fic : what chain reaction

[walksbyherself]

Story Title: what chain reaction
Author's Name: walksbyherself
Rating: PG13 for language and mindfuckery
Summary: Originally written for this prompt on the kink meme -- A mission goes bad and Jim loses his mind. Bones has to reassemble the pieces.
Disclaimer: The boys aren't mine.
Notes: Thanks to everybody who encouraged me to de-anon and post this here.


His cell is the last one in the row. It is nine steps by seven steps and it has no windows. The door is old fashioned; it has bars and must be opened manually. They feed him once in the morning (after his first session, not before or he will be sick) and once at night (after his second session). A faucet on the wall gives him all the water he wants. The latrine is in the corner, behind a low partition. He had a pallet but there were bugs in it and when he said so, they took it away. His name is Jim.

This is everything he knows.

They are late for his morning session.

He wonders if he did something wrong and they no longer want him, but if that were the case, he would have been reassigned or terminated. Jim waits by the door and tries to be patient.

The door at the far end of the hall slams open and Jim wonders if someone had a bad session again. There are voices shouting and he recognizes none of them. He knows all the technicians’ voices and the subjects aren’t allowed to speak outside of a session. Maybe--

Maybe it is a rescue.

He shakes his head and wonders why he thought that.

“I don’t see him!”

“They said he was here--”

“It ever occur to you that they lied?”

“Doctor--”

“There!”

Two, three, four pairs of feet running and they stop in front of his cell. They are not dressed like technicians; their clothes fit better and have brighter colors. Maybe they are here to take him to a different program. That would be nice.

One of the men opens his door and another holds out a hand. “Come on, Jim. Time to go.”

“Where are we going?”

The man’s hand drops and Jim fights to keep smiling. If this is a test to get to the new program, he doesn’t want to fail. There are better cells there and better food and no bugs. It’s what everyone says, or whispers, at night in the minutes between shifts. Jim wants that like he’s never wanted anything but they are staring at him like he said something awful so he quits smiling and takes a step back from the door.

“Jim?” This time it’s the Vulcan who speaks. There was a Vulcan subject in the cell across from Jim’s. He got her to smile and then she had a bad session and never came back.

“I think you have the wrong subject,” he replies slowly. “There might be a different Jim on one of the other halls.”

“No, Jim,” the Vulcan says. “You are the one we’ve been looking for.”

Jim takes another step back.

“Christ almighty, we don’t have time for you to be scaring him.” The man in the blue shirt--the one who held out his hand--edges into the cell. “Jim...Jim, you have to trust me.”

His voice is gentle but firm, expecting to be obeyed. Commands are something Jim understands.

Jim steps forward.

When the hypospray punches into his neck, he is utterly unsurprised.

They had Jim for two full weeks. Scans reveal what they did to him, but not why. The people at the Institute--the ones Jim calls ‘technicians’--are stubbornly close-mouthed about the content of their work. They acknowledge that they used Jim as a subject in error, but won’t say who provided him. For all McCoy knows, the technicians are all fucking lying and they know exactly who they had. This isn’t a Federation world, just an amalgam of labs and corporations and black market tech with more laws concerning intellectual property than the rights of sentient beings.

They take Jim home and they call it a win.

He lives in a drugged fog, words and faces rising to the surface, only to be swallowed up by the next wave of treatments.

He hears intermittent words like ‘malnutrition’ and ‘chemical imbalance’ and ‘neural scarring.’ It is like being back in a session and the thought makes him smile.

When the fog clears, he does not know where he is. Everyone is very happy to see him. He is not happy to see anyone.

He asks for the man in the blue shirt. There are a lot of blue shirts in this new place, but it does not take them long to figure out who he means.

“Nurse Chapel tells me you were refusing breakfast.”

“I don’t eat in the morning,” Jim explains, as if McCoy should already know. “Not before my first session. Otherwise I’ll be sick and they’ll have to decontaminate the chair and that throws off the whole morning schedule. But she said if I didn’t eat, I wouldn’t get to see you, so I ate.”

The corner of McCoy’s mouth twitches in a smile. “You’re going to be just fine, Jim.”

Jim shrugs, swinging his feet back and forth. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Just thought you’d want to know I might throw up on you.”

The words are barely out of his mouth when Jim goes still.

“Jim?”

“...Bones?”

McCoy’s breath lodges in his throat. “Yes, Jim?”

“Did I make that up? Is that your name?”

“It’s what you call me.”

“It’s what he called you,” Jim corrects and the hope flickering in McCoy’s eyes is drawn back and buried. “But...is it alright if I call you that, too?”

“Yeah, Jim. I’d like that.”

They are talking about a cure, talking about him and how he is like he isn’t in the room.

It does not occur to him to be offended; the subject is never that involved in his treatment, just the effects--new symptoms, old symptoms, how do you feel today.

It will take a month, they say, for the solution to be developed properly.

Jim does not mind waiting.

Following his release from sickbay, Jim trails behind McCoy like a breathing shadow. After the first two days, everyone just assumes that a request for the doctor will bring the captain also. Jim keeps out of the way, hands clasped behind him, sometimes rocking back on his heels if the conversation takes too long.

Jim is shy around most of the crew, Uhura in particular. When McCoy asks why, Jim says she reminds him of the girl across the hall and refuses to explain further.

Jim likes Bones because Bones does not expect him to be the captain.

Everyone is nice to him, but they talk to him like he is the other Jim, and Jim has to smile too much to cover for all the things he doesn’t know. Bones spends most of his time in Sickbay and Jim likes Sickbay, too. It smells familiar, like the session rooms in the Institute. Jim doesn’t talk about the Institute with Bones because he knows it makes him upset, but one day he is looking at all the equipment and thinking about how there is nothing here for him to do except look like the captain and he asks Bones for a session.

Bones doesn’t answer for a long time and Jim fills the silence by saying how he wants to help and he knows that the sessions were good work, they said so, so maybe--

Bones puts a hand on his shoulder and he stops talking. “We don’t...do that kind of work here, Jim. We do good work, but not...not like that.”

Jim tries not to let the disappointment show on his face. That night, he gets his idea.

McCoy wakes early to check on a patient and that’s how he catches him, asleep sitting up with his back against the door.

“Jim?”

The whisper brings him fully awake; he tenses but doesn’t flee.

“Jim, what are you doing here?”

“Keeping watch. Someone has to stand watch for you.”

“Jim, you don’t--”

“Yes, I do.” There’s a spark of Jim’s old fire. “Everyone tries to tell me who I am and what I did and what I can do but I can’t do any of that now. I just...this is something I...”

“It’s fine, Jim.” McCoy climbs out of bed, running a hand through his hair and grabbing a clean uniform. “I have to go in early. Why don’t you crash here until alpha shifts actually starts? Take my bed.”

“I couldn’t--”

McCoy pins Jim with a stern look. “Yeah, you could. It’ll just be going to waste. I’ll swing back around and get you at the shift change. Alright?”

“Alright.” Jim sounds hesitant, but can’t hide his smile.

Jim wakes up in a bed that smells like Bones and it takes him a moment to remember why. When he does, he gets up and makes the bed--the corners as crisp as he can manage--and gets dressed.

And then he waits.

He waits for a long time.

“Bones!”

It’s almost a scream and McCoy stares in disbelief at the clock on the wall--halfway through alpha shift, god fucking dammit.

“Bones!”

McCoy scrambles out from behind his desk and into Sickbay. Chapel is doing her best to calm Jim down, but Jim isn’t having it.

“Jim!”

The relief on Jim’s face is sudden and total; he looks damn near ready to collapse.

“Jim, come here.” He practically sprints for McCoy’s office, drawing up short beside the desk. As soon as the door closes, Jim’s mouth opens.

“I’m sorry, I overslept and when I woke up, it was so late and I couldn’t find you. I waited, because you said you’d come, but it was too late and I thought--”

“Jim, it’s my fault. I was busy and...” ‘And I forgot’ seems like the worst possible thing to say, so he lets it trail off.

Jim doesn’t seem to notice. “I couldn’t remember how to get here. I couldn’t remember and I didn’t want to ask...” It’s Jim’s turn to fall silent as something occurs to him. “It’s alright for me to be here, isn’t it? You didn’t--it’s not that I wasn’t supposed to come?”

“Oh, Jim, no.”

Jim hides his face in his hands. “I don’t know what I’m doing here, Bones. I don’t belong here.”

“No,” McCoy repeats, softer this time. “This is your home.”

He sleeps in McCoy’s bed after that. It’s a tight fit, but they manage, and McCoy gets used to waking up to blue eyes and tangled limbs and that soft, soft smile that shreds his heart a little more each time.

They’ve moved on to their next duty station--a blue and tan jewel of a world that Jim likes to watch from the observation deck. Things are much more complicated on the surface; something to do with rival factions and kidnappings and territorial exchanges. They have been talking about it for long enough that Jim thinks he understands.

So when the faction leaders request the presence of the famous Captain Kirk, it seems only natural to speak up. “I can go.”

It takes everyone a minute to realize what he said; in the interim, he repeats it. “I can go. I can pretend, if it’ll help.”

“Are you certain, Captain?”

No matter how many times he’s asked, Jim can’t convince Spock to stop calling him that. “Yes. I’m certain.”

He is anything but. Still, this may be something he can do.

The entire away team is on edge--McCoy ready to explain away the captain’s erratic behavior, Spock to take over the negotiations--but Jim is charming, diplomatic, sincere.

He’s perfect.

When they get back aboard the Enterprise, it’s nearly midnight, ship’s time. Jim follows McCoy back to his room in silence. Once inside, he pulls McCoy close, hands fisted in the doctor’s shirt, and rests his forehead at the base of McCoy’s throat. When he speaks, the words are nearly muffled by fabric. “Don’t ever let me do that again.”

He tries to pull Jim into a hug, but the other man steps back, yanking the gold shirt off and hurling it into a far corner. “That’s not mine!” He glares after it. “That’s not mine and I wish everyone would quit saying it was. I should never have touched it.”

McCoy sinks down onto the edge of the bed.

Jim’s expression crumples. “Bones, I..."

“It’s alright, Jim. C’mere.”

Jim fidgets a moment before sitting beside him, hands in his lap and his eyes on the floor. “They liked me better when I was him. I could tell.”

“That...doesn’t mean they don’t like you, Jim. They just miss their captain.”

“If they don’t get him back, I can’t pretend to be him, Bones. I won’t.”

McCoy slips an arm around his shoulders and prays it won’t come to that. “You did good work today--”

“No, I didn’t! I lied to all those people, told them they would be safe just because of who I am and I’m not that person, Bones! My name--Jim Kirk’s name--won’t protect them from anything.”

“Maybe it won’t, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t do any good. A lot of what we do isn’t flashy or even real; it’s words and posturing, but that doesn’t make it any less important.”

It’s not enough to sway Jim. “The sessions, the program was important. That was real and you took me away from it! Now even if I get back, I’ll be so far behind the other subjects, they won’t want me. And all the progress we made goes out the airlock because you all needed your goddamn captain.”

McCoy doesn’t flinch. “All this crap about sessions and progress--you only miss it because they told you how glorious it was. You don’t really know the first fucking thing about what they did to you.”

“And you’re so different?” Jim laughs. “What is this place--your mission--if not one more program? Someone upstairs running everything and telling you it’s for the best but what do you know except what they tell you?”

McCoy doesn’t have an answer for him; when Jim leaves, he doesn’t move to stop him.

Jim hates his room, but it’s the only place other than sickbay he can reliably find and he needs to be alone.

The bed is too wide and too soft and too empty. He takes the blanket and curls up on the floor.

When McCoy enters Sickbay alone, everyone stares.

He acts like he doesn’t know what (who) they’re looking for and asks Chapel for the notes from the previous shift. She hands him the PADD, pointing out particular items that will require his attention.

“One more thing, Doctor,” she says before he can retreat to his office. “They’ve finished it.”

It takes him a moment to realize what she means, a moment more for him to respond. “I...I’ll go get Jim, then.”

He heads back out into the hall like he doesn’t feel the eyes of his staff burning a hole in his shoulders.

The door opens and Bones doesn’t say anything. Jim sits up from his huddle on the floor and asks eventually, “Is it ready?”

When Bones nods, he stands up and follows him to Sickbay. He tries to think of this as getting things back he didn’t know he was missing. He tries not to think of this as getting erased.

Jim sits on a biobed and holds still and rolls up his sleeve and doesn’t really listen when Bones starts explaining something. He just closes his eyes and waits.

The hypo sinks in and he thinks this is how we met.

And then, from somewhere deeper, no, it isn’t.

It’s strange not to have Jim following him around all day.

More than once, someone starts to address the captain and draws up short when they remember one does not guarantee the other anymore. McCoy smiles crookedly (more crooked than smile) and carries on. He means to finish a stack of reports after his shift but the first one he picks up is Jim’s, so he goes to bed early instead.

He wakes up an hour later. Jim is sitting with his back to the door, watching him.

“Jim?” McCoy is already calculating the odds of a relapse, side effects, alternative treatments.

“I missed you today.”

“Oh.” He feels like there should be something more to say to that.

If that smile is any indication, so does Jim. “Suppose I could always start stalking you on my off shifts. Or keep spending my nights here.”

The suggestion slides in so casually as to be part of the joke, but McCoy looks at his eyes and knows it isn’t.

“Yeah,” he murmurs hoarsely. “You could do that.”

Jim gets up and comes to sit beside him on the bed. “If that’s alright, Bones.”

“Yeah,” McCoy repeats, already leaning toward him. “I’d like that.”