Present for jimpage363
Title: Running with Scissors
Rating: NC-17
Characters/Pairings: Spock/McCoy, Kirk/McCoy/Spock
Warnings: A tablespoon of snark, a teaspoon of schmoop, two cups of porn, mix well. Add crack to taste.
Recipient: JiM (jimpage363) Happy Holidays~
~oOo~
"You behave as if I have never seen an ocean before," Spock says, staring at the water below him.
Leonard has his shoes off and is digging his toes into the sand. It maybe isn’t the most dignified thing he’s ever done, but it’s been ages since he set foot on any land worth looking at and the oceans on those planets were...odd, to say the least. Oceans made up of red water or filled with black rocks that bumble around or inhabited by crazy tentacle monsters that nearly ravish Lt. Chekov until the captain's rather inventive display of phaser power, are not oceans at all, in his humble opinion.
This one’s quite nice though-it has a fresh, briny breeze and all the right colors: blue sky, white beaches, sparkling blue-green water. Almost exactly like Earth, except for a ripe, musky...almost fecal smell to the air that comes and goes with each puff of wind.
"Don't you Vulcans ever relax?" he asks. "I mean look at this." He gestures at the ocean and its rippled expanse that vanishes into the distant gray horizon. "Vulcan was a desert planet. You can't tell me this doesn't impress you."
"You have forgotten that I was stationed in San Francisco for quite some time, and as such these scenes are not unfamiliar." Spock turns black eyes towards Leonard. "And while I can say that this view is certainly aesthetically pleasing, it does not evoke in myself the same level of nostalgia as it does in you or Captain Kirk."
Leonard drops his shoes on the sand and pointedly bends to roll up his cuffs. Spock might be a huge buzzkill, but he is going to go wading in those waves and have a fucking good time, dammit. Spock clears his throat. "Might I remind you, Doctor McCoy, that we are still on an away mission?"
"I'm old, Spock, not senile," Leonard snaps back just as Jim comes skidding up to them, spraying sand against their legs, and slings an arm around both their shoulders. Spock doesn’t budge an inch, but Leonard, already off balance, nearly topples over. "Dammit, Jim!"
Jim grins at him, hale and hearty in the salty air. "Isn’t this great? An honest-to-god M-class ocean. It's been ages!" He shakes Spock maniacally, which Spock bears stoically without changing expression.
Leonard groans, brushing sand off his ass. "You think I didn’t try that already? He's a robot, a fucking unfeeling robot." He stalks off towards the water and barely catches Jim's low reply, "Well, I don't know, he surprises you sometimes, isn’t that right, Spock?" He looks back in time to see Jim's hands wandering and Spock flushing green, and he groans loudly enough for them to hear him over the wind and the waves. "I'm right here, dammit! Get a room!"
Jim leers-leers, that’s definitely an expression Jim’s never aimed at him before-and says, "Why don't you join us?"
Leonard just stands there, brain in reboot mode, waves lapping at his legs-trying to parse whether Jim has just asked him what he thinks he has, or if Jim’s just fucking around as usual with an incredibly distasteful joke. Desperate ain’t your color seems an appropriate response. Traitorously, so does Maybe.
He doesn’t have time to think on that further, because then the ground quakes.
They’ve been feeling faint tremors for a while that they’d ceased to notice as background noise after Spock attributed it to seismic activity. But now it’s ominously louder and closer, the waves shattering apart into tiny ripples with each vibration. Boom.
A loud, inhuman screech shatters the air and nearly their eardrums.
BOOM.
boom BOOM.
Whatever it is, it’s coming straight at them.
Birds explode out of the treeline and head out over the ocean in a squawking, panicked mass. An enormous, mottled black head towers over the copse of tall trees at the edge of the beach not three hundred yards away and focuses beady red eyes on the three of them. When it sees them frozen there on the beach, it opens a large mouth full of rows and rows of jagged, sharp teeth and shrieks.
That explains the smell, Leonard thinks distantly; carnivores have unusually smelly scat. How wonderful that he paid attention in class because now he can remember all sorts of comfortless factoids like this at appropriate times.
Goddamn, what big teeth it has.
"Holy tit-monkeys on a stick," Jim breathes, face drained of color, because that thing’s as big as a motherfucking house. A really, really, really big house. Skyscraper, even. It extends two stubby arms as if to part the grove, but then just rears back, lifting a giant hind leg, and simply crushes the trees in its way. BOOM.
"I think it entirely advisable to run," Spock says conversationally.
They do.
~oOo~
It turns out the massive creature can breathe fire.
It also turns out that three men of varying heights and builds can cram themselves into one improbably tiny crevice in the cliff-side like sardines into a can, if given sufficient motivation to do so.
~oOo~
"You gonna say something about having seen snow before?" Leonard demands, blinking hard against the fat flakes driving into his eyes. God, he hates snow. He hates cold. San Francisco was a purgatory with its eternally gray fog and chill, but it was heaven compared to this hell of below-freezing temperatures. Their Starfleet-issue cold weather gear is top-of-the-line and made of the most revolutionary, streamlined material, but he still feels like a goddamn marshmallow in it, stifled and awkward. Give him heat anyday. Hell, he’ll even take the humid wet-blanket heat of Georgia over all this cold and wet, and now he can’t feel his nose, which he knows, is a sign of impending frostbite, gangrene, and possibly even death.
"That would be incorrect," Spock replies, derailing Leonard’s morbid thoughts. "I have never seen snow before outside of holovids, and I certainly have never experienced it."
Leonard can’t help but soften a little at that. Spock has turned his face upward and is blinking at the snowflakes swirling into his eyes, but in that innocently wonderstruck way that forcibly reminds Leonard of Joanna the time he and Jim took her snowboarding in Lake Tahoe. His eyes are shining, snow is sticking in great, unmelting gobs in his flat, black hair, and his hands are curling at his sides, like he’s barely restraining himself from putting them out to catch the flakes. “Yeah?” Leonard says, not nearly as gruffly as he intends.
"It is...fascinating." Which is the Vulcan equivalent of wow. Then Spock seems to catch himself. With a sidelong glance at Leonard he adds hastily, "As part of my duties, I have studied much about atmospherically created ice crystals. Their unique structure created depending on the surrounding air's temperature and water vapor content is a particularly interesting top-"
Leonard makes a rude noise in reply. "Can't you just enjoy something without analyzing the everlasting hell out of it?" he mutters, kicking snow off his boot.
Spock blinks at him in seemingly honest puzzlement. "I do not understand your question. There are many forms of enjoyment, and I consider my studies to be included in that number.” He pauses, and that Vulcan superiority creeps back into his voice as he adds, “Although you may not find it so."
With that, of course, Leonard has no choice but to peg the smug bastard full in the face with a snowball.
Apparently even a Vulcan can’t maintain his composure with snow up his nose, covering both eyes and dripping off the high arches of his brows. The shock on Spock's face has Leonard doubled over in stitches, and thank god Spock has apparently no idea how to respond because otherwise Leonard would be dead, nerve-pinched meat instead of wheezing rusty laughter and staggering over to a tree for support. "You-haha-you're supposed to duck when someone goes for a handful of snow, you know," Leonard chokes out, and goes off into another bout of helpless laughter.
Spock slowly reaches up, and with impressive gravity, wipes his face off with quick, efficient movements. "That was unnecessary, Doctor."
"Excuse me, but I beg to differ. I think that was very necessary."
Spock bends and starts gathering snow.
"Uh-Spock-" Leonard says, laughter trailing off, eyes widening. Spock has generous hands and inhuman strength, and the ball of snow he’s compacting is getting alarmingly large and looking very, very hard.
Leonard stumbles backwards and dashes to hides behind the tree. Holy fuck, who knew starting a snowball fight with a Vulcan would be so dangerous?
But Spock doesn’t throw the Ice Ball o' Doom at him; after some calm assessment he aims much higher and it misses Leonard entirely. Leonard’s about to taunt him for being a shitty mark when he realizes the reason why as the jarred tree releases its entire burden of snow directly on top of Leonard with a flump and buries him.
He’s cursing and working his way out of the deep pile when Jim, back from scouting just in time to witness this development, drawls in an amused tone, "Only you’d make snowball fighting efficient, Spock."
"It is simply a matter of strategy. A tactic that ends a battle quickly and decisively is always the most efficacious course to take." And that’s deep satisfaction Leonard detects in Spock's tone, and Leonard just isn’t having it because now he has snow down his back and down his pants, and it’s wet and cold and just not okay. He growls, "'Efficacious,' my ass," as he lunges from the snow like a monster from the deep, firing with both hands.
"Hey!" Jim shouts, scrambling for cover but not before he’s liberally splatted by the indiscriminate salvo. "Civilian casualty! Civilian casualty!" Then faintly, after he’s thrown himself over the side of a drift, laughter in his voice: "Oh, the humanity!"
"Doctor," Spock says patiently, standing stock still as Leonard advances, grimly hurling handfuls of snow at him, "as you cannot hurt me with the snow, I have very little incentive to move away."
"Wait until I get close enough to dump some down your pants," Leonard says, and here Spock looks intrigued. That small lift to the corner of his lips is back. "Then I advise you to beware of your surroundings," he says blandly, and folds his hands behind his back.
Leonard gets out a "Whuh-oof!" when he’s suddenly tackled from the side. He and Jim go thrashing, skidding a few feet as Leonard futilely tries to kick him though Jim has him pinned down good, knobby knees pressing into Leonard's thighs and attempting to pin Leonard's wrists. Thank god the marshmallow cold-weather suit is slippery so Jim’s having a hard time of it. Eventually he gives up and opts for scooping snow onto Leonard's head, laughing like a lunatic.
Leonard sputters some choice expletives he usually reserves for days when he spills his morning coffee into his lap, resisting Jim's shouts, "Say uncle! Uncle! Say! It!" with flailing slaps until he remembers his medical training and jabs Jim hard in the pressure point under the armpit. Jim's jacket cushions the blow a little, so Jim just jerks, yelps, and flops off Leonard to lay sprawled on his back, panting. "Cheap shot, Bones."
Leonard groans. "I learned from the best, you hypocrite."
Jim turns his head enough to grin at Leonard. "Can’t just let my CMO maim my first officer, can I?"
"Next time I have you in Medical, we'll see who'll maim who," Leonard mutters. He squints up as Spock looms over him. "Are you all right, Doctor?" Spock asks.
Leonard pushes himself up to his elbows and cracks his neck gingerly. "I'm sure my old ass would feel a helluva lot less broken into ten million pieces if my friends stopped tag-teaming me."
"That is an inaccurate assessment," Spock informs him. "To date, this is only the first time that Jim and I have, as you say, 'tag-teamed' you."
"You’re easier to tackle anyways," Jim chimes in, then pulls himself up to his feet and puts a hand out for Leonard. "Learned never to fuck with a temperamental Vulcan the hard way my first time out, remember?" He doesn’t let go of Leonard's hand even after he helps him up. Jim’s grinning like a kid, snow crusted along one cheek and ground into his golden hair.
"Scarier than-I’ve been too nice with the hypos lately, that’s what." Leonard tugs at his hand but Jim only tightens his grip. Leonard turns his glare on Spock. "And the hell you mean, 'this is only the first time'? You have more times planned?"
"Funny you should ask that," Jim murmurs, with a meaningful glance at Spock. "I asked you a question the last away mission, and you never gave me an answer."
"Wha- You mean the question right before we nearly got squashed into jelly between that giant monster's toes?" That monster that Scotty-with his encyclopedic knowledge of esoteric historic Earth pop culture gained during six months of isolation on Delta Vega with nothing but Keenser and holovid archives for company-had christened 'Godzilla.' Scotty was inordinately excited about the whole debacle.
"Heh. Yeah. That one."
Leonard pauses and searches Jim's face. Damn, Jim looks serious. "I thought you were just joking. Badly, might I add." But hesitance undermines the bite of his words, and he can’t help the stutter of his eyes to guage the barometer of Spock's face. Vulcans would look perfectly placid while having this sort of conversation, open relationship or no.
Spock just adds to his confusion, hoisting an eyebrow at him and saying, "You are thinking entirely too hard about this, Doctor McCoy."
Jim’s a damn good kisser and one helluva opportunist, taking that split second of hesitation to tug Leonard forward by the hand and feather a soft kiss across his mouth. Jim’s lips are cold and rough, but he manages to put a world of want and promise into the simple touch. Leonard is left gasping, instantly hard at the sensual flirtation in the warmth of breath and the slow drag of pliant lips.
He follows as Jim draws back, as involuntarily as a flower turning towards the sun. Jim licks his lips slowly as if savoring the taste, eyes searching Leonard’s face again. He seems about to repeat the question. Leonard’s pretty sure the answer will be yes, if only because he can’t remember what the other options were. He holds his breath, waiting for it, blood rushing in his ears
Jim never has the chance because, of course, everything goes to crap.
"WAAAAAAAAGHHHH!" behind Spock and snow explodes, filling the air and whiting out his vision. Something-or someone-slams bodily into him, knocking him flat onto his back and his head into a snowdrift, the whine of phaser fire and Jim’s shouts barely audible over the snarls and roars of something very large and very angry.
He can’t see anything beyond black hair that makes him sputter and wheeze, and damn, Vulcans are heavier than they look because Spock-it has to be Spock, because his sharp nose is socketed into Leonard's eyeball and Leonard is crushed under his weight, his breath slowly being squeezed out of him.
He only catches glimpses of flailing white furry monster arms and claws and huge yellow teeth-why does every monster they come across have such big fucking teeth, why-then everything goes black.
~oOo~
Leonard’s head is pounding, his sinuses are stuffed, his arms are dangling over his head, and his feet are very cold. He also grows aware of a distant irritation and the pulsing thought of well, this sucks. Eventually he realizes this is because he’s upside down. He opens his eyes.
Ice cave.
Okay.
His shirt and jacket are rucked up in the neighborhood of his armpits, exposing an embarrassing expanse of chilled chest and belly.
Great. He shoves at it, then looks around again.
Jim’s a gold blur off to his left.
Better.
They’re both hanging from the ceiling by their feet in ice blocks. That’s certainly a new one in the annals of shitty away missions, he grouches to himself as sarcastically as he can make it, because sarcasm is good.
Sarcasm helps control the wild fear that kindles in him at seeing Jim's limp form, because panic won't help either of them. He needs to keep his mind on practicalities, dammit-like getting them down somehow, treating Jim, finding Spock, and getting them all the fuck out of here without getting eaten-and sarcasm neatly compartmentalizes the situation into simplified, manageable chunks.
So-taking stock: crazy hairy fanged ice monster? Nowhere to be seen.
Neither is Spock, for that matter. Or Leonard's communicator.
"Dammit all to hell," he growls aloud until it occurs to him that whatever caught them and stashed them there like entrees in a walk-in freezer might still be around, if not seen.
The gold blur twitches. A rusty groan. "Bones? You awake?"
He closes his eyes in relief. "Yeah. Unfortunately," he replies, dryly spoken words doing little to cover the way his voice wobbles. Thank god. Thank god.
The gold blur starts wriggling around, reaching up towards its feet with little grunts of effort, and then flopping back down again. "I really hate ice planets, Bones." Plaintively.
Days like this, he hates being on any planet with Jim Kirk, because Jim has just the sort of dismal luck that likes company. At least Jim's luck also always has a silver lining. They’re alive. Jim is alive. So, as far as Leonard is concerned, they’re only a little behind the curve.
Leonard gets his voice under enough control to say, "You hurt anywhere, Jim?" willing his eyes to focus so he can at least give Jim a visual examination. The pressure in his head and sinuses from being upside down for lord knows how long doesn’t help.
Jim pats himself, then wiggles his fingers experimentally. "S'okay." Jim’s lied to him about this sort of shit before, hiding a sprained wrist or a concussion until Leonard tracked him down and physically dragged him to sickbay, but right now he seems alert and limber enough, considering.
"You see Spock anywhere?"
Jim looks around. When he finally answers, his voice is sharp. "No."
In the silence they gauge the possibility that Spock might be dead.
Nah. Spock is a tough bastard, Leonard decides. Vulcans’re probably tough and gamy, so the monster probably wouldn’t have eaten him, not with two tender and delicious human morsels on hand. Well, he amends, if Spock wasn’t the appetizer. Sarcasm. Sarcasm is good.
No, he can’t be dead. Leonard won’t allow even the possiblity to cross his mind. Don’t you dare be dead, he thinks fiercely in Spock’s direction.
But Jim is silent, his face turned away. Leonard can’t focus well enough to see if he’s crying. "Jim..." he murmurs, reaching out in alarm, wishing Jim were close enough to touch. Dammit, this is why he can’t take Jim up on his impulsive offer, tempting though it is. Only the hopelessly stupid or the heartlessly cruel would interfere in the sort of epic partnership that Jim and Spock have, the kind that alters history and is celebrated in legend and song.
Leonard is neither.
Most of the time.
Jim shakes himself all over. Then he says firmly, "We'll get through this, Bones." As if the strength of his conviction will simply make it so.
"I never doubted that." Leonard's tone is soft. His sinuses are blocked up, so he also snuffles a little.
"Ah. Well-good." Jim sounds snuffly too.
They give it a moment.
Then:
"So. Does Captain Awesome have a plan yet?" Leonard says with deliberate nonchalance, though there’s something lumpy stuck in his throat and a suspicious prickling at the corners of his eyes.
Jim makes a valiant effort to sound cheerful. "You know, Bones, sometimes I just can't tell when you're being sarcastic and when you're being serious." Leonard turns his head and watches Jim heave some quick breaths to pump himself up and start doing a power sit-up, reaching for his feet again.
Leonard raises an upside-down eyebrow, impressed and more than a little appreciative of the flex of Jim’s abs. "Been eating your protein cubes, Jim?"
"Feel free to help," Jim gripes, but without rancor. When he reaches his feet, he pulls a knife from its sheath in his boot and starts hacking away at the ice. The sound of it echoes loud in the cave as Jim works. Leonard hangs there and holds his breath, hoping the beast isn’t around to notice this not-so-subtle escape attempt.
But of course Jim’s luck comes ‘round to bite them on the ass again, because speak of the devil.
“Jim!” he shouts just as a deafening roar fills the cave, and large, white, hairy, and toothy with flailing arms lunges forward from wherever it’s been hiding. Jim shouts Leonard’s name and hacks more furiously before flopping back down again and brandishing the blade at it.
But it doesn’t attack them; it rushes past and into a pack of security red shirts who’re suddenly flooding into the cavern. Sulu’s leading the charge, grim and determined and holding the longest, sharpest sword Leonard ever clapped eyes on.
“No phaser fire!” Sulu shouts, ducking as the creature swipes at them and a red shirt who looks vaguely familiar goes flying into the wall with a sodden crunch. Good thinking-don’t hit the captives, Leonard thinks approvingly. Always knew Sulu was command material, at all times quiet but cocksure, understated but making sure shit gets done.
Sulu fences around a bit then lunges, the blade flashing. The monster roars in pain and Jim whoops in triumph as the creature turns and beats a hasty retreat, leaving a trail of blood in the snow.
~oOo~
Leonard considers himself something of an expert in xeno-medicine. Sure, he realized pretty early on that despite studying all the known species in med school-including a dead Klingon-what he doesn’t know could fill a black hole. But after (multiple) outbreaks of sex pollen, crazy disinhibiting alien red juice, Sulu's habit of picking up creepy tentacled plants (with sex pollen), and the discovery of the Tribble N3M34 flu, he thinks it’s a pretty safe bet that now he’s a god in the field of frontier medicine. Compared to other CMOs, at least, because he’s lucky enough to assigned to the Enterprise, which is not only the flagship of the Federation but also the flagship for attracting every single bacterium, virus, parasite, and homicidal alien species in the fucking universe.
Yet he still doesn’t have the foggiest idea why he has a Vulcan standing in his sickbay office with his shirt off.
“You have been avoiding the bridge,” Spock says without preamble, his expanses of skin and his surprisingly hairy chest staring Leonard full in the face. “Is there something wrong, Doctor McCoy?”
Leonard opens and closes his mouth. “No. Not really.” His answer really isn’t intended to be sarcastic or even wry; the resolution he’d made to not interfere with and potentially screw up Jim's relationship with Spock is still firm, though untested. He isn’t avoiding them, exactly-he just has a lot to keep him occupied in Medical, is all.
And-chest. Huh. It’s not like he’s never seen a bare chest before.
“You have not sustained any lasting effects from our previous away mission?”
Besides his insatiable urge to strangle Scotty every time the man nudges him and mutters ‘monster’ under his breath like they’re sharing a private joke? “I’m supposed to be asking those questions,” he snaps, then adds, “But for your information, no.”
Spock purses his lips. It’s a tic that always drives Leonard bugfuck crazy. “Perhaps it will please you to know that the Captain has refused Commander Scott’s requests to formally rename the last planet ‘Hoth’?"
Leonard wouldn’t have Spock know for the world how much that statement fills him with a petty glee that ought to be beyond a man his age. He coughs instead and gestures vaguely in Spock’s direction. “Uh, what happened to your shirt?”
Spock blinks and looks down at himself like he honestly can’t remember why his shirt’s vanished like it’s been blown off in a high-powered wind turbine. “Your examination will simply be more efficient in this manner,” he says like he can’t believe it isn’t obvious to Leonard, and it’s like Leonard’s back in med school, caught out by a professor, and he’s fumbling for his tricorder before his brain catches up to him. He asks sharply, “And why do you need to be examined? Again?" Unless it’s to check your head, he adds mentally.
“I…” Spock pauses. “I believe I have contracted a form of acute viral rhinopharyngitis during our…adventures on the planet Nivix V.”
Leonard quits fiddling with the tricorder to stare at him. “Acu-you mean you caught a cold?” Do Vulcans even catch colds? He’s never heard of such a thing, but then Vulcans are secretive bastards who keep their medical records close to their chests until something dire and absolutely last-minute crops up that’s guaranteed to raise Leonard’s blood pressure. He’ll have to check with M'Benga. “This isn’t like pon farr, is it?” he asks carefully.
Spock’s exasperation isn’t an obvious thing, even to a seasoned observer like Leonard who probably spends way more of his time watching Spock than is strictly non-stalker-like. Spock's expressions seem to involve psychic powers, like how he can suddenly go from amused but observant silence to fuck off and die in a fire silence, and like how the angles of his eyebrows can express varying degrees of WTF, Jim? Currently, I find you satisfactorily intellectually gifted 92.57% of the time but now I am forced to re-evaluate comes rolling off him in waves.
“I am unused to particularly low temperatures, and as such, my immune systems were apparently compromised and I have, as you say, ‘caught a cold,’" Spock tells him. “While it is uncommon to my species, the symptoms are very similar to those in humans.”
“Hm.” Now that he’s listening for it, Leonard does detect a slight hoarseness to Spock’s voice, and no, feeling guilty over the snowball fight is not on the agenda. Spock was just lucky the snow monster hadn’t captured him and strung him up by his ankles like a slab of beef too, and was instead left outside half-buried in the snow.
Apparently Vulcans are unappetizing. Leonard loves being right, and after getting over the relief of finding Spock whole and uneaten, the thought of it never fails to warm the cockles of his cantankerous heart and bring a smile to his face.
He’s always careful when he examines Spock. He knows the Vulcan doesn’t like to be touched without warning, touch telepathy being what it is, so he startles badly when a long-fingered hand wraps itself around his wrist as Leonard is frowning over the data and trying to remember if the medication’s contra-indicated for Vulcans or not. He jerks his gaze up to find Spock hitched closer, his narrow face intent.
Leonard has to keep himself from drawing away out of surprise. Jim’s apparently teaching Spock a thing or two about personal space because he’s waaaaay inside Leonard’s. “Logic dictates that it is highly likely you are avoiding the bridge to the purpose of avoiding either the captain or myself,” Spock observes.
"Maybe I'm just busy," he retorts and hikes an eyebrow at Spock, daring him to call him out on the lie.
Spock hoists one in return. "Jim's proposition may have been excessively direct and...” He seems to be searching for the correct word. “…Ill-timed."
Leonard keeps his eyebrow pegged where it is, because that’s certainly one way to put it.
Spock continues, "And after some consideration, I have come to the conclusion that perhaps your reluctance originates from an misapprehension of my acquiescence to this proposal."
Leonard's voice comes in a hoarse croak. "And what-you're…acquiescing?"
In response, Spock drops his gaze and trails his fingers in lingering touches down Leonard's wrist.
Why hasn’t Leonard noticed before how long and elegant Spock’s hands are? They're square-nailed, the pads rough and tickling against the skin of Leonard's arm which breaks out in gooseflesh, and he stares, mesmerized, as Spock rubs a slow thumb over his palm. It’s such a simple touch, but also a shockingly sensual one; Leonard has to bite back a moan when he remembers something Jim mentioned in passing. To Vulcans, a touch of hands can be as intimate as sex.
Spock is having hand-sex with him. Holy shit.
His cock doesn’t seem to think that’s disturbing at all, because it’s like the nerve endings in his hand have a direct line to his crotch and severed the ones to his brain. He can’t move, feet rooted to the floor, his world focused on the fingers trailing his life-lines. Spock looks back up through his thick, black eyelashes and how could Leonard have ever thought those eyes expressionless? They’re liquid dark and heated, his thin lips loose and parted, and if just an hour ago you asked Leonard H. McCoy if a Vulcan could be seductive, he’d have laughed in your face, but now he can’t laugh at the want blatant in every line of Spock’s body.
Leonard’s other hand relaxes, and his tricorder falls.
The noise breaks the spell. The tricorder’s one of the expensive ones meant for in-sickbay use, not a hardier field model, so it hits the floor with a tinkle of glass and a rattle of loose parts. He looks down and swears, because though Jim played fast and loose with money while in Academy, as captain he’s proven as balky about signing off on ship requisitions and budgets as a penny-pinching grandmother on a pension, mostly because he hates paperwork with the fire of a thousand burning suns. Leonard and every other department head generally gets around it by having all the forms filled out ahead of time and sticking it under Jim's nose for a signature at strategic times when Jim’s guaranteed to be in a massively good mood-which is usually 1. after dinner, 2. before an away mission, not after, while Jim is still filled with dreams of adventure and excitement instead of brooding about all the crazy shit in the universe that only seems to happen to him, and 3. after he’s gotten laid.
More pain-in-the-ass work for Leonard, is what it boils down to.
Spock looks down too. Leonard pulls out of Spock’s grip and picks up the shattered tricorder, muttering under his breath, hand-sex temporarily forgotten under all the paperwork and careful, paranoid timing this’ll entail. Spock watches him for a long moment before he says, "Join us after gamma shift tomorrow." And it’s a request, softening what’s otherwise a flat order. Leonard would've missed the nuance if not for the way Spock’s leaning just slightly towards him, his head tilted just so, like he’s just barely keeping himself from touching Leonard again.
Leonard raises an eyebrow at him. Tomorrow, huh? Probably had to coordinate schedules and make a fucking appointment.
Spock lifts his in response.
Leonard hoists it higher, adds a bit of glower.
Spock matches its height, then tilts his head a little more. That flexible corner of his mouth lifts.
Leonard continues to hold Spock's gaze, then, impossibly, Spock's eyebrow climbs even higher and nearly disappears into his bangs.
Leonard hangs on as long as he can, grim determination warring with disbelief because there’s no way he can lose an eyebrowing contest with a Vulcan, just no fucking way, but his face starts to twitch with fatigue and he can’t hold it anymore. "That's cheating, you pickleshit," he complains, rubbing his cramping forehead.
"Your statement is illogical," Spock replies, and Leonard knows, knows that whatever the Vulcan version of smug is, he’s seeing it right now. He growls, "Your eyebrows come naturally at that angle and I gotta work at mine, so if that ain't cheating I don't know what i-" and he can’t continue because Spock grabs his shoulders in those strong, long-boned hands and is licking his way into Leonard's mouth.
His skin is warm, degrees hotter than a human, and the taste of him is strange and metallic, Spock kneading Leonard's shoulders as he angles his head and deepens the kiss. It is all Leonard can do to just go with it, to allow Spock to bend him back over and onto his own desk. Spock fits himself in between Leonard's legs with smooth assurance, his body an amazingly heavy blanket of heated muscle and bone, manhandling him into place with that inhuman strength until Leonard is flat on his back and gasping in shock. Datapads slide onto the floor with a muted clatter, and Leonard reaches for them-god no, no more requisition forms-before Spock captures his wrist again.
Spock looks down at Leonard with those dark eyes and now he’s breathing harder-not nearly as much as Leonard, the stoic bastard-and his cheeks are flushed, his lips wet. He rubs his thumb over the rapidly beating pulse in Leonard's wrist and looks down at where his other hand is splayed against Leonard's ribcage, pale against the blue fabric. "Is this satisfactory?" he wants to know.
Is this satis-? Spoken with that dry, almost business-like tone, when he knows he has Leonard hard and desperate and just barely controlling himself from squirming under him. Leonard more than fleetingly considers taking a chomp out of the closest limb he can reach because his head’s the only thing he can will to move; apparently the rest of his body is happily going along with the program and his crotch is in full mutiny and refusing to move away from Spock's. Leonard’s a doctor, dammit; he can fix Spock up afterwards. No harm, no foul, and damn it’ll be satisfying, that smug bastard and his smug understatements. He’ll give him his goddamn satisfactory.
Then he doesn’t have time for any more indignation because Spock hears that growl of rage and feels god knows whatever Leonard is broadcasting at him, probably porno on all bandwidths-damn touch telepaths-because then Spock moves his hand from ribcage to Leonard’s fly and from there he just as efficiently replaces hand with mouth.
Leonard drops his head over the edge of the desk, breath stuttering in his throat and barely feeling the pain of the lip he catches between his teeth, over the pressure and the wet roughness of Spock's tongue and the divine suction that explodes stars behind eyes screwed shut, and he twists his hand just enough in Spock's loosened grasp to twine their fingers together. Spock flicks a startled glance upwards and their gazes lock.
His grip turns almost painful and Leonard can feel Spock's breath puff faster against the wet base of his cock. Spock is watching him unblinking, absorbing every grimace and gasp and bitten off moan, and riding every involuntary thrust of Leonard's hips until Leonard can’t bear the weight of his regard any more and throws his head back again, clutching at Spock's hand and the desk's edge, a harsh groan through clenched teeth as he comes hard.
He comes back to himself with the sensation of a rough tongue lapping at him, cleaning him with broad sweeps up and down and around the oversensitive head. He twitches. Then the inquisitive tongue moves lower, and he convulses as one ball slips into that hot, wet mouth. It’s laved with precise care, that talented tongue curling and tracing wicked shapes and probably even alphabets for all Leonard knows; the nudge of Spock’s nose and the movements of his breath so ticklish but so sinfully good that Leonard can only writhe as Spock pushes his thighs farther apart for better access. If Spock keeps it up Leonard’s going to be hard again, but he can only manage a broken moan in protest.
Then it’s abruptly gone. Spock’s standing, pulling on and straightening his uniform shirt with efficient tugs, smoothing down his hair, wiping the corner of his mouth. He looks at Leonard sprawled on the broad CMO desk: pants down, shirt up, wet and panting and half-erect, looking freshly fucked and wrung out, and says primly, "The standard dosage for the acute viral rhinopharyngitis medication must be doubled for maximum efficacy in a Vulcan physiology."
If Leonard jabs Spock in the neck with more vim than is strictly necessary, it doesn’t show in the little curl to Spock's lips and the slight laughing crinkle to his eyes. Smug fucking Vulcan, who pulls Leonard into another, rougher kiss as Leonard slams down the hypospray, and then looks into his eyes and says, "Jim's quarters, after gamma shift. Tomorrow."
Then he’s gone, having the last word over his shoulder with, “Perhaps you might consider bringing your requisition requests with you.” Leonard could swear there’s laughter in his voice.
~oOo~
It isn’t like all Leonard's reservations have vanished in one bout of ridiculously good oral sex. It is more that though he trusts Jim with his life, Jim’s an impulsive, shoot-first-charm-later sort of guy who always manages to bulldoze his way smooth by sheer force of personality after he’s gone and kicked sand in everybody's faces. Leonard doesn’t have that kind of charisma, never did, and he knows Spock doesn’t either. They've had to go through life more cautiously than Jim, with far more care for consequences and plans and reasons and the sanctity of their own hides, so if Spock’s decided this isn’t such a bad idea, then Leonard’s willing to give-whatever this is that they’re offering-a try.
Still, at times he has to stop and take a deep breath and remind himself that he trusts both of them, as apprehension and excitement twist their way through his gut.
However, Leonard doesn’t make it to anyone's quarters for quite some time, because he catches the cold too.
It’s a particularly virulent, fast-acting strain, thanks to its incubation in Spock's hybrid physiology. Leonard hates being sick, hates it with a passion, but he’s a doctor, dammit, and practical enough to know when it’s best to admit defeat and bow out while the bowing is good. Avoiding infecting the rest of the crew is pretty damn important too-if only, he tells himself, to save himself some work later. God knows he has too much of that as it is.
He’s on his way out-albeit slowly-leaving last-minute instructions, when Chapel sneaks up and hyposprays him into submission with rather unnecessary enthusiasm. "Blugh," is all he manages, staring at her with bulging, betrayed eyes before his knees give out and he keels forward onto his face.
The next few days are a blur. He hallucinates that his blankets are swelling with fluid and are actively trying to smother him, and he beats them back with a flurry of well-placed slaps. He sleeps, he wakes. Jim is sitting there, reading aloud to him from a padd. An isolation field shimmers around the bed. Is Jim a hallucination? Leonard can’t tell. He wishes he were hallucinating Chapel and her ridiculously large hyposprays. Damn, those things fucking hurt! Jim stops reading and looks at him. "Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it?" he says with a cheerful grin, and Leonard fades out again halfway through rolling his eyes.
Blink.
The plomeek soup actually smells good, so he’s probably dying. Spock is standing there stiffly, bowl in hand. "You must eat," he says and now Leonard definitely knows he’s dying, because he has that clarity of vision granted before it’s time to go into the light and with it, he can tell Spock’s feeling a little guilty for killing him. "You are maudlin and delirious," Spock replies, even more stiffly, so either Leonard said that aloud or he’s suddenly developed telepathic powers. Ho shit.
Spock narrows his eyes at him. "I will call Doctor M'Benga. Your condition appears to be worsening." No, no more hyposprays, Leonard thinks despairingly. Spock sounds bemused. "I find your antipathy to hyposprays exceedingly ironic, Doctor."
My name's Leonard, you damn hobgoblin, Leonard thinks indignantly. You give a guy a little oral, I think you're entitled to call him by his first name.
Spock shifts in surprise. "Leo-nard," he repeats, slowly, awkwardly, like he’s trying to fit his tongue around a sharp rock. Then a muttered, "Fascinating."
Ha, Leonard thinks triumphantly. I am telepa-
Blink.
Jim is back. The isolation field is gone. “What did you say to Spock?” he wants to know, and Leonard completely misses the humor in Jim’s question. He only seizes on the name, the name, grasping at associations free floating at the back of his mind. It’s like the name on Jim’s lips shatters a dam, the combination of the fever and whatever meds he’s hopped up on flooding a torrent of words from his brain to his mouth with absolutely no barrier or filter at all. “Never hated Spock,” is what comes out, his mind detached and his body buzzing and far away.
Jim looks startled but Leonard plunges on before he can answer: “Even like Spock. Sometimes. Was only ever jealous-because-because-we’re friends, you n me, friends since Academy and that fucking shuttle. I don’t make friends easy like you do, and you two have this thing, a chemistry that anyone can see, you fit together like a jigsaw puzzle and I can’t compete with that-“
Jim puts a hand on his arm, mouth open like he’s going to interrupt, but Leonard just babbles on and on. When he comes back to himself from that far away floaty place, he finds himself droning, “Love you Jimmy, always have, love-“ and Jim isn’t looking surprised, not one fucking bit.
“Confessions when you're high are just so cliché,” Jim tells him, smiling a little but his eyes are serious and impossibly, vividly, blue. Leonard is drowning in them.
Jim catches his hand before he can poke him in the eye with a finger to see if the color will rub off. “Bones-listen to me,” he says earnestly. “You don't have to compete-there's no competition. Never was. You’re my best friend and my conscience, and we’re a team just as much as Spock and I are a team and the three of us are a triumvirate, you understand me? We ground each other in ways that us apart or even paired can't, and-” He squeezes Leonard’s hand. “Bones, you know I wasn’t joking when I asked you to-it can’t-won’t be just a one-time thing. Spock told me about you two, and-Bones, you wouldn’t believe how much Spock wants-”
“Spock has sexy hands,” Leonard observes, and grins dopily at the ceiling.
“Are you even listening?" Jim sounds exasperated and aggrieved. "I'm trying to tell you that I love you back, you drugged up asshole. Hello?” As Leonard fades, tunneling deeper into sleep, he thinks he hears Jim say, I think Spock does too. I mean, plomeek soup?
Part 2
Rating: NC-17
Characters/Pairings: Spock/McCoy, Kirk/McCoy/Spock
Warnings: A tablespoon of snark, a teaspoon of schmoop, two cups of porn, mix well. Add crack to taste.
Recipient: JiM (jimpage363) Happy Holidays~
~oOo~
"You behave as if I have never seen an ocean before," Spock says, staring at the water below him.
Leonard has his shoes off and is digging his toes into the sand. It maybe isn’t the most dignified thing he’s ever done, but it’s been ages since he set foot on any land worth looking at and the oceans on those planets were...odd, to say the least. Oceans made up of red water or filled with black rocks that bumble around or inhabited by crazy tentacle monsters that nearly ravish Lt. Chekov until the captain's rather inventive display of phaser power, are not oceans at all, in his humble opinion.
This one’s quite nice though-it has a fresh, briny breeze and all the right colors: blue sky, white beaches, sparkling blue-green water. Almost exactly like Earth, except for a ripe, musky...almost fecal smell to the air that comes and goes with each puff of wind.
"Don't you Vulcans ever relax?" he asks. "I mean look at this." He gestures at the ocean and its rippled expanse that vanishes into the distant gray horizon. "Vulcan was a desert planet. You can't tell me this doesn't impress you."
"You have forgotten that I was stationed in San Francisco for quite some time, and as such these scenes are not unfamiliar." Spock turns black eyes towards Leonard. "And while I can say that this view is certainly aesthetically pleasing, it does not evoke in myself the same level of nostalgia as it does in you or Captain Kirk."
Leonard drops his shoes on the sand and pointedly bends to roll up his cuffs. Spock might be a huge buzzkill, but he is going to go wading in those waves and have a fucking good time, dammit. Spock clears his throat. "Might I remind you, Doctor McCoy, that we are still on an away mission?"
"I'm old, Spock, not senile," Leonard snaps back just as Jim comes skidding up to them, spraying sand against their legs, and slings an arm around both their shoulders. Spock doesn’t budge an inch, but Leonard, already off balance, nearly topples over. "Dammit, Jim!"
Jim grins at him, hale and hearty in the salty air. "Isn’t this great? An honest-to-god M-class ocean. It's been ages!" He shakes Spock maniacally, which Spock bears stoically without changing expression.
Leonard groans, brushing sand off his ass. "You think I didn’t try that already? He's a robot, a fucking unfeeling robot." He stalks off towards the water and barely catches Jim's low reply, "Well, I don't know, he surprises you sometimes, isn’t that right, Spock?" He looks back in time to see Jim's hands wandering and Spock flushing green, and he groans loudly enough for them to hear him over the wind and the waves. "I'm right here, dammit! Get a room!"
Jim leers-leers, that’s definitely an expression Jim’s never aimed at him before-and says, "Why don't you join us?"
Leonard just stands there, brain in reboot mode, waves lapping at his legs-trying to parse whether Jim has just asked him what he thinks he has, or if Jim’s just fucking around as usual with an incredibly distasteful joke. Desperate ain’t your color seems an appropriate response. Traitorously, so does Maybe.
He doesn’t have time to think on that further, because then the ground quakes.
They’ve been feeling faint tremors for a while that they’d ceased to notice as background noise after Spock attributed it to seismic activity. But now it’s ominously louder and closer, the waves shattering apart into tiny ripples with each vibration. Boom.
A loud, inhuman screech shatters the air and nearly their eardrums.
BOOM.
boom BOOM.
Whatever it is, it’s coming straight at them.
Birds explode out of the treeline and head out over the ocean in a squawking, panicked mass. An enormous, mottled black head towers over the copse of tall trees at the edge of the beach not three hundred yards away and focuses beady red eyes on the three of them. When it sees them frozen there on the beach, it opens a large mouth full of rows and rows of jagged, sharp teeth and shrieks.
That explains the smell, Leonard thinks distantly; carnivores have unusually smelly scat. How wonderful that he paid attention in class because now he can remember all sorts of comfortless factoids like this at appropriate times.
Goddamn, what big teeth it has.
"Holy tit-monkeys on a stick," Jim breathes, face drained of color, because that thing’s as big as a motherfucking house. A really, really, really big house. Skyscraper, even. It extends two stubby arms as if to part the grove, but then just rears back, lifting a giant hind leg, and simply crushes the trees in its way. BOOM.
"I think it entirely advisable to run," Spock says conversationally.
They do.
~oOo~
It turns out the massive creature can breathe fire.
It also turns out that three men of varying heights and builds can cram themselves into one improbably tiny crevice in the cliff-side like sardines into a can, if given sufficient motivation to do so.
~oOo~
"You gonna say something about having seen snow before?" Leonard demands, blinking hard against the fat flakes driving into his eyes. God, he hates snow. He hates cold. San Francisco was a purgatory with its eternally gray fog and chill, but it was heaven compared to this hell of below-freezing temperatures. Their Starfleet-issue cold weather gear is top-of-the-line and made of the most revolutionary, streamlined material, but he still feels like a goddamn marshmallow in it, stifled and awkward. Give him heat anyday. Hell, he’ll even take the humid wet-blanket heat of Georgia over all this cold and wet, and now he can’t feel his nose, which he knows, is a sign of impending frostbite, gangrene, and possibly even death.
"That would be incorrect," Spock replies, derailing Leonard’s morbid thoughts. "I have never seen snow before outside of holovids, and I certainly have never experienced it."
Leonard can’t help but soften a little at that. Spock has turned his face upward and is blinking at the snowflakes swirling into his eyes, but in that innocently wonderstruck way that forcibly reminds Leonard of Joanna the time he and Jim took her snowboarding in Lake Tahoe. His eyes are shining, snow is sticking in great, unmelting gobs in his flat, black hair, and his hands are curling at his sides, like he’s barely restraining himself from putting them out to catch the flakes. “Yeah?” Leonard says, not nearly as gruffly as he intends.
"It is...fascinating." Which is the Vulcan equivalent of wow. Then Spock seems to catch himself. With a sidelong glance at Leonard he adds hastily, "As part of my duties, I have studied much about atmospherically created ice crystals. Their unique structure created depending on the surrounding air's temperature and water vapor content is a particularly interesting top-"
Leonard makes a rude noise in reply. "Can't you just enjoy something without analyzing the everlasting hell out of it?" he mutters, kicking snow off his boot.
Spock blinks at him in seemingly honest puzzlement. "I do not understand your question. There are many forms of enjoyment, and I consider my studies to be included in that number.” He pauses, and that Vulcan superiority creeps back into his voice as he adds, “Although you may not find it so."
With that, of course, Leonard has no choice but to peg the smug bastard full in the face with a snowball.
Apparently even a Vulcan can’t maintain his composure with snow up his nose, covering both eyes and dripping off the high arches of his brows. The shock on Spock's face has Leonard doubled over in stitches, and thank god Spock has apparently no idea how to respond because otherwise Leonard would be dead, nerve-pinched meat instead of wheezing rusty laughter and staggering over to a tree for support. "You-haha-you're supposed to duck when someone goes for a handful of snow, you know," Leonard chokes out, and goes off into another bout of helpless laughter.
Spock slowly reaches up, and with impressive gravity, wipes his face off with quick, efficient movements. "That was unnecessary, Doctor."
"Excuse me, but I beg to differ. I think that was very necessary."
Spock bends and starts gathering snow.
"Uh-Spock-" Leonard says, laughter trailing off, eyes widening. Spock has generous hands and inhuman strength, and the ball of snow he’s compacting is getting alarmingly large and looking very, very hard.
Leonard stumbles backwards and dashes to hides behind the tree. Holy fuck, who knew starting a snowball fight with a Vulcan would be so dangerous?
But Spock doesn’t throw the Ice Ball o' Doom at him; after some calm assessment he aims much higher and it misses Leonard entirely. Leonard’s about to taunt him for being a shitty mark when he realizes the reason why as the jarred tree releases its entire burden of snow directly on top of Leonard with a flump and buries him.
He’s cursing and working his way out of the deep pile when Jim, back from scouting just in time to witness this development, drawls in an amused tone, "Only you’d make snowball fighting efficient, Spock."
"It is simply a matter of strategy. A tactic that ends a battle quickly and decisively is always the most efficacious course to take." And that’s deep satisfaction Leonard detects in Spock's tone, and Leonard just isn’t having it because now he has snow down his back and down his pants, and it’s wet and cold and just not okay. He growls, "'Efficacious,' my ass," as he lunges from the snow like a monster from the deep, firing with both hands.
"Hey!" Jim shouts, scrambling for cover but not before he’s liberally splatted by the indiscriminate salvo. "Civilian casualty! Civilian casualty!" Then faintly, after he’s thrown himself over the side of a drift, laughter in his voice: "Oh, the humanity!"
"Doctor," Spock says patiently, standing stock still as Leonard advances, grimly hurling handfuls of snow at him, "as you cannot hurt me with the snow, I have very little incentive to move away."
"Wait until I get close enough to dump some down your pants," Leonard says, and here Spock looks intrigued. That small lift to the corner of his lips is back. "Then I advise you to beware of your surroundings," he says blandly, and folds his hands behind his back.
Leonard gets out a "Whuh-oof!" when he’s suddenly tackled from the side. He and Jim go thrashing, skidding a few feet as Leonard futilely tries to kick him though Jim has him pinned down good, knobby knees pressing into Leonard's thighs and attempting to pin Leonard's wrists. Thank god the marshmallow cold-weather suit is slippery so Jim’s having a hard time of it. Eventually he gives up and opts for scooping snow onto Leonard's head, laughing like a lunatic.
Leonard sputters some choice expletives he usually reserves for days when he spills his morning coffee into his lap, resisting Jim's shouts, "Say uncle! Uncle! Say! It!" with flailing slaps until he remembers his medical training and jabs Jim hard in the pressure point under the armpit. Jim's jacket cushions the blow a little, so Jim just jerks, yelps, and flops off Leonard to lay sprawled on his back, panting. "Cheap shot, Bones."
Leonard groans. "I learned from the best, you hypocrite."
Jim turns his head enough to grin at Leonard. "Can’t just let my CMO maim my first officer, can I?"
"Next time I have you in Medical, we'll see who'll maim who," Leonard mutters. He squints up as Spock looms over him. "Are you all right, Doctor?" Spock asks.
Leonard pushes himself up to his elbows and cracks his neck gingerly. "I'm sure my old ass would feel a helluva lot less broken into ten million pieces if my friends stopped tag-teaming me."
"That is an inaccurate assessment," Spock informs him. "To date, this is only the first time that Jim and I have, as you say, 'tag-teamed' you."
"You’re easier to tackle anyways," Jim chimes in, then pulls himself up to his feet and puts a hand out for Leonard. "Learned never to fuck with a temperamental Vulcan the hard way my first time out, remember?" He doesn’t let go of Leonard's hand even after he helps him up. Jim’s grinning like a kid, snow crusted along one cheek and ground into his golden hair.
"Scarier than-I’ve been too nice with the hypos lately, that’s what." Leonard tugs at his hand but Jim only tightens his grip. Leonard turns his glare on Spock. "And the hell you mean, 'this is only the first time'? You have more times planned?"
"Funny you should ask that," Jim murmurs, with a meaningful glance at Spock. "I asked you a question the last away mission, and you never gave me an answer."
"Wha- You mean the question right before we nearly got squashed into jelly between that giant monster's toes?" That monster that Scotty-with his encyclopedic knowledge of esoteric historic Earth pop culture gained during six months of isolation on Delta Vega with nothing but Keenser and holovid archives for company-had christened 'Godzilla.' Scotty was inordinately excited about the whole debacle.
"Heh. Yeah. That one."
Leonard pauses and searches Jim's face. Damn, Jim looks serious. "I thought you were just joking. Badly, might I add." But hesitance undermines the bite of his words, and he can’t help the stutter of his eyes to guage the barometer of Spock's face. Vulcans would look perfectly placid while having this sort of conversation, open relationship or no.
Spock just adds to his confusion, hoisting an eyebrow at him and saying, "You are thinking entirely too hard about this, Doctor McCoy."
Jim’s a damn good kisser and one helluva opportunist, taking that split second of hesitation to tug Leonard forward by the hand and feather a soft kiss across his mouth. Jim’s lips are cold and rough, but he manages to put a world of want and promise into the simple touch. Leonard is left gasping, instantly hard at the sensual flirtation in the warmth of breath and the slow drag of pliant lips.
He follows as Jim draws back, as involuntarily as a flower turning towards the sun. Jim licks his lips slowly as if savoring the taste, eyes searching Leonard’s face again. He seems about to repeat the question. Leonard’s pretty sure the answer will be yes, if only because he can’t remember what the other options were. He holds his breath, waiting for it, blood rushing in his ears
Jim never has the chance because, of course, everything goes to crap.
"WAAAAAAAAGHHHH!" behind Spock and snow explodes, filling the air and whiting out his vision. Something-or someone-slams bodily into him, knocking him flat onto his back and his head into a snowdrift, the whine of phaser fire and Jim’s shouts barely audible over the snarls and roars of something very large and very angry.
He can’t see anything beyond black hair that makes him sputter and wheeze, and damn, Vulcans are heavier than they look because Spock-it has to be Spock, because his sharp nose is socketed into Leonard's eyeball and Leonard is crushed under his weight, his breath slowly being squeezed out of him.
He only catches glimpses of flailing white furry monster arms and claws and huge yellow teeth-why does every monster they come across have such big fucking teeth, why-then everything goes black.
~oOo~
Leonard’s head is pounding, his sinuses are stuffed, his arms are dangling over his head, and his feet are very cold. He also grows aware of a distant irritation and the pulsing thought of well, this sucks. Eventually he realizes this is because he’s upside down. He opens his eyes.
Ice cave.
Okay.
His shirt and jacket are rucked up in the neighborhood of his armpits, exposing an embarrassing expanse of chilled chest and belly.
Great. He shoves at it, then looks around again.
Jim’s a gold blur off to his left.
Better.
They’re both hanging from the ceiling by their feet in ice blocks. That’s certainly a new one in the annals of shitty away missions, he grouches to himself as sarcastically as he can make it, because sarcasm is good.
Sarcasm helps control the wild fear that kindles in him at seeing Jim's limp form, because panic won't help either of them. He needs to keep his mind on practicalities, dammit-like getting them down somehow, treating Jim, finding Spock, and getting them all the fuck out of here without getting eaten-and sarcasm neatly compartmentalizes the situation into simplified, manageable chunks.
So-taking stock: crazy hairy fanged ice monster? Nowhere to be seen.
Neither is Spock, for that matter. Or Leonard's communicator.
"Dammit all to hell," he growls aloud until it occurs to him that whatever caught them and stashed them there like entrees in a walk-in freezer might still be around, if not seen.
The gold blur twitches. A rusty groan. "Bones? You awake?"
He closes his eyes in relief. "Yeah. Unfortunately," he replies, dryly spoken words doing little to cover the way his voice wobbles. Thank god. Thank god.
The gold blur starts wriggling around, reaching up towards its feet with little grunts of effort, and then flopping back down again. "I really hate ice planets, Bones." Plaintively.
Days like this, he hates being on any planet with Jim Kirk, because Jim has just the sort of dismal luck that likes company. At least Jim's luck also always has a silver lining. They’re alive. Jim is alive. So, as far as Leonard is concerned, they’re only a little behind the curve.
Leonard gets his voice under enough control to say, "You hurt anywhere, Jim?" willing his eyes to focus so he can at least give Jim a visual examination. The pressure in his head and sinuses from being upside down for lord knows how long doesn’t help.
Jim pats himself, then wiggles his fingers experimentally. "S'okay." Jim’s lied to him about this sort of shit before, hiding a sprained wrist or a concussion until Leonard tracked him down and physically dragged him to sickbay, but right now he seems alert and limber enough, considering.
"You see Spock anywhere?"
Jim looks around. When he finally answers, his voice is sharp. "No."
In the silence they gauge the possibility that Spock might be dead.
Nah. Spock is a tough bastard, Leonard decides. Vulcans’re probably tough and gamy, so the monster probably wouldn’t have eaten him, not with two tender and delicious human morsels on hand. Well, he amends, if Spock wasn’t the appetizer. Sarcasm. Sarcasm is good.
No, he can’t be dead. Leonard won’t allow even the possiblity to cross his mind. Don’t you dare be dead, he thinks fiercely in Spock’s direction.
But Jim is silent, his face turned away. Leonard can’t focus well enough to see if he’s crying. "Jim..." he murmurs, reaching out in alarm, wishing Jim were close enough to touch. Dammit, this is why he can’t take Jim up on his impulsive offer, tempting though it is. Only the hopelessly stupid or the heartlessly cruel would interfere in the sort of epic partnership that Jim and Spock have, the kind that alters history and is celebrated in legend and song.
Leonard is neither.
Most of the time.
Jim shakes himself all over. Then he says firmly, "We'll get through this, Bones." As if the strength of his conviction will simply make it so.
"I never doubted that." Leonard's tone is soft. His sinuses are blocked up, so he also snuffles a little.
"Ah. Well-good." Jim sounds snuffly too.
They give it a moment.
Then:
"So. Does Captain Awesome have a plan yet?" Leonard says with deliberate nonchalance, though there’s something lumpy stuck in his throat and a suspicious prickling at the corners of his eyes.
Jim makes a valiant effort to sound cheerful. "You know, Bones, sometimes I just can't tell when you're being sarcastic and when you're being serious." Leonard turns his head and watches Jim heave some quick breaths to pump himself up and start doing a power sit-up, reaching for his feet again.
Leonard raises an upside-down eyebrow, impressed and more than a little appreciative of the flex of Jim’s abs. "Been eating your protein cubes, Jim?"
"Feel free to help," Jim gripes, but without rancor. When he reaches his feet, he pulls a knife from its sheath in his boot and starts hacking away at the ice. The sound of it echoes loud in the cave as Jim works. Leonard hangs there and holds his breath, hoping the beast isn’t around to notice this not-so-subtle escape attempt.
But of course Jim’s luck comes ‘round to bite them on the ass again, because speak of the devil.
“Jim!” he shouts just as a deafening roar fills the cave, and large, white, hairy, and toothy with flailing arms lunges forward from wherever it’s been hiding. Jim shouts Leonard’s name and hacks more furiously before flopping back down again and brandishing the blade at it.
But it doesn’t attack them; it rushes past and into a pack of security red shirts who’re suddenly flooding into the cavern. Sulu’s leading the charge, grim and determined and holding the longest, sharpest sword Leonard ever clapped eyes on.
“No phaser fire!” Sulu shouts, ducking as the creature swipes at them and a red shirt who looks vaguely familiar goes flying into the wall with a sodden crunch. Good thinking-don’t hit the captives, Leonard thinks approvingly. Always knew Sulu was command material, at all times quiet but cocksure, understated but making sure shit gets done.
Sulu fences around a bit then lunges, the blade flashing. The monster roars in pain and Jim whoops in triumph as the creature turns and beats a hasty retreat, leaving a trail of blood in the snow.
~oOo~
Leonard considers himself something of an expert in xeno-medicine. Sure, he realized pretty early on that despite studying all the known species in med school-including a dead Klingon-what he doesn’t know could fill a black hole. But after (multiple) outbreaks of sex pollen, crazy disinhibiting alien red juice, Sulu's habit of picking up creepy tentacled plants (with sex pollen), and the discovery of the Tribble N3M34 flu, he thinks it’s a pretty safe bet that now he’s a god in the field of frontier medicine. Compared to other CMOs, at least, because he’s lucky enough to assigned to the Enterprise, which is not only the flagship of the Federation but also the flagship for attracting every single bacterium, virus, parasite, and homicidal alien species in the fucking universe.
Yet he still doesn’t have the foggiest idea why he has a Vulcan standing in his sickbay office with his shirt off.
“You have been avoiding the bridge,” Spock says without preamble, his expanses of skin and his surprisingly hairy chest staring Leonard full in the face. “Is there something wrong, Doctor McCoy?”
Leonard opens and closes his mouth. “No. Not really.” His answer really isn’t intended to be sarcastic or even wry; the resolution he’d made to not interfere with and potentially screw up Jim's relationship with Spock is still firm, though untested. He isn’t avoiding them, exactly-he just has a lot to keep him occupied in Medical, is all.
And-chest. Huh. It’s not like he’s never seen a bare chest before.
“You have not sustained any lasting effects from our previous away mission?”
Besides his insatiable urge to strangle Scotty every time the man nudges him and mutters ‘monster’ under his breath like they’re sharing a private joke? “I’m supposed to be asking those questions,” he snaps, then adds, “But for your information, no.”
Spock purses his lips. It’s a tic that always drives Leonard bugfuck crazy. “Perhaps it will please you to know that the Captain has refused Commander Scott’s requests to formally rename the last planet ‘Hoth’?"
Leonard wouldn’t have Spock know for the world how much that statement fills him with a petty glee that ought to be beyond a man his age. He coughs instead and gestures vaguely in Spock’s direction. “Uh, what happened to your shirt?”
Spock blinks and looks down at himself like he honestly can’t remember why his shirt’s vanished like it’s been blown off in a high-powered wind turbine. “Your examination will simply be more efficient in this manner,” he says like he can’t believe it isn’t obvious to Leonard, and it’s like Leonard’s back in med school, caught out by a professor, and he’s fumbling for his tricorder before his brain catches up to him. He asks sharply, “And why do you need to be examined? Again?" Unless it’s to check your head, he adds mentally.
“I…” Spock pauses. “I believe I have contracted a form of acute viral rhinopharyngitis during our…adventures on the planet Nivix V.”
Leonard quits fiddling with the tricorder to stare at him. “Acu-you mean you caught a cold?” Do Vulcans even catch colds? He’s never heard of such a thing, but then Vulcans are secretive bastards who keep their medical records close to their chests until something dire and absolutely last-minute crops up that’s guaranteed to raise Leonard’s blood pressure. He’ll have to check with M'Benga. “This isn’t like pon farr, is it?” he asks carefully.
Spock’s exasperation isn’t an obvious thing, even to a seasoned observer like Leonard who probably spends way more of his time watching Spock than is strictly non-stalker-like. Spock's expressions seem to involve psychic powers, like how he can suddenly go from amused but observant silence to fuck off and die in a fire silence, and like how the angles of his eyebrows can express varying degrees of WTF, Jim? Currently, I find you satisfactorily intellectually gifted 92.57% of the time but now I am forced to re-evaluate comes rolling off him in waves.
“I am unused to particularly low temperatures, and as such, my immune systems were apparently compromised and I have, as you say, ‘caught a cold,’" Spock tells him. “While it is uncommon to my species, the symptoms are very similar to those in humans.”
“Hm.” Now that he’s listening for it, Leonard does detect a slight hoarseness to Spock’s voice, and no, feeling guilty over the snowball fight is not on the agenda. Spock was just lucky the snow monster hadn’t captured him and strung him up by his ankles like a slab of beef too, and was instead left outside half-buried in the snow.
Apparently Vulcans are unappetizing. Leonard loves being right, and after getting over the relief of finding Spock whole and uneaten, the thought of it never fails to warm the cockles of his cantankerous heart and bring a smile to his face.
He’s always careful when he examines Spock. He knows the Vulcan doesn’t like to be touched without warning, touch telepathy being what it is, so he startles badly when a long-fingered hand wraps itself around his wrist as Leonard is frowning over the data and trying to remember if the medication’s contra-indicated for Vulcans or not. He jerks his gaze up to find Spock hitched closer, his narrow face intent.
Leonard has to keep himself from drawing away out of surprise. Jim’s apparently teaching Spock a thing or two about personal space because he’s waaaaay inside Leonard’s. “Logic dictates that it is highly likely you are avoiding the bridge to the purpose of avoiding either the captain or myself,” Spock observes.
"Maybe I'm just busy," he retorts and hikes an eyebrow at Spock, daring him to call him out on the lie.
Spock hoists one in return. "Jim's proposition may have been excessively direct and...” He seems to be searching for the correct word. “…Ill-timed."
Leonard keeps his eyebrow pegged where it is, because that’s certainly one way to put it.
Spock continues, "And after some consideration, I have come to the conclusion that perhaps your reluctance originates from an misapprehension of my acquiescence to this proposal."
Leonard's voice comes in a hoarse croak. "And what-you're…acquiescing?"
In response, Spock drops his gaze and trails his fingers in lingering touches down Leonard's wrist.
Why hasn’t Leonard noticed before how long and elegant Spock’s hands are? They're square-nailed, the pads rough and tickling against the skin of Leonard's arm which breaks out in gooseflesh, and he stares, mesmerized, as Spock rubs a slow thumb over his palm. It’s such a simple touch, but also a shockingly sensual one; Leonard has to bite back a moan when he remembers something Jim mentioned in passing. To Vulcans, a touch of hands can be as intimate as sex.
Spock is having hand-sex with him. Holy shit.
His cock doesn’t seem to think that’s disturbing at all, because it’s like the nerve endings in his hand have a direct line to his crotch and severed the ones to his brain. He can’t move, feet rooted to the floor, his world focused on the fingers trailing his life-lines. Spock looks back up through his thick, black eyelashes and how could Leonard have ever thought those eyes expressionless? They’re liquid dark and heated, his thin lips loose and parted, and if just an hour ago you asked Leonard H. McCoy if a Vulcan could be seductive, he’d have laughed in your face, but now he can’t laugh at the want blatant in every line of Spock’s body.
Leonard’s other hand relaxes, and his tricorder falls.
The noise breaks the spell. The tricorder’s one of the expensive ones meant for in-sickbay use, not a hardier field model, so it hits the floor with a tinkle of glass and a rattle of loose parts. He looks down and swears, because though Jim played fast and loose with money while in Academy, as captain he’s proven as balky about signing off on ship requisitions and budgets as a penny-pinching grandmother on a pension, mostly because he hates paperwork with the fire of a thousand burning suns. Leonard and every other department head generally gets around it by having all the forms filled out ahead of time and sticking it under Jim's nose for a signature at strategic times when Jim’s guaranteed to be in a massively good mood-which is usually 1. after dinner, 2. before an away mission, not after, while Jim is still filled with dreams of adventure and excitement instead of brooding about all the crazy shit in the universe that only seems to happen to him, and 3. after he’s gotten laid.
More pain-in-the-ass work for Leonard, is what it boils down to.
Spock looks down too. Leonard pulls out of Spock’s grip and picks up the shattered tricorder, muttering under his breath, hand-sex temporarily forgotten under all the paperwork and careful, paranoid timing this’ll entail. Spock watches him for a long moment before he says, "Join us after gamma shift tomorrow." And it’s a request, softening what’s otherwise a flat order. Leonard would've missed the nuance if not for the way Spock’s leaning just slightly towards him, his head tilted just so, like he’s just barely keeping himself from touching Leonard again.
Leonard raises an eyebrow at him. Tomorrow, huh? Probably had to coordinate schedules and make a fucking appointment.
Spock lifts his in response.
Leonard hoists it higher, adds a bit of glower.
Spock matches its height, then tilts his head a little more. That flexible corner of his mouth lifts.
Leonard continues to hold Spock's gaze, then, impossibly, Spock's eyebrow climbs even higher and nearly disappears into his bangs.
Leonard hangs on as long as he can, grim determination warring with disbelief because there’s no way he can lose an eyebrowing contest with a Vulcan, just no fucking way, but his face starts to twitch with fatigue and he can’t hold it anymore. "That's cheating, you pickleshit," he complains, rubbing his cramping forehead.
"Your statement is illogical," Spock replies, and Leonard knows, knows that whatever the Vulcan version of smug is, he’s seeing it right now. He growls, "Your eyebrows come naturally at that angle and I gotta work at mine, so if that ain't cheating I don't know what i-" and he can’t continue because Spock grabs his shoulders in those strong, long-boned hands and is licking his way into Leonard's mouth.
His skin is warm, degrees hotter than a human, and the taste of him is strange and metallic, Spock kneading Leonard's shoulders as he angles his head and deepens the kiss. It is all Leonard can do to just go with it, to allow Spock to bend him back over and onto his own desk. Spock fits himself in between Leonard's legs with smooth assurance, his body an amazingly heavy blanket of heated muscle and bone, manhandling him into place with that inhuman strength until Leonard is flat on his back and gasping in shock. Datapads slide onto the floor with a muted clatter, and Leonard reaches for them-god no, no more requisition forms-before Spock captures his wrist again.
Spock looks down at Leonard with those dark eyes and now he’s breathing harder-not nearly as much as Leonard, the stoic bastard-and his cheeks are flushed, his lips wet. He rubs his thumb over the rapidly beating pulse in Leonard's wrist and looks down at where his other hand is splayed against Leonard's ribcage, pale against the blue fabric. "Is this satisfactory?" he wants to know.
Is this satis-? Spoken with that dry, almost business-like tone, when he knows he has Leonard hard and desperate and just barely controlling himself from squirming under him. Leonard more than fleetingly considers taking a chomp out of the closest limb he can reach because his head’s the only thing he can will to move; apparently the rest of his body is happily going along with the program and his crotch is in full mutiny and refusing to move away from Spock's. Leonard’s a doctor, dammit; he can fix Spock up afterwards. No harm, no foul, and damn it’ll be satisfying, that smug bastard and his smug understatements. He’ll give him his goddamn satisfactory.
Then he doesn’t have time for any more indignation because Spock hears that growl of rage and feels god knows whatever Leonard is broadcasting at him, probably porno on all bandwidths-damn touch telepaths-because then Spock moves his hand from ribcage to Leonard’s fly and from there he just as efficiently replaces hand with mouth.
Leonard drops his head over the edge of the desk, breath stuttering in his throat and barely feeling the pain of the lip he catches between his teeth, over the pressure and the wet roughness of Spock's tongue and the divine suction that explodes stars behind eyes screwed shut, and he twists his hand just enough in Spock's loosened grasp to twine their fingers together. Spock flicks a startled glance upwards and their gazes lock.
His grip turns almost painful and Leonard can feel Spock's breath puff faster against the wet base of his cock. Spock is watching him unblinking, absorbing every grimace and gasp and bitten off moan, and riding every involuntary thrust of Leonard's hips until Leonard can’t bear the weight of his regard any more and throws his head back again, clutching at Spock's hand and the desk's edge, a harsh groan through clenched teeth as he comes hard.
He comes back to himself with the sensation of a rough tongue lapping at him, cleaning him with broad sweeps up and down and around the oversensitive head. He twitches. Then the inquisitive tongue moves lower, and he convulses as one ball slips into that hot, wet mouth. It’s laved with precise care, that talented tongue curling and tracing wicked shapes and probably even alphabets for all Leonard knows; the nudge of Spock’s nose and the movements of his breath so ticklish but so sinfully good that Leonard can only writhe as Spock pushes his thighs farther apart for better access. If Spock keeps it up Leonard’s going to be hard again, but he can only manage a broken moan in protest.
Then it’s abruptly gone. Spock’s standing, pulling on and straightening his uniform shirt with efficient tugs, smoothing down his hair, wiping the corner of his mouth. He looks at Leonard sprawled on the broad CMO desk: pants down, shirt up, wet and panting and half-erect, looking freshly fucked and wrung out, and says primly, "The standard dosage for the acute viral rhinopharyngitis medication must be doubled for maximum efficacy in a Vulcan physiology."
If Leonard jabs Spock in the neck with more vim than is strictly necessary, it doesn’t show in the little curl to Spock's lips and the slight laughing crinkle to his eyes. Smug fucking Vulcan, who pulls Leonard into another, rougher kiss as Leonard slams down the hypospray, and then looks into his eyes and says, "Jim's quarters, after gamma shift. Tomorrow."
Then he’s gone, having the last word over his shoulder with, “Perhaps you might consider bringing your requisition requests with you.” Leonard could swear there’s laughter in his voice.
~oOo~
It isn’t like all Leonard's reservations have vanished in one bout of ridiculously good oral sex. It is more that though he trusts Jim with his life, Jim’s an impulsive, shoot-first-charm-later sort of guy who always manages to bulldoze his way smooth by sheer force of personality after he’s gone and kicked sand in everybody's faces. Leonard doesn’t have that kind of charisma, never did, and he knows Spock doesn’t either. They've had to go through life more cautiously than Jim, with far more care for consequences and plans and reasons and the sanctity of their own hides, so if Spock’s decided this isn’t such a bad idea, then Leonard’s willing to give-whatever this is that they’re offering-a try.
Still, at times he has to stop and take a deep breath and remind himself that he trusts both of them, as apprehension and excitement twist their way through his gut.
However, Leonard doesn’t make it to anyone's quarters for quite some time, because he catches the cold too.
It’s a particularly virulent, fast-acting strain, thanks to its incubation in Spock's hybrid physiology. Leonard hates being sick, hates it with a passion, but he’s a doctor, dammit, and practical enough to know when it’s best to admit defeat and bow out while the bowing is good. Avoiding infecting the rest of the crew is pretty damn important too-if only, he tells himself, to save himself some work later. God knows he has too much of that as it is.
He’s on his way out-albeit slowly-leaving last-minute instructions, when Chapel sneaks up and hyposprays him into submission with rather unnecessary enthusiasm. "Blugh," is all he manages, staring at her with bulging, betrayed eyes before his knees give out and he keels forward onto his face.
The next few days are a blur. He hallucinates that his blankets are swelling with fluid and are actively trying to smother him, and he beats them back with a flurry of well-placed slaps. He sleeps, he wakes. Jim is sitting there, reading aloud to him from a padd. An isolation field shimmers around the bed. Is Jim a hallucination? Leonard can’t tell. He wishes he were hallucinating Chapel and her ridiculously large hyposprays. Damn, those things fucking hurt! Jim stops reading and looks at him. "Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it?" he says with a cheerful grin, and Leonard fades out again halfway through rolling his eyes.
Blink.
The plomeek soup actually smells good, so he’s probably dying. Spock is standing there stiffly, bowl in hand. "You must eat," he says and now Leonard definitely knows he’s dying, because he has that clarity of vision granted before it’s time to go into the light and with it, he can tell Spock’s feeling a little guilty for killing him. "You are maudlin and delirious," Spock replies, even more stiffly, so either Leonard said that aloud or he’s suddenly developed telepathic powers. Ho shit.
Spock narrows his eyes at him. "I will call Doctor M'Benga. Your condition appears to be worsening." No, no more hyposprays, Leonard thinks despairingly. Spock sounds bemused. "I find your antipathy to hyposprays exceedingly ironic, Doctor."
My name's Leonard, you damn hobgoblin, Leonard thinks indignantly. You give a guy a little oral, I think you're entitled to call him by his first name.
Spock shifts in surprise. "Leo-nard," he repeats, slowly, awkwardly, like he’s trying to fit his tongue around a sharp rock. Then a muttered, "Fascinating."
Ha, Leonard thinks triumphantly. I am telepa-
Blink.
Jim is back. The isolation field is gone. “What did you say to Spock?” he wants to know, and Leonard completely misses the humor in Jim’s question. He only seizes on the name, the name, grasping at associations free floating at the back of his mind. It’s like the name on Jim’s lips shatters a dam, the combination of the fever and whatever meds he’s hopped up on flooding a torrent of words from his brain to his mouth with absolutely no barrier or filter at all. “Never hated Spock,” is what comes out, his mind detached and his body buzzing and far away.
Jim looks startled but Leonard plunges on before he can answer: “Even like Spock. Sometimes. Was only ever jealous-because-because-we’re friends, you n me, friends since Academy and that fucking shuttle. I don’t make friends easy like you do, and you two have this thing, a chemistry that anyone can see, you fit together like a jigsaw puzzle and I can’t compete with that-“
Jim puts a hand on his arm, mouth open like he’s going to interrupt, but Leonard just babbles on and on. When he comes back to himself from that far away floaty place, he finds himself droning, “Love you Jimmy, always have, love-“ and Jim isn’t looking surprised, not one fucking bit.
“Confessions when you're high are just so cliché,” Jim tells him, smiling a little but his eyes are serious and impossibly, vividly, blue. Leonard is drowning in them.
Jim catches his hand before he can poke him in the eye with a finger to see if the color will rub off. “Bones-listen to me,” he says earnestly. “You don't have to compete-there's no competition. Never was. You’re my best friend and my conscience, and we’re a team just as much as Spock and I are a team and the three of us are a triumvirate, you understand me? We ground each other in ways that us apart or even paired can't, and-” He squeezes Leonard’s hand. “Bones, you know I wasn’t joking when I asked you to-it can’t-won’t be just a one-time thing. Spock told me about you two, and-Bones, you wouldn’t believe how much Spock wants-”
“Spock has sexy hands,” Leonard observes, and grins dopily at the ceiling.
“Are you even listening?" Jim sounds exasperated and aggrieved. "I'm trying to tell you that I love you back, you drugged up asshole. Hello?” As Leonard fades, tunneling deeper into sleep, he thinks he hears Jim say, I think Spock does too. I mean, plomeek soup?
Part 2