STXI fic: No Dead End In Sight
Title: No Dead End In Sight
Author: northatlantic
Word Count: ~10,800
Characters: Leonard McCoy, Theodore Jackson (TJ) McCoy, David McCoy, Eleanora McCoy, Jocelyn Darnell McCoy, Joanna McCoy, James Kirk, Emony Dax, Mark Rousseau
Genre: Gen, McCoy/Jocelyn, Kirk/McCoy friendship/preslash
Rating: NC-17 (explicit heterosexual sex, implied homosexual sex/multiple partner sex, language)
Warning: minor character deaths
Summary: Leonard McCoy has always been an old soul in a young body.
Author's Notes: According to the canon dates for when McCoy was born/when he has his first medical achievements and the procedures he does on the Enterprise, it is literally impossible for him to have completed med school at the usual age (extended riff on why that is if you follow the link). Now, we all know that's probably because whoever did the fact-checking did not do a very good job. But that's a BORING explanation. I like the explanation that McCoy is as much a misfit prodigy as his boys Kirk and Spock MUCH better. And that might have looked something like this. Any errors in THIS continuity, or of grammar, are of course my own. Title from the Foo Fighters, "Long Road To Ruin."
2230.22
Leonard McCoy is three years old when someone other than his doting mother realizes he is something a little bit out of the ordinary; it is his preschool teacher, when he corrects her spelling on a note she's written to said doting mother about how Leonard prefers to hide under the table and look at books to playing with the other children during free time.
"They never have anything interesting to say," he explains when he gets home with a somewhat expanded and revised note suggesting accelerated curriculum. "I'd rather read."
2236.17
"What have you got there, little man?"
Leonard cordially despises the phrase "little man," and is not sure how to feel about Grandpa TJ, who is a Very Busy Man which appears to be an adult abbreviation for 'and never has time to talk about anything ever.' But being a doctor, he has a very useful library, much more so than the local branch for some things. "Xenoinfectious Diseases," he says shortly, flipping through the index at "c." Just as he thought, there is no listing for cooties. "Do you have any references with more common names? I'm trying to find something and nobody seems to know the right name for ANYTHING at school. You should hear some of the ridiculous things they come up with for the reproductive system. Let alone what they think you DO with it."
"Leonard, refresh my memory," his grandfather says thoughtfully after a moment. "You're in what grade this year?"
"Sixth," he said, curling his lip. "I can't skip any further. My social development is already 'compromised.' I hate that word." He considers that. "What does it even mean? Compromise is supposed to be a good thing, I'm supposed to be more open to compromise, so why do people use it when they mean 'defective?'"
"You got me, but then I've never been much of a fan of compromise myself." Scowling hazel eyes look up at that, but Grandpa McCoy's expression is sober interest, not the look of someone who's thinking "awww, that's so cute." Leonard hates that more than "little man," if possible. Even more, maybe, than the bigger, older kids in his classes who like to stuff him in his locker, tease him about his ears getting pointy and being a teacher's pet, among similarly unimaginative offerings. "You might have better luck with that social development deal in a setting where you're not competition. At least, I've always had better luck that way. People like feeling like they're on equal footing, or like they can show you something for a change. Makes them want to take you down a peg less."
"Did they call you a douchebag Vulcan wannabe when you were my age?"
"Asskissing teacher's pet. They didn't know as much about Vulcans."
Leonard sighs. "What kind of setting?"
David McCoy is delighted when his son stops resisting the suggestion to join the park basketball team, and even more so when despite himself, Leonard actually acquires some friends out of it.
Leonard, for his part, begins to appreciate T.J. McCoy's value as a resource above and beyond his library.
2240.42
"Your mama told me you were up here," David says, sitting under the tree.
"Go away." His voice is thick and scratchy, jumping and wavering and dammit, dammit, dammit he sounds like a stupid junior high child and it's no wonder Lori had looked at him so incredulously when he'd tried to ask her to prom.
"Len," his father says quietly and Leonard hides his face against his knees. "Len, I know this is hard for you because of who you are, where you are, but nobody is happy when they're thirteen, kiddo. Nobody. And I promise, that girl is going to look back someday and wonder how stupid she was that she had a chance to catch your eye and let it go."
"Dad, stop it, please." He squirms with the sheer humiliation of it. God, if he's heard it once, he's heard it a million times and that's great, he's sure everything will be wonderful someday except for the part where it's not someday, it's now, and now he's still a scrawny geek who can't drive.
"Not until you come out of the tree. I have a whole stack of inspirational stories, Len. They issue them with your So You're A Parent guidebook along with Embarrassing Your Children, An Easy 12-Step Guide To Alienation For Teens and the Songs To Sing Along With In The Car To Pretend You're Hip In Front Of Your Kid's Friends vid."
Leonard smiles painfully at that, then feels sick again as he thinks about his friends, and about having to see Lori again in Bio II tomorrow and he thinks he may never come down. "Please, Dad. I just...I'll come down in a little bit."
"Sounds to me like you've got a sore throat, kiddo. Maybe you're coming down with something. I think maybe you need to stay home tomorrow, huh?" David's voice is soft. "And maybe we'll steal your grandpa. Have a just-men day, go fish. You think?"
The idea of not being there to see everyone to look at him and smirk feels like a stay of execution; a soft rustling announces Leonard's jump down out of the tree to wrap around his father, face against his chest. "Okay."
He tastes his first beer the next day out on the water, under strict orders to never tell his mother ever, and nobody talks about girls or school, or anything but fish and basketball. He thinks it might be the best day ever. He KNOWS he has the best dad ever.
2242.40
"Mama, please don't cry," Leonard says helplessly. "I'm almost sixteen, and Ole Miss isn't THAT far. Only an hour by shuttle."
"I still don't understand why you couldn't pick somewhere closer to home," she replies, voice trembling.
"'Cause noplace else thinks I'm ready." There is something weary and cynical in his eyes. Applying to colleges, test scores aside, has been educational on any number of levels beyond the obvious. "And Ole Miss thinks I am. I promise, Mama, I'm not interested in messing around and getting in trouble. This is too important."
"You should be," she said, taking his face in her hands, drawing it down and kissing his forehead; he has shot up in the last year, as tall as his father now, taller than his grandfather. "You should still be thinking about girls and messing around and getting into trouble and you should be here for your daddy and I to keep an eye on you..." She let out a trembling sigh. "But you'll shine, baby boy. You always do."
"Ellie, let the boy go. You be sure and call your mama and me every couple days, you hear, Leonard? And if you need to come home for anything, anything at all, you know I don't mind coming to get you." David's eyes on his son are just as full of love and worry as much as his wife's, for all that his tone is calmer.
Leonard swallows hard, his eyes meeting his mother's identical teary glowing hazel and he hugs her tight, feeling very much her baby boy and small and scared even as he sighs and pats to reassure. "I love you, Mama. It'll be okay. I'll be home for Thanksgiving in no time."
2244.02
Of all the ways Leonard McCoy has envisioned losing his virginity--many, many, imaginative ways--Emony Dax's elegant and unbelievably flexible body wrapped around his is a revelation beyond any of them. It isn't her glowing golden beauty that draws him, but rather how comfortable she looks in her skin, the absolute confidence that informs every inch of her carriage. He wonders at it, how calm and graceful she is with another whole being living with her, inside her, when it frequently feels to him like he is a stranger along for the ride in a body that supposedly belongs only to him.
The Trill gymnast is here with him, her mouth sliding hotly along his jawline, because he'd asked her that, desperate and frank and intrigued. He still does not know what she saw that led her to offer her hand and lead him back with her to her rooms. "You should be confident," she murmurs, "you're beautiful." He is not about to correct her, not when he is memorizing the feel of her skin, skimming her tight muscular curves with his lips, palm sliding along the willowy line of her leg wrapping around his waist.
"God, your hands," she purrs as one of them slips between her legs, strokes over her, hot and wet. He doesn't have to have done this to know he won't last long inside her, and he's had enough regrettably platonic female friends cry on his shoulder to know that's going to be unacceptable. Out of desperation he calls up the page he wants from Netter's atlas in his head as he ravages her mouth, takes her over that first edge with slow, smooth strokes of crooked fingers inside her and a thumb gently circling her clit, blessing the long-dead author for an accurate geography of the region as she moans and pushes up to him. She is whimpering and clawing as he finally slides into her, ready for blinding hot and fast and there is no room to feel awkward or disconnected in that blaze of feeling.
"You didn't pretend there aren't two of us," she says afterwards, drowsy, when he asks her why she brought him back. The second time is slower and more relaxed as they discuss anatomy, chemistry, the effect of the symbiont on her athletic ability, and since honesty got him this far, the fact that he's never given head and he'd like to have some guidance on his technique. No one, ever, has been disappointed with Leonard McCoy's focus once they've gotten his attention. As Dax writhes beneath the gentle rhythmic stroke of his tongue and gasps, "yes, just like that," he is relieved in a small, far-off portion of him that's not centered in his dick that that they will apparently not be the first.
Emony Dax is unfortunately only there for three days to judge a gymnastics competition, but the success of Leonard's initial attempt at putting sexual theory into practice encourages him to seek out further opportunities. The newfound confidence in the big dark eyes, his attention to detail, and his willingness to treat gender and species differences as continued education yields no small number of willing participants. The morning after twin Betazoids, brother and sister, introduce him to the joys of multiple-participant sex he bombs his first test, and for the first time keeping up with school seems like a challenge.
It is the most fun Leonard McCoy has ever had learning in his life, and that's saying something. Learning is what Leonard McCoy does.
2245.95
It is eleven AM on a Saturday morning and Leonard is sleeping off last night's party when the com chirps. He reaches over for it and blinks somewhat painfully against the light from the window. "Leonard," his father says, and he is suddenly wide, heart-pounding awake at the tone of his voice. He will remember forever after the angle of the light through the window, that a crow was cawing somewhere outside, that the smell of burned toast was coming from the hallway.
"Dad? What is it?" He blinks the sleep out of his eyes, chest tight.
"Leonard," David says again, and his voice breaks a little. "It's your mother. There was an accident. You need to come home. Now."
He is numb and shaking, headache forgotten, everything but those words, written across the inside of his head in fire. "Yes. Is she--Dad, is she going to be okay?"
"You need to come home now." His father's voice is devoid of emotion, and it is all Leonard can do not to scream. "Do you have money for a shuttle ticket?"
"Yes." Leonard bites his lip until he can taste iron. "I can get there. Don't worry about the shuttle port either. I have ticket money, I have cab fare. Where?"
"Emory Medical Center. Just go to the front desk, your grandpa will be waiting for you."
He calls his friend Mark Rousseau to drive him to the shuttleport, stuffing clothes in a bag as he does and praying to a God he's not sure he ever believed in and certainly not one who can let something happen to Eleanora McCoy that his father can't say aloud, that his grandfather can't fix. The shuttle ride itself is a nightmare, his hangover and his sick anxiety, the thin thread of hope and the press of people around him blending into vertigo that leaves him vilely and violently sick in the tiny bathroom of the shuttle, sweat-wet and shaking as he stumbles out at the end of the flight.
He waits with his father and grandfather that night, sitting with his mother until the neurologist comes. There is no mistaking the gentle gravity of his bearing for anything that might be carrying hope. Around ten PM, David McCoy closes his wife's eyes and Leonard kisses her cheek as TJ McCoy silences the monitors, the famous hands clumsy and trembling as his son and grandson say goodbye.
The next week is unbearable for many reasons, although the lead ones are "you have your mama's eyes," and "your mama would be so proud." Would be doesn't mean shit, he wants to say, would be means she's not fucking here and is never going to be here again and nothing you say is going to fix or help or change that in any way so would you just stop SAYING it? But David McCoy smiles and reaches out to ruffle his hair every time someone says it, so he smiles every time, and makes sure to be close enough for him to be able do it.
David is firm about him going back to school after that week ("no, Len, I'm okay, you need to be back before you're too far behind to catch up"), and he's fine until he gets on the shuttle. Feels that swim of nausea and grief and terror again as they take off and although he's not sick this time, it's close, it's really, really close and he is white as a sheet by the time he can escape. Mark picks him up and Leonard's acutely grateful that he doesn't say anything about how he looks, just stops at the liquor store on the way back to campus. He spends the night getting quietly trashed with Mark and Danith and Jae to hang onto when it's too much, to forge the thank-you notes to the letters of condolence and refuse to let him sleep alone for the first couple of nights until he can find his equilibrium.
At the end of the week, he gets his first acceptances to medical school back. Johns Hopkins--and Emory, the dual MD/MPH program.
I still don't understand why you couldn't pick somewhere closer to home. He can feel his father's hand, carding through his hair.
"Dad, tell Grandpa I'll be coming for his job pretty soon," he says when he calls home that night. "And we really need to repaint my room."
2247.40
He meets her in his Proposal Development class and hates her on sight, from the sleek glossy twist of her hair to the soles of the boots that probably cost more than everything Leonard McCoy owns, the erect spine and precise speech, the way her eyes skim dismissively over his tattered jeans and Ole Miss hoodie. Another aspiring politician, he thinks, another wannabe administrator here to slick another shiny layer of social consciousness over ambition.
But then he listens to her talk, polite and resolute and pulling no punches when she talks about malnutrition and mismanagement in relief agencies and when Leonard McCoy is wrong, he admits he is. Jocelyn Darnell is passionately interested, passionately offended, passionately involved, knows her numbers and policies and personalities and that honed image is a blade and armor both to cut peoples' legs out from under them. He comes to her after class as she is gathering up her things. "Have you read Arnesson on NGOs on Capella and cross-cultural strategies for creating value? I think it might tail well into what you're interested in doing."
It is her turn to look at him, eyebrow cocked. "You've read Arnesson?"
"Yes. I think he's got his limitations and likes to cherry-pick his cases too much to support his interpretation about the role of the Federation versus non-governmental actors but he has some useful things to say about how to address resistance to public health measures from non-technological populations."
"I'm just surprised. You don't look like the kind of person who thinks you'll have to convince anybody of the worth of your actions." Her voice is an alto whip, and he grins maliciously at the sweet sting of it.
"Am I concerned with whether my shoes meet with your approval? No. Whether you think I know what I'm doing when I stick you with a hypospray, yes. Leonard McCoy." He offers his hand, and she takes it, hers firm and cool, the brown eyes considering.
"Well, Leonard McCoy. Thanks for the suggestion." She frees her hand and finishes gathering up her things, heads for the door. He waits, shrugging battered backpack to his shoulder, and is rewarded by a quick glance over her shoulder and frown as he catches her looking back, an eyeroll as she heads in the direction of her next class, the icepick heels of her boots clicking on tile as he unabashedly studies her excellent ass in that short power-red skirt.
And he had thought this class was going to be the boring one this semester.
2248.13
It is the happiest day of his life. He should probably feel less like he's going to puke.
"I wish your mama could have been here for this," David McCoy said softly, straightening his son's tie, brushing a hand through his hair.
"I know, Dad." He wraps his arms around him, feels a pang at how much more...fragile his father feels than he remembers as a child. More than he should? "I know. Dad, have you been for your yearly checkup yet?"
"Leonard, quit stalling, you don't even have that MD yet," David says, rolling his eyes. "You don't want to keep a pretty girl waiting. Especially on your wedding day."
Random thoughts, wishes, worries, regrets, he can't hold onto any of them as he waits at the altar, and everything else dissolves anyway as his bride walks down the aisle to him, serene and smiling. She looks like promise, like their whole future spread out in front of him. Like every hope he's ever had for something better and his voice trembles as he says the words with emotion, not nerves. He's never been more sure of anything in his life.
2249.30
"Leonard, I'm pregnant."
He blinks. "I...how? When?"
"You're the doctor, I don't actually have to explain it, do I?" Joss puts her face in her hands. "This was so not in the 5-year-plan. You'll be starting your residency and I've got a job offer from DHHS..."
"You're having a baby. Our baby."
She looks up, ready to say something sharp, he can see it in her face but she freezes, studies his face. "You really want to do this, don't you."
"You don't?"
She blows out a breath. "It's not that simple, Len--"
"I'll look for a GP residency," he says, words tumbling over themselves. "I don't--Joss, I know how hard you've worked for this."
"You'll do no such thing, not after you already matched for surgery. You can be so much more than that, Len, SHOULD be. You have what you have for a reason." She sighs. "It's not perfect timing. But maybe there's a reason for that. Sometimes things just happen--god knows, I was not looking for your cantankerous country ass in that class."
He smiles, wraps her up, kisses her forehead and then tilts her face up to kiss her on the mouth. "I love you so much, Joss." He takes a deep breath, cups her face in his hands. "Be sure. You're the one driving here. We can do this later if you need, if you think it's a better idea."
She shook her head. "Len, nobody looking at you right now could. You were made to be a daddy. If it's a little bit off schedule, well, it's a little bit off."
His head is swimming with that, with you were made to be a daddy. He picks his wife up, his wife with their child inside her, takes her back to their bedroom over laughing protest about work and rotation and he shows up late for rounds. Even being roundly chewed out by Dr. Xeridides can't take the smile off his face.
You were made to be a daddy. He doesn't know about that, but it fills him with so much mingled terror and delight he is surprised he isn't glowing.
2251.167
"Leonard, do you know yet when you're going to be back from Dramia?" Jocelyn's mouth is tight, her eyes red. She turns with a jerk at the crashing sound behind her and the wail of an overtired toddler; Joanna Eleanora McCoy has her grandmother's eyes, her mouth, and her opinionation, and he winces a little as Joanna twists in her mother's arms as she is picked up, still hollering like a banshee.
"Come on, baby girl, let's not give Mama such a hard time, huh?" he croons, and teary eyes go wide and bright at the sound. The indignant shrieking stops, Joanna's little fists opening like small sticky flowers as she pats the screen. "I know, Joss," he said, closing his eyes and wishing desperately for home, where there were real showers instead of sonics, his bed instead of a camp cot, and a small fierce baby to contend with instead of the neverending lines of the sick and fearful to be vaccinated. "But we've got three staff down and the organization here is a nightmare."
"You said three weeks. It's been closer to three months."
"I know. But one way or another it's almost over. This last push and it's done." At least, I hope like hell it's done; if we can't get 90 percent coverage by the end of the week, this shit is going to mutate and all our work is going to go for nothing. I swear, I will never leave the surface of the earth or home again... "My practicum will be finished and I can write my public health thesis. I know it's been hard..."
"Just come home, Len. You have responsibilities here too, you know. People who miss you, who need you."
He wants to snap at her--it's not like he doesn't KNOW that, dammit, it's not like he wants to be stuck on this backward frigid hellhole battling with superstition and suspicion and inadequate sanitation any longer than he has to. But he bites down on the temper, recognizes the signs of exhaustion and loneliness in her as much as him. "I know," he says again, gentle and inadequate and aching. "And God knows I miss my girls." He rests his hand against the screen as Joanna does, his voice rusty with fatigue and regret.
Soon. Please God, soon.
2254.15
Sweat is pooling between Leonard's shoulderblades as he presents his preliminary findings to the review board; they grill him on his sources, his technique, the sims, murine and primate models, the in vitro studies. He hears one of them under his breath muttering about the numbers for the axon pathway formation. Oh, I'm pretty sure they are real, Dr. Saysavanh he thinks, lips curving a little bit. He's done an awful lot of meticulous work to make sure they are.
"Doctor McCoy." The chief reviewer, Amandrasav herself of the golden hands, who broke the brain barrier in microregen, offers him one of said hands coolly, antennae dipping slightly in a more Andorian gesture of respect. "Obviously, my colleagues and I will need some time to confer before your formal approval. But I feel I can say this is more than promising. I look forward to seeing how this procedure works outside the laboratory. You'll notify me when you're ready to enroll patients?" The slight emphasis on 'me' makes his chest tighten; she is interested personally in his work, him, Leonard McCoy, not as a formality of monitoring.
"I'd be more than happy, Doctor Amandrasav," he says, and is. So many hours, so much time juggled and scraped from all the other directions his life pulls him and so many times he'd wondered if he was fooling himself, chasing something that wasn't there. But today is the evidence that he has taken a step, a real step to keep the damage that took Eleanora McCoy's life decades too soon from claiming more victims. All of the frustration and self-doubt and sweat and tears are transmuted to sweet vindication, and he can believe in this moment that this was what he was made for, that it's been worth it.
Jubilant, his good mood is dimmed a little bit by the message in his voicemail from Joss when he is finished: Len, hope things went well for your proposal. Not going to be finished here until 8 or 9, please pick up Joanna? But he is philosophical; he can celebrate tonight with his father, and he'll almost certainly be willing to take his granddaughter tomorrow night or Saturday so Leonard and Joss can make a night of it. He goes and collects Jo from daycare, her serious little face lighting when she sees him and he feels more than a little guilty for how little he's seen her this week. But she is oblivious to his worries, just happily chattering to him about the teacher and her storybook that day.
"Dad?" he calls out as he keys himself in, the light on and the kettle whistling in the kitchen. Whistling, whistling, still whistling and frowning, he goes to the kitchen to find David McCoy curled into a ball on the floor, white and gasping in pain, crawling breathlessly towards his dropped comlink. "Dad!"
Joanna's eyes are wide, silently clinging to Leonard as he frantically calls the paramedics and performs a basic triage. The kettle has boiled itself dry before anyone thinks to turn it off, and the scent of burning clings to his shirt as he sits in the ER waiting for answers. TJ arrives not long after he does, and Joss some time after that, still in suit and heels and spicy perfume that he does not recognize. They sit in a horribly familiar tableau and Joanna refuses to be removed from her clutch on him until she falls asleep, biting TJ when he tries to Leonard's mingled amusement and dismay.
They are told David McCoy is being admitted for further testing and observation, and to come back in the morning. Joanna does not cry until they are home, inconsolable in her father's lap as he strokes her hair and Joss holds them both, silent.
Leonard does not cry until the day after, fist crammed into his mouth in a bathroom stall on the 5th floor internal medicine ward after he hears the word pyrrhoneuritis.
2254.130
It is brutally quick and agonizingly drawn-out at the same time, the way David McCoy crumples in on himself. The attacks of excruciating pain come closer and closer, leave less and less of him there to withstand the next each time. The laughing blue eyes have gone blank and bleak, kind and capable hands knotted into claws that clutch impotently at first the cane, and then shockingly quickly the arms of the wheelchair, the rails of the bed.
Leonard is a surgeon, not a neurologist, but it does not stop him from devouring the literature, using every connection he's developed and every favor he can beg, borrow and steal to review work in process, protocols being developed. Every day he brings David something to try and make him smile, to try and put something other than the increasing distance in his eyes.
"Enough, Len," he whispers finally one morning, lashes low, pushing weakly at the papers on his tray. "Please, I've had enough. It's time."
"Dad..." He picks up the papers, the words lawful termination leaping out from the first page. He is unable to say "no" as David's eyes meet his but the chill in his stomach becomes ice, a lead weight compressing his lungs, everything in him screaming it. "Please..." he chokes out instead. Please, Dad I'm not ready to do this without you. Please....
"It'll happen, son, one way or the other. Len, I don't..." He gasps for breath until the biobed can catch up with his distress, release more opioids into his bloodstream; the chaotic nerve activity and intractable pain produced by pyrrohneuritis can't be subdued with more sophisticated and less damaging techniques, a dark age torture and a treatment nearly as archaic. "Leonard," he says finally. "I won't be able to talk soon. Please, son. Let me go while I can still say goodbye. Still tell my granddaughter I love her."
He agrees because there is nothing he can say to that, his own voice gone.
They do it a week later. TJ, who spent most of the night pleading with his son, is there as David's breath whispers softly to a halt. This time it is Leonard who silences the alarms, notes time of death on the chart as his grandfather keens like a wounded animal. When he touches his grandfather's shoulder, he pulls violently away, wraps around David's body and sobs. Leonard is beyond tears as he goes to call the funeral home, calls the daily news service with the obituary. He thinks he might never cry again, an assumption that seems validated the day after David's memorial, when TJ's lawyer calls and apologetically informs him that his grandfather has rescinded Leonard's medical power of attorney for him and cut him out of his will. Even the knowledge that he has ceased to exist for TJ McCoy does not find tears.
However, the pre-publication paper sent to him by a well-meaning former classmate from Ole Miss that reaches him the week after rips him open and he thinks he might dissolve as he looks at the numbers, the treatment statistics. It's a breakthrough. It's genius of the purest kind, and it is two months too late for his father.
His grandfather was right. David McCoy hadn't had to die. And Leonard McCoy had killed him.
When Jocelyn comes home, she finds him passed out on the couch with the bottle of bourbon puddling at his feet. She is furious and terrified when she can't wake him up; there is a discussion later about responsibilities and appropriate ways to manage grief and counseling. He goes and listens, makes the appropriate noises in session, accepts sleep aids and mood stabilizers and wonders dryly what exactly the difference is between the numbing agents that come in a blister-pak and the ones that come in a glass bottle and dose by the shot glass, other than palatability and social acceptability.
None of them can erase the images that keep waking him, David McCoy asking him for his help to die, eyes glazed and breath shallow. TJ McCoy holding his son and moaning in agony, pulling away from a murderer's touch.
2255.04
"You're not the man I married," Jocelyn says as Leonard stares at her, her eyes hard and diamond-dry. "Len, if I thought you were trying, even..." Her voice cracks at that, and he studies her as if she is a stranger.
"Trying to do what?" His voice is harsh. "Jesus Christ, Jocelyn, it's been six months. I went to group. I'm taking the pills--"
"Leonard, you were drunk before 4 in the afternoon on Christmas."
"Yeah, well, I've had a death in the family. What was your father's excuse?" He hates himself for that as he watches her flinch, her mouth tightening. Knows how many family holidays have been ruined for her by her father and a bottle of gin. "Joss, I'm sorry..."
"Yeah, so is he. Every goddamn time." Her voice is thick with tears. "I can't stop him. Or you. But I'll be damned if I watch you do this to yourself. To our daughter. I'm done, Leonard." She pushes the papers across the table to him and he is struck by the way her hand shakes. The termination of their marriage, like the termination of his father's life and he wants to beg.
"Please," he whispers after she has gotten up from the table and left, orders another whiskey and scrawls his name on the bottom of the respondent's consent.
He does not deserve her second chance, he knows.
He is still bitter when she is awarded their house, and furious when she applies for sole custody, using the therapy she insisted he get as evidence that he's emotionally unsuited to care for their daughter. And when she threatens to go public with accusations of alcoholism, he stops fighting it, because even if unsubstantiated, it will make him poison as far as his career is concerned, the risk of liability if it's true too great for a hospital to ignore in a surgeon. He has lost his father, his wife, his daughter--to lose his purpose would kill him.
2255.58
"Daddy, don't go," Joanna is curled into his lap and he strokes a hand over her head.
"Honey, I've got to." He takes her face in his hands. "This is nothing to do with you, okay? Your mama and I, we both love you more than anything in the world. We just can't be together any more."
"But why can't you stay here? You can still be here!" She pulls away angrily, pushes at him. "You don't have to go to stupid San Francisco!"
He pushes out a shaky breath. He has thought long and hard about how to retrieve his life from its downward spiral; it was Mark, who once again was there when he needed him although by comm now as captain of the Manhattan, who suggested Starfleet. You need a purpose, Len, to feel like you're doing good, and a place that doesn't remind you every second of what you've lost, he'd said. And after Leonard's initial disbelief at the suggestion, he'd had to agree it made a certain amount of sense. Five years was a long time, but it would also demonstrate his stability and responsibility to a judge, give him another shot at contesting the custody arrangement. "Yeah, baby girl, I do. I haven't been a very good daddy to you since Grandpa...passed." He swallows hard. "I need to go someplace far enough away so I'm not thinking all the time about your grandpa and your mama and how bad I feel, how many mistakes I've made, or I'm just going to keep making more and bigger ones, hurt more people. I hope you can forgive me for that. I know you need me. But you need me to be a good daddy, not one who's too sad and too mad at the world to take care of you. And that's the way it's gotta be."
She pounds on him with little fists, then collapses in against him crying quietly. He holds her, eyes squeezed shut tight. "I've got two weeks before I have to go, baby doll. Let's think of as many things we can do to keep together between now and then as we can, huh? Vidcalls, letters, postcards, skywriting, Morse code, carrier pigeon.."
"Daddy," she says reprovingly, looking up. "You know carrier pigeons are extinct..."
"We'll clone some. I'll buy you a DNA lab for Christmas."
She tangles her fingers into his shirt, rolls her eyes and the smile is watery but there. He will have to hurt her worse than he is for her to stop loving him, and it is selfish to thank God for that McCoy stubbornness, but he does. It is the only thing that he can hold onto as he packs his things.
2255.72
The shuttle full of recruits hits a stiff crosswind and Leonard's uneasy doze is suddenly glaze-eyed terror. At his involuntary moan, Kirk's hand vises on his hard enough to startle. "Breathe," he murmurs, undoes Leonard's harness with a quick jerk and shoves his head between his knees, rubs his back as Leonard does his best to follow orders and not puke on his seatmate, earlier threats aside. "Is it the motion or the close quarters that are getting to you?"
"Both," he grits out. "I'm sorry."
"For what? It's not like you can help it," Kirk says matter-of-factly. "They should have listened to you." He keeps rubbing, slow firm circles, open palm smoothing over his back. "It's steadying out, the pilot's taken her up a bit," he says after a moment. "You still feel like you need to boot, I can help you get to the head."
"Okay for the moment, I think," he says, swallows back the hot taste of bile and whiskey, sits up, eyes still closed. They blink open in startlement as Kirk buckles his harness again, a soft brush of hands straightening straps and settling them comfortably. "Thanks."
"Don't mention it." He tips his head back against the grab-bar behind his seat. "Don't suppose you have anything for a headache in that bag, huh?"
McCoy studies his unlikely caretaker, a layer of fatigue dulling the otherwise rakish golden good looks, lines of pain and tension marring mouth and eyes along with the marks of a heavy fist. He realizes that the dark smudge on Kirk's shirt is blood, probably his own. "Looks like you had a hell of a night last night. I don't have any drugs that I can get to just this minute, but hold still." He reaches out and presses down on several biofeedback points on Kirk's nape, is fascinated by the jerk at contact, the way the electric-blue eyes flare for a moment before his lashes flicker. For all his apparent ease with touch, the other man clearly prefers initiating contact and he wonders at it a little.
"Oh," Kirk sighs as the endorphins start to kick in, eyes closing. "Okay. Yeah. That. Keep doing that."
"Only works but so long, but maybe it'll hold you over until we're on the ground again and I can give you a look-over with a scanner. The way you're holding yourself whoever worked you over did you more damage than what shows."
Kirk cracks a lid at him. "Bones, don't get all MD on me. Just a fistfight."
"Bones?" Leonard frowns, then rolls his eyes as he realized what that came from. "Oh, for God's sake. I'm sorry I said it. I have a perfectly good name. Leonard. Len." A quick flicker of pain impossible to suppress, his voice too much like his father's and it sounded like a ghost's voice in his ears.
Kirk's eyes narrow consideringly at that and Leonard wonders what he sees. "Bones," he repeats firmly, and Leonard can't bring himself to correct him again. "And quit looking at me like you can't wait to get me under a microscope, not EVERYTHING requires medical attention." It does not occur to him until much later that the second half of the flight, negotiating with a suspicious Jim about examining and treatment, he does not feel sick at all.
2256.17
While Leonard is received with open arms by Starfleet Medical and cheerfully put to work as an attending, there's a metric fuckton of things he doesn't know about Starfleet itself, and to his disgust there are classes in all of them. He has a good memory and he reads fast, however, so most of it's fine. He actually picks up a concentration in Xenopsych to keep himself thinking and not just regurgitating regs; also, if he will be Mark's CMO on the Manhattan, and even more so if he is awarded command of one of the destroyers under construction, he will need that extra credentialling.
On a more physical level, hand-to-hand training's not bad--he's strong with good balance, good hand-to-eye coordination, a good shot and already knows an impressive number of ways to inflict disabling pain on the average hominid physique. What really sucks sideways, however, are the survival and flight training sections. "This stupid shit isn't really about survival, anyway. It's about goddamn group psychology and subordinating individual ego and impulse to teamwork." he grouses, flopping face down on his bed and groaning after an extended hike in the desert. "At this late date that fucking ship has sailed. My mind's not 18 any more and my body sure the hell isn't."
"Get over yourself already, you're hardly Methuselah," Jim says, peeling off his socks and throwing one at Leonard's head. "Christ, Bones, what are you, all of thirty?"
"Offsides, germ warfare." McCoy makes a face at him, flings the sock back. "Twenty-nine."
"Wait, seriously? You're not even 30 and you're a fully accredited trauma surgeon, primary investigator for three studies, finished a master's in public health and halfway to a Ph.D in psych from what I hear?" Kirk shook his head. "You're a fucking boy genius, McCoy."
McCoy snorts. "Yeah, well, if you're only as old as you feel some days I'm goddamn fifty and book-smarts aren't everything. If I'm a genius how'd I end up here?"
"You're going to seek out new worlds and new civilizations. Boldly puke where no man has puked before!"
McCoy wings a pillow at him. "That what you're doing, Jim? Exploring in the hope of discovering a woman who's yet to hear one of your lame pick-up lines?"
"Something like that."
McCoy, intrigued, rolls over to study his roommate more closely at that flat, too-casual tone. Somewhat to his bemusement, sharing accommodations has actually been a reasonably positive experience thus far. Jim has his irritating quirks, including a complete disregard for personal space, inability to not read over Leonard's shoulder, providing commentary while watching vids and talking with his mouth full. But on the plus side, he keeps his side of the room picked up, goes elsewhere to party, doesn't ask personal questions, has decent taste in music and is surprisingly well-read. If he HAS to have a roommate, he could have done a lot worse. "Why ARE you here, Jim?"
Jim shrugs, toys with the edge of the blanket. "Same as you, nowhere else to be." He smiles at McCoy, inviting him to make a joke of it with him but there is something bleak in his eyes as he says it and McCoy has already learned that Jim tends to say things lightly that aren't, at all, uncomfortable truth in plain sight with a thin gloss of biting humor.
"Well, for what it's worth, I'm glad you're here. Don't feel like the only old man," McCoy says gruffly. Jim may be only 23, but that's still five years older than most of the new recruits, another plus as far as McCoy's concerned because if he had to room with an 18-year-old, he'd kill him. And he is coming to realize that like him, Jim may be chronologically 23 but what lives behind those deceptively bright eyes is a lot older for all his occasional recklessness.
Jim huffs a soft laugh, but the loneliness eases a little bit. "Gee, thanks, Bones. Glad I could help out," he says, dust-dry. "At some point, I swear to God, I'll convince you that being young isn't an awful thing."
"Good luck with that, kid. Many have tried."
"Yeah, and they were not James Tiberius Kirk."
McCoy rolls his eyes. "Yeah, yeah. Pick up your goddamn socks, James Tiberius Kirk."
2256.320
Leonard has gotten fairly good at turning the dream, refusing to have the dream, waking himself up and reading or pacing until he is ready to lie down again but when he's at his weakest, when he's been on-call and working until he's ready to drop and always, always when he's lost a patient, it's still there, waiting for him. He moans and shivers, aware in some small part of him that it's a dream, and in some deeper part of him that he dreams it because it was real, because he put his hand on the drip and turned it up to where it would stop his father's breath, let his heart falter into irregularity and cease so long before it would have had to...
No, the voice whispers, almost as familiar to him as the sound of his own now, soft against his ears, warmth wrapping him up. You're not there. You're here with me, in the dorm, come on, come back to me Bones. There is something about that voice, calm and tender but firm, that commands obedience, that makes him curl into that warmth and hang on. He is rewarded with a sigh that shivers across his ear, a hand carding softly through sweat-soaked hair. That's right, here with me now. You sleep. I'll keep watch. Whatever it is, it won't come back, not while I'm here, I won't let it.
When McCoy does wake up, Jim and his running shoes are gone, as per usual at oh-dark-what-the-fuck when the kid tends to get up. He would dismiss the whole episode as his imagination but he is on his left side, not his right and the scent of Jim still clings to his pillow. He can't bring himself to get up, just noses into that scent and lets his mind go blank. He is not ready to acknowledge how much comfort that touch, that voice in the dark has become to him over the last several months. Any more than Jim is, probably, he thinks dryly.
In some strange way it was that neither one of them would ever ask that has enabled Jim to talk a little bit to Leonard about being George Kirk's son, of everyone seeing a man he does not know in every choice he does and doesn't make, of always being found wanting. Leonard, in turn, talks in small, hesitant ways about the divorce and Joanna, his fears and hopes about being an absent parent to her. Subsequent to these discussions, he has woken up late once or twice on his days off to find Jim has answered his comlink for him and is cheerfully discussing school, the latest Interplanetary Geographic or some other reasonably appropriate topic with Jo while waiting for him to regain consciousness. When asked about that, Jim answers quite reasonably that Jo was curious about him, therefore she should know who he is, and if Bones is going to talk about her to him, HE should know who SHE is. And this makes a certain amount of sense, and also leaves him strangely warmed, listening to them while half-awake talking about dinosaurs and comic books and Jo's ongoing campaign to talk her mother into a puppy.
There are still things they have not shared; Jim has not offered any explanation, or Leonard any comment, about the origin of any number of scars that should have been regenerated when Jim was a kid, the manic intensity with which he studies when he's not carousing like an Orion pirate or the fact that he carefully allows people to believe the latter occurs a lot more often than it actually does. Leonard simply makes sure there is food in the room when Jim has missed meals (too frequently), snaps at him when he is going for coffee after 10 PM (also too frequently) and treats him for hangovers, sparring and the occasional brawls without asking ("Get off me." "Yeah, no, live with it.")
In return, Jim does not ask him about his father, drags him around like a stuffed toy when he's unable or unwilling to force himself to socialize ("One more night sitting on it and your ass is gonna meld with that chair, a fate it does not deserve"), quizzes him on his research when he's brooding ("How do you RETAIN all this stuff-" "Genius, remember?"), brings him silly or interesting things to send to Joanna ("what the hell IS it?" "A Tliktalook." "Come again?" "Bones, just trust me. It sparkles. AND purrs.") And after unbearably long nights, Jim takes him out for breakfast.
The door closes softly as Jim comes back in, but when Jim realizes he is awake he does not bother to be quiet any more, tossing shoes haphazardly in the direction of the closet and stripping on his way to their shower. "Hey, I'm starving. Get your lazy ass out of bed and let's hit Flanigan's."
"Yeah, yeah," he grouses softly, reaches for the comlink. "As soon as I've showered and called my daughter. You can wait that long."
"Tell Joey hi for me."
"Joey?"
"Jo-Jo is your nickname. Joey is mine."
2257.359
Leonard does not realize just how much Joanna has been talking to Jim until Christmas. He is invited to his uncle John's house with Joanna for Christmas Eve, and this year instead of boycotting in protest, TJ comes and stonily ignores his grandson until he's a few drinks to the worse.
"Invited or not, you should have realized you're not welcome," he says under his breath, and Leonard freezes.
"Believe me, I'm not in any doubt about how you feel, TJ," he replies. "But it's not fair that Joanna shouldn't know her McCoy cousins because you can't forgive me. For her sake, and the rest of the family, can you bring yourself to be civil for another hour or two?" Joanna, because she is as regrettably quick as he was at that age, is watching, biting her lip.
"Have you told her yet? Why she doesn't have a grandfather?"
Leonard closes his eyes. "Ah. I see the answer to that is no. Why don't I just go then, and I'll pick her up in an hour?"
What he does NOT expect is for Joanna to get up, jaw set in an expression TJ should certainly recognize, head tipped back to meet his gaze. "I don't wanna stay, Daddy. Sometimes people say mean, crazy things when they're hurting. But being sorry for 'em doesn't mean you have to listen to 'em."
"Joanna McCoy--" TJ's face has gone red.
"Papa TJ, if you can't say anything nice don't you say anything to me at all. Or my daddy." she says firmly, taking a dumbstruck Leonard by the hand and towing him towards the door. "Auntie Linda, Uncle John, Merry Christmas. Thank you for a nice time. Daddy, put your coat on." She herds him towards the door like a sheepdog with one charge, and he is so amazed he allows her her way.
Outside, he finds his voice. "Joanna, what--we can't just leave..."
"Can too. I can see Uncle John and Aunt Linda and the cousins whenever I want, I just ask Mama. I only get you for Christmas and breaks. And I don't like Papa TJ. Even if he is a sad old man."
He takes a deep breath, let it out slowly. "All right." Steels himself for the next part. "Do you want to ask me about what he said?"
"No," she replies, still equally firm and matter-of-fact. "I know you didn't hurt Grandpa Dave. Sometimes people get sick and die and even a doctor can't fix them."
He closes his eyes at the love and certainty in her voice, the absolute faith that he can't bring himself to tarnish. "Okay. So what now, baby girl?"
"Let's go back and play with my new sampling apparatus. See how many kinds of DNA we can find in the hotel room."
He has to laugh at that. "Jo-Jo, that's kind of gross."
"It's just biology, Daddy."
He hears her talking when he gets out of the shower and is drying off. "No, I didn't. It was just like you said. I didn't give him a chance to say no...." A pause, and she laughs. "Yep. Other than that it's been nice. Are you having a nice Christmas? I got you a present but I'm gonna give it to Daddy for you, I didn't know where to mail it...well of course you silly goose. Merry Christmas, Jim." Leonard's eyebrows climb to his hairline as he comes out and Joanna is turning off her comlink.
"Who were you talking to, baby girl?"
"Jim. He's in New Mexico, heading for Arizona. He said he'd send me a postcard from the Grand Canyon. Do his people live down there?"
"No, Iowa. Do you talk to Jim a lot?"
"Sometimes. He's lonesome, Daddy, I can tell when he talks to me waiting for you. And he knows lots of things. And I can ask him stuff and he doesn't tell me I'm too young or I don't need to know." Her eyebrow arches at him.
"What kind of stuff do you ask him?" He scowls. "Why can't you ask me?"
"Sometimes I ask you too," she says unflappably. "But it makes him happy when I ask. And sometimes it's about you. You don't always say you're not happy when you're not happy, Daddy. But Jim will say."
"Did Jim tell you about your grandpa?" He's not sure how he feels about that, at all. Especially since he hadn't told him, so how would he--
She shakes her head. "Mama told me. Papa TJ's said things before about you and being an unnatural son and blood on your hands, crazy stuff and I asked Mama then. But then I told Jim 'cause I didn't know what to do about it, and he said that just because someone's had bad things happen to them doesn't mean they get to be mean to people and if you love somebody you shouldn't let them act like a jackass. It's not good for you OR them. So just be polite and kind and chop 'em off at the kneecaps."
He looks at her, a deep ache of love and pride and worry in his chest. "Jo-Jo, you don't have to protect me."
She huffs out a surprisingly adult sigh. "See, this is why I asked Jim. You don't let anybody help you. He doesn't tell me I don't need to or I shouldn't be thinking about that, he just answers the question."
"He is not the person to talk about not asking for help," he replies dryly. "But point taken, baby doll."
"I kinda figured, but he has you to take care of him." She looks at him seriously. "If his people are in Iowa, how come he's not there for Christmas?"
"It's kind of hard for him like it is for me, I think. But he's not very good at answering my questions. Maybe you ought to try."
"Might could. You bring him with next time if he doesn't want to go home. We'll all have Chinese and not talk to Papa TJ."
"How'd you get so smart?"
"Mama says caught it from you," she says impishly, crawls into his lap.
He calls Jim later, his arms full of sleeping child and the lights from outside sparkling over them. "You sneak. Subverting my own daughter."
"Bones, Merry Christmas." Jim's voice is soft. "She deserves a father who's happy to be with her, not one being torn down by an angry, bitter old man."
"Joanna tells me you're on the way to Arizona."
"Yep. Always wanted to see the Grand Canyon at sunrise."
"Take pictures, she'll want to see too. Oh, and mark your calendar for next year."
"Huh?"
"I've been informed you have plans for Christmas. You're going to come to Savannah, get takeout Chinese, and ignore my grandfather with us."
"Bones--" Jim's voice is trying too hard to be casual and amused.
"She loves you. Deal with it, you have only yourself to blame. My baby girl wants you here, you'll be here if I have to sedate your ass and stuff you in a pet carrier."
"Haven't been to Georgia before," he says carefully after a long moment.
"Well, that'll change since there's approximately no chance in hell Joss will let me have her in San Fran over the holidays."
"Is Joanna the only one who loves me?" Jim's voice is teasing.
"Fuck off, kid, or you won't get your Christmas present. Night, Jim. Merry Christmas."
2258.44
Jim is wavering on his feet by the time he comes down to Sickbay--of course it isn't for himself, goddamn martyr, but to check on the casualties, to talk to the ones who are conscious, to get the butcher's bill in private so a crew that is already shellshocked with loss does not have to hear the number of casualties over open channels. To maintain the tenuous mood of victory.
This does not stop McCoy from hauling him into his office and pushing him down to the cot there as Jim blinks up at him. "Hey, ow!"
"Idiot. Moron. Asshole. Why the hell has it taken you this long to get down here?" He hissed as the tricorder started spitting back readings at him. "You've got a bruised spleen, three broken ribs, your hyoid's cracked, you're going to spring a lung if you're not careful-"
"That's asshole, SIR, Bones. And I've been kind of busy--what is that?" He catches McCoy's wrist before he can inject him.
"You're bleeding internally. Sir. You're going to go into shock if you don't lie your ass down and let me take care of you for a few fucking minutes and may I say, Captain, that it would be really bad for morale if I have TWO commanding officers holding down beds." McCoy's eyelid is twitching. "Will you let me treat you, or do I need to lick your boots first?"
Jim closed his eyes, huffed out a breath. "Fine. Please don't give me anything that's going to mess me up. The ship's a mess, and nobody big enough to tow her is is going to be back from the Laurentian system for two days at maximum warp, best case. So we'll be on our own for at least that long with no warp drive, and who the hell knows what will fall apart after the beating she's taken."
"I'm not setting your ribs and starting the regen without pain meds, sorry. I'll do as little as I can. Here my judgment overrides yours."
"Thanks for the support," Jim says in the same tone as on the bridge, grey and exhausted, lashes still closed.
McCoy flinches. "Dammit, Jim," he snaps. "Do you think I don't know nobody else could have done what you did? How many lives you saved, how many lives you're carrying of the lost? How many people are still relying on you? They need you too much for me to do less than my best for you." I need you too much.
Dazed blue eyes open to his, study him for a moment as if they'd never seen him before as Jim's hand closes over his. "Okay. Bones, tell Spock he has the conn until you're ready to let me out of here. Try and make it quick."
"Do the best I can," he mutters, still gruff. He applies the hypo as gently as he can, and Jim's lashes start to flutter.
"B'nes. You know, my dad saw me get my ship, in 'nother life," Jim mumbles before he passes out.
"He did here too," McCoy says softly, lets himself feather a hand through Jim's hair before starting to work.
He does not know exactly when he became sure it would be Jim that he went to the black with, not Mark. But he knows now that it will be both harder than he imagined and that it is no longer imagination, because he can't leave Jim in someone else's hands, to someone who doesn't know him as well, who won't know to force him to take care of himself.
He won't lose another person he loves if he can help it.
2258.49
The families of the crew of the Enterprise are waiting for them when they disembark, a milling laughing crying cacophony of anxious, loving voices and Leonard only has eyes for one of them, Joanna using her slight frame and being all knees and elbows to advantage to push through the crowd like a tiny ramjet and cannon into him, wrapping around him with desperate strength. He holds her and closes his eyes, unabashed tears on his face as he kisses hers away.
It is a lifetime and not long enough of whispered nonsense and joy before Joanna turns to frown at something. "There's Jim! Why isn't he with you? Is that his mama?"
Leonard turns at that and Jim is indeed standing with a small slim woman whose dark blonde hair echoes his only lighter, the fine angular bone structure becoming more prominent and the lines fanning around her eyes a glimpse of how Jim might age. There is pain and pride on both sides there, Jim loosely holding his mother's hands and his smile reassuring, the blue eyes full of love and uncertainty both. Joanna slides down and tugs at her father, intent unmistakable. "Jo, I don't know that we should bother them," he says weakly.
Joanna awards Leonard a LOOK for his cowardice and heads for Jim with all the certainty she'd shown looking for him. Jim's startlement at being crashed into turns into wonder and then shy--shy! Jim!--pleasure as Joanna wraps around him. "Thank you for saving my daddy," she murmurs, eyes wide as she studies him. "You're skinnier than you look on vid. And your eyes are bluer."
"You, on the other hand, look exactly the same," he says, picking her up. "Mom, this is Joanna McCoy, who belongs to Bones." He looks up as McCoy comes to stand next to him, shoulder to shoulder. "And this is Bones. Leonard I guess if you're not me," he says, smiling, something like relief there. "Bones, my mom, Winona Kirk."
"Ma'am." McCoy offers his hand. Winona's is hard and callused, her gaze both direct and achingly vulnerable as it strays to her son. It occurs to him that as much as the comparisons to Jim's father may or may not be apt, that carefully guarded tenderness, love and fear of love tangled seamlessly together is certainly as much a part of Jim Kirk as George Kirk's courage and resolve. "A pleasure."
Jim murmurs to Joanna with a conspiratorial gleam in his eye, "You know, Joey, it was kind of your dad who actually saved all of us. He snuck me on board the Enterprise, I wasn't even supposed to be there." Joanna's eyes widen as Winona glances over and Leonard's cheeks redden.
"That sounds like a story," Winona observes softly.
"Good God, Jim, not hardly," he says, flustered both by the way Jim and his mother are looking at him, Joanna's eyes sparkling. "I think you should come to breakfast with us, ma'am, so I can keep his story straight." Jocelyn has made her way to them at that point, the tall man with his hand possessively on her elbow something that would have hurt more at one point but with Jim's hand finding his shoulder and Jim's mother keeping his hand, he can smile at her as if he means it and mostly he does. "Joss. I can't thank you enough for this. And this must be Clay?"
The man nods, and Joss says rawly, "Shut up, Leonard, it was the least I could do for either her or you. And this is Jim?"
Jim gives her his second-best smile, which is still blinding and somewhat masks the malicious and territorial glint in his eyes. Leonard is mildly terrified that he can recognize both of those things; he would be more frightened if it didn't warm him, fill him up the way it did. "It's so nice to meet Joanna's mom," Jim says, probably to remind himself not to be snide in front of Jo. "So, Bones. Breakfast?"
"Yeah." There is suddenly a lot to talk about, just him and Jim, but he is not in any great hurry. He is perfectly content to watch Jo pestering Winona about what Jim was like as a little boy, and Jim splashing that bright hot charm around while his hand tightens on his shoulder. So much loss and fear and pain still all around them, so much healing and rebuilding and resecuring that will need to be done but in this one moment he feels like a phoenix rising out of the ashes, young and new and happy to be so. The way Jim had promised a few thousand hours and miles away in a dorm room. "Dammit, Jim," he murmurs.
"Huh?" Jim glances at him, confused.
"Never mind. I'll tell you later."
Author: northatlantic
Word Count: ~10,800
Characters: Leonard McCoy, Theodore Jackson (TJ) McCoy, David McCoy, Eleanora McCoy, Jocelyn Darnell McCoy, Joanna McCoy, James Kirk, Emony Dax, Mark Rousseau
Genre: Gen, McCoy/Jocelyn, Kirk/McCoy friendship/preslash
Rating: NC-17 (explicit heterosexual sex, implied homosexual sex/multiple partner sex, language)
Warning: minor character deaths
Summary: Leonard McCoy has always been an old soul in a young body.
Author's Notes: According to the canon dates for when McCoy was born/when he has his first medical achievements and the procedures he does on the Enterprise, it is literally impossible for him to have completed med school at the usual age (extended riff on why that is if you follow the link). Now, we all know that's probably because whoever did the fact-checking did not do a very good job. But that's a BORING explanation. I like the explanation that McCoy is as much a misfit prodigy as his boys Kirk and Spock MUCH better. And that might have looked something like this. Any errors in THIS continuity, or of grammar, are of course my own. Title from the Foo Fighters, "Long Road To Ruin."
2230.22
Leonard McCoy is three years old when someone other than his doting mother realizes he is something a little bit out of the ordinary; it is his preschool teacher, when he corrects her spelling on a note she's written to said doting mother about how Leonard prefers to hide under the table and look at books to playing with the other children during free time.
"They never have anything interesting to say," he explains when he gets home with a somewhat expanded and revised note suggesting accelerated curriculum. "I'd rather read."
2236.17
"What have you got there, little man?"
Leonard cordially despises the phrase "little man," and is not sure how to feel about Grandpa TJ, who is a Very Busy Man which appears to be an adult abbreviation for 'and never has time to talk about anything ever.' But being a doctor, he has a very useful library, much more so than the local branch for some things. "Xenoinfectious Diseases," he says shortly, flipping through the index at "c." Just as he thought, there is no listing for cooties. "Do you have any references with more common names? I'm trying to find something and nobody seems to know the right name for ANYTHING at school. You should hear some of the ridiculous things they come up with for the reproductive system. Let alone what they think you DO with it."
"Leonard, refresh my memory," his grandfather says thoughtfully after a moment. "You're in what grade this year?"
"Sixth," he said, curling his lip. "I can't skip any further. My social development is already 'compromised.' I hate that word." He considers that. "What does it even mean? Compromise is supposed to be a good thing, I'm supposed to be more open to compromise, so why do people use it when they mean 'defective?'"
"You got me, but then I've never been much of a fan of compromise myself." Scowling hazel eyes look up at that, but Grandpa McCoy's expression is sober interest, not the look of someone who's thinking "awww, that's so cute." Leonard hates that more than "little man," if possible. Even more, maybe, than the bigger, older kids in his classes who like to stuff him in his locker, tease him about his ears getting pointy and being a teacher's pet, among similarly unimaginative offerings. "You might have better luck with that social development deal in a setting where you're not competition. At least, I've always had better luck that way. People like feeling like they're on equal footing, or like they can show you something for a change. Makes them want to take you down a peg less."
"Did they call you a douchebag Vulcan wannabe when you were my age?"
"Asskissing teacher's pet. They didn't know as much about Vulcans."
Leonard sighs. "What kind of setting?"
David McCoy is delighted when his son stops resisting the suggestion to join the park basketball team, and even more so when despite himself, Leonard actually acquires some friends out of it.
Leonard, for his part, begins to appreciate T.J. McCoy's value as a resource above and beyond his library.
2240.42
"Your mama told me you were up here," David says, sitting under the tree.
"Go away." His voice is thick and scratchy, jumping and wavering and dammit, dammit, dammit he sounds like a stupid junior high child and it's no wonder Lori had looked at him so incredulously when he'd tried to ask her to prom.
"Len," his father says quietly and Leonard hides his face against his knees. "Len, I know this is hard for you because of who you are, where you are, but nobody is happy when they're thirteen, kiddo. Nobody. And I promise, that girl is going to look back someday and wonder how stupid she was that she had a chance to catch your eye and let it go."
"Dad, stop it, please." He squirms with the sheer humiliation of it. God, if he's heard it once, he's heard it a million times and that's great, he's sure everything will be wonderful someday except for the part where it's not someday, it's now, and now he's still a scrawny geek who can't drive.
"Not until you come out of the tree. I have a whole stack of inspirational stories, Len. They issue them with your So You're A Parent guidebook along with Embarrassing Your Children, An Easy 12-Step Guide To Alienation For Teens and the Songs To Sing Along With In The Car To Pretend You're Hip In Front Of Your Kid's Friends vid."
Leonard smiles painfully at that, then feels sick again as he thinks about his friends, and about having to see Lori again in Bio II tomorrow and he thinks he may never come down. "Please, Dad. I just...I'll come down in a little bit."
"Sounds to me like you've got a sore throat, kiddo. Maybe you're coming down with something. I think maybe you need to stay home tomorrow, huh?" David's voice is soft. "And maybe we'll steal your grandpa. Have a just-men day, go fish. You think?"
The idea of not being there to see everyone to look at him and smirk feels like a stay of execution; a soft rustling announces Leonard's jump down out of the tree to wrap around his father, face against his chest. "Okay."
He tastes his first beer the next day out on the water, under strict orders to never tell his mother ever, and nobody talks about girls or school, or anything but fish and basketball. He thinks it might be the best day ever. He KNOWS he has the best dad ever.
2242.40
"Mama, please don't cry," Leonard says helplessly. "I'm almost sixteen, and Ole Miss isn't THAT far. Only an hour by shuttle."
"I still don't understand why you couldn't pick somewhere closer to home," she replies, voice trembling.
"'Cause noplace else thinks I'm ready." There is something weary and cynical in his eyes. Applying to colleges, test scores aside, has been educational on any number of levels beyond the obvious. "And Ole Miss thinks I am. I promise, Mama, I'm not interested in messing around and getting in trouble. This is too important."
"You should be," she said, taking his face in her hands, drawing it down and kissing his forehead; he has shot up in the last year, as tall as his father now, taller than his grandfather. "You should still be thinking about girls and messing around and getting into trouble and you should be here for your daddy and I to keep an eye on you..." She let out a trembling sigh. "But you'll shine, baby boy. You always do."
"Ellie, let the boy go. You be sure and call your mama and me every couple days, you hear, Leonard? And if you need to come home for anything, anything at all, you know I don't mind coming to get you." David's eyes on his son are just as full of love and worry as much as his wife's, for all that his tone is calmer.
Leonard swallows hard, his eyes meeting his mother's identical teary glowing hazel and he hugs her tight, feeling very much her baby boy and small and scared even as he sighs and pats to reassure. "I love you, Mama. It'll be okay. I'll be home for Thanksgiving in no time."
2244.02
Of all the ways Leonard McCoy has envisioned losing his virginity--many, many, imaginative ways--Emony Dax's elegant and unbelievably flexible body wrapped around his is a revelation beyond any of them. It isn't her glowing golden beauty that draws him, but rather how comfortable she looks in her skin, the absolute confidence that informs every inch of her carriage. He wonders at it, how calm and graceful she is with another whole being living with her, inside her, when it frequently feels to him like he is a stranger along for the ride in a body that supposedly belongs only to him.
The Trill gymnast is here with him, her mouth sliding hotly along his jawline, because he'd asked her that, desperate and frank and intrigued. He still does not know what she saw that led her to offer her hand and lead him back with her to her rooms. "You should be confident," she murmurs, "you're beautiful." He is not about to correct her, not when he is memorizing the feel of her skin, skimming her tight muscular curves with his lips, palm sliding along the willowy line of her leg wrapping around his waist.
"God, your hands," she purrs as one of them slips between her legs, strokes over her, hot and wet. He doesn't have to have done this to know he won't last long inside her, and he's had enough regrettably platonic female friends cry on his shoulder to know that's going to be unacceptable. Out of desperation he calls up the page he wants from Netter's atlas in his head as he ravages her mouth, takes her over that first edge with slow, smooth strokes of crooked fingers inside her and a thumb gently circling her clit, blessing the long-dead author for an accurate geography of the region as she moans and pushes up to him. She is whimpering and clawing as he finally slides into her, ready for blinding hot and fast and there is no room to feel awkward or disconnected in that blaze of feeling.
"You didn't pretend there aren't two of us," she says afterwards, drowsy, when he asks her why she brought him back. The second time is slower and more relaxed as they discuss anatomy, chemistry, the effect of the symbiont on her athletic ability, and since honesty got him this far, the fact that he's never given head and he'd like to have some guidance on his technique. No one, ever, has been disappointed with Leonard McCoy's focus once they've gotten his attention. As Dax writhes beneath the gentle rhythmic stroke of his tongue and gasps, "yes, just like that," he is relieved in a small, far-off portion of him that's not centered in his dick that that they will apparently not be the first.
Emony Dax is unfortunately only there for three days to judge a gymnastics competition, but the success of Leonard's initial attempt at putting sexual theory into practice encourages him to seek out further opportunities. The newfound confidence in the big dark eyes, his attention to detail, and his willingness to treat gender and species differences as continued education yields no small number of willing participants. The morning after twin Betazoids, brother and sister, introduce him to the joys of multiple-participant sex he bombs his first test, and for the first time keeping up with school seems like a challenge.
It is the most fun Leonard McCoy has ever had learning in his life, and that's saying something. Learning is what Leonard McCoy does.
2245.95
It is eleven AM on a Saturday morning and Leonard is sleeping off last night's party when the com chirps. He reaches over for it and blinks somewhat painfully against the light from the window. "Leonard," his father says, and he is suddenly wide, heart-pounding awake at the tone of his voice. He will remember forever after the angle of the light through the window, that a crow was cawing somewhere outside, that the smell of burned toast was coming from the hallway.
"Dad? What is it?" He blinks the sleep out of his eyes, chest tight.
"Leonard," David says again, and his voice breaks a little. "It's your mother. There was an accident. You need to come home. Now."
He is numb and shaking, headache forgotten, everything but those words, written across the inside of his head in fire. "Yes. Is she--Dad, is she going to be okay?"
"You need to come home now." His father's voice is devoid of emotion, and it is all Leonard can do not to scream. "Do you have money for a shuttle ticket?"
"Yes." Leonard bites his lip until he can taste iron. "I can get there. Don't worry about the shuttle port either. I have ticket money, I have cab fare. Where?"
"Emory Medical Center. Just go to the front desk, your grandpa will be waiting for you."
He calls his friend Mark Rousseau to drive him to the shuttleport, stuffing clothes in a bag as he does and praying to a God he's not sure he ever believed in and certainly not one who can let something happen to Eleanora McCoy that his father can't say aloud, that his grandfather can't fix. The shuttle ride itself is a nightmare, his hangover and his sick anxiety, the thin thread of hope and the press of people around him blending into vertigo that leaves him vilely and violently sick in the tiny bathroom of the shuttle, sweat-wet and shaking as he stumbles out at the end of the flight.
He waits with his father and grandfather that night, sitting with his mother until the neurologist comes. There is no mistaking the gentle gravity of his bearing for anything that might be carrying hope. Around ten PM, David McCoy closes his wife's eyes and Leonard kisses her cheek as TJ McCoy silences the monitors, the famous hands clumsy and trembling as his son and grandson say goodbye.
The next week is unbearable for many reasons, although the lead ones are "you have your mama's eyes," and "your mama would be so proud." Would be doesn't mean shit, he wants to say, would be means she's not fucking here and is never going to be here again and nothing you say is going to fix or help or change that in any way so would you just stop SAYING it? But David McCoy smiles and reaches out to ruffle his hair every time someone says it, so he smiles every time, and makes sure to be close enough for him to be able do it.
David is firm about him going back to school after that week ("no, Len, I'm okay, you need to be back before you're too far behind to catch up"), and he's fine until he gets on the shuttle. Feels that swim of nausea and grief and terror again as they take off and although he's not sick this time, it's close, it's really, really close and he is white as a sheet by the time he can escape. Mark picks him up and Leonard's acutely grateful that he doesn't say anything about how he looks, just stops at the liquor store on the way back to campus. He spends the night getting quietly trashed with Mark and Danith and Jae to hang onto when it's too much, to forge the thank-you notes to the letters of condolence and refuse to let him sleep alone for the first couple of nights until he can find his equilibrium.
At the end of the week, he gets his first acceptances to medical school back. Johns Hopkins--and Emory, the dual MD/MPH program.
I still don't understand why you couldn't pick somewhere closer to home. He can feel his father's hand, carding through his hair.
"Dad, tell Grandpa I'll be coming for his job pretty soon," he says when he calls home that night. "And we really need to repaint my room."
2247.40
He meets her in his Proposal Development class and hates her on sight, from the sleek glossy twist of her hair to the soles of the boots that probably cost more than everything Leonard McCoy owns, the erect spine and precise speech, the way her eyes skim dismissively over his tattered jeans and Ole Miss hoodie. Another aspiring politician, he thinks, another wannabe administrator here to slick another shiny layer of social consciousness over ambition.
But then he listens to her talk, polite and resolute and pulling no punches when she talks about malnutrition and mismanagement in relief agencies and when Leonard McCoy is wrong, he admits he is. Jocelyn Darnell is passionately interested, passionately offended, passionately involved, knows her numbers and policies and personalities and that honed image is a blade and armor both to cut peoples' legs out from under them. He comes to her after class as she is gathering up her things. "Have you read Arnesson on NGOs on Capella and cross-cultural strategies for creating value? I think it might tail well into what you're interested in doing."
It is her turn to look at him, eyebrow cocked. "You've read Arnesson?"
"Yes. I think he's got his limitations and likes to cherry-pick his cases too much to support his interpretation about the role of the Federation versus non-governmental actors but he has some useful things to say about how to address resistance to public health measures from non-technological populations."
"I'm just surprised. You don't look like the kind of person who thinks you'll have to convince anybody of the worth of your actions." Her voice is an alto whip, and he grins maliciously at the sweet sting of it.
"Am I concerned with whether my shoes meet with your approval? No. Whether you think I know what I'm doing when I stick you with a hypospray, yes. Leonard McCoy." He offers his hand, and she takes it, hers firm and cool, the brown eyes considering.
"Well, Leonard McCoy. Thanks for the suggestion." She frees her hand and finishes gathering up her things, heads for the door. He waits, shrugging battered backpack to his shoulder, and is rewarded by a quick glance over her shoulder and frown as he catches her looking back, an eyeroll as she heads in the direction of her next class, the icepick heels of her boots clicking on tile as he unabashedly studies her excellent ass in that short power-red skirt.
And he had thought this class was going to be the boring one this semester.
2248.13
It is the happiest day of his life. He should probably feel less like he's going to puke.
"I wish your mama could have been here for this," David McCoy said softly, straightening his son's tie, brushing a hand through his hair.
"I know, Dad." He wraps his arms around him, feels a pang at how much more...fragile his father feels than he remembers as a child. More than he should? "I know. Dad, have you been for your yearly checkup yet?"
"Leonard, quit stalling, you don't even have that MD yet," David says, rolling his eyes. "You don't want to keep a pretty girl waiting. Especially on your wedding day."
Random thoughts, wishes, worries, regrets, he can't hold onto any of them as he waits at the altar, and everything else dissolves anyway as his bride walks down the aisle to him, serene and smiling. She looks like promise, like their whole future spread out in front of him. Like every hope he's ever had for something better and his voice trembles as he says the words with emotion, not nerves. He's never been more sure of anything in his life.
2249.30
"Leonard, I'm pregnant."
He blinks. "I...how? When?"
"You're the doctor, I don't actually have to explain it, do I?" Joss puts her face in her hands. "This was so not in the 5-year-plan. You'll be starting your residency and I've got a job offer from DHHS..."
"You're having a baby. Our baby."
She looks up, ready to say something sharp, he can see it in her face but she freezes, studies his face. "You really want to do this, don't you."
"You don't?"
She blows out a breath. "It's not that simple, Len--"
"I'll look for a GP residency," he says, words tumbling over themselves. "I don't--Joss, I know how hard you've worked for this."
"You'll do no such thing, not after you already matched for surgery. You can be so much more than that, Len, SHOULD be. You have what you have for a reason." She sighs. "It's not perfect timing. But maybe there's a reason for that. Sometimes things just happen--god knows, I was not looking for your cantankerous country ass in that class."
He smiles, wraps her up, kisses her forehead and then tilts her face up to kiss her on the mouth. "I love you so much, Joss." He takes a deep breath, cups her face in his hands. "Be sure. You're the one driving here. We can do this later if you need, if you think it's a better idea."
She shook her head. "Len, nobody looking at you right now could. You were made to be a daddy. If it's a little bit off schedule, well, it's a little bit off."
His head is swimming with that, with you were made to be a daddy. He picks his wife up, his wife with their child inside her, takes her back to their bedroom over laughing protest about work and rotation and he shows up late for rounds. Even being roundly chewed out by Dr. Xeridides can't take the smile off his face.
You were made to be a daddy. He doesn't know about that, but it fills him with so much mingled terror and delight he is surprised he isn't glowing.
2251.167
"Leonard, do you know yet when you're going to be back from Dramia?" Jocelyn's mouth is tight, her eyes red. She turns with a jerk at the crashing sound behind her and the wail of an overtired toddler; Joanna Eleanora McCoy has her grandmother's eyes, her mouth, and her opinionation, and he winces a little as Joanna twists in her mother's arms as she is picked up, still hollering like a banshee.
"Come on, baby girl, let's not give Mama such a hard time, huh?" he croons, and teary eyes go wide and bright at the sound. The indignant shrieking stops, Joanna's little fists opening like small sticky flowers as she pats the screen. "I know, Joss," he said, closing his eyes and wishing desperately for home, where there were real showers instead of sonics, his bed instead of a camp cot, and a small fierce baby to contend with instead of the neverending lines of the sick and fearful to be vaccinated. "But we've got three staff down and the organization here is a nightmare."
"You said three weeks. It's been closer to three months."
"I know. But one way or another it's almost over. This last push and it's done." At least, I hope like hell it's done; if we can't get 90 percent coverage by the end of the week, this shit is going to mutate and all our work is going to go for nothing. I swear, I will never leave the surface of the earth or home again... "My practicum will be finished and I can write my public health thesis. I know it's been hard..."
"Just come home, Len. You have responsibilities here too, you know. People who miss you, who need you."
He wants to snap at her--it's not like he doesn't KNOW that, dammit, it's not like he wants to be stuck on this backward frigid hellhole battling with superstition and suspicion and inadequate sanitation any longer than he has to. But he bites down on the temper, recognizes the signs of exhaustion and loneliness in her as much as him. "I know," he says again, gentle and inadequate and aching. "And God knows I miss my girls." He rests his hand against the screen as Joanna does, his voice rusty with fatigue and regret.
Soon. Please God, soon.
2254.15
Sweat is pooling between Leonard's shoulderblades as he presents his preliminary findings to the review board; they grill him on his sources, his technique, the sims, murine and primate models, the in vitro studies. He hears one of them under his breath muttering about the numbers for the axon pathway formation. Oh, I'm pretty sure they are real, Dr. Saysavanh he thinks, lips curving a little bit. He's done an awful lot of meticulous work to make sure they are.
"Doctor McCoy." The chief reviewer, Amandrasav herself of the golden hands, who broke the brain barrier in microregen, offers him one of said hands coolly, antennae dipping slightly in a more Andorian gesture of respect. "Obviously, my colleagues and I will need some time to confer before your formal approval. But I feel I can say this is more than promising. I look forward to seeing how this procedure works outside the laboratory. You'll notify me when you're ready to enroll patients?" The slight emphasis on 'me' makes his chest tighten; she is interested personally in his work, him, Leonard McCoy, not as a formality of monitoring.
"I'd be more than happy, Doctor Amandrasav," he says, and is. So many hours, so much time juggled and scraped from all the other directions his life pulls him and so many times he'd wondered if he was fooling himself, chasing something that wasn't there. But today is the evidence that he has taken a step, a real step to keep the damage that took Eleanora McCoy's life decades too soon from claiming more victims. All of the frustration and self-doubt and sweat and tears are transmuted to sweet vindication, and he can believe in this moment that this was what he was made for, that it's been worth it.
Jubilant, his good mood is dimmed a little bit by the message in his voicemail from Joss when he is finished: Len, hope things went well for your proposal. Not going to be finished here until 8 or 9, please pick up Joanna? But he is philosophical; he can celebrate tonight with his father, and he'll almost certainly be willing to take his granddaughter tomorrow night or Saturday so Leonard and Joss can make a night of it. He goes and collects Jo from daycare, her serious little face lighting when she sees him and he feels more than a little guilty for how little he's seen her this week. But she is oblivious to his worries, just happily chattering to him about the teacher and her storybook that day.
"Dad?" he calls out as he keys himself in, the light on and the kettle whistling in the kitchen. Whistling, whistling, still whistling and frowning, he goes to the kitchen to find David McCoy curled into a ball on the floor, white and gasping in pain, crawling breathlessly towards his dropped comlink. "Dad!"
Joanna's eyes are wide, silently clinging to Leonard as he frantically calls the paramedics and performs a basic triage. The kettle has boiled itself dry before anyone thinks to turn it off, and the scent of burning clings to his shirt as he sits in the ER waiting for answers. TJ arrives not long after he does, and Joss some time after that, still in suit and heels and spicy perfume that he does not recognize. They sit in a horribly familiar tableau and Joanna refuses to be removed from her clutch on him until she falls asleep, biting TJ when he tries to Leonard's mingled amusement and dismay.
They are told David McCoy is being admitted for further testing and observation, and to come back in the morning. Joanna does not cry until they are home, inconsolable in her father's lap as he strokes her hair and Joss holds them both, silent.
Leonard does not cry until the day after, fist crammed into his mouth in a bathroom stall on the 5th floor internal medicine ward after he hears the word pyrrhoneuritis.
2254.130
It is brutally quick and agonizingly drawn-out at the same time, the way David McCoy crumples in on himself. The attacks of excruciating pain come closer and closer, leave less and less of him there to withstand the next each time. The laughing blue eyes have gone blank and bleak, kind and capable hands knotted into claws that clutch impotently at first the cane, and then shockingly quickly the arms of the wheelchair, the rails of the bed.
Leonard is a surgeon, not a neurologist, but it does not stop him from devouring the literature, using every connection he's developed and every favor he can beg, borrow and steal to review work in process, protocols being developed. Every day he brings David something to try and make him smile, to try and put something other than the increasing distance in his eyes.
"Enough, Len," he whispers finally one morning, lashes low, pushing weakly at the papers on his tray. "Please, I've had enough. It's time."
"Dad..." He picks up the papers, the words lawful termination leaping out from the first page. He is unable to say "no" as David's eyes meet his but the chill in his stomach becomes ice, a lead weight compressing his lungs, everything in him screaming it. "Please..." he chokes out instead. Please, Dad I'm not ready to do this without you. Please....
"It'll happen, son, one way or the other. Len, I don't..." He gasps for breath until the biobed can catch up with his distress, release more opioids into his bloodstream; the chaotic nerve activity and intractable pain produced by pyrrohneuritis can't be subdued with more sophisticated and less damaging techniques, a dark age torture and a treatment nearly as archaic. "Leonard," he says finally. "I won't be able to talk soon. Please, son. Let me go while I can still say goodbye. Still tell my granddaughter I love her."
He agrees because there is nothing he can say to that, his own voice gone.
They do it a week later. TJ, who spent most of the night pleading with his son, is there as David's breath whispers softly to a halt. This time it is Leonard who silences the alarms, notes time of death on the chart as his grandfather keens like a wounded animal. When he touches his grandfather's shoulder, he pulls violently away, wraps around David's body and sobs. Leonard is beyond tears as he goes to call the funeral home, calls the daily news service with the obituary. He thinks he might never cry again, an assumption that seems validated the day after David's memorial, when TJ's lawyer calls and apologetically informs him that his grandfather has rescinded Leonard's medical power of attorney for him and cut him out of his will. Even the knowledge that he has ceased to exist for TJ McCoy does not find tears.
However, the pre-publication paper sent to him by a well-meaning former classmate from Ole Miss that reaches him the week after rips him open and he thinks he might dissolve as he looks at the numbers, the treatment statistics. It's a breakthrough. It's genius of the purest kind, and it is two months too late for his father.
His grandfather was right. David McCoy hadn't had to die. And Leonard McCoy had killed him.
When Jocelyn comes home, she finds him passed out on the couch with the bottle of bourbon puddling at his feet. She is furious and terrified when she can't wake him up; there is a discussion later about responsibilities and appropriate ways to manage grief and counseling. He goes and listens, makes the appropriate noises in session, accepts sleep aids and mood stabilizers and wonders dryly what exactly the difference is between the numbing agents that come in a blister-pak and the ones that come in a glass bottle and dose by the shot glass, other than palatability and social acceptability.
None of them can erase the images that keep waking him, David McCoy asking him for his help to die, eyes glazed and breath shallow. TJ McCoy holding his son and moaning in agony, pulling away from a murderer's touch.
2255.04
"You're not the man I married," Jocelyn says as Leonard stares at her, her eyes hard and diamond-dry. "Len, if I thought you were trying, even..." Her voice cracks at that, and he studies her as if she is a stranger.
"Trying to do what?" His voice is harsh. "Jesus Christ, Jocelyn, it's been six months. I went to group. I'm taking the pills--"
"Leonard, you were drunk before 4 in the afternoon on Christmas."
"Yeah, well, I've had a death in the family. What was your father's excuse?" He hates himself for that as he watches her flinch, her mouth tightening. Knows how many family holidays have been ruined for her by her father and a bottle of gin. "Joss, I'm sorry..."
"Yeah, so is he. Every goddamn time." Her voice is thick with tears. "I can't stop him. Or you. But I'll be damned if I watch you do this to yourself. To our daughter. I'm done, Leonard." She pushes the papers across the table to him and he is struck by the way her hand shakes. The termination of their marriage, like the termination of his father's life and he wants to beg.
"Please," he whispers after she has gotten up from the table and left, orders another whiskey and scrawls his name on the bottom of the respondent's consent.
He does not deserve her second chance, he knows.
He is still bitter when she is awarded their house, and furious when she applies for sole custody, using the therapy she insisted he get as evidence that he's emotionally unsuited to care for their daughter. And when she threatens to go public with accusations of alcoholism, he stops fighting it, because even if unsubstantiated, it will make him poison as far as his career is concerned, the risk of liability if it's true too great for a hospital to ignore in a surgeon. He has lost his father, his wife, his daughter--to lose his purpose would kill him.
2255.58
"Daddy, don't go," Joanna is curled into his lap and he strokes a hand over her head.
"Honey, I've got to." He takes her face in his hands. "This is nothing to do with you, okay? Your mama and I, we both love you more than anything in the world. We just can't be together any more."
"But why can't you stay here? You can still be here!" She pulls away angrily, pushes at him. "You don't have to go to stupid San Francisco!"
He pushes out a shaky breath. He has thought long and hard about how to retrieve his life from its downward spiral; it was Mark, who once again was there when he needed him although by comm now as captain of the Manhattan, who suggested Starfleet. You need a purpose, Len, to feel like you're doing good, and a place that doesn't remind you every second of what you've lost, he'd said. And after Leonard's initial disbelief at the suggestion, he'd had to agree it made a certain amount of sense. Five years was a long time, but it would also demonstrate his stability and responsibility to a judge, give him another shot at contesting the custody arrangement. "Yeah, baby girl, I do. I haven't been a very good daddy to you since Grandpa...passed." He swallows hard. "I need to go someplace far enough away so I'm not thinking all the time about your grandpa and your mama and how bad I feel, how many mistakes I've made, or I'm just going to keep making more and bigger ones, hurt more people. I hope you can forgive me for that. I know you need me. But you need me to be a good daddy, not one who's too sad and too mad at the world to take care of you. And that's the way it's gotta be."
She pounds on him with little fists, then collapses in against him crying quietly. He holds her, eyes squeezed shut tight. "I've got two weeks before I have to go, baby doll. Let's think of as many things we can do to keep together between now and then as we can, huh? Vidcalls, letters, postcards, skywriting, Morse code, carrier pigeon.."
"Daddy," she says reprovingly, looking up. "You know carrier pigeons are extinct..."
"We'll clone some. I'll buy you a DNA lab for Christmas."
She tangles her fingers into his shirt, rolls her eyes and the smile is watery but there. He will have to hurt her worse than he is for her to stop loving him, and it is selfish to thank God for that McCoy stubbornness, but he does. It is the only thing that he can hold onto as he packs his things.
2255.72
The shuttle full of recruits hits a stiff crosswind and Leonard's uneasy doze is suddenly glaze-eyed terror. At his involuntary moan, Kirk's hand vises on his hard enough to startle. "Breathe," he murmurs, undoes Leonard's harness with a quick jerk and shoves his head between his knees, rubs his back as Leonard does his best to follow orders and not puke on his seatmate, earlier threats aside. "Is it the motion or the close quarters that are getting to you?"
"Both," he grits out. "I'm sorry."
"For what? It's not like you can help it," Kirk says matter-of-factly. "They should have listened to you." He keeps rubbing, slow firm circles, open palm smoothing over his back. "It's steadying out, the pilot's taken her up a bit," he says after a moment. "You still feel like you need to boot, I can help you get to the head."
"Okay for the moment, I think," he says, swallows back the hot taste of bile and whiskey, sits up, eyes still closed. They blink open in startlement as Kirk buckles his harness again, a soft brush of hands straightening straps and settling them comfortably. "Thanks."
"Don't mention it." He tips his head back against the grab-bar behind his seat. "Don't suppose you have anything for a headache in that bag, huh?"
McCoy studies his unlikely caretaker, a layer of fatigue dulling the otherwise rakish golden good looks, lines of pain and tension marring mouth and eyes along with the marks of a heavy fist. He realizes that the dark smudge on Kirk's shirt is blood, probably his own. "Looks like you had a hell of a night last night. I don't have any drugs that I can get to just this minute, but hold still." He reaches out and presses down on several biofeedback points on Kirk's nape, is fascinated by the jerk at contact, the way the electric-blue eyes flare for a moment before his lashes flicker. For all his apparent ease with touch, the other man clearly prefers initiating contact and he wonders at it a little.
"Oh," Kirk sighs as the endorphins start to kick in, eyes closing. "Okay. Yeah. That. Keep doing that."
"Only works but so long, but maybe it'll hold you over until we're on the ground again and I can give you a look-over with a scanner. The way you're holding yourself whoever worked you over did you more damage than what shows."
Kirk cracks a lid at him. "Bones, don't get all MD on me. Just a fistfight."
"Bones?" Leonard frowns, then rolls his eyes as he realized what that came from. "Oh, for God's sake. I'm sorry I said it. I have a perfectly good name. Leonard. Len." A quick flicker of pain impossible to suppress, his voice too much like his father's and it sounded like a ghost's voice in his ears.
Kirk's eyes narrow consideringly at that and Leonard wonders what he sees. "Bones," he repeats firmly, and Leonard can't bring himself to correct him again. "And quit looking at me like you can't wait to get me under a microscope, not EVERYTHING requires medical attention." It does not occur to him until much later that the second half of the flight, negotiating with a suspicious Jim about examining and treatment, he does not feel sick at all.
2256.17
While Leonard is received with open arms by Starfleet Medical and cheerfully put to work as an attending, there's a metric fuckton of things he doesn't know about Starfleet itself, and to his disgust there are classes in all of them. He has a good memory and he reads fast, however, so most of it's fine. He actually picks up a concentration in Xenopsych to keep himself thinking and not just regurgitating regs; also, if he will be Mark's CMO on the Manhattan, and even more so if he is awarded command of one of the destroyers under construction, he will need that extra credentialling.
On a more physical level, hand-to-hand training's not bad--he's strong with good balance, good hand-to-eye coordination, a good shot and already knows an impressive number of ways to inflict disabling pain on the average hominid physique. What really sucks sideways, however, are the survival and flight training sections. "This stupid shit isn't really about survival, anyway. It's about goddamn group psychology and subordinating individual ego and impulse to teamwork." he grouses, flopping face down on his bed and groaning after an extended hike in the desert. "At this late date that fucking ship has sailed. My mind's not 18 any more and my body sure the hell isn't."
"Get over yourself already, you're hardly Methuselah," Jim says, peeling off his socks and throwing one at Leonard's head. "Christ, Bones, what are you, all of thirty?"
"Offsides, germ warfare." McCoy makes a face at him, flings the sock back. "Twenty-nine."
"Wait, seriously? You're not even 30 and you're a fully accredited trauma surgeon, primary investigator for three studies, finished a master's in public health and halfway to a Ph.D in psych from what I hear?" Kirk shook his head. "You're a fucking boy genius, McCoy."
McCoy snorts. "Yeah, well, if you're only as old as you feel some days I'm goddamn fifty and book-smarts aren't everything. If I'm a genius how'd I end up here?"
"You're going to seek out new worlds and new civilizations. Boldly puke where no man has puked before!"
McCoy wings a pillow at him. "That what you're doing, Jim? Exploring in the hope of discovering a woman who's yet to hear one of your lame pick-up lines?"
"Something like that."
McCoy, intrigued, rolls over to study his roommate more closely at that flat, too-casual tone. Somewhat to his bemusement, sharing accommodations has actually been a reasonably positive experience thus far. Jim has his irritating quirks, including a complete disregard for personal space, inability to not read over Leonard's shoulder, providing commentary while watching vids and talking with his mouth full. But on the plus side, he keeps his side of the room picked up, goes elsewhere to party, doesn't ask personal questions, has decent taste in music and is surprisingly well-read. If he HAS to have a roommate, he could have done a lot worse. "Why ARE you here, Jim?"
Jim shrugs, toys with the edge of the blanket. "Same as you, nowhere else to be." He smiles at McCoy, inviting him to make a joke of it with him but there is something bleak in his eyes as he says it and McCoy has already learned that Jim tends to say things lightly that aren't, at all, uncomfortable truth in plain sight with a thin gloss of biting humor.
"Well, for what it's worth, I'm glad you're here. Don't feel like the only old man," McCoy says gruffly. Jim may be only 23, but that's still five years older than most of the new recruits, another plus as far as McCoy's concerned because if he had to room with an 18-year-old, he'd kill him. And he is coming to realize that like him, Jim may be chronologically 23 but what lives behind those deceptively bright eyes is a lot older for all his occasional recklessness.
Jim huffs a soft laugh, but the loneliness eases a little bit. "Gee, thanks, Bones. Glad I could help out," he says, dust-dry. "At some point, I swear to God, I'll convince you that being young isn't an awful thing."
"Good luck with that, kid. Many have tried."
"Yeah, and they were not James Tiberius Kirk."
McCoy rolls his eyes. "Yeah, yeah. Pick up your goddamn socks, James Tiberius Kirk."
2256.320
Leonard has gotten fairly good at turning the dream, refusing to have the dream, waking himself up and reading or pacing until he is ready to lie down again but when he's at his weakest, when he's been on-call and working until he's ready to drop and always, always when he's lost a patient, it's still there, waiting for him. He moans and shivers, aware in some small part of him that it's a dream, and in some deeper part of him that he dreams it because it was real, because he put his hand on the drip and turned it up to where it would stop his father's breath, let his heart falter into irregularity and cease so long before it would have had to...
No, the voice whispers, almost as familiar to him as the sound of his own now, soft against his ears, warmth wrapping him up. You're not there. You're here with me, in the dorm, come on, come back to me Bones. There is something about that voice, calm and tender but firm, that commands obedience, that makes him curl into that warmth and hang on. He is rewarded with a sigh that shivers across his ear, a hand carding softly through sweat-soaked hair. That's right, here with me now. You sleep. I'll keep watch. Whatever it is, it won't come back, not while I'm here, I won't let it.
When McCoy does wake up, Jim and his running shoes are gone, as per usual at oh-dark-what-the-fuck when the kid tends to get up. He would dismiss the whole episode as his imagination but he is on his left side, not his right and the scent of Jim still clings to his pillow. He can't bring himself to get up, just noses into that scent and lets his mind go blank. He is not ready to acknowledge how much comfort that touch, that voice in the dark has become to him over the last several months. Any more than Jim is, probably, he thinks dryly.
In some strange way it was that neither one of them would ever ask that has enabled Jim to talk a little bit to Leonard about being George Kirk's son, of everyone seeing a man he does not know in every choice he does and doesn't make, of always being found wanting. Leonard, in turn, talks in small, hesitant ways about the divorce and Joanna, his fears and hopes about being an absent parent to her. Subsequent to these discussions, he has woken up late once or twice on his days off to find Jim has answered his comlink for him and is cheerfully discussing school, the latest Interplanetary Geographic or some other reasonably appropriate topic with Jo while waiting for him to regain consciousness. When asked about that, Jim answers quite reasonably that Jo was curious about him, therefore she should know who he is, and if Bones is going to talk about her to him, HE should know who SHE is. And this makes a certain amount of sense, and also leaves him strangely warmed, listening to them while half-awake talking about dinosaurs and comic books and Jo's ongoing campaign to talk her mother into a puppy.
There are still things they have not shared; Jim has not offered any explanation, or Leonard any comment, about the origin of any number of scars that should have been regenerated when Jim was a kid, the manic intensity with which he studies when he's not carousing like an Orion pirate or the fact that he carefully allows people to believe the latter occurs a lot more often than it actually does. Leonard simply makes sure there is food in the room when Jim has missed meals (too frequently), snaps at him when he is going for coffee after 10 PM (also too frequently) and treats him for hangovers, sparring and the occasional brawls without asking ("Get off me." "Yeah, no, live with it.")
In return, Jim does not ask him about his father, drags him around like a stuffed toy when he's unable or unwilling to force himself to socialize ("One more night sitting on it and your ass is gonna meld with that chair, a fate it does not deserve"), quizzes him on his research when he's brooding ("How do you RETAIN all this stuff-" "Genius, remember?"), brings him silly or interesting things to send to Joanna ("what the hell IS it?" "A Tliktalook." "Come again?" "Bones, just trust me. It sparkles. AND purrs.") And after unbearably long nights, Jim takes him out for breakfast.
The door closes softly as Jim comes back in, but when Jim realizes he is awake he does not bother to be quiet any more, tossing shoes haphazardly in the direction of the closet and stripping on his way to their shower. "Hey, I'm starving. Get your lazy ass out of bed and let's hit Flanigan's."
"Yeah, yeah," he grouses softly, reaches for the comlink. "As soon as I've showered and called my daughter. You can wait that long."
"Tell Joey hi for me."
"Joey?"
"Jo-Jo is your nickname. Joey is mine."
2257.359
Leonard does not realize just how much Joanna has been talking to Jim until Christmas. He is invited to his uncle John's house with Joanna for Christmas Eve, and this year instead of boycotting in protest, TJ comes and stonily ignores his grandson until he's a few drinks to the worse.
"Invited or not, you should have realized you're not welcome," he says under his breath, and Leonard freezes.
"Believe me, I'm not in any doubt about how you feel, TJ," he replies. "But it's not fair that Joanna shouldn't know her McCoy cousins because you can't forgive me. For her sake, and the rest of the family, can you bring yourself to be civil for another hour or two?" Joanna, because she is as regrettably quick as he was at that age, is watching, biting her lip.
"Have you told her yet? Why she doesn't have a grandfather?"
Leonard closes his eyes. "Ah. I see the answer to that is no. Why don't I just go then, and I'll pick her up in an hour?"
What he does NOT expect is for Joanna to get up, jaw set in an expression TJ should certainly recognize, head tipped back to meet his gaze. "I don't wanna stay, Daddy. Sometimes people say mean, crazy things when they're hurting. But being sorry for 'em doesn't mean you have to listen to 'em."
"Joanna McCoy--" TJ's face has gone red.
"Papa TJ, if you can't say anything nice don't you say anything to me at all. Or my daddy." she says firmly, taking a dumbstruck Leonard by the hand and towing him towards the door. "Auntie Linda, Uncle John, Merry Christmas. Thank you for a nice time. Daddy, put your coat on." She herds him towards the door like a sheepdog with one charge, and he is so amazed he allows her her way.
Outside, he finds his voice. "Joanna, what--we can't just leave..."
"Can too. I can see Uncle John and Aunt Linda and the cousins whenever I want, I just ask Mama. I only get you for Christmas and breaks. And I don't like Papa TJ. Even if he is a sad old man."
He takes a deep breath, let it out slowly. "All right." Steels himself for the next part. "Do you want to ask me about what he said?"
"No," she replies, still equally firm and matter-of-fact. "I know you didn't hurt Grandpa Dave. Sometimes people get sick and die and even a doctor can't fix them."
He closes his eyes at the love and certainty in her voice, the absolute faith that he can't bring himself to tarnish. "Okay. So what now, baby girl?"
"Let's go back and play with my new sampling apparatus. See how many kinds of DNA we can find in the hotel room."
He has to laugh at that. "Jo-Jo, that's kind of gross."
"It's just biology, Daddy."
He hears her talking when he gets out of the shower and is drying off. "No, I didn't. It was just like you said. I didn't give him a chance to say no...." A pause, and she laughs. "Yep. Other than that it's been nice. Are you having a nice Christmas? I got you a present but I'm gonna give it to Daddy for you, I didn't know where to mail it...well of course you silly goose. Merry Christmas, Jim." Leonard's eyebrows climb to his hairline as he comes out and Joanna is turning off her comlink.
"Who were you talking to, baby girl?"
"Jim. He's in New Mexico, heading for Arizona. He said he'd send me a postcard from the Grand Canyon. Do his people live down there?"
"No, Iowa. Do you talk to Jim a lot?"
"Sometimes. He's lonesome, Daddy, I can tell when he talks to me waiting for you. And he knows lots of things. And I can ask him stuff and he doesn't tell me I'm too young or I don't need to know." Her eyebrow arches at him.
"What kind of stuff do you ask him?" He scowls. "Why can't you ask me?"
"Sometimes I ask you too," she says unflappably. "But it makes him happy when I ask. And sometimes it's about you. You don't always say you're not happy when you're not happy, Daddy. But Jim will say."
"Did Jim tell you about your grandpa?" He's not sure how he feels about that, at all. Especially since he hadn't told him, so how would he--
She shakes her head. "Mama told me. Papa TJ's said things before about you and being an unnatural son and blood on your hands, crazy stuff and I asked Mama then. But then I told Jim 'cause I didn't know what to do about it, and he said that just because someone's had bad things happen to them doesn't mean they get to be mean to people and if you love somebody you shouldn't let them act like a jackass. It's not good for you OR them. So just be polite and kind and chop 'em off at the kneecaps."
He looks at her, a deep ache of love and pride and worry in his chest. "Jo-Jo, you don't have to protect me."
She huffs out a surprisingly adult sigh. "See, this is why I asked Jim. You don't let anybody help you. He doesn't tell me I don't need to or I shouldn't be thinking about that, he just answers the question."
"He is not the person to talk about not asking for help," he replies dryly. "But point taken, baby doll."
"I kinda figured, but he has you to take care of him." She looks at him seriously. "If his people are in Iowa, how come he's not there for Christmas?"
"It's kind of hard for him like it is for me, I think. But he's not very good at answering my questions. Maybe you ought to try."
"Might could. You bring him with next time if he doesn't want to go home. We'll all have Chinese and not talk to Papa TJ."
"How'd you get so smart?"
"Mama says caught it from you," she says impishly, crawls into his lap.
He calls Jim later, his arms full of sleeping child and the lights from outside sparkling over them. "You sneak. Subverting my own daughter."
"Bones, Merry Christmas." Jim's voice is soft. "She deserves a father who's happy to be with her, not one being torn down by an angry, bitter old man."
"Joanna tells me you're on the way to Arizona."
"Yep. Always wanted to see the Grand Canyon at sunrise."
"Take pictures, she'll want to see too. Oh, and mark your calendar for next year."
"Huh?"
"I've been informed you have plans for Christmas. You're going to come to Savannah, get takeout Chinese, and ignore my grandfather with us."
"Bones--" Jim's voice is trying too hard to be casual and amused.
"She loves you. Deal with it, you have only yourself to blame. My baby girl wants you here, you'll be here if I have to sedate your ass and stuff you in a pet carrier."
"Haven't been to Georgia before," he says carefully after a long moment.
"Well, that'll change since there's approximately no chance in hell Joss will let me have her in San Fran over the holidays."
"Is Joanna the only one who loves me?" Jim's voice is teasing.
"Fuck off, kid, or you won't get your Christmas present. Night, Jim. Merry Christmas."
2258.44
Jim is wavering on his feet by the time he comes down to Sickbay--of course it isn't for himself, goddamn martyr, but to check on the casualties, to talk to the ones who are conscious, to get the butcher's bill in private so a crew that is already shellshocked with loss does not have to hear the number of casualties over open channels. To maintain the tenuous mood of victory.
This does not stop McCoy from hauling him into his office and pushing him down to the cot there as Jim blinks up at him. "Hey, ow!"
"Idiot. Moron. Asshole. Why the hell has it taken you this long to get down here?" He hissed as the tricorder started spitting back readings at him. "You've got a bruised spleen, three broken ribs, your hyoid's cracked, you're going to spring a lung if you're not careful-"
"That's asshole, SIR, Bones. And I've been kind of busy--what is that?" He catches McCoy's wrist before he can inject him.
"You're bleeding internally. Sir. You're going to go into shock if you don't lie your ass down and let me take care of you for a few fucking minutes and may I say, Captain, that it would be really bad for morale if I have TWO commanding officers holding down beds." McCoy's eyelid is twitching. "Will you let me treat you, or do I need to lick your boots first?"
Jim closed his eyes, huffed out a breath. "Fine. Please don't give me anything that's going to mess me up. The ship's a mess, and nobody big enough to tow her is is going to be back from the Laurentian system for two days at maximum warp, best case. So we'll be on our own for at least that long with no warp drive, and who the hell knows what will fall apart after the beating she's taken."
"I'm not setting your ribs and starting the regen without pain meds, sorry. I'll do as little as I can. Here my judgment overrides yours."
"Thanks for the support," Jim says in the same tone as on the bridge, grey and exhausted, lashes still closed.
McCoy flinches. "Dammit, Jim," he snaps. "Do you think I don't know nobody else could have done what you did? How many lives you saved, how many lives you're carrying of the lost? How many people are still relying on you? They need you too much for me to do less than my best for you." I need you too much.
Dazed blue eyes open to his, study him for a moment as if they'd never seen him before as Jim's hand closes over his. "Okay. Bones, tell Spock he has the conn until you're ready to let me out of here. Try and make it quick."
"Do the best I can," he mutters, still gruff. He applies the hypo as gently as he can, and Jim's lashes start to flutter.
"B'nes. You know, my dad saw me get my ship, in 'nother life," Jim mumbles before he passes out.
"He did here too," McCoy says softly, lets himself feather a hand through Jim's hair before starting to work.
He does not know exactly when he became sure it would be Jim that he went to the black with, not Mark. But he knows now that it will be both harder than he imagined and that it is no longer imagination, because he can't leave Jim in someone else's hands, to someone who doesn't know him as well, who won't know to force him to take care of himself.
He won't lose another person he loves if he can help it.
2258.49
The families of the crew of the Enterprise are waiting for them when they disembark, a milling laughing crying cacophony of anxious, loving voices and Leonard only has eyes for one of them, Joanna using her slight frame and being all knees and elbows to advantage to push through the crowd like a tiny ramjet and cannon into him, wrapping around him with desperate strength. He holds her and closes his eyes, unabashed tears on his face as he kisses hers away.
It is a lifetime and not long enough of whispered nonsense and joy before Joanna turns to frown at something. "There's Jim! Why isn't he with you? Is that his mama?"
Leonard turns at that and Jim is indeed standing with a small slim woman whose dark blonde hair echoes his only lighter, the fine angular bone structure becoming more prominent and the lines fanning around her eyes a glimpse of how Jim might age. There is pain and pride on both sides there, Jim loosely holding his mother's hands and his smile reassuring, the blue eyes full of love and uncertainty both. Joanna slides down and tugs at her father, intent unmistakable. "Jo, I don't know that we should bother them," he says weakly.
Joanna awards Leonard a LOOK for his cowardice and heads for Jim with all the certainty she'd shown looking for him. Jim's startlement at being crashed into turns into wonder and then shy--shy! Jim!--pleasure as Joanna wraps around him. "Thank you for saving my daddy," she murmurs, eyes wide as she studies him. "You're skinnier than you look on vid. And your eyes are bluer."
"You, on the other hand, look exactly the same," he says, picking her up. "Mom, this is Joanna McCoy, who belongs to Bones." He looks up as McCoy comes to stand next to him, shoulder to shoulder. "And this is Bones. Leonard I guess if you're not me," he says, smiling, something like relief there. "Bones, my mom, Winona Kirk."
"Ma'am." McCoy offers his hand. Winona's is hard and callused, her gaze both direct and achingly vulnerable as it strays to her son. It occurs to him that as much as the comparisons to Jim's father may or may not be apt, that carefully guarded tenderness, love and fear of love tangled seamlessly together is certainly as much a part of Jim Kirk as George Kirk's courage and resolve. "A pleasure."
Jim murmurs to Joanna with a conspiratorial gleam in his eye, "You know, Joey, it was kind of your dad who actually saved all of us. He snuck me on board the Enterprise, I wasn't even supposed to be there." Joanna's eyes widen as Winona glances over and Leonard's cheeks redden.
"That sounds like a story," Winona observes softly.
"Good God, Jim, not hardly," he says, flustered both by the way Jim and his mother are looking at him, Joanna's eyes sparkling. "I think you should come to breakfast with us, ma'am, so I can keep his story straight." Jocelyn has made her way to them at that point, the tall man with his hand possessively on her elbow something that would have hurt more at one point but with Jim's hand finding his shoulder and Jim's mother keeping his hand, he can smile at her as if he means it and mostly he does. "Joss. I can't thank you enough for this. And this must be Clay?"
The man nods, and Joss says rawly, "Shut up, Leonard, it was the least I could do for either her or you. And this is Jim?"
Jim gives her his second-best smile, which is still blinding and somewhat masks the malicious and territorial glint in his eyes. Leonard is mildly terrified that he can recognize both of those things; he would be more frightened if it didn't warm him, fill him up the way it did. "It's so nice to meet Joanna's mom," Jim says, probably to remind himself not to be snide in front of Jo. "So, Bones. Breakfast?"
"Yeah." There is suddenly a lot to talk about, just him and Jim, but he is not in any great hurry. He is perfectly content to watch Jo pestering Winona about what Jim was like as a little boy, and Jim splashing that bright hot charm around while his hand tightens on his shoulder. So much loss and fear and pain still all around them, so much healing and rebuilding and resecuring that will need to be done but in this one moment he feels like a phoenix rising out of the ashes, young and new and happy to be so. The way Jim had promised a few thousand hours and miles away in a dorm room. "Dammit, Jim," he murmurs.
"Huh?" Jim glances at him, confused.
"Never mind. I'll tell you later."