FIC: Hard-Earned Rights
Title: Hard-Earned Rights
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: They don't belong to me.
Word Count: 4,700
Summary: Kirk is in a shuttle accident.
Hard-Earned Rights // Just About Time // The Graceful Waltz // One // The Grave Memorial Of A Life Unlived // Houses & Heartwarmings // Guess Who's Coming To Dinner // Enterprise On My Mind // Your Fate's Not In The Stars // A World of Solemn Thought // Time Can Never Kill The True Heart
Jim Kirk doesn’t think his head has hurt this much in his whole life. And yes, he’s counting the time he got his brains bashed in by that overprotective boyfriend and the time he drank so much that he passed out and smacked his head on the bar. This is worse than every hostile planet they’ve gone to during their five-year-exploratory mission and for some reason, he’d deluded himself into thinking he’d finally get a reprieve now that he’s on leave between terms.
This is so much worse than the worst pain he’s ever been in, especially because Bones is usually sitting by to jab him with a sedative.
He can’t exactly place what’s happened just yet, so all Kirk does is focus on getting his eyes fully open. It’s bright and he still hurts, but there’s one hell of a chaotic landscape to be seen when he does open his eyes. There’s wreckage all around him and Kirk groans as he starts to put the pieces together.
Guess you were right about those shuttles, Kirk manages to say to his inner-McCoy and rubs the back of his head with his palm, searching for a familiar landmark. He’d been on his way out to Georgia to visit Bones before heading back to the ship when this had happened.
Kirk manages to swallow back his horror at the scene. He should be used to seeing bodies, but he still doesn’t want to even think of the possibility of death as a result of the accident. Each moment that passes, another piece of the wreckage seems to ignite and burst into flames. All this has distracted him away from the fact that he’s being watched.
There had been eight people on that shuttle with him plus two pilots, and two Starfleet attendants. He could clearly see two unmoving bodies and several injured people, but he’s not the doctor. He wouldn’t know what to do with them and they’re not the ones watching him. It’s a girl who can’t be anymore than thirteen with a backpack slung over one arm and her brown hair catching the glint of the sun and the fire from the shuttle.
She stands there above him and studies him quietly and curiously.
“You’re finally awake,” she notes with quiet concern as she sits down beside him and offers out her flask of water. It’s like she’s decided to adopt him, like some stray pet and Jim might be absolutely adorable, but young teenage girls should not want to take him in as a rule. “I thought you might be dead for good.”
“Yeah? Well, I’m not.”
“Well, you’re not anymore,” the girl says in a practical tone, fiddling with her backpack as she lets it drop by her bent knees. “You lost your pulse. I had to give you CPR the old-fashioned way.”
Yeah, Kirk’s definitely starting to feel like this situation is spiraling and sprinting out of his control. He tries not to think about the girl’s lips on his or the way his chest feels bruised as he slowly sits up and mimics her position - knees drawn up to his chest, elbows draped over them.
He cranes his neck to the side and studies the look in her eyes. It’s far off and distant and he wonders if she got a smack to the head like he did. Shit, what’s Bones always telling him about concussions? No sleep for the wicked or something like that, but it had always boiled down to ‘don’t you fall asleep or you’ll regret it’.
“What’s your name?” Kirk probes lightly, figuring they can start with the basics. He watches her dig out a small kit of rations and pry it open, snacking on some of the dried meat before extending it to him. He takes it and uses the piece to offer a gesture of thanks before watching her face for reactions.
“My parents always told me not to give personal information to strangers,” she replies and there’s just this hint, this glimmer of teasing in her eyes past that distant reserve she’s got going on and Kirk wants to laugh. She’d given him CPR for christ’s sake and now she’s not going to tell him her name? What is it with him and women not wanting to reveal that?
If it hadn’t been for her paler-than-pale skin-tone, Kirk might have asked if she happened to be related to a Nyota Uhura by chance.
“So, what, you can breathe life into me, but I can’t learn your name?” Kirk scoffs and tries not to think about the medic over there with the bodies. He should help, but he’d do no good. The injured seem to be no worse off than he is and he knows from experience that what they need is rescue and supplies.
They’ve cleared the damaged ship with enough distance that they ought to be safe. The girl seems to have enough snacks for them to ration things between the two of them for a couple of days, but Kirk knows it won’t take that long for someone to pick up on the crashed shuttle.
In fact, he’s actually looking forward to hearing Bones’ angry rant when they get picked up.
Bones.
If not for the older man, Kirk wouldn’t have even been on that shuttle. After five years serving together and eight years as best friends, Kirk had managed to secure himself an invitation to the family ranch, which had been ‘oh so generously given back to me by the wife’, McCoy had put it sarcastically. Kirk had agreed to visit before Bones was even done talking because impatience has been leading the charge between them these days. Kirk hasn’t been able to put it into words, exactly, but he knows one thing and one thing alone. Being Captain of the Enterprise has changed him just enough that he realizes that all those years with Bones had been like practice for the real thing and the time to start that part of his life is fast approaching. He wants to tell Bones this. He wants to tell him that he’s tired of the crew expecting him to find some new alien beauty in every port when he just wants to focus on getting the ship what it needs. He wants to tell Bones that he never feels better than when they’re just hanging around Kirk’s quarters and laughing about something Spock’s done to upset Uhura and the subsequent make-up session. He wants to remind him that he takes dinner with Bones more often than he does with whichever women he’s focused on wooing.
He wants a chance with Bones to prove to the other man that he can be the kind of person that you share those intimacies with.
The invitation back home had seemed like the perfect breach into the topic. Instead of being at his destination, though, he’s sitting on the desert ground of either Arizona or maybe New Mexico while the sun bakes down into the ground, Starfleet’s vessel is burning away like a supernova, and he shares beef jerky with some strange girl who’s apparently afraid he might stalk her when this is all over.
“Well, then you can’t have my name either,” Kirk decides belatedly, sticking his tongue out at the girl in a way that’s definitely not befitting Federation captains, but it makes her laugh anyway and that’s definitely worth it. “So where were you going? Or can I not have that information either.” He’s thirty now and he’s got teenage girls freaked out by him instead of crushing haplessly on him.
He wants to know when the hell that happened.
“I was going home,” she says simply and rests her cheek against her palms. “You?”
Kirk wants to be able to say the same, but it’s with a bitter grin that he manages a shrug and a, “Just visiting a friend.” His attention turns back to the scene before him and he rouses when he sees one of the medics hailing him over. He’s avoided this long enough and even if he’s in civilian wear, he can’t keep dodging the task at hand. He has responsibilities and duties. “Wait here, okay?” he instructs her, watching her dutiful nod as he crosses the span of distance between her and the other passengers.
The bodies have already been covered. Kirk’s seen too many corpses and he’s grown to hate the gaunt fall of fabric on a face more than anything. He knows funerals as well as he knows the weddings he performs and he swears that the day he has to give a eulogy for one of his senior crew members is the day he retires.
“What happened?” Kirk demands with a pained groan when all his injures seem to flare to life again and remind him of their existence. Fuck, he inwardly curses. Bones is going to be so happy to get his hands on me this time.
“Small meteorite punctured a hole in the gas tank,” the pilot explains, rubbing his hand back and forth over a large goose bump. “Starfleet’s got our coordinates, but they say it could take until the late evening now that we’re not critical.”
“Everyone’s stable?” Kirk checks with the general populace of survivors. He turns to the medic for a real answer. “Nothing we’re going to die from?”
“Cuts, bruises, contusions, possible broken bones, and you died, but the girl seems to know what she’s doing,” the medic replies with a suspicious and grateful glance past Kirk’s shoulder to the girl - who has now taken to pulling out a journal of sorts and is skimming letters from her notebook. “She said you don’t show signs of internal bleeding. I told her she could be a nurse if she kept that up. And no, you’re not bleeding internally, but since she checked the absolute wrong place on you, we’re letting her think she did the right thing,” the medic continues with a smile. She’s the youngest of them, Kirk observes. They’re all around his age or older and Kirk doesn’t want to hear the details just yet on the two deceased to know how much life they’d had left to live before it had all been taken unfairly from them.
There’s a time and a place for that and it isn’t now.
He finishes the quick briefing and gets out another message to Starfleet to update them on their situation before returning to the girl’s side and settling himself down. “So, I can’t have your name, you’re going home. What else can I know about you?”
“My dad owns a gun,” is her almost-sweet response, but she’s still distant and reading her letters.
It’s just enough to make Kirk laugh through his exhausted and wounded state until he’s hoarse and he does catch the grin on her lips, thank you very much, even if she tries to hide it behind her papers.
“Better not tell him about our secret love affair, since you can’t seem to keep your lips off me,” Kirk replies with a broad smirk on his face and man, but she’s got a glare on her. It’s odd, but as the girl is glaring at him with those icy blue eyes, all Kirk can think is how much he misses Bones.
Just a couple of hours, he tells himself. He can make this. And until then, he’s got her for company.
“Alright,” Kirk says, stretching out and lying back on the sand as the sun makes its first indication that it’s ready to dip into the sky and give them a reprieve from the maddening temperature. “I’ll talk, then. So, there’s this person…”
“I’m listening.”
Kirk grins sideways at her and starts in on a story that started eight years ago. Names omitted, of course. Since that seems to be her thing.
*
The rescue shuttle arrives at nearly midnight, which is too late for Kirk’s liking seeing as he’d started to hear the howling of nearby coyotes and had been beginning to fear he would be someone’s dinner if they didn’t turn up. And yet, just like the cavalry when it’s most needed, they came with food, water, and more advanced medical attention before charting an express course to Athens.
Kirk’s buckled in tightly and shares a quick grin with his new friend from across the shuttle, trying to calm his heart down from rabbitting too quickly. He couldn’t get a hold of Bones from the communicator. He’d been out of range, but he had managed to contact Uhura who had promised to give Bones the message and would tell him where to meet them. Kirk’s still got a couple of pretty hefty bruises, but his head isn’t hurting half as badly as it had been a while ago.
He’s counting the minutes until arrival and when he realizes this, he bites down on his lower lip and tries vehemently not to realize how much of a sap he’s become over this. Maybe God had struck down the shuttle just to put Kirk through a test as to how much he wants McCoy.
The answer is simple: More than he’s wanted anything or anyone but his ship.
The arrival is almost anticlimactic and the moon is still high in the sky as the injured passengers leave the ship first. Though Jim’s probably the roughest of them all, he hangs back with the girl and waits until everyone else is off the ship.
“It was good to meet you, strange girl,” Kirk cheerfully remarks, leaning his hand on the frame of the shuttle as he extends the other to shake. “Guess we’ll always have our star-cross’d kiss.”
“Is your personality why you haven’t gotten that person you’ve been chasing?” she asks curiously, shaking his hand and not giving him time to reply before she hoists her backpack up on her shoulder and descends the metal stairs with Kirk hovering right behind her like a shadow. There’s a small crowd waiting on the tarmac and Kirk’s already searching to find Bones, but he’s tired and his vision has blurred.
He falls into step beside the girl and figures that he can at least wait with her until her family turns up to get her and until Bones turns up to claim him, smack him on the head, and then knock him out with a sedative.
He really shouldn’t be looking forward to that as much as he is, but the constant pain hasn’t exactly been a real ride at the amusement park.
Kirk’s ready to feel put-out that Bones isn’t on time when he hears a familiar voice pushing through the crowd with a ‘get the hell out of my way’ and assorted mutterings of ‘I’ll move you if you don’t’ and ‘dammit, man, are you a person or a roadblock?’ as he shoves his way to the front of the crowd and all Kirk can think is that he’s never been so happy to hear Bones’ grumbling complaints.
“Guess I’ll see you…well…” Kirk starts to say to the girl beside him and it’s no sooner than he can get the words out that Bones has managed to sprint forward as if he’s running for gold and nearly skids to a stop while pulling her into a hug.
Wait.
“Bones?” Kirk asks warily.
Bones is a little busy to hear him, having pulled the girl as tightly into a hug as is completely humanly possible and is busy ignoring Kirk, which isn’t doing any favors for his already-precarious ego or anything. He’s pressing kiss after kiss to that brown hair and she’s burrowing her face into his neck as tightly as she can, mumbling a quiet litany of ‘I was so scared,’ again and again as she clung to him tightly. “Daddy, I thought…”
“You’re fine, Joanna, you’re fine,” McCoy is insisting roughly, holding her as close as he can and nearly falling to the ground as he keeps her close, glancing up at Kirk. In one flash of a moment, Kirk sees every layer and every barrier that McCoy’s ever kept up fall away and he looks so scared and worried and utterly without control that Kirk doesn’t know how to sympathize.
It hadn’t just been him in the crash. Bones had gotten the news of a crash and he probably thought for a moment that he’d lost his best friend and his daughter in one fell swoop.
“Joanna McCoy,” Kirk accuses her. “Is Joanna McCoy really so hard to say?”
She peers up at him past the brim of her father’s shoulder and there are tears in those blue eyes, but there’s also a heavy amount of confusion. He kind of wishes that confusion would last because next comes comprehension and Kirk suddenly wishes he hadn’t spent a full evening telling her all about his trials and tribulations when it came to loving her father.
“He didn’t give you any trouble, did he?” McCoy asks as he finally releases Joanna from his grasp and turns to Kirk to envelope him whole in a hug that’s about as tight as he wants it to be, but that makes him give a pained squeak.
Joanna manages a demure smile. “He broke a rib, Dad,” she says lightly, which makes Bones ease off him and Kirk’s simultaneously relieved and pissed-off. “And he died.”
“Jim,” Bones growls.
“I brought him back,” Joanna goes on, sounding as if this was a simple task. “I just remembered what you taught me when you visited last Christmas. I kind of was hoping I would have gotten to amputate. I’ve been practicing my tourniquets,” she says proudly and Kirk is staring at her in horror, suddenly wishing that he had never met the McCoy family with their penchant for stabbing and cutting.
“Your daughter refuses to give her name to strangers!” Kirk complains as if that’s a bad thing when suddenly a hypospray appears from nowhere. “Oh, no,” he says, as if he hadn’t been looking forward to this. “No, no, no, not…”
It’s all he gets out before everything goes black.
Goddamn McCoys is his last thought.
When Kirk rouses again, the light is spilling in a window and he’s surrounded by what feels like a mountain’s worth of quilts on him. The world is still topsy-turvy and blurry, but he spares a hazed glance to the foot of the bed where he can just barely make out a man-shaped person. It really can only be one person and he smiles blissfully with relief (helped along by the drugs).
“Bones, your kid’s great,” he praises, words sticking together. “Saved my life.”
“She’s got the McCoy genes,” Bones grunts and settles himself down on the edge of the bed, craning his chin towards a large chair in the corner of the room. Joanna’s curled up there with a sleeping golden retriever and the both of them are caught in deep and steady breaths. She’s dressed up in flannel and has bandages littering her light skin, which means that her father’s patched her up. “…and a penchant to heal idiots,” Bones is still talking, but Kirk’s just not listening anymore because he’s still trying to put all the pieces in place.
He turns his gaze to Bones and shifts wearily in bed.
“Well?” Bones demands.
“Wha…?”
“Do I get to say ‘I told you so’ now?” Bones continues with an infuriating and smug smirk on his face. It doesn’t extend to his eyes. There’s fear and sadness and exhaustion lingering there and instead of laughing at the joke, Kirk reaches his fingers out to brush at the furrows on Bones’ forehead, those marks of consummate worry he’s going to bear forever.
He brushes the pad of his thumb against that wrinkle and it shuts Bones up, which is an epiphany that Kirk’s going to have to keep in mind.
“Your kid’s pretty amazing,” Kirk admits, sparing another glance at Joanna.
“She’s got a bit of a thing for you, I think,” Bones sighs, as if he’s been spending his entire life trying to figure out how to prevent something like that from happening. “And before you even think of anything, Jim, she’s thirteen, she’s not…”
“Bones, trust me,” Kirk laughs wearily and decides to just come out with it. “She’s not the McCoy I want.”
“…you’ve never met my mother.”
Kirk doesn’t give him anything but a leveled ‘I’m the one who got severely injured and temporarily died and you’re the one being a dumbass’ look.
“Shit.”
Kirk purses his lips and manages a quiet sound. For some funny reason, he feels okay. He’s not nervous and he’s not exactly expecting to get jumped. Maybe it’s another sign that he’s growing up. He just needs to get that out before it burns a hole through him. Or worse, before Joanna wakes up and informs her father of the very long, very thorough conversation the two of them had experienced.
He doesn’t really expect to feel that flare of disappointment and lack of self-worth when Bones rises to his feet and nearly bolts from the room.
He feels a sharp pain flicker through his body as his head hits the pillow (and partially the headboard with a ‘thump’ and he lets out a wicked yowl of pain). It startles both Joanna and the dog, but she’s the only one who stays in the room long enough to ask, ‘are you okay?’
“I told him,” Kirk says simply, no need for dramatics or whining. Maybe five years ago he would have complained that Bones should need him and maybe five years ago, he would have stubbornly gotten up and out of the bed against his doctor’s wishes to chase Bones down and make him see how much Kirk wants him.
Jim’s not the same guy, though.
Joanna shuffles out of her chair without a word and heads out the door without explaining to Kirk where she’s going. All he sees is someone else leaving him and suddenly he’s all alone and it isn’t by his own choosing.
*
McCoy’s made it as far as the tire-swing on the edge of the property. It’s sat here overlooking a stagnant marsh all thirteen years of Joanna’s life, since he had bought the property as a gift to his wife in thanks for giving him a daughter. For a couple of years, they’d made a good go of it, but if McCoy thinks carefully enough, it had all been a patina of lies. They hardly saw each other and just knew they loved each other because they were supposed to.
And then McCoy’s father grew sick and things fell apart.
He’s sitting in the shell of the swing when he sees Joanna walking out the front door. She lets the screen-door slam shut and bounds down the porch in a light jog before reaching him, pushing her hair back behind both ears. It’s the same habit she’s had since she was little more than four. It means she’s got something important she wants to say.
“Did you take your antibiotics?” he immediately asks to cut her off and gain slight control of the conversation. When she nods, he’s already launching into his next demand. “And did you change your bandages?”
“Dad,” she complains sharply, shifting until she’s sharing half of the oversized tire swing and curled up in the innards of it, sharing the intimate space. “He loves you.”
“I don’t want to hear this, Jo,” McCoy says evenly.
“He kept babbling in that desert, Dad.” She’s annoyed now because she’s shooting him her mother’s icy glare and she leans forward enough to shove him against the knee. “He talked so much about that ship of his and just you. You and more you and more. And when I stood there and watched you two on the tarmac and the way he looked at you, I didn’t know what to say because that’s just…that’s just…”
“Awkward.”
“Yeah, awkward,” she agrees, but blinks rapidly when she realizes that it hadn’t been her father to supply the word. Both McCoys turn their heads to find Kirk standing beside them, swathed in a blanket. “You’re supposed to be resting!” she accuses, taking the onus off of her father’s shoulders in this situation. McCoy settles back against the tire swing and crosses his arms over his chest.
Kirk watches McCoy and McCoy just stares right back.
“I told you,” Joanna sighs and crawls out of the swing, letting it sway back and forth before she reaches Kirk’s side. Her denim shorts and flannel shirt with the messy ponytail make her look like she’s right at home, but it’s the hug she surrounds Kirk with that says she’s really comfortable in this situation. “He does own a gun,” is what she murmurs against her ear.
It gets a laugh out of him before he swats her playfully at the back of her hand with his own, watching before drifting to lean against the swing.
“She’s right, you know. You are supposed to be resting,” McCoy accuses. If his accent’s grown thicker in the time since he’s been at home, he’s not about to mention it.
“See, I thought to myself that I wasn’t going to be the guy I was five years ago and I would rest. I’d be mature and responsible and then I kinda remembered that I didn’t get to be the youngest captain in the Federation by playing by their rules. So my rules,” he says impulsively and catches hold of the rope of the swing with two hands, with ten calloused fingers.
“Jim,” McCoy says, swallowing down his anxiety as Kirk leans in over him.
“Thing is, Bones,” Kirk admits as he keeps leaning in until their foreheads are all but touching. “I always earn what I want. And I was coming here to tell you that I’m not the same guy I was five years ago. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the minute I turn into a celibate monk is the day the universe implodes,” he reasons, “but I’m kind of liking being the responsible Captain and exceeding everyone’s expectations,” he says with a grin. If Bones has got a permanent line on his forehead, then Jim’s got those laugh lines on his face that are never going away. And those are the last words Jim Kirk gets out before he leans in and presses a light kiss to McCoy’s lips.
That’s it.
No tongue, no moaning, no comments about sexual prowess. McCoy leans back and eyes Kirk up and down warily. “What was that?”
“Your warning.”
“Oh?”
“Your daughter’s a smart kid, Bones. So after I gave her this huge history about you and how much I wanted you and how I didn’t know what to do, you know what she said?” Kirk manages with a broad grin.
“If I know my daughter…” Bones mutters as he shakes his head.
“All she said was that I ought to make this person happy, the way no one else in their life managed to. And okay, so I guess that doesn’t count,” Kirk amends, “because I didn’t know she was your kid or anything and she makes you pretty happy, but Bones. I’m coming for you,” he says with a grin. “And I’m going to earn you.” He doesn’t even kiss McCoy again and instead gives the swing a push before limping his way back into the small house, shouting a loud ‘alright, McCoy,’ after his daughter. ‘You and me, arm wrestling, two out of three this time!’
McCoy exhales shakily and tries not to think about the look in Kirk’s eyes when he said those four terrifying and exhilarating words.
I’m coming for you.
McCoy doesn’t know if he ought to be afraid for his future or eager for the possibilities. He settles on a healthy mix on the two and smiles to himself as he swings back and forth while the heat of the day rises and he watches his house turn into a home once more.
Jim may be coming for him, but McCoy is going to be ready.
THE END
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: They don't belong to me.
Word Count: 4,700
Summary: Kirk is in a shuttle accident.
Hard-Earned Rights // Just About Time // The Graceful Waltz // One // The Grave Memorial Of A Life Unlived // Houses & Heartwarmings // Guess Who's Coming To Dinner // Enterprise On My Mind // Your Fate's Not In The Stars // A World of Solemn Thought // Time Can Never Kill The True Heart
Jim Kirk doesn’t think his head has hurt this much in his whole life. And yes, he’s counting the time he got his brains bashed in by that overprotective boyfriend and the time he drank so much that he passed out and smacked his head on the bar. This is worse than every hostile planet they’ve gone to during their five-year-exploratory mission and for some reason, he’d deluded himself into thinking he’d finally get a reprieve now that he’s on leave between terms.
This is so much worse than the worst pain he’s ever been in, especially because Bones is usually sitting by to jab him with a sedative.
He can’t exactly place what’s happened just yet, so all Kirk does is focus on getting his eyes fully open. It’s bright and he still hurts, but there’s one hell of a chaotic landscape to be seen when he does open his eyes. There’s wreckage all around him and Kirk groans as he starts to put the pieces together.
Guess you were right about those shuttles, Kirk manages to say to his inner-McCoy and rubs the back of his head with his palm, searching for a familiar landmark. He’d been on his way out to Georgia to visit Bones before heading back to the ship when this had happened.
Kirk manages to swallow back his horror at the scene. He should be used to seeing bodies, but he still doesn’t want to even think of the possibility of death as a result of the accident. Each moment that passes, another piece of the wreckage seems to ignite and burst into flames. All this has distracted him away from the fact that he’s being watched.
There had been eight people on that shuttle with him plus two pilots, and two Starfleet attendants. He could clearly see two unmoving bodies and several injured people, but he’s not the doctor. He wouldn’t know what to do with them and they’re not the ones watching him. It’s a girl who can’t be anymore than thirteen with a backpack slung over one arm and her brown hair catching the glint of the sun and the fire from the shuttle.
She stands there above him and studies him quietly and curiously.
“You’re finally awake,” she notes with quiet concern as she sits down beside him and offers out her flask of water. It’s like she’s decided to adopt him, like some stray pet and Jim might be absolutely adorable, but young teenage girls should not want to take him in as a rule. “I thought you might be dead for good.”
“Yeah? Well, I’m not.”
“Well, you’re not anymore,” the girl says in a practical tone, fiddling with her backpack as she lets it drop by her bent knees. “You lost your pulse. I had to give you CPR the old-fashioned way.”
Yeah, Kirk’s definitely starting to feel like this situation is spiraling and sprinting out of his control. He tries not to think about the girl’s lips on his or the way his chest feels bruised as he slowly sits up and mimics her position - knees drawn up to his chest, elbows draped over them.
He cranes his neck to the side and studies the look in her eyes. It’s far off and distant and he wonders if she got a smack to the head like he did. Shit, what’s Bones always telling him about concussions? No sleep for the wicked or something like that, but it had always boiled down to ‘don’t you fall asleep or you’ll regret it’.
“What’s your name?” Kirk probes lightly, figuring they can start with the basics. He watches her dig out a small kit of rations and pry it open, snacking on some of the dried meat before extending it to him. He takes it and uses the piece to offer a gesture of thanks before watching her face for reactions.
“My parents always told me not to give personal information to strangers,” she replies and there’s just this hint, this glimmer of teasing in her eyes past that distant reserve she’s got going on and Kirk wants to laugh. She’d given him CPR for christ’s sake and now she’s not going to tell him her name? What is it with him and women not wanting to reveal that?
If it hadn’t been for her paler-than-pale skin-tone, Kirk might have asked if she happened to be related to a Nyota Uhura by chance.
“So, what, you can breathe life into me, but I can’t learn your name?” Kirk scoffs and tries not to think about the medic over there with the bodies. He should help, but he’d do no good. The injured seem to be no worse off than he is and he knows from experience that what they need is rescue and supplies.
They’ve cleared the damaged ship with enough distance that they ought to be safe. The girl seems to have enough snacks for them to ration things between the two of them for a couple of days, but Kirk knows it won’t take that long for someone to pick up on the crashed shuttle.
In fact, he’s actually looking forward to hearing Bones’ angry rant when they get picked up.
Bones.
If not for the older man, Kirk wouldn’t have even been on that shuttle. After five years serving together and eight years as best friends, Kirk had managed to secure himself an invitation to the family ranch, which had been ‘oh so generously given back to me by the wife’, McCoy had put it sarcastically. Kirk had agreed to visit before Bones was even done talking because impatience has been leading the charge between them these days. Kirk hasn’t been able to put it into words, exactly, but he knows one thing and one thing alone. Being Captain of the Enterprise has changed him just enough that he realizes that all those years with Bones had been like practice for the real thing and the time to start that part of his life is fast approaching. He wants to tell Bones this. He wants to tell him that he’s tired of the crew expecting him to find some new alien beauty in every port when he just wants to focus on getting the ship what it needs. He wants to tell Bones that he never feels better than when they’re just hanging around Kirk’s quarters and laughing about something Spock’s done to upset Uhura and the subsequent make-up session. He wants to remind him that he takes dinner with Bones more often than he does with whichever women he’s focused on wooing.
He wants a chance with Bones to prove to the other man that he can be the kind of person that you share those intimacies with.
The invitation back home had seemed like the perfect breach into the topic. Instead of being at his destination, though, he’s sitting on the desert ground of either Arizona or maybe New Mexico while the sun bakes down into the ground, Starfleet’s vessel is burning away like a supernova, and he shares beef jerky with some strange girl who’s apparently afraid he might stalk her when this is all over.
“Well, then you can’t have my name either,” Kirk decides belatedly, sticking his tongue out at the girl in a way that’s definitely not befitting Federation captains, but it makes her laugh anyway and that’s definitely worth it. “So where were you going? Or can I not have that information either.” He’s thirty now and he’s got teenage girls freaked out by him instead of crushing haplessly on him.
He wants to know when the hell that happened.
“I was going home,” she says simply and rests her cheek against her palms. “You?”
Kirk wants to be able to say the same, but it’s with a bitter grin that he manages a shrug and a, “Just visiting a friend.” His attention turns back to the scene before him and he rouses when he sees one of the medics hailing him over. He’s avoided this long enough and even if he’s in civilian wear, he can’t keep dodging the task at hand. He has responsibilities and duties. “Wait here, okay?” he instructs her, watching her dutiful nod as he crosses the span of distance between her and the other passengers.
The bodies have already been covered. Kirk’s seen too many corpses and he’s grown to hate the gaunt fall of fabric on a face more than anything. He knows funerals as well as he knows the weddings he performs and he swears that the day he has to give a eulogy for one of his senior crew members is the day he retires.
“What happened?” Kirk demands with a pained groan when all his injures seem to flare to life again and remind him of their existence. Fuck, he inwardly curses. Bones is going to be so happy to get his hands on me this time.
“Small meteorite punctured a hole in the gas tank,” the pilot explains, rubbing his hand back and forth over a large goose bump. “Starfleet’s got our coordinates, but they say it could take until the late evening now that we’re not critical.”
“Everyone’s stable?” Kirk checks with the general populace of survivors. He turns to the medic for a real answer. “Nothing we’re going to die from?”
“Cuts, bruises, contusions, possible broken bones, and you died, but the girl seems to know what she’s doing,” the medic replies with a suspicious and grateful glance past Kirk’s shoulder to the girl - who has now taken to pulling out a journal of sorts and is skimming letters from her notebook. “She said you don’t show signs of internal bleeding. I told her she could be a nurse if she kept that up. And no, you’re not bleeding internally, but since she checked the absolute wrong place on you, we’re letting her think she did the right thing,” the medic continues with a smile. She’s the youngest of them, Kirk observes. They’re all around his age or older and Kirk doesn’t want to hear the details just yet on the two deceased to know how much life they’d had left to live before it had all been taken unfairly from them.
There’s a time and a place for that and it isn’t now.
He finishes the quick briefing and gets out another message to Starfleet to update them on their situation before returning to the girl’s side and settling himself down. “So, I can’t have your name, you’re going home. What else can I know about you?”
“My dad owns a gun,” is her almost-sweet response, but she’s still distant and reading her letters.
It’s just enough to make Kirk laugh through his exhausted and wounded state until he’s hoarse and he does catch the grin on her lips, thank you very much, even if she tries to hide it behind her papers.
“Better not tell him about our secret love affair, since you can’t seem to keep your lips off me,” Kirk replies with a broad smirk on his face and man, but she’s got a glare on her. It’s odd, but as the girl is glaring at him with those icy blue eyes, all Kirk can think is how much he misses Bones.
Just a couple of hours, he tells himself. He can make this. And until then, he’s got her for company.
“Alright,” Kirk says, stretching out and lying back on the sand as the sun makes its first indication that it’s ready to dip into the sky and give them a reprieve from the maddening temperature. “I’ll talk, then. So, there’s this person…”
“I’m listening.”
Kirk grins sideways at her and starts in on a story that started eight years ago. Names omitted, of course. Since that seems to be her thing.
*
The rescue shuttle arrives at nearly midnight, which is too late for Kirk’s liking seeing as he’d started to hear the howling of nearby coyotes and had been beginning to fear he would be someone’s dinner if they didn’t turn up. And yet, just like the cavalry when it’s most needed, they came with food, water, and more advanced medical attention before charting an express course to Athens.
Kirk’s buckled in tightly and shares a quick grin with his new friend from across the shuttle, trying to calm his heart down from rabbitting too quickly. He couldn’t get a hold of Bones from the communicator. He’d been out of range, but he had managed to contact Uhura who had promised to give Bones the message and would tell him where to meet them. Kirk’s still got a couple of pretty hefty bruises, but his head isn’t hurting half as badly as it had been a while ago.
He’s counting the minutes until arrival and when he realizes this, he bites down on his lower lip and tries vehemently not to realize how much of a sap he’s become over this. Maybe God had struck down the shuttle just to put Kirk through a test as to how much he wants McCoy.
The answer is simple: More than he’s wanted anything or anyone but his ship.
The arrival is almost anticlimactic and the moon is still high in the sky as the injured passengers leave the ship first. Though Jim’s probably the roughest of them all, he hangs back with the girl and waits until everyone else is off the ship.
“It was good to meet you, strange girl,” Kirk cheerfully remarks, leaning his hand on the frame of the shuttle as he extends the other to shake. “Guess we’ll always have our star-cross’d kiss.”
“Is your personality why you haven’t gotten that person you’ve been chasing?” she asks curiously, shaking his hand and not giving him time to reply before she hoists her backpack up on her shoulder and descends the metal stairs with Kirk hovering right behind her like a shadow. There’s a small crowd waiting on the tarmac and Kirk’s already searching to find Bones, but he’s tired and his vision has blurred.
He falls into step beside the girl and figures that he can at least wait with her until her family turns up to get her and until Bones turns up to claim him, smack him on the head, and then knock him out with a sedative.
He really shouldn’t be looking forward to that as much as he is, but the constant pain hasn’t exactly been a real ride at the amusement park.
Kirk’s ready to feel put-out that Bones isn’t on time when he hears a familiar voice pushing through the crowd with a ‘get the hell out of my way’ and assorted mutterings of ‘I’ll move you if you don’t’ and ‘dammit, man, are you a person or a roadblock?’ as he shoves his way to the front of the crowd and all Kirk can think is that he’s never been so happy to hear Bones’ grumbling complaints.
“Guess I’ll see you…well…” Kirk starts to say to the girl beside him and it’s no sooner than he can get the words out that Bones has managed to sprint forward as if he’s running for gold and nearly skids to a stop while pulling her into a hug.
Wait.
“Bones?” Kirk asks warily.
Bones is a little busy to hear him, having pulled the girl as tightly into a hug as is completely humanly possible and is busy ignoring Kirk, which isn’t doing any favors for his already-precarious ego or anything. He’s pressing kiss after kiss to that brown hair and she’s burrowing her face into his neck as tightly as she can, mumbling a quiet litany of ‘I was so scared,’ again and again as she clung to him tightly. “Daddy, I thought…”
“You’re fine, Joanna, you’re fine,” McCoy is insisting roughly, holding her as close as he can and nearly falling to the ground as he keeps her close, glancing up at Kirk. In one flash of a moment, Kirk sees every layer and every barrier that McCoy’s ever kept up fall away and he looks so scared and worried and utterly without control that Kirk doesn’t know how to sympathize.
It hadn’t just been him in the crash. Bones had gotten the news of a crash and he probably thought for a moment that he’d lost his best friend and his daughter in one fell swoop.
“Joanna McCoy,” Kirk accuses her. “Is Joanna McCoy really so hard to say?”
She peers up at him past the brim of her father’s shoulder and there are tears in those blue eyes, but there’s also a heavy amount of confusion. He kind of wishes that confusion would last because next comes comprehension and Kirk suddenly wishes he hadn’t spent a full evening telling her all about his trials and tribulations when it came to loving her father.
“He didn’t give you any trouble, did he?” McCoy asks as he finally releases Joanna from his grasp and turns to Kirk to envelope him whole in a hug that’s about as tight as he wants it to be, but that makes him give a pained squeak.
Joanna manages a demure smile. “He broke a rib, Dad,” she says lightly, which makes Bones ease off him and Kirk’s simultaneously relieved and pissed-off. “And he died.”
“Jim,” Bones growls.
“I brought him back,” Joanna goes on, sounding as if this was a simple task. “I just remembered what you taught me when you visited last Christmas. I kind of was hoping I would have gotten to amputate. I’ve been practicing my tourniquets,” she says proudly and Kirk is staring at her in horror, suddenly wishing that he had never met the McCoy family with their penchant for stabbing and cutting.
“Your daughter refuses to give her name to strangers!” Kirk complains as if that’s a bad thing when suddenly a hypospray appears from nowhere. “Oh, no,” he says, as if he hadn’t been looking forward to this. “No, no, no, not…”
It’s all he gets out before everything goes black.
Goddamn McCoys is his last thought.
When Kirk rouses again, the light is spilling in a window and he’s surrounded by what feels like a mountain’s worth of quilts on him. The world is still topsy-turvy and blurry, but he spares a hazed glance to the foot of the bed where he can just barely make out a man-shaped person. It really can only be one person and he smiles blissfully with relief (helped along by the drugs).
“Bones, your kid’s great,” he praises, words sticking together. “Saved my life.”
“She’s got the McCoy genes,” Bones grunts and settles himself down on the edge of the bed, craning his chin towards a large chair in the corner of the room. Joanna’s curled up there with a sleeping golden retriever and the both of them are caught in deep and steady breaths. She’s dressed up in flannel and has bandages littering her light skin, which means that her father’s patched her up. “…and a penchant to heal idiots,” Bones is still talking, but Kirk’s just not listening anymore because he’s still trying to put all the pieces in place.
He turns his gaze to Bones and shifts wearily in bed.
“Well?” Bones demands.
“Wha…?”
“Do I get to say ‘I told you so’ now?” Bones continues with an infuriating and smug smirk on his face. It doesn’t extend to his eyes. There’s fear and sadness and exhaustion lingering there and instead of laughing at the joke, Kirk reaches his fingers out to brush at the furrows on Bones’ forehead, those marks of consummate worry he’s going to bear forever.
He brushes the pad of his thumb against that wrinkle and it shuts Bones up, which is an epiphany that Kirk’s going to have to keep in mind.
“Your kid’s pretty amazing,” Kirk admits, sparing another glance at Joanna.
“She’s got a bit of a thing for you, I think,” Bones sighs, as if he’s been spending his entire life trying to figure out how to prevent something like that from happening. “And before you even think of anything, Jim, she’s thirteen, she’s not…”
“Bones, trust me,” Kirk laughs wearily and decides to just come out with it. “She’s not the McCoy I want.”
“…you’ve never met my mother.”
Kirk doesn’t give him anything but a leveled ‘I’m the one who got severely injured and temporarily died and you’re the one being a dumbass’ look.
“Shit.”
Kirk purses his lips and manages a quiet sound. For some funny reason, he feels okay. He’s not nervous and he’s not exactly expecting to get jumped. Maybe it’s another sign that he’s growing up. He just needs to get that out before it burns a hole through him. Or worse, before Joanna wakes up and informs her father of the very long, very thorough conversation the two of them had experienced.
He doesn’t really expect to feel that flare of disappointment and lack of self-worth when Bones rises to his feet and nearly bolts from the room.
He feels a sharp pain flicker through his body as his head hits the pillow (and partially the headboard with a ‘thump’ and he lets out a wicked yowl of pain). It startles both Joanna and the dog, but she’s the only one who stays in the room long enough to ask, ‘are you okay?’
“I told him,” Kirk says simply, no need for dramatics or whining. Maybe five years ago he would have complained that Bones should need him and maybe five years ago, he would have stubbornly gotten up and out of the bed against his doctor’s wishes to chase Bones down and make him see how much Kirk wants him.
Jim’s not the same guy, though.
Joanna shuffles out of her chair without a word and heads out the door without explaining to Kirk where she’s going. All he sees is someone else leaving him and suddenly he’s all alone and it isn’t by his own choosing.
*
McCoy’s made it as far as the tire-swing on the edge of the property. It’s sat here overlooking a stagnant marsh all thirteen years of Joanna’s life, since he had bought the property as a gift to his wife in thanks for giving him a daughter. For a couple of years, they’d made a good go of it, but if McCoy thinks carefully enough, it had all been a patina of lies. They hardly saw each other and just knew they loved each other because they were supposed to.
And then McCoy’s father grew sick and things fell apart.
He’s sitting in the shell of the swing when he sees Joanna walking out the front door. She lets the screen-door slam shut and bounds down the porch in a light jog before reaching him, pushing her hair back behind both ears. It’s the same habit she’s had since she was little more than four. It means she’s got something important she wants to say.
“Did you take your antibiotics?” he immediately asks to cut her off and gain slight control of the conversation. When she nods, he’s already launching into his next demand. “And did you change your bandages?”
“Dad,” she complains sharply, shifting until she’s sharing half of the oversized tire swing and curled up in the innards of it, sharing the intimate space. “He loves you.”
“I don’t want to hear this, Jo,” McCoy says evenly.
“He kept babbling in that desert, Dad.” She’s annoyed now because she’s shooting him her mother’s icy glare and she leans forward enough to shove him against the knee. “He talked so much about that ship of his and just you. You and more you and more. And when I stood there and watched you two on the tarmac and the way he looked at you, I didn’t know what to say because that’s just…that’s just…”
“Awkward.”
“Yeah, awkward,” she agrees, but blinks rapidly when she realizes that it hadn’t been her father to supply the word. Both McCoys turn their heads to find Kirk standing beside them, swathed in a blanket. “You’re supposed to be resting!” she accuses, taking the onus off of her father’s shoulders in this situation. McCoy settles back against the tire swing and crosses his arms over his chest.
Kirk watches McCoy and McCoy just stares right back.
“I told you,” Joanna sighs and crawls out of the swing, letting it sway back and forth before she reaches Kirk’s side. Her denim shorts and flannel shirt with the messy ponytail make her look like she’s right at home, but it’s the hug she surrounds Kirk with that says she’s really comfortable in this situation. “He does own a gun,” is what she murmurs against her ear.
It gets a laugh out of him before he swats her playfully at the back of her hand with his own, watching before drifting to lean against the swing.
“She’s right, you know. You are supposed to be resting,” McCoy accuses. If his accent’s grown thicker in the time since he’s been at home, he’s not about to mention it.
“See, I thought to myself that I wasn’t going to be the guy I was five years ago and I would rest. I’d be mature and responsible and then I kinda remembered that I didn’t get to be the youngest captain in the Federation by playing by their rules. So my rules,” he says impulsively and catches hold of the rope of the swing with two hands, with ten calloused fingers.
“Jim,” McCoy says, swallowing down his anxiety as Kirk leans in over him.
“Thing is, Bones,” Kirk admits as he keeps leaning in until their foreheads are all but touching. “I always earn what I want. And I was coming here to tell you that I’m not the same guy I was five years ago. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the minute I turn into a celibate monk is the day the universe implodes,” he reasons, “but I’m kind of liking being the responsible Captain and exceeding everyone’s expectations,” he says with a grin. If Bones has got a permanent line on his forehead, then Jim’s got those laugh lines on his face that are never going away. And those are the last words Jim Kirk gets out before he leans in and presses a light kiss to McCoy’s lips.
That’s it.
No tongue, no moaning, no comments about sexual prowess. McCoy leans back and eyes Kirk up and down warily. “What was that?”
“Your warning.”
“Oh?”
“Your daughter’s a smart kid, Bones. So after I gave her this huge history about you and how much I wanted you and how I didn’t know what to do, you know what she said?” Kirk manages with a broad grin.
“If I know my daughter…” Bones mutters as he shakes his head.
“All she said was that I ought to make this person happy, the way no one else in their life managed to. And okay, so I guess that doesn’t count,” Kirk amends, “because I didn’t know she was your kid or anything and she makes you pretty happy, but Bones. I’m coming for you,” he says with a grin. “And I’m going to earn you.” He doesn’t even kiss McCoy again and instead gives the swing a push before limping his way back into the small house, shouting a loud ‘alright, McCoy,’ after his daughter. ‘You and me, arm wrestling, two out of three this time!’
McCoy exhales shakily and tries not to think about the look in Kirk’s eyes when he said those four terrifying and exhilarating words.
I’m coming for you.
McCoy doesn’t know if he ought to be afraid for his future or eager for the possibilities. He settles on a healthy mix on the two and smiles to himself as he swings back and forth while the heat of the day rises and he watches his house turn into a home once more.
Jim may be coming for him, but McCoy is going to be ready.
THE END