The Immeasurable In-Between (Kirk/McCoy, R) part 5
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Day 14
For the thing that will determine the course of McCoy’s life, Jim’s revival is shockingly easy: a hypo full of dedrazine, on top of discontinuing the albiturates. They don’t even bother to do it in an operating theater, because Jim isn’t on life support. So there’s just Jim, surrounded by a ring of doctors that includes McCoy, now in medical whites--some winged contraption, of Marcus’s design no doubt--acting as if he’s one of the crowd.
The neurogram is the first thing to show signs of change, a fluttering butterfly of a line as Jim’s brain becomes more active. Then Jim’s hand twitches, and McCoy nearly jumps out of his skin.
Come back. Come back to me, you beautiful son of a bitch, he thinks, eyes on Jim’s neural profile, heart in his throat.
“Vitals are looking good,” Boyce says. He aims a small, pulsing light at Jim’s eyes. “No problem syncing alpha waves. I think we’re ready for another 20 cc’s.” The nurse hands Boyce the hypo, and he pivots and hands it to McCoy. “Care to do the honors?”
McCoy has to strain to keep the look of horrified surprise off his face, while inwardly cursing Boyce and his deceptively avuncular manner. He has no choice but to take the hypo and then stand there, staring at it, until T'Kan must be wondering if his two weeks off from Medical have left him unable to perform the most basic tasks.
Boyce hovers at his elbow, watching, and then finally gives him a small but actual shove with an elbow to his ribs.
“All in, Doctor,” he says.
McCoy watches his own hands lift the hypo and guide it to Jim’s arm. There’s a hiss as the medicine goes in, this injection a perfect mirror of the first, except that the Enterprise isn’t coming apart around him, and he has more than a faint hope that this one will work.
There’s a long pause during which nothing happens, not even another twitch of Jim’s hand, and McCoy is on the verge of believing that nothing will. Into the void comes a sudden memory of Jim on the deck of the Enterprise taking the last minute of his life to apologize to his crew.
I’m sorry.
It was the worst thing McCoy had ever seen, worse even that his death: Jim, defeated, the hero’s story brought to a violent end, the bad guy winning, everything that was bright and good about Jim and Starfleet on the verge of being wiped out in an instant of malicious force. And then Jim had fought back the way Jim always did, and he won, even at the cost of his life. Saving the rest of them was the only victory that counted, and it seemed Khan was right--it was a good death as far as Jim was concerned, and maybe Jim would have been content to leave the story there, despite his fears.
“She’s giving me up,” David said. They were sitting on the front porch enjoying a summer twilight, cool rising from the valley and lifting away the heavy heat of day. “She said she knew I wasn’t happy, which is funny, because I thought I was.”
“That’s bull,” McCoy snorts, bitterness like a sharp-edged rock in his chest. “She’s the one who wants to get away from here. There’s nothing noble about it.”
“Oh, no, I think she’s probably right.” David crosses his long legs and takes a sip of tea; even now, he won’t drink bourbon until after 8 PM. “It’s love that’s selfish. Indifference can be pretty clear-eyed.”
Back in the present, McCoy thinks, Dad, you were right. I’m the one I’m doing this for.
As if on command, Jim’s lashes flutter open. His eyes are the brightest thing in the room.
The doctors spring into action like they’re performing a well-rehearsed dance, scanning Jim’s brain and irrigating his eyes and adjusting his electrolyte balance. McCoy just stands there, hands limp at his sides.
Jim’s blinks against the harsh light, and his tongue darts out to wet his lips. The first thing he says is “Shit,” followed by “Bones.” His voice is raspy, but distinct.
“Here,” McCoy says, voice hardly stronger. “I’m here, Jim. Right here.” He drops a shaking hand to Jim’s shoulder, gripping it lightly. His heart is full to bursting, the shock and joy enough that he’s afraid he’s going to become a patient himself--Boyce’s, probably, because luck this incredible can’t possibly hold. It doesn’t matter; McCoy would trade whatever he has, whatever he will have, for this moment.
Jim’s eyes roam the room, assessing, trying to figure out the where and why and how long on what may be scant or absence memories.
His gaze settles on McCoy, and he squints a little against the white glare, pupils contracting. “What the fuck are you wearing?”
“He’s fine,” Boyce says, continuing to check the neurograms anyway.
With hope roaring in his ears, it still occurs to McCoy that Jim might mistake him for some otherworldly being. “New uniform. We’re at Starfleet Medical, and I--”
“Not yet,” Dr. T’Kan says, moving to block McCoy. “We must first ask Captain Kirk a series of questions to determine the state of his memory. Captain, do you know what year it is?”
Jim’s eyes aren’t exactly focused, but he still manages to approximate an eyeroll. “2259.”
“Do you know who the Federation president is?”
Jim squeezes his eyes tight, concentrating, and then pops them open again. “That asshole I didn’t vote for.”
T’Kan cocks an eyebrow. “And what is the last thing you remember?”
Jim shifts uncomfortably in the bed, as if trying to reacclimate to having muscle control. “Standing on the bridge of the Enterprise, about to get blown up.”
McCoy tells himself that short-term memory loss is not unexpected, and a small price to pay, though he’s not sure if it’s better for Jim to remember his death or his defeat.
“I see.” T’Kan nods, noncommittal, tapping away on her padd. “Thank you, Captain. We’ll have more questions later, but now we shall attempt to make you comfortable. You have a long period of recuperation and rehabilitation ahead of you.”
“Oh, good,” Jim says as the white coats close in. “That sounds like fun.”
The team now realigns itself around a conscious (and rather cranky and demanding) Kirk, bringing him water and oral medication and some easily digestible goo, presented in the traditional form of a gelatin dessert. McCoy takes a minute to text Spock, who’s stuck in some admirals’ meeting. He’s awake and everything seems fine.
Mere seconds later he gets back, Thank you. I am very pleased to hear it. McCoy is glad that, for once, there’s an emotion Spock isn’t ashamed to admit to.
After another half-hour or so of tests and report-making, the great doctor armada is ready to move on.
“I trust you not to tire him out,” Boyce says, and then claps him a little too hard between the shoulder blades. “Good work, McCoy.” McCoy shrugs him off and doesn’t deign to reply.
“Friend of yours?” Jim asks when he’s left.
McCoy snorts. “Not hardly. Mostly a reminder of why I could never work at Medical.”
There’s a brief silence during which everything that comes to McCoy’s mind to say seems awkward at best and pushy at worst. He settles for the bland.
“Can I get you anything?”
Jim makes a little sound of derision. Everything, even his laughter, is altered with disuse--not rusty, but refurbished, like a ship on a shakedown cruise. “You mean like juice or something? No, what you already got me is plenty.”
“What?” McCoy is abruptly on his guard. “What do you mean?”
“You saved my life, right?”
“Do you remember that you--” McCoy trails off.
Abruptly, Jim’s eyes lock on McCoy’s. “That I died? Yeah. I remember everything.” He squeezes his eyes shut again, like he’s trying to clear a headache. “Lying to your doctors isn’t perjury or anything is, it? I just knew they were probably going to ask me a million questions, and I don’t feel like--” He stops and recalibrates. “Where’s Spock?”
McCoy does his best to repress a stab of jealousy. “Covering for you at some bigwig meeting. He wanted to be here. He’s been here every day.”
“And he’s okay? Everybody’s okay?” Jim tries to raise himself off the bed, but McCoy holds up a cautionary hand.
“Whoa there. He’s fine. Everybody’s fine,” McCoy says, not wanting to mention, at this point, the many thousands who are far from fine.
“Good,” Jim says with a sigh, relaxing back into the bed. “That’s good. Me included, I guess. So what did you do?”
There’s no point in hiding it; Starfleet knows and the world will likely know. Still, McCoy sighs. “Khan’s blood is capable of repairing massive cell damage. I made a serum from it and injected you with it.”
Jim’s eyes go wide and McCoy is ready for anger or suspicion or questions, but not for the smile that breaks over Jim’s face.
“Seriously? Did you have to squeeze it out of him drop by drop? Maybe through his eyeballs?” Seeing McCoy’s guilty look, he tries to wipe the smile off his face. “No, I know you wouldn’t do that, but trust me, Spock’s right about this one. Peace is great but there are times when violence is really fucking called for.” His glee turns to a frown and he and stares at his hands, which are fidgeting with the edge of the sheet.
“What I did was pretty close,” McCoy says tentatively. “He may be a war criminal, but he wasn’t a willing donor. His blood was probably his last bargaining chip.”
“I know,” Jim says, still frowning. “I heard Spock and Uhura talking about it. At least, I think I did.”
“You could hear?” That’s big damned news to McCoy; none of the neurograms suggested such a thing should be possible. “You didn’t feel like you were trapped in your body, did you, because--”
“No, no, don’t get all doctory. It wasn’t bad at all. It was like dreaming, except that sometimes it was whole conversations. I think some of them were real--Scotty said the Enterprise is getting a new warp engine, I hope that was real--but there were memories, too, my mom and Pike, and other things.” A small, private smile comes to his lips. “Good things, so I didn’t feel so lonely.”
The idea that some part of Jim had been awake inside his unmoving body, alone in the crowds of doctors and visitors, is more than McCoy can stand. Jim’s left hand is lying quiescent on the sheet. He reaches out and covers it with his own, torn between apology and confession. He should let Jim rest, or talk, or tell him about everything that’s gone on since he took his temporary leave from the world, but all that he can think is Jim is awake, and he’s here, and I’m here.
“You weren’t alone,” McCoy says, his own voice guttural to his ears. “Even when I wasn’t here, I--Oh, God, Jim--”
He catches himself just at the edge of breaking down, because it isn’t fair to Jim to dump all this on him when he hardly knows what reality he’s been reborn into. Instead he clings to Jim’s hand, unable to meet his eyes.
McCoy’s resolve lasts as long as it takes Jim to reach up, joints cracking, and lay a hand on his arm. Jim, with his flawless instinct for danger, knows McCoy is lost, and of course he’ll come after him.
The same way he would for Spock. The same way he would for any member of his crew.
“I tried,” McCoy says, angry tears in his eyes. “I tried to be strong, I tried to tell myself that whether you lived or died or ended up somewhere in between, that I’d deal with it, because you accepted the risk and so did I, when you put your life in my hands. I’m supposed to be your doctor and your friend and an officer on a goddamned starship, and I’m supposed to know something about life at this age, but in the end--all those people in the city who lost everything, all those Vulcans who lost their whole damn planet--I can barely tie my shoelaces without you. So yeah, Jim,” he finishes, scrubbing at his face with the sleeve of the white uniform that hides nothing, “I was worried.”
Jim draws his hand away, slowly, swallowing hard. McCoy wouldn’t blame him if he pulled the covers over his head and went back to sleep, the way his alleged best friend is carrying on. But when he dares to meet Jim’s eyes, there are tears in them, too.
“I’m really sorry,” he says. “I guess I had the easy part. Shit, if it had been you-- That thing with the torpedo was bad enough; it took about five years off my life.” He’s smiling a little, trying to take the edge off. For someone who can talk the stripes off a zebra, Jim is honest when it counts. It’s not deception that McCoy fears, it’s that he has no idea what Jim’s interior space of relationships looks like. Of the handful McCoy knows about--himself, Pike, Winona, and now Spock--they’re either friends or parent figures. He has no idea if Jim even has a blueprint for what McCoy wants. “If it helps, there were a bunch of times in the last 24 hours--or whenever, it could be the future for all I know--when I thought I was going to lose it. I saw people, my own people, die in front of me. But if it had been you--”
“Then we’re even,” McCoy interrupts, not even sure why, except that it’s second nature, a self-defense mechanism that predates even Jocelyn. He can feel himself contracting, retreating back to an easy friendship, one that fits now like an old sweater, one that McCoy thought he shrugged off decisively, at least when Jim was unconscious.
Jim is looking at him with that familiar bright incisiveness; his wits are returning like the fire-up of a warp core. But Jim is a good enough friend that he’s learned to navigate around McCoy’s insecurities. Whatever he sees, whatever he heard in his twilight sleep, he’ll be happy to drop it if that lets McCoy keep his beloved status quo. Jim won’t do what McCoy needs him to do for the very reason McCoy wishes he would, and thinking of the endless spirals of possibility away from this moment make him crazy with frustration.
He can’t live like this. Not any more.
“Jim,” he begins. His hand is still covering Jim’s, so he picks it up, presses it between his own. It’s large but fine, pale with prominent veins, capable and beautiful, and McCoy loves it the way he loves everything else about Jim, with a magnitude that acknowledges and transcends faults. “These last two weeks-- they took me off your case, so I didn’t have time to do anything but think. And I want to tell you that I’ll always be your friend, but that would be a lie. It hasn’t been true for a while.”
“Oh?” Jim looks concerned now, and a bit wary. “What do you mean? For how long?”
“Not since Anatareon.”
He watches the realization pass over Jim’s face like fast-moving clouds across the bay.
“I thought you--” he begins, and then stops, flashes a quick self-mocking smile, and starts again. “I mean, I’m not the most dependable person. Pike was right about that; I almost got everyone killed, and it was sheer fucking luck that I didn’t. The thing is, I always feel like I can see everything so clearly--it’s like a landing strip with a bunch of lights along it, and all you have to do is follow it. But sometimes the lights are wrong and you head into the mountain instead, and now that I know that, how am I ever going to make a decision again?” Jim rubs his forehead like there’s an itch inside. “Am I making any sense? My brain is probably still kind of broken.”
“You’re making perfect sense. You’re pretty much describing my life.”
“You weren’t indecisive about the Khan blood thing. Pulling that off in the middle of a starship battle is pretty fucking amazing.”
“But that was--that was selfish,” McCoy almost moans. “I did that because I couldn’t stand the idea of you being dead. I wanted to undo it, by any means necessary. My God, Jim, what did I do?”
Jim lifts up his other hand and wraps it around McCoy’s. “What you always do. Turn death into a fighting chance to live. Nobody hates death more than you do, but it’s not exactly an enemy you can defeat. Except it seems like you did.”
“For you,” McCoy says desperately. “I did it for you.”
“I know,” Jim says, with the same calm smile. Only a man like Jim, McCoy thinks, could accept a gift so large.
Jim looks down at their clasped hands and brushes his fingers across McCoy’s knuckles. It’s a small freedom, but thrilling, knowing that Jim feels confident enough to take it.
“It’s going to happen again, you know, if we do this thing,” Jim says. “We’re going to be making decisions that could get the other person killed all the time. That will get the other person killed, probably; I mean, I’ve only been at this for a year and I’ve already died once. Is that something you’re going to be able to stand?”
“Yes,” McCoy says without hesitation. Every path leads to the same place in the end; no one knows that better than a doctor. But out of all possible realities, this is the one he’s chosen, the one that he’ll be able to think about without regret.
“Good,” Jim says, a hint of mischief in his voice. “It’s probably just going to get worse. I’m going to go for that deep space assignment, you know. Uncharted territory.”
It should all be terrifying--the newness of it, the worlds to explore, Jim’s charismatic unpredictability victorious again. But for once McCoy isn’t scared at all.
Jim tightens his grip on McCoy’s hand, just for a second, and then closes his eyes, sinking back into the exhaustion of the newly resurrected, completely at peace.
+++++
Notes: I tried to be as canon-compliant as possible (although, Trek writers, you make that damn hard, but you may have noticed I left out McCoy's line when Jim wakes up. In the context of the story (and maybe in the movie as well) I couldn't see him making a simultaneous joke about Jim being dead and having acquired genocidal tendencies. So let's say that happens when Jim wakes up from his nap and McCoy is in more of a joking mood.
I also had to figure out a way to deal with the whole "Doctor cures death, news at 11" thing, so I decided that the serum is good for repairing massive cell damage caused by disease or injury, which makes it extremely useful, but not a panacea. It's also my headcanon that one of things it cures is pyrrhoneuritis, the disease that killed David McCoy in the TOS timeline, and that he's already beginning to suffer from in this story. In the original timeline, a cure was found just weeks after Leonard took his father off life support, causing him to have terrible feelings of guilt. Maybe in this timeline, Leonard is the one who finds the cure that, in TOS, was found by someone else, and he won't spend the rest of his life feeling as guilty and angsty as he does in this story ;)
Day 14
For the thing that will determine the course of McCoy’s life, Jim’s revival is shockingly easy: a hypo full of dedrazine, on top of discontinuing the albiturates. They don’t even bother to do it in an operating theater, because Jim isn’t on life support. So there’s just Jim, surrounded by a ring of doctors that includes McCoy, now in medical whites--some winged contraption, of Marcus’s design no doubt--acting as if he’s one of the crowd.
The neurogram is the first thing to show signs of change, a fluttering butterfly of a line as Jim’s brain becomes more active. Then Jim’s hand twitches, and McCoy nearly jumps out of his skin.
Come back. Come back to me, you beautiful son of a bitch, he thinks, eyes on Jim’s neural profile, heart in his throat.
“Vitals are looking good,” Boyce says. He aims a small, pulsing light at Jim’s eyes. “No problem syncing alpha waves. I think we’re ready for another 20 cc’s.” The nurse hands Boyce the hypo, and he pivots and hands it to McCoy. “Care to do the honors?”
McCoy has to strain to keep the look of horrified surprise off his face, while inwardly cursing Boyce and his deceptively avuncular manner. He has no choice but to take the hypo and then stand there, staring at it, until T'Kan must be wondering if his two weeks off from Medical have left him unable to perform the most basic tasks.
Boyce hovers at his elbow, watching, and then finally gives him a small but actual shove with an elbow to his ribs.
“All in, Doctor,” he says.
McCoy watches his own hands lift the hypo and guide it to Jim’s arm. There’s a hiss as the medicine goes in, this injection a perfect mirror of the first, except that the Enterprise isn’t coming apart around him, and he has more than a faint hope that this one will work.
There’s a long pause during which nothing happens, not even another twitch of Jim’s hand, and McCoy is on the verge of believing that nothing will. Into the void comes a sudden memory of Jim on the deck of the Enterprise taking the last minute of his life to apologize to his crew.
I’m sorry.
It was the worst thing McCoy had ever seen, worse even that his death: Jim, defeated, the hero’s story brought to a violent end, the bad guy winning, everything that was bright and good about Jim and Starfleet on the verge of being wiped out in an instant of malicious force. And then Jim had fought back the way Jim always did, and he won, even at the cost of his life. Saving the rest of them was the only victory that counted, and it seemed Khan was right--it was a good death as far as Jim was concerned, and maybe Jim would have been content to leave the story there, despite his fears.
“She’s giving me up,” David said. They were sitting on the front porch enjoying a summer twilight, cool rising from the valley and lifting away the heavy heat of day. “She said she knew I wasn’t happy, which is funny, because I thought I was.”
“That’s bull,” McCoy snorts, bitterness like a sharp-edged rock in his chest. “She’s the one who wants to get away from here. There’s nothing noble about it.”
“Oh, no, I think she’s probably right.” David crosses his long legs and takes a sip of tea; even now, he won’t drink bourbon until after 8 PM. “It’s love that’s selfish. Indifference can be pretty clear-eyed.”
Back in the present, McCoy thinks, Dad, you were right. I’m the one I’m doing this for.
As if on command, Jim’s lashes flutter open. His eyes are the brightest thing in the room.
The doctors spring into action like they’re performing a well-rehearsed dance, scanning Jim’s brain and irrigating his eyes and adjusting his electrolyte balance. McCoy just stands there, hands limp at his sides.
Jim’s blinks against the harsh light, and his tongue darts out to wet his lips. The first thing he says is “Shit,” followed by “Bones.” His voice is raspy, but distinct.
“Here,” McCoy says, voice hardly stronger. “I’m here, Jim. Right here.” He drops a shaking hand to Jim’s shoulder, gripping it lightly. His heart is full to bursting, the shock and joy enough that he’s afraid he’s going to become a patient himself--Boyce’s, probably, because luck this incredible can’t possibly hold. It doesn’t matter; McCoy would trade whatever he has, whatever he will have, for this moment.
Jim’s eyes roam the room, assessing, trying to figure out the where and why and how long on what may be scant or absence memories.
His gaze settles on McCoy, and he squints a little against the white glare, pupils contracting. “What the fuck are you wearing?”
“He’s fine,” Boyce says, continuing to check the neurograms anyway.
With hope roaring in his ears, it still occurs to McCoy that Jim might mistake him for some otherworldly being. “New uniform. We’re at Starfleet Medical, and I--”
“Not yet,” Dr. T’Kan says, moving to block McCoy. “We must first ask Captain Kirk a series of questions to determine the state of his memory. Captain, do you know what year it is?”
Jim’s eyes aren’t exactly focused, but he still manages to approximate an eyeroll. “2259.”
“Do you know who the Federation president is?”
Jim squeezes his eyes tight, concentrating, and then pops them open again. “That asshole I didn’t vote for.”
T’Kan cocks an eyebrow. “And what is the last thing you remember?”
Jim shifts uncomfortably in the bed, as if trying to reacclimate to having muscle control. “Standing on the bridge of the Enterprise, about to get blown up.”
McCoy tells himself that short-term memory loss is not unexpected, and a small price to pay, though he’s not sure if it’s better for Jim to remember his death or his defeat.
“I see.” T’Kan nods, noncommittal, tapping away on her padd. “Thank you, Captain. We’ll have more questions later, but now we shall attempt to make you comfortable. You have a long period of recuperation and rehabilitation ahead of you.”
“Oh, good,” Jim says as the white coats close in. “That sounds like fun.”
The team now realigns itself around a conscious (and rather cranky and demanding) Kirk, bringing him water and oral medication and some easily digestible goo, presented in the traditional form of a gelatin dessert. McCoy takes a minute to text Spock, who’s stuck in some admirals’ meeting. He’s awake and everything seems fine.
Mere seconds later he gets back, Thank you. I am very pleased to hear it. McCoy is glad that, for once, there’s an emotion Spock isn’t ashamed to admit to.
After another half-hour or so of tests and report-making, the great doctor armada is ready to move on.
“I trust you not to tire him out,” Boyce says, and then claps him a little too hard between the shoulder blades. “Good work, McCoy.” McCoy shrugs him off and doesn’t deign to reply.
“Friend of yours?” Jim asks when he’s left.
McCoy snorts. “Not hardly. Mostly a reminder of why I could never work at Medical.”
There’s a brief silence during which everything that comes to McCoy’s mind to say seems awkward at best and pushy at worst. He settles for the bland.
“Can I get you anything?”
Jim makes a little sound of derision. Everything, even his laughter, is altered with disuse--not rusty, but refurbished, like a ship on a shakedown cruise. “You mean like juice or something? No, what you already got me is plenty.”
“What?” McCoy is abruptly on his guard. “What do you mean?”
“You saved my life, right?”
“Do you remember that you--” McCoy trails off.
Abruptly, Jim’s eyes lock on McCoy’s. “That I died? Yeah. I remember everything.” He squeezes his eyes shut again, like he’s trying to clear a headache. “Lying to your doctors isn’t perjury or anything is, it? I just knew they were probably going to ask me a million questions, and I don’t feel like--” He stops and recalibrates. “Where’s Spock?”
McCoy does his best to repress a stab of jealousy. “Covering for you at some bigwig meeting. He wanted to be here. He’s been here every day.”
“And he’s okay? Everybody’s okay?” Jim tries to raise himself off the bed, but McCoy holds up a cautionary hand.
“Whoa there. He’s fine. Everybody’s fine,” McCoy says, not wanting to mention, at this point, the many thousands who are far from fine.
“Good,” Jim says with a sigh, relaxing back into the bed. “That’s good. Me included, I guess. So what did you do?”
There’s no point in hiding it; Starfleet knows and the world will likely know. Still, McCoy sighs. “Khan’s blood is capable of repairing massive cell damage. I made a serum from it and injected you with it.”
Jim’s eyes go wide and McCoy is ready for anger or suspicion or questions, but not for the smile that breaks over Jim’s face.
“Seriously? Did you have to squeeze it out of him drop by drop? Maybe through his eyeballs?” Seeing McCoy’s guilty look, he tries to wipe the smile off his face. “No, I know you wouldn’t do that, but trust me, Spock’s right about this one. Peace is great but there are times when violence is really fucking called for.” His glee turns to a frown and he and stares at his hands, which are fidgeting with the edge of the sheet.
“What I did was pretty close,” McCoy says tentatively. “He may be a war criminal, but he wasn’t a willing donor. His blood was probably his last bargaining chip.”
“I know,” Jim says, still frowning. “I heard Spock and Uhura talking about it. At least, I think I did.”
“You could hear?” That’s big damned news to McCoy; none of the neurograms suggested such a thing should be possible. “You didn’t feel like you were trapped in your body, did you, because--”
“No, no, don’t get all doctory. It wasn’t bad at all. It was like dreaming, except that sometimes it was whole conversations. I think some of them were real--Scotty said the Enterprise is getting a new warp engine, I hope that was real--but there were memories, too, my mom and Pike, and other things.” A small, private smile comes to his lips. “Good things, so I didn’t feel so lonely.”
The idea that some part of Jim had been awake inside his unmoving body, alone in the crowds of doctors and visitors, is more than McCoy can stand. Jim’s left hand is lying quiescent on the sheet. He reaches out and covers it with his own, torn between apology and confession. He should let Jim rest, or talk, or tell him about everything that’s gone on since he took his temporary leave from the world, but all that he can think is Jim is awake, and he’s here, and I’m here.
“You weren’t alone,” McCoy says, his own voice guttural to his ears. “Even when I wasn’t here, I--Oh, God, Jim--”
He catches himself just at the edge of breaking down, because it isn’t fair to Jim to dump all this on him when he hardly knows what reality he’s been reborn into. Instead he clings to Jim’s hand, unable to meet his eyes.
McCoy’s resolve lasts as long as it takes Jim to reach up, joints cracking, and lay a hand on his arm. Jim, with his flawless instinct for danger, knows McCoy is lost, and of course he’ll come after him.
The same way he would for Spock. The same way he would for any member of his crew.
“I tried,” McCoy says, angry tears in his eyes. “I tried to be strong, I tried to tell myself that whether you lived or died or ended up somewhere in between, that I’d deal with it, because you accepted the risk and so did I, when you put your life in my hands. I’m supposed to be your doctor and your friend and an officer on a goddamned starship, and I’m supposed to know something about life at this age, but in the end--all those people in the city who lost everything, all those Vulcans who lost their whole damn planet--I can barely tie my shoelaces without you. So yeah, Jim,” he finishes, scrubbing at his face with the sleeve of the white uniform that hides nothing, “I was worried.”
Jim draws his hand away, slowly, swallowing hard. McCoy wouldn’t blame him if he pulled the covers over his head and went back to sleep, the way his alleged best friend is carrying on. But when he dares to meet Jim’s eyes, there are tears in them, too.
“I’m really sorry,” he says. “I guess I had the easy part. Shit, if it had been you-- That thing with the torpedo was bad enough; it took about five years off my life.” He’s smiling a little, trying to take the edge off. For someone who can talk the stripes off a zebra, Jim is honest when it counts. It’s not deception that McCoy fears, it’s that he has no idea what Jim’s interior space of relationships looks like. Of the handful McCoy knows about--himself, Pike, Winona, and now Spock--they’re either friends or parent figures. He has no idea if Jim even has a blueprint for what McCoy wants. “If it helps, there were a bunch of times in the last 24 hours--or whenever, it could be the future for all I know--when I thought I was going to lose it. I saw people, my own people, die in front of me. But if it had been you--”
“Then we’re even,” McCoy interrupts, not even sure why, except that it’s second nature, a self-defense mechanism that predates even Jocelyn. He can feel himself contracting, retreating back to an easy friendship, one that fits now like an old sweater, one that McCoy thought he shrugged off decisively, at least when Jim was unconscious.
Jim is looking at him with that familiar bright incisiveness; his wits are returning like the fire-up of a warp core. But Jim is a good enough friend that he’s learned to navigate around McCoy’s insecurities. Whatever he sees, whatever he heard in his twilight sleep, he’ll be happy to drop it if that lets McCoy keep his beloved status quo. Jim won’t do what McCoy needs him to do for the very reason McCoy wishes he would, and thinking of the endless spirals of possibility away from this moment make him crazy with frustration.
He can’t live like this. Not any more.
“Jim,” he begins. His hand is still covering Jim’s, so he picks it up, presses it between his own. It’s large but fine, pale with prominent veins, capable and beautiful, and McCoy loves it the way he loves everything else about Jim, with a magnitude that acknowledges and transcends faults. “These last two weeks-- they took me off your case, so I didn’t have time to do anything but think. And I want to tell you that I’ll always be your friend, but that would be a lie. It hasn’t been true for a while.”
“Oh?” Jim looks concerned now, and a bit wary. “What do you mean? For how long?”
“Not since Anatareon.”
He watches the realization pass over Jim’s face like fast-moving clouds across the bay.
“I thought you--” he begins, and then stops, flashes a quick self-mocking smile, and starts again. “I mean, I’m not the most dependable person. Pike was right about that; I almost got everyone killed, and it was sheer fucking luck that I didn’t. The thing is, I always feel like I can see everything so clearly--it’s like a landing strip with a bunch of lights along it, and all you have to do is follow it. But sometimes the lights are wrong and you head into the mountain instead, and now that I know that, how am I ever going to make a decision again?” Jim rubs his forehead like there’s an itch inside. “Am I making any sense? My brain is probably still kind of broken.”
“You’re making perfect sense. You’re pretty much describing my life.”
“You weren’t indecisive about the Khan blood thing. Pulling that off in the middle of a starship battle is pretty fucking amazing.”
“But that was--that was selfish,” McCoy almost moans. “I did that because I couldn’t stand the idea of you being dead. I wanted to undo it, by any means necessary. My God, Jim, what did I do?”
Jim lifts up his other hand and wraps it around McCoy’s. “What you always do. Turn death into a fighting chance to live. Nobody hates death more than you do, but it’s not exactly an enemy you can defeat. Except it seems like you did.”
“For you,” McCoy says desperately. “I did it for you.”
“I know,” Jim says, with the same calm smile. Only a man like Jim, McCoy thinks, could accept a gift so large.
Jim looks down at their clasped hands and brushes his fingers across McCoy’s knuckles. It’s a small freedom, but thrilling, knowing that Jim feels confident enough to take it.
“It’s going to happen again, you know, if we do this thing,” Jim says. “We’re going to be making decisions that could get the other person killed all the time. That will get the other person killed, probably; I mean, I’ve only been at this for a year and I’ve already died once. Is that something you’re going to be able to stand?”
“Yes,” McCoy says without hesitation. Every path leads to the same place in the end; no one knows that better than a doctor. But out of all possible realities, this is the one he’s chosen, the one that he’ll be able to think about without regret.
“Good,” Jim says, a hint of mischief in his voice. “It’s probably just going to get worse. I’m going to go for that deep space assignment, you know. Uncharted territory.”
It should all be terrifying--the newness of it, the worlds to explore, Jim’s charismatic unpredictability victorious again. But for once McCoy isn’t scared at all.
Jim tightens his grip on McCoy’s hand, just for a second, and then closes his eyes, sinking back into the exhaustion of the newly resurrected, completely at peace.
+++++
Notes: I tried to be as canon-compliant as possible (although, Trek writers, you make that damn hard, but you may have noticed I left out McCoy's line when Jim wakes up. In the context of the story (and maybe in the movie as well) I couldn't see him making a simultaneous joke about Jim being dead and having acquired genocidal tendencies. So let's say that happens when Jim wakes up from his nap and McCoy is in more of a joking mood.
I also had to figure out a way to deal with the whole "Doctor cures death, news at 11" thing, so I decided that the serum is good for repairing massive cell damage caused by disease or injury, which makes it extremely useful, but not a panacea. It's also my headcanon that one of things it cures is pyrrhoneuritis, the disease that killed David McCoy in the TOS timeline, and that he's already beginning to suffer from in this story. In the original timeline, a cure was found just weeks after Leonard took his father off life support, causing him to have terrible feelings of guilt. Maybe in this timeline, Leonard is the one who finds the cure that, in TOS, was found by someone else, and he won't spend the rest of his life feeling as guilty and angsty as he does in this story ;)