"Release The Stars", Star Trek XI, McCoy/Uhura
Title: Release The Stars
Fandom: Star Trek (2009 reboot)
Pairing: McCoy/Uhura (and McCoy-Kirk friendship)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 17,000 (yesyes I know I need to be institutionalised)
Genre: Het
Copyright: Title is a Rufus Wainwright song. And album too, actually.
Summary: “Don’t worry,” he tells her. “Jim sometimes makes me want to go out and attack innocent bystanders too.”
Author’s Notes: I must’ve been the one person alive who left the movie and felt the need to write het! Ah well. Begun on the train from Amsterdam to Brussels, and then written in various places in Belgium and Luxembourg, and finished when I got home. I do love Star Trek but there will probably be canonical mistakes anyway, please feel free to point them out so I can fix them. And how half of this ended being about McCoy’s perceptions of Jim, I’ll never know. Also, I was slightly drunk while writing the last 5000 words; please feel free to point out typos/grammatical errors/nonsensical bits. So possibly if it’s terrible there may need to be a sober!rewrite.
I’m still fucking around with character voices, so please be gentle and patient with me!
Yes of course I am speaking in metaphors
For something more in your heart.
- Rufus Wainwright
As the shuttle takes them closer to Starfleet Academy, Jim Kirk falls silent, picking at the blood under his fingernails. He looks like he spent most of last night buried under rubble, or at the very least going ten rounds with a guy intent on caving his face in. Although he’s only known Jim twenty minutes, Leonard suspects it’s probably the latter.
“Have you had someone look at you?” he asks, gesturing vaguely at Jim’s bruised and blood face, t-shirt and hands. Jim shrugs.
“The bartender gave me some painkillers,” he offers. “Then he told me if I ever went back in his bar he’d ‘shoot me in the fucking head’.” He sniffs disdainfully, not quite hiding a wince of pain as he does so. “I’m pretty sure bar staff shouldn’t talk like that, they’ll lose customers.”
“That was probably the general idea,” Leonard replies. The corner of Jim’s swollen mouth twitches into a smile. “God, you look like your night was nearly as shitty as mine.”
The light of competition sparks in Jim’s eyes. “My night was so shittier than yours.”
A young woman sitting opposite them tuts, just loud enough to travel. She’s looking at Jim like he’s some kind of irritating bug she’d just love to squash, and Leonard decides that there’s a story there he doesn’t really want to hear. Jim catches the tut too and looks over at her, sending her a grin that’s surprisingly full of raw charm.
“Oh, you were definitely the high point,” Jim tells her. Her mouth twitches - Leonard can’t tell if it’s a smile or a sneer - and she looks away.
“You got into a bar fight over a girl,” Leonard translates. “My night was shittier than yours.”
Jim is looking at him in a go on, prove it sort of way, but Leonard has had enough of dredging up the dirty remains of his disintegrated marriage, and anyway he’s too damn tired to relate one more night of that ugly argument they’ve been having for two years, which ended with a lighter and all of his possessions going up in smoke. It’s just as well his medical skills are safely packed away in his head, or Lucy would probably have tried to take those too. In any case, here he is; exhausted, dirty, unshaven, heading for the stars because he’s got nothing else left. There was a time when he was going to be prestigious, when he was going to do things that mattered. Now, he’ll count it as a victory if his head doesn’t turn inside out before they reach the Academy.
Leonard says none of this, but some of it must leak onto his face because he sees a flash of what might be pity in Jim’s eyes before it’s swiftly replaced by that perpetual brittle arrogance.
The landing is bumpy and Leonard can feel his knuckles straining white, his nails biting into his palms. Jim is starting to look queasy, probably nursing a hangover on top of whatever injuries he’s wearing like battle scars rather than signs he’s a foolhardy idiot, and Leonard spends a moment of distraction trying to work out how much it won’t endear them to their fellow passengers when they both start puking. The young woman is looking at Leonard and when she catches his eye she gives him the smallest of sympathetic smiles. Leonard doesn’t smile back because his teeth are rattling in his skull, but he feels a rueful sort of grimace somewhere deep down anyway.
After staggering out of the shuttle on shaky legs, Leonard resists the urge to fall to his knees and kiss the ground, if only because most of his body feels like it doesn’t belong to him and he doesn’t know if he would be able to get up again. Jim looks white beneath the dried blood, weaving slightly, and Leonard can’t help but contrast how the two of them look compared to the other cadets, in their spotless red uniforms.
“Hey,” Jim says, as they wander after the others, who all seem to know where they’re going and have so much purpose in their step that it sort of makes Leonard feel sick all over again, “at least you didn’t throw up on me.”
“True,” Leonard agrees. “That’s the first good thing that’s happened to me all month.”
-
About five weeks later, Leonard learns that the woman from the shuttle is called Uhura, because she slaps Jim kind of publicly and it gets recorded and within minutes half the Academy has seen the videos. Leonard isn’t particularly interested - he spends a surprisingly large amount of his time watching Jim getting slapped by women - but it’s always nice to put names to faces.
When he finally gets back to their room, Jim is sitting on his bed looking pissed and sulky.
“Do you need medical attention?” Leonard asks, keeping his tone light and just a little mocking. “Need me to check if any bones are broken?”
Jim gives him a deeply unamused look. “You could check Uhura,” he offers. “I think she broke a nail.”
“Oh dear God.” It breaks out before Leonard can stop it. “What did- no, wait, I don’t want to know what you said or did to her.”
“It was more a case of what I offered to do,” Jim replies, looking a little more cheerful.
“Right,” Leonard manages, for lack of anything else to say. Jim has the remarkable ability to render anyone speechless.
“I think she might be warming to me,” Jim adds brightly.
Leonard does not say you know, blind hatred isn’t always hiding sexual tension, sometimes it’s just plain hatred because he has already learned that there is no telling Jim anything. He also does not say leave the poor girl alone, because that would like telling the sun not to shine or rain not to be wet. Instead, all he does is sigh and mutter: “Right” again.
Jim laughs.
-
Most of them have sneaked off-campus to go to one of the local clubs; a noisy hellhole of cheap, sweet and potent drinks, dreadful music played far too loud, and nauseatingly bright-coloured lights that flash on and off fit to give anyone a fit. Needless to say, Leonard would much rather go to a quiet, badly-lit bar, where no one speaks or looks each other in the eye, and everyone drinks the kind of spirits that burn on the way down, but he lets Jim drag him along anyway - “you are not an old man, Bones, no matter how hard you try to become one, and you are still allowed to have fun, even if you pretend you don’t know what it is” - because it turns out that Jim Kirk is kind of a hard man to refuse anything.
Of course, Jim vanished hours ago on a wave of laughter, purple lights striping his face, and is even now probably getting laid in a bathroom stall or having a Warp Drive (three kinds of spirits mixed with passionfruit juice) thrown in his face again. Leonard drifts through the crowded, noisy room, blue light shining obnoxiously in his eyes, shoes sticking to the floor, and reflects that he does have a profoundly antisocial streak. He finally manages to get to the bar, and is trying to work out which of the drinks sounds most like it will have some kind of real alcohol in it that hasn’t been combined with horrible artificial fruit flavouring or worse when someone pushes in beside him. When Leonard turns to look, he finds Uhura glaring at him, eyelids smeared with gold and mouth pressed in an angry, firm line.
“Your friend,” she spits, “is an asshole.” When Leonard doesn’t respond, she repeats, louder: “Your friend is an asshole. Did you hear me?”
Leonard shrugs. “I was kind of waiting for you to tell me something I didn’t already know.”
Uhura considers him, scowling now. Leonard waits patiently for her to come to some kind of conclusion, and while he does take care not to notice the way the glittery blue dress she’s chosen for tonight clings to every curve on her body.
“You’re an asshole too,” she decides finally.
“Yes, but I do it in a much quieter and less obnoxious way,” Leonard replies, “which just about redeems me.”
It probably doesn’t actually; God knows if he had a dollar for every time his ex-wife called him an asshole he wouldn’t have needed to join Starfleet in the first place, but then being friends with Jim has the advantage of making anything Leonard does or doesn’t do look much better in comparison.
After a moment, Uhura’s scowl softens into the beginnings of a smile.
“You can buy me a drink,” she tells him.
Uhura is slightly drunk and prettier than Leonard is going to let on, but she’s also declared herself Jim’s nemesis; Leonard hasn’t drunk nearly enough to be charitable and he didn’t want to come here in the first place.
“I’m not just a pawn to be used in some kind of game against Jim Kirk,” he says, loudly and clearly and just a little too hard. Uhura looks like he’s slapped her and Leonard knows he should bite back the: “just grow up, ok?” but it tumbles out of his mouth before he can stop it.
Uhura’s eyes narrow and Leonard doesn’t even see it coming before she dumps the nearest glass over his head. Sticky-sweet alcohol and juice run down his neck, soak into his shirt. It takes a moment, but Leonard realises that Uhura looks just as shocked as he feels.
“Oh… my… God,” she says slowly, the words nearly lost under the thudding of the music. “Oh God, I’m so sorry.”
Even with orange juice sliding unpleasantly down his spine, Leonard can feel his momentary anger ebbing away. He gently takes her arm, and she doesn’t resist.
“Come on,” he says, “let’s take this outside.”
They move through the crowds of people; Leonard catches sight of Jim, dancing, entwined with about three people, golden light sprayed across him, and decides that he’s probably got the room to himself tonight.
When they make it outside, Uhura takes several deep breaths. The air is cold, especially after the heat of the club. Leonard notices, once again, that Uhura’s shiny blue dress doesn’t cover all that much skin. On instinct, he shucks his jacket and drapes it over her bare shoulders.
“It’s a bit sticky,” he all but mutters.
“It’s fine,” Uhura replies. “I mean - thank you. I mean - sorry.” She’s losing composure, that shell of dignity and muted fury that she seems to wear all the time cracking and peeling before his eyes. “God, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry,” he tells her. “Jim sometimes makes me want to go out and attack innocent bystanders too.”
She laughs, blurred and shaky, and the doctor part of Leonard that never switches off immediately tries to work out just how drunk she really is.
“Do you want me to walk you home?” he asks quietly.
Uhura frowns at him. “Don’t you want-”
“I never wanted to be there,” he responds.
Uhura’s lips curl. “Then it’s the least I can do,” she says.
They walk in silence for a while, under glowing streetlights and the hints of stars between them, Uhura’s impractical heels clacking a steady staccato beat.
“I thought chivalry was dead,” she says at last, a half-teasing smile on her mouth.
“Lucy used to say it would be the last thing I’d lose,” Leonard remarks, and reflects that he must be drunk too, enough to loosen his tongue anyway. Lucy had a good go at tearing away his manners and what remained of his better nature, but all she got was his money and his patience; both of which were enough, really. Should have been enough anyway; it didn’t stop her from trying for everything.
“Lucy was your wife?” Uhura asks.
Leonard raises an eyebrow. “You were listening in on the shuttle?” Uhura shrugs, unapologetic. “Yeah,” he sighs, “Lucy was my wife.”
Maybe Uhura sees something in his expression; she changes the subject anyway.
“So if chivalry’s the last thing you lose, what will be the first?”
Leonard considers this. “My mind?”
Uhura laughs again. “Yeah, I’ll buy that.”
-
Jim teases him for longer than is really necessary about the trail of glitter lipgloss still stubbornly there on his cheek the next morning; Uhura’s mouth pressing a kiss there and mumbling I don’t think you’re an asshole at all, secretly. She was wrong, of course, but Leonard wasn’t about to correct the pretty, drunk girl. He’s never going to tell Jim the truth - it’s none of his damn business, for one thing - but the constant so, when am I going to meet your girlfriend? grates quickly.
“You need to get laid, Bones,” Jim drawls the next time Leonard snipes out a you’re not nearly as funny or as clever as you think you are.
“Actually,” Leonard corrects him, “sex generally makes me even more grumpy and taciturn.”
Jim rolls his eyes and flops down onto his bed. “You’re not nearly as unhappy as you’re pretending to be,” he says. When Leonard opens his mouth to protest this, Jim cuts him off with a shake of his head. “No, you’re really not.”
Leonard scowls, because Jim was never meant to become perceptive, but then it’s just another of the jarring discrepancies and contradictions that make up his personality. He’d be a psychiatrist’s wet dream, and Leonard has never been more relieved that he chose not to study psychology: trying to pull Jim apart to see what makes him tick seems too much of a thankless task. You’d get answers, but they wouldn’t be the ones you’d want, and Jim would make the whole thing as difficult as possible because that’s what he does. Leonard, on the other hand, is far too simple; the trick lies in trying to prevent people from figuring it out.
Jim’s expression becomes irritatingly told you so when Leonard fails to reply; he’s lounging comfortably on his own bed, hands folded behind his head. “Seriously, hook up with Glitter Girl and you’ll be much more cheerful.”
Leonard could list twenty different ways that ‘hooking up’ with Uhura would make his life considerably more difficult than it is already, but he doesn’t think Jim really needs to know them.
“I like being the kind of bad-tempered bastard who makes small children cry and people of a weaker disposition cower,” he says instead. “It’s taken my years to get this good at it, why should I undo all my hard work now?”
“You are so full of bullshit, Bones,” Jim singsongs, closing his eyes.
Leonard would really like to be as full of bullshit as he seems to be; he thinks it would make things a lot easier. He opens his mouth to contradict Jim, and then remembers that they’re both so stubborn that there’s no point in getting into an argument, because nobody ever wins. He sighs instead, and leaves Jim to delude himself with victory.
-
Uhura is completely and utterly poised and in control of herself the next time Leonard runs into her; her make-up and posture flawless, her expression even more so.
“Can we talk?” she asks.
Leonard isn’t sure how much of that night Uhura actually remembers; he’s mostly convinced himself that she just sees him as Jim Kirk’s doctor friend and she has no recollection of pouring a drink over his head at all.
“Sure,” he says; he may pretend to have no social skills whatsoever, but he does manage to skirt the edges of downright rude.
Uhura falls into step beside him, dark hair shimmering in the late afternoon sunlight. She looks as good in the red form-fitting uniform as she looked in the blue glitter dress, and Leonard startles himself with the observation; he’s gotten too used to seeing all women as heartless harpies, all of them trapped in Lucy’s shadow. He swallows, angry with himself for being disconcerted.
“What did you want to talk about?” he asks. His tone is civil enough but he catches an edge of ungraciousness in there anyway; he’s too angry and too bitter with the world these days and it’s not always as well-hidden as it probably should be.
Uhura’s lips curl, almost imperceptibly. “You freely admit that you’re an asshole,” she says. “You don’t mess around with words and say things you don’t actually mean, and underneath the scowl you’re actually kind of a gentleman.” Her smile widens. “That actually makes you pretty unique around here.”
It occurs to Leonard that he genuinely has no idea what’s going on right now, and he fleetingly wonders whether this is some kind of practical joke that Jim has set up, before he remembers that the last time Jim went near Uhura she kneed him in the balls and Leonard had to spend an entire night listening to his roommate groan while he refused to do a medical examination, and therefore it’s pretty unlikely that Uhura will be in league with him.
“No matter how much you flatter me, I won’t help you destroy Jim,” he warns.
Uhura laughs. “I don’t need help to do that,” she replies loftily. “And I know it may be an alien concept to you, but not everything is about Jim Kirk.”
Sometimes Leonard has difficulty remembering that he only met Jim two months ago; he struggles to recall a time when he didn’t spend half his life trying to keep his friend from self-destroying, either deliberately or accidentally.
“So what is this about?” he asks.
Uhura gives him a surprisingly patronising look as she replies: “It’s about reminding you there are people other than James T. Kirk and his all-consuming ego in the universe.”
She’s startled him, not that Leonard will ever let on. He’s surrounded himself with so many layers of intentionally spiky personality flaws that he really isn’t used to people actively seeking his friendship.
“Besides,” she adds, with a wicked twinkle in her eyes, “don’t tell anyone I said so, but now you’ve had a haircut and started shaving, you’re not bad-looking either.”
“Jim will never let me hear the end of this,” Leonard muses, half to himself.
Uhura shrugs. “So don’t tell him.”
They’re not in high school and Leonard is too damn old to have a friendship based on sneaking around so his roommate doesn’t find out. Still, there’s something fundamentally appealing in Leonard having an aspect of his life that Jim doesn’t have six different loudly-voiced opinions on. Uhura must see some of this in his face, because she holds out her hand. Leonard barely hesitates before he takes it.
“Nyota Uhura,” she says, shaking his hand with a crushingly firm grip. A little voice in the back of Leonard’s head that sounds far too much like Jim for comfort says: oh, so her first name’s ‘Nyota’, huh? but he ignores it.
“Leonard McCoy,” he replies, amused by the ritual but still finding the idea of a fresh start appealing.
Uhura smiles, but a bell goes off somewhere and she turns toward it.
“Damn, I’m late!” She lets go of his hand, and they both pretend they haven’t been holding onto each other for just longer than necessary. “See you around, Leonard.”
And then she’s running off across the sundrenched grass, while Leonard tries to figure out what exactly just happened.
-
Starfleet breeds ambition, and from ambition comes envy and betrayal and cold, cruel determination, though of course all this is bundled up and labelled ‘efficiency’ in the brochure. While Lucy’s court case stole Leonard’s home and money and friends, and her lawyer worked out a strangely competent case for making Leonard McCoy utterly unemployable on Earth, he took the time to study his options. There weren’t many of them, and he read all the Starfleet Literature that existed for new recruits, watched all the glossy videos, and decided that the one thing he was going to do was not join the Federation with their perky and utterly ridiculous plans for a shiny, bright, united future. Then, of course, the planet was wrenched from his fingers, and space became the sole option. At least Starfleet lets him get a career out of pretending he hasn’t been effectively exiled.
“I never wanted anything but to join the Federation,” Uhura says, one forefinger idly circling the rim of her coffee cup. Her grin is a little sheepish. “Of course, when I was a kid, I was going to be a captain when I grew up.”
“I was going to be a superhero,” Leonard offers. “Then I realised how much time I’d have to spend around the general public.”
Uhura arches an eyebrow. “So you became a doctor?”
Leonard shrugs. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Uhura’s smile as teeth in it. “You really can’t hate people as much as you say you do. Otherwise you’d be living in a cave somewhere.”
“You’re starting to sound like Jim,” Leonard remarks, just because he enjoys the spark of annoyance that the words fire up in eyes. Still, she refuses to be baited.
“And you’re trying to dodge the topic laughably badly,” Uhura replies without missing a beat.
“You’re not going to scratch the surface to find I’m all puppies and starlight and goddamn rainbows underneath,” Leonard warns.
“Good.”
Leonard considers replying, but reflects that there’s only so long you can keep telling someone you won’t like me, go away before the whole thing becomes kind of soul destroying. He enjoys his misery like a vintage scotch but he isn’t a masochist, after all. Uhura is staring down at her coffee cup, blue-painted nails tapping idly against the ceramic. She almost seems to be waiting for something; Leonard mentally sighs and gives it to her.
“So go on, tell me about when you were eight and you ran away from home and managed to hitch your way here because you wanted to be the youngest serving officer ever.”
Uhura looks a mixture of pleased and embarrassed. “You heard about that?”
“Most people have,” Leonard shrugs. “They admire ambition here.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Uhura observes.
Leonard doesn’t try to correct her; it’s really not worth it.
-
Jim skids into his seat beside Leonard a second before the bell rings for class. His hair is a mess and his mouth is incriminatingly red, and his uniform has telltale creases in it. He has the look of a man who’s just had really good sex.
“You have a problem,” Leonard grits from the corner of his mouth. They’re in navigation class (compulsory for all cadets; after all, any of them could end up stranded in a ship somewhere, and at least this way they might all be able to get themselves home); their instructor makes even him look even-tempered, and will have no problem at all kicking them out for talking.
“Not any more,” Jim responds cheerfully, a horrible little smirk unfurling over his lips. He digs a lollipop out of his pocket and unwraps it as their instructor starts the hologram program; the classroom ceiling is immediately scattered with silver star pinpricks. Leonard looks upwards, pointedly ignoring Jim, as his friend begins sucking noisily on the candy.
After class, he has no chance of pretending that Jim Kirk doesn’t exist. Leonard patiently walks down the hall with Jim practically skipping beside him, voice way too loud as he describes in minute detail exactly what he did in his free periods, accompanied by faintly disturbing hand gestures.
“I’m telling you, Bones, this girl could suck the bolts out of a warp drive-”
“I feel like I need to bathe in a vat of disinfectant just listening to you,” Leonard interrupts.
Jim sighs in a put-upon way. “You act like you’re some kind of monk,” he says. “You were married, Bones.”
“Not to a hooker!” The little voice in the back of Leonard’s mind that sounds increasingly like Jim adds something along the lines of more’s the pity, but Leonard kicks it and it goes away.
“Grace isn’t a hooker,” Jim protests, “she’s just… kind of slutty. Not that that’s a bad thing,” he adds swiftly.
“Of course not,” Leonard mutters, sarcasm dripping from the words. He’s saved from more of this by Uhura swishing past, looking especially disdainful.
“Uhura!” James calls brightly after her. “You’re looking stunning today. You really didn’t have to dress up for me, you know.”
“Go fuck yourself, Kirk,” Uhura responds.
“Is that an offer?” Jim shouts. Uhura doesn’t bother replying, doesn’t even pause as she strides away.
“She likes me really,” Jim shrugs.
“No, she really doesn’t,” Leonard tells him, but Jim isn’t listening.
Later, Uhura demonstrates exactly how much she doesn’t like Jim by offering Leonard money to kill him.
“You’re a doctor!” she says. “You could make it look like an accident!”
“I am not going to kill my friend,” Leonard replies with all the patience he can muster. Uhura opens her mouth. “I am not going to castrate him either.”
“I could do that,” she responds grimly. “I just need your door code.”
“I am also not going to give you my door code so you can go in and emasculate my roommate,” Leonard tells her. He can hear amusement threading itself through his tone, but he can see Uhura is still genuinely angry.
“Why not?”
“Because it will be a bitch to clean up.”
She doesn’t smile, but her lips soften a little. “He’s a misogynistic asshole,” she snaps.
“Well,” Leonard concedes, “yes. A little bit. Some of the time.” Uhura’s eyes are still spitting flames, so he adds: “Look, did you ever have a dog as a kid?”
She frowns, looking confused. “My neighbours did.”
“And did it jump on you and hump your leg from time to time?”
Uhura’s mouth has gone thin again. “Where are you going with this?”
Leonard decides to take that as a ‘yes’. “Jim’s kind of like that. Just treat him the same way you treated the dog.”
Uhura arches an eyebrow. “Sterilisation?”
He really has got to get her mind away from going for Jim’s balls with a pair of scissors.
“Jim doesn’t know any better and he doesn’t mean any real harm so you may as well just get used to it because he’s not going to stop.” Uhura scowls. “I’m being pragmatic,” Leonard adds. “Really, that’s just the way it is.”
Uhura considers this. Finally, she sighs. “Fuck you, McCoy, and fuck Kirk too. Ok?”
“Ok,” he replies, and lets her storm off, wondering if Starfleet specialises in selecting cadets with particularly short fuses. He stays out late that night, wandering the grounds, careful not to return to their room until he’s certain that the urge to punch Jim has passed.
-
Uhura doesn’t talk to him for four days, and he’s not about to break first because Leonard’s a stubborn bastard and he doesn’t crack for anyone. Anyone. It’s four days of him being even more monosyllabic and acerbic than usual - “for God’s sake!” Jim exclaims after two, “let me hire you a hooker! Getting laid cannot possibly make this any worse!” - and he spends most of the hours he’s not in class a little more drunk than is really socially acceptable. And he can’t even blame Jim, as much as he’d like to, because there’s no sense in being angry with him. Jim’s a good guy underneath the fact he’s also kind of a whore, and sometimes Leonard feels privileged to see the determined man he is beneath the I’ve walked into the room; everyone drop their panties attitude that’s made him increasingly unpopular with half their classmates (and far too appealing to the rest), and other days it just makes him want to stick needles in Jim until he chooses one personality or the other, because being such a contradiction and mess of oxymorons is doing his fucking head in.
“I’m asking for a new roommate,” Jim warns, day four. He’s out of his cadet uniform, shoulders hunched under his leather jacket, and even if Leonard weren’t childishly ignoring him he would still not want to know whatever it is that Jim has planned. “I’m lodging a formal complaint.”
Leonard sighs, sprawled on his own bed, staring up at the ceiling. “Good luck with that.”
Jim laughs, rummaging through his nightstand. “You think I won’t?”
“You do not do well with authority figures,” Leonard can’t resist reminding him.
“Two sentences in the space of a minute!” Jim observes. “You’re slipping, Bones.” Leonard rolls his eyes and he’s ground his teeth so much in the last few days, he’s probably going to require medical attention of some kind. “Besides,” Jim adds, “once I point out how you’re no fucking fun anymore, they’ll be tripping over themselves to assign me someone new.”
“No one else will ever put up with you,” Leonard can’t resist reminding him. Jim tuts, pulling at his nightstand drawer too hard; it falls to the floor and in a moment the carpet is covered in a truly unsettling number of condoms and at least four kinds of lubricant, including the stuff you can only get in the medical bays, which means that at some point when Jim was meant to be in there to see Leonard or to get stitches for another stupid stunt, he actually managed to steal medical supplies. Leonard looks at the mess and then at Jim. “Case in point.”
Jim laughs, raucous and rough, then scoops everything away in an approximation of tidiness. “I’m going out,” he announces entirely unnecessarily. “Look, Bones; comm a hooker, go out to one of those soul-destroying bars you like so much, I could probably score you some drugs-”
“I’m a doctor,” Leonard points out, “I can score the kind of really good drugs you can only dream about.”
“Then score some.” Jim sighs in a put-upon way, which is a bit rich. “Just let me help you, or help yourself.”
He’s being horribly juvenile and he’s not even entirely sure why (or, at least, he won’t let himself acknowledge it, which is admittedly a different thing), but at this point in time he doesn’t particularly care.
“Enjoy your relentless pursuit of as many alien STDs as possible,” Leonard says instead. Some days, he remains convinced that Jim has a list of some kind and is ticking them off as he contracts them (Leonard has ready access to Jim’s medical records, which really don’t make pretty reading), though that thought is kind of disturbing.
“No fucking fun,” Jim reiterates, as he leaves.
Leonard spends the next hour pretending to study while really quietly simmering, and also reflecting that if he were less of a stubborn ass he’d go and find Uhura and yell at her until some of this started to feel better (although if he were less of a stubborn ass maybe his marriage wouldn’t have crashed and burned quite so spectacularly and then he wouldn’t be here, and that’s never a good train of thought to get started on). He’s startled when the door chimes, and for a moment contemplates not answering. He’s in no mood for one of Jim’s clingy lays to be turning up here, all wide-eyed and horny; something which has happened on more than one occasion, and then Jim wonders why their commanders have reports about him. Still, one of those last shreds of common politeness that Lucy could never manage to take has him telling the door to open anyway.
Uhura is standing in the doorway, looking as carefully composed as she ever is, not a strand of dark hair out of place, not a wrinkle in her uniform.
“He here?” she asks, calmly abrupt.
Leonard tosses the PADD he wasn’t really looking at aside, and sits up. “No.”
“Good.” Uhura walks in, the door swishing closed behind her.
They could waste time with stilted small talk, could try and dance around the issue, could even try apologies that neither of them will mean, but Leonard hasn’t been that patient in years and Uhura will never be that frivolous. Instead, he stands up, crosses the room.
“Jim and I come as a package deal,” he says, catching Uhura’s gaze and making sure he holds it.
“I know,” she says, voice so quiet he nearly doesn’t catch it.
“You can hate him as much as you want but you can’t make me hate him and either you can handle that or you can’t.”
“I know.” Uhura glares at him for a moment, before finally lowering her eyes, a smile that’s nearly rueful tugging her lips. “I just wish I liked you a hell of a lot less.”
It’s the closest he’ll get to an apology as she’ll give him, and that’s fine, because he wouldn’t know what to do with a sorry even if he got one. And Leonard refuses to be thrown by her words, though he knows he could be, all too easily; people don’t like him, not any more. They admire him, they’re in awe of him, they’re scared of him (he’s made a few of the younger medical cadets cry; something Jim remains insistently gleeful about), but Leonard’s best friend is possibly the most obnoxious man alive and his ex-wife had him exiled from the entire planet, so Leonard knows exactly how unlikeable he really is.
“Nicely damning,” he observes.
Uhura shrugs, but she’s still smiling, which isn’t a bad sign.
-
“So, that hooker must’ve really paid off,” Jim remarks brightly, and just loud enough to make half the corridor turn around and stare at him. Leonard’s fingers curl tight around the PADD he’s carrying.
“All that getting punched in the face really must’ve killed off your braincells,” he remarks. “And why the obsession with prostitutes? Contemplating a change of career?”
“Ha ha.” Jim rolls his eyes. “That’s not to say I wouldn’t be the best damn whore ever.”
This competitiveness is really not healthy, but Leonard has given up on pointing this out, just as he has given up on trying to tell Jim anything. Really, he’s just building up ammunition for the major fight that they will one day inevitably have, the one that will probably end in blood. You can’t have two men as volatile as they are in a friendship without it inevitably imploding, though hopefully they’ll be able to put it off for a long time.
“I thought you already were,” he can’t help saying.
Jim stops abruptly, forcing Leonard to come to a halt too.
“I need you to pretend to be nice for about three minutes,” Jim tells him. “Can you do that?”
There’s an expression that’s almost serious on his face, so Leonard obediently shrugs and offers: “I can try.”
Jim starts walking again, forcing Leonard to fall into step beside him. “I’m going to take the Kobayashi Maru test,” he announces.
Leonard’s brain literally cannot process that for a moment; Jim is looking expectantly at him and he can’t come up with a single damn thing to say.
“Wow,” Jim remarks, “I’ve actually rendered you speechless, Bones. Miracles will never cease.”
“The Kobayashi Maru?” Leonard repeats. “You’re going to take the Kobayashi Maru?”
Jim shrugs, looking insufferably smug. “Yep.”
“You can’t take the Kobayashi Maru!” Leonard says. “Grown men leave the room crying, and perfectly sensible people have to come to medical to be tranquilised afterwards.”
Jim shrugs again, in a you’ve told me on several occasions that I couldn’t be called ‘sensible’ in any sense of the word kind of way. “I’m going to do it.”
“Jim,” Leonard says, a little desperately because really this is stupid, “the test is unbeatable. That is the point of it. And people with years of experience can’t pass it. You’ve been here less than five months, and yes, you’re irritatingly precocious and Pike likes you in a way that is bordering on creepy, which is actually probably the only reason you haven’t been kicked out of here for sexual misconduct yet, but it is going to be a complete disaster.” Jim opens his mouth, so he hastily adds: “and not in a fun way.”
“Man,” Jim sighs, “you really need to take some of those drugs you’re stealing from medical.”
Once again, Jim says this loudly enough to get half their fellow students glaring accusingly at Leonard, and he really needs to get some friends who aren’t going to cast public aspersions on his character.
“Anyway,” Jim continues brightly, “I want you there. As one of my crew members.”
“No,” Leonard says immediately. “I do not want to watch you make an ass of yourself. I can do that without having to dress up and play roleplaying games.”
Jim pouts, actually fucking pouts. “Please, Bones,” he whines, “please.”
Leonard sighs, but the fact remains that while he can’t stop Jim from doing stupid things he can be there afterwards to assess the carnage and put it all back together again. It’s just depressing how often the carnage is actually literal.
“Fine,” he mutters, and reflects that stealing drugs from medical is really looking appealing right now. Possibly the only way to get through this is to take as many tranquilisers as his body can stand.
Jim’s grin is broad and insufferable and makes Leonard want to kick him quite a lot until Jim realises just how inadvisable his actions really are. But enough people have beaten Jim up to date and none of it has ever really stuck.
“Thanks Bones, knew I could rely on you.”
And then he’s darting off into the crowds, waylaying a pretty girl with her uniform skirt hitched up way too high, and Leonard sighs heavily because there’s not a damn thing he can do about any of this.
-
The reality is far, far worse than anything Leonard came up with when he was bombarding Jim with prophecies of doom last night. Nothing he listed in their room, while Jim laughed patiently at him with a faintly patronising air of smugness, can compare to this.
Right now, all Leonard really wants in the whole world - in the whole universe - is to be drunk.
A horrible hush has descended over the false bridge, broken only by the soft explosion noises as the Klingon ships due to kill them in minutes come ever closer. Leonard has not asked (because he doesn’t want to know) exactly what Uhura did and to whom in order to get herself into Jim’s Kobayashi Maru exam, but even her expression of smug glee has slid off her face to be replaced with something that, while not quite pity, is bordering on sympathetic. Jim has gone white, all the blood drained out of his face, fingers clenched in the arms of his command chair like rigor mortis. Two cadets on the conn have their heads in their hands. There’s a woman near the back quietly sobbing into her palms. This may only be a simulation of a doomed starship, but the sense of shock and devastation is all too real.
“Cadet Kirk.” A voice comes across the intercom from those watching, and they all jump. This finally proves too much for the crying woman, who starts a soft sort of keening between her teeth. Leonard forces himself to move, getting one of the hypos of tranquillisers out of his pocket that he brought with him, supporting her as he gives her the dose. “Cadet Kirk, let us put you out of your misery.”
Glancing over his shoulder, Leonard can see Jim’s eyes glittering in his wan face, the bloodless line of his mouth pressed flat. Come on, Jim, he thinks desperately, admit defeat. But he knows his friend far too well, and Jim will never do that. Jim cannot do that. Uhura opens her mouth like she’s going to tell Jim to walk away as well; she catches Leonard’s eye, expression helpless, and closes it again.
Jim takes a slow breath, fingers unclenching from the chair slightly. “Cadet Lewis, you are excused,” he says, tone slow and measured. The woman leaning against Leonard as though he’s the only thing keeping her upright right now starts; Leonard helps her get to the door, where there’s already a doctor waiting to take her away.
“I’m finishing this,” Jim adds, for the benefit of the room. Leonard grits his teeth to prevent an expletive from slipping out, while Uhura hangs her head.
It doesn’t take long. No matter how many photons they fire, the ships keep coming; within minutes their life support and navigational systems are hit. The terminals actually explode with real bangs and sparks, drawing shouts and curses from the crew, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re going to die or not because right now everyone is caught up in the simulation, eyes fixed on the screens with terror in their expressions. The screens finally flood with fire, signifying the fact the ship has blown up and they’ve all died.
For a long, horrible moment, no one seems to know what to say; probably because there isn’t anything to say. You cannot win the Kobayashi Maru, but there are ways that you can fail that are commendable anyway. This, though; this is not commendable. This is just pure failure, ugly and messy and inglorious.
You’re supposed to wait for feedback, but no one is surprised when Jim pushes himself out of his captain’s chair and heads for the door, opening it so hard it rebounds off the wall. Uhura flinches and looks to Leonard.
“Hell,” he mutters, and hurries after Jim.
He manages to catch his friend three corridors away.
“Jim! Jim! For God’s sake, stop!”
After a few more steps, Jim spins around.
“Going to say I told you so?” he demands. “Going to tell me that this is all my own fault, caused by my own arrogance? Going to tell me that I’m too young and too inexperienced, so of course it was going to end like this?”
“No,” Leonard responds, keeping his voice as steady as he can. “Not right now, anyway.”
A feeble smile flickers across Jim’s mouth, but he can’t sustain it. “You’re a good man, Bones.”
Leonard shrugs, offering him a half-smile in return. “Some days.”
Jim claps a hand against his shoulder, fingers digging in just a little too tight, and then turns and walks away. Leonard doesn’t try to go after him; he knows that there’s nothing he can do to help.
-
“I’ve been looking for you for hours,” Uhura says. She looks faintly worried, hands on her hips, dark hair haloed by the floodlight directly behind her head.
“Well,” Leonard shrugs, “you found me.”
He’s not sitting in the empty bleachers of the Academy’s sports stadium because he’s hiding, per se; he just needed somewhere discreet and quiet.
Uhura frowns. “You’re drunk.”
Leonard shrugs. “Not nearly drunk enough.” He sighs, indicates the glass bottle that he had a hell of a time sneaking onto the campus. “It’s ok; I will be later.”
Generally, this is the point at which whoever he’s talking to walks away, disgusted, so he’s a little startled when Uhura sits down beside him.
“And you couldn’t have done this in your room?” she asks quietly.
Leonard would’ve loved to have done this in his room, undignified and out of sight, but sadly circumstances prevented him.
“Jim is in our room,” he tells her. “And he’s doing whatever it is that he needs to do in order to get over today, and there were four girls in there with him when I left, so whatever he’s doing doesn’t need to involve me.”
Uhura sighs, but she does not immediately start on her Jim Kirk is a misogynistic man-whore speech, so presumably she understands as well as Leonard does, much as she may not want to.
“So where are you sleeping tonight?” she asks, after a moment of silence.
Leonard shrugs. “Here, I guess.” By the time he passes out drunk, he really won’t care where he is, though he keeps that part silent; Uhura can probably guess anyway. This is a part of his life that he was going to try and leave behind when he joined Starfleet, but there are some days when that just isn’t an option.
Uhura is studying him thoughtfully, head tilted to one side, and he shouldn’t be getting her involved in this. She’s young and pretty and happy and smart and is not dragging a shitload of messy baggage after her and she should stay the hell away from him.
“Don’t you think that’s for me to decide?” Uhura’s tone is neutral and Leonard must be drunker than he thought he was if he’s already reached the accidentally-talking-out-loud stage.
“You clearly have no idea what’s good for you,” he informs her.
She shrugs. “So I’ve heard.” Efficient, still frighteningly collected, she stands up. “Come on, you can sleep in my room.”
“What about-”
“My roommate is the female equivalent of Jim,” Uhura informs him crisply. “She won’t be back tonight.”
“Looks like we finally have something in common,” Leonard mutters, pushing himself to his feet with a little too much difficulty.
Uhura smiles a little, then moves swiftly to help hold him upright as Leonard’s legs threaten to fold beneath him. Her grip is surprisingly strong, fingers digging far too hard into his arm. She bends and picks up his bottle for him. “What-”
“I am not going to try and stage an intervention,” Uhura informs him calmly. “This isn’t the time or the place. And I assume you went to a lot of effort to get this here, so you won’t thank me if we leave it behind.”
He smiles, even if it feels uncoordinated and lopsided. “You’re a good woman, Nyota Uhura.”
She smiles back. “Oh, I know.”
He hasn’t managed to get drunk enough for his coordination to be utterly shot, so after a couple of false starts he manages to walk beside Uhura, through the dark, mostly-empty campus.
“When was the last time you ate?” Uhura asks him, after a few minutes. Leonard shrugs, which turns out to be kind of a mistake, and sways on his feet for a minute. Uhura sighs. “And you’re supposed to be a doctor.”
“Not right now I’m not,” he tells her. Frowns at Uhura in the weak orange-tinted lighting. “And why the hell are you doing this?”
“You looked after me when I was drunk,” Uhura responds, tone carefully neutral again.
“That was throwing-cocktails-over-people drunk,” Leonard reminds her. “I’m not that kind of drunk.”
“Thank God,” Uhura says without missing a beat, “I like this sweater.”
He smiles in spite of himself, in spite of it all; the twist of his lips is rueful and tired. “You’re gonna regret this.”
Uhura doesn’t look at him, keying in the code for her dorm block. “Then that’s my problem, isn’t it?” Her tone is soft, softer than it usually is, and then the door swishes open and they’re suddenly in a hallway with lighting far too bright for Leonard’s blurring eyes. “Come on.”
When they reach her room, Uhura tells the lights to dim, and indicates which bed he can sleep on. Leonard is too tired and too uncoordinated to try and snoop around, but he does manage to spare a thought of just how jealous Jim would be if he knew where Leonard is right now. It’s really a pity he’ll never be able to tell him and rub it in.
With difficulty , Leonard manages to lie down on the bed, reaching to tug his boots off first because even if the sheets’ll be freshly laundered in the morning there’s such a thing as common courtesy. Uhura stands over him, a thoughtful smile on her face.
“Goodnight, Leonard,” she tells him, and reaches down with tender fingers to smooth his hair off his brow.
Oh God, Leonard thinks, swiftly followed by: I’ve fallen for better women than you, missy.
But the problem is, of course, that he hasn’t.
-
{continued here}
Fandom: Star Trek (2009 reboot)
Pairing: McCoy/Uhura (and McCoy-Kirk friendship)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 17,000 (yesyes I know I need to be institutionalised)
Genre: Het
Copyright: Title is a Rufus Wainwright song. And album too, actually.
Summary: “Don’t worry,” he tells her. “Jim sometimes makes me want to go out and attack innocent bystanders too.”
Author’s Notes: I must’ve been the one person alive who left the movie and felt the need to write het! Ah well. Begun on the train from Amsterdam to Brussels, and then written in various places in Belgium and Luxembourg, and finished when I got home. I do love Star Trek but there will probably be canonical mistakes anyway, please feel free to point them out so I can fix them. And how half of this ended being about McCoy’s perceptions of Jim, I’ll never know. Also, I was slightly drunk while writing the last 5000 words; please feel free to point out typos/grammatical errors/nonsensical bits. So possibly if it’s terrible there may need to be a sober!rewrite.
I’m still fucking around with character voices, so please be gentle and patient with me!
Yes of course I am speaking in metaphors
For something more in your heart.
- Rufus Wainwright
As the shuttle takes them closer to Starfleet Academy, Jim Kirk falls silent, picking at the blood under his fingernails. He looks like he spent most of last night buried under rubble, or at the very least going ten rounds with a guy intent on caving his face in. Although he’s only known Jim twenty minutes, Leonard suspects it’s probably the latter.
“Have you had someone look at you?” he asks, gesturing vaguely at Jim’s bruised and blood face, t-shirt and hands. Jim shrugs.
“The bartender gave me some painkillers,” he offers. “Then he told me if I ever went back in his bar he’d ‘shoot me in the fucking head’.” He sniffs disdainfully, not quite hiding a wince of pain as he does so. “I’m pretty sure bar staff shouldn’t talk like that, they’ll lose customers.”
“That was probably the general idea,” Leonard replies. The corner of Jim’s swollen mouth twitches into a smile. “God, you look like your night was nearly as shitty as mine.”
The light of competition sparks in Jim’s eyes. “My night was so shittier than yours.”
A young woman sitting opposite them tuts, just loud enough to travel. She’s looking at Jim like he’s some kind of irritating bug she’d just love to squash, and Leonard decides that there’s a story there he doesn’t really want to hear. Jim catches the tut too and looks over at her, sending her a grin that’s surprisingly full of raw charm.
“Oh, you were definitely the high point,” Jim tells her. Her mouth twitches - Leonard can’t tell if it’s a smile or a sneer - and she looks away.
“You got into a bar fight over a girl,” Leonard translates. “My night was shittier than yours.”
Jim is looking at him in a go on, prove it sort of way, but Leonard has had enough of dredging up the dirty remains of his disintegrated marriage, and anyway he’s too damn tired to relate one more night of that ugly argument they’ve been having for two years, which ended with a lighter and all of his possessions going up in smoke. It’s just as well his medical skills are safely packed away in his head, or Lucy would probably have tried to take those too. In any case, here he is; exhausted, dirty, unshaven, heading for the stars because he’s got nothing else left. There was a time when he was going to be prestigious, when he was going to do things that mattered. Now, he’ll count it as a victory if his head doesn’t turn inside out before they reach the Academy.
Leonard says none of this, but some of it must leak onto his face because he sees a flash of what might be pity in Jim’s eyes before it’s swiftly replaced by that perpetual brittle arrogance.
The landing is bumpy and Leonard can feel his knuckles straining white, his nails biting into his palms. Jim is starting to look queasy, probably nursing a hangover on top of whatever injuries he’s wearing like battle scars rather than signs he’s a foolhardy idiot, and Leonard spends a moment of distraction trying to work out how much it won’t endear them to their fellow passengers when they both start puking. The young woman is looking at Leonard and when she catches his eye she gives him the smallest of sympathetic smiles. Leonard doesn’t smile back because his teeth are rattling in his skull, but he feels a rueful sort of grimace somewhere deep down anyway.
After staggering out of the shuttle on shaky legs, Leonard resists the urge to fall to his knees and kiss the ground, if only because most of his body feels like it doesn’t belong to him and he doesn’t know if he would be able to get up again. Jim looks white beneath the dried blood, weaving slightly, and Leonard can’t help but contrast how the two of them look compared to the other cadets, in their spotless red uniforms.
“Hey,” Jim says, as they wander after the others, who all seem to know where they’re going and have so much purpose in their step that it sort of makes Leonard feel sick all over again, “at least you didn’t throw up on me.”
“True,” Leonard agrees. “That’s the first good thing that’s happened to me all month.”
-
About five weeks later, Leonard learns that the woman from the shuttle is called Uhura, because she slaps Jim kind of publicly and it gets recorded and within minutes half the Academy has seen the videos. Leonard isn’t particularly interested - he spends a surprisingly large amount of his time watching Jim getting slapped by women - but it’s always nice to put names to faces.
When he finally gets back to their room, Jim is sitting on his bed looking pissed and sulky.
“Do you need medical attention?” Leonard asks, keeping his tone light and just a little mocking. “Need me to check if any bones are broken?”
Jim gives him a deeply unamused look. “You could check Uhura,” he offers. “I think she broke a nail.”
“Oh dear God.” It breaks out before Leonard can stop it. “What did- no, wait, I don’t want to know what you said or did to her.”
“It was more a case of what I offered to do,” Jim replies, looking a little more cheerful.
“Right,” Leonard manages, for lack of anything else to say. Jim has the remarkable ability to render anyone speechless.
“I think she might be warming to me,” Jim adds brightly.
Leonard does not say you know, blind hatred isn’t always hiding sexual tension, sometimes it’s just plain hatred because he has already learned that there is no telling Jim anything. He also does not say leave the poor girl alone, because that would like telling the sun not to shine or rain not to be wet. Instead, all he does is sigh and mutter: “Right” again.
Jim laughs.
-
Most of them have sneaked off-campus to go to one of the local clubs; a noisy hellhole of cheap, sweet and potent drinks, dreadful music played far too loud, and nauseatingly bright-coloured lights that flash on and off fit to give anyone a fit. Needless to say, Leonard would much rather go to a quiet, badly-lit bar, where no one speaks or looks each other in the eye, and everyone drinks the kind of spirits that burn on the way down, but he lets Jim drag him along anyway - “you are not an old man, Bones, no matter how hard you try to become one, and you are still allowed to have fun, even if you pretend you don’t know what it is” - because it turns out that Jim Kirk is kind of a hard man to refuse anything.
Of course, Jim vanished hours ago on a wave of laughter, purple lights striping his face, and is even now probably getting laid in a bathroom stall or having a Warp Drive (three kinds of spirits mixed with passionfruit juice) thrown in his face again. Leonard drifts through the crowded, noisy room, blue light shining obnoxiously in his eyes, shoes sticking to the floor, and reflects that he does have a profoundly antisocial streak. He finally manages to get to the bar, and is trying to work out which of the drinks sounds most like it will have some kind of real alcohol in it that hasn’t been combined with horrible artificial fruit flavouring or worse when someone pushes in beside him. When Leonard turns to look, he finds Uhura glaring at him, eyelids smeared with gold and mouth pressed in an angry, firm line.
“Your friend,” she spits, “is an asshole.” When Leonard doesn’t respond, she repeats, louder: “Your friend is an asshole. Did you hear me?”
Leonard shrugs. “I was kind of waiting for you to tell me something I didn’t already know.”
Uhura considers him, scowling now. Leonard waits patiently for her to come to some kind of conclusion, and while he does take care not to notice the way the glittery blue dress she’s chosen for tonight clings to every curve on her body.
“You’re an asshole too,” she decides finally.
“Yes, but I do it in a much quieter and less obnoxious way,” Leonard replies, “which just about redeems me.”
It probably doesn’t actually; God knows if he had a dollar for every time his ex-wife called him an asshole he wouldn’t have needed to join Starfleet in the first place, but then being friends with Jim has the advantage of making anything Leonard does or doesn’t do look much better in comparison.
After a moment, Uhura’s scowl softens into the beginnings of a smile.
“You can buy me a drink,” she tells him.
Uhura is slightly drunk and prettier than Leonard is going to let on, but she’s also declared herself Jim’s nemesis; Leonard hasn’t drunk nearly enough to be charitable and he didn’t want to come here in the first place.
“I’m not just a pawn to be used in some kind of game against Jim Kirk,” he says, loudly and clearly and just a little too hard. Uhura looks like he’s slapped her and Leonard knows he should bite back the: “just grow up, ok?” but it tumbles out of his mouth before he can stop it.
Uhura’s eyes narrow and Leonard doesn’t even see it coming before she dumps the nearest glass over his head. Sticky-sweet alcohol and juice run down his neck, soak into his shirt. It takes a moment, but Leonard realises that Uhura looks just as shocked as he feels.
“Oh… my… God,” she says slowly, the words nearly lost under the thudding of the music. “Oh God, I’m so sorry.”
Even with orange juice sliding unpleasantly down his spine, Leonard can feel his momentary anger ebbing away. He gently takes her arm, and she doesn’t resist.
“Come on,” he says, “let’s take this outside.”
They move through the crowds of people; Leonard catches sight of Jim, dancing, entwined with about three people, golden light sprayed across him, and decides that he’s probably got the room to himself tonight.
When they make it outside, Uhura takes several deep breaths. The air is cold, especially after the heat of the club. Leonard notices, once again, that Uhura’s shiny blue dress doesn’t cover all that much skin. On instinct, he shucks his jacket and drapes it over her bare shoulders.
“It’s a bit sticky,” he all but mutters.
“It’s fine,” Uhura replies. “I mean - thank you. I mean - sorry.” She’s losing composure, that shell of dignity and muted fury that she seems to wear all the time cracking and peeling before his eyes. “God, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry,” he tells her. “Jim sometimes makes me want to go out and attack innocent bystanders too.”
She laughs, blurred and shaky, and the doctor part of Leonard that never switches off immediately tries to work out just how drunk she really is.
“Do you want me to walk you home?” he asks quietly.
Uhura frowns at him. “Don’t you want-”
“I never wanted to be there,” he responds.
Uhura’s lips curl. “Then it’s the least I can do,” she says.
They walk in silence for a while, under glowing streetlights and the hints of stars between them, Uhura’s impractical heels clacking a steady staccato beat.
“I thought chivalry was dead,” she says at last, a half-teasing smile on her mouth.
“Lucy used to say it would be the last thing I’d lose,” Leonard remarks, and reflects that he must be drunk too, enough to loosen his tongue anyway. Lucy had a good go at tearing away his manners and what remained of his better nature, but all she got was his money and his patience; both of which were enough, really. Should have been enough anyway; it didn’t stop her from trying for everything.
“Lucy was your wife?” Uhura asks.
Leonard raises an eyebrow. “You were listening in on the shuttle?” Uhura shrugs, unapologetic. “Yeah,” he sighs, “Lucy was my wife.”
Maybe Uhura sees something in his expression; she changes the subject anyway.
“So if chivalry’s the last thing you lose, what will be the first?”
Leonard considers this. “My mind?”
Uhura laughs again. “Yeah, I’ll buy that.”
-
Jim teases him for longer than is really necessary about the trail of glitter lipgloss still stubbornly there on his cheek the next morning; Uhura’s mouth pressing a kiss there and mumbling I don’t think you’re an asshole at all, secretly. She was wrong, of course, but Leonard wasn’t about to correct the pretty, drunk girl. He’s never going to tell Jim the truth - it’s none of his damn business, for one thing - but the constant so, when am I going to meet your girlfriend? grates quickly.
“You need to get laid, Bones,” Jim drawls the next time Leonard snipes out a you’re not nearly as funny or as clever as you think you are.
“Actually,” Leonard corrects him, “sex generally makes me even more grumpy and taciturn.”
Jim rolls his eyes and flops down onto his bed. “You’re not nearly as unhappy as you’re pretending to be,” he says. When Leonard opens his mouth to protest this, Jim cuts him off with a shake of his head. “No, you’re really not.”
Leonard scowls, because Jim was never meant to become perceptive, but then it’s just another of the jarring discrepancies and contradictions that make up his personality. He’d be a psychiatrist’s wet dream, and Leonard has never been more relieved that he chose not to study psychology: trying to pull Jim apart to see what makes him tick seems too much of a thankless task. You’d get answers, but they wouldn’t be the ones you’d want, and Jim would make the whole thing as difficult as possible because that’s what he does. Leonard, on the other hand, is far too simple; the trick lies in trying to prevent people from figuring it out.
Jim’s expression becomes irritatingly told you so when Leonard fails to reply; he’s lounging comfortably on his own bed, hands folded behind his head. “Seriously, hook up with Glitter Girl and you’ll be much more cheerful.”
Leonard could list twenty different ways that ‘hooking up’ with Uhura would make his life considerably more difficult than it is already, but he doesn’t think Jim really needs to know them.
“I like being the kind of bad-tempered bastard who makes small children cry and people of a weaker disposition cower,” he says instead. “It’s taken my years to get this good at it, why should I undo all my hard work now?”
“You are so full of bullshit, Bones,” Jim singsongs, closing his eyes.
Leonard would really like to be as full of bullshit as he seems to be; he thinks it would make things a lot easier. He opens his mouth to contradict Jim, and then remembers that they’re both so stubborn that there’s no point in getting into an argument, because nobody ever wins. He sighs instead, and leaves Jim to delude himself with victory.
-
Uhura is completely and utterly poised and in control of herself the next time Leonard runs into her; her make-up and posture flawless, her expression even more so.
“Can we talk?” she asks.
Leonard isn’t sure how much of that night Uhura actually remembers; he’s mostly convinced himself that she just sees him as Jim Kirk’s doctor friend and she has no recollection of pouring a drink over his head at all.
“Sure,” he says; he may pretend to have no social skills whatsoever, but he does manage to skirt the edges of downright rude.
Uhura falls into step beside him, dark hair shimmering in the late afternoon sunlight. She looks as good in the red form-fitting uniform as she looked in the blue glitter dress, and Leonard startles himself with the observation; he’s gotten too used to seeing all women as heartless harpies, all of them trapped in Lucy’s shadow. He swallows, angry with himself for being disconcerted.
“What did you want to talk about?” he asks. His tone is civil enough but he catches an edge of ungraciousness in there anyway; he’s too angry and too bitter with the world these days and it’s not always as well-hidden as it probably should be.
Uhura’s lips curl, almost imperceptibly. “You freely admit that you’re an asshole,” she says. “You don’t mess around with words and say things you don’t actually mean, and underneath the scowl you’re actually kind of a gentleman.” Her smile widens. “That actually makes you pretty unique around here.”
It occurs to Leonard that he genuinely has no idea what’s going on right now, and he fleetingly wonders whether this is some kind of practical joke that Jim has set up, before he remembers that the last time Jim went near Uhura she kneed him in the balls and Leonard had to spend an entire night listening to his roommate groan while he refused to do a medical examination, and therefore it’s pretty unlikely that Uhura will be in league with him.
“No matter how much you flatter me, I won’t help you destroy Jim,” he warns.
Uhura laughs. “I don’t need help to do that,” she replies loftily. “And I know it may be an alien concept to you, but not everything is about Jim Kirk.”
Sometimes Leonard has difficulty remembering that he only met Jim two months ago; he struggles to recall a time when he didn’t spend half his life trying to keep his friend from self-destroying, either deliberately or accidentally.
“So what is this about?” he asks.
Uhura gives him a surprisingly patronising look as she replies: “It’s about reminding you there are people other than James T. Kirk and his all-consuming ego in the universe.”
She’s startled him, not that Leonard will ever let on. He’s surrounded himself with so many layers of intentionally spiky personality flaws that he really isn’t used to people actively seeking his friendship.
“Besides,” she adds, with a wicked twinkle in her eyes, “don’t tell anyone I said so, but now you’ve had a haircut and started shaving, you’re not bad-looking either.”
“Jim will never let me hear the end of this,” Leonard muses, half to himself.
Uhura shrugs. “So don’t tell him.”
They’re not in high school and Leonard is too damn old to have a friendship based on sneaking around so his roommate doesn’t find out. Still, there’s something fundamentally appealing in Leonard having an aspect of his life that Jim doesn’t have six different loudly-voiced opinions on. Uhura must see some of this in his face, because she holds out her hand. Leonard barely hesitates before he takes it.
“Nyota Uhura,” she says, shaking his hand with a crushingly firm grip. A little voice in the back of Leonard’s head that sounds far too much like Jim for comfort says: oh, so her first name’s ‘Nyota’, huh? but he ignores it.
“Leonard McCoy,” he replies, amused by the ritual but still finding the idea of a fresh start appealing.
Uhura smiles, but a bell goes off somewhere and she turns toward it.
“Damn, I’m late!” She lets go of his hand, and they both pretend they haven’t been holding onto each other for just longer than necessary. “See you around, Leonard.”
And then she’s running off across the sundrenched grass, while Leonard tries to figure out what exactly just happened.
-
Starfleet breeds ambition, and from ambition comes envy and betrayal and cold, cruel determination, though of course all this is bundled up and labelled ‘efficiency’ in the brochure. While Lucy’s court case stole Leonard’s home and money and friends, and her lawyer worked out a strangely competent case for making Leonard McCoy utterly unemployable on Earth, he took the time to study his options. There weren’t many of them, and he read all the Starfleet Literature that existed for new recruits, watched all the glossy videos, and decided that the one thing he was going to do was not join the Federation with their perky and utterly ridiculous plans for a shiny, bright, united future. Then, of course, the planet was wrenched from his fingers, and space became the sole option. At least Starfleet lets him get a career out of pretending he hasn’t been effectively exiled.
“I never wanted anything but to join the Federation,” Uhura says, one forefinger idly circling the rim of her coffee cup. Her grin is a little sheepish. “Of course, when I was a kid, I was going to be a captain when I grew up.”
“I was going to be a superhero,” Leonard offers. “Then I realised how much time I’d have to spend around the general public.”
Uhura arches an eyebrow. “So you became a doctor?”
Leonard shrugs. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Uhura’s smile as teeth in it. “You really can’t hate people as much as you say you do. Otherwise you’d be living in a cave somewhere.”
“You’re starting to sound like Jim,” Leonard remarks, just because he enjoys the spark of annoyance that the words fire up in eyes. Still, she refuses to be baited.
“And you’re trying to dodge the topic laughably badly,” Uhura replies without missing a beat.
“You’re not going to scratch the surface to find I’m all puppies and starlight and goddamn rainbows underneath,” Leonard warns.
“Good.”
Leonard considers replying, but reflects that there’s only so long you can keep telling someone you won’t like me, go away before the whole thing becomes kind of soul destroying. He enjoys his misery like a vintage scotch but he isn’t a masochist, after all. Uhura is staring down at her coffee cup, blue-painted nails tapping idly against the ceramic. She almost seems to be waiting for something; Leonard mentally sighs and gives it to her.
“So go on, tell me about when you were eight and you ran away from home and managed to hitch your way here because you wanted to be the youngest serving officer ever.”
Uhura looks a mixture of pleased and embarrassed. “You heard about that?”
“Most people have,” Leonard shrugs. “They admire ambition here.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Uhura observes.
Leonard doesn’t try to correct her; it’s really not worth it.
-
Jim skids into his seat beside Leonard a second before the bell rings for class. His hair is a mess and his mouth is incriminatingly red, and his uniform has telltale creases in it. He has the look of a man who’s just had really good sex.
“You have a problem,” Leonard grits from the corner of his mouth. They’re in navigation class (compulsory for all cadets; after all, any of them could end up stranded in a ship somewhere, and at least this way they might all be able to get themselves home); their instructor makes even him look even-tempered, and will have no problem at all kicking them out for talking.
“Not any more,” Jim responds cheerfully, a horrible little smirk unfurling over his lips. He digs a lollipop out of his pocket and unwraps it as their instructor starts the hologram program; the classroom ceiling is immediately scattered with silver star pinpricks. Leonard looks upwards, pointedly ignoring Jim, as his friend begins sucking noisily on the candy.
After class, he has no chance of pretending that Jim Kirk doesn’t exist. Leonard patiently walks down the hall with Jim practically skipping beside him, voice way too loud as he describes in minute detail exactly what he did in his free periods, accompanied by faintly disturbing hand gestures.
“I’m telling you, Bones, this girl could suck the bolts out of a warp drive-”
“I feel like I need to bathe in a vat of disinfectant just listening to you,” Leonard interrupts.
Jim sighs in a put-upon way. “You act like you’re some kind of monk,” he says. “You were married, Bones.”
“Not to a hooker!” The little voice in the back of Leonard’s mind that sounds increasingly like Jim adds something along the lines of more’s the pity, but Leonard kicks it and it goes away.
“Grace isn’t a hooker,” Jim protests, “she’s just… kind of slutty. Not that that’s a bad thing,” he adds swiftly.
“Of course not,” Leonard mutters, sarcasm dripping from the words. He’s saved from more of this by Uhura swishing past, looking especially disdainful.
“Uhura!” James calls brightly after her. “You’re looking stunning today. You really didn’t have to dress up for me, you know.”
“Go fuck yourself, Kirk,” Uhura responds.
“Is that an offer?” Jim shouts. Uhura doesn’t bother replying, doesn’t even pause as she strides away.
“She likes me really,” Jim shrugs.
“No, she really doesn’t,” Leonard tells him, but Jim isn’t listening.
Later, Uhura demonstrates exactly how much she doesn’t like Jim by offering Leonard money to kill him.
“You’re a doctor!” she says. “You could make it look like an accident!”
“I am not going to kill my friend,” Leonard replies with all the patience he can muster. Uhura opens her mouth. “I am not going to castrate him either.”
“I could do that,” she responds grimly. “I just need your door code.”
“I am also not going to give you my door code so you can go in and emasculate my roommate,” Leonard tells her. He can hear amusement threading itself through his tone, but he can see Uhura is still genuinely angry.
“Why not?”
“Because it will be a bitch to clean up.”
She doesn’t smile, but her lips soften a little. “He’s a misogynistic asshole,” she snaps.
“Well,” Leonard concedes, “yes. A little bit. Some of the time.” Uhura’s eyes are still spitting flames, so he adds: “Look, did you ever have a dog as a kid?”
She frowns, looking confused. “My neighbours did.”
“And did it jump on you and hump your leg from time to time?”
Uhura’s mouth has gone thin again. “Where are you going with this?”
Leonard decides to take that as a ‘yes’. “Jim’s kind of like that. Just treat him the same way you treated the dog.”
Uhura arches an eyebrow. “Sterilisation?”
He really has got to get her mind away from going for Jim’s balls with a pair of scissors.
“Jim doesn’t know any better and he doesn’t mean any real harm so you may as well just get used to it because he’s not going to stop.” Uhura scowls. “I’m being pragmatic,” Leonard adds. “Really, that’s just the way it is.”
Uhura considers this. Finally, she sighs. “Fuck you, McCoy, and fuck Kirk too. Ok?”
“Ok,” he replies, and lets her storm off, wondering if Starfleet specialises in selecting cadets with particularly short fuses. He stays out late that night, wandering the grounds, careful not to return to their room until he’s certain that the urge to punch Jim has passed.
-
Uhura doesn’t talk to him for four days, and he’s not about to break first because Leonard’s a stubborn bastard and he doesn’t crack for anyone. Anyone. It’s four days of him being even more monosyllabic and acerbic than usual - “for God’s sake!” Jim exclaims after two, “let me hire you a hooker! Getting laid cannot possibly make this any worse!” - and he spends most of the hours he’s not in class a little more drunk than is really socially acceptable. And he can’t even blame Jim, as much as he’d like to, because there’s no sense in being angry with him. Jim’s a good guy underneath the fact he’s also kind of a whore, and sometimes Leonard feels privileged to see the determined man he is beneath the I’ve walked into the room; everyone drop their panties attitude that’s made him increasingly unpopular with half their classmates (and far too appealing to the rest), and other days it just makes him want to stick needles in Jim until he chooses one personality or the other, because being such a contradiction and mess of oxymorons is doing his fucking head in.
“I’m asking for a new roommate,” Jim warns, day four. He’s out of his cadet uniform, shoulders hunched under his leather jacket, and even if Leonard weren’t childishly ignoring him he would still not want to know whatever it is that Jim has planned. “I’m lodging a formal complaint.”
Leonard sighs, sprawled on his own bed, staring up at the ceiling. “Good luck with that.”
Jim laughs, rummaging through his nightstand. “You think I won’t?”
“You do not do well with authority figures,” Leonard can’t resist reminding him.
“Two sentences in the space of a minute!” Jim observes. “You’re slipping, Bones.” Leonard rolls his eyes and he’s ground his teeth so much in the last few days, he’s probably going to require medical attention of some kind. “Besides,” Jim adds, “once I point out how you’re no fucking fun anymore, they’ll be tripping over themselves to assign me someone new.”
“No one else will ever put up with you,” Leonard can’t resist reminding him. Jim tuts, pulling at his nightstand drawer too hard; it falls to the floor and in a moment the carpet is covered in a truly unsettling number of condoms and at least four kinds of lubricant, including the stuff you can only get in the medical bays, which means that at some point when Jim was meant to be in there to see Leonard or to get stitches for another stupid stunt, he actually managed to steal medical supplies. Leonard looks at the mess and then at Jim. “Case in point.”
Jim laughs, raucous and rough, then scoops everything away in an approximation of tidiness. “I’m going out,” he announces entirely unnecessarily. “Look, Bones; comm a hooker, go out to one of those soul-destroying bars you like so much, I could probably score you some drugs-”
“I’m a doctor,” Leonard points out, “I can score the kind of really good drugs you can only dream about.”
“Then score some.” Jim sighs in a put-upon way, which is a bit rich. “Just let me help you, or help yourself.”
He’s being horribly juvenile and he’s not even entirely sure why (or, at least, he won’t let himself acknowledge it, which is admittedly a different thing), but at this point in time he doesn’t particularly care.
“Enjoy your relentless pursuit of as many alien STDs as possible,” Leonard says instead. Some days, he remains convinced that Jim has a list of some kind and is ticking them off as he contracts them (Leonard has ready access to Jim’s medical records, which really don’t make pretty reading), though that thought is kind of disturbing.
“No fucking fun,” Jim reiterates, as he leaves.
Leonard spends the next hour pretending to study while really quietly simmering, and also reflecting that if he were less of a stubborn ass he’d go and find Uhura and yell at her until some of this started to feel better (although if he were less of a stubborn ass maybe his marriage wouldn’t have crashed and burned quite so spectacularly and then he wouldn’t be here, and that’s never a good train of thought to get started on). He’s startled when the door chimes, and for a moment contemplates not answering. He’s in no mood for one of Jim’s clingy lays to be turning up here, all wide-eyed and horny; something which has happened on more than one occasion, and then Jim wonders why their commanders have reports about him. Still, one of those last shreds of common politeness that Lucy could never manage to take has him telling the door to open anyway.
Uhura is standing in the doorway, looking as carefully composed as she ever is, not a strand of dark hair out of place, not a wrinkle in her uniform.
“He here?” she asks, calmly abrupt.
Leonard tosses the PADD he wasn’t really looking at aside, and sits up. “No.”
“Good.” Uhura walks in, the door swishing closed behind her.
They could waste time with stilted small talk, could try and dance around the issue, could even try apologies that neither of them will mean, but Leonard hasn’t been that patient in years and Uhura will never be that frivolous. Instead, he stands up, crosses the room.
“Jim and I come as a package deal,” he says, catching Uhura’s gaze and making sure he holds it.
“I know,” she says, voice so quiet he nearly doesn’t catch it.
“You can hate him as much as you want but you can’t make me hate him and either you can handle that or you can’t.”
“I know.” Uhura glares at him for a moment, before finally lowering her eyes, a smile that’s nearly rueful tugging her lips. “I just wish I liked you a hell of a lot less.”
It’s the closest he’ll get to an apology as she’ll give him, and that’s fine, because he wouldn’t know what to do with a sorry even if he got one. And Leonard refuses to be thrown by her words, though he knows he could be, all too easily; people don’t like him, not any more. They admire him, they’re in awe of him, they’re scared of him (he’s made a few of the younger medical cadets cry; something Jim remains insistently gleeful about), but Leonard’s best friend is possibly the most obnoxious man alive and his ex-wife had him exiled from the entire planet, so Leonard knows exactly how unlikeable he really is.
“Nicely damning,” he observes.
Uhura shrugs, but she’s still smiling, which isn’t a bad sign.
-
“So, that hooker must’ve really paid off,” Jim remarks brightly, and just loud enough to make half the corridor turn around and stare at him. Leonard’s fingers curl tight around the PADD he’s carrying.
“All that getting punched in the face really must’ve killed off your braincells,” he remarks. “And why the obsession with prostitutes? Contemplating a change of career?”
“Ha ha.” Jim rolls his eyes. “That’s not to say I wouldn’t be the best damn whore ever.”
This competitiveness is really not healthy, but Leonard has given up on pointing this out, just as he has given up on trying to tell Jim anything. Really, he’s just building up ammunition for the major fight that they will one day inevitably have, the one that will probably end in blood. You can’t have two men as volatile as they are in a friendship without it inevitably imploding, though hopefully they’ll be able to put it off for a long time.
“I thought you already were,” he can’t help saying.
Jim stops abruptly, forcing Leonard to come to a halt too.
“I need you to pretend to be nice for about three minutes,” Jim tells him. “Can you do that?”
There’s an expression that’s almost serious on his face, so Leonard obediently shrugs and offers: “I can try.”
Jim starts walking again, forcing Leonard to fall into step beside him. “I’m going to take the Kobayashi Maru test,” he announces.
Leonard’s brain literally cannot process that for a moment; Jim is looking expectantly at him and he can’t come up with a single damn thing to say.
“Wow,” Jim remarks, “I’ve actually rendered you speechless, Bones. Miracles will never cease.”
“The Kobayashi Maru?” Leonard repeats. “You’re going to take the Kobayashi Maru?”
Jim shrugs, looking insufferably smug. “Yep.”
“You can’t take the Kobayashi Maru!” Leonard says. “Grown men leave the room crying, and perfectly sensible people have to come to medical to be tranquilised afterwards.”
Jim shrugs again, in a you’ve told me on several occasions that I couldn’t be called ‘sensible’ in any sense of the word kind of way. “I’m going to do it.”
“Jim,” Leonard says, a little desperately because really this is stupid, “the test is unbeatable. That is the point of it. And people with years of experience can’t pass it. You’ve been here less than five months, and yes, you’re irritatingly precocious and Pike likes you in a way that is bordering on creepy, which is actually probably the only reason you haven’t been kicked out of here for sexual misconduct yet, but it is going to be a complete disaster.” Jim opens his mouth, so he hastily adds: “and not in a fun way.”
“Man,” Jim sighs, “you really need to take some of those drugs you’re stealing from medical.”
Once again, Jim says this loudly enough to get half their fellow students glaring accusingly at Leonard, and he really needs to get some friends who aren’t going to cast public aspersions on his character.
“Anyway,” Jim continues brightly, “I want you there. As one of my crew members.”
“No,” Leonard says immediately. “I do not want to watch you make an ass of yourself. I can do that without having to dress up and play roleplaying games.”
Jim pouts, actually fucking pouts. “Please, Bones,” he whines, “please.”
Leonard sighs, but the fact remains that while he can’t stop Jim from doing stupid things he can be there afterwards to assess the carnage and put it all back together again. It’s just depressing how often the carnage is actually literal.
“Fine,” he mutters, and reflects that stealing drugs from medical is really looking appealing right now. Possibly the only way to get through this is to take as many tranquilisers as his body can stand.
Jim’s grin is broad and insufferable and makes Leonard want to kick him quite a lot until Jim realises just how inadvisable his actions really are. But enough people have beaten Jim up to date and none of it has ever really stuck.
“Thanks Bones, knew I could rely on you.”
And then he’s darting off into the crowds, waylaying a pretty girl with her uniform skirt hitched up way too high, and Leonard sighs heavily because there’s not a damn thing he can do about any of this.
-
The reality is far, far worse than anything Leonard came up with when he was bombarding Jim with prophecies of doom last night. Nothing he listed in their room, while Jim laughed patiently at him with a faintly patronising air of smugness, can compare to this.
Right now, all Leonard really wants in the whole world - in the whole universe - is to be drunk.
A horrible hush has descended over the false bridge, broken only by the soft explosion noises as the Klingon ships due to kill them in minutes come ever closer. Leonard has not asked (because he doesn’t want to know) exactly what Uhura did and to whom in order to get herself into Jim’s Kobayashi Maru exam, but even her expression of smug glee has slid off her face to be replaced with something that, while not quite pity, is bordering on sympathetic. Jim has gone white, all the blood drained out of his face, fingers clenched in the arms of his command chair like rigor mortis. Two cadets on the conn have their heads in their hands. There’s a woman near the back quietly sobbing into her palms. This may only be a simulation of a doomed starship, but the sense of shock and devastation is all too real.
“Cadet Kirk.” A voice comes across the intercom from those watching, and they all jump. This finally proves too much for the crying woman, who starts a soft sort of keening between her teeth. Leonard forces himself to move, getting one of the hypos of tranquillisers out of his pocket that he brought with him, supporting her as he gives her the dose. “Cadet Kirk, let us put you out of your misery.”
Glancing over his shoulder, Leonard can see Jim’s eyes glittering in his wan face, the bloodless line of his mouth pressed flat. Come on, Jim, he thinks desperately, admit defeat. But he knows his friend far too well, and Jim will never do that. Jim cannot do that. Uhura opens her mouth like she’s going to tell Jim to walk away as well; she catches Leonard’s eye, expression helpless, and closes it again.
Jim takes a slow breath, fingers unclenching from the chair slightly. “Cadet Lewis, you are excused,” he says, tone slow and measured. The woman leaning against Leonard as though he’s the only thing keeping her upright right now starts; Leonard helps her get to the door, where there’s already a doctor waiting to take her away.
“I’m finishing this,” Jim adds, for the benefit of the room. Leonard grits his teeth to prevent an expletive from slipping out, while Uhura hangs her head.
It doesn’t take long. No matter how many photons they fire, the ships keep coming; within minutes their life support and navigational systems are hit. The terminals actually explode with real bangs and sparks, drawing shouts and curses from the crew, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re going to die or not because right now everyone is caught up in the simulation, eyes fixed on the screens with terror in their expressions. The screens finally flood with fire, signifying the fact the ship has blown up and they’ve all died.
For a long, horrible moment, no one seems to know what to say; probably because there isn’t anything to say. You cannot win the Kobayashi Maru, but there are ways that you can fail that are commendable anyway. This, though; this is not commendable. This is just pure failure, ugly and messy and inglorious.
You’re supposed to wait for feedback, but no one is surprised when Jim pushes himself out of his captain’s chair and heads for the door, opening it so hard it rebounds off the wall. Uhura flinches and looks to Leonard.
“Hell,” he mutters, and hurries after Jim.
He manages to catch his friend three corridors away.
“Jim! Jim! For God’s sake, stop!”
After a few more steps, Jim spins around.
“Going to say I told you so?” he demands. “Going to tell me that this is all my own fault, caused by my own arrogance? Going to tell me that I’m too young and too inexperienced, so of course it was going to end like this?”
“No,” Leonard responds, keeping his voice as steady as he can. “Not right now, anyway.”
A feeble smile flickers across Jim’s mouth, but he can’t sustain it. “You’re a good man, Bones.”
Leonard shrugs, offering him a half-smile in return. “Some days.”
Jim claps a hand against his shoulder, fingers digging in just a little too tight, and then turns and walks away. Leonard doesn’t try to go after him; he knows that there’s nothing he can do to help.
-
“I’ve been looking for you for hours,” Uhura says. She looks faintly worried, hands on her hips, dark hair haloed by the floodlight directly behind her head.
“Well,” Leonard shrugs, “you found me.”
He’s not sitting in the empty bleachers of the Academy’s sports stadium because he’s hiding, per se; he just needed somewhere discreet and quiet.
Uhura frowns. “You’re drunk.”
Leonard shrugs. “Not nearly drunk enough.” He sighs, indicates the glass bottle that he had a hell of a time sneaking onto the campus. “It’s ok; I will be later.”
Generally, this is the point at which whoever he’s talking to walks away, disgusted, so he’s a little startled when Uhura sits down beside him.
“And you couldn’t have done this in your room?” she asks quietly.
Leonard would’ve loved to have done this in his room, undignified and out of sight, but sadly circumstances prevented him.
“Jim is in our room,” he tells her. “And he’s doing whatever it is that he needs to do in order to get over today, and there were four girls in there with him when I left, so whatever he’s doing doesn’t need to involve me.”
Uhura sighs, but she does not immediately start on her Jim Kirk is a misogynistic man-whore speech, so presumably she understands as well as Leonard does, much as she may not want to.
“So where are you sleeping tonight?” she asks, after a moment of silence.
Leonard shrugs. “Here, I guess.” By the time he passes out drunk, he really won’t care where he is, though he keeps that part silent; Uhura can probably guess anyway. This is a part of his life that he was going to try and leave behind when he joined Starfleet, but there are some days when that just isn’t an option.
Uhura is studying him thoughtfully, head tilted to one side, and he shouldn’t be getting her involved in this. She’s young and pretty and happy and smart and is not dragging a shitload of messy baggage after her and she should stay the hell away from him.
“Don’t you think that’s for me to decide?” Uhura’s tone is neutral and Leonard must be drunker than he thought he was if he’s already reached the accidentally-talking-out-loud stage.
“You clearly have no idea what’s good for you,” he informs her.
She shrugs. “So I’ve heard.” Efficient, still frighteningly collected, she stands up. “Come on, you can sleep in my room.”
“What about-”
“My roommate is the female equivalent of Jim,” Uhura informs him crisply. “She won’t be back tonight.”
“Looks like we finally have something in common,” Leonard mutters, pushing himself to his feet with a little too much difficulty.
Uhura smiles a little, then moves swiftly to help hold him upright as Leonard’s legs threaten to fold beneath him. Her grip is surprisingly strong, fingers digging far too hard into his arm. She bends and picks up his bottle for him. “What-”
“I am not going to try and stage an intervention,” Uhura informs him calmly. “This isn’t the time or the place. And I assume you went to a lot of effort to get this here, so you won’t thank me if we leave it behind.”
He smiles, even if it feels uncoordinated and lopsided. “You’re a good woman, Nyota Uhura.”
She smiles back. “Oh, I know.”
He hasn’t managed to get drunk enough for his coordination to be utterly shot, so after a couple of false starts he manages to walk beside Uhura, through the dark, mostly-empty campus.
“When was the last time you ate?” Uhura asks him, after a few minutes. Leonard shrugs, which turns out to be kind of a mistake, and sways on his feet for a minute. Uhura sighs. “And you’re supposed to be a doctor.”
“Not right now I’m not,” he tells her. Frowns at Uhura in the weak orange-tinted lighting. “And why the hell are you doing this?”
“You looked after me when I was drunk,” Uhura responds, tone carefully neutral again.
“That was throwing-cocktails-over-people drunk,” Leonard reminds her. “I’m not that kind of drunk.”
“Thank God,” Uhura says without missing a beat, “I like this sweater.”
He smiles in spite of himself, in spite of it all; the twist of his lips is rueful and tired. “You’re gonna regret this.”
Uhura doesn’t look at him, keying in the code for her dorm block. “Then that’s my problem, isn’t it?” Her tone is soft, softer than it usually is, and then the door swishes open and they’re suddenly in a hallway with lighting far too bright for Leonard’s blurring eyes. “Come on.”
When they reach her room, Uhura tells the lights to dim, and indicates which bed he can sleep on. Leonard is too tired and too uncoordinated to try and snoop around, but he does manage to spare a thought of just how jealous Jim would be if he knew where Leonard is right now. It’s really a pity he’ll never be able to tell him and rub it in.
With difficulty , Leonard manages to lie down on the bed, reaching to tug his boots off first because even if the sheets’ll be freshly laundered in the morning there’s such a thing as common courtesy. Uhura stands over him, a thoughtful smile on her face.
“Goodnight, Leonard,” she tells him, and reaches down with tender fingers to smooth his hair off his brow.
Oh God, Leonard thinks, swiftly followed by: I’ve fallen for better women than you, missy.
But the problem is, of course, that he hasn’t.
-
{continued here}