a part time thing, a paper ring
Leonard McCoy hates shore leave. Which is some goddamn beautiful irony, because he hates being in space too. In fact the only place he's ever happy anymore is in his medical bay, surrounded by familiar white and metal and the sounds and smells of his profession, where he can pretend his feet are on solid earth and go about the comforting routine of charts and immunizations and researching diseases and healing people.
Okay, if he has to be honest (and McCoy is often brutally honest), once in a while there are small moments in other places. Mostly with Jim, having drinks or playing cards or just shooting the shit about their respective duty shifts. Occasionally with other crewmembers doing the same thing, but he hasn't grown close to any of them and he has three years of friendship (the clinical psychology courses he took prefer to apply the term 'co-dependence', but he's not drunk enough yet for that kind of honesty) with the man, and that's due in no small part to Jim's refusal to ever take no for an answer. Except that he's not just McCoy's friend anymore, he's his Captain now too, his superior officer, saddled with the weight of a responsibility that no kid that age should ever be expected to take on. Already meeting it head-on, determined and full of energy and brash ego and McCoy knows he's up to the task, even if he shouldn't be.
Hell, none of them should be where they are right now. Starfleet in its bold (questionable) wisdom has crewed its flagship with the brightest, fiercest minds it has, but they're so fucking young, so inexperienced. Some days it makes him feel old, older, despite only having a handful of years on most of them (and none at all on Spock, but the doctor doesn't count that because maybe the first officer has a technical age advantage but he's young for a Vulcan and no more experienced at his new post than any of the rest of them). But how you live your life makes all the difference, and McCoy already has a lifetime under his belt. He's had a career and a marriage and a family, he's buried his father and watched his marriage fail and his family fall apart. He's seen the world from the bottom of a bottle that he only pulled himself up out of through sheer pig-headedness. Some days he feels a hundred years old, surrounded by fresh-faced youngsters chomping at the bit, ready to fling themselves into the darkness for the sheer thrill of it.
Some days he wonders what the hell ever got into him, getting on that shuttle and doing this thing that terrifies him, that he never wanted to begin with.
Then there are the days like this one, when he sits at a crowded bar wearing a two-day stubble and filling his stomach with nothing but bourbon and bile, counting down the hours until he can get back on that shuttle and hide away on that ship, where he knows who he is and what's expected of him and he can pretend the reason he's alone is because there are too many miles between Earth and the Enterprise. Where he doesn't have to lie to his best friend, saying he's going to Mississippi to see his little girl when he knows she's gone to spend the holiday with her mother's family, and instead sit at this bar in a battered green coat and pray no one recognizes him from the news feeds while he works the numbers in his head that'll tell him exactly how much alcohol he can imbibe and still be able to able to walk out under his own power. Days when he knows that the thing that scares him the most isn't dying horribly out in the black, but simply dying alone.
100 prompts: Thanksgiving