, if he hadn’t fought for his life, he’d always have regretted it and Christ, but the notion of him in space? That was a laugh and a half.
Today was the same as all other days. Jo had been roused with a sleepy ‘morning Daddy’ and he was cooking up eggs and bacon for them. It was Friday and while he was still on-call during the weekend, he was looking forward to a country ride with his daughter and the enjoyment he got out of bonding with his eight-year-old daughter. They were talking at the table about the latest assignments she was pulling in school when they both heard the distressing noise from outside.
There’d been a heavy thump in the barn that had McCoy slowly standing up and edging protectively towards the door. “Wait here, kiddo, okay?” he coaxed. “Lock the door after me.” When he got a nod of agreement, he slowly drifted until he could find the shotgun he kept protectively hidden and started to head to the barn.
The horses weren’t in distress, so maybe it was just a stray animal, maybe it was some drunk teenagers partying one night too early. He lifted the gun slowly and kept it trained at eye-level as he wandered forward, ready to pull the trigger if need be.
“You’ve got five seconds to come on out,” McCoy warned, one hand poised to yank the barn doors open. Hell, he was a doctor. He could shoot first and patch up the intruder later, being that he didn’t appreciate people sneaking around his property. There was another bang-crash-disaster of a chaos of noise and the doors drew open to reveal a bloodied and bruised man wearing a cocky smile and stumbling slightly.
He definitely didn’t smell drunk, though.
“Hi,” the man greeted him woozily. “Your motel’s great. My neighbours were pretty loud though. Pretty negative too, what with all the neighing,” he joked.
McCoy had the feeling that he wasn’t going to need the gun if bad puns were the worst offense he was going to be facing. He lowered the barrel of the gun and eyed the man warily. “Your shoulder’s dislocated.”
“What?”
“Come here,” he sighed and took long strides over before setting the gun down and grabbing hold of the man’s shoulder, bracing his other hand on his torso below and while the man was giving a babble of protest, he was setting the shoulder hard and swift and fast. “Don’t worry,” McCoy said heavily. “I’m a Doctor.”
“Ow...my...” The man hissed and yelped. “Bones!”
“Yeah?”
They were only inches away, but the man was giving him an incredulous look. “I was talking about my bones. Who responds to that? Who wants to respond to that?” He hissed and stumbled away. “Jesus, you’re sadistic. I’ve known you thirty seconds and already you’re mangling my body.”
McCoy grasped one of the old cloths lying over the stall and eyed the man warily. “I think someone beat me there.”
The man swiped the back of his hand over a still-bloody lip and he gave a wary laugh. “Yeah, apparently guys you name Cupcake can do some pretty good damage, inside and outside the bar. And the cops thought I was the one making the trouble. And this is so not a case of ‘you should see the other guy’. I’m bad enough for three other-guys combined.” He stared at the man warily. “Jim Kirk,” he introduced himself quietly. “Was just going to crash in your barn before I kept heading on to Florida, maybe find a place in the Keys.”
“The cops still looking for you?” McCoy asked, figuring it was the natural assumption of things.
Jim offered a light shrug and the sheepish look on his face was answer enough for McCoy. He had a choice. He could patch the man up and make a couple of phone calls or he could...
“Daddy, what’s going on?”
Damn it. “Jo, I told you to lock the door behind you,” McCoy said critically, giving his hands one last firm wipe before heading to his daughter’s side and picking her up. He balanced her against his hip, slightly overprotective (though it wasn’t like it was his fault considering he was fixing up a fugitive in his barn). “This is Jim Kirk.”
“How come his face looks like a horse stepped on him?” Joanna asked with a wrinkle of her nose.
That got a genuine laugh from this Jim Kirk and it made Joanna giggle in turn.
“If you got arrested and someone made bail for you, would you stop running?” McCoy asked curiously, eyeing the man. Sure, he had only known him for a few minutes, but it wasn’t like his life had any variety in it these days. Putting things right for a young man seemed like a good act that would rain down good karma on his shoulders like he needed. Jim opened his mouth to protest, but McCoy was already there to cut him off. “You can stay here t’il you’re patched up and if you want to head on down to the Keys after, you can still go.”
Joanna rested her head firmly against his shoulder and for all that he thought that Jim Kirk might just pass on his offer and keep running, he seemed to consider.
And then shocked the crap out of McCoy when he gave an easy nod. “Yeah, I could do that.”
So apparently a trip to the bank was on the books for the day, too.
*
Joanna was dropped off at school before McCoy called in to work and got hold of his nurses to inform them that he was only to be brought in for severe emergency and that he had personal matters to attend to. Those personal matters were currently whining on the bed as McCoy pressed salve to wounds on his chest.
“That hurts, Bones, stop it,” Jim spat out the words.
“That’s not my name.”
“You kind of seem to have a thing about trying to reset my bones in the name of fixing them. And you haven’t given me your name otherwise.”
Shit, hadn’t he? McCoy frowned heavily as he started to wipe down Jim’s face and eyed the wounds for a possible need to stitch them. “Well, it’s McCoy. Doctor Leonard McCoy.”
Jim was smirking at that and McCoy wanted to know what was so gods-damned funny that he needed to smile like an idiot. “What?”
“Leonard?” Jim echoed. “And you’re complaining about a pretty apt nickname?” He was looking fairly pained in the face, so McCoy dug through his kit to find the hypospray and press it to his neck, checking vitals as he went along. Soon enough, the look of pain mutated into one of blessed and dazed pleasure and McCoy praised a set of deities when the kid quieted down so McCoy could make some real progress on the wounds.
He found several scars as he went along, but did nothing more than give a quiet sound.
“You didn’t exactly lead a charmed life, did you, kid?” McCoy asked lightly, knowing that if he had seen those bruises and marks on Joanna, there would have been hell to pay for whoever had done that to her.
Jim just shrugged with his good shoulder. “Stepfather. You know.”
McCoy didn’t know. He hadn’t had a father figure in his life for over a year now and it was still difficult some days to come to terms with the fact that he had been the one who killed his own father. Now wasn’t the time to think about that. He knew that Jocelyn was making noise about dating again so soon after the divorce and while he didn’t exactly approve, it wasn’t his to control. So he made a grunt and patched Jim up and clapped him on the back.
“Iowa doesn’t really care about you anymore,” McCoy informed him as he groaned, stretching his back while getting up. “Your bail is paid and they’d rather not see you within the state limits for a while. You can have the guest room upstairs and the minute anything is broken, you’re out. The minute you scare or hurt Joanna, you’re out, and the minute I feel like I can’t trust you...”
“Let me guess, I’m out?” Jim interrupted. “You’re taking a pretty big leap of faith on me. How do you know I’m not just some petty criminal?”
“Because after I posted your bail, I got a call from Starfleet of all fucking places,” McCoy muttered, pushing gauze and hyposprays back into his bag. “Captain Pike? Says you’re a genius-level repeat-offender who could be bound for better things if he put his mind to it. Something about your father saving eight hundred lives in twelve minutes?”
Jim was looking away, decidedly trying not to make eye contact.
“Something about him daring you to do better.”
“Yeah, well...” Jim muttered under his breath. “Maybe I’m coming around to the philosophy that I’d rather live my life than go out in a blaze of glory.”
That was all that was said on the subject.
“I’m going to work. Remember...” McCoy growled.
“Yeah, yeah. I break it, I bought it.”
When McCoy picked up Joanna from school in the afternoon, they took the long drive home because McCoy had started to explain the situation to her and he felt as if they needed to get that out of the way before they got back to the house. McCoy was just hoping that he wouldn’t be returning to find everything not bolted down gone.
Jo was fiddling with her pink knapsack in her lap, other hand pushing the seatbelt out and then in again. “So he’s in trouble?” she asked.
“He was in trouble.”
“How come?”
Joanna was at the age where everything was a question and she wanted explanations for everything. McCoy wasn’t sure he wanted to sit there and talk about what he’d gleaned from Pike: Well, kiddo, when a boy is young and loses his Daddy and his Stepdaddy is abusive, you grow up with a lot of issues and some of those issues lead to promiscuity and violent behaviour. Yeah, maybe he’d wait until Jo was thirteen to lay that one on her. They had parked on the bluff overlooking the park in the middle of town and were sitting there having the conversation while looking out at the centuries-old trees below. McCoy let a long sigh past his lips and looked fondly over at his daughter.
How could he put this best? “Well, he was very sad for a long time because he didn’t have his Daddy growing up. So he just wanted some attention.”
Joanna’s face fell slightly as she peered up at McCoy with wide eyes. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Daddy.”
“God, me neither, kid,” McCoy replied, his voice raw and emotional. He cleared his throat and started the car up again as they wound their way down to the two-story house on the outskirts of town, hearing classical music from the twenty-first century coming from the front and a distinct smell permeating the air. He gave the driver door a hard shove as he and Joanna exchanged mutual looks of confusion.
She was sniffing the air, almost like a dog, and frowning. “Smells like...”
The front door opened wide to reveal an over-eager Jim Kirk with a bowl in his hands. “Lasagna, salad, and pudding. I’ve got to earn my keep around here if I’m crashing,” he joked, but there was a wariness to his eyes that McCoy could tell meant that he genuinely felt he owed it to them to do his share.
McCoy wasn’t exactly used to the care and feeding (not to mention keeping) of young former-fugitives, so he couldn’t say exactly if this was a common thing. He kept a protective hand on Joanna’s back as he led her into the house and shot their interloper a long glare.
“What!”
“We have lasagna on Wednesdays,” McCoy informed Jim simply. “Because it’s a treat.” And because Jocelyn used to make it from scratch and now McCoy did his best to live up to it once a week. It sounded like a stupid thing to say aloud, but such was his life.
“Daddy!” Joanna’s cry from the kitchen summoned him and he went running, only to find her kneeling on the chair and dipping her pinky into a plate’s worth of heaping lasagna. She was grinning widely. “Tastes good.”
God help him, but when McCoy glanced over his shoulder, the kid was grinning as smugly as he had ever seen.
“Fine. Traditions can bend just this once.”
McCoy didn’t think about that any further as they sat down to dinner and Jim regaled them all with stories about some kid he had known (which wasn’t transparent at all) and cars driven off cliffs.
Good god, what kind of terror had McCoy let into his home?
*
He awoke the next morning to Joanna in bed with him.
McCoy shifted and sighed as he gently rolled her onto her other side and gave himself room to get up. This was a bad habit that had started during the separation and had worsened during the divorce. At first, she would wake him up and had cited bad dreams. Now, she just crawled wordlessly into bed with him and curled close as she could. It was the most female company he got anymore, but it was the only kind he wanted.
Clad in nothing more than a white threadbare t-shirt and a baggy pair of grey sweats, McCoy rubbed a hand over his face and lazily navigated his way to the kitchen, sinking down into one of the chairs while he set the coffee to brew. It felt as if it deserved to be later than Saturday being that yesterday had been so eventful and yet, the day was still Saturday and McCoy had to figure out what to do now that he had a strange man in the house.
“Good morning,” said strange man chirped happily at him as he wandered into the kitchen. “Ooh, coffee. There’s nothing like coffee and stims in the morning to get a man ready for the day,” he insisted, pouring himself a cup. McCoy wasn’t ready for that level of cheer in the morning and so he let out a glower and a bear of a growl - the likes of which tended to send Jocelyn running in their last days together - and Jim just raised his coffee in salute to him.
Jim propped his feet up on the table long enough for McCoy to swat them down. “So I was thinking...”
“Here we go...”
“...that we should take your kid out on a picnic or something. She was babbling last night while we were watching television and you were doing paperwork that you don’t take her on picnics because of something to do with bugs on food or grass contaminants, but it was pretty stupid and I think you ought to change that. Also, I’m awesome with picnics,” Jim said with a grin. “I figure I’ll find work Monday, but that leaves me a weekend of freedom, so what do you say, Bones?”
McCoy braced himself for more of the whirlwind of speech, but it didn’t come.
“We spend Saturday with the horses,” McCoy calmly explained. “On Sunday, we go to church and then visit my cousins for lunch. She goes back to school on Monday and you’re just our guest, you’re not her babysitter.”
Jim eyed him warily as he leaned forward. “You’re this boring and she still fawns over you,” he said with amazement. “At least let the kid live a little and let her do something out of the ordinary for a change.”
“Yesterday, I let a stranger into our home without knowing who he was and knowing he was on the run from the law,” McCoy pointed out calmly. “I’m fairly sure that as far as ‘out of the ordinary’ goes, I’m all full up for the next year.” He sipped slowly at his coffee and began to make breakfast for the day so that when Joanna did rouse, she would have waffles and fresh fruit at her disposal. “I want you to make phone calls to Iowa today. Call Captain Pike, call your family, and clear things up with the law. The last thing my daughter needs to see is you being carted away by the police.” McCoy hesitated slightly. “She seems to have taken an inexplicable shine to you.”
“Kids like me,” Jim admitted easily, slurping up the last of his coffee before peering over McCoy’s shoulder. “I like my waffles with blueberry.”
“Well, you’re getting ‘em with chocolate,” McCoy said in a low and steady tone. “So sit down and deal with it.”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
And Pike said that Jim Kirk had a problem with authority, McCoy thought to himself sarcastically.
They settled into a conversation about potential jobs for Monday (Jim seemed to be convinced that he could waltz into the local auto-shop and get a job based on nothing more than a pure belief that he could do anything with a car). Waffles were plated and the smell was what brought Joanna downstairs, if McCoy had to put money on it.
She rubbed at her eyes while tugging on her cotton nightgown and let loose a broad grin (that showed off her missing teeth) as she settled into the chair and dug into her breakfast. “Jim’s still here,” she said happily.
“Yeah,” McCoy agreed and shot Jim a look that implied that if he ever bolted without an explanation and hurt Joanna’s feelings, he would not only be out, but McCoy would hunt him down and practice some ancient medicine on him. He was aware that some of his demands were slightly contradictory, but at this point, he didn’t care. He lightly plated the waffles in front of Joanna and let her go at them, smiling warmly as Joanna mumbled a ‘thanks’.
“We still doing the horses today, Daddy?” Joanna asked, mouth full. “Even though you got your date with Miss Perkins?”
“A date?” Jim latched onto that with sheer delight and suddenly McCoy wished to god that he could just choose when to mute Jim Kirk. “You have a date? You actually have interest in women? Alert the presses.”
“You’ve known me for a day.”
“Yeah, and the stick’s been up there the whole time. You can cancel whatever babysitter you’ve got. I’ll watch Joanna while you go make time with Miss Perkins.” Jim said it with such a lascivious tone that McCoy temporarily debated cancelling the night out just because he didn’t want to deal with more of that.
He managed somehow to not kill Jim before the day was out and they tended to the horses and as he prepared for his date, he ignored the grooming comments coming from the main room. He just wished he understood why Jim Kirk was so desperate for a friend that he had to constantly be there. McCoy tugged on his suit jacket and ran a hand through his styled-hair, ignoring the wolf-whistle coming from Jim as he made his way to Joanna’s room in order to give her instructions for the night.
Seven though she was, McCoy trusted her a hell of a lot more than he trusted Jim Kirk. He was going to trust his instincts on that one.
“If you like her,” Joanna was asking quietly as she helped to straighten his lapels. “Does that mean I’m going to have a new Mommy?”
“It’s a first date, Jo,” McCoy said as an awkward bit of a laugh escaped him. “And no matter what, I’m always going to be here for you.” He pressed his forehead to hers, their dependency on each other not escaping his notice. “You and me, Jo, forever. I promise you that.” He hugged her tightly and didn’t even notice when Jim had sidled into the room, leaning against the door and waiting for the embrace to end.
McCoy let her go and forced a smile. “Daddy,” Joanna said as she stepped back. “I’ll take good care of Jim.”
“Good girl,” McCoy praised. “Make sure he eats his greens and goes to bed at a reasonable hour.”
“Hey!”
Father and daughter shared a mischievous smile and it put McCoy in a good enough mood that he was already whistling by the time he was heading out of the door and heading towards his date with the comely teacher for the local elementary school. Miss Perkins. Now if he could just convince his mind that he actually wanted to be dating so soon after the divorce, that’d help him wonders.
When McCoy returned from his date at eleven PM, he was tired, weary, and disappointed. All Sheila Perkins had wanted to talk about was Joanna’s progress in a nervous way that hinted that she was either too comfortable with the thought of his daughter or not comfortable at all and was trying to overcompensate. Hell, McCoy hadn’t learned anything about her during the evening and the date had fizzled out when McCoy tried to lean over for a goodnight kiss and she just about slammed the door in his face.
Great, he thought, just great. He was starting a real winner of a streak when it came to dating other women. He slowly worked his tie loose and draped it over the couch before checking on Joanna in her room. No matter what, at the end of the day, this was what he came back to. He settled wearily on her bed and leaned over to press a kiss to her forehead.
They could talk in the morning about how it seemed as if Joanna was bound to go just a little bit longer without a new mother. He got the feeling she wouldn’t really mind that.
After stroking Joanna’s back and tucking her properly into bed, he got up to head to sleep himself. The house was still standing and if he wasn’t mistaken, it looked as if some cleaning had been done in the evening. Apparently Jim Kirk passed a responsibility test and McCoy wouldn’t have to ring up Pike in the morning (who was an old family friend and who tended to try and convince McCoy on a regular basis to join the Fleet. McCoy just always told him to shove it where the sun didn’t shine) and tell the man that his little prodigy wasn’t so bad after all.
Well, maybe he’d have to rethink that, because that reprobate genius was sprawled all over his bed.
“Does the part of your brain that does directions know where you are?” McCoy half-growled, tossing his tie to the chair and draping his suit jacket atop it while he worked the top button of his crisp white shirt loose.
Jim peeked up and reclined on his elbows. “I was just waiting for you to give you the report. We had spinach and chicken for dinner...she made me eat the spinach,” Jim glowered. “Then we played ‘who can clean the fastest’. I grabbed the kitchen and she did the den. She won, but I’m still calling dirty play because I decided to steam the oven.” McCoy raised a brow as he flicked the light switch to his walk-in closet and wandered inside to change while listening to Jim’s ramble, making sure the door was closed enough so that he couldn’t look inside.
“Television?” McCoy called over his shoulder.
“We watched three documentaries, her choice, and then she went to bed on her own. You’ve either got the world’s most obedient child - and I’m thinking she’s a zombie then - or you’re employing a wicked case of mind control, Bones,” Jim said with a lazy smirk. McCoy stepped out from the closet in his pajamas and shoved at Jim’s legs. “So, I did notice the time. Why aren’t you making Miss Perkins’ bedsprings squeal?”
“None of your goddamn business,” McCoy muttered heavily.
“Mm,” was all Jim would say in turn. “Well, better sleep. Tomorrow’s Sunday and you know what that means! Church!” he said with mock-enthusiasm, clapping his hands together. He bounded off McCoy’s bed and clapped him once on the shoulder as he went, somehow escaping the room before McCoy could make a joke about Jim Kirk being unable to step over the threshold for fear of being immolated for his sins.
*
Life did the worst possible thing to McCoy by progressing absolutely normally after he had taken a stray into their home. Jim made himself nonexistent a lot of the time, but always turned up for dinner where he minded his manners, washed his hands, ate his greens, and looked pointedly at Joanna as if expecting her to do the same.
“Are you a middle child?” McCoy wondered curiously as they washed dishes after dinner. From Pike’s stories, he knew that there was an older sibling, but sometimes Jim acted as if he had taken care of someone younger than him.
Jim just grinned as he tucked dishes away. “The youngest. Come on, would a middle child get arrested as often as I have?”
“Yes,” McCoy replied without missing a beat. His psychiatry degree might specialize in space disease, but he knew the dynamics of siblings well. “They’d do it to seek attention.”
“Well…” Jim seemed at a loss. “Sorry, but I’m the youngest.”
McCoy later amended his diagnosis to account for the fact that as much as McCoy wasn’t having second thoughts about his decision to take Jim Kirk in, the other man didn’t know that. All his behavior could be explained through a conscious desire to give McCoy absolutely no cause to kick Jim out of the house. It would explain why the beds were always made, the house was always clean, and it explained the small rent check on his desk after the first week.
McCoy tore up the check and scribbled a note to replace it saying that he had earned more than his keep.
When Jim came home that night and found the ripped check, he cast a strange look on McCoy that the doctor didn’t understand. He was busy with patient records and a consult on a case from Princeton Hospital up in New Jersey and didn’t have time to decipher why Jim looked so awed (though his constantly-diagnosing brain said that it was possibly because no one had ever done something like that for Jim before).
He got his communications from Jocelyn and always put Joanna on the vidphone when she called, stepping out of the room to give the both of them privacy.
“So that’s her, huh,” Jim asked, sliding his hands into the pockets of his jeans while they got comfortable on the porch and Joanna could talk about whatever she liked. “The mythical ex?”
“Jocelyn,” McCoy advised. “Her name is Jocelyn.”
He settled on the porch swing and watched as Jim swayed back and forth over the creaky floorboards, unable to settle. McCoy had been out on a second date with Sheila Perkins and they had gone to a little pizza place. The date had ended early when he had stained her white blouse with pizza sauce in an effort to affectionately brush her arm. Suffice to say, he was zero for two when it came to the dating batting average. This was why he was unexpectedly home at seven in the evening, still in his suit and staring into the distance while wondering what the hell was wrong with him.
“Earth to Bones?”
“What?”
“Why’d the date end so early?” It sounded like this was the second time that Jim was asking the question.
McCoy shrugged. “I’m the world’s worst wooing man,” he admitted. “Pizza sauce on a white blouse. I’m pretty sure she was mumbling something about never seeing me again while she was dousing club soda on herself.” He couldn’t help a snicker of a slightly cruel laugh. “I got a view of the goods, if nothing else.”
“And?”
“Probably wouldn’t have been worth it,” McCoy sighed out the words, just as Jim decided to take up the other half of the bench. “I caught Pike calling you the other day. Joanna answered, lied for you and said you weren’t here. I thought the delinquent behavior was a thing of the past?”
“I don’t want to be in Starfleet,” Jim insisted coolly. “It killed my father and broke my mother. Why should I follow in those footsteps?”
“And here I’m just terrified of flying,” McCoy lightly said, arranging the pillows at his back to keep them between him and Jim. The crickets nearby were chirping and he looked sideways at Jim in the dim light of the porch, watching him without much intent but with constant curiosity. “What happened to you taking off for the Keys?”
“Warm enough here for my blood,” Jim said without much commitment. “Besides. You’re kind of my only friend in a while. Most people kick me out when I try and hang around them. They hate the attitude or the cockiness or they don’t like it when I have anonymous sex.’
“So long as you aren’t doing it in my bed or hers, I don’t care,” McCoy assured him. “Hell, I’m the one who gave you all the condoms.”
“I was wondering who the condom fairy was,” Jim noted sarcastically. “I came home to a pile of them on my bed.”
“This town is small,” McCoy said with a smirk. “Rumors get started quick and the one about you being a down-home bred cowboy at heart weren’t hard to decipher when Luella Barnes was singin’ your praises in town.” His accent was thick when it came to talking about things in his hometown. Somehow, it pleased Jim, too. McCoy stretched and draped his arms over the back of the swing. “You can take a shot at Sheila Perkins, now. Don’t think I’ll get another chance.”
“Nah,” Jim said with a shrug. “Not one for seconds, generally. I only make scant exceptions.”
Before McCoy could continue along their line of conversation, the front door opened and Joanna bounded out and inserted herself snugly between both McCoy and Jim, curling up so that her head was in McCoy’s lap and her feet were in Jim’s.
“Mommy says hi,” Joanna said blissfully with an easy smile. “She said she has ‘portant news to tell you ‘bout a new girlfriend.”
Jim and McCoy exchanged a curious look over Joanna’s head. “She still on the line, kiddo?”
“Yup!”
McCoy slowly rose to his feet and made the journey into the house to find out what this was about.
*
“She’s screwing an Orion!”
Jim was in McCoy’s room because he had reacted incredibly poorly to the news. It had only been months since their divorce, not even a year, and his ex-wife had already moved on into the arms of a green-skinned, slaved, daughter of a…Jim had needed to turn off the vidphone before he could finish that sentence and had forcibly dragged McCoy up to the bedroom, searching through drawers.
“Where is…”
“What the hell are you looking for?”
“You always have those hyposprays! I was going to sedate you!” Jim protested wildly.
“I don’t need sedation. I need for my ex-wife to not have already found herself with someone else before I have!” he spat out and he realized that it was hypocritical for him because he was dating and he wanted to move on, but to hear that Jocelyn had found herself a working relationship (even if it wasn’t monogamous) burned him up inside.
Jim looked frantic and frazzled and worried and was grabbing at McCoy’s shoulders to clutch him tightly. “Shut up, okay?” he ordered. “Joanna’s going to hear you.”
“I’ll shut up when I damn well want to,” McCoy muttered, yanking himself out of Jim’s grip. “I’m going to San Francisco to meet this woman, see what the hell she’s got that I didn’t have for six years of marriage...” He was already tossing clothes onto the bed to pack in his frenzied state, ready to move the world just to try and justify his anger at the situation. “Can’t possibly wait until she’s out in space and away from the world to move on. And she had to tell me! She couldn’t just keep it in the dark.” He was going to complain about this until the sun rose in the sky and probably would have if Jim hadn’t discovered a way to shut him up.
Funny enough, it involved him grabbing McCoy’s cheeks and planting a hard kiss to his lips.
And it shut McCoy up perfectly. Froze him to the spot, too.
Jim eased back and blinked warily, sighing with relief when McCoy didn’t immediately re-start his tirade.
“…damn it, Jim,” McCoy hissed. “I just treated you last week for aphthous stomatitis.”
“…yeah, sorry? It shut you up.”
McCoy’s anger was still burning heavy and hard, but he didn’t want to explain the why of it to Joanna and he didn’t think that catching a shuttle to San Francisco just to see his ex-wife in the happy new embrace of someone else was going to do anything for him. He sighed and rubbed at his face, collapsing on the end of the bed.
“Get out, Jim,” he muttered tiredly.
“Okay.”
Just before Jim could get out of the room fully, McCoy quietly added a dulled ‘thank you’ and if not for the ‘no problem, Bones’, he wouldn’t have thought that Jim was capable of hearing that small sliver of gratitude.
*
McCoy had gone to Savannah in order to attend a medical conference. Jim had been living with the McCoys for near-on six months. Every end-of-month, he would pack his bags and insist that he would finally make his departure and leave them alone. Every first-of-the-month, he would wake up to find that his suitcase had been summarily unpacked. McCoy always swore innocence, but Joanna had a guilty look about her that Jim couldn’t really fault her for.
It felt different to actually be wanted somewhere. Even home wasn’t so much home because he looked so much like his father that his mother would sometimes visibly cringe at the sight of him, her face crumpling in heartache and despair.
Jim knew that he was actually a welcome guest of the house when McCoy packed his bags and informed Joanna that Jim would be watching over her for the five days that he was gone. It was approval and Jim felt as if he had a place.
Of course, Jim had the feeling that place was about to disappear because he had fucked up and it was bad. He hadn’t stopped for a single red light on his way in and was charging across the hall to skitter to a stop by the desk. “Joanna McCoy,” he demanded. “They called me, they phoned my cell, I’m Jim Kirk, I’m her second contact. Where is she?”
The hospital had called him the minute it had happened and informed him that Joanna had broken her arm in an accident at school. In that one moment, Jim had felt his heart almost stop. He hadn’t known, exactly, how much the McCoys meant to him until suddenly he thought of a life without Joanna and a life in which Bones blamed him for losing her. He just couldn’t do it.
The nurse - pretty, Jim almost entertained a subconscious thought to visit her later - directed him to the second floor and he nearly sprinted up stairs and down halls, only to find Joanna in her civilian clothes, already changed and appearing ready to head out.
Jim, for his part, was breathless.
“Jim,” she merely said and looked up at him with wide eyes. It took no less than three seconds for Jim to carefully wrap her in a hug, trying to ignore her arm in the sling and trying not to think violent thoughts about whatever had put her here. His mind is a litany of panicked thoughts and they’re all sprinting back to ‘Bones is going to kill me’. “I’m okay,” she promised him, but her voice sounded like a small echo of its usual state. “It was just an accident. Big fire drill and I got pushed down the stairs.”
“I’m gonna make things right,” Jim insisted, his voice stubborn and scared at once. “No one gets to hurt you, not even …”
He stopped when he felt a small hand on his forearm and looked down at Joanna, who was looking back up at him with a tiny smile of pride.
“What?”
“Thank you for coming to get me. I didn’t want to worry Daddy with a call,” she admitted and took his hand with her good arm. “You’ll have to call him now, but we can promise him I’m okay together,” she said, swinging their hands slightly after Jim helped secure her pink knapsack to her back and led her out to McCoy’s car - because he had left it in the event of emergency.
God dammit, but Jim didn’t want to have to make that phone call.
Joanna did the brunt of the explaining for him. She phoned McCoy and showed off her pink sling as tears shone in her eyes and she explained that it was all an accident and that it only hurt a little and that Jim had come to pick her up and had even made her soup and rubbed her arm where it ached and itched.
Bones told her to go through her nightly routine and then beckoned Jim forward.
“I swear to god, Bones, I…” Jim struggled to find words, not wanting to be kicked out of the house because he had finally managed to screw everything up past the point of return. “I’m so sorry, if I’d known she was getting hurt, I would have been there to catch her. I would have, I swear.”
There was a long moment of silence and Jim finally dared to look up to the screen and caught a disconcerted and soft look in McCoy’s eyes. Jim kept praying to a god he wasn't sure he believed in and tried to think of all the ways he could make sure he got to stay right where he was. He didn’t like the thought of packing his bags only to have them stay packed the next morning.
“I’ll be home by morning. We’ll talk about it then,” McCoy said quietly and hung up before Jim could ask any more questions.
Shit, he thought.
*
Jim packed for the morning.
It wasn’t even the end of the month, but he waited until Joanna was with her cousins and hauled out his bag. He only had the clothes on his back when he’d arrived and had collected himself an array of things that resembled a life. They all fit in his duffel bag and that sat by the front door. Jim was perched beside it on the sturdy table, waiting for Bones to come and give him his eviction notice. He bit at his nails until they were half-crescent shadows of what they were before.
Jim definitely didn’t look forward to this speech.
He knew this speech way too well for his own good. You’re just too much trouble, Jimmy boy and I think it’s about time you moved on in your life and out of ours. Memories of too many places were flooding back and he was in the middle of remembering Iowa when the front door lock was slowly released and McCoy entered the room haltingly.
Jim glanced up warily. “I uh, I sent Jo to her cousins. I figured she didn’t need to hear this.”
Bones didn’t reply to him. His eyes skirted over Jim and then cast a look down to the duffel bag. He didn’t say a word, but his brow rose curiously and he shot Jim a questioning look that didn’t need words to explain itself. Jim swallowed the lump in his throat, trying to will away the dryness of his mouth as he shrugged haplessly.
“I…anticipated,” he replied quietly to an unspoken question.
Bones set his own suitcase down and locked the door behind him. It took him three strides to get to the duffel bag, at which point he picked it up and carried it over his shoulder up the stairs. Jim felt a flash of panic at all the unknown variables that were throwing him off. He didn’t know what to make of the situation and he definitely didn’t know what Bones was doing with his things. He shot to his feet and trailed after McCoy by no more than two feet.
Jim stared, praying McCoy wasn’t about to dump his possessions out a second story window. “Hey,” he called after him, voice low and wary. “Hey, McCoy…” It was the first time in three months that Jim hadn’t used his nickname.
Bones went straight for the guest room and set the duffel on the bed. Instead of opening the window and chucking his things out, he unzipped the top and very calmly began to unpack the belongings into their rightful drawers. Bones seemed to know where everything went and for a brief flash of a moment, he started to think that maybe, just maybe, Joanna wasn’t acting alone on the last day of the month.
Jim cast Bones a grateful look without saying a word.
“You took care of her. You don’t need to thank me,” Bones insisted gruffly, somehow understanding that Jim was looking at him with utter fondness and appreciation that both funnelled into abject gratitude.
He gave one last nod before leaving the room, shutting the door softly behind him.
Jim nearly passed out from relief as he sank down onto his bed and let out a giddy laugh. That laugh slowly started to morph into a plan of a smile and he bit down on his lower lip as he reached across the bed for the phone.
The phone didn’t ring very long before Joanna picked up with a cheerful ‘lo?’ Jim didn’t waste any time explaining to her the situation. She just laughed and snorted when he said that he assumed that Joanna acted all on her own.
“Daddy didn’t know where all your stuff went, but he still helped,” she said matter-of-factly over the vidphone, cradling the speaking to her ear as she sank deeper into her chair while stroking her cousins’ golden retriever absently, her harmed arm out of the way. “Said that you needed a place to feel like home and you were just gonna be stupid and run away.”
“Well, I have done some very stupid things in my life,” Jim acknowledged and stared at her for a long moment. “Hey Jo, can I take your Dad out for dinner? Can you ask your cousins to watch you a bit longer so I can take him out and thank him?”
Joanna seemed to think on it for a very long moment. “Sure,” she said absently. “But don’t go to that Italian place he always takes his dates to. Daddy’s bad when it comes to white clothes and spaghetti sauce,” she said, unable to help her bemused giggle at announcing those words. Jim watched her before speaking because she had a thoughtful and distant look on her face, as if something whimsically deep was about to come from her. “Take him out for sushi. He really likes it.”
Jim grinned and decided that she was definitely the smartest one in the entire household.
“We’ll be back before nine, okay?” Jim insisted and blew her a kiss before hanging up and descending the stairs rapidly, lifting McCoy forcibly from his chair where he was doing charting. Jim wasted no time in wrapping one arm around McCoy’s waist and draped the other around his shoulders.
It was easy to do, even when the other person was resisting slightly. Jim hadn’t fought his share of grudgematches in Iowa for nothing.
He just kept tugging Bones along. “Come on. I owe you dinner,” Jim insisted and tucked his wallet away in his back pocket. “And I swear to god, if you don’t let me pay this time, I’m going to tell the whole town about your date with Angela Maudry,” Jim warned. That had been the night that McCoy had actually gotten fairly far only to discover that the woman was allergic to latex.
Jim hadn’t stopped laughing about that one for a week.
The woman also had five cats, so it was a good thing Bones had an exit gifted to him by the gods, but that was besides the point.
“I swear to god, Jim, no Ita...”
“Sushi,” Jim interrupted any discussion about wayward curses on lasagna and the alcoholic content of certain spaghetti sauces. He even flashed his best charming grin at McCoy to try and let that sweeten the pot (as if that could do anything to help when the decision was probably already cast in stone). “Good, great, let’s go!” he insisted, making the decision for McCoy and shoving a jacket his way.
Jim didn’t know why he worried. If he really looked back at the pattern of their friendship, it became very clear that Bones pretty much did what Jim asked. Maybe it was some crazy Stockholm Syndrome thing or maybe he was just bored.
So that was how they wound up at a dinner table at a sushi restaurant while trading food on each other’s plates, getting a good taste of all the offerings.
“Jo’s really taken a shine to you, you know,” McCoy commented as he twirled chopsticks in his fingers and Jim fought not to stare at them. Just because he had Doctor’s fingers didn’t mean that Jim automatically got permission to gape. Still, it was fairly hard not to. “According to the nurses, she was the first person you asked for, seeing as she knew I was out of town. She still wants you to know that it wasn’t your fault, that you couldn’t have done anything differently.”
“Yeah?” Jim asked, cheeks flushing a pleased pink. “Well, I still wish I could’ve stopped it,” he stubbornly insisted. “And you would have been totally within your rights to kick me out.”
“Yeah, well…” McCoy trailed off, a sentence that seemed to need to be spoken and had no genuine end at the same rate.
They ate dinner mostly in silence because Jim found he wasn’t sure what to say and McCoy had a generally perturbed air about him.
“Starfleet called again,” McCoy grunted.
“I’m pretty sure I actually told them, verbatim, to go fuck themselves the last time,” Jim noted mildly, wondering if he was somehow going to earn the blame of an annoying caller.
McCoy glanced up from his empty plate and there was a flickering of something like sheepish guilt on his face. It almost looked like…well, like McCoy had been keeping secrets from him. Jim instantly wanted to know how many there were, how plentiful in number, how deep in severity they were.
“It wasn’t you they were after, Jim,” McCoy sighed heavily. “It was me. You think Pike’s only after you? The man hasn’t shut up about getting me to serve since I got my degree.”
“Yeah, but you hate space,” Jim pointed out the obvious.
“Which is what I told ‘em. I told ‘em I was happy and had Joanna and had…well, had you.” McCoy was staring at Jim across the table. “And I told them that and I don’t even know what I’m saying, then or now, because you’re my fucking house-guest, not some kind of therapy tool. I don’t have you, you’re not a possession and…”
Oh.
Jim’s foot had started to have ideas of its own, slipping out of a fine black shoe and pressing lightly to Bones’ calf.
“Jim? You’re not a possession,” McCoy roughly growled.
That didn’t dissuade Jim’s foot.
“I swear, it’s got a mind of its own,” Jim half-confessed. His mouth was dry and he was trying to figure out when staying with the McCoys had become less about hiding from the law in a place he didn’t want to go back to and more about staying with a family that seemed to accept him - flaws and all. “You can have me. You do have me,” Jim swore, but removed his foot. This wasn’t going to go well unless he seemed and acted serious, so he set his face in firm sternness while asking for the check. “Think about it, Bones. Okay? Just…think about maybe me staying with you for reasons other than sanctuary.”
*
The house was dark but for the four lights.
The kitchen, Jim’s room, Joanna’s, and the den. McCoy was pacing between the four of them as if they were the points that were guiding him home. He had been handed a present and told that if he wanted to unwrap it, he could have the contents. Except that they were a surprise and he had no idea how long they were going to last, being that someone had forget to stamp the expiration date on the package, so it was all a surprise.
McCoy just wasn’t sure that he was at a point in his life that he really wanted to be dealing with surprises. He was still pacing the circuit when he was caught out by the surprise-package itself. Jim opened the door to his room and leaned heavily against the frame.
“Your house creaks,” he accused and shifted so that his arms were crossed over his torso and he looked as if he was comfortable sprawling right there. “What are you still doing up?”
“It’s eight,” McCoy pointed out. The dinner with Jim seemed ages away and another day had dawned, but he hadn’t found any answers in the midst of it. “Joanna is still up, for god’s sake, I wouldn’t call it late in the least.”
“Point,” Jim admitted and his eyes didn’t wander from McCoy’s form as he looked him slowly up and down, a gentle smile on his face. “Do you want to come in?”
McCoy hated that he felt a rush of desire at the very question. He hated that ‘yes’ wanted to trip past his lips before he even stepped back to consider things. This was a man he had met while he was on the lam. He was still a wanted man as far as Starfleet was concerned and he was another man, let McCoy not forget that.
His feet answered for him when they gravitated towards the door. They were steady and sure. They were deciding for him.
He hated his goddamn feet for that.
Jim closed the door behind them and McCoy reminded himself that they had to be quiet because Joanna was just two doors down and they couldn’t let their talking get too loud. That was all they’d be doing. Talking.
“So uh...” Jim started.
“You a poker player, Jim?” McCoy started conversationally, drifting around his carpeted floors as he kept his eyes on every object and fixture in the room except for Jim. He looked at the bay-window seat and the desk and his eyes lingered on dishevelled shoes near the closet.
Finally, McCoy looked up at Jim and caught him in an unsure moment. “I guess? I mean, it’s not like I’d put it on my resume, but I don’t say no to a good game every now and again. Why, did you want to play?”
“This is the time between us where the river’s dealt,” McCoy said as he crossed the distance between them. His tone was hushed, as if tampered by cotton. “Cards on the table, Jim. Go. I can have you. If I want you. How long is that having for? I’ve got a little girl, Jim, who’s watched her father go through heartbreak the once. Jocelyn is off in space finding love in new places and I’m...I’m trying to be a good father.” His eyes roam Jim up and down. “You break the law and run away as fast as you can, trying to give light speed a run for its money. You break limbs and flash a charming smile to make it better. You make all the girls in town crazy about you...” he was rambling now, voice tending towards the irrational. “You...you...”
“I’m still here even though I was supposed to be gone months ago?” Jim supplied helpfully.
“That too.”
McCoy didn’t know what to do because he didn’t know what to make of Jim. He rubbed at his forehead and opened his mouth long enough to let out a helpless sound and then he was shaking his head and heading to the door.
“Bones, wait,” Jim pleaded, catching hold of his wrist and turning him around, gracefully sliding into his personal space and just standing there. It blurred McCoy’s vision and he didn’t know what to do. “My turn.”
McCoy closed his eyes and waited. He just waited.
“I don’t want this room anymore.”
And there it was.
“Right, I’ll...”
“I want your room and you in it,” Jim kept plowing forward, a glint of mischief and delight in his eyes.
Well, McCoy thought. A full house with hearts and aces wasn’t such a bad hand to be playing, he supposed. Jim was still in his personal space and they were barely touching. McCoy felt that needed to change and he leaned in slowly, pressing his forehead to Jim’s as he stole gentle kisses from his lips, light punctuations and reminders that he was going to have him.
That first day seemed so far away and the only thing that McCoy ever wants to do now with Jim is to run when he wants to run, Joanna on his shoulders and giving them direction.
“You got it, Jim,” McCoy promised in a single exhalation, hands around Jim’s hips and pulling him even closer than before as Jim’s room went back to being the guest room in a single heartbeat.
THE END
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy, implied Jocelyn/Gaila
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not only are they not mine, I made an AU into an AU. It's like a never-ending hall of mirrors.
Word Count: 9,155
Summary: AU. McCoy got full custody of Joanna. Jim ran away from Starfleet. They meet in a barn in Georgia and life goes on.
Notes: Written for the st_xi_kink meme!
Life on the farm in Georgia had a fairly set routine since the divorce and McCoy couldn’t find a reason to find anything wrong with it. Mornings started with rousing Jo, continued with breakfast, and then he would drop her off at school before working at the small practice he maintained. He thanked God every day for that practice because it was the baseline reason why he had been able to win full custody, the house, and everything else in the divorce.
Jocelyn had taken it poorly, heading off to Starfleet with the faint hint of gin lurking around her clothes and making McCoy feel a pang of regret. Still, if he hadn’t fought for his life, he’d always have regretted it and Christ, but the notion of him in space? That was a laugh and a half.
Today was the same as all other days. Jo had been roused with a sleepy ‘morning Daddy’ and he was cooking up eggs and bacon for them. It was Friday and while he was still on-call during the weekend, he was looking forward to a country ride with his daughter and the enjoyment he got out of bonding with his eight-year-old daughter. They were talking at the table about the latest assignments she was pulling in school when they both heard the distressing noise from outside.
There’d been a heavy thump in the barn that had McCoy slowly standing up and edging protectively towards the door. “Wait here, kiddo, okay?” he coaxed. “Lock the door after me.” When he got a nod of agreement, he slowly drifted until he could find the shotgun he kept protectively hidden and started to head to the barn.
The horses weren’t in distress, so maybe it was just a stray animal, maybe it was some drunk teenagers partying one night too early. He lifted the gun slowly and kept it trained at eye-level as he wandered forward, ready to pull the trigger if need be.
“You’ve got five seconds to come on out,” McCoy warned, one hand poised to yank the barn doors open. Hell, he was a doctor. He could shoot first and patch up the intruder later, being that he didn’t appreciate people sneaking around his property. There was another bang-crash-disaster of a chaos of noise and the doors drew open to reveal a bloodied and bruised man wearing a cocky smile and stumbling slightly.
He definitely didn’t smell drunk, though.
“Hi,” the man greeted him woozily. “Your motel’s great. My neighbours were pretty loud though. Pretty negative too, what with all the neighing,” he joked.
McCoy had the feeling that he wasn’t going to need the gun if bad puns were the worst offense he was going to be facing. He lowered the barrel of the gun and eyed the man warily. “Your shoulder’s dislocated.”
“What?”
“Come here,” he sighed and took long strides over before setting the gun down and grabbing hold of the man’s shoulder, bracing his other hand on his torso below and while the man was giving a babble of protest, he was setting the shoulder hard and swift and fast. “Don’t worry,” McCoy said heavily. “I’m a Doctor.”
“Ow...my...” The man hissed and yelped. “Bones!”
“Yeah?”
They were only inches away, but the man was giving him an incredulous look. “I was talking about my bones. Who responds to that? Who wants to respond to that?” He hissed and stumbled away. “Jesus, you’re sadistic. I’ve known you thirty seconds and already you’re mangling my body.”
McCoy grasped one of the old cloths lying over the stall and eyed the man warily. “I think someone beat me there.”
The man swiped the back of his hand over a still-bloody lip and he gave a wary laugh. “Yeah, apparently guys you name Cupcake can do some pretty good damage, inside and outside the bar. And the cops thought I was the one making the trouble. And this is so not a case of ‘you should see the other guy’. I’m bad enough for three other-guys combined.” He stared at the man warily. “Jim Kirk,” he introduced himself quietly. “Was just going to crash in your barn before I kept heading on to Florida, maybe find a place in the Keys.”
“The cops still looking for you?” McCoy asked, figuring it was the natural assumption of things.
Jim offered a light shrug and the sheepish look on his face was answer enough for McCoy. He had a choice. He could patch the man up and make a couple of phone calls or he could...
“Daddy, what’s going on?”
Damn it. “Jo, I told you to lock the door behind you,” McCoy said critically, giving his hands one last firm wipe before heading to his daughter’s side and picking her up. He balanced her against his hip, slightly overprotective (though it wasn’t like it was his fault considering he was fixing up a fugitive in his barn). “This is Jim Kirk.”
“How come his face looks like a horse stepped on him?” Joanna asked with a wrinkle of her nose.
That got a genuine laugh from this Jim Kirk and it made Joanna giggle in turn.
“If you got arrested and someone made bail for you, would you stop running?” McCoy asked curiously, eyeing the man. Sure, he had only known him for a few minutes, but it wasn’t like his life had any variety in it these days. Putting things right for a young man seemed like a good act that would rain down good karma on his shoulders like he needed. Jim opened his mouth to protest, but McCoy was already there to cut him off. “You can stay here t’il you’re patched up and if you want to head on down to the Keys after, you can still go.”
Joanna rested her head firmly against his shoulder and for all that he thought that Jim Kirk might just pass on his offer and keep running, he seemed to consider.
And then shocked the crap out of McCoy when he gave an easy nod. “Yeah, I could do that.”
So apparently a trip to the bank was on the books for the day, too.
*
Joanna was dropped off at school before McCoy called in to work and got hold of his nurses to inform them that he was only to be brought in for severe emergency and that he had personal matters to attend to. Those personal matters were currently whining on the bed as McCoy pressed salve to wounds on his chest.
“That hurts, Bones, stop it,” Jim spat out the words.
“That’s not my name.”
“You kind of seem to have a thing about trying to reset my bones in the name of fixing them. And you haven’t given me your name otherwise.”
Shit, hadn’t he? McCoy frowned heavily as he started to wipe down Jim’s face and eyed the wounds for a possible need to stitch them. “Well, it’s McCoy. Doctor Leonard McCoy.”
Jim was smirking at that and McCoy wanted to know what was so gods-damned funny that he needed to smile like an idiot. “What?”
“Leonard?” Jim echoed. “And you’re complaining about a pretty apt nickname?” He was looking fairly pained in the face, so McCoy dug through his kit to find the hypospray and press it to his neck, checking vitals as he went along. Soon enough, the look of pain mutated into one of blessed and dazed pleasure and McCoy praised a set of deities when the kid quieted down so McCoy could make some real progress on the wounds.
He found several scars as he went along, but did nothing more than give a quiet sound.
“You didn’t exactly lead a charmed life, did you, kid?” McCoy asked lightly, knowing that if he had seen those bruises and marks on Joanna, there would have been hell to pay for whoever had done that to her.
Jim just shrugged with his good shoulder. “Stepfather. You know.”
McCoy didn’t know. He hadn’t had a father figure in his life for over a year now and it was still difficult some days to come to terms with the fact that he had been the one who killed his own father. Now wasn’t the time to think about that. He knew that Jocelyn was making noise about dating again so soon after the divorce and while he didn’t exactly approve, it wasn’t his to control. So he made a grunt and patched Jim up and clapped him on the back.
“Iowa doesn’t really care about you anymore,” McCoy informed him as he groaned, stretching his back while getting up. “Your bail is paid and they’d rather not see you within the state limits for a while. You can have the guest room upstairs and the minute anything is broken, you’re out. The minute you scare or hurt Joanna, you’re out, and the minute I feel like I can’t trust you...”
“Let me guess, I’m out?” Jim interrupted. “You’re taking a pretty big leap of faith on me. How do you know I’m not just some petty criminal?”
“Because after I posted your bail, I got a call from Starfleet of all fucking places,” McCoy muttered, pushing gauze and hyposprays back into his bag. “Captain Pike? Says you’re a genius-level repeat-offender who could be bound for better things if he put his mind to it. Something about your father saving eight hundred lives in twelve minutes?”
Jim was looking away, decidedly trying not to make eye contact.
“Something about him daring you to do better.”
“Yeah, well...” Jim muttered under his breath. “Maybe I’m coming around to the philosophy that I’d rather live my life than go out in a blaze of glory.”
That was all that was said on the subject.
“I’m going to work. Remember...” McCoy growled.
“Yeah, yeah. I break it, I bought it.”
When McCoy picked up Joanna from school in the afternoon, they took the long drive home because McCoy had started to explain the situation to her and he felt as if they needed to get that out of the way before they got back to the house. McCoy was just hoping that he wouldn’t be returning to find everything not bolted down gone.
Jo was fiddling with her pink knapsack in her lap, other hand pushing the seatbelt out and then in again. “So he’s in trouble?” she asked.
“He was in trouble.”
“How come?”
Joanna was at the age where everything was a question and she wanted explanations for everything. McCoy wasn’t sure he wanted to sit there and talk about what he’d gleaned from Pike: Well, kiddo, when a boy is young and loses his Daddy and his Stepdaddy is abusive, you grow up with a lot of issues and some of those issues lead to promiscuity and violent behaviour. Yeah, maybe he’d wait until Jo was thirteen to lay that one on her. They had parked on the bluff overlooking the park in the middle of town and were sitting there having the conversation while looking out at the centuries-old trees below. McCoy let a long sigh past his lips and looked fondly over at his daughter.
How could he put this best? “Well, he was very sad for a long time because he didn’t have his Daddy growing up. So he just wanted some attention.”
Joanna’s face fell slightly as she peered up at McCoy with wide eyes. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Daddy.”
“God, me neither, kid,” McCoy replied, his voice raw and emotional. He cleared his throat and started the car up again as they wound their way down to the two-story house on the outskirts of town, hearing classical music from the twenty-first century coming from the front and a distinct smell permeating the air. He gave the driver door a hard shove as he and Joanna exchanged mutual looks of confusion.
She was sniffing the air, almost like a dog, and frowning. “Smells like...”
The front door opened wide to reveal an over-eager Jim Kirk with a bowl in his hands. “Lasagna, salad, and pudding. I’ve got to earn my keep around here if I’m crashing,” he joked, but there was a wariness to his eyes that McCoy could tell meant that he genuinely felt he owed it to them to do his share.
McCoy wasn’t exactly used to the care and feeding (not to mention keeping) of young former-fugitives, so he couldn’t say exactly if this was a common thing. He kept a protective hand on Joanna’s back as he led her into the house and shot their interloper a long glare.
“What!”
“We have lasagna on Wednesdays,” McCoy informed Jim simply. “Because it’s a treat.” And because Jocelyn used to make it from scratch and now McCoy did his best to live up to it once a week. It sounded like a stupid thing to say aloud, but such was his life.
“Daddy!” Joanna’s cry from the kitchen summoned him and he went running, only to find her kneeling on the chair and dipping her pinky into a plate’s worth of heaping lasagna. She was grinning widely. “Tastes good.”
God help him, but when McCoy glanced over his shoulder, the kid was grinning as smugly as he had ever seen.
“Fine. Traditions can bend just this once.”
McCoy didn’t think about that any further as they sat down to dinner and Jim regaled them all with stories about some kid he had known (which wasn’t transparent at all) and cars driven off cliffs.
Good god, what kind of terror had McCoy let into his home?
*
He awoke the next morning to Joanna in bed with him.
McCoy shifted and sighed as he gently rolled her onto her other side and gave himself room to get up. This was a bad habit that had started during the separation and had worsened during the divorce. At first, she would wake him up and had cited bad dreams. Now, she just crawled wordlessly into bed with him and curled close as she could. It was the most female company he got anymore, but it was the only kind he wanted.
Clad in nothing more than a white threadbare t-shirt and a baggy pair of grey sweats, McCoy rubbed a hand over his face and lazily navigated his way to the kitchen, sinking down into one of the chairs while he set the coffee to brew. It felt as if it deserved to be later than Saturday being that yesterday had been so eventful and yet, the day was still Saturday and McCoy had to figure out what to do now that he had a strange man in the house.
“Good morning,” said strange man chirped happily at him as he wandered into the kitchen. “Ooh, coffee. There’s nothing like coffee and stims in the morning to get a man ready for the day,” he insisted, pouring himself a cup. McCoy wasn’t ready for that level of cheer in the morning and so he let out a glower and a bear of a growl - the likes of which tended to send Jocelyn running in their last days together - and Jim just raised his coffee in salute to him.
Jim propped his feet up on the table long enough for McCoy to swat them down. “So I was thinking...”
“Here we go...”
“...that we should take your kid out on a picnic or something. She was babbling last night while we were watching television and you were doing paperwork that you don’t take her on picnics because of something to do with bugs on food or grass contaminants, but it was pretty stupid and I think you ought to change that. Also, I’m awesome with picnics,” Jim said with a grin. “I figure I’ll find work Monday, but that leaves me a weekend of freedom, so what do you say, Bones?”
McCoy braced himself for more of the whirlwind of speech, but it didn’t come.
“We spend Saturday with the horses,” McCoy calmly explained. “On Sunday, we go to church and then visit my cousins for lunch. She goes back to school on Monday and you’re just our guest, you’re not her babysitter.”
Jim eyed him warily as he leaned forward. “You’re this boring and she still fawns over you,” he said with amazement. “At least let the kid live a little and let her do something out of the ordinary for a change.”
“Yesterday, I let a stranger into our home without knowing who he was and knowing he was on the run from the law,” McCoy pointed out calmly. “I’m fairly sure that as far as ‘out of the ordinary’ goes, I’m all full up for the next year.” He sipped slowly at his coffee and began to make breakfast for the day so that when Joanna did rouse, she would have waffles and fresh fruit at her disposal. “I want you to make phone calls to Iowa today. Call Captain Pike, call your family, and clear things up with the law. The last thing my daughter needs to see is you being carted away by the police.” McCoy hesitated slightly. “She seems to have taken an inexplicable shine to you.”
“Kids like me,” Jim admitted easily, slurping up the last of his coffee before peering over McCoy’s shoulder. “I like my waffles with blueberry.”
“Well, you’re getting ‘em with chocolate,” McCoy said in a low and steady tone. “So sit down and deal with it.”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
And Pike said that Jim Kirk had a problem with authority, McCoy thought to himself sarcastically.
They settled into a conversation about potential jobs for Monday (Jim seemed to be convinced that he could waltz into the local auto-shop and get a job based on nothing more than a pure belief that he could do anything with a car). Waffles were plated and the smell was what brought Joanna downstairs, if McCoy had to put money on it.
She rubbed at her eyes while tugging on her cotton nightgown and let loose a broad grin (that showed off her missing teeth) as she settled into the chair and dug into her breakfast. “Jim’s still here,” she said happily.
“Yeah,” McCoy agreed and shot Jim a look that implied that if he ever bolted without an explanation and hurt Joanna’s feelings, he would not only be out, but McCoy would hunt him down and practice some ancient medicine on him. He was aware that some of his demands were slightly contradictory, but at this point, he didn’t care. He lightly plated the waffles in front of Joanna and let her go at them, smiling warmly as Joanna mumbled a ‘thanks’.
“We still doing the horses today, Daddy?” Joanna asked, mouth full. “Even though you got your date with Miss Perkins?”
“A date?” Jim latched onto that with sheer delight and suddenly McCoy wished to god that he could just choose when to mute Jim Kirk. “You have a date? You actually have interest in women? Alert the presses.”
“You’ve known me for a day.”
“Yeah, and the stick’s been up there the whole time. You can cancel whatever babysitter you’ve got. I’ll watch Joanna while you go make time with Miss Perkins.” Jim said it with such a lascivious tone that McCoy temporarily debated cancelling the night out just because he didn’t want to deal with more of that.
He managed somehow to not kill Jim before the day was out and they tended to the horses and as he prepared for his date, he ignored the grooming comments coming from the main room. He just wished he understood why Jim Kirk was so desperate for a friend that he had to constantly be there. McCoy tugged on his suit jacket and ran a hand through his styled-hair, ignoring the wolf-whistle coming from Jim as he made his way to Joanna’s room in order to give her instructions for the night.
Seven though she was, McCoy trusted her a hell of a lot more than he trusted Jim Kirk. He was going to trust his instincts on that one.
“If you like her,” Joanna was asking quietly as she helped to straighten his lapels. “Does that mean I’m going to have a new Mommy?”
“It’s a first date, Jo,” McCoy said as an awkward bit of a laugh escaped him. “And no matter what, I’m always going to be here for you.” He pressed his forehead to hers, their dependency on each other not escaping his notice. “You and me, Jo, forever. I promise you that.” He hugged her tightly and didn’t even notice when Jim had sidled into the room, leaning against the door and waiting for the embrace to end.
McCoy let her go and forced a smile. “Daddy,” Joanna said as she stepped back. “I’ll take good care of Jim.”
“Good girl,” McCoy praised. “Make sure he eats his greens and goes to bed at a reasonable hour.”
“Hey!”
Father and daughter shared a mischievous smile and it put McCoy in a good enough mood that he was already whistling by the time he was heading out of the door and heading towards his date with the comely teacher for the local elementary school. Miss Perkins. Now if he could just convince his mind that he actually wanted to be dating so soon after the divorce, that’d help him wonders.
When McCoy returned from his date at eleven PM, he was tired, weary, and disappointed. All Sheila Perkins had wanted to talk about was Joanna’s progress in a nervous way that hinted that she was either too comfortable with the thought of his daughter or not comfortable at all and was trying to overcompensate. Hell, McCoy hadn’t learned anything about her during the evening and the date had fizzled out when McCoy tried to lean over for a goodnight kiss and she just about slammed the door in his face.
Great, he thought, just great. He was starting a real winner of a streak when it came to dating other women. He slowly worked his tie loose and draped it over the couch before checking on Joanna in her room. No matter what, at the end of the day, this was what he came back to. He settled wearily on her bed and leaned over to press a kiss to her forehead.
They could talk in the morning about how it seemed as if Joanna was bound to go just a little bit longer without a new mother. He got the feeling she wouldn’t really mind that.
After stroking Joanna’s back and tucking her properly into bed, he got up to head to sleep himself. The house was still standing and if he wasn’t mistaken, it looked as if some cleaning had been done in the evening. Apparently Jim Kirk passed a responsibility test and McCoy wouldn’t have to ring up Pike in the morning (who was an old family friend and who tended to try and convince McCoy on a regular basis to join the Fleet. McCoy just always told him to shove it where the sun didn’t shine) and tell the man that his little prodigy wasn’t so bad after all.
Well, maybe he’d have to rethink that, because that reprobate genius was sprawled all over his bed.
“Does the part of your brain that does directions know where you are?” McCoy half-growled, tossing his tie to the chair and draping his suit jacket atop it while he worked the top button of his crisp white shirt loose.
Jim peeked up and reclined on his elbows. “I was just waiting for you to give you the report. We had spinach and chicken for dinner...she made me eat the spinach,” Jim glowered. “Then we played ‘who can clean the fastest’. I grabbed the kitchen and she did the den. She won, but I’m still calling dirty play because I decided to steam the oven.” McCoy raised a brow as he flicked the light switch to his walk-in closet and wandered inside to change while listening to Jim’s ramble, making sure the door was closed enough so that he couldn’t look inside.
“Television?” McCoy called over his shoulder.
“We watched three documentaries, her choice, and then she went to bed on her own. You’ve either got the world’s most obedient child - and I’m thinking she’s a zombie then - or you’re employing a wicked case of mind control, Bones,” Jim said with a lazy smirk. McCoy stepped out from the closet in his pajamas and shoved at Jim’s legs. “So, I did notice the time. Why aren’t you making Miss Perkins’ bedsprings squeal?”
“None of your goddamn business,” McCoy muttered heavily.
“Mm,” was all Jim would say in turn. “Well, better sleep. Tomorrow’s Sunday and you know what that means! Church!” he said with mock-enthusiasm, clapping his hands together. He bounded off McCoy’s bed and clapped him once on the shoulder as he went, somehow escaping the room before McCoy could make a joke about Jim Kirk being unable to step over the threshold for fear of being immolated for his sins.
*
Life did the worst possible thing to McCoy by progressing absolutely normally after he had taken a stray into their home. Jim made himself nonexistent a lot of the time, but always turned up for dinner where he minded his manners, washed his hands, ate his greens, and looked pointedly at Joanna as if expecting her to do the same.
“Are you a middle child?” McCoy wondered curiously as they washed dishes after dinner. From Pike’s stories, he knew that there was an older sibling, but sometimes Jim acted as if he had taken care of someone younger than him.
Jim just grinned as he tucked dishes away. “The youngest. Come on, would a middle child get arrested as often as I have?”
“Yes,” McCoy replied without missing a beat. His psychiatry degree might specialize in space disease, but he knew the dynamics of siblings well. “They’d do it to seek attention.”
“Well…” Jim seemed at a loss. “Sorry, but I’m the youngest.”
McCoy later amended his diagnosis to account for the fact that as much as McCoy wasn’t having second thoughts about his decision to take Jim Kirk in, the other man didn’t know that. All his behavior could be explained through a conscious desire to give McCoy absolutely no cause to kick Jim out of the house. It would explain why the beds were always made, the house was always clean, and it explained the small rent check on his desk after the first week.
McCoy tore up the check and scribbled a note to replace it saying that he had earned more than his keep.
When Jim came home that night and found the ripped check, he cast a strange look on McCoy that the doctor didn’t understand. He was busy with patient records and a consult on a case from Princeton Hospital up in New Jersey and didn’t have time to decipher why Jim looked so awed (though his constantly-diagnosing brain said that it was possibly because no one had ever done something like that for Jim before).
He got his communications from Jocelyn and always put Joanna on the vidphone when she called, stepping out of the room to give the both of them privacy.
“So that’s her, huh,” Jim asked, sliding his hands into the pockets of his jeans while they got comfortable on the porch and Joanna could talk about whatever she liked. “The mythical ex?”
“Jocelyn,” McCoy advised. “Her name is Jocelyn.”
He settled on the porch swing and watched as Jim swayed back and forth over the creaky floorboards, unable to settle. McCoy had been out on a second date with Sheila Perkins and they had gone to a little pizza place. The date had ended early when he had stained her white blouse with pizza sauce in an effort to affectionately brush her arm. Suffice to say, he was zero for two when it came to the dating batting average. This was why he was unexpectedly home at seven in the evening, still in his suit and staring into the distance while wondering what the hell was wrong with him.
“Earth to Bones?”
“What?”
“Why’d the date end so early?” It sounded like this was the second time that Jim was asking the question.
McCoy shrugged. “I’m the world’s worst wooing man,” he admitted. “Pizza sauce on a white blouse. I’m pretty sure she was mumbling something about never seeing me again while she was dousing club soda on herself.” He couldn’t help a snicker of a slightly cruel laugh. “I got a view of the goods, if nothing else.”
“And?”
“Probably wouldn’t have been worth it,” McCoy sighed out the words, just as Jim decided to take up the other half of the bench. “I caught Pike calling you the other day. Joanna answered, lied for you and said you weren’t here. I thought the delinquent behavior was a thing of the past?”
“I don’t want to be in Starfleet,” Jim insisted coolly. “It killed my father and broke my mother. Why should I follow in those footsteps?”
“And here I’m just terrified of flying,” McCoy lightly said, arranging the pillows at his back to keep them between him and Jim. The crickets nearby were chirping and he looked sideways at Jim in the dim light of the porch, watching him without much intent but with constant curiosity. “What happened to you taking off for the Keys?”
“Warm enough here for my blood,” Jim said without much commitment. “Besides. You’re kind of my only friend in a while. Most people kick me out when I try and hang around them. They hate the attitude or the cockiness or they don’t like it when I have anonymous sex.’
“So long as you aren’t doing it in my bed or hers, I don’t care,” McCoy assured him. “Hell, I’m the one who gave you all the condoms.”
“I was wondering who the condom fairy was,” Jim noted sarcastically. “I came home to a pile of them on my bed.”
“This town is small,” McCoy said with a smirk. “Rumors get started quick and the one about you being a down-home bred cowboy at heart weren’t hard to decipher when Luella Barnes was singin’ your praises in town.” His accent was thick when it came to talking about things in his hometown. Somehow, it pleased Jim, too. McCoy stretched and draped his arms over the back of the swing. “You can take a shot at Sheila Perkins, now. Don’t think I’ll get another chance.”
“Nah,” Jim said with a shrug. “Not one for seconds, generally. I only make scant exceptions.”
Before McCoy could continue along their line of conversation, the front door opened and Joanna bounded out and inserted herself snugly between both McCoy and Jim, curling up so that her head was in McCoy’s lap and her feet were in Jim’s.
“Mommy says hi,” Joanna said blissfully with an easy smile. “She said she has ‘portant news to tell you ‘bout a new girlfriend.”
Jim and McCoy exchanged a curious look over Joanna’s head. “She still on the line, kiddo?”
“Yup!”
McCoy slowly rose to his feet and made the journey into the house to find out what this was about.
*
“She’s screwing an Orion!”
Jim was in McCoy’s room because he had reacted incredibly poorly to the news. It had only been months since their divorce, not even a year, and his ex-wife had already moved on into the arms of a green-skinned, slaved, daughter of a…Jim had needed to turn off the vidphone before he could finish that sentence and had forcibly dragged McCoy up to the bedroom, searching through drawers.
“Where is…”
“What the hell are you looking for?”
“You always have those hyposprays! I was going to sedate you!” Jim protested wildly.
“I don’t need sedation. I need for my ex-wife to not have already found herself with someone else before I have!” he spat out and he realized that it was hypocritical for him because he was dating and he wanted to move on, but to hear that Jocelyn had found herself a working relationship (even if it wasn’t monogamous) burned him up inside.
Jim looked frantic and frazzled and worried and was grabbing at McCoy’s shoulders to clutch him tightly. “Shut up, okay?” he ordered. “Joanna’s going to hear you.”
“I’ll shut up when I damn well want to,” McCoy muttered, yanking himself out of Jim’s grip. “I’m going to San Francisco to meet this woman, see what the hell she’s got that I didn’t have for six years of marriage...” He was already tossing clothes onto the bed to pack in his frenzied state, ready to move the world just to try and justify his anger at the situation. “Can’t possibly wait until she’s out in space and away from the world to move on. And she had to tell me! She couldn’t just keep it in the dark.” He was going to complain about this until the sun rose in the sky and probably would have if Jim hadn’t discovered a way to shut him up.
Funny enough, it involved him grabbing McCoy’s cheeks and planting a hard kiss to his lips.
And it shut McCoy up perfectly. Froze him to the spot, too.
Jim eased back and blinked warily, sighing with relief when McCoy didn’t immediately re-start his tirade.
“…damn it, Jim,” McCoy hissed. “I just treated you last week for aphthous stomatitis.”
“…yeah, sorry? It shut you up.”
McCoy’s anger was still burning heavy and hard, but he didn’t want to explain the why of it to Joanna and he didn’t think that catching a shuttle to San Francisco just to see his ex-wife in the happy new embrace of someone else was going to do anything for him. He sighed and rubbed at his face, collapsing on the end of the bed.
“Get out, Jim,” he muttered tiredly.
“Okay.”
Just before Jim could get out of the room fully, McCoy quietly added a dulled ‘thank you’ and if not for the ‘no problem, Bones’, he wouldn’t have thought that Jim was capable of hearing that small sliver of gratitude.
*
McCoy had gone to Savannah in order to attend a medical conference. Jim had been living with the McCoys for near-on six months. Every end-of-month, he would pack his bags and insist that he would finally make his departure and leave them alone. Every first-of-the-month, he would wake up to find that his suitcase had been summarily unpacked. McCoy always swore innocence, but Joanna had a guilty look about her that Jim couldn’t really fault her for.
It felt different to actually be wanted somewhere. Even home wasn’t so much home because he looked so much like his father that his mother would sometimes visibly cringe at the sight of him, her face crumpling in heartache and despair.
Jim knew that he was actually a welcome guest of the house when McCoy packed his bags and informed Joanna that Jim would be watching over her for the five days that he was gone. It was approval and Jim felt as if he had a place.
Of course, Jim had the feeling that place was about to disappear because he had fucked up and it was bad. He hadn’t stopped for a single red light on his way in and was charging across the hall to skitter to a stop by the desk. “Joanna McCoy,” he demanded. “They called me, they phoned my cell, I’m Jim Kirk, I’m her second contact. Where is she?”
The hospital had called him the minute it had happened and informed him that Joanna had broken her arm in an accident at school. In that one moment, Jim had felt his heart almost stop. He hadn’t known, exactly, how much the McCoys meant to him until suddenly he thought of a life without Joanna and a life in which Bones blamed him for losing her. He just couldn’t do it.
The nurse - pretty, Jim almost entertained a subconscious thought to visit her later - directed him to the second floor and he nearly sprinted up stairs and down halls, only to find Joanna in her civilian clothes, already changed and appearing ready to head out.
Jim, for his part, was breathless.
“Jim,” she merely said and looked up at him with wide eyes. It took no less than three seconds for Jim to carefully wrap her in a hug, trying to ignore her arm in the sling and trying not to think violent thoughts about whatever had put her here. His mind is a litany of panicked thoughts and they’re all sprinting back to ‘Bones is going to kill me’. “I’m okay,” she promised him, but her voice sounded like a small echo of its usual state. “It was just an accident. Big fire drill and I got pushed down the stairs.”
“I’m gonna make things right,” Jim insisted, his voice stubborn and scared at once. “No one gets to hurt you, not even …”
He stopped when he felt a small hand on his forearm and looked down at Joanna, who was looking back up at him with a tiny smile of pride.
“What?”
“Thank you for coming to get me. I didn’t want to worry Daddy with a call,” she admitted and took his hand with her good arm. “You’ll have to call him now, but we can promise him I’m okay together,” she said, swinging their hands slightly after Jim helped secure her pink knapsack to her back and led her out to McCoy’s car - because he had left it in the event of emergency.
God dammit, but Jim didn’t want to have to make that phone call.
Joanna did the brunt of the explaining for him. She phoned McCoy and showed off her pink sling as tears shone in her eyes and she explained that it was all an accident and that it only hurt a little and that Jim had come to pick her up and had even made her soup and rubbed her arm where it ached and itched.
Bones told her to go through her nightly routine and then beckoned Jim forward.
“I swear to god, Bones, I…” Jim struggled to find words, not wanting to be kicked out of the house because he had finally managed to screw everything up past the point of return. “I’m so sorry, if I’d known she was getting hurt, I would have been there to catch her. I would have, I swear.”
There was a long moment of silence and Jim finally dared to look up to the screen and caught a disconcerted and soft look in McCoy’s eyes. Jim kept praying to a god he wasn't sure he believed in and tried to think of all the ways he could make sure he got to stay right where he was. He didn’t like the thought of packing his bags only to have them stay packed the next morning.
“I’ll be home by morning. We’ll talk about it then,” McCoy said quietly and hung up before Jim could ask any more questions.
Shit, he thought.
*
Jim packed for the morning.
It wasn’t even the end of the month, but he waited until Joanna was with her cousins and hauled out his bag. He only had the clothes on his back when he’d arrived and had collected himself an array of things that resembled a life. They all fit in his duffel bag and that sat by the front door. Jim was perched beside it on the sturdy table, waiting for Bones to come and give him his eviction notice. He bit at his nails until they were half-crescent shadows of what they were before.
Jim definitely didn’t look forward to this speech.
He knew this speech way too well for his own good. You’re just too much trouble, Jimmy boy and I think it’s about time you moved on in your life and out of ours. Memories of too many places were flooding back and he was in the middle of remembering Iowa when the front door lock was slowly released and McCoy entered the room haltingly.
Jim glanced up warily. “I uh, I sent Jo to her cousins. I figured she didn’t need to hear this.”
Bones didn’t reply to him. His eyes skirted over Jim and then cast a look down to the duffel bag. He didn’t say a word, but his brow rose curiously and he shot Jim a questioning look that didn’t need words to explain itself. Jim swallowed the lump in his throat, trying to will away the dryness of his mouth as he shrugged haplessly.
“I…anticipated,” he replied quietly to an unspoken question.
Bones set his own suitcase down and locked the door behind him. It took him three strides to get to the duffel bag, at which point he picked it up and carried it over his shoulder up the stairs. Jim felt a flash of panic at all the unknown variables that were throwing him off. He didn’t know what to make of the situation and he definitely didn’t know what Bones was doing with his things. He shot to his feet and trailed after McCoy by no more than two feet.
Jim stared, praying McCoy wasn’t about to dump his possessions out a second story window. “Hey,” he called after him, voice low and wary. “Hey, McCoy…” It was the first time in three months that Jim hadn’t used his nickname.
Bones went straight for the guest room and set the duffel on the bed. Instead of opening the window and chucking his things out, he unzipped the top and very calmly began to unpack the belongings into their rightful drawers. Bones seemed to know where everything went and for a brief flash of a moment, he started to think that maybe, just maybe, Joanna wasn’t acting alone on the last day of the month.
Jim cast Bones a grateful look without saying a word.
“You took care of her. You don’t need to thank me,” Bones insisted gruffly, somehow understanding that Jim was looking at him with utter fondness and appreciation that both funnelled into abject gratitude.
He gave one last nod before leaving the room, shutting the door softly behind him.
Jim nearly passed out from relief as he sank down onto his bed and let out a giddy laugh. That laugh slowly started to morph into a plan of a smile and he bit down on his lower lip as he reached across the bed for the phone.
The phone didn’t ring very long before Joanna picked up with a cheerful ‘lo?’ Jim didn’t waste any time explaining to her the situation. She just laughed and snorted when he said that he assumed that Joanna acted all on her own.
“Daddy didn’t know where all your stuff went, but he still helped,” she said matter-of-factly over the vidphone, cradling the speaking to her ear as she sank deeper into her chair while stroking her cousins’ golden retriever absently, her harmed arm out of the way. “Said that you needed a place to feel like home and you were just gonna be stupid and run away.”
“Well, I have done some very stupid things in my life,” Jim acknowledged and stared at her for a long moment. “Hey Jo, can I take your Dad out for dinner? Can you ask your cousins to watch you a bit longer so I can take him out and thank him?”
Joanna seemed to think on it for a very long moment. “Sure,” she said absently. “But don’t go to that Italian place he always takes his dates to. Daddy’s bad when it comes to white clothes and spaghetti sauce,” she said, unable to help her bemused giggle at announcing those words. Jim watched her before speaking because she had a thoughtful and distant look on her face, as if something whimsically deep was about to come from her. “Take him out for sushi. He really likes it.”
Jim grinned and decided that she was definitely the smartest one in the entire household.
“We’ll be back before nine, okay?” Jim insisted and blew her a kiss before hanging up and descending the stairs rapidly, lifting McCoy forcibly from his chair where he was doing charting. Jim wasted no time in wrapping one arm around McCoy’s waist and draped the other around his shoulders.
It was easy to do, even when the other person was resisting slightly. Jim hadn’t fought his share of grudgematches in Iowa for nothing.
He just kept tugging Bones along. “Come on. I owe you dinner,” Jim insisted and tucked his wallet away in his back pocket. “And I swear to god, if you don’t let me pay this time, I’m going to tell the whole town about your date with Angela Maudry,” Jim warned. That had been the night that McCoy had actually gotten fairly far only to discover that the woman was allergic to latex.
Jim hadn’t stopped laughing about that one for a week.
The woman also had five cats, so it was a good thing Bones had an exit gifted to him by the gods, but that was besides the point.
“I swear to god, Jim, no Ita...”
“Sushi,” Jim interrupted any discussion about wayward curses on lasagna and the alcoholic content of certain spaghetti sauces. He even flashed his best charming grin at McCoy to try and let that sweeten the pot (as if that could do anything to help when the decision was probably already cast in stone). “Good, great, let’s go!” he insisted, making the decision for McCoy and shoving a jacket his way.
Jim didn’t know why he worried. If he really looked back at the pattern of their friendship, it became very clear that Bones pretty much did what Jim asked. Maybe it was some crazy Stockholm Syndrome thing or maybe he was just bored.
So that was how they wound up at a dinner table at a sushi restaurant while trading food on each other’s plates, getting a good taste of all the offerings.
“Jo’s really taken a shine to you, you know,” McCoy commented as he twirled chopsticks in his fingers and Jim fought not to stare at them. Just because he had Doctor’s fingers didn’t mean that Jim automatically got permission to gape. Still, it was fairly hard not to. “According to the nurses, she was the first person you asked for, seeing as she knew I was out of town. She still wants you to know that it wasn’t your fault, that you couldn’t have done anything differently.”
“Yeah?” Jim asked, cheeks flushing a pleased pink. “Well, I still wish I could’ve stopped it,” he stubbornly insisted. “And you would have been totally within your rights to kick me out.”
“Yeah, well…” McCoy trailed off, a sentence that seemed to need to be spoken and had no genuine end at the same rate.
They ate dinner mostly in silence because Jim found he wasn’t sure what to say and McCoy had a generally perturbed air about him.
“Starfleet called again,” McCoy grunted.
“I’m pretty sure I actually told them, verbatim, to go fuck themselves the last time,” Jim noted mildly, wondering if he was somehow going to earn the blame of an annoying caller.
McCoy glanced up from his empty plate and there was a flickering of something like sheepish guilt on his face. It almost looked like…well, like McCoy had been keeping secrets from him. Jim instantly wanted to know how many there were, how plentiful in number, how deep in severity they were.
“It wasn’t you they were after, Jim,” McCoy sighed heavily. “It was me. You think Pike’s only after you? The man hasn’t shut up about getting me to serve since I got my degree.”
“Yeah, but you hate space,” Jim pointed out the obvious.
“Which is what I told ‘em. I told ‘em I was happy and had Joanna and had…well, had you.” McCoy was staring at Jim across the table. “And I told them that and I don’t even know what I’m saying, then or now, because you’re my fucking house-guest, not some kind of therapy tool. I don’t have you, you’re not a possession and…”
Oh.
Jim’s foot had started to have ideas of its own, slipping out of a fine black shoe and pressing lightly to Bones’ calf.
“Jim? You’re not a possession,” McCoy roughly growled.
That didn’t dissuade Jim’s foot.
“I swear, it’s got a mind of its own,” Jim half-confessed. His mouth was dry and he was trying to figure out when staying with the McCoys had become less about hiding from the law in a place he didn’t want to go back to and more about staying with a family that seemed to accept him - flaws and all. “You can have me. You do have me,” Jim swore, but removed his foot. This wasn’t going to go well unless he seemed and acted serious, so he set his face in firm sternness while asking for the check. “Think about it, Bones. Okay? Just…think about maybe me staying with you for reasons other than sanctuary.”
*
The house was dark but for the four lights.
The kitchen, Jim’s room, Joanna’s, and the den. McCoy was pacing between the four of them as if they were the points that were guiding him home. He had been handed a present and told that if he wanted to unwrap it, he could have the contents. Except that they were a surprise and he had no idea how long they were going to last, being that someone had forget to stamp the expiration date on the package, so it was all a surprise.
McCoy just wasn’t sure that he was at a point in his life that he really wanted to be dealing with surprises. He was still pacing the circuit when he was caught out by the surprise-package itself. Jim opened the door to his room and leaned heavily against the frame.
“Your house creaks,” he accused and shifted so that his arms were crossed over his torso and he looked as if he was comfortable sprawling right there. “What are you still doing up?”
“It’s eight,” McCoy pointed out. The dinner with Jim seemed ages away and another day had dawned, but he hadn’t found any answers in the midst of it. “Joanna is still up, for god’s sake, I wouldn’t call it late in the least.”
“Point,” Jim admitted and his eyes didn’t wander from McCoy’s form as he looked him slowly up and down, a gentle smile on his face. “Do you want to come in?”
McCoy hated that he felt a rush of desire at the very question. He hated that ‘yes’ wanted to trip past his lips before he even stepped back to consider things. This was a man he had met while he was on the lam. He was still a wanted man as far as Starfleet was concerned and he was another man, let McCoy not forget that.
His feet answered for him when they gravitated towards the door. They were steady and sure. They were deciding for him.
He hated his goddamn feet for that.
Jim closed the door behind them and McCoy reminded himself that they had to be quiet because Joanna was just two doors down and they couldn’t let their talking get too loud. That was all they’d be doing. Talking.
“So uh...” Jim started.
“You a poker player, Jim?” McCoy started conversationally, drifting around his carpeted floors as he kept his eyes on every object and fixture in the room except for Jim. He looked at the bay-window seat and the desk and his eyes lingered on dishevelled shoes near the closet.
Finally, McCoy looked up at Jim and caught him in an unsure moment. “I guess? I mean, it’s not like I’d put it on my resume, but I don’t say no to a good game every now and again. Why, did you want to play?”
“This is the time between us where the river’s dealt,” McCoy said as he crossed the distance between them. His tone was hushed, as if tampered by cotton. “Cards on the table, Jim. Go. I can have you. If I want you. How long is that having for? I’ve got a little girl, Jim, who’s watched her father go through heartbreak the once. Jocelyn is off in space finding love in new places and I’m...I’m trying to be a good father.” His eyes roam Jim up and down. “You break the law and run away as fast as you can, trying to give light speed a run for its money. You break limbs and flash a charming smile to make it better. You make all the girls in town crazy about you...” he was rambling now, voice tending towards the irrational. “You...you...”
“I’m still here even though I was supposed to be gone months ago?” Jim supplied helpfully.
“That too.”
McCoy didn’t know what to do because he didn’t know what to make of Jim. He rubbed at his forehead and opened his mouth long enough to let out a helpless sound and then he was shaking his head and heading to the door.
“Bones, wait,” Jim pleaded, catching hold of his wrist and turning him around, gracefully sliding into his personal space and just standing there. It blurred McCoy’s vision and he didn’t know what to do. “My turn.”
McCoy closed his eyes and waited. He just waited.
“I don’t want this room anymore.”
And there it was.
“Right, I’ll...”
“I want your room and you in it,” Jim kept plowing forward, a glint of mischief and delight in his eyes.
Well, McCoy thought. A full house with hearts and aces wasn’t such a bad hand to be playing, he supposed. Jim was still in his personal space and they were barely touching. McCoy felt that needed to change and he leaned in slowly, pressing his forehead to Jim’s as he stole gentle kisses from his lips, light punctuations and reminders that he was going to have him.
That first day seemed so far away and the only thing that McCoy ever wants to do now with Jim is to run when he wants to run, Joanna on his shoulders and giving them direction.
“You got it, Jim,” McCoy promised in a single exhalation, hands around Jim’s hips and pulling him even closer than before as Jim’s room went back to being the guest room in a single heartbeat.
THE END