Switch 25/50
Sep. 18th, 2009 09:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ceres_liberaTitle: "Switch" (25/50)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ceres_libera
Rating: R to NC-17
Summary: The life and times of Leonard H. McCoy MD/PhD … If Leonard McCoy's life could get any fucking weirder, it would be … Jesus, he didn't even want to think what that could possibly mean, because it's already been too fucking weird to make any kind of rational sense.
Canon: Based in the ST:XI universe, but strongly influenced by all canon ST-verses.
Characters: McCoy/Kirk, with eventual appearances by all other ST:XI characters.
Notes: I'm not entirely happy with this section, but I'm moving on after cutting scenes out and re-writing and re-writing until my head hurts. Anyway. 2257 dawns, and brings another Remembrance Day. The slowtorture burn continues.
+
Christmas and New Year’s had been relatively quiet, especially after their conversation very early on Christmas Day. Jim seemed to be in a thoughtful mood, but Leo wouldn’t go so far as to say that he was brooding. What he was doing was spending a lot of time reading things on his PADD, and not necessarily talking, but he wasn’t doing it alone. They’d spent a fair amount of time together, just hanging out. Jim had trounced him in chess, and he’d cleaned Jim’s clock, and that of several KFFers, in an all-night poker game that ended early on New Year’s Day. Technically, he’d showed up at the party while it was still New Year’s Eve, although 2257 had dawned soon enough after his arrival. After the previous year’s fiasco, Jim had taken it upon himself to chaperone the KFF, and although almost no one was entirely sober, and the party wasn’t exactly dry, there were no fights or illicit substances. Jim had saved him some bourbon to call in the New Year with. It was a fine sipping whiskey, and he savored it while he beat the pants off the girl and boy geniuses of the KFF, something which he had to admit was extremely satisfying, even if they weren’t playing for anything more than snacks. He’s ended up with quite a pile of Subie’s pocky sticks, not to mention some other exotic fare that he’d never seen before and most certainly wouldn’t be eating.
He and Jim had stumbled out at midday on New Year’s Day to find the sun shining weakly. They treated themselves to a Dim sum in San Francisco’s old Chinatown. Even if it wasn’t yet the New Year in Terra’s Asian cultures, there was still a healthy respect for the tradition of New Year’s, no matter who was celebrating it. Their small table was decorated with a stalk of sunflower and bamboo in a vase, and when the check was delivered after a delicious meal of fragrant buns and tea, there was a red packet with chocolate for each of them. Jim sent the bill back with tiny Mandarin oranges from the bag that he’d bought as they walked through Chinatown, and insisted that Leo calculate the tip so that the total bill began and ended with the number 8. When they left, the owner came out and spoke to them, the oranges in her hand. Leo listened bemusedly while she and Jim spoke, liking the changes in the tones of Jim’s voice as it twisted and turned over the different musicality of the Mandarin tongue.
His amusement was not shared by the young woman also in Cadet reds (for luck, Jim had insisted they wear theirs), whose eyes flashed as she stepped into the vestibule, followed by Gaila. Leo was amused by the constant irritation that Cadet Uhura always seemed to express in Jim’s presence, especially whenever Jim happened to be expressing his linguistic capacities. It had long been Uhura’s plan to take firsts in all the linguistic disciplines, and Jim’s bursting upon the scene had been a challenge to her, and a thorn in her side.
Of course, Jim didn’t help things any just by being Jim. It was clear to Leo that he loved languages, but he was nowhere near interested in them being his vocation. He was clearly on the command track, but he was challenging Uhura for linguistic supremacy just because he could –- just because it would get under her skin. Uhura was an undeniably bright young woman, but she had yet to figure out that as long as she was paying some kind of attention to Jim Kirk, his ego was appeased. Leo knew that Jim’s efforts at wooing Uhura were more for show than anything else, but that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t mock them.
“Happy New Year, Cadets!” Leo drawled pleasantly.
“Happy New Year,” Uhura murmured back, eyes barely moving from Kirk more than perfunctorily.
“Doctor!” Gaila said, moving past her roommate to brush a kiss against his lips. “I hear that a New Year’s kiss is lucky.”
“I think that’s supposed to happen at midnight, Gaila darlin',” Leo said.
“Oh well,” she said with a shrug, pressing another soft kiss to his mouth. “It must be midnight somewhere.”
Leo gave her waist a squeeze and Gaila snuggled a little closer in the small vestibule. “Are you ladies here for Dim sum?” Leo asked courteously.
“Yes,” Gaila said, when it appeared that Uhura would not respond. “Nyota says that eating Dim sum on New Year’s Day is lucky.”
“Why, Jim said the same thing,” Leo said drily. “As is wearing red.”
“Yes!” Gaila agreed with enthusiasm. “And one new item of clothing. I’m wearing new underpants.” She paused, eyes sparkling. “They’re red.”
“I bet they are, darling,” Leo said, feeling even more crowded as Jim finished his conversation with the owner, bowed and then threw an arm around Leo’s shoulders, feigning that he hadn’t noticed Uhura and Gaila until then.
“Ladies!” he said, “Happy New Year, or should I say …” he launched into a series of phrases that made Leo’s head spin, and caused Uhura to raise an eyebrow and answer him in kind.
“Should we leave them alone?” Leo asked Gaila.
“They are kind of boring sometimes,” she admitted.
“Hey!” Kirk and Uhura protested at the same time.
“Happy New Year, Jim,” Gaila said sweetly, leaning across Leo to kiss him.
“Boring?” Jim said petulantly to Leo, his lips still pursed in the shape of a kiss.
“Our table is ready,” Uhura snapped. “Dr. McCoy, it’s always nice to see you,” she said as she walked away.
“She loves me,” Jim said aloud to her retreating back before he fixed his blue stare on Gaila again. “Boring?”
“Something for you to work on in the New Year,” Gaila said with a giggle, brushing a kiss against Jim’s cheek as she walked by. “Doctor …” she waggled her fingers at Leo and he blew her a kiss.
“Boring?” Jim said to Leo, voice incensed.
“Boring,” Leo agreed, opening the door and stepping outside with Jim still half-hanging off of him.
“How do you figure that?” Jim said.
“No matter what language you speak to that woman, she’s still gonna shoot you down,” Leo pointed out.
“But I'm wearing her down,” Kirk insisted, “like water on a rock.”
“Is that the erosion method, or just plain ol’ water torture?” he said as Kirk scoffed. “Because from where I’m standing, you ain’t a step closer to getting anywhere near her brand new 2257 red panties than you were last year.”
“So you say – wait, brand new panties? Bones!”
Kirk had stopped walking, while Leo kept on going, whistling under his breath. “If you weren’t showing off so much, you’d learn interesting things,” Leo said. “Make a resolution.”
+
Although Leo’s scientific and skeptical nature would not allow him to embrace superstitions or believe in omens, he couldn’t help but feel relief that in 2257, Remembrance Day would be celebrated on January 5th, which was a Monday. Of course, that didn’t mean that January 4th wasn’t the 24th anniversary of the Kelvin’s destruction and Jim’s birth, but it did mean that Jim got a bit of a respite on his actual birthday, that he didn’t have to be reminded by solemn ritual and public gatherings of what the day represented to the Federation. Still, he wasn’t foolish enough to believe that this respite would mean that Jim would be easier about celebrating his birthday. He didn’t think that there would ever come a time that Jim would see his birthday as a day to be remembered fondly, a day for taking stock and making future plans. Hell, even those people who claimed to hate their birthdays had nothing on Jim Kirk in that regard. It would be up to him, as it had been last year, to make sure that there was some positive remembrance of the day of Jim’s birth. He owed that to Jim as a friend, but he wasn’t stupid. Jim was going to make him work for it. And he knew Jim well enough by now to know that he wouldn’t find Jim at Finnegan’s this year, that Jim would take the rare opportunity for privacy and go to ground with impunity.
True to form, Jim stopped answering his comm on Saturday, and Leo knew that the hunt was on. Whether or not Jim ever confirmed how he truly felt about Leo or acted on it, this was one of the tests that Gram had warned him about. It was up to Leo to find the trail and follow the bread crumbs into the woods.
Prove it.
He heard the echo of those words in his head while he pondered where Jim could be. During the long weeks of his recuperation, he’d come to believe that his fever dream of Jim kissing him was half-dream, half-reality. He knew that his own confession had been. Jim wanted proof. A year ago, Leo would’ve said that Jim wanted to be proven right to not believe in or trust in love, that he would have preferred not to be found, and that he would have resented Leo when he was found – all the ways he’d behaved when Leo had found and practically had to force him to drink a toast. Finding Jim at Finnegan’s had been logical, easy. Nothing about finding Jim this year was going to be easy.
Leonard McCoy was not Jim Kirk. He did believe in no-win situations. But he was stubborn and he was smart, and goddamnit, he was going to prove that he knew Jim, and that he wasn’t so easily shaken. He was a McCoy, after all, and he had his pride.
+
By Sunday, Leo had thought of and discarded a number of possibilities. He’d even given some consideration to Iowa -- there’d probably be a grave there for George Kirk, even if his body was nowhere near it, and more than likely some kind of memorial park. But that would require a shuttle trip and as angry as Jim had been with him for almost dying, he sincerely doubted that Jim would subject him to that. Besides, his instincts told him that Jim was still here in San Francisco, and most likely somewhere on campus. He wandered the grounds, trying to think like Jim, trying to find meaning in what he was seeing around him. He even stopped by the Kelvin Memorial, looking up at the hollow-eyed bronze of George Kirk that looked so much like Jim, before casting his eyes over the list of names.
They all died, he heard Jim’s voice saying in his head. He’d been talking about Tarsus, but this had been the first loss, the crucible that Jim had been born from, the storm and fire in space. What had happened between this day and the Children’s Revolution was still a mystery, but he had no doubt that Jim’s character had been forged early on. There was no way that he could have survived Tarsus otherwise.
He thumbed the viewscreen on his comm, trying to get an overview of the campus buildings. Jim was here, somewhere, he was sure of it. He returned to his room and studied the campus map, letting his eyes go unfocused and his mind wander, idly spinning the Enterprise salt shaker on the dark Christmas tree. Just like the year before, it had shut itself off on January 1st, the happy sparkle of the stars only lasting a week before they died. He sat bolt upright and studied the map, tapping the screen when he found the building on the edge of campus, as far from the city’s lights as possible. He nodded, sure of himself now.
+
Hours later, Leo stood at the door of the campus astronomical observatory, looking at the dark and quiet building, not quite as sure of himself.
He’d waited until the campus was still and quiet, and dressed himself in dark, warm clothes to better obscure himself from the prying eyes of the campus cameras. He watched from the shadows as the cameras ran a circuit of the area around the astronomical observatory and then quietly climbed the stairs, pressing into a darkened corner on their next sweep. He waited two more rounds before he moved, trying to convince himself that he was right to have made this choice, then moved to the front door keypad, holding his breath as he used gloved fingers to type the code for his dorm room into it. With a whoosh, the front door to the observatory popped open, and Leo stifled the chuckle that rose up his lips, swiping the hair off his forehead with a nervous hand. He’d been right to follow the breadcrumbs here. He stopped gloating enough to slip inside the door, following the dim floor lighting. If Jim was here in this building, there’s only one place he’d be – well, there would have been two, but with the moon nearly full and rising, there was only so much that San Francisco’s exceptional ambient light dampening system could do. That reasoning had led him to rule out the possibility of the small observation area that housed the telescope at the top of the building. Instead, he followed the signs to the cosmos visualization center, the high-ceilinged domed room that used to be called a planetarium back in Horatio’s day.
Leo had a moment of doubt when he opened the door to the planetarium and saw nothing projected up on the ceiling. Then he heard the click of a button, and the tap of keys, and he knew that he’d guessed right.
“Over here, Bones,” Jim’s voice said from the center of the room. He was speaking quietly, but his voice echoed in the cavernous space.
Leo kept his eyes on the ground, navigating down the aisles using the dimly lit strips of the same type that you’d see on shuttles … or star ships. He swallowed a shudder and thought longingly of the flasks that he’d tucked inside his boots. He wasn’t looking forward to whatever Jim had cooked up for this evening, that was for sure.
“Nice outfit,” Jim said wryly. Leo took off his pea coat and piled it atop Jim’s. Jim was sitting at the console that the instructor usually occupied in the few demonstrations that he’d seen here. His arms were crossed over the dark mock turtleneck he’d worn with a pair of black paratrooper pants. “You know the cameras measure non-visually, right?”
“Yes, Jim,” Leo said sarcastically. “Even doctors know about heat signatures and the like. Still, it looks like you went with the same idea, so I’m not sure who you’re mocking here.”
Jim tilted his head in agreement, his expression amused. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, spinning a half circle in the chair.
Leo watched him, waiting.
“So,” Jim began finally, half-turned away from him so that all he could see was his profile. “I wrote this program.”
“OK,” Leo said, when he didn’t continue. “Are you gonna run it?”
He watched Jim’s chest rise like a bellows, as he took a long breath in through his nose and then exhaled in a slow, calming stream, and felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Jesus, fuck. Jim was anxious. “Jim?”
“Yeah,” he answered, scratching the right side of his head vigorously. “Yeah. That’s why we’re here, right?”
“Jim,” Leo said steadily. “We’re here to do whatever it is that you need to do, but we don’t have to do anything.”
Jim turned around in his chair and faced Leo fully for the first time. Leo didn’t shrink from Jim’s blue gaze. He nodded. “Let’s do this, Bones,” he said decisively, and stood up from the chair. He clapped Leo on the back as he walked by him, and strode to the centermost point of the room. He turned with an expectant air, and Leo followed him.
“Lay down,” Jim ordered quietly.
Leo raised an eyebrow, but did as Jim said. He heard the rip of Velcro and looked up to see Jim pulling a remote controller out of one of his pockets.
Jim pointed the controller at the booth and all the lights in the hall went out.
Leo blinked in the suddenly inky blackness and waited. Above him, the stars began to appear on the dome of the ceiling. He heard Jim lay down, and put out a hand, only to feel the brush of Jim’s hair against his fingers. “What?” he lifted his head to see that Jim had laid down so that his head was next to Leo’s, but his feet were facing the other way.
Jim turned his head to look at him. When Leo lay back down, he shifted so that the back of his head was resting against Leo’s shoulder. “You make a good pillow, Bones,” Jim remarked.
Leo rested his head against Jim’s more bony shoulder. “I’m pretty sure you got the better end of this deal.”
Jim smiled, just a curve of his lips. When he turned his head away from the projections of the endless night above them, his eyes were the darkest blue that Leo could recall, his eyes searching Leo’s face. He turned his head back toward the stars. “My grandfather would have disagreed with you, you know,” he said quietly. “He would have said that confronting the thing that you’re most afraid of is the one thing that you have to do.”
Leo watched the Adam’s Apple working in Jim’s throat. His voice sounded dry and strained. He bent his leg up and pulled one of the flasks out of his boot. “Catch,” he said to Jim, arcing it up high.
Jim caught the flask one-handed, flashing his teeth in a real smile. “Thanks, Bones,” he murmured.
“Yeah,” Leo said, unscrewing the other flask he’d pulled from his boot. “Should we drink to courage?” he asked, turning his head toward Jim’s.
Jim snorted. “I thought we were drinking for courage,” he said.
“Semantics,” Leo pointed out. He tilted his flask toward Jim and waited until Jim’s was poised before he took a swig. “Is it coincidental that whatever this fear is aligns so well with mine?”
Jim shrugged as best he could, jostling Leo’s head. “Sorry,” he said. “There was no way I could …” he paused. “Sorry, Bones.” He looked sheepish, but Leo was astute enough to recognize that there was a bit of vengeance in Jim’s choice of birthday activities.
He nodded. “Just remember that apology if I throw up on you,” he said, taking another swig.
Jim laughed and pushed a button on the controller and the stars began to move, the outlines of the constellations that he knew blurring as they would to the eye if it could register the jump to warp. Leo felt his insides curl and closed his eyes, disoriented, only to open them at a small noise from Jim. The sky above him was comprised of stars in positions that he didn’t recognize at all, but he was sure he knew what they were.
“I’ve tried to picture it, you know.” Jim reached a hand up and traced the outlines of the alien constellations. “What happened that day. When I was a kid, my mother kept me from really knowing about it. She put a block on the computers at home, and I was too little to work around it. Hell, I didn’t even know it was there until Sam told me,” he paused. “And then … once I knew, I was relentless. I wanted to know more.”
“How old were you, Jim?” Leo asked.
“When I broke through the block?” Jim asked. “Five. Sam told me about the block because he was furious with me, told me that my questions were making our mother cry. He ratted me out to our grandfather – I think he was hoping that Tiberius would rip me a new one.”
“He didn’t, though,” Leo said.
“He told me that if I ever had any questions that I should come ask him, that he’d always tell me the truth,” he nodded, his eyes scanning the starscape. “He always did. He showed me the star charts of where I’d been born, and we stretched them out, all over the floor in the barn so that I could see it from the hayloft. He thought it would help me visualize it.”
“Why was it so important that you see it, Jim?” Leo asked.
“Maybe because she wouldn’t talk to me about it,” Jim answered, after a minute. “My mother. It was like it was this big secret. And it is, really.” Jim pointed the controller at the console. “Most of the data that I fed into the program I got from Pike’s dissertation, and he had to get me clearance to read the unexpurgated version of it.”
“Why?” Leo asked, puzzled.
“It's classified,” Jim said. “I extrapolated from the data feeds from the Kelvin, but a lot of streams were corrupted.” He sat up and twisted around, eyes glued to the expanse above them as the flashes of lightning began to fill the horizon in front of Leo.
Leo shuddered, propping himself up on his elbows. “Good God, Jim,” he whispered. “That can’t be right.” He watched in horror as a huge spaceship appeared, filling a vast section of space. “That can’t be right, Jim – it looks nothing like a warbird – and Jesus, that thing is bigger than a space station.”
“That’s what the sensor readings sent back for data, and they identified themselves as Romulan to Robau. There was no visual of the ship itself that survived,” Jim said. He appeared to be holding his breath. “But you’re right – it didn’t look like that – that’s just the amount of space it filled. All the survivors, all the comm streams describe the ship as having arms and a huge nacelle, but even Pike couldn’t get me access to those drawings.”
Leo looked at Jim, considering. “Does this help, Jim?” he asked. “Is it better than the floor of the barn?”
Jim still couldn’t tear his eyes away from the dark disk that obliterated so much of the horizon. He pressed another button on the control. “This is the Kelvin,” he said quietly.
“Jesus,” Leo breathed out. It was so small, comparatively speaking. “How the hell did he fight that thing off for as long as he did?”
Jim shook his head. “He knew his ship, knew what it could do.” He paused, looked at Leo. “He knew that he had to do it.”
Leo nodded. “To protect you and your mom.”
“And the other people in the escape pods,” Jim said.
“I’m sure he gave a thought to them,” Leo said quietly. “But Jim, he did it for you and your mom.”
Jim took a breath in. “I'm going to do my dissertation in Tactical,” he said.
“OK” Leo said, sitting up and turning away from the image of the tiny Kelvin superimposed over the black disc of the Romulan vessel that obliterated so much of the available sky, blotting out the stars.
"Have you met Donovan, the head of the department?”
Leo shook his head. “Can’t say that I’ve had the pleasure,” he said, taking a hit off his flask. “I’ve heard he’s an asshole.”
Jim followed suit before he spoke. “He told me that it was too bad that Pike had already written the definitive dissertation on the Kelvin, as that would have been the perfect topic for me.”
Leo ground his teeth together in frustration before he spoke. “I would say you’re kiddin' or some shit, but I know you’re not. But you know that his opinion counts for nothing, right?”
“That’s not the point, though, Bones,” Jim said. He waved a hand up at the heavens. “This, all of this, this is what they all see when they look at me. What happened here, in the first minutes I was alive, it defines me to them. And for most of my life, nobody would really tell me anything. Everybody got somber, or reverent, or looked at me with pity. Or they told me my father was a hero,” he shrugged. “Only Tiberius ever talked to me about my father like he was a real person. He was the one who tried to help me see what everyone else was talking about when they talked about the Kelvin. But all the times we talked about this, about what really happened, we were just guessing.” The hand waved in the air again. “It was all top-secret, need-to-know.”
“Wasn’t your grandfather a Captain in the ‘fleet?”
Jim shook his head. “It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that my dad was his kid, or that Tiberius had served with honor. They just … they wouldn’t tell him,” he paused and his voice was wistful. “I wish he’d lived long enough to see this,” he said. “To read all the stuff in Pike’s doctoral dissertation about the decisions that Robau made, about the things that my dad did. He would have loved to have known that.” He was quiet for a long time, his eyes fixed on the mass that represented the Romulan ship. "I guess he didn't have much of a choice, did he? My father."
"I'm sure that he didn't want to leave you, Jim," Leo said steadily.
Jim nodded. "There's audio, you know, of him talking to my mother."
Leo took another swallow from the flask. The whiskey tasted bitter on his tongue.
"I couldn't listen to it," Jim continued quietly. "It wasn't … he was talking to my mom, and … it's bad enough to read the transcript, to know that everybody here has heard what they said to each other." He blinked, and Leo felt the weight of unshed tears in his own eyes, before Jim smiled ruefully. "He did more than just save my life, you know – he wouldn't let my mother name me Tiberius. My grandfather would have loved that, too. He hated his name." Jim was quiet again. "He never even saw me, Bones." Jim pressed the button again, and the space around them moved, shuttles escaping the Kelvin while the firefight raged. "I was on shuttle 37," he said, pointing.
Leo watched as the tiny shuttle was pursued and then saved by a blast of suppressing fire from the Kelvin before the cruiser exploded against the unforgiving blankness of the Romulan ship. One minute it was there, and the next, it was just wreckage, dispersing over the starfield as the shuttles streamed away. "He made sure that you got away," Leo said softly.
Jim nodded. "I didn't realize," he said. "I mean, I knew it, in the abstract, but …" He drew a deep breath in. His shoulders were hunched, and Leo found himself thinking about Cronus, about the burdens that a father, even a loving one, could place on a son. Above them, the black disk shuddered and threw off sparks, then disappeared. Jim watched it happening, then said, "I think it's still out there, that ship. I think it's waiting, out there in the black."
Leo shivered and looped his arm over Jim's shoulders and pulled him close. They sat there below the endless night of space, and watched the alien stars wheel and turn above them in silence.
+
Switch 26/?
Author:
ceres_liberaRating: R to NC-17
Summary: The life and times of Leonard H. McCoy MD/PhD … If Leonard McCoy's life could get any fucking weirder, it would be … Jesus, he didn't even want to think what that could possibly mean, because it's already been too fucking weird to make any kind of rational sense.
Canon: Based in the ST:XI universe, but strongly influenced by all canon ST-verses.
Characters: McCoy/Kirk, with eventual appearances by all other ST:XI characters.
Notes: I'm not entirely happy with this section, but I'm moving on after cutting scenes out and re-writing and re-writing until my head hurts. Anyway. 2257 dawns, and brings another Remembrance Day. The slow
+
Christmas and New Year’s had been relatively quiet, especially after their conversation very early on Christmas Day. Jim seemed to be in a thoughtful mood, but Leo wouldn’t go so far as to say that he was brooding. What he was doing was spending a lot of time reading things on his PADD, and not necessarily talking, but he wasn’t doing it alone. They’d spent a fair amount of time together, just hanging out. Jim had trounced him in chess, and he’d cleaned Jim’s clock, and that of several KFFers, in an all-night poker game that ended early on New Year’s Day. Technically, he’d showed up at the party while it was still New Year’s Eve, although 2257 had dawned soon enough after his arrival. After the previous year’s fiasco, Jim had taken it upon himself to chaperone the KFF, and although almost no one was entirely sober, and the party wasn’t exactly dry, there were no fights or illicit substances. Jim had saved him some bourbon to call in the New Year with. It was a fine sipping whiskey, and he savored it while he beat the pants off the girl and boy geniuses of the KFF, something which he had to admit was extremely satisfying, even if they weren’t playing for anything more than snacks. He’s ended up with quite a pile of Subie’s pocky sticks, not to mention some other exotic fare that he’d never seen before and most certainly wouldn’t be eating.
He and Jim had stumbled out at midday on New Year’s Day to find the sun shining weakly. They treated themselves to a Dim sum in San Francisco’s old Chinatown. Even if it wasn’t yet the New Year in Terra’s Asian cultures, there was still a healthy respect for the tradition of New Year’s, no matter who was celebrating it. Their small table was decorated with a stalk of sunflower and bamboo in a vase, and when the check was delivered after a delicious meal of fragrant buns and tea, there was a red packet with chocolate for each of them. Jim sent the bill back with tiny Mandarin oranges from the bag that he’d bought as they walked through Chinatown, and insisted that Leo calculate the tip so that the total bill began and ended with the number 8. When they left, the owner came out and spoke to them, the oranges in her hand. Leo listened bemusedly while she and Jim spoke, liking the changes in the tones of Jim’s voice as it twisted and turned over the different musicality of the Mandarin tongue.
His amusement was not shared by the young woman also in Cadet reds (for luck, Jim had insisted they wear theirs), whose eyes flashed as she stepped into the vestibule, followed by Gaila. Leo was amused by the constant irritation that Cadet Uhura always seemed to express in Jim’s presence, especially whenever Jim happened to be expressing his linguistic capacities. It had long been Uhura’s plan to take firsts in all the linguistic disciplines, and Jim’s bursting upon the scene had been a challenge to her, and a thorn in her side.
Of course, Jim didn’t help things any just by being Jim. It was clear to Leo that he loved languages, but he was nowhere near interested in them being his vocation. He was clearly on the command track, but he was challenging Uhura for linguistic supremacy just because he could –- just because it would get under her skin. Uhura was an undeniably bright young woman, but she had yet to figure out that as long as she was paying some kind of attention to Jim Kirk, his ego was appeased. Leo knew that Jim’s efforts at wooing Uhura were more for show than anything else, but that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t mock them.
“Happy New Year, Cadets!” Leo drawled pleasantly.
“Happy New Year,” Uhura murmured back, eyes barely moving from Kirk more than perfunctorily.
“Doctor!” Gaila said, moving past her roommate to brush a kiss against his lips. “I hear that a New Year’s kiss is lucky.”
“I think that’s supposed to happen at midnight, Gaila darlin',” Leo said.
“Oh well,” she said with a shrug, pressing another soft kiss to his mouth. “It must be midnight somewhere.”
Leo gave her waist a squeeze and Gaila snuggled a little closer in the small vestibule. “Are you ladies here for Dim sum?” Leo asked courteously.
“Yes,” Gaila said, when it appeared that Uhura would not respond. “Nyota says that eating Dim sum on New Year’s Day is lucky.”
“Why, Jim said the same thing,” Leo said drily. “As is wearing red.”
“Yes!” Gaila agreed with enthusiasm. “And one new item of clothing. I’m wearing new underpants.” She paused, eyes sparkling. “They’re red.”
“I bet they are, darling,” Leo said, feeling even more crowded as Jim finished his conversation with the owner, bowed and then threw an arm around Leo’s shoulders, feigning that he hadn’t noticed Uhura and Gaila until then.
“Ladies!” he said, “Happy New Year, or should I say …” he launched into a series of phrases that made Leo’s head spin, and caused Uhura to raise an eyebrow and answer him in kind.
“Should we leave them alone?” Leo asked Gaila.
“They are kind of boring sometimes,” she admitted.
“Hey!” Kirk and Uhura protested at the same time.
“Happy New Year, Jim,” Gaila said sweetly, leaning across Leo to kiss him.
“Boring?” Jim said petulantly to Leo, his lips still pursed in the shape of a kiss.
“Our table is ready,” Uhura snapped. “Dr. McCoy, it’s always nice to see you,” she said as she walked away.
“She loves me,” Jim said aloud to her retreating back before he fixed his blue stare on Gaila again. “Boring?”
“Something for you to work on in the New Year,” Gaila said with a giggle, brushing a kiss against Jim’s cheek as she walked by. “Doctor …” she waggled her fingers at Leo and he blew her a kiss.
“Boring?” Jim said to Leo, voice incensed.
“Boring,” Leo agreed, opening the door and stepping outside with Jim still half-hanging off of him.
“How do you figure that?” Jim said.
“No matter what language you speak to that woman, she’s still gonna shoot you down,” Leo pointed out.
“But I'm wearing her down,” Kirk insisted, “like water on a rock.”
“Is that the erosion method, or just plain ol’ water torture?” he said as Kirk scoffed. “Because from where I’m standing, you ain’t a step closer to getting anywhere near her brand new 2257 red panties than you were last year.”
“So you say – wait, brand new panties? Bones!”
Kirk had stopped walking, while Leo kept on going, whistling under his breath. “If you weren’t showing off so much, you’d learn interesting things,” Leo said. “Make a resolution.”
+
Although Leo’s scientific and skeptical nature would not allow him to embrace superstitions or believe in omens, he couldn’t help but feel relief that in 2257, Remembrance Day would be celebrated on January 5th, which was a Monday. Of course, that didn’t mean that January 4th wasn’t the 24th anniversary of the Kelvin’s destruction and Jim’s birth, but it did mean that Jim got a bit of a respite on his actual birthday, that he didn’t have to be reminded by solemn ritual and public gatherings of what the day represented to the Federation. Still, he wasn’t foolish enough to believe that this respite would mean that Jim would be easier about celebrating his birthday. He didn’t think that there would ever come a time that Jim would see his birthday as a day to be remembered fondly, a day for taking stock and making future plans. Hell, even those people who claimed to hate their birthdays had nothing on Jim Kirk in that regard. It would be up to him, as it had been last year, to make sure that there was some positive remembrance of the day of Jim’s birth. He owed that to Jim as a friend, but he wasn’t stupid. Jim was going to make him work for it. And he knew Jim well enough by now to know that he wouldn’t find Jim at Finnegan’s this year, that Jim would take the rare opportunity for privacy and go to ground with impunity.
True to form, Jim stopped answering his comm on Saturday, and Leo knew that the hunt was on. Whether or not Jim ever confirmed how he truly felt about Leo or acted on it, this was one of the tests that Gram had warned him about. It was up to Leo to find the trail and follow the bread crumbs into the woods.
Prove it.
He heard the echo of those words in his head while he pondered where Jim could be. During the long weeks of his recuperation, he’d come to believe that his fever dream of Jim kissing him was half-dream, half-reality. He knew that his own confession had been. Jim wanted proof. A year ago, Leo would’ve said that Jim wanted to be proven right to not believe in or trust in love, that he would have preferred not to be found, and that he would have resented Leo when he was found – all the ways he’d behaved when Leo had found and practically had to force him to drink a toast. Finding Jim at Finnegan’s had been logical, easy. Nothing about finding Jim this year was going to be easy.
Leonard McCoy was not Jim Kirk. He did believe in no-win situations. But he was stubborn and he was smart, and goddamnit, he was going to prove that he knew Jim, and that he wasn’t so easily shaken. He was a McCoy, after all, and he had his pride.
+
By Sunday, Leo had thought of and discarded a number of possibilities. He’d even given some consideration to Iowa -- there’d probably be a grave there for George Kirk, even if his body was nowhere near it, and more than likely some kind of memorial park. But that would require a shuttle trip and as angry as Jim had been with him for almost dying, he sincerely doubted that Jim would subject him to that. Besides, his instincts told him that Jim was still here in San Francisco, and most likely somewhere on campus. He wandered the grounds, trying to think like Jim, trying to find meaning in what he was seeing around him. He even stopped by the Kelvin Memorial, looking up at the hollow-eyed bronze of George Kirk that looked so much like Jim, before casting his eyes over the list of names.
They all died, he heard Jim’s voice saying in his head. He’d been talking about Tarsus, but this had been the first loss, the crucible that Jim had been born from, the storm and fire in space. What had happened between this day and the Children’s Revolution was still a mystery, but he had no doubt that Jim’s character had been forged early on. There was no way that he could have survived Tarsus otherwise.
He thumbed the viewscreen on his comm, trying to get an overview of the campus buildings. Jim was here, somewhere, he was sure of it. He returned to his room and studied the campus map, letting his eyes go unfocused and his mind wander, idly spinning the Enterprise salt shaker on the dark Christmas tree. Just like the year before, it had shut itself off on January 1st, the happy sparkle of the stars only lasting a week before they died. He sat bolt upright and studied the map, tapping the screen when he found the building on the edge of campus, as far from the city’s lights as possible. He nodded, sure of himself now.
+
Hours later, Leo stood at the door of the campus astronomical observatory, looking at the dark and quiet building, not quite as sure of himself.
He’d waited until the campus was still and quiet, and dressed himself in dark, warm clothes to better obscure himself from the prying eyes of the campus cameras. He watched from the shadows as the cameras ran a circuit of the area around the astronomical observatory and then quietly climbed the stairs, pressing into a darkened corner on their next sweep. He waited two more rounds before he moved, trying to convince himself that he was right to have made this choice, then moved to the front door keypad, holding his breath as he used gloved fingers to type the code for his dorm room into it. With a whoosh, the front door to the observatory popped open, and Leo stifled the chuckle that rose up his lips, swiping the hair off his forehead with a nervous hand. He’d been right to follow the breadcrumbs here. He stopped gloating enough to slip inside the door, following the dim floor lighting. If Jim was here in this building, there’s only one place he’d be – well, there would have been two, but with the moon nearly full and rising, there was only so much that San Francisco’s exceptional ambient light dampening system could do. That reasoning had led him to rule out the possibility of the small observation area that housed the telescope at the top of the building. Instead, he followed the signs to the cosmos visualization center, the high-ceilinged domed room that used to be called a planetarium back in Horatio’s day.
Leo had a moment of doubt when he opened the door to the planetarium and saw nothing projected up on the ceiling. Then he heard the click of a button, and the tap of keys, and he knew that he’d guessed right.
“Over here, Bones,” Jim’s voice said from the center of the room. He was speaking quietly, but his voice echoed in the cavernous space.
Leo kept his eyes on the ground, navigating down the aisles using the dimly lit strips of the same type that you’d see on shuttles … or star ships. He swallowed a shudder and thought longingly of the flasks that he’d tucked inside his boots. He wasn’t looking forward to whatever Jim had cooked up for this evening, that was for sure.
“Nice outfit,” Jim said wryly. Leo took off his pea coat and piled it atop Jim’s. Jim was sitting at the console that the instructor usually occupied in the few demonstrations that he’d seen here. His arms were crossed over the dark mock turtleneck he’d worn with a pair of black paratrooper pants. “You know the cameras measure non-visually, right?”
“Yes, Jim,” Leo said sarcastically. “Even doctors know about heat signatures and the like. Still, it looks like you went with the same idea, so I’m not sure who you’re mocking here.”
Jim tilted his head in agreement, his expression amused. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, spinning a half circle in the chair.
Leo watched him, waiting.
“So,” Jim began finally, half-turned away from him so that all he could see was his profile. “I wrote this program.”
“OK,” Leo said, when he didn’t continue. “Are you gonna run it?”
He watched Jim’s chest rise like a bellows, as he took a long breath in through his nose and then exhaled in a slow, calming stream, and felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Jesus, fuck. Jim was anxious. “Jim?”
“Yeah,” he answered, scratching the right side of his head vigorously. “Yeah. That’s why we’re here, right?”
“Jim,” Leo said steadily. “We’re here to do whatever it is that you need to do, but we don’t have to do anything.”
Jim turned around in his chair and faced Leo fully for the first time. Leo didn’t shrink from Jim’s blue gaze. He nodded. “Let’s do this, Bones,” he said decisively, and stood up from the chair. He clapped Leo on the back as he walked by him, and strode to the centermost point of the room. He turned with an expectant air, and Leo followed him.
“Lay down,” Jim ordered quietly.
Leo raised an eyebrow, but did as Jim said. He heard the rip of Velcro and looked up to see Jim pulling a remote controller out of one of his pockets.
Jim pointed the controller at the booth and all the lights in the hall went out.
Leo blinked in the suddenly inky blackness and waited. Above him, the stars began to appear on the dome of the ceiling. He heard Jim lay down, and put out a hand, only to feel the brush of Jim’s hair against his fingers. “What?” he lifted his head to see that Jim had laid down so that his head was next to Leo’s, but his feet were facing the other way.
Jim turned his head to look at him. When Leo lay back down, he shifted so that the back of his head was resting against Leo’s shoulder. “You make a good pillow, Bones,” Jim remarked.
Leo rested his head against Jim’s more bony shoulder. “I’m pretty sure you got the better end of this deal.”
Jim smiled, just a curve of his lips. When he turned his head away from the projections of the endless night above them, his eyes were the darkest blue that Leo could recall, his eyes searching Leo’s face. He turned his head back toward the stars. “My grandfather would have disagreed with you, you know,” he said quietly. “He would have said that confronting the thing that you’re most afraid of is the one thing that you have to do.”
Leo watched the Adam’s Apple working in Jim’s throat. His voice sounded dry and strained. He bent his leg up and pulled one of the flasks out of his boot. “Catch,” he said to Jim, arcing it up high.
Jim caught the flask one-handed, flashing his teeth in a real smile. “Thanks, Bones,” he murmured.
“Yeah,” Leo said, unscrewing the other flask he’d pulled from his boot. “Should we drink to courage?” he asked, turning his head toward Jim’s.
Jim snorted. “I thought we were drinking for courage,” he said.
“Semantics,” Leo pointed out. He tilted his flask toward Jim and waited until Jim’s was poised before he took a swig. “Is it coincidental that whatever this fear is aligns so well with mine?”
Jim shrugged as best he could, jostling Leo’s head. “Sorry,” he said. “There was no way I could …” he paused. “Sorry, Bones.” He looked sheepish, but Leo was astute enough to recognize that there was a bit of vengeance in Jim’s choice of birthday activities.
He nodded. “Just remember that apology if I throw up on you,” he said, taking another swig.
Jim laughed and pushed a button on the controller and the stars began to move, the outlines of the constellations that he knew blurring as they would to the eye if it could register the jump to warp. Leo felt his insides curl and closed his eyes, disoriented, only to open them at a small noise from Jim. The sky above him was comprised of stars in positions that he didn’t recognize at all, but he was sure he knew what they were.
“I’ve tried to picture it, you know.” Jim reached a hand up and traced the outlines of the alien constellations. “What happened that day. When I was a kid, my mother kept me from really knowing about it. She put a block on the computers at home, and I was too little to work around it. Hell, I didn’t even know it was there until Sam told me,” he paused. “And then … once I knew, I was relentless. I wanted to know more.”
“How old were you, Jim?” Leo asked.
“When I broke through the block?” Jim asked. “Five. Sam told me about the block because he was furious with me, told me that my questions were making our mother cry. He ratted me out to our grandfather – I think he was hoping that Tiberius would rip me a new one.”
“He didn’t, though,” Leo said.
“He told me that if I ever had any questions that I should come ask him, that he’d always tell me the truth,” he nodded, his eyes scanning the starscape. “He always did. He showed me the star charts of where I’d been born, and we stretched them out, all over the floor in the barn so that I could see it from the hayloft. He thought it would help me visualize it.”
“Why was it so important that you see it, Jim?” Leo asked.
“Maybe because she wouldn’t talk to me about it,” Jim answered, after a minute. “My mother. It was like it was this big secret. And it is, really.” Jim pointed the controller at the console. “Most of the data that I fed into the program I got from Pike’s dissertation, and he had to get me clearance to read the unexpurgated version of it.”
“Why?” Leo asked, puzzled.
“It's classified,” Jim said. “I extrapolated from the data feeds from the Kelvin, but a lot of streams were corrupted.” He sat up and twisted around, eyes glued to the expanse above them as the flashes of lightning began to fill the horizon in front of Leo.
Leo shuddered, propping himself up on his elbows. “Good God, Jim,” he whispered. “That can’t be right.” He watched in horror as a huge spaceship appeared, filling a vast section of space. “That can’t be right, Jim – it looks nothing like a warbird – and Jesus, that thing is bigger than a space station.”
“That’s what the sensor readings sent back for data, and they identified themselves as Romulan to Robau. There was no visual of the ship itself that survived,” Jim said. He appeared to be holding his breath. “But you’re right – it didn’t look like that – that’s just the amount of space it filled. All the survivors, all the comm streams describe the ship as having arms and a huge nacelle, but even Pike couldn’t get me access to those drawings.”
Leo looked at Jim, considering. “Does this help, Jim?” he asked. “Is it better than the floor of the barn?”
Jim still couldn’t tear his eyes away from the dark disk that obliterated so much of the horizon. He pressed another button on the control. “This is the Kelvin,” he said quietly.
“Jesus,” Leo breathed out. It was so small, comparatively speaking. “How the hell did he fight that thing off for as long as he did?”
Jim shook his head. “He knew his ship, knew what it could do.” He paused, looked at Leo. “He knew that he had to do it.”
Leo nodded. “To protect you and your mom.”
“And the other people in the escape pods,” Jim said.
“I’m sure he gave a thought to them,” Leo said quietly. “But Jim, he did it for you and your mom.”
Jim took a breath in. “I'm going to do my dissertation in Tactical,” he said.
“OK” Leo said, sitting up and turning away from the image of the tiny Kelvin superimposed over the black disc of the Romulan vessel that obliterated so much of the available sky, blotting out the stars.
"Have you met Donovan, the head of the department?”
Leo shook his head. “Can’t say that I’ve had the pleasure,” he said, taking a hit off his flask. “I’ve heard he’s an asshole.”
Jim followed suit before he spoke. “He told me that it was too bad that Pike had already written the definitive dissertation on the Kelvin, as that would have been the perfect topic for me.”
Leo ground his teeth together in frustration before he spoke. “I would say you’re kiddin' or some shit, but I know you’re not. But you know that his opinion counts for nothing, right?”
“That’s not the point, though, Bones,” Jim said. He waved a hand up at the heavens. “This, all of this, this is what they all see when they look at me. What happened here, in the first minutes I was alive, it defines me to them. And for most of my life, nobody would really tell me anything. Everybody got somber, or reverent, or looked at me with pity. Or they told me my father was a hero,” he shrugged. “Only Tiberius ever talked to me about my father like he was a real person. He was the one who tried to help me see what everyone else was talking about when they talked about the Kelvin. But all the times we talked about this, about what really happened, we were just guessing.” The hand waved in the air again. “It was all top-secret, need-to-know.”
“Wasn’t your grandfather a Captain in the ‘fleet?”
Jim shook his head. “It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that my dad was his kid, or that Tiberius had served with honor. They just … they wouldn’t tell him,” he paused and his voice was wistful. “I wish he’d lived long enough to see this,” he said. “To read all the stuff in Pike’s doctoral dissertation about the decisions that Robau made, about the things that my dad did. He would have loved to have known that.” He was quiet for a long time, his eyes fixed on the mass that represented the Romulan ship. "I guess he didn't have much of a choice, did he? My father."
"I'm sure that he didn't want to leave you, Jim," Leo said steadily.
Jim nodded. "There's audio, you know, of him talking to my mother."
Leo took another swallow from the flask. The whiskey tasted bitter on his tongue.
"I couldn't listen to it," Jim continued quietly. "It wasn't … he was talking to my mom, and … it's bad enough to read the transcript, to know that everybody here has heard what they said to each other." He blinked, and Leo felt the weight of unshed tears in his own eyes, before Jim smiled ruefully. "He did more than just save my life, you know – he wouldn't let my mother name me Tiberius. My grandfather would have loved that, too. He hated his name." Jim was quiet again. "He never even saw me, Bones." Jim pressed the button again, and the space around them moved, shuttles escaping the Kelvin while the firefight raged. "I was on shuttle 37," he said, pointing.
Leo watched as the tiny shuttle was pursued and then saved by a blast of suppressing fire from the Kelvin before the cruiser exploded against the unforgiving blankness of the Romulan ship. One minute it was there, and the next, it was just wreckage, dispersing over the starfield as the shuttles streamed away. "He made sure that you got away," Leo said softly.
Jim nodded. "I didn't realize," he said. "I mean, I knew it, in the abstract, but …" He drew a deep breath in. His shoulders were hunched, and Leo found himself thinking about Cronus, about the burdens that a father, even a loving one, could place on a son. Above them, the black disk shuddered and threw off sparks, then disappeared. Jim watched it happening, then said, "I think it's still out there, that ship. I think it's waiting, out there in the black."
Leo shivered and looped his arm over Jim's shoulders and pulled him close. They sat there below the endless night of space, and watched the alien stars wheel and turn above them in silence.
+
Switch 26/?
